This afternoon I had nothing to write about. I felt like I was cheating, picking the films that affected me only to try and find something musically pleasing (or perhaps horridly displeasing?) in order to ascribe the film’s success to the attainment of musical ingenuity one finds once every blue moon.
I am still uncertain whether I found it or not, suffice to say today’s approach is vastly different for I can’t say that The Six Dollar Fifty Man is necessarily a filmic experience I would in any way attribute to a feeling of audio-enlightenment but I can definitely say that, momentarily putting aside all fancies of language, I liked that sometimes the sounds of life are clearer.
Our ears are accustomed to quiet a bit of static on a daily basis, so much so that the moments in life that sound crisp and clear are abnormal, mystifying, as if hearing the grass crunch under your feet is impossible without an ear to the ground.
Cinema takes the sounds of daily life very seriously. Since the early 20th century with the semi-hostile takeover of the talkies the music of reality has always been about subtle recreation. A glass, a footstep a sneeze all with the possibility of having been re-animated, Frankensteined together through the doctored works of the mad\brilliant foley artists. The horrors of the talkie takeover probably seem incomprehensible to a contemporary audience (hard to imagine that the fear of not being heard may have originally been the fear of being heard), though one does have the opportunity to re-live the early sound anxieties, just think to the not accidentally disimilar performances of Gene Kelley in Singing in the Rain and more recently Jean Dujardin in The Artist (remember the sound sequence?).
From no sound to doctored sound, the audio enhanced world of filmic reality today is like a bleached crime scene–––squeaky clean to the point that we are no longer aware of what sounds are born from the world we inhabit and what sounds are the masked creations of a sound lab–––was that a footstep or was it “a footstep”? Does it matter if they sound the same?
I guess what surprised me about The Six Dollar Fifty Man was that sound had a perspective. It was not about sounding right to my untrained, stunted ears but about how the world sounded to the ears of a gap-toothed, blue eyed wonderboy. By default, sound comes with a perspective, but it is usually one that is spatially associated not character-driven. We come to assume that sounds can be far away or up close but not necessarily different experiences for different characters. Six Fifty seems to inadvertently filter its audio experiences through a single character (Andy)–––as a result in watching the film, the sound became a sort of character study.
Andy hears the world we recognize and an otherworld altogether. In the opening sequence the simmering of the electric fence is almost as indistinguishable as Andy’s discomfort. It’s there and it isn’t, tangible like his grip on the wire, ephemeral like his aforementioned super powers. Alternatively, anxiety, urgency and the threat of an intimidating authority are shaped by a kind of siren call, astronomical in nature, producing hollow sounds that orbit our periphery and shed an eerie sense of dread. Andy’s final confrontation with the disembodied head of authority known as Mr. Hannah is filtered through the hum of a melody that seems to drift into our ears straight from the dreams of science fiction, cutting off all recognizable sounds save for the staccato of the leather belt. The result is a reverberation of pathos, a life vivified through a modest auditory journey that is not so much about creating musical cues for the film as much as it is about creating a auditory signature for it’s protagonist.
Watching Six Fifty I am no longer sure if life can sound so crisp outside the cinema. Maybe it does, maybe we just have to listen with our ears closer to the ground. All I know is that an inner life is alive and well in the film, perpetuated by a soundscape that allows us, for a change, to dawn someone else’s ears.