9 - The Hermeneutics of Noise: The Sounds of Salvation in Ken Russell’s Tommy

Summary

INTRODUCTION: A STRANGE VIBRATION LAND

Ken Russell’s 1975 film of The Who’s rock opera Tommy (Columbia, 1975) is among the best known of his films, celebrated both for its music as well as for its daring phantasmagoric spectacle. While the former has been entirely attributed to the band (especially guitarist and writer Pete Townshend), the symbiosis between the film-maker and the music-makers is much richer than may be apparent at first viewing. Far too much of film criticism still focuses on narrative, acting and visuals whilst neglecting the importance of sound, and as Rick Altman has argued, the theoreticians who overlook sound usually do so quite self-consciously, proposing what they consider strong arguments in favour of an ‘image-based notion of cinema’. With Russell’s visual pyrotechnics this is perhaps an excusable point of view, but a careful examination of the narrative and extra-narrative sound will demonstrate how Russell’s film not only presents the story of Tommy as Townshend and The Who did musically, but also adds an additional rhetorical flourish to the aural aspects of this tale of enlightenment gained through the unlikely medium of pinball.

The initial impact of the film on most viewers is of an ecstatic and overpowering visual stimulus. In reviewing the film, thirty-five years after it was released, the late critic Ken Hanke argued that ‘No one had seen anything like it. Remember this is pre-MTV. In fact, for good or ill, Ken Russell and Tommy may be viewed as having largely spawned MTV.’ The fast cuts and technological sound innovation were enough to prompt the young critic to pursue all of Russell’s films and eventually write one of the key studies of the oeuvre. Even in 1984 Hanke could see that the spectacle of Tommy (as well as Russell’s other films) would prove inspirational, and that the world of popular music was the first to grasp its visual immediacy, causing him to note, ‘There are more pirated images from Tommy than can be comfortably counted, all drenched in pseudo-Russell symbols that, in this usage, are devoid of all meaning.’ The intoxicating mix of rock music’s power and opera’s larger-than-life theatrics could be seen as inspiring similar works, from Pink Floyd’s dystopic The Wall (1982) right up to the recent smash, the irresistible rap-fuelled musical Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2015).