Reestablishing Contact

As I sit here typing this, none of the grosses for Contact are in yet. I'm very curious to see how this film does, because it's really something of an anomaly in this summer's film lineup. It's such an audaciously inward movie for the season—there are no simple answers at the end, the special effects often revolve around commonplace things like tracking shots in mirrors, and everything moves at an unhurried pace. I wonder if the audience's expectation for the usual dose of sensory overload will cause them to be bored out of their minds in Contact, or if they will accept something a little more adult.

Now, I don't think Contact was a perfect movie by any means. It's intent was to tell the old alien-meets- humans story in the most scientifically realistic way possible. Really, that's the only way left to tell this story with any impact. We've seen it done so many times that in order to beguile us into accepting it on more than a myth- retold level, Contact has to give us the most realistic portrayal possible. This is the thinking behind the CNN clips and the inclusion of real media and political icons. They aren't usual movie devices and they lend a realism. Problems begin arising, however, when we turn to such movie conventions as the one night stand that leads to true love, the corporate engineering genius/reclusive zealot, and the scientist who can buy a dress and look great in one afternoon's planning. These are Hollywood inventions, and as often as the story convinces us that we are watching something truly momentous, they remind us that we're watching an assembled product. This criticism also extends to Alan Silvestri's score which propagates yet one more Hollywood standard: the simplistic piano theme representing decency and purity.

This kind of music has been used so many times to represent the sanctity of simplicity that it has almost lost all sincerity. We all know these themes. They're usually plain/folksy melodies over an Alberti bass (arpeggiated chords) spelling out the same handful of harmonies over and over—like C major, E minor, F major, A minor, and G major thrown into a blender. And it really is as much of a by-the-numbers recipe as that. Yes, it always works, but in an entirely stock way. It's akin to playing Taps in a score (not as source music) for a funeral scene. It's not telling us anything about the project at hand, it's just abusing our preset emotional switches. I think film music should do more than simply hand us our expectations on a plate and let us bask in the preestablished equations. Was there a way to write a "simple" music for Contact that would be saying something about this project in specific rather than general melancholy? Let's first see how some others did it.

Simple Gifts

One of my favorite "simple" scores of the last few years is Thomas Newman's Little Women. It uses themes that are warm, diatonic, and very immediate, but look at the construction of these themes. Harmonically, they are written in old church modes—especially the Dorian mode (a minor scale with a raised 6th degree). This immediately ties these themes to historic New England where this music first entered the country and continued to stem from for many years (see composer Charles Ives). And the coloristic orchestral effects and rhythmic inventiveness Newman uses are fairly new to these kind of harmonies, so the score is self-contained and individual. The music is satisfying our expectations for the setting while bringing something unique enough to the project to form a bond with it. It's a score for Little Women, not just a score with Little Women.

Another recent score that should be mentioned here is Elmer Bernstein's The Age of Innocence. Again, it's the music that we've come to expect with the time period and social class portrayed. But, it's integrated into the movie in such a way that, again, it's an entirely unique creation. The score dances back and forth between being source music and not. It's like the characters are at first hearing the music with us, then suddenly the music become about them. It's such an interesting technical device that we could never associate Age of Innocence's score with another movie—it's only telling us about the one we're watching.

Solutions?

Actually, I think we can turn to another of Silvestri's Contact cues for a possible solution to the simplicity problem. When Jodie Foster first finds the alien's signal, there is a cue that enters by musically imitating the sound of the signal. It's a thick bass chord below an upper violin figure. This upper violin figure consists of three very simple notes—up a whole step, down a whole step. (C D C and transpositions.) What a perfect motif. It's simple enough that it can fit into any mood, any cue, any tonality. And it's got a unique relevance to Contact. It's a little bit like Close Encounters of the Third Kind in that the signal has been musicalized, but here it's a musical approximation of white noise—the upper harmonics of the alien's signal—and not just the signal itself.

Perhaps the scenes of young Ellie could have been scored with the strings and woodwinds all ready there plus some interesting textural piano writing based on the three note motive—maybe adding a vibraphone and harp or something else to flesh this texture out a bit. This would have been gentle, warm, and appropriately introverted while still being something different and relevant. And it would have been terrifically interesting during the discovery scene to finally understand the relevance of the notes. It would also have been entirely appropriate to continue using this motif throughout the score. The whole story stems from this signal, so why not continue its undercurrents?

I'm probably coming off as hating Contact's score, which is not the case. I don't think it's great, but I do think it's some of the most impressive scoring Alan Silvestri has done for a while. Other than the piano theme, it really does not resort to a lot of button pushing. In many ways, it's one of Silvestri's most subtle scores, and that couldn't be more appropriate for the film. There were elements like this piano theme and a rather dull romantic theme based on chordal suspensions that did nothing for me, but I can think of at least three cues that I enjoyed—the aforementioned discovery of the signal, the first glimpse of the transporting machine, and the final launch sequence which is far more interesting than the similarly written Apollo 13 launch cue. That's approximately three more things than I've liked in most scores this summer.

Armchair (or actual) composers, how would you have solved the dilemma of Contact? How would you have written music that was specific and unique to this project?

Comments or Contact ideas? DAdams1127@aol.com