Artless Singing

Claudia Gorbman

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 5:2 (Autumn 2011), 157—171

What happens in a fiction film when characters sing – not in the patently artificial,
artful song performances that we normally call musical numbers, but in moments that
are construed and perceived as integral parts of the “realistic” diegetic world? These
tend to be throwaway moments, when the characters sing in ways people often do in
real life: you might hum as you clean the kitchen, or sing along with a familiar TV
title theme, or join a friend in belting out a tune whose lyrics fit the occasion or whose
recording star you’re imitating. I am calling such scenes ‘artless singing’, for lack of
another concise term for singing that, in the conceit of a film story, is not a
professional performance, and is done in synch sound with appropriate indices of
spatial realism, and without the magical backing of an orchestra. It’s a deployment of
the voice in film that might seem marginal, but it may well contribute toward our
understanding of the possibilities of speech, music and song in the audiovisual media.

The general invisibility, or inaudibility, of this common phenomenon becomes

clear to anyone who sets out to read the critical literature and finds that there is none.
Artless singing falls through the disciplinary cracks: it is not quite film music, and not
quite performances as students of the musical recognise them(1)—though it is
emphatically both. Nor can most filmgoers remember more than one or two such
scenes in actual films. I’m hoping here to raise to consciousness of this trope and
some of its functions.

First, some general observations. Motives for singing in movies are almost as
numerous as the motives for talking. A character can sing from happiness or sadness,
as a response to love or companionship, as an expression of aloneness or group
solidarity. Singing can act rhetorically to elicit a reaction from others. As a ritual
practice to fend off danger, singing is a form of whistling in the dark. A film can
present a character singing, unaware of some momentous event happening nearby, or
she can be singing a song whose lyrics present her more truthfully than she could
know; in these cases, both the narrative situation and something about the song itself
can help create affect and irony. Or a character can appropriate a song, identify with
it, and in this process we learn something about him. Increasingly in the age of digital
music formats and platforms, characters sing to make allusions, often in ironic parody
or recontextualisation of song performances. And singing with other characters forges
bonds, identities, sometimes rivalries.

Just as with dialogue, stage business tends to go with singing in movies;

characters drive and sing, shower and sing, they hum as they do house chores and
cooking, they walk or feed a baby or put on makeup and sing.(2) On occasions when
they don’t, when they just sing without moving, they appear to bare their souls all the
more, revealing truth that dialogue could not credibly contain.

A character‘s singing often acts as a distillation – of feeling, subjectivity, a

relationship, a narrative situation. We may surmise that since actors are not routinely
called upon to sing, the filmmakers need to have good justification to compel the
actor to do so. At its simplest and most impoverished, artless singing is an easy way
to “reveal” or suggest the inner life, motivations, or identifications of a character, to
forge a connection between two characters or a common bond in a group of
characters. But as some scenes we’ll consider suggest, singing scenes often go farther
than this in distilling themes, narrative lines, and other aspects of a film’s formal
architecture.

Artless singing lies somewhere between speech and music. Characters

“nonperformatively” sing in the theatre too, but singing in a film is different for
several reasons. The film-specific enunciatory factors of framing, camera movement,
editing, sound recording and mixing can have much to do with its effects. And since
in film, action is generally situated in realist space and shown from multiple
perspectives through editing, the duration of a song in a film scene can often matter: a
change in the situation might occur between the time a character has begun singing
and the time he/she leaves off, so that the meaning of the singing has the opportunity
to change.

While I have been distinguishing between the professional musical number

and artless singing, it goes without saying that a character’s artless singing is a
musical number, a scene scripted, rehearsed, polished, shot, recorded and edited.
Artless singing embodies an in-between status of the actor’s voice. This singing
affords the greatest impression of authenticity of a voice, matching bodily gestures
and lips with sound; indeed, it is impossible to imagine dubbing these moments, as
against the routine practice in musicals of lipsynching and post-dubbing, or the more
extreme treatments of the voice produced by vocoders and AutoTune. In many cases,
it’s the imperfections in the voice—breathiness, faltering and quavering, false notes,
singing out of comfortable range, pauses, forgotten or mistaken lyrics--that equate
amateurishness with authenticity, and that make of the singing a natural and sincere
expression of the character. In several cases, as in examples we’ll examine that
involve Meryl Streep, singing helps define the character’s body—as young, sedentary,
strong, old, ghostly, and so on, through these markers of breath, rhythm and pacing,
timbre, pitch, and accent.

Whereas the musical number is understood as highly artificial, even though

it’s routinely used to indicate the character’s psychology (as in Judy Garland’s ‘The
Boy Next Door’ in Meet Me in St. Louis or Bjork’s ‘I’ve Seen it All’ in Dancer in the
Dark), artless singing is understood as close to the way and close to the occasions on
which people sing in real life. A character singing artlessly is normally indulging in
an intimacy, conveying a truth, externalising a subjectivity. It is a performance that
participates in the codes of realism, and at the same time it rarely is innocent or
without significant narrative functions in the film where it appears.

Sarah Kozloff, in her project of establishing meaningful categories by which

to discuss speech in film, makes the distinction among monologues, duologues, and
polylogues - distinctions also quite useful for considering artless singing.(3) For
when characters sing, they might be singing alone to themselves—monologically--or
to or with another person, or to or with a group.

The singing monologue is first and foremost a device for rendering the state of
the character without resorting to the more obvious artifice of spoken monologue. For
example, in American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999), as Carolyn (Annette Bening) goes
about her chores as a realtor and then as a housewife, her humming is tuneless but
energetically part of her physical activity. Her humming resolutely says I’m happy,
I’m in control, I’m getting things done. Artless singing almost always does more than
describe character, however. In two scenes, American Beauty makes a structural use
of her humming, when in each case her self-satisfied busy-ness is interrupted by a
male presence. In a first scene, she sees the big realtor sign erected by her competitor
and stops singing, and later in the film, her happy humming in the driveway stops
when she hears her husband’s stereo playing Dylan as he works out in the garage.

Then there is the trope of the single character singing while driving. Consider
Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) at the beginning of A Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc
Godard, 1959). He hotwires a car in Marseille and drives it up toward Paris, thinking
out loud about the money and the girl he’ll romance when he gets there. At first,
Belmondo does some amateurish solfeggio singing, then ‘Buenos noches, mi amor’ –
a tune he repeats. Then he thinks out loud about driving, and also plays with singing
Patricia’s name. It’s a performative, energetic mix of vocalising, entirely in keeping
with Michel’s modernity.(4) Godard’s alternation of shots of Michel’s playfulness in
talking, singing, and driving with point-of-view shots of the open road allow us to feel
the freedom and energy of his new ride. Artless singing gives expression to Michel’s
character: cocky, impulsive, loving language play (including foreign language),
restlessly creative.

Carolyn, Lester’s wife in American Beauty, sings as she drives, too. Once
she’s begun her affair with the real estate agent Buddy Kane, the film shows her
singing along with Bobby Darin’s cover of ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, as sung by
Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. Annette Bening gives the song the power of an
anthem; it’s Carolyn’s song, which she turns into an almost hysterical warning to her
husband not to get in the way of her sexual adventures. The film does not allow her to
finish the song, just as her humming is cut off in earlier scenes. When she sees her
husband’s new red sportscar in the driveway, her last syllable of “parade” stops in
mid-air, though Darin’s voice happily crows it on the car stereo; from this we
understand that her sense of power and control has abruptly disappeared. Perhaps that
is why director Sam Mendes has chosen to use the recording of ‘Don’t Rain on My
Parade’ by a male singer instead of Streisand (although the real answer might simply
involve expensive reproduction rights): the male voice prevails, while Carolyn’s trails
off. The alternation of point-of-view shots–-such as the Buddy Kane realty sign on a
bench as she drives by, and the red car in the driveway-–with shots of Carolyn singing
with the song—and also the truncating of the song, as through editing the film
eliminates all but the essentials to express her fierce, thrilled determination—are ways
in which American Beauty uses its expressive cinematic means to convey Carolyn’s
subjectivity during the scene.
 Another example of the widespread driving-and-singing trope comes from
Defending Your Life (Albert Brooks, 1991). At the beginning of the story, Daniel
(Albert Brooks) has just purchased a new BMW, and has taken to the Los Angeles
roadways to enjoy driving and listening to Barbra Streisand on the CD player. He
joyfully sings along with her version of ‘Something’s Coming’ from West Side Story.
Distracted by a CD that slides and drops to the floor of his car, he does not notice the
oncoming truck—and is killed immediately.

The comedy of the scene leading up to his death, which the New York Times
reviewer not unappreciatively calls a ‘bad joke’, arises largely out of the character’s
artlessness in singing along with Streisand, forgetting the lyrics, punctuating the air
with gestures. As in American Beauty, singing along with the sound system while you
drive is a locus of power, joy, privacy, and creativity. A derisory offscreen comment
from another driver (“Do we all have to hear that?”) helps us understand how far
Daniel has amped up the volume; he’s a boy, thoroughly enjoying his new toys. The
song happens to fit the narrative situation perfectly, in its premonitory mood,
‘something’s coming’; in this case, the ‘something’ turns out to be not love and
happiness but Daniel’s death and entry into the film’s principal setting, Judgment
City.

Most monologic singing is private by definition, not intended to be heard by

others in the diegetic world. It’s perhaps for this reason that private artless singing is
so evocative. In the case of singing-along (e.g., Carolyn with ‘Don’t Rain on My
Parade’, Lester in the same film with ‘American Woman’, Daniel with ‘Something’s
Coming’), the character’s musical choice indicates his or her taste and cultural
identifications, and the manner of the singing can convey more than speech with
considerable expressive efficiency.(5)

Perhaps the most compelling register of monologic singing is the most private,
the musical equivalent of mumbling or muttering: singing to oneself under one’s
breath, singing that the moviegoer must work to understand. At a frontier where
breathing, pitch, speech, and rhythm meet, the presence of musical syntax and
reference can come as a surprise, as the most intimate portal to the singer’s
subjectivity. A powerful example of this liminal singing comes very near the end of
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has been through the hellish
battle with the sickening, deadly aliens on the far-off planet, an encounter of which
she is the sole human survivor. She has escaped into the getaway spaceship, thinking
she has safely left the alien monsters behind, and has taken off for the home galaxy.
In the course of a scene where she can finally relax and strip to her underwear, as any
good horror-film heroine does, an alien turns out to have followed her into her
spacecraft. She quickly dons a space suit for protection, and begins whispering a kind
of chant, strategising all the while. The song, barely recognisable as she sings to
herself in a whisper, is ‘You Are My Lucky Star’ (written by Arthur Freed and Nacio
Herb Brown in 1935). Recorded by many, but best known today from the end of
Singin’ in the Rain, it feels here like a song Ripley knows from childhood, a
comforting song, but which also relates to her space travel, the star, and to the issue of
luck; she uses it as a sort of talisman. Like whistling in the dark, singing is essentially
an attempt to organise something out of chaos - music, as organised sound, gives or
promises a comforting structure. Singing from fear is a kind of mirroring moment,
when one is both oneself and one’s parent, and the mother sings to reassure the
frightened child. Sigourney Weaver’s singing is minimal: she barely hits notes, and
mostly what we hear is her panting; Ripley departs strictly from the song and chants
‘lucky lucky lucky lucky’ at one point, unable to care about the musical line although
she valiantly attempts to. The scene has a bare-bones efficiency: it gets great mileage
out of strobe lighting effects, some crosscutting between closeups of Ripley and the
massive slithery alien, and on the soundtrack, Ripley’s increasingly terrified voice,
which has more and more difficulty singing notes and words between her heavy
breaths, until it climaxes in a scream.

But then, we might prefer to consider the scene a duologue and not a
monologue, just like the final number shared by Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in
Singin’ in the Rain—that is, as a grotesque love song from Ripley to the alien as her
‘lucky star’, in what we can read as the culminating erotic moment of the film, when
no one remains but the two of them—in fact, the grotesque duet includes screeches
from the alien. As Ripley’s destruction starts to appear inevitable, her voice rises, and
at the same time if we listened only to it, the voice would be indistinguishable from a
woman’s breathy grunts in a porn film. In the actual course of watching Alien, you
might not recognise that Ripley is singing at all. We can credibly read the scene as a
parody of musical numbers, as a twisted reworking of the romantic duet.
 Let us pass on to more singing duologues. Artless singing in scenes with two
characters most commonly has as its mission to get the characters together, to bond
them through song, quite like the conventional musical number does in musicals. In a
touching scene in Parenthood (Ron Howard, 1989), Nathan (Rick Moranis) visits his
schoolteacher wife at work to make amends to her after some fractious arguing and
separation. In his romantic gesture, Nathan enters the classroom, which is in full
session with thirty-odd twelve-year-olds at their desks, and sings the Carpenters’
‘Close to You’, already an oldie by the time of Parenthood. In an endearingly
nebbishy way, he even does his best to incorporate the original recording’s
background singing in his one-voice version with no help from an instrumental
backup. But the camerawork, with its increasingly flattering framings of Nathan and
Susan, and its gliding tracking shots, as well as the rhythm of Susan’s spoken
punctuations every two lines, all enhance our reception of the scene as a veritable
musical number. The students as the onscreen audience start out with sceptical looks,
emitting a realistic level of diegetic noise and making disbelieving faces; by the end,
they are completely enveloped in the romantic gesture they witness.

The charm of the scene is that Nathan does what heroes in musicals routinely
do-- they take a risk and proclaim their love in song. But in Parenthood, the prosaic
setting, the lack of an orchestra, and the very real danger of failure create tension;
Nathan really is risking rejection and public embarrassment. But the film grants him
his wish. By sheer will, it tells us, Nathan has summoned up the movie-musical mode,
and the musical fantasy takes over the prosaic reality.

A common duologue trope involves a parent and child sharing a song as an

externalisation of their close bond. Toward the end of Postcards from the Edge (Mike
Nichols, 1990), a film that dwells on the fraught relationship between a struggling
actress daughter and her show-business mother, Suzanne and mother Doris (Meryl
Streep and Shirley MacLaine, respectively) finally have a lovely rapprochement while
the mother is in hospital after a car accident. The mother’s infirmity allows them to
put aside their strife and share a song that, as we can tell, they used to sing when
Suzanne was a small girl. Stage business makes the sentimentality of the moment
bearable: Suzanne helps her mother put on her makeup as they sing. Their rendition of
the nursery-rhyme song ‘Little Drops of Water’ comes to a long fermata in the third
line in a way that helps us believe in their ideolect as they sang it together in the past.
Artless singing provides a direct and credible route to intimacy via the shared song.

This intimate mode enjoys a privileged moment in another Mike Nichols

work, the TV adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003). Toward the
end Meryl Streep appears as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, haunting Roy Cohn (Al
Pacino), the anticommunist lawyer who in actual fact was largely responsible for
getting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted of espionage and sent to the electric
chair. Ethel’s ghost has visited Roy several times as he is dying of AIDS, happy to see
that he’s suffering. Here in the hospital, Roy appears to be experiencing delusions,
taking Ethel’s ghost for his own mother. He begs ‘mother’ to sing to him. Ethel, with
little to lose, and hearing him apologise, sings an old Yiddish lullaby to him. Once she
has sung to him tenderly, he taunts her, having tricked her into being nice to him—but
then the last laugh is on him, for he dies.

But when she sings, what a marvellous way to begin the lullaby,
‘Tumbalalaika’: she sweetly pronounces some ‘shhh’ syllables, which a Jewish
mother would do to calm a child; this shishing becomes the first word of the verse,
‘Shteyt a bocher’. The mood is so tender during the lullaby: the lighting confers a
blue pallor on the dead Ethel and the dying Roy, there’s no other sound on the
soundtrack, and a long-lost innocence magically returns, if only for a moment. Ethel’s
singing to Roy is an act of grace—even though it turns out that Roy has perpetrated
one more betrayal in conning her, getting her to sing to him.

Much artless singing occurs over food. In Heartburn (Mike Nichols, 1986),
when Rachel and Mark (Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson) eat pizza in their half-
redecorated home, Rachel lets on that she is pregnant. Her news initiates a singing
duologue involving tunes about babies. Initially they appear to be the ideal happy
couple celebrating by harmonising, having fun eating and singing at the same time.
The visual composition shows them as equals, each wearing white, both in medium
shot, and enjoying trading songs about babies and children. The amateurishness of
their singing is emphasised by close miking of their eating and slurping, and by the
pauses that comically show each one thinking up more songs and lyrics to sing.

As soon as Mark starts intoning ‘My Boy Bill’ from Carousel, their body
language indicates a shift. Rachel is reclining, while Mark sings loudly, standing and
gesturing theatrically; he dominates in the frame, just as he begins to dominate on the
soundtrack. The scene ends in the bedroom: Rachel is trying to sleep, but Mark
obliviously bursts in to sing the latter part of the Carousel soliloquy where Billy
Bigelow reimagines his baby as a girl. The closing images show Rachel completely
horizontal, and Mark completely vertical standing on the bed over her, bellowing the
song in which Rachel no longer participates.

The mise-en-scene is strikingly eloquent. From a beginning in mutuality

emphasised by visual composition and by literal harmony in their amateur voices, the
scene progresses to show that Mark is far more interested in his own performance
than he is in communicating with his wife. In this he is perhaps more egregiously self-
centred a character than Carousel’s Billy Bigelow, who at least ultimately redeems
himself; Heartburn, adapting Nora Ephron’s novel about her failed marriage to Carl
Bernstein, is even more starkly cynical about marriage.

Of monologues, duologues, and polylogues, one would think that a scene

involving singing for or with a group would yield the most conventional results: a
group bonds through the common beat, melody, and pleasure of a song, and their
group activity of singing it. This group solidarity and identification abounds in movies
from war films to Wayne’s World. To continue with eating scenes, think of Renoir’s
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), when the drunken old concierge sings a
delightfully inappropriate Christmas song at a celebration feast. His full-throated
rendition of ‘C’est la nuit de Noel’ continues, ever more ironically, through the
shooting and death of the villain in the courtyard. In Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are
All Right (2010), an off-the-cuff singing of an early 1970s Joni Mitchell song by two
characters at a family dinner elicits marvelously complex dramatic interactions and
reactions.

Drama often arises in scenes of groups singing. Let me provide one example.
In The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), a cluster of mourners sing ‘Shall We Gather at
the River’, an oft-recurring tune in Ford’s westerns, over the fresh graves of the
victims of an Indian raid. But Ethan (John Wayne) cuts off their singing in brazen
disregard of the ceremony and parishioners. ‘Put an amen to it’, he bellows
impatiently, so that he may go hunt down the Indians and exact revenge.
 This scene alerts us to another dimension of artless singing: interrupting it can
have dramatic consequences, as I already suggested occurs in American Beauty. Ethan
is hard, so hard that he has no time for the ‘feminine’ side of grieving. This scene
amply shows his bullish cruelty—or perhaps that is my own musical sensitivity
speaking, my desire for a musical line to arrive at its proper cadence. Ethan cuts the
music off, just as he cuts off humanity, domesticity, society, and rationality.

Before proceeding to suggesting an auteurist approach to artless singing, let us

briefly consider a scene that‘s difficult to classify, from Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). A
single man sings, in the presence of a crowd that becomes his audience. Watanabe,
played by Takashi Shimura, has learned that he has incurable stomach cancer, that his
life as a petty bureaucrat in City Hall has been a waste. One night he meets a writer,
and like Virgil with Dante in Hell, the writer shows Watanabe the wild nightlife
world, a side of the city that the meek municipal worker has never seen. They go to
bars and clubs, they play pachinko, they drink copiously. In the last club they visit,
the young patrons have just been dancing with abandon to jazzy piano music. Then
the piano player takes a request from old Watanabe; it is an old tune that could not
differ more dramatically from the jazz and pop that has dominated the atmosphere.
The carpe diem message of the sweet, slow, old-fashioned song, ‘Life Is So Short’,
quiets the whole club into a stricken sense of innocence and mortality.

Kurosawa films the entire first stanza from the collective point of view of the
people in the nightclub: one long take includes the piano player, couples moving to
the floor to dance quietly, the bead curtain swaying to the 3/4 rhythm. In fact when
the song begins in this way, Watanabe is nowhere in the frame though his offscreen
voice dominates the soundtrack. The next shot does show him and a saloon girl, but
again the camera stays with her; she draws away from him as from death itself, and a
subsequent shot shows the writer, and others present, as Watanabe sings. The visual
emphasis is thus on the collectivity as it listens to this deep, tremulous voice and
understands for a moment how near life is to death. The entire second stanza shows
why we love Kurosawa: he takes the risk of extreme sentimentality in order to touch
us, holding his camera on a lengthy medium closeup of Watanabe’s tearful face as he
sings. We are now inescapably face to face with the consciousness of death,
unmediated by the crowd seen during the first stanza. The amateurishness of
Watanabe’s singing – the piano and the singer are even out of phase with each other –
brings the moment down to the concrete, the irrevocable, the present world in all its
imperfection and evanescence.

An auteur approach can illuminate the qualities and functions of artless

singing. I’d like to outline and illustrate this idea through examples from Kubrick,
Hawks, and Hitchcock.

It is surprising, since Kubrick has such a premeditating, uber-objective

authorial presence, to find that scenes of singing in his work tend to be almost
sentimental, where a character or group of characters soften as they sing. The greater
part of the story of Full Metal Jacket (1987), for example, dwells on the harrowing
tension and unpredictable violence of close combat in Vietnam. At the very end, the
soldiers who remain alive march against the backdrop of burning ruins at night. They
sing the theme from the long-running 1950s-60s Mickey Mouse Club TV show:
‘Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me? M-I-C K-E-Y M-O-U-S-
E’. Not only is the song oddly appropriate, with a strong 4/4 marching rhythm and
phrases like “raise our banner high”. It is also satirical—the leader of the pack for
these toughened, traumatised young fighters in the senseless fight for Vietnam being
not an American general or president, but Disney’s high-voiced cartoon rodent. It also
unquestionably suggests something about the soldiers who sing it. It provides
solidarity, but more importantly, it refers to a childhood innocence and an
Americanism these battle-torn men have had and, despite everything, may be trying to
hang onto.

Similarly, recall the remarkable scene at the end of Kubrick’s other war film,
Paths of Glory, which he made thirty years earlier. A German girl is forced to sing for
hooting and whistling American soldiers in a cantina in Germany, but soon, as if
transformed by her singing, they hum along with her and shed tears. Singing is a barer
of the soul for Kubrick; it makes characters into children, their first and better selves.
We might think as well of the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). As
Dave Bowman unplugs his circuits to ‘kill’ him, HAL becomes simpler and simpler.
It’s a surprise that this scheming and seemingly ineluctable intelligence has music
now that he, or it, is being dismantled; he sings ‘Daisy, Daisy,’ an old American
classic in 3/4 time that, again, evokes innocent love.
 Where artless singing harkens to the unsullied child in adult characters in
Kubrick’s work, it has quite different effects with Hawks and Hitchcock. In a Hawks
adventure film, singing, usually a public polylogue, represents a solidification of
group bonding. An emblematic scene occurs in Only Angels Have Wings (1939).
Bonnie (Jean Arthur) is a newcomer to the outpost hotel in a remote settlement in
Central America. She is quickly learning the rules and codes of the male group, but
has not yet gained acceptance into it. Then one evening in the cantina, the men are
trying to play a tune together. Jeff (Cary Grant) sits down at the piano to plunk out the
notes of the 1920s Sophie Tucker hit ‘Some of These Days’ with a group of
musicians, but he keeps hitting wrong notes. Bonnie offers to play it right; she quickly
takes control of the band and the piano and they perform a rollicking version of the
tune. Through her professionalism and through the joy of music—joy and joking have
an important place in the Hawksian group—Bonnie contributes her musical
competence and will henceforth be accepted as one of the guys.

Hawks’ westerns are full of artless singing. A very minor example from Red
River (1948) might seem to contradict the auteur construct I am proposing. A cowboy
sings ‘Get Along, Little Dogies’ on his night duty tending cattle on the cattle drive.

Note, however, that his singing is social, perhaps even more than it’s singing
to himself. He is communicating with his group, the cattle, in order to keep them
calm. Later, the jittery cattle will be set off into a stampede by a different character
who rattles some pots and pans as he steals sugar, his selfishness violating the
Hawksian code of group solidarity.

Peter Wollen showed that Hawks’s oeuvre can be neatly divided into the
adventure films and the comedies, and that the comedies invert the values of the
adventure films.(6) The comedies emphasise not the masculine group of competent
professionals bonding, but instead they place masculinity in jeopardy. In Bringing Up
Baby (1939), the two main characters are trying to recapture a pet leopard that has
escaped. After hours of a comical pursuit of the animal through the woods, they
discover it on a rooftop. They know that the song ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But
Love’ pacifies Baby, and they attempt to bring this leopard (which happens to be the
wrong leopard) down to terra firma by singing to it. Here, you could say that the
singing makes a gesture toward the group bonding characteristic of Hawks’s
adventure films, but which the unleashed, midsummer-night’s-dream quality of the
comedy overshadows. The ‘hero’, the befuddled paleontologist played by Cary Grant,
has lost his glasses, a woman is ordering him around, and he is compelled to sing a
popular love song not to Katharine Hepburn but to a wild animal. Even as Grant and
Hepburn harmonise, they sing loudly, fraught with desperation.

I’ll resist the temptation to confirm these patterns of artless singing in

Hawks’s work through more examples, and instead move on to Hitchcock, to show
how differently the two directors deploy singing characters. Where Hawks deploys
singing to unify the group, Hitchcock uses the device structurally, and often to ironic
ends. Liz Weis observed in 1982 that ‘Hitchcock’s dependence on music, classical or
popular, is also the logical outgrowth of his search for plot devices that are suggestive
but that derive naturally from a situation, so that any symbolic or metaphorical value
they might have is not so obtrusive as to stop the flow of action or reduce audience
involvement’(7).

In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), young Charlie (Teresa Wright) starts humming

a tune that she cannot place. The ‘Merry Widow Waltz’ has been playing
nondiegetically on the soundtrack; it is as if she has plucked it out of the air to
become lodged in her mind. Her uncle Charlie, visiting the family in Santa Rosa,
doesn’t want her to recognise the tune, since he is the psychopath the newspapers
have dubbed the Merry Widow murderer. In one scene at the dinner table, young
Charlie hums the tune and comments on it, and Uncle Charlie changes the subject.
Weis argues that the song represents a transfer of guilt from the uncle to his niece, the
corruption of her innocence. This humming scene, which inaugurates things ‘jumping
from head to head,’ from one Charlie to another, will culminate in young Charlie’s
guilt about which she must remain silent as the film ends. Hitchcock’s propensity to
find darkness in sunlit normality emerges here as the murderous signification
underlying a pretty waltz.

In The Birds (1963), a class of schoolchildren sing a song, actually the

Scottish folk-tune ‘Risselty-Rosselty’, which the schoolteacher is leading when
Melanie comes to see her. Melanie is obliged to wait outside as the children sing the
interminable song—and as, with each verse, more and more birds arrive and settle on
the playground bars behind her by the school. The song is well chosen: it tells an
accumulative story, which lengthens in lines from verse to verse, just as the birds
accumulate. In fact, Weis mentions that each chorus ends with the words “now, now
now” to heighten the suspense about when the birds will attack. The performance of
‘Risselty-Rosselty’, slower than the way one usually hears it, gives it an almost
unbearable sing-song effect; when will it ever end, and when will Melanie finally see
the birds? Pete Seeger popularised the tune in the US in the 50s and 60s; he clearly
recognised its sadistic quality which he underlined at least once, at a concert where I
saw him, by adding a last stanza:

And now my song has come to an end,

Risselty-rosselty, now, now, now;

And if you don’t like it I’ll sing it again…

In the two instances above, Hitchcock chooses songs with great care to be
sung artlessly, as an integral part of the drama, creating ironies and parallels, raising
expectations and suspense. There is clearly a colder, more intellectual, architectonic
quality to these singing scenes than Hawks’s singalongs. Consider one more example
from the second The Man Who Knew Too Much (the 1956 version, though the 1934
film has some brilliant singing moments too). Young Hank is being held hostage
upstairs in a mansion where a lavish party, being thrown by the assassins, is underway
downstairs. His mother devises a novel way to communicate to him that she is there
to try to rescue him: she sits at the piano and sings to the gathering, but more loudly
than the situation calls for, in order to project up the stairway toward the little boy.

The film’s beginning had established the mother-son bond through music;
they are shown singing ‘Que Sera, Sera’ together in their hotel room in Marrakesh. Jo
(Doris Day) has sung for a career in the past. At the end, she sings their song. The
spatial qualities of her voice, as it rises up the stairs and through the corridors of the
mansion, eventually to reach Hank who’s locked in a room far above, strongly recall
the mother’s voice about which Michel Chion writes so eloquently in Mizoguchi’s
Sansho the Bailiff (although this voice in Mizoguchi is not singing, strictly
speaking).(8) The mother’s voice in both cases is heard at a distance, echoing
improbably through distant spaces, and it kindles hope and longing in the children
who hear it.
 Though ‘Que Sera, Sera’ would shortly become a huge hit on the pop charts, it
was written (by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans) expressly for The Man Who Knew
Too Much. “Whatever will be will be – The future’s not ours to see, what will be will
be…”, yet, as Weis says, ‘[the mother’s] actions contradict the very lyrics she sings.
The words of the chorus recommend fatalistic passivity… Yet the heroine is more …
successfully and actively engaged in saving both her son [and the statesman there’s an
assassination plot against] than anyone else in the film.’(9) So again, Hitchcock’s
choice of this song gives it an ironic and key role in the film, and the singing of ‘Que
Sera, Sera’ in two scenes link mother and son so that their reunion can occur not
through dialogue but through the sheer passage of song through cinematic space.

What may we conclude from this overview of artless singing? Certainly, it is a

key way of evoking character, subjectivity, and interrelationships, and accordingly
deserves as much critical attention as does film dialogue or camerawork and editing.
We have seen specific ways in which it behaves as a structural and thematic device,
and I have suggested that in the multiple forms of amateur singing scenes in the
cinema, an auteur approach can be revealing. The complications and nuances of these
individual scenes are even more fruitful than any generalisations. Take The Man Who
Knew Too Much: Doris Day’s status as a popular singer, far more than as an actress,
is going to change audiences’ relations to how she sings.(10) The conceit that a star is
artfully creating amateurish performances leads to a polyphony of readings, and this is
especially so in more recent film, where the relation between star and character,
between diegetic life and real life, is so often part of a film’s texture.

The variations of artless singing moments range much farther than the distance
between Ripley’s croaking of ‘Lucky Star’ in the spaceship and Nathan’s self-
consciously public rendition of ‘Close to You’ in the classroom. For example, in
another Mike Nichols-Meryl Streep film, Silkwood (1983), in a driving-while-singing
scene, Streep’s singing of ‘Amazing Grace’ during a road trip as her boyfriend (Kurt
Russell) plunks along a nominal accompaniment on banjo from the back seat, is
helped out by an unseen orchestra, yet still no one would call it a conventional
musical number. But even within the codes of realism, the borders between diegetic
and nondiegetic become porous and ask to be interrogated. In many other ways—in
films as divergent as Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties (1986), Wim Wenders’
Kings of the Road (1976), and Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004), scenes of artless
singing refer to musicals in a whole range of ways, hinting that perhaps all singing in
films ultimately lies along a continuum, and that our love for song and singing in all
its manifestations finds a receptive and endlessly flexible medium in the cinema.

----

Notes

1. On the other hand, artless singing should be central to the understanding of music
not as the sounding-out of a canonised written musical text (as musicologists have
studied music until recently), but as a mode of performativity.

2. For example, see the chapter ‘Expressive Objects’ in James Naremore, Acting in
the Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), and Michel
Chion’s comments about dialogue and cigarettes, in his (trans. Claudia Gorbman,
NY: Columbia U. Press, 2009), 73-76.

3. Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,

2000), 70.

4. Naremore notes that ‘a great many of Belmondo’s gestures become allusions, and
his otherwise naturalistic performance evokes Brecht’s notion that an actor should
always behave as if he were quoting.’ Naremore, op. cit., 18.

5. Singing along also occurs as a way to bond two or more characters; think of
examples in Thelma & Louise.

6. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1969). Cf. chapter 2, ‘The Auteur Theory.’

7. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track (Rutherford,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1982), 87.

8. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (trans. Claudia Gorbman, NY: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1999), 109-114. Chion makes the connection between the mother’s
voice in Sansho the Bailiff and Hitchcock’s 1956 Man Who Knew Too Much; cf. 117-
18.

9. Weis, op. cit., 91-92.

10. And note ‘audiences’ in the plural. 1950s audiences, for example, surely situated
Doris Day as a star quite differently than most viewers would today.