POP FICTION

Foreword
FOREWORD
Film music studies has been undergoing what might be thought of as a naissance - the first
significant period of fertility - in the past few years. There is, undoubtedly, a case to be made that
there was an early flourishing of works at the time of the birth of sound on film, with works such
as Leonid Sabaneev’s 1935 Music for the Films and Kurt London’s 1936 Film Music, for
example. But those works were not speaking to each other, and thus, to my mind, they did not
constitute a field or an object of study. One might also argue that the current blossoming actually
begin in the late 80’s and early 90’s, with Unheard Melodies (Gorbman, 1987), Settling the
Score (Kalinak, 1992), and Strains of Utopia (Flinn, 1992). And in some ways, that’s clearly
true. But it took most of the 1990s for that opening to really take root.
The past few years, however, have heard an explosion of work. Suddenly, there are books like
Martin Marks Music and the Silent Film, anthologies like Soundtrack Available and Music and
the Cinema, articles in film and music journals, and conference panels and even entire
conferences. And what that means, of course, is that as a community of scholars we can begin
asking much more interesting, detailed questions. That’s where this present volume comes in.
Unlike any other collection, all of the essays here focus on a single song and its place in a single
film. Perhaps this sounds like an obvious approach. But in fact, most work on film music (with a
few significant exceptions) has accepted the received notion that pre-existing songs do not play
significant roles in the film that houses them. Pop Fiction does away with that notion once and
for all. In all 12 essays, these authors make compelling cases that the films in question would be
markedly different were it not for the song they discuss.
In some ways, the delight of this volume is the wide range of theoretical and disciplinary
approaches to the topic. Several essays use psychoanalytic paradigms. For example, in Always
Blue: Chet Baker’s Voice, John Roberts focuses on the intersections of Chet Baker’s biography
and the grain of his voice to argue that while both his addition and his vocal limitations have
been used to dismiss Baker as a vocalist, other interpretations are possible. Roberts suggests that
Baker offers what psychoanalytic theorists call “the good voice” of the mother, creating a
“sonorous envelope” in which the listening subject can bask. Thus, Baker’s performance of
Always Blue, written for him by Elvis Costello, in Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s 1986
documentary biography of Baker, offers a hauntingly beautiful space of pleasure.
In “Music, Masculinity and Membership,” Ian Inglis discusses Frankie Valli’s Can’t Take My Eyes
off of You in Michael Cimino’s 1978 The Deer Hunter, showing how the careful placement of a
song can create multiple layers of meaning. Inglis argues that, in this case, the song opens
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