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Jun. 16th, 2005 03:04 pmI have very mixed feelings about Sarah McLachlan. On one hand, I really love some of her songs (never the whole album, though, although "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" was decent, overall, as a cohesive whole). I enjoy being entranced, in a somewhat uncomfortable way, by the creepy subversiveness of "Possession," I delight in "Building a Mystery," I love her cover of "Dear God" and I think "Ice" is one of the most beautiful songs ever writetn by anyone, period. But on the other hand, so much of the the time she is way too Lilith Fair for me without any nuances to differentiate that entire body of her work from a thousand other songs that I find as interesting and engaging as pretty wallpaper. She fails to be consistently interesting (to me) and that makes me suspicious that when she IS interesting, it is accidental.
BUT I have to say that without fail I appreciate how her music has been used in the visual medium. Either it's something about her music that makes it particularly suitable for sound illustrations, or it's just random fortune, but her music has been put to excellent use on the big screen and the small one.
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer," was a show that, unlike its WB (for the first 5 seasons at least) peers, really made a consistent and concerted effort to score its narratives with really independent/obscure/alternative music (as opposed, say, to the "alternative" soundtrack of "Dawson's Crack"). Through "Buffy" I discovered Cibo Matto, Rasputina, Velvet Chain, Darling Violetta, Dollshead, K's Choice, THC, etc. Music on "Buffy" was always used very well, without lapsing into that eye-rolling territory of song-lyrics-literally-illustrating-screen-ongoings. But two of the best "use of music" moments on "Buffy" happened in season 2 and season 6 finales, and involved Sarah McLachlan.
The final five minutes of "Becoming Part 2," the season two finale, the saddest five minutes scripted and produced for network TV ever (with the possible exception of the Al Gore "West Wing" SNL skit in 2003) are set to "Full of Grace," and from the shot of her stepping away from the statue of Acathla starts up, scrunching up her face as "the winter here's cold and bitter...", to the final fade-out of her on the Greyhound out of Sunnydale, I really can't think of any other song that would have worked as well.
And similarly, as the black drains out of Willow's hair and Buffy and Dawn climb out of the grave at the end of "Grave," "The Prayer of St. Francis" provides a perfect musical culmination to the one Buffy finale that was slightly more uplifting at the end, rather than utterly and completely devastating, as they tended to be.
There was a peculiar film called "Kissed" a few years ago, that I liked, although I didn't expect to. Some people get angry at films that are obvious tearjerkers, films that they feel manipulate them in a slick but effective Pavlovian way. Those films don't bother me. I may cry at them, but it's like a sunshower, I flex the tearducts, and there is no trace five minutes later, not like with films that may not make me cry, but haunt me for days (like "Mysterious Skin" which I saw last weekend). I do have an ambivalent relationship to films that make me like them because of their sheer beauty. I don't mean, like, "inner beauty" of the message, we all know how I feel about "beauty", but I mean a particular kind of cinematography, of the sort you find in Alfonso Cuaron films, that affects me in the same way that the "icy geometry" prose pieces do. The ambiguity comes from being dissatisfied with the content, while being completely enraptured by the medium. "Great Expectations," the 1998 adaptation with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, is a perfect example of that. The script was atroctious and the whole project was misguided and uneven in flow, but the film was so fucking beautiful, from the scenes of the dilapidated, green-and-sun-drenched Florida mansion set to "Besame Mucho" to the Francisco Clemente paintings used as Pip's/Finn's creations.
Anyway, "Kissed" was kind of like that. I am not sure how I ended up seeing a film about necrophilia, it must have been by accident, because while I am not, like, Horrified by the topic, I can't imagine being intrigued by the idea of a film about it enough to actively seek it out. But somehow I ended up seeing it and I had the same dissonant experience of being unmoved and uncaptivated by the subject (I stayed interested throughout the main heroine's childhood relationship to death and her rituals for the dead animals she found, but the film became too literal for me once she gets a job at the funeral parlor and practices her fusion of spirituality/sexuality with the more attractive corpses), but drawn in by the slow, serious, grave beauty and carefulness with which the film unfolded on-screen. Still, I wasn't as seduced even by this aesthetic as I was with "Great Expectations" until the climactic scene which is set to "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy," and that song completes that film, at least on an aesthetic level, that took it from "films I am unsure about" to "films I am ambivalent about because they captivate me for reasons I maybe find shallow but I am okay with that, mostly."
And when I saw that trainwreck of a film, "Brokedown Palace" with Claire Danes, my only positive memory of anything pertaining to that film is the trailer (I really appreciate good trailers), which conveyed just the right urgency and anxiety and desperation that the film failed to deliver. The trailer was set to the Delirium/Sarah McLachlan song "Silence."
I am trying to think of another artist who has been used to well so consistently in films and I sort of can't. Except possibly Johnny Cash.
P.S. In Sarah McLachlan's case, I claim exemption with regard to her song "Angel" featured in "City of Angels" on the grounds that I hate the song, the film and 99% of American remakes in general.
BUT I have to say that without fail I appreciate how her music has been used in the visual medium. Either it's something about her music that makes it particularly suitable for sound illustrations, or it's just random fortune, but her music has been put to excellent use on the big screen and the small one.
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer," was a show that, unlike its WB (for the first 5 seasons at least) peers, really made a consistent and concerted effort to score its narratives with really independent/obscure/alternative music (as opposed, say, to the "alternative" soundtrack of "Dawson's Crack"). Through "Buffy" I discovered Cibo Matto, Rasputina, Velvet Chain, Darling Violetta, Dollshead, K's Choice, THC, etc. Music on "Buffy" was always used very well, without lapsing into that eye-rolling territory of song-lyrics-literally-illustrating-screen-ongoings. But two of the best "use of music" moments on "Buffy" happened in season 2 and season 6 finales, and involved Sarah McLachlan.
The final five minutes of "Becoming Part 2," the season two finale, the saddest five minutes scripted and produced for network TV ever (with the possible exception of the Al Gore "West Wing" SNL skit in 2003) are set to "Full of Grace," and from the shot of her stepping away from the statue of Acathla starts up, scrunching up her face as "the winter here's cold and bitter...", to the final fade-out of her on the Greyhound out of Sunnydale, I really can't think of any other song that would have worked as well.
And similarly, as the black drains out of Willow's hair and Buffy and Dawn climb out of the grave at the end of "Grave," "The Prayer of St. Francis" provides a perfect musical culmination to the one Buffy finale that was slightly more uplifting at the end, rather than utterly and completely devastating, as they tended to be.
There was a peculiar film called "Kissed" a few years ago, that I liked, although I didn't expect to. Some people get angry at films that are obvious tearjerkers, films that they feel manipulate them in a slick but effective Pavlovian way. Those films don't bother me. I may cry at them, but it's like a sunshower, I flex the tearducts, and there is no trace five minutes later, not like with films that may not make me cry, but haunt me for days (like "Mysterious Skin" which I saw last weekend). I do have an ambivalent relationship to films that make me like them because of their sheer beauty. I don't mean, like, "inner beauty" of the message, we all know how I feel about "beauty", but I mean a particular kind of cinematography, of the sort you find in Alfonso Cuaron films, that affects me in the same way that the "icy geometry" prose pieces do. The ambiguity comes from being dissatisfied with the content, while being completely enraptured by the medium. "Great Expectations," the 1998 adaptation with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, is a perfect example of that. The script was atroctious and the whole project was misguided and uneven in flow, but the film was so fucking beautiful, from the scenes of the dilapidated, green-and-sun-drenched Florida mansion set to "Besame Mucho" to the Francisco Clemente paintings used as Pip's/Finn's creations.
Anyway, "Kissed" was kind of like that. I am not sure how I ended up seeing a film about necrophilia, it must have been by accident, because while I am not, like, Horrified by the topic, I can't imagine being intrigued by the idea of a film about it enough to actively seek it out. But somehow I ended up seeing it and I had the same dissonant experience of being unmoved and uncaptivated by the subject (I stayed interested throughout the main heroine's childhood relationship to death and her rituals for the dead animals she found, but the film became too literal for me once she gets a job at the funeral parlor and practices her fusion of spirituality/sexuality with the more attractive corpses), but drawn in by the slow, serious, grave beauty and carefulness with which the film unfolded on-screen. Still, I wasn't as seduced even by this aesthetic as I was with "Great Expectations" until the climactic scene which is set to "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy," and that song completes that film, at least on an aesthetic level, that took it from "films I am unsure about" to "films I am ambivalent about because they captivate me for reasons I maybe find shallow but I am okay with that, mostly."
And when I saw that trainwreck of a film, "Brokedown Palace" with Claire Danes, my only positive memory of anything pertaining to that film is the trailer (I really appreciate good trailers), which conveyed just the right urgency and anxiety and desperation that the film failed to deliver. The trailer was set to the Delirium/Sarah McLachlan song "Silence."
I am trying to think of another artist who has been used to well so consistently in films and I sort of can't. Except possibly Johnny Cash.
P.S. In Sarah McLachlan's case, I claim exemption with regard to her song "Angel" featured in "City of Angels" on the grounds that I hate the song, the film and 99% of American remakes in general.
