Film sound and American cultural memory: Resounding trauma in Sophie’s Choice

Abstract

One of the most dynamic discussions in memory studies concerns memory’s infusion with phantasy, which Freud also referred to as fantasy. This article examines how memory and fantasy intermingle in ways analogous to the ambivalent human experience of sound: sounds and musical cues can both trigger memories and be active in repressing them by encoding them into fantasmatic ‘counter memories’. Taking Alan J. Pakula’s film Sophie’s Choice (1982) as a case study, I examine how the three principal characters are traumatized by intruding sounds, but use music to repress or reconfigure the memories these sounds trigger. Sophie’s memories of Auschwitz are signalled by Hamlisch’s flute, which provides the soundscape of her fantasy-infused flashbacks; her companion Nathan’s delusional ‘memories’ of the war are safely repressed when the oboe supplies him with his ego’s anthem; and sounds from the narrator Stingo’s childhood rupture the nostalgic soundtrack of violins accompanying his fantasy-inflected narrative. The relevance of Pakula’s melodrama to the social memory of the Holocaust lies in its challenge to the polarized debate between modernist refusals to represent the past ‘directly’ (as in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah) and realist attempts at ‘total representation’ (Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List). In Sophie’s Choice, acts of individual memory, infused with fantasy soundscapes, are analogous to broader processes of social memory, which are always instilled with our fantasies of what might have been.