There’s a moment in Music by John Williams, Laurent Bouzereau’s wonderfully entertaining and informative documentary about the life and music of legendary film composer John Williams, in which almost as equally legendary film director Steven Spielberg puts forth the theory that in order to truly understand the brilliance of John Williams’ film scores (or any film score), one should watch a scene from any one of the movies he’s composed a score for without the music that accompanies it.
In the trailer for this documentary, the scene that dropped the music to demonstrate this idea was the iconic opening of Spielberg’s Jaws (in the documentary itself, it’s the opening train sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), in which a young swimmer goes out for a night swim while the man she was flirting with just moments ago lies drunkenly passed out on the beach.
What’s funny is that Steven Spielberg is asking us to do an impossible thing. That scene is so iconic and so thoroughly etched into our collective pop-culture consciousness that it’s borderline impossible to imagine that scene without music. But in asking us to ponder that idea, Steven Spielberg is inadvertently making a slightly more profound point. Our brains will always fill in the gaps for us. Every time I’ve watched a movie scene with the music score dropped out, especially one that John Williams scored, my brain does all the work for me and I can hear the music whether it’s there or not. That scene is truly iconic but is but one of countless iconic scenes Williams has scored.
That’s the real power of John Williams’ music, though. Just thinking of those two Jaws notes, first E and then a half-step up to F, played on the bottom register of the lower string section, instantly instills dread and fear in anyone who hears those notes, whether we’re at the beach on a warm summer day or just playfully swimming in a chlorinated pool 1,000 miles and impossibly away from the nearest shark. That’s how you know art truly hits.
When we grow up and get older, we tend to forget about some of the pieces of art that filled our young hearts and souls. More often than not, that’s just a feature of the aging process. We get older and have new life experiences and suddenly the stuff that gave our young lives meaning or added depth doesn’t hit in the same way when we’re adults with all our big bad serious thoughts. When I think of that dynamic, I instantly think of the books of Stephen King and how I used to inhale every piece of Stephen King penned batshit insanity that I could get my hands on. Whatever kind of terror inducing fiction that dude was selling, my young ass was buying. But then at some point, what was once a book to book to book obsession became something I’d only visit occasionally. Books that I used to be flying through now sit on my bedside table either unopen or half read and abandoned. And before I knew it, they left my bedside table altogether. Like the kids in his novella The Body (adapted into the movie Stand By Me), King’s works and I just kind of grew apart, even though I look back on all of the time I spent reading those books with nothing but fondness. (Quick tangent: I’m writing this piece while stuck in bed with a nasty head/chest cold. It reminds me of the time I read Misery while stuck in bed for a week with a 102 degree fever. Talk about a harrowing experience).
But sometimes, that stuff we see in our rearview mirror is left in our past because we unceremoniously and purposely left it there. Like Stephen King’s books, maybe I aged out of Weird Al’s music naturally. Maybe hearing a song with fart noises in it doesn’t hit the same comedic nerve as a 47yo man that it hit as an uber dork 11yo kid in 1988. And maybe I stopped collecting baseball cards because at a certain point staring at cards with the images of ballplayers on the front and then memorizing their stats on the back wasn’t as fun as watching Headbangers Ball on MTV. And maybe I stopped reading and collecting copies of MAD Magazine because I started reading and collecting Rolling Stone Magazine instead.
But maybe, at least partly, I stopped doing all of those things because at a certain point it almost feels embarrassing to be a teenager who is still tied to the more “dorky” stuff that occupied my time as a kid. I think that’s why 11yo kids get into stuff like Yo-Yo’s or magic tricks. There’s that really specific age where learning that stuff is kind of fun and (to our 11yo eyes, at least) kind of cool. But then you hit a certain age and learn otherwise.
Being a teenager is strange. We fumble our way through our decisions, relying partly on our innately stubborn instincts but also on the erratic and fickle wisdom of the pack. And if the pack isn’t flipping through Beckett’s baseball card pricing guides or having lengthy internal discussions on whether Cracked Magazine is actually better than MAD Magazine, then neither was I. That’s all dumb kid stuff, we tell ourselves regardless of whatever thing it is that we’re throwing out the window. We aren’t quite adults yet, but we’re clearly on the path there, each step taking us further and further away from the childhood skins we shed along the way.
Sure, no one was overtly telling me I needed to stop listening to Weird Al or to stop reading MAD Magazine or to stop collecting baseball cards, but at a certain point, the need and want to just be a normal teen meant putting all that stuff away in dirty old shoeboxes in the garage to make way for all the cool stuff everyone my age was listening to, which I (admittedly) enjoyed, too. As I constantly have to remind myself, we aren’t a part of the pack, we are the pack.
Being a teenager in the 1990s meant I was blessed with a steady stream of great new rock and hip-hop music on an almost weekly basis, sometimes seemingly all at once (Google: September 24, 1991). And that’s not even mentioning all the great new cinema we were getting with the indie movie explosion of the mid-90s. At a certain point, whether we choose it or not, our brains just don’t have the same space for all of the new and all of the old.
So, we end up ditching the old, even if “the old” things we ditched were responsible for some of my earliest memories on this green earth of ours. I can close my eyes and vividly recall my siblings and me putting on the John Williams Star Wars double album and running around the top floor of our childhood home, imagining we were characters from the movie, which it’s possible I hadn’t actually seen at that point in my life. Regardless of whether a 3-year-old me knew who Obi Wan Kenobi was, John Williams’ music was more than enough to help me fully jump into a state of imaginative play that involved princesses, dark warriors, wizards, and robots. It’s all right there in the music, with its Peter and the Wolf style leitmotifs for each character. In the way that one could turn off the sound and enjoy Star Wars as a silent movie, one could easily do the same with just listening to the music as a storytelling device. That kind of dynamic fed hours of imaginative play both with my siblings and then for me individually as I constructed entire scenes with crayon and paper and then with the Star Wars branded toys, of which we had quite a few.
And being the uber band nerd that I was in middle school and high school, musical soundtracks were never that far removed from my listening rotation. While most of my music listening transitioned from soundtracks to “classical music” compositions (don’t “well actually” me, music nerds, on the use of the term “classical music”), music soundtracks were always my homebase. My dad was just as likely to tell me to turn down the volume of my stereo blasting Weezer’s Blue Album as he was to tell me to turn down the volume because I was blasting tracks from James Horner’s Apollo 13 film score.
Film scores are powerful because they’re equal parts immersive and transportive in ways that other musical genres aren’t quite capable of. All music transports us, but because film scores are tied directly to characters, things, and places that exist spatially in a different state than most other music, the film scores take us to those places with those characters as we listen to it. Why sit at your desk studying for an algebra test when you can put on the Lion King soundtrack and study for your algebra test from the plains of the Serengeti. Ever driven across the American west while John Barry’s Dances with Wolves soundtrack played over your Walkman headphones? Ever stargazed at the night sky while (not technically a film score) Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” from 2001: A Space Odyssey blasted out of your car speakers? The meta idea that I was using musical cues from movies to provide a soundtrack for my life was not lost on me.
But at a certain point, as I started listening to more diverse kinds of music, and as I started realizing that people weren’t exactly bumping movie soundtracks out of their car windows while driving down the street, I started listening to film scores less and less. So now, film scores sit in between the two aforementioned realities of something I grew out of but also something that I left behind. As I got older, the hold movies and their film scores had on me started to wane and normal everyday life and everyday memories started to supersede the movie scenes and film scores I constantly had playing in my head. Realism finally overtook escapism. Whereas I would spend entire evenings as a kid listening to soundtracks as I either imagined scenes from the movie or made up new scenes in my head, I would much more likely now replay past anxieties or think about future plans or any number of things that adults spend time thinking about. Being an adult kind of sucks in that way.
I don’t want to paint a picture like soundtracks and film scores are completely out of my life, but my listening to film scores now is a lot more focused and direct. I’m much more likely to make a playlist of my favorite musical cues from movies than I am to sit down and listen to the entirety of any particular film score, no matter how good or memorable it is. Just give me the goods. Give me the “main themes” or the “ending credits” montages that contain a sampling of all the themes from the movies. I don’t need the filler anymore.
And that’s not even taking into account the YouTube effect where if I want to replay or relive a scene from a movie I’ve seen, I can just bypass the middle-man and watch it on YouTube. I’m always in such a rush these days. Who has time to cue up a track from a soundtrack for me to just sit there and listen to it with my eyes closed? I can go straight to YouTube, replay the scene in question, get the quick emotional boost from it, and then go about my day. Probably takes the same amount of time as listening to the piece on Spotify, but you get the difference, right? Mindfulness is hard in a world where everything we think we want is a click away.
But in those moments where I do take that time for myself, for my money, no matter how frequently or not I visit that space, there really is no experience quite similar to putting on a great film score and letting it do whatever it’s intended to do. Exhilarate. Frighten. Bring joy. Enlighten. If you need it, it’s in a film score. And trust me, your brain and soul need it. When my oldest sister and I are feeling particularly down about the state of the world or the state of our politics, we often send each other Howard Shore’s “The Lighting of the Beacons” from the Return of the King original soundtrack. And just like that, neither one of us feel as down as we had been moments before. Or how when I’m needing an extra boost of energy on a run and I can’t find it internally, I put on Hans Zimmer’s “The Dream is Collapsing” from the Inception soundtrack and before I know it, I’m pushing myself to continue on. Sure, I’m not as likely to sit down and listen to the entirety of the original Star Wars score anymore, but when I need or want that quick fix that only Yoda’s theme or the “Throne Room” can provide, I know where to find it.
Film scores work because stories matter. And stories matter because our imaginations matter. Film scenes and the music that accompany them have that way of cutting through the noise and reminding us of what’s important. They give us hope when we feel none around us. Or maybe they remind us of a bravery we don’t think we’re capable of reaching for. Or they make us smile when we’re sad or remind us of our impermanence by showing us sadness when we’re feeling joy. These film scores lift me, even if that “lifting” is me irrationally lifting myself out of a pool because my brain played the two Jaws notes in my head and somehow someway a great white shark is about to patrol the deep end of the pool. Film scores lift me to familiar places. They always have. Even when maybe I was too embarrassed or thought I was too cool to admit that they did. These stories matter. The music that accompanies them matters equally as much, sometimes even more so.
An open and shut book 
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