Artless Singing

In realist fiction films, characters frequently sing or hum, singly or with other characters. Such moments are not presented as ‘musical numbers’ with the production values this term implies; they are emphatically not perceived as ‘departures from reality’. Such ‘artless singing’ falls through the cracks of film criticism, as it is not quite film music, nor dialogue, nor performance as usually considered. Examination of a number of examples shows that having characters sing in a realistic mode has a surprising variety of narrative, dramatic, and structural functions. Finally, an auteur approach to instances of artless singing shows consistent uses of the trope by directors as diverse as Kubrick, Hawks, and Hitchcock.

What happens in a fiction film when characters sing – not in the patently artificial, artful song performances that we normally call musical numbers, but in moments that are construed and perceived as integral parts of the ‘realistic’ diegetic world? These tend to be throwaway moments, when the characters sing in ways people often do in real life: you might hum as you clean the kitchen, or sing along with a familiar TV title theme, or join a friend in belting out a tune whose lyrics fit the occasion or whose recording star you are imitating. I am calling such scenes ‘artless singing’, for lack of another concise term for singing that, in the conceit of a film story, is not a professional performance, and is done in synch sound with appropriate indices of spatial realism, and without the magical backing of an orchestra. It is a deployment of the voice in film that might seem marginal, but it may well contribute towards our understanding of the possibilities of speech, music, and song in the audiovisual media.

The general invisibility, or inaudibility, of this common phenomenon becomes clear to anyone who sets out to read the critical literature and finds that there is none. Artless singing falls through the disciplinary cracks: it is not quite film music, and not quite performances as students of the musical recognise them – though it is emphatically both.¹ Nor can most filmgoers remember more than one or two such scenes in actual films. I am hoping here to raise the consciousness of this trope and some of its functions.

First, some general observations. Motives for singing in movies are almost as numerous as motives for talking. A character can sing from happiness or sadness, as a response to love or companionship, as an expression of aloneness or group solidarity. Singing can act rhetorically to elicit a reaction from others. As a ritual practice to fend off danger, singing is a form of whistling in the dark. A film can present a character singing, unaware of some momentous event happening nearby, or a character can be singing a song whose lyrics present him or her more truthfully than he or she could know; in these cases, both the narrative situation and something about the song itself can help create affect and irony. Or a character can appropriate a song, identify with it, and in this process we learn something about him or her. Increasingly, in the age of digital music formats and platforms, characters sing to make allusions, often in ironic parody or recontextualisation of song performances; and singing with other characters forges bonds, identities, rivalries.

Just as with dialogue, stage business tends to go with singing in movies; characters drive and sing, shower and sing, they hum as they do house chores and cooking, they walk or feed a baby or put on makeup and sing.² On occasions when they do not, when they just sing without moving, they appear to bare their souls all the more, revealing truth that dialogue could not credibly contain.

A character’s singing often acts as a distillation – of feeling, subjectivity, a relationship, a narrative situation. We may surmise that since actors are not routinely called upon to sing, the filmmakers need to have good justification to compel the actor to do so. At its simplest and most impoverished, artless singing is an easy way to ‘reveal’ or suggest the inner life, motivations, or identifications of a character, to...