Music in image and image as music (part 1)

The goal in this text is to examine the role of music as a part of audiovisual experience. So, my starting point is quite orthodoxy. But the main goal in this text is to produce a perspective that is slightly more speculative, and certainly more interesting: I will try to examine images from the perspective of music and sound, I will try to see images as aural experience, images as becoming-music, as Gilles Deleuze would put it. So, this text will be somewhat unorthodox, but I will try to connect it, as much as I can, to theoretical discussions about the relation between music and image.

I got the inspiration for this text from a lecture series about Twin Peaks in university of Turku couple years back. In those lectures many comments were risen about the unorthodox or unnatural usage of sounds in the series and how it made the show’s atmosphere really weird. This connection between music and unnatural (or should I say Nature as opposition to human rationale) is in the core of my text so I will first proceed by examining Twin Peaks and the relation between image and music. This first part will consider music as a part of image, or more precisely how some of the musical properties can be found in the image. The second part of my text will examine some of the latest action films and the focus moves mainly to the image’s properties to be mostly musical, image as becoming-music.

So, the main idea in this text is that the usual starting point in many cinema books, namely that of concidering music and image as equal entities, is in most cases wrong. There’s some movies and shots that harness the properties of image more fully and the same goes for the music. So my proposition is that in Twin Peaks music is dominating image and in recent action flicks images have become more music-like.

David Lynch and unnatural dynamism - Nietszche’s Apollon and Dionysos

One of the points made about Twin Peaks in our lecture was that of the weird athmosphere. The examplary scene from Twin Peaks was Dale Cooper’s visit in the Black lodge in which all the other characters spoke backwards causing some distorted properties to seamingly banal comments like: ”I have good news for you / the gum you like is coming back in style.” Of course it can be said that this remark itself in Black lodge’s context is quite unusual, but the point im trying to make here is that Lynch’s playful usage of voice and sound in general is making ordinary scenes very weird.

Slavoj Žižek made a great point about Lynch’s films saying that Lynch’s world is intensified or over-intensified. ”Darkness is really dark, light is really unbearable blinding light, fire really hurts, it’s so hot.” (Slavoj Žižek: Pervert’s guide to cinema) This notion could be extended to characters also. For example special agent Dale Cooper experiences his world very intensively, he sees banal things exiting. He always praises his cup of jo’ and the strawberry pie. He notices little details in the case that others would miss and also in other character’s love lifes. In short, his world is intensified. It’s a common rule to make characters in drama a bit extreme but in the case of Lynch this rule has been used in it’s limits.

More importantly Žižek’s remarks of intensified reality exemplifies itself in Lynch’s usage of sounds. We can find many occasions in which some particular detail in the scene is making almost unbearable noise. Was it a gramofon or ceiling fan in the Palmer’s apartment, one of the policemen trying to tape a wanted poster to diner’s door or Lynch’s character yelling due his lack of hearing. I could list countless details here but the main point remains that the source of all these sounds is in normal world but the volume and in many cases the duration has been prolonged intensified. And in some cases the affecting power of these noises to it’s surraunding is also intensified. Of course Lynch uses some weird or other-worldly sounds also, but in most cases these sounds are just normal everyday sounds that are slighly distorted with some use of audio filtering and can still posses some reminiscence to the original sound, and to be precise, in many cases these sounds are like their own intensified counterparts. In any case im in agreement with Žižek’s notion of Lynch’s world as intensified reality, but not so much with his lacanian inferences from it.

Lynch is known for his extensive usage of sound and music as a way to make atmosphere become weird, but he also uses quite a lot visual effects in aiming at the same purpose. In my view, he uses two types of elements to do this. As Žižek pointed out Lynch’s use of lighting and bright colors could be counted as unordinary visual elements. Also as I pointed out, there’s a lot of sounds that could be counted as parts of intensified reality. Lynch’s world is full intensified detail, bright and clear images and sounds, and this is the first element of making a proper lynchian athmosphere. The second element or another side of the same element is Lynch’s use dynamical or open-ended entities, such as waterfalls, running rivers, foggy landscapes and blurry jazz music. Twin Peaks intro is a brilliant example of this. This second aspect is what I will call the properly musical element, and yes, in the case of Twin Peaks it’s not limited only to sounds. So this second aspect is becoming-music of audiovisuality. This aspect is a profound element in Lynch’s ouvre, and while it’s just another side of the same element with the intensified world, it’s still more prominent of those two sides. I think a clear-cut distinction between this 1) intensified, clear and distict world and 2) the dynamic, undelineated world can’t be made, becauce in the case of Twin Peaks both these two elements kind of live from each other. But I think that some kind of elementary distiction can be made.

At this point I must clarify the concept of music and musicality so that we could arrive at better understanding in what way music is playing the primary role in Lynch’s Twin Peaks.  

What I consider as a musical element is simply that of a purely dynamic and somewhat freely adapting element. Music for me is something profoundly dynamic and natural. More direcly put, music is dynamic as non-axiomatic (topology vs. axiomatics) and music is natural as non-rational (fysis vs. logos). So the point that im aiming at is music as a non-rational and undeterminate element of dynamic complexity. Interestingly enough, this point was rised in our lectures as the classical binary distiction between image and music in which image is seen as clear and distict, and music as multiple and chaotic. This purely musical element of indeterminacy is playing a central role in Lynch’s films as the mysterious dwarf in the Black lodge puts it: ”There’s always music in the air.” In the Twin Peaks lectures one of the constant themes was that of music as a demonic and other-worldly element; of as a lacanian the big Other. 

Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy

I will try to elaborate this view with remarks from Nietzsche’s first masterpiece The Birth of Tragedy. One of my goals is to consider the distiction between music and image in the context of The Birth of Tragedy, but this is just a complementary problem, although necessary, in regard of my text's main problem: music as an image and image as music. 

So, exploring Lynch’s films we arrived to a vague description of music as some kind of surreal or other-worldly entity that can be seen as fantastical, escapist or utopian element. And we also produced a kind of antithesis for music, namely the image. Later we will see that, as we follow Nietzsche and Deleuze, music and image are complementary modes of the same element, but at this point, as we are proposing the first question, it is neccesary to make this raw distinction. 

Considering tragedy Nietzsche raises the importance of two Greek gods: Dionysos and Apollon.

For Nietzsche these two gods or god-figures are the two constructing elements of true tragedy. The basic distiction is that of Dionysos as music and Apollon as image. This distinction holds as we consider the art forms that Dionysos and Apollon represent: Apollon is the god of plastical and pictorial arts, Dionysos non-imagical musical arts. (Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, chapters 1 and 16)

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche pretty much stays inside the borders of art and tragedy, and so he isn’t making many generalized points about Apollon and Dionysos as two basic elements of metaphysical world. I think the only parts in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche is making some generalized points are those where he is concidering his great mentor Arthur Schopenhauer. (Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 16) In those lines Nietzsche (or Schopenhauer-Nietzsche) claims that music is the dynamic base structure of everything or at least the nature. And if we follow Deleuze’s interpretation about this Dionysian element as a general structure of world (Deleuze: Nietzsche ja Filosofia, 30-34), we could put forward a following proposition: Dionysos as an element of musical chaos could be related to Schopenhauer’s transcendental field of forces, and so this musical and chaotic element could be seen as a immanent plane or birth place of everything. Dionysos as music is the source of dynamics and difference, and Apollon as coherent and somewhat repetitive image, as principium individuationis. (Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 2)

For Nietzsche, this two-way movement of Dionysos and Apollon is the source for true tragedy. So for Nietzsche the main problem in The Birth of Tragedy is that of linking the two god-figures. Doing this he proposes that the true Greek tragedy is based or build on the choir and so Dionysos becomes kind of the primary element. (Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 8) So, Nietzsche goes on writing about kind of storytelling elements that the involvement of choir produces. The main point I think in the chorus is that the story is at the same time lucid but still undelineated. Lynch said in his book Catching the big fish (2007) that nowadays he prefers non-HD cameras because with low quality there is left some murky or shadowy corners in the image. This is a true Dionysian element. So, in this way we have departed from the classical distinction between image and music, and arrived to a slightly more complicated distinction between music-image and concept.

The way I see Twin Peaks (or at least the first season) is close to this Dionysian conception of musicality. It’s important to note that the properties of music in this sense aren’t limited only to aural expression. The main distinction is made between formality and deformality, between distinct and different. So it’s important to note that music isn’t always Dionysian or in other words music doesn’t always play the leading role - as in Euripedean drama. (Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 12) Euripedean drama was one of many ”deaths of tragedy” as Nietzsche puts it, and what this death means is that Dionysos has been killed and this killing is accomplished with rationalization and conceptualization. And the one who is to blame for this killing is Socrates. The great ”conceptualist” Socrates caused one of many ”deaths of tragedy”. Socrates sees tragedy operating only on the level of Apollon and he completely misses the role of Apollon as an individuating element and so the Dionysian element where Apollon is individuating from. So, by dismissing the role of Dionysos, Socrates conceptualizes or rationalizes Apollon, and by doing so he delineates music and image. Against Socrates, Nietzsche proposes that music can’t be homogeneous, its indeterminate, it has wholly different properties than static image. (Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, chapters 16, 19 and 21) Nietzsche’s point here is to promote the role of music in tragedy, but more importantly he is proposing a chaotic or a complex property in the art in general.

He clearly states that, sure, there’s Apollon, the clear and bright god, as an image’s plasticity that audience can take as a somewhat given, but under Apollon there roars Dionysos, the great disorganizer and the great dynamicity. The important point here to make is that of Dionysos’ role as a producer of Apollon and not just that of a disorganizer of the somewhat rational Apollon. In fact, Nietzsche says it quite clearly that Dionysos is the more prominent god. (Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, chapters 2 and 4) It also can be said that The Birth of Tragedy in it’s entirety concentrates on proposing that tragedy (or art in general) based on pure rationality, as Socrates would have it, is an absolute impossibility.

Terrence Malick & Goya and the open

Pasi Väliaho made some wonderful remarks about somewhat similiar case in his article From Mediasphere to Mediasophy. Nature, Machine, Media. He writes about Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line (1998) and points out that in the film there’s some third aggressive element besides the opposing sides of the WWII. This third element which we could call Nature or Spirit (God-Nature as in Spinoza’s writings or, as Malick would probably prefer it, World or being-everywhere as in Heidegger’s) is in great importance in all Malick’s movies. Väliaho also notes the resemblance of Malick’s film and Francisco Goya’s painting Duelo a garrotazos o La riña (1820-1823). In the painting there’s two enemies fighting who are disregarding the surraundings and, so, are missing the sunset and perhaps more importantly the fact that they are sinking deeper and deeper into the mud. It could be said that in both cases the most powerful element is outside the actual action, or more precicely that third element is the open in which the action happens. This is precisely the point that im trying to make with Twin Peaks and it’s usage of musical elements.

It’s debatable if all art is based on this Dionysian dynamic, but at least I see many elements in Twin Peaks that way (and also in Malick’s movies). For example the story line in the first six episodes could be seen as more dynamical than teleological and rational. It’s as if Cooper’s dreams and intuitions are the main driving force in the investigation and so they operate similarly as choir in Greek tragedy. Also Lynch’s use of symbolism or at least the use of some pictoral motifs could be seen as aphoristical expression which is known for it’s dynamisity. Nietzsche’s writing style is dynamic throughtout his ouvre, but especially when he is using aphorisms. It could be said that aphorisms as well as symbols do leave some “murky corners” and so leaves some space for interpretation. Of course in every picture and in every sound there’s space for interpretation but with aphorisms its more prominent, more underlined. So, in this way those weird and almost irrelevant details, obscure close-shots from owl’s eyes or slow-motion shots from waterfalls could be seen as kind of aphoristical musicality.

To sum up this first part: Lynch’s creative usage of sounds in Twin Peaks launches an action-reaction chain. And once again this chain doesn’t start purely from musical or Dionysian elements, but it neseccarily needs them. This Lynch’s praise for purely dynamical or Dionysian elements leads to an artwork similiar to Greek tragedy as Nietzsche saw it. This meens that audiovision is harnessing musical elements to produce some dynamicity and still remaining partly Apollonian, as Žižek’s remarks on intensified reality shows.

What to continue reading? Click here to read the second part!