This is another installment of my deep dives into an extremely specific thing. My first two, pigeons and the color blue brought responses with your own favorite examples, and I’d love it if that happened again.
For this installment, I want to explore diegetic sound and see what I discover. For anyone who didn’t take a film class in college, diegetic sound comes from within the world of the scene—music coming from the radio, for example—rather than outside like voiceover. (Since I’m not getting into non-diegetic sound today but absolutely love this scene, here’s an example from Driver that illustrates its concept).
I think the first example of diegetic sound has to be the first one where I really got what diegetic sound could accomplish even if I didn’t have the language for it. As a kid of the 80s whose parents didn’t give a shit about age-appropriate content, Tim Burton’s weirder films (before he became a caricature of his own aesthetic) were foundational parts of my childhood. I loved this scene from his first Batman film. As a kid, I actually think I understood the film’s anti-elitism, but now I think about Burton’s coded aesthetics for corporate power and greed and find it chilling. Anyway, at the time, this scene made anti-elitism fun. I also love that it’s just so weird—can you imagine a movie being made with a scene like this today? Or an artist like Prince doing an original soundtrack?
The term diegetic comes from the Greek word diegesis, meaning narrative. So the sound is intrinsic to the story itself. I can’t help but think of Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he argues all things in the craft of a drama must contribute to the mimesis of action, the elements of plot, character, and yes, music, must contribute to the imitation of life. “The Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action.”
In the Cohen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? the sirens scene is a perfect illustration of diegetic sound as narrative itself. The song and the imagery of the sirens bathing so perfectly meld together to communicate the seductive danger of women (a theme throughout the Odyssey as well).
If music participates as a character in a narrative, that character can be dynamic—a song can grow and change over the course of the plot. Look at the three appearances of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” in Do the Right Thing. It begins with the opening credits in which Rosie Perez’s dancing embodies the sheer exuberance and energy that is being bottled up by racial oppression.
Then, the song reappears when Radio Raheem is introduced carrying his boombox and expounding on love and hate. There is something authentic and beautiful about Radio Raheem’s philosophy as it is accompanied by the song. The song gains complexity and nuance as a character and defines Radio Raheem.
It’s a hot day in Bed Stuy, and the pressure of racial tension builds throughout the day until it finally blows over in a confrontation between the Black residents and the racist Italian family that owns the local pizza joint. The song is pivotal in this scene, the catalyst for the eruption of violence. When Radio Raheem’s music is insulted, it’s not just an insult to a song, but an identity. This fight will spill out into the street, and Radio Raheem will be murdered by the police, a martyr of injustice and inequality, the very reason to fight the power.
If we apply Aristotle’s Poetics to Do the Right Thing, it is a perfect tragedy.
(It’s a coincidence that John Turturro plays an idiot so well in both of these movies. He is a fantastic actor. Respect.)
Diegetic sound can lead to some spectacular dance scenes. Although drama didn’t include dance in Aristotle’s day, the transitive properties of music mean that dance scenes build the narrative world by speaking to the tensions between characters in a way dialogue alone cannot. Here are some excellent dance scenes from different decades:
Although music has the power to sweep audiences into a narrative, diegetic sound is not JUST music in a scene. It’s all the sound emanating within the narrative. Film sound design is often unappreciated—the Oscar award nobody cares about—but it plays a pivotal role in transporting us into this other world.
I have read Moby Dick and watched Mad Max: Fury Road more than almost any other book or movie, so imagine how excited I was to find this interview in which the sound designers of Fury Road explain how they were inspired by Moby Dick.
I had this notion that the truck itself was an allegory for "Moby Dick." If you think about this a little bit, we saw Immortan Joe — the leader of the war party — as [Captain] Ahab. He's hellbent on killing the great white whale — the War Rig. We wanted to personify it as this giant, growling, breathing, roaring beast. […] It had to be grounded in reality, but we wanted it to be more than that, so we designed whale sounds to play underneath all those truck sounds to embody the real sounds and to personify it. […] And to further that storytelling aspect, the "Moby Dick" aspect, at the end of the movie they're shooting harpoons at it. We already have the visual metaphors to support this allegory. Every time it was struck with a harpoon, you hear these deep whale-like groans to say that it has been hurt and wounded. It's not just the sound of metal into metal. When the harpoons do pierce the War Rig and the milk sprays out, we use the sounds of whale blowholes.
On the subject of sound design, I also can’t let this one go out without recommending Sound of Metal, in which the sound moves from the external narrative of the world to the inner narrative of the main character as he copes with losing his hearing. It places the audience in the world of the hearing so that we can appreciate the protagonist’s alienation and journey toward inner peace. It is an incredibly beautiful film.
This is not really diegetic sound, but I’ve been thinking about this particular podcast episode since I heard it years ago, driving at night in the rain so that the outside world beyond the red, yellow, and white-lit drops of water on the windshield melted away. Song Exploder’s usual format is to talk to a musician about their creative process and making of a single song, but this one diverges to interview Yo-Yo Ma about playing the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suites over the course of 58 years as a cellist.
Ma analyzes his own performance of this music when he was younger and now, saying that he is still learning from it. At the end of the interview, listening to his most recent recording of this music, he hears the wisdom and experience he has gained with life in the bowings and pauses.
There’s more attention to changing landscape. There's less emphasis on saying, “Let's make a beautiful sound,” and there's different kinds of texture. There's greater fragility. There’s more attention to the bits of landscape that says, “Hmm, wait, look at that. Check that out.” So what does all this mean? Like a great book that you read several times during your life, each time you read it, it's the same book but you certainly get very, very different material from the same stories.
This interview transcends its subject matter. As he listens, Ma can hear the journey of his own life in the notes. And what he says is not just about this piece of music or playing an instrument—it is advice for living, for being vulnerable, for putting one’s whole self into whatever it is you do with that life.
There's no question that with life experience as you experience loss and love and tragedy, you are slightly changed. And as a musician, you make your living from being sensitized to these changes and digest them and make sure that you are always giving your full self to whatever you're doing, which means that any experience that you’ve had has to be somehow revealed in the process of making music. And I think that almost forces you to make yourself vulnerable to whatever is there to be vulnerable to, because that actually is your strength.
Yo-Yo Ma’s life story can be heard in the changing texture of his playing, and that brings me back to Aristotle and storytelling and of all the emotional textures and life experiences found in each of these different clips I’ve shared today.
As I think about what I’ve learned from this day of digging through diegetic sound, I realize that sound and story are inextricable. Life has its own musical qualities, and we should take notice of them. To live fully means to immerse ourselves in the story and listen to the world around us.
I’ll leave you with a little trio of poems with diegetic sounds hidden in them.
Career
by Carl Phillips
Long after the dark that the singing was for
is over, some keep singing for a while. As if
refusing to stop could change the fact of daylight
or could make what it felt like to sing hidden
inside the dark—that part, at least—stay. What
is it with the dark, anyway, that the closer they
get to it, the more some people seem to all but
shake with expectancy, even those raised, like us,
to expect nothing?
—What if all the truth is
is an over-washed sweatshirt, sometimes on
purpose worn inside out?
Yet the world’s still
so beautiful, he said. Sometimes, I whispered back,
but barely, just in case he was listening; Sometimes
it is … We were hours from nightfall. Everywhere,
promises kept becoming apologies, our way of
talking-without-talking-about the leaves coming
to rest finally against their own images on the water’s
surface. It seemed enough, we understood it might
have to be, we sat and watched and, briefly, it was.
Joy
by Miller Oberman
Like the time I dreamt about a loon family,
just some common loons—not metaphors
in any way, just real loons in a lake swimming
near each other so it was clear they were a set,
preferring each other’s company in the cold
still lake with its depth of reflected pines.
The curve of their black heads and sleek
necks, black and white stripes then checks
on their folded wings, floating so low
atop their reflections they almost seem
inside them. Their wails like wolves, their
calls like an echo without origin, their
calls like an echo of lake, or what makes lake
lake. How nice to think the male and female
loons cannot be told apart by their plumage
and that they build a nest and sit on eggs
together. One of their calls is called “tremolo.”
Emptying
by Aaron Zhang
The air emptied of summer.
The summer emptied of air.
The impression in the sand’s edge;
The wave as shadow. Silking over
The branches, spidering
As we watch. Lose a leaf, lose
Another. Lose the pretense
Of loss.
Where is the winter, the unimaginable
Zero winter? The noon and the paper
Wreath. The soiled and coiled
Breath. Waver in the dark beam.
Sit for the afternoon. Stir sand
Underfoot and hear
Nothing. Beneath light as a pool, a stream
Over the mouth, the bridge, the canal
Of an ear. Do you hear it ring.
The children leap and assume waterform.
The flesh of a shell, peach, cheek.
Cochlea as nautilus, the world reflected
As warble. As sustenance, as the echo
Of a fallen peach.
Makes me think of another great Cohen brothers' film, "Inside Llewyn Davis," which explores this concept in a few different ways.
I've also been listening to this lecture, which opens with some related thoughts on sonic metaphor and meaning: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155720527732976
Thank you as always for the inspiring read!