August 2010

Not long ago I posted the first part of an analysis of the music in Christopher Nolan’s film, Inception. Before that I had analyzed the film’s emotional over- and under-tones and had reviewed the film (giving it a glowing review, actually). Now, I present to you the second part of my analysis of the score for Inception. The Musicology of Inception: A Simple Score, or Musical Genius? (Part Two) II. A Layered Cake of Musical Notes While much has been said about Christopher Nolan’s and Zimmer’s attempt to make the music of Inception a character in the narrative of the film via “No Regrets”, very little has been said about Zimmer’s attempt to make his score reflect a key element of Inception’s novum: the dream within a dream–within a dream. This seems to me to be a gross oversight on the part of critics, particularly those that have criticized Zimmer’s limited technicality.1 For the rest of this piece, I am going to focus on “Time,” one of the most popular songs from the album, which accurately reflects what I am trying to argue. What Zimmer’s score seems to do most effectively is expand upon the notion of layering within Inception‘s narrative. Anyone who has seen the film knows that it is a sequence of things built on top of one another, all of which come crashing down in the final moments of the film. Much like the film, Zimmer’s song “Time” is also built in layers, but not in the traditional sense of layered musical scores. Most scores, after all, are layered, because they must be in order to accommodate the range of instruments that make for beautiful music. But “Time” is layered in a much different sense, because it does not begin as a sea of harmonic instruments, but as a pair or trio of sounds (a piano and one or two electronic-sounding elements to enhance the deeper tones). The song starts here because it is establishing the basic structure of the entire song, and the structure of the narrative, which we’ll come to shortly. Every 32 beats (in 4/4 time, in case you’re wondering) is a repetition of that particular layer’s contribution to the song, repeating essentially the same 32 beats through all the succeeding layers; these layers typically introduce one to four new instruments, from strings to brass to percussion. All of these elements build and build until the climax, which is a sudden tapering off of all but a reduced form of the strings, the piano at normal, and a heavily reduced monotone base beat that sits underneath the rest, almost as if it were an echo of all that came before. From there, the song is reduced layer by layer until only the piano remains. Why is all of this important? Because this is the exact structure of the movie, and not in the sense that all movies are a building and building of elements to a climax. No, “Time” is an echo, if you will, of the dreamscape of Inception. The dream within the dream–within the dream. Each addition of a level of dream is as much a repetition of what came before and an addition of something new as the song “Time.” Even the tapering off of the song is a mirror of the sudden eruption of the layers by the “kick riding” that occurs. But “Time” also has a curious placement in Inception, which says something else about how Zimmer’s score and Inception‘s narrative consist of multiple interpretations. In the film, “Time” plays from the moment Cobb “awakes” on the airplane to the moment he sees the faces of his children. To interpret “Time” in this context is somewhat tricky, because it would seem that the layering of the music is not necessarily relevant to Cobb’s final moments. Layers, however, do exist for Cobb, not simply because he is a former “architect” (builder of the dreamscapes) or a dreamscaper. The buildup of Cobb’s narrative, as I have discussed in part here, is one of psychological elements. Cobb’s relationship with his wife and his children, and even those around him, are caught in two fundamentally oppositional elements (in the sense that one is a singular, and the other is a multitude): his obsession with getting back to his children at any cost, and his obsession with the death of his wife, his involvement in it, and his need to change the course of his own history through his memories. The latter of these is most important to the discussion here. One of the important scenes of the film is also the most telling when it comes to this idea of “layering” in relation to Cobb. When Ariadne descends into Cobb’s dreams, she discovers that they are actually a buildup of his fears, regrets, and memories, the last of which have been damaged to varying degrees by the first two. The result is Cobb’s mind consists of layers (relayed through the metaphor of an elevator) that are not entirely secure, since most of them can be punctured by the projection of his wife (typically the distorted version of her, which seems to be the strongest). The fact that these issues spill over into the other dreamscapes we’re exposed to throughout the film is something worth acknowledging. Cobb’s psychological makeup, thus, is affected by its layers and the interaction of his competing desires (children and wife). While those layers are not necessarily building up in the same sense as the climactic dreamscape of the film, they are at least reflected in how Cobb’s narrative invades that dreamscape and closes in the same hurried fashion, something I noted earlier in the design of “Time.” Since “Time” is as much a reflection of the layering of the narrative as it is an introduction of tension, the end of the song and the sudden burst of emotional closure for Cobb in the end of the film go hand in hand. All that tension between Cobb and his

(You can read my review of Inception here and my other analytical post about the issue of emotion in the film here.) (Note: Because this particular post has become far longer than I had originally intended, I’m going to split it into two parts.) The Musicology of Inception: A Simple Score, or Musical Genius? (Part One) Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Inception that can be easily externalized pre-DVD-release is the musical score composed by Hans Zimmer. Much of the discussion over Zimmer’s score has centered on two positions: an ingrained hatred for Zimmer’s work, often based on legitimate criticisms, and an incredible misunderstanding of Zimmer’s musical style and its importance in the discussion of Inception‘s narrative. Both issues will be addressed in these two posts on musicology. What sets Zimmer apart from many film scorers is not that he is a technically destitute composer, but that his scores seem to rise to the challenge of accentuation despite their technically vacuity, largely because Zimmer, unlike other composers, understands, on some intuitive level, that film scores must necessarily reflect the film and must impose themselves upon the film medium to amplify the effects produced by all the other aspects of film production (acting, directing, cinematography, CG, etc.). Inception‘s score, thus, is perhaps one of Zimmer’s most complicated musical achievements due to the way in which it creates a dialogue with the film; it is also a score that has already begun to rack up a considerable amount of vitriol, general criticism, and so on. Sadly, many critics have missed what makes Zimmer’s score function so well within Inception‘s narrative, which is the subject I’d like to discuss here and in the post that will follow. There are two elements that I would argue are central to understanding the relevance of Zimmer’s score for Inception: audio manipulation and musical layering. Both are also relevant to the discussion of Inception‘s narrative structure, which will become apparent, I hope, as you read each section. The best course of action, I think, is to take these in order of importance, which leaves us with Zimmer’s experimentation with audio as a starting point. I. Manipulation: Dropping the Audio Levels A less than astute reading of music in Inception would bring one to the growing presence of audio manipulation within Zimmer’s various film scores. None is more obvious than that of The Dark Knight, another Christopher Nolan vehicle, in which Zimmer was given free reign to develop a cacophony of sounds taken from a variety of sources in order to create something that could represent the feel of Nolan’s second and most famous comic book adaptation. The resulting score for The Dark Knight is, understandably, forgettable only if one is looking for familiar themes–like you might with a John Williams score–but not if one is looking for the best example of an attempt by a composer to create an exact musical equivalent for what amounts to an intensive character study–specifically, of the Joker. Zimmer, as such, is not afraid of experimentation, nor one who is new to it, something that many film composers could not say with confidence. But Inception is slightly less ambitious than The Dark Knight, though no less important in terms of what Zimmer’s audio manipulations represent. Unlike The Dark Knight, which is based on a multitude of often inharmonious sounds, Inception is primarily focused on a particular musical element: that of the Edith Piaf version of the song “Non, je ne regrette rien.” If you’ve seen the film, then you understand the importance of “No Regrets” (the English title that I’m going to use throughout the essay to save space) for the various mechanisms of the dreamscape. Zimmer and Nolan have both acknowledged that “No Regrets” is the origin of the score, although this is only obvious in the title song, which uses a severely decelerated brass blare that follows the same beat–this beat also regularly reappears at other moments in the film. The manipulation of “No Regrets” by Zimmer, however, extends far beyond multiplications or divisions of tempos, beats, and tones; for each layer of dream, there is a degradation of the classic French tune, which, as you get deeper and deeper, makes one thing quite clear: the title song is the state of limbo. Limbo, if you haven’t seen the film, is the lowest level of the dreamscape that you can enter before death. The best real-world analogy to limbo is a coma, in which one’s conscious self recedes deep into the psyche and is lost–in Inception, we’re told that staying in limbo reduces your brain to mush. Zimmer’s score is absolutely a reflection of this. For each step downward, Zimmer reduces the tempo, dampens the sound, and manipulates the actual audio to merge the spondaic tonal qualities of “No Regrets” with synthesizers and blaring brass instruments. This reduction is demonstrated quite clearly in the film as the sounds reverberate down the levels to each group of characters until they are all aware of the impending “kick” (the act that “wakes you up”). Part of this manipulation is to denote time, since each level of dream is also on a different plane of mental time–i.e. the deeper you go, the greater time dilates. For Zimmer to play with music in this way, it signals a kind of musical composition that is not simply an accent to a visual medium, but as much a part of that medium as every other aspect. Zimmer’s score cannot be externalized entirely from the medium it was written for without removing the actual meaning and importance of the manipulated elements. As such, to criticize Zimmer for his lack of technical grace–such as in this Amazon review–is to make a grand assumption about what constitutes technicality. Zimmer’s score is absolutely composed of simple movements of notes and chords–particularly in the case of the most popular song from the album, “Time”–but that simplicity is so intimately connected to the structure of the film that its