Reflective Empathy

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Abstract This chapter makes an explicit connection between film sound and another core practice in acoustic ecology, soundscape composition, through an analysis of Gus Van Sant’s film Last Days (2005). The sound design for Last Days incorporates the soundscape compositions of Hildegard Westerkamp, original member of the World Soundscape Project. This chapter examines how her piece “Doors of Perception” is mapped onto the space of the house occupied by Blake (Michael Pitt), a character loosely based on Kurt Cobain during the days leading up to his death. This chapter argues that to properly understand how soundscape composition works as a sound design element we need a new model for theorizing how the compilation film soundtrack makes use of pre-existing pieces of music, one that considers the undertheorized role of music’s spatial qualities in film. Soundscape composition attunes us to the spatial dimensions of music, bringing theorizations of the genre to questions of the compilation film soundtrack, offering a new pathway into thinking about film music along ecological lines. This chapter demonstrates how the presence of Westerkamp’s piece in the film opens up ways of thinking about the function of space across all the sound design elements, as well as the image track, to reveal the heart of the film: reflective empathy, the author’s term used to describe the problems of opening up empathetic spaces of identification between characters in the film, and between films and their audiences, echoing the problems of vanishing mediation in the discourse of fidelity discussed throughout this book.