The Song Was You

Music operates in occult ways. Not even Alfred Hitchcock and his composer Bernard Herrmann could have known exactly what they were doing during their mystical collaboration on Vertigo, their most perfervidly incantatorial shadowplay. When the great channeler Herrmann looked up Wagner on his Ouija board, he never could have known he’d end up pumping so much unleaded Liebestod into Jimmy Stewart’s gas tank, nor what queer mileage would be unspooled in Hitch’s rear-screen projections as a result.

The first score for 1928’s Un Chien Andalou was supplied by Luis Buñuel himself, who deejayed his favorite 78s from behind the curtains of the Cinema des Ursulines in Paris. He sloppily synchronized Beethoven, Wagner, and various scratched-out tangos in obedience to the surrealistic belief that randomness offered access to the subconscious. Whatever penetration he made into our irrational spheres was aided immensely by the powerful thrusts of those recordings, some of them classical chestnuts half-buried in the opiating murk of wine spilt in the grooves, and some of them of vague Spanish origin, as oneiric as the womb.

Music draws us into film, and then it draws us someplace still further away. Corridors traversing our movie-viewing experience will yawn open of a sudden and detour us toward the deathly source of all that is lyrical. Down these resounding hallways we trudge, perhaps toward a seashore, until from a distant Muscle Beach Party we hear some surf—or surf music—and we conclude that what Dick Dale and his Del-tones have always played is just klezmer on Stratocasters. Onward we move into this invisible architecture, through space and across centuries if necessary, pursuing we know not what, until we find it.

I SMELL SMOKE…

Driven by morbid fears remembered from childhood, I hear ahead of me the Mills Brothers singing “Cab Driver.” Doo-doo-da-doo. Doo-doot-doo-da-doo… A few more steps down the breezeway and I cross the threshold into the darkened living room where my father lies on the Chesterfield listening to the record player.A few embers are visible in the blackness—those of my dad’s cigarette and the amp overheating in its console. I know he wears an eye patch and a wristwatch. His face is a smudge of shadow, and there’s no way it’s happy. This room is the scene of great dread, where my father will die, I bet.

As I stand here, I can’t even recall how many years I’ve been ruled by panic, by superstitions as unrepealable as the Commandments. I know my father is going to die and only I can prevent it. The prevention of his death is a full-time job. I’m on duty now, bent on correctly reading all the...