by Dario Martinelli 02-24-2011

To speak about the different usages of music in David Lynch movies, does not mean to speak solely of soundtracks and diegetic music. The relationship that the director from Missoula has established with the seven notes since the very beginning of his career is an intense, symbiotic and eclectic one, experienced from any possible angle. Lynch is a listener, a performer, a composer, a user and even a fan of the music featured in his movies. He manipulates music and lets music manipulate him.

The history of cinema is full of directors who gave, or give, music function and relevance that exceed those which tradition established as customary. Some compose their music together with professional composers (like the famous collaboration that occurred between Gillo Pontecorvo and Ennio Morricone in the Battle of Algeri), or by themselves only (like Alejandro Amenabar or Clint Eastwood, both achieving admittedly good results). Some others provide music (diegetic music, particularly) with a role in the narration and definition of soundscape that goes far beyond the notion of "colour" (an obvious mention being here Aki Kaurismäki, who is in fact almost allergic to non-diegetic music). We also know of directors who are so in love with the synchronisation between sound and image that they end up constructing some sequences, in a videoclip-fashion, which arise from the music. Several of Quentin Tarantino’s movies would not work the way they do, if he did not follow this reversed order of action.

We also know of directors who work side by side with composers, letting them participate in the decision making process. Some even establish a long-lasting and reciprocally affectionate relationship. How much does Hermann owe to Hitchcock? And how much does Hitchcock to Hermann?

We are even aware of directors whose Umwelt is so perfused with musical imagery, particularly within the pop environment, that they actually want rock stars or other musicians to play relevant acting roles. The chat between Iggy Pop and Tom Waits in Jarmusch’s Coffee and cigarettes remains for me the best-crafted example of this special creative relationship.

In sum, we have knowledge of many forms of symbiosis between directors and music that not only help us to better decode the poetic gesture, and the aesthetic intentions of a movie (or an entire filmography, e.g. Tarantino), but that testify to a whole territory of semiotic relations describing conception, articulation, and mise-en-scene of a cinematographic work. These relations tell us about how a sequence was born, how it is written, and how it develops.

David Lynch possesses and exercises all these relations, sometimes separately, but more often all together. As he himself states: "Sometimes, if I listen to music, the ideas really flow. It’s like the music changes into something else, and I see scenes unfolding" (in Pizzello 1997: 36).

To start with, Lynch is himself a musician. His first movie, Eraserhead (1977), contains music designed and produced by himself and Alan Splet (as reported in the credit notes of the soundtrack). Why is it, that the music is not credited as composed by Lynch and Splet? It is 1977, and sampling sounds or entire song passages¹, as it occurs in this movie, has not yet achieved the institutional acknowledgement of being deemed ‘artwork’ in all respects that it is today. Lynch loves deconstructing and reconstructing sounds, giving them a new identity, decontextualising them. It is a similar process that he actually applies to his movie characters. In Eraserhead there is an original song, In Heaven, which Lynch co-wrote with Peter Ivers. This is not an isolated case. In Fire walks with me, 1992, the prequel of the super-famous Twin Peaks TV series, two songs, The Pink Room and Best Friends, are written by Lynch, who is also the lyricist for all songs on the soundtrack (the latter role being performed several times throughout his cinematographic career, and also in other projects²).

Even more emblematic of the Lynch-musician, in my opinion, is an album released in 1998, entitled Lux Vivens, together with singer Jocelyn Montgomery, whose vocal timbre might remind one of Sinead O’Connor, if we exclude the pop nuances of the latter. Lux Vivens is an interesting alternative project, which re-elaborates in a (post) modern sense some chants written by the 12th century mystic composer Hildegard of Bingen. Lynch reactivates his passion for sound sampling and handles with remarkable competence sounds and noises of a varied nature, resulting in a moderately (that is, catchy³) experimental album.

When listening to this album, one gets the not-so-common sensation of somebody who knows what he wants, and does it. Albeit not an extraordinarily refined musician, Lynch impresses us with his musical mind (in a John Sloboda sense), namely for his way of shaping the musical matter in discourse, structure. And such a procedure appears even more clearly if one works with somebody else’s material, as indeed is the case of Lux Vivens.

Of course, given such conditions, and as he also happens to be a director, Lynch simply cannot passively experience his relationship with film music. The dialogue with the latter is intense and continuous, founded upon a reciprocal exchange of suggestions and inspirations. And, more importantly, based upon real-time interaction. To many directors, a soundtrack is something to think of after the movie is shot. Scenes are edited, packaged and provided with a cinematographic pace that is already a rhythm, with which the composer (often one of the last workers to be hired in a movie production) must primarily agree.

Now, not only does Lynch often turn the order of this convention upside down (this aspect already suggesting a rather unusual definition of the creative process), but also - even more significantly - he chooses to work with music during the shooting of a movie. And, come to think of it, during is in this case more extreme a word than before. One can fit the music into the images, or the images into the music. The former case is the rule, the latter an increasingly common exception. But, to creatively operate at the same time with both music and images is something more than a simple modus operandi: it is a specific aesthetic project, regardless of how rare or frequent that may be.

In this venture, Lynch found a collaborator who, besides being a very good, was tuned into the same frequency from the start⁴. He is Angelo Badalamenti, who is one of those Italian immigrants who end up looking archetypically American (De Niro or Sinatra being the models of this special category. Not to mention Joe Pesci, in fact a Badalamenti look-alike).

The pair met in rather amusing circumstances. Lynch was working on Blue Velvet, the movie that trapped him into the occasionally uncomfortable status of cult-director. Isabella Rossellini, the female protagonist, was due to shoot the sequence where she sings in a nightclub. Lynch wanted a realistic scene, and that would also require that the actress actually perform the singing for real, without being dubbed by a professional singer. There is a problem: Rossellini is as tone-deaf as Yoko Ono. If the sequence is not meant as a parody, and it is definitely not, a music teacher is urgently needed. The production staff went off in search of one, and - in one of those coincidences that someone might call cosmic - they bump into a composer who makes ends meet by writing music for commercials and Off Broadway shows. They assume that Badalamenti and Rossellini, both being of Italian heritage, will find some common understanding in working together.

And it works, not just for the actress (who tackles the performance with acceptable results, especially considering the situation), but mostly for the careers of both Lynch and Badalamenti. A partnership was born, with such an exceptional chemistry that it may easily be featured in the Olympus of Hermann-Hitchcock, or Leone-Morricone. Lynch asks Badalamenti to write the whole score of the movie, assigning him the hardly boring task (inaugurating a leit-motif in their collaboration) of writing "something that reminds of Shostakovitch!" The Italo-American composer obliges and charges the movie with a cool jazzy atmosphere, which will in turn become a little topos in Lynch’s movies, whose main example remains the fortunate (for both) Twin Peaks series.

Blue Velvet wound up being the only instance where the Lynch-Badalamenti partnership proceeded in the traditional manner: one makes the movie and the other - eventually - scores the music. From then on, the pair began working side by side during the production, thinking of sounds and images as entities in constant and real-time dialogue. Scenes, sometimes before being shot and sometimes right after, are discussed in front of an electronic keyboard: Lynch launches an idea, an image, with one or more key words. Then, Badalamenti translates it all into a musical theme. It is then the musical theme’s turn, to suggest a possible visual and dynamic development of the action. Then, it is again the images’ turn to suggest the music, and so forth.

Music and images, simply, talk to each other.

Moreover, the type of descriptions that Lynch may offer to Badalamenti reveal all about the pair’s chemistry with each other:

With Mulholland Drive, I´d see a few scenes, but certainly not the whole film, and get an improvising thing going with him. I´d sit at a keyboard and say, "Okay, David, talk to me about a mood." And he´d say, "I need a theme for Betty - she’s like a little girl who comes to Hollywood and she´s got stars in her eyes..." And as he´s talking we record it, you know, put it right to DAT [tape]. And, bang, that´s it! (in Jolin 2002: 113)

The collaboration between the pair continues, with variable intensity, in all following projects for the American director. The prototype of this partnership will always remain Twin Peaks (oddly enough, as it is not a movie, but a TV series). Twin Peaks is not only Lynch’s first (and perhaps last) mainstream success, but it also leaves for posterity a soundtrack (particularly a main theme) of tremendous success. It is an album capable of placing in the highest regions of the general music charts, a most unusual occurrence for a soundtrack featuring almost exclusively instrumental tracks. The Twin Peaks soundtrack rose to number 22 on the Billboard charts, ever since then there has not been a single "free association" that will keep Badalamenti (and perhaps Lynch himself) separated from the opening theme of the series. A theme which is not only successful in a generally artistic sense (it is well written, well arranged, and well performed), but which also ends up constructing another, very important, topos of the pair’s collaboration. We could call such a topos the "quiet during the storm". More or less what Kafka was able to render in his literary production: a sub-layer of pacific, even relaxing normality, upon which a dark and disturbing context operates. The Twin Peaks theme is a great piece of ambient music in which nothing, from harmony to arrangement, gives hint to the thrilling TV series’ plot. Yet, the efficacy of the match is even superior to what Badalamenti would have achieved if he did not resist the temptation to write a cliché noir/thriller theme. It is a form of alienation that works, also because it is based upon a very explicit visual context, which does not need any redundant reinforcement.

The chemistry between Badalamenti and Lynch, when it comes to this contrast, can be detected not only by the many themes that the Italo-American composer wrote for his friend’s movies, all generally clean and ethereal, but also from the cinematographic imagery itself. Let us take, for example, the garden sequence at the beginning of Blue Velvet: every element, from photography to camera movements (and music, of course: in this case Bobby Venton’s version of the standard Blue Velvet), suggests an idea of charming serenity. It is in that context, that Lynch inserts, in fact shoves, the death of one character and the disgusting shot of the worms that we get the next minute. A similar strategy we witness in certain surrealistic art, from artists like De Chirico or Ernst.

Badalamenti’s centrality in Lynch’s cinematography⁵, though, should not prevent us from noticing the generous (and carefully designed) use of diegetic music within each movie. Songs of all sorts (mainstream or alternative) appear in several key-sequences: Lynch plans their use long before starting the production of the movie. In more than one case, it is while listening to those songs that he gets inspired to shoot a certain sequence. Once he has decided what song to play, Lynch takes the record along to the set, and literally blasts it from the speakers, asking the actors - as much as they can - to move and act "in accordance" with the song (for instance, following its tempo).

However, most of all, what Lynch manages to create with certain songs is a sheer microcosmos of references and meta-references: to the movie, to its characters, to the actors who interpret them, and to himself. Lost Highway, one of his best movies (perhaps the best), is an excellent catalogue of this microcosmos and its mentioned dynamics. The first song is Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Barry Adamson (some might remember him for having played bass with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). It is a track containing a number of samples (once again), and even a meta-sample: Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, in turn sampled from Tom Scott’s Sneaking in the Back. Lynch loves Chinese boxes, apparently.

Still Adamson’s work, the next song in the movie is Hollywood Sunset. Here, probably, Lynch must have had another chat with Badalamenti, asking him to write music (the track called Dub Driving) that, in terms of BPM, would be an ideal ‘partner’ to Adamson’s track. Diegetic and non-diegetic music are now merged in a coherent soundscape.

Song to the Siren, by This Mortal Coil, is therefore a track Lynch must particularly love, if it is true that he already intended to use it in Blue Velvet (an intention eventually replaced with an original Lynch-Badalamenti composition called Mysteries of Love). Still within a meta-linguistic framework, it should be remembered that Song to the siren was originally written and performed by Tim Buckley. Lynch adores covers because they are like him: they de-contextualize and re-contextualize, referring, also through a negation, to more than one aesthetic and textual dimension. However, in this case, there is one more reason for choosing a cover: it is because Fred, the saxophone playing lead character in Lost Highway has a double identity. Fred is first, Fred, and then, as his wife dies, becomes Pete. In other words, there is an original Fred, and then there is a cover.

And indeed, the next song is yet another remake: Marilyn Manson offers his version of Screaming Jay Hawkins’ famous song I Put a Spell on You. Another Chinese box, brought to a new climax when Lynch asks Manson himself to make a cameo appearance in the movie. In fact, it goes deeper than that: Manson (and his band guitarist Twiggy Ramirez) appears in a movie within the movie! That is, the cameo occurs in the porn-horror clip that the characters are watching at some point during the film. Basically, a matryoshka doll!⁶

Manson’s cameo, suggests a last topic for this very short article. I had mentioned Lynch’s inclination (shared, in fairness, with a few other directors) to invite musicians and rock stars (who are not professional actors) to appear in brief sequences within his movies. Generally, when a director does this, it is mostly for marketing purposes: one spreads the rumour that Keith Richards will act in Pirates of the Caribbean, and of course quite a few otherwise unconcerned Rolling Stones fans will go see it. However, there can also be strictly artistic reasons for such a choice: a cameo offers a portion of reality, which helps with the framing of the space-time dimension constructed within a movie. It is certainly in this manner that one should interpret, for instance, the famous appearance of the then very hip British band Yardbirds in Antonioni’s Blow-up.

Once more, however, Lynch brings this choice to a more sophisticated level, bringing it closer to his personal surrealistic and meta-referential aesthetic. We spoke already of Marilyn Manson, well what about the character Pete? The character Pete is played by the actor Balthazar Getty. Getty used the alias "B-Zar", when he produced the hip-hop band Mannish’s album Audio Sedative, just a year before starring in Lost Highway. Indeed, an alias. And who else is Pete, if not an alias for Fred?

Still in Lost Highway, one can also spot Henry Rollins, former member of Black Flag, and I am sure there are many other examples that have certainly escaped my attention (I will not even count David Bowie’s part in Fire Walks With Me, as ‘the Duke’ has been acting in several different movies, with remarkable results).

Finally, to conclude in the most appropriate manner, we should mention those brief parts that Lynch made for his faithful partner Badalamenti. A most obvious one is the appearance in Blue Velvet, in the predictable role of a pianist (a clear identification with the composer himself, who - I shall remind you - was hired on that occasion as a music teacher for Isabella Rossellini). More interesting, and very significantly, is the part of mafia boss Luigi Castigliane, in Mulholland Drive, whom Lynch creates as part of an inside joke, and is also a tribute to Badalamenti, as the director’s alter ego. Castigliane is a coffee-maniac, as he drinks one espresso after another. Who else could Lynch be referring to if not himself, an enthusiast who founded his personal coffee brand, and - as Special Agent Dale Cooper would put it - likes his coffee "black as midnight on a moonless night"?

1 In the specific, Digha´s Stomp, Lenox Avenue Blues e Messin´ Around With The Blues by Fats Waller, and Stompin´ The Bug by Phil Worde and Mercedes Gilbert.
2 See Julee Cruise’s albums Floating Into The Night and The Voice Of Love, where the singer, the director and faithful collaborator to Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti, re-form a trio that is often featured in many of Lynch’s movies. Cruise is among other things the vocalist of the hit Falling, from the Twin Peaks series.
3 Obviously, with such a title and such an exotically ancient composer, one finds it easy to guess that the album resulted appealing to the New Age market (climbing up to number 25 in the special Billboard chart). However, despite the aesthetic banalisation that such an affiliation implies, I am inclined to believe that this interest did not exactly disappoint the American director, who has always been a passionate supporter of transcendental meditation.
4 The exceptions are only Lynch’s first three movies: we spoke already of Eraserhead; in Elephant Man (1980) the soundtrack is composed by John Morris, following the traditional rules (movie first, then score); in the fiasco Dune (1984), the music is written by the rock-band Toto, with a (nice) theme composed by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno.
5 The collaboration between Lynch and Badalamenti is extended also to more experimental projects, some of which were already mentioned in a previous footnote. Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted is deserving of a chapter of its own. Staged at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, during the 1989 edition of the New Wave Music Festival, Industrial Symphony is a performance featuring 10 songs, sung by Julee Cruise. 
6 The list of covers featured in Lost Highway continues with That magic moment, originally by Doc Pomus, and re-interpreted by Lou Reed in the movie.