Assay Office

Assay office [from Wikipedia]: “Institutions set up to assay (test the purity of) precious metals . . . . often done to protect consumers from buying fake items.”

Music critics are motivated by opposing, mutually exclusive, desires. On the one hand, they strive to identify and distinguish the very best albums currently being marketed to mass audiences. On the other, they seek to shelter those same albums from mass consumption—from a homogenizing process that consists of assimilation or “popularization.” The critic’s sorting process is predicated on an epistemology that makes real/fake distinctions, its aim to vilify the counterfeit and praise the genuine item. Because of the critic’s status as an expert in the field, the critic’s discourse, merely descriptive or impressionistic, has the rhetorical force of science (applicable to critics of the arts in general, in fact).

Fortunately, the authenticating discourse of the critic can be subject to parody, undermining the critic’s epistemological certainty. Jazz critics have been especially subject to parody, and rightly so. Steve Allen’s spoken-word recordings, “Cinderella” and “Crazy Red Riding Hood,” issued on record in 1953 prior to the publication of his collection Bop Fables (1955), satirize hipster bop talk. Marshall Brickman’s hilarious “What, Another Legend?” (1973), mocks the jazzographer’s tendency to erect a jazz hall of fame. Perhaps the best parody of critics’ attempts to transform jazz into language is Donald Barthelme’s short story “The King of Jazz.” In Barthelme’s humorous story, a jazz fan responds to a question about how to describe the peerless sound of trombonist Hokie Mokie, the current king of jazz:

“You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like—“

Barthelme’s metaphorical feat, in fact, illustrates “the normal practice of music criticism,” translating “a work (or its performance) . . . into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective" (Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 179). 

Whistling A Different Tune

Several years ago, I published a blog post on songs that feature whistling. At the time, I wrote about the many significations of whistling: contentment (“Don't Worry, Be Happy”), solitary, melancholy contemplation (“(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay”), self-absorbed autoeroticism (“Centerfold”), pleasant, relaxing idleness (the theme from The Andy Griffith Show), or simply to pass the time, to avoid monotony when speech is either impossible or forbidden (“Colonel Bogey March”; “Whistle While You Work” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Whistling can also simply represent an individual’s joie de vivre ("Daydream").

But there's another aspect of whistling that I ignored when I wrote the earlier post, that whistling can bring bad luck. A popular superstition holds that whistling at night is dangerous and may bring unwanted attention from creatures that stalk the night, or perhaps may attract evil spirits. There are some world cultures that believe whistling is a means to summon supernatural beings.

Perhaps because of the association of whistling with certain morbid superstitions, movies have used whistling as means to establish an ominous mood or atmosphere. Each of  the films in Columbia's 8-film Whistler series (1944-1948) begins with the slightly sinister narrator whistling an eerie tune, soon to introduce himself as The Whistler: “I am the Whistler and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.” A few years prior to the debut of the Whistler series, in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), throughout the film the child murderer, Hans Beckert, identifies himself off-screen by whistling Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” An inspired cinematic use of whistling is Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score for the psycho-thriller Twisted Nerve (1968), widely known as the “Kill Bill whistle song,” having been appropriated by Quentin Tarantino for a sequence in Kill Bill Vol. I (2003). Tarantino follows Fritz Lang’s lead in having the whistler introduced off-screen prior to the character’s actual appearance. The “whistle song” was again used by Tarantino as a phone’s ringtone in Death Proof (2007).

I find Herrmann’s melodic theme for Twisted Nerve powerful and haunting because, to use a linguistic analogy, it is like an antonym: it is both tranquil and foreboding at the same time. It is the sonic equivalent of M’s Hans Beckert, whose jolly smile and jaunty whistle cloaks his murderous intent. I hear Twisted Nerve’s whistle in many songs that use whistling but are musically much different. I hear it in Roy Orbison’s “Here Comes the Rain, Baby,” the beginning of Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” (1977), the whistling that closes Peter Gabriel's masterful “Intruder,” Roxy Music's cover of “Jealous Guy,” and Scorpions’ “Wind of Change," among others. 

Here are a few songs to listen to and think about in the way they use whistling:

 

A Fistful of Dollars (Main Title) – Ennio Morricone (1964) (Alessandro Alessandroni, whistler)

Here Comes The Rain, Baby – Roy Orbison (1967) (Mickey Newbury)

One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong – Leonard Cohen (1967) (Features Cohen using a hand whistle)

Twisted Nerve (Main Title) – Bernard Herrmann (1968) (Gareth Williams, whistler)

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life – Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) (Eric Idle)

Intruder – Peter Gabriel (1980)

Generals and Majors – XTC (1980)

Roxy Music – Jealous Guy (1981) (John Lennon tribute)

Patience – Guns N' Roses (1988) 

Wind of Change – Scorpions (1990)

The Big Bang – Rock Mafia featuring Miley Cyrus (Video, 2010)

The New School

How many critics—of the theater, movies, music, contemporary fine arts—wake up each morning with the uncomfortable feeling that someday they will be wrong in their critical judgment? After all, what is a critic’s deepest fear? To have erred in judgment, to have made the wrong call, to have missed the boat. Certainly, no movie critic wants to miss the boat—to have critically underestimated, or what’s worse, to have dismissed the next Citizen Kane (1941), for instance—so in order to avoid making such an unwitting mistake, the critic engages in what Robert Ray, employing a term taken from Max Ernst, calls critical overcomprehension (How a Film Theory Got Lost, Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 82). Ray writes:

 Aware of previous mistakes, reviewers become increasingly afraid to condemn anything....Hence ... [one] ... of modern criticism’s ... great dangers, what Max Ernst called “overcomprehension” or “the waning of indignation”.... (82)

 

No critic, of course, can see beyond the curtain of Time. Time is the ultimate critic, and the critic’s limited perspective doesn’t allow him to see beyond his own pitifully narrow moment in history. Critical overcomprehension—the act of giving every new movie an equally glowing reception—is a result of the critic’s deep fear that history may prove him wrong. No one wants to be, for instance, television critic Jack Gould, who reviewed The Milton Berle Show appearance of Elvis Presley for the New York Times in 1956:

 

Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore, not nearly so talented as Frank Sinatra back in the latter's rather hysterical days at the Paramount Theater. (qtd. in Robert Ray, 80)

 

However, as Ray points out, Gould’s kind of critical misjudgment has its own unintended consequences: such gross critical mistakes have led to “rejection and incomprehensibility as promises of ultimate value” (82). For instance, if a record album sold poorly, or the artist who recorded it was given little or no attention—or worse, completely neglected in his or her own time, the record must therefore be great, perhaps even a masterwork. The initial neglect of 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico serves as a useful example. Ignored upon release, it is now considered a classic. Initial neglect as a sign of greatness is a powerful myth and governs much of modern criticism of the arts.

 

According to Self-Styled Siren (critic and film historian Farran Smith Nehme), whose knowledge of silent era Hollywood is nothing short of encyclopedic, the practice of critical overcomprehension is currently being applied to Babylon (2022), a box-office failure upon release last year that also divided critics (“Bye, bye Babylon,” August 23, 2023). While the Siren believes it is a “lousy movie,” nonetheless she has noticed that there are “ongoing attempts to enshrine last year's Babylon as some kind of masterwork,” which is to say, for some, the movie's initial rejection is a surefire guarantee of its ultimate value. The myth serves to shield such movies from negative reviews.

In addition, the Siren refers to a recent New York Times article about the new phenomenon of “MovieTok” influencers. The Times calls them “the new school of film critic,” observing that “some tenets of the profession—such as rendering judgments or making claims that go beyond one’s personal taste—are now considered antiquated and objectionable.” Critics of the new school are never going to make an egregious mistake like Jack Gould made with Elvis Presley. More than that, by insisting that the tenets of a previous generation of critics have become antiquated—meaning they are too old to get what’s really going on—the new school of film critics seeks to shield itself, not simply certain films, but from criticism as well. The new school influencers have little concern for the movie itself. Instead, they are far more interested in the multiple ways they can attribute significance to the movie, e.g., “outrageous,” “extravagant,” “over the top,” “mind-blowing,” “thought-provoking,” on and on. Criticism is simply a form of publicity, and the film itself a commodity.

Timbre

According to Wikipedia, there are well over a thousand cover versions of “Louie Louie.” Question: Given the many hundreds of versions available, why is it that the Kingsmen’s cover version the one most widely known? As we all know, Paul Revere & the Raiders recorded the song a week or two after the Kingsmen, but the Raiders’ version failed to become a hit. Why did the Kingsmen’s version succeed and the Raiders’ version fail? After all, it’s the same song. Or is it?

In Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk asks a relevant question: Why  do rock fans “listen again and again to the same records”? Why did a student that Gracyk knew wear out “a new Neil Young cassette in a month”? In answer to these questions, Gracyk writes:

What is needed is a plausible account of how “Louie Louie” can retain its impact when the record is played over and over. The answer must be that song structure is often an incidental framing device for something further; a “coathanger,” as John Sheperd puts it, upon which other qualities and “significant personal statements” are hung. Alan Durant proposes that recording shapes listening by locating the corresponding pleasure in “precise recollection and anticipation: knowing sounds, movements, and instrumental textures by memory and familiarity, rather than by extrapolation from perceived patterns, symmetries and learned musical structures.” But why should this anticipation please us? (58)

The short answer to this question, Gracyk says, is timbre (“what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note”). The problem is that timbres “fade” after a short period of time, “becoming more imprecise with the passage of time” (60). In other words, our auditory memories, when it comes to musical timbres, are poor. We can’t remember a song’s timbres precisely, so we want to hear it again (and again). So why is the Kingmen’s version of “Louie Louie” the one that became the most widely known? The short answer is the song's timbres.

In film studies, the closest analogy to timbre is mise-en-scéne, that magical dimension of a movie that is generated by the gap between a director’s (auteur’s) intentions and the camera’s automatism (André Bazin). When discussing the role of the music producer in the creation of a record, music critic Michael Jarrett writes:

When Owen Bradley produces Patsy Cline’s massive hits, he records a sonic concept just as much as he records an artist. In the vocabulary of film studies, the producer’s purview is the mise-en-scéne, in all of that term’s mystery. (Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings, 37).

My Huckleberry Friend

Search the web, and you’ll find various meanings attributed to “My huckleberry friend,” the penultimate line from Mancini and Mercer’s “Moon River.” For the sake of convenience I reproduce the lyrics in question here:

Two drifters off to see the world

There’s such a lot of world to see

We’re after the same rainbow’s end

Waiting round the bend

My huckleberry friend

Moon river and me

As sung by Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the song reveals her rootlessness, her yearning to take flight, to get away—unusual characteristics for the heroine of what is essentially a romantic comedy with a few screwball elements. Childlike and often childish (as the heroines of this genre frequently are), “free-spirited,” she has escaped an unfulfilling life in rural Texas, abandoned her husband and step-children, and moved to New York City. Her reinvention takes the form of a revolt against conventionality—defying social convention is a characteristic trait of the screwball heroine. Subject to whims and tantrums, impulsive, a “kook” (derived from “cuckoo,” late 50s-early 60s lingo for someone who flaunts convention, individuality expressed through eccentricity), she seeks to avoid the confines of responsibility and in order to maintain her independence she avoids commitment, seeking to prolong her adolescence as far into adulthood as she possibly can. 

Perhaps this is why Breakfast at Tiffany’s has that wistful, melancholic mood that I identified in my last post. After thinking about this movie for several years, it seems to me that the ending, in which Holly and Paul famously kiss in the rain as the music swells, cannot conceal what seems to me to be a hint of sadness. Why? Because inevitably, like Huckleberry Finn, Holly is going “to light out for the Territory.” Critic Judith Crist expressed a similar idea (without invoking Huck Finn) during an interview in 2009:

But what’s clever about the way they ended Breakfast at Tiffany’s—this is, of course, my own feeling—is that you don’t get the sense that the two of them will last forever. About George Peppard’s character, I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s not long for it. Just because you’re going to give the cat a name doesn’t mean that the cat isn’t going to go back to the alley.’ (Quoted in Sam Wasson’s book on the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Fifth Avenue, 5:00 a.m., p. 168)

Like Judith Crist, I can’t shake the feeling that the couple’s relationship will not last, either. Perhaps Crist felt that Paul Varjak (George Peppard) wanted to control Holly, to suppress her, that he isn’t the “right” match, rather like having the wrong couple end up married at the end of a screwball comedy—imagine Johnny Case (Cary Grant) married to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) at the end of George Cukor’s Holiday (1938). Yet the sadness I’m trying to identify isn’t simply an issue of compatibility, or certain hesitations about George Peppard’s performance (it is no secret that director Blake Edwards was strongly against casting him in the role), but something deeper than that, having to do with the underlying motivations of Holly’s character. Leslie A. Fiedler wrote about Huck Finn in a way that is applicable to Holly Golightly:

[H]e does not know to what he is escaping, except into nothing: a mere anti-society, in which he is a cipher, a ghost without a real name. “All I wanted was to go somewheres,” he tells Miss Watson, “all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.” Huck is heading for no utopia, since he has heard of none; and so he ends up making flight itself his goal. He flees from the impermanence of boyhood to that of continual change; and, of course, it is a vain evasion except as it leads him to understand that no society can fulfill his destiny. (Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 464-65)

Perhaps Fiedler’s observation is more applicable to the Holly Golightly as portrayed in Truman Capote’s novel rather than the Hollywood adaptation. Nonetheless, the diegetic use of “Moon River” requires an explanation, and there is nothing in the movie that interests me more.

Moon River and Me

According to legend, after a successful preview of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the then supervisory chief of production at Paramount, Martin Rackin, although happy with the test audience’s positive assessment of the film, insisted that the scene of Audrey Hepburn singing “Moon River” be cut from the picture. Some accounts aver that Rackin had been an opponent of the song all along. Others say that he preferred a different composer than Henry Mancini. Is there any truth to these rumors? Composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, “Moon River” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and additionally received the 1962 Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Given the song’s huge success and popularity, could the production head at Paramount really have been so obtuse? How could he have failed to recognize the song’s greatness?

Pure speculation, but perhaps the reason why he wanted the song cut was because he felt the scene was narratively unnecessary. For the sake of argument, I might even say that I agree with him: the scene doesn’t advance the plot. However, plot is only one dimension of a movie. The “Moon River” scene is essential to the film—imagine Breakfast at Tiffany’s with the scene omitted. What is lost? Holly singing “Moon River” contributes nothing to the plot, but has everything to do with mood or atmosphere. The song’s subject—wanderlust, the lure of the river—deepens our understanding of Holly’s character and also invokes a wistful, melancholic mood that haunts the rest of the movie. The scene is an instance of diegetic music, music that is actually played within the fictional space of the film’s story.

Of course, the movies are loaded with such moments, and the best of these moments remain indelibly etched in our memories. For author and critic Umberto Eco (1985’s “’Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”), the greatest movies are “great” precisely because they contain such moments. The challenge presented to us is how to write about such moments in a way to do them justice. As Christian Metz stated in his now famous epigraph (cited by James Monaco in How to Read a Film), “[M]ovies are difficult to explain because they are easy to understand.”