Music in Epic Film

Listening to Spectacle

Stephen Meyer, Stephen C. Meyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317425861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

As both a distinct genre and a particular mode of filmmaking, the idea of the epic has been central to the history of cinema. Including contributions from both established and emerging film music scholars, the ten essays in Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle provide a cross-section of contemporary scholarship on the subject. They explore diverse topics, including the function of music in epic narratives, the socio-political implications of cinematic music, and the use of pre-existing music in epic films. Intended for students and scholars in film music, film appreciation, and media studies, the wide range of topics and the diversity of the films that the authors discuss make Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle an ideal introduction to the field of music in epic film.

Part I

Marketing and Production

Chapter 1

Branding the Franchise

Music, Opening Credits, and the (Corporate) Myth of Origin¹

James Buhler

The World of the Franchise

A central facet of the film industry since 1980 has been its orientation around the production of blockbusters and the development of media franchises. For Paul Grainge, the concept of the franchise “denotes the partnership between Hollywood, as the owner of a business system offering a branded product or service, and the network of individuals licensed to sell that brand in accordance with the system’s regulation of trademarks, logos and intellectual property rights.”² I will develop the concept of franchise along similar lines, taking it to designate those media properties designed to encompass several films and to produce significant ancillary income from product merchandising, such as books, music, toys, costumes, and games. Franchises typically include extensive media crossover into television, video games, books, amusement park rides, and websites that extend the story world in significant ways into those other domains. The concept of franchise thus also presumes what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence,” “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”³ If the cinematic event in particular and the film commodity in general remain indispensable to the definition of the franchise, the franchise is not reducible to the film even construed in the broadest sense. As Grainge notes, “[I]n economic terms, film has become less important as a discrete commodity than as a brand platform that can be transfigured across industries and cultural fields.”⁴ He adds:

[I]f … theatrical film is one long marketing device for a range of ancillary products (videos, DVDs, soundtracks) extra-textual experiences (theme park rides, video games) and non-filmic consumables (toys, soft drinks, fast food), then branding has become the lynchpin of a new gestalt of “total entertainment,” central to a consolidated media moment transforming the status of motion picture as commodity and aesthetic object.⁵

Although nothing in the concept of the franchise restricts it to a particular genre of film, the most expansive franchises in the film industry and those that most fully encompass Grainge’s conception of “total entertainment” belong to the genre of action film, especially its various subgenres of science fiction, comic books, and fantasy. These films, whose primary demographic target is adolescent and young adult males, have an epic, spectacular quality as well as a strong commitment to constructing well-defined fictional worlds that evidently makes them especially well suited to satisfy the demands of franchising.⁶

One reason franchising is drawn to developing epic tales, then, is because franchising works best when its world is immersive, when it can overlay our world with another fictive one. The catchphrase is “world building,” the creation of “compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium. The world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise,” and its various products of fiction have the effect of displacement: they produce “a deepening of the universe” but at the expense of infiltrating and overrunning our actual world.⁷ Sometimes this world building entails borrowing the framework of the fictional universe from the actual world, as in franchises such as Indiana Jones and James Bond or in more extended fashion Harry Potter, the Matrix, or the Marvel universe, where something like our actual world is projected as a mundane surface thinly stretched across a fictional universe of fantastic depth; other times, especially in overt science fiction and fantasy, it can involve entirely different (or future) worlds, such as Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Star Trek.⁸ The difference (and distance) from our actual world, the representation of a richly drawn fictional level, however, is crucial. One media executive notes how a basic substitution of fiction for reality works on desire and experience: “I want to participate in [this fictional universe]. I’ve just been introduced to the world in the film and I want to get there, explore it. You need that connection to the [fictional] world to make participation exciting.”⁹ With respect to games, one designer says the point is to “draw [the players] more deeply into the world—they feel more a part of it.”¹⁰ A website for one transmedia firm declares an almost imperialist ambition, with the fictional fantasy worlds substituting for the colonial fantasy world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “Our aim is to carve the client’s world into today’s cultural landscape, so that, like Middle Earth or Hogwarts, it becomes a priority destination for the American imagination… . We create communities passionately committed to spending not their money but their imaginations in the worlds we represent.”¹¹ The ideal franchise thus has an inherent epic quality, since the world represented in the story both encompasses the tale and exceeds its telling. Epic, here, means not simply big and spectacular but also harkens back to the literary meaning of the term as a story told in episodes and aimed at relating mythical tales of heroic acts. The epic is resistant to containment in form; it tends to spill over and present itself in fragments. In this way, the meaning of the heroic acts becomes dependent on the totality that its fiction represents.

Creating media properties through and around world building is, Henry Jenkins notes, fundamental to what he calls “convergence culture” and he locates its origin, at least in mass media, in Star Wars.

[George] Lucas’s decision to defer salary for the first Star Wars film in favor of maintaining a share of ancillary profits has been widely cited as a turning point in the emergence of this new strategy of media production and distribution. Lucas made a ton of money, and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation learned a valuable lesson. Kenner’s Star Wars action figures are thought to have been the key in reestablishing the value of media tie-in products in the toy industry, and John Williams’s score helped to revitalize the market for soundtrack albums. The rich narrative universe of the Star Wars saga provided countless images, icons, and artifacts that could be reproduced in a wide variety of forms.¹²

David A. Cook similarly notes that Star Wars ushered in an era when “merchandising became an industry unto itself, and tie-in product marketing began to drive the conception and selling of motion pictures rather than vice versa.”¹³ Although Walt Disney had developed his studio into an impressive business through merchandising and cross-promotion already in the 1950s, Lucas showed with Star Wars that following something resembling Disney’s strategy, which the Disney company had itself somewhat abandoned following Walt’s death, could still yield substantial profits. And the lesson that Twentieth Century Fox learned was that the franchise should be constructed to extract profit that flows back to the corporate body.

Music, Myth, and Corporate Logos

Music’s place in this configuration of the franchise has been recognized but not well understood. Music has been widely acknowledged as a resource for cross-promotion and for its capacity to generate ancillary income and to establish an appropriate cinematic (and increasingly epic) tone—“big and loud” is one of the primary generic attributes of these films.¹⁴ But less appreciated has been music’s function in product branding, its way of binding the world of the franchise together across not just various films but an increasingly diverse media landscape, including especially video games, websites, and amusement park rides. Music in fact has often been deployed as though it was a key franchise asset, along with characters and set and prop design, which induces the appearance of, our belief in, and commitment to the fictional world. Music seems especially important to encourage us to embrace the fantasy of an alternate universe. As Giorgio Biancorosso argues, music has long associations with ritual, and one of its primary functions, whether in itself or as an accompaniment to a dramatic presentation, is that it serves as “an invitation to imagine, to transform the ensuing sounds and images into paths accessing imaginary places, people, stories.”¹⁵

Biancorosso’s attention to music’s contributions to the ritual of filmic fiction links music to the franchise project of world building, and he rightly notes the importance of music during the opening credit sequence for the preparation of the fantasy. Credit music, however, does not so much extend “an invitation,” as it issues an ambiguous command: “imagine.” We proceed to the fiction by refusing to acknowledge or at least to consider the source of this command, or indeed to account for the debits required to balance these opening credits. Biancorosso’s focus on the process and object of our imagining occludes precisely the conditions of possibility of this imagining, the economy that it puts into circulation, and indeed the way it is given to us (for a price) even as it is perpetually withheld as a piece of property. Our minds perform the labor of imagining but the fruits of that labor remain intricately bound up with an intellectual property that we cannot, by law, possess for ourselves. This strange play of fantasy—the economy of art as entertainment—retains a distant connection to the sacred ritual that celebrated the presence of community and testified to social bonds forged by the myth of a common origin. As myths, origin stories produce not only an image of society but also the conditions for its reproduction. They must naturalize any conditions of social inequity, to convince its subjects that the world is as it is by virtue of its beginning; they also serve to naturalize ownership, to establish the unequivocal right to property, in fact, to create the very idea of property as something to be owned. And something similar happens at the beginning of every film, which presents us with a ritual of our own society. What is the function of this myth? What social contradiction does it expose and propose to reconcile?

Because of the extensive cost of production, most films require financing, and beyond that they must establish ownership of the property if they are to recoup costs and make a profit. That banal economic fact affects film form. The film opens not just with title and credits—increasingly these are displaced to the end especially in epic films—but with corporate logo sequences, marks of ownership. In a world where the corporate logo sequence is so much a part of the ritual of opening films that it largely passes unnoticed, its presence, like that of the title sequence itself, offers an origin that productively confuses the corporate and the total entertainment of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface: Epic Genre, Epic Style
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Marketing and Production
• Part II Narrative and Interpretation
• Part III Pre-Existing Music and the Epic Style
• Part IV Songs and Themes
• Part V Genre and the (Anti-)Epic
• Contributors
• Index