This week on the Bleader we’re running a series of posts on “Silence vs. Noise.” As a resident of Chicago, you’re probably intimately acquainted with the latter, though the former may seem like a quaint abstraction. Walk into any bar or restaurant and you’ll be assaulted with dance music or the blare of a sports channel or the bleating of someone’s unruly kid. Try to shush someone—even in a public library—and you’ll quickly discover that you’re the asshole, not the person making all the racket. Sometimes the only defense against your upstairs neighbors is to crank the stereo; the only resort to the bleed-over from someone’s headphones is to don your own. “Much has been written about the isolating effect of the iPod,” notes Brian Patrick Eha in the Atlantic post that inspired our series, “but little has been said of its other pernicious consequence, the way it makes self-inflicted sound a constant feature of our solitude. We are each of us cocooned in noise, and can escape from one another’s only when immersed in our own.”
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I find this notion particularly intriguing because, for the past few days, I’ve been immersed in the new Terence Davies film The Deep Blue Sea, which opens Friday at Music Box. Davies adapted a classic 1952 play by Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is being celebrated in Britain this year, and though you might have trouble sorting out the film’s competing levels of authorship, one element attributable solely to Davies is the strategic use of music and quiet on the soundtrack. Most of the music comes from radios or people singing, and some of the weightiest scenes transpire in rooms so hushed you can hear the metronomic ticking of a mechanical clock. To watch The Deep Blue Sea is to be plunged into a past world completely foreign to our own, where a person really can be alone with his thoughts (for better or worse) and people have a much healthier relationship with music, using it to connect with each other rather than blot each other out.
The Barber concerto may be overwhelming in its grandeur, yet Davies understands that the emotional impact of music in a movie derives less from the piece itself than from how, when, and why it’s deployed. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the elaborate opening sequence, there’s a brief moment in which Hester stares out the window of her flat, miserably smoking a cigarette in her bathrobe, while children down below gaily sing a little tune identified in the end credits as “A Sailor Went to Sea, Sea, Sea”; the contrast between her mental state and theirs is devastating. Later in the movie, when Freddie has stumbled on a suicide note Hester intended for him and has stalked off in a rage, she finds him in the pub, and the moment when he recoils from her touch feels even more painful given the merriment of the patrons as they croon the old Eddie Fisher hit “Anytime” (“Anytime you feel downhearted / That’s the time your love for me is true”) and the World War I relic “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm? After They’ve Seen Paree.”
Directed by Terence Davies
