The Hunger Games
Let's just start by saying no, I haven't read the books and I appreciate there are a lot of people out there who have who are really disappointed by the film to which I would just say a film is not a book and there simply is not time in the scale of a film to deal with the discursive level of commentary and critique underlying the narrative of books set in dystopian alternate realities that you all seem to be so miffed about not being properly addressed in the movie. You have to do things differently, and that sometimes leaves things feeling too compressed, too much missing from the much-loved book. A film is not book. This was a very good film. It did not need to discuss the poverty and oppression of the districts: we could see it - and that general point could be made about many of the other criticisms I have read from disappointed fans. Films are primarily visual: the basic rule of film and TV is "show, don't tell". And this film showed very well. Fantastic cast, well drawn characters, and a particularly credible and marvellous heroine.
And really good music! The score is by James Newton Howard who has always been 'steady' and essentially interesting (liked his work on The Sixth Sense and Batman films) but has never really set my world alight before. This, however, is a very intelligent score. The film has three environments. We start in district 12, Catniss Everdeene's home, a poor rural mining community surround by forest where Catniss hunts for squirrels and the occasional deer. We then move the capital city, a wealthy, hi-tech enclave of privilege; and from there to the arena in which the Hunger Games are conducted, which is also a forest but not an entirely real one - it is controlled and fabricated by the Gamemakers. The music responds to these environments, but most of it belongs to Catniss. At the start of the film, in district 12, the music has a distinctly folkish feel to is, voices and strings; and then Catniss goes to the forest to hunt. As she retrieves her bow from its hiding place in a tree, the folk music is punctuated by a single harp note, a monotone that repeats at the beginning of each musical phrase. In scoring Catniss, JNH hits on a sublimely simple and lovely metaphor, connecting the idea of Catniss's bow with its single string to plucked strings which we hear in various guises throughout the score in her music, whether it's the monotone harp underneath other textures, or the use of plectrum dulcimer, guitar or banjo - all manner of plucked string instruments are heard in the score. But her bow can operate on a second level of musical metaphor, because although the archery bow is 'plucked' the musical bow is used to play the other string instruments, so the strings that characterize the folk music of district 12, and Catniss's own music, are therefore also potentially part of the same extended metaphor that places Catniss and her bow at the heart of the narrative.
The music of the capital city initially intrudes diegetically into district 12 as the music accompanying the promotional film that the inhabitants of 12 are made to watch before the two tributes are selected. This is classic film score music: a full orchestral score in a quasi late romantic idiom - it could have been written by John Williams on his day off. We hear exactly the same music during the tributes parade, confirming its function as a piece of source music associated by the Capitol with the games. Other than the contrast of folk strings with orchestra between these two music, the important difference is also one of drive. The music of Catniss and district 12 is thoughtful, sombre, subdued and utterly lacking in rhythmic drive; that of the Capitol is grandiose, overblown by contrast with the quieter folk music of district 12, and typically has an obvious drum beat under it, and so the sense of moving from one environment to another is captured in the contrasting tone and feel of the rural and urban spaces sonically as well as visual.
When we get into the arena where the hunger games are conducted, we are in a hybrid space: it looks like Catniss's much loved forest, but is in fact created and controlled by the city, so both types of music - the folkish and the pulse driven - are found here: but the sense of contrast as we move into the new environment is achieved through a slightly bizarre use of a piece of music by the composer Steve Reich, and extract from his Three Movements for Orchestra (1986). I say bizarre because for me it was a "who let Steve Reich in here" moment, the music simply too recognizable to sit comfortably within the film, shocking me back out into my own reality for a second, but I realize I am probably in a minority.... and in fact, the extreme tonal difference has that same effect of letting us know that we are somewhere quite other than before: it has the pulse driven element of the city music, but the woody percussion of the marimbas is a completely new timbre, perhaps evoking the forest, but certainly achieving that same shifting of tone for the new environment.
But perhaps the thing I loved most about this film was its use of silence. One of the criticisms (as well as one of the main functions) of mainstream Hollywood scoring is the way it can evoke fairly specific emotions in the audience: the music can tell you how to feel, which is why directors often use it so much, as it can impose an interpretation on a scene that might otherwise be ambivalent, or heighten the emotion in a scene that otherwise lacks the emotional punch it needs to have. Without music, audiences tend to have to work harder to understand what is going on, and silence can also be unsettling and make one too aware of things around you in the cinema other than the film - the result is that a lot of mainstream films have huge amounts of music in them, and it becomes like wallpaper, pleasantly ignorable (as Satie would say) and is so busy filling up the gaps between the car chases and explosions that it never gets a chance to do anything particularly interesting . But not this film: part of the strength of the score is connected to the fact that most of the film's intense and emotionally charged moments are allowed to play without music chipping in to tell us what to feel, although the musically silent scenes are no less affecting for it. The result is a kind of stripped down emotional rawness: the acting, the scripting and the shooting are all sufficiently good that we don't need music to tell us how to feel and this very 'difficult' narrative (let's get kids to murder each other and turn it into a game show) has a stark emotional honesty as a result. Film music can easily become devalued by being overused, lazily used: I love it when a film doesn't (literally) overplay the music - it leaves both film and score stronger. Played without music, the choices that Catniss is forced into remain terrible and painful: they do not suffer the sentimentalizing gloss that music is often asked to bring to difficult situations in film. And that is something that the people who loved the book should take comfort from - those silences speak volumes for the seriousness with which this film has taken its story.
