Wild Things

Abstract

In an early scene from genre-bender film Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986), protagonist Charles Driggs (JeffDaniels) sits at ease in an upscale family restaurant. He is enjoying a final drink and a piano-andviolin duet playing Bach's Minuet in G Major lightly in the background before rejoining his new companion, Lulu (Melanie Griffith), who has promised to pick up the tab for their meal on her way out. Charlie (as Lulu refers to him) tips his glass pleasantly at a fellow diner, relaxing back into his chair against an enormous window filled with idyllic green countryside. The accompanying classical air unmistakably reflects his comfort and control, the first time since he has embarked on his wild ride with the raucous, domineering Lulu that the soundtrack has so flattered his preferred image of himself. But when Charlie innocently attempts to leave, he learns that Lulu has played a trick on him, telling the restaurant hostess that 'the gentleman will take care of the bill'. Having already exhausted his cash, Charlie cannot pay, leaving him to deal with the menacing proprietor and the still more threatening cook blocking his exit; in the meantime, Lulu sits just outside the entrance at the wheel of her convertible, rocking back and forth to the thumping popular music she is always playing. Lulu goads Charlie to make a fateful choice: will he cut and run to rejoin her, or will he somehow contrive to play the conventionally chivalrous part she has - to his enormous discomfiture - mischievously cast him in?Something Wild works, often with unsettling simultaneity, as an improbable romance, a road trip comedy of small-town American manners, and a foreboding, violent doppelganger thriller. Characteristically, the scene presenting Charlie's dilemma at Mom and Dad's restaurant uses the soundtrack to connect viewers meaningfully to Charlie's experience. The film charts Charlie's transformation from nebbish Wall Street businessman to the unlikely chivalric hero who rescues Lulu in the film's climactic scene by once and for all dispatching Ray (Ray Liotta), her exhusband and Charlie's violent underworld counterpart. Throughout this journey, the soundscape and the primarily diegetic score in particular prove essential; Ray's very debut in the film synchronises carefully with Charlie's full and final embrace of all that Lulu represents, as the improbably odd couple sway together on the dance floor at her high school reunion. As is the case with Cary Grant's David Huxtable in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), the camera consistently treats Charlie as a comic spectacle, a man in usually humbling and only partially successful search of his masculinity. His quest for his manhood pairs him with a woman whose independence and capriciousness repeatedly expose his shortcomings, enchaining him (comically and helplessly) to her will. And Lulu's ability to tantalise and control Charlie so irresistibly arises consistently from the soundscapes in which she immerses him.Another 1986 movie which serves up an unsettlingly comic and violent vision of small-town America uses the songtrack perhaps even more pointedly to simultaneously inspire and stymie its male protagonist in his efforts to play the manly hero. In David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) gets himself into serious trouble by pursuing a dubious interest in the nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who, it turns out, is caught up in a nightmarish abduction plot orchestrated by the brutally unhinged Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). In the deadly course of events which ensues, Jeffrey develops differently intimate relationships with both Dorothy and Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of the local detective, initially confident that he can play the dashing sleuth with both women, but putting himself in deadly peril as events spin out of his control. In the course of Jeffrey's attempts to play the hero, Lynch uses several musical set-pieces - two involving Dorothy's performance of the film's title track at the Slow Club, and another featuring a tour-de-force lip-synch of Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams' - to freeze Jeffrey in a mix of fascination and dread, the wouldbe hero reduced to a helpless spectator caught in the glare of competing emotions. …