Jazz + Paranoia
I just saw Mickey One, Arthur Penn’s wonderfully edgy 1965 film starring Warren Beatty, which the two made just before Bonnie Clyde. The movie is about a charismatic and irresponsible nightclub performer who is on the run from the mob. There’s so much to say about the film’s impressionistic editing and avant garde style, but my own interest in surveillance and cinema kept me interested in the movie’s soundtrack, which uses jazz. The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film about a surveillance professional, also has a jazz score, which made me wonder: why does jazz score these two great films about paranoia and surveillance?
The answer, I suspect, goes far beyond the obvious resonance of jazz as a metaphor for the iconoclastic, modernist style of both films. While both films motivate the orchestration through the plot, the music is so striking that one can’t help but notice how sound works not just as element of story and representation but also as matter of theme and style. In Mickey One, orchestration often occurs in transitions showing the protagonist in the nightclub; in The Conversation, jazz motifs are similarly allied with the protagonist because the character plays saxophone. Jazz works better than other musical forms because both films exploit its loose and improvisational nature to suggest the anxiety and deteriorating mental states of both characters. As Mickey goes into hiding and Harry Caul in The Conversation grows increasingly nervous, the music in both films modify their rhythm and tone, growing more harried and dissonant to evoke the characters’ increasing paranoia.
I’m no music expert, so I’m hardly qualified to speak to the details of the films’ marvelous scores, but the stylistic prominence of jazz in these films is central their visceral depiction of surveillance and paranoia. The Conversation makes jazz crucial to the film’s harrowing conclusion. That movie ends with the protagonist tearing his home to pieces, unable to locate the wiretap or bug that he suspects has been planted. In the final moments of the film, he receives a telephone call that replays a few phrases of his last jazz solo, apparently legitimating his paranoia because the vestigial nature of jazz means that the recording cannot have been faked.
The role of jazz in Mickey One is a little harder to fathom. The mood of Penn’s film is far more fluid than the relentless atmosphere of repression in Coppola’s, and the music in Mickey One is correspondingly varied, with romantic and whimsical sequences at the beginning and middle of the movie correspondingly rendered upbeat. The movie’s ending is also sufficiently ambiguous to invite some optimism, as Mickey returns to the piano. On the surface this ending is more hopeful than The Conversation, but given the deliberately unconventional nature of jazz the finale only leaves open the possibility that Mickey is just as mentally unstable as Harry Caul. Jazz doesn’t give the crashing cymbals and wall of sound that indicates conclusions in the more conventional orchestration of classical Hollywood. Its infinite loops make jazz the perfect accompaniment to the disintegrating rationality of paranoia.