Popular Film Music and

Masculinity in Action

Amanda Howell offers a new perspective on the contemporary pop score, as

the means by which masculinities not seen—or heard—before became a part
of American cinema after World War II. Popular Film Music and Masculin-
ity in Action considers an eclectic mix of film, from Elvis and Travolta star
vehicles to Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster action, with a special focus
on the work of musically innovative directors Melvin Van Peebles, Martin
Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Gregg Araki. Of particular interest is the
way these films and their representations of masculinity are shaped by generic
exchanges among contemporary music, music cultures, and film, combining
American cinema’s longstanding investment in violence-as-spectacle with
similarly body-focused pleasures of contemporary youth music.
Drawing on the scholarship of popular music and the pop score, as well
as feminist film and media studies, Howell addresses an often neglected area
of gender representation by considering cinematic masculinity as an audio-
visual construction. Through her analyses of music’s role in action and other
film genres that share its investment in violence, she reveals the mechanisms
by which the pop score has helped to reinvent gender—and gendered fictions
of male empowerment—in contemporary screen entertainment.

Amanda Howell is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Griffith

University, Queensland, Australia.
Routledge Advances in Film Studies

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Masculinity in Action
A Different Tune
Amanda Howell
Popular Film Music and
Masculinity in Action
A Different Tune

Amanda Howell
First published 2015
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Howell, Amanda.
Popular film music and masculinity in action : a different tune /
by Amanda Howell.
pages cm — (Routledge advances in film studies ; 38)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion picture music—United States—History and
criticism.
2. Masculinity in motion pictures. 3. Popular music in motion pictures.
I. Title.
ML2075.H69 2015
781.5ʹ420973—dc23
2014035999
ISBN: 978-0-415-89720-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-38250-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For my family, with love and thanks.
Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 A Different Tune: Hollywood, Popular Music, and Elvis 16

2 Orchestrating Violence: Music and Masculinity in

Scorsese’s Gangster Films 46

3 Two Worlds: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and

the Dual Diegesis 74

4 The Power Chord Goes to War: The Bruckheimer

Film, Music, and Militainment 94

5 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack: Gregg Araki’s

The Living End 120

6 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 143

Conclusion 167

Index 171
Acknowledgments

For assistance with this project, humble gratitude to Cory Messenger,

who has critiqued chapter drafts and generously shared his encyclopedic
knowledge of American popular music and music industries. My thanks
to Susan K. Hess are laced with amazement at the power of friendship.
Despite having zero interest in films with blood, bullets, explosions, or
music by the Rolling Stones, she has been a steadfast source of support
and editorial feedback.
Others who lent their expertise on film, music, dance, and the writing
of books over the years of development are David Baker, Andy Bennett,
Annita Boyd, Trish FitzSimons, Stephanie Green, Christine Grodd, Wendy
Keys, and Fiona Paisley. Discussions with the students of Popular Music and
Film 2002-2009 sparked the ideas I share here. In shaping these ideas into
a coherent study, I am indebted to the sharply informed and encouraging
feedback I received from anonymous readers at Routledge. Feedback from
anonymous referees and advice from former journal editor Ann Kibbey on
cognate research published in Genders in 2012 (“Performing Countercul-
tural Masculinity: Mick, Music, and Masquerade in Gimme Shelter”) has
also contributed to this study. My thanks go likewise to those who engaged
with and responded enthusiastically to some of my earliest thoughts on mas-
culinity and music at the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas Seminar 2006
and the Annual Meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in
2005. The good bits wouldn’t be here without these folks. The errors are
mine alone.
In addition, I am grateful for the support of the School of Humanities
at Griffith University in Australia, which gave me research leave in 2010
during which I completed my proposal for this project and early chapter
drafts. The School of Humanities and Griffith Centre for Cultural Research
have funded the indexing of this work. In addition, many staff and col-
leagues in the School have helped me along the way. My Heads of School
2010-2014, Jock MacLeod, Susan Forde, and Chris Lee, supported and
encouraged me during the development of this book. School Administra-
tive Officer, Janice Mitchell, always a source of strength and institutional
knowledge for academic staff, has helped me to manage my administrative
duties during the crucial final weeks of completing the manuscript.
Introduction

STRONG, NOT SILENT

He was the strong but silent type: the stereotypical white male hero of
classic Hollywood film, the one against whom all difference—represented
by comic or villainous ethnic types, the poor and the cowardly, the drunken
and disabled, sissy boys and women, non-Americans and nonwhites—was
measured and found wanting. Seemingly beyond representation, he was
as much hidden as revealed by the cinematic conventions that produced
him. In contemporary Hollywood, an idealized notion of empowered white
masculinity still dominates screen entertainment, but it no longer appears
beyond representation. Thanks in large part to the critical eye of feminist
scholarship of the past four decades, the historically specific performances
and masquerades, anxieties and hysterical symptoms, gendered and genre-
specific codes of narration that create such fantasies of gender privilege have
been exposed to view.
And yet, screen masculinity—even if it is not as strong or as seamless in
its construction as it once appeared—is still often silent, at least so far as
feminist film studies are concerned. The silence is particularly noticeable
when the films are themselves anything but, with soundtracks and scores
designed to catch the ear just as their visual spectacles attract the eye. The
most obvious examples are those big-budget action films of the 1980s and
early 1990s that, along with their excessively muscled stars, have been
so closely read by feminist film scholars. 1 “Big and Loud” not just as a
consequence of explosions and firefights,2 the blockbuster action film is
also known for ramping up the excitement of its soundtracks with popular
music, especially variants of rock and heavy metal. When the 1993 Arnold
Schwarzenegger vehicle, Last Action Hero, looked back to gently parody
action film of the previous decade, it did so to the sound of the electric
guitar, as stereotypical of the genre at this point as the sight of the Austrian
Oak’s enormous biceps.
Although this study spends some time with blockbuster masculinity and
the rock score, these are not its sole focus. It considers a fairly eclectic mix
2 Introduction
of films that share action entertainment’s typical focus on the body and
physical acts that are violent, risky, or challenging and discusses the varied
array of popular music used to construct these spectacles of male empower-
ment. Narratives of beset manhood have been part of action entertainment
at least since Douglas Fairbanks first picked up a sword to defend his honor
in the 1920s, and this study is broadly interested in this strand of film
entertainment.3 But the focus on masculinity—on the male body—is also
part of the heritage of the pop score. When rock ‘n’ roll found its niche
in Hollywood in the 1950s, one of the first steps toward a long-standing
engagement between youth music cultures, youth audiences and American
cinema was to create new type of cinematic masculinity, the rock ‘n’ roll
rebel in the person of Elvis Presley. Since then, the pop score has been
used repeatedly to reinvent masculinity and male difference. Make a Venn
diagram of popular cinema and popular music’s aesthetic and cultural pre-
dilections since the 1950s, and you’ll find that the male body, especially
the young male body, is a consistent site of shared interest and ideological
investment. The aesthetic shape this interest takes, and the values and
beliefs associated with these music-driven body spectacles, alter with
specific social, political, and historical contexts.
The incorporation of youth-identified music and music cultural mean-
ings into cinema is a key element in what Thomas Doherty has labeled the
“juvenilization” of American film. 4 Films specifically addressed to teenagers
made their first appearance in the 1950s, and the youth audience became
increasingly important for box office success through the 1960s and 1970s,
a period when youth cinema also meant young directors who brought music
of their generation to the screen. Teen and youth films are still being made,
but the real effect of juvenilization is evident beyond these genres, inas-
much as Hollywood product as a whole is created with younger audiences in
mind. According to a Motion Picture Association of America report released
in 2014, the age groups of 12-24 and 25-39 have more “frequent movie-
goers” than any other, their percentages proportionately greater than their
actual numbers in the U.S. population. 5 As young media consumers have
become more visible and influential over the years, the pop score has come
to include a wide array of youth music from the past and present, and now
is in the mainstream of U.S. film entertainment.
The pop score’s expanded role in contemporary Hollywood reflects
the part it has played in securing a youth audience for American film but
likewise speaks to changes in the business of film during the same period.
From the 1970s onward, the New Hollywood is defined in part by multime-
dia conglomerates that combine music and film, as well as other media, at
an industrial level, making the pop score a sound business investment. And,
as a consequence, some critics have regarded the pop score, especially those
scores compiled from prerecorded songs, as little more than a cynical exer-
cise in audience manipulation and ancillary marketing. 6 But the pop score,
even when it is a business decision, is one that, like all decisions affecting
 Introduction 3

what we hear and see on screen, has aesthetic and ideological consequences.
In the examples discussed here, new modes of screen masculinity constructed
by the pop score are one of the consequences of media convergence.
My interest in better understanding the relation between representations
of screen gender and contemporary scoring practices was sparked a few
years ago when I contributed to an interdisciplinary course entitled Popular
Music and Film. A course focused on varieties of youth- and music-oriented
film from the U.S. and U.K. during the post-World War II period, it worked
its way through the teenpics of the 1950s, the rockumentaries and youth
films of the 1960s and 1970s, up through the MTV-influenced audiovisual
extravaganzas of the 1980s, into the 1990s and 2000s, when the pop score
utilizing youth-identified music was no longer just a feature of the teen or
youth film, but was pretty well integrated into mainstream Hollywood. One
of the most striking features of the course for me, as a feminist film scholar,
was not just the male centeredness of the films studied (despite an effort at
gender parity in course design) but the near-obsessive focus on male bod-
ies as well as male experience. In fact, the overwhelming impression given
by this broad survey of youth, music, and film cultures was that the male
body—once repressed or, at the very least, thoroughly upstaged by glamorous,
eroticized, and fetishized femininities in classic Hollywood cinema of the
1920s through the 1940s—returned with a vengeance in rock and pop cul-
tures and in their cinematic representations from the 1950s onward. And
“vengeance” is not just a figure of speech, either. In these films, making a
spectacle of oneself—whether on a dance floor, behind a microphone, on a
motorbike, in a street brawl or bar fight, or even shooting down an enemy
from billion-dollar planes—is an act of rebellion, rebellion constructed, in
part, by the pop score.
Of course, the male body was never entirely repressed—or suppressed or
ignored—by studio-era Hollywood: It made a spectacle of itself in the musical
and in the shoot-outs, in the showdowns and fistfights that were the action
set-pieces of Westerns, gangster films, and adventure serials. These different
types of entertainment are recombined in new ways for new generations in the
films discussed here, starting with Elvis, who, unlike musical stars of the past,
sings, dances, and fights in his films of the 1950s. He is the rock ‘n’ roll rebel,
a screen creation cobbled from American film, music, and youth cultures, at
a critical juncture for all three. Offering a complex and remarkably durable
fantasy of music-driven masculinity, the rock ‘n’ roll rebel is revived for a new
generation in the rock-fueled, military-financed blockbusters produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer in the 1980s-2000s. He is still visible (and audible) today,
for instance in the Iron Man series (2008-2013), which makes playful but
strategic use of a varied array of contemporary youth music to construct a
(not particularly young) protagonist who is both a billionaire superstar poster
boy for the military-industrial complex and an outlaw vigilante.
The persistence of the rock ‘n’ roll rebel beyond the bounds of the teen
or youth film points not just to the ongoing work of media convergence
4 Introduction
but also to the changing status of youth itself as a cultural category over
the decades spanned by this study. 7 The body focus of rock ‘n’ roll mas-
culinity as imagined by Hollywood in the 1950s spoke aggressively of a
generational difference that took the form of gendered rebellion. But in
the more recent films discussed here, the stances associated with youth
culture, youth music, and youth film of the past, including gender rebel-
lion, deviancy, and rejection of the status quo, are directed toward a
broader array of representations and take place in a range of historical
and cultural milieux. Masculinities constructed by the score, and marked
by differences of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference, bear witness
to the complex cultural and historical meanings carried by youth-identified
popular music and the varied uses made of this music in contemporary
American film.

POP CHALLENGE

While occupying the common ground of America’s popular film and music
cultures of the post-World War II period, the screen masculinities discussed
here also inhabit the interstices between film studies and popular music schol-
arship. Early agenda-setting publications in each area highlighted their shared
concerns with pleasure and desire, with representations of the body as well
as with their different approaches to exploring them. Laura Mulvey’s Screen
essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the 1975 polemical sketch
of how sexual inequality structures popular film, highlighted the central role
played by female body spectacle,8 and Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie’s
“Rock and Sexuality,” published in Screen Education three years later, simi-
larly observed the central role of the young male body within “cock rock”
and “teeny bop.”9 Mulvey’s attention to the work of film, while privileging
Hollywood film and classical narrative, was both largely ahistorical and
grounded in the theoretical notions of film as text and cinema as apparatus;
by contrast, Frith and McRobbie’s account, despite some ruminations on
the problems of how to read rock music, aimed to offer a broad portrait
of youth music cultures at a particular historical moment. These essays
illustrate the different approaches of these fields of study, which persist to a
great degree even after decades of debate and scholarly reflection. One anchors
its scholarship in a sense of how films work as texts as well as products,
whereas the other is more inclined to address itself to broader patterns of
cultural activity and meaning. Together, they suggest some of the
methodological challenges for a study like this one.
Happily, I am not alone in the task of interrogating the work of the
pop score. Scholarship focused on popular music and screen media has
become a significant subfield in film and media studies, particularly since
the publication of two key works: Jeff Smith’s 1998 The Sounds of Com-
merce: Marketing Popular Film Music, which surveys industrial histories
 Proof Introduction 5

of the pop score, and John Mundy’s 1999 Popular Music on Screen: From
Hollywood Musical to Music Video, an historical account of the visual
economies of popular music in film and television. 10 Since their publica-
tion, various monographs and anthologies have employed a wide range of
approaches to the pop score and to musical meaning in film. 11 In general
terms, the pop score does much the same work as the classical, composed
score in that it can comment on action or character, connect scenes, cre-
ate atmosphere, and portray emotions. To a great degree, understanding
the pop score began with scholarship focused on the work of the classical
orchestral score. In particular, Claudia Gorbman’s 1987 study of narrative
film music was one of the originating sparks that set contemporary film
music studies in motion. Gorbman likens the function of the classical film
score to the “invisible” editing of the continuity system when she sums up
its work with the catchy oxymoron, “unheard melodies.” Accordingly, the
main purpose of the orchestral score is to “suture” the audience into the
world of the story, in part by lessening audience “defenses against the fan-
tasy structures to which narrative provides access.” 12 As Kathryn Kalinak
describes the orchestral score, its “medium . . . was largely symphonic; its
idiom romantic; and its formal unity typically derived from the principle
of the leitmotif.”13 The purpose of the classical score, Kalinak confirms, is
telling stories as efficiently as possible.
Musical conventions which become ingrained and universal in a culture
function as a type of collective experience, activating particular and pre-
dictable responses ....... Composers, working under the pressure of time,
used familiar conventions to establish geographic place and historical
time, and to summon up specific emotional responses predictably and
quickly. The fact that musical conventions are often arbitrary seems of
little consequence 14

By contrast, the narrative and representational functions of pop scores,

whether a score compiled from already existing songs or composed in a genre
of popular music or some combination of the two, are not so predictable.
Pop scores—designed to be heard, or paid attention to, in a way
that Hollywood’s orchestral scores of the studio era arguably were not—
depend on broader social and cultural contexts in order to work on and
for their audiences. Their meanings for any given auditor have the poten-
tial to be simultaneously contextual and experiential, broadly historical
and idiosyncratically personal. As a consequence of the range of meanings
it might produce, the popular music score offers new possibilities in the
contemporary period, particularly for those stories and characters outside
the collective experiences recognized and codified by classical Hollywood
film. Anahid Kassabian’s breakthrough study of 2001, Hearing Film: Track-
ing Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music, for example,
focuses on the work of popular music in 1980s films to portray women
6 Introduction
and female friendship. 15 Based on her analyses, Kassabian concludes that
pop scores offer the means to represent stories and worlds beyond the
Hollywood mainstream, in part because they have an “aleatory quality”
and provide a “loose fit” with the visuals. 16
While the pop score has the potential to open up the film text in this
way, it also offers certain challenges, especially for film scholars accustomed
to grounding their historical, industrial, and cultural analyses in detailed
explanations of how texts work. When Kassabian reflected in 2001 on the
almost complete neglect of the music score by film scholars until the end
of the 1990s, she argued that it had less to do with how important or not
such work was considered to be than with disciplinary and methodological
limitations:

Most people imagine that they cannot say anything about music, in
spite of regular practices of buying, listening to, and often producing
music. They imagine this in spite of regular conversations about songs,
performers, albums, radio stations, and concerts . . . about stylistic
pedigrees and generic histories, and much more. While film scholars do
not generally feel a need to professionalize themselves in art history or
linguistics before talking about “a film” the strong hold of the “expert
discourse ideology” of music has kept a tight lid on the production of
studies of film music and an even tighter lid on their routine inclusion
in courses, theorizing, and criticism. 17

But beyond the perception that only professional musicians or musicologists

can talk usefully about music are the particular challenges offered by the pop
score—or the pop song, for that matter—as an object of study.
Unlike film studies, where even scholars whose approaches and percep-
tions clash share a common vocabulary for their disagreement, in popular
music studies, the approaches to, the value of, and even the question of what
might constitute a popular music “text” have all been matters for debate.
John Shepherd, in his 1991 book Music as Social Text, notes that popu-
lar music scholars tend to regard the music itself as an “inscrutable black
box,”18 and David Brackett observed in 1995 that popular music studies is
“the one area of cultural practice in which cultural studies scholars seem to
be content not to refer to the specific characteristics of the medium they are
studying.”19 John Covach in 1999 declared that popular music scholars sim-
ply lack “the specialized skills necessary to deal with the musical ‘texts’ in
the ways that musicologists do,” 20 but Richard Middleton, in Reading Pop:
Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (2000), sees a more sub-
stantive problem with the formalist approaches taken by musicology—quite
aside from questions of who does or doesn’t have those skills and knowledge.
He observes that, because musicology deals with aspects of music amenable
to notation, such as the structures of harmony, chord changes, and so on,
its techniques are not especially useful to the study of popular songs, where
 Introduction 7

“rhythm, pitch gradation, timber and the whole ensemble of performance

articulation techniques are often more important.” 21 That is, although many
pop songs have been rendered in notational form to be distributed and sold
as sheet music, this type of representation says little about the meanings
potentially carried by different interpretations, performances, or recordings.
The impossibility of understanding popular music outside the param-
eters of a particular performance or recording of a performance is a point
illustrated by David Brackett’s comparison of two 1944 recordings of the
song “I’ll Be Seeing You,” by Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday. 22 In Brackett’s
analysis, radically different meanings are carried by two performances of the
same music and lyrics. He notes in particular the importance of what Mid-
dleton sums up as “intoned feeling,” the way that particularities of vocal
style, diction, and inflection—communicators of affect—all contribute to
meaning. His analysis utilizes spectrum photography to translate vocal ele-
ments into images that can be considered side by side in a visual comparison.
He then demonstrates the way the performative elements recorded in
this way become meaningful to auditors, thanks to the frames of biographi-
cal discourse and media coverage.
Ultimately, Brackett’s comparison illustrates the way that pop musical
meanings are constituted via a relation among the song, singer, auditor, and
the social, cultural, and historical spaces they share. In this way, it confirms
John Shepherd’s assertion that popular music’s “contextual, intertextual,
and textual processes are interpenetrative.” 23 That said, the sheer range of
secondary texts that Brackett draws upon, to confirm, delimit, and bind
his reading of musical meaning to its cultural and historical contexts, also
serves as a reminder of the fluidity of signification that typifies any given pop
tune—and, by extension, the pop score. The “aleatory” quality that Kassa-
bian references in her work has the potential to open up the film text to the
social, cultural, and historical contexts of popular music, to new or alterna-
tive stories and characters. But what makes the pop score such an interesting
addition to contemporary film also makes it a slippery object of study. Or, to
put it another way, as Susan McClary and Robert Walser observed in their
1988 essay, “Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock,” it’s no
easy task explaining why a particular pop song “kicks butt.” And the same
can be said of the pop score.
Roland Barthes addresses himself to such issues of musical pleasure and
meaning in a couple of essays collected in the 1977 volume, Image-Music-
Text. Barthes’ essays are especially useful to this study, interested as it is in
more than just metaphorical butt kicking. Without solving the problem of
how to read popular music, Barthes’ 1970 essay, “The Grain of the Voice,” 24
points to how the not-quite-readable song might nevertheless be understood
in terms of the workings of musical pleasure and engagement. Borrowing
Julia Kristeva’s concepts of phenotext (language) and genotext (extralinguis -
tic processes) to distinguish between different types of vocal performance and
experiences of listening, 25 Barthes coins the term “geno-song” to describe
8 Introduction
those he finds particularly pleasurable, in part because they hover on the
borderlines of signification, escapees from the “tyranny of meaning,” mak-
ing the listener an escapee as well. His experience of such performances is,
as a consequence, not one of conventional expectations fulfilled or knowl-
edge of musical conventions gratified, but rather something that feels more
immediate and unmediated: “the grain of the voice,” “the body in the voice
as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” 26
To illustrate, Barthes describes his pleasure in listening to a Russian bass
as an imaginary exchange between the body of the singer and that of the
auditor: “something which is directly in the cantor’s body, brought to your
ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the
muscles, the membranes.” 27 A bit like the process of “suture” by which
the viewer is bound to or stitched into a narrative film, Barthes describes
here an imagined “moment of junction” between singer and auditor that is
the product of projection and (mis)identification. 28 (And it is worth remem-
bering that “suture” is itself a process both highly conventional, produced
by various techniques of continuity editing and framing—phenotext—and
also, as Stephen Heath sums it up, “toward the imaginary.” 29) In another
essay on music in the same volume, “Musica Practica,” 30 Barthes describes
the listening relation explicitly as one of “fantasmatic” engagement with
the somatic basis of musical production, engagement that underpins the
“mimetic impulse” that prompts the listener to claim an imaginary “place,
as subject, in the scenario of the performance.”31 In “The Grain of the
Voice,” he describes a similar imaginary engagement with somatic sources of
music, but not for the purposes of mimesis; instead, it is the basis of pleasure
in musical experiences otherwise uncoded, a species of embodied, affective
understanding, underpinned, in a manner similar to cinematic engagement,
by processes of projection and identification.
Barthes’ ruminations on “grain” offer another perspective on the way that
different renditions of the same song carry different meanings, the distinc-
tion between pheno-song and geno-song having less to do with the song, per
se, than with the singer and auditor. Most useful for this study is its sketch
of how musical meaning, perception, and pleasure are linked. In particular,
Barthes’ notion of musical pleasure and engagement, taking the shape of a
fantasmatic scenario focused on music’s origin in the body of the performer,
is particularly evocative for the type of films and scores discussed here. Even
though they construct different types of masculinities and utilize differ-
ent types of popular music, these films are all resolutely focused on male
embodiment—and on using popular music to construct that embodiment.
The aural traces of the music’s somatic source (the voice that sings, the arms,
fingers, lips, and breath that play the instruments) have particular work to
do: Bodies heard and bodies seen, their relationship orchestrated by the
particular musical systems of a film, constitute audiovisual representations
of masculinity. From the musical energy that generates between funk musi-
cians as they play and inflects the narrative and representational, political
 Introduction 9

and ideological role of funk in Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baa-
dasssss Song (1971), to the group harmonies of doo-wop and their role in
Martin Scorsese’s screen representations of ethnic male communities, to the
embodied performances of rock guitar solos that that become an important
part of blockbuster action films’ depiction of male-empowerment-through-
technology, the body heard in the music—the performance imagined by the
listener—is key to musical meanings that help to shape these gendered spec-
tacles on screen and their ideological effects.

POPULAR MUSIC IN FILM AND MASCULINITY IN ACTION

The films discussed here utilize a wide range of popular music, from rock ‘n’ roll
to Neopolitan pop and 1950s pop ballads, to funk, soul, doo-wop, rock,
punk, and post-punk industrial, each film developing a distinctive musi-
cal system that puts into play the particular aesthetic qualities and cultural
meanings of its score’s prerecorded songs or original, pop-flavored composi-
tions. Some of the films had soundtrack albums or singles as part of their
marketing campaigns, and others did not. In many cases, but not all, the
use of popular music scores functions as an authorial signature—or part
of the brand identity—for the directors and producers who made the films.
Likewise, the film examples used in this study hail from various sectors of
the U.S. industry and are the products of varied production modes: exploita-
tion, low-budget independent, as well as big-budget studio. They reflect the
tendencies and concerns of a range of film cycles and genres, of historical
and cultural moments of the mid-1950s to the 2000s, with examples drawn
from post-studio era Hollywood, the New Hollywood, Blaxploitation, New
Queer Cinema, and the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster.
What these films have in common are embattled masculinities whose
violent confrontations are all, ultimately, struggles for identity, identities
constructed, represented and narrated by the pop score. A number of the
masculinities discussed here are ones that, at the time of their screen debuts,
had not previously been seen—or heard from—before in U.S. film, at least
not in the form made possible, in part, by the work of popular music. Popular
songs and music genres construct protagonists in terms of race and ethnic-
ity, gender and sexuality, generational and class difference. The pop score
narrates their struggles as they strive against poverty, against racist police,
against the traditions and limitations of ethnic communities and the
American class structure, against the violent repression of difference in
heterosexist society—or, in the typical manner of the war film and action
cinema, against the various (other, external) enemies of America. Violence is a
constant, and the physical conflicts, the striving, and the posturing of these
characters are both a means and a metaphor for the struggle to assert—even
perhaps to change—what is understood to be masculinity in its culturally
appropriate and dominant form.
10 Introduction
And yet, even though difference is a central theme of this study, the screen
masculinities discussed here are, in some respects, all too familiar. They offer
further evidence that what has often been called since the 1980s a crisis
in masculinity is perhaps more accurately regarded as the historically and
culturally specific process of reinventing masculinities and their gendered
fictions of empowerment for new generations and new audiences. As these
films draw on and transform familiar film genres like the Western, the gang-
ster film, the road movie, the war and action film, they recall a cinematic
past in which Hollywood’s white male hero was always challenged, always
forced to (re)assert himself, to take action and reinvent masculinity, once
again, for those who watch, and listen, in the dark.
Chapter 1, “A Different Tune: Hollywood, Popular Music, and Elvis,”
offers some additional historical background to this project with a brief
survey of popular music’s role in U.S. film before the New Hollywood era
of the 1970s before turning its attention to the incorporation of youth music
into Hollywood film. Of particular interest is the way that a connection
between rock ‘n’ roll and delinquent masculinity is forged by Hollywood in
the social problem drama, Blackboard Jungle (1955). Its depiction of vio-
lent, antisocial, rebellious masculinity, wedded to and constructed by youth
music, is sustained and refined in Elvis films of the 1950s, the aim of which is
to profit from but also to contain the controversial pleasures of rock ‘n’ roll.
The product of this endeavor was a new sort of song and dance man, one that
would influence the gender constructions of popular music and film cultures
for decades to come.
Chapter 2, “Orchestrating Violence: Music and Masculinity in Scorsese’s
Gangster Films,” addresses the audiovisual construction of urban mascu-
linity in its analyses of gangster films by Martin Scorsese, starting with
his student production Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967).
Released to a youth market, this “finger exercise” for Mean Streets offers an
image of young masculinity worlds away from the late 1960s releases Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969).32 Scors-
ese’s experiments with popular music helped to transform contemporary
cinema soundtracks, moving the pop score from its place in the low-budget
youth film into the mainstream of U.S. filmmaking, while influencing the
look—and the sound—of urban masculinity on screen. In particular, upon
its release in 1973, Mean Streets was heralded as a breakthrough representa-
tion of ethnic, working-class masculinity. In Mean Streets as well as in his
later films, GoodFellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Departed (2006),
popular songs help to construct the relation between ethnic masculinity and
urban life. Music narrates and represents all that places these men in conflict
with mainstream American culture, both the violence and the sense of com-
munity that underpin their difference.
Chapter 3, “Two Worlds: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and the
Dual Diegesis,” also focuses on music and the construction of urban mas-
culinity as it takes a close look at Melvin Van Peebles’ ultra-low-budget
 Introduction 11

film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). It argues that music and
image signify opposed worlds of black community and white society, with
the film’s titular character located at the point of collision between these
diegetic realities. Its use of music to construct a new sort of black hero —
and its extraordinary financial success in doing so—helped to spark the
“Blaxploitation” cycle of films that followed in the 1970s. In its use of jazz
funk instrumentation to claim urban space for its hero, it influenced audio-
visual representations of urban masculinity for decades to come.
Chapter 4, “The Power Chord Goes to War: The Bruckheimer Film, Music
and Militainment,” considers three works associated with the Bruckheimer
“brand” that represent, celebrate, eulogize—and are financially backed by—
the U.S. military. Engaging with the very different films Top Gun (1986),
Armageddon (1998), and Black Hawk Down (2002), this chapter argues
that the rock soundtrack is a significant element in the “Bruckheimer film”
not just because it lends excitement to spectacular images and offers oppor-
tunities for cross-media marketing synergies, but because guitar-driven rock
carries with it connotations of empowerment, of performative masculin-
ity mediated through technological virtuosity, crucial to America’s military
self-image and successful marketing of itself in the era of an all-volunteer
fighting force.
Chapter 5, “Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack: Gregg Araki’s The
Living End,” discusses the work of music in Araki’s 1992 film, The Living
End, which uses industrial, post-punk music to musically distinguish its
protagonists from the tragic and sentimentalized, disco-identified young
men of the Hollywood AIDS film. In contrast to those Hollywood AIDs
victims who passively wait for death, the HIV-positive outlaws of The
Living End take to the road in the manner of youthful rock rebels of the
past, as its music works on a number of levels to recreate sunny California
as a dystopian reality where governmental neglect, if not its imprimatur,
contributed to the devastation wreaked by the pandemic. A punk aesthet-
ic influences the film’s rough-and-ready, DIY approach to storytelling,
while a range of postpunk and industrial music accompanies the journey
and communicates the protagonists’ critical attitude toward the world
at large.
Chapter 6, “John Travolta, A Song and Dance Man in Action,” concludes
this survey of popular music, male violence, and difference in contemporary
U.S. cinema by surveying the star text of John Travolta who, as a song and
dance man, got his start in danceploitation film Saturday Night Fever (1977)
and who has, since his 1994 comeback in Pulp Fiction, found some of his
most successful roles in the contemporary crime and action genres. Look-
ing at these films as well as his most recent comeback performance as Edna
Turnblad in Hairspray (2007), this discussion considers Travolta as a star
who embodies, in many ways, convergences of film and music cultures. As
such, he has often troubled gender representation by performing masculin-
ity as spectacle and masquerade. Travolta offers an appropriate end for this
12 Introduction
selective tour of music in action, of male difference and the pop score in the
contemporary period, as a performer who, in his most popular and lucrative
performances at least, dances to a different tune.

NOTES

1. See in particular Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic”; Holmlund, “Masculinity as Mul-

tiple Masquerade”; Jeffords, Hard Bodies; and Tasker, Spectacular Bodies.
2. Gross, “Big and Loud,” 6-10.
3. More recent works engaged with cinema’s ongoing project of reimagining mas-
culinity in action and cognate genres include Gallagher, Action Figures; Kord
and Krimmer, Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities; Purse, Contemporary
Action Cinema; and Shary, Millennial Masculinity.
4. Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics.
5. Motion Picture Association of America, Inc., Theatrical Market Statistics,
2013.
6. In 1975, Irwin Bazelon commented that, “In recent years the influx of pop
musicians and assorted rock composers has turned almost every major film into
a kind of a musical, with hit songs born overnight, exploited and consumed
like chocolate bars melting in the mouth.” Bazelon, Knowing the Score, 29.
Aimed at adolescent tastes, the pop score in this account has no resonance, no
staying power, no purpose, beyond fleeting and questionable pleasure. Royal
Brown describes compilation scores as being strategically padded with numer-
ous songs to attract younger audiences and generate ancillary product: “By
the 1980s, cine-pop-music strategies often involved slipping as many already
recorded songs as possible on to a given film’s music track, generally as source
music, in order to attract younger audiences and to generate audio record-
ings that recycled these songs on to albums billed as ‘original sound-tracks.’”
Brown, “Modern Film Music,” 566.
7. This may likewise serve as evidence of a broader trend in popular culture,
where, as Andy Bennett has pointed out, “youth is no longer regarded as
straightforwardly linked with the condition of being young.” Bennett, “As
Young as You Feel,” 23.
8. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975).
9. In “Rock and Sexuality,” Frith and McRobbie also spend some time consider-
ing the problem of women in popular music. This includes women’s limited
opportunities to forge their own version of rock’s “oppositional rebellious hard
edges” and the limited places for women in the male-dominated business of
music (321), the ways in which domestic ideology shapes some female musi-
cian’s careers (321-322), as well as the packaging of “teen idols” for a female
market (323).
10. A notable precursor to these studies is Denisoff and Romanowski’s Risky Busi-
ness, an encyclopedic account of soundtrack hits and misses.
11. Anthologies and edited collections include Robertston-Wojcik and Knight’s
Soundtrack Available; Dickinson’s Movie Music; Inglis’s Popular Music and
Film; Lannin and Caley’s Pop Fiction; Powrie and Stilwell’s Changing Tunes;
Conrich and Tincknell’s Film’s Musical Moments; Deaville’s Music in Tele-
vision; Ashby’s Popular Music and the New Auteur. Monographs include
Kalinak’s How the West Was Sung, Reay’s Music in Film, and Dickinson’s
Off Key.
12. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 5.
13. Kalinak, Settling the Score, 79.
 Introduction 13
14. Ibid., 12
15. Kassabian, “A Woman Scored,” 61-90.
16. Ibid., 80
17. Ibid., 10.
18. Shepherd, Music as Social Text, 260.
19. Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music, xvii.
20. Covach, “Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology,” 454-455.
21. Middleton, Reading Pop, 104.
22. Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music, 34-74.
23. Shepherd, Music as Social Text, 177.
24. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 180-181. In the way that “The Grain of
the Voice” engages with musical experience outside set categories of musical
understanding it is similar to “punctum” in Camera Lucida, that uncoded
photographic detail whose meanings Barthes sets in contrast to “studium,”
meanings available and obvious to anyone (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87).
25. Barthes uses Kristeva’s concepts of phenotext (language) and genotext (extra-
linguistic processes) to distinguish between different types of vocal performance
and experiences of listening. In contrast to geno-song, what he labels “pheno-
song” is a polished, highly conventional vocal performance, where “everything
in the performance . . . is in the service of communication, representation.” In
contrast to Barthes’ formulation of geno-song and pheno-song as two different
types of music, Kristeva considers phenotext and genotext two aspects of the
signifying process. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 87.
26. Ibid., 188.
27. Ibid., 181.
28. Heath, Questions of Cinema, 86. For a more complete explanation of the
concept of “suture” and debates over its meaning, see Stam, Burgoyne, and
Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, 170-173.
29. Ibid.
30. Barthes, “Musica Practica,” 149-154.
31. Ibid., 152.
32. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 197.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashby, Arved, ed. Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after
MTV. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by
Richard Howe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
———. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image-Music-Text. Selected and translated by
Stephen Heath, 179-189. New York: Noonday Press, 1977.
———.“Musica Practica.” In Image-Music-Text. Selected and translated by Stephen
Heath, 149-154. New York: Noonday Press, 1977.
Bazelon, Irwin. Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music. New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1975.
Bennett, Andy. “As Young as You Feel: Youth as a Discursive Construct.” In Youth
Subcultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes. Edited by Paul Hodkinson and
Wolfgang Deicke, 23-36. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Brackett, David. Interpreting Popular Music. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2000.
Brown, Royal. “Modern Film Music.” In Oxford History of World Cinema. Edited
by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 558-566. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
14 Introduction
Conrich, Ian, and Estella Tincknell, eds. Film’s Musical Moments. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Covach, John. “Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology.” In Rethinking Music.
Edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 452-470. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Deaville, James, ed. Music in Television: Channels of Listening. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2011.
Denisoff, R. Serge, and William D. Romanowski. Risky Business: Rock in Film. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991.
Dickinson, Kay, ed. Movie Music: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002. —
——. Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies
in the 1950s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Frith, Simon, and Angela McRobbie. “Rock and Sexuality.” In On Record: Rock,
Pop, and the Written Word. Edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin,
317-332. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Fuchs, Cynthia. “The Buddy Politic.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculini-
ties in Hollywood Cinema. Edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 194-212.
London: Routledge, 1993.
Gallagher, Mark. Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Narratives.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2006.
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987.
Gross, Larry. “Big and Loud.” Sight and Sound 5 (1995): 6-10.
Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Holmlund, Chris. “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘Mature’ Stallone and
the Stallone Clone.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Holly-
wood Cinema. Edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 213-230. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Inglis, Ian, ed. Popular Music and Film. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.
Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Kalinak, Kathryn. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford.
Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.
———. Settling the Score: Music and the Classic Hollywood Film. Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hol-
lywood Film Music. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Kord, Susanne, and Elisabeth Krimmer. Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities:
Gender, Genre, and Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984 [1974].
Lannin, Steve, and Matthew Caley, eds. Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema. Bristol:
Intellect Books, 2005.
McClary, Susan, and Robert Walser. “‘Start Making Sense!’ Musicology Wrestles
with Rock.” In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. Edited by Simon
Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 277-292. New York: Pantheon, 1992 [1988].
Middleton, Richard. Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular
Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. Theatrical Market Statistics, 2013.
http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-
Statistics-2013_032514-v2.pdf (accessed July 7, 2014).
 Introduction 15

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film
Theory. Edited by Constance Penley, 57-68. New York: Routledge, 1988 [1975].
Mundy, John. Popular Music on Screen: From Hollywood Musical to Music Video.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
Powrie, Phil, and Robynn J. Stilwell, eds. Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing
Music in Film. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.
Purse, Lisa. Contemporary Action Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011.
Reay, Pauline. Music in Film: Soundtracks and Synergy. London: Wallflower Press,
2004.
Robertston-Wojcik, Pamela, and Arthur Knight, eds. Soundtrack Available: Essays
on Film and Popular Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Shary, Timothy. Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema.
Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013.
Shepherd, John. Music as Social Text. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998.
Stam, Robert, Peter Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in
Film Semiotics. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. London:
Routledge, 1993.
1 A Different Tune
Hollywood, Popular Music, and Elvis

When is a musical not a musical? When it has Elvis Presley in it.

-Rick Altman1

SUITABLE MUSIC, FROM THE NICKELODEON

TO THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

Inappropriate music may “do” for the unintelligent part of the audi-
ence, but what is the use of driving away the intelligent portion? . . .
Better music means better patronage and more of it. . . Suitable music
is an essential.
—Louise Reeves Harrison, 19112
This study considers the music used in the pop score as a signifier of dif-
ference for the cinematic masculinities it investigates. But this isn’t quite
the claim to historical exclusivity that it might seem at first glance. Well
before Hollywood undertook to make Elvis Presley, rock ‘n’ roll sensation,
into a musical star, U.S. histories of music and cinematic entertainment were
entwined. Almost since its beginning, the American film industry engaged
with both the business and pleasures of popular music.
Popular music has been a key element in film entertainments from the
ragtime played by nickelodeon musicians and the Tin Pan Alley ballads
performed by “illustrated singers” who entertained during reel changes
when the 20th century was new, 3 to the musical talents from opera, musi-
cal comedy, and vaudeville that Warner Brothers sought to make available
to even the smallest cinema outlets by adopting sound technology at the
end of the 1920s,4 to the Hollywood-produced musicals of the 1930s and
1940s that featured songs by important popular composers like Irving
Berlin, Cole Porter, and the Gershwins. In fact, popular music was so
important to film that, by the end of the 1930s, as Jeff Smith notes in
Sounds of Commerce, Hollywood controlled a significant portion of the
U.S. music publishing industry. It was a sound business move, prompted
by the profitability of the musical genre and the rapid rise of licensing
 A Different Tune 17

costs on the part of music publishers in response to that popularity. 5 As

of 1942, according to Peatman’s Audience Coverage Index, music from
Hollywood and Broadway together accounted for more than 80 percent
of U.S. radio play.6
Even in the early decades of the American film industry, Hollywood and
its predecessors were alert to the social and cultural roles and connotations
of popular music, as well as its economic significance. In both silent and
sound eras, music was a means not just of narrating film but of attracting
desirable audiences and signifying the particular quality of filmed entertain-
ments. For instance, when more elaborate—also safer, cleaner, and more
spacious—theaters were created to replace nickelodeons in the 1910s, pro-
ducers and exhibitors keen to distinguish themselves from the tarnished
reputation of the nickel theater worked to change both musical accom-
paniment as well as narrative content to attract a higher class of patrons.
Of particular concern was the ragtime piano typical of so-called “jackass
music,” where nickelodeon accompanists interrupted rather than supported
the spectatorial relation to film through careless, or even deliberately and
amusingly unsuitable, musical choices (that could prompt inappropriate
laughter, even impromptu dance).7 Worse yet for industry aspirations, rag-
time was associated not just with those urban, working-class audiences, who
reputedly delighted in and encouraged such irreverent musical treatments of
film, 8 but also with whorehouses and people of color. As a consequence, “it
was not considered respectable music for the middle class.” 9 Decades later
in the 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll would challenge Hollywood in a similar way, as a
controversial music with questionable effects on its young fans and its roots
in working-class, white and black popular music of the rural South and
urban North.
To encourage more appropriate accompaniment for film in the early
years of U.S. cinema, trade press publications like Edison’s Kinetogram pro-
vided “musical suggestions” starting in the 1910s. The aim was to attract
higher-class patrons who could afford to bring custom to new and
improved exhibition sites, such as New York’s million-dollar picture palace,
“The Strand,” which opened its doors in 1914. In the 1920s (the decade
when studios keen to take advantage of California’s sunny weather and
cheap land moved from the East to the West coast and started their work of
making Hollywood into more than just another Los Angeles suburb), cue,
or “dope,” sheets for musical accompaniment became commonplace. They
often included a range of classical pieces, excerpts from Beethoven, Wagner,
and Tchaikovsky,10 which lent an aura of respectability to a night at the
movies. And, of course, it didn’t hurt that classical music, being in the public
domain, could be used free of charge. Rick Altman, in Silent Film Sound,
considers that such accompaniment “played a major role in training the
American public to appreciate classical compositions.”11
Techniques that the Hollywood studios developed for musical accompa-
niment of nonmusical films in the 1930s confirmed the ongoing influence
18 A Different Tune
of the romantic idiom represented by such classical standards, starting with
Max Steiner’s experiments in orchestral underscoring for the RKO Radio
Pictures productions, King Kong (1933) and The Informer (1935). The clas-
sical film score as used in these and later films subsumed itself to narrative
aims, even as it added “High Art sheen” to Hollywood product. 12 Kathryn
Kalinak explains the work of such scores, noting how, by “synchronizing
diegetic action to its musical accompaniment,” conventional underscoring
effectively “masks the actual source of sonic production,” rendering the
music from the off-screen orchestra “natural and consequently inaudible.” 13
Like other conventions of classical Hollywood narration—such as the con-
tinuity editing system of cutting and framing—the classical film score works
to a great degree by effacing its presence. What Claudia Gorbman sums up
as “unheard melodies” consists of a

strongly codified set of scoring and mixing practices [that] ensured

music’s inconspicuousness in classical cinema. A music cue would often
begin or end on an action . . . like the closing of a door or the transition
to a new scene. It was standard to avoid orchestration that would “com-
pete” in register or tonal quality with a speaking voice; to synchronize
dynamics of music and action, and parallel music with mood or action;
and to use the very familiar language of late-Romantic music as the
primary idiom of scoring, relying on its instantly recognizable reservoir
of connotation.14

The scoring practices described by Gorbman and Kalinak dominated

Hollywood cinema throughout the studio era. And “unheard” though the
classical score might have been in its narrative role, when created by one of
Hollywood’s most celebrated composers such as Max Steiner, Alfred
Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, or Eric Korngold, it was also an important part
of production values provided by Hollywood product.
Despite an ongoing reliance on the Romantic idiom (a convention that,
Kalinak notes, extended beyond studio era Hollywood to influence the
sound of television15), the orchestral score was not unaltered by time or by
cultural and industrial change. From the beginning of the 1950s through
the first half of the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a period of “uncertainty
and disarray.”16 Precipitating events for this period of instability and change
included the Supreme Court’s trust-busting verdict against the studios in
the Paramount Decree of 1948, which found Hollywood guilty of anti-com-
petitive business practices. It forced studios to divest themselves of their
theatrical holdings and cease collusive practices like block-booking. No
longer vertically integrated companies that controlled their own exhibition
outlets, Hollywood studios scaled back their production in the 1950s to so-
called A features. And as independent production increased across the U.S.,
they became distribution companies. But perhaps even more significant than
such industrial challenges and changes were the cultural transformations
 A Different Tune 19

produced by the World War II-era economic boom, summed up in the

widespread, postwar suburbanization of America.
In contrast to the speed and success with which television was marketed to
a newly prosperous, home-owning, family-focused American population via
ad campaigns aimed at the social and cultural promise of this new tech-
nology,17 Hollywood only haltingly registered, responded to, and finally
harnessed the economic potential of postwar changes in its audience. Holly-
wood’s immediate response to the challenges it faced after World War II was
to counter technology with technology. It met competition from television
with improved sound, color, widescreen, and 3-D in the films of the 1950s
and 1960s. Only more slowly did Hollywood begin “to evolve toward a
broader spectrum of film types and spectator choices” in recognition of its
changing audience and its altered place in the entertainment marketplace. 18
As the industry moved toward greater degrees of conglomeratization, which
included further acquisition and development of music subsidiaries, the films
it produced and distributed changed and soundtrack albums became a sig-
nificant form of ancillary marketing. Film scores started to change as well,
as some composers moved away from the neo-Romantic idiom of the classi-
cal score. Henry Mancini incorporated jazz idioms in films like Breakfast at
Tiffany’s (1961) and The Pink Panther (1963), creating tunes that are still
widely recognizable and iconic of Cold War-era cool.19 Bernard Herrmann
utilized the dissonance and atonality of art music and experimented with
new types of electronic instrumentation. Like Mancini, his compositions
moved decisively away from the aesthetic of “unheard melodies,” particu-
larly when he created unnerving and impossible-to-ignore scores that blurred
the line between music and sound effects for Alfred Hitchcock horror films,
The Birds (1953) and Psycho (1960).
Idiom and instrumentation were not the only changes in film scores.
Even those indebted to the music of the past—like the blockbuster composi-
tions of John Williams in the 1970s—were reshaped by the requirements
of cross-media marketing in the conglomeratized industrial environment
of New Hollywood. Thomas Schatz credits blockbuster event film Jaws
(1975) with defining and demarcating the New Hollywood era. Portions of
Williams’ score for the film were crucial both to its innovative marketing
campaign as well as to the film’s success as a “high-cost, high-tech, high-
speed” adventure.20 The “saturation” marketing and release campaign for
Jaws utilized both television and print media to fill what was, at the time, an
unprecedented number of cinema seats, for 467 screens across the U.S. and
Canada.21 Its marketing campaign was designed to “front-load” the audi-
ence for these screens in a manner similar to that of exploitation cinema,
thus maximizing its event status while minimizing opportunities for negative
word of mouth.22 Prototypical of what Justin Wyatt calls a “high concept”
film, Jaws offered a simple but thrilling story easily marketed by a single,
iconic image splashed across newspaper ads, book covers, and film posters: a
huge, open-mouthed shark closing in on its human prey. 23 Just as important
20 A Different Tune
and succinct as this signature image was Williams’ spare but portentous
shark theme. Its machine-like throb of cello signified the relentlessness of
the film’s villain; it could—with nary a fin in sight—suffuse screens big and
small with threat. Overall, the music for Jaws is reliant upon principles of
classical Hollywood scoring. Williams, as a young contract musician, had
worked with famed composers of the classical score like Alfred Newman,
Franz Waxman, and Dimitri Tiomkin. 24 But, thanks to saturation market-
ing, the widely reproduced and widely recognized lietmotif for the star of
Jaws ultimately achieved a life of its own beyond the haunted waters of the
film—and well past the classical score’s aesthetic of inaudibility.
Meanwhile, as the classical score adjusted in various ways to the post-
studio era, popular music continued to be a feature of Hollywood enter-
tainment. The musical had been a reliable generator of pop hits since its
introduction with the coming of sound. And it was still a significant genre
for Hollywood decades later, with screen adaptations of Broadway hits pro-
viding some of Hollywood’s top box office draws (as well as some of its
most disastrous flops)25 through the 1960s. South Pacific (1958) and Sound
of Music (1965) were the most lucrative of Hollywood’s Rogers and Ham-
merstein adaptations for the screen, generating significant returns and
chart-topping soundtrack albums. The hugely popular film adaptation of
West Side Story (1961) made soundtrack history when its album captured
and held the number one spot on Billboard charts in both 1962 and 1963,
a record that would not be broken until Michael Jackson’s Thriller took the
top spot in 1983 and 1984.26
Beyond the musical genre, pop tunes found a new role in Hollywood film
as theme songs. The narrative worlds of the B Western had often included
singing cowboys, and John Ford, one of the Western’s most prolific and influ -
ential directors, consistently included American folk songs and period music
in his films.27 All the same, when Tex Ritter’s rendition of “Do Not Forsake
Me, Oh My Darlin”28 was featured over the opening credits of High Noon
(1952), the Cold War Western directed by Fred Zinnemann, it appeared as a
striking innovation, an unusual instance of a song used nondiegetically in a
drama film. Jeff Smith observes that the campaign launched by United Artists
around “Do Not Forsake Me,” or what became known as the “Ballad of High
Noon,” bore many similarities to later pop-fueled movie promotions, includ-
ing multiple-release singles and radio play.29 As Corey Creekmur points out,
the Tex Ritter songs over the opening credits of both High Noon and later The
Searchers (1956) work in a manner similar to a Greek chorus, occupying a
liminal space neither inside nor entirely outside the diegesis, commenting not
just on one film but on the Western genre as a whole. 30
Decades later, Elmer Bernstein credited Tex Ritter’s rendition of that
“innocuous pop song” with being the beginning of the end of classical
film scores.31 While Bernstein certainly overstated the issue, theme songs
did carve a new space for popular song in 1950s film, as “The Ballad of
High Noon” sparked a flurry of interest and emulation. 32 Most theme
 A Different Tune 21

songs took the form of innocuous, middle-of-the-road pop tunes designed

to raise awareness of film titles, 33 as for instance the Decca release of the
Four Aces’ “It’s a Woman’s World” for the 1954 CinemaScope melodrama
Woman’s World. The song provides cross-media marketing, with a lush
pop sound that confirms the film’s focus on the glossy promise of postwar
prosperity, as it—like the film—pays homage to women whose world is
men. By contrast, another Decca tune, “Rock Around the Clock,” was
both energizing and divisive in its effect when used as the theme song
for the social problem film Blackboard Jungle (1955). Hollywood’s first
engagement with rock ‘n’ roll resulted in both controversy and box office
success. MGM vice president in charge of production, Dore Schary, testify-
ing before a Senate committee on juvenile delinquency a few months after
the film opened, offered assurances that young audience’s responses to the
rock ‘n’ roll theme song were part of the film’s design, directed toward its
ultimate aim to expose and condemn delinquency. But other commentators
were not so sure about the film’s effects—and its use of the controversial
new youth music.

UNSUITABLE MUSIC AND UNDESIRABLE OTHERS:

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IN HOLLYWOOD
I have seen . . . at least 5 or 6 runnings with audiences . . . and their
reactions are pretty much the same. One of the things is the usual dem-
onstrations on the part of the kids towards the exciting music at the
beginning . . . the rock-and-roll music, and in the early section they
are laughing really at the teacher; they are with the gang. There is no
doubt about that, and that’s the way the picture was designed. But as
the picture develops. . . the attitude of the audience begins to switch
away from the hoodlum elements . . . they are with the teacher. . . they
always applaud the end of the picture where the teacher triumphs over
bad.
—Dore Schary, defending Blackboard Jungle
before the Senate subcommittee 34

Thanks in part to Blackboard Jungle this new form of dance music

became instant shorthand for an undesirable Other: rock and roll was
music for juvenile delinquents—and low budget musicals.
—Cory Messenger 35

Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” helped to make
Blackboard Jungle, with its claustrophobic portrait of delinquency in an
inner city high school, a box office success, even as the exposure lent by
the film propelled the song up the charts. Once “Rock Around the Clock”
reached the top spot on Billboard’s pop chart, the rock ‘n’ roll craze had
22 A Different Tune
officially begun. When “Rock Around the Clock” played over the open-
ing credits of the film, teens reportedly leapt from their seats to dance in
emulation of the young ne’er-do-wells on screen; when forbidden to dance
in the aisles, some took revenge on cinema upholstery, slashing their seats,
with the consequence that stories circulated of delinquent behavior and
property damage related to the film. Overseas, full-scale riots were linked
to the film and its music; at the Gaiety Cinema, in Manchester, Great
Britain,

gangs of teenage youths and their girlfriends danced in the aisles, vaulted
up on to the stage, and turned fire hoses on the manager when he tried
to restore order. After the programme, they surged into city streets in a
wild stampede, bringing traffic to a standstill in the centre of town and
pounding a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm on buses and cars with their fists. 36

For some observers, at least, such behavior was proof of rock ‘n’ roll’s threat
to social order.37 Certainly, this is a reading of events supported by the film
itself, via a musical structure that works to connect youth, music, and vio-
lence. As Hollywood’s first point of engagement with rock ‘n’ roll music, the
enthusiasm and controversy generated by “Rock Around the Clock” and
its use in Blackboard Jungle suggested the new youth music’s challenge and
appeal for an industry in transition.
“Rock Around the Clock” had already been released once in 1954 with-
out making it into Billboard’s top 20, but on July 9, 1955, four months after
the March debut of Blackboard Jungle, it became the first single of its type
to hit number one on Billboard’s pop chart. It stayed in the top spot for eight
weeks; meanwhile, it peaked at three on R&B charts and ranked fourth for
1955 on the list of R&B disc jockey favorites.38 In its combination of West-
ern swing and jump blues and its popularity with young white music fans,
it effectively crossed the “color line” that divided music, artists, styles, and
markets. As Thomas Doherty explains,

Billboard divided its popular song charts along racial lines: best-
selling songs mostly by white artists on one chart, rhythm-and-blues
(R&B) songs by black artists for the growing black audience . . . on
another. . . The pop charts were dominated by smooth orchestral
kitsch pitched mainly to adults by powerful national record companies.
(Patti Page’s 1953 hit “The Doggie in the Window” on Mercury is the
usual example.) R&B songs were generally recorded and marketed by
small independent companies and featured a rollicking four-four beat,
raw vocalizing, and vaguely licentious lyrics . . . (Ruth Brown’s 1953 hit
“Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” on Atlantic is exemplary on
all counts.) Because musical tastes and radio airwaves were not as easily
segregated as public facilities, R&B made steady inroads on the white
audience. Teenagers . . . were especially enthusiastic. 39
 A Different Tune 23

The crossover style music that came to be known as rock ‘n’ roll was made
possible by the wide range of regional music finding airplay and fans in
the early 1950s. As John Mundy points out, “because media technologies
create new spaces and new spatial relationships . . . old spatial geographies
which made racial segregation possible” were “under attack.” By bringing
together “hillbilly” music of the white, working-class South, with “race”
music of the black South and urban North, rock ‘n’ roll created controversial
“new cultural geographies.” 40
In part because of its mixed heritage of race, class, and region, and in part
due to some incidents of violence following rock ‘n’ roll shows, 41 rock ‘n’ roll
became firmly yoked to juvenile delinquency in the popular imagination.
Blackboard Jungle helped to forge this connection. Invested in the point of
view of the novice teacher, Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford), the film depicts
a world radically separated by generational and class difference. Echoing
sensational headlines about youth out of control, the marketing campaign
for Blackboard Jungle confirms its interest in delinquent youth-as-object.
The most lurid of the film’s posters uses visual tropes of the horror film to
represent the delinquent and the danger he presents: a woman, with terror
in her eyes and clothing in disarray, backs away from a shadow with clawed
hands—the teen male, lustful, dangerous, monstrous. 42
As a consequence of its investment in the adult fears and its address to an
adult audience, Blackboard Jungle did not produce a rebel icon in the man-
ner of its predecessor, The Wild One (1953) or its successor, Rebel Without
a Cause (1955), despite a striking performance by Sidney Poitier as Gregory
Miller, sometime antagonist to Dadier. Poitier clearly had the potential to
make an appealing rebel icon, “silky, sullen, sexually charged” as he is in
his exchanges with Ford. 43 But it would be some years yet before Amer-
ican cinema produced a black antihero equivalent to Hollywood’s white
rebel male of the 1950s. Instead, by the end of the film, Poitier takes on
what would become an all too familiar role for him in the 1960s, the black
man who helps the white hero and, in the process, allays white fears of
blackness—and, in this case, of class and generational difference as well.
In contrast to intelligent, articulate Miller, “glassy-eyed, thumb-sucking”
Artie West (Vic Morrow) 44 appears beyond the range of both educational
reform and perhaps filmic identification as well. He is, as Doherty points
out, a “new criminal type,” his extravagant badness putting him “beyond
the pale.”45 These two key characters, the charismatically good black stu-
dent and the theatrically bad white one, share screen time and space, and,
at certain points of the narrative, they bear a common antipathy toward
Dadier. But they are completely separate musically, as Miller is associated
only with gospel, never with the (rather odd) combination of jazz and rock ‘n’
roll that the film uses to “other” the students of North Manual High. (When
practicing with his gospel group, Miller interrupts their singing to chide,
“Stop jazzin’ it up, okay?”) This segregation of the film’s musical design
points to the care with which the filmmakers negotiated issues of race and
24 A Different Tune
integration in their design of the film, while confirming the negative
connotations attached to rock ‘n’ roll.
Jazz and rock ‘n’ roll are connected via a series of scenes that link young
masculinity and musicality, embodied pleasure and violence. The eclectic
combination of music used on the soundtrack has, of course, little or nothing
to do with what the actual musical preferences of teenagers in a mixed-race
high school in 1955 might have been. As Krin Gabbard points out, 1950s
Hollywood film, as it began to engage with new forms of youth and music
culture, was inclined to conflate jazz and rock ‘n’ roll as “emblems of rebel-
lion.”46 In The Wild One, for example, “outlaw motorcyclists listen to big
band jazz and talk about bebop as an expression of their youthful rebel-
lion,” while later films—The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), Jamboree (1957),
and Mr. Rock and Roll (1957)—tumble jazz music and musicians together
with rock ‘n’ roll performers and performances, making “no real distinction
between the youthcult music of the mid-fifties and mainstream jazz.”47 In
Blackboard Jungle, rock ‘n’ roll and jazz are linked through scenes that (in
anticipation of the controversy over the film) represent dance and violence
as cognate expressions of youthful exuberance and failures of discipline.
The connection between music and delinquency begins in the pre-credit
sequence. The scrolling message from the film’s producers presents the film
as a first step toward “public awareness” of delinquency. Oppositions of
discipline versus delinquency and of social awareness versus entertainment
structure what doubles as public service announcement and advertisement,
in which high-minded ideals about social reform are combined with the
tacit promise of titillating action. Its musical accompaniment, a drum solo
at once jazzy and martial, adds another structuring opposition, dance ver-
sus march (or, perhaps for young audiences, fun versus duty). In terms of
the film’s narrative focus, the Gene Krupa-meets-military-field-march col-
lision of drumming styles musically foreshadows the struggle of veterans
whose new war as high school teachers is against delinquency. Anticipa-
tion builds through the percussive battle between danceable syncopation
and march-time discipline, embodied rhythms (drumming and dancing,
drumming and marching) moving what Barthes calls “geno-song” into the
ascendant,48 even as their thematic relevance for the film is made clear.
When the drum solo segues, via its final rimshot, into “Rock Around the
Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets, dancing and pleasure win out (tem-
porarily at least) over march-time discipline. Is it any wonder that some
teen audience members were inspired to jump up and dance in the aisles?
The rough but innovative mix of jazz, R&B, and Western swing of “Rock
Around the Clock,” propelled by hooting sax and thumping bass, shuf-
fling drum and rimshots aplenty, blares through the credit sequence. Then,
diminished in volume, Bill Haley and His Comets are integrated into the
urban world of the film, where Dadier’s first glimpse at North Manual High
is a sort of music-inspired chaos of young bodies in motion, united only in
their appreciation of the beat.
 A Different Tune 25

After a city bus drops Dadier into the scene, his wary but intense study
of his surroundings identifies him as the film’s agent of “public awareness.”
He enters the forecourt of the school with an air of determination, more or
less ignoring the gaggle of teens and apparently oblivious to the music that
moves them. For contemporary audiences, “Rock Around the Clock” is dif-
ficult to ignore and almost impossible to imagine as anything but joyous. But
this opening sequence works to suggest that the appeal of its toe-tapping,
hip-shaking, head-bobbing rhythm is on par with that of an open fire
hydrant on a busy city street in the final dog days of August: a distinctly
uncouth, lower-class pleasure, alluring but possibly dangerous to the young
who succumb. In these terms, a little vignette of urban family life witnessed
by Dadier before he approaches the school—a mother who shakes her fist at
a water-soaked little boy as she drags him away from the hydrant, shouting,
“You wanna be a bum?”—doubles as an example of both the questionable
parenting techniques that have produced his future students and a bit of
homegrown wisdom on the risky pleasures of street life.
Our first glimpse of the all-male student population of North Manual
High is through the bars of the school fence as Dadier walks in for his job inter-
view. They are presented as the product of this city, this street, this mode of
parenting—and this music. They snap their fingers, bob their heads, walk
on their hands, while boy-on-boy couples dance, their rough but rhythmic
acrobatics recognizable as the swing era moves of the Lindy Hop, a GI favor-
ite, which the film (ironically enough) helped to popularize as a rock ‘n’ roll
dance.49 “Rock Around the Clock,” now firmly located in the diegesis, is not
so easy to hear, but its effects are easy to see. Dadier garners looks of suspi-
cion, amusement, and a single wolf whistle from the boys. But they crowd
the fence when a pretty young woman walks by, reaching through the bars,
banging on trash can lids, free-form disorder giving way to more explicitly
sexual excitement, more or less timed to the rock ‘n’ roll beat. Rock ‘n’ roll
was 1920s-era slang for sexual intercourse, a fact never too far from the
minds of rock ‘n’ roll’s critics. 50 The new youth music would bring to the
white mainstream the danceable beat of rhythm and blues, as well as its lyri-
cal partiality for sexual double entendre. Only a month before Blackboard
Jungle opened, in February 1955, Variety featured an editorial entitled “A
Warning to the Music Business” that, without naming names, focused on
the danger of “‘leer-ics’” in music popular with teens, which was “attempt-
ing a total breakdown of all reticences about sex.” 51 As Roy Shuker sums
it up, it was the “link between sex and rock ‘n’ roll—the devil’s music—that
underpinned the moral reaction to its popularization in the 1950s.” 52
From the link between rock ‘n’ roll and dance to rock ‘n’ roll and sex, the
film moves on to confirm the link between youth music and youth violence.
Artie West and his gang offer payback in kind for Dadier’s beating of a would-
be rapist, a student who attacks a female teacher on the first day of school.
The MGM orchestra’s big band style cover of “Rock Around the Clock”
offers nondiegetic accompaniment for the alleyway fight sequence between
26 A Different Tune
the students and their teachers, staged after Dadier and his colleague, Joshua
Edwards (Richard Kiley), have a few too many drinks at a local bar. Choreo-
graphed to fit the MGM orchestra’s wildly overblown interpretation of “Rock
Around the Clock,” the fight sequence links the rock ‘n’ roll tune to violence.
The familiar melody becomes recognizable just before the fight commences
(“Did you hear footsteps?”), and the volume goes up as students move in to
attack. When Dadier throws off repeated assailants and Edwards is swung
against the wall, moving roughly in time to the familiar “Rock Around the
Clock” melody, the fight recalls the athletic dance of the opening sequence.
But then the scene surrenders itself to big band jazz-driven mayhem, as horns
punctuate punches and Dadier is beaten along with a kettledrum. The link
between music, dance, and violence is confirmed in the scene where teacher
Mr. Edwards has his treasured collection of jazz records destroyed by Artie,
his gang, and a handful of other students. In perhaps the most famous scene
of the film, old-fashioned Dixieland (“Jazz Me Blues” by Bix Beiderbecke)
sets off the frenzy of destruction; only a more contemporary disc, whose fast-
paced jazz fuels the melee and once again inspires the school Lindy Hoppers
to move, is spared. Maybe it’s not rock ‘n’ roll, but it has a good beat that you
can dance—or smash records—to.
Despite (or because of) its depiction of inner city youth-as-other, Black-
board Jungle had great appeal for young audiences. A 1956 survey by
Gilbert Youth Research confirmed that Blackboard Jungle was most high
school students’ favorite film.53 As James Gilbert points out in his study of
juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, the film, despite an ending where the
teacher “triumphs over bad,” also “depicts the successful defiance of
delinquents who reject authority.”54 But just as important, it also provided
the exciting and unprecedented opportunity to hear the new music, loud.
James Miller notes that the song was in these terms a calculated assault on
the audience for Blackboard Jungle:

. . . it was customary for Hollywood producers to lower the levels of

bass on the music used on soundtracks, lest the audience be deafened by
the giant loudspeakers. For Blackboard Jungle, however, the producers
ran . . . “Rock Around the Clock” wide open, letting the music hit the
listeners in the gut ........ 55

Frank Zappa, reflecting on his own gut response to Blackboard Jungle as a

teen, describes the experience of hearing “Rock Around the Clock” at full
volume as one that overwhelmed—or simply rendered irrelevant—the
narrative logic of the film:

When the titles flashed up there on the screen Bill Haley and his Comets
started blurching “One Two Three O’Clock, Four O’Clock Rock . . .” It
was the loudest rock sound kids had ever heard at that time. I remember
being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms across America,
 A Different Tune 27

kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players lis-
tening to the “dirty music” of their life style (“Go in your room if you
wanna listen to that crap ...... and turn the volume all the way down.”)
But in the theater, watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn’t tell you
to turn it down . . . Bill Haley was ........ playing the Teenage National
Anthem and it was so loud I was jumping up and down. Blackboard
Jungle, not even considering the story line (which had the old people
winning in the end) represented a strange sort of “endorsement” of
the teenage cause: “They have made a movie about us, therefore, we
exist.”56
As Zappa describes it, the happy surprise of “Rock Around the Clock” at
full volume produced its own set of identifications and engagements for the
teen audience of the 1950s, quite apart from those endorsed by the narra-
tive proper. It is the “teenage national anthem” not (just) because of what it
says but because of what it does for the listener. The embodied engagement
described by Zappa is one that the film itself encourages, incorporates into
its narrative, and then roundly condemns, through its musical design and its
narrative of intergenerational violence, making it a good example of how
Hollywood (or MGM, at least) hedged its bets in regard to rock ‘n’ roll.
Despite the evidence provided by the reception of Blackboard Jungle of
teens keen for film and music entertainment, it would be more than a decade
before Hollywood addressed itself in a sustained and purposeful way to
exploiting the youth market. 57 That said, a number of rock ‘n’ roll films
made it to the screen during the second half of the 1950s, most of them
low-budget quickies like Rock Around the Clock (1956), created by
independent producer Sam Katzman and distributed by Columbia Pictures.
Despite being aimed at a teen audience, the narrative of Rock Around the
Clock is, like that of other rocksploitation films, Don’t Knock the Rock
(1956), Shake Rattle and Rock (1956), and rocksploitation-style Elvis
Presley vehicle Loving You (1957), a thinly veiled piece of wish fulfilment
on the part of producers not secure in regard to either the ongoing
popularity of rock ‘n’ roll—or the potential negative consequences of
controversy. The standard rocksploitation narrative recounts how rock ‘n’roll
is discovered by down-on-their-luck music professionals who recognize the
novelty and appeal of the sound. They are wildly successful in promoting it to
larger and larger teen audiences. When controversy erupts, these same media
professionals are instrumental in healing generational rifts between
community elders who threaten to shut down the big dance or show and
young people who just want a chance to dance and listen to music. By the end
of each film, the new youth music has been transformed into something that
even the most crotchety senior citizen can appreciate, as they see in youthful
enthusiasm over rock ‘n’ roll a reflection of their own youth and the
controversial musical fads they once enjoyed. Doherty avers that Katzman’s
quickies “testified unmistakably to the present power and future ascendancy
28 A Different Tune
of the teenage moviegoer.”58 They also, in their repeated narrative efforts to
find mainstream acceptance for the new youth music, energetically disputed
the tie between delinquency and rock ‘n’ roll insisted upon by the musical
design of Blackboard Jungle.
In contrast to Katzman’s interest in teen audiences, one of the few high-
budget films made by Hollywood in this period that featured rock ‘n’ roll
music, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), addresses itself to an adult audience,
with little attention paid to teen fans. The film features glorious, Technicolor
performances by stars like Little Richard and Fats Domino, Gene Vincent
and Eddie Cochran, but, in contrast to Hollywood musicals of the past
whose fantasy worlds are built around an aesthetic investment and a belief
in the value of the musical entertainment they offer, rock ‘n’ roll is to a great
degree alien to the world of the film, inexplicably popular, loud, and strange.
Even though the musical comedy did well at the box office and seemed to
demonstrate that “rock could not only be contained but could actually be
assimilated by the production machine,” 59 it is, in fact, the cluelessness of
the production machine working to assimilate new youth music that is the
basis for much of its comedy.
The story focuses on how “the girl” of the title, Jerri Jordan (Jayne Man-
sfield), is groomed as a rock ‘n’ roll star by her mobster boyfriend, “Fats”
Murdoch (Edmond O’Brien), with the help of an alcoholic press agent,
Tom Miller (Tom Ewell), despite her complete lack of interest and appar-
ent lack of talent. Once Tom and Jerri are paired romantically, the film’s
making-of-a-star narrative shifts from the unwilling Jerri to the inappro-
priate Fats. He is revealed at the end of the film as the newest and most
improbable rock ‘n’ roll sensation, when he performs one of the knowingly
terrible original compositions he penned in the penitentiary, “Rock Around
the Rockpile.” A bit baggy and decades older than his “fans,” but apparently
adored by the moon-faced teens who sway to his songs, his shape if not his
talent is more than a little reminiscent of Bill Haley, even if his music rocks
in name only. In this conclusion, The Girl Can’t Help It comically acknowl-
edges its own, failed effort to realign the erotics of rock ‘n’ roll to the white,
female body—and away from those of rock ‘n’ roll’s male performers, both
black and white.
The Girl Can’t Help It is a backstage musical that never quite decides
where exactly the stage might be or who might perform on it, with its musi-
cal performances and narrative worlds organized around different types of
body spectacle. Fats, apparently inspired by watching Betty Grable perform
“(I wish I could) Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” in the musical Wabash Ave-
nue (1950), plans to make Jerri a “somebody” by creating a musical career
around her bombshell looks. Why not? After all, weren’t Grable’s million-
dollar legs, rather than her vocal talents or the Tin Pan Alley tunes she
sang, the real focus of the musicals that made her the highest-paid female
star of World War II? 60 True or not, the comparison between Grable and
Mansfield confirms Fats’ investment in Hollywood gender conventions,
 A Different Tune 29

fundamental to his plans for Jerri’s star makeover. Yet Mansfield, like the
African American performers in the film who are divorced from the narra-
tive proper by the “insistent musicality” of their roles, 61 is strangely isolated
in and immobilized by her role as animated pinup. Ultimately, what the
“girl can’t help” isn’t her sexy looks and their comically exaggerated effect
on strange men in the street, or even her preference for being “domestic”
(as she puts it) to being a star, but that her physical beauty doesn’t really
seem to give her any purchase on the rock ‘n’ roll music career Fats envisions
for her—or on the making-of-a-star narrative that is, putatively, the focus
of the film. Even if she could sing like Betty Grable (or dance like her sister
Kate), it wouldn’t make her any more of a rock ‘n’ roll attraction than the
siren song novelty that briefly lends her one-hit-wonder status. Instead, it’s
Fats who wriggles and struts his stuff on stage in the final segment and gets
“discovered” despite a complete lack of skill or style. This unlikely turn of
narrative events makes a bit more sense when we consider that, in the world
beyond the film, a very different sort of white male performer has shimmied
his way to national exposure as a rock ‘n’ roll star and is, in fact, on the verge
of doing the same in Hollywood.

THE DESIRABLE OTHER: ELVIS IN THE 1950S

Later that night at the show Mae ran into one of her former students,
now a student nurse. Elvis was onstage, “and she was just right into it,
didn’t know who he was, none of them did. But she was just ahhhh—all
of them were, even some of the old ones were doing like that. I looked at
the faces—they were loving it. And I said, ‘Hey, honey, what is it about
this kid?’ And she said, ‘Awww, Miz Axton, he’s just a great big beauti-
ful hunk of forbidden fruit.’”
—Peter Guralnick62

The Girl Can’t Help It reflects the bemusement of media gatekeepers at the
rock ‘n’ roll craze of the mid-1950s, as it comically addresses the incom-
prehensibility of the new youth music and its sites of attraction. In its
last-minute substitution of the white male for the white female body as the
focus of excitement generated by rock ‘n’ roll and in its narrative (if not
musical) exclusion of black rock ‘n’ rollers, it offers a broadly comic gloss on
the erotic investments and social complexities of the rock ‘n’ roll craze. The
confusion over which body to watch—and why—if not explicitly directed
to the early career of the “hillbilly cat” out of Memphis certainly brings
to mind the unprecedented performances, successes, and controversies over
Elvis Presley as he became one of the most visible rock ‘n’ roll stars of the
mid-1950s.
In 1954, 19-year-old Elvis Presley, with Scotty Moore and Bill Black,
recorded “That’s All Right Mama” for Sun Records in Memphis. Sun
30 A Different Tune
impresario Sam Phillips recognized the “goosed up” version of the Delta
blues tune, previously released in 1946 by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, as
the crossover sound he’d been working toward in his recordings of regional
black and white musicians. He took it to local disc jockey, “Daddy-O”
Dewey Phillips, who helped to make it a hit. Dewey Phillips’ radio program
captured the diverse sounds of midcentury Memphis, a river city that, at
a time of social and economic change, attracted rural whites and blacks
looking for what the land could no longer provide. Dewey was known for
playing a wide range of rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, country, and jazz,
as well as black and white gospel in his program, “Red, Hot, and Blue.” Its
eclectic musical mix was the same one that informed the “hillbilly bop” that
made Presley a local hero and then gave him a string of hits. 63
By the end of 1956, when Hollywood released The Girl Can’t Help It, with
its confused but comic account of rock ‘n’ roll star making, Presley was no
longer just a regional sensation. Under the management of music promoter
and former carnival barker, Colonel Tom Parker, Presley went national. At
the end of 1955, Sam Phillips sold RCA his contract for an unprecedented
$35,000. Presley went from his first appearance on network television at the
end of January 1956, on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s Stage Show, to a screen
test at Paramount Studios for independent producer Hal Wallis a few months
later. His first film, Love Me Tender, was released in November 1956. Mean-
while, eight of his singles made it to the Billboard top 20 in 1956, and nine
in 1957. With bumps, grinds, and shimmies that would do sister Kate proud
and an unprecedented ability to spin crossover hits from the musical styles
of his hometown of Memphis, Presley became a rock ‘n’ roll star. And, unlike
any other rock ‘n’ rollers, including those featured in The Girl Can’t Help It,
Presley made it into the narrative center of Hollywood film (even if, by the end
of Love Me Tender, he’s dead and singing from the great beyond).
Elvis Presley, simply by virtue of being white, had access to media
opportunities, exposure, and audiences that black rock ‘n’ roll artists did
not, including Hollywood’s storytelling and star-making apparatus. At
the same time, not just his music, but his personal and performance style
were informed by regional and class identities that crossed race and gender
boundaries to make white masculinity into something different—possibly
dangerous, certainly a source of excitement. Like many whose power to
achieve rags-to-riches dreams reaches no further than the clothes on their
backs, teenage Elvis Presley focused early on his personal style. He was
already a peacock well before the bejeweled jumpsuit-and-cape days of the
1970s. He drew his inspirations from styles outside the white middle-class
norms of the 1950s, with an eye for all that could make the male body
a source of visual confrontation and delight. In high school, he grew his
trademark sideburns in emulation of the tough men who drove the big diesel
trucks through Memphis and drank in its redneck bars. His time- and grease-
intensive pompadour, on the other hand, appeared to have been inspired by
 A Different Tune 31

the hairdo’s worn by black musicians, a black imitation of white hairstyles

of the 1940s that went beyond mimesis to become something new. And, at a
time when country singers were as likely to perform in bib overalls as suits
with string ties, Presley refused the denim of rural poverty as well as the twill
and madras of 1950s white middle-class masculinity. He preferred mohair
and silk, bold plaids, varied textures, and unexpected color combinations.
His sartorial inspiration came from Beale Street, hub of the Memphis blues
culture, where Lansky Brothers was the fashion stop for gangsters and gam-
blers as well as bluesmen and gospel groups. 64
Elvis Presley’s stage persona, like his hair and clothing, reflected a mix
of influences. The pegged trousers and slouchy jackets provided by Bernard
Lansky exaggerated the profile of his body and created an electric ripple
between hip and ankle with every movement. Unlike the country singer
he might have been in an earlier decade and different from pop singers he
admired, like Dean Martin and Bing Crosby, Elvis moved. In this respect too,
Presley drew his inspiration from black music culture as well as the working-
class white culture of the South. The moves that helped to make Presley a
regional sensation (and a source of national controversy once he performed
them on television) appeared to combine the hip undulations of slow blues
dance with the shakes and shudders of the Pentecostal churches and tent
revivals of his youth. Speaking to a reporter about music in the Pentecostal
church, Presley recalled that “there were these . . . singers . . . they cut up all
over the place, jumpin’ on the piano, movin’ every which way. The audience
liked ’em. I guess I learned from them singers.” 65 On stage, Presley did seem
possessed not by the Holy Spirit (he reserved a stance of quiet intensity for
his gospel performances) but by rock ‘n’ roll itself, and, like the direct reli-
gious experience at the center of Pentecostalism, rock ‘n’ roll meant not just
a particular type of stage performance but also a particular sort of energetic
exchange with the audience.
Although most of these influences were derived from the music and cul-
ture of Memphis, Presley was also inspired by Hollywood, particularly by
the new generation of male stars. Jack Philbin, executive producer of Stage
Show, the CBS program where Presley made his national television debut,
memorably described the young unknown as a “guitar playing Marlon
Brando.”66 Presley consciously modeled elements of his performance on
Brando and James Dean, who had become youth icons by popu-
larizing a new mode of screen masculinity for the 1950s: the rebel. In this
persona, they enacted
a backlash against the dominant ideal of the corporate cog. The rebel
figure was a crucial component in the creation of new masculine styles
that revealed vulnerability and confusion and suggested that masculinity
was a culturally constructed category that arbitrarily imposed its
structures on men who did not easily fit. 67
32 A Different Tune
By all accounts scrupulously polite in everyday life, deeply attached to his
parents, and almost pretty with his soft mouth and mascaraed eyes, Presley
nevertheless affected on stage the glower and snarl of Brando, the sulky
appeal of Dean. With every twitch and glare, audiences—female audiences,
especially—responded. Presley reflected on the effect of such performances,
saying:

I’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I’ve made a study of myself,
and I know why the girls, at least the young ’uns, go for us. We’re sul-
len, we’re broodin’, we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand
it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men. I don’t know anything
about Hollywood, but I know you can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t
be a rebel if you grin. 68

His ability to synthesize diverse musical influences in his own performances

seemed natural, instinctive, derived from a long-standing enthusiasm for
all types of music combined with what some have described as a near
eidetic memory for songs. But if anyone understood that that masculinity—
particularly the sort of rock ‘n’ roll masculinity that he performed on stage —
was a cultural construction, it was Elvis Presley.
For all that he took some of his performance cues from the big screen,
Presley, like rock ‘n’ roll music itself, presented something of a challenge
to Hollywood, as well as an opportunity. Like the glamour photographs
that made people into stars by transforming flesh into light, Hollywood
film had, over the decades of its ascendance, smoothed over considerable
regional differences to create its own version of America: homogeneous in
its values and beliefs thanks to the workings of the Production Code Admin-
istration, idealized and generalized largely as a consequence of its aesthetics
of efficiency—and almost entirely white and virtually classless in its aim to
make quality entertainment that appealed to the widest possible audience.
Its music likewise tended toward the polished and conventional, from the
romantic music of nondiegetic orchestral scores to the reliably formulaic
Tin Pan Alley pop that enlivened the fantasy worlds of its musicals. In this
context, the Hollywood star vehicles created for Elvis Presley in the mid-
1950s might be viewed as the cinematic equivalent of those rock ‘n’ roll
cover tunes (say, Pat Boone’s laughably clueless but popular 1956 version
of “Tutti Frutti”), aimed at capitalizing on the currency and excitement
generated by the new youth music by making it into broadly acceptable,
transgenerational, middle-of-the-road entertainment. And, certainly, by
each film’s conclusion, Elvis takes his rightful place in professional, famil-
ial, and romantic institutions, very much in the approved generic mode of
the Hollywood musical. As John Mundy sums it up, the inevitable narra-
tive trajectory of his films—Loving You (1957), Jailhouse Rock (1957), and
King Creole (1958)—goes from Elvis as “socially undesirable ‘other’” to
“star performer.”69 Yet, at the same time that the films represent the young
 A Different Tune 33

singer’s social and cultural difference as a set of problems to be solved, they

also do as much as they dare to wring excitement and entertainment value
from that difference.

“SINGING! FIGHTING! DANCING! ROMANCING!”: 70

ELVIS GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

When I first heard Elvis’s voice, I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for
anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first
time was like busting out of jail.
—Bob Dylan71

Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, and King Creole replay the backstage musi-
cal’s typical making-of-a-star narrative, where the heady pleasures of musical
entertainment are wedded to and are the fulfilment of an equally intoxicating
American myth of success (“Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster but you’ve
got to come back a star!”72). But whereas Ruby Keeler always waited in the
wings for discovery, already a part of the Hollywood musical world as fledgling
chorus girl and enthusiastic hoofer, Elvis Presley—no less an ingenue—is
always from elsewhere. Opening up and extending the spaces of the typical
backstage musical to narrate his trajectory from the margins to the center of both
musical entertainment and American culture, his 1950s vehicles endeavor to
make a space for male difference, even as they work to make Presley into
Hollywood’s newest song and dance man. In the rural roadshow of Loving You,
Deke Rivers (Elvis Presley) is literally a nobody from nowhere, a softhearted
rube who took his name from a grave marker in some unnamed stretch of
rural Texas and eventually makes it big in Amarillo—a real city, quips ersatz
country and western bandleader “Tex” (Wendell Cory), where “they have
sidewalks and the cops wear shoes.” Working his way up from some regional
prison to Hollywood in Jailhouse Rock, Vince Everett (Elvis Presley) is an
emotionally scarred and stunted, violent and mannerless backwoods thug. In
the sinister but music-saturated world of the New Orleans French Quarter in
King Creole, Danny Fisher (Elvis Presley) is the black- and female-identified
juvenile delinquent whose family fell on hard times after the death of his mother.
As Alison Graham sums up his roles in these films, “the Elvis character is always
a ‘natural’ boy, a working-class youth of uncontrolled passion whose penchant
for violence repeatedly lands him in trouble with the law.” 73 Loving You, a
Katzman-style rocksploitation narrative, touches on conventional tropes of
delinquency, particularly in its characterization of Deke’s fans, whereas
Jailhouse Rock and King Creole incorporate elements of prison, crime, and
gangster films. The three films repeat the movement from nowhere to
somewhere and use Elvis’s outsider status to make sex and violence, negatively
associated with rock ‘n’ roll in Blackboard Jungle, into exciting adjuncts to the
Hollywood musical, as Elvis sings and fights his way to stardom.
34 A Different Tune
Steven Cohan has observed the way that male stars of studio era Holly-
wood musicals are constructed in terms of conventionally feminine tropes,
legitimatized in terms of the musical’s professional and entertainment val-
ues, as they empower male stars to take the lead in narratives of romance
and education.74 Elvis Presley, as we see him in these three films, clearly has a
good deal in common with such musically constructed masculinities, insofar
as his appeal is likewise constituted via conventionally feminine tropes of
narcissism, exhibitionism, and masquerade—qualities that set him apart and
identify him as a star-in-the-making. But Presley, unlike song and dance men
of the past, does not take the lead in narratives of romance and education
in his star vehicles. Instead, he is tutored by older (or at least more mature
and sophisticated) professional women who instruct him in the ways of
middle-class romance and decorum, along with the business of music. As
a consequence (and even though King Creole is the only one of the three
films where he actually plays a teenager), the films locate his character in a
liminal space of dependency that recalls the limitations and in-between-ness
of adolescence. In this space, at the same time that the narrative trajectory
is toward integration and conformity, much of the pleasure provided by
the films is found in representations of the difference and nonconformity
of Presley’s characters, who are at once not quite stars and not quite men.
Whereas the classical Hollywood musical is structured narratively to off-
set the feminizing effects of performance on its featured male stars, these
Elvis vehicles tend to highlight his trademark androgyny while drawing
narrative attention to his sexualized performance style, aspects of his star
persona that were a source of controversy following his television perfor-
mances (one New York Times critic famously deriding him, after he sang
“Hound Dog” on The Milton Berle Show, as a “virtuoso of the hootchy-
kootchy”75). Accordingly, in King Creole, Danny is represented not just as
a possible love interest for gangster moll Ronnie (Carolyn Jones) but as
her double: Like Ronnie, he has had the bad luck to catch the eye and ear
of gangster Maxie Fields (Walter Matthau). He has become, as a conse-
quence, the object of not-entirely-friendly competition between Maxie and
his childhood chum, Charlie LeGrand (Paul Stewart). What has placed him
in this treacherous position is his ability to upstage any female performer
with whom he shares an audience. (The exotic dancer at LeGrand’s Bourbon
Street club, the King Creole, complains, “He’s ruining my performance. Ever
since he started there’s nothing but women out there. They don’t want to see
me. And tonight I heard one of them yell, ‘Leave it on!’” Similarly, in Loving
You, Deke complains, “I don’t hear ’em yellin’ like that when Susan’s out
there.” Susan replies, “That’s the difference between us, Deke, they really
go for you; me, they just tolerate.”) In the “Teddy Bear” sequence of Loving
You, the performance that his predominately young, female audience “goes
for,” as Susan puts it, anticipates the “self-invention and sexual plasticity”
that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, will become a key component in rock
masculinity.76 Voice alternately high and hoarse then deep and resonant in
 A Different Tune 35

delivery of its baby talk lyrics, he punctuates his playful request for domi-
nation with little shakes of shoulder and chest to make his red-and-white
valentine of a cowboy shirt shimmer. It is a performance of the sort to justify
David Shumway’s assessment of Elvis Presley as “feminized” by his sexual
display,77 even as it suggests the limitations of that assessment. While work-
ing the bombshell potential of white satin on skin in a way that is more
Jean Harlow than Gene Autry (and delivering cutesy pie lyrics worthy of
Marilyn Monroe at her most playfully seductive), Deke offsets the theatrical
femininity of costume, lyrics, and dance with the easygoing delivery of the
song, the casual use of his guitar as percussion. Moreover, the occasional
self-consciously delighted grin or eye movement directed at the audience/
camera makes the masquerade into a source of shared amusement with his
ecstatic audience. The performance serves to highlight the fact that much of
what outraged Elvis’s critics wasn’t his act but audiences’—especially young,
female audiences’—responses to it. Linked to his fans via both the work of
shot-reverse-shot editing and the energy that circulates between performer
and audience, Elvis’s gender rebellion goes beyond self-representation to
suggest an entire set of social relations variously invested in difference and
desire, set into motion by musical flirtation and self-conscious play.
Presley is depicted in the films not just as a gender rebel but as a type that
Alison Graham identifies as the “southern delinquent.” Like Marlon Brando
in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Defiant Ones (1958) and like
Paul Newman in The Long Hot Summer (1958), Elvis in Jailhouse Rock
and King Creole is represented, Graham says, as “metaphorically black” in
his “marginal social legitimacy and poverty.” 78 The violent impulsivity that
lands Vince in jail for manslaughter in Jailhouse Rock recalls screen repre-
sentations of juvenile delinquency, but it is linked explicitly to his regional
and class identity in the film rather than to his age. This regional and class
identity is represented as racialized whiteness through an extended, implied
comparison between prison and slavery. Prisoners and slaves are equated in
the lyrics of the cowboy tune, “One More Day,” a comparison that arguably
inflects the film’s notorious whipping scene as well, and, after a day of hard
labor of breaking rocks, Vince’s white skin is shown literally blackened by
the experience. As a consequence, when he sings “I Want to Be Free” in the
jail talent show, it is as both as a prisoner and as a character whose white
otherness and victimization have been represented by the film through this
uncomfortable series of allusions to the history of black enslavement. Once
he leaves prison, the comparisons follow in a way that recreates Elvis’s com-
paratively privileged access to media as a white performer in the form o f
victimization and marginalization. When his first record, “Don’t Leave Me
Now,” is covered by Mickey Alba, who copies Vincent’s “style, my arrange-
ment, everything,” it of course recalls the experience of black artists (Arthur
Crudup, for example), whose songs found commercial success only when
covered by white performers, thanks to their greater access to mainstream
media.
36 A Different Tune
King Creole likewise works through racial signifiers to represent class
and regional difference, but it is a bit more subtle and substantive in its
approach, working to link Elvis’s character to regionally specific black
music, instead of representing him in terms of questionable black stereo-
types. Danny Fisher’s family relocates to the French Quarter of New Orleans
after his father, submerged in grief, loses his job and their family home.
His musical influences as we see them in the film are derived from the way
that black and white working-class characters share that space and its expe-
riences, a representation that recalls Elvis’s upbringing in Memphis. The
pre-credit sequence depicts Danny “being neighborly” with the other work-
ing people in the area, including a vocal exchange with black street singers/
food sellers as he prepares for his own before-school job as a busboy. Most
of the songs in King Creole content themselves with little more than a lyrical
nod to the South with a scattering of kitschy tourist imagery (he’s singing on
Bourbon Street, after all). But “Crawfish” actually works musically to evoke
the specificity of the New Orleans setting, with its protofunk use of syncopa-
tion and the call-and-response structure of Presley’s duet with jazz vocalist
Kitty White. And, as Danny’s before-school experience at Maxie’s club will
soon confirm, black or white, male or female, busboy or street vendor or
prostitute, they are all entertainers in the French Quarter, all part of what
New Orleans has to offer its visitors.
Similarly, “Trouble,” the song that launches Danny’s singing career in
the film, has greater geographic specificity than most of the film’s music.
It is Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s version of a blues statement of male
bravado, like Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” (1955), Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie
Coochie Man” (1954) and “Mannish Boy” (1955), lyrically invoking a
mythic, folkloric, larger-than-life masculinity. In the context of the strug-
gle for Civil Rights, the statement “I’m a Man,” which “Trouble” recalls,
demands recognition of the full humanity of African Americans by refusing
the racist epithet “boy.” Despite having been penned by Jerry Leiber and
Mike Stoller with their tongues firmly in their cheeks, 79 the song works in
the narrative context of the film as a statement of empowerment on the
part of a “pretty fresh boy,” whom Maxi has set up for embarrassment. It
is the second time that Danny, as busboy, has been pressured into singing
in Maxie Field’s joint, positioning him, like Ronnie herself, as plaything
and amusement for New Orleans’ criminal element. When Danny begins
singing “Trouble,” he’s in earnest; he transforms the cartoonish lyrics into
a cry of rage against circumstance and also, more explicitly, into a warning
to Maxie. The excesses of the song are highlighted by the Dixieland back-
ing band and by Presley’s delivery. He then reins himself in. At the song’s
end, when Danny draws out the word “eeeee-vil” and concludes with a
saucy shake of his shoulders, it is a teasing challenge to Maxie, the man
who “owns the air you’re breathing.” The same playful androgyny that
seduces in the “Teddy Bear” sequence of Loving You taunts the powers
that be in King Creole. By playfully transforming the song’s conclusion into
 A Different Tune 37

a cheeky taunt that substitutes music for a more violent confrontation, the
sophistication of Danny’s performance offers a sharp contrast to Maxie
Field’s heavy-handed attempt to tease, humiliate, and intimidate his young
employee. By the conclusion, Danny has won over the crowd—and, at least
temporarily, secured the upper hand.
So, in the fictional context of this noirish version of New Orleans, with
its inequities of power, “Trouble” works as more than a joke. It is a perfor-
mance that gets Danny his job at the King Creole, but it also places him on
a collision course with Maxie Fields. Maxie’s response to Danny is a com-
bination of desire and the desire to control reminiscent of his relationship
with Ronnie. His influence on Danny’s world is given visual representation
via the noir aesthetics of the film. As a noir version of the making-of-a-star
narrative, the “backstage” of Danny’s performances at the King Creole is
the dark alleyways and duplicitous thugs owned by Fields, a shadow world
of manipulative power plays, knife fights, and fistfights. And we are never
allowed to forget this outer darkness as it is kept—literally—in view by the
production design that has Danny giving his electrifying performances at
Le Grand’s club literally surrounded by shadow. The dreamy noir version
of New Orleans that King Creole creates is a strangely apt narrative space
for Presley—and for rock ‘n’ roll more generally. After all, noirs of the
1940s and 1950s commonly deal with male fear, desire, and refusal of the
status quo, its narratives typically located in the gray areas between law
and lawlessness, where oppositional masculinity expresses itself through
violence and (illicit) sex. The affective relations made possible by rock ‘n’ roll—
what Lawrence Grossberg sums up as the “rock formation”—are amenable
to noir treatment inasmuch as they challenge the “particular stabilities of
. . . everyday life” and seek “to transcend the . . . specific forms of repeti -
tion, mundanity, and triviality.” 80 Backstage violence is, in these terms, not
just the flip side of Danny’s energetic stage performances, but confirma-
tion of the threat that this music and this young man pose to the status
quo—and thus is the guarantor of its appeal in the context of the “rock
formation.” As John Mundy sums it up, the
simultaneous desire to be both rebellious and conformist, to reject the
trappings of parental existence and high school culture, and at the
same time crave prosperity and affluence which they delivered—lies at
the heart of the structural dichotomies experienced by young people in
the 1950s. What rock ‘n’ roll created was a cultural space in which these
dichotomies could be given expression, explored, and symbolically, at
least, resolved.81

King Creole, without addressing itself explicitly to—or even including in its
narrative world—a teen audience, nevertheless captures some of the darker
promises of rock ‘n’ roll, in the way it positions Danny, as a consequence of his
musical talent, in the destabilized terrain of noir.
38 A Different Tune
In terms of the affective economies articulated by Grossberg and Mundy,
violent and musical performances are closely aligned as expressions of rebel-
lion, defiance, and refusal of the securities of everyday life. In King Creole,
the increasingly violent relationship between Danny and Maxie Fields is
at least as important as either of Danny’s romantic interests, in terms of
the typical backstage musical’s narrative objective, to bring musical and
nonmusical worlds into sync. In Loving You and Jailhouse Rock, narra-
tive justification for violence is not nearly so elaborate, but here too there
is the sense that violent performances are equivalent to musical ones, both
in their screen entertainment (if not aesthetic) value and in their cultural
function as gestures of rebellion. Certainly, the juke joint brawl in Loving
You is choreographed to make just this point, when Deke’s impromptu,
jukebox-accompanied performance of “Mean Woman Blues” turns into an
equally impromptu fistfight. This, like his song and dance, delights his on-
screen audience of teens, suggesting that they are more or less equivalent
expressions of the excitement generated by Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll. It con-
cludes with a well-aimed punch that drives Deke’s assailant into the jukebox,
which burps out, appropriately enough, an instrumental version of “Gotta
Lotta Living to Do,” as his opponent slides unconscious to the ground.
Jailhouse Rock depicts Vince’s musical expression as coming from the same
uncontrolled emotion as his tendency to violence, so that his criminal past, his
uncouth behavior, and his musical ability are imbricated with one another,
all expressions of an innocent savage with a “beast” in him, who must learn
to channel his emotional energy into his music to find success. As his
musical mentor and love interest Peggy (Judy Tyler) advises him, “Put your
own emotions into the song; make it fit you.”

CONCLUSION

Rock ‘n’ roll offered a challenge to Hollywood that was both aesthetic and
social, in its difference from the orchestral scores that constituted quality
film entertainment and in its controversial connection to new youth subcul-
tures. The impact of “Rock Around the Clock” as the theme for Blackboard
Jungle highlights the appeal of the new music for youth audiences and its
box office potential. But it also points to the difficulties of integrating this
new music into existing modes of Hollywood entertainment. John Mundy
argues convincingly for the way that early star vehicles for Elvis Presley
transform the subcultural “noise” generated by the rock ‘n’ roll craze into
cultural meaning accessible to a much wider audience through the narra-
tive and generic structures of the Hollywood musical. 82 But, as this brief
survey indicates, at the same time that the Elvis musicals integrate the new
youth music into Hollywood entertainment, the Hollywood musical is not
unchanged by the process. By making a space for rock ‘n’ roll’s assertion of
 A Different Tune 39

generational difference, they also offer an alternative mode of masculinity

that signifies that difference.
When Hollywood finally recognizes that the youth market is key to its
economic survival at the end of the 1960s, 83 the youth cinema that emerges
(though worlds away from the Elvis vehicles of the 1950s) similarly organizes
itself around assertions of male difference. We see this in the eroticization of
violence and “peculiar ideas of lovemaking” held by Clyde Barrow (Warren
Beatty) in Bonnie and Clyde, in the last-minute, postgraduate rejection of
the work ethic and material success of his parents’ generation by Benjamin
Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate, and likewise in the counter-
cultural performances of Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis
Hopper) in Easy Rider. As stolen cars veer down dirt roads to the raucous
sound of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in Bonnie and Clyde, as Ben races
against time and his beloved’s wedding vows to the sound of “Mrs. Robin-
son” in The Graduate, and as the American landscape is transformed into
a rock musical version of itself in the course of Captain America and Billy’s
road trip, music-driven screen performances of undisciplined, deviant, and
delinquent males are transformed into youth cinema.

NOTES

1. Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach,” 7.

2. Harrison, “Jackass Music,” 179.
3. The phrase “illustrated singers,” for those who perform illustrated songs, is
used by H. F. Hoffman in “The Singer and the Song,” 159. For more on singers,
songs, and song slides in the Nickelodeon era, see Sanjek, American Popular
Music and Its Business, 32; Altman, Silent Film Sound, 182-183, 220; Bowser,
“The Nickelodeon,” 15.
4. See Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 218; Crafton, The Talkies, 75-76; and Hutchin-
son, “The Vitaphone Project,” 41-43.
5. Smith, The Sounds of Commerce, 30-33.
6. Sanjek, American Popular Music, 317-318.
7. Anderson,“Reforming ‘Jackass Music,’” 3-5.
8. Ibid.
9. Bowser, 13. Jon Savage, while discussing the relation between an emergent
youth culture and ragtime music in the 1890s, notes it became a target for
reformers (Savage, Teenage, 56-57). For a thorough survey of the debate over
ragtime as a threat to public taste, morals, and health (the dangers of syncopa-
tion!), from the 1890s to 1910s, see Berlin, Ragtime, 32-60.
10. See Altman, Silent Film Sound, 345-366.
11. Ibid., 365
12. Smith, Sounds of Commerce, 6.
13. Kalinak, Settling the Score, 86
14. Gorbman, “Ears Wide Open,” 4-5.
15. Kalinak, Settling the Score, 189.
16. Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” 10.

17. See Spigel, Make Room for TV.

40 A Different Tune
18. Lev, The Fifties, 217.
19. For more on Mancini as a composer, his reputation then and now, see Smith,
“That Money-Making ‘Moon River’ Sound,” 247-271.
20. Ibid., 17.
21. Acland, Screen Traffic, 160.
22. Schatz, “The New Hollywood,”19.
23. Wyatt, High Concept, 111-117.
24. Kalinak, Settling the Score, 189.
25. These include Fox’s Doctor Dolittle (1967) and Hello, Dolly! (1969), Warner
Brothers’ Camelot (1967), and Paramount’s Paint Your Wagon (1979). See
Cook, Lost Illusions, 209.
26. Green, “Overview ’84,” 50.
27. See Kalinak, How the West was Sung.
28. Composed by Dimitri Tiomkin with lyrics by Ned Washington.
29. But rather than investing itself in—and associating the film with—one par-
ticular rendition of the song, United Artists aimed for as much repetition as
possible by releasing six versions by six different vocalists, including Ritter.
Smith, Sounds of Commerce, 59-60.
30. Creekmur, “Cowboy Chorus,” 24-28.
31. In 1972 Bernstein stated that “the death of the classical film music score began
in 1952 with an innocuous pop song that was used in the title sequence of the
classic Gary Cooper western, High Noon.” Elmer Bernstein, quoted by Creek-
mur, “The Cowboy Chorus.”
32. Creekmur, “The Cowboy Chorus,” 21-35.
33. See Denisoff and Romanowski, Risky Business, 10. For more regarding
“cross-promotion” and “tie-ups,” see Bundy, “Title Tunes Cut for Picture and
Disks,” 12.
34. Dore Shary testimony, Juvenile delinquency (motion picture) Hearings before
the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on
the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-fourth Congress, first session, pur-
suant to S. Res. 62. June 15, 16, 17, and 18, 1955. http://archive.org/stream/
juveniledelinque955unit/juveniledelinque955unit_djvu.txt (accessed Septem-
ber 23, 2014).
35. Messenger, “Calling the Tune,” 163.
36. Quoted in Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, 220.
37. Somewhat ironically, all of the stories that circulate concerning the circum-
stances by which “Rock Around the Clock” was chosen as theme song for
Blackboard Jungle locate its discovery in the most innocuous of domestic set-
tings. By some accounts, director Richard Brooks heard it on his car radio; in
others, the record is played by Brook’s daughter—or Pandro Berman’s daugh-
ter or Glenn Ford’s son. See Dawson, Rock Around the Clock, 114-115.
38. Below Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” Big Joe Turner’s “Shake Rattle
and Roll,” and Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline.” Billboard, November 12, 1955,
122.
39. As Doherty points out, the first song to break through the color line was a 1954
song, “Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream)” by the Chords, the “first rhythm-and-
blues tune with an undeniable ‘black’ flavor to cross over successfully” (43).
40. Mundy, Popular Music on Screen, 95, 97.
41. See “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fight Hospitalizes Youth” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Stabbing:
Teens Attack Sailor in Brawl after Boston Show.”
42. The attempted rape of a teacher by student Joe Murray (Peter Miller) precipi-
tates a cascade of intergenerational violence in the film.
43. Goudsouzian, Sidney Poitier, 103.
 A Different Tune 41

44. Cohan, Masked Men, 116.

45. Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 107.
46. Gabbard, Jammin’, 125.
47. Ibid., 126.
48. Barthes, “Grain,” 188.
49. As Joel Dinerstein observes, the Lindy Hop, an African American dance
developed in the late 1920s, challenged existing dance traditions while incor-
porating a distinctive jazz aesthetic. Controversial in the 1930s, it was barred
from dance studios in an act of “cultural segregation.” See Dinerstein, Swing-
ing the Machine, 277. Later, it attained mainstream acceptance along with
swing music more generally in the 1940s, when it also came to be known
by the nicknames “Jitterbug” and “Jive.” In “Negotiating Compromise on a
Burnished Wood Floor,” Hubbard and Monaghan note that the Lindy Hop,
dominated as it was “by continuous rhythmic play in its defining swing-outs”
through which “two partners rhythmically improvised while separating apart
and drawing back together,” constituted a “comprehensive and rhythmically
charged critique of the European partner-dancing tradition,” based as it was
on a jazz aesthetic that “paid minimal deference to the ballroom conventions
of leaders and followers.” Hubbard and Monaghan note that, even though
the initial dance response to rock ‘n’ roll was mostly focused on line dances, by
featuring Lindy Hop-style dances in Blackboard Jungle, “Hollywood led the
rest of the world to believe that the new excitement centered on the jitterbug,
or jive.” Hubbard and Monaghan, “Negotiating Compromise on a Burnished
Wood Floor,” 133, 141. This is ironic in terms of how delinquency, violence,
and dance are linked in the film, underpinning oppositions between the new,
delinquent generation of youth and the veterans of World War II who try to
teach them. In fact, the Lindy Hop was promoted among GIs of World War II
as a “healthy heterosexual leisure” activity and a “state-sanctioned substitute
for the commercialized sex that the military feared would arise to serve sol-
diers.” Craig, Sorry I Don’t Dance, 26.
50. An example is Trixie Smith’s 1922 recording on Black Swan, “My Daddy
Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll).”
51. Green, “A Warning to the Music Business,” 9.
52. Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, 220.
53. Eugene Gilbert, president of the Gilbert Youth Research Company, wrote
a weekly syndicated newspaper column, “What Young People Think.” See
Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 57.
54. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 183.
55. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 92.
56. Zappa, “The New Rock,” 85.
57. For instance, MGM purchased the rights to use “Rock Around the Clock” from
Decca for $5,000 but thriftily passed on the opportunity to purchase complete
ownership, thus missing out on profits from the single’s record-breaking sales.
58. Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 55.
59. Jenkenson and Warner, Celluloid Rock, 16.
60. As Schatz sums it up: “Grable was the consummate Zanuck-Fox star: unabash-
edly sexy and attractive, with a screen personality that . . . utterly dominated
one formula picture after another. For Grable the formula was Technicolor
musicals with threadbare plots and promising titles that were often quite liter -
ally constructed around her performance and her figure.” Schatz, Boom and
Bust, 211.
61. Dickinson, Off Key, 46

62. Mae Axton quoted in Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis, 188.

42 A Different Tune
63. Carlin notes that Elvis’s Sun recordings were marketed as “hillbilly bop.”
Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary, 316.
64. For details on his style, clothing, and early influences, see Guralnick, Last Train
to Memphis.
65. Quoted in Stephens, The Fire Spreads, 257.
66. Jack Philbin quoted in Denisoff, Tarnished Gold, 333.
67. Springer, James Dean Transfigured, 33.
68. Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis, 324.
69. Mundy, Popular Music on Screen 119
70. Newspaper ad for Jailhouse Rock
71. Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 546.
72. 42nd Street.
73. Graham, Framing the South, 122.
74. Cohan, “‘Feminizing’ the Song-and-Dance Man.”
75. Gould, “TV: New Phenomemon,” 67.
76. Whiteley, “Little Red Rooster v. The Honky Tonk Woman,” 67.
77. See Shumway, “Watching Elvis.”
78. Graham, Framing the South, 27.
79. Jerry Lieber recalls that “there was a bit of contempt on our part. You know,
when the guy sang, Ba boom ba ba boom, ‘If you’re looking for trouble,’
you know, ‘just come looking for me’—there’s something laughable there.
I mean, if you get Memphis Slim or John Lee Hooker singing it, it sounds right,
but Elvis did not sound right to us ........ It sounded sort of comical to us, but
strangely enough to the mass market it wasn’t. It was somewhat generational
and somewhat cultural, but they bought it.” Quoted in Guralnick, Last Train
to Memphis, 449.
80. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, 155-156.
81. Mundy, Popular Music on Screen, 99.
82. Ibid., 118.
83. In 1968, when the studios were experiencing their worst financial setbacks
since the Great Depression, the Motion Picture Association of America com-
missioned a survey of the Hollywood audience; the outcome surprised studio
executives who, inspired by the success of Sound of Music in 1965, had been
putting big money into the family entertainment provided by super musicals.
The Yankelovich and Associates survey concluded that 48 percent of the audi-
ence for film was 16-24 and that, moreover, “‘being young and single is the
overriding precondition for being a frequent and enthusiastic moviegoer.’”
Quoted in Cook, Lost Illusions, 67.

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2 Orchestrating Violence
Music and Masculinity in
Scorsese’s Gangster Films

When I think back . . . I see my family less as Americans than Europe-

ans, in a state of transition between the old and the new world, with
their own way of looking at life. This was the emigrant experience, of
course.
—Martin Scorsese1

Instead of breaking into song, his characters break into fights ......... His
films are all musicals.
—Phil Joanou2

Martin Scorsese, director of rockumentaries The Last Waltz (1978), Bob

Dylan: No Direction Home (2005), and Shine a Light (2008),3 is known
as much for his interest in and inspiration from popular music as for his com-
mitment to auteurism, his belief in personal cinema. And in his films that
track the lives of male characters at the edge of law and society—Who’s
That Knocking at My Door (1967), Mean Streets (1973), GoodFellas
(1990), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Departed
(2006)—these concerns are combined. These films revisit and revise the
Hollywood gangster genre to put dramatically heightened versions of
the immigrant experience on screen, using popular music to narrate the
lives of male characters caught between tradition and modernity, between
tribal loyalties and mainstream America. As their Italian American and
Irish American protagonists fight to survive, to stake their claim, and to
achieve their versions of the American dream, fights and murders, like
song and dance sequences in the classic Hollywood musical, beguile the
boredom of the everyday, both delaying and holding the promise of
narrative resolution. Scorsese’s “narrative orchestration of violence” is at
once typical of the New Hollywood cinema as it emerged in the late 1960s
and dependent on his experiments with the pop score. 4
 Orchestrating Violence 47

THE TRIBAL MASCULINITIES IN WHO’S THAT

KNOCKING AT MY DOOR
Violence has always been a pretty scary thing for me, but I’m fascinated
by it, especially by the aimlessness of it. It’s always erupting when you
don’t expect it.
—Martin Scorsese 5

Scorsese’s first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, gestures toward

the systematic use of music typical of Scorsese’s later films; it experiments
with music’s emotional impact and its role in creating violent set pieces. In
particular, Scorsese’s interest in the possibilities offered by musical narra-
tion shapes the audiovisual effect of its two-part opening sequence, as well
as its sequences of sexual and violent release. In the first part of the opening
sequence, the domestic image of a mother (Catherine Scorsese) preparing a
meat pie and feeding children under the white gaze of a ceramic St. Mary
is rendered painfully claustrophobic by a loud, percussive sound suggestive
of large machinery at work. This scene is followed by a street fight in which
the beating of a fallen foe is synched to the handclaps that punctuate Mitch
Ryder’s “Jenny Take a Ride with Me.” In this two-part sequence, the clash
of sound and image is used to comment on—and elicit emotional responses
to—representations of those strict gender roles that demarcate the spaces
of this neighborhood and shape its everyday life. Specifically, this sequence
audiovisually evokes a sense of inhibition or tension, followed by release.
The machine noise, its metallic rhythm suggestive of blows or stamping,
carries with it multiple metaphoric possibilities for comment on social and
cultural order, as well as a more generalized sense of the peaceful tableau
being under threat. By sheer volume and persistence, it pervades with anxi-
ety the ordinary domestic scene of food and family. Then, by contrast, the
street fight is transformed into an expressive and celebratory dance by its
musical narration. In the rhythmic and thematic patterning of this opening
sequence, it anticipates the use of music later in the film where violence
within the all-male group follows scenes of sexual inhibition, illustrative
of the gender strictures that rule the world of J.R. (Harvey Keitel) and
his friends. More substantively, this brief sequence anticipates the sort of
narrative orchestration of violence that later becomes a significant part of
Scorsese’s gangster films.
Scorsese himself says that he is “not a fan” of the film Who’s That Knock-
ing at My Door, owing to the unevenness of its style, a consequence of its
development from a graduate project at New York University. Originally
titled Bring on the Dancing Girls (1965), it was retitled I Call First, after
48 Orchestrating Violence
additional footage was added but it failed to find distribution. Exploitation
distributor Joseph Brenner agreed to release the film on the condition that
Scorsese take advantage of the end of the Production Code by adding a sex
scene. Only then did the renamed and reedited film find an audience in the
late 1960s youth market. 6 Despite its flaws, Who’s That Knocking at My
Door is a significant early example of Scorsese’s efforts in musical narration,
even if Scorsese didn’t have access to the songs he wanted. 7 Certainly, in no
other film is the degree to which Scorsese was influenced both
by the French New Wave and by the audacious use of early rock ‘n’ roll in
Kenneth Anger’s 1964 underground collage film, Scorpio Rising, more clear.
In terms of the thematic use of popular music, it engages with notions of youth
rebellion, but in ways specific to Scorsese’s memories of Little Italy.
In Who’s That Knocking at My Door, the life of low-level hoods J.R.
and his friends, Joey (Lennard Kuras) and Sally Ga Ga (Michael Scala), is
defined mostly by repetition. Most of their criminal activities take place off-
screen, and the violence of their world is more suggested than depicted in a
film that is, as Scorsese puts it, “about boredom.” 8 Violence in this world
is, as the dance music used for the first fight scene suggests, a matter of
amusement, a way of breaking up the day. Scorsese summarizes it as a film
about “the down days, when the stuff that happens in Mean Streets doesn’t
happen.”9 In its thematic focus on cultural conflict between the world of
Little Italy and contemporary American society more generally, it reflects
the fact that when Scorsese made the film he was himself in the process of
“changing as a person.”10 His days were spent at New York University on
the West side, reading and studying, while his nights and weekends were
spent, in a manner similar to that of J.R. and his friends, in the urban
village of the Lower East side neighborhood where he grew up. In these
terms, Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Mean Streets can be read as
intensely personal representations of Scorsese’s youth, as well as of a
broader cultural change in America, told from an urban, ethnic, working -
class youth’s perspective.
J.R. and his friends are visibly out of step with American youth culture
of the late 1960s—their sharp suits, neat haircuts, and topcoats an out-
ward sign of their cultural allegiance to the past, to tradition. Thus, unlike
those music-driven depictions of rebellious masculinities in Easy Rider and
The Graduate, the concern in Who’s That Knocking at My Door and later
in Mean Streets is to represent the experience of rebellious youth whose
physical and social mobility is far more limited. Who’s That Knocking at
My Door focuses on the cultural conflict experienced by J.R. when he falls
for a young woman from outside his world. “The Girl,” played by television
soap actress Zina Bethune, represents a world beyond the neighborhood, as
well as the problematic category of the feminine (as indicated by her lack
of a name). Blonde and fair and sweet though she is (and she bears more
than a passing resemblance to his mother’s prized statue of St. Mary), her
revelation to J.R. that she was the victim of rape a number of years earlier
 Orchestrating Violence 49

radically alters his perception of her, forcing him to confront, at least to a

degree, his own cultural beliefs and assumptions about love, sex, and gender.
As in the case of Scorsese’s later films, Who’s That Knocking at My Door
focuses on a largely male world. For instance, when Sally Ga Ga brings
along some young women to enliven an all-male gathering, they drive them
away with a blend of sophomoric humor (bugs in drinking glasses) and
sexual threat (the early title I Called First refers to J.R.’s calling dibs on what
appears to be shaping up as a gang rape, until it dissolves into yet another
squabble among the young men as the women escape into the night). In this
context, the added sex scene required for Who’s That Knocking at My Door to
find an audience for its 1969 release appears as a fantasy, illustrative of
J.R.’s explanation of what a “broad” is as opposed to a “girl,” an object of
desire, rather than a potential wife and mother. Filmed in Amsterdam, with its
vertiginous camera movement and complex editing synced to the 1967
psychedelic opus, “The End” by The Doors, it is—literally—a scene from
another world. It depicts the alternative universe of the sexual revolution
and contemporary youth culture, not just the possibility of sexual release
but sexual play. By contrast, J.R.’s hesitation to consummate his relation-
ship with The Girl highlights his ties to the values and beliefs of the past.
“If you love me, you’ll understand,” J.R. says, drawing away from her on
a bed surrounded by physical signs of his mother and their shared faith.
But The Girl doesn’t understand, nor does she take him seriously when,
after a screening of Rio Bravo (1959) and her expressed admiration for the
character Feathers (Angie Dickinson), J.R. explains to her about “girls” and
“broads.” Only when he calls her a whore at the end of the film does she
fully understand how alien his culture is to her own.
Immediately after their encounter in his mother’s bedroom, the slow-
motion fight scene that erupts during an all-male party appears as a different
sort of release, distinct from but not entirely unrelated to J.R.’s psychedelic
fantasy of sex with an exotic woman. And, while Scorsese bemoans the fact
that, by the time the film finally found a distributor in 1969, slow-motion
violence had been “done,” the scene differs from those in Arthur Penn’s Bon-
nie and Clyde or Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). In both films,
the ground-breaking representations are bloody, pyrotechnic spectacles. By
contrast, the scene in Who’s That Knocking at My Door is more concerned
with the fantasy of and potential for violence and its particular place in this
closed, hierarchical, sexually repressed male culture. It is an early example
of what becomes an important motif in Scorsese’s films: the way that ten-
sion can build just below the surface of everyday life (with its boredom and
repetition) and then explode into unexpected violence.
The scene is musically narrated by Ray Barretto’s “El Watusi.” A
crossover Latin/pop hit of 1963, its music helps to create the urban party
atmosphere of the scene, as well as the theme of violence as male ritual and
masculine performance. Although the title carries associations of the Watusi
dance craze, the Latin dance rhythms of the song are quite different from
50 Orchestrating Violence
those associated with that popular alternative to the Twist. 11 The song by
percussionist Barretto was an early precursor of Latin boogaloo, charac-
terized by the “spontaneous, conversational nature of the voices and the
general rowdy crowd atmosphere” in which shouts and applause become
part of the music.12 Replacing all other diegetic sound during the scene,
Barretto’s song defines the increasingly chaotic tone of the gathering through
its loose, rough, rhythmic blend of piano joined by handclaps and appar-
ently spontaneous vocals—vocals spoken in the unmistakable cadences of
male challenge, assertion, and camaraderie. 13 The song highlights the theme
of masculine braggadocio, as its “swaggering Spanglish street babble of
a lyric” 14 tells the story of a seven-foot-tall, handsome, fearsome Havana
mulatto, El Watusi, with Barretto’s description punctuated by guttural
monosyllables, apparently from the street tough himself.
The opening notes of “El Watusi” bridge the scene of The Girl and J.R.
in his mother’s room and the all-male party. The elements of the song build
incrementally: piano, followed by handclaps, shouts, lyrics, then flute, and
percussion. The commencement of Barretto’s description of El Watusi is
cued to an image of Joey and J.R.—the leader of the gang and his second—
holding forth to the others. Like the song, the visuals of the scene build
gradually, through slow tracking shots left to right, linked by dissolves. As
the texture of the song builds, we are taken deeper into the male culture it
represents: Framing tightens as the characters get increasingly drunk and
begin to lose control. Dissolves are used to isolate key moments, such as
when the first gun appears, passed hand to hand and then dropped into
the lap of a drunken J.R., who checks the chamber to show it is empty as
he laughs. Barretto’s continued recital about El Watusi is synched to the
appearance of a second, smaller gun that is loaded. The young men all
laugh uncontrollably at the threat and then—still laughing—make a stra-
tegic retreat as the gunman takes hold of Sally Ga Ga, the “crazy” friend,
who is younger, perpetually in trouble, and at the bottom of the gang’s
hierarchy. Their laughter and combined movement to the relative safety of
the other side of the room are aestheticized, made into an elegant, expressive
dance by the continued use of slow motion. As Sally, crying in real terror,
is abandoned to the gunman, the scene achieves something like the blend
of beauty and horror that characterizes Penn’s and Peckinpah’s bloodier
and more explosive sequences, those intellectually repellent but aestheti-
cally entrancing dances of death, 15 in which “the body no longer functions,
when it becomes an object and has a certain kind of detached ugly beauty.” 16
However, in this scene, it is not the weapon or its effects but the culture
itself—the combination of boredom with the desire for violent release, of
real affection coupled with a cruelly enforced pecking order—that appears
at once dangerous and alluring. When the gun finally goes off—the only
victims a bunch of liquor bottles—the shots ring out synced to a Godard-
like collage of still images from Rio Bravo. The audiovisual bricolage recalls
another all-male world, intruded upon by desire for a woman, and makes
 Orchestrating Violence 51

J.R.’s love of Western movies stand in for a broader imaginary investment in

violence gendered as masculine.

CITY OF THE IMAGINATION: MUSIC AND

SETTING IN MEAN STREETS

[F]or the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to
personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the
imagination . . . which is the modern world.
—Robert Warshow17

But for me, Mean Streets had the best music because it was what I
enjoyed and it was part of the way we lived. Suddenly a piece would
come on and we’d stay with it for two or three minutes. Life would stop,
so I wanted the film to stop and go with the music. Mean Streets has
that quality, whether it’s rock ‘n’ roll, opera or Neapolitan love songs. In
our neighborhood you’d hear rock ‘n’ roll playing in the little bars in the
back of the tenement buildings at three in the morning, so that was “Be
My Baby” when Harvey’s head hits the pillow. For me, the whole movie
was “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Be My Baby.”
—Martin Scorsese 18

Elaborating on the concerns of Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean

Streets is the film that Scorsese identifies as his most autobiographical: “not
really a film, but a declaration . . . a statement of who I am” and a “represen-
tation . . . of the world I came from.” 19 Set during the Feast of San Gennaro
(Saint Januarius, patron saint of Naples), in lower Manhattan’s Little Italy, its
young protagonists are all in a state of uncertainty, the limbo between leav-
ing the family and starting a family of one’s own as decreed by patterns of
working-class Italian American life at midcentury. The feast itself is a noisy,
gaudy, picturesque tourist magnet of an event that like the Sicilian festivals
of Scorsese’s youth, confirms the continuation of past belief in the present.
Exteriors shot on location during the festival show streets and sidewalks
jammed with tourists and locals, processions and festival bands. This loca-
tion shooting contributes to the documentary qualities applauded by critics
upon the film’s release. These exteriors also contribute to the sense of claus-
trophobia that pervades the film, an effect heightened by Scorsese’s kinetic
camerawork in the confines of bars and pool halls, bedrooms, back rooms,
restaurants, and cafes where most of the action takes place—interiors lovingly
reconstructed in Los Angeles, to cut down on production costs. 20
The cinematic and musical treatment of these urban spaces works as
an objective correlative of youthful energy bound by the densely worked
web of immigrant culture. The mix of—and clash between—1950s and
early 1960s recordings of Neapolitan popular songs on the one hand,
52 Orchestrating Violence
and youth-identified American popular music from the 1950s through the
1970s on the other, highlight the cultural mix of the urban village life of
Little Italy as well as the generational tensions that shape its character net-
work. At its center, Charlie (Harvey Keitel) is an older version of J.R. from
Who’s That Knocking at My Door, a character whose ruminations on sin
and salvation are spoken in voice-over by both Keitel and Scorsese. The other
characters in Mean Streets represent extremes of conformity and rebellion,
effectively externalizing Charlie’s conflicted allegiances. Charlie is, on the
one hand, the good son, good nephew, and good friend, who spends almost
as much time at the local bar, Volpe’s, as does its proprietor, Tony (David
Proval). Charlie, like Michael (Richard Romanus), has ambitions to follow
in the footsteps of his Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), the local mob boss.
On the other hand, he is a rebel, who secretly yearns for Diane (Jeanne Bell),
Volpe’s beautiful stripper, despite the racism of his world, and who maintains
a close friendship with the increasingly self-destructive Johnny Boy (Robert
de Niro). And, he maintains a sexual relationship with Johnny’s “sick in the
head” cousin, Teresa (Amy Robinson ), in defiance of his uncle’s warnings
about the company Charlie keeps.
Just as the tensions among the film’s characters externalize Charlie’s
inner conflicts, the music of the film—though all diegetic, sourced from
restaurants, bars, pool halls, and festival bands—works expressively, with
Charlie as the one character who links all of the different musical/cultural
zones of the film. Local bar Volpe’s is the most diverse of these musical set-
tings: Its fantastically eclectic jukebox, supplied by Scorsese’s own personal
record collection, combines 1950s and 1960s R&B, as well as the Ameri-
canized Neapolitan songs of Jimmy Roselli and Renato Carosene, with
the hard rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Outside, American and
Italian traditional tunes are played by the festival bands in the streets, and
the Puerto Rican jazz of Ray Barretto’s “Ritmo Sabroso” blares from tene-
ments adjoining the church that draws Charlie repeatedly. Inside, Guiseppe
Di Stefano’s heartbreaking tenor defines the spaces of the restaurant and
the café where Uncle Giovanni does business, and the seductive sound
of the Ronettes finds Charlie in his bedroom at night. As Charlie moves
through the neighborhood, clashes between musical periods, nationalities,
and genres narrate his desires and the conflicting claims on his time and
loyalty. In Oscar’s Restaurant, for instance, the Neapolitan song “Munas-
terio di Santa Chiara” (the song of an immigrant who has to leave after the
destruction of World War II and fears returning to ruins) plays as Charlie
talks to Oscar about his debt to Charlie’s uncle. When Charlie steps out
into the street, di Stefano’s soaring, emotive tenor abruptly gives way to
the festival band’s hectic rendition of the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The
musical clash that emphasizes the distance between Little Italy and main-
stream America also betokens Charlie’s pursuit of a would-be gangster’s
version of the American dream: to take over Oscar’s restaurant when he can
no longer keep up his payments to Uncle Giovanni.
 Orchestrating Violence 53

At the end of the film, the final moment of bloody violence coincides
with the closing ceremonies of the San Gennaro festival, and a festival
band concludes its concert performance with a brief, frenetic rendering of
the widely familiar nineteenth-century pop song “Home Sweet Home.”
Given the foregoing drama, its sentiments are, for Charlie and his friends,
both deeply ironic and simply true. As Robert Casillo observes, this music
playing over the image of window shades being pulled down in a local
apartment suggests “the circular futility, insularity and entrapment of the
residents of Little Italy.” 21 Yet Scorsese himself, mindful of the limited
options for youth with no education and few prospects who thus cannot
“physically or intellectually rise above” their place in the world, maintains
that the real punishment for these young characters is not that they must
remain in such a stultifying environment or even that they are injured dur-
ing the film’s violent conclusion, but that “[t]hey are banished . . . thrown
out of their village.” 22
The opening of Mean Streets makes clear Charlie’s ties to this urban vil-
lage, even as it conveys the importance to the film’s narration of a dialectical
relation between music and image. The first image of Mean Streets is Charlie
starting awake; he goes to the mirror, looking at himself with the sound of
sirens in the air, an aural signifier of the free-floating guilt that drives him.
Returning to bed, the movement of putting head to pillow is shown in three
jump cuts almost synced to the opening drum beat of the Ronettes’ 1963
“Be My Baby” and Ronnie Bennett’s “hugely quavering, massively sexy
voice.”23 Of this opening Scorsese says:
The music was always in the original script . . . . “Be My Baby” was the
song. You can’t beat that. I mean that’s 1963, or 1962 New York. That’s
the Ronettes. We used to hear that late at night. There was always a
social club stuck in the back of some building and that song was always
playing, echoing in the streets. That sound—the Crystals, the Ronettes,
Martha and the Vandellas, all the female singing groups of that time—
that’s what it was. Right before the Beatles . . . . That was in my mind.
All that stuff.24

But while Scorsese cites aural verisimilitude as his motivation, for Charlie
“Be My Baby” functions more immediately as the sound of musical tempta-
tion, the reasons for which are made clear in the next scene where Volpe’s
stripper, Diane, prompts in Charlie an internal debate on race, racism,
and sexual desire. “Be My Baby” creates a total environment of rhythmic
music and roiling emotion that draws the listener into a fantasy of idealized
romance and sexual desire. Introducing a film that actor Amy Robinson
rightly enough summarizes as “such a male movie,” the Ronettes’ song
nevertheless brings with it multiple signifiers of femininity and female sexu-
ality,25 making it clear that gender is a core concern of this film, just as it is
in Who’s That Knocking at My Door.
54 Orchestrating Violence
The lush sound of “Be My Baby” is only part of the song’s effect; there
are also the group members. The Ronettes, with their passionate vocals and
Spanish Harlem street glamour were, in contrast to other girl groups, known
throughout the 1960s for their “aura of brazen sex.”26 The erotic invitation
of “Be My Baby” is the first sign that female sexuality—both its appeal and
the simple fact of its existence—will be a vexed topic for Charlie. But to
signal Charlie’s rather tortured relation with women and sex is not the only
possible narrative role of “Be My Baby” as it continues to play throughout
the credit sequence. The move from medium shot to extreme close-up as
Charlie closes his eyes tells us that we are in Charlie’s head —and not for
the last time. Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” orchestration, pierced through
by the romantic/erotic plea of Ronnie Bennett’s slightly hoarse vibrato,
accompanies home movie-style images of Charlie’s world, whose ontologi-
cal status in the film—like the status of the music itself—is uncertain. That
is, as home movies, the images are marked as memory, as well as a signal of
the film’s interest in and inspiration by documentary film. 27 But these images
are also Charlie’s dream, the close association of dream and screen indicated
by the cut from Charlie returning to sleep to the image of a movie projector.
In this home movie/dream/memory, domestic femininity is both omnipres-
ent and absent; all of the women in the opening credits are seen only as arms
and hands attending to babies and food, just as Charlie’s mother—never
seen in the film—cossets her son, who still lives at home. The one exception
to this representation of women is Teresa. Marked as different, she has a
head as well as hands and doesn’t serve food but eats. Like the young women
in George Lucas’s semiautobiographical, music-driven film of the same year,
American Graffiti (1973), whose futures—in contrast to those of the male
characters—are not documented by the title cards at the end of the film,
Teresa goes unrecognized by the titles that follow this credit sequence. But
despite her not being named as a protagonist like Charlie, Michael, Tony,
and Johnny Boy, the credit sequence takes note of her as the one woman in
Charlie’s life not relegated to the margins. Her position—centered, yet mar-
ginalized, forgotten, and remembered—is a point of ambiguity in a film that
struggles with femininity no less than its protagonists do. Scorsese, decades
later, reflected on Teresa’s significance to the film, saying “she has ideas . . .
and the old guard doesn’t like that.” More pointedly, Paula Massood
observes that Charlie, like his predecessor J.R. in Who’s That Knocking at
My Door, “projects his desires of border crossing and transgressing soci-
etal mores onto the bodies of women.”28 Overdetermined in the film as a
figure of problematic difference—being both female and epileptic—in her
open sexuality, in her desire for Charlie, and in her desire to escape the old
neighborhood, she highlights and gives Charlie the opportunity to express
his own more tentative urge to rebel.
Meanwhile, the combination of passionate lyrics and domestic images
in this sequence shifts, or complicates, the significance of Ronnie Bennett’s
vocals. At first the import of the music and its lyrics seems purely erotic,
 Orchestrating Violence 55

but once the home movies start with images of babies and families and
of Charlie with neighbors and friends, they become likewise maternal, a
play on the dual significance of being “my baby.” The “wall of sound”
envelops Charlie in what Greil Marcus, in writing about the music of the
girl groups of the 1960s, describes as “a utopia of feeling, of sentiment, of
desire most of all”29 that is both erotic and comforting. Thanks to its musi-
cal accompaniment, we see Charlie in this dream/memory as both adult and
child, identified with the infant whose christening is pictured, soothed and
attended by the hands of an invisible mother. It’s a reminder that the streets
are mean, but they are also mother and home. In the “dangerous and sad
city of the imagination” depicted in Mean Streets, the continued use of girl-
group songs and other R&B music of the past serves as a reminder of the
domestic, familial, communal imagery of this opening sequence, even when
they are used to narrate the day-to-day violence of Charlie’s world.

SHALL WE FIGHT? MUSIC, MALE FRIENDSHIP, AND

RITUAL VIOLENCE IN MEAN STREETS

Violence is a form of expression. It’s how people live.

—Martin Scorsese 30
A little over a quarter of an hour into Mean Streets, the first doo-wop tune
we hear in Volpe’s is “Desirie” (1957) by the Harlem-based group, The
Charts. With blended harmonies, a lead tenor whose falsetto notes high-
light moments of emotional expression, and a simple accompaniment of
piano, drums, and sax, “Desirie” typifies the “innocence and spontaneity
(and amateurishness)” of classic doo-wop.31 It provides the underscore for
Charlie’s attempt to bring Johnny Boy to task for debts owed to Michael,
but Johnny takes over the conversation, turning it into a shaggy dog tale of
gambling, kids, cops, and a new tie that reengages Charlie’s affection for
his ne’er-do-well friend. Irritation giving way to indulgence, the familiar-
ity between the two—the ease with which they slip into a variation of the
old who’s-on-first gag in their conversation about Joey Clams—establishes
their personal bond, the harmony and complementarity of which is echoed
by The Charts’ blended vocals. Their friendship is cemented by their plan
to share the two bohemian girls that Johnny has brought in from the Village.
“Desirie,” moving a bit further into the forefront of the sound mix, offers
an ironic backdrop to their conversation with the girls, its romantic lyrics
and emotion ultimately more applicable to the affection between the young
men than to any (hoped for) sexual conquest.
The music of 1950s doo-wop singers and the 1960s girl groups that
followed in their wake is the sound of local neighborhoods, school, and
church. Youthful voices, pleasing but untrained, make them the sound of an
innocent, idealized past. And, from the 1970s onward, the doo-wop sound
56 Orchestrating Violence
carried with it connotations of what David Shumway calls “commodified
nostalgia,”32 popularized by oldies stations and revival groups like Sha
Na Na—who performed at Woodstock in 1969 and experienced a steady
growth in popularity in the decade following. Charlie, Johnny, Tony, and
Michael are a long way from proms and sock hops, but for all this, such
R&B selections work in a fairly straightforward way to comment on their
friendship as a fraternity whose neighborhood ties we understand to be at
least as long-standing as the doo-wop sound, a relationship that reestab-
lishes its harmony by the conclusion of this first scene of Mean Streets.
And, while the “grown up” girl-group sound of the Ronettes speaks of
sex and temptation in the opening of Mean Streets, songs by “wholesome
and respectable” girl groups,33 like the harmonies of 1950s doo-wop, signify
friendship and commonality in the film’s musical system. 34 The Shirelles’
“I Met Him on a Sunday” and the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman”
have in common call-and-response structures that, in this context, speak
of the female friendships and family relations from which the mostly black,
mostly urban female singing groups of the 1960s emerged. In the scene
following Charlie’s intervention into the growing tension between Johnny
and Michael, an amused Tony plays along as Michael separates a couple
of Riverdale teens—festival tourists—from their cash in exchange for non-
existent fireworks. As Michael works the marks, the Shirelles’ “I Met Him
on a Sunday” offers a sharp contrast to his talk of “business.” With its
simple verses about a one-week romance and its “doo-ronde-ronde-ronde-
pa-pa” chorus, it provides comic counterpoint to Michael’s seriousness and
self-importance, while, as a song that is as much “about” the fun of singing
together as sharing confidences, it comments on the easy friendship between
him and Tony. In “I Met Him on a Sunday,” no one voice takes the lead;
instead, each sings a verse in turn, with its rhythm of hand claps and finger
pops recalling clapping games of girls’ musical play. Later, when Charlie,
Johnny, and Tony drive to collect a gambling debt for their friend Jimmy,
Little Caesar and the Romans’ “Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of
You)” of 1961 makes the nostalgic tie between boyhood compatriots and
the doo-wop sound lyrically obvious. And so, when at the homecoming
party for Jerry, the Vietnam vet, Tony says to Michael, “play only oldies,”
the response is R&B of the 1950s and early 1960s, with an emphasis on
doo-wop and girl groups: the Nutmegs’ “Ship of Love” (1955), The Chips’
“Rubber Biscuit” (1956), and The Chantels’ “I Love You So” (1958).
If the musical choices of Mean Streets were to continue in this vein, it
might accurately be described as another 1970s nostalgia film—perhaps,
like Cooley High (Schultz, U.S., 1975), offering an ethnic alternative to
American Graffiti—rather than what it is, a film about nostalgia and its
limits, a half-longing, half-critical view of Scorsese’s not-so-long-ago youth.
Once the doo-wop and girl-group sounds have been established as signifi-
ers of home, community, and male friendship within the musical system of
Mean Streets, these musical genres are available for more explicitly ironic
 Orchestrating Violence 57

deployments. For instance, one of the ironies of Scorsese’s use of doo-wop

and girl-group music is the degree to which African American voices help
to narrate relationships among Italian American males overt in their racism.
The clash between musical narration, action, and dialogue is most pointed
in the scene depicting a homecoming party for Jerry. The Chantels—one
of the first female R&B groups to have nationwide success—sing “I Love
You So” in the background as Michael shares a picture of his new girlfriend,
who’s “smart” and “gonna be a teacher.” Tony easily punctures Michael’s
pride by saying he saw her “kissing a nigger,” smirking at Michael’s hor-
rified expression as he walks away. The casual combination of racism and
misogyny that underpins Tony’s teasing of Michael—and the ease with
which Michael’s pride is replaced by disgust—is highlighted by the contrast
between this exchange and the Chantels’ choir-like harmonies. Thus, it is
perhaps significant that the one time a white doo-wop group is featured on
the soundtrack (the Aquatones’ “You” from 1958) it is used to narrate Char-
lie’s first attempt to act on his attraction to Volpe’s stripper, Diane—and his
fear of doing so, given the racism of his world. While Lynne Nixon’s ringing
soprano sings of teen love and loneliness against the backdrop of male doo-
wop-style harmonies, Charlie ventures beyond the boundaries of Little Italy,
taking a taxi to where Diane waits for him; but he loses his nerve and asks
the driver to “take me back to where you picked me up.”
But more pointed in their critical perspective are those scenes where
popular songs are used to create striking audiovisual composites. Like
those “improbable parallels” created by the drunken pianist whose unlikely
accompaniments to silent films Siegfried Kracauer recalls from his youth,
the effect of these combinations of sound and image track is based on an
apparent “lack of relation between the musical themes and the action they
were supposed to sustain.” As such, they offer the opportunity to see the
world of the film “in a new and unexpected light.”35 Using girl-group music,
as well as the commodified nostalgia of Neapolitan pop song—genres asso-
ciated with community and tradition in the film—the film creates
audiovisual representations of urban masculinity structured by musical
counterpoint and analogy between fight and dance as ritual and spectacle.
The first and most arresting example is the use of “Please, Mr. Postman”
for the pool hall fight that erupts when the friends venture out of Little Italy
to collect on a gambling debt. The Marvelettes’ “Please, Mr. Postman” was
the first Motown release to reach number one on both the R&B and pop
charts. It is a girl-group song with call-and-response exchanges, featuring
Gladys Horton’s gritty lead vocals and a gospel piano, made irresistibly
danceable by its “rockin’ tempo.”36 Like other girl-group hits, its arrange-
ment communicates a sense of kinship and social connection, as the song
transforms loneliness and disappointment into an opportunity for collective
commentary; its joyous musical play is filled with high-energy interjections
that create a complex rhythmic counterpoint to the lead vocals. As Dave
Marsh puts it:
58 Orchestrating Violence
Horton is pretty cool, for a woman in despair over the silence of her
lover. The other Marvelettes sing like they’re just passersby wanting to
help out the lady with the problem—they’ve seen it before, they’ve been
this woman, their job is now just to get the mailman’s attention, snap-
ping “Wait!” and adding “oh yeah” to her every plea and explanation,
the girl-group equivalent of shouting “amen” and “hallelujah.” 37

In contrast to the dance rhythms of the song—and in contrast to fight

sequences in mainstream Hollywood films that are choreographed like
dances—the fight scene in the pool hall is a full-on scuffle, an indoor street
brawl. One could easily imagine a Hollywood-style fistfight synched or
edited to the timing of “Please, Mr. Postman,” with punches landing on the
accented syllables of “Wait!” and “Please!” but instead this fight is pure
disarray, disorder highlighted by its total lack of synchronization with or
rhythmic relation to the music.
Grappling arms and legs, missed punches, awkward pursuit, and even
more awkward evasion create visual chaos highlighted by the mobile fram-
ing that follows, lurches, dips, and weaves along with the combatants. By
comparison, much of the comedy in the fight sequence from The Searchers
shown in the previous sequence (when Michael’s ill-gotten gains take them
all to the movies) comes from its theatricality, its combination of control
(“spit over that piece of firewood”) and uncontrolled violence (“no chok-
ing! no gouging!”). Its ritualized violence is framed by its spatial proximity,
physical homology, and narrative relevance to the wedding dance scene that
preceded it, similarly constructed in long shots and relatively long takes. The
would-be groom fights the bride’s childhood sweetheart, who returns in the
midst of the festivities. The two men circle one another like wedding dancers
before launching into attack, as the rest of the community perform their role
as witnesses, one spectacle apparently serving as a worthy—perhaps even
superior—substitute for the other.
The fight scene in Mean Streets likewise appears, in its own way, as ritual,
in the sense that we understand that this is a regular part of the relationship
between the youth of Little Italy and “outsiders” (who together close ranks
against the ultimate outsiders, the police, at the end of the scene). The starting
point of the affray is the rather obscure insult Joey throws at Jimmy, calling
him a “mook.” As no one knows exactly what it means—and no one cares—it
is the absent center of their disagreement, highlighting the purely symbolic
value of the clash. Its musical treatment emphasizes the fight both as a regular
feature of the young men’s friendship—like those other activities previously
narrated with R&B—as well as its essential “silliness.” 38 It’s an effect reprised
in Gangs of New York, when the mysterious accusation of being a “fiddling
ben” sparks a brawl between Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) and McGloin
(Gary Lewis), two generations of Irish immigrants whose fight is accompanied
by a lilting dulcimer rendition of the traditional Irish dance tune, “Morrison’s
Jig.” In the rhythmic mismatch between musical accompaniment and action
 Orchestrating Violence 59

in both examples, the focus of the sequence is on discord and disorder, tumult
and turmoil, offering an audiovisual sketch of masculinities with no outlet
except violence, the pointlessness of which is the point.
Just as the previous use of doo-wop and girl-group music in Mean Streets
prefigured the work of “Please, Mr. Postman” in the pool room fight scene,
the film’s prior association of Neapolitan music with tradition, nostalgia,
and the old guard sets the scene for the use of Jimmy Roselli’s “Mala-
femmena” (1965) in Volpe’s, when a young, anonymous gunman shoots a
drunk in the misguided belief that it is an “honor” killing. While Roselli’s
Americanized Italian song about a “bad woman” plays, Tony, Charlie, and
Johnny Boy gather around the pool table, Tony arguing with Charlie over
the latter’s belief in the Church and its priests. This is followed by Renato
Carosene’s romantic ballad, “Maruzzella” (1966), another Americanized
Neapolitan song, during which Tony and Johnny come close to blows over
Johnny’s endless interest in gambling. Then Roselli’s “Malafemmena” plays
again, the repetition emphasizing the boredom of the boyhood friends, the
sameness of the arguments and the games they play in Volpe’s bar. The aim-
less time wasting of the four young men (Michael, as it turns out, has been
sitting at the bar the whole time the other three played pool) is suddenly
interrupted when a young man (Robert Carradine—listed in the credits sim-
ply as “Boy with Gun”) shoots a drunk (David Carradine) as he attempts to
use the toilet in back.
Whereas the representation of the pool room brawl in Mean Streets depends
on the incompatibility between the visual chaos of bodies in motion and the
rhythmic order of “Please, Mr. Postman,” and the barroom brawl of Gangs
of New York achieves its comic effect from a similar clash of dance music
and chaotic violence, this sequence instead takes the form of a grotesque,
violent dance parody, choreographed to “Malafemmena.” 39 The first shots
are fired during the opening of Roselli’s song, with the victim’s shocked eyes
and open mouth a macabre mirror of Roselli’s passionate performance. The
drunk stumbles, turns, and grabs his assailant as the percussive tango beat of
the song commences. And, rather like those couples who would have danced
the tango to Roselli’s trademark tune in the 1950s, 40 the two grapple, end-
ing in an intimate embrace chest to chest, as the victim “leads” his assailant
outside, before being shot again and falling into the street, prompting sirens
and an exodus of the bar’s remaining customers.
In exploring—and exploiting—the cinematic common ground between
violence and dance as cinematic spectacle and social ritual, Scorsese finds a
peculiarly apt metaphor for those forces of tradition—ethnic solidarity, mas-
culinity that aspires to dominance—that have the power both to bind and
to tear apart a community and the individuals within it. This is the entire
focus of Gangs of New York, with its raucous tale of patricide, bloodletting
and city building. In Mean Streets, this represents the limitations placed
on Charlie’s hopes for the future, made entirely clear in the scene that fol-
lows the shooting in Volpe’s. When Charlie visits his uncle at the café the
60 Orchestrating Violence
next day, the old guard is discussing the future of the young gunman, while
Giuseppe Di Stefano sings the Neapolitan song, “Addio Sogni di Gloria/
Good-bye Dreams of Glory” (1955) in the background. As Charlie waits
in the bathroom, listening to the music and the discussion (“He did it for
Mario’s Honor” . . . “My son only did what he thought was right”) and
once again checking his reflection in the mirror, the similarities between
him and the Boy with Gun are made clear. Both are attempting to negoti-
ate between their desires and those of the older generation; both are trying,
without success, to dance to their tune.

MUSIC TO FETISHIZE BY: GOODFELLAS AND CASINO

[M]an is a being with the possibilities of success or failure . . . one must

emerge from the crowd or else one is nothing.
—Robert Warshow41

The material success and power represented by Uncle Giovanni in Mean

Streets, so tantalizing to would-be gangsters Charlie and Michael, are
depicted in lush terms by Scorsese’s subsequent films, GoodFellas and
Casino, whose musical account of mobsters in New York and Las Vegas is
linked intertextually to Mean Streets. In particular, GoodFellas, like Mean
Streets, uses a mix of 1950s and 1960s doo-wop, girl-group songs, and
Italian and Neapolitan pop to depict coming-of-age in an Italian American
neighborhood in New York. But the aim of its musical narration is some-
what different from Mean Streets’ portrait of low-level street thugs, thieves,
and con men, as the film focuses explicitly on—and popular music is one of
the key methods for depicting—how a soldier for the mob is seduced by a
lifestyle whose glossy surface is underpinned by brutality. Thus the narrative
and musical systems of GoodFellas, like that of Scorsese’s next film, Casino,
are shaped by the logic of fetishism—whereby belief trumps knowledge—
and the promise of material success in the world of organized crime.
As in Mean Streets, the credit sequence of GoodFellas effectively sum-
marizes the film’s musical and narrative strategy, the relation between the
film’s mise en scène and its pop score. In bloody detail and without musical
accompaniment, a pre-credit scene shows the internecine violence of mob
life, the (second) killing of Billy Batts. At its conclusion, Henry Hill (Ray
Liotta) recalls in voice-over that, “For as long as I can remember, I always
wanted to be a gangster.” Cued to Tony Bennett’s 1953 interpretation of
“Rags to Riches,” the film cuts from Hill’s wistful look to an image of the
gangster lifestyle seen through the eyes of the young Henry Hill (Christopher
Serrone). Middle-aged gangsters on the street are fetishized, their bodies
fragmented by his gaze as a series of telling details: a foot wearing a highly
polished wing-tip, a glossily coiffed head, a be-ringed hand on the door of
an expensive car. Focusing quite literally on the “sheen” of gangster life, the
 Orchestrating Violence 61

glittering surface of bodies and objects, the scene establishes Hill’s narrative
perspective and the film’s aesthetic commitment to depicting the allure of
the gangster lifestyle. What Stella Bruzzi notes as the gangster genre’s
concern with sartorial display as a signifier of “instant wealth” is extended
in GoodFellas to embrace all aspects of conspicuous consumption: from pinky
rings to pink Cadillacs, yellow cardigans to silver and lilac Christmas trees, the
gangster lifestyle in GoodFellas dazzles the eye.
The opening sequence makes it clear that this focus on surface is a gesture
of disavowal, set in contrast to mob violence. Blood, brutality, and aggres-
sion are the flipside of Henry Hill’s fantasy of escape from his class-based
destiny of too little respect, overcrowded houses, and too small paychecks.
As Hill closes the car trunk that held the body of Batts at the end of the pre-
credit sequence and recollects his past (and present) desire to be a gangster,
his dreamy look and voice-over statement of childhood desire are gestures of
enunciation that set the nostalgic, retrospective narrative of the first section
of the film in motion. Just as Charlie’s inner life as we see it in the open -
ing sequence of Mean Streets is animated by illicit desire and populated by
nostalgic images of being nurtured by the same culture that he haphazardly
rebels against, the pleasures and desires that drive Hill are depicted as being
those of the young boy he once was. Buoyed by wall-to-wall popular tunes
from Hill’s—and the viewer’s—past, as well as Hill’s voice-over narration,
the audience is engaged by a representation that diverts attention from the
gruesome realities of a body that won’t stay dead in the car trunk, the same
body that later in the film won’t stay buried in its grave. Shaped in this way
by the logic of disavowal, the “willing suspension of knowledge in favour
of belief,”42 the first part of GoodFellas demonstrates how music can work
in concert with cinematography and mise en scène to create opportunities
for—and cinematic accounts of—fetishistic engagement.
Specifically, 1950s pop songs have a key role to play in depicting the
gangster lifestyle as a fantasy space of glamour and empowerment for
Henry, while enticing the “credulous” part of the film audience to identify
with his gangster ambitions. For instance, what Mulvey calls, in her 1994
reflections on the work of fetishism in contemporary cinema and culture,
a “‘rich sight’ aesthetic” (an apt summary of Hill’s perception of gangster
glamour) is complemented by its sonorial equivalent, especially in the use of
Tony Bennett’s number one hit of 1953, “Rags to Riches” at the beginning
of Hill’s retrospective narrative. In both its sound and its lyrics, this song
acts as musical signifier of not just an era but an attitude, an expectation,
and a set of desires particular to the economic and social promise of post-
World War II America—all dramatically magnified. Bennett—groomed by
Columbia Records producer Mitch Miller to replace recently departed Frank
Sinatra—lyrically touts romantic love as true wealth that would make him a
“millionaire” despite empty pockets. The sound of this swinging up-tempo
pop, with its flashy, brassy accompaniment by Percy Faith and his orches-
tra, belies Bennett’s lyrical will to poverty. And, while the big lush sound
62 Orchestrating Violence
and Bennett’s vocal flourishes may be meant as metaphoric expressions of
the pleasure and excitement of romantic love filtered through a Hollywood
musical or Broadway aesthetic, they also speak to the big-ticket, restaurant-
and nightclub-centered lifestyle of a mob soldier, whose position, power, and
scope for self-indulgence Hill himself likens at the end of the film to that of
“movie stars.”
In addition to the rich sound aesthetic of 1950s pop crooners like Bennett,
Hill’s recollection of his early days in the cab stand, working as a gopher for
the local mob, is musically narrated by mid-1950s R&B. With an emphasis
on doo-wop by groups like the Cleftones, Moonglows, and the Cadillacs,
these musical choices link Hill’s reminiscences of youth to those of Scorsese
in Mean Streets, an intertextual tie connecting the films and acting as both
a sign of the authenticity of this tale and as authorial signature. Likewise,
in GoodFellas, as in Mean Streets, vocals by Guiseppe Di Stefano are a
privileged sonorial marker of tradition and the influence of the old guard,
signifying connections (real and imagined) to the past, between Italy and
America. They narrate key moments in Hill’s growing connection to the
mob and his youthful fascination with the Sicilian American culture at its
center. For instance, when Henry shares his first attempt at mob-inspired
male glamour with his mother (“Oh, my god! You look like a gangster!”),
di Stephano’s heartfelt rendition of “Firenza Sogna/Florence Dreams” offers
a tongue-in-cheek comment on Hill’s fantasy of Italian-American masculin-
ity. It is still playing when he sees his first person get shot outside Tuddy’s
Pizzeria. And, his “graduation,” when he is arrested and goes to court for
the first time, is celebrated with the Neapolitan pop of “Parlami d’amore
Marilù.”
The use of Neapolitan pop at this moment is in keeping with the fetish-
istic logic of this first part of GoodFellas. Iain Chambers has termed such
Neapolitan songs—which offer themselves as the authentic sound of the
past but are in fact part of “an exquisitely modern practice” of inventing
and selling “tradition”—to be the “sonorial glue” for contemporary ethnic
identities.43 In the musical systems of Mean Streets and GoodFellas, they are
the songs of the immigrant; yearning songs in the language of the homeland,
signifiers of identities located in the past and present, here and there. Later
in GoodFellas, when some of the gloss has worn off this life and its violence
is again registered on the surface of the narrative, Hill distances himself
from such traditions, dismissing them as “real greaseball shit.” But in the
early stages of his career, his fantasy engagement with the gangster lifestyle
is represented as a fantasy engagement with Italian immigrant life, in part
through the commodified nostalgia of Neapolitan pop.
The use of 1950s R&B to narrate Henry’s nostalgic relationship to his
early years in the mob culminates with the 1957 rendition of “Stardust”
by Billy Ward and His Dominoes. Its lyrical longing for a past love affair is
directed specifically to Hill’s memory of himself as a young soldier, soon to
be at the height of his career. In other words, if there is any romance here,
 Orchestrating Violence 63

it is the romance between Henry and his past or, more precisely, between
Henry and “the life” that he later must give up in order to survive. As “Star-
dust” plays, the frenetic narrative pace of the film’s audiovisual account of
young Henry’s education slows to a standstill, 44 halting on an image of the
adult Henry, depicted in a shot that is reminiscent of that first, fetishistic,
loving look at gangster flash. This time, of course, it is Henry himself who
embodies the lifestyle, the dream, in a fetishized image of male glamour
offered to the film audience as confirmation of all that is good about being
a “good fella.”
While feminist film theory traditionally has argued that the image of
the woman is cinema’s most perfect fetishistic object—of which studio-era
Hollywood film offered many examples—images like this one of gangster
glamour in Scorsese’s films confirm that it is not the only one. As Bruzzi
observes,
In keeping with generic tradition [of the gangster film] if not with
established perception of masculinity, it is Scorsese’s male characters
who are the primary objects of spectacle and fetishisation. . . . Good-
Fellas signals Henry has conclusively made it when Ray Liotta (as the
adult Hill) is introduced in 1963 with the same lazy, fetishistic pan up
his body, taking in his tasseled grey loafers, the stirrupped trousers of his
grey sheen suit and his trademark Gabicci-style striped shirt.45

The fluid camera movement, offering the opportunity to linger over the vivid
surface of Hill’s body and the accoutrements of his lifestyle, is repeated and
extended in the next scene at the Bamboo Lounge, where the entire “cast”
of his adult life is introduced and he confirms his commitment to its values
and beliefs. In voice-over, Henry comments that, for “us to live any other
way was nuts . . . to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs
for bum paychecks . . . were dead . . . they were suckers.” A similar com-
bination of sinuous camera movement and romantic pop also narrates the
seduction of Karen (Lorraine Bracco) by Henry and his lifestyle, when he
treats her to a night out at the Copacabana. The music and lyrics of The
Crystals’ 1963 single, “Then He Kissed Me,” complement mobile framing
that is itself as flashy and stylish—and as much an invitation to fetishistic
engagement—as the world and the man that lure Karen. In this part of the
film, which focuses on various types of seduction—of Henry, of Karen, and
of the audience—lush arrangements of 1960s romantic ballads by female
vocalists, like the polished sound of 1950s male crooners used elsewhere,
highlight the appeal of this life of crime—this life of style. In these terms, the
the English version of the Italian pop hit “Il cielo in una stanza/This World
We Love In” by Mina plays much the same role in the Bamboo Lounge scene
as The Crystals’ impassioned song does at the Copacabana. In both cases,
romantic music participates in the eroticization of Hill’s life, a combination
of score, mise en scène, and cinematographic style that, as Martha Nochism
64 Orchestrating Violence
observes, offers “the audience a chance to experience a seduction that blinds
the mind to a very coarse reality. . . .”46
The rich sound aesthetic at work in GoodFellas is also important to
Casino, inasmuch as Las Vegas is presented as a city constructed entirely
on the logic of fetishistic display and engagement. It is a place where, as
flashy East Coast bookie Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert de Niro) says in his
voice-over narration, they “sell dreams for cash.” The “free” entertainment
of the casinos, gaudy décor, beautiful showgirls, and bright lights are calcu-
lated to entice, distract, and conceal the fact that the odds are always in the
house’s favor. In Casino, Ace and his boyhood pal, tough guy Nicky Santoro
(Joe Pesci), are transplanted to Las Vegas by those dowdy, Midwestern mob
elders who are the real power behind the gloss. Ace and Nicky and hustler
Ginger (Sharon Stone) each embody aspects of Vegas—its surface glamour
and underlying greed and aggression—even as they are each duped by its
fetishistic logic, each taking Vegas to be their personal land of opportunity,
despite what they know about its workings, its true nature. In particular,
Ace, controlled and businesslike in the midst of the flash, glitter, and giddy
abandon of the patrons, his grim face in stark contrast to his candy-bright
attire, personifies a business whose dazzling surface conceals the serious
moneymaking operations at its heart. Yet he, as well as Nicky, despite the
intimate knowledge of Vegas revealed in their voice-over narration, falls
prey to its promises, pleasures, and possibilities.
As in the case of GoodFellas, popular songs have a key representational
role in Casino, contributing to its fetishistic logic. But unlike GoodFellas
and despite the overt nostalgia of Ace’s and Nicky’s retrospective voice-
overs, Casino appears less concerned with seducing its audience than with
highlighting the dangers and consequences of seduction. A dense and eclec-
tic mix of upbeat pop hits from the 1950s through to the1980s intermingles
with the voice-over narrations by Ace and Nicky as the two offer a critical
perspective on the allure of Vegas, while both falling, in different ways, for
the temptations of the city. Wall-to-wall pop songs offer ironic commentary
on Ace and Nicky’s narration, the “crowded, fragmented, and omniscient
soundtrack” aesthetic of GoodFellas pushed even further in Casino,47 to
suggest the excitement that Vegas generates in each man. For instance, Lee
Dorsey’s jaunty 1966 rendition of Allen Toussaint’s “Working in the Coal
Mine” is a tongue-in-cheek musical appreciation of the nonstop work of
surveillance and sometimes violent control exerted by Ace and his staff to
maintain the casino’s lucrative atmosphere of indulgence, excitement, and
fun. Ray Charles and Betty Carter’s 1961 rendition of “Two to Tango”
offers a similarly irreverent commentary on Nicky and Ace’s intimate but
tense relationship. But more substantively, the unremitting, almost chaotic
musical mix of pop works as the sonic equivalent of the hectic casino décor,
whose glitter and flashing lights are calculated to distract customers from
the passage of their time and money, to urge the substitution of fantasy for
reality, belief for knowledge. The film’s pop score is in constant competition
 Orchestrating Violence 65

with Ace and Nicky’s knowing voice-over (in which each sees the other
more clearly than he sees himself). Crowding the verbal commentary in this
way, it signifies the effect of this heady atmosphere on the former bookie
and his mob-appointed muscle in spite of themselves. The densely textured
mix of music and verbal commentary is the soundtrack of their ill-founded
and ill-fated belief in the possibilities—for love and theft, for prestige
and wealth—offered by Vegas.

ROCKING AND ROLLING AND LOSING CONTROL

[T]he gangster’s pre-eminence lies in the suggestion that he may at any

moment lose control.
—Robert Warshow48

Scorsese’s gangster antiheroes are all rebels, and their ambitions, their
struggles, are a dark mirror of Scorsese’s own. Accordingly, the work of
guitar-driven rock of the late 1960s and 1970s in Scorsese’s films registers
his sense of its significance in his own life, especially the impact on him as
a young man hearing the “restless energy” of the Stones for the first time,
playing on a car radio in 1965. 49 In Mean Streets, as Scorsese summarizes
it, the Rolling Stones’ song “‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ is danger.” 50 This and
other songs by the Stones are used to narrate the very different obsessions
of Charlie and Johnny Boy and to place their rebellious desires in the larger
contexts of social change and youth culture. For instance, the Stones’ 1964
“Tell Me” plays as Charlie first enters Volpe’s at the beginning of the film,
the camera harnessed to Keitel creating the dreamlike effect that Charlie is
not so much in the world of the film but that it is unfolding in front of him,
a continuation of the dream/screen motif of the opening credits. Charlie’s
voice-over continues with his reflections on sin and hell, elaborating on his
sense of guilt, directed specifically toward sexual desire that crosses racial
lines, with Scorsese’s voice saying “. . . she is really good-looking; but she’s
black . . . there’s not much difference anyway, is there? Is there?”—as Jagger
sings of obsessive desire. Both Scorsese’s voice and the sound of the Rolling
Stones help to define Charlie’s reality in terms of the world beyond Little
Italy, the urban village’s connection to and separation from the youth and
Civil Rights movements, and the sexual revolution. In these terms, the use
of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” for Johnny Boy’s entrance to Volpe’s, just after
Charlie’s, connects Johnny and his anarchic performance (he keeps his hat
but checks his pants) to the countercultural impulses of the youth move-
ment. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a song as lyrically sparse and vividly imagistic
as the blues from which the Stones’ music was derived, offers a teacup-sized
bildungsroman with a cartoonishly vivid rendition of the working-class
identity affected by the Stones. Moving narratively from past to present,
subjugation to freedom, suffering to ecstasy, it weaves a coming-of-age tale
66 Orchestrating Violence
in which a Dickensian boyhood (dark and stormy, marked by abuse at the
hands of an aged and grotesque maternal figure) is subsequently transformed
into triumphant young masculinity: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Repeating that
quintessential statement of 1960s optimism, “It’s alright,” it is a celebration
of the modern, of the now, based in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek dramatic
recreation of the past. In its lyrical invocation of the new, 51 it celebrates
something that Johnny Boy attempts in his haphazard rebellions but never
achieves and that Charlie is afraid to try—personal transformation through
a radical break with the past.
Late 1960s and 1970s rock music also has a key role to play in Good-
Fellas, signaling temporal and cultural shifts in Hill’s life. The hokey but
elegiac hippie mysticism of Donovan’s ruminations in “Atlantis” (1969)
marks the beginning of the end of his mob career, when Billy Batts is
beaten, the backstory of the film’s pre-credit horror. Even more strikingly,
the instrumental portion of Derek and the Dominoes’ “Layla,” the “Piano
Exit” (1971), offers an alternative perspective on mob life, as this coda
to Eric Clapton’s account of unrequited love communicates a very differ-
ent sort of loss. Hill, in his role as narrator, turns away from the bodies
of Jimmy Conway’s collaborators, butchered after the Lufthansa heist,
dismissing them (“What do I care?”). At this point of the film, the filter
of Hill’s nostalgic perspective is removed entirely from the narrative of
GoodFellas, replaced by the POV of those hapless bystanders—children at
play, ordinary working people—who come upon the dead in parking lots,
dumpsters, and trucks. As Scorsese reflects on the gruesome but lyrical
montage of the abused, discarded, and discovered bodies “. . . the trag-
edy is in the music. The music made me feel a certain way and gave a
certain sadness to it . . . and a certain sympathy.” 52 And just as the glossy
surface of mob life is put aside to reveal its brutality, at the end of Hill’s
mob career, his own surface polish and cool authority give way to the
pale, disheveled demeanor of the habitual coke user. Hill’s drug-propelled
downward spiral is narrated by a mix of 1960s and 1970s rock by Harry
Nilsson, the Stones, The Who, and George Harrison, in a montage of his
final day of freedom. Shot through with Hill’s not entirely unwarranted
sense of paranoia, the montage uses its music to confirm a sharp sense of
difference—both cultural and temporal—between the world he inhabits in
the present and the one he idolized in his youth. Rock music marks his sep-
aration from the past. The apparent power, position, security—and even
familial affection—that Hill found in the mob all fail at this point, leaving
nothing except the threat of arrest and the likelihood of violent death.
Rock music plays a similarly ominous role in Casino, where Nicky’s
unthinking and unrelenting violence ultimately attracts the wrong type of
attention. While a hectic blend of pop and R&B serves as the sonic com-
plement to Ace’s workaholic attention to detail in the glittering world of
the casino, Nicky’s music is invariably hard rock. In this way, the musical
 Orchestrating Violence 67

system of Casino harks back to Mean Streets and GoodFellas. The

sound of guitar-driven rock by The Jeff Beck Group and by Cream narrate
Nicky’s rebellious attitude, his refusal of the authority of the Midwest-
ern mob elders, as well as his taste for energetic violence. The raucous,
aggressive guitar of Beck’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” (1968), for example,
accompanies Ace’s description of Nicky’s “system” for gambling, through
which he effectively intimidates his way to wealth. (“When he won, he
collected,” Ace says. “When he didn’t, he told them to fuck themselves.”)
In particular, the Stones’ song “Gimme Shelter” is a signature element in
Casino, as well as in GoodFellas and The Departed. In each film, it marks
watershed moments when, in the process of achieving their version of the
“American Dream,” protagonists set in motion those events that will lead
to their destruction. In GoodFellas, “Gimme Shelter” plays as Henry (who
has just reassured boss Pauli [Paul Sorvino] that he’d never get involved
in the drug trade) processes the cocaine that he’s gotten from his “Pitts-
burgh connection.” In Casino, it plays repeatedly (both live and studio
versions) to narrate Nicky’s violent outbursts and irrepressible criminality.
And it casts a pall over The Departed, which opens with a monologue by
South Boston mob boss Frankie Costello (Jack Nicholson) underscored by
“Gimme Shelter.” As Costello shares his philosophy of success in terms
that make his vulgarity and brutality clear, the song begins with a some-
what tentative, fingerpicked guitar that is gradually overlaid with drum,
guiro, echoing vocals. Its overall effect is haunting and unsettling, becom-
ing dreamlike and apocalyptic when the voices of Mick Jagger and Merry
Clayton enter the mix, singing of horrors. As in GoodFellas and Casino,
“Gimme Shelter” in The Departed is prophetic of Costello’s downfall.
Stones biographer, Stephen Davis, ignores the more common analyses of
the song that cite the influence of Vietnam. Instead, he claims it is, like a
number of their songs, about heroin. These songs describe “heroin use as
a text containing all the bittersweet sadness of the times, in which people
felt powerless and turned inward for solace and security.” 53 Appropri-
ately, when used in Scorsese’s films, “Gimme Shelter” marks moments of
separation of the individual from community, present from past, that are
intoxicating but deadly.

CONCLUSION

I wish I could create music, but I can’t. What I can do is put images and
music together.
—Martin Scorsese 54

In Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Mean Streets, Scorsese’s musi-

cal innovations demonstrate the usefulness of alternative scoring practices
68 Orchestrating Violence
to narrate people and places outside the Hollywood mainstream. At the
same time, in the way that they explore the relationship between violence
and dance as spectacle and quasi-tribal ritual, these films also demonstrate
their indebtedness to studio-era musical and gangster films, two Hollywood
genres most deeply invested in such displays. GoodFellas and Casino fur-
ther explore the possibilities of the pop score and the trope of male display
with their focus on gangster glamour constructed audiovisually through
music, cinematography, and mise en scéne—criminal fantasy and desire
expressed via fetishistic representations. Rich sight working in concert with
the rich sound of retro pop, these audiovisual representations are emblem-
atic of the desire to get rich quick, to make a public spectacle of one’s power
and success—and to ignore their price in blood, pain, and death. Underpin-
ning these aspirational fictions and representations are more commonplace
desires that make Scorsese’s gangster protagonists a criminalized depiction
of the American dream, one that returns to Scorsese’s own story of ethnic
masculinity and its relation to mainstream America. His experiments with
the pop score make the gangster genre new and provide the means
of both critical and identificatory relationships between the audience and
these
characters.
Through their use of the pop score, particularly in their use of rock music,
these films return obsessively to Scorsese’s story of ethnic identity and dif-
ference, their musical meanings both broadly cultural and part of Scorsese’s
personal lore as an auteur. Musical allusion, from Mean Streets to The
Departed, frames Scorsese’s characters in terms of broader contexts of his-
torical and social change, however unmindful or dimly aware the characters
themselves might be of such contexts. Thus, at the same time as popular music
gives us the texture of life in Little Italy in Mean Streets, it also serves as a
reminder of life outside that eight blocks of extended families and long-held
tradition. The changes brought by the Civil Rights movement, youth pro -
test, and even the beginnings of second-wave feminism cannot entirely
be ignored: they are heard in the siren songs of 1960s girl groups and the
energetic challenge of guitar-driven rock. In the process of creating his
audiovisual portrait of young masculinity in Mean Streets, Scorsese connects
his work to youth cinemas and cultures more broadly, even as he draws on
his own history. In the songs used for Mean Streets, we hear Scorsese’s memo-
ries (the passage of time and the workings of recollection literally inscribed
in the text, via pops and crackles of well-used 45s from his personal record
collection). Framed by music that evokes home and the past for Scorsese,
while also triggering a range of meanings for those in the audience “who
do not lose their histories at the theater door,” 55 the inchoate desires of the
youth of Mean Streets are given shape and historical context, becoming for
the audience both self and other—and, as a consequence, very different
from Hollywood’s ethnic clichés of the past. Mean Streets establishes Scors-
ese as what Claudia Gorbman has named a “mélomane,” a music-loving
auteur who uses music as a “key thematic element and marker of authorial
 Orchestrating Violence 69

style.”56 In his later films, of the 1990s and 2000s, pop music continues to
function both as a signifier of Scorsese’s personal stake in stories of ethnic
masculinity on the make and as a means to encourage identification
with and critical reflection on the paths taken by his criminal protagonists.
His persistent focus on remaking Hollywood genre film marks his ongo-
ing generational identification with the New Hollywood and his directorial
identity as a music-loving “movie brat”. In his ongoing experiments with
the pop score, especially pre-recorded popular songs, he has extended those
musical innovations associated specifically with youth cinema in the New
Hollywood to the mainstream of contemporary American filmmaking.

NOTES

1. Scorsese in Donato, “Docufictions,” 199.

2. Quoted in White, “Half a Note,” 36.
3. He was editorial supervisor on Woodstock (1970), Medicine Ball Caravan
(1971), and Elvis on Tour (1972).
4. Kinder, “Violence American Style,” 68.
5. Quoted in Flatley, “Martin Scorsese’s Gamble,” 55.
6. Joseph Brenner who, at the end of the 1960s, had turned from distributing
exploitation films, to American independent films with a youth focus, asked
for those changes he saw as being necessary for the youth market. The film
opened at Carnegie Hall Cinema, known for its screenings of art and foreign
films. See LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 71-105, for an exhaustive account of the
production history of Who’s That Knocking at My Door.
7. Scorsese notes that, wanting to find a distributor, he was hesitant to use any
music for which he didn’t have the rights: “[W]e had to be careful.” Morris
Levy gave them the songs used in the release print. The music industry execu-
tive who handled the distribution for a number of major labels, including his
own company, Roulette Records, Levy was known for claiming authorship to
early rock songs that others were believed to have written.
8. Scorsese, “Commentary,” Who’s That Knocking at My Door.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. As found in the song “Wah-Watusi,” which was recorded by a number of art-
ists, including the Orlons, Chubby Checker, and Annette Funicello.
12. Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop, 91.
13. Ibid. Flores comments on the “open song structure” of “El Watusi” in which
lyrics are made up as the singer goes along.
14. Sweeney, The Rough Guide to Cuban Music, 185.
15. Bliss, “Introduction,” xx.
16. Penn quoted in Comolli and Labarthe, “Bonnie and Clyde,” 16, 17.
17. Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” 13.
18. Quoted in Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 45.
19. Martin Scorsese, “Commentary,” Mean Streets.
20. Ibid.
21. Casillo, Gangster Priest, 219.
22. Scorsese, “Commentary,” Mean Streets.
23. Williams, Phil Spector, 76.
24. Scorsese in Brunette, Martin Scorsese, 19.
70 Orchestrating Violence
25. Maggie Haselswerdt writes convincingly how the “uncanny power” of “Be
My Baby” owes itself to “wholesale appropriation of female patterns of sex-
ual response” in which “Phil Spector and the Ronettes weave a gauzy curtain
around the sexual impulse, diffusing and romanticizing it . . . . highlighting the
drama of the encounter with a series of minute yet heart-stopping pauses.”
Haselswerdt, “Let’s Talk about Girls.”
26. Daugherty, “Punk Rock,” 529. In both their appearance (Spanish Harlem glam-
our comprised of enormous beehive hairdos and liquid eyeliner) and in their
vocal delivery, they offered a sharp contrast to the other “nice” girl groups,
like the Chantels, the Bobbettes, the Shirelles. The Ronettes’ predecessors—
demurely dressed and neatly coiffed African American women who learned
their craft in church—had, in their own right, altered “girl” culture in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. With songs like Carol King’s “Will You Love Me
Tomorrow?” recorded by the Shirelles in 1960, they voiced female concerns
and made it acceptable for nice girls to talk about sex “without upsetting soci-
ety’s view of them as wholesome and respectable.” Buchanan, “Girl Group
History,” 307.
27. See, for instance, Bondanella, Hollywood Italians, 82; Casillo, Gangster Priest,
180; Brunette, Martin Scorsese: Interviews, 102. As Paula Masood points
out, the marketing of the film also emphasized its documentary qualities. See
Phillips, “From Little Italy to Big-Time Movies,” and Flatley, “He has Often
Walked the ‘Mean Streets,’” The DVD also includes a short documentary
called Back on the Block, which locates the origins of Mean Streets in real
places and people. See Massood, “Ethnicity and Urban Space,” note 1, 88.
28. Massood, “Ethnicity and Urban Space,” 82.
29. Marcus, “The Girl Groups,” 190.
30. Scorsese in Brunette, Martin Scorsese: Interviews, 140.
31. Garofalo, Rockin’ Out, 107.
32. Shumway, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Sound Tracks and the Production of Nostalgia,” 39.
33. Buchanan, “Girl Group History,” 307.
34. Of girl groups, Elijah Wald observes, “To some extent the ‘girl group’ rubric is
misleading because at first no one was thinking of the Shirelles, Chantels, Mar-
velettes, and their successors as forming a separate genre, but it highlights the
inclusive feel that made their records so attractive . . . . It was as if the most popu-
lar girls in the country were suddenly your best friends, sharing all your problems
and anxieties . . . . ” Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, 223.
35. Kracauer, The Theory of Film, 137.
36. Billboard, “Spotlight Singles of the Week,” 29.
37. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 69.
38. “For me, there’s no such thing as ‘senseless’ violence. In the fight in the pool
room, I held it long because of the sense of helplessness, the silliness of the whole
thing.” Scorsese quoted in Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 47.
39. Written in 1951, the song in Neapolitan dialect was a trademark of Hoboken-
born pop singer Jimmy Roselli.
40. In the Argentine tango, dancers’ chests are very close, heads close or touching,
with steps improvised and determined by the lead.
41. Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” 15.
42. Mulvey, “Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism,” 3.
43. Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings, 43.
44. For a discussion of tempo and music in GoodFellas, see Hubbert “‘Without
Music, I Would Be Lost,’” 41-57.
45. Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema, 85.
46. Nochimson, Dying to Belong, 65.
47. Hubbert, “‘Without Music I Would Be Lost,’” 57
 Orchestrating Violence 71

48. Warshow, “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” 457.

49. “It was 1965. I was driving on the Long Island Expressway in a Volkswagen,
and suddenly out of this mono speaker came the opening guitar licks of Keith
Richards and ‘Satisfaction.’ And the impression of Mick Jagger’s voice, then
the lyrics and the driving, relentless nature of the song. It’s like a motor. I had
to go back and find their other music.” Scorsese, quoted in Travers, “Martin
Scorsese on Rolling Stones Doc.”
50. Scorsese, “Commentary,” Mean Streets.
51. For more on the song and the Stones more generally, see Howell, “Performing
Countercultural Masculinity.”
52. Scorsese quoted in DeCurtis, “What the Streets Mean,” 217.
53. Davis, Old Gods, Almost Dead, 304.
54. Scorsese, quoted in Travers, “Martin Scorsese on Rolling Stones Doc.”
55. Kassabian, Hearing Film, 89.
56. Gorbman, “Auteur Music,” 149.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Billboard. “Spotlight Singles of the Week.” April 21, 1962, 29.

Bliss, Michael. “Introduction.” In Doing It Right: The Best Criticism on Sam Peck-
inpah’s The Wild Bunch. Edited by Michael Bliss, xv-xxiii. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1994.
Bondanella, Peter E. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and
Sopranos. New York: Continuum, 2006.
Brunette, Peter, ed. Martin Scorsese: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 1999.
Bruzzi, Stella. Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Buchanan, Rebekah. “Girl Group History.” In Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia,
Vol. 1. Edited by Claudia A. Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, 307-310. West-
port, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.
Casillo, Robert. Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Chambers, Iain. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Andre S. Labarthe. “Bonnie and Clyde: An Interview with
Arthur Penn.” In Focus on Bonnie and Clyde. Edited by John G. Cawelti, 15-19.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973.
Daugherty, Rebecca. “Punk Rock.” In Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia.
Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, 525-532. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO,
2001.
Davis, Stephen. Old Gods, Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones.
London: Aurum, 2002.
DeCurtis, Anthony. “What the Streets Mean: An Interview with Martin Scorsese.”
In Plays, Movies, and Critics. Edited by Jody McAuliffe, 197-228. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993.
Donato, Raffaele. “Docufictions: An Interview with Martin Scorsese on Documen-
tary Film.” Film History 19.2 (2007): 199-207.
Flatley, Guy. “He Has Often Walked the ‘Mean Streets.’” New York Times, Decem-
ber 16, 1973, sec. 2: 17, 28.
———. “Martin Scorsese’s Gamble.” In Martin Scorsese: Interviews. Edited by Peter
Brunette, 48-58. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 [1976].
72 Orchestrating Violence
Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Garofalo, Reebee. Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A., 3rd ed. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004.
Gorbman, Claudia. “Auteur Music.” In Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing
Music in Cinema. Edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard D.
Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Haselswerdt, Maggie. “Let’s Talk About Girls. . . . ” Rock & Rap Confidential.
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Masquerade in Gimme Shelter.” Genders 55 (2012). www.genders.org/g55/g55_
howell.html (accessed September 24, 2014).
Hubbert, Julia. “‘Without Music, I Would Be Lost’: Scorsese, Goodfellas, and a New
Soundtrack Practice.” In Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Film-
makers After MTV. Edited by Arved Ashby, 31-62. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013.
Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary
Hollywood Film Music. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Kinder, Marsha. “Violence American Style: The Narrative Orchestration of Vio-
lent Attractions.” In Violence and American Cinema. Edited by J. David Slocum,
68-100. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Kracauer, Siegfried. The Theory of Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997 [1960].
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lishing, 2008.
Marcus, Greil. “The Girl Groups.” In The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock
and Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music.
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edited by Jim Miller, 189-191. New York: Random House and Rolling Stone
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Marsh, Dave. The Beatles’ Second Album. New York: Rodale Press, 2007.
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Urban Space in the Films of Martin Scorsese.” In City That Never Sleeps: New
York and the Filmic Imagination. Edited by Murray Pomerance, 77-90. Piscat-
away, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
Mulvey, Laura. “Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contem-
porary Culture.” October 65 (Summer 1993): 3-20.
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Kong. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Phillips, McCandish. “From Little Italy to Big-Time Movies.” New York Times,
October 18, 1973, 64
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(1973). London: Universal Pictures UK, 2005.
———. “Commentary.” Who’s That Knocking at My Door, DVD. Directed by Mar-
tin Scorsese (1969). Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2004.
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Sweeney, Philip. The Rough Guide to Cuban Music. London: Penguin, 2001.
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Faber, 2003.
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the Music.” Rolling Stone. April 17, 2008. www.rollingstone.com/music/news/
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(accessed September 24, 2014).
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Wald, Elijah. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of
American Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 11-16. Newark, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2007. —
——. “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introduc-
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453-466. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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[1972].
3 Two Worlds
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
and the Dual Diegesis

Alongside auteurist experiments by Martin Scorsese, Blaxploitation cinema

of the 1970s had a significant role to play in shaping the audiovisual charac-
ter of urban masculinity on screen. Though only a brief cycle of low-budget
films in the first half of the decade, it helped to shape screen entertainments
to come, making funk-inflected soundtracks the sound of the city and
empowered black masculinity. And, just as Scorsese’s use of rock in Mean
Streets links the insular world of the film to contexts of youth culture, the
musically constructed masculinities of black action films were likewise a
sign of broader patterns of social change. After civil disobedience under the
leadership of Martin Luther King gave way to the more aggressive stance
of the Black Power movement, the clean-cut, overachieving integrationist
negroes of 1960s Hollywood film yielded screen space to the violent heroes
and antiheroes of Blaxploitation, whose adventures, in the most popular and
enduring of these films, were narrated by the music of prominent black com-
posers and performers of the 1970s, such as Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield,
James Brown, Willie Hutch, and others. Albums and singles extended the
popularity of the Blaxploitation film, 1 whose techniques for scoring action
sequences would be influential on both television and film; funk-inflected
themes became di rigueur for programs (like Starsky and Hutch [1975-79] or
Baretta [1975-78]) that wanted to give their white heroes urban street cred.
Inspiration for the spectacular, music-driven representations of the 1970s
cycle of crime and action films was taken from a number of sources, 2 but
an important catalyst for this cycle of films was the unprecedented financial
success—and unprecedented screen representation of black masculinity—in
Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
Praise for Van Peebles’ business acumen has been unstinting, especially
for the audacious marketing innovations that helped Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song make box office history. But criticism of Van Peebles’ film
from the 1970s to the present has struggled with its exploitation cinema
aesthetics: its focus on sex, violence, crime, and its spectacular represen -
tation of black masculinity. 3 Particularly challenging for contemporary
criticism—and historical accounts of Van Peebles’ contribution to black
American cinema—is its image of black screen heroism: the silent, sexual-
ized, violent brothel-worker-on-the-run, Sweetback.
 Two Worlds 75

Within Van Peebles’ own filmmaking oeuvre, Sweet Sweetback’s Baad-

asssss Song appears as the third of a trilogy of films made in different
industrial contexts and aesthetic modes that all focus on the same topic:
the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the black male in white-dominated society. 4
His award-winning, French-produced La Permission (Story of a Three Day
Pass) (1968) tells the story in terms set by international art cinema romance;
Watermelon Man (1970), the one film he completed for Columbia Pictures
after his return to the U.S. as French delegate to the San Francisco film fes-
tival where he caught the attention of studio executives, is a Hollywood
comedy; and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is part underground avant-
garde film and part exploitation quickie. Deliberately topical and
titillating in its subject matter and made using the production expertise
and facilities of pornography’s parallel movie industry in California, Sweet
Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song references in its freewheeling narrative a number
of exploitation genres—biker, vice, sexploitation.5 In Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto, Van Peebles explains his
choice of subject matter and approach, saying, “I had no illusion about the
attention level of people brain-washed to triviality. . . . to attract the mass we
have to produce work that not only instructs but entertains.” 6
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is not just a sex pic laced with vio-
lence; it is also heavily influenced by those underground cinemas that first
inspired Van Peebles to begin filmmaking in the early 1960s. Layered over
its simple narrative—and, for the most part, much more spectacular than
its representations of sex and violence—is an avant-garde visual aesthetic
based on jazz improvisation. 7 And indispensable to its characterization of
exploitation/folk hero Sweetback is Van Peebles’ own musical innovation,
semispoken-word declamatory songs of the sort he recorded in three albums
released by A&M when he returned to the U.S. from France in the late
1960s: Brer Soul (1968), Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1969),
and As Serious as a Heart Attack (1971).8 The basis for his Broadway pro-
ductions, as well as for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the songs—or
performances—of these three albums are first-person narrations, orations
that put the listener on site in black urban life, thus foreshadowing rap
and hip-hop in topic and approach. 9 The songs of Ain’t Supposed to Die a
Natural Death bring to life black urban types—pimps, prostitutes, bad cops,
winos, and a street lady who curses the white world. It’s on this album that
the character who will become Sweetback has its first incarnation, as a man
running for his life in “Come On Feet,” and, it’s on this album that Van
Peebles first creates lyrically and musically the black, ghetto milieu of Sweet
Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
In histories of cinema, Blaxploitation and especially Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song are recognized as not unproblematic sites of origin for con-
temporary African American film.10 Despite the genesis of Sweetback as a
character and the film’s title, what tends to be left out of discussions of Van
Peebles’ film—or pushed to the side—is the role of music in its spectacle.
Nevertheless, the title of the film is more than metaphoric: Music is at the
76 Two Worlds
core of the aesthetic, social, and political aims of the film: to make a film
that speaks to black audiences, to say things about the black experience not
said before. Of his work in film and theater, Van Peebles asserts:

I’m trying to provide them with a sense of self. Look, Jesus Christ was
white. Santa Claus was white. Ralph Bunche was white. You never saw
anybody that you could say, that’s me. You don’t realize what that can
spark in kids who’ve never been able to see themselves. Or never heard
their language being talked. This legitimizes them in their own minds.
They become somebody. 11

Van Peebles’ goal was to address his film to and to offer a screen represen-
tation of the black, urban underclass. Music, crucial for his address to his
chosen audience, is likewise significant to the transformation of accused
and on-the-run Sweetback into a hero. And it was an important factor in
the film’s unprecedented financial success. Van Peebles marketed a variety
of products to his audience to raise awareness of and engagement with his
film: T-shirts with the slogan “Rated X by an all-white jury”; a paperback of
his manifesto that included a script of the film; even Sweetback-themed wine:
Mama’s Tub Red and Mama’s Tub White. 12 But perhaps the most important
product was the soundtrack. The musical strategy for Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song was worked out between Van Peebles and Al Bell of Stax,
who agreed to release the soundtrack when A&M—to whom Van Peebles
was still under contract—declined to be involved with what promised to
be a controversial film. A month after the film was first released in March
1971, the album was released and sold in the cinema foyers. 13 Perhaps
even more important than the album sales to cinemagoers was the access
that the music gave Van Peebles to the community-oriented deejays of black
radio. Regarding his preferred marketing medium, Van Peebles observes,
“My public doesn’t read the New York Times. They listen to WWRL.”14
Even though the single “Sweetback’s Theme,” released in July 1971, never
made it to the charts, black disc jockeys who hosted their own soul and jazz
shows played it and talked about Van Peebles’ film to their listeners. As Van
Peebles puts it, “I went to the tom tom and the tom tom was black radio.” 15
The role of music in the marketing of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
resonates with its role in the film itself. Black radio was at the center of black
urban life throughout the 1950s and 1960s and retained that role at the
time of the release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Radio was where
black music and oral cultures—rhythm and blues, soul, jazz, and the pat-
ter of fast-talking deejays—were shared with the black community. 16 In the
film, it is music that draws the viewer more deeply into Sweetback’s world,
the world beyond bordellos and crooked cops—even beyond ghetto blacks
immobilized by poverty. In the music of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
is a community of black voices that supports and the funk-jazz fusion that
compels Sweetback as he runs. In the opposition between the film’s visual
 Two Worlds 77

realm, dominated by the white gaze, and its aural realm, identified with the
black voice and music, the film’s multiple diegeses render aesthetically—and
offer their own response to—what Michelle Wallace has termed “the problem
of visuality” in African American culture:
I think we need to begin to understand how regimes of visuality enforce
racism, how they literally hold it in place . . . The relationship of the
problem of visuality (who produces and reproduces vision) to popular
culture and material culture and, ultimately, history, is vital. We are in
danger of getting wasted by ghosts . . . by visual traces that haunt us
because we refuse to study them, to look them in the eye. 17

In his moviemaking, Van Peebles explores—endeavors to “look in the

eye”—the visual regime of contemporary racism. Even though Van Peebles’
most controversial screen creation, Sweetback, has attracted a good deal of
criticism for his spectacular representation of black masculinity, he is also
a figure that embodies a critique of black representations in popular cul-
ture, especially film cultures. Mobilizing images from black aural cultures,
including folk tales, blues lyrics, and Van Peebles’ own musical creations,
Sweetback is a refusal of the self-sacrificing negroes of 1950s Hollywood
film, as well as a deliberate departure from the desexualized “ebony saint”
of 1960s box office hits like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

SWEET SWEETBACK

Since what I want is the Man’s foot out of our collective asses, why not
make the film about a brother getting the Man’s foot out of his ass. That
was going to be the thing.18
—Melvin Van Peebles

Sweetback is a sex worker doing shows for a brothel when he’s chosen by
a couple of cops to play the role of suspect in the murder of a black man,
a bit of politically motivated “eyewash” for police superiors going through
the motions, investigating a black death. His boss tells him to dress and go
with the white police officers, and he does as he’s told, taking his place in
the back of their car. His life changes when the police stop to arrest a young
man—Moo-Moo—involved in the Black Power movement. They handcuff
Moo-Moo to a silent, obedient-but-wary Sweetback, only separating the
two—with apologies to Sweetback for the inconvenience—in order to more
easily beat Moo-Moo into submission. Sweetback gives up his passive stance
to attack the police with his cuffed hands and free the young man. Then
Sweetback begins to run and runs through to the end of the film.
Van Peebles’ commentary on the film stresses Sweetback’s role as a sort of
black, urban everyman: hip, cool, and angry; in this way, he is deliberately
78 Two Worlds
different from the clean-cut, highly educated negroes that Hollywood fea-
tured in the integrationist films that helped to make Sidney Poitier a star.
But the film also constructs Sweetback as something of a mythic figure even
before his epic chase commences. Opening credits roll over the story of his
childhood: a street child adopted by a brothel, he loses his virginity at a
young age. As the credits roll, we see him seduced and bedded by one of the
prostitutes, the scene accompanied by raucous and celebratory renditions
of “Wade in the Water” and “This Little Light of Mine.” The scene and
the gospel music coincide with a screen credit for “The Black Community.”
We later realize these songs are part of Sweetback’s internal soundtrack.
His sexual initiation at a young age and the consequent acquisition of his
name (“Boy, you gotta sweet, sweet back”) announce him to be something
of a prodigy, a prodigy who comes of age doing what he does best (a boy
lays down, but the adult Sweetback—played by Van Peebles—gets up from
the bed). Sweetback’s reputation as urban folk hero is confirmed by the
applause that greets his/the prostitute’s climax.
This sound bridge links his sexual initiation to the next scene, the brothel’s
live sex show (what Van Peebles, in his script, calls a “freak show”) that
offers yet another version of the origins of Sweetback. This time, his gift is
depicted as being nothing less than magical, a wish granted by the “Good
Dyke Fairy Godmother” to a male impersonator who wants to become a real
man. Thanks to the Godmother’s (cinematic) magic, a bra is removed to show
a muscular chest and a dildo removed to show a penis: the adult Sweetback is
born (again) into a life of sexual service and display, the image of virile black
masculinity, compared to which everything else is a poor imitation. But in
spite of the way this scene serves to emphasize Sweetback’s sexuality—and
thus his difference from other black screen heroes—he’s not just another black
stud. Sweetback—like Van Peebles himself, who is identified as Brer Soul in
the credits—appears also as something of a trickster figure, a rule breaker.
This is depicted first in his form and gender variability and later in his roles
as the criminal and fugitive who escapes the police by running through the all
too familiar “briar patch” of Los Angeles’ ghettos and industrial wastelands.
Quasi mythic or folkloric figure that he is, Sweetback is also represented
as the object of desiring looks—an occupational hazard, to be sure, but
not just that. We come to understand that these looks have made him what
he is. We see a series of looks shape Sweetback and his destiny: from the
looks of the prostitutes who take him in as a small, hungry boy and circle
to watch him wolf down food, to the mischievous look of the one prostitute
who takes the boy—now clean and well fed, distributing towels—to her
bed and offers a sexual initiation that determines his future livelihood; then
there are the customers—male and female, black and white—who cluster
around the star of the sex show; and there are also the women he encounters
in his travels, who sometimes use him for sex but sometimes help him too.
Then there is the look of police who want a scapegoat for a murder and
who choose the black stud they see performing in the brothel, as though
 Two Worlds 79

one stereotypical role serves as an audition for another. Later on, when
the police want him for injuring two policemen—and later for murdering
two others—their looks shape a good deal of the last part of the film, both
the travelling POV of cars searching the cityscape and the sinister aerial
view of helicopters, as well as sometimes comic moments where “ghetto
folks” answer their questions regarding Sweetback’s whereabouts. 19 From
the progress of the police search, we understand that they don’t just want
to capture the perpetrator of a specific crime; they’ll punish any black man
who crosses their path. In Watermelon Man, a white man whose skin turns
miraculously black becomes a black man in more than just skin color as a
result of the looks—suspicious, desiring, hateful, fearful—directed toward
him by his white family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. 20 This too, we
understand, is Sweetback’s experience.
Sweetback’s objectified status anticipates and inspires critical response
to Van Peebles’ film, whose representations of black masculinity are still a
matter for debate. Its strongest critics found revived in Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song—and the Blaxploitation films that followed in its wake—a
problematic representation of black masculinity from the past, the figure
Donald Bogle calls the “brutal black buck,” who made his screen debut in
D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.21 In Griffith’s 1915 account of the birth of
the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South, the villain Gus (played,
appropriately enough, by a white actor in blackface) personified white fears of
blackness, especially black masculinity, as he sexually threatens and chases
after an innocent white girl, “Little Sister,” who flings herself off a cliff to
escape his advances. While the “Gus chase” sequence, innovative in its
construction of points of view through framing and editing, emphasizes the
danger when a black man looks at a white woman with desire, Gus too is
the object of a voyeuristic gaze. In Manthia Diawara’s analysis of this
sequence, he shows how a white point of view is constructed for the spectator,
who is thus compelled to view Gus as “the representation of danger and
chaos.”22
This early, spectacular representation of black masculinity—or more
precisely, of white fears of black masculinity embodied in the character of
Gus—illustrates Michelle Wallace’s observation regarding the problem of
visuality and racism, and places the black body at the center of this visualist
regime. As bell hooks has observed:
The black body has always received attention within the framework of
white supremacy, as racist/sexist iconography has been deployed to
perpetrate notions of innate biological inferiority. Against this cultural
backdrop, every movement for black liberation in this society, whether
reformist or radical has had to formulate a counter-hegemonic discourse of
the body to effectively resist white supremacy.23

What some critics saw in Sweetback was, in these terms, a retrograde move.
Ebony critic Lerone Bennett, for example, called Sweetback a “preposterous
80 Two Worlds
reversal” to an earlier, damaging pre-Civil Rights era, white-produced
image of blackness24—what Jesse Algernon Rhines has termed simply “the
bad nigger.”25 But, by transforming the “bad nigger” into the “baadasssss
nigger,” Sweetback, Van Peebles endeavored to offer a reverse angle on the
brutal black buck, while at the same time offering a cinematic refusal of
those integrationist images of blackness that dominated Hollywood screens
in the 1950s and 1960s.
Sexualized though he is, Sweetback runs not because of his own un-
bridled sexual desire, as in the case of the grotesque caricature that is D.W.
Griffith’s Gus, but rather because he wants to elude the white gaze and
escape from white desire for a black scapegoat. Sweetback was a response
to the integrationist negroes played with such talent and charisma by Sidney
Poitier, whose strength and intelligence were undeniable, yet always used to
support white power structures, institutions, and individuals. Poitier, unlike
sidelined black actors of the past, took active roles on screen in his films of
the 1960s; he was “a figure in a landscape,” to quote Mulvey’s summary of
masculinity’s place in classic Hollywood narrative. 26 But the landscape of
his films was always white, his narrative goals were framed by white power
structures, and his actions were driven by white desires. On more than one
occasion he portrayed a black man willing to die for a white friend. 27 By
contrast, Sweetback’s first action based on his own desire is to sacrifice his
safety for a black revolutionary, a gesture of sacrifice he repeats later in the
film.
The double bind that defines the visualist regime as it is experienced by
Sweetback-the-performer and Sweetback-the-criminal—to embody black
desire is to embody black threat—is echoed in turn by Van Peebles’ public
double role of outlaw film director and serial womanizer, a role he con-
tinued to play both on and off camera more than 30 years later. 28 This
self-representation has caused some of Van Peebles’ critics to dismiss Sweet-
back (with some justification) as no more than a self-aggrandizing portrait
of its director.29 Yet the film as I’ve outlined it here does not unproblem-
atically celebrate the objectification or the sexualization of the black male.
Instead, at the same time that it makes Sweetback’s sexual prowess a part of
his characterization as urban folk hero, and thus aligns him with countless
heroes of blues lyrics as well as with white-generated screen stereotypes, it
also uses this characterization to highlight the problems visited upon Sweet-
back by his role as object. He is initially characterized as the object of a
desiring black, female look; this look and this desire prefigure and ultimately
are replaced in the film by an anxious, desiring, and dangerous officially
sanctioned white gaze. Repeating the gendered division that characterizes
both many blues lyrics as well as the classic Hollywood Western, Sweetback
runs from this static, constrained, feminine-and-white-identified world into
the frontier. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song imagines Sweetback’s flight,
his frontier, as a liminal zone at the edge of white law, where black desire—
in this case, black desire for liberation identified in specifically masculinist
 Two Worlds 81

terms30 —can be expressed. Dramatizing the way Sweetback’s place in a

white-dominated visualist regime underpins his social positioning as a figure
both to be desired and feared, the film, while making it clear why Sweetback
runs, also articulates the challenges faced by Van Peebles in putting a new,
engaging, politicized image of black masculinity on screen.
Ultimately, in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Van Peebles created a
film that endeavors to have its cake and eat it: It entertains with representa-
tions of sex and violence, while offering a critique of the various desires,
looks, and gazes that make Sweetback the violent and sexualized figure he
is—and that make him run. It is a sleight of hand appropriate to a filmmaker
who delights in stories of how he strategically plays the racist preconcep-
tions of others to gain the upper hand in business 31—and a filmmaker whose
screen credit is borrowed from the best-known trickster of black folklore. 32
It is a sleight of hand that resulted in a film produced as porn (Van Peebles’
strategy for securing a racially mixed, non-union crew); marketed as action
(Baadasssss!); and addressed to the audience as a social critique (“dedicated to
all of those who have had enough of the Man”). The key element of the
film’s power—to entertain, to address itself to black audiences, and to cri-
tique white-dominated regimes of visuality—is its music.

SWEETBACK’S MUSIC

If it makes you shake your rump, it’s The Funk.

—George Clinton33

Funk is a way out, and a way in. Funk is all over the place.
—Rickey Vincent34

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is a film that promises in various ways

the spectacle of black male sexuality. And, as a consequence, it has been
dismissed as no more than pornography by some critics. 35 But what is rarely
acknowledged by critics is the nontitillating, almost comic way in which it
delivers its sexual content, thanks in part to the deadpan acting style of its
lead (who approaches sex in such a workmanlike fashion that it’s clear he
regards copulation as his day job, so to speak) and in part to the often
unflattering portraits of those, black and white, who desire him. But as
absurdly unsexy as its sex acts tend to be, the film does depict Sweetback as
a figure whose physical energy is identified both with masculine virility and
with power, power to resist “the Man,” power to run. In these terms, the
real erotics of the film are to be found not in the somewhat perfunctory sex
scenes but rather in the interplay of energetic cinematography, editing,
music—all of which highlight the mayhem Sweetback creates and the sense
of liberation he experiences as he eludes his pursuers. In these terms, one can
understand why Huey Newton declared the film to be “truly revolutionary”
82 Two Worlds
and made it required viewing for the Black Panthers.36 The film encourages an
affective engagement with Sweetback’s footrace for freedom, as the film’s
soundtrack transforms his escape into an audiovisual representation of
physical and emotional liberation.
Although Van Peebles’ own dissonant vocal compositions are the basis
for film’s music, for the instrumentals he was lucky enough to secure the
services of a young and quite literally hungry 10-person band called Earth,
Wind & Fire, founded in 1969 by former Chess Records session drummer,
Maurice White. The band was later dismantled and reassembled with new
members by White in 1972—after their work on Van Peebles’ film and their
first album, but even this first incarnation of Earth, Wind & Fire had char-
acteristics of what would become one of the most accomplished and popular
groups of the 1970s. Musically eclectic, its sound embraced jazz, blues, soul,
gospel, and traditional African music, but the group was, at its foundation, a
funk band. Funk is the sound that keeps Sweetback moving. And funk was
the sound that came to dominate Blaxploitation soundtracks: It enlivened
this low-budget action cinema’s representation of urban blackness and gave
it emotional—and physical—power, beyond its simple stories and generic
characterizations.
James Brown and his band the JBs are usually cited as funk’s immediate
point of origin. But the musical form has a history that extends back to New
Orleans and to the so-called second line of musical parades, jazz funerals,
where members of the community would follow behind the official proces-
sion, dancing and adding their own sounds of offbeat improvisation. The
term “funk” was first used in reference to hard-bop jazz of the 1950s, which
consciously moved to a sound its creators identified as more authentically
black and away from those “cool” jazz idioms that had become identified
with white performers. According to Frank Kofsky, the term “funk” was
used to signal the “uniquely black” qualities of this hard-bop idiom:

To describe a musician as funky—ie, unwashed and repellent—meant

that he was worse (that is, better) . . . than just bad—he was . . . funky.
Hence to call a composition, a passage or a player funky was not only to
offer praise in general, but a means of lauding the object of praise for its
specifically black qualities.37

Hard bop compositions drew attention to their specifically black qualities

with names like “Barrel of Funk”38 and “Opus de Funk.” 39 In the music
criticism of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), the hard bop aesthetic was signifi-
cant politically as an early example of pride in black folk roots, a shift in
self-perception that he considers “perhaps the profoundest change within the
Negro consciousness since the early part of the century.” 40 Emerging paral-
lel with the Civil Rights movement, some of these hard-bop compositions
made deliberate references to political protest, as in the case of Archie Shepp’s
“Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm” and Sony Rollins’ “Freedom Suite.”
 Two Worlds 83

By the end of the 1960s, negro consciousness of cultural roots had grown
into Black Nationalism and the Black Power movement, and funk had become
the sound of black pride—a role effectively summarized by James Brown’s
1968 funk anthem, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” 41 In the years
before the “crossover mentality” of the late 1970s, 42 the funk of James Brown
and others was played by and promoted primarily through radio stations that
provided the soundtracks of urban blacks’ everyday lives. 43 Genre of choice for
both politicized songwriting as well as the dance music of the period, the “new
black funk” or “heavy, heavy funk” remained closely identified with various
representations of black culture and community—all of which inflected its
work in black action cinema. Ultimately a multimedia phenomenon, funk
became in the early 1970s a multivalent signifier for urban blackness.
While funk brought with it from hard bop roots connotations of authentic
black culture, the funk sound itself made it a powerful vehicle for political
protest as well as for cinematic representations of black power and mobil-
ity. Jazz/funk trombonist Fred Wesley, who played with James Brown in the
1960s and became leader and musical director of the JBs in the 1970s, has
this to say about the funk sound:

If you have a syncopated bass line, a strong, strong, heavy back beat
from the drummer, a counter-line from the guitar, or the keyboard, and
someone soul-singing on top of that, in a gospel style, then you have
funk . . . if you put all of these ingredients together and vary it in differ-
ent ways, you can write it down, you can construct The Funk. 44
As Wesley’s description makes clear, funk is an eclectic style. It can embrace
gospel and its secular correlative, soul. And it brings with it a particular
social or interpersonal component because it’s always the result of coopera-
tive effort.
In funk, every instrument plays rhythm—a “brief, repeated pattern”—
weaving these rhythms together in a “timbric and tonal conversation” in
which melody is downplayed and no single instrument dominates: 45

Rhythm instruments often create melodic lines, and melodic instruments

often pulse with percussive strength. The bass line, the guitar line, the
horn lines in the funk often deliver such complete melodic phrases that
each could be the primary melody of a simpler soul or R&B tune . . . . In
a funk jam session the bass line would lump along, a guitar would fall
in, the drummer would kick a funky march, a horn player would devise
an adventurous riff along the funky foundation, and the process would
build and build. The chops that resulted took an accumulation of ideas,
effects, and talents, as each element complemented the other . . . . Funk
music was and is always played together, and for the best results, funk
should be played continuously, so that the musical energy can generate
among players and listeners. 46
84 Two Worlds
A focus on rhythm rather than on melody in the music, along with flexibility,
improvisation, and interaction, as well as sheer strength, energy, and
persistence on the part of performers, are key elements of funk music that
viscerally engage listeners and give it nonstop dance appeal.
These features of funk performance highlighted by Wesley and analyzed
in Rickey Vincent’s magisterial history of funk provide the aesthetic
underpinning for funk’s affective work in black action cinema. Also important
for its use in cinema is the way that this polyrhythmic, nonlinear music
produces what Vincent describes as “broad landscapes of rhythm”47 and
what Matthew Brown calls an “architectural” design, with both critics
observing funk’s ability to evoke a “three-dimensional space” through its
layering of rhythmic phrases.48 These spatial/temporal aesthetic features
differentiated the music of 1970s black action cinema both from classical
Hollywood scores—with their linear focus on melody and narrative-driven
leitmotif—and likewise marked their difference from the rock- and folk-
oriented pop songs that filled youth cinema’s compilation scores of the late
1960s and early 1970s. Funk’s unique musical character underpinned those
audiovisual representations of mobility, freedom, and escape in Sweet
Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song that later became the set pieces of
Blaxploitation: the high-angle shot that claims urban space for the hero, the
chase scene, the violent confrontation. Funk made these audiovisual
moments expressive of the power of black (usually male) protagonists to
move and to act decisively in their urban environments49—and shaped
otherwise oppressive milieux into spaces resonant with black potentiality.
The first time we hear music identified specifically with Sweetback is when
he rides in the back of the police car, on command of the brothel owner.
We see the neon signs and lighted shops against the night sky; white pedes-
trians turn to watch the car pass—another audience for Sweetback, who
this time performs the role of young-black-man-in-trouble-with-the-police.
A lone saxophone plays the lament “Won’t Bleed Me” as the cops get the call to
pick up Moo Moo; it’s reprised when they take the young man, now cuffed
to Sweetback, out of the car to beat him. After Sweetback frees the young
revolutionary and starts to run, Earth, Wind & Fire instrumentals start in
earnest with the driving polyrhythmic sound of “Sweetback’s Theme.” This
improvisational jazz-funk blend is the sound of his footrace, which is shown
to us in traveling shots of the city, in near abstract superimpositions, and in
giddy, fast-paced montage sequences that only just keep Sweetback’s crushed
velvet-clad figure in view as Los Angeles moves behind him and under his
feet. As well as supporting our sense of Sweetback’s energy and mobility, the
“geno-song” of Earth, Wind & Fire’s music also supports a sense of his per-
sistence,50 as the music itself persists, endlessly flexible in its reinvention of
itself. Although Earth, Wind & Fire’s music incorporates elements of melody,
it does not “progress” in the sense a melodic line would, but it continues:
There is no end in sight for its headlong instrumentation; repetition is fol-
lowed by shifts in key and tempo, followed by reiteration. 51
 Two Worlds 85

As persistent as Sweetback himself, Earth, Wind & Fire’s musical improvi-

sations effectively forestall any possibility of his stopping or failing or being
captured, even when Sweetback is sent literally in circles by the mazelike
warren of Los Angeles’ inner city streets or dwarfed by the enormity of its
industrial wastelands. The music’s polyrhythmic texture rhymes the frenetic
montage of the visuals, visuals that put Sweetback seemingly everywhere at
once, always on the move, disappearing in the city here, emerging from a
subway there, clinging to the roof of a truck as it barrels down the high-
way. Both Sweetback and his music can fit into and negotiate any narrative
space. Thus the musical and editorial treatment of the mise en scène together
give audiovisual expression to “Brer Soul’s” ability to negotiate Watts’s urban
tangle, its burned-out buildings and streets, and to be somehow in control of
this environment, even as he keeps running. Ultimately, this music of motion
disregards the possibility of Sweetback’s capture or failure, making him the
embodiment of—if not the prototype for—liberation.
By contrast, scenes at the police station, with cops planning their moves
against Sweetback, are without music, as are many of scenes of the black,
urban poor he encounters on his run: a young woman waiting for her man
to return from jail; worn-out women mourning a dead young man (“died
of an overdose, an overdose of black misery”) in a ghetto funeral presided
over by a charlatan priest; an old woman questioned about the boy who
became Sweetback but who has fostered so many children she can’t remember
them all, much less one called Leroy (the sameness of her life emphasized by
overlapping editing, so she appears caught in a loop of repeated action); an
angry junkie nightclub singer who rails against the cops, saying “I’m clean,
I’m clean.” In this way, the Earth, Wind & Fire score puts Sweetback in con-
trast to much of the black population that he encounters and those whom the
police question, emphasizing his mobility, as opposed to their lives confined
to grim, decayed urban dwellings. Through the strategic use of the score to
highlight Sweetback’s flight—and in one noteworthy montage sequence, the
support he gets from ghetto men who profess ignorance of his whereabouts
to white cops—the misery of black ghetto life is represented in contrast as
overwhelmingly static. And overwhelmingly female. Like the youth films of
the late 1960s and the majority of Blaxploitation films that follow in its wake,
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is strikingly, unregenerately masculinist in
the fantasy of liberation it offers, in a way that mirrored aspects of the bur-
geoning Black Power movement.52

BLACK COMMUNITY, BLACK AUDIENCE, AND

SWEETBACK’S DUAL DIEGESIS

For the black man, Sweetback is a new kind of hero, for the white man, my
picture is a new kind of foreign film.
—Melvin Van Peebles53
86 Two Worlds
In debates over Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a common criticism
lodged against the film and its lead character—whom Van Peebles himself
identified as a sort of “brown Clint Eastwood”—is its individualism, at odds
with the film’s political claims. As Brandon Wander observed in 1975,

Sweetback is not so much a spokesman for the black community as he is

an isolated, monadic entity. Speaking only 40 words in the film, this
“brown Clint Eastwood” is a man of action but of limited consciousness.
His run-when-he-must, screw-when-he-can approach defeats
communal resistance, organization, and identity. 54

If one focuses solely on the narrative of Sweetback and ignores the method
and structure of narration, Wander’s critique is pretty much on target. Huey
Newton’s enthusiastic endorsement notwithstanding, the film is no blueprint
for collective political action in its black-man-on-the-run-from-white-cops
scenario. But there’s more to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song than just
plot or dialogue.
In the presentation of his escape, as well as in its construction of Sweet-
back himself as a character, the film employs the sort of multiple diegetic
structure that Peter Wollen identifies with countercinema. 55 The contrast
between Sweetback’s mobility and the static nature of ghetto misery runs
along the faultline between the film’s two diegetic realms. We come to
understand these as Sweetback’s inner and outer realities, although in terms
of its political aims, they might be better described as the black-centered and
white-centered worlds of the film. In classical Hollywood cinema, we expect
characters’ inner worlds to be the extension of their outer realities and vice
versa because its narratives typically create a single diegetic realm centered
around the desires and motivations of the protagonist. If, as in the case of
the studio era Hollywood musical, multiple narrative realms coexist, they do
so, as Jane Feuer points out, so that those “heterogeneous levels . . . may be
homogenized in the end.” 56 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song resembles
the Hollywood musical insofar as one of its worlds centers on music, while
the other does not. But, unlike the Hollywood musical, its musical realm is
not so much associated with fantasy (for all that, in his script, Van Peebles
labels song lyrics as belonging to “Sweetback’s Head”), as with another
reality created by a different method of storytelling, an alternative to the
white-dominated, vision-centered world of the film. Unlike the Hollywood
musical, the juxtaposition between the film’s two worlds is not resolved,
although the goals of one outdistance the other by the end of the film.
In one world of the film, the white-dominated visualist or ocularcentric
regime, Sweetback is an object of pursuit, silent, dogged, dangerous, and, to
a great extent, alone. He is even isolated from the black community whose
members are preoccupied with their own misery, their own exile, proscribed
by poverty and white authority. This world—of white cops and black
criminals—is characterized largely by silence, broken only by the film’s rather
 Two Worlds 87
stilted dialogue. This world is represented by fairly conventional staging,
camerawork, and editing, all of which signal, within the limits of low-
budget filmmaking, its alliance with the dominant forms of screen realism
and storytelling. By contrast, in the other, black-dominated realm of the
film, Sweetback is a subject with a history, a community, and motivations
beyond the desires of the moment. Unlike the integrationist heroes of
Hollywood, he does not fit neatly into a white-dominated landscape but
effectively transforms it by his actions and perceptions. The black-dominated
world of the film is centered largely on the aural rather than the visual; it is
populated by a polyphonic combination of black music and voices that
transforms a black man on the run into something—someone—more heroic.
Sweetback’s music functions as another character, or as a Greek chorus of
characters. This Greek cho-rus serves as intermediary for the audience with
this black-centered reality, giving it a mythical resonance. Through a
combination of song and spoken word, it speaks for, as well as to, our
largely silent hero. Beyond the lyrical function of call-and-response
exchanges, the music itself, with its use of gospel and jazz-funk fusion,
suggests utopian possibilities that are both past and future for the film’s
protagonist, the black-identified audience, and “the black community.” The
music ties Sweetback’s political awakening, signified by his sacrifice to
save Moo Moo, to a wider context of black nationalism by harking back
to a shared black past, while projecting forward to the prospect of a shared
future. In sum, the score of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song creates a
politically charged audiovisual reality for Sweetback, set in contrast to the
bleak wasteland of black urban life in a white-dominated world.
The score of Sweetback is anchored in the past primarily through its
use of call-and-response structures. Call-and-response, the basic structure
of gospel music whereby performers and participants are joined in a com-
munity, has been called by musicologists one of the most enduring traits of
black music.57 A link between African American and Black African musical
practice, in the period of the 1950s to the1970s it emerged in various secular
forms—including the work of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Isaac Hayes—
dramatizing and engaging its listeners with black cultural identity and
community. Likewise, the African rhythm instruments used by Earth, Wind
& Fire can be read as a musical gesture toward the past and a diasporic
cultural inheritance in a way that reflects the appeal in the 1970s of a black
nationalistic conscious-ness and the desire to identify with cultural identity
located in a shared past. Yet the film’s music is not merely backward-looking
in its appeal to black cultural identity; owing to the way that the audiovisual
work of funk high-lights the energy of Sweetback’s run, it also provides what
might be termed an anticipatory utopian strain in its innovative blend of the
electronic with more traditional instrumentation in Earth, Wind & Fire’s jazz-
funk fusion.
Highlighting the differences between white- and black-centered realities
of the film is the way in which in its black-centered world, images are
responsive to musical rather than narrative cues. Conventional framing and
88 Two Worlds
editing give way to funk- and jazz-inspired superimpositions, color
solarizations and rhythmic editing, in a way that upends Hollywood narrative
convention and runs counter to Hollywood’s tendency to privilege visual
storytelling. In this alternative diegetic realm, Sweetback is not separated from
his community or from his history. In contrast to the static and largely
silent black indi-viduals encountered in the ghetto, the voices in Sweetback’s
black-centered world (what Van Peebles, in his script, calls the “Colored
Angels”) are the true “black community” of the film. Their diegetic space is
identified with music, energy, motion, emotion, and a keen concern for
Sweetback’s well-being. They remind him of the lessons of history, of
black history, of his personal history, and of his family’s history—while he
in turn finds, in this world, a voice to reply to these lessons of history, when
he (to quote Van Peebles) “turns the angels around,” making them believe
in his power to escape white law and the white gaze, not to be “bled” by
white reality, as his family was or as “he used to be.” In addition to shaping
Sweetback’s alternative world, these voices and their music are likewise a
significant site of potential identification for the audience.

CONCLUSION
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul
by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
One ever feels his two-ness—An American, A Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W.E.B. Du Bois58

The Hollywood musical, according to Jane Feuer, uses its dual diegetic
structure—in which backstage drama is set in contrast to musical per-
formance and “real” worlds are juxtaposed with dreams and fantasies—to
mirror the relation of the audience to the film. Ultimately, the Hollywood
musical resolves that dualism (the bifurcation of staged performance and
backstage practice, fantasy and reality) when its two worlds are brought
together, with narrative closure confirming the power of Hollywood
entertainment to transform the character of everyday life. By contrast, the
distance between the two worlds of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
remains to the end. There is no closure, only aperture, a dramatization of
W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “double consciousness,” in the way that the
distance between black and white worlds of the film remains. Dubois
explains “double consciousness” as being the “sense of always looking at
one’s self through the eyes of others,” the alienating consequence of living as
the black other in a white-dominated world. 59 In this way, Sweet
Sweetback’s Baa-dasssss Song makes strategic use of popular music,
 Two Worlds 89

recalling the structural tropes of the Hollywood musical, in order to

demonstrate not the power but the limitations of Hollywood entertainment.
The political project of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is not so much to
provide a plan for revolution in its portrayal of Sweetback’s story as to be itself
an aesthetic revolt against the Hollywood mainstream and its white-centered
realities. In doing so, it too suggests the possibility of transforming everyday
life by putting a different reality on screen, by using music to address a
different audience, and by making its difference profitable.
The Blaxploitation films that followed Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song were quite different from Van Peebles’ film, with its use of techniques
drawn from underground and avant-garde cinemas. But they show the influ-
ence of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in a similar use of music to
transcend the generic character of these films, their narrative limitations.
In the raw-grained expressivity of James Brown’s vocals in Black Caesar
(1973), for example, we hear emotion and pain belied by the cool image
projected by the film’s gangster protagonist; likewise, in a similar manner to
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Brown’s songs lyrically locate gangster
Tommy Gibbs (Fred Williamson) in relation to black experience and history.
Similarly, the compositions by Curtis Mayfield for Superfly contextualize
the film’s protagonist, give him a history, while offering an explicitly criti-
cal view on the life that he leads. Brown’s and Mayfield’s scores are clearly
exceptional. But even the more common run of Blaxploitation scores provide
cultural context for the low-budget action films through the use of contem-
porary black music. And, a common trope of Blaxploitation film is the way
in which the specific aesthetic qualities and cultural associations of funk
facilitate a privileged and empowered relationship between (male)
protagonists and their urban environments. (Even though there are black
female action heroes in the Blaxploitation cycle, their musical narration tends
to focus on them as objects of romantic interest and sexual attraction.) Like
the soundtrack for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Blaxploitation
soundtracks offer a site for comment from black composers and musicians;
these scores, in various ways, inflect visual storytelling to register the social
and cultural challenges and contexts of the moment.

NOTES

1. For a partial list of Blaxploitation soundtrack albums and singles, see Appen-
dix 1 of Howell, “Spectacle, Masculinity, and Music.”
2. See Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 69-112.
3. For a summary of these controversies, see Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 87-91.
4. This phrase is, of course, from Laura Mulvey’s oft-cited article of 1975,
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 62.
5. Although the scope of his history predates Van Peebles’ film, the most useful
survey of various exploitation genres and their use of spectacle is Schaefer’s
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! It is particularly useful for understanding a
film like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which deliberately blurs the line
90 Two Worlds
between sexploitation and art cinema. Schaefer’s Bold! Daring! Shocking!
True!, 325-342.
6. Van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking
Manifesto, 68.
7. David E. calls it an “audacious melding of black folk traditions with the
vernacular of contemporary exploitation films” and notes that its “otherwise
conventionally structured narrative is, for example, embellished by stylis-
tic irregularities, especially deriving from the 1960s underground that had
attempted to produce a film style modeled on modern jazz.” James, The Most
Typical Avant-garde, 322-323.
8. A&M Records Artist Report, s.v., “Van Peebles, Melvin.”
9. When discussing his newest release, Ghetto Gothic, Van Peebles reflects on his
albums of the late 1960s: “. . . on my first albums, I suppressed the musicality
to a minimum, taking a minimalist beat and shouting a cadence over it. . . . My
music didn’t fall into the format of gospel or blues or spirituals, so I did another
form that suited the music and story: talk-rapping, which eventually became
rap.” Quoted in Bessman, “Capitol’s Melvin Van Peebles Issues.”
10. See Guerrero, “Be Black and Buy.”
11. Van Peebles, Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto, 25.
12. Darrach, “Sweet.”
13. Bowman, Soulsville USA, 220-222.
14. Van Peebles, Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto, 19.
15. Quoted in Bowman, The Melvin Van Peebles Collection.
16. For more on black radio and the community, see George, The Death of Rhythm
and Blues.
17. While Van Peebles’ film offers music as an alternative to the problem of visual-
ity in a white-dominated culture, Wallace concludes her essay by saying she’s
“at war with music, to the extent that it completely defines the parameters
of intellectual discourse in the African-American community.” Wallace, Dark
Designs, 191, 192.
18. Van Peebles, Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto, 67.
19. Ibid., 191.
20. As Surowiecki puts it, “Although the film is often described as a joke—a white
man turns black—repeated ad nauseum, a closer look reveals that Van Peebles
pries unexpected insight out of his rather simple conceit. Jeff Gerber begins the
film as a bigoted white man, but when his skin suddenly and inexplicably turns
black, he’s renounced by his family, his neighbors, and his employers. Slowly,
inexorably, Jeff Gerber becomes a black man, from the outside in.” Surowiecki,
“Making It.”
21. Bogle discusses the “brutal black buck” in his critical account of black screen
stereotypes. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 10-18.
22. Diawara, “Black Spectatorship,” 212-213.
23. hooks, “Feminism Inside,” 127.
24. Bennett, “The Emancipation Orgasm,” 106.
25. Rhines, Black Film/White Money, 43.
26. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 63.
27. See, for instance, Edge of the City (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958).
28. See, for instance, Van Peebles’ How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Com-
pany and Enjoy It (2005).
29. Cripps, for example, concludes that Van Peebles’ “simple nationalist politics”
ultimately “bloat into a self-indulgent fantasy.” Black Film as Genre, 138.
30. In these terms, Van Peeble’s characterization of Sweetback is closely aligned to
what Wallace has observed to be the masculinist orientation of the Black Power
movement. See Wallace, Black Macho, 1-86.
 Two Worlds 91

31. “Next I went to a big commercial bank in L.A. and said I wanted to open an
account for my corporation. I was looking even more raggedy than usual and
the bank manager treated me a little pompously, exactly as I had planned it . . . .
He didn’t realize I was setting him up . . . . Then I got cleaned up and went back
to the bank. It was a whole different ball game, after their receiving my seventy
thousand dollars. Besides, I was enunciating like a mother fucker. The cat was
bowled over. . . . he was very very apologetic and he stayed apologetic which
was right the fuck where I wanted him to be.” Van Peebles, Guerilla Filmmak-
ing Manifesto, 84-85.
32. Of course, Brer Rabbit himself has a complex history, having been popular-
ized both through black aural and white screen cultures, with the collecting of
black folklore by white journalist Joel Chandler Harris—first to publish the
Uncle Remus tales in 1881—a matter of debate. See for example, Walker,
“Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine,” 29-31.
33. Quoted in Vincent, Funk, 13.
34. Ibid., 3.
35. For instance, Koven asserts that the film is “more pornography than Blax-
ploitation . . . [and] the $15 million it made domestically was due more to
curiosity about sex in the film, than an engagement with the socio-politics of
it.” The Pocket Essential Blaxploitation Films, 15. One of the film’s most
outspoken critics, Lerone Bennett Jr., criticized not the amount of sex in the film
but rather its soullessness and joylessness, and the way it is used narratively
to assist in Sweetback’s escape: “Now, with all due respects to the license of
art, it is necessary to say frankly that nobody every f***ed his way to free-
dom. And it is mischievous and reactionary finally for anyone to suggest to
black people in 1971 that they are going to be able to sc**w their way across
the Red Sea. F***ing will not set you free. If f***ing freed, black people
would have celebrated the millennium 400 years ago.” Bennett, “Emancipa-
tion Orgasm,” 118.
36. See “From a Revolutionary Analysis,” in Van Peebles, Guerilla Filmmaking
Manifesto, 5. Ed Guerrero offers a useful discussion of Newton’s perspective
on the film in Framing Blackness, 88-89.
37. Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, 43-44.
38. “Barrel of Funk” was composed by Hank Mobley, 1957.
39. “Opus de Funk” was composed by Horace Silver, 1953.
40. LeRoi Jones, Blues People, 218.
41. Released as a two-part single that was number one on the R&B chart for six
weeks and made it to number 10 on the pop chart.
42. Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure, 98.
43. See George’s discussion of the importance of radio stations to black communi-
ties in The Death of Rhythm and Blues.
44. Quoted in Vincent, Funk, 13.
45. Brown, “Funk Music as Genre,” 488.
46. Vincent, Funk, 14
47. Ibid., 16.
48. Brown, “Funk Music as Genre,” 494.
49. The musical themes for female black action heroes are not as heavily invested
in a funk aesthetic. For discussions of women in Blaxploitation, see Sims,
Women of Blaxploitation; Dunn, Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas; and
Gates, “Femme Makes Right.”
50. See Barthes, “Grain of the Voice,” and my discussion in the Introduction to this
volume.
51. Matthew Brown emphasizes these qualities in his aesthetic and cultural analy -
sis of funk.
92 Two Worlds
52. For a discussion of the masculinist character of the Black Power movement —
and responses to this by Black Women’s Liberation organizations, see Springer,
“Black Feminists Respond to Black Power Masculinism,” and Ward, “The
Third World Women’s Alliance.”
53. Quoted in Darrach, “Sweet.”
54. Wander, “Black Dreams,” 9.
55. Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema,” 500-508.
56. Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 68.
57. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 44.
58. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 9. Du Bois’s conceptualization of
double-consciousness is useful to this argument as a symptomatic description
of black subjectivity as it is framed and narrated in, and addressed by, film
produced by a white-dominated film industry.
59. Du Bois called it “double vision” or “double consciousness” and identified it as
a source of power for blacks to understand whites in a way that whites never
understood blacks. Du Bois also described this “double vision” as a source of
pain, inasmuch as blacks thus see themselves through the eyes of white racism
that imagines them as other. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 9.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A&M Records Artist Report, s.v. “Van Peebles, Melvin.” www.onamrecords.com/

artists/detail/Melvin%20Van%20Peebles (accessed September 24, 2014).
Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image-Music-Text. Selected and trans-
lated by Stephen Heath, 179-189. New York: Noonday Press, 1977.
Bennett, Lerone Jr. “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland.” Ebony.
September 1971, 106-118.
Bessman, Jim. “Capitol’s Melvin Van Peebles Issues 1st Album in 20 Years.” Bill-
board. March 4, 1995, 8, 86.
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive
History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Bowman, Rob. Liner notes, The Melvin Van Peebles Collection, Melvin Van Peebles,
Stax Records 2SCD-88040-2, ©1999, Fantasy Inc.
———. Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records. New York: Schirmer Trade
Books, 1997.
Brown, Matthew P. “Funk Music as Genre: Black Aesthetics, Apocalyptic Thinking
and Urban Protest in Post 1965 African American Pop.” Cultural Studies 8.3
(1994): 484-508.
Cripps, Thomas. Black Film as Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Danielsen, Anne. Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and
Parliament. Middletown, CT : Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
Darrach, Brad. “Sweet Melvin’s Very Hot, Very Cool Black Movie.” Life. August
13, 1971, 61.
Diawara, Manthia. “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resis-
tance.” In Black American Cinema. Edited by Manthia Diawara, 211-220. New
York: Routledge, 1993.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. With introduction and notes by Farah
Jasmine Griffin. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003 [1903].
Dunn, Stephanie. Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993.
 Two Worlds 93

Floyd, Samuel A. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to
the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Gates, Philippa. “Femme Makes Right: The 1970s Blaxploitation Vigilante Crime-
Fighter.” In Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Penguin, 1988.
Guerrero, Ed. “Be Black and Buy.” In American Independent Cinema: A Sight and
Sound Reader. Edited by Jim Hillier, 69-73. London: BFI, 2001.
———. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1993.
hooks, bell. “Feminism Inside: Towards Black Body Politics.” In Black Male: Rep-
resentations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Edited by Thelma
Golden, 127-140. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994.
Howell, Amanda. “Spectacle, Masculinity, and Music in Blaxploitation Cinema.”
In Screening the Past 18 (2005): 1-18. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/
screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr_18/AHfr18a.html (accessed September 24, 2014).
James, David E. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor
Cinemas in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.
Jones, LeRoi. Blues People. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1963.
Kofsky, Frank. Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music. New York: Path-
finder, 1970.
Koven, Mikel J. The Pocket Essential Blaxploitation Films. Harpendon, UK: Pocket
Essentials, 2001.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film
Theory. Edited by Constance Penley, 57-68. New York: Routledge, 1988 [1975].
Rhines, Jesse Algernon. Black Film/White Money. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
Schaefer, Eric. Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films,
1919-1959. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Sims, Yvonne D. Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine
Changed American Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
Springer, Kimberly. “Black Feminists Respond to Black Power Masculinism.” In The
Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. Edited by
Peniel E. Joseph, 105-118. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Surowiecki, James. “Making It.” Transition 79 (1999): 179.
Van Peebles, Melvin. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking
Manifesto. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004 [1971].
Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One. New
York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996.
Walker, Alice. “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine,” Southern Exposure 9 (Summer
1981): 29-31.
Wallace, Michelle. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso,
1999 [1978].
———. Dark Designs and Visual Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004.
Wander, Brandon. “Black Dreams: The Fantasy and Ritual of Black Films.” Film
Quarterly 29.1 (1975): 2-11.
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ment: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. Edited by Peniel E. Joseph,
119-144. New York: Routledge, 2006.
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1985.
4 The Power Chord Goes to War
The Bruckheimer Film, Music,
and Militainment

My biggest thrill is when I sit in a theater and watch people laugh

and cry and cheer . . . You start with a little idea and make it
happen and watch it explode.
—Jerry Bruckheimer1

The big-budget productions of Jerry Bruckheimer exemplify the main-

streaming of the pop score, in the way that they moved youth-identified music
beyond the teen or youth genre in the 1980s and 1990s. Top Gun (1986)
capitalized on strategies that Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films
previously had used for both Flashdance (1983) and Beverly Hills Cop
(1984). Like its predecessors, it exemplified what 1980s Hollywood called
synergy, the multimedia approach to filmmaking and marketing whereby
“movies + soundtrack + video = $$$.”2 The number one film of the year, with a
soundtrack that went multi-platinum, Top Gun combined a coming-of-age
story with war and action genres. Revisiting the most successful aspects of
the production team’s previous two films and directing them to the cause of
U.S. militarism, Top Gun achieved a $350 million box office worldwide
with its combination of youth-identified popular music, technologized
spectacle, and promotional use of music video. 3
Plenty of films have since availed themselves of the Top Gun formula to
feed “the public’s need for the loud and the proud,” 4 but the name most
commonly associated with such films is Jerry Bruckheimer. Following the
success of Top Gun, Bruckheimer, until the end of 1996 in partnership with
Don Simpson and henceforward the head of Jerry Bruckheimer Films, con-
tinued to be a prolific producer in the action genre. He is often compared
with old-style Hollywood studio bosses for his hands-on approach and com-
mitment to brand (“Brand identification,” Bruckheimer says, “that’s what
we strive to do”).5 Also reminiscent of studio-era Hollywood is the way
Bruckheimer has collaborated with favorite directors—especially the late
Tony Scott and Michael Bay; 6 they, like Bruckheimer, got their start making
television commercials, thus learning how to “take the air out” and “keep
the story moving.”7 The “Bruckheimer film,” summed up by USA Today
reviewer Claudia Puig in 1998, is “high on concept, long on action and
 The Power Chord Goes to War 95

features macho heroes backed by amped-up rock music.”8 As Puig observes,

one of the elements of Bruckheimer’s “brand” is music, especially guitar-
driven rock. Even the television franchise CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,9
described by creator Anthony E. Zuiker as “a show about thinking and
watching people think,” 10 has as its trademark big, brash anthems by 1970s
British rockers, The Who. 11
In the case of Top Gun, which was part of what Lawrence Grossberg
observes to be an “explosion” in youth films during the 1980s,12 music
expresses the film’s particular version of the youth genre’s “dialectic
between . . . alienation and a struggle for empowerment.” 13 In doing so,
Top Gun influenced the way that future action films used popular music,
especially guitar-driven rock, so much so that by 1993 the formula of spec-
tacular action-plus-electric-guitar was recognizable as a cliché available for
gentle parody by the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Last Action Hero. In
drawing on intertextual associations between rock rebellion and masculine
display, as well as visual tropes of action cinema, Top Gun highlighted rock
culture’s and action cinema’s shared investment in spectacular masculinities,
even as it reoriented action film themes in terms of rock musical construc-
tions of gender, youth, pleasure, and empowerment. In these terms, the
1980s industrial strategy of synergy was ultimately about more than just
marketing. Rock music as we see and hear it used in the Bruckheimer film
helped to shape contemporary Hollywood masculinities—and the image of
the U.S. military—according to the imagination of youth and music cultures.
And even years after the success of Top Gun, this audiovisual representation
of masculinity—once innovative, now obvious and clichéd—persisted as an
element of Bruckheimer productions and their construction of heroic action.
From the cartoonish Armageddon (1998) to Ridley Scott’s somber, elegiac
historical reconstruction Black Hawk Down (2002), rock musical construc-
tions of action masculinity continued to anchor Bruckheimer-produced
depictions of the U.S. military and its world mission.

THE POWER CHORD GOES TO WAR: MUSIC AND

MASCULINITY IN TOP GUN

. . . Top Gun may be the most brazenly eroticized recruiting poster in the
history of warfare.
—David Denby14

Heroic masculinity is at the center of the typical Bruckheimer production.

Audiovisually constructed, it is indebted both to rock rebels of the past
and to those muscular screen heroes of the late 1970s and 1980s: Sylvester
Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and their low-budget kin, Chuck Nor-
ris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. With bodies as fetishized, as prone to
masquerade, as those of showgirls or female stars of classic Hollywood,
96 The Power Chord Goes to War
these action heroes seemed to compensate with extreme violence for the
way that gleaming muscularity disrupted gendered representational codes
of studio-era Hollywood. Thus, while some observers like Susan Jeffords
saw their embodiment of male power merely as a reification of existing
divisions between masculinity and femininity on screen, 15 others like Chris
Holmlund and Yvonne Tasker note the potential that such muscular per-
formances have to reshape monolithic notions of male heroism. 16 Their
bodies highlighted by conventions associated primarily with female per-
formers, 1980s action heroes were made strange by those very techniques
aimed at showcasing their strength and power, at the same time as their
representations suggested a common ancestry for musical and muscular per-
formances on screen: As Gaylin Studlar and David Desser observe in regard
to the Rambo series, Sylvester Stallone’s “glistening hypermasculinity . . . [is]
emphasized in the kind of languid camera movements and fetishizing close-
up[s] usually reserved for ‘female flashdancers’. . . . ”17
Top Gun reimagined the action formula in a way that persists into the
present. Although the film is crowded with handsome young pilots who
“strip off their clothes so often they could be trying out for the swim team,” 18
Top Gun does not feature a muscular star like a Stallone or Schwarzeneg-
ger. But its spectacular treatment of action and masculinity owes a debt to
such overblown heroes, as well as to the representations of rebellious youth
(Brando, Dean) that inspired Elvis in the 1950s. Its story is simple enough,
recounting the process by which a talented but unruly young man (Pete
Mitchell aka “Maverick,” played by Tom Cruise) comes to be integrated
into an institution (the Navy’s Fighter Weapon’s School, aka Top Gun),
which both appreciates his talent and has the ability to curb its excesses,
ultimately directing its energy to the profit of all involved. A star-maker nar-
rative, it’s pretty much the same process by which Elvis comes to emotional/
social/economic maturity in Jailhouse Rock and King Creole.19 Its narrative
also shares thematic concerns with previous combat films featuring dare-
devils who fly by the seat of their pants, a trope evident as early as William
Wellman‘s Wings of 1927, a film that wowed audiences with its recreation
of World War I battles using newsreel footage combined with new material.
The main difference between Top Gun and its predecessors in the com-
bat genre is that it is a war film with no war—except for what’s left of a
cold one. Focused on its coming-of-age/rise-of-a-star narrative, Top Gun has
little to say about just who it is Maverick fights when he tangles with MiG
28s that appear “somewhere over the Indian Ocean.” But even if the film is
unclear as to its enemy, hailing from some never specified unfriendly nation
utilizing Soviet-made aircraft, Top Gun is itself real enough, as indicated in
the opening credits which, like World War II combat films, backs its claim
to authenticity by announcing the film’s precise location in history. 20 The
Fighter Weapons School was begun in 1969 to train Vietnam War pilots
in the art of aerial combat. As the chief instructor of Top Gun explains to
students on the first day of class, during the Korean War the kill ratio of
 The Power Chord Goes to War 97

aerial combat had been 12 to one, a ratio that fell to three to one in Vietnam
because pilots had “grown dependent on missiles and lost their dog-fighting
skills,” prompting the establishment of a school to teach air combat
maneuvers. By the end of Vietnam, the instructor continues, the ratio was back
up to 12 to one. In that brief history lesson, delivered to both Top Gun
students and the film audience, the entire historical quagmire of the Vietnam
War is drained and reconstructed as a suitable foundation for future
remilitarization, based on individual mastery of war technology and explicit
nostalgia for the military masculinity of the pre-Vietnam past. As in the
case of Rambo films featuring a return to Vietnam “to win this time,” Top
Gun, in its brief nod to context, rewrites an ignominious past in Vietnam (a
past that includes, we discover later in the film, Maverick’s father, a pilot who
mysteriously dis-appeared in the early years of the conflict), revising it as a
story of military achievement expressed in kill ratios.
Although its political project in revising and simplifying the U.S. past
in Vietnam through nostalgic evocation of other eras of war aligns it with
action films like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which staged returns to
Vietnam,21 Top Gun is primarily focused on the present and future of U.S.
remilitarization, based on a renewed professionalism and faith in technol-
ogy. The film’s coming-of-age narrative, which concludes with the unruly
student becoming a teacher, is directed toward the rejuvenation of its par-
ticular military tradition. 22 Crucial in its future-directed representation of
war and the military is the way that the body spectacle of other action films
of the 1980s, with their uneasy relation both to conventional representa-
tions of masculinity on screen and—in the case of POW/MIA films—to the
role of the injured male body in America’s understanding of its experience in
Vietnam, is replaced by the spectacle of technology. In Top Gun, producers
Simpson and Bruckheimer recycled their strategy of employing a direc-
tor whose previous experience was in shooting commercials; like Adrian
Lyne who directed Flashdance, Tony Scott had a background suited to a
film whose vestigial narrative is an opportunity for visual plenitude. The
fetishistic treatment Rambo gives Stallone’s body, and that Flashdance uses
to eroticize dancers, Top Gun directs to Navy jets.
While Top Gun substitutes lovingly rendered jets for the lovingly ren-
dered bodies of Flashdance, it does not entirely abandon the spectacular
masculinities of previous action films. Rather, what we see—and hear—is a
strategic refocusing of visual spectacle from body to machine, from physi-
cal to instrumental prowess. It is strategic both in the way that it closes off
those imputations of physical vulnerability that motivate —and inevitably
attend—muscular display and in the way that it genders war technology as
masculine,23 while constructing it as a source of expressivity and pleasure
as well as power. Shaping our understanding of this spectacle is musical
accompaniment that offers an intertextual tie to rock-oriented tropes of
masculine display and a musical analogue to the story of technological mas-
tery by a rebel male. The resultant construction of action masculinity is an
98 The Power Chord Goes to War
audiovisual composite that speaks to the future of both cinematic
entertainment24 and American militarization.

GUITAR HEROES

. . . pleasure frequently is the politics of music .........

—Susan McClary and Robert Walser 25

I’m a guitar hero for people who don’t play guitar.

—Steve Stevens26

The popular music score, whether it is entirely compiled from prerecorded

songs or, as in Top Gun, a hybrid creation, draws attention to itself in a
way that studio-era orchestral scores do not, a characteristic emphasized by
multimedia marketing techniques of synergy. For example, the song “Dan-
ger Zone” featured in the opening sequence was released before Top Gun
made it to theaters,27 giving audiences a chance to gain familiarity with the
tune, perhaps even attach their own meanings to it, prior to its specific use
in the film’s narrative. This process of familiarization was likewise encour-
aged by MTV video clips designed as “musical trailers.” 28 As for the film
itself, one Variety reviewer commented, “watching the film is like wearing
a stereo walkman, so pervasive and insistent is the music . . . it seems there
is no experience not accompanied by Harold Faltermeyer’s sound track.” 29
From the beginning of Top Gun, its “pervasive and insistent” score works to
shape its representation of war and technology according to the values and
aesthetic of popular youth-identified music.
Noteworthy in these terms is the opening credit sequence, in which a
wash of synthesized music (comprising drum machine, chimes, a melodic
line that combines the sounds of horns and strings, all subtended by a bub-
bling synthetic bass line) merges with the ambient noise of the aircraft carrier:
The indistinct mutter of voices and static from the tower are combined with
sound effects that may be wind or waves or the beginnings of engine noise.
This soundscape is what Michael Chion calls a “superfield” of sound, made
possible by the wide sound strips of Dolby technology. 30 The aural equiva-
lent of an establishing shot, it keeps us mindful of our setting on the deck
of an aircraft carrier during jet takeoff, spatially locating us prior to the
rapidly and discontinuously edited sequence that follows a fade-in from a
black screen. A similar technique is also used in the rapidly edited combat
sequences. But perhaps more important than how these sounds locate us is
the way this prologue allows us to hear—even before we see—how the human
and the technological are joined. In the sequence to follow, they will both be
framed and choreographed by the demands of nondiegetic music.
Chords played on an electric guitar cut through this superfield of sound
to introduce the Kenny Loggins’ song, “Danger Zone.” 31 These power
 The Power Chord Goes to War 99

chords subsequently mark the rhythm of the song as well as the movement
of jets;32 coordinated with the image, they mime the gunning of engines, as
jets take off and land. The allusive work of the guitar, power chords both
emulating and marking the line of takeoff and landing, is heightened by the
editing patterns in the sequence. In its editing, the sequence departs entirely
from the demands of continuity, even though the movement of the song
toward its climax gives us a sense of coherence and shape. A typical montage
sequence, it maintains no consistent screen direction, spaces overlap almost
randomly, and the 180-degree rule is forgotten. Space and time are formed
to fit the demands of music, while deckhands (waving, bowing, even kick-
ing up their heels in unison) and planes appear to dance to Loggins’ tune.
As the sequence draws to its climax, a climax marked by a brief guitar solo,
the fragmentation of both bodies and machinery is particularly marked, but
the whole is made to appear continuous by the music. In this way, we see
military personnel and war technology transformed into a visual composite
shaped specifically by the demands of a fairly standard (rock-flavored) pop
song whose lyrics are about the pleasures and challenges of flight. (In the
manner of most rock songs, these may or may not be read as a metaphor for
sex, but it would be more accurate to say that sex functions as a metaphor
for flight in this film, rather than the reverse.)
While synthesized music continues to dominate the soundtrack of Top
Gun, electric guitar has a significant thematic role, as indicated in this open-
ing sequence. It continues to be associated consistently with jets and with
flight, and, once our hero Maverick gets his assignment to Top Gun, we
find that it is increasingly—and exclusively—associated with him and his
experiences in aerial combat. The musical and editorial response to the news
that Maverick, despite his disciplinary problems, has been assigned to Top
Gun school at Miramar is a sound bridge that links this scene to that of
his arrival at the base on a motorcycle. As Maverick arrives on the other
side of this sound bridge, we see him race with a plane in takeoff as the
song “Danger Zone” is reprised, its power chords confirming musically the
film’s investment in rock masculinity, visually represented by Maverick’s
leather-jacketed attire and rebel attitude. Later at Top Gun, Maverick’s ini-
tial moments of a timed combat exercise are likewise accompanied by a brief
reprise of the power chords from “Danger Zone.” At the end of that train-
ing sequence, when Maverick’s virtuosity as a naval aviator clashes with his
resistance to discipline or safe practice (he pursues his instructor’s plane into
a real danger zone, to make a “kill” below the hard deck, the altitude under
which no combat can safely take place), this moment is marked by a brief
solo. This burst of guitar virtuosity, performed by former Billy Idol guitarist,
Steve Stevens, anticipates the final moment of victory in the film, when we
hear Stevens’ rendition of the “Top Gun Anthem” in its entirety.
At the same time that the narrative is about Maverick’s unruliness as
a pilot and his disregard for others in his team and thus his questionable
value as a military aviator until he grows out of these traits, the music
100 The Power Chord Goes to War
tells a different story—or at least offers a different musical response to
Maverick’s rebellion. Particularly significant are the intertextual connota-
tions of the electric guitar that come to be so closely identified with Maverick
as a character. Although electric guitars were a part of both R&B and country
music scenes from the 1930s through the 1950s, associated with performers
like Memphis Minnie and Chet Atkins, 33 by the 1960s the history of rock
had become, as music historian Philip Ennis puts it, the story of a “boy with
a guitar.”34 From the late 1960s through the 1970s, the dominant image
of rock music was that of male musicians—mostly white—whose guitar
performances became increasingly spectacular with the passing of decades,
culminating in the audiovisual pyrotechnics of stadium or arena rock. In
this period, we see the guitar featured on stage as what Steve Waksman calls
the “technophallus,” 35 the visual correlative to rock musical discourses in
which the association of the electric guitar with excessive male physical-
ity had become commonplace, consolidated in the (not entirely derogatory)
term “cock rock.”
By the 1980s, the sound of electric guitar music was associated with bodily
performances that emphasized the passion and virtuosity of the music and
the authenticity of the musician. Like the male pinup or the muscular hero
of action cinema,36 the rock guitarist became in this period a spectacle that
both reveled in and endeavored to control the terms of its objectification
and erotic appeal—its own particular combination of body and technology,
sound and image. This is a trope that continues to the present, in guitar
performances that work to maintain physical and technological control at
the same time that they strive for “a virtuosic transcendence.” 37 While the
soundtrack of Top Gun might be said to standardize and regulate the degree
of expressivity communicated by its guitar performances, the embodied
quality of its guitar music gains emphasis in the context of the more abstract
sound of the synthesizer. During guitar solos especially, moments of what
Michael Chion calls “materializing sound indices,” or “MSIs,” remind the
listener of the body in the music, 38 when the sound of fingers slipping on
guitar strings or the use of a whammy bar creates moments of distortion. In
sequences where MSIs remind us of the body that performs the music even
as the music itself blends with and serves as a counterpoint to the sound of
plane engines, the music track facilitates a metaphoric exchange between jet
and guitar.39 In this exchange, discourses of bodily expressivity associated
with guitar performance support and validate, and even celebrate, behaviors
on Maverick’s part that are condemned by the military establishment.
When Maverick’s commanding officer informs him of his appointment
to Top Gun, near the beginning of the film, he reels off a list of Maverick’s
misdemeanors—ranging from disregard for safety instructions to aerial
horseplay such as buzzing the tower—and warns him, “Your ego is writ-
ing checks that your body can’t cash.” While Maverick’s experience at Top
Gun would seem to support this assessment, the music tells a different story,
as it conjures a body equal to the demands of his ego, concocted as it is
 The Power Chord Goes to War 101

of intertextually invoked rock masculinity wedded to the spectacular tech-

nological display of the Navy’s $30 million planes at work. This music,
combined with editing techniques used in the aerial combat sequences that
effectively anthropomorphize the jets by presenting them as if they were—like
the pilots themselves—in conversation, facilitates identification not merely
with Maverick, but with Maverick as his personality is expressed through
the medium of technology—both jet and guitar. The musical accompaniment,
as well as the cinematic treatment of the jets in flight sequences, effectively
fetishizes military technology in a way that recalls both the fragmented and
the overvalued female bodies of studio-era Hollywood and the muscular
heroes of previous action cinema.
The formula of fetishistic fantasy (“I know it’s not, but all the same . . . ”)
is particularly apt for the audiovisual masculinity constructed in such
sequences: the metaphoric exchange—whereby Maverick’s virtuosity and
his competitive spirit are refigured within the rock musical codes of mas-
culinity, authenticity, and expressivity through technology—facilitates an
alternate reality wherein the military might be viewed as a site of individual
self-expression and hedonistic indulgence. Though at odds with the institu-
tional rhetoric of the Top Gun school as seen in the film—as well as with
one’s commonsense knowledge of the military—this intertextual function of
the music and the way it contributes to the reading of Maverick’s char-
acter and the spectacle of aerial combat support what at this time was still
the recruitment slogan for an all-volunteer Navy: “It’s not just a job, it’s an
adventure.” The slogan is never mentioned but is featured in the film’s mise
en scène. In the locker room of Miramar we see it on a recruitment poster,
featured in two different scenes where Maverick is criticized by fellow offi-
cers and by his flight instructor for his unsafe practices, which could
get someone killed. However, the fantasy of military life created in the aerial
combat and training sequences of Top Gun is one that supports a recon-
struction of combat as youthful fun, while it also facilitates disavowal of
war’s losses—its bloody realities—turning as it does the focus in the action
and war film away from the male body to technology.
The male body, which is displayed almost to excess in scenes of locker
room camaraderie and recreational horseplay, is almost entirely absent from
combat sequences, as the actors are only visible in close-up, except for that
body that one hears, so to speak, in conversation and the guitar perfor-
mances. Significantly, the one American death that takes place in the film is
a training accident, in which Maverick’s copilot dies while ejecting from the
plane after it is caught in turbulence. 40 Much of the rest of the film is taken
up with various characters reassuring Maverick that the death is not his fault
and urging him to “get his nerve back”; and so, through this narrative diver-
sion, we find entirely exorcised the specter of what Maverick’s predilection
for unsafe flight practices might mean in an actual combat situation. The
film’s distancing of itself from the injured male body—despite the fact that
one of its own naval experts was actually killed in the process of filming its
102 The Power Chord Goes to War
sequences of aerial hijinks—is confirmed by the manner in which this one
death is filmed, in a long shot, through a picturesque blur of water vapor
and wind, that reduces the body of Maverick’s dead friend to no more than a
silhouette against the sky.
In addition to its strategic role in characterizing Maverick and his place in
the military establishment, the rock-identified guitar music of Top Gun facil-
itates gender divisions in the score that frame a narrative built around some
fairly conventional oppositions between masculine and feminine spheres.
These spheres are united in the successful reunion of lovers (facilitated in
part by the diegetic use of pre-Vietnam music, especially the “blue-eyed
soul” of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”) that attends Maverick’s suc-
cessful return to Top Gun at the film’s conclusion. In previous war films,
domestic spaces of the house and home front were coded as feminine and
strictly set apart from the masculine one of the military. Top Gun updates this
by making Maverick’s female love interest a civilian contractor, Charlotte
“Charlie” Blackwood, an astrophysicist played by Kelly McGillis, equally at
home in her cozy seaside cottage or on the tarmac at Top Gun. At the same
time offering a nod to contemporary shifts in women’s roles and broadening
the film’s address beyond its core audience of young males, this romantic
subplot works to gender the film’s structural opposition between the insti-
tution (including its rules and theoretical expertise) and the individual; in
these terms, Maverick’s decision to return to Top Gun as an instructor and
his (implied) return to a monogamous romantic relationship with Charlie
are similar gestures of domestication of the rebel male.
These broadly gendered movements of the narrative correspond to
gendered oppositions in the soundtrack between pop and rock, seen, for
instance, in the contrast between the love theme, Berlin’s “Take My Breath
Away,”41 and the action themes, Loggins’ “Danger Zone” and, to a lesser
extent, Stevens’ “Top Gun Anthem.” As Norma Coates observes, the equa-
tion of rock as a “boy with a guitar” has widespread ramifications for
the ways in which different styles of music are understood, especially in
regard to the commonplace opposition in popular culture between rock
and pop music:

“Rock” is not so much a sound or a particular style of playing music,

but represents a degree of emotional honesty, liveness, musical straight-
forwardness, and other less tangible, largely subjective aspects. “Pop”
music is allegedly slick, prefabricated, and used for dancing, mooning
over teen idols, and other “feminine” or “feminised” recreations. 42

Even though all of the music in Top Gun is manifestly prefabricated,

designed specifically for its use in the film, the sound of the guitar—its
contrast to synthesized music—brings with it some of the connotations of
authenticity and “liveness” associated with rock, an association buttressed
by the intertextual resonance provided by the use of Steve Stevens—rather
 The Power Chord Goes to War 103

than some less well-known musician—as guitarist. By contrast, the rest

of Faltermeyer’s score, as well as the romantic ballad “You Take My
Breath Away,” are easily aligned with the “feminized” associations of pop.
In the way that these musical elements are used narratively, they become
more than just a way to attract a youth audience. These musical elements
also support the film’s gendered oppositions, between the sort of rebel
masculinity embodied in Maverick and those narrative forces—whether
institutionalized regulation or heterosexual romance—that seek to tame
the rebel male.

GUITAR HEROES IN SPACE: ARMAGEDDON

United States government just asked us to save the world. Anybody

wanna say no?
—Harry Stamper, Armageddon

Top Gun could not have been completed without the Navy’s aircraft carriers
and two dozen or so planes flown by real-life Top Gun pilots. And the Navy
reaped the rewards of the film’s success: during Top Gun’s theatrical release,
enlistment—which had been down since Vietnam—increased 500 percent,
the largest increase ever witnessed during peacetime, facilitated in part by
the placement of Navy recruiters in the larger theaters that screened the
film.43 According to military historian Laurence Suid, Top Gun completed
the “rehabilitation” of the image of the U.S. military after Vietnam in
such a way that even the grimly authentic returns to the past imagined by
Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987)
couldn’t tarnish it.44 In a statement that perhaps says more about the tech-
nologized televisual representation of the Gulf War than the realism of Top
Gun, Suid observes that, when the Gulf War broke out in January 1991,
“the real war . . . confirmed for the American people that the images of Top
Gun represented the reality of the post-Vietnam Navy.”45
For Roger Stahl, Top Gun, with its music video aesthetics and glorifi-
cation of technology, was the first step toward “militainment,” which he
defines as “a symbolic shift, described by dominant narratives of war, ways
of imaging war, and the integration of the experience of war with estab-
lished entertainment genres.” 46 Clearly, these entertainment genres include
music as well as film: Shortly after the success of Top Gun, both the Navy
and Army began advertising themselves on MTV, giving themselves what
appears to be a permanent place in contemporary youth and popular music
cultures.47 And along with its new presence on music television channels, the
Pentagon’s involvement in Hollywood filmmaking increased significantly
after Top Gun, as the services subsequently “maintained an open door and
a willingness to at least consider . . . all requests for cooperation.” 48 Since
Top Gun, the Department of Defense, which has first refusal on all scripts
104 The Power Chord Goes to War
prior to their going to the specific branches of the military, increasingly has
approved scripts based on the attractiveness of their representation of the
military rather than on the strict basis of their accuracy or authenticity, with
the result that the sci-fi and fantasy films Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact
(1998), and the Iron Man franchise (2008-2013) all won approval for DOD
support, despite the fact that, as Suid dryly observes, “opposing aliens or
meteors remained outside the normal realm of combat for which the armed
services prepared.”49 Such representations are significant for their positive
image of the military—and their emphasis on the excitement provided by
spectacular technology wedded to the pleasures of popular music. Of Iron
Man (2008), Hollywood Liaison Office Air Force Captain Christian Hodge
commented, in terms that make clear the audience that the military seeks
to impress (teens soon of an age to recruit) with representations that have
nothing to do with the realities of war, “This movie is going to be fantastic.
The Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars.”50
More consistently than any other contemporary film producer, Jerry
Bruckheimer has been successful in winning DOD support for his projects.
All the same, Armageddon seems in many ways an odd choice for its sup-
port; not only is it a sci-fi fantasy, but it depicts governmental and military
agencies (NASA and the Air Force) as incapable of rising to the challenge
presented by an oncoming meteor without the assistance of a bunch of misfit
drillers, with the first half of the film divided between disaster epic and a
comic spoof of The Right Stuff (1983).51 Its depiction of male heroism—
briefly sketched though it is, in a film described by one of its (many) critics as
“the first 150-minute trailer” 52—draws on Top Gun–styled invocations of
rock cultural masculinity combined with fetishized technology for the pur-
poses of what is a strikingly right-wing representation of patriotic fervor. 53
Yet at the same time that it replays right-wing mistrust of the government,
it can also be read in terms of Simpson and Bruckheimer’s understanding
of Top Gun as the story of “a contemporary American rebel,” a “guy who
came from the outside and learned how to play on the inside and did it for
all the right reasons.” 54 Their formulation of the Top Gun narrative makes
clear the ongoing relevance of youth music to the action film, not just for
the excitement it lends to spectacular images, but likewise for the way it
speaks to youthful alienation and empowerment channeled, in this instance,
into serving the needs of the U.S. military. Just as rock music—especially
guitar-driven rock with its connotations of performative masculinity medi-
ated through technological virtuosity—speaks to the young rebel, it also
speaks to the situation of the typical action hero, the outsider who fights
against both his own social marginalization and disempowerment at the
same time he battles bad guys—or meteors—and saves the day “for all the
right reasons.”
Armageddon exemplifies the America-saves-the-world narrative so
remorselessly spoofed by Team America in 2004.55 But in lieu of the sort of
guitar-driven anthemic scores featured in Top Gun and lovingly replicated in
 The Power Chord Goes to War 105

the South Park team’s marionette action epic, it features familiar hits of the
past to characterize its heroes in terms of rock-identified nostalgia for rebel
masculinity. The world is facing total annihilation in 18 days, unless a mete-
orite “the size of Texas” can be deflected from its path. NASA determines
its only hope is to drill into the meteorite surface and explode it from
the inside out. Despite the efforts of the agency’s best scientific minds and
Air Force personnel, NASA is unable to properly master drilling technolo-
gies without the help of outside experts—oil rig owner and operator Harry
Stamper (Bruce Willis) and his team. As General Kimsey (Keith David) com-
plains, “We spend 250 billion dollars a year on defense, and the fate of the
planet rests on a bunch of retards I wouldn’t trust with a potato gun.”
As Krin Gabbard notes, the film’s representations of the government and
the civilian agency NASA aren’t exactly positive. But in its broad strokes,
Armageddon might be called an enlistment or volunteer narrative, as it
focuses on ordinary citizens who are called upon to serve and who, when
they learn to work with the military as a team, become unlikely heroes,
citizen soldiers. The remainder of the film recounts the process by which “a
bunch of retards” saves the world. The process by which these rebels and
misfits come to be valued as heroes parallels the romantic subplot in which the
youngest and most rebellious of the roughnecks—AJ (Ben Affleck)—courts and
wins not Harry’s daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler), to whom he’s already plighted
his troth, but Harry himself. “I’ll be damned if I worked all these years, so
my little girl could marry a roughneck. She’s better than that, better than all
of us.” Just as AJ proves himself to Harry, so too does Harry demonstrate his
own worth by giving his life to complete the mission. The film concludes
that there is no better than these roughnecks. Even the lead astronaut, Colo-
nel Willy Sharp (William Fitchner), initially unimpressed with the civilian
volunteers (“Talk about the wrong stuff”), praises their courage and con-
gratulates Grace on having such a father.
A selection of rock tunes (and one funk piece) characterize the roughneck
heroes, invoking an intertextual construction of action masculinity-as-rock-
masculinity similar to that of Top Gun. A key difference, however, is the way
that rock nostalgia figures in this representation. Although pre-Vietnam-era
pop hits play an important role in the diegesis of Top Gun, to buttress the
representation of military life as youthful fun and to cement ties between
friends and lovers, its musical characterization of heroism utilizes contem-
porary hits, appropriate for a film that ultimately restores and rejuvenates
the military tradition that was a casualty of Vietnam. While Armageddon
has its own generational logic, figured in the Oedipal conflict of Harry and
AJ, its larger investment is in nostalgia. Its character network is shaped
by contrasts between two types, classes, and eras of masculinity. The ten-
sion between roughnecks and NASA is figured through binary oppositions
between blue collar versus white, manual versus intellectual labor, hands-
on technological skill versus theoretical knowledge, field experience versus
office-bound expertise, individuals versus institutions, individual ingenuity
106 The Power Chord Goes to War
versus corporate technology. These binary oppositions are audiovisually
consolidated as a contrast between masculinities of the past and present.
Thus Harry Stamper despite being, we’re told, an internationally recognized
expert in his field and well-to-do businessman, comes to stand along with
the members of his team as the emblematic everyman of the past. Like his
father, who lives in palatial splendor but wants nothing more than to get
back to work (“All go, no quit, you know me”), Harry may own oil wells
but by virtue of his roughneck life is the film’s model of an old-fashioned
ordinary guy, a working-class hero, even with what turns out to be the
“right stuff” for the task.
As part of the film’s shorthand style of characterization, rock hits of the
1970s and 1980s have a significant role to play. For instance, Harry’s char-
acter is pithily summarized in a moment of screen time: When we first meet
him, he’s good-naturedly whacking golf balls off his oil rig into the direction
of a Greenpeace boat full of protesters buzzing his rig in the middle of the
South China Sea. As he aims his club—the extreme close-up on the doomed
ball a tongue-in-cheek comment on the Earth’s predicament covered in more
serious terms in the scene preceding—the opening riffs of ZZ Top’s 1973 hit
“La Grange” count down to impact.
Like the Rolling Stones, ZZ Top is composed of white
rockers whose authenticity turns on the reinvention of “race music” of
the past, rough-and-ready hard rock infused by blues and R&B. It is
one of those Southern rock bands that kept so-called classic rock tropes
of the 1960s current through the 1970s and 1980s. In the case of ZZ
Top, its hillbilly look (boots, big hats, and even bigger beards) is both a
type of self-parody on the part of a group that started out as a “cowboy
band” and genuine acknowledgment of roots in the South and its debt
to the music of the past. Billy Gibbons’ rough-textured vocal delivery (haw
haw haw) and his rock licks are both inspired by and derived from the
blues, especially the music of John Lee Hooker. 56 It would have connota-
tive force for anyone familiar with American popular music, even if the
listener could not identify the song. But the likelihood of not recognizing
“La Grange” after 20-plus years of FM airplay on rock and oldies stations
is slim. ZZ Top also had heavy rotation on MTV throughout the 1980s,
with videos that created a vivid Tex Mex regional identity to differentiate
the group from its predecessors.
“La Grange,” like the rest of the group’s songs, draws the listeners into
a fantasmatic Southern/Texan past, male-identified and centered on young
women, old cars, and classic guitars. In addition to the specific musical qual-
ities of “La Grange,” its connotative work in recalling such vintage MTV
masculinities is especially apt for Harry Stamper, a man who likewise has
built his own reality in the middle of nowhere, with the South China Sea
currently his “home on the range.” Art direction supports this musical setting
as the rough-and-ready chaos of the oil rig is in contrast to the glossy newness
of NASA’s metallic blue and gray interiors. Both Harry’s rig, with its vintage
 The Power Chord Goes to War 107

industrial look (heavy on the grease and 1940s-era knickknacks), and the
brief visual sketch of the crew’s leisure time, with their horses and motorcy-
cles, small towns, and seedy bars in the American South and West, continue
the characterization begun with ZZ Top’s song about a whorehouse in a
small Texas town, in terms of nostalgically rendered regionalism and rural,
working-class masculinity. Significantly, the America that NASA seeks to
save is likewise imagined in similarly nostalgic terms—as if a world already
lost to the past (like the dinosaurs referenced in the film’s prologue) might
be returned by the roughnecks’ heroism. Aside from the opening scenes of
a meteor shower in New York City that, in a relatively brief sequence,
manages to make a number of races and ethnicities the butt of its jokes, the
images of the American population at risk are overwhelmingly white and
rural. In fact, it’s the roughnecks’ kind of place: a place where men who
work with their hands, little boys in overalls, and women in print dresses
listen to old-fashioned radios and head for the root cellar when trouble is
imminent.
Rock-infused Top Gun-style montage sequences are sidestepped by the
joking use of Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” as accompaniment to the bar-
rage of medical exams required of Harry’s crew, but they are embraced in
the sequence that uses Aerosmith’s 1975 hit “Sweet Emotion” to summa-
rize their introduction to astronauts and space-age technology. Following a
heavily processed opening bass riff, Stephen Tyler’s lead vocals are punctu-
ated with repeated power chords, cued to long shots of the jets where the
roughnecks undergo their first flight experience. While the formula of power
chords-plus-jets is intertextually linked to similar sequences in Top Gun, the
effect here is deliberately more comic than heroic, as Aerosmith’s hard rock
sound accompanies not images of virtuosity and control, ending with heroic
aviators lifted on the shoulders of their comrades, but instead a montage of
roughnecks losing their cool (and their lunches) and having to be carried
off the tarmac. But as the sequence and the song continue, we see
the roughnecks proving themselves equal to different types of technological
challenges in their particular area of expertise.
“Sweet Emotion,” like “La Grange,” is a song whose familiarity to a wide
range of audiences is guaranteed. It was Aerosmith’s first big top 40 hit and
the Boston-based band’s signature tune for 20 years. Like ZZ Top, Aeros-
mith, sometimes derided as a “poor-man’s Rolling Stones,” was a part of
that second generation that kept classic blues-based rock alive in the 1970s,
hitting a peak of popularity in 1976. Also like ZZ Top, Aerosmith gained expo-
sure on MTV and a new peak of popularity in the late 1980s. As a band
that—depending on one’s perspective—is either committed to or a parody of
rock music of the past, Aerosmith and its mid-1970s hit song are steeped in
nostalgia for rock masculinity. By including Aerosmith in the soundtrack
of Armageddon, the equation between rockers of the past and nostalgically
rendered roughnecks made explicit by the way that father-daughter relation-
ships resonate through music and narrative, Harry and Grace’s relationship
paralleling that of Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler and his real-life daughter.
108 The Power Chord Goes to War
This intertextual link is confirmed—and complicated—by the use of a new
song by Aerosmith, the power ballad “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” 57 A
song that introduced the band to a new generation of fans, it is their most suc-
cessful single ever, hitting number one in countries around the world. 58 Used
to narrate both Grace’s relationship with her father and with her lover, AJ,
Tyler’s impassioned vocals effectively highlight what Slavoj Žižek observes to
be a theme of father-daughter incest that Armageddon shares with the other
film of that year about a meteor threatening Earth, Deep Impact.59 The video
for the song emphasizes the intertextual father-daughter bond, as Tyler’s
face is superimposed/substituted for Willis’s in images from the scene where
Harry makes contact with NASA for the last time, saying his final good-bye
to his daughter before destroying himself and the meteorite. But by intercut-
ting close-ups of Tyler as he sings impassioned lyrics about watching his love
asleep, with images from Grace and AJ’s lovemaking, the video also heightens
our sense of the potentially incestuous duality of this song in its narrative
role. Thus when, in the conclusion of the video, Aerosmith’s live performance
appears engulfed by the blowback of an explosion, it’s not clear whether this
is a visual reference to Harry’s final sacrifice or his and AJ’s passion for Grace,
as it recalls Žižek’s assertion that the catastrophe in such films is “a blessing in
disguise, an intrusion that prevents another, true catastrophe.” 60
For all that the allusive work of I don’t Want to Miss a Thing” has the
potential to take the viewer far from the concerns of militainment, the video
doubling of Tyler and Willis also reminds us of the way in which the values
of rock rebellion persist in the film even when, in the second half, both
popular music and comedy drop out of the narrative. The rock score and
intertextual links to rock music of the past are keys to the characterization of
drillers as a different breed, hailing from a different era; as a result, they
are tougher, more pragmatic—and ultimately more resourceful—than the
military and NASA-trained professionals. Here, as in Top Gun, rebellion
is represented as being ultimately laudable (and fun), even though it is at
odds with military-style discipline. Astronauts—strong and brave, fit and
disciplined though they are—appear as mere functionaries by comparison to
the roughneck drillers who show themselves to be true heroes. Rock-infused
male rebellion—once again—saves the day.
As Claudia Springer points out, rebel iconography is “exceptionally
malleable and open to contradictory uses,” noting that

the twenty-first century U.S. military found a way to appropriate the

rebel stance in its war in Iraq, advertising its troops not as cogs in a
well-oiled fighting machine but as a collection of young ragtag individu-
alists engaged in rugged self-expression, a calculated move presumably
motivated by the desire to erase public awareness of soldiers’ boot-
camp conformity and regimentation ......... Right- and left-wing dissidents
converge in their reverence for the rebel icon, and when official orga-
nizations like the Defense Department join in, all sense of oppositional
value vanishes.61
 The Power Chord Goes to War 109

The negotiations of rock musical and military modes of masculinity enacted by

pop scores in films like Top Gun and Armageddon paved the way for the
American military to appropriate the “rebel stance” for the purposes of
marketing and recruitment.

MILITAINMENT AFTER 9/11: BLACK HAWK DOWN AND

THE GUITAR HERO IN UNCERTAIN TIMES

I think the Army wanted this film to be made, because, if it hadn’t been
made, there would be no closure for what occurred in 1993 for those
guys . . . . it became yesterday’s news very quickly, I think, except for the
guys who were involved and their buddies who died . . . . we made this
movie . . . out of respect to what occurred and out of respect for what
those guys do for us today.
—Ridley Scott62

We just lost the initiative.

—General Garrison, Black Hawk Down

Worlds away from the sci-fi action fantasy of Armageddon, Black Hawk
Down was based on an actual event, the costly attempt on the part of U.S.
Delta Forces and Army Rangers to capture Mogadishu warlord Moham-
med Farrah Aidid in 1993. Yet it too shows how the combination of male
heroism and rock rebellion popularized in Top Gun persists in the decades
following, adapted to the purposes of militainment in a new era of screen
combat. The specific aim of the film was to revise public perception of one
of the most notorious failures of the post-Cold War U.S. military—one that
Osama Bin Laden told the ABC in 1998 had persuaded him of the “weakness
of the American soldier.” 63
Bruckheimer—like Pentagon personnel who worked with director Ridley
Scott on the film’s script—saw the film as an opportunity to depict the oper-
ation from a military rather than a media standpoint, commenting to CNN
in 2002 that the mission in Somalia “was called a failure by the media. The
military doesn’t look at it that way. They went in to get two advisors to
warlord Mohamed Aidid. That was their mission. They accomplished their
mission. They killed a thousand of the enemy and brought back the two
warlords.”64 When questioned further about his commitment to patriotism
as a Hollywood producer, Bruckheimer replied, “I think it is a very difficult
time. We are at war. I would love to lift the spirits of our country, if we
possibly can. But it all comes down to the story, because an audience will
see through that kind of patriotic fervor unless it’s honest and true.” 65 In
bringing the story to the screen, Ridley Scott recalled an “almost
page by page” negotiation with the Pentagon, noting that they are “very,
very, very user-friendly . . . providing what you are actually trying to do is
represent the military in the right and proper light.” 66
110 The Power Chord Goes to War
The resulting film accomplishes its revisionist history to portray individ-
ual heroism in the context of catastrophic failure and transform a political
embarrassment—if not into a success, at least into a tragedy with its focus
on the fortitude of U.S. soldiers. In the way that it balances the necessity for
“the honest and true” against its mission to “represent the military in the
right and proper light,” the film exhibits some similarities with other, contem-
poraneous reality-based reenactments of military action of the past, most
notably Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), whose “tone,” as
Roger Stahl has observed, is “contradictory,” especially in the spectacular
opening sequence that depicts the landing on Omaha Beach: “The experi-
ence is couched in revulsion to the horrors of battle, but it is also a fantastic
thrill ride, an exercise in ‘playing soldier’ under the most exotic of circum-
stances.”67 In Black Hawk Down, as in Top Gun before it, the construction
of what Stahl terms the “experiential template”68 or sense of first-person
involvement, “being there” in battle—so important to the success of mili-
tainment—depends in part on the visceral and connotative power of the
film’s music. The score for the film, a complex world-music-inspired hybrid
by Hans Zimmer, is as densely layered as Ridley Scott’s visual represen-
tations, including in its action theme, for example, synthesized sounds of
machine gun fire, the slap-thud of helicopters combined with heavy electric
guitar. Other music the soundtrack includes are songs by international
boundary-crossing artists like Raz Mesinai and Rachid Taha, 69 as well as
popular songs that locate American soldiers in their cultural space and time,
from vintage Elvis and Jimi Hendrix to the 1993 hit by Stone Temple Pilots,
“Creep.”
The soundtrack supports the ends of militainment by drawing on the
audiovisual heroism of the past, including previous films associated with
Bruckheimer, Scott, and Zimmer. For instance, the lament “Gortoz a ran/I’m
Waiting,” composed by Lisa Gerrard and sung in Breton by Gerrard with
Denes Prigent, forges a connection between the depiction of heroism in Black
Hawk Down and that in previous Ridley Scott-Hans Zimmer collaboration
Gladiator (2000), owing to Gerrard’s similarly Celtic-themed compositions
for the earlier film.70 But the film also revisits the “guitar-hero” trope of
Bruckheimer’s previous action films. Fifteen years after Top Gun first rocked
the soundtrack of war and action genres, the power chords of Rachid Taha’s
“Barra Barra” and the virtuosic guitar of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 1984 cover of
Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile—Slight Return” serve as musical shorthand
for the gung ho attitude of a group of young soldiers barely characterized
in any other way, the sounds of guitar-driven rock once again carrying con-
notations of technologized power.
But, just as the film itself balances thrills of combat against revulsion at its
cost in lives, those songs that enliven images of young soldiers at work, rest,
and in preparation for combat also allude to the darker side of a story about
American soldiers in the wrong place at the wrong time—and utilizing the
wrong technology.71 The Elvis songs used diegetically, “Suspicious Minds”
 The Power Chord Goes to War 111

and “Devil in Disguise,” 72 offer not too subtle hints of what awaits the elite
U.S. forces in a mission they assume will be a brief and straightforward
exercise in the superiority of U.S. firepower. And when Todd Blackburn
(Orlando Bloom), after signing in with the base clerk, says, “I’m gonna kick
some ass,” the assertion is punctuated by nondiegetic guitar chords that
remind us he’s just the right age to have grown up watching Top Gun.
But French Algerian Rachid Taha’s “Barra Barra,” whose metallic groove
continues as an underscore when Blackburn is escorted to the firing range
to meet his commanding officer, is not a guitar-driven anthem for U.S. ass
kicking, even if that is what it seems initially. Sung in Arabic, the song is
dominated by the clash of punk-style power chords against the sound of
Middle Eastern acoustic instruments. It carries a lyrical sting in its tail, at
least for the militarized context of Black Hawk Down (even if many in the
English-speaking audience would not recognize it), offering a challenge to
U.S. military intervention with its anticolonial tone and harsh descriptions
of the waste brought by war. 73
Blackburn’s enthusiasm is echoed by the soldier who reassures the clerk,
Grimes (Ewan McGregor), about the combat to come, saying that “it might
even be fun.” Vaughan’s “Voodoo Chile—Slight Return”74 seems to confirm
this optimism in the way that it narrates the launch of the mission. Hummers
line up and move out, and Black Hawks lift into the sky, carrying along the audi-
ence thanks to the way they move in time with Vaughan’s rhythmic guitar
accented by wah pedal. When we see tables and glasses that appear to shiver
in the reverb from both the helicopters and guitar, it recalls Top Gun-style
metaphoric exchanges between music and machine. Cross-cutting to the
Bakara markets, a network of small boys is acknowledged with a friendly
wave from U.S. soldiers as they fly over, seemingly borne aloft by the non-
diegetic music as well as their high spirits. But these boys alert Aidid’s men
to the approach of the helicopters. At this point, Vaughan’s solo abruptly
gives way to the much harsher guitar of Zimmer’s action theme, “Chant,”
identified with Aidid’s militia. With the change of music, the tone of the
mission changes as well. Like “Barra Barra,” Zimmer’s action theme con-
trasts acoustic instrumentation with electric guitar. But the guitar chords in
“Chant,” chunky and palm-muted,75 their technologized sound powerful
but deadened, have (literally) a different resonance from the punk-inspired
power chords of “Barra Barra.” The response to this is silence. Cutting back
to the airborne Black Hawks as they approach the market, the guitar noise
of “Chant” is swallowed up; even the helicopter noise is reduced to muffled
thuds. In contrast to the clash of two very different guitar-driven themes, this
near-silence is more ominous still, as if the film itself were holding its breath.
In this scene preceding combat in the market, that increasingly chaotic
battle that will take up the final three-quarters of the film, what begins as a
conventionally uplifting rock-driven audiovisual representation of the U.S.
military is transformed into a portent of defeat, expressed both in terms
of the clash between the two different guitar themes and likewise in terms of
112 The Power Chord Goes to War
this scene’s construction of race. “Voodoo Chile—Slight Return” was, when
Hendrix composed it, a “statement of black identity,” its lyrics, as Steve
Waksman points out, “masculine braggadocio framed by mysticism and
black magic.”76 Vaughan’s cover of Hendrix recalls the complex relation of
white blues-based rock to black music and musicians, centering on the rela-
tion between race and masculinity, power, pleasure, and authenticity in ways
that resonate through the physical and musical performances of white guitar
heroes. Like the music of ZZ Top and Aerosmith, Vaughan’s music is shot
through with nostalgia, looking back to 1960s music to construct Southern
rock masculinity on the basis of the authenticity it lends. As the music is
used to narrate the soldiers’ excitement at the prospect of battle, Hendrix’s
special relation with his guitar—those sexually virtuosic performances that
are the primal scene of cock rock—is recalled in the image of a young soldier
who dreamily caresses his gun as the sound of Vaughan’s guitar carries the
helicopter into combat.
While Vaughan’s cover of Hendrix is used at the beginning of this scene
to convey the excitement—the erotics, even—of anticipated combat, its role
changes at the moment the position of the U.S. soldiers is betrayed. At the
moment we see the two Somali boys alert the militia, the words “voodoo
chile” sung by Vaughan no longer refer to the supernaturally empowered
guitarist who sends helicopters into the sky with his soaring psychedelic
blues. Instead, the complex intertextual allusions—about masculinity, rock,
pleasure, and power (and even gifted Texan guitarists who die young in
helicopter crashes)—give way to the simplified logic of what Frantz Fanon
calls “epidermalization.” 77 The young Somali boys signify at this moment
blackness from which all culture and individuality have been removed. This
image of blackness-as-enemy will structure the combat that follows between
Somalis and the mostly white forces of the U.S. military. As Elvis Mitchell
observes in his review of Black Hawk Down, “the lack of characterization
converts the Somalis into a pack of snarling dark-skinned beasts, glee-
fully pulling the Americans from their downed aircraft and stripping them.
Intended or not, it reeks of glumly staged racism.” 78
Thus, the popular music used in Black Hawk Down links it intertex-
tually to previous representations of heroism and the U.S. military. Yet it
also foreshadows in various ways the losses that U.S. forces will suffer. And
it does so in terms that empty the battle of specific political meaning, by
demonizing and simplifying the enemy, by making the battle into a contest
between the mostly white and the overwhelmingly black and by suggesting
(by way of Elvis playing in the background) that the ill-fated mission was,
in fact, a trap for unwary soldiers. In this way, music supports the depoliti-
cization of war, a theme broached within the film’s dialogue; when seasoned
soldier Hoot (Eric Bana) says, when asked whether he thinks the U.S. should
be in Somalia: “Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that
shit just goes right out the window.” Later, he more fully summarizes his view
of war: “When I go home people’ll ask me, ‘Hey Hoot, why do you do it man?
 The Power Chord Goes to War 113

What, you some kinda war junkie?’ You know what I’ll say? I won’t say a
goddamn word. Why? They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we
do it. They won’t understand that it’s about the men next to you, and that’s
it. That’s all it is.”

CONCLUSION

The sound of rock guitar is an important signifier of the Bruckheimer brand

as it developed in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time that pop scores
create opportunities for cross-marketing synergies in the MTV era, guitar-
driven rock has aesthetic and ideological work to do for action cinema,
especially the war film, thanks to its connotations of empowerment, of
performative masculinity mediated through technological virtuosity. Scores
featuring rock guitar anchor representations of war in pop musical construc-
tions of masculinity, creating a new audiovisual identity for the U.S. military,
an asset in the era of an all-volunteer fighting force. Recruitment materials
from the 1980s onward show the influence of this combination of rock
masculinity and militarism—evident, for instance, in the 2008 video by Kid
Rock, “Warrior,” which addresses itself to the citizen soldiers of the
National Guard, an increasingly important part of U.S. forces during the Iraq
War.
Although musically “Warrior” has a good deal in common with the
Southern rock used in Armageddon and Black Hawk Down—with power
chords marking key moments of technological display—this is not to say
that the meanings carried by such musical constructions of militarized
masculinities do not change over time. After the attacks of September 11,
Columbia Pictures rushed to get Black Hawk Down into cinemas ahead of
schedule. Although the film had been in production long before the attacks,
its representations of war—its account of the experiences of soldiers who
fight not to win but merely to survive in circumstances beyond their control
or understanding—seemed to speak to Americans in a new era. As Neil
Gabler puts it, “Americans are no longer distrustful of authority and no
longer doubt the cause. Rather we trust in each other and see the cause
as us.”79 Deliberately ambiguous in regard to its larger political purpose
beyond affirming the heroism of the individual soldier in the face of defeat,
Black Hawk Down created heroes for a new era of combat. And, like the
heroes of previous Bruckheimer productions, they were characterized, in
part, by rock music on screen. But whereas Top Gun and even Armaged-
don offer assurances of military triumph, the rock musical constructions
of Black Hawk Down alert the audience to the hopes and expectations of
young soldiers only to show how, in the course of battle, these are traded
for much grimmer realities. Musical references to earlier fantasies like Top
Gun and Armageddon are musical markers of hopes not fulfilled in Black-
hawk Down. These support the film’s representation of courage in the face
Proof
of defeat, but also suggest unfinished business. Blackhawk Down’s is the
114 The Power Chord Goes to War
soundtrack for America’s continuing war on terror, some of whose rhetorical
strategies are forecast by the film’s music-driven racism.

NOTES

1. Quoted in Cagle, “Pearl Harbor’s Top Gun.”

2. Denisoff and Plasketes, “Synergy in 1980s Film and Music,” 257. Denisoff and
Plasketes, offering an account of the many failures of synergy, conclude that it
is more myth than a guarantee of success—despite the fact that such practices
of cross-promotion are firmly established in contemporary Hollywood.
3. Flashdance was the third highest grossing film of the year; the soundtrack album
won a Grammy and went 6-times platinum. Beverly Hills Cop (1984) was the
number one box office hit of the year, taking $316 million box office
worldwide; its soundtrack album won an Academy Award and went double
platinum. Top Gun was number one box office hit of the year; the single “Take
My Breath Away,” composed by Giorgio Moroder and performed by Berlin,
won an Academy Award, and “Top Gun Anthem” performed by Steve Stevens
won a Grammy for best instrumental performance; the soundtrack album
ultimately went 9-times platinum. Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA) database.
4. Armstrong, “Jerry Bruckheimer,” New York Times http://movies.nytimes.com/
person/83309/Jerry-Bruckheimer/biography.
5. Quoted in Stein, “Jerry Bruckheimer: TV’s Top Gun.”
6. James M. Welsh says of the Bruckheimer film: “Such pictures require compe-
tent directors capable of harnessing nervous intensity, such as Tony Scott or
Michael Bay, who helmed Armageddon, but not necessarily auteurs, since the
producer is calling the shots.” James Welsh, “Action Films,” 166.
7. Ibid.
8. Puig, “The Bruckheimer Touch,” D1.
9. The franchise is comprised of CSI (2000-present), CSI: Miami (2002-2012),
and CSI: New York (2004-2013). The newest spinoff of the series is CSI:
Cyber, beginning in the 2014/15 season.
10. Quoted in Cohan, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 8.
11. CSI uses the title track of their 1978 album, “Who Are You”; the CSI: Miami
theme is “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and CSI: New York uses “Baba O’Riley,”
both from the 1971 album, Who’s Next. For CSI: Cyber the theme will be,
predictably enough, “I Can See For Miles” from the 1967 album, The Who
Sell Out.
12. Grossberg, “Cinema, Postmodernity, and Authenticity,” 85.
13. Ibid., 89.
14. Denby, “Pop Gun,” 102.
15. See Jeffords, Hard Bodies and The Remasculinization of America.
16. See, for example, Holmlund, “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade,” in
Screening the Male, and Tasker, “The Body in Crisis or the Body Triumphant?”
in Spectacular Bodies.
17. Studlar and Desser, “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” 110.
18. Denby, “Pop Gun,” 102.
19. Discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume.
20. See Basinger, World War II Combat Film, 27.
21. Also Good Guys Wear Black (1978), Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in
Action (1984), and Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985).
22. Lawrence Suid sees Top Gun as a key text for the “rehabilitation” of the armed
forces’ image after Vietnam. See Suid, Guts and Glory.
 The Power Chord Goes to War 115

23. For a discussion of masculinity and war technology in relation to the Gulf
War and “kicking the Vietnam syndrome,” see Wiegman, “Missiles and Melo-
drama,” 171-181.
24. And not just cinematic entertainment: Music video game distributor Activi-
sion celebrated Fourth of July 2008 by offering the “Top Gun Anthem” as
free downloadable content for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Ongoing
multimedia marketing of Top Gun has given its soundtrack an extended life.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the soundtrack
album, which achieved 4-times platinum in 1987, continued to sell for more than
a decade, achieving 9-times platinum in 2000
(www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata. php?content_selector=gold-platinum-
searchable-database).
25. McClary and Walser, “‘Start Making Sense!’” 287.
26. Quoted in Kot, “A Modest Hot-shot.”
27. Top Gun had its New York film premiere on May 12, opening in the rest of
the U.S. May 16. According to Denisoff and Plasketes, Kenny Loggin’s
“Danger Zone” appeared on the charts at number 85 on May 10. Denisoff and
Plasketes, “Synergy,” 263.
28. Ibid.
29. Review of Top Gun.
30. Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, 150-151.
31. Written and composed by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock, “Danger
Zone” made it to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
32. As Robert Walser points out, when a power chord is played on an electric guitar,
what you get is more than just two notes, as a result of distortion and volume that
affect timbre and “presence” of the sound. Moreover, the power chord carries
with it specific music cultural connotations: “. . . the power chord is used by all
of the bands that are ever called heavy metal and, until heavy metal’s enormous
influence on other musical genres in the late 1980s, by comparatively few musi-
cians outside the genre . . . . It is at once the musical basis of heavy metal and an
apt metaphor for it, for musical articulation of power is the most important single
factor in the experience of heavy metal.” Walser, Running with the Devil, 2.
33. For an account of this history, see Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire.
34. Ennis, The Seventh Stream, 250.
35. Waksman, Instruments of Desire, 188-189, 247.
36. See the often cited essay, Dyer, “Don’t Look Now.”
37. Walser, Running with the Devil, 119.
38. MSIs are those sonic “details that cause us to ‘feel’ the material conditions of
the sound source, and refer to the concrete process of the sound’s production.”
Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, 114.
39. The video for the “Top Gun Anthem,” despite its minimalism, confirms the
connection between guitar and jet. As required by MTV, Stevens plays guitar in
the video, his performance intercut with images from the film. Hair vast, guitar
unplugged, he is dressed in a silver jumpsuit coordinated with the metal skin of
the plane that shares his hangar stage.
40. In the original script, Maverick’s sidekick Goose dies in a midair collision, but
the Navy complained that too many pilots were crashing in the film. Lamar,
“The Pentagon Goes Hollywood,” 30.
41. Written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock and performed by the band
Berlin, it won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, reached number one
on Billboard’s Hot 100 and spent four weeks at number one in the UK.
42. Coates, “(R)evolution Now?” 53.
43. Robb, Operation Hollywood, 182.
44. Suid, Guts and Glory, 502.
45. Ibid., 555.
116 The Power Chord Goes to War
46. Stahl, Militainment, 3.
47. For more on this, see Dwinell, “Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since
9/11,” and Brown, Enlisting Masculinity.
48. Suid, Guts and Glory, 502.
49. Ibid., 594.
50. Quoted in Stahl, Militainment, 96.
51. The Oscar-winning film dealt with the rough-and-ready characters who popu-
lated Tom Wolfe’s book about the early days of the U.S. space program.
52. Ebert, Armageddon.
53. Krin Gabbard observes that “the politics of Armageddon are far to the right,
even for a Hollywood blockbuster,” noting how it expresses mistrust of insti-
tutions, favoring instead “[i]ndividual solutions by charismatic loner heroes.”
Gabbard, “Movies, Dying Fathers, and a Few Survivors,” 220.
54. Quoted in Suid, Guts and Glory, 495.
55. A film that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone designed specifically
to be a spoof of the “Bruckheimer film.” See Parker and Stone, “Commentary.”
56. In particular, the opening of “La Grange” bears a strong resemblance to the
lick used by Hooker in his “Boogie Chillen,” an electric blues hit of 1949.
57. Released in August, a month after the opening of Armageddon, the song stayed
at number one for four weeks in September 1998.
58. The song hit number one in Australia, Austria, Germany, Holland, Ireland,
Italy, Norway, and Switzerland.
59. Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space,” 166.
60. Ibid.
61. Springer, James Dean Transfigured, 45-46.
62. Bruckheimer, Scott, and Bowden, Interview.
63. Bin Laden, Interview.
64. Bruckheimer, Scott, Bowden, Interview.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Stahl, Militainment, 4.
68. Stahl, Militainment, 4.
69. Raz Mesinai is a Jerusalem-born composer known for hybrid Middle Eastern
and Dub compositions influenced by the music of New York’s hip-hop scene of
the 1980s, produced under the name Badawai. “Tall King Dub,” from the 1998
LP Jerusalem Under Fire, is used in the scene when gunrunner Atto (George
Harris) is picked up by soldiers in the Delta unit. For more on Badawai, see
Moskowitz, Caribbean Popular Music, 19. Rachid Taha is a French Algerian
singer/composer who mixes styles such as rock, techno, punk, and raï.
70. Black Hawk Down was the fourth Bruckheimer-produced film Zimmer had
scored and his fifth film with director Ridley Scott.
71. Poor choices on the part of the military leadership are alluded to in the film.
Former East Africa correspondent for the UK newspaper, the Daily
Telegraph, enumerates these in greater detail in his review of the film, noting
the reuse of “exactly the same tactical template in six snatch attempts,” so that
the militia could easily prepare their defenses and the vulnerability of both
low-flying helicopters and open-backed Humvees, which together made
American forces “ripe for ambush.” Peterson, “Black Hawk Down.”
72. “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” of 1963 was Elvis’s last top 10 single on the
R&B charts, and “Suspicious Minds” of 1969 was his last number one hit.
73. Taha gave Scott permission to use his song “Barra Barra/Outside” from his
2000 album Made in Madina in Blackhawk Down, but was unhappy with the
 The Power Chord Goes to War 117

film, which he considered “propaganda.” Quoted in Swedenburg, “The ‘Arab

Wave’ in World Music after 9/11,” 185. For a translation and discussion of the
lyrics of “Barra Barra,” see arabicmusictranslation.com.
74. From Vaughan’s album, Can’t Stand the Weather.
75. Palm muting deepens the sound of power chords and shortens their sustain,
giving a heavier, harsher sound.
76. Waksman, Instruments, 186, 184.
77. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xv.
78. Mitchell, “Mission of Mercy Goes Bad in Africa.”
79. Gabler, “Ideas and Trends.”

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goes-bad-in-africa.html (accessed September 25, 2014).
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5 Queering the Road Movie
Soundtrack
Gregg Araki’s The Living End

I realize that my work is bound to be marginalized. Not just because of

the queerness of the subject matter, but because of the whole punk thing,
which probably much more than being gay or Asian is the biggest
cultural influence on me.
—Gregg Araki1

Like Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets, independent filmmaker Gregg Araki

is known for scoring his films from his personal music collection. In his
breakthrough production of 1992, The Living End, he makes use of the
sort of post-punk music that will later lend its “aggressive grind” to his
“teenage apocalypse” trilogy of the 1990s:2 Totally F***ed Up (1993),
Nowhere (1997), and The Doom Generation (1995). Whereas these films
depict teen struggle in an oppressive and irrational world, The Living End
creates a similarly dystopic milieu to critique governmental mismanagement
of the AIDS crisis and imagine an alternative to mainstream representa-
tions of homosexuality in the AIDS era. Individual songs used in the film
might variously be described as industrial rock, industrial dance, electro-
industrial, industrial metal, techno, synthpop, electronic body music, ambient,
or dark wave. In addition to music by local LA bands Babyland, Drance,
and Braindead Soundmachine, the soundtrack gives significant space to
musical groups and performers descended from or related to the industrial/
experimental band Throbbing Gristle: Psychic TV, Fred, Chris & Cosey,
and Coil. Like the German industrial band KMFDM, which began in Ham-
burg as a “performance art project” in 1984, Throbbing Gristle grew out of
visual arts practice and became known for its punitive (or as one reviewer
put it, “character building”)3 experiments in noise and confrontational multi-
media performances. As the 1976 press release for its anti-music, produced
and released on its own label, Industrial Records, made clear in its descrip-
tion, “film music to cover the holocaust,” 4 the group was committed to
sharing a dystopian vision of the world, through which it aimed to awaken
the social conscience of its listeners. As part of its address to how The Living
End queers gay screen representation while engaging with the political con-
texts of its time, this discussion focuses on the way that the aesthetics, aims,
values, and beliefs associated with industrial music pervade Araki’s film. 5
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 121

Like punk, the aim of industrial music—and its related art movements—
was to disturb and shock. Unlike punk, industrial music emphasized noise
experiments (tape loops, sampling, white noise, spoken word performance)
calculated to resist commercial co-optation of the sort experienced by punk in
the 1970s, while communicating a critical view of the world that
industrialization created. As Daphne Carr sums it up,
industrial musicians embrace the technologies of management, the
sounds of the shop floor . . . in their critique of power. Their cut-
ups, sputtering drum machines, and shreds of harsh noise are the ugly
mirrors of pop music’s technological wonderland, while their lyrics
literalize the horror of humans being treated as dead machines in pop-
Marxist language and production styles that robotize the voice . . . .
[I]ndustrial posits a central theme: dystopia is already around us, if
only we were awake enough to see it. The music becomes a way for
its listeners to stay sharp, to hear and feel not sorrow for the betrayals
that have led to their lost way of life but to see causes, feel rage, and
be moved to resistance.6

In its substitution of rage for sorrow, its commitment to a dystopian vision of

modernity, and its embrace of a “post-holocaust” morality that leaves no
room for “false politeness,” 7 industrial music inflects the emotional tone,
aesthetic priorities, and general worldview of The Living End.
Made at a time when anger in the gay community was high, sparked
by the slow governmental response to the epidemic and increased anti-
homosexual violence in the streets, the film became, rather to Araki’s
surprise, an international success as well as a source of controversy. In its
opening weekend in August 1992, it grossed $43,715 in two theaters in New
York and Chicago,8 and in its first two weeks grossed five times its
production costs.9 Dismissed entirely by a few reviewers (“a misfire of a black
comedy guaranteed to offend”) 10, it was criticized even by some of its
supporters for its low (“harrowingly amateurish”) 11 production values,
“precious post-modern imagery,”12 and its “tiresomely nihilistic self-
indulgence.”13 Araki himself recollected years later, with a mix of pride and
disbelief, the controversy its representations of HIV-positive lovers on the
run sparked amongst its audience even to the point, rumor had it, of igniting
fistfights in LA bars.14 The Living End divided viewers in the gay, lesbian, and
bisexual communities for its camp depiction of serial-killing lesbians in the
same year that the ice pick-wielding bisexuals of Basic Instinct (1992)
prompted widespread protests. But the main focus of its contested status
was the attitude of its protagonists toward the AIDS plague and their own
HIV status, “not as a death sentence, but as something that could set them
free.”15 In The Living End, Araki draws on criminal-couples-on-the-run
movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy (1950) as inspiration, films
“where outlaw couples were on the run in a universe that’s crazy and hostile
and trying to destroy them.”16 The film’s tagline, “An irresponsible film by
122 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
Gregg Araki,” refers to Robin Wood’s discussion of Howard Hawks’ Bringing
Up Baby (1938). As Araki explains, “That movie is a screwball comedy . . .
but the structure of it is kind of the same as The Living End in that it was
about this spirited, free-willed character who frees this repressed, more normal-
life character.”17 In addition to the inspiration it draws from film genres of the
past for its tale of two HIV-positive men who take to the road, the qualities
of anger and aggression, irony and crazy comedy that distinguish The Living
End from mainstream Hollywood representations of people with AIDS are
differences that Araki himself identifies with “the whole punk thing.”
Toward the end of the film, Jon (Craig Gilmore) is determined to seek
the safety of home—personified in his long-suffering female friend Darcy
(Darcy Marta), who puts her life on hold to wait for and worry about Jon
full-time. Jon pulls over to have it out with an increasingly violent and out-
of-control Luke (Mike Dytri); as Jon paces and fumes, Luke deliberately
cuts open his arm. Jon finds him slumped next to the car, transfixed by the
sight of his own blood. There is no sign of contagion, any more than there
is in his external appearance: “It’s just blood.” In contrast to AIDS films
like Longtime Companion (1990) which track the decline following diagno-
sis with inexorable speed, the main signifiers of the seropositive status in
Araki’s protagonists are rage, sorrow, and confusion. As Michael Cunning-
ham observes, in a piece for the New York Times on gay art after the advent
of AIDS:

Gay anger isn’t new. Gay sorrow isn’t either. Both were burgeoning
well before AIDS announced itself. But if gay emotions feel especially
sharp these days, it may be because until relatively recently, many of us
tended to tell ourselves we were provisional members of the status quo.
Unlike most other groups that live on the margins, white gay men can
pass . . . . AIDS has changed everything, and not only because it’s invad-
ing our bodies. AIDS has also torn the wrapper off this country’s hatred
of homosexuals.18

In The Living End, music from the industrial rock of KMFDM to the
ambient electronica of Coil narrates these emotional responses and social
contexts. The “sonic belligerence” of industrial music is an aural signifier
that,19 LA sunshine and palm trees notwithstanding, Luke and Jon are living
in a dystopian reality, where governmental neglect has contributed to the
depredations AIDS visits on American communities. Used in combination
with an array of antirealist strategies in mise en scène and cinematography,
these musical choices deconstruct and reinvent everyday reality in terms of
the felt experience of gay men under siege. As UK director Derek Jarman
drily remarks in an open letter to Araki published in The Guardian, “Los
Angeles doesn’t appear as it does in the glossies.” 20
In the way that it speaks of alienation and anger, music is central to the
film’s address to “a generation tired of rehearsing safe sex practices like a
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 123

flight attendant demonstrating safety procedures before takeoff.” 21 Its Hol-

lywood predecessor, Longtime Companion (a groundbreaking film in its
own right), focuses on gay protagonists who form a community inspired to
embrace political activism as a consequence of their experience of AIDS. By
contrast, Araki’s characters are confused and self-absorbed, self-destructive
and directionless in the face of the epidemic and their own diagnoses. And
yet, even though the film’s characters are self-indulgent, the film itself—in
no small part because of the way it taps into the anger and sorrow of the
protagonists and links these to industrial music’s noisy investment in critical
dystopias—is closely aligned with the political concerns of the moment, con-
cerns consolidated, for example, in the Queer Nation Manifesto of 1990.

“BEING GAY FELT LIKE A POLITICAL ACT IN ITSELF”:

AIDS, ANGER, AND NEW QUEER CINEMA

Remastering The Living End—due to be released properly on DVD

for the first time in 2007—reminded me of how this little renegade
movie . . . captured something about being gay and being unapologetic
about it at a time in history when it was dangerous to do so. . . . the
whole “queer new wave” hoopla was the byproduct of the cultural
zeitgeist of the late 1980s and early ’90s—the same sociocultural cli-
mate that bred ACT UP, Queer Nation . . . and so on. . . . it came from
a very real and very specific time and place and mood, where being gay
felt like a political act in itself.
—Gregg Araki22

They bash us and stab us and shoot us and bomb us in ever increasing
numbers and still we freak out when angry queers carry banners or signs
that say bash BACK. For the last decade they let us die in droves and still
we thank President Bush for planting a fucking tree, applaud him for
likening PWAs to car accident victims who refuse to wear seatbelts. LET
YOURSELF BE ANGRY. Let yourself be angry that the price of our
visibility is the constant threat of violence, anti-queer violence to which
practically every segment of this society contributes. Let yourself feel
angry that THERE IS NO PLACE IN THIS COUNTRY WHERE WE
ARE SAFE.
—Queer Nation Manifesto 199023

Writing in the Advocate about The Living End upon the occasion of its
DVD release in 2008, Alonso Duralde muses that, “enough time has passed
to make The Living End almost a historical document of a specific time and
place in queer history.” 24 Specifically, The Living End was one of the films
that ushered in the New Queer Cinema, making 1992 “a watershed year”
for gay and lesbian film. 25 Shot for $20,000, a small budget even for an inde-
pendent film in the early 1990s, it was product of what Araki himself calls a
124 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
“guerilla” filmmaking effort, made with a minimal crew on found locations.
It was one of a number of films showcased at Sundance, where a panel on
queer filmmaking, Barbed Wire Kisses, hosted by B. Ruby Rich, discussed
the significance of The Living End, as well as Derek Jarman’s Edward VII
(1991), Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times (1991), Tom Kalin’s
Swoon (1992), and Laurie Lynd’s R.S.V.P. (1991). Without being the same,
the films share concerns, most notably a desire to respond to previous screen
representations of homosexuality, using aspects of “appropriation and pas-
tiche” to create what Rich summarizes as “Homo Pomo.” 26 Chief among the
appropriations of this New Queer Cinema is the image of gays and lesbians
themselves, increasingly dominated in mainstream cinema by assimilationist
perspectives, representations that emphasize the “kindness and harmless -
ness of gay people.”27
This assimilationist trend began with the 20th Century Fox film, Making
Love (1982), whose gay lovers are as “spruce and foursquare as two senior
class presidents.”28 Similarly, Longtime Companion, scripted by gay play-
wright Craig Lucas, funded by PBS’s American Playhouse, and distributed
by indiewood company Samuel Goldwyn Co., continued this trend as the
first feature film about AIDS and its impact on gay life to reach a mainstream
audience. In its portrait of AIDS’ impact on homosexual communities of
Manhattan and Fire Island, it tracks the experiences of seven men over the
years 1981-1989, who are surprised, challenged, saddened, terrorized,
and ultimately politicized by the AIDS crisis. With the aim to “console,
instruct and inspire,” the film creates exemplary images of gay men before
and during the epidemic, offering, as David Denby observes, the “lesson . . .
that AIDS improves everyone’s character.” 29
By contrast, The Living End, like other films of New Queer Cinema,
reflects the fury fueled by AIDS. In its combination of black humor and
cultural critique, it reflects not just Araki’s punk/industrial art aesthetic
but likewise the influence of organizations like ACT UP (the AIDS Coali-
tion to Unleash Power), which made activism a part of the political lives
of homosexual, bisexual, and transgender American communities from the
mid-1980s onward. A movement founded by playwright Larry Kramer,
ACT UP offered theatrical performances that confronted its “audiences.”
Demonstrations were aimed in the first instance against the profiteering
of pharmaceutical companies and against the government’s lack of AIDS-
focused policies. Performances such as “die-ins and political funerals”
highlighted the “decidedly queer wit” of ACT UP. 30 In 1990, Queer
Nation was founded by the activists of ACT UP in response to antigay and
lesbian violence on the streets, with the specific aim to “make every space a
Lesbian and Gay space . . . every street a part of our sexual geography.” 31
In doing so, it was less concerned with blending into or gaining acceptance
from the mainstream than with collective and coordinated response to street
violence and challenges to oppressive norms. This queering of public space,
based on a critical view of contemporary American culture, is clearly an
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 125

influence on Araki’s audiovisual construction of Jon and Luke’s world in

The Living End.
In the way that the film engages with the anger voiced by Queer Nation
and challenges the heteronormativity of public spaces—the open road as
well as Hollywood film genres—it confirms what Steve Cohan and Ina Rae
Hark observe in the introduction of The Road Movie Book, that road mov-
ies “tend to come in periods of upheaval and dislocation . . . or in periods
whose dominant ideologies generate fantasies of escape and opposition.”32
Its project of queering the musical conventions of both the road movie and
mainstream representations of gay masculinity commences with the sound
of KMFDM,33 combined with the rattle of Luke’s spray paint can. Luke’s
graffiti, “Fuck the World,” sprayed in red on concrete is just the latest layer
on a palimpsest of public commentary. Similarly, KMFDM’s sound is con-
stituted by varied strata of cultural noise, the song “Godlike” made from
samples of political rallies, pop songs, heavy metal songs, all piled on top of
a nonstop dance rhythm, the band’s characteristic “deep Teutonic post-PiL
dub.”34 Layered over this tumult of sound, its lyrics are as clear and to the
point as Luke’s painted sentiment, intoned by Sascha Konietzko in a robotic
voice that one music review of 1991 described as “demonically possessed,
belching bullfrogs”:35 “I’ll pray and pray that your country undergoes
recovery.” But as popular music studies make clear, no music’s meaning is
contained in its lyrics, and this is especially true of the industrial genre with
its layered agglomerations of found sound and machine-generated discord,
its investment in the so-called cut-up, a means of disrupting the status quo
but also revealing hidden meanings through unexpected juxtapositions. 36
As S. Alexander Reed points out, due to “its propensity to cut up culture
and make meaning anew, industrial music is best understood in relation
to people, politics, technology, and other music . . . echoes . . . reverberate
between industrial music and totalitarianism, war, punk rock, performance
art, techno, and technology.”37 “Godlike” musically highlights key features
of Araki’s film, a film that like the song itself, is violent, crude, angry, and
fun. Both film and music make their point in part by the way they quote,
reference, and overwrite other, previous representations.
In terms of the “echoes” the song “Godlike” sets up with other music,
its inclusion of a heavy metal guitar riff (copied from Slayer’s “Angel of
Death”) is the first example of how Luke’s character will be constructed in
terms of the punk/rock end of industrial music, an echo of, among other
things, earlier, rock-themed road movies. Combined with his tendency to
act, and to act out, the musical narration of Luke works to gender his char-
acter in some fairly conventional ways. As a surly, black-leather-jacketed
image of gay male fantasy musically associated with industrial echoes of
rock music history, Luke evokes myriad associations of the rebel male. In
fact, as ready as he is to use his gun, fists, or blunt objects on attackers,
hard-bodied and hardheaded Luke is in many ways a very conventional,
action-oriented example of screen masculinity. He is the vehicle for a wish
126 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
fulfillment fantasy of street-level retaliation against homophobia when he
uses his gun on three gay bashers with baseball bats (“Prepare to swallow
your teeth, faggot”) or uses his new boombox to bash in the head of a neo-
Nazi who taunts him and Jon on the street (“Know what AIDS stands for?
Adios, infected dick suckers”). In the latter scenario, the “independent elec-
tronic junk punk” sound of Babyland—a Los Angeles band known for its use
of found objects in lieu of conventional instrumentation in performance (the
drummer keeps the beat banging on empty oil cans and other industrial rub-
bish with a screwdriver and file in lieu of drum kit and sticks)—accompanies
Luke’s own violent bricolage, his use of a found blunt object (boombox-as-
weapon) to express his anger against their attacker. Babyland’s “Mask,”
an “adrenalin-fueled sample orgy,”38 layers between raw punk-style vocals
multiple TV, film, and pop music clips, including cries that sound like sirens
and sirens that sound like cries. Sampled dialogue (“Take your hands off
me you son of a bitch!”) takes the place of verbal commentary from Luke.
Luke, meanwhile, demonstrates his fluency in physical violence, expressing
the anger that Jon turns inward in self-blame.

ROCKING AND ROLLING: MUSIC, MASCULINITY, AND

THE ROAD MOVIE
A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.
—Easy Rider tagline

Although Luke is constructed as conventionally masculine in his willing -

ness to act (to move, to run, to fight), before he meets Jon, he drifts from
place to place (a fugitive, as many have noted, from gay porn). We see him
wandering—and waiting—in the interstices of public space, parking lots
and roadsides, leaving traces of himself in the form of graffitied social com-
mentary. Hustler, hitchhiker, and striking male beauty, he is armed and
dangerous, and, when his muscular body is tightly framed in low-angle shots
against the sky, he appears as monumental as any big screen action hero, a
visual echo not just of gay porn but of 1980s blockbuster cinema bodies as
well. He lives in a violent world, always at risk. Isolated both socially
and cinematically (often framed in such a way that he recalls the uncredited
subject of Andy Warhol’s Blowjob [1963], whose image we see on a poster
in Jon’s apartment), he is always available—and vulnerable—to what hap-
pens or appears to happen in off-screen space. In this way he personifies
the Queer Nation statement that, “There is no place in this country where
we are safe.” The second shot of the film offers a low-angle image of Luke,
nodding in satisfaction at his spray-painted handiwork as the metal machine
noise of KMFDM blares through his headphones. Having made his point
concerning the world (and his attitude toward it), he spins, winding up to
pitch his paint can into the sky and over Los Angeles, watching it arc over a
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 127

miniature cityscape laid out below the hillside. And in a manner of speaking,
Luke continues in circles until he meets Jon, running athwart the campy,
kookie, and dangerous denizens of Araki’s Los Angeles.
Jon, a movie critic, is by contrast a passive, self-absorbed and domesti-
cated character. Newly informed of his HIV status by a doctor whose airy
delivery of the bad news is a model of camp insincerity (“Positive. Sorry.”),
he’s wrapped in his own thoughts, which he chronicles with a personal tape
recorder as he drives (instead of sharing them with the world, like Luke).
But he has something in common with Luke; he too is listening to KMFDM.
The men are musically paired long before they meet, the film teasing us with
their proximity when Jon drives past Luke hitchhiking, yet another tune
from KMFDM’s 1990 album Naïve, “(I want to) Go to Hell,” playing on
the tape deck of his battered little Subaru. But Luke and Jon are also set in
contrast in gender-specific ways, through oppositions of road versus home,
active versus passive, public versus private. Later on, after Luke throws him-
self onto Jon’s windshield and mercy following his attack by three men with
baseball bats, Jon will take the drifter home. Despite Jon’s qualms (“How
do I know you won’t bludgeon me and rip off my CD collection?”), Luke
ends up sharing Jon’s bed, then breakfast and a shopping trip with Luke’s
“borrowed” credit card, a new boom-box-cum-blunt-object in Luke’s hands
confirming music’s role as a floating signifier of cultural value and of the
desire and identification linking the two men.
When Luke turns from being a victim of antigay violence to aggressor—
bashing back the neo-Nazi who confronts the two when they share a brief
kiss on the street—Jon throws him out, only to accede, once again, to Luke’s
pleas for help when he appears in Jon’s bedroom in the middle of the night.
With the ominous sound of helicopters in the air, Luke explains that he
has shot and probably killed a policeman. Once on the road, Jon’s life is
transformed as he and Luke extend their “sexual geography” to the high-
ways, roadsides, and motels of America. The men gain new autonomy and
mobility on the road, what Katie Mills summarizes as the road genre’s focus
on “automobility.”39 The music that accompanies their journey—industrial
variants—is different from that found in previous road movies and different
from previous representations of gay masculinity.
At the same time that the music Araki uses is different, the link between
music and both the road and the road film is long-standing. Music moves
the body, and, in popular American music, travel and the promise of mobility
as signifiers of self-empowerment are recurrent lyrical themes. In traditional
blues and country, men ramble on foot and by train. In the affluent postwar
years, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and 1960s rock songs offer escapist entertainment
to listeners, celebrating the freedom and adventure to be had in cars or on
motorbikes. So the long-standing link between music and the road movie,
with the resultant pop-musical construction of autonomy and mobility, is
unsurprising. Especially since the success of influential youth film Easy
Rider, rock music compilations have been a recurrent part of the road
128 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
movie; many of them, as Corey Creekmur points out, are more musical, at
least in terms of the number of songs (or song fragments) included, than the
musical genre itself: “Musically saturated, and commercially successful at
generating and promoting hit songs and soundtracks, road films may now
replace narrativized musical spectacle for contemporary audiences that find
the fantastic conventions of the traditional musical old-fashioned.”40
Going back to the 1930s and the genres’ origins among the dislocated
poor of the Great Depression, road movies of various kinds have tradi-
tionally included popular music: The screwball comedy It Happened One
Night (1934) enlivened the journey of its mismatched couple with bus sing-
alongs, while later noir road films like Detour (1945) and Gun Crazy (1950)
included stops for nightclub performances “that bluntly comment upon the
situations of the couples.” 41 But it was Easy Rider and its nondiegetic com-
pilation score that became the model for youth-themed, music-driven road
movies to follow. As the two hippie cowboys ride their motorcycles through
gorgeous, panoramic landscapes shot by cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs,
songs by Steppenwolf (“Born to Be Wild” [1968]), The Byrds (“Wasn’t Born
to Follow” [1969]), and The Band (“The Weight” [1968]) comment on their
journey. The music is central to the meaning and cultural impact of the film,
offering, as David Shumway points out, “a powerful sense of generational
solidarity.”42 Easy Rider’s audiovisual representations of the journey suggest
the utopian potential of the countercultural youth movement, particularly in
the way that it combines rock music with frontier imagery borrowed from
the Western. But by reversing the Western, moving from the promise of the
frontier to the repressive social enclaves of the East and South, it under-
mined that utopian impulse and the film ends—as so many road films that
follow it do—in violence and death.
The utopian fantasy of rock plus road as seen in Easy Rider hovers over
The Living End, which deliberately works to thwart or subvert expectations
that this association generates, especially the road movie’s investment in the
ideology of the American frontier. Another generic influence on Araki’s film
is the way that the road movie, drawing on earlier film and musical traditions
as it does, appears overdetermined in terms of gender. The figures who ramble
through blues and country tunes and then motor through the rock ‘n’ roll and
rock songs, having inherited from earlier musical forms the urge to move
on down the road, are almost invariably male. So too are the lonely wan-
derers of the Hollywood Western and Beat literature, whose influences are
evident in the loosely structured, drug-spiked spontaneity of Easy Rider. In
this way, musical as well as literary and filmic traditions contribute to the
gendered tendencies of the road movie, summarized by Timothy Corrigan as
being “peopled with male buddies, usually a pair whose questing will only
be distracted or, at best, complemented by the women who intrude from
time to time.”43 Shari Roberts observes how even when female
stars “play integral halves of the heterosexual, anti-heroic couple,” as in the
films Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands (1973), they still “act as appendages
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 129

to masculinist fantasies.”44 As a consequence, when Thelma and Louise was

released the year before The Living End, much of the public discourse that
raged around the film centered on whether it could offer an alternative to
the male-centered road movie or was simply “a case of role reversal.” 45
Roberts concludes that, because “these female characters attempt to flee not
just men, but patriarchy, which is omnipresent and which in part defines the
road and genre,” they are “ultimately unsuccessful.” 46
Given that Luke and Jon, like Thelma and Louise, are on the road not
just for a lark but to escape a repressive and dangerous milieu, it is worth
taking a look at how these women’s journey is framed musically and in
terms of gender and genre. At the beginning of the women’s journey, the
“soundtrack suggests a world of women that is supported by the visuals and
dialogue,”47 a world ruptured by the attack on Thelma in the bar’s parking
lot and Louise’s murder of her attacker. And, just as the change in mood in
Easy Rider as they enter the South is signaled by Jimi Hendrix’s “nihilistic
‘If Six Was Nine,’ a stark counterpoint to the more carefree celebrations
of the road earlier on the soundtrack,”48 in Thelma and Louise, Marianne
Faithfull’s ragged vocals in “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” (1979) announce
the foreclosure of their dream of driving out of trouble with the law into a
new utopian reality (“We’ll be drinking margaritas by the sea, mamacita”).
The scene Faithfull narrates with her song is doom laden, despite the prom-
ise of freedom offered by the classic Western landscape that surrounds the
travelers; beautiful but eerie, it resonates with expectations of the road film
which, as Mills reminds us, includes “a death sentence” as part of its generic
inheritance.49 But Faithfull’s song is also, crucially, about a woman engag-
ing with a fantasy of mobility, a fantasy that Thelma and Louise do realize,
even if the film ends with their green Thunderbird convertible poised over
an abyss. As Sharon Willis points out, Thelma and Louise is “a story about
women and cars” that offers a relationship other than “adorning men’s cars
. . . sitting, fixed and still, draped across them . . . .”50
Thelma and Louise, like Easy Rider, celebrates the physical enactment
via combustion engines and the journey motif of those “lines of flight”
that Lawrence Grossberg identifies as being at the core of rock music’s
power to “transform the boredom of the repetition of everyday life into
the energizing possibilities of fun.”51 By contrast, The Living End uses the
journey motif differently, to imagine an alternative notion of escape and
release for its protagonists. Musically, Jon and Luke are narrated by a genre
uninterested in the lyrical fantasies of release and escape espoused by the
blues, country, and the rock derived from them, whose urban, club-based
sound is strangely static (though underpinned by a 4/4 dance beat), domi-
nated as it is by machine-like repetition, accretions of layer upon layer of
music, noise, vocals to create electronic and metallic textures. And whereas
Thelma and Louise are, at least for a while, liberated by a vintage convert-
ible, the wind in their hair, and a rock and pop score in a way that comes
close to fulfilling the dream of poor Lucy Jordan, Jon and Luke are set
130 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
free—against all odds—by sex in a Subaru. Their journey is more about
each other than about moving down the road. When they stop (for Jon to
clean up, or get money, or call his friend Darcy collect), Luke drapes himself
over the car, handsome face and impressive torso turned to the sun, as a
reminder of the real reason why Jon hasn’t yet made it back home. Whereas
in Bonnie and Clyde, as Robin Wood points out, “Bonnie robs with Clyde as
a substitute for intercourse,”52 and, as Carole Clarens notes in Gun Crazy,
“gunplay substitutes for foreplay” 53—sex is the most exciting and dangerous
activity Luke and Jon pursue. And every street they drive down becomes a
part of their “sexual geography.”
Mindful of its generic inheritance in the road movie and the AIDS film,
Araki deliberately resists the move from the promise of utopia to disappoint-
ment and death. As Mills points out, Araki gives his protagonists, literally,
a “living end.” They do not die, even though the final scene is brutal and
harrowing in its own right, with the potential for bloody violence and death.
Suggesting, as Thelma and Louise does, the impossibility of escaping patri-
archy, Luke—already associated with conventional tropes of active, violent,
masculinity—rapes Jon on some unknown beach, having tied him up when
he announces his intention of returning home. During his attack on Jon,
Luke holds his gun in his own mouth and pulls the trigger. But the antici-
pated climax of sex and death is averted by a click: The chamber is empty;
impulsive and bad-tempered fugitive that he is, Luke used his last bullet
on a recalcitrant ATM. Luke releases Jon who, performing his first act of
violence, punches Luke and walks away, only to return and sit with him,
looking out to the sunset over the ocean. In a film that constructs a diegetic
reality for its protagonists that is, from its beginning, more dystopic than
utopic, more queer than gay, it is—almost—a happy ending.

HE’S MUSICAL: MUSICAL STEREOTYPING AND

MUSICAL IDENTITIES

“I want to go home. I want to listen to my Smiths CDs.”

“So you and Toto can go back to Kansas and live happily ever after,
right?”
“Fuck you.”
—Jon and Luke

There was very much that sense of AIDS being like a hostile genocidal
warfare and that being gay immediately made you an outsider and
dangerous to society at large. Being heavily influenced by punk and
post-punk music, I was comfortable living in this margin. And it was
this “punk” aspect of The Living End that made the film so upsetting
and so threatening in the more mainstream vanilla gay culture.
-Gregg Araki54
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 131

Underpinning the oppositional use of music in The Living End is what Brett
Farmer has noted as the metaphorical association between homosexuality
and music. In “gay subcultural argot, the term musical has long been used
as a coded reference to homosexuality; to describe someone as ‘musical’ or
‘into musicals’ is to describe them as homosexual.” 55 In particular, the classic
Hollywood musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), with its story of double lives
and double worlds—reference to which Luke throws at Jon when Jon wants
to retreat to the relative safety and predictability of home—has become “a
kind of sacred text for American gay culture” and the song “Over the Rain-
bow” its anthem.56 Especially in the closeted days pre-Stonewall, the phrase
“friend of Dorothy,” or simply “FOD,” was a code to indicate homosexual-
ity. Although the classical Hollywood musical became a more marginalized
taste in gay subcultures over the decades, music and musical preferences
continue as a privileged signifier of homosexuality, through a specific set of
generic stereotypes. As Jodie Taylor points out in her discussion of queer
punk culture:
Identifying as lesbian or gay does not necessarily presuppose affiliation
with a particular musical scene or subculture. However there are unde-
niable musical norms that are associated with mainstream lesbian and
gay cultural identity. . . . For example, there is a general understand-
ing that “lesbian music” is female singer-song writer music, while “gay
music” . . . equates to some category of dance music. 57

In Longtime Companion, for example, the film opens on Fire Island to the
sound of Blondie’s hit of 1980, a dance-friendly reggae/ska cover of
“The Tide is High,” musically signifying—along with “Do Ya Wanna Funk”
(1982) by “Queen of Disco” Sylvester James—what the film portrays as an
idyllic gay party culture before AIDS. And even after AIDS appears on the
horizon, Alan aka “Fuzzy” (Stephen Caffrey) takes time out to perform an
impromptu lip-sync and dance to the theme song from 1981 Broadway musi-
cal Dream Girls while his lover and roommate Willy (Campbell Scott) visits
an old friend who is in the hospital with a mysterious infection. In the final
sequence, the Finger Lakes Trio, a New York cabaret act of the 1980s that
achieves its comic effect by playing 1970s disco in the manner of “provin-
cial chamber music musicians,” 58 performs the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”
Sung in a sweet clear voice by Jesse Hultberg with string accompaniment,
the double-entendre-filled disco hit of 1978 becomes a camp threnody for
the gay lifestyle portrayed at the beginning of the film.
At the same time as The Living End responds to the sort of musical stereo-
typing evident in Longtime Companion, it also engages in some musical
stereotyping of its own. Before Luke meets up with Jon, he hitches a ride
with Daisy (Mary Woronov) and Fern (Johanna Went), murderous lesbians
who pick up the hunky hitchhiker only to abandon their car when Fern runs
into trouble while relieving herself on the roadside (“Snakes!”). Luke’s first
132 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
response after taking over their car is to plunder their collection of cassettes.
But he throws them down with disgust, commenting, “Don’t these wenches
listen to anything else, besides k.d. lang and Michelle Shocked?” By con-
trast, The Living End is at pains to distinguish Jon and Luke musically not
just from the lesbian travelers but from the gay male mainstream as well, not
just through its score but via an array of intertextual references to varieties
of music on the margins.
The dialogue and mise en scène of the film are littered with references
that attest to the importance of music and music cultures, beginning with
the Jesus and Mary Chain T-shirt that Luke wears in the opening of the film.
Then there is the “Choose Death” bumper sticker on Jon’s car, a darkly
comic rejoinder to the “Choose Life” T-shirt popularized by George Michael
and Wham! in their 1984 video “Wake Me before You Go-Go.” It com-
ments on the driver’s state of mind as he pulls away from the clinic with
what he regards as his death sentence, as well as his attitude toward 1980s
mainstream pop and its closeted gay performers. Inside the car, there is a
Nine Inch Nails sticker on Jon’s dash, and he notes in his recorder that he
took the time to purchase a Dead Can Dance CD before his fateful doctor’s
appointment. A poster for The Smiths’ 1986 tour takes pride of place in Jon’s
kitchen. And when friend Darcy dutifully checks Jon’s phone messages dur-
ing his absence, she finds that he’s got messages about a Revolting Cocks
concert ticket opportunity and a missing Nitzer Ebb CD.
But perhaps the most significant music not actually featured on the
soundtrack is Joy Division, a key cultural and musical reference in the repre-
sentation of sensitive and intellectual, depressive and fatalistic Jon. While Luke
is inspecting Daisy and Fern’s music collection, Jon is telling his friend Darcy
about his HIV status. He quips, “I’m gonna be fine; I just need to lay off the
Joy Division records for a while.” Pioneers of post-punk music in the 1980s,
the group is often cited as the precursor of goth rock. Joy Division’s “gloomy
impressionistic sound and lyrics . . . didn’t just describe feelings of doom and
hopelessness, but embodied them.” 59 Commenting on the way that Joy Division
used the technique of “echoing reverb” as a “metaphor for emptiness,” James
Hanraham summarizes the spatial and emotional effect of their music:

Many Joy Division songs sound as if they were recorded in deserted

school buildings, abandoned factories, or under the lonely bridges of
Manchester. These bleak soundscapes reinforced Curtis’s lyrics, which
nakedly display his obsession with isolation . . . the way in which numb-
ness and surrender divides the self . . . . Curtis’s voice sounded old . . .
his intonation had a haunting power and creaky authority . . . shaky
and unsure of itself, at times nearly conversational in tone, it said noth-
ing if not that Ian Curtis was an ordinary man in extraordinary pain. 60

The ghost of Ian Curtis, a suicide at age 23, hovers over Jon and Luke, as
pervasively as the skeletons that populate the mise en scène, dangling from
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 133

ears and rearview mirrors, and hanging cheekily in Jon’s closet. When, dur-
ing a stop, Luke asks Jon about his views on the afterlife, their conversation
is accompanied by Psychic TV’s song, “I.C. Water,” the single released in
1990 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Ian Curtis’s death. Later,
Jon talks to Luke about Ian Curtis’s suicide in response to Luke’s asser-
tion that, at “the first sign of it, I’m going to off myself.” As they talk,
roadside images of a seemingly alien landscape—barren desert, naked red
hills dotted with giant windmills—offer the visual correlative of the “bleak
soundscapes” of Joy Division’s music, while an atmospheric synthpop blend
of the natural and electronic (steady rainfall and synthesizer drone, punctu-
ated by thunder, reverb heavy guitar, and the occasional female sigh) from
Psychic TV’s Fred Giannelli underscores their conversation about death and
suicide. In characterization and dialogue, mise en scène and score, genera-
tions of music-cultural association and imagery are thickly intertwined with
generic expectations of death—rather than the Emerald City—waiting at the
end of the road for Luke and Jon, expectations that heighten the significance
of the film’s “living end.”

DANCING THROUGH DYSTOPIA

Imagine walking down blurred streets of havoc, post-civilisation, stray
dogs eating refuse. . . . It’s 1984 . . . . It’s the death factory society, hyp-
notic, mechanical grinding, music of hopelessness, film music to cover
the holocaust. . . . The music of 1984 has arrived.
—1976 Industrial Records press release 61

We’ve always thought everything sucks anyway, so let’s have a good

time.
—Sascha Konietzco, KMFDM 62

After Luke spends the night at Jon’s apartment, he and Jon share a conver-
sation over a breakfast of Barbie cereal and beer. Like much of the film’s
dialogue, it is less a naturalistic exchange of ideas between two psycholo-
gized characters than a series of slogans, suitable for T-shirts or bumper
stickers, further evidence of the film’s aesthetic debt to punk/DIY techniques
of sampling and collage. All the same, Luke’s perspective on the AIDS crisis,
as a “neo-Nazi Republican final solution” and “germ warfare,” appears to
be not too far from Araki’s own. The film’s credit sequence dedication to
“the hundreds of thousands who’ve died and the hundreds of thousands
more who will die because of a big white house full of Republican fuck-
heads” echoes Luke’s assertion of conspiracy, for all that it is derided by Jon
as “paranoid.” And when Jon and Luke take to the road, visual representa-
tions of the land through which they travel offer visual evidence of a world
ruined by “a big white house full of Republican fuckheads.”
134 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
Road movies commonly feature panoramic views framed by windshield
and windows. In The Living End, by contrast, we often see nothing outside
the car: There are only the travelers and the music from the Subaru’s tinny
speakers that narrates their journey. But when the windows of Jon’s car are
not black with night or blank with sun glare, they often show only bleak
sameness. As in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1969 road movie The Rain People,
the America through which Jon and Luke speed is made up entirely of fast
food outlets, roadside phone booths, motels, anonymous and often barren
landscapes, abandoned construction sites, graffiti-covered walls, and bro-
ken chainlink fences. There are no vistas of America the beautiful to inspire
or urge the travelers on. Instead, it is a post-industrial wasteland occasionally
interrupted by police-patrolled or heavily gated suburban islands of green.
When Jon and Luke leave the car for money, food, gas, or liquor, extreme
low-angle shots frame them against the sky and old neon signs, so that the
men appear to be alone in an ex-urban landscape of uncertain age. Many
of the signs function as ironic commentary on the (lack of) attraction to
be found outside the car: “Blue Sky,” “Circus Liquor,” “Paradise Motel.”
(That said, the motel does offer paradise, of a sort, as they get to have sex
someplace besides the car.) This image of their world is directly linked to
what Stacy Thompson summarizes as the “punk project”—begun in New
York and English scenes of the mid-1970s and continued over the decades
in various other subcultures and locales—as being that punks “cannot fully
imagine what the better world would look like, but they refuse to accept the
one that they know as final.” 63
This refusal to accept the modern world shapes the musical practice of
industrial music. Very much a British movement, industrial music took its
inspiration for the critical dystopias of its sonic experiments from the
blighted surroundings of England’s factory towns. As Mick Fish explains in
his account of Cabaret Voltaire and Thatcherite England:

It saw the world as a mess of sound; a harsh, bleak landscape. In effect

the reality that many people had to live with every day. . . . It wasn’t
escapist or full of the frills or trappings of rock ‘n’ roll. Bands like the
Cabs, Clock DVA and TG [Throbbing Gristle] held a mirror up to
British life, and a lot of what was reflected wasn’t very pretty. With
their noises, cut-ups, walls of sound, ethnic strains and synthesized
bleeps, the early industrial groups were awash with the flotsam and
jetsam of modern life. . . . It wasn’t that different from the Dadaists
and surrealists of the twenties who had jumbled up and reassembled
their version of reality. 64

Implacably antiescapist in the earliest iterations of the genre, variations

on industrial music in The Living End frame the desperation of Luke and
Jon’s world. Continuing with the audiovisual construction of the opening
sequence, Luke continues to be narrated by harder-edged industrial music
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 135

that shows the influence of garage, punk, and guitar-driven rock music
whose violent soundscapes and samples highlight his tendency to act on his
anger. By contrast, Jon tends to be associated with experimental electronica of
the industrial genre, suggestive of his alienated existence before Luke—and
the lonely life he can expect if he lets Luke go. For instance, before he meets
Luke, the intellectual loner is contacted by an anonymous phone caller
wanting sex. At the time, he is playing Coil’s wintry and atmospheric, aptly
named electronica piece “The Snow,” a diegetic underscore for the
conversation whose layers of synthesized bleeps, drones, and ghostly vocals,
as beauti-fully seductive (and danceable) as they are, suggest the disembodied
nature of what could be, for Jon, the ultimate in safe sex. (Appropriately
enough, Coil’s John Balance and his partner Peter Christopherson the
following year composed the soundtrack for the 1992 documentary, A Gay
Man’s Guide to Safer Sex, using a similar focus on ambient electronica.) As
Jon drives down the darkened tunnel where he first meets Luke, the car
tape deck plays Chris & Cosey’s hypnotic song of 1991, “Synaesthesia,”
Cosey Fanni Tutti’s heavily processed vocal repetitions against a backdrop
of ambient electronic music creating a trancelike effect even as they urge him
to “Feel your senses.” When Luke throws himself onto Jon’s windshield, it is
as if in answer to the lyrical invocation, even as he breaks the spell woven by
Tutti’s mesmerizing but distancing electronic music. After Jon throws Luke
out the next day, Jon’s anonymous caller phones him again. This time, the
under-score for their conversation is 16Volt’s aptly titled 1991 song,
“Imitation,” in which increasingly frantic and intimidating
whispered/electronically dis-torted vocals are all but overridden by a racing
drum machine and sci-fi samples of metal and electronic noise. When Jon
snarls, “Will you just get a fucking life,” it seems to be directed as much to
himself as the caller.
In the way that music is used in these scenes, Araki establishes both Jon
and Luke’s shared predicament and their different responses—violent public
outbursts versus depressed withdrawal—to life in the dangerous, alienating
post-industrial dystopia that is the America of The Living End. At the same
time that the men are connected musically in various ways, the musical
contrast between Luke and Jon highlights the way that the film picks up
the gendered schema of the road movie where the home to which Jon
retreats is feminized and rebellious escape is a masculine prerogative. Quick-
tempered and violent Luke is narrated by male vocals that speak to and for
his anger and aggression, along with the hard-driving rhythms of punk and
rock-style instrumentation. By contrast, on the few occasions that female
vocalists appear in the music for The Living End, it is Jon who listens to
them— Jon, whom the film associates with the feminized sphere of home
and the domestic, tied as he is not just to Luke, but to Darcy, whom he
regularly calls collect. Darcy’s own role, as a number of critics have confirmed,
is both problematic and thankless, inasmuch as the cross-cutting between
her as she waits and worries and the runaways as they explore America and
each other is used in a quite conventional way to highlight the difference
136 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
between her passivity and their activity. 65 Even Jon appears as a liberated rebel
male, compared with Darcy.
One comic scene highlights the musical differences (or highlights differ-
ences musically) between Jon and Luke. As Jon drives down the darkened
highway, Cosey Fanni Tutti’s mesmerizing, erotically charged vocals for the
Chris & Cosey song “Cords of Love” (1991) lyrically comment on the way
Jon is bound by pleasure and growing affection for his passenger. But when
Jon becomes so tired that he lets Luke drive (for the first and only time
because Luke is as violently erratic behind the wheel as he is in every other
facet of life), Luke comments that this “stuff is putting me to sleep” and
replaces Chris & Cosey’s sensuous electronica with Babyland’s loud and
raucous, “Reality,” jarring an exasperated Jon out of his nap. When, later
in their trip, Luke finally persuades Jon to rebel, to break away from rules
and regulations and concerns about safety, the event is marked musically by
a song notable for the way that it mixes musical signifiers associated with
both Luke and Jon in its instrumentation and vocals. As KMFDM’s 1990
song “Naïve” plays, we see Jon in profile, driving with an ecstatic look on
his face, the car’s interior filled with golden light. As Jon drives, Luke has
his head in his lap, performing fellatio, Jon’s concerns about highway safety
clearly put to one side (“I’m not going to fondle your crotch right now . . .
because I’m a responsible driver”). The window and windshield white with
glare, the focus is entirely on the interior of the car; the music playing is filled
with the heavy bass, metal, and rock-inspired sounds that have character-
ized Luke and combined with female vocals associated with Jon. As “a disco
anthem for a generation grown upon feedback as much as acid pulse, with a
catchy-as-hell lead female vocal . . . and the whole thing slamming forward
without pause,”66 the song effectively ties this brief moment of bliss on the
road to a broader, musically signified gay culture from which the film is, for
the most part, at pains to distance itself aesthetically and politically.
That is, while much of the music used in The Living End could be described
as dance or club or house music of one kind or another, the KMFDM song
“Naïve” picks up, uses, and transforms a recognizable disco sound to mark
what perhaps comes closest to a utopian moment in Jon and Luke’s dysto-
pian reality on the road, a high point in their sexual geography, the moment
when Jon joins Luke in rebellion. At the same time that it clearly isn’t the
sort of early 1980s dance music used to signify gay masculinity in Longtime
Companion, the so-called diva vocals sampled in “Naïve” bring to mind the
role that disco played in a pre-AIDS homosexual culture—musical nostalgia
mixed with the ironic distance and pleasure in anarchic noise that is so char-
acteristic of industrial music and so appropriate to Araki’s film. As Jon and
Luke hurtle down the highway, “Naïve” is a musical reminder of “the power
of the beat to make us dance,” which is, according to Walter Hughes in his
analysis of gay identity and disco, “commensurate with the power of desire
to lead us into sexual acts, even those considered forbidden, unnatural, even
unnameable by our culture.” 67
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 137

CONCLUSION

It’s almost like I approach my soundtracks in my movies as a collector. . . . I

don’t normally collect soundtracks unless there’s something in them that
I really, really want. I always try to find things that are either super
obscure or that a collector would want.
—Gregg Araki68

Punk aesthetics influence the film’s rough-and-ready approach to storytell-

ing, its “combination of straightforward pastiche and off beat camp.” 69 But
it is the critical dystopia of industrial music that most fully communicates
a sense of Luke’s anger and Jon’s alienation in The Living End. Araki’s
use of industrial music registers the way that this genre endeavors to break
with what Lawrence Grossberg acknowledges as “the obvious but painful
truth that rock rarely challenges the political and economic institutions of
society.”70 As Karen Collins observes in her study of the industrial music
community in the 2000s, fans of the genre consider that it maintains its
integrity by remaining in the margins, the outside of popular music. 71 That
Araki likewise is committed in 1992 to the integrity of marginal media
practice is clear, highlighted by the fact that, as many critics have noticed,
the baseball-bat-wielding fag bashers (credited as the “three stooges”) who
attack Luke wear T-shirts emblazoned with the titles of higher-budget indie
films that achieved mainstream, crossover success: Sex, Lies, and Videotape
(1989) and Drugstore Cowboy (1989). Accordingly, music used for The
Living End is entirely sourced from indie labels and unsigned artists. The
song “Cords of Love” was released on Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s
own label, Conspiracy International. Babyland was signed with Flipside
Records, the label begun by Los Angeles punk rock fanzine, Flipside. Other
music is provided by as yet unsigned bands, industrial rock bands 16Volt
and Biohazard PCB (aka Contagion) and electronic-synth band Drance.
KMFDM, Coil, Fred, and rereleases from Chris & Cosey are from Wax
Trax! Records, which, though perhaps the most commercially successful of
the indie industrial labels of the 1980s, rarely sold more than 40,000 copies
of a release.
Yet, while taking care to distinguish itself from the mainstream of gay
culture, film culture, and music culture, in its reimagining of the road movie
as well as in its use of music to characterize John and Luke, The Living End
draws on familiar conventions of gender and genre to produce, for example,
the wish-fulfilling spectacle of Luke’s violence and anger. While linked by
their shared taste for industrial music, Jon is consistently associated with
lighter-textured electronic compositions and female vocalists, and Luke with
hard-edged rock and punk with male vocals. Gender differences suggested
by these musical choices are confirmed by very conventional structural
oppositions between the two men—the activity, mobility, and undomesti-
cated violence of Luke in contrast to Jon, the passive homebody. At the
138 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack
same time that this gendered structure lends (an all too familiar) shape to the
narrative of Jon and Luke’s relationship, any notion of Jon’s feminization is
offset by the far more problematic representation of Darcy (whose musical
representations are an extension of Jon’s). Not just bound to but the personi-
fication of home, Darcy is desexualized—sacrificing her own relationship as
she gives over her emotional energy to worrying about Jon—in a film where
sex is the one, true escape from a dystopic reality. In contrast to Darcy, Jon
appears as the footloose rebel that Luke wishes he could be. In this way, at
the same time that it offers a politicized and unapologetic representation of
gay anger and gay desire, The Living End also serves as a reminder of how
the structures of patriarchy can reinvent themselves in the queerest of spaces.

NOTES

1. Quoted in Chua, “Gregg Araki.”

2. Gdula, “A Different Tune,” 72.
3. Barnes, “Hot and Throbbing,” 22.
4. Quoted in Reed, Assimilate, 50.
5. The nomenclature for industrial music, its points of origin, its history and
its current status are all hotly contested by fans and practitioners. Currently,
industrial is marketed as a subgenre of alternative rock or electronica. For
purists, industrial music—as an avant-garde performance practice and exper-
iment in noise—began in the mid 1970s and ended in the early 1980s when
people started to dance and Throbbing Gristle (whose independent label,
“Industrial Records” gives the music its name) was disbanded. For others,
there are three generations or waves of industrial music, distinguished by
sound, technologies, degrees of popularity and subject matter. See Hanley,
“Metal Machine Music.”
6. See Carr, Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, 20-21.
7. Vale, Foreword to RE/SEARCH Industrial Culture Handbook, 2.
8. Green, “More Doors Open for Gay-Themed Films,” 6.
9. Travers, “The Year in Movies.”
10. Hurlbut, “A Movie That’s Truly Offensive.”
11. Arnold, “‘Living End’ Has Its Charms.”
12. Hunter, “Araki Taps Vivid Sense of Hatred,” 3.
13. Kempley “Living: Dead-End Explicitness.”
14. Smith, “Rebel, Rebel.”
15. Araki, “Commentary.”
16. Ibid.
17. Quoted in Smith, “Rebel, Rebel.”
18. Cunningham, “After AIDS.”
19. Mallinder, Foreword, 13.
20. Jarman, “The Road to Hell.”
21. Grundmann, “The Fantasies We Live By.”
22. Quoted in Hays, The View from Here, 37-38.
23. “Queers Read This.”
24. Duralde, “The Living End Lives Again.”
25. Rich, “New Queer Cinema,” 31.
26. Ibid., 32.
27. Cunningham, “After AIDS.”
28. Ibid.
 Queering the Road Movie Soundtrack 139

29. Denby, “Tender Mercy,” 68, 69.

30. “Fight Back, Fight AIDS.”
31. “Queers Read This.”
32. Cohan and Hark, “Introduction,” 2.
33. Kein Mehrheit fűr die Mitleid is an ungrammatical rearrangement of the phrase
“No pity for the masses.”
34. Eddy, Review.
35. Pahnelas, “Raw and Untamed, KMFDM Rocks Hard.”
36. On the cut-up, its origins in the work of William Burroughs, its influence on Throb-
bing Gristle, and later bands like KMFDM, see Reed, Assimilate, 49-60, 202.
37. Ibid., 32-33.
38. “The Music of the Future Today.”
39. Mills, The Road Story and the Rebel, 8.
40. Creekmur, “On the Run and on the Road,” 102.
41. Ibid., 101.
42. Shumway, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Sound Tracks and the Production of Nostalgia,” 38.
43. Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls, 144.
44. Roberts, “Western Meets Eastwood,” 62.
45. Ibid., 63.
46. Ibid., 66.
47. Ibid., 81.
48. Klinger, “The Road to Dystopia,” 193.
49. Mills, “Revitalizing the Road Movie,” 322.
50. Willis, High Contrast, 108.
51. Grossberg, “Is Anybody Listening?” 51.
52. Wood, Arthur Penn, 85.
53. Clarens, Crime Movies, 229.
54. Quoted in Hays, The View from Here, 38
55. Farmer, Spectacular Passions, 74.
56. Long, AIDS and American Apocalypticism, 29.
57. Taylor, “Spewing out of the Closet,” 2.
58. Hultberg, Interview.
59. Savage, Foreword, xiii.
60. Hannaham, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” 52.
61. Quoted in Collins, “The Future is Happening Already,” 122.
62. Quoted in Rodriguez, “Industrial Band Spells It Out.”
63. Thompson, Punk Productions, 4.
64. Fish, Industrial Evolution, 189.
65. As Amy Villarejo sums it up, the fact that the film builds its “fantasy upon
caricatures or wholesale exclusions of women opens it to feminist critique,
repeating the marginalization of women in most of the films of this year.” See
Villarejo, “Movies and the Politics of Authorship,” 90.
66. Raggett, Review.
67. Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat,” 150.
68. Quoted in Steve Gdula, “A Different Tune.”
69. Grundmann, “The Fantasies We Live by.”
70. Grossberg, “Is Anybody Listening?” 51.
71. Collins, “The Future is Happening Already.”

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6 John Travolta, a Song and
Dance Man in Action

You know what? I think we should just dance.

—John Travolta on Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show, 2007

This chapter, rather than considering another specific example

of how popular film and music work in tandem to leverage pleasure and
possibility on behalf of the screen masculinities they construct, takes a some -
what different approach. It looks at John Travolta or, more precisely, John
Travolta’s star persona, and considers how it has been shaped by media con-
vergence, specifically by generic exchanges between popular film and music
cultures, action and musical genres. Considering common denominators
across a varied array of films—the engaging and occasionally controver-
sial body spectacles that repeatedly reinvent Travolta as a song and dance
man—we find a star whose persona has been built on performative versions
of masculinity that trouble gender boundaries.
A decade ago, in 2004, John Travolta was honored by the American
Museum of the Moving Image in its annual salute. At that moment, as New
York Times journalist Caryn James observed, Travolta was waiting for his
“3rd comeback” as an actor “who has been alternately admired and turned
into a joke for nearly three decades”:

He established himself as a genuine movie star with Saturday Night

Fever in 1977, but soon went into a long artistic tailspin that took
him through all those talking-baby movies (the Look Who’s Talking
series) only to return with Pulp Fiction, a stunning reminder that he
could act. But that was 10 years ago. More recently he has played too
many snarling investigators in movies that range from ordinary . . . to
unwatchable. It’s hard to get artistic respect after you’ve played an alien
with yellow eyes and rubber claws for hands. (Battlefield Earth was just
four years ago.)1

As James notes, Travolta’s power as a box office draw has waxed and waned
over the years. Though still celebrated—and a celebrity whose personal life
often makes the news—his star image is marked by those box office successes
144 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
that established him in the late 1970s, as well as by the unevenness of his
later career. In Saturday Night Fever and Grease, as well as Urban Cowboy,
he plays working-class dreamers who pursue the possibilities of music-driven
self-expression and escape from the limitations of everyday life, his eye-
catching, light-stepping, hip-swinging performances alternately erotic and
playful. Saturday Night Fever focuses on urban working-class youth who
retreat each weekend to the alternative world of disco at the 2001 Odyssey.
Camp musical Grease offers a comically nostalgic look at the past, with
musical fantasy sequences that both celebrate and cast wryly critical glances
toward the mythical world of 1950s teens. And Urban Cowboy relocates
Travolta’s working-class hero to the Houston refineries of the oil boom and
the country-and-western-themed playground and bar, Gilley’s.
These youth cinema performances, particularly Saturday Night Fever
and Grease, still resonate, and are still a durable part of Travolta’s star
persona decades later thanks in large part to the extraordinary, ongoing
popularity of their soundtracks. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack peaked
at number one on Billboard’s Top 200 in 1978. It was also the number one
R&B album of 1978, had three number one singles, and won the Grammy for
Album of the Year. The unexpected success of the Saturday Night Fever album
permanently changed Hollywood’s attitude toward the financial possibilities of
the soundtrack. The film wildly outperformed the expectations of its
distributor, Paramount, which had declined the offer to share in its Polygram
soundtrack, based on the belief—widely held by Hollywood—that
“soundtracks just didn’t sell.”2 The success of the album marked the beginning
of Hollywood’s interest in the synergistic possibilities offered by popular music
and film. In 1984, Saturday Night Fever was awarded 11 times platinum
status. Continuing to sell over the next 15 years, as additional windows of
exhibition were opened by new technologies of video and DVD, it was
confirmed as 15 times platinum in 1999, five years after Travolta’s 1994
comeback in Pulp Fiction. The Grease soundtrack peaked at number one on
the Billboard Top 200 in 1978, had two number one singles, and was
confirmed 8 times platinum in 1984. Likewise an ongoing favorite with new
generations of fans, interest stoked by a series of rereleases, Grease made it
to the top 10 for the Billboard list of Best Soundtracks in 2001, 2012, and
2013.3
Taking into consideration Travolta’s early roles—and the ongoing popu-
larity of the soundtracks associated with them—it is no great surprise that,
some 30 years later, Travolta’s comeback performance of the 21st cen-
tury wasn’t, as James anticipated, A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004).
Instead of Travolta’s hard-working, emotive portrayal of a crusty, drunken
ex-literature professor in the Southern-accented drama, it was his drag-
and-fat-suited performance as Edna Turnblad in the film adaptation of the
Broadway musical Hairspray (2007) that once again garnered critical and
box office approval and brought him back into the spotlight. To kick up his
heels in the character of Baltimore housewife and shut-in Edna, a screen role
previously made famous by Divine (Glenn Milstead), he had to be encased
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 145
in 30 pounds of silicone gel packs and rubber padding. Nevertheless, it is a
part that recognizes and allows for the central role of gender-play-via-
bodily-display in Travolta’s star image, as well as his identification with the
urban working class and his engagement with music and dance as a means of
expression and self-empowerment.
The uneven path of Travolta’s career, as summed up by James, might
be read as a sign or symptom of contemporary Hollywood’s not always
successful effort to profit from a star who is at his best when making a spec-
tacle of himself on the dance floor—and who came to fame in an era of
filmmaking that didn’t have steady work for such talent. But the twists and
turns taken by Travolta’s career also evince the influence of popular music on
film beyond the musical genre, as Travolta becomes a vector for pop music
and pop music-inflected performances of gender. From his star-making role
as the working-class Italian American thug who transforms himself into a
disco god each weekend, to the dancing gunman Vincent Vega in Quentin
Tarantino’s love letter to exploitation cinemas, to his strangely effective
and affecting representation of Edna Turnblad in the camp-exploitation-
film-turned-Broadway-musical-turned-Hollywood-musical-cum-teen-film
Hairspray, Travolta’s star text is shaped by and exemplifies increasingly
complex relations between popular music and film in contemporary cinema
from the 1970s to the 2000s. The shape of his star persona and the way he is
framed by his most successful films speak to the shared investment of musi-
cal, action, and exploitation cinemas in spectacular excess and bodily display.
More specifically, as a star whose image has been shaped by film and musical
entertainment, perhaps Travolta’s most consistent characteristic is a tendency
to represent masculinity as mask and masquerade.

A STAR IS FORMED: BODILY DISPLAY, MASCULINITY, AND

MASQUERADE IN SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, GREASE, AND
URBAN COWBOY

. . . if we’ve been merchandising women’s bodies in films for years,

there’s no reason you can’t do the same thing with an attractive man.
It’s been effective. Most of our repeat viewers are women, and they’re
not going back to see my work, I can assure you. They’re going back to
look at Travolta.
—John Badham4

The camera concentrated on his legs as he walked into stardom like

Lana Turner during her tight-sweatered stroll in They Won’t Forget.
—George Anderson5

The path of Travolta’s career from Tony Manero to Edna Turnblad clearly
depends in the first instance on his talent and past experience as “an old
146 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
Broadway hoofer,”6 his ongoing willingness over the decades to shake his
stuff for the camera, as well as the personal attractiveness and charisma
he brings to his dance roles. It also reflects the importance of what Chris-
tine Gledhill calls “genrified” relations of gender. Gledhill observes how the
“aesthetic effects, affective appeals, and signification” of gender representa-
tions are shaped by generic fictions and as a consequence become readable
as an “inter-subjective space of cinematic fiction and cultural imagining.” 7
Located, in the first instance, at the juncture of youth cinema narratives of
rebellion and pop music culture’s erotic fixation on the young male body,
the “inter-subjective” fictional and cultural spaces of John Travolta’s per-
formances in the danceploitation flick Saturday Night Fever, pop musical
Grease, and music-driven drama Urban Cowboy were shaped both by the
gender conventions of the Hollywood musical and by wider trends in youth
and music cultures. Although Grease is the only one of Travolta’s early films
that is structured like a classic Hollywood musical, all three share with musi-
cal films of the past the imagining of “an alternative style of masculinity,
one grounded in spectacle and spectatorship.” 8 Travolta’s characters, Tony,
Danny, and Bud, all dance; and their dance performances are generically
coded as rebellion, the means to differentiate themselves from an older gen-
eration of masculinity. So, in all three films, Travolta’s gender rebellion is part
of his generational identity as well as the path, via romance narratives, to a
heterosexual relationship and a new life beyond youth and adolescence. As
a consequence, all three films make a space for Travolta’s characters to make
spectacles of themselves, emphasizing masculinity as performance. In fact,
they all depict male coming-of-age in terms of competing and taking prizes
for gendered performances (on the dance floor, in hot-rod races, or on the
back of a mechanical bull), their narratives constructed around contests and
competitions. But as part of their role as rebels, Travolta’s protagonists, after
winning these contests and enacting triumphant performances of young
masculinity proscribed thereby, go on to question the value of what they
have won—and the social hierarchies, values, and beliefs of their worlds.
Narratives of romance and maturation in these films require Tony,
Danny, and Bud to realize the limits of social constructions of masculinity
in worlds depicted as marginalized and culturally backward (Saturday Night
Fever and Urban Cowboy), temporally past (Grease), and/or nostalgically
past-identified (Grease and Urban Cowboy). In Saturday Night Fever, Tony
Manero gives up the longed- and worked-for dance trophy when he realizes
that it was awarded to him and Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), rather than
a Puerto Rican couple he considers to be superior dancers, on the basis of
racism. The “king” of the disco in club 2001 Odyssey abdicates his throne
after giving back the trophy and prize money. In Grease, Danny wins the
National Bandstand contest with “bad girl” Cha Cha (Annette Charles)
and a hot-rod race on Thunder Road against the leader of the Scorpions,
but he forfeits his greaser identity and his place as leader of Rydell greas-
ers, the T-Birds, to arrive at the graduation fair in a jock’s letter sweater in the
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 147
hope of winning back Sandy (Olivia Newton John). Hard won, through
long-distance running, the sweater is nevertheless worn casually over his
greaser attire, a new masculine identity treated as just another costume
change. In Urban Cowboy, Bud works to win the bull-riding contest to
show up his estranged wife Sissy (Debra Winger) and her violent, nasty-
tempered new beau, Wes (Scott Glenn), but he ends up more interested in
Sissy and their relationship than the win or the money. These contest and
prize narratives help to highlight the (affective, emotional, and physical)
process whereby Tony, Danny, and Bud distance themselves from the values
and beliefs of their worlds, along with (some of their) macho poses and
postures and assumptions of power, in order to win at love. In Grease and
Urban Cowboy, “winning at love” means a successful conclusion to het-
erosexual romance narratives, but Saturday Night Fever offers the—rather
extraordinary—possibility of Stephanie and Tony concluding their stormy
personal relationship as friends. (“You think you could be friends? With a
girl?” “The truth? I dunno. But I’ll try. I’ll try.”)
The gestures of refusal that mark the narrative climaxes of the three
films, as well as the effort to negotiate, circumnavigate, or transcend gen-
der norms of the past, mark Travolta’s difference. This narrative focus on
gender rebellion also marks Travolta as the typical product of the New
Hollywood, which, in the late 1960s and 1970s, had more than its share
of young stars who troubled or rejected idealized or conventional images
of the past,9 as well as young directors who endeavored to do the same.
Travolta was recognized by critics and scholars as a star who offered a new
image of masculinity, marked most obviously by its eroticization and depen-
dence on body display. In their presentation of Travolta, the films work
through tropes long associated with song and dance men of the musical,
namely narcissism, exhibitionism, and masquerade, 10 but with the explicit
aim to acknowledge—and court—desiring looks both on and off screen.
So his performances as gender rebel explicitly acknowledged and engaged
female desire—both within the narrative worlds of the films and in the
film audience. In this way, these films, while courting the younger audience
of teenybopper fans from his television career, 11 also worked to engage a
broader audience and remake Travolta the “teen idol” into a new sort of
erotically charged leading man for the 1970s. 12
His audiovisual construction through the soundtracks that he helped to
propel to platinum status is at the center of this transformation. The open-
ing sequence of Saturday Night Fever depicts Travolta as both an eroticized
object of the camera’s look and as a young man somewhat at odds with its
social environment. Framed in close-ups that fragment his body, emphasiz-
ing his face, his feet, the sway of his legs and hips, Travolta walks into the
film swinging a paint can to the music in his head (and ours), the Bee Gees’
“Stayin’ Alive.” He shops on the run (confirming that the spectacle he makes
of himself is no accident), comparing his high-heeled shoes to those he sees
in a window display, putting a five dollar deposit on a shirt that catches his
148 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
eye. The funk riff that drives “Staying Alive” recalls the way that Blaxploita-
tion soundtracks earlier in the decade claimed space for their protagonists; 13
however, tightly framed as Travolta is in this sequence, the scope of this
claim extends no further than his tapping feet and swinging hips. Eroticized,
energized, even empowered by the music’s dance beat, Travolta’s relation-
ship with this urban space is nevertheless troubled, a starting point for the
film’s critical view of masculinity in terms of race—whiteness and ethnicity,
that is—and class. The framing and editing of the sequence emphasize the
movement of Travolta’s legs and hips, those parts of the body that, accord-
ing to Maxine Leeds Craig, straight white men generally do not move (any
more than they have to) in order to maintain a “non-sexualized, minimally
expressive body,” a nonperformance that allows them to claim dominance
“because of its distance from physically expressive and sensual gay men,
women, and men of color.” 14 Thus, Travolta’s performance takes place
on a fine line between music- and dance-driven empowerment (of the sort
achieved within the Hollywood musical—or even the sort of performances
we see in Blaxploitation) and disempowerment (in terms of conventions of
white masculinity). The precariousness of Tony Manero’s positioning in his
world and in relation to straight white masculinity more generally will be
narrated by the film in terms of ethnicity but especially in terms of class,
articulated as the cultural and economic differences between Manhattan
and Bay Ridge.
Contributing to our sense of the precariousness of his performance, the
same music that propels Tony’s sidewalk-eating stride, his dancelike walk,
registers a certain anxiety, both in its lyrical tale of a working-class male’s
struggle to survive and the vocal treatment of these lyrics by the Bee Gees
(whose performance was unflatteringly described by Village Voice rock
critic, Robert Christgau, as the sound of “mechanical mice with an unnatu-
ral sense of rhythm” 15). The irony of a song about a “woman’s man” sung
in falsetto has been routinely pointed out since the song’s release, comments
that gesture to but don’t quite explain the effect of Tony’s audiovisual con-
struction in this scene. Falsetto has its origins in black gospel of the earlier
20th century, and in rock, pop, and soul it often retains its gospel associa-
tion with the otherworldly, even as it works to broaden the emotive and
affective scope of male vocal representation. Michael Eric Dyson speaks of
Marvin Gaye’s falsetto vocalizing, for example, in terms of an eroticized
and “poignant vulnerability,” 16 whereas Peter Lehman describes Roy Orbi-
son’s eerie falsetto as being expressive of a “male desire to relinquish power
and control for passivity and loss.” 17 But in contrast to the restrained and
expressive use of falsetto by Gaye, Orbison, and others, the nonstop fal-
setto of “Staying Alive” has a rather different effect. In particular, Barry
Gibb’s nonverbal interjections that punctuate the chorus have something of
the “hysterical quality” that Richard Dyer identifies in the imagery of male
pinups, “all straining after what can hardly ever be achieved.” 18 Considered
in terms of Barthes’ formulation of “grain” —as well as falsetto’s history as a
vocal trope of gospel—“straining after” another world, another state of
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 149
being and other possibilities, is clearly a part of falsetto’s aesthetic effect and
connotative work. While the audiovisual structure of the sequence works to
eroticize and in some respects empower Travolta’s body (being one of the
sequences frequently referenced when discussing his launch into stardom), it
also puts him in a position that is—as Richard Dyer and Barry Gibb remind
us—risky in terms of the gendered organization of looking relations. In these
terms, Tony’s repeated failure to attract—or distract—beautiful women on
the street, his failure to look with authority and back up that look with
action, highlights the uncertainty of his place in this world, even as it injects
a bit of comic relief into the sequence. Only in the disco, 2001 Odyssey, will
the problematic status of Tony’s eroticization (by his own self-presentation
and by the camera) be resolved by the way it relocates his performance of
gender—his striving for other possibilities—to the generic context of the
musical. At the club, particularly on the dancefloor, he successfully courts
approval of the men and women who are his audience, an audience that
lends him the social status he lacks on the streets of Brooklyn. Were it not for
his escape into dance each weekend, he would be no more than, as Stephanie
jeers, “a cliché,” “nowhere on the way to no place.” 19
In its representation of popular music and dance as escape from the
everyday, Saturday Night Fever picks up a common trope of the youth
and rock film that dates back to the delinquents of Blackboard Jungle. But
unlike rock ‘n’ roll and teen culture in the 1950s or rock and youth cul -
tures of the 1960s, disco dance entered American culture as something of a
covert operation, starting in mostly black, then mostly gay and white, urban
subcultural spaces. Clubs like New York’s Le Jardin and Infinity, or Los
Angeles’s Studio One, were born, flourished below the radar until they were
discovered by hip—and then not so hip—heterosexuals, then abandoned. 20
Nevertheless, the musical influence of disco would soon be heard beyond
this club culture. With its “steady 4/4 thump that clocked in at about 120
beats per minute and long instrumental passages,”21 disco was specifically
designed for nonstop dance, offering a very different aesthetic from the
varieties of rock and soul music that dominated the airwaves by the end of
the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, Billboard charts included disco hits like Hues
Corporation’s number one of 1974, “Rock the Boat,” and Carl Douglas’s
“Kung Fu Fighting,” which won the Grammy the same year. But when pre-
production for Saturday Night Fever started, the disco trend was already
on the wane. As Travolta recalls, “Even in Brooklyn, they no longer had
polyester suits and high heeled shoes or any of that. I found my whole ward-
robe in the Village in boxes in the back of the store high up on shelves. . . .
I was playing a character who didn’t care if it was out of style. He was
doing it because that is what he did well.” 22 Despite the film’s associa-
tion of disco music and dance cultures with what it depicts as a stultifying
and claustrophobic working-class milieu, Saturday Night Fever made disco
newly attractive and accessible to mainstream America, both through its
hugely successful soundtrack and its appealing image of Travolta. No lon-
ger solely associated with black-identified or gay-dominated underground
150 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
urban clubs of the early 1970s, it became a white, suburban phenomenon
after Saturday Night Fever.23
As a mainstream phenomenon, Travolta’s performance as disco king
offered a challenge to youth music cultures of the period. He was a straight
white male who was also, somehow (with those moves, those looks, those
clothes) not quite white and not quite masculine. While Elvis had created
an enduring emblem of rock rebellion with his own performance of male dif-
ference decades before, Travolta, by contrast, became an emblem of all that
rock is not. For some rock fans, in fact, he became the iconic representation
of what “sucked” about disco in the late 1970s. Expressing the antipathy
of rock fans against a musical aesthetic that favored “the synthetic over the
organic, the cut-up over the whole, the producer over the artist, and the
record over live performance,”24 the rock-centered antidisco movement also
directed itself against the masculinity embodied by Travolta in Saturday
Night Fever. Travolta was burned in effigy during the most notorious pub-
lic expression of the “disco sucks” movement, “Disco Demolition Night,”
organized by disc jockey Steve Dahl for a July 1979 doubleheader in Chica-
go’s Comiskey Park.25 As Maxine Leeds Craig sums it up, “John Travolta’s
image was burned that day as the wrong kind of heterosexual man, one too
concerned with appearance. He danced too well. He danced as if dancing
were a man’s game.”26
And it was precisely through being the “wrong kind of heterosexual
man” that Travolta’s stardom was confirmed in the 1970s. Time magazine,
noting the unusual willingness of Saturday Night Fever to put the mostly
unclad male body on display and registering the threat of this (but with-
out specifying to whom or to what), proclaimed Travolta a sex symbol,
whose “threatening sexuality” and “carnal presence can make even a safe
Hollywood package seem like dangerous goods.” 27 Director John Badham
was straightforward in his assessment of the part played by Travolta’s body
spectacle in the film’s success, noting that “[m]ost of our repeat viewers
are women, and they’re not going back to see my work. . . . They’re going
back to look at Travolta.” 28 Marsha Kinder, in her film review for Cin-
ema Journal, links his erotic appeal to his identity as a song and dance
man as she compares him to dance stars of the past, saying, “he knows
how to move with style—whether walking down the street, mixing paint,
handling a ladder, or looking in a mirror. Like Fred Astaire, a genius of
dance, he can turn the simplest gesture into a stylized line that is fascinat-
ing to watch.”29 As a song and dance man whose spectacular appeal moved
beyond the dance floor, Travolta represented the new synergistic possibilities
of music and film. He also represented an unusual acknowledgment of a
desiring female audience at the end of the 1970s, even as he embodied what
might be described as mainstream queerness, his performances taking place
in (what Saturday Night Fever narrates as) a precarious social space and
what Alexander Doty calls a “flexible space,” a place where straight white
masculinity is identified with other desires and ways of being in the world.
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 151
In this “flexible space,” Travolta’s appeal had the potential to cross a “wide
range of positions within culture that are non-, anti-, or contra-straight.”30
In the wake of Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Urban Cowboy are
even more forthright in the fetishization of Travolta’s body and face than the
earlier film. In both films, the initial moment of recognition or revelation of
Travolta on screen and in the world of the film is highlighted. When he is
hailed by the zany high school pals who idolize him in Grease, for example,
this is the cue for the camera to move in for a closer look, his appeal for both
male and female onlookers confirmed in the process. In Urban Cowboy,
after he cuts off his beard (Travolta being not quite Travolta until you can
see his face), the camera lingers on his clean-shaven profile as he lounges
against the bar in Gilley’s, where he catches the eye of a lone “cowgirl,” a
moment of female-to-male fetishistic attention produced by framing, edit-
ing, and music, and prompted by a new awareness of female desire driven
by the film’s narrative investment in singles bar culture of the late 1970s.
Such moments of fetishistic attention build up to and are followed by dance
sequences, which, even outside the danceploitation of Saturday Night
Fever, are key narrative and audiovisual settings for Travolta’s particular
star appeal. In the “inter-subjective space of cinematic fiction and cultural
imagining” created by these films, Travolta’s gendered difference appears
as an echo of the past but mostly as a harbinger of the new. It is a 1970s
version of studio-era Hollywood’s song and dance men, as well as those
eroticized images of young masculinity popularized by pop music cultures
of the 1950s and 1960s. But Travolta’s star vehicles make an explicit appeal
to female desire, which is given narrative space and—in a striking change
from past representations—something like respect. In Elvis films, the crowds
of young women who scream at the sight and sound of him are depicted
as a joke. Their sexualized excitement makes them into either dangerous
delinquents or grotesques; they are entirely different from the women with
whom Elvis is romantically linked in the films, inasmuch as these women
are (apparently) driven less by sexual desire than by the desire to civilize
and domesticate the rebel male. Initially, Saturday Night Fever registers a
similar attitude toward female sexual desire, evident in Tony Manero’s obvi-
ous contempt for the women who admire him at the Odyssey (“you make it
with some of these chicks and they think you have to dance with them”), 31
an attitude that cohabitates unpleasantly with his clear need for admiration
and reassurance. But Tony’s attitude changes in the course of the film, as
his views of women—what they can or can’t do—are challenged repeatedly
by upwardly mobile Stephanie. The sexual assault by his friends of needy
and pathetic Annette (Donna Pescow) is one of the key events—along with
his own near-rape of Stephanie—that causes Tony to reevaluate the casual
misogyny of his world, where female sexual desire marks a girl as a “cunt,”
available to abuse.
Similarly, Grease uses camp comedy to reevaluate 1950s-era myths of
teen life, including the relation of gender and sexual desire. Different notions
152 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
of male and female romance are caricatured in “Summer Nights”; the song
“Look at Me I’m Sandra Dee” takes aim at the artificiality of Hollywood
femininity as lure and refusal of desire; while the heartfelt “There are Worse
Things I Could Do,” sung by Rizzo (Stockard Channing), condemns the
sexual repression and hypocrisy of “good girls.” Grease (despite a camp
aesthetic that mystified some critics 32) is structured very much as an old-
fashioned Hollywood musical, with the sort of parallel structure through
which, as Rick Altman observes, “we alternate between the male focus and
the female focus.” 33 Utilizing a “prepackaged love story whose dynamic
principle remains the difference between male and female,” it emphasizes
the similarly performative nature of both femininity and masculinity. 34 The
dual nature of Travolta’s character, Danny, who is both the ideal nice boy
summer romance of Sandy and the bad boy leader of the T-Birds at Rydell
High, creates the central challenge for the romantic narrative, a challenge
overcome when Sandy takes on a masquerade of her own at the end of the
film, inspired by the tough girl personas of the Pink Ladies. In doing so, she
effectively undermines (or renders irrelevant) the opposition between “good
girl” and “bad boy” that structures the song “Summer Nights.” By refusing
her positioning as a latter-day Sandra Dee in the final scene, Sandy remakes
herself as a sexual spectacle, but by doing so she also creates a space where
her own desires can be expressed. The expression of female desire (which,
once built into the narration, effectively opens the film to an array of viewers
and desires, making it into what Doty calls a “flexible space”) is a key ele-
ment in the success of these early films and their transformation of Travolta
from teen idol into star.

A STAR IS REBORN: PERFORMING MASCULINITY

IN PULP FICTION

I’ve been a fan forever of John Travolta. . . . But I’ve been very sad about
how he’s been used. . . . I realised John needed to work with somebody
who would take him seriously and would look at him with the love he
needed.
—Quentin Tarantino35

I do believe that Marsellus, my husband, your boss, told you to take me

out and do whatever I want. Now I wanna dance, I wanna win, I want
that trophy. So dance good.
—Mia Wallace, in Pulp Fiction

The John Travolta created by Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Urban
Cowboy—eroticized and vulnerable, a figure who struggles with and departs
from gender convention—all but disappeared from view during the 1980s.
As Jesse Zigelstein observes, if one takes into consideration the trend toward
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 153
what Susan Jeffords has identified as the “hard bodies” of the Reagan era, 36
this isn’t too surprising:

[I]t seems in retrospect almost inevitable that Travolta should have been
replaced as an embodiment of idealized masculinity by action film stars
like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, paradigmatic Reagan
heroes both, whose “hard body” images were implicitly defined against
the symbolically “soft” 70s American male, for which Travolta, no less
than Jimmy Carter, served as emblem. 37

Travolta returns to popular consciousness and audience approval in the

different political milieu and (more importantly perhaps) the different film
industrial contexts of the mid-1990s. The product of eroded boundaries
between independent and mainstream Hollywood production in the late
1980s and 1990s, Pulp Fiction confirms Quentin Tarantino’s reputation as
a modern auteur in the way it draws on a patchwork of cultural influences
and speaks of its director’s pop cultural passions for everything from junk
food to junk film—even for stars whose careers have been junked.
With a fragmented narrative of “three stories about one story,” Pulp
Fiction draws on various decades of popular music, low-budget film pro-
duction, and lowbrow fiction to create a postmodernist “art” film with
crossover appeal. In this context, John Travolta appears, in the first
instance, as a sort of lost-and-found object added to the film’s bricolage
aesthetic. (“What is wrong with these directors?” Tarantino says of Tra-
volta, “Don’t they see what they have—if they just blew the dust off it?”) 38.
Travolta appears as a surprise from the past in a film that, as Dana Polan
points out, reaches “beyond meaning and moralism to offer itself up as
a sheer cinematic spectacle, a fun-house experience of vibrant sights and
sounds.”39 In terms of the “inter-subjective” fictional and cultural spaces
of Pulp Fiction, Polan’s characterization implicitly acknowledges Taran-
tino’s debt to exploitation cinemas and their investment in the exciting
and spectacular possibilities of sensational subject matter over other types
of entertainment or audience engagement. It also suggests the way that
the film offers the cinematic equivalent of a pop musical experience, with
action and character sketches packaged into musically themed, bite-sized
chunks, a modular structure different from MTV-era action cinema given
its dialogue-driven style,40 but just as well adapted to move across multiple
media. As a tribute to exploitation cinema that offers the cinematic equiva-
lent of the three-minute pop song in its oh-so-quotable scenes, Pulp Fiction
was an apt vehicle for Travolta’s return. And consequently it is appropriate
that the image of John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in Jack Rabbit
Slim’s “World Famous Twist Contest” should grace the covers of so many
books focused on postclassical cinema and on the pop score. But Travolta
is not just a camp reminder of a pop film and musical past. In his depiction
of Vincent Vega, we also see him pick up key aspects of his star persona
154 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
as developed in the 1970s, especially the representation of masculinity as
performance and masquerade.
Tarantino explains how Pulp Fiction’s commitment to generic storytelling is
calculated to free the audience to focus on character rather than on plot, style
rather than story:

The jumping-off point was Black Mask magazine. What I wanted to do

with the three stories was start with the oldest chestnuts in the world ........
you don’t need to be caught up with the story because you already know
it. The guy takes out the mob guy’s wife—“but don’t touch her”. . . or
the boxer who’s supposed to throw the fight and doesn’t. . . . The third
story isn’t an old familiar story, but an old familiar situation. The story
starts with Jules and Vincent going to kill some guys. That’s like the
opening five minutes of every other Joel Silver movie. . . . So let’s extend
that whole little opening, let’s hang out with them for the rest of their
day, and the shenanigans that follow. 41

“Hanging out” with these characters, we find ourselves, once again, in liminal
spaces familiar from youth cinema, but in this case they are the liminal spaces
occupied by the outlaws of action film. 42 The characters in Pulp Fiction live
lives that are sandwiched between those of ordinary, law-abiding citizens
(who are their marks or, sometimes—like Bonnie—their mates, and when
shots are fired, they are collateral damage). The similarity to escapist tropes
of youth cinema is heightened by the film’s use of popular songs, source
music chosen by the characters themselves.
In addition to structural and aesthetic similarities to youth cinema, Pulp
Fiction is also a bit like backstage musicals in that it routinely puts us behind
the scenes of various criminal and other “performances,” the outcomes of
which we must wait to see (or hear about secondhand). When we do see
these performances, they are strikingly theatrical, violent confrontations
calculated to intimidate, manipulate, and disarm (sometimes literally). As
Tarantino describes the characters of Pulp Fiction, “They’re a cross between
criminals and actors and children playing roles.” 43 Thieves, Honey Bunny
aka “Yolanda” (Amanda Plummer) and Pumpkin aka “Ringo” (Tim Roth),
discuss their options, including the dread possibility of day jobs, then launch
into an address to/performance for their fellow diners calculated to transfix,
overpower, and limit the “hero factor.” Enforcers for Marsellus Wallace
(Ving Rhames), Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), and Vincent (John Travolta),
“get into character” before making their precisely timed breakfast hit. Boxer
“Butch” Coolidge (Bruce Willis) is instructed by boss Wallace to throw a
fight, but when we next see Butch, he’s on the run after not just beating but
murdering his opponent. The boss’s wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), conducts
electronic surveillance of the hireling given the task of keeping her company
in Marsellus’s absence; she watches and gives instructions via the intercom
as Vincent finds his way around the empty living room of the Wallaces’ lush
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 155
Hollywood display home. The uncomfortable scenario, apparently devised
by Mia for her own amusement, comes complete with the blue-eyed soul of
Dusty Springfield, which might be read both as a comment on Mia’s identity
as Marsellus’s wife and also, perhaps, as a teasing hint of seductive intent.
Though not written for Travolta, the role of hitman Vincent Vega is well
suited to an actor whose earliest roles returned obsessively to the perfor-
mativity of male identity, as we see him engaged in a series of increasingly
uncomfortable predicaments, which gradually strip away his veneer of
gangster cool—and get him killed. By the end of the film, he’s come back to
life but has lost his slick black suit, trench coat, and faddish ponytail to the
misadventures of the day. “Cool” is, arguably, the dominant trope of Pulp
Fiction, a pose that signifies empowerment and cultural capital. 44 Certainly,
it is a pose that, in this world, could save your life. (“We’re all gonna be like
three little Fonzies here. And what’s Fonzie like?” “C-C-Cool” “Correcta-
mundo! We are gonna be cool.”) Vincent’s performance of cool is supported
by the 1960s surf music that, as Ronald Rodman points out, is the leitmotif
of his character.45
Just as the heavy funk of Kool and the Gang’s 1973 “Jungle Boogie,”
used in the opening credits, signals the film’s debt to Blaxploitation, Dick
Dale’s 1962 “Misirlou” signals its ties to Latin American exploitation film
of the 1960s. As Tarantino explains, “I always really dug surf music, but . . .
never quite understood what the hell it had to do with surfing. To me, it
sounded like rock ‘n’ roll spaghetti Western music. Which made it perfect for
this movie, because this movie is kind of like a rock ‘n’ roll spaghetti West-
ern.”46 Commenting specifically on his use of “Misirlou” in the opening
credits, Tarantino says that it “sounds like the beginning of The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly,” and, as a consequence “it throws down a gauntlet that
the movie has to live up to.”47 As it happens, this isn’t just a musical quirk
on Tarantino’s part; surf rock was one of the main inspirations for Ennio
Morricone’s influential 1966 score for the film. As Jeff Smith sums up the
score for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, it is “a highly evocative post-
modernist stew, one that juxtaposes ostinatos with ear-bending themes; surf
guitars with mariachi trumpets; wordless grunts and whistles with melliflu-
ous singing. . . . these diverse elements added up to a soundtrack that was
as tuneful as any late sixties rock album.” 48 Like Sergio Leone in his use of
Morricone’s compositions, Tarantino shows in Pulp Fiction a willingness to
foreground music, the pop songs that determine the tone of individual scenes,
that narrate action and character. In the case of Vincent Vega and the associa-
tion of his character with surf rock, a key sequence is his heroin trip/drive
to Mia Wallace’s house. Twelve-bar blues with a bass playing simple chords
plus guitar bent by a whammy bar, “Bullwinkle Part 2” by the Centurions
shares with “Miserlou” the combination of fast staccato attack and reverb
meant to give the impression of rushing waves. But it is a rougher production
than Dick Dale’s tune in terms of recording quality and performance, almost
a garage-band effect overall. The uneven sound quality and uncertainty in
156 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
the performance suit close up images of a profoundly stoned Vincent driving
through the dark and extreme close-ups of the well-used gear that produces
this effect: The zip of an old leather wallet that holds his works, the metallic
snick of a vintage lighter, the sizzle of heroin in a flame-tarnished spoon. The
sequence produces a dreamlike effect from images and music that aestheti-
cize a drug habit as retro as the music, its governing metaphor obvious but
effective: It’s a trip. To the worn and wobbly, dark and distorted sounds of
“Bullwinkle Part 2,” Vincent rides waves of heroin as he drives down the
darkened highway in a 1964 Chevy Malibu, red as the blood in his syringe.
Removed from drudgery of the everyday, he is the picture of drugged serenity.
In more general terms, the instrumentation of surf rock meant to sug-
gest oceans and waves, routed through the intertextual link with Morricone,
evokes instead the large and empty spaces of the Spaghetti Western: the
stark minimalism of its desert settings and the violent energy of its protago-
nists. Whether they bring to mind ocean or desert, the soundscapes of surf
rock offer a stark contrast to the enclosed, cluttered, near claustrophobic
interior spaces that dominate the film, thus effectively suggesting the dif -
ference between Vincent’s inner and outer realities. At the same time, surf
music—for instance in the heroin/highway sequence—lends quasi-mythical
resonance to Vincent’s pose of gangster cool. In terms of the connotations
sought by Tarantino through his use of surf rock, it’s worth remembering that
Italian-made Westerns, at the same time that they cored out the moral and
mythical center of the Hollywood Western, created new mythologies focused
especially on the lone antihero who strode through their wastelands. When
Vincent shoots up and drives through the night in his 1964 car, listening to a
1964 surf tune on his own personal soundtrack, he achieves something of the
élan of Clint Eastwood’s taciturn loner (so different from his vibrant chatti-
ness behind the scenes, with Jules). But after his trip ends and he sobers up
at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Vincent finds himself plunged back into life and one
messy situation after another. The rest of the film is a process of whittling
him down from the (drugged and) self-possessed, hip hit man to a somewhat
overweight, no longer young, out-of-control white guy who (after acciden-
tally firing his gun, of all things) gets hosed down like a smelly dog in a
suburban back garden, then dressed in the dorkiest of borrowed clothing. It
is pretty much impossible to hold onto one’s cool while stone cold sober and
dressed in a University of California Santa Cruz “Banana Slugs” T-shirt, but
Vincent (a distant second to Jules in these terms) does his best.

THE SONG AND DANCE MAN, IN ACTION

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by cartoons and by musicals—

especially musicals. I’m crazy about them . . . . So I’ve got a very strong
feeling for the rhythm and the beauty of body movement. When I’m
deciding how to do an action scene, I’m creating a dance scene.
—John Woo on Face/Off49
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 157
Some critics read the downward trajectory traced by Vincent in Pulp Fiction
in terms of the “deterioration” of Travolta-as-star. In such a reading, the
film’s twist contest highlights “the lost mastery of the dance floor king,”50
where Travolta appears as a poor imitation of his past self (a star imperson-
ator who, unlike the waitstaff of Jack Rabbit Slim’s, is an actual star fallen
on hard times). But this reading depends on, among other things, ignoring
the way that Travolta’s star persona was shaped by roles in the 1970s that
always worked to strip away (at least some of) masculinity’s poses and pre-
tenses, as part of the process of making his characters vulnerable, attractive,
and new. Taking this into consideration, Vincent seems less emblematic of
the dissolution of Travolta-as-star than an older version of Tony, Danny,
and Bud (still) struggling to inhabit the role of white male—and still, like
those characters, looking for escape and finding it, however briefly, on the
dance floor. In this version of the scene, the hip, camp restaurant interior
of Jack Rabbit Slim’s frames the self-styled cool of two not so different
characters, in that both Mia and Vincent rely on their images to survive
(and drugs to escape from) their treacherous criminal subculture. The twist
contest, the goofy playacting, the ersatz cool of their dance to the Chuck
Berry oddity “You Never Can Tell” (yet another tune from 1964), with its
barrel-house boogie-woogie piano in lieu of guitar, offers a respite from
the everyday grind of being cool for keeps. The irony, of course, is that, by
Vincent’s “dancing good” as Mia requested and showing Mia a good time
as Marsellus commanded, the near tragedy of the evening is set in motion.
Because Vincent and Mia are happy and at ease with one another when they
get back to the boss’s place, Vincent retreats to the bathroom to have a seri-
ous talk with himself about staying alive and inadvertently sets in motion a
series of events that will conclude with a needle to the heart and a bad joke.
Travolta of 1994 is clearly older and more imperfect than Travolta of
1977, something that unsettled some critics. Martin Amis, commenting on
his comeback in Pulp Fiction, concludes that “John Travolta is so iconic that
he ought to be dead.”51 And yet, in his role as Vincent, Travolta makes clear
that his early musical and dance performances, as well as his willingness to
make a spectacle of himself on screen, persist as durable aspects of his star
persona despite the fact that his body has aged and changed. One might
expect that, faced with the fading of the physical beauty that characterized
his spectacular appeal as a young actor, Travolta might opt to enact the “non-
sexualized, minimally expressive body” typical of the straight white male.
But instead, in his most successful roles during the 1990s-2000s, he contin-
ues to dance “as if dancing were a man’s game”. 52 Thanks to the way his role
in Pulp Fiction relocates him as a performer, these performances take place
in the hybridized fictional and cultural spaces of crime, action, and comedy.
After Vincent, assassin and hired thug, dances through a heroin fog to
win the trophy and the girl (however temporarily), Travolta continues to
play screen villains and mobsters through the 1990s into the 2000s. Like
the Hollywood star Travolta claims as hero and inspiration, James Cagney,
who began as a Broadway dancer before taking gangster roles in films like
158 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
The Public Enemy (1931), Travolta’s criminals and bad guys are marked
by a physical grace, a sort of internalized musicality, that becomes part of
their representation of empowered urban masculinity. The most polished
iteration of this is Chili Palmer in Get Shorty (1995), the film-loving loan
shark who leaves Miami to collect a debt from a low-budget movie pro-
ducer in Los Angeles and ends up pitching a movie idea instead. One of
the most self-assured and smoothly attractive characters Travolta has ever
put on screen, Chili sets about producing in real life, with real people, the
movie he’d like to make in Hollywood. In doing this, he reverses the pro-
cess by which he has created his street persona by compositing his favorite
Hollywood tough guys (especially Al Pacino and Robert De Niro). In a
film filled with male characters who are performing—or attempting to per-
form—roles to achieve their ends, Chili is, as Jesse Zigelstein points out,
“at the top of the hierarchy” with a “repertoire of distinctive gestures—
the penetrating stare, the style of cigarette smoking, the confident strut,
the habitual slight adjustment of the neck—that signifies the charismatic
gangster.”53 In contrast to the characters Travolta has played previously,
masculinity is, for Chili Palmer, no strain, but it is clearly a performance.
Travolta is no longer the lean androgyne of Saturday Night Fever, but as
Chili Palmer he glides through the chaos he helps to create, once again
claiming urban space with his dancelike walk, complemented by the film’s
retro-1960s jazz-proto-funk-influenced score.
Chili Palmer’s performative masculinity in Get Shorty, recognizable as a
variation on and ode to the male flamboyance of Hollywood gangster films,
is linked to and motivated by his cinephilia. By contrast, the bad guys that
Travolta plays in John Woo’s Broken Arrow (1996) and Face/Off (1997)
have no such motivation for their performative excesses beyond their roles
as villains—and director John Woo’s own aesthetic investment in action cin-
ema choreographed in the manner of a musical. In both films, Travolta turns
his musical background, his ability to queer straight white masculinity, into
a theatrical otherness that signifies not just criminality but sociopathy. In
Broken Arrow, John Woo gives Travolta little scope for these performances,
except for fight scenes at the beginning and end. The film opens with a high-
angle shot of a boxing ring where Travolta’s character, Deakins—maverick
pilot who orchestrates the theft (or kidnapping) of two nuclear bombs—
spars with his copilot Hale (Christian Slater), a friend soon to become an
enemy. The two circle one another like dancers, an effect reprised at the end.
In the rest of the film, however, Deakins, in contrast to Hale, is a largely
static figure. In the rather limited space he’s given by the film, Travolta
poses and preens as bodies fall and helicopters explode around him, his
theatrical villainy somewhat at odds with his physical lack of engagement
in the complex, violent choreography. By contrast, in Face/Off, Travolta
is given greater scope for his particular style of music- and dance-inspired
masculinity, in a role that draws attention to the different ways white mas-
culinity is embodied by its protagonists. “Top Cop” Sean Archer (Travolta/
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 159
Nicholas Cage) is a deeply serious professional who seeks the terrorist for
hire, Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage/Travolta); Troy is the sociopath who killed
Archer’s 5-year-old son while trying to assassinate Archer himself. At the
center of the film is the scheme to put Archer (Travolta) under cover as a
Troy (Cage) lookalike by surgically replacing his face with that of his foe. As
might be expected, the plan goes terribly wrong, with the consequence that
Troy also goes undercover, the terrorist surgically altered so that he wears
the face and body of the good but troubled antiterrorist specialist, Archer.
Travolta restrains his usual body language in his performance of good cop
Sean Archer at the beginning of the film, but is released to create a far more
familiar screen persona when he plays Troy disguised as Archer. Once his
body and face become the property of the archcriminal and terrorist for hire,
Travolta gives up the defeated slump and shuffle of Archer to walk like a
dancer. He struts, promenades, and pirouettes. As David Denby observes,
“Travolta . . . is liberated . . . he’s suddenly a free-and-easy egoist, dancing
his way into rooms, insinuating, vicious.” 54 With this performance, the film
makes it clear that the only sort of straight white male who moves like a
song and dance man outside the generic parameters of the musical is one
who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

SOFT BODY: THE SONG AND DANCE MAN,

WITH HIPS AND IN HEELS

For a while . . . it was hard for me to grasp the concept of being a lead-
ing man for 30 years and now I’m being sought out to play a fat woman
from Baltimore.
—John Travolta55

The irony of Face/Off is, of course, that Travolta is returned to his trade-
mark physical performance style only when a madman wears his face as
a mask and dons his body as a suit. As Travolta reengages with his own
star persona in the film as a sort of drag performance, he is in a position
to poke fun at straight white masculinity of the sort that Craig describes
as “non-sexualized” and “minimally expressive”—and that the nefarious
Castor Troy dismisses as “an insufferable bore.” The multiple masquerade
narrative also provides the opportunity for Travolta to poke fun at Travolta.
Wearing Travolta’s face with his body altered to look like Travolta’s, Castor
Troy replies to his brother’s disgust at the transformation with a sigh that
combines understanding and theatrical dismay, “Think about me. This nose.
This hair. This ridiculous chin.” Later, in a more serious mood, when the two
masquerading men meet for a big firefight, he says to Archer, “I don’t know
which I hate more, wearing your face or your body.” With this line and with
references to the abdominoplasty required for Sean Archer/Travolta to fit
in the body of/be remade to resemble Castor Troy/Nicholas Cage, Face/Off
160 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
engages with what also becomes a trope in Travolta’s screen representations
after Pulp Fiction, beyond the integration of musical masculinity into
nonmusical film, namely comedy derived from featuring Travolta’s
unclothed body (pudgy, furry, middle-aged, and ordinary) on screen.
In the 1970s, the Travolta body was lanky and androgynous. When
Travolta appeared in Staying Alive (1983), nothing more clearly announced
Sylvester Stallone’s auteurist efforts as director than Travolta’s 1980s action
cinema style “hard body” makeover. Tony Manero appears on Broad-
way smoothly hairless and muscular, tanned and oiled, in a Stallone-style
headband and tattered loincloth for his performance in the execrable rock
musical, “Satan’s Alley.” A decade later, in his mid-1990s comeback, Tra-
volta’s body has acquired a softness that Rebecca Adams, writing in 1999,
considers typical of the Clinton era, observing that “a host of Hollywood
films . . . have featured less conventionally manly stars that challenged
the primacy of the hard-bodied action hero.” 56 When Vincent and Jules
are given their garden hose shower, Travolta’s body, without the profile -
defining lines of his black suit, appears pale and a bit unformed, like some
sea creature pulled from its shell, signifier of Vincent’s growing vulnerabil-
ity. In the 1996 film Michael, Travolta’s big belly and hairy torso compete
with his 11-foot wingspan as a signifier of the chain-smoking, barfighting,
sugar-loving, women magnet of an archangel’s difference from ordinary
men (“Halos? Inner light? I’m not that kind of Angel”). And, in the 1997
film, Primary Colors, Travolta’s soft body is that of the Southern-bred,
Krispy-Kreme-donut-and-barbecued-ribs-eating president himself. In the
way that Travolta’s body is used and put on display in these films, it is evi-
dent that he still conveys “an alternative style of masculinity, one grounded
in spectacle and spectatorship”—reminiscent of his ties to the musical—but
with a body that is increasingly unregulated and malleable, whose display
is apt to be used as an opportunity for comedy rather than to excite desire
(although it usually manages to do both).
In the way that Travolta makes his aging “soft” body dance through
the 1990s and 2000s, he becomes, among other things, an emblem of baby
boomers’ ongoing identification with pop music cultures. Taking into con-
sideration such performances, as well as his long-standing challenge to
gender convention in his role as a song and dance man, his casting as Edna
Turnblad has a curious logic, even beyond the producers’ aim to attract
the widest possible audience to the film adaptation of the Broadway musi-
cal.57 The casting of Travolta was controversial, given that both Divine and
Harvey Fierstein, who played her in on screen in 1988 and on Broadway
in 2002, are both openly gay performers. Moreover, Travolta’s stated aim
was to play Edna “straight,” not as an obvious drag: “I told [the makeup
and costume people] that I wanted Edna to be pleasant to look at . . . I was
determined that she have curves. . . . Imagine Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren
gone to flesh. . . I wanted her to look like a woman.” 58 Nevertheless, his
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 161
performance registers the influence of earlier iterations of the role thanks to
the way that the 2007 musical remake brings to the surface the “queering
of corpulence,59” implied by Divine’s 1988 interpretation in the role. In the
remake, Edna moves to the center of the film narrative. She is no longer
just a mother who works too hard to venture far from her ironing board,
identified as working class by her size and frumpiness, but an agoraphobic
kept indoors by the shame and stigma of being fat. When she follows her
daughter into the limelight, it is depicted literally as a “coming-out process,”
whereby Edna is transformed “from a fearful, self-abnegating laundress to
a woman who owns her appetites and is in full charge of her femininity and
sexuality.”60 In this revision, the original film’s focus on Civil Rights is (not
unproblematically) upstaged by a broader focus on difference and otherness
(with the landslide victory for Little Inez as dance contest winner instead of
Tracy strongly suggestive of a home audience well in advance of television
programming in the matter of integration). As a consequence, Edna takes
her place in the final dance sequence not just in support of her daughter
but as an act of defiance against conventional standards of femininity, as a
public acknowledgment and embrace of her difference.

CONCLUSION: JUST AN IN-BETWEEN

You’re born naked and the rest is drag.

—RuPaul62

As a less campy, less queer, and generally softer version of Hairspray

aimed at a mainstream (especially teen) market, the film returns to familiar
tropes of youth cinema in its depiction of dance as social and sexual release
and the opportunity for rebellion. Thus, Travolta is on familiar narrative
and thematic ground, albeit in a different guise from the androgynous stud
of the 1970s. Travolta’s Edna may well be “as straight as they come,” 61 but
when he steps into her shoes he returns to his seemingly ever present history
as a star of youth musicals, where he routinely challenged gender boundar-
ies while making a space for female—and other—desire. Thirty years after
his debut in Saturday Night Fever, it is a performance that can be read in
terms of his willingness, over the past two decades, to make a spectacle of
his own aging, ordinary body—a body poised between objectification and
abjection when it is stripped and put on display—and to make that body
dance. The same association with the film musical and youth music cultures
more generally that made him a gender rebel in the 1970s prevents him, in
the 2000s, from entirely settling into the safe nonexpressivity of mature,
straight white masculinity. Whether twisting to Chuck Berry in 1994, dodg-
ing a hail of bullets in 1997, or swinging generous hips to the irresistible
beat of Rob Base’s “It Takes 2” on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2007,
162 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
the soft(er) Travolta body of the 1990s and 2000s continues to move to the
beat, to make a spectacle of itself on stage and screen. Musical, malleable,
persistently eroticized, and, as a consequence, never completely contained
by the gender conventions that putatively define it, Travolta’s body persists
as a key element in a star text that, especially when it steps onto the dance
floor, complicates monolithic definitions of screen masculinity.
Reflecting on John Travolta’s star persona and her own Travolta-inspired
“drag king” performances as Johnny T, K. Bradford says,

all of the dressing up and changing roles and taking center stage—draws
attention to the lines (and the holes) between maleness and masculinity.
He self-consciously tries on and plays up various divergent masculinities,
and as a result, the seams, the cut and paste involved in making a male
masculine are revealed for what they are. 63

In the way that a certain troubling of—or playing with—gender boundaries

is, as Bradford notes, central to Travolta’s star persona, he is similar to Judy
Garland, a performer whose star persona was likewise built on the way in
which she didn’t fit Hollywood’s gender stereotypes of femininity. Despite her
enormous talent, charisma, and popularity, Judy Garland was something of
a challenge for Hollywood, a challenge persistently replayed in star vehicles
about an unconventional female talent struggling to find love and success.
As Garland sang in one of her earliest film roles (which hinted at the shape
of the stardom to come in films that persistently replay her difference), Love
Finds Andy Hardy (1938), “I’m just an in-between.” This is something that
might likewise be said of John Travolta, whose star image, surveyed here, is
shaped by generic exchanges between popular film and music cultures, action
and musical genres. As both point of convergence and hybridized product of
cross-media contexts, Travolta persists as an example of the difference popu-
lar music has made in contemporary screen masculinities.

NOTES

1. James, “As Praise Flows.”

2. Denisoff and Romanowski, Risky Business, 222.
3. According to AllMusic.com, the soundtrack peaked at number six for Bill-
board’s Top Soundtracks in 2001, 2012, 2013. www.allmusic.com/album/
grease-the-soundtrack-from-the-motion-picture-mw0000312651/awards
(accessed September 25, 2014). The Urban Cowboy soundtrack did not have
quite the extraordinary success of the previous two, yet it peaked at number
one for Billboard Country Albums, had a number one single, and was con-
firmed platinum in 1980. See RIAA database.
4. Breibart, “Lost in the Hustle,” 4.
5. Anderson, “The Year of John Travolta.”
6. Ibid.
 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action 163
7. Gledhill, “Introduction,” 7.
8. Cohan, “‘Feminizing’ the Song-and-Dance Man,” 66.
9. See Morrison, “Introduction,” 1-10, and Wlodarz, “Al Pacino,” 61-80.
10. See Cohan, “‘Feminizing’ the Song-and-Dance Man.”
11. At the time he made Saturday Night Fever, Travolta was already a teen heart-
throb from his role on the ABC sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979).
12. This aim to engage an older audience while retaining the younger one is sug-
gested, for instance, by the marketing of Grease, which included on the one
hand newspaper ads that offered $15 gift certificates to Arthur Murray’s dance
studios to learn the “Grease Hustle,” a disco line dance plus hand jive intro-
duced on The Merv Griffin Show in June, and on the other hand four-color ads
in teen magazines like Glamour, Seventeen, and American Girl for a free John
Travolta poster with the purchase of Helene Curtis’s “Every Night” shampoo .
See Tropiano, Grease, 89.
13. Echols identifies the guitar riff that gives it a groove to be a “rip off” of Stevie
Wonder’s clavinet in his irrepressibly funky Motown hit of 1972, “Supersti-
tion.” Echols, Hot Stuff, 204.
14. Craig, Sorry I Don’t Dance, 127-128.
15. Christgau, “Saturday Night Fever (1977).”
16. Michael Eric Dyson notes that, generally, in black music, “falsetto’s political
meaning was partially derived from its willingness to reach for notes—like
reaching for freedoms and privileges—far beyond the pale.” Dyson, Mercy
Mercy Me, 132.
17. Lehman, Roy Orbison, 182. Lehman considers Orbison’s “eerie falsetto” to be
one of the key ways that Orbison did not “adhere to the norms of masculinity
of his time.” Lehman, Roy Orbison, 8.
18. Dyer, “Don’t Look Now,” 71.
19. Saturday Night Fever was based on a New York story that recounts a primitive,
male-dominated world, where women are marginalized. Its central character,
Vincent, is a third-generation Italian American with a head full of violent fan-
tasies and a deep identification with actor Al Pacino; he commands his crew to
“set the formations, dictated every move” of his gang, The Faces, who dance
like “a small battalion, uniformed in flowered shirts and tight flared p ants.”
Cohn, “Tribal Rites.”
20. For historical surveys of disco, see Echols, Hot Stuff, 30-99, Chapters 1 and 2,
and Oritz, Disco Dance, Chapter 1, 1-38.
21. Echols, Hot Stuff, 38.
22. Quoted in King, “After 30 Years.”
23. Echols notes a binary, or “two-tier,” structure in histories of disco, what she
calls “disco revisionism,” whereby the “glitz and greed and tackiness in main-
stream disco” are considered separately from “the gay/queer underground,”
where “one finds disco’s authentic self in all its noirish and subversive glory.”
As a consequence of this two-tier history, relatively little is known about pat-
terns of consumption in mainstream disco. Echols, Hot Stuff, 184
24. Ibid.
25. The entry fee was only 98¢, plus a piece of disco music. Close to 60,000
showed up, not the normal crowd for baseball. Security had been provided for
only 35,000. After promoters detonated an estimated 40,000 disco records in
centerfield, a riot ensued. People excluded from the park brought ladders t o
climb in; outside, an effigy of John Travolta was burned. For descriptions of
the event, see Gillian, “Discophobia”; Craig, Sorry I Don’t Dance, 115-116;
Echols, Hot Stuff, 148; and Lapointe, “The Night Disco Went Up in Smoke.”
26. Craig, Sorry I Don’t Dance, 115, 116.
164 John Travolta, a Song and Dance Man in Action
27. Rich, “Cinema: Discomania.”
28. Quoted in Breibart, “Lost in the Hustle,” 4.
29. Kinder, Saturday Night Fever, 40.
30. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, 6.
31. Echols, Hot Stuff, 215.
32. See Tropiano, Grease, 93-96.
33. Altman, The American Film Musical, 20.
34. Ibid.
35. Quoted in Dargis, “Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction,” 51.
36. Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 23-25.
37. Zigelstein, “Staying Alive in the 90s,” 3.
38. Quoted in Dargis, “Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction (1994),” 51.
39. Polan, Pulp Fiction, 7.
40. The soundtrack for Pulp Fiction, which includes dialogue from the film as well
as pop songs, was confirmed as having reached 3x platinum in 1996. RIAA
database.
41. Quoted in Dargis, “Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction,” 49
42. That is, the in-between spaces of action films of the sort produced by Joel Silver
in the 1980s, such as the Lethal Weapon series (1987-1992), the Die Hard
series (1988-1990), and Commando (1985), where quirky but anonymous
(and short-lived) bad guy henchmen abound.
43. Quoted in Smith, “When You Know You’re in Good Hands,” 64
44. It is also at the heart of the racial politics of Pulp Fiction, ultimately dependent
on the reinscription, as Sharon Willis points out, of “black masculinity as an
image, a cultural icon, seen through white eyes.” Willis, “The Fathers Watch
the Boys’ Room,” 61.
45. Rodman, “The Popular Song as Leitmotiv in 1990s Film,” 126-127.
46. Quoted in Bailey, Pulp Fiction, 107
47. Ibid.
48. Smith, Sounds of Commerce, 136.
49. Quoted in Ryan, “Look Woo’s Talking,” 121.
50. Zigelstein, “Staying Alive in the 90s,” 3.
51. Amis, “Travolta’s Second Act,” 212.
52. Craig, Sorry I Don’t Dance, 116.
53. Zigelstein, “Staying Alive in the 90s,” 5.
54. Denby, “Masquerade,” 48.
55. Condon, “Stepping Out in Ladies’ Shoes.”
56. Adams, “‘Fat Man Walking,’” 6.
57. Of particular interest was a teen demographic who is unlikely to be familiar with
John Waters’ original film but who would know Travolta’s early work in Grease.
58. Monk, “Travolta Turns on a Curve.”
59. Heller, Hairspray, 55, 54.
60. Ibid., 54, 87.
61. Yabroff, “Drag.”
62. Quoted in Schacht and Underwood, “The Absolutely Fabulous,” 13.
63. Bradford, “Grease, Cowboy Fever,” 16.

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Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989.
Amis, Martin. “Travolta’s Second Act.” New Yorker. February 20, 1995, 212-218.
Anderson, George. “The Year of John Travolta.” Pittsburgh Post Gazette Daily
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Bradford, K. “Grease, Cowboy Fever; or, the Making of Johnny T.” Journal of
Homosexuality 43.3-4 (2002): 15-34.
Breibart, Eric. “Lost in the Hustle.” Cineaste 9.2 (1978/1979): 2-5, 57.
Christgau, Robert. “Saturday Night Fever (1977).” Dean of American Rock Crit -
ics’ Album Guide. www.robertchristgau.com/get_album.php?id=7726 (accessed
September 25, 2014).
Cohan, Steven. “‘Feminizing’ the Song-and-Dance Man: Fred Astaire and the Specta-
cle of Masculinity in the Hollywood Musical.” In Screening the Male: Exploring
Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. Edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark,
46-69. London: Routledge, 1993.
Cohn, Nik. “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” New York. June 7, 1976.
http://nymag.com/nightlife/features/45933/index4.html (accessed September 25,
2014).
Condon, Eileen. “Stepping Out in Ladies’ Shoes.” Evening Post (Bristol UK). July
19, 2007.
Craig, Maxine Leeds. Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014.
Dargis, Manohla. “Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction.” In Quentin Tarantino:
Interviews Revised and Updated. Edited by Gerald Peary, 49-52. Jackson: Uni-
versity of Mississippi Press, 2013 [1994].
Denby, David. “Masquerade.” New York Magazine. July 14, 1997, 48.
Denisoff, R. Serge, and William D. Romanowski. Risky Business: Rock in Film. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991.
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Dyer, Richard. “Don’t Look Now: Richard Dyer Examines the Instabilities of the
Male Pin Up.” Screen 23.4 (1982): 61-73.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Mercy Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin
Gaye. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.
Echols, Alice. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York:
W. W. Norton, 2010.
Gillian, Frank. “Discophobia: Anti-Gay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against
Disco.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16.2 (2007): 276-306.
Gledhill, Christine. Introduction to Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas. Edited
by Christine Gledhill, 1-14. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Heller, Dana. Hairspray. Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2011.
James, Caryn. “As Praise Flows, Travolta Awaits His 3rd Comeback.” New York
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Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ:
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Kinder, Marsha. Saturday Night Fever. By John Badham. Film Quarterly 31.3
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King, Susan. “After 30 Years, ‘Fever’ Still Burns.” LA Times. November 18, 2007.
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Lapointe, Joe. “The Night Disco Went Up in Smoke.” New York Times. July 4, 2009.
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Conclusion

Beginning with the cultural challenge and box office opportunity that
rock ‘n’ roll offered Hollywood, this study has surveyed some examples of
how convergences of popular music and film produced new modes of
screen masculinity in American cinema after World War II. It has considered
how varieties of youth music have been used to create new audiovisual
representations of male embodiment and masculine empowerment, and how
the pop score has worked to narrate and represent masculinities marked as
different in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. In doing so, it has
engaged with some of the ways in which the pop score works to broaden film
representation, as it has explored the work of scores whose meanings are
derived from the specific social and cultural contexts, aesthetic qualities and
affective appeal of popular music. Of particular interest for its focus on gender
representation is the pop score’s ability to prompt a different relation with
bodies seen—and heard—on screen. Male spectacle, musically framed
and constructed, is a common trope across the films discussed here. It carries
different meanings in specific social and historical, narrative and generic
contexts. But, generally speaking, making a spectacle of oneself is presented
in these films as a statement of difference, a mode of rebellion and defiance
facilitated and framed by the embodied pleasures of youth-identified popular
music. It is a stance that highlights the difference between these masculinities
and those of an earlier generation—and likewise between these film
representations and those of studio era Hollywood, even as the films
analyzed in the preceding chapters reinvest themselves in and reinvent the
most familiar forms of body-focused entertainment from Hollywood’s past.
The survey started with Elvis Presley who, in his stage and screen perfor-
mances, drew on varied filmic and musical source materials, working across
race, class, and gender boundaries to suggest—if only for the span of a
song—alternative ways of being for mid-1950s youth. In his films, his screen
persona was a rock ‘n’ roll version of the rebel male, who performed gen-
dered and generational difference while anonymous young women screamed
out approval from the sidelines. The alternatives hinted at by Elvis’s perfor-
mances percolated through youth music cultures and cinemas of the 1960s
and beyond. Some of the screen masculinities discussed here specifically
168 Conclusion
reference, or hark back to, the rock rebel of the 1950s. Big-budget,
Pentagon-funded films produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, for instance, offer a
pointed reminder that youth music-cultural myths of freedom and expres-
sivity embodied in the rock rebel figure can be accessed by a range of social
and political ideologies. John Travolta offers, by contrast, the example of
a different sort of gender rebellion, as a star whose ability to queer white
masculinity is linked to disco music, the Hollywood musical, and the youth
film, as well as to dance cultures more generally. But even the masculinities
discussed here that don’t specifically reference the rock rebel—the ethnic
masculinities of Scorsese’s gangster films, for example—point to the condi-
tions of possibility offered by pop scores. The film examples explored here
testify to the work of pop musical pleasures derived from and centered on
the body—what Roland Barthes calls the “geno-song,” or “grain”—and the
freedoms evoked affectively by those pleasures, what Lawrence Grossberg
identifies in reference to youth music cultures as the “rock formation,” and
what Richard Dyer in his discussion of the studio-era Hollywood musical
identifies as “utopia”. Wed to screen action—of the sort found in juvenile
delinquent, noir, crime, gangster, exploitation, and action films—pop musi-
cal pleasures, affective meanings, and connotations facilitate a new iteration
of cinema’s long-standing fascination with transgression and malefaction as
empowerment and escape, the expression of which is, more often than not,
violence. The refusal of order and ordinariness in such film devolves on the
body-in-action, on spectacle, just as it does in a wide array of popular music
cultures, including the generic worlds of the Hollywood musical. In the
films of Scorsese, Van Peebles, and Araki, music and violence are the means
to assert and perform male difference in the very different contexts of the
New Hollywood, the Black Power movement, and the New Queer Cinema.
That their characters fight for their space on screen isn’t much of a surprise.
Haven’t Hollywood’s male protagonists always done that in action-based
genres? But musical narration and representation make these familiar expe-
riences of male heroism new even as they connect these representations to
their specific historical, social and political contexts.
The pop musical “struggle for fun,” as Simon Frith puts it, 1 is turned,
in these films, into struggles for identity and empowerment in cinematic
worlds that are, by and large, not just male but masculinist. At the
same time that these films are invested in producing, with the help of the pop
score, alternative versions of masculinity, marked by difference, they seem
equally invested in confirming the most enervating images of femininity as
passive, static, and domesticated. These gender imbalances reflect social and
historical contexts in which the films were made (the masculinist tenden-
cies of the Black Power movement in the case of Van Peebles’ rendering of
Sweetback’s world, for example), as well as the popular music cultures they
engage as part of their gender representations (action masculinities shaped
in terms of a rock masculinity defined in contradistinction to pop music’s
association with femininity). But they are also a reminder of the ties these
 Conclusion 169

representations have to a cinematic past where Hollywood’s white male

hero repeatedly faced challenges, took action, and reinvented masculinity
along with his own heroism, one film at a time.

NOTE

1. Frith, Sound Effects, 271.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image-Music-Text. Selected and trans-
lated by Stephen Heath, 179-189. New York: Noonday Press, 1977.
Dyer, Richard, “Entertainment and Utopia,” Movie 24 (1977): 2-13.
Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock. London:
Constable, 1981.
Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and
Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Index
action film 94, 104, 143, 164n, 168;
masculinity 1-3, 9-10, 12n,
95-7, 100-1, 113, 125-6, 145,
153-4, 157-8, 160, 162; see also
blaxploitation; militainment
ACT UP 123-4
“Addio Sogni di Gloria” 60
Aerosmith 107-8, 112
AIDS/HIV 11, 120-4, 126-7, 130-3,
136
American Graffiti 54, 56
Aquatones, The 57
Araki, Gregg 11, 120-2, 133, 137, 168
Armageddon 11, 95, 103-9, 113, 116n
“Atlantis” 66
Babyland 121, 126, 136-7
“Ballad of Lucy Jordan, The” 129
Barretto, Ray 49-50, 52
Barthes, Roland 7-8, 13n, 24, 148, 168
Bay, Michael 94, 114n
“Be My Baby” 51, 53-5, 69n
Beck, Jeff 67
Bee Gees 144, 148
Bennett, Ronnie 53-4
Bennett, Tony 60-2
Berlin 102, 114n, 115n
Berry, Chuck 40n, 157, 161
Beverly Hills Cop 94, 114n
Birth of a Nation 79
Blackboard Jungle 10, 21-8, 38, 40n,
41n, 149
Black Caesar 89
Black Hawk Down 11, 95, 109-13,
116n
Black Power movement 74, 77, 83, 85,
90n, 91n, 168
blaxploitation 9, 11, 74-5, 79, 81-4,
89, 91n, 148, 155
blockbusters 19
Blondie 131
blues 30-1, 36, 65, 76-7, 80, 82, 90n,
106-7, 112, 116n, 127-9,
155
Bonnie and Clyde 10, 39, 49, 121, 128,
130
Brackett, David 6-7
Brando, Marlon 31-2, 35, 96
Broken Arrow 158
Brown, James 74, 82-3, 89
Bruckheimer, Jerry 3, 11, 94-5, 97,
104, 109-10, 113, 116n, 167
“Bullwinkle Part 2” 155-6
Cabaret Voltaire 134
Carter, Betty 64
Casino 10, 46, 60, 64-8
Centurions, The 155
“Chant” 111
Chantels, The 56-7, 70n
Charles, Ray 64, 87
Charts, The 55
Chion, Michael 98, 100
Chris & Cosey 121, 135-7
classical Hollywood film score 5,
17-20, 32, 38, 40, 84; post-
studio impact on 19-20
Coil 121-2, 135, 137
Columbia Pictures 27, 75, 113
compilation score see pop score
Cooley High 56
“Cords of Love” 136-7
country and western 30-1, 33, 100,
127-9, 162n
Cream 67
“Creep” 110
Crosby, Bing 7, 31
Crudup, Arthur “Big Boy” 30, 35
Crystals, The 53, 63
Curtis, Ian 132-3
172 Index
Dale, Dick 155
danceploitation 11, 146, 151
“Danger Zone” 98-9, 102, 115n
Dean, James 31-2, 96
Deep Impact 104, 108
Departed, The 10, 46, 67-8
Derek and the Dominoes 66
“Desirie” 55
“Devil in Disguise” 110, 116n
disco 11, 131, 136, 144, 149-50, 163n,
167
Di Stefano, Giuseppe 52, 60, 62
Divine 144, 160-1
“Do Ya Wanna Funk” 131
Doherty, Thomas 2, 22-3, 27, 40n
Donovan 66
Don’t Knock the Rock 27
Doom Generation, The 120
doo-wop 9, 55-7, 59-60, 62
Dorsey, Lee 64
Drance 121, 137
Earth, Wind & Fire 82, 84-5, 87
Eastwood, Clint 86, 156
Easy Rider 10, 39, 48, 126-9
electronica 122, 135-6, 138n
“El Watusi” 49-50, 69n
exploitation cinema 9, 19, 48, 69n,
74-5, 89n, 90n, 145, 153, 155,
168; see also blaxploitation;
danceploitation; rocksploitation
Face/Off 158-60
Faithfull, Marianne 129
Faltermeyer, Harold 98, 103
femininity: conventional tropes
34-5, 80, 96, 102, 128-9, 135-6,
162, 168; fetishization 3;
‘problematic’ 48-9; sexuality 53-
4, 69n, 150, 152, 161
film narrative 86, 88; gender and 1,
9-10, 28-9, 34, 50-1, 80, 96,
102, 128, 137, 146-7, 149,
151, 162; film music and 5,
18, 27, 37-8, 46; suture 5, 8,
13n
film noir 37, 128, 163n
film score see classical Hollywood film
score; pop score
“Firenza Sogna” 62
Flashdance 94, 97, 114n
Fred 121, 137
Frith, Simon 4, 12n
funk 82-4
Gangs of New York 46, 58-9
gangster film 10, 33, 46-7, 61, 63,
68-9, 157-8, 168
Garland, Judy 162
gender see femininity; masculinity
geno-song 7-8, 13n, 24, 84, 89, 148,
168
Gerrard, Lisa 110
Get Shorty 158
Gibbons, Billy 106
“Gimme Shelter” 67
Girl Can’t Help It, The 24, 28-30
girl groups 53-60, 63, 68, 70n
“Godlike” 125
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The 155
Goodfellas 10, 46, 60-4, 66-8
Gorbman, Claudia 5, 18, 68
“Gortoz a ran/I’m Waiting” 110
gospel 23, 30-1, 57, 78, 82-3, 87, 90n,
148
“Go to Hell” 127
Graduate, The 10, 39, 48
grain of the voice see geno-song
Grease 144, 146-7, 151-2, 163n, 164n
Griffith, D.W. 79-80
Grossberg, Lawrence 37-8, 95, 129,
137, 168
guitar see rock music
Gun Crazy 121, 128, 130
Hairspray 11, 144-5, 160-1
Haley, Bill and His Comets 21, 24,
26-8
Harrison, George 66
Hayes, Isaac 74, 87
heavy metal 1, 115n, 125, 136
Hendrix, Jimi 110-12, 129
High Noon 20, 40n
Hollywood musical 20, 42n, 62, 128,
131, 167-8; gender and 34, 145-
8, 158-61; homosexuality and
131; narrative 32-4, 38, 46, 86,
88-9, 152, 154; spectacle 3, 28
Hooker, John Lee 42n, 106, 116n
“I Ain’t Superstitious” 67
“I.C. Water” 133
“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” 108,
116n
“If Six Was Nine” 129
“I Love You So” 56-7
“I Met Him on a Sunday” 56
industrial music 9, 11, 120-7, 134-7,
138n

Industrial Records 121, 138n
Iron Man 3, 104
Jagger, Mick 65, 67, 71n
Jailhouse Rock 32-3, 35, 38, 96
Jarman, Derek 122, 124
jazz 23-4, 26, 30, 36, 39n, 41n, 52,
75-6, 82-3, 88, 90n, 158
jazz-funk 11, 84, 87
Joy Division 132-3
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” 51, 65-6
“Jungle Boogie” 155
Kalinak, Kathryn 5, 12n, 18
Kassabian, Anahid 5-7
Katzman, Sam 27-8, 33
King Creole 32-8, 96
KMFDM 121-2, 125-7, 136-7, 139n
Kool and the Gang 155
Kristeva, Julia 7, 13n
“La Grange” 106-7, 116n
La Permission (Story of a Three Day
Pass) 75
Last Action Hero 1, 95
“Layla” 66
Little Caesar and the Romans 56
Living End, The 11, 120-5, 128-32,
134-8
Loggins, Kenny 98-9, 102
Longtime Companion 122-4, 131, 136
“Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” 152
Love Me Tender 30
Loving You 27, 32-4, 36, 38
McClary, Susan 7, 98
McRobbie, Angela 4, 12n
“Malafemmena” 59
Mancini, Henry 19, 40n
Marvelettes, The 56-8, 70n
masculinity: in crisis 9-10, 37, 168;
display/ performance 4, 30-2,
49, 63, 66, 68-9, 74-5, 77-81,
84, 88, 95-7, 101, 126, 143,
146-53, 155-7, 159-62, 167;
ethnicity and 62, 68-9, 148,
167-8; gender rebellion 34-6,
96, 135, 143, 146-7, 158, 161;
juvenile delinquency and 10, 23,
35, 39, 41n; military and 97;
queer 125, 127, 130, 146-7,
150-2, 161, 168; race and 1, 9,
23, 35-6, 74-5, 77-81, 84, 90n,
107, 112, 147, 150, 158-9,
Index 173
161-2, 167-8; rebellion and
2-4, 10, 23, 31-2, 35, 39, 48,
52, 54, 65, 68, 95-7, 99, 102-5,
108-9, 125, 135-6, 138, 146,
151, 167-8; sex and 48-9;
technology and 9, 11, 97-101,
104-7, 110, 113, 114n; violence
and 9-11, 24, 37-8, 47, 49-51,
59, 69, 96, 130, 135, 168
“Mask” 126
Mayfield, Curtis 74, 89, 107
Mean Streets 11, 46, 48, 60, 70n, 74,
120; music and Charlie 53-5,
61; music and masculinity
in 57-60, 65-8; music and
nostalgia in 55-7; music and
tradition in 51-3, 62
Mesinai, Raz 110, 116n
MGM 20, 27, 41n
Middleton, Richard 6-7
militainment 103, 108-10
Mina 63
“Miserlou” 155
Morricone, Ennio 155-6
MTV 3, 98, 103, 106-7, 113, 115n,
153
Mulvey, Laura 4, 61, 80, 89n
Mundy, John 5, 23, 32, 37-8
musicals see Hollywood musical
music video 94, 98, 103, 106, 108, 113,
115n, 132
“Naïve” 136
Neapolitan pop 51-2, 57, 59-60, 62,
70n
New Hollywood 2, 9-10, 19, 46, 69,
147
New Queer Cinema 9, 123-5, 168
Newton, Huey 81-2, 86, 91n
Nilsson, Harry 66
Nowhere 120
Nutmegs, The 56
“Please Mr. Postman” 56-9
Poitier, Sidney 23, 78, 80
pop score: counterpoint 57-9, 64, 87,
100; fetishization and 61, 63-4,
68, 101, 151; gender and 5-6,
9-10, 84, 102-3, 108, 129,
135, 137-8, 145, 152, 168;
history 16-17, 20-1, 40n; ironic
commentary 64-5; narration and
46, 60, 64-5, 67-8, 167; race
and 86-7; synergy 2-4, 12n, 84,
174 Index
94, 98, 113, 153; theory 4-6;
youth culture and 2, 65; see also
soundtrack albums
popular music: community and 55-6,
76, 83, 87-8, 90n; gender and
4, 9, 53-4, 80, 95, 102-3, 125,
127-9, 137, 145-6, 167-8;
homosexuality and 131-2, 136,
149-50, 163n; industry 16-17;
meaning 2, 4-5, 7-9, 68, 98,
113, 125, 128, 163n, 167-8;
nostalgia 56-7, 62, 136; pleasure
4, 7-8, 10, 12n, 13n, 15, 24-5,
33, 95, 104, 112, 136, 143, 166,
168; race 17, 57, 87; theory
4, 6-8; Tin Pan Alley 16, 28,
32; see also blues; country and
western; disco; funk; gospel;
heavy metal; industrial; jazz;
punk; rock ‘n’ roll; rock music;
post-punk 9, 11, 120, 132
Presley, Elvis 96, 110, 112, 116n; as
gender rebel 2-3, 33-5, 37-9,
150-1, 167; persona 31-3, 42n;
race and 30-1, 36; rock ‘n’ roll
performer 10, 16, 29-30;
rocksploitation 27
Psychic TV 121, 133
Pulp Fiction 11, 143-4, 152-7, 160,
164n
punk 9, 11, 111, 116n, 120-2, 124-6,
130-1, 133-5, 137
“Pusherman” 107
Queer Nation 123-6
R&B (rhythm and blues) 22, 24, 30,
40n, 52, 55-8, 62, 66, 83, 91n,
100, 106, 116n, 144
“Rags to Riches” 60-1
Rambo series 96-7
Right Stuff, The 104, 116n
Ritter, Tex 20, 40n
road movies 10, 125, 130, 134-5, 137;
music in 127-9
“Rock Around the Clock” 21-2, 24-7,
38, 40n, 41n
Rock Around the Clock 27
rock formation 37, 168
rock music: authenticity 100-2, 106,
112; drugs 67; escape 129;
guitar-driven 1, 9, 11, 35, 65,
67-8, 70n, 83, 95, 98-104, 106,
110-13, 115n, 125, 133, 135,
155, 163n; masculine display 4,
34, 95-6, 100-1; masculinity 66,
106-7, 112, 150; nostalgia 105-
8; rebellion 12n, 39, 48, 67-8,
95, 99-100, 103, 105, 108-9,
125; technology and 97-101,
104, 107, 110-11, 113, 115n,
121, 125; violence 67, 135, 168;
see also pop score
rock ‘n’ roll (1950s) 9; class 17, 23,
25, 30-1, 37, 65; juvenile
delinquency 10, 21-4, 26, 28,
33, 151, 168; liberation 127-8,
149; masculine display 31-2;
race 17, 30, 35; rebellion 2-4,
10-11, 24, 37-8, 48, 150, 167-
8; sex 25, 33; violence 22-6, 33,
37-8, 41n; youth market 27; see
also pop score
rocksploitation 27, 33
Rolling Stones 65-7, 70n, 106-7
Ronettes, The 52-4, 56, 69n, 70n
Roselli, Jimmy 52, 59, 70n
“Rubber Biscuit” 56
Saturday Night Fever 11, 143-4, 146-
52, 158, 161, 163n
Schwarzenegger, Arnold 1, 95-6, 153
sci-fi 104, 109, 135
Scorpio Rising 48
score see classical Hollywood film
score; pop score
Scorsese, Martin 2, 9-10, 46, 49,
51-2, 65-9, 120, 168; musical
narration 47-8
Scott, Ridley 95, 109-10, 116n
Scott, Tony 94, 97, 114n
screwball comedy 122, 128
Searchers, The 20, 58
Shepherd, John 6-7
“Ship of Love” 56
Shirelles, The 56, 70n
silent film music 17, 39n
Simpson, Don 94, 97, 104
Smith, Jeff 4-5, 16, 20, 155
“Snow, The” 135
soul 9, 76, 82-3, 102, 148-9, 155
soundtrack albums 9, 12n, 19-20, 74,
76, 89n, 94, 114n, 115n, 144,
147, 149, 162n, 164n; see also
synergy
Spector, Phil 54, 69n
Springfield, Dusty 155

Stallone, Sylvester 95-7, 153, 160
“Stardust” 62-3
Stax 76
“Stayin’ Alive” 147-9
Staying Alive 160
Steiner, Max 18
Stevens, Steve 99, 102, 114n, 115n
Stone Temple Pilots 110
“Summer Nights” 152
Superfly 89
“Suspicious Minds” 110, 116n
“Sweetback’s Theme” 76, 84
“Sweet Emotion” 107
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
10-11, 88-9; black masculinity in
74, 77-81; funk in 9, 84-5, 88;
marketing 76; narrative style 75,
86-8; race and 75-6
Sylvester 131
“Synaesthesia” 135
synergy 2-3, 11, 12n, 19-21, 74, 76,
94-5, 98, 103, 113, 114n, 115n,
128, 143-4, 150, 153, 162
Taha, Rachid 110, 111, 116n
“Take My Breath Away” 102, 104,
114n
Tarantino, Quentin 145, 153-6
Team America 104-5, 116n
“Teddy Bear” 34, 36
teen film see youth audience
“Tell Me” 65
Thelma and Louise 129-30
theme songs 19-20, 114n, 131
“Then He Kissed Me” 63
“There Are Worse Things I Could Do”
152
“This Little Light of Mine” 78
“This World We Love in (Il cielo in una
stanza)” 63
“Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind
Me of You)” 56
Throbbing Gristle 121, 134, 138n,
139n
“Tide Is High, The” 131
Top Gun 11, 107-11; as militainment
103-4, 113; gendered
soundtrack of 102-3; rock music
in 95, 98-101; synergy 94, 98,
114n, 115n; technology 97, 99
“Top Gun Anthem” 99, 102, 114n,
115n
Index 175
Totally F***ed Up 120
Travolta, John 11-12, 143-4; 163n,
164n, 167; ageing of 157, 160;
eroticization of 147, 149-51;
gender rebellion of 146, 150-1,
161; performative masculinity of
145, 148, 155-6, 158-60
“Trouble” 36-7, 42n
Tyler, Stephen 107-8
Urban Cowboy 144, 146-7, 151-2,
162n
Van Peebles, Melvin 9-10, 91n, 168;
and black cinema 74-7, 80-1,
89; criticism of 77, 79-80;
musical performance 75-6, 82,
90n
Vaughan, Stevie Ray 110-12
Village People 131
“Voodoo Chile—Slight Return” 110-12
“Wade in the Water” 78
Walser, Robert 7, 98, 115n
Ward, Billy and His Dominoes 62
“Warrior” 113
Watermelon Man 75, 79, 90n
westerns 3, 10, 20, 40n, 50-1, 80,
128-9, 155-6
Who, The 66, 95
Who’s That Knocking at My Door 10;
music and cultural conflict 48-9,
51-2; music and gender 53-4;
music and violence 47-51, 68
Wild One, The 23-4
Williams, John 19-20
Woo, John 158
“Y.M.C.A.” 131
“You” 57
“You Never Can Tell” 157
“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” 102
youth audience 161, 164n; 1950s 22,
24, 26-8, 37; 1960s 38, 48, 69n;
1980s 95; music culture and
2-4; synergy and 12n, 94, 104,
147, 163n
Zappa, Frank 26-7
Zimmer, Hans 110-11, 116n
Žižek, Slavoj 108
ZZ Top 106-7