Metered

Having set aside the military march, serious post-Vietnam war films have explored other strongly metrical musics. Three World War II films have turned to triple-meter, or waltz-time, themes. Band of Brothers and Flags of Our Fathers alike use tuneful waltz-time music to support a sentimental transgenerational agenda linking fathers and sons. The Thin Red Line supports the philosophical ruminations of soldiers with a group of triple-meter melodies that create a zone of quiet reflection. Twenty-first-century war films use beat-driven music to excite the audience physically and also to characterize new sorts of soldierly action—such as work at a computer—as exciting combat action. Beat-driven combat film scores for Black Hawk Down, United 93, and Green Zone are compared. Finally, an extended combat sequence from The Thin Red Line scored to a stately ostinato musical cue is considered as an extreme case of music taking the place of diegetic sound.

Nothing Sounds Like an M-16

This chapter details how sound effects are used by combat filmmakers to tell coherent battlefield stories. The narrative potential of individual weapons’ sounds—such as grenades and RPGs—and the use of sound effects to direct the audience to particular plot, character, or thematic ends is described in extended analyses of battle sequences from The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Zero Dark Thirty, and Platoon. Sound effects prove important to directing viewer engagement during combat scenes along a spectrum between immersion in the immediate danger of battle and reflection on the experience of war for the individual soldier. Episodes of subjective sound prove important, as does the use of explosions to punctuate combat narratives and effect sonic transitions. In all these ways, sound effects work towards the making of meaning in serious Hollywood war films. Select battle scenes using music are also discussed.

Elegies

Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) introduced a new sort of movie music resounding across Hollywood war films for the last thirty years: the elegiac register. Composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, heard repeatedly in Platoon, proves the musical source for this slow, strings-only, contrapuntal, harmonious, sad, and mournful music. This chapter describes this new sort of movie music in musical terms and identifies moments in later films when composers model their original scores directly on Barber’s Adagio. Film form often follows musical form when elegiac music is used. Multiple scenes from combat films are described visually and sonically, showing how the elegiac register has been put to varied ends: to foster reflection in combat film audiences, to put a pause on the action, and, most significantly, to frame the repeated images of dead and injured American soldiers’ bodies which lie at the heart of the cultural work done by serious war films in the post-Vietnam era.

Disembodied Voices

Disembodied voices resound across the post-Vietnam Hollywood combat film. Some are heard in real time by way of military technology, such as radios which let soldiers and audiences experience battles which are heard but not seen (acousmatic battles, in Michel Chion’s term). Different wars present different technological opportunities to unify the dispersed nature of modern combat by way of the soundtrack. Disembodied voices also enter these films by way of tape recordings sent from home, allowing the voices and perspectives of women into otherwise all-male films. Letters heard in voice-over frequently deliver the voices of soldiers who died in the line of duty. When present, voice-over narration in these films is assigned to specific characters who offer their individual perspective on events. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line takes this approach an extreme, combining voice-overs attached to specific characters with acousmatic voices that speak from a kind of soldier’s over-soul.

Soldiers’ Song

The use of popular music in post-Vietnam Hollywood war films has varied depending on the war being depicted. Swing, the popular music of World War II, goes almost entirely unrepresented in films depicting that war. Films about Vietnam have exploited the rich resource of popular music from the 1960s to characterize significant racial and class differences among American soldiers, typically pitting black Motown and soul music against white country music. Draft scripts for Apocalypse Now reveal how that film might have used late 1960s rock to emphasize the pathological nature of the American effort in Vietnam. Popular music in films about the all-volunteer, post-hip hop military suggest that racial tensions have abated, with a racial mix of soldiers enjoying a variety of musics. Films about twenty-first-century soldiers have almost no popular music, eliding well-documented practices of contemporary soldiers and denying civilian audiences potential points of connection by way of popular culture.

Unmetered

Post-Vietnam Hollywood combat filmmakers set aside the most common musical trope of earlier war movies: the military march. Instead, new musical tropes were developed, initially in the 1980s Vietnam cycle. A particularly unstable musical register, here called veil music, uses musical texture rather than melody or meter to expresses a range of equivocal combat states, most related to the foreignness of the battlefield for the American soldiers at the center of these films. In the Vietnam cycle, veil music is connected to moments of moral liminality, when surprising acts of violence might be done. Examples from Platoon and Full Metal Jacket are discussed. Veil music in war films set in the Middle East often characterize the Arab other by way of untranslated singing voices, putting exotic musical tropes to rather generalized uses characterizing the foreign other. Examples from The Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, and Three Kings are analyzed.

Helicopter Music

This chapter considers the sonic representation of the helicopter in combat films set in Vietnam and the Greater Middle East. The sound of unseen helicopters has frequently been used as a kind of effects-made music underlining tense narrative moments or dialogue. The sound of helicopter rotors in scenes set on or near helicopters has often been modulated (lowered in volume) or replaced entirely by music. Special attention is given to scenes of soldiers inside helicopters riding into battle and to how music has been used to shape the cinematic experience of helicopter-borne battle. Film form often follows musical form when helos take to the skies on-screen. The helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village to the supposedly diegetic sound of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now is analyzed in detail. The editor Walter Murch built the sequence on Wagner’s musical form, expressing an equivalence between musical pleasure and the pleasures of firing weapons.

Soldiers’ Talk

Serious Hollywood war films moderate the dialogue norms of the action/adventure genre, opting for a reserved sort of male speech that is moderate in tone and delivery. Aggressive talk is typically used as an element of contrast to suggest characters are inexperienced, undisciplined, untrustworthy, or overaggressive. The masculinity of American soldiers in these films is thereby shaped for a mixed gender and generational audience, as evidenced by comparison of films with their sources and draft scripts. The foul-mouthed and confrontational drill instructor (especially in Full Metal Jacket) stands outside this norm. War film dialogue regularly draws from authentic military speech. Poems (“The Rifleman’s Creed) and sayings (the Vietnam expressions “don’t mean nothin’” and “sorry ’bout that”) resound across the genre, connecting these films to each other and to actual military culture. Some such sayings also function as refrains within given films (the African American soldiers who dap each other in Hamburger Hill).

End Titles

This chapter considers music heard during the end titles and at the moment of narrative closure in Hollywood combat films made after Vietnam. In many of these films, music during the end titles provides time and musical content for reflection after the narrative, creating a ritual space for meditating on the meaning of patriotism. The end titles choices made by combat film composers and directors are shown to have a profound effect on the meaning of these films. Most films end with reflective music encouraging the audience who remains to listen to “count the cost” of the narrative just seen as it reflects the lives of real soldiers and veterans. A few films, including The Hurt Locker, end with popular music that challenges the listener to think critically about the relationship between the tropes of screen violence and the US military and militarism.

Soundtracks and Scores

This chapter describes the large-scale narrative and musical patterns of serious Hollywood combat films made after Vietnam. Two larger narrative shapes are identified: two-part forms (such as training camp followed by battlefield) and alternating action-reflection forms. Then, the overall shape and content of combat film musical scores are described in a comparative context. Four strategies for the use of music in war films are described: films with very little music of any sort, films which alternate between scored and unscored scenes (Saving Private Ryan), music-laden films with music noticeably present much of the time (Born on the Fourth of July), and films with almost continuous music. The frequently blurry distinctions between sound effects and music, the role of popular music (Full Metal Jacket), the importance of diegetic silence, the ambiguous authorship of some film scores (Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker), and the shifting nature of the soundtrack mix are also considered.