Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience

Notes

195 noTeS Introduction 1 A brief glance at the Rotten Tomatoes website reveals a host of similar descriptions concerning Up, where, as I write, it is currently receiving a rating of 97 percent among critics and viewers. See http:// www.rottentomatoes.com/m/up. 2 Christopher Smith, “Up: Movie Review,” Bangor Daily News, July 14, 2009, http://www.weekinrewind.com/ (accessed August 15, 2009). 3 As such, this work falls under the larger category of “apologetic theology .” I can do no better than William Dyrness’ definition: “[A]pologetic theology . . . seeks to develop theological categories, given to us by Scripture and tradition, in conversation with the contemporary cultural situation. It is assumed that whether this is recognized or not, all living theology grows in this way.” Dyrness, Poetic Theology : God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 10. 4 I owe these insights concerning subjective truth and authorship to Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences in Theology: Ways and Forms of Christian Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), xix. 5 In the second edition to his book Reel Spirituality, Robert Johnston suggests that in order to truly understand the power and meaning of a film and thus to participate in a constructive theological dialogue, theologians must attend more fully to music in their engagements with film. Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), esp. 178–83. Indeed, in his subsequent book, Useless Beauty, he follows 196 noTeS To pp. 8–10 through with this suggestion and discusses Paul Thomas Anderson ’s Magnolia (1999) in terms of the film’s music. Robert K. Johnston, Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 74–91. Similarly, in Reframing Theology and Film, a book edited by Johnston, Barry Taylor offers a brief introduction to the meaningmaking dimensions of film music and argues that a theological construal of film must not only include narrative and visual analyses, but musical analyses as well. Barry Taylor, “The Colors of Sound: Music and Meaning Making in Film,” in Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, ed. Robert K. Johnston (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). 6 The two exceptions are Pixar’s Toy Story, which was first released in 1995, and The Tree of Life, which was just released in 2011. I have included Toy Story in our discussion not only because it was the first of many groundbreaking films by Pixar, but also because without it our understanding of Pixar’s use of music would remain incomplete and even inadequate. As the most recent film, I chose to conclude the book with The Tree of Life in order to demonstrate the ways in which our inquiry will move the theology and film discussion forward. 7 We will discuss in a later chapter the rather ambiguous ways in which contemporary persons conceive of and use the term “transcendence .” For now, though, it is enough to note that, as Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor have suggested, beginning with the year 1999— “The Year That Changed Movies”—we have entered “the most spiritually charged era in Hollywood history.” Detweiler and Taylor, A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 167. 8 I owe this insight to Nicholas Cook. Although Cook is concerned with music in general, his insights apply directly to our consideration of film music. See Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 1. 9 “To be told that the beauty or significance of a piece of music lies in relationships that one cannot hear is to have the aesthetic validity of one’s experience of the music thrown into doubt; and the manner in which music is described by professionals can only create in the untrained listener a sense of inadequacy, a feeling that though he may enjoy the music he cannot claim really to understand it.” Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture, 1. 10 I am affirming here the role that actual audiences play in both noTeS To pp. 10–11 197 the discovery and the construction of filmic meaning. At the same time, though, the film’s actual form in its final state of production is equally significant and even determinative to some degree. It not only serves as the mediating entity between production and reception, but it also structures and delimits the meaning-making process; without...