The first thing one notices about Todd Haynes’s HBO Mildred Pierce (April 2011) is that unlike Michael Curtiz’s 1945 film, this version does not begin with the murder of Monty Beragon: in fact, in Haynes’ version, as in the James M.Cain 1941 novel, there is no murder. Rejecting the noir tendencies of Curtiz’s film and returning to the source text, Haynes’ five-part mini series version of Mildred Pierce eschews the melodramatic action in favour of a realistic tale of mother love and middle class aspirations gone awry. In Haynes’ film as in Cain’s original, Mildred does not continue to sacrifice herself for her thankless daughter Veda, but rather brutally attacks her, survives divorce and bankruptcy, remarries her ex-husband and begins anew in her old Glendale home. While there is a climactic scene of discovery and violence, this is not the final moment for either the film or its title character.

Focusing on the quotidian and everyday, the series opens and closes in the Pierce Glendale home with a middle class couple facing the everyday clashes and failures of family life. Evoking Fassbinder more than classical Hollywood, Haynes’ film is characterized by pastels, muted lighting and the grain of film itself, a drabness and detail that is particularly noticeable in the overwhelming beige and gray mise-en-scène of the opening and closing scenes. Concluding with re-marriage, as Mildred and Bert return to the Glendale home and the marriage that opened the series, the final scene suggests a return to stasis after the excesses of the narrative arc and stresses the banal routine that lay at the heart of the affective extremes of melodramatic action. Quite unlike the epilogue structure of the Curtiz film, this ending not only does not offer the emotional satisfactions of loss and sacrifice associated with Mildred’s murderous gesture, but rather deflates affective satisfaction itself by closing with a tired, middle aged couple agreeing to forget their daughter and her troubles and get “stinko.”

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This focus on the mundane is inseparable from the crucial lack of irony in Haynes’ adaptation. Indeed, while Haynes’ films are undeniably postmodern, reflexive and intertextual, they are nonetheless affectively and intellectually sincere, a characteristic that is essential to this adaptation of Cain’s novel.1 As J. Hoberman notes in his review of the miniseries, “there’s neither camp nor irony nor reference to the Crawford vehicle.”2 But this is not to say that Mildred Pierce is without excess. For all of its social and cinematic realism, Haynes’ series is maternal melodrama at its finest and at the heart of this affective genre is that most excessive emotional material – mother love. Stressing the libidinal, erotic and narcissistic dimensions of maternal affection, Haynes interrogates the perversities and pleasures of this excessive loving as it connects with social climbing, class conflict and Depression era want.

Crucially, Haynes also considers the correlations of these class ambitions with the desires associated with stardom and spectatorship. First intent on turning Veda into a concert pianist, Mildred is delighted to hear of her movie star aspirations and even more overjoyed with her daughter’s career as a coloratura soprano. Recalling the final scene of that most melodramatic of maternal melodramas, Stella Dallas, in which the eponymous character watches her daughter’s socially advantageous marriage from a distance, Mildred at first listens then gazes from afar at her daughter’s increasing success as a opera star. According to Lacanian theory, both the gaze and the voice operate as instigators of love, as objects that fascinate, seduce and disarm. As Slavoj Zizek notes, the voice holds a particularly interesting place as a love object and “the medium of hypnotic power par excellence, the medium of disarming the other’s protective shield.” This hypnotic power is in loving evidence when Mildred first listens to her daughter sing over the radio.

As she sits mesmerized gazing at the radio, the machinic vehicle for this acousmatic voice seems to dislodge itself from its technological confines to float otherworldly throughout the outdoor space. She is overwhelmed by the voice as she moves closer to the machine voice (radio), but then flees its presence, but not its music.

Giving material weight to Mildred’s earlier insistence that Veda “has something in her,” this magical voice is both more than and less than Veda herself: it is what was “in her” all her life, that special thing that Veda had but that Mildred could not identify; but it is also that thing that is in excess of Veda herself, giving her a power and pervasive presence that is not limited to the confines of any body. As Mladen Dolar notes of the voice in psychoanalytic thought, the voice is truly “plus-de-corps” in the double sense, “both the surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the no-more-body, the end of the corporeal.” Veda’s voice is quite simply that initially mysterious but now fully amplified thing in her that is more than her. And yet the film reverses this excess of the voice – it is Veda’s body, not her voice that becomes the element that does not quite fit. As Mildred watches and listens to her daughter’s solo performance at the Philharmonic, she is both overwhelmed with emotion and slightly disturbed by the presence of Veda herself, as she backs away from the opera eyeglass close-up on her daughter’s expressive eyes: she prefers to gaze from a distance like a star struck fan.

This portrait of the mother as fan takes the series to another level in its interrogation of mother love by suggesting that the same narcissistic and immersive identificatory structures shape both spectatorship and maternal love and, in Mildred, both are shaped by pathologies of class struggle – Mildred the spectator will always gaze from afar at the fiction of upward mobility. But the film does not end with this gaze or even the hypnotic power of the voice, but rather with the quite everyday actions of a mother/ woman purged of obsessive and perverse child/ class love. Mildred gives up “chasing the rainbow” (the repeated song motif in the series) of class mobility through her narcissistic identification with what she identifies as the better version of her. But there is nothing noble in this rejection: it is more simply and more poignantly a matter of defeat. Veda as the monstrous incarnation of Mildred’s own class aspirations, is ignored but not exorcised as the parents takes solace in forgetful obliteration. As the final lines so eloquently sum it up – “to hell with her . . . Let’s get stinko.”

Image Credits:

1. Kate Winslet
2. Evan Rachel Wood

Please feel free to comment.

1. This point is indebted to conversations with Christine Evans regarding the wonderful lack of irony in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, a film that (perhaps not coincidentally) like Mildred Pierce is adapted not from the well known previous cinematic incarnation, but from the original novel.
2. Hoberman, J. 2011. Raising Cain in Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce. http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-03-23/film/raising-cain-in-todd-haynes-s-mildred-pierce/

Starting as a web phenomena, making it onto HBO’s Funny or Die Presents and winning the 2010 Jury Prize for Short Film at the Sundance Film Festival, Derek Waters’ and John Konner’s Drunk History highlights the drama of American history, the convergence and transfer between media in our modern age and the hilarious potential of vocal displacement and incongruity. With six episodes to date, Drunk History consists of a drunk individual telling the story of an historical event that is intercut with filmed re-enactments with major actors and actresses (such as Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, Paul Schneider, Jack Black, Michael Cera, Crispin Glover and Zooey Deschanel) playing the key roles. Filmed after the telling of the event, these historical segments visually recreate the story with actors lip-synching the drunk narrator’s voice. Because this voice is always a drunken one, it frequently slurs, makes mistakes, hiccups and even vomits. It is this contradiction and displacement that renders the short videos so funny and effective. Combining serious history with drunken ramblings, relatively glossy historical re-enactments with low budget interview style cinematography and vocal presence with lip-synched artifice, each episode plays with the central trope of historical re-enactment as a mode of story telling. In this combination of live telling and re-enactment, the videos stress the way that one’s current state of being (drunk, contemporary American) shapes the interpretation and telling of historical events of the past. The teller literally calls the action into being as the historical figures become puppets re-enacting what the narrator describes. This force of the present on the past is most obvious in those moments where the narrator makes mistakes, such as when Jen Kirkman refers to Richard Dreyfuss instead of Frederick Douglass, Bush instead of Washington and Clinton instead of Lincoln.

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As one would expect, the historical commentaries of Drunk History are frequently hilarious because of the mode and nature of their telling and the incongruities this suggests: use of profanity and slang; meandering or fractured narration; interference of non-linguistic noises made by the teller (sniffs, hiccups, gagging and heaving). Rendering strange the relationship between visible body and vocality, the ventriloquist voice of the drunk teller is foregrounded as it replaces the known and expected voice of the star, transforms the historical voice into contemporary slang and diction and, as in the episodes narrated by Jen Kirkman, thwarts divisions of gender. It is also noteworthy that in every episode the narrator’s voice appears to be unaware of the re-enacted life it is animating, even though the actors within the stories respond to their own narration in reflexive and interactive ways (pausing during a stutter or looking at the camera quizzically when a mistake is made, for instance). This split between the narrator and the re-enactment reworks any notion of the actors as puppets or ventriloquist dummies: their animation is an afterthought rather than an intended outcome of the narration itself.

This last point is important in considering the appeal of Drunk History. It is not only that viewers enjoy the comedic potentialities made available through witnessing the drunkenness of others, but also that the divide between an inebriated lack of self-awareness and the seriousness and purposefulness of historical narration provides an interesting paradox. In fact, Waters has commented on the importance of the process in creating these short videos: the subjects must be quite drunk and must be allowed to tell the story several times before anything can be filmed. This practice works to help the narrators make the story their own and invest themselves in the telling of it, but more importantly it gives them space to work through the inevitable performativity that comes with being filmed. As Waters notes, he needs to let them get over trying to be funny so that they can tell the story with the appropriate level of unselfconsciousness that is necessary for the effective re-enactment.

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The voice of the narrator occupies a different visual and narrational space than the actors and this displacement is an essential part of the acoustic humor in each of the episodes: the actors in the re-enactments play them straight as historical drama, complete with costuming, sepia tones and appropriate musical accompaniment, while they also reveal their awareness of the drunken historian as narrating force and make explicit their own star identities (recognizable actors in bad wigs or bald caps, for example). But more basic than this is the appeal of the displaced voice itself. As psychoanalysts, film scholars and sound theorists have noted, there is an uncanny split between the body and the voice that becomes even more extreme when that voice is recorded and manipulated. As Lacan, Dolar, Chion and Zizek have all noted, the most mundane example of this is the disturbing phenomena of listening to our own voice recorded, as on a telephone answering machine, for example. Whether used for horrific or comedic impact, the voice that does not belong or seems out of place in the visible body is a frequent trope in film and television. From the out of synch comedy of “The Dueling Cavalier” in Singin’ in the Rain to The Exorcist to the Look Who’s Talking franchise, the uncomfortable relationship between voices and bodies is clearly a central and enduring motif and it is one that Drunk History has used expertly to achieve its transmedial success.

Image Credits:

1. Drunk History

Please feel free to comment.

With black humour and precise attention to character development, AMC’s Emmy winning series Breaking Bad has garnered critical praise during its three seasons to date. A serial narrative focused on a chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) who starts manufacturing crystal methamphetamine as a way to subsidize his cancer treatment and ensure his family’s continuing financial security after his death, Breaking Bad offers a smart and frequently funny take on a “the ordinary guy turned gangster” narrative. Sure of his imminent death, White in the first two seasons embarks on a life of crime that does not change him so much as enables him to express the person he has always been. After the remission of his cancer, it becomes clear that there is more to his criminal ways than financial security as Walter White the meth cook finds confidence, satisfaction in his work and career success in ways that Mr. White the high school teacher never did.

Like many of the most highly praised series on television today, Breaking Bad expands this narrative premise into a long form serial narrative that builds upon events in a cumulative rather than episodic fashion. More than merely parsing out the story across a number of episodes, these contemporary examples of televisual seriality use the long form narrative to build mystery and intrigue in ways that have the audience searching for clues, hints or hidden meanings. In film studies, this tendency has been described in terms of narrative puzzles or games that function as complex nodes for viewer engagement. For instance, focusing on the mind game film as a variant of the puzzle film, Thomas Elsaesser argues that films such as Memento, Lost Highway, Fight Club and The Others operate as brainteasers that take delight in misleading spectators and involve them in fan-based cult-style reception. Noting that the puzzle structure of these films invites multiple viewings as well as a spectatorial attention to detail and minutiae, Elsaesser comments on the invested and frequently obsessive fan interaction with such films. Through fan forums, marketing and the creation of para-textual as well as textual games (for instance, games that arise from a film but also games within a film as in Lars von Trier’s clue based contest for The Boss of It All), these puzzle films take on a life beyond the diegesis itself. As Elsaesser terms it, a puzzle or mind game film is more than just a film, it is “a node that sustains and distributes a particular form of (floating) discourse.”1

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While Elsaesser focuses on filmic examples, his argument is illustrated even more clearly in recent televisual innovations in long form serial narratives. Jason Mittell refers to television series such as The Wire as examples of a new “complex narrative,” a phrase in which “complex” is not a descriptive or evaluative adjective but rather a designation of a new form. This kind of complex seriality is easily connected to the kind of puzzle films that Elsaesser discusses, a tendency that encourages the kind of attention to detail and investment in story that are required in order to keep audiences over several episodes of what is in some way a single narrative. This form of seriality has been likened to the installment novel and even to poetry; comparisons that suggest the complexity and intensity of both narration and viewer engagement. As Elsaesser’s analysis suggests, the filmic or televisual puzzle is “part-text, part-archive, part-point of departure, part-node in a rhizomactic, expandable network of inter-tribal communication.”2

Turning back to the example with which I began, we can see how Breaking Bad provides a clear illustration of this kind of puzzle narrative in a televisual serial form. With active fan communities and even more active niche marketing by AMC, Breaking Bad manipulates the puzzle format in unique ways, the most intriguing of which is the variation on that television narrative standard—the cold open. Popular throughout the 1950s and 60s, the cold open is most succinctly defined as a pre-credit teaser that is not necessarily or directly tied to the action of the episode itself, but is rather an attraction on its own terms aimed at catching an audience quickly and convincing them to stay.

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From the playfulness of the Los Cuates De Sinaloa music video for 2.7 “Negro y Azul” to the Lynchean 3.1 “No Mas” to the cryptic pilot episode, Breaking Bad’s cold opens have stood out: often surreal, tangential, temporally distanced and confusing, these opens are set pieces, unhinged or fractured from the narrative flow and style of the episode. The pilot episode, for instance, started with a shot of pants flying off a recreational vehicle as it sped down a dirt road and the ensuing distress of a middle aged bald man, who we will only later determine is the chemistry teacher turned meth manufacturer Walter White. Grabbing the audience through intrigue, this open displaced the temporal flow of the action by showing us the end of the episode first and then moved us backwards in time to reveal the cause and effect chain that resulted in this scene.

The puzzle nature of these cold opens is most obvious in the show’s second season, in which the cold opens for 2.1 “Seven Thirty-Seven”, 2.4 “Down”, 2.10 “Over” and 2.13 “ABQ” work together to provide clues for the climactic event in the final episode of the season: as the titles spell out, the culminating action of the season is the collision of two planes over Albuquerque. To parallel this titular puzzle, the cold open for each episode reveals a segment of mysterious action that turns out to be the clean-up of this horrific accident. What makes these opens a puzzle or mind-game rather than mere foreshadowing is that these clues are only detectable after the season has ended: they are retroactive clues, rather than hints to help us in a gradual unfolding of a mystery. That is, as the fan and marketing discourses created around the show make clear, these hints work in the nodal, paratextually motivating ways Elsaesser suggests and indicate the ways in which a variation on an old formal device works to further the innovations associated with the puzzle tendencies of complex narratives in televisual seriality.

Image Credits:

1. Bryan Cranston

Please feel free to comment.

1. Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Mind Game Film.” Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Ed. Warren Buckland. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009: 30.
2. Ibid, 33.

Perhaps most thoroughly parodied in Team America:World Police’s “Montage,” the most ubiquitous film and television cliché today is the musical montage. As the Team America parody illustrates nicely, this film and television trope is defined primarily through music: a single song or piece of music unifies the action, temporal condensation or ellipses that tend to characterize the montage. But for all of the clichéd markers of the montage, we should not take such a dominant trope in contemporary television too lightly. As Slavoj Zizek notes, clichés are powerful because they contain some element of truth. If we consider the prevalence of the montage in television today, it becomes clear that the musical montage invites serious consideration, especially as a musical moment. From the “anger” montage, to the “hard work” or “love” montage (see the website TV Tropes for a listing of over 40 kinds of montage), music is what unifies and carries the montage sequence: it is what defines the edited sequence as montage and not just a random grouping of shots or events. In this column I want to focus on a particular form of the musical montage that falls within the TV trope category of “hard work” that is a characteristic feature of any number of forensically based TV series such as NCIS, Criminal Minds or House (a forensic show on the living), but is especially prominent in the most successful forensic series in television history — the CSI franchise.

Mystifying, condensing and rendering action-packed the most mundane and sometimes painstaking acts of labour, the “hard work” montage turns banal, everyday action into sensationalized, abstracted and kinetically charged musical moments. Using popular music of different forms, this kind of montage is frequently an attempt to legitimize or authenticate the action, a key aspect of the so-called CSI effect that is theorized as a social phenomenon stemming from the popularity of the franchise. It is also key in what is frequently seen to be a fetishizing of technology in the show. For instance, in a 2007 article for FLOW, Rochelle Rodrigo discussed technofetishization in CSI and noted the role of techno and rock music in creating the fetishizing effects of the show.

Defined less in terms of its editing patterns (montage) than the characteristic use of music, the “hard work montages” in CSI are distinct from many television montage tropes insofar as they highlight work itself as the important action. At their most basic, technology or process montages in CSI are fairly brief sequences of moderately elliptical editing accompanied by music. The action is fragmented into extremely brief shots of decontextualized movement: hands shaking beakers, the use of a dropper, the placement of a slide. The music becomes the action as the shots themselves convey very little in terms of narration, thematic exploration, character development or affective engagement. Often paired with experimental editing patterns (split screens) or stylistically enhanced cinematography, the music turns a collection of fragmented images into an impression of cohesive action defined as work.

As this brief description suggests, the CSI work montage is a well defined form and the music for these montages tends to function across the series in fairly consistent ways, even though each CSI (Las Vegas, Miami, New York) has a unique musical style and a separate composer: John M. Keane, Graeme Revell/ Jeff Cardoni, Bill Brown. Across all these series, the process montage dominates as does the overall presence of music. And yet, it is important to note that this prominent place of music as a unifying force is not restricted to these technological sequences, but rather defines the franchise as a whole: Bill Brown and Jeff Cardoni both estimate that each episode requires a massive 30 minutes of music. With soundtrack sales as well as fan, forum and downloading sites devoted to the discussion and distribution of music that is heard on the three CSI series, it is clear that music plays a key role in the franchise’s ongoing popularity.

Indeed, although formally conventionalized in terms of usage, music in CSI includes a multitude of musical paradigms: opening title credits and music cues before commercials; diegetic or background music played low during dialogue or action focused sequences; process montages at crime scene or laboratory; accompanying music for effects or hypothetical dramatizations; musical interludes during emotionally focused, usually concluding, montages. In fact, if we look at music sequences in the CSI franchise, it becomes clear that the music montage is not a singular or even fully identifiable sequence, trope or cliché. In addition to the fact that each series in the franchise has its own composer, the music of any single episode reveals great variety. Ranging from score to popular song, from upbeat and techno to melodic and lyrical and from brief cue to entire song, the music is varied in tone, character and instrumentation. The presence of the music is equally diverse as it operates as background and foreground throughout a number of visual moments: even if we restrict these moments to montage sequences, we note that these sequences are difficult to define in a coherent way as they include crime scene, laboratory, action sequence and concluding montages. Other than the separation from dialogue driven moments in the show, the music montage is less a separate form than a pervasive technique that weaves in and out of the show’s more dialogue driven sequences.

While it might be too harsh to say that the entire show is made up of a series of clichés (see the YouTube photomontage of David Caruso’s sunglass moments as well as parodies of the show by The Simpsons, MADtv, Saturday Night Live or Jim Carrey), it is clear that the musical montage does not hold an exceptional place in terms of heavily formalized and conventionalized CSI moments. In fact, in some ways the music might be among the most varied stylistic elements of the franchise. If we take the CSI “hard work” montages as an illustration of one form of montage, we realize the variety across a single franchise, series, season or episode as well the lack of definitive separation from the stylistic and formal conventions of the series’ non-montage based moments. Well-defined enough to be easily recognized in any parody, the musical montage proves to be a multidimensional trope that is difficult to define with any certainty even within the highly conventionalized format of a franchised forensic series.

Image Credits:

1. Flickr

Please feel free to comment.

In a recent article published in the journal Music, Sound and the Moving Image, Michele Hilmes questions the silence on sound and music in television studies. Arguing for the necessity of studying this essential aspect of television aesthetics, form and reception, Hilmes notes that television’s roots in radio as well as its streaming seriality distinguish television sound from film sound. While it is commonplace for scholars, technicians and artists working in television to note the fundamental noisiness of the medium (verbocentric and musical, television sound is rarely silent), there has been very little research in the area of television sound and music. Confronting this silence with the acoustic richness of television’s radio roots, Hilmes makes a case for considering the medium’s streaming structure as an integral part of its musical and aural fertility.

In my last column I related television’s seriality to the ritualistic and repetitive nature of the opening credits and the music associated with them. As I argued there, opening credits can attain an aesthetic and cultural impact and significance that cannot be subsumed under the functional analysis of the informational structure of the credits themselves. Credits frequently surpass the information they give and a large part of their aesthetic, stylistic and affective impact is the music associated with them. Whether a song, original score or a new version of a well-known hit, the opening music for a series plays a crucial role in the success and influence of not only the credit sequence but often the series as a whole.

Music also of course plays a large role in the paratextual economic synergies associated with a series: a good opening sequence can create a hit song as in Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” from True Blood, make a composer’s career, increase the popularity of a show or renew and redefine a series in a new season. For instance, the controversial new opening credits and song for Big Love’s Season 4 radically changed both song and visuals in order to reflect the changing emotional and narrative events of the series. While a number of series have changed opening credit songs and visuals over the years, the shift in Big Love’s opening can be read as indicative of a crucial thematic and narrative shift – the move from brightly lit ice skating accompanied by The Beach Boy’s “God Only Knows” to falling through darkness scored by the Engineers’ ambivalent and questioning “Home” is indicative of the changing lives and certainties of the characters in the series.

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But beyond the credits alone, the role of music within television series offers insight into the fundamental differences between film and television sound outlined by Hilmes. For a composer associated with a series, the length, repetition and formal specificities of artistic creation are all impacted by the streaming seriality of the medium. Rather than creating a score for a single film, the television composer works across a changing landscape of narrational, thematic and characterological events and nuances. Creating motifs and themes that work throughout a large number of episodes is a far different challenge than composing for a single film. Add to the greater overall use of music within television and the aesthetic changes and challenges that come with working with a number of different directors, the art of the television composer provides opportunities, challenges and rewards that shape the style, form and aesthetics of his or her work.

For instance, if we consider the work of Daniel Licht, the composer for Showtime’s Dexter, we note the prominence of music in creating the overall tone and atmosphere for the show. Visually the show foregrounds the paradoxical parallel of its brightly lit and colourful Miami locale and Dexter’s “dark passenger” of serial killing. This is immediately palpable in the opening designed by Digital Kitchen that places the everyday in the context of the grotesquely violent (like American Psycho, Dexter’s opening uses food as a visual analogue for blood), a contextualization that is stressed by the Rolfe Kent’s opening music, a blend of upbeat Latin rhythms with a slight sinister edge. This visual paradox of brightness and beauty and sinister ugliness is carried throughout the series, but is most palpable in the series’ emphasis on blood splatter patterns, especially visible in Dexter’s lab where the bright, saturated vibrancy of red stands out against white, clinical backgrounds. In the opening credits, crime scene, lab and images hanging from the walls of Dexter’s office, blood becomes a purely aesthetic subject: blood splatters take on the visual style of abstract art.

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This predominance of blood is musically evident as well, as Licht’s signature “blood theme” is almost as prevalent as Dexter’s own musical theme in the soundscape of the series. Given the series’ focus on a blood splatter analyst/ vigilante serial killer, it is not surprising that Licht’s music for Dexter articulates the dark, uncanny and grotesque. Emphasizing unusual percussion (Licht even uses human bones as percussive instruments) and minor keys, Licht’s music stresses the intensity of action and the melancholic sadness that shape Dexter’s character. In combination with the foregrounded voiceover (Dexter’s stream of consciousness/ direct address to the viewer) and elaborate and viscerally present sound effects, the music of Dexter provides the context and content of much of the series’ violent and bloody action.

In combination with the musical scoring, foley and sound effects concentrate attention on the sounds of bodily violence and dismemberment. For instance, in addition to the “blood theme,” there are musical cues tied to Dexter’s signature cheek slicing, his gathering of killing tools and his acts of murder. Sound effects and foley are also played loud in the mix, especially those relating to violent physical action such as blood splatters, body blows and plastic bags containing body parts being dumped over the side of Dexter’s boat. These moments usually downplay dialogue as music and effects take over to convey action and bodily presence.

In Dexter violence and the body have an acoustic presence equal to that of any character – tools sing, blood has tunes and body blows weave in out of the percussive elements of Licht’s score. Each episode features repeated themes and motifs with certain developments, variations and nuances across the series as a whole, but the dominance of the “blood” and “Dexter” themes unifies the action across the series and offers an affective and narrational context that moves beyond the weekly repetition of content. A serial killer is by definition repetitive, so a television series on serial killing suggests a kind of synchronicity of form and content – the seriality of television was made for the serial killer and Dexter’s wild popularity confirms this. Sold on soundtracks, posted on youtube, discussed in internet forums, Licht’s score holds a prominent place in this popular seriality and it is in large part recognized as a key aspect in making uncanny and dark the brightly lit and colourful mise en scene and cinematography.

Blood is a crucial part of this bright mise en scene – a primary colour most often framed against blinding whiteness, blood becomes an aesthetic element in Dexter and, as we have noted, a musical one. Emphasizing this musicality, my title takes its cue from Godard’s famous “that’s not blood, that’s red”: Godard’s answer to attacks on the violence of his films reminds his viewers of the aesthetic, performative and artificial nature of cinema.

Godard insists that blood in film is first and foremost an element of aesthetics, cinematography and mise en scene, and television crime shows such as Dexter remind us that music is part of this mix as well. As a blood splatter analyst, Dexter always reminds us that blood tells stories, but if we listen closely, we also realize that it sings.

Image Credits:
1. http://www.d-kitchen.com/projects/dexter-main-title#
2. http://www.sho.com/site/dexter/episodes.do
3. http://pjmix.tumblr.com/post/377787059/jean-luc-godard-pierrot-le-fou-1965

Opening title sequences seduce, invite, prepare and inform their audiences. Frequently foregrounded and formally complex, the opening sequence can attain a level of import far beyond its introductory capacity. Forming a kind of audiovisual contract with the viewer, television opening credits represent a privileged space of narrational suspension, cognitive mapping, libinidal activation and spectatorial engagement: in short, they can be both a space of pure pleasure in image and sound and one that sets the stage, tone and atmosphere for the ensuing action. Especially when accompanied by a voice-over, they frequently also offer essential narrative points and information. For all of this significance, import and visibility, the opening credit is a much under-theorized and under-analyzed audiovisual space. Despite numerous websites, blogs and internet top ten lists, there is very little scholarly research into the space of the opening sequence in either film or television.

Indeed, because of the television series’s fundamental repetitive seriality, the opening sequence is a particularly integral and intriguing field for analysis, a fact that networks such as Showtime and HBO have recently recognized if we look at recent innovations in their series’ title designs. The willing viewing of, and listening to, the opening sequence of a TV series on a weekly, daily or hourly basis (depending on your viewing situation) is a unique spectatorial experience suggestive of the potential import of the space of the credits. It is crucial to remember here that this audiovisual experience is absolutely optional in televisual viewing – there are no implicit norms, coercive forms or social prohibitions in the viewing or non-viewing of opening televisual sequences. Whether viewed streaming on-air, on video or downloaded online, the attention paid to the opening sequence is a non-compulsory and discretionary activity.

It is also an audiovisual experience imbued with intense pleasure, concentration and engagement. A quick look at a few key websites considering opening sequences as well as a glance at youtube remakes of openings indicates the level of audience engagement in these seemingly secondary, formally non-diegetic, paratextual televisual moments that frequently have little to do directly with series content. Producers, designers and composers have clearly noticed this power of the opening sequence. For instance, the work of Los Angeles based a52 and Seattle’s Digital Kitchen have garnered awards, attention and a wide popularity verging on cult fandom with sequences characterized by atmospheric, tonal and audiovisual sophistication and ambiguity. Together, these two design companies are responsible for a large number of the television title sequences shortlisted by different internet and fan sites: Dexter, Six Feet Under, True Blood, Nip/ Tuck (Digital Kitchen) and Carnivale, Deadwood and Rome (a52). Sharing stylistic experimentation, all of these opening sequences suggest the powerful emotive and tonal paratextuality of the title sequence.

Although stemming from a literary framework, Gerard Genette’s concept of the paratext has been an influential one in media studies. In a media context, it indicates not only the space of the opening and closing credits, but also advertising, fandom and trailers and other elements that work alongside a text (in this case a film, television show or series), but that are not strictly a part of the main diegesis of that text. With opening title sequences, we see the way this concept both productively expands and problematically restricts the critical engagement with main title design: as the afterlives, fandom and aesthetic appreciation of main titles indicates, many sequences acquire a textual status that operates in conjunction with the main text but not in a secondary parasitical relationship. In this way, opening credits can be (and sometimes are) seen as short films, works of art in their own right and not simply a medium for advertising the main text. This can be tied to the willingness of audiences to engage in repeat viewings: there is an appreciation and pleasure in the sequence itself that cannot be accounted for by the textual analogue of the book jacket cover.

In order to explore this in a little depth I want to look at the affective engagement, abstraction and experimentation in the paratextual space of the opening credits for True Blood [view] and Deadwood [view]. Both of these opening sequences are marked by central ambiguities, as the openings give impressions and tone but relatively little information. This ambiguity is key as the sequences work on an abstract rather than narrational level: neither of these sequences is particularly informative about the series, neither clearly indicates narrative focus, genre or story and neither features a central character. In these sequences, we have no real sense of characters or storylines, yet each is strong in conveying atmosphere, a sense of the historical past and a tonal gothic.

In both Deadwood and True Blood, the emphases are emotional and abstractly conceptual: suggestive of the series and poignant to those familiar with the show, the sequences on their own contain little that is informative or preparatory for the viewer. For example, the opening of True Blood trades in a kind southern gothic through a blending of archival footage of religious ritual, clansmen, animal decay and violence and erotic spectacle. Other than the billboard decrying fangs, there is no indication of the series’ concentration on vampires and the supernatural; instead, natural decay and degradation pair with images suggestive of a strong desire for human interaction, sexual and spiritual. As the producer for True Blood Alan Ball has noted, the opening for the series works toward abstract conceptualism, rather than narrational detail: “I wanted a sense of the twin polarities of the need for transcendence as it plays out in the rural south – of church and sort of whipping yourself up into an evangelical frenzy and the honkytonk on Saturday night where you basically do the same thing only through drugs and hooking up and getting into brawls.” 1

Similarly trading in abstracted and aesthetically beautiful imagery, Deadwood’s opening sequence gives a sense of period and place, but only in very non-specific terms. Fractured images of a butcher, the radiance of blood running down a white screen and a horse running in the wild coalesce to emphasize a vague sense of the dialectic of freedom and restraint, life and death. The brownness of the series’ cinematography is given this privileged moment of quiet respite as the isolated images invite a concentration that the cacophony and muddiness of the actual series does not allow. These effects are intensified in the musical opening that offers the plaintive strains of a fiddle that is tonal and pleasurable, but also indicative of melancholy and loss.

I emphasize the auditory aspect, because it is crucial to recognize the place of music in the opening credits. Title songs or themes set tone, mood and play a significant role in both the appeal (or lack of appeal) of the title sequence and the pleasures that can be found in its repeated viewing. Studies on music and cognition have shown that familiarity breeds enjoyment: we are more apt to like a piece of music the more often we hear it, a fact known by mainstream radio, music and culture industries. Together with the experimental, fractured and imagistically oriented visual track of both of these openings, the title music works to mark the opening sequence as a distinct and singular space: David Schwartz’s innovative opening theme “featuring Fiddle, Cavaquinho, Weissenborn, Guitar, Harmonium, Duduk, and Kitchen Pots,” and Jace Everett’s country song “Bad Things” have both taken on lives outside their series-based paratextuality, a status reflected in the opening sequences themselves.

Not merely ancillary, informational, functional, commercially based advertisements for the series, the opening sequence is both an integral part of both Deadwood and True Blood (and many others) and a textually cohesive, if not totally independent, cultural and aesthetic object. Engaging in a contract with the repeat viewer, luring in the neophyte and seducing all, the well designed opening sequence surpasses the boundaries of paratextuality to become a ritualistic event, enacted before every viewing and appreciated as a unique televisual moment, one that becomes more exceptional in its serial repetition.

Image Credits:

1. True Blood title sequence
2. Deadwood title sequence

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1. http://truebloodnet.com/true-blood-filming-opening-sequence-designer-moves/