Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

4. Decoding the Digital Surround Style

112 Decoding the Digital Surround St yle Certain Academy Awards like Sound and Visual Effects and Editing are sometimes referred to as technical awards. They’re not technical awards. They’re given for artistic decisions. And sometimes we make them better than others, and I guess we made a couple of good ones on this one. Randy Thom, accepting the 2005 Oscar for Sound Editing Digital surround sound (DSS) has promoted a number of specific stylistic trends in the cinema. Some of these, such as movies’ loudest sounds becoming even louder and their silences even quieter, derive specifically from the technical differences between DSS systems and their immediate predecessor, Dolby Stereo. Others result indirectly from this technological change. For example, filmmakers have always been technically able to ignore the 180-degree rule in picture editing, but their newfound ability to do so without confusing the audience is tied to the capability of DSS soundtracks to precisely place—and smoothly move—sounds around the theater. That digital surround opened the door to changes in film style should not be seen as evidence of technological determinism; the shift to DSS has not forced filmmakers to adopt any new techniques or different stylistic approaches. Indeed, anything that could be done with a monophonic or Dolby Stereo soundtrack can still be done with a digital one, allowing filmmakers the option of continuing to employ Dolby Stereo–era sound design and shooting conventions. For those 4 Decoding the Digital Surround St yle · 113 filmmakers taking this approach, the only tangible effect of the transition to DSS is that release prints of their movies now include a digitally encoded version of their soundtracks in addition to the standard analog one—a change that neither filmmakers nor audiences are likely to notice . In other words, the mere ability of digital surround to do certain new things has not meant that filmmakers have taken advantage of all those opportunities: a DSS soundtrack is perfectly capable of placing all dialogue in the left rear channel, but as yet no films have chosen to exploit this potential. Writing about the introduction of Dolby Stereo in the 1970s, scholar-filmmaker Michel Chion opined that “Dolby will become what we decide to make of it; it is not Dolby which should dictate what we should do with it”;1 the same is no less true of digital surround today. As Randy Thom notes in this chapter’s epigraph, making movies is about making artistic choices—and what digital surround sound did was give filmmakers more choices of aural and visual strategies. From this palette of options, filmmakers choose the strategies they believe will best serve a film’s primary story concerns or the creative aims of a particular moment. The conclusion to chapter 3 mentioned that filmmakers often choose to deploy the DSS-linked aesthetic traits en masse—where one of them is used others tend to be as well. Since aesthetic choices are made to achieve particular creative or narrative goals, this adoption of a de facto “digital surround style” suggests these seemingly independent stylistic elements all serve a common purpose; the principal concern of this chapter is discovering that unifying aspect that underlies the “digital surround style.” A Music Video Style? Extant frameworks for understanding contemporary film style may offer insight into the unifying element of the digital surround style’s various components. For instance, several of the “new” techniques discussed in the past two chapters have gained notice by film scholars and critics outside the context of digital surround sound; of these, contemporary Hollywood’s quick cutting and increased use of closeups have probably garnered the most attention. Indeed, much popular discourse seems to take it for granted that current movies adopt an 114 · Production and St yle incoherent style based on music video aesthetics. This approach has even been given the (usually derisive) shorthand label of “MTV style.” Carol Vernallis, author of Experiencing Music Video, interrogates this alleged connection between music video and film and suggests that it runs deeper than mere visual similarities: “If we study music video closely, this ‘low art’ can tell us a great deal about contemporary media.”2 Rather than focusing on music video shooting and editing tactics themselves, Vernallis considers why music videos tend to rely on the particular stylistic traits they do—and whether the same rationale can explain those traits’ increasing utilization by feature films. First, she notes...