The terrorist has all the best tunes

Writing her initial impressions of Olivier Assayas' Carlos from the Cannes Film Festival in May, my friend Manohla Dargis admitted something about the picture, which she largely admired, was bugging her: "I'm not sure what I think about all of the groovy music—but that's what second viewings are for." Having had a second viewing, she expands on her thoughts about the film's soundtrack music in her review of the film in today's New York Times: "Just as startling is the thrum of electric guitars revving up in the 1981 song 'Dreams Never End,' by the postpunk band New Order, which accompanies Carlos as he throws the bomb and hurries away. The music feels dangerously off-putting at first because it’s unclear if Mr. Assayas is trying to sex up the violence, its perpetrator, both or neither. But as the guitars carry over into the next scene — a seemingly unremarkable yet crucial pause in the action in which Carlos listens to a report about the bombing and then clutches his genitals while gazing in a mirror — the music feels a lot less like an empty device, one used simply to pump the story, and more like the soundtrack you might expect to be playing inside the head of a world-class self-mythologizer like this one."

Yes, there's that. And there's definitely more as well. Music is incredibly important to Assayas personally, and the way he uses it in his films always reflects a multiplicity of concerns. His feature prior to Summer Hours, for instance, comes to it denoument proper to the strains of the Plasticenes' peppy, disarming bit of contemporary Gallic electropop "Loser," which is very fitting; but it is no accident that the film's actual end credits roll up to a piece of countercultural pastoral by the Incredible String Band. 

While the film's story begins in the early '70s and ends with until Carlos' capture by French authorities in 1994, the songs used on its soundtrack (with at least one notable exception) were recorded and released in the span of time that encompassed the ostensible birth of punk rock (as a commodity) on one end, and the start of the Reagan era on the other, that is, between 1976 and the early '80s. The music is mostly tensile, edgy, guitar-based punk or "alternative" rock. It's appropriate to the action, yes, creating a particular kind of trebly tension that's like a more "New Wave" version of the feeling created by Scorsese's classic-rock-with-cocaine sequence near the end of Goodfellas. But the temporal evocations the music carries are just as significant to making its themes felt. The film makes pretty clear, in its final third, that Reagan's Cold War pushback against the Soviets and other ostensible Communist and/or rogue states was not at all ineffectual, and in fact threw quite the monkey wrench into the operations that men such as Carlos were largely bungling throughout their "heyday." So while Dargis' point about the possible soundtrack-of-my-life point for the character, there's also that dimension, which ties into a larger music-geek dimension. The use of New Order music gains in resonance if/when you recall that New Order was a band that rose from the ruins of Joy Division after the latter group's lead singer took his life in May of 1980. These events have little to do with geopolitics, to be sure, but they're zeitgeist markers, by the same token. 

In my interview with him, Assayas talks about how important it was for him to use "Sonic Reducer" by The Dead Boys during the scene in which the extremely fervent and murderous terrorist known as Nada gets into a shootout with the Swiss border patrol. Nada is the most "out of control" of the terrorists we meet in the film; similarly, the sentiments expressed in "Sonic Reducer"'s lyrics have a pretty definitively anti-social perspective. First verse: "I don't need anyone/don't need no mom and dad/don't need no pretty face/don't need no human race/I got some new for you/Don't even need you too." And by the finale, the singer boasts "I'll be a pharoah soon," a slightly highbrow iteration of the up here/down there scenario originated by Question Mark and the Mysterian's "96 Tears." Assayas talks about Nada being the most arguably "punk" of her ilk. And of course the punk group the Dead Boys were a splinter of Rocket From the Tombs, a proto-punk Cleveland outfit, the other half of which became Pere Ubu; Ubu's David Thomas wrote the lyrics. Thomas in interviews intimates that the perspective of these songs was adopted from the teen angst of such tunes as Alice Cooper's "Eighteen;" RFTT and later Ubu's "Final Solution," he recalls, began as an adaptation of Blue Cheer's cover of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues." Having all of these associations bouncing around one's head as the scene in Carlos plays out is, for me, one of the film's signal pleasures. (Assayas' use of New Order and Pere Ubu music in his early feature Disorder is something I may get to in a later post.)

As I mentioned in the intro to my Assayas interview, I was VERY slightly and peripherally involved in helping the director out with the soundtrack; he wanted to use some music by the Feelies in the film, and was getting some not-inconsiderable-resistance from the U.K. record label that had recently reissued the first two records by that band. Via the band's drummer, Stanley Demeski, who's an old friend, I helped Assayas make contact with Bill Million and Glenn Mercer, the band's guitarists and songwriters,who in fact are the licensors of that material, and who have always had very specific ideas of their sound and how they want their music to be used in such contexts, if at all. They are not known for granting permissions willy-nilly, and I gather that there was a lot of back-and-forth before the four minutes or so of Feelies music that wound up in the film wound up there. Where Assayas did not get to use the Feelies stuff he wanted, or as he wanted, he filled in the space sometimes with stuff by Wire, who were definitely on a similar creative wavelength as the Haledon band's back in the late '80s; we hear the former band's propulsive '78 single "Dot Dash" at least twice in the film.

"Hey, did he ever get 'Higher Ground'?" Stanley asked me the last time I saw him; that song is from the band's 1988 album Only Life, made for the then-major-label A&M, and apparently the band itself isn't quite sure where the licensing rights for that record currently reside. As it happens, he did not, and I'm curious as to where he wanted to use it in the film, although I can hazard a guess (I think it would fit nicely/ironically at a particular spot in the final third). He did, on the other hand, get the recently departed guitarist Davy Graham's "Jenra," one of the great musician's wonderful Middle-East-tinged tunes, off of the very mixed 1968 album Large As Life And Twice As Natural (this is the exception I mentioned earlier), which kicks off with one of the most godawful covers of "Both Sides Now" perpetrated by anyone, anywhere. That he made it past that anomalous atrocity in Graham's oeuvre proves yet again what an encyclopedist, and ardent miner, Assayas is in such matters. 

Comments

[Sam Adams]

There's a funny resonance between Assayas' use of the Feelies at a pivotal moment and the fact that his wife opens her most recent movie with the Modern Lovers' "Egyptian Reggae," which sounded like a Feelies song even before they covered it. Kismet, or something.

[Tom Carson]

One thing I love about the "Sonic Reducer" shootout sequence is that the Dead Boys never did quite cut it as punk immortals, which struck me as adding yet another sneakily reductive twist to Assayas's take on the demented terrorists = rock stars equation that Carlos and his kind lived by. I mean, it's not like he used "Anarchy in the UK" or whatever, in which case he could've been fairly accused of romanticizing.

[bill]

This is all very interesting (which sounds sarcastic, but isn't). I'm going to do my damndest to watch this whole thing over the weekend.

[Kent Jones]

His way with music has always been sharp. He uses "Debaser" by the Pixies to powerful effect in PARIS AT DAWN, and I really love the way Brian Eno's music works in CLEAN.

[Mark Asch]

The nice/ironic place you had in mind for "Higher Ground" is the Berlin Wall/family postcard sequence, I assume? (currently scored to your "notable exception" to the post-punk, "Pure and Simple," by the Lightning Seeds, which I think works great, actually, though again daringly noncontemporaneous). "Only Life" is a really great record about domesticity and its, well, undertow, and in addition to having come out the year before the Wall came down I can see the plaintive, tense "Higher Ground" getting really well at the discontent/contentment coursing through that really astonishingly complex personal/political montage.

[James Keepnews]

I did feel the disjuncture during the moment of post-explosion narcissistic self-regard -- a scene that appears to be recognized as sort of an instant classic -- and music scored many years after the historical events. And of course New Order's sound at that early point is very much a template for 80's British Not-So-New Wave thereafter -- when I heard it on the soundtrack, I initially thought it was a Cure song.

A word for Sonic Youth's work in DEMONLOVER, some of their very best of recent vintage and surprisingly varied in texture and dynamic. I'd love to hear more soundtrack work from our heroes.

[Steve Macfarlane]

NGNRNGRNGRNNGRNGRNRRGR.

saw it last night. is Any kind of soundtrack listing online?