Post on 23-Feb-2023
Suburbs and Serenades: The Location of Australian CulturalIdentities
Through Popular Film MusicAdam Trainer
Australian identity is a discourse of plurality and
juxtaposition. It encompasses the limits of dialogue on
class, race, ethnicity, nation and a range of other
significant and often conflicting cultural conditions.
Cinematic representations of Australian culture are
similarly contradictory. Not all are inherently reflective
of the country’s anglo-colonial past or its many indigenous
identities. Although specific images or icons from
Australia’s celluloid history may act in certain contexts as
representative of its stylistic approach or concerns, there
can be no definitive approximation of Australian cinema, nor
its reflection of or relationship to national cultural
identity.
This diversity and disparity is reflected not only in visual
terms, but also in the aural approach taken by filmmakers
towards representing particular facets of Australian life.
The music of Australian cinema is as vast and varied as the
films that comprise it. From tightly structured orchestral
scores, through what Atherton terms the hybrid score1 where
orchestral movements are complimented by existing popular
music tracks, to complex fusions of field-recordings and
aural textures, Australian film music provides compelling
and varied confirmation of the multiplicity of identities
existent in the national cinema.
In particular two seemingly antithetical approaches to film
music have become popularized in Australian film over the
last two decades, as they have in other film cultures. These
are the compilation soundtrack, whereby existing pieces of
music are appropriated into a new cultural context through
their inclusion on a film soundtrack, and the popular film
score where an often recognizable popular artist composes
new music for a film in a style reminiscent of or divergent
from their own. Whilst seemingly oppositional in terms of
the cultural processes they enlist, these approaches are
connected.
The compilation soundtrack relies on pre-existent recordings
to impart ideological connections, tethering their filmic
use to either the political orientation of the aesthetics of
the music track or accompanying lyrics, or to the
subcultural affiliations of the attached performer or
musical era. Although in this regard the popular film score
is a new text, it carries similar political affinities, by
providing an ideological connection between the film and the
existing work of the score composer. By enlisting a popular
musician to score a film, the director is harnessing the
popular memory of that performer and their work, its
subcultural positioning and often the persona of that
musician in order to provide an ideological context for
their film.
These approaches can yield contradictory results. It might
be appealing to view the soundtrack compilation as a messy
1 Atherton, Michael. ‘The Composer as Alchemist: An Overview of Australian Film Scores 1994-2004.’ Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities. Rebecca Coyle ed. Eastley (UK): John Libbey, 2005. p. 232
and complex exercise in intertextuality and the popular film
score as a streamlined convergence of two cultural entities;
the meeting of film and music in their purest forms,
crystalised in a new, contextually unblemished
configuration. However, neither can be so exclusively
labeled as one or the other. The compilation requires unity;
an aesthetic affinity between tracks. There needs to be a
signifying concept or abstraction – some recognizable
quality that draws these disparate shards of culture
together in a new context. Several soundtrack compilations
for Australian films have achieved this through their
revelry in and celebration of one particular era or genre of
music. Often contemporary artists from similar genres might
be compiled on a soundtrack, offering a marketable
compilation of either popular musical figureheads or up-and-
comers, as in the case of youth-oriented pictures such as
Occasional Coarse Language2, Two Hands3 and Blackrock4. Another
popular approach to compilations is the cover compilation,
where contemporary performers contribute new versions of
established songs from a particular era or genre. This
approach was taken for the soundtrack to Thunderstruck5, where
a number of contemporary rock bands recreated AC/DC songs to
accompany the story of a group of fans on a road trip to the
grave of the band’s front man Bonn Scott.
However, the compilation soundtrack is not always
necessarily comprised of new music or contemporary artists.
Throughout the 1990s a trend emerged in Australian cinema,
as it did in other national cinemas where cinematic
recreations of the country’s dry, earthy landscapes and
droll characters were contrasted by vibrant and playful
selections of older tracks from non-Australian musical
traditions, often used ironically as a direct contradiction
to the deadpan comedy favoured within the idiom of the
national cinema at that time. Both The Adventures of Priscilla:
Queen of the Desert6 and Muriel’s Wedding7, two of the most
2 Occasional Coarse Language. Dir. Brad Hayward. Prod. Brad Hayward. Dist. Roadshow Entertainment, 1998.3 Two Hands. Dir. Gregor Jordan. Prod. Marian Macgowan. Dist. Beyond Films International, 1999.4 Blackrock. Dir. Stephen Vidler. Prod. David Elfick. Dist. Globe Film Company, 1997.5 Thunderstruck. Dir. Darren Ashton. Prod. Jodi Matterson. Dist. Icon FilmDistribution, 2004.
successful Australian films of the 1990s infused their
quirky yet scathing comic narratives with bright, up-tempo
disco tunes, the former reintroducing audiences to Alicia
Bridges’ iconic queer anthem ‘I Love the Nightlife’8, the
latter popularising Abba for a new generation.
Arguably as successful as Priscilla and Muriel in its
appropriation of 1970s American pop music was Shirley
Barrett’s first film Love Serenade9. Set in the small country
town of Sunray, Love Serenade uses the character of Ken
Sherry, a washed-up radio personality from Brisbane as the
catalyst for its pointed use of 1970s soul and disco songs.
The film locates its narrative in the relationship between
Sherry and two sisters – Vicki-Anne and Dimity Hurley –
locals and lifetime residents of Sunray. Sherry’s arrival in
Sunray is, for this sleepy town, a significant event.
6 The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Dir. Stephan Elliot. Prod. Al Clark. Dist. Roadshow Entertainment, 1994.7 Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. P.J Hogan. Prod. Jocelyn Moorhouse. Dist. RoadshowEntertainment, 1994.8 Alicia Bridges and Susan Hutcheson. ‘I Love the Nightlife’. London: Polydor, 1978.9 Love Serenade. Dir. Shirley Barrett. Prod. Jan Chapman. Dist. Miramax Films, 1996.
Immediately enamoured of Sherry’s semi-celebrity status in
the larger regional centre of Brisbane, Vicki-Anne and
Dimity fight for his affections.
Taking control of the local radio station, Sherry favours
disco and soul music from the 1970s, specifically the
innuendo-laden rhythm and blues of artists such as Barry
White and Billy Paul. Blasted from speakers around the town
the slick, lushly orchestrated and overtly sexual nature of
this music juxtaposes Sunray and its sun-bleached barrenness
like an omnipotent narrator; pointing out the its lack of
cosmopolitan influence, it’s desolation, emptiness and time-
warn sense of creepy rural nostalgia. This music is Ken
Sherry’s narration on Sunray and on himself. As explained by
Avila, in the post-war period in the United States, “black
became increasingly synonymous with urban”10 The black urban
soul music favoured by Ken Sherry projects onto rural,
(mostly) white Sunray all it lacks in urban sophistication,
emphasising the film’s visual focus on its decrepit
10 Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban LosAngeles. Berkley: University of California Press, 2004. p. 5
architecture, its dusty, wind-blown streets and parks, and
its desolate vastness. As Barry White pumps from a worn
speaker atop a rusty pole somewhere in the town, Sherry is
projecting onto Sunray all that its inhabitants, especially
Vicki-Ann, Dimity and Albert Lee, proprietor of the local
Chinese restaurant and Dimity’s employer, project onto him.
To Sunray, Sherry represents – as do his Barry White records
– the cosmopolitan glamour of the ‘big smoke’, although he
has come not from New York, London or even Sydney but
Brisbane. Vicki-Anne is excited by this injection of urbane
vitality, assuring Ken that “we’re all thrilled to bits”11
that he has chosen to grace the airwaves of their humble
country town. Albert is more suspicious. He makes a point of
introducing himself to Sherry during his meal at Albert’s
restaurant, but this introduction, although met with
indifference and impatience from Sherry, is vaguely baleful
in nature, a display of Alpha-male dominance and a masculine
threat, of what we are never overtly made aware.
11 Rebecca Frith in Love Serenade, op. cit.
Albert provides an antithesis to Sherry’s city-slickness and
this binary is given aural context through his professed
preference for country and western performers more
traditionally favoured by rural audiences. At one point
Albert performs a compelling a cappella version of Jimmy
Webb’s ‘Wichita Lineman’12, made all the more touching by
the conviction with which he sings it to himself as he
solemnly prepares his kitchen for the night’s business.
Ken’s selection of tunes comes under attack from Albert, who
complains that Sherry only ever plays songs “about the act
of fornication.”13 Albert’s objections reflect not only the
controversial nature of this sexually suggestive music
within a conservative country town, but also its ill-fitting
aesthetic for a town like Sunray. But these songs are
ultimately harmless. Barry White is such an extreme
juxtaposition to Sunray’s blandness that any controversy or
confrontation distinguishable in Sherry’s music is
dissipated by its comparative absurdity; the sheer silliness
12 Jimmy Webb. ‘Wichita Linema’. New York: Canopy Music/Polygram, 1968.13 John Alansu in Love Serenade, op. cit.
of its bombast. Albert’s preference for Glen Campbell and
Charley Rich appears to run more in line with rural tastes.
But Albert prefers country performers from the US,
inadvertently revealing the neglect or disdain often
projected by Australian audiences towards Australian popular
music. This runs parallel with both Dermody and Jacka’s
notion of the unequal cultural exchange between Australia
and Britain14 or the United States and O’Regan’s argument
that Australian audiences often find their own culture
“unhip, boring, and not with the times”15. Lotman also
discusses this element of cultural transfer, where for local
audiences, texts from outside “hold a high position in the
scale of values, and are considered to be true, beautiful,
of divine origin.”16 These ideas might be considered in the
context of Australian popular culture generally, but can
certainly be recognized in the consumption of both local
musical and cinematic output. However, it is arguably not14 Dermody, Susan and Elizabeth Jacka. ‘An Australian Film Reader in Question..’ Continuum 1: 1 1987. pp. 140-15515 O’Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. p. 21616 Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Trans. Ann Shukman, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. p. 146
for this reason that Love Serenade itself avoids Australian
music.
An Australian film in the fact that it is a made by
Australians, set in Australia, features an all-Australian
cast and was funded by Australian institutions, Love Serenade
does not feature any music by Australian performers. Yet it
is an undeniably Australian vision. The windswept Rotary
park where Dimity and Vicki-Ann meet for lunch characterised
by cracked concrete and weeds; the neglected, sun-bleached
storefronts of which Vicki-Ann’s hair salon is one; the
colourbond steel fence over which Dimity spies on Ken; the
dark-brick 70s suburban chic of his lounge-room. These are
all inherently Australian images. They no doubt resonate
with familiarity for some Australians, and yet this
familiarity becomes more pointed through the ironic use of
foreign (American) music on the film’s soundtrack. Ken’s
slick soul music serves to exaggerate Sunray’s backwater
aesthetic and Albert’s love for Glen Campbell provides an
idealized and impossible antithesis of rural Americana to
which the scorched wheat fields of country Australia compete
but can never hope to attain. Lotman’s notion of cultural
transfer is summoned here in that “[t]he texts coming in
from the outside keep their “strangeness”, such that they
are ‘read’ in the foreign language (both in the sense of
natural language and in the semiotic sense).”17 Foreign not
to Ken or Albert but to the world of Sunray, to the imagery
and aesthetic of Barrett’s film, the music of Love Serenade
works the films characters and its dramatic exchanges
through the incongruence of Barry White to bleak rural
Australia.
The music in Love Serenade serves to illuminate the lack felt
by inhabitants of places like Sunray. There is a lack of
cosmopolitan hipness for which Ken yearns despite his
assurances on air that he has escaped to Sunray to forget
the hustle and bustle of city life. There is a lack of
romantic American frontier mystique that Albert craves and
finds in the music of Glen Campbell and Charley Rich. Yet
17 Lotman, op. cit. p. 146
this music connects each of them to something they cannot
find in Sunray. As a result, it connects Sunray to the
cluttered streets of Detroit or Chicago, to Nashville, to
personal identities and popular memories of place and space.
The film’s use of these subculturally specific texts in a
new spatial and aesthetic context activates Wark’s theory of
antipodality, expressed as “an active trajectory between
places, identities, formations, rather than a drawing of
borders, be they of the self or place.”18 Although it
illuminates difference through irony; the difference between
discursive oppositions such as urban/rural or
sophisticated/naïve, the music of Love Serenade also
illustrates a shared consciousness; Ken’s need for sexual
intimacy voiced through Barry White and Albert’s loneliness
and romanticism expressed through ‘Wichita Lineman’.
These cultural trajectories connect each character to larger
frameworks of subcultural literacy and ideological
connection that are mobile in both time and space. As Steve
18 Wark, McKenzie. ‘Elsewhere’. The Literary Review Fall 2001, 45: 1. p. 104
Rosen points out, the scene where Albert confronts Ken about
the sexual nature of his playlist is “an affecting and
serious conversation about pop music, made all the more
absurd because of the place where it's occurring - a Chinese
restaurant in a nowheresville Australian town.”19 The
cultural trajectories paved by these reappropriations offer
new interpretations of the songs used, their histories and
their popular memories. As Brabazon offers, “[p]opular
culture is a conduit for popular memory, moving words,
ideas, ideologies and narratives through time”20, and whilst
popular memory is a catalyst for consensus, it also exists
alongside – and is embedded within – individual experience,
which permits disparate remembrance and subjective opinion.
Both of these characters are explained and explainable
through their musical preferences. Although it cannot speak
definitively for them, they are able to speak through it, to
say the things they fear to reveal about themselves. Both
19 Rosen, Steve. ‘A Soundtrack to Love: Disc Jockey Seduces Wrong Women in Disco Serenade’. Denver Post 5, August 1997. p. E.0820 Brabazon, Tara. From Revolution to Revelation: Generation X, Popular Memory and Cultural Studies, Aldershot, Ashgate 2005. p. 67
the sexually loaded soul-funk favoured by Ken and Albert’s
sentimental MOR country-pop were created and popularized in
the 1970s - arguably the period in which both men, who are
of a similar age, were experiencing life as young adults.
Through a transparent timeline Love Serenade invokes the music
of their youth, which for them no doubt has personal
significance, but for Vicki-Ann and Dimity, represents their
romanticized masculine failings – Ken’s overt preoccupation
with sex and sensuality, and Albert’s nostalgic longing for
an impossible vision of the rural experience.
The juxtaposition of this lush, sentimental, charismatic
music with droll performances, the drained, sepia-toned
cinematography and the drab settings of Sunray itself is one
of the film’s central stylistic concerns. Sunray is bleak,
windblown and desolate; untouched by cosmopolitan taste or
rustic agrarian nostalgia. Both Ken and Albert rely on their
nostalgia in order to survive. These glamourous American
songs of heartbreak and lust prop them up; give them
strength. Oppositionally Dimity and Vicki-Ann, though
innocuous and parochial, are both strong willed and
independent. Although they each fall for Ken’s advances, by
the film’s end they have realised that they don’t need him,
that his faded glamour is less appealing once they’ve seen
the shallowness behind it. Director Barrett comments that
“He's cynical in the way he uses music. Barry White does all
the work for him. He's using fine music to spin his web to
lure his victims.”21 Vicki and Dimity realise that Ken’s
attachment to the sordid disco grooves of a faded era have
left him soulless and empty.
Aesthetically the syrupy string-laden pop that Ken plays
juxtaposes Sunray’s bland dryness. It works structurally to
heighten the barrenness of the landscapes featured in the
film, whilst Albert’s romanticized Americana provides a
maudlin emphasis on the town’s lack of romance; offering
passion to counteract Sunray’s boredom and monotony. But the
reappropriation of these distant songs provides the film
with one of its dominant stylistic techniques. The
21 Shirley Barrett in Rosen. op. cit.
compilation soundtrack is capable of this process of drawing
upon established cultural texts in order to create new
mechanisms with which to frame specific cultural identities.
Pop music soundtracks mesh discourses of filmic form,
popular cultural consumption, audio-visual aesthetics and
sub-cultural specificity. The relationship between these
discourses is constantly changing, as Love Serenade
exemplifies. The social and historical positioning of texts
and readers triggers specific readerships within precise
contexts so that individual cultural identities, as they
relate to notions of community and aesthetic taste can be
cultivated, read and recognized in their new cinematic
context.
The soundtrack compilation works to collect disparate texts
and sew them together, to form a cohesive whole from
culturally scattered fragments. The popular film score
however begins with a film as a blank canvas upon which to
place sounds, as opposed to collecting and attaching. In a
cultural economy where the voice of art is disembodied from
the tangible, and the transitive nature of cultural goods
forces us to live with fragmentation as a constant, the
compilation soundtrack mines this cultural ether whilst the
popular film score attempts to harness something just as
transitive but larger, more complete; singular. As opposed
to creating an identity from remnants, the popular film
score utilizes the subcultural and ideological affinities of
an artist to create a new cinematic aesthetic.
This approach, arguably borne as much out of the marketing
and promotional possibilities of media cross-pollination as
the aesthetic and political affinities between specific
filmmakers and musicians, has enabled the expansion of film
music into new markets, as well as attracting popular music
audiences to films they may otherwise not have seen. The
attachment of a recognizable name to a film as score
composer is a guarantee of at least partial interest by fans
and potential sales for soundtrack recordings, but it may be
argued that the decision to enlist a popular musician as
scorer does not have to be purely financially motivated. The
aesthetic oeuvre of a popular recording artist has been
harnessed as a dominant structural characteristic of a
number of Australian films. This specific cinematic
apparatus works to crystallize the sound and image,
providing a sonic equivalent for the colours, shapes and
textures of Australian films, a bridge between media that
draws upon local musical styles to provide aural context for
local stories told on celluloid.
This trend became increasingly popular in the late 1990s and
early into the new millennium, when a number of established
musical acts married their sounds to locally made films.
Making a clean sweep of the 2004 Australian Film Institutes
annual awards was Somersault22, written and directed by Cate
Shortland. The film won in all thirteen categories of the
AFIs, including Best Original Music Score, which was
composed and performed by six-piece Sydney act Decoder Ring,
The band looked to the childlike-innocence of lead character
Heidi for inspiration23, creating a score adorned with
glimmering glockenspiels and quietly pattering electronic
beats to match the glacial post-rock guitar textures that
aestheticise the film’s mountainous setting. Decoder Ring’s
score for Somersault stands as not only a successful
collaboration between director and composer(s) but also an
impressive collision of musical characteristics with the
interior world of a film’s central character. Acting as much
as a form of interior narration by Heidi – a lost and
confused adolescent who flees Canberra for the alpine town
of Jindabyne after domestic conflict, the score exemplifies
the diverse cultural identities fostered and expressed in
the national cinema, not only in visual terms, but also in
and through film music.
Existing in a similar musical mileau as Decoder Ring’s
score, but placing the filmic action for their work in
Australia’s distant past is Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’22 Somersault. Dir: Cate Shortland. Prod. Anthony Anderson. Dist. Hopscotch Productions, 2004.23 Keyboardist with the band Matt Fitzgerald commented that their collaboration with Shortland was based around “get[ting]inside [Heidi]'shead and get the sounds of what she sees, or her interpretation of it”. Matt Fitzgerald in James Wigney. ‘Film Soundtrack Has the Right Ring’. Sunday Herald-Sun [Sydney, NSW] 3 October 2004. p. E.15
score for The Proposition24. Cave and Ellis, both elder
statesmen of Australian indie rock25 and bandmates from The
Bad Seeds, collaborated on the score for John Hillcoat’s
vision of Australia as a scorched and savage colonial
outpost ravaged by the rampant epidemics of alcoholism and
racist brutality. Cave had collaborated with Hillcoat on his
previous film Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead26, having co-written the
screenplay and appeared in the film as a homicidal inmate of
a high-tech maximum security prison of the future. The
imagery of violence that had always permeated his music,
especially his engagement with the personal and emotional
implications of a death-row prisoner about to be executed,
‘Mercy Seat’27, is the musical counterpart to his
involvement in Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead, and the two were
conceptualized within a similar time frame. This cross-media
output provides the kind of political and ideological
affinity filmmakers aim to harness for their films by
enlisting popular musicians to score their work.
The Proposition marked Cave’s second screenwriting credit and
one of many film soundtracks to which he had contributed.
Providing a sonic framework for the film’s investigation of
the politics of early nationhood, Cave commented that whilst
the film’s ideological overtones were never intended to be
overtly stated, they had subsequently emerged from the
filmmaking process.28 It might be argued that the inherent
political content of Cave and Ellis’ recorded output with
The Bad Seeds was being summoned in their involvement in
Hillcoat’s film. Throughout their career, arguably
culminating in the macabre Murder Ballads29 The Bad Seeds had
explored death and violence both literally in Cave’s lyrics
and musical personae, and in their dark and often brooding
24 The Proposition. Dir: John Hillcoat. Prod. Chris Brown. Dist. Columbia Tri-Star, 2005.25 Both Cave and Ellis’ other band The Dirty Three are mentioned as proponents of the musical genre of ‘indie rock’ in Hibbert, Ryan. ‘What is Indie Rock?’ Popular Music & Society 28: 1 February 2005. pp. 55-7726 Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead. Dir. John Hillcoat. Prod. Evan English. Dist. Electric Pictures, 1988.27 Nick Cave & Mick Harvey. ‘Mercy Seat’. Mercy Seat. Mute, 1988.28 Cave stated that “It doesn't obviously offer any answers to anything,but it does raise a lot of questions. It wasn't something that we ever set out to discuss that it was going to end up being a political film but it's turned out that way.” Nick Cave in Simon Ferguson. ‘Writer, Muso, Actor… Now Don’t Forget Icon Says Cave’. The Daily Telegraph [Sydney, NSW] 6 October 2005. p. 329 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Murder Ballads. Mute/Reprise, 1996.
music. Whilst Cave and Ellis’ score follows many of the
musical traditions of the Bad Seeds sound it is recognizably
divergent, adding a pastoral beauty and lilting majesty
matched by the film’s often surreal cinematographic
rendering of the brutal Australian landscape. The score
comprises of a series of sonic vignettes; poems and clusters
of verse backed by swollen strings and abstract textures.
Cave’s words find a melodic counterpoint in Ellis’
melancholic, wandering violin which weaves through the
scorched and blustering windswept vistas of the filmic
landscape. The score becomes submerged within the film’s
overall visceral approach, blending with other elements of
the production design to create an aesthetic unity, albeit
one achieved through creative collaboration. The most
affecting film scores, both traditional orchestral
compositions and those incorporating more contemporary
musical styles and approaches become enmeshed in the story
and characters of a film. As Atherton points out, “the
composer is also a filmmaker caught up in an evolving
aesthetic”30, mediated by technology and film practice, but
ultimately working towards structural synergy.
One of the best examples of this synergy in contemporary
Australian film sound is Phillip Brophy’s sound design for
Vincent Giarrusso’s 1995 film Mallboy31. Whilst the film
deals with the adolescent difficulties of a working class
youth stuck in the monotony of the suburban landscape, the
score is layered, cerebral and dense, moving between
contemporary popular musical sounds and structures and the
more experimental aspects of film sound. True to Brophy’s
other work, the score also includes diegetic sounds and
suggestive or implied sonic phenomena such as field
recordings.32 Not only does it encompass several styles
including jazz, electronica and hip hop, but the film’s
overall sound design has been influenced by music concrete,
with large sections of the score devoted to reflecting and30 Atherton, op. cit. p. 22831 Mallboy. Dir: Vincent Giarrusso. Prod. Fionna Eagger. Dist. Buena Vista International, 2001.32 Brophy’s sound design has been examined in Philip Samartzis. ‘Avant-garde Meets Mainstream: The Film Scores of Philip Brophy’. Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Film Music. Rebecca Coyle ed. North Ryde: Australian Film, Television and Radio School, 1997. pp. 124-140
submerging the audio environment of the film within the
score as opposed to commenting on it in purely musicological
terms. For these reasons, Brophy’s work on Mallboy is a
literal example of the way in which popular music can be
anchored aesthetically to the form of a particular film.
Brophy’s soundtrack blends popular musical genres such as
hip hop, which matches and voices the subcultural
positioning of its young protagonist Sean and his friends,
with the music concrete approach of the film’s diegetic
sound design, creating a hybrid that achieves synergy by
allowing the two elements of the sound design to influence
each other.
The Mallboy soundtrack is alternately jagged and submersive,
stimulating and calming; moving from samples of rickety
trains speeding along their tracks with bursts of free jazz
percussion to the sonic periphera of a shopping mall or
distant, echoing conversations accompanying gritty
breakbeats. Brophy explains his technique of using the
“noise of life”:
The cinema is not a concert hall: it does not requirethe hush of mute respect to follow its stories. Thecinema expels us, projects us and snares us in itsenlivened spaces. More films could sound the noise oflife and immerse us in all that occurs beyond the edgeof the frame.33
The sonic environment of the suburbs, with its cluttered
malls, rustling trees and passing cars is never far from the
heart of Mallboy, which Brophy performed as a part of
Underground LOVERS, the experimental rock band that
Giarrusso had fronted with guitarist Glen Bennie since the
late 1980s. The sounds of the suburbs are immersed in the
score, shimmering to the surface, then submerging themselves
within the non-diegetic hues and textures of the sound mix.
The Underground LOVERS’ score and Brophy’s sound design move
in and out of the film’s diegesis. This exemplifies the
ability of the aural elements of the mise en scene to
rupture the reality of the film whilst also adding an
emotional context to the characters and plot.
33 Philip Brophy. Mallboy Soundtrack sleeve notes. Silvertone Records, 2001.
As Corrigan and White comment, film music exists both within
the world of a film and as a cinematic construction – a
comment on that world. “In the back of our minds, we are
aware that the practise of scoring films with music that has
no source in the story violates verisimilitude, and yet we
readily accept this convention.34 In submerging the score
within ‘natural’ diegetic sounds and vice versa, Underground
LOVERS score for Mallboy attempts to lessen this
contradiction between the violation of verisimilitude and
our acceptance of it through an understanding of film form.
The bouncy, plastic sounds of shopping malls filter through
guitar drones and waves of synths; the interference of
telephone towers, planes overhead and busy traffic fade in
and out of ambient pieces, which in turn bookend structured
songs, be they thrashy rock numbers, beat-heavy hip hop or
expansive psychedelia. In Mallboy, the suburbs have been
sonically ingrained. As Brophy himself points out:
The suburbs are full of sonic irritation and auralaggravation... Many people are attracted to thesuburbs, believing they will escape the claustrophobia
34 Corrigan, Timothy & Patricia White. The Film Experience. Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2004. p. 191
of housing commission flats or inner-city apartmentblocks. The acoustic reality is that in the suburbs,the people next door are amplifiers of all you wish tocensor, suppress, silence.35
This metaphor is the film’s central narrative device.
Protagonist Sean is in trouble with the law and under attack
from welfare authorities as a result. His only escape is the
mall, with its massive swarm of consumers. Its glass and
tile reflects collective noise and its expansive dimensions
dissipate it into a subdued babble. Mallboy embodies this
experience through a synthesis of sound design and visual
exposition. The sonic landscape of the suburbs has
influenced the film’s musical component not only in terms of
mood, but also through the integration of the two
structurally. The sound design infuses the score, and the
score reflects the sound design.
But the subject of this approach is arguably what makes
Brophy’s score and Giarrusso’s film important and relevant
texts. Through their incorporation of the mundane, the
quotidian sounds of contemporary existence – an existence35 Brophy. Mallboy Soundtrack sleeve notes, op. cit.
that for the vast majority of Australians is encapsulated by
suburban spaces – Mallboy supports and expands upon a
diverse, culturally sophisticated language of Australian
identity on celluloid. Through a complex rendering of a
specific Australian identity tethered to discourses of
class, work, crime, youth and the spaces within which these
operate, Mallboy marries sound and vision in an original and
culturally relevant context. The project of Australian
literature and literary theory to “dismantle the European
perspective that represents Australia as colonial, marginal
“peripheral” or provincial”36 can be viewed as an active
proposition for other facets of Australian culture, and in
particular for both its cinema and popular music. Through
the story it tells and its sonic rendering of that story,
Mallboy provides a contemporary vision of Australia that
moves away from the colonial and the provincial into a
globally relevant vision with a local context and a
contemporary aural aesthetic and literate musical approach
that matches and enables its goal of cultural transcendence.
36 Yelin, Louise. From the margins of empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. New York: Cornell University Press, 1998. p. 39
As with all film cultures that collect from disparate
sources, that incorporate works from a range of cultural
environments, Australian film culture embraces and practices
divergence. Similarly the music, and in particular the
popular music of the national film culture is embedded in
processes that transgress borders, that utilize
international texts in local contexts. As Wark points out:
Cultural differences are no longer so tied to theexperience of the particularities of place. These‘vertical’ differences, of locality, ethnicity, nationare doubled by ‘horizontal’ differences, determined notby being rooted in a particular place but by beingplugged into a particular circuit.37
By plugging their own texts into particular circuits,
Australian filmmakers have expressed local identities
through the universal appeal of popular culture.
Alternately, Australian film culture has fostered texts that
create new visions of specific identities that are expressed
and explained through the political and ideological tethers
of culturally and creatively specific musical styles and
37 Wark, op. cit. p. 105
personalities. These two practices, the compilation score
and the popular film score are both borne out of the
expanding potential for cross-media pollination and are
facilitated by new and changing discourses of art, commerce
and creative identity.
Popular film music is emerging as an increasingly relevant
field of academic investigation. The place and importance of
popular music in cinema has shifted and evolved due to
changing cultural economies of taste. The industrial
circumstances that have both influenced and been influenced
by these shifts, as well as the texts that emerge from them
are in constant need of academic appraisal. Journals such as
Music and the Moving Image and the Journal of Film Music ensure that
new and relevant scholarly debate on film music includes and
addresses popular music in its various cinematic guises. It
is vital that both Australian film and Australian music,
whether utilized cinematically in a local or international
context, are represented within this field and that new
Australian film and film music is catalogued and debated
from a scholarly perspective. Texts such as Coyle’s edited
collection Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities
and Brophy’s trio of edited collections emerging from the
Cinesonic conference of film scores and sound design have
created a precedent for academic discussion of film music
from an Australian perspective. As Australian cinema
continues its evolution as a recognized and recognizable
national cinema that contributes to international film
culture through its originality and innovation, scholarly
discussion of the language of Australian film music is
imperative.