Beyond POV: Sound and Paradox in Film
For July's FilmStack Challenge
FilmStack ringleader has passed the conch shell to his co-conspirator for this month’s FilmStack Challenge. What follows is my response to her prompt, which goes: “For this challenge, you can choose to share either your favorite needle drops, composers, themes, monologues, usage of voice-over narration, or directors who use soundtracks to further their storytelling. Expand upon how these key moments of sound usage helped to shape a scene or contributed to the emotions you had while watching it. This challenge is designed to get you to think about an element in film that is invisible—but sound shapes the image as much as the image shapes sound.” I look forward to engaging with the community here as we explore the invisible realm of cinema. Cheers!
Barry (Adam Sandler) is on a date with Lena (Emily Watson), a colleague of his sister, and despite his intense social awkwardness, things are going well enough. That is until Lena lets slip that his sister shared with her an embarrassing story about him, just another in a series of emotional abuse he suffers from his siblings. Barry, who is prone to fits of rage, excuses himself, heads to the bathroom, and proceeds to destroy it, knocking a stall door of its hinges and tearing the soap dispenser from the wall.
The carnage is rendered in a single shot, the handheld camera whipping about, at times barely keeping Barry in frame, as he lays waste to the bathroom and seeks out the next object to demolish. What’s more, Barry’s frenzy is imparted via the sound design as well. Notice that grating distortion with the sound of every bang and clatter, like car stereo speakers on the verge of blowing? This shot is not depicted from Barry’s physical point-of-view, but it is tinged with his emotional state nevertheless, as though the film itself were likewise enraged, or as if Barry, dissociated from his body, were gazing down upon himself.
The most common, and thus most easily identified, means of conveying the subjective experience of characters in cinema is through the POV shot, but as this scene from Punch-Drunk Love (2002) demonstrates, there are subtler, and potentially more effective, tools at the filmmaker’s disposal. In particular, sound can grant the audience indirect access to the inner states of characters, delivering in the process an audiovisual presentation that is neither objective nor subjective but, paradoxically, somewhere in between.1
Another compelling instance of this sort of tactic is in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls (2003) when Noel (Zooey Deschanel) reveals to her boyfriend Paul (Paul Schneider) that she has been unfaithful. He does not take the news well, asking her repeatedly what he did to push her away and demanding to know the name and whereabouts of the other party. All the while, Noel insists she loves Paul still, but, hurting and angry, he can’t seem to process what she says. “Did you hear me?,” she screams. “I love you!” Seconds later, we cut a shot of her from his visual POV. As the shot begins, we hear her protests; midway through, her voice abruptly exits the shot while all other sounds remain. Says Paul, “I’m looking at you right now and I hear you talking and the words that are coming out of your mouth are like they are coming from a stranger.” No doubt, Paul can hear her, but in this moment he can’t comprehend her actions or justifications. The film conveys his sudden estrangement from the woman he loves by briefly but conspicuously removing her voice, a metaphor for the dissolution of their relationship.
Our first two examples have focused on sound effects (the over-modulated crash and bangs of Punch-Drunk Love) and dialogue (the sudden withdrawal of a characters voice in All the Real Girls). To close, I turn our attention to music.
When we first see the titular characters of Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), the former, a young woman played by Michelle Williams, is playing fetch with latter, who is playing herself. In voiceover we hear Williams humming a tune that proceeds without interruption for nearly one-and-a-half minutes. It only ceases when Wendy worriedly calls for Lucy moments after she bounds out of frame, as though she had run out of her sight.
Later, Wendy ties up her companion outside a supermarket while she goes inside to shoplift dog food for her. Overhead on the store’s PA system, we hear that same tune now in Muzak form, that bland form of background music common in public spaces.2
Are we to assume that the song Wendy hums is so popular that it has reached retail-levels of ubiquity? Or is it that this little indie film briefly departs from its stylistic default of “meticulously rendered realism” in favor of an expressionism that manifests the character’s interiority into her physical reality? How poignant it is: by the time Wendy emerges from the grocery, Lucy will be gone, just as she had when we initially heard this tune in the film’s very first scene. Indeed, locating Lucy is the narrative crisis of the film, foreshadowed in its opening moments and presaged again via this rich, nuanced use of sound.
What I hope this brief analysis of three scenes shows is how some of cinema’s most complex and compelling evocations of character interiority are not necessarily rendered through overt visual clues — or at least not only so. These examples highlight a form of audiovisual expression that sits somewhere in between hard-and-fast objectivity and subjectivity, inviting a deeper, more empathetic engagement with characters’ frustrations, fears, and losses.
V. N. Volosinov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Gilles Deleuze, among others, have theorized “quasi-subjective,” “semi-subjective,” or “free indirect” modes of cinematic expression, and the concept has been central to the way I think about and engage with film. You can clearly see the influence in my recent Substack essay on Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, and I wrote about these ideas extensively in a piece I wrote for Cinema Journal more than a decade ago.
These two moments occur roughly 15 minutes apart in the film, but this clip has placed them side-by-side for emphasis.
The sound design that Punch Drunk Love clip is so good. I love how scratchy it is, further adding to his agitation in the scene.