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Strange Voices: Subjectivity and Gender in Forbidden Planet’s Soundscape of Tomorrow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2014

STEPHAN PROCK
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Abstract

As the first Hollywood film to employ an all-electronic score, Forbidden Planet (1956) helped cement the association of science-fiction films with electronically produced sounds and music. While sounds lacking real-world referents were crucial for representing sonically the nature of fantastic objects and beings, Louis and Bebe Barron's soundscape also had to serve the more conventional musical demands of narrative cinema where music sets mood and atmosphere and creates the illusion of character subjectivity. This double function of their “electronic tonalities,” however, engendered a strange ambiguity in the film's sonic ontology. In this article, I examine how the practical and aesthetic issues arising from this ambiguity forced the Barrons to confront in their score a complex of intertwined musical and cultural messages: how electronic music evokes notions of the exotic Other; how conceptions of vocality and embodiment in their music intersect with other visual and narrative elements to illuminate a gendered divide among envoiced bodies in the film; and how music in the film evolves to illustrate and posit a threat to the male body and, thus, masculinity itself—only in order, ultimately, to restore and reassert conventional patriarchy and the primacy of male subjectivity. As I argue, by using modernist methods and materials to serve a conventionally populist representational form, the Barrons effectively exposed some of the deep underlying tensions and contradictions within modernism itself, even while revisioning fundamental aspects of the Hollywood film score.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 8 , Special Issue 3: Music and Sound in American Cinema, 1927–56 , August 2014 , pp. 371 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2014 

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Footnotes

Thanks go to those who over a number of years and in various contexts (conferences, colloquia) have provided invaluable feedback on this topic, including Mitchell Morris, Neil Lerner and Linda Dusman. More recently, returning to this essay after a number of years, I would like to thank Holly Watkins for casting a critical eye over a late version of the manuscript. Thanks are also due to the anonymous readers whose comments and suggestions helped me avoid a number of potential pitfalls and to JSAM editor Mark Katz and assistant editor Will Robin, along with Sally Bick, for their carefully detailed editing. Finally, and most of all, my gratitude to Elizabeth Hudson whose fountain of ideas and encouragement kept me continually refreshed.

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