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kaigouI’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but didn’t get around to tracking down the excerpts I wanted until I had the breathing time between contract-nightmare-hours. Anyway.
I know some of you on my flist are fans of Naruto; for those who aren’t, it’s a Japanese fantasy/action series that revolves around the story of a young man, Naruto, who lives in a ninja community. His goal is to become the village’s strongest ninja, and if anything sums up Naruto’s personality in one go, it’s this: he’s a ninja who wears orange. Bright, dayglo orange. (Obviously, stealth is not his strongpoint.) So here we have a story about a young man who’s pretty much characterized from the get-go as bucking the trends/traditions to make it to the top despite everything against him. Nothing really that new in the plotline, if you think about it, other than a few minor twists in the treatment.
Okay, then. The soundtrack is done by Toshio Masuda, who also did the soundtrack for Mushishi -- a gentle, self-restrained slice-of-life series that’s the radical opposite of Naruto. That contrast is in the soundtracks’ respective musical styles as well -- at least, at first glance. The Mushishi soundtrack is heavily influenced by traditional Japanese instruments and melodies, while the Naruto soundtrack sounds like your average boys-action-series, replete with a theme for every character (of which the majority are chirpy, cheerful, almost goofy melodies). Then one day I was listening to whatever CP had put on the stereo, and not long after that my iPod skipped around and delivered the main theme to Naruto, and suddenly I realized why Masuda’s theme seemed so familiar.
Here’s the opening segment of the Naruto main theme. (I truncated all of these to about 15-30 seconds or so, because you really only need to hear a little bit to get the gist.) Notice also the instrument playing the melody is a shakuhachi (traditional Japanese flute) or possibly a digitized/sampled version of one.
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Now, listen to this:
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Hrmmm. Going back to the Naruto soundtrack, here’s the maintheme from its central segment, this time with an electric guitar taking over the traditional-instrument quality of the opening part.
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And from the comparison piece, later in the track, the piece evolves into this:
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The comparison piece is from the Ramayana, from a specific part known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant (also known as the Kecak). In this section, the monkey king, Haruman (or Hanuman), leads an army of monkeys to help Prince Rama rescue the Princess Sita from the evil King Ravana. That “cha-CHAK” is both the sound of the monkeys and the replacement of vocal power for what would be percussive instruments in other sections of the Ramayana. The single “HO” parts, here and there, are (as I understand it) Haruman exhorting his army of monkeys forward.
It really makes me wonder how much the composer got to talk to Masashi Kishimoto (the original author) or perhaps whether the composer had the chance to read the already-published chapters of Naruto prior to the anime’s creation. Because the lines you can draw between Naruto -- and his personal army of ninja-replicated energy-based clones -- and Haruman -- and his army of monkeys -- doesn’t just start and end with that. There’s also a running theme in Naruto about the difficulties of controlling, and using, one’s internal animalistic senses/sides, which in Naruto himself are externalized as a demon fox that had been sealed within him as an infant: so while Naruto is incredibly strong and resilient, a great deal of this is because he has the option to tap into this additional, non-native, source of power. One interpretation of Haruman’s use/meaning in Indian mythology is:
Although I guess this means if you’re really hung up on the notion of Naruto eventually winning Sakura’s heart, then you might not like this take on it, even if it seems Kishimoto tweaks the basic premise so that the (Princess) Sakura is the one rescuing the (Prince) Sasuke from the evil king. From what I’ve seen so far, that remains a pretty basic summary of the series’ external events, but Haruman’s personal meaning (of balancing animal and human for the goal of complete dedication/one-mindedness) also matches the series’ internal conflicts, for Naruto himself.
If you’re wondering, the answer is yes: there is some link between Haruman and Sun Wukong/Son Goku, aka the Monkey of Journey to the West. Relevant to Naruto’s characterization, Sun Wukong earned his godhood not via birth but by battling heaven and earth -- and he didn’t take on all of heaven and earth to make himself a god as the entire purpose. The most common explanation for the Monkey King’s rebellion is that despite being a good leader to his people, and respected by them, he was frustrated and dismayed that they continued to fall ill and die: he could do so much for them, but he could not prevent death itself.
So when he heads off to do incredible things (and to get into incredible amounts of trouble along the way), it’s not out of a selfish wish that he’d be immortal, so much as a powerful drive to protect those people/monkeys nearest and dearest to him. Naruto’s repeated mantra (err, so to speak) that everything he does is to protect his “most precious people” echoes the Monkey King’s devotion, even as Naruto’s unconventional styles of learning and growing echo the Monkey King’s unorthodox development from simple monkey to a god who chooses for himself the name Great Sage Equal to Heaven.
Which, in all, pleases me to find something so new harking back to something so old. What is it so many have said about the number of existing plots?
The next few are segments from the soundtrack of Transformers -- big genre jump, I know, but there’s a reason I highlight these. I’ve seen enough movies... okay, so I’m not the absolute movie-watcher liek woah like some folks I know, but I do tend to focus on soundtracks when watching movies, for whatever reason -- maybe because often you can’t not: what is up with needing a soundtrack to be constantly at 120 decibels, anyway? Anyway, I recall mentioning going to see Transformers in the theatre when it came out, and being somewhat lukewarm on parts of it despite being impressed (which was more a factor of being impressed by the director/cinematographer’s point of focus despite differing from my own personal point of focus -- think of it like having the camera focus on the costumes while you’re fascinated by the backdrop, I guess: it’s not that you dislike the costumes, just that if you’d run the world, you would’ve spent more time on other objects).
The soundtrack, though, really impressed me, but not because it’s particularly that phenomenal of a soundtrack when you look at it on its own. No, it’s more that it’s so well integrated into the editing. Here’s an example, and you probably will need to turn it up a LOT -- this soundtrack’s range of dynamics is huge. Anyway, turn it up, and listen for the percussion-that-isn’t, that sound become audible four or five seconds in. (It builds, so I started the segment a little early.)
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Those are helicopter blades. Nothing that crazy, or unexpected, in a storyline where the military ends up combining forces with some group -- in this case, metal AI creature/monsters from outer space -- to rally around and defend the planet. Yada, yada, yada, another story told a million times over. Thing is, the majority of the time when you listen to a soundtrack, the emotional context of a moment is lessened, and I realized in listening to that segment that this is because most often, the sound mix covers three main channels/areas: you’ve got your vocals, you’ve got your foley guys (sound effects), and then you’ve got your orchestral movements (background music). Those three things get mixed in the booth around the time the editing guys are stringing together all the scenes... which means when the soundtrack is released, the average company releases the orchestral music that became the soundtrack -- and not the soundtrack+foley, which has already been processed along with the vocals and wrapped into the film itself.
(Think of the times you may’ve listened to the soundtrack from a musical, and there’s a beat of pause where someone would normally speak. In some soundtracks, the silence is sign that the vocal/spoken section was mixed/added separately, so it’s not on the “master tracks” for the soundtrack. Though I should add that not all of this particular soundtrack is orchestra+foley; a little more than half the tracks are orchestral-only in that they're the actual compositions and not the remixed versions used for accompaniament -- mostly because different scenes used different bits and pieces from each. The tracks excerpted here, though, are all from-the-movie-entirety tracks.)
I should note that from what I recall Steve Jablonsky (the composer) has worked with Michael Bay (director) on a number of projects. That means to some extent, I’d guess, Jablonsky’s had plenty of exposure to how Bay sees, edits, directs, and visualizes a story, and that would put Jablonsky in the enviable position of having a pretty damn good idea of how to compose the soundtrack to merge seamlessly with Bay’s vision... and that, I think, is why what’s normally a foley-sound is embedded in, and mingled with, the orchestral elements of the movie’s sound.
Here’s a twenty-second or so snippet from the second track, where the main theme (or more precisely, the “good guys” theme) is introduced. Again, gonna need to keep the volume up:
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Several things I’ve noticed. First, that kind of off-beat, off-pattern metallic element only shows up when the theme is the good guys’: it’s very quiet, sure, and it’s a common enough composer-method (at least in hollywood) for “creating tension” (maybe because it so clearly does not fit the standard three-four main beat timing?). But this is a story about big machines fighting other big machines while humans do their best to aid, or prevent, the battlefield -- the earth -- from being destroyed in the process. Without the right focus* it could’ve become a rather dehumanized story where the humans are nothing more than a greek chorus, so it really stands out to me that in the good-guy theme is when you hear this clangey, machine-like sound buried in the percussion section.
Now listen to a bit from the theme for the bad guys (modulating into the good guys’ theme showing up near the end).
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The strongest percussive-like element, for the bad guys, are human vocals. It’s an organic element, that I’m not sure I even really noticed when watching the movie, but when I listen to the ‘track without visuals, boy, does it jump out at you. The bad guys get this humanizing element, while the good guys get subtle reinforcement that these are machines. It’s like a composer’s way of off-setting, maybe, the risk of manipulating the audience via script or visuals into relating 100% to good-machines and demonizing 100% the bad-machines: instead, the sound reminds you the good guys are machines even if sentient, and the also reminds you that the bad guys sentient even if machines.
One last section before I get into what I meant by hearing the final showdown. This bit is taken from about halfway through the movie (if I recall correctly), and I’m highlighting it for several reasons. One, it’s a shorter encapsulation of the good-guy and bad-guy themes as they blend mid-battle, but the way it ends is particularly striking. It’s another example of the mix of orchestra+foley working together, especially near the end of the segment, and it’s not -- as CP remarked -- the normal ‘ending’ for a battle, especially one that ends with the good guys coming out on top. It’s got a very strong sense of ‘and now the dust settles’. Plus, it’s a good example of the kind of range/dynamics I’ve not really found in other soundtracks.
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This last bit I figured I’d take a screen shot of the piece, just so you can see the dynamics. This is the ‘final battle’ track, as it were. A few weeks ago I was listening to this on the plane with plenty of uninterrupted mental space, and I realized: this track may not be the most original out there, or in some ways the most subtle (though that, I think, is partially because of its mix of orchestra+foley, which means you’re getting a lot more of the clues you get in the actual movie experience, clues often lacking from other orchestral soundtrack releases). But it does follow almost perfectly a kind of template for what makes a Very Strong Final Battle -- and in particular, it made me realize that it has a segment or step along the way that, if missing from a story/novel’s “final showdown”, does weaken that final battle.
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So listening to the stages, this is what I hear. (The good stories I can name don’t all spend a lot of time on each stage, and sometimes one point merges seamlessly into the next -- although preferably all are seamless, but hey -- but my point is that none are neglected. At least, in the stories whose final conflict points actually work for me.)
0:00 - 0:25 : preface
A quiet moment where the hero is making that decision to do this. (Or, as CP calls it, “the loin-girding bit.”) Noticeably it also has a bit of a minor-key, a feeling of regret in the tonal quality. That works for me, much as it does when I’m reading the corresponding part in a story, because a hero who wants to go into the final battle -- with no regrets or second thoughts -- is usually a pretty stupid hero, to me. There’s an important distinction between “let’s kick their asses!” versus “nothing else worked, so now we have no choice but to hand out some ass-kicking.”
0:25 - 0:55 : approach
The power-shot, in Whedon’s words, that starts when Buffy says, “Let’s do it,” and walks out with the Scoobies flanking her. But it’s not just that; it’s a point of taking stock of what you’ve got, and lining it all up. It’s getting in place -- with the second half being the point where the other guys are getting in place. It’s the Jets falling into place when they meet the Sharks, it’s the Colonial Army lined up along one side of the battlefield as the British army pulls its last cannon to the front.
In this case, the approach sounds like it’s the bad guys -- there’s the vocal-percussive element, and the cellos keep the beat, but about halfway through the french horns come in (good guy musical element), and remain long and slow as they do in the main good-guy theme -- but they’re playing the bad-guy theme. Which basically is a sort of blending that (to me) speaks of all parties coming to the main point/meeting place.
0:55 - 1:20 : realization
Between “oh my god they’re here” and the first shot fired, there’s a moment in which everything kind of hangs for at least a split-second. The showdown at high noon doesn’t mean the shots are fired at high noon; there’s a passage between the start and the shot where there’s a lot of summing up going on... and, for me, there’s also got to be a point of realization: okay. We’re really doing this. This is it. It’s a confirmation of the previous decision-point, but it’s one that comes with a better pragmatic sense now that the hero is staring the conflict/obstacle/enemy in the face. Yeah, so it’s also a way to draw out tension, but it’s a crucial part, because it’s yet another decision-point. It comes with the risk of pulling back, the implied risk that the hero will back down, maybe the hope that the other side will back down instead.
A detail about this specific soundtrack is that the helicopter-like-percussion comes in during this quieter segment. That’s the sound you hear when the film is working squarely from a “human perspective”. In this case, IIRC, it’s where the military/humans move their forces into ranks of machines, a bit nervously, while others hang back out of the fighting-range and look on -- there’s the “looking down from overhead of passing helicopter” sense of removal. In terms of a story, I can think of at least three or four that have taken this ‘realization’ point and shown it from the pov of the sidekick, or an onlooker, as they go through a belated version of the hero’s decision-point made in the preface. (Braveheart comes to mind, along with a handful of US Civil War movies: the generals make the decision, the troops move out, and then some guy on the front lines gets a close-up as he goes, holy crap, I’m really here.)
The cellos, btw, fade at first and then reappear near the end of this section, and if you listen, they don’t resolve: they start at a low note, rise, drop, and then rise -- when the next section starts, listen for the violins, which repeat this pattern but an octave higher.
1:20 - 1:35 : awe
I can’t think of a better way to put it. Sure, the huge bass beat implies there’s action, but the combination of strings and melody retain the tension. The reason I pointed out the violins echoing the cellos is because if you listen specifically to the violins, you’ll hear the auditory equivalent to the literary passage I personally call the “oh fuck we’ve got to deal with that?” moment. (Yes, very technical term.)
The strings play a series of notes that start at, uh, I dunno, let’s say maybe middle-G... and slowly progress up the scale to an octave, maybe octave-and-a-half higher. (I don’t have perfect pitch, so my guess is just a wild one, and could be totally off in terms of the range, but anyway.) But the important detail that’s being played out here is that this is when the bad guys start showing just how bad they really are; it’s when the good guys get a glimpse of the rest of the damn iceberg and realize they made the original decision based on, hunh, maybe not quite so accurate information. It’s when it’s too late to back down or back out or run away, and it’s a sense of inevitability (and possibly no small amount of fatalism) as the view pulls up, up, up, or looks up, up, up -- carried along by the tension in the strings -- and suddenly David realizes just how damn freaking small he is compared to that honking behemoth, Goliath.
This is, too, a kind of payoff prior to the battle’s actual start: because if I’ve been rooting for the hero all this time, then I need to know that the hero is worth rooting for: that s/he hasn’t picked a battle that’s an easy win. I need to know that the bad guys outrank, outflank, and out firepower the hero so that when the hero does win, it’s not because it was easy or cheap. When the bad guy intimidates by revealing s/he has even more resources (and effectively proving once and for all that the hero’s worry/fear/anxiety of failure was justified) then it also justifies the worry I’ve felt as well. I need to see the hero looking up, or recognizing a bit of diminishment (or at least the possible diminishment compared to the bad guy’s powers/resources).
Without the process of looking up, of seeing how far s/he has to climb to overcome this obstacle, the hero cannot -- even in winning -- become “large”. It’s no great feat to step over a molehill, after all. In some ways, this is also a decision-point, if only an affirmation (or reaffirmation) of what's already decided.
1:35 - 1:55 : first shots
In some stories, this is the passage where being in awe throws the hero off-balance, and the first shots put him at a disadvantage. In cheaper storylines, of course, the hero has to be beaten down and then come to a decision of “I’m gonna really do this!” As CP observed, it’s like those staged wrestling matches where the guy who ends up with his face in the mat first is the one you know will rise up and conquer by the end of theact event. But you don’t have to provoke sympathy for the underdog, and sometimes, in storylines, I get annoyed when I’m seeing underdog-tweaking going on. I don’t need to see the hero beaten down to a pulp before he’ll get up and fight, and in fact, sometimes that makes me respect the hero less. After all, if the hero is intelligent enough to have a moment of realization of “oh, hell, there’s a lot of them” (or “they’ve got bigger guns” or even “the threat from X or Y is a lot worse than I’d realized”) and can even acknowledge that this bad guy is a lot more than hoped-for or planned-for, then the underdog moment isn’t required. In a sense, going through the awe of seeing the obstacle is, in itself, a fair amount of the underdog’s “oh, man, I’m gonna get my ass kicked” kind of moment.
If that makes sense. Anyway. First shots, and you’ll notice the sound isn’t that dense, nor is the dynamic that high (yet): this is where both sides are kind of ‘testing’ the other. It’s not entirely at the point of no return, but it’s getting there.
1:55 - 2:00 : no return
At some point -- usually near the start of the battle -- the hero commits all resources. A bare second prior to ‘redoubling his efforts,’ maybe, or the half-second before the body of the race, after the starting gun. It’s when the potentially avoidable (even if only by outrageous means) becomes the truly inevitable. It’s not even that long, and in most stories I’ve read or seen, it’s maybe a single expression or a single paragraph, but it’s something in there -- somewhere -- that acknowledges the change from “we’re going to do this and win” to a simpler “we are doing this”. In action stories, the better ones at least, the no-return also comes with a sort of stripping down, a movement where “and win” becomes “and freaking survive.” The pretty effects and grandiose justifications strip away in this heartbeat and it’s down to committing everything and no turning back. One heartbeat, one drumbeat right there to crystallize this moment, and then...
2:00 - 2:25 : battle
The movement from frozen awareness of inevitability and into battle: the wind section goes from low range to full force pretty fast, and within a single measure everything’s going on at once. The thickness of the musical layers in this segment really reinforce the sense that everyone’s in it now, no holds-barred: the entire orchestra and a whallop of foley guys are going at it.
Action scene, baby, and the incorporation of the horns and the strings really fascinate me at this point, for what they’re saying about the points of view being shown. I mean, hrm, how to put it? The main melody line isn’t the slow grandeur of the good-guy theme, but has the faster pace (and slight minor key) of the bad-guy theme, but it’s a combination of horns and strings -- and if your speakers are really good, you might be able to hear the vocal-percussion going on in the mix, as well, but it’s buried down deep. Then the horns stretch out, and they’re echoing the rising action that the strings played in the awe-passage: but more middle-range, not so high, and not rising so far. Meanwhile the strings/percussion continue to increase pace just slightly, and the dynamics of course are going up steadily.
2:25 - 2:35 : full view
Again the rising melody line, but the sound remains kind of thick -- it’s not as condensed or thin as the point of no return -- but the driving beat is gone, or at least muffled/distanced. In the middle any conflict, it’s hard to see the edges, but I can think of a number of instances (especially in multi-view point stories/movies) where somewhere in the middle, we get a sense of the long-range view. Or perhaps it’s that the hero or one of the heroes can spare a minute to grasp the long-range, or take a guess of how it appears (or may be impacting) the borders of the conflict. Maybe it’s just someone realizing that people in the next house can hear the screaming, or maybe it’s hearing that shots have gone off-target and blown up a surburban grocery store -- but it’s a pause long enough to see that this conflict has consequences outside the small circle of the actual battle/fight/whatever.
I’m not saying that every conflict in every story has to revolve around something that saves the world, or that collateral damage must always involve stray rocket-fire, but that for a final showdown to really have impact (at least on me) there’s got to be collateral damage. It can’t just be the hero versus the anti-hero, and when the dust settles the only ones who walk away (or don’t) are them: it must reach past them, because when the damage caused is bigger than their circle, then it’s one more motivation not just to win but to win without taking forever about it.
Alternately, in some stories I’ve read, this kind of damage-beyond-the-battle is the moment when the hero, say, realizes that the bad guys are drawing the battle out purposefully for some reason, with the usual conclusion being they’ve got more up their sleeve but need the time to get set up: with the implication being that the cost to be paid will double, treble, etc. It’s still a sudden awareness of the fight as a conflict beyond just the good guy exchanging blows with the bad guy. I guess you could say it’s a point in the final showdown where the camera pulls away to give a sense of the overall scope, but that this is best done when there’s unforeseen damage occuring outside the previously narrow scope.
But anyway, it's still yet one more decision-point, but this time in light of midway through the battle: do you keep going? do you change tactics? do you pull back? do you press forward full-throttle?
A hero who enters the final conflict and has no need (or sees no need, or for whom the author gives no chance to consider a need) is a hero whose conflict -- as an echo or foundation of the external conflict -- is rather shallow. I mean, come on: wouldn't the average person be conflicted about the conflict itself, to some degree? Even if it's just passing doubt?
2:35 - 2:50 : limits
I don’t know what else to call the point in a conflict when the hero has to make the choice to (or starts to move into position in order to) limit any further duration of the conflict. Deliver the final blow, bring things to a head, strike with all you’ve got because the bad guy’s resources otherwise will drown you if you don’t act now -- whatever the story’s gist, it’s still a kind of smaller redoubling of effort, but it’s one done within a context of “we’ve lost X, and we’ll lose Y and more.” (Notice the strings repeat the rising action in this passage, as well, echoing that sense of being overwhelmed and/or not big enough to take on the bad guy and/or just plain awe at what the hero’s facing down.)
Thing is, this is both a decision point (hence the slight suspension of the overall beat) and a recognition point, and if it’s not in a story’s final conflict, I do feel cheated. Maybe I don’t always recognize it, but it’s something that must happen, and I don’t know why. I only know in the stories without this step, it doesn’t feel as... I don’t know, urgent, maybe.
This is the step that happens at the point of the limit: it’s basically when the hero -- having realized the extent of damage or collateral damage or whatever -- realizes not just that there is a price to pay, but quite possibly what that price will be. It’s the dawning horror, and I don’t mean in the hollywood horror-gore sense but in the dawning awe-terror of the truly inevitable -- in which the hero can see clearly just what the cost will be if s/he is going to win the fight.
And that segues into...
2:50 - 2:55 : cost
If the point of seeing the limit is seeing what you don’t want to lose, more than anything, and knowing that you will lose it, this is the point where you do. The driving force of the fight returns, though quieter -- which says to me that the battle continues without break, if perhaps in the background or secondary to the hero’s point of view. If you look at the wave-image, you can see the dynamics compressed for a bit, then returned but they’re at half-level compared to the full-on fight in the battle segment. Effectively, this is the fight in miniature, in the micro-level, and this fight... is lost. That’s the price.
It’s the point when Buffy realizes that despite her best efforts, it’s too late, and to save the world she must kill the man she loves; it’s when (if a tragedy) the hero takes the shot to the gut that’s going to kill him shortly, which means even if he gets to the bomb and defuses it in time, it won’t be in enough time for him -- and yet despite the loss of this battle-inside-the-battle, the hero continues to fight. Maybe for some stories this is also the underdog moment, where the hero’s beaten down and we see him fall to the ground in slo-mo and we think, oh, he’s done for! Even though we know that in good movie-fashion (or bad fiction-fashion) the hero will struggle to his feet to keep going, rally himself up to keep fighting... but in that case, the cost wasn’t much of a cost, was it? In the greater scheme of things, being beaten down to the cement -- perhaps supposed to be a form of humiliation in almost-losing, where the cost paid is that of losing face, albeit temporarily -- well, overall, if you win the war, I don’t think having to suffer getting your gut kicked in and dropping to your knees is really that much of a cost... particularly when it’s not a cost that stretches past the hero.
A true cost, one that makes the conflict that much more poignant, is when the hero him/herself does not bear the cost except as the guilty party for having created (or continued) the situation that caused another to pay the price. That’s my take on it, at least. If that collateral damage does not exist, then the conflict has no reaching ramifications; if the damage does not stretch to include that which the hero holds precious (above and beyond his teeth or nose or other bruisable body part), then the hero didn’t really suffer a cost. Okay, the possible exception there is if the hero’s sacrifice is his own life -- but even then, I’d prefer to see that sacrifice as being an active choice (again, a decision point) on the part of the hero to prevent another paying the cost.
That’s why Buffy sacrificing herself at the end of season 5, to save her little sister, is so powerful: because when the limit comes and it’s apparent there’s no way to undo the damage done by the big bad, that damage leads obviously and immediately to the cost of Buffy’s sister using her own life to repair the damage -- and so, when Buffy sacrifices herself instead, as the price, it’s one of the few times that not having a major cost outside the hero is possible... only because you know if the hero had not chosen that path, just how great the alternate cost would have been.
However, this isn’t necessarily the point that the cost is actually paid... but it is logically the point where the cost becomes both apparent, and unavoidable.
2:55 - 3:25 : desperation
That might seem like an odd title but it fits the action I logically expect (as a reader, and as someone looking for the tension when writing). For a visual, if in the previous passage the hero sees the anvil swinging and then starting to fall and tracks the line down to the hero’s sidekick unaware below -- or in the example of Buffy’s season 5 ending, Buffy looks up to see the portal open and her sister unable to prevent it but readying herself to close it -- this is the point where the battle isn’t really to win, anymore. It’s to get out in one piece, with some semblance of survival, some semblance of success but the hope of doing so unscathed is pretty much gone.
If there’s a point where the hero is justified in giving into desperation and losing his/her mind, of going berserk or going all out despite uncountable injuries or maybe even blindly injuring himself from stupid moves because he’s no longer caring for his own safety but acting solely to prevent more loss... then that’s at this point. It’s the desperate drive across the bloody field when the hero may even have already defeated the big bad in a showdown -- and yet there’s someone charging in the direction of his best friend, and if he can just -- get -- there -- in -- time --
But thing is, if you listen to the music, its minor key tells you (as you well know) that the hero can’t, and won’t. Not because we want sad points, not because we want to pay the cost, but because unless you want a hero who’s superman, who’s a useless Mary Sue, then the simple fact is that the hero’s own cost paid so far (blood, emotion, energy, whatever) is going to be part of what makes him or her unable to get there in time to prevent the cost. If the hero has anything left to exert in that final moment, after/during fighting the big bad, then obviously the big bad wasn’t that big, nor that bad: to make it possible for the hero to prevent paying the price means that the previous prices already paid just weren’t that great.
Without that, without that price -- and perhaps as importantly -- without that advance recognition of the price, and the awareness of helplessness of preventing the payment of that price -- a final conflict is cheapened. You cannot win without sacrifice, one way or another. If the bad guy is really that scary, that bad, that big, enough to drive the conflict in an entire movie or novel, then you can’t just tip a hat at him and consider yourself the victor.
Alternately this passage is the fight continuing with the bad guy even as the incoming price is recognized: the hero just plain can’t get away in time, and knows s/he won’t, but fights anyway... maybe, just maybe, if s/he can manage even a half-second, then s/he can turn, holler, warn, do something to prevent it. And, of course, it’s this split attention that’s also a downfall or drawback -- because any bad guy worth his/her salt naturally can tell the hero is distracted, maybe even anxious. So of course the bad guy will also put even more effort into being an obstacle, knowing it’s somehow keeping the hero from doing something else that’s clearly so important, maybe even more important than the bad guy.
Depending on the bad guy, natch, you may get “hey! pay attention to me, asshole!” reaction, or you may get a delighted maniacal glee as the bad guy realizes the situation as well, or some other reaction: but there'd better be a reaction. If the bad guy’s been smart enough all along to make the hero miserable all the way up to the final conflict, then the bad guy shouldn’t turn suddenly stupid and miss the big honking clues that the hero’s attention is divided for some reason. Duh.
The other reason (it seems to me) that Jablonsky's thematic/tempo-based separation works so well in terms of an analogy is because that tension-filled suspended moment of "now I can see the cost I will pay" is often pushed off, or denied, how else to put it. I guess I'm used to reading, and come on, it's a human reaction, of the protagonist seeing the inevitable and choosing to continue with this course of action rather than that one, and just stick to your guns (so to speak) and hope/trust/cross fingers that the sidekicks over there will manage to pull through.
Maybe the "no, don't deal with that, but with this" (usually the bad guy) is because the character's finally realized that s/he has to trust that the orders will be followed and s/he can't be everywhere at once; maybe it's because s/he figures it's not a really big threat and the bad guy is, maybe it's something else. But sometimes the decision in the middle of things can be to not make a decision at all -- but that's still a decision, and I should still get to see the character making it.
3:25 - 3:35 : urgency
This may be where the hero is now fighting to get to his best friend’s side, or to prevent the bomb that will take out the entire state, or whatever other cost is incoming. It might be the point where the sidekick sees the hero’s not going to make it, and is fighting to get to the hero’s side, to help. But if you listen to the music, it’s a distillation -- it’s another form of a battle-within-a-battle, but instead of being compressed, it’s stripped to its bare bones. It’s a different kind of tension, and maybe it comes as a result of things out of the hero's control -- but maybe it comes from the hero's decision previously to not act or to keep on a specific course or even to change course.
Mid-battle, there should still be consequences. It can't all be decided from the get-go. That just makes me feel like, as a reader, I should've just skipped the whole thing because if nothing happens (or more importantly, nothing changes for the protagonist), then why bother? It's like including sex scenes: don't do it unless there's some crucial point in the middle that will shift things dramatically -- and sorry, but conflict alone, two people exchanging knuckle sandwiches, isn't enough.
3:35 - 3:45 : final blow / the loss
Good stories arrange this pattern in all sorts of orders. The final blow is sometimes the hero striking down the bad guy -- even after seeing the price paid by someone, or something, important to him -- or it may be that the bad guy was taken out and despite that there was still a cost to be realized. Whether it’s Buffy standing over Glory and looking up to see the portal and her sister standing before it ready to jump, or if it’s William Wallace seeing his best friend cut down from behind and helpless to stop it and striking that last blow as not so much a victory as a final stand against complete loss... it’s still the final blow. Either the tragedy of the payment comes after, in which the hero is helpless to prevent it, or the tragedy comes before, in which the hero’s victory is colored by knowledge of the price paid.
In respect to Transformers -- err, yeah, the actual soundtrack here -- this is the point when in order to win, one character sacrifices the very thing that was the goal of the fight. Trying to avoid bogging anyone down in the details, but it’s essentially this: it becomes apparent that to destroy the bad guy requires using as a weapon the same object that is the only means to recreating the autobots’ home world. There’s a cost for you, and it smacks close of a big-frame version of nose, face, and spite: you win, but only at the cost of losing what you would’ve won. It’s the same calibre of cost paid when Buffy must kill Angel to save the world. The victory is almost hollow, and perhaps will ever after retain a question of whether the victory was really worth the price paid... except it was, but still, the price was so high.
3:45 - 4:00 : recognition
Hrm, it could be the fall, or the denouement, maybe. But in this case -- in the specific soundtrack at least -- it’s more a sense not so much of the battle coming to final glorious blow as it simply, well, ends. Win, lose, the cost was high enough that there’s no victory dance, no victorious march down main street (as there is, CP noted, in a lot of hollywood-style films). And, too, if you’re thinking about the manner of sequels in novels and movies, this kind of unresolved -- if powerful -- tonal end also contains the nucleus of a notion that the battle itself remains, however minutely, also still unresolved. If an author is going for the implication that there’s more to come, then yeah, allow this unresolved sensation to hover there for a few frames or paragraphs. But then again, even if the author wants to tell me it’s over and done yet also came at a very high price, then the unresolved element is not necessarily a question of the bad guy’s survival (or the continuation of the bad cause), so much as an indication of the hero’s own internal unresolved feelings on just how much s/he had to pay to achieve this end.
Then again, I want to see that price paid, and I want to see the hero suffer for it, too. I keep saying (and maybe some authors might listen, if I say it enough) that if you want me to believe that the bad guy is bad enough that I should spend 300+ pages with your characters worrying over and preparing for the bad guy’s full-blown all-out power, then if the good guy’s going to beat that, the good guy isn’t going to do it with no more than a wiggle of his pinky. He just might lose the entire hand, more like it. Because if he doesn’t, you-the-author have undermined every scene previous for the hero, in his/her preparation.
Which is a big fat duh, I suppose, but maybe it’s better put to say there must be echoing elements of realization, of awareness, of recognition, throughout the conflict. It’s action, reaction, action, reaction, and the real power comes not in the hero’s actions but in his reactions, and maybe just as much in his reactions that contain awareness that he cannot act -- that despite all his energy and effort to get to this point, that in the end, he is still, in some way, helpless. Maybe some folks like the underdog manipulation, but I’d rather see someone who doesn’t need to get kicked all the way to the dirt to find it in himself to pick himself up and come back swinging -- that’s just not much of a cost. I’d much rather read about someone who doesn’t plan to go down, and maybe doesn’t, but who loses on one hand and yet despite seeing the cost, knowing the price to be paid, continues to fight -- that means more to me.
Or maybe I just like a bit of regret in my victories.
Just to compare how other final battle soundtracks look... Here’s the track for Saya’s Battle, from the Blood+ soundtrack, by Mark Mancina:
You can see the dynamic’s pretty steady, with a drop-off at about 2:30 that’s the final blow/loss point... followed by a rendition of the main theme’s victory-like orchestral movement.
And the battle-scene track for Gundam 00, by Kenji Kawai:
Here there’s a segment at the start which is the lead-in for the battle, followed by battle space, with a slight break (but not a significant shift in tempo) that’s for a dropping point -- whether this is the beat-down-before-getting-up or the loss-point, I can’t recall, but the battle then continues with similar pacing and dynamics as previously.
And here’s a rare long encapsulation of an entire battle, but if you look at the range and tempo, you can probably pick out where it mimics the same patterns in the Transformers final battle-track. It’s from The Thirteenth Warrior, soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. It also clocks in at almost 11 minutes, which is way way too long to use as an example, so no, I’m not including this track. My server can only take so much.
Not sure what you might’ve taken away from this, other than the awareness that I tend to focus a bit more on the background music than most folks might (or maybe that’s just thanks to the hearing damage from those hardcore shows when I stupidly thought it would be just fine to be sitting on the stage with one ear pressed to the double Marshall stacks, damn it, and now I’m ultra-sensitive to dynamics since too low and I can’t hear and too loud and, uh, I can’t hear). Or maybe, hopefully, the next movie you watch, you’ll also find yourself paying attention to the score, to see how the themes and instruments and mixing come together to imply the series of movements that echo what you’d find in a good story... or maybe you’re still back on the whole monkey-king thing. Could be.
I know some of you on my flist are fans of Naruto; for those who aren’t, it’s a Japanese fantasy/action series that revolves around the story of a young man, Naruto, who lives in a ninja community. His goal is to become the village’s strongest ninja, and if anything sums up Naruto’s personality in one go, it’s this: he’s a ninja who wears orange. Bright, dayglo orange. (Obviously, stealth is not his strongpoint.) So here we have a story about a young man who’s pretty much characterized from the get-go as bucking the trends/traditions to make it to the top despite everything against him. Nothing really that new in the plotline, if you think about it, other than a few minor twists in the treatment.
Okay, then. The soundtrack is done by Toshio Masuda, who also did the soundtrack for Mushishi -- a gentle, self-restrained slice-of-life series that’s the radical opposite of Naruto. That contrast is in the soundtracks’ respective musical styles as well -- at least, at first glance. The Mushishi soundtrack is heavily influenced by traditional Japanese instruments and melodies, while the Naruto soundtrack sounds like your average boys-action-series, replete with a theme for every character (of which the majority are chirpy, cheerful, almost goofy melodies). Then one day I was listening to whatever CP had put on the stereo, and not long after that my iPod skipped around and delivered the main theme to Naruto, and suddenly I realized why Masuda’s theme seemed so familiar.
Here’s the opening segment of the Naruto main theme. (I truncated all of these to about 15-30 seconds or so, because you really only need to hear a little bit to get the gist.) Notice also the instrument playing the melody is a shakuhachi (traditional Japanese flute) or possibly a digitized/sampled version of one.
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Now, listen to this:
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Hrmmm. Going back to the Naruto soundtrack, here’s the maintheme from its central segment, this time with an electric guitar taking over the traditional-instrument quality of the opening part.
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And from the comparison piece, later in the track, the piece evolves into this:
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The comparison piece is from the Ramayana, from a specific part known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant (also known as the Kecak). In this section, the monkey king, Haruman (or Hanuman), leads an army of monkeys to help Prince Rama rescue the Princess Sita from the evil King Ravana. That “cha-CHAK” is both the sound of the monkeys and the replacement of vocal power for what would be percussive instruments in other sections of the Ramayana. The single “HO” parts, here and there, are (as I understand it) Haruman exhorting his army of monkeys forward.
It really makes me wonder how much the composer got to talk to Masashi Kishimoto (the original author) or perhaps whether the composer had the chance to read the already-published chapters of Naruto prior to the anime’s creation. Because the lines you can draw between Naruto -- and his personal army of ninja-replicated energy-based clones -- and Haruman -- and his army of monkeys -- doesn’t just start and end with that. There’s also a running theme in Naruto about the difficulties of controlling, and using, one’s internal animalistic senses/sides, which in Naruto himself are externalized as a demon fox that had been sealed within him as an infant: so while Naruto is incredibly strong and resilient, a great deal of this is because he has the option to tap into this additional, non-native, source of power. One interpretation of Haruman’s use/meaning in Indian mythology is:
The monkey symbolism of Lord Hanuman is related to the notion that a human being’s mind is ever active and never restful, hence the depiction of a human being with the face of a monkey. Furthermore, Lord Hanuman symbolically stands for pure devotion, complete surrender and absence of ego or the lower self. As the son of Vayu, symbolically he also stands for the subtle body consisting of the breath body, the mental body and the intelligence body. Here we explain Hanuman as the mental body in a human being.Additionally, the story of this section of the Ramayana is that of Haruman aiding the Prince to rescue the Princess from the evil overlord: Haruman himself is not the main hero, but only an enabler or provider. That in particular makes me wonder about any conversations between composer and author, if the composer’s quietly pointing to this ancient storyline as a melodic, and subtle, indication of Naruto’s eventual outcome: that he’s not really the ‘hero’ in the sense of getting the girl, but is to some degree the ‘hero’ in that it’s his contribution that makes the final resolution even possible.
The mind, being ever fickle, jumps from place to place, obtaining everything in its path and engaging in numerous activities that brings no peace to the surroundings. The mind can travel to any place and fly anywhere and cross to other parts of the world such is the power of the mind.
The mind can also expand or contract, and if it remains under the control of animal passions and sensory activities, it will become unstable and devious. Hence, the mind of Hanuman is always under this fluctuation.
However, once surrendering occurs to the inner self and the mind becomes devoted unconditionally, the mind can obtain miraculous powers and perform stupendous feats like that of Lord Hanuman. When one’s mind reaches this state in working for the divine, it helps the lower self (Sita) and Soul (Rama) to come together and become united.
Although I guess this means if you’re really hung up on the notion of Naruto eventually winning Sakura’s heart, then you might not like this take on it, even if it seems Kishimoto tweaks the basic premise so that the (Princess) Sakura is the one rescuing the (Prince) Sasuke from the evil king. From what I’ve seen so far, that remains a pretty basic summary of the series’ external events, but Haruman’s personal meaning (of balancing animal and human for the goal of complete dedication/one-mindedness) also matches the series’ internal conflicts, for Naruto himself.
If you’re wondering, the answer is yes: there is some link between Haruman and Sun Wukong/Son Goku, aka the Monkey of Journey to the West. Relevant to Naruto’s characterization, Sun Wukong earned his godhood not via birth but by battling heaven and earth -- and he didn’t take on all of heaven and earth to make himself a god as the entire purpose. The most common explanation for the Monkey King’s rebellion is that despite being a good leader to his people, and respected by them, he was frustrated and dismayed that they continued to fall ill and die: he could do so much for them, but he could not prevent death itself.
So when he heads off to do incredible things (and to get into incredible amounts of trouble along the way), it’s not out of a selfish wish that he’d be immortal, so much as a powerful drive to protect those people/monkeys nearest and dearest to him. Naruto’s repeated mantra (err, so to speak) that everything he does is to protect his “most precious people” echoes the Monkey King’s devotion, even as Naruto’s unconventional styles of learning and growing echo the Monkey King’s unorthodox development from simple monkey to a god who chooses for himself the name Great Sage Equal to Heaven.
Which, in all, pleases me to find something so new harking back to something so old. What is it so many have said about the number of existing plots?
The next few are segments from the soundtrack of Transformers -- big genre jump, I know, but there’s a reason I highlight these. I’ve seen enough movies... okay, so I’m not the absolute movie-watcher liek woah like some folks I know, but I do tend to focus on soundtracks when watching movies, for whatever reason -- maybe because often you can’t not: what is up with needing a soundtrack to be constantly at 120 decibels, anyway? Anyway, I recall mentioning going to see Transformers in the theatre when it came out, and being somewhat lukewarm on parts of it despite being impressed (which was more a factor of being impressed by the director/cinematographer’s point of focus despite differing from my own personal point of focus -- think of it like having the camera focus on the costumes while you’re fascinated by the backdrop, I guess: it’s not that you dislike the costumes, just that if you’d run the world, you would’ve spent more time on other objects).
The soundtrack, though, really impressed me, but not because it’s particularly that phenomenal of a soundtrack when you look at it on its own. No, it’s more that it’s so well integrated into the editing. Here’s an example, and you probably will need to turn it up a LOT -- this soundtrack’s range of dynamics is huge. Anyway, turn it up, and listen for the percussion-that-isn’t, that sound become audible four or five seconds in. (It builds, so I started the segment a little early.)
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Those are helicopter blades. Nothing that crazy, or unexpected, in a storyline where the military ends up combining forces with some group -- in this case, metal AI creature/monsters from outer space -- to rally around and defend the planet. Yada, yada, yada, another story told a million times over. Thing is, the majority of the time when you listen to a soundtrack, the emotional context of a moment is lessened, and I realized in listening to that segment that this is because most often, the sound mix covers three main channels/areas: you’ve got your vocals, you’ve got your foley guys (sound effects), and then you’ve got your orchestral movements (background music). Those three things get mixed in the booth around the time the editing guys are stringing together all the scenes... which means when the soundtrack is released, the average company releases the orchestral music that became the soundtrack -- and not the soundtrack+foley, which has already been processed along with the vocals and wrapped into the film itself.
(Think of the times you may’ve listened to the soundtrack from a musical, and there’s a beat of pause where someone would normally speak. In some soundtracks, the silence is sign that the vocal/spoken section was mixed/added separately, so it’s not on the “master tracks” for the soundtrack. Though I should add that not all of this particular soundtrack is orchestra+foley; a little more than half the tracks are orchestral-only in that they're the actual compositions and not the remixed versions used for accompaniament -- mostly because different scenes used different bits and pieces from each. The tracks excerpted here, though, are all from-the-movie-entirety tracks.)
I should note that from what I recall Steve Jablonsky (the composer) has worked with Michael Bay (director) on a number of projects. That means to some extent, I’d guess, Jablonsky’s had plenty of exposure to how Bay sees, edits, directs, and visualizes a story, and that would put Jablonsky in the enviable position of having a pretty damn good idea of how to compose the soundtrack to merge seamlessly with Bay’s vision... and that, I think, is why what’s normally a foley-sound is embedded in, and mingled with, the orchestral elements of the movie’s sound.
Here’s a twenty-second or so snippet from the second track, where the main theme (or more precisely, the “good guys” theme) is introduced. Again, gonna need to keep the volume up:
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Several things I’ve noticed. First, that kind of off-beat, off-pattern metallic element only shows up when the theme is the good guys’: it’s very quiet, sure, and it’s a common enough composer-method (at least in hollywood) for “creating tension” (maybe because it so clearly does not fit the standard three-four main beat timing?). But this is a story about big machines fighting other big machines while humans do their best to aid, or prevent, the battlefield -- the earth -- from being destroyed in the process. Without the right focus* it could’ve become a rather dehumanized story where the humans are nothing more than a greek chorus, so it really stands out to me that in the good-guy theme is when you hear this clangey, machine-like sound buried in the percussion section.
Now listen to a bit from the theme for the bad guys (modulating into the good guys’ theme showing up near the end).
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The strongest percussive-like element, for the bad guys, are human vocals. It’s an organic element, that I’m not sure I even really noticed when watching the movie, but when I listen to the ‘track without visuals, boy, does it jump out at you. The bad guys get this humanizing element, while the good guys get subtle reinforcement that these are machines. It’s like a composer’s way of off-setting, maybe, the risk of manipulating the audience via script or visuals into relating 100% to good-machines and demonizing 100% the bad-machines: instead, the sound reminds you the good guys are machines even if sentient, and the also reminds you that the bad guys sentient even if machines.
- * I mention the focus because Bay is so well-known and in demand in action-land for a very particular reason: he has incredible focus on what makes a story move you even when the story itself, on paper, couldn’t hang together with three rolls of duct-tape and night goggles. (And honestly, the Transformers movie is a poster child of storylines that make absolutely no sense whatsoever, throw in everything including the kitchen sink and an old bowling bag, and require you suspend disbelief so freaking much you’re practically floating five feet above the theater seats.)
If you get the chance, watch the movie again and pay attention to where the camera is positioned relative to the action: it’s almost always on the ground -- and I don’t mean at standing-human-height; I mean almost literally on the ground. The shot, early on, where a little girl stands beside a swimming pool as an autobot rises from the water and steps over her -- the camera hangs at her eye-level, and then as the machine rises up, the camera remains on the ground, with the girl in view, and tilts upwards to capture the shot -- and then angles over and around to watching the autobot step over the child.
Bay uses almost an identical sequence much later in the movie, when an autobot just barely avoids squashing a woman on the street; the woman is huddled on the ground in terror, and as the autobot goes by, the woman remains in the foreground in human-size for the duration of the shot. The point-of-view for the entire movie -- despite ostensibly having machines as main characters, for the most part -- remains always at human-level: so you cannot, as a viewer, ever get away from the sense that these machines are that awe-inspiring, and that out-of-scale to human experience. Even when watching the film, I realized just how rare were the shots in which the human characters are seen from the machine point of view: the cinematography, I think, is geared towards keeping our attention on, and our sympathies for, the humans and not the machines.
And since -- it seems to me -- that what really horrifies us, scares us, upsets us, or even pleases us -- are things that happen on a human scale, that if you want to tell a story about monsters, you have to have a human in the frame. It’s like that journalism advice I remember getting that if you say, “4,000 people died in a mudslide this afternoon in Gary, Indiana,” then it’s, well, news, but not very moving... but if you say, “Six-year old Fernando and his puppy Alistair were among the four thousand victims of today’s landslide,” then suddenly you’ve personalized the event. In this case, Bay’s focus is a visual means of personalizing what could be a pretty damn impersonal story, given the combination of machine-as-hero along with mangled-storyline-kitchen-sink-from-hell.
One last section before I get into what I meant by hearing the final showdown. This bit is taken from about halfway through the movie (if I recall correctly), and I’m highlighting it for several reasons. One, it’s a shorter encapsulation of the good-guy and bad-guy themes as they blend mid-battle, but the way it ends is particularly striking. It’s another example of the mix of orchestra+foley working together, especially near the end of the segment, and it’s not -- as CP remarked -- the normal ‘ending’ for a battle, especially one that ends with the good guys coming out on top. It’s got a very strong sense of ‘and now the dust settles’. Plus, it’s a good example of the kind of range/dynamics I’ve not really found in other soundtracks.
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This last bit I figured I’d take a screen shot of the piece, just so you can see the dynamics. This is the ‘final battle’ track, as it were. A few weeks ago I was listening to this on the plane with plenty of uninterrupted mental space, and I realized: this track may not be the most original out there, or in some ways the most subtle (though that, I think, is partially because of its mix of orchestra+foley, which means you’re getting a lot more of the clues you get in the actual movie experience, clues often lacking from other orchestral soundtrack releases). But it does follow almost perfectly a kind of template for what makes a Very Strong Final Battle -- and in particular, it made me realize that it has a segment or step along the way that, if missing from a story/novel’s “final showdown”, does weaken that final battle.
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So listening to the stages, this is what I hear. (The good stories I can name don’t all spend a lot of time on each stage, and sometimes one point merges seamlessly into the next -- although preferably all are seamless, but hey -- but my point is that none are neglected. At least, in the stories whose final conflict points actually work for me.)
0:00 - 0:25 : preface
A quiet moment where the hero is making that decision to do this. (Or, as CP calls it, “the loin-girding bit.”) Noticeably it also has a bit of a minor-key, a feeling of regret in the tonal quality. That works for me, much as it does when I’m reading the corresponding part in a story, because a hero who wants to go into the final battle -- with no regrets or second thoughts -- is usually a pretty stupid hero, to me. There’s an important distinction between “let’s kick their asses!” versus “nothing else worked, so now we have no choice but to hand out some ass-kicking.”
0:25 - 0:55 : approach
The power-shot, in Whedon’s words, that starts when Buffy says, “Let’s do it,” and walks out with the Scoobies flanking her. But it’s not just that; it’s a point of taking stock of what you’ve got, and lining it all up. It’s getting in place -- with the second half being the point where the other guys are getting in place. It’s the Jets falling into place when they meet the Sharks, it’s the Colonial Army lined up along one side of the battlefield as the British army pulls its last cannon to the front.
In this case, the approach sounds like it’s the bad guys -- there’s the vocal-percussive element, and the cellos keep the beat, but about halfway through the french horns come in (good guy musical element), and remain long and slow as they do in the main good-guy theme -- but they’re playing the bad-guy theme. Which basically is a sort of blending that (to me) speaks of all parties coming to the main point/meeting place.
0:55 - 1:20 : realization
Between “oh my god they’re here” and the first shot fired, there’s a moment in which everything kind of hangs for at least a split-second. The showdown at high noon doesn’t mean the shots are fired at high noon; there’s a passage between the start and the shot where there’s a lot of summing up going on... and, for me, there’s also got to be a point of realization: okay. We’re really doing this. This is it. It’s a confirmation of the previous decision-point, but it’s one that comes with a better pragmatic sense now that the hero is staring the conflict/obstacle/enemy in the face. Yeah, so it’s also a way to draw out tension, but it’s a crucial part, because it’s yet another decision-point. It comes with the risk of pulling back, the implied risk that the hero will back down, maybe the hope that the other side will back down instead.
A detail about this specific soundtrack is that the helicopter-like-percussion comes in during this quieter segment. That’s the sound you hear when the film is working squarely from a “human perspective”. In this case, IIRC, it’s where the military/humans move their forces into ranks of machines, a bit nervously, while others hang back out of the fighting-range and look on -- there’s the “looking down from overhead of passing helicopter” sense of removal. In terms of a story, I can think of at least three or four that have taken this ‘realization’ point and shown it from the pov of the sidekick, or an onlooker, as they go through a belated version of the hero’s decision-point made in the preface. (Braveheart comes to mind, along with a handful of US Civil War movies: the generals make the decision, the troops move out, and then some guy on the front lines gets a close-up as he goes, holy crap, I’m really here.)
The cellos, btw, fade at first and then reappear near the end of this section, and if you listen, they don’t resolve: they start at a low note, rise, drop, and then rise -- when the next section starts, listen for the violins, which repeat this pattern but an octave higher.
1:20 - 1:35 : awe
I can’t think of a better way to put it. Sure, the huge bass beat implies there’s action, but the combination of strings and melody retain the tension. The reason I pointed out the violins echoing the cellos is because if you listen specifically to the violins, you’ll hear the auditory equivalent to the literary passage I personally call the “oh fuck we’ve got to deal with that?” moment. (Yes, very technical term.)
The strings play a series of notes that start at, uh, I dunno, let’s say maybe middle-G... and slowly progress up the scale to an octave, maybe octave-and-a-half higher. (I don’t have perfect pitch, so my guess is just a wild one, and could be totally off in terms of the range, but anyway.) But the important detail that’s being played out here is that this is when the bad guys start showing just how bad they really are; it’s when the good guys get a glimpse of the rest of the damn iceberg and realize they made the original decision based on, hunh, maybe not quite so accurate information. It’s when it’s too late to back down or back out or run away, and it’s a sense of inevitability (and possibly no small amount of fatalism) as the view pulls up, up, up, or looks up, up, up -- carried along by the tension in the strings -- and suddenly David realizes just how damn freaking small he is compared to that honking behemoth, Goliath.
This is, too, a kind of payoff prior to the battle’s actual start: because if I’ve been rooting for the hero all this time, then I need to know that the hero is worth rooting for: that s/he hasn’t picked a battle that’s an easy win. I need to know that the bad guys outrank, outflank, and out firepower the hero so that when the hero does win, it’s not because it was easy or cheap. When the bad guy intimidates by revealing s/he has even more resources (and effectively proving once and for all that the hero’s worry/fear/anxiety of failure was justified) then it also justifies the worry I’ve felt as well. I need to see the hero looking up, or recognizing a bit of diminishment (or at least the possible diminishment compared to the bad guy’s powers/resources).
Without the process of looking up, of seeing how far s/he has to climb to overcome this obstacle, the hero cannot -- even in winning -- become “large”. It’s no great feat to step over a molehill, after all. In some ways, this is also a decision-point, if only an affirmation (or reaffirmation) of what's already decided.
1:35 - 1:55 : first shots
In some stories, this is the passage where being in awe throws the hero off-balance, and the first shots put him at a disadvantage. In cheaper storylines, of course, the hero has to be beaten down and then come to a decision of “I’m gonna really do this!” As CP observed, it’s like those staged wrestling matches where the guy who ends up with his face in the mat first is the one you know will rise up and conquer by the end of the
If that makes sense. Anyway. First shots, and you’ll notice the sound isn’t that dense, nor is the dynamic that high (yet): this is where both sides are kind of ‘testing’ the other. It’s not entirely at the point of no return, but it’s getting there.
1:55 - 2:00 : no return
At some point -- usually near the start of the battle -- the hero commits all resources. A bare second prior to ‘redoubling his efforts,’ maybe, or the half-second before the body of the race, after the starting gun. It’s when the potentially avoidable (even if only by outrageous means) becomes the truly inevitable. It’s not even that long, and in most stories I’ve read or seen, it’s maybe a single expression or a single paragraph, but it’s something in there -- somewhere -- that acknowledges the change from “we’re going to do this and win” to a simpler “we are doing this”. In action stories, the better ones at least, the no-return also comes with a sort of stripping down, a movement where “and win” becomes “and freaking survive.” The pretty effects and grandiose justifications strip away in this heartbeat and it’s down to committing everything and no turning back. One heartbeat, one drumbeat right there to crystallize this moment, and then...
2:00 - 2:25 : battle
The movement from frozen awareness of inevitability and into battle: the wind section goes from low range to full force pretty fast, and within a single measure everything’s going on at once. The thickness of the musical layers in this segment really reinforce the sense that everyone’s in it now, no holds-barred: the entire orchestra and a whallop of foley guys are going at it.
Action scene, baby, and the incorporation of the horns and the strings really fascinate me at this point, for what they’re saying about the points of view being shown. I mean, hrm, how to put it? The main melody line isn’t the slow grandeur of the good-guy theme, but has the faster pace (and slight minor key) of the bad-guy theme, but it’s a combination of horns and strings -- and if your speakers are really good, you might be able to hear the vocal-percussion going on in the mix, as well, but it’s buried down deep. Then the horns stretch out, and they’re echoing the rising action that the strings played in the awe-passage: but more middle-range, not so high, and not rising so far. Meanwhile the strings/percussion continue to increase pace just slightly, and the dynamics of course are going up steadily.
2:25 - 2:35 : full view
Again the rising melody line, but the sound remains kind of thick -- it’s not as condensed or thin as the point of no return -- but the driving beat is gone, or at least muffled/distanced. In the middle any conflict, it’s hard to see the edges, but I can think of a number of instances (especially in multi-view point stories/movies) where somewhere in the middle, we get a sense of the long-range view. Or perhaps it’s that the hero or one of the heroes can spare a minute to grasp the long-range, or take a guess of how it appears (or may be impacting) the borders of the conflict. Maybe it’s just someone realizing that people in the next house can hear the screaming, or maybe it’s hearing that shots have gone off-target and blown up a surburban grocery store -- but it’s a pause long enough to see that this conflict has consequences outside the small circle of the actual battle/fight/whatever.
I’m not saying that every conflict in every story has to revolve around something that saves the world, or that collateral damage must always involve stray rocket-fire, but that for a final showdown to really have impact (at least on me) there’s got to be collateral damage. It can’t just be the hero versus the anti-hero, and when the dust settles the only ones who walk away (or don’t) are them: it must reach past them, because when the damage caused is bigger than their circle, then it’s one more motivation not just to win but to win without taking forever about it.
Alternately, in some stories I’ve read, this kind of damage-beyond-the-battle is the moment when the hero, say, realizes that the bad guys are drawing the battle out purposefully for some reason, with the usual conclusion being they’ve got more up their sleeve but need the time to get set up: with the implication being that the cost to be paid will double, treble, etc. It’s still a sudden awareness of the fight as a conflict beyond just the good guy exchanging blows with the bad guy. I guess you could say it’s a point in the final showdown where the camera pulls away to give a sense of the overall scope, but that this is best done when there’s unforeseen damage occuring outside the previously narrow scope.
But anyway, it's still yet one more decision-point, but this time in light of midway through the battle: do you keep going? do you change tactics? do you pull back? do you press forward full-throttle?
A hero who enters the final conflict and has no need (or sees no need, or for whom the author gives no chance to consider a need) is a hero whose conflict -- as an echo or foundation of the external conflict -- is rather shallow. I mean, come on: wouldn't the average person be conflicted about the conflict itself, to some degree? Even if it's just passing doubt?
2:35 - 2:50 : limits
I don’t know what else to call the point in a conflict when the hero has to make the choice to (or starts to move into position in order to) limit any further duration of the conflict. Deliver the final blow, bring things to a head, strike with all you’ve got because the bad guy’s resources otherwise will drown you if you don’t act now -- whatever the story’s gist, it’s still a kind of smaller redoubling of effort, but it’s one done within a context of “we’ve lost X, and we’ll lose Y and more.” (Notice the strings repeat the rising action in this passage, as well, echoing that sense of being overwhelmed and/or not big enough to take on the bad guy and/or just plain awe at what the hero’s facing down.)
Thing is, this is both a decision point (hence the slight suspension of the overall beat) and a recognition point, and if it’s not in a story’s final conflict, I do feel cheated. Maybe I don’t always recognize it, but it’s something that must happen, and I don’t know why. I only know in the stories without this step, it doesn’t feel as... I don’t know, urgent, maybe.
This is the step that happens at the point of the limit: it’s basically when the hero -- having realized the extent of damage or collateral damage or whatever -- realizes not just that there is a price to pay, but quite possibly what that price will be. It’s the dawning horror, and I don’t mean in the hollywood horror-gore sense but in the dawning awe-terror of the truly inevitable -- in which the hero can see clearly just what the cost will be if s/he is going to win the fight.
And that segues into...
2:50 - 2:55 : cost
If the point of seeing the limit is seeing what you don’t want to lose, more than anything, and knowing that you will lose it, this is the point where you do. The driving force of the fight returns, though quieter -- which says to me that the battle continues without break, if perhaps in the background or secondary to the hero’s point of view. If you look at the wave-image, you can see the dynamics compressed for a bit, then returned but they’re at half-level compared to the full-on fight in the battle segment. Effectively, this is the fight in miniature, in the micro-level, and this fight... is lost. That’s the price.
It’s the point when Buffy realizes that despite her best efforts, it’s too late, and to save the world she must kill the man she loves; it’s when (if a tragedy) the hero takes the shot to the gut that’s going to kill him shortly, which means even if he gets to the bomb and defuses it in time, it won’t be in enough time for him -- and yet despite the loss of this battle-inside-the-battle, the hero continues to fight. Maybe for some stories this is also the underdog moment, where the hero’s beaten down and we see him fall to the ground in slo-mo and we think, oh, he’s done for! Even though we know that in good movie-fashion (or bad fiction-fashion) the hero will struggle to his feet to keep going, rally himself up to keep fighting... but in that case, the cost wasn’t much of a cost, was it? In the greater scheme of things, being beaten down to the cement -- perhaps supposed to be a form of humiliation in almost-losing, where the cost paid is that of losing face, albeit temporarily -- well, overall, if you win the war, I don’t think having to suffer getting your gut kicked in and dropping to your knees is really that much of a cost... particularly when it’s not a cost that stretches past the hero.
A true cost, one that makes the conflict that much more poignant, is when the hero him/herself does not bear the cost except as the guilty party for having created (or continued) the situation that caused another to pay the price. That’s my take on it, at least. If that collateral damage does not exist, then the conflict has no reaching ramifications; if the damage does not stretch to include that which the hero holds precious (above and beyond his teeth or nose or other bruisable body part), then the hero didn’t really suffer a cost. Okay, the possible exception there is if the hero’s sacrifice is his own life -- but even then, I’d prefer to see that sacrifice as being an active choice (again, a decision point) on the part of the hero to prevent another paying the cost.
That’s why Buffy sacrificing herself at the end of season 5, to save her little sister, is so powerful: because when the limit comes and it’s apparent there’s no way to undo the damage done by the big bad, that damage leads obviously and immediately to the cost of Buffy’s sister using her own life to repair the damage -- and so, when Buffy sacrifices herself instead, as the price, it’s one of the few times that not having a major cost outside the hero is possible... only because you know if the hero had not chosen that path, just how great the alternate cost would have been.
However, this isn’t necessarily the point that the cost is actually paid... but it is logically the point where the cost becomes both apparent, and unavoidable.
2:55 - 3:25 : desperation
That might seem like an odd title but it fits the action I logically expect (as a reader, and as someone looking for the tension when writing). For a visual, if in the previous passage the hero sees the anvil swinging and then starting to fall and tracks the line down to the hero’s sidekick unaware below -- or in the example of Buffy’s season 5 ending, Buffy looks up to see the portal open and her sister unable to prevent it but readying herself to close it -- this is the point where the battle isn’t really to win, anymore. It’s to get out in one piece, with some semblance of survival, some semblance of success but the hope of doing so unscathed is pretty much gone.
If there’s a point where the hero is justified in giving into desperation and losing his/her mind, of going berserk or going all out despite uncountable injuries or maybe even blindly injuring himself from stupid moves because he’s no longer caring for his own safety but acting solely to prevent more loss... then that’s at this point. It’s the desperate drive across the bloody field when the hero may even have already defeated the big bad in a showdown -- and yet there’s someone charging in the direction of his best friend, and if he can just -- get -- there -- in -- time --
But thing is, if you listen to the music, its minor key tells you (as you well know) that the hero can’t, and won’t. Not because we want sad points, not because we want to pay the cost, but because unless you want a hero who’s superman, who’s a useless Mary Sue, then the simple fact is that the hero’s own cost paid so far (blood, emotion, energy, whatever) is going to be part of what makes him or her unable to get there in time to prevent the cost. If the hero has anything left to exert in that final moment, after/during fighting the big bad, then obviously the big bad wasn’t that big, nor that bad: to make it possible for the hero to prevent paying the price means that the previous prices already paid just weren’t that great.
Without that, without that price -- and perhaps as importantly -- without that advance recognition of the price, and the awareness of helplessness of preventing the payment of that price -- a final conflict is cheapened. You cannot win without sacrifice, one way or another. If the bad guy is really that scary, that bad, that big, enough to drive the conflict in an entire movie or novel, then you can’t just tip a hat at him and consider yourself the victor.
Alternately this passage is the fight continuing with the bad guy even as the incoming price is recognized: the hero just plain can’t get away in time, and knows s/he won’t, but fights anyway... maybe, just maybe, if s/he can manage even a half-second, then s/he can turn, holler, warn, do something to prevent it. And, of course, it’s this split attention that’s also a downfall or drawback -- because any bad guy worth his/her salt naturally can tell the hero is distracted, maybe even anxious. So of course the bad guy will also put even more effort into being an obstacle, knowing it’s somehow keeping the hero from doing something else that’s clearly so important, maybe even more important than the bad guy.
Depending on the bad guy, natch, you may get “hey! pay attention to me, asshole!” reaction, or you may get a delighted maniacal glee as the bad guy realizes the situation as well, or some other reaction: but there'd better be a reaction. If the bad guy’s been smart enough all along to make the hero miserable all the way up to the final conflict, then the bad guy shouldn’t turn suddenly stupid and miss the big honking clues that the hero’s attention is divided for some reason. Duh.
The other reason (it seems to me) that Jablonsky's thematic/tempo-based separation works so well in terms of an analogy is because that tension-filled suspended moment of "now I can see the cost I will pay" is often pushed off, or denied, how else to put it. I guess I'm used to reading, and come on, it's a human reaction, of the protagonist seeing the inevitable and choosing to continue with this course of action rather than that one, and just stick to your guns (so to speak) and hope/trust/cross fingers that the sidekicks over there will manage to pull through.
Maybe the "no, don't deal with that, but with this" (usually the bad guy) is because the character's finally realized that s/he has to trust that the orders will be followed and s/he can't be everywhere at once; maybe it's because s/he figures it's not a really big threat and the bad guy is, maybe it's something else. But sometimes the decision in the middle of things can be to not make a decision at all -- but that's still a decision, and I should still get to see the character making it.
3:25 - 3:35 : urgency
This may be where the hero is now fighting to get to his best friend’s side, or to prevent the bomb that will take out the entire state, or whatever other cost is incoming. It might be the point where the sidekick sees the hero’s not going to make it, and is fighting to get to the hero’s side, to help. But if you listen to the music, it’s a distillation -- it’s another form of a battle-within-a-battle, but instead of being compressed, it’s stripped to its bare bones. It’s a different kind of tension, and maybe it comes as a result of things out of the hero's control -- but maybe it comes from the hero's decision previously to not act or to keep on a specific course or even to change course.
Mid-battle, there should still be consequences. It can't all be decided from the get-go. That just makes me feel like, as a reader, I should've just skipped the whole thing because if nothing happens (or more importantly, nothing changes for the protagonist), then why bother? It's like including sex scenes: don't do it unless there's some crucial point in the middle that will shift things dramatically -- and sorry, but conflict alone, two people exchanging knuckle sandwiches, isn't enough.
3:35 - 3:45 : final blow / the loss
Good stories arrange this pattern in all sorts of orders. The final blow is sometimes the hero striking down the bad guy -- even after seeing the price paid by someone, or something, important to him -- or it may be that the bad guy was taken out and despite that there was still a cost to be realized. Whether it’s Buffy standing over Glory and looking up to see the portal and her sister standing before it ready to jump, or if it’s William Wallace seeing his best friend cut down from behind and helpless to stop it and striking that last blow as not so much a victory as a final stand against complete loss... it’s still the final blow. Either the tragedy of the payment comes after, in which the hero is helpless to prevent it, or the tragedy comes before, in which the hero’s victory is colored by knowledge of the price paid.
In respect to Transformers -- err, yeah, the actual soundtrack here -- this is the point when in order to win, one character sacrifices the very thing that was the goal of the fight. Trying to avoid bogging anyone down in the details, but it’s essentially this: it becomes apparent that to destroy the bad guy requires using as a weapon the same object that is the only means to recreating the autobots’ home world. There’s a cost for you, and it smacks close of a big-frame version of nose, face, and spite: you win, but only at the cost of losing what you would’ve won. It’s the same calibre of cost paid when Buffy must kill Angel to save the world. The victory is almost hollow, and perhaps will ever after retain a question of whether the victory was really worth the price paid... except it was, but still, the price was so high.
3:45 - 4:00 : recognition
Hrm, it could be the fall, or the denouement, maybe. But in this case -- in the specific soundtrack at least -- it’s more a sense not so much of the battle coming to final glorious blow as it simply, well, ends. Win, lose, the cost was high enough that there’s no victory dance, no victorious march down main street (as there is, CP noted, in a lot of hollywood-style films). And, too, if you’re thinking about the manner of sequels in novels and movies, this kind of unresolved -- if powerful -- tonal end also contains the nucleus of a notion that the battle itself remains, however minutely, also still unresolved. If an author is going for the implication that there’s more to come, then yeah, allow this unresolved sensation to hover there for a few frames or paragraphs. But then again, even if the author wants to tell me it’s over and done yet also came at a very high price, then the unresolved element is not necessarily a question of the bad guy’s survival (or the continuation of the bad cause), so much as an indication of the hero’s own internal unresolved feelings on just how much s/he had to pay to achieve this end.
Then again, I want to see that price paid, and I want to see the hero suffer for it, too. I keep saying (and maybe some authors might listen, if I say it enough) that if you want me to believe that the bad guy is bad enough that I should spend 300+ pages with your characters worrying over and preparing for the bad guy’s full-blown all-out power, then if the good guy’s going to beat that, the good guy isn’t going to do it with no more than a wiggle of his pinky. He just might lose the entire hand, more like it. Because if he doesn’t, you-the-author have undermined every scene previous for the hero, in his/her preparation.
Which is a big fat duh, I suppose, but maybe it’s better put to say there must be echoing elements of realization, of awareness, of recognition, throughout the conflict. It’s action, reaction, action, reaction, and the real power comes not in the hero’s actions but in his reactions, and maybe just as much in his reactions that contain awareness that he cannot act -- that despite all his energy and effort to get to this point, that in the end, he is still, in some way, helpless. Maybe some folks like the underdog manipulation, but I’d rather see someone who doesn’t need to get kicked all the way to the dirt to find it in himself to pick himself up and come back swinging -- that’s just not much of a cost. I’d much rather read about someone who doesn’t plan to go down, and maybe doesn’t, but who loses on one hand and yet despite seeing the cost, knowing the price to be paid, continues to fight -- that means more to me.
Or maybe I just like a bit of regret in my victories.
Just to compare how other final battle soundtracks look... Here’s the track for Saya’s Battle, from the Blood+ soundtrack, by Mark Mancina:
You can see the dynamic’s pretty steady, with a drop-off at about 2:30 that’s the final blow/loss point... followed by a rendition of the main theme’s victory-like orchestral movement.
And the battle-scene track for Gundam 00, by Kenji Kawai:
Here there’s a segment at the start which is the lead-in for the battle, followed by battle space, with a slight break (but not a significant shift in tempo) that’s for a dropping point -- whether this is the beat-down-before-getting-up or the loss-point, I can’t recall, but the battle then continues with similar pacing and dynamics as previously.
And here’s a rare long encapsulation of an entire battle, but if you look at the range and tempo, you can probably pick out where it mimics the same patterns in the Transformers final battle-track. It’s from The Thirteenth Warrior, soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. It also clocks in at almost 11 minutes, which is way way too long to use as an example, so no, I’m not including this track. My server can only take so much.
Not sure what you might’ve taken away from this, other than the awareness that I tend to focus a bit more on the background music than most folks might (or maybe that’s just thanks to the hearing damage from those hardcore shows when I stupidly thought it would be just fine to be sitting on the stage with one ear pressed to the double Marshall stacks, damn it, and now I’m ultra-sensitive to dynamics since too low and I can’t hear and too loud and, uh, I can’t hear). Or maybe, hopefully, the next movie you watch, you’ll also find yourself paying attention to the score, to see how the themes and instruments and mixing come together to imply the series of movements that echo what you’d find in a good story... or maybe you’re still back on the whole monkey-king thing. Could be.