the representative of the collectivity: not the collectivity drunk with its own power, but the oppressed invisible one, which does not figure in the scene.”29 The film’s images of Heydrich’s death, by way of contrast, were accompanied by dissonant piano figures and string pizzicatos. Cacophonous sounds here were meant to undercut any forms of sympathy that may result from rendering visible the oppressor’s slain body.30
The general principles and possibilities of dialectical film sound were, of course, theorized most influentially by Eisler himself in his 1947 Composing for the Films, which he coauthored with Adorno during their exile years in Southern California. Polemically arguing against conventional practices of using film music as a subconscious trigger of emotional responses in the viewer, Eisler and Adorno called for a sonic aesthetics of interruption and affective distanciation that would concede to film music greater presence and autonomy, in fact would elevate it at certain points to the primary carrier of cinematic meaning. Echoing Eisenstein’s theory of cinematic counterpoint,31 Eisler and Adorno insisted,
on the one hand, that standard cues for interpolating music—as for background effect, or in scenes of suspense or high emotion—should be avoided as far as possible and that music should no longer intervene automatically at certain moments as though obeying a cue. On the other hand, methods that take into account the relation between the two media should be developed, just as methods have been developed that take into account the modifications of photographic exposure and camera installation. Thanks to them, it would be possible to make music perceptible on different levels, more or less distant, as a figure or a background, overdistinct or quite vague.32
Subjected to the principles of dialectical montage, film music for Eisler and Adorno was meant to become an equal player in the composite art of filmmaking. It should complicate the viewer’s relation to a particular film by pitting sound against image, encouraging viewers thereby to actively negotiate moments of tension, polyphony, ambiguity, and shock.
Produced only a few years after the initial publication of Composing for the Films, Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious seems to put Eisler and Adorno’s program into practice. The theme song, taking recourse to popular American folk traditions, promotes nondiegetic film music to an equal carrier of meaning. Certainly, at specific moments, Darby’s cowboy ballad helps set the mood for the narrative, transport the viewer across time and space, and comment on narrative action; in this respect the song continues to adhere to the prioritization of image over sound scorned by Eisler and Adorno. At other points, however, Lang clearly allows the theme song to exceed such
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auxiliary functions so as to either have nondiegetic sounds assume control over the image track or to render film music a contrapuntal and hence quasi-autonomous medium of information and spectatorial attention. Witness an interesting passage halfway through the film when the ballad reports the cowboy’s frenzied search for his fiancée’s murderer while the image track offers a series of snapshots that present male faces in frontal perspective. The song here clearly pushes the visual beyond the conventional limits of the diegetic. Also witness the use of nondiegetic music in the final sequence, when Darby’s lyrics contradict the ending imposed on Rancho Notorious by RKO producer Howard Welsch. While we watch Vern and Frenchy riding off into the open, the ballad tells the astonished viewer that both cowboys died “that day”—“with empty guns they fought and fell.” Following Eisler and Adorno’s suggestions, nondiegetic film music here assumes a right of its own, opening a space of ambiguity and spectatorial activity. The final stanza of the ballad offers alternative meanings that—according to each viewer’s interpretation— either question, add to, or displace the images we behold at the same time.
It has become a commonplace to hail such instances of audiovisual dialectic and dissonance as a subversive deconstruction of dominant narrative conventions. Does Rancho Notorious, in espousing Eisler and Adorno’s theory of dialectical sound, really live up to these expectations? Does the film offer a subversive model of popular culture in which formal aspects of cinematic representation— counterpoint, ambiguity, shock— empower the viewer to be an active maker of meaning? One possible answer to these questions, I suggest, can be found in the ballad itself as it is intoned during the film’s opening credit sequence:
Oh listen, listen well,
Listen to the legend of Chuck-a-Luck, Chuck-a-Luck, Listen to the song of the gambler’s wheel,
A souvenir from a bygone year,
Spinning a tale of the old frontier,
And a man of skill and a passion that drew him on and on and on.
It began, they say, one summer day,
When the sun was blazing down.
It was back in the early seventies in a little Wyoming town.
So listen to the legend of Chuck-a-Luck, Chuck-a-Luck, Listen to the wheel of fate,
As ’round and ’round, with a whispering sound, It sings the old, old story of
Hate, murder, and revenge.
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Oscillating between three different temporal planes, the ballad serves as a medium of narrative authentication. It speaks in the name of collective authorities rooted in the past (“the legend,” “they say”) in order to address the viewer of the present directly (“Oh listen, listen well”). Storytelling here is understood not simply as an attempt to cast the entropy of life into meaningful symbolic structures but rather to connect premodern and modern lifeworlds, the far and the near, the imaginary and the real. Speaking from a curiously unsettled location in between the narrated event, the original fables, and the present space of reception, the act of narration in fact aspires simultaneously to reveal what is new about the old and old about the new.
Narrations only work, this first installment of the theme song suggests, if they succeed in intermeshing different horizons of lived experience and ship knowledge across space and time.
A popular, vertical version of roulette, “Chuck-a-Luck” gambling provides the central, although twofold, trope for this kind of narrative project.
On the one hand, the song employs the game as a metonymy for the popular, for the hopes, excesses, and utopias that putatively structure the popular dimension at any given point in time. On the other hand, however, the gambling wheel also serves the ballad as a metaphoric substitution for the act of narration itself: the Chuck-a-Luck wheel spins out stories similar to the way storytellers spin their yarns. Significantly, however, the passage of the theme song quoted above by no means tries to keep these two different interpretations of Chuck-a-Luck gambling distinct. The text repeatedly blurs the lines between metaphoric and metonymic uses. The popular, as a result, becomes identified with practices of narrativity that link past and present; the telling of tales figures as the primary characteristic of popular culture. The signified slips underneath the signifier, stories displace events, and history emerges as a product of the invariable desires circulated in and through popular culture.
It is instructive to compare this slippage between the metaphoric and the metonymic, between narration and popular culture, with the model of cultural critique discussed earlier with regard to Sirk’s The First Legion.
Whereas for Sirk the popular constituted a site of vacuity and manipulation, for Lang it represents a crucible of desires and symbols that exceed political power and commercialization. Whereas Sirk conflated high cultural and religious practices intending to end the banality of modern secular society, Lang endorses the popular as a site at which archetypal human longings and depravities reveal themselves most graphically. Sirk’s project is to explode the continuum of history; Lang’s is to show how the past already
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contains the seeds of any future present. These differences notwithstanding, both Sirk and Lang of course share a view of history in which transcendental forces (Sirk’s salvation, Lang’s fate) in the final analysis categorically overwhelm individual self-determination and self-expression. In their respective attempts to remake contemporary culture from either above (Sirk) or below (Lang), both ironically deny autonomous forms of human agency.
To put it differently, both the miracle play and the adult western offer anti-evolutionary and atrophic views of secular history. Both films suggest that modern history leads us away from the possibility of happiness or self-awareness. History extinguishes rather than enriches the cultural resources we may use in order to shape or understand our life as meaningful.
Lang’s Rancho Notorious, then, confronts the viewer with a paradox.
Whereas the very presence of the ballad calls for spectatorial activity and Brechtian distanciation, the lyrics of the song lay claim to the futility of shaping new meanings and becoming a Brechtian subject of history. People, according to the text of the theme song, may receive through popular culture semantic resources from the past, but there is little reason to believe that they can invent new symbols and meanings to change the course of history. Facing this paradox, Lang’s viewers are left to draw their own conclusions—including the one that history makes them unfit for acts of choosing and concluding. How historical audiences in the early 1950s actually responded to this paradox must remain beyond what film historians are able to reconstruct, but Lang’s vacillation between aesthetic innovation and premodern traditionalism, enlightenment and myth, should at least alert us to the fact that we cannot simply celebrate audiovisual counterpoint as subversive or avant-garde per se. Lang’s Rancho Notorious is a telling example of the power of twentieth-century commercial culture simultaneously to incorporate certain avant-garde techniques and to disavow the avant-garde’s hope for radical political change. Whereas the historical avant-garde hoped to close the gap between aesthetic modernism and vernacular experiences in order to achieve a profound reorganization of culture, postwar neo-avant-gardes and consumer cultures alike institutionalized the avant-garde as either art or commodity (or both at once) and thus negated genuinely avant-gardist intentions.33 If Rancho Notorious teaches us a lesson, it is that our decisions about what is really subversive cannot simply be seen as a matter of textual interpretation and formal judgment.
