Music in film: Emotional manipulation or enhancement?

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HI, I'm new so prepare to cringe - I think music works well to emotionally push the viewer further into the world: it's already edited and the view restricted to this rectangle of light - but the music sort of fills in the bits you cannot see and builds the world. Wonderful background scores like Vangelis's Blade Runner, Glass's Candyman, Revell's 'The Crow' or even in trashy films, Zimmer's Broken Arrow is pretty much the only thing I can remember. Music itself can add more direct flavour when more in-your-face, nostalgia-soundtracks like a lot of Tarantino's films, or ridiculous films like Lock Stock or Snatch. Musicals like Half a Sixpence, Mamma Mia etc are very much to the camera of course. Trying to ting of films without or very minimal music - Alien does spring to mind as it has stabs of music which is quite dramatic.
I think a good musical score builds in a layer of nostalgia for a movie, gives you some additional things to latch onto and go back and watch something for. Movies that are like documentaries of course work without music, like City of God.

Movies ruined by soundtracks? well, I know if you watch old 70s 80s sci-fi movies with their crazy synths, they have aged very badly: would Star Wars have remained as timeless without John Williams? (although John Carpenter gets a pass here )
And what of films like Knight's Tale that try to squeeze in contemporary music using period instrumentation?
Would The Lighthouse been as-tense with music throughout?
And War films: they seem a black-and-white genre for this, often mixing within the same film - either jingoistic and musical to scenes of silence and intense dread.

Summary: the more music, the more fantastic the movie is - and the less it feels more real. So it is there to manipulate. But surely this is why we enjoy films and enjoy the emotional ride.



I’ve been thinking about this since I saw this thread. Generally, I’m not a Dogme 95 type of person and in fact, I often find myself sitting through mediocre films just so I could Shazam the soundtrack, be it Hans Zimmer or Yasmine Hamdan. But there are cases when music feels misplaced precisely because it is so obvious what it is trying to do in terms of emotional manipulation. I re-watched Black Book about a week ago, which I don’t consider to be a masterpiece but quite entertaining still, and was amased at how jarring the score is. It’s totally on the nose, trumpets (or whatever wind instruments) at times of ““emotional intensity”” (triple speech marks needed) and piano when the moment is meant to be what ads call “tender”.

I do think by this point, with audiences being used to it and increasingly discerning, the manipulation quite irritating. When it comes to soundtracks rather than instrumental scores, I’ve been eager to watch something high-quality that sneaks in “pop” or something unambiguously anachronistic while being a period piece and gets away with it, i.e. does it well. That would be refreshing. Didn’t much like the Baz Luhrmann Gatsby (or anything Luhrmann) but thought the club music worked quite well. Tarantino does it, but it’s more subtle and I’m more interested in overt examples. Zimmer often has electronics in orchestral scores, which I really like. In the ideal world, it would be insidious and throw the audience off guard just enough.

Otherwise, manipulation can and does backfire. I often find myself laughing at dramatic emotional music if the significance of the event it accompanies has not been sold to me. As with anything, it’s about skill and talent. The Munich and Pianist scores are utterly manipulative, but fantastic nonetheless.