Anatomy of a Song

Abstract

An instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” by the Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band plays repeatedly in the soundtrack of Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning film Anatomy of a Fall (2023). We first hear it play in an isolated mountain lodge in the French Alps, the music rudely intruding from above as German author Sandra (Sandra Hüller) holds an interview with a graduate student, the latter keen to learn about the writer’s methods and ideas. The song has been put on by Sandra’s unseen husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), permanently looping on the laptop in the unrenovated attic at the top of the house. It is assumedly a childish but effective way of sabotaging the quality of the interview below. The song continues to play as the graduate student leaves the house and drives away with very little of the interview completed. It plays as Sandra and Samuel’s vision-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes his dog for a walk along frozen, icy valleys. It is still playing as the son discovers his father’s dead body on the ground upon his return, having fallen from the balcony at the top of the chalet. Now, the aggressively upbeat music of the song jars against the visual tableau of real-life human tragedy. The visual-aural juxtaposition between the snowy world of the French Alps against the tropical, Caribbean-inflected song reveals an inconsistency or an incongruity that rubs against the grain of the incident. This article interrogates the novel use of this song in the soundtrack of Anatomy of a Fall: for the innovative way it is used as part of the storytelling of the film to stand in for both the characterisation of Samuel and the point of view of Sandra, and for the way that it manages to conflate the act of repetitive music play as a form of active audience participation. As Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman-Lewis have suggested in their 1992 text, it acts in the mode of “didactic contrapuntal music”, which is used “in order to elicit a precise, usually ironic, idea in the spectator’s mind” (59). By featuring this song so heavily in the first part of the film, the soundtrack moves against the conventional use of a musical score, which typically contains themes and leitmotifs that play across the length of the film, linking the narrative. Here, I also draw ideas from Elizabeth Margulis’s monograph On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind to link musical theory together with an understanding of how that music impacts as a part of formal screen analysis. As Margulis suggests, “musical repetitiveness is so common as to seem almost invisible. But when someone draws your attention to it, this repetitiveness comes to seem quite strange” (1). This is what occurs in Anatomy of a Fall: the storytelling draws the audience’s attention to the bizarre aspects of repetitive music play, and hence defamiliarises the music as well. Therefore, the act of repetition of a song in a film soundtrack takes on meanings that can be analysed through understanding of societal uses of music in everyday life, which adds complexity to our reading of the film. After the vivid opening scenes that were described above, the instrumental cover of P.I.M.P. continues to play as a part of the diegesis of the film, as investigators try and determine the validity of Sandra's version of events – such as why she could not hear Samuel falling – and then her son is tested to see if he could hear his parents fighting upstairs from the outside. Finally, P.I.M.P. will play loudly and absurdly in the large courtroom in Grenoble, as a criminal investigation commences to determine if Sandra was responsible for murdering Samuel. The strangeness of a light-hearted pop song in a quiet courtroom space enhances the menace of the music, set within a new context to see if it evidences a murder. Here, the misogynist lyrics of the original version of the song by 50 Cent (“I don’t know what you heard about me / But a bitch can’t get a dollar out of me”) is suggested by the prosecutor as a motive for Sandra to end her husband’s life. In this version of events, the song is seen to be weaponised as a phallic earworm, which even constitutes a form of aural violence through the materiality of the repetitive steel drums. According to this interpretation, it is a song determined to embarrass Sandra and put her in her place. Of course, in this film the idea of truth is blurred, and many other fragmentary ideas are put forward as counter-suggestions to the prosecutor’s theory. Why was this song selected for the film? We can look to filmmaker choices as they were filtered through real-life copyright issues as well as aesthetic and storytelling concerns. As an art film not beholden to a major film studio, there did not seem to be any motivation for choosing a song that would need to support any additional commercial and ancillary imperatives (e.g. a commercial soundtrack release) or to conform within any expectations of a particular genre (Tompkins). The track “P.I.M.P.” by the Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band was selected as a purely aesthetic choice by the filmmakers at the end of the production phase of the film. Interestingly, the director Justine Triet and the co-writer Arthur Harari had originally selected Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” as the repeating song of the film, but they were denied the rights to the song shortly before filming began (Zuckerman). As the GQ journalist Esther Zuckerman explains, P.I.M.P. was finally selected for the film because of how usefully it tied in with the film’s storytelling and characterisation of Daniel: the song had to represent Samuel – who the audience only sees in flashbacks after he’s dead – and Triet thought it would be appropriate that he picks a relatively obscure cover that still keeps the “essence of the tune”. You can see how someone like Samuel – a teacher and wannabe writer who probably thought of himself as pretty cool – would be drawn to this version. “I think the song is aggressive because we hear it a lot of times,” Triet says. “But it’s quite funny at the same time, no?” Adding to this explanation, Patrick Ryan in USA Today notes that Triet also chose the song as it seemed to become more annoying the more you hear it. Indeed, this observation may be true for any repeated song, where there are diminishing returns when you relisten to music too many times. Elizabeth Margulis notices that relistening to music tends to theoretically conform to the Wundt curve, which traces a non-linear, inverted-U relationship between hedonic value and stimulus familiarity. According to the Wundt curve, pleasure is increased toward a song the more times that you hear it; but when the novelty wears off and the familiarity rises, the original pleasure disappears. She writes: in the end, however, if you’ve heard it too many times over a short span of time, you may once again start to realise why you hated it in the first place. This example, which might seem painfully familiar, points to an interesting characteristic of repetition – it works one way at first, and then another way later. In many cases, it increases pleasure for a certain period and then reduces it. The relationship between exposure and enjoyment, in other words, is nonlinear. (95) This concept of repetition eventually leading to a loss of pleasure is also applicable to language, as the Latin term ad nauseam suggests, which means that there is an eventual progress towards sickness (literally, nausea) after the interminable repetition of ideas or arguments. This nonlinearity of musical enjoyment and repetition is therefore used to connect to the film’s narrative, where knowledge of the relationship with a failing marriage starts to slowly materialise as the murder case continues. Hence, the audience becomes clued in to how annoying Samuel is, the more we listen to the song. Whereas the song is novel to the audience at the beginning of the film, by its final use in the courtroom the nonlinear development of the song as a painful experience starts to approach the way that it would have felt for Sandra, who would have heard it played so often in the household. Here, then, the “point of view” moves us towards Sandra’s perspective: it’s Samuel’s annoying song that is also being forced on us. The impact of the repeated song in Anatomy of a Fall is humorous, even if it is the incongruity between the steel drums and the clashing visual scene. This kind of audio-visual discrepancy – pleasant or upbeat songs ironically played on top of visually unpleasant scenes – has been a notable aspect of postmodern film soundtracks that utilise contemporary pop music for “compiled film scores”, for example expressed in the compiled rock music in the films of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese (Decker). But the act of “playing counter to the image” – whether the music is playing with or against the visual imagery – has been a notable feature of cinema since its infancy (Green 90). Again, the contrast between the audio and the visual creates an enigma for the audience to solve. As Jessica Green suggests, “by hearing music that seemingly opposes the mood of what is happening on screen, the audience must make sense of the contradiction and what purpose it serves” (90). The lengthy repetition of P.I.M.P. in the film also evokes repeating soundtrack songs in earlier films, such as “California Dreaming” in ChungKing Express (1994), “I Got You, Babe” in Groundhog Day (1993), and the eponymous use of the song in Norwegian Wood (Anh Hung Tran, 2010). In each of these films, the use of the repeated song has very different storytelling outcomes. However, what distinguishes the P.I.M.P. cover from these other repeated pop songs is the fact that it is not the original pop hit. Rather, it is an obscure 2016 cover of a popular rap song from 2003. Therefore, the music is both familiar and unfamiliar for the film listener at the same time: recognisable because of the original song’s basic melody and its prominence in pop culture, but different due to the Caribbean-style focus and the absence of the rap lyrics. So, having analysed the impact of the repetition as part of the film, how can we understand this song culturally? Both the steel drum music and the connection to rap are clear references to a global music history of protest songs and social unrest, but the appropriation of these Caribbean and American songs into a home of European white privilege removes the political implications of class and racial disadvantage (Aho; Pope). Instead, the private play in the home renders the music apolitical as it is turned into an individual’s selfish expression rather than its broader use as music for a community of listeners. Both Sandra and Daniel put up with the music rather than connect with Samuel through it – Sandra focusses on her own writing to drown out the sound while Daniel leaves the home to walk away from it. Elizabeth Margulis notes that “repetition is an important component of music’s shareability, of its social and biological role in the creation of interpersonal cohesion” (6), and yet in Anatomy of a Fall the repetition of the P.I.M.P. cover seems antisocial and designed to repel the other residents.  The P.I.M.P. song becomes a substitution for Samuel’s actual voice: while there is no language to the music, as the prosecutor suggests it can still symbolically express anger and pent-up frustration, enhanced by the repetition. Hence, when P.I.M.P. plays in the courtroom it is akin to a ghost-like encounter with Samuel: we now understand that it was one of Samuel’s last actions. In many ways, this is his voice. Even when he was still alive as the music played – muffled as it was upstairs during the graduate interview – there is a spectral quality, a kind of sonic haunting by Samuel as he drives down the music unseen. The location of the attic as Samuel’s space plays into this concept of a phantom or a ghost. Symbolically in literature and film, the attic is often used to convey memory, as well as the random stored detritus of life, but in this film the attic is empty: we find out that Samuel has not gotten around to renovating it yet. This is the site of the song, here on the laptop: the same device where Samuel’s unwritten novel is supposed to be. As a replacement for his unwritten novel, the wordless P.I.M.P. that plays out is akin to Jack Torrance’s repeated typewritten phrase “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in The Shining (1980). One is reminded of Žižek’s famous analysis in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema of Norman Bates’s three-level house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, divided into ego, superego, and id, the superego being presented at the top level (in Psycho, when Norman “talks” to his mother). In Anatomy of a Fall, we could read the P.I.M.P. song from the attic as the projection of the superego of Daniel, playing out across the rest of the home. This psychoanalytical interpretation of film space lends the audio a way of moving or bleeding through other states, causing a kind of aural rupture as it repeats. Here, by use of an instrumental cover that as discussed earlier means the removal of the lyrics from the original P.I.M.P., the impotence of Samuel’s actions, especially his inability to have a literary voice or to be a creator is fully emphasised. In terms of his characterisation, Samuel is not given a voice or any other kind of visual or aural identity in the first part of the film, and the fact that this is an instrumental means that his ideas and meanings are caught within the sonic. The only time that Samuel’s voice appears in the film is later, when an audio recording on his phone is discovered, which documents a fight between himself and Sandra. The fact that the recording was secretly made – Sandra has no knowledge that she was being recorded – raises ethical concerns about Samuel’s treatment of Sandra. The recording itself documented a fight between two artists: here, Samuel talks about his inability to write and create at the chalet, and Sandra chastises him as they had moved from England due to his wishes. Yet it is the song that ultimately stands in for Samuel’s voice across the film: ambiguous, with insinuations of bravado, menace, and frustration. In this brief analysis I have focussed on the way that music repetition in the film can be understood through musical and cultural theory, and to show how the audio soundtrack expresses the film’s broader themes of family dissent, personal alienation, and self-destructiveness. The repetition and over-familiarity of music in film can lead to emotive feelings of annoyance the more the music is overplayed, and through this act the perspective of the audience can even be aligned to the point-of-view perspective of the main characters. Whatever the “truth” of the fall, the film creates a sympathy for Sandra and her son, forced to listen to P.I.M.P. ad nauseam.