So then, Wonder Woman. Where
do I start? Well let’s start by saying alleluia,
and see where we go from there.
Somewhere around 2008 I wrote the first version of what ended up in 2013
as Cue the Big
Theme? The Sound of the Superhero, essentially a little requiem for the
demise of thematically-driven superhero scoring in the era of CGI. I contrasted
how the two big superhero scores of the pre-CGI era, Williams’ Superman (1978) and Elfman’s Batman (1989) used their themes to
construct their hero’s identity, Williams’ Great Big Optimist and Elfman’s
complex, troubled Gadget Man. I have a particular love of Elfman’s approach,
where he only really composes one five note motif for Batman and then constantly
reinvents and varies it to provide the music for all aspects of Our Hero,
whether that is the action hero, the genius detective, the terrifyingly
powerful horror-film figure, the troubled soul, the bereft child or the man in
love (which I wrote about at some length here).
And then along come a) CGI and b) Hans Zimmer and the musical landscape
changed. The music no longer had to work so hard to convince us that the
polystyrene boulders that Superman was hauling around were heavy, or that
Batman’s car was going really fast,
and so it shifted away from action and toward psychology, and in doing so
rather abandoned all those marvelous themes. Sing me the theme from Batman Begins, anyone? And while I have
always been an advocate of the ‘different does not actually mean worse, it just
means different’ school of thought, I missed the themes, and I especially
missed the cleverness with which a composer like Elfman could take one musical
idea and make it mean so many things.
And so, alleluia, Wonder Woman,
scored by Rupert Gregson-Williams, younger brother of the better-known Harry.
RGW is mostly known, until very recently, for scoring comedy and the lighter
end of film (highlights include the 2014 Postman
Pat: The Movie). I do so like it when you get a composer basically new to a
genre, who therefore has not become what Elfman was by the end of the 1990s, namely
was Sick to Death of Superheroes. Anyway, RGW writes an absolute blinder for Wonder Woman; and he does my favourite
thing, which is have one musical idea that he uses to generate all his musical
ideas about her. I am going to resist the temptation to sit here and throw
musical examples at you, so some of this you are going to have to take my word
for.
On the face if it, it looks like she has two distinct themes: a lyrical,
extended anthem (which I will come back to) and the one we already knew from Batman v. Superman (and therefore
written by Hans Zimmer/ Junkie XL). This one has driving drums, wailing
electric cello (which could easily be mistaken for an electric guitar),
both the instrumentation and the whole shape of the theme breaking every expectation
of what ‘female’ music sounds like. My good friend (actually, never met him,
but love his work) Phillip Tagg would point to the fact that both the ascending
melodic line and the use of the electric guitaresque cello and drums point to
masculine musical codes – the ladies are properly scored with nice flutes and
pianos, yes with cellos, but nice tuneful cellos; and with gently curved
melodies (up and back down; or down and back up). WW’s big theme does not do
this. Oh my word, no it does not (nor does Ms Buffy Summers’ theme tune, of
course).
OK, music: the theme goes rapidly up a broken chord (E – G – B, so
outlining the triad and rising up from the tonic to the great heroic interval,
the perfect fifth) and then it wails; it undulates from the B to the B flat a
semitone below and then back to the B again (want a score example? Go here). So,
strip away the banshee ululation, and the basic shape is B – B flat – B. We are
in the key of E minor, so the B is our heroic perfect fifth; the B flat,
meanwhile, is the tritone, the diabolus in musica, the interval associated most
often with evil, danger and dysfunction. What the heck is it doing here?
Well, Batman’s scoring (1989) also uses lots of tritones – that’s part of
how Elfman makes him complex and ‘dark’ in comparison to Williams’ sunny
Superman. But Diana is not dark – she is much more like Superman in many
respects. And she clearly is not evil - but oh, the number of bad women in film
music history with tritones in their (usually jazzy) scoring to symbolize how
very naughty they are, from the tritones all over the place in Franz Waxman’s
1941 score for the sexy, threatening and entirely absent eponymous anti-heroine
in Rebecca to those in
both Bellatrix Lestrange
and Dolores Umbridge’s
themes in the Harry Potter scores (links
are to youtube examples)…. So why the tritone here, given that Diana is clearly
not one of those women?
Well, let’s think of this tritone as the equivalent of the word ‘bitch’,
a word we so often find applied to women of power from Hillary Clinton to any
woman on social media who has taken a stand against mysongynistic attitudes; a
word that would also describe all those bad, bad women in film who deceive and
betray good men, because that is what bad women in film are normally guilty of.
This tritone, used here for Diana, is an appropriation, a reclamation, a
rehabilitation of a term of musical abuse used to score women who would dare to
be powerful. It traditionally constructs such women as evil. Here, it
constructs Diana as a goddess. This makes me very happy.
In the already familiar form of that strident (Harpy! Banshee! Bitch!) wailing
electronic guitarish cello that is clearly taking no prisoners, this is the
theme that RGW uses for Diana in some of her most obviously powerful moments of
pure action. We get it, very understated, near the start of the film as she
stands on the clifftop contemplating her wrists after that first extraordinary
moment when her divine power was suddenly unleashed (here at 1:03); we then
have to wait until after she has crossed No Man’s Land and descends upon the
German’s in the town of Veld like – well, like an avenging god (here at 3:24); and again
in her showdown with Ludendorf; but it is missing from her battle with Ares and
we don’t hear it again until the closing seconds of the film where it confirms
her power rather than scoring any specific action on screen.
To understand why her theme of godly power is missing from the battle
with Ares, we need to look at her second theme, the heroic anthem. Right at the
start of the film, still in the production credits (here from the start to 0:35),
we hear first a muted, distant version of the Power theme and then, shortly
afterwards, a four note rising theme (E – F sharp – G – G) . This four note
theme then develops later both in the opening scene and throughout the film to
give us a much more traditionally heroic theme in the Batman/ Superman mold. It
is characterized by sequences of short phrases – phrases that keep on rising, taking
us higher: this is a classic heroic musical gesture, the idea of ascent, of the
hero’s power in the ascendant. [This theme also tends to do some lovely mediant
shifts in the harmony that, along with these ascending melodies, point to restlessness,
the quest, the impetus and momentum of the hero’s journey, but I shall leave
that for another occasionThere’s an additional element to this theme which is a
motif that is clearly part of it but used less frequently and has in it some
really emotive minor sixth leaps and falls (big intervals tend to give us big
emotions) – we hear this part of the theme at the point that Diana looks at the
photo of Steve when she opens the ‘gift’ from Bruce Wayne at the start of the
film. Again, an important musical element for scenes that need just a bit more
of an emotional kick, but too much for today].
So: the rising ‘anthem’ theme. It is actually derived from the Power
theme, which is revealed in its second phrase: sorry, I said I wouldn’t throw
musical examples at you, I lied. This is done using some of the basic
techniques of thematic transformation (which include intervallic or rhythmic
diminution and augmentation, transposition, inversion, retrograding and other
fun things)
So, remember the power theme:
E – G – B – B flat – B. Let’s divide this into two parts
Motif 1: E – G – B [the broken chord on E minor]
Motif 2: B – B flat – B
So the first two phrases of the ‘anthem’ (here at 2:20) go:
E – F sharp – G - G ----------
G – B – D - D ----------- [ a broken chord starting on G]
The first phrase is therefore a melodic
compression of motif 1 (the intervals made smaller); the second phrase
restores the original intervals but are a transposition
of motif 1 (the intervals made larger again, but all shifted up a third, whilst
staying in the key E minor). So there we have the reinvention of the first
motif. Later in this ‘new’ theme, the music shifts into a new key (here at 2:42) and brings
in another idea that comes back a lot in later cues:
F – C – B flat – C
This is an augmentation and
transposition of motif 2: the semitone ‘bend’ from B to B flat and back again
(a semitone) becomes a more lyrical bend of a slightly larger interval (a whole
tone). So, this second theme is the musical child of the first: much more
lyrical, much more varied and developed, but with its musical material derived
from the Power theme.
The No Man’s Land Scene uses this second theme for Diana’s crossing – it
starts out with just the underlying harmony, no obvious melody (but you can
actually sing the melody
of the theme along to it if you want!) but the melody comes in later on.
This, to me, is the theme of Diana’s heroic compassion, the theme of Diana as
Amazon, pursuing the Amazon mission to save humankind. The Power theme is Diana
as God: and this is why it is the Heroic theme rather than the Power theme that
we hear in her final battle with Ares. She does not battle him as Diana the goddess,
a war between gods for pre-eminence, but as Diana the champion of humanity; and
so, just as when her compassion leads her to cross No Man’s Land to liberate
the people of Veld we hear her Heroic theme, so too we hear it as she finally
employs the full scope of her power to liberate the world from Ares – same
mission on a larger scale. It is her compassion, not her innate power, that
makes her the superhero that I now love most in the whole universe of superheroes.
And it is a brilliant, brilliant score that never compromises her power.
She has a lovely love theme that is an inversion of her heroic theme (Batman’s
love theme was also a variation of his hero theme), which casts her love for
Steve as something connected with and embedded in her heroic identity – not in
conflict with it, but an aspect of her as a fully rounded person that (quite
literally, in musical terms) just allows it to go in another direction – the
only time that her scoring has a predominantly descending shape rather than an
ascending one (here at 4:00).
Two other characters get themes: Ludendorf has a fabulous (oh joy!)
octatonic theme that musically means he is operating in a completely different
musical territory to everyone else - if you are unfamiliar with the octatonic,
it’s a strange scale/ mode that was ‘invented’ in the late 19th
century and has some very odd properties, one of which is that it is full of my
much love little tritones; and likewise, Ares’ music is octatonic. He has a
nasty little three mote motif F – A flat – E and an octatonic ostinato/
repeating figure (F – G – A flat – F – B
- A flat - E) that places him and Ludendorf in the same musical
territory – but it’s the octatonic character of the music rather than the
tritones as such that group them as the bad guys, leaving the tritone itself
simply as a carrier of power in this score, one can be used for good or evil.
However, the Zimmer/ Junkie XL theme from the earlier film was a
potential problem: it’s a very odd theme, and I recognize that they were trying
to write something which sounded different from the darkly brooding, strangely
restrained themes that have been written for most superheroes over the last decade
or so; but it is so un-restrained and all that electronica is so timbrally at
odds with the classic superhero orchestral sound that it could have resulted in
a score that was big on quirky and unusual, with its crazy-woman Banshee wail
(I have discovered in the course of writing this that they were genuinely
trying to evoke a Banshee wail) and not so hot on superheroic. RGW gets it
absolute right: he reinvents the key elements of the Power theme for his heroic
orchestral music, uses the Power theme in muted versions in the first hour or
so of the film, and saves the Power theme for a tiny number of key moments in
the second half of the film where the scale of the action is such that its
introduction just raise the stakes a few notches even higher than they already
were. And in this underused form, the timbral difference works constructively:
we are thrown out of the familiar orchestral textures into this musically other
place of electronica and pounding drums – we hear her other nature as God, her
awesome Otherness in these moments. So we get it all: the big compassionately
heroic score that humanizes her, allows us to identify with her; and we get the
theme of her unutterable difference and power that can leave no one in any
doubt that this woman is truly a hero. I shall go and have a little weep now,
I’m all overcome.