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This thread
comes up about once a year, so veterans, please forgive repeated things. But I'm
fascinated with this thread and I think about it a
lot.
There are a lot of very interesting
subliminal messages in popular movies whose loathsome villains like to punch up
Bach and Glenn Gould on the jukebox.
I think the Hannibal Lecter message is
a pretty dumb but very traditional movie Cautionary Tale: If you get too smart,
and read too many books, it transforms you from "a regular guy" (like
the FBI profiler in "Red Dragon") into a perverted psychopath. In the
early part of RD, before he realizes that Lecter's a serial diner, the FBI
profiler increasingly admires the brilliant and amazing Dr. Lecter -- he finds
himself drawn to Lecter, his knowledge, his achievements, his sophistication and
culture. And drawn away from what had been his comfortable identity as "a
regular guy," family man, yadda yadda (... who listens to Country &
Western, or Classic Rock, or Kenny G. "Normal" stuff).
So the love of classical music is an
author's or screenwriter's cheap "character shortcut" to portray evil
and perversion. Normal, safe, familiar folk don't listen to this kind of weird
stuff, or at least they use earphones and don't advertise it.
All this is a reflection of the kind of
audiences these Cautionary Tales are designed for. And they're particularly
designed for American audiences, with America's historical and deep cultural
umbra of Puritanism and suspicion of "high culture."
(Fiction has had a really rough,
bigotted time in America since Charles Brockden Brown prefaced his
"Wieland" [1798] with an Apology to the Reader for daring to write and
publish it in the first place. Until quite recent times, American Protestant
parents regularly cautioned their children against reading fiction, because it
provided nothing of worth, but plenty of temptations toward wickedness and
frivolities.)
When a character in a European movie,
for example, puts on classical music, the message about his or her character is
an entirely different one, often a shortcut message to show the character has
very positive and attractive traits, sensitivity, generosity, intellectual and
artistic curiosity. A Euro who listens to classical music doesn't creep out the
target audience.
I've seen at least two good movies --
which ones I'm sorry I forget -- in which a modern, seemingly ordinary character
puts on a Caruso aria, and listens to it alone, but loudly, so that Caruso can
express the character's joi du vivre, his exultation in being alive on the
beautiful Earth where such voices and such music exist.
In "The Grey Fox," the goofy
old (60-ish) cowboy bank robber, in the Prairie Provinces circa 1900, rides up
on a young suffragette photographer practicing her golf drive far out of town.
She's brought her Victrola with her and cranked it up to play "Le
Wally." Richard Farnsworth startles her out of her idyl and says, "I
saw So-and-So sing Le Wally in Chicago twelve years ago. I'll never forget it.
That was a wonderful night." The suffragette falls instantly in love with
the opera-loving, gun-toting old cowboy. It's a very powerful, moving, romantic
moment. Is he a villain? Is she a pervert? Everyone should watch this lovely
movie, but remember that it was a "little movie" aimed at an art-house
audience. So the messages about who listens to classical music, and what that's
supposed to mean, are far more subtle than Quadruplex Multicinema cannibals who
like to crank out GG.
A woman shrink who'd worked in
psychiatric hospitals told me that schizophrenics love Bach -- his music orders
their chaotic interior lives, and mutes the voices in their heads. That's what
the shrink said, anyway. If that's true, you guys know how much I love Mozart,
and I strongly suspect Mozart wouldn't at all have that same
effect.
Elmer
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