Watching : Listening

Diegetic Music and Character Revelation

Among the questions to ask oneself when thinking about music in film: 1. Is the music diegetic or non-diegetic?; and 2. How does it serve the scene?

In the very broadest terms, music we hear in movies is either diegetic or non-diegetic.¹ The former can be sourced within the fictional world, like the prom-night band in Back to the Future (1985) or the boombox that John Cusack holds aloft in Say Anything… (1989). We viewers can hear it, and so too can the characters in the film. Meanwhile, non-diegetic music is heard exclusively by the viewer, such as the orchestral score in the opening of Forrest Gump (1994) or when Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” accompanies Dustin Hoffman’s languid swimming pool drift. Filmmakers often rely on non-diegetic music to cue the viewer’s emotions or to “comment” upon the unfolding scene, such as when we hear The Doors’ “This is the End” playing over the beginning of Apocalypse Now (1979).

I want to focus solely on diegetic music here. I’m less interested in the music playing in a nightclub (which contributes to the scene’s verisimilitude) and more concerned with the songs characters select for themselves in their homes or cars or earbuds.

This sort of music serves a variety of narrative ends. Sometimes, as with period pieces, the music helps ground the viewer in the specific era of the film.

More frequently, such music is meant to tell us something about a character. Maybe a she is an old soul, preferring songs out-of-step with the era she inhabits.

Or her good taste.

Sometimes what a character listens to is at odds with what we might assume about him based solely on his appearance.

In these examples, music functions as a shorthand for a movie’s setting or a character’s personality. To borrow an idea from screenwriting textbooks, it’s a highly effective and efficient means of showing, not telling. Instead of having a character verbalize his enduring affection for his late mother, why not have him listen to a mixtape of her favorite songs instead? It’s a more subtle way of relaying crucial bits of information to the audience — and why it’s so common in mainstream cinema.

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More rare, and therefore more interesting, are instances where a character listens intently to diegetic music and discovers something in the process, something unknown even to themselves. These moments aren’t mere context; they are points of inflection where something new emerges in that very moment.

An example from what — gun to my head — is my very favorite film, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002): Morvern, played by Samantha Mathis, arrives home on Christmas morning to discover her boyfriend dead by his own hand on their living room floor. He’s left behind a note, some money, his book manuscript, and a gift for her: a mixtape. For reasons too complex to wade into here, Morvern, rather than alert authorities or slink to the floor and sob, lights a cigarette and pops the cassette into her Walkman. More than one minute of screen time elapses.

It seems callous, doesn’t it, to vibe out to the music with her lover’s corpse in sight? But as the remainder of the film reveals, she is by no means indifferent or unmoved by his death; rather, she’s grieving in her own highly idiosyncratic way, communing with him via the songs he left behind. As the camera lingers on Morvern, still and listening, we see a complex, perhaps even inscrutable, range of emotions — play across her face.

Allow me to close with perhaps a more relatable example, from Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 adaptation of the Daniel Clowes comics of the same name. Moments before this scene commences, Ingrid (Thora Burch) purchases on a whim a used blues record at a garage sale. The song is Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman,” from 1931. Back at home, the young woman spins the 45 after a shower and almost immediately is arrested by it.

Ingrid pauses in front of the bathroom mirror before walking slowly into her bedroom. There she freezes, rapt, as Zwigoff’s camera swivels around her for 27 uninterrupted seconds. Next, an editing slight of hand: an insert shot of the record spinning on the turntable followed immediately by a view of Ingrid no longer standing but supine on a beanbag, feet hoisted on an ottoman. She lies completely still, head back, for an additional 15 seconds. All the while, the music has continued without interruption, obscuring the fact that the film has skipped ahead in time. Standing Ingrid was hearing James’s song for the very first time; the reclining Ingrid, however, is no stranger to “Devil Got My Woman.” Indeed, as the song draws to its end, Ingrid sits up, resets the needle, and begins it again from the top. All told, the scene is 90 seconds, but who knows how many times she has cued up that song? The Ingrid we see at the end of the scene is not the same as the one who began it. Without warning, some switch, triggered by the music, has been flipped within her.

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The Ghost World clip above was posted to YouTube more than 10 years ago. I’m struck by the user comments there, for they more succinctly summarize what I’ve been aiming to say with this post. A representative sample:

• “This perfectly illustrates the moment you hear a song and realize that it can change your life. One of my favorites moments ever in all of film.”

• “I’ve never in my life related to a character so much.”

• “This is one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema. Her quiet performance really captures what it feels like when you hear something that speaks to your soul.”

• “I wish I could discover this movie again for the first time.”

In both Morvern Callar and Ghost World, the characters still themselves and listen, closely. Conventional films strive for efficiency and forward momentum, and diegetic music as conventionally deployed serves these ends. But an often untapped power of the needle drop is that it can cause a character to halt even as time moves forward, while the most profound transformations unfold within them.

1. This is an oversimplification, of course. Music often slides in and out of the diegetic world in complex ways. But this short essay is not the place to unpack that sort of thing.