The Trailer Park is where I discuss a trailer, the people and themes surrounding it, and ultimately make an attempt at composing my own music for it as a practical exercise. For the second installment in this series, I wanted to pick something Halloween-themed. I will always be somewhat limited by whether I can find a particular trailer without existing music. The only two Halloween-themed/adjacent movies I could find were the new Candyman and the 2019 Joker film. Having not seen the original Candyman or the re-imagined version, I felt I had to go with the alternative. I do plan to watch both of the Candyman movies soon. I am told that I am missing out.
I realize that the new Joker movie is probably better described as a meditation on mental illness and violence in the United States than a horror film. There is a profound sadness in its story that is not found in any other superhero (or super-villain) movies. There is a reason that Heath Ledger’s Joker Became the ubiquitous costume of 2008 — the character comes to the screen without a backstory. When Ledger’s Joker asks, “do you want to know how I got these scars?” he always provides a different story than the last time he answered his rhetorical question.
By focusing on the character’s origins in rejection and mental illness, director Todd Phillips makes this joker a strange choice for a Halloween costume. The maniacal laughter is given context. The horror no longer resides in the character’s brutality but, instead, reflects real life’s hardships. There was also plenty of debate about the consequences of making a film of this nature amongst the backdrop of seemingly endless mass shootings. The year the film was released, there were 417 mass shootings in the United States.
The film also came under heat for its use of Gary Glitter’s Rock N’ Roll (Part 2). Glitter is a known pedophile, currently serving 16 years in prison for the abuse of three young girls. Despite being banned by the NFL in 2006, Rock N’ Roll (Part 2) is still a staple at stadiums across the country, generating an estimated $250,000 a year for Glitter. It is reasonable to ask why the musical supervisors of the film needed to use this song. Does this asshole really need more of a revenue stream?
So, to counter-balance the solemn and disturbing nature of Joker, I thought it might be fun to look back on the musical themes associated with different versions of the Ace of Knaves. After all, there are plenty of everyday horrors to go around. Halloween is best enjoyed as an escape into the fantastical.
The on-screen Joker begins with Cesar Romero’s portrayal in the 1966 Batman TV series. Here is a link to that character singing a little villainous ditty. However, one could argue that Conrad Veidt’s character in The Man Who Laughs from 1928 is the character’s true origin. Batman appeared earlier in a 1944 Serial release and again in 1949’s Batman and Robin. These films do not feature the joker character.
The music for the TV program was composed by Nelson Riddle, Billy May, and Neal Hefti. Hefti, a former arranger for Count Basie, wrote the iconic theme song for the Television show. The theme was structured around a twelve-bar blues with its memorable, attention-grabbing horn stabs on each measure’s first two beats, kicking in after the first cycle. It is also heard as a motif in the Adam West as Batman, country-tinged Miranda.
Riddle was an arranger and composer who worked with Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others. He wrote arrangements for composer Les Baxter’s Mona Lisa, one of Cole’s highest-selling singles. He was responsible for the music on the first two seasons of the Batman TV show and Batman: The Movie, also released in 1966.
Billy May took over musical responsibilities on the show in Season 3 and penned the Batgirl theme song. His jazz arrangement of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee for the Green Hornet TV show is just one of his notable works. As far as I care to dig, he wrote no new music for the Joker character, though.
Nelson Riddle wrote the Joker’s Theme, an unsettling little musical cue. The opening notes of the theme contain an augmented fourth (the dreaded tritone or Diabolus in Musica) before resolving to the fifth note of the scale. The tritone is situated directly between the purest Intervals of the fourth and the fifth. If Batman is the fourth and Robin the fifth, that makes the Joker the tritone—his dissonance disrupts Gotham City’s otherwise perfect moral society.
Following the cancellation of the TV show, the Joker would not reappear as a live-action character until Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman adaptation. Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo fame scored the film. The pieces were arranged for orchestra by Steve Bartek (also of Oingo Boingo) and conducted by Shirley Walker. The Joker’s Theme in this movie is known as the Waltz to the Death. It plays while the Joker, named Jack Napier in this version, dances in the Belltower with Vicki Vale as a hostage. The composition relies on our understanding of the Harlequin of Hate as a sophisticate. It emphasizes the structured beauty of the Waltz form with the random violence and disfigurement of the Joker. This contrast between image and music has been used to significant effect since (Stealer’s Wheel’s Stuck in the Middle with You from Reservoir Dogs is an oft-cited example). The piece is also reminiscent of the carousel calliope. Adding to the circular hypnosis (one of the Joker’s powers), the disembodied mechanical waltz takes both rider and viewer into an altered state. With its connections to medieval jousting, the carousel takes on new meanings in the context of the film. The hero challenges the villain to a joust, and there can be only one victor. This battle plays out like the carousel scene from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, increasing in madness until it resolves.
It would be an oversight not to mention the museum takeover scene of this film in which Jack Nicholson’s Joker defaces the portraits (sans Bacon’s Figure with Meat) in a museum to the music of Prince. The track is called Partyman, and it plays from a boombox on one of his crony’s shoulders. It’s a great example of diegetic sound (again, Stuck in the Middle WIth You is the oft-cited model here). The song’s refrain goes, “young and old, gather round; everybody Hail, the new king in town.” The music video features Prince in a half-joker persona. A kind of Two-Face, Joker, Batman, Prince hybrid. The character is known as Gemini— representing both good and evil. Gemini is equal parts, Batman and Joker.
The Joker’s next appearance is in the animated Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, released in 1993. I am not going to cover all of the animated appearances in this post. There are simply too many. There is the 1969 Adventures of Batman, 1977’s The New Adventures of Batman, 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series. This is just skimming the surface. I’m sure Joker superfans will be disappointed in my lack of dedication. Still, I can’t justify watching the two episodes of The New Scooby-Doo Movies in which he makes a crossover appearance.
The Joker’s Theme Music from Phantasm is an exciting amalgamation of styles. I think it points to the character’s unpredictable nature. It opens with an Elfman-like piece of dark whimsy, then transforms suddenly to frolicking carnival music and then just as suddenly into a bit reminiscent of early Hollywood romance pieces. This is all within two minutes. The work was composed by Shirley Walker. As mentioned above, she was the conductor for the 1989 Elfman score. I would love to write a whole post just on her life.
She wrote all of her scores by hand and orchestrated and conducted her music as well. She was a solo pianist with the San Francisco Symphony while still in High School. After writing jingles for several years following college, she was hired to play the synthesizers on Carmine Coppola’s score to Apocalypse Now. In 1992 she became one of the first female composers with a solo credit for John Carpenter’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Carpenter is known for scoring his films, but he seems to have made an exception here.
Female composers are the exception in film scoring. Both Germaine Tailleferre and Bebe Barron co-scored early films — Tailleferre with a travelogue in 1926 and Baron with the avant-garde electronic score for 1956’s Forbidden Planet. Wendy Carlos scored A Clockwork Orange in 1971, and Angela Morley composed the music for the 1978 animated adaptation of Watership Down. Rachel Portman would be the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Score with 1996’s Emma.
Walker worked on many projects with Elfman and Hans Zimmer, who credit her as a teacher. Walker died in 2006. She was somehow not recognized in the In Memorium segment of the 79th annual Academy Awards.
The Clown Prince of Crime (I’m going to see if I can fit all of his aliases in here somewhere) returned in 2008’s The Dark Knight, portrayed famously by Heath Ledger. The Joker Theme for this film was composed by Hans Zimmer. It features a lot of unnerving sound design against a backdrop of time-displaced, panned, pulsing strings. The piece begins with a buzzy note that stretches and swells to the point of discomfort Heavy, chunky rhythmic hits are added to the mix periodically. At one point, the music drops out, with only the sub-bass rumbling away. I assume anyone without a subwoofer experiences only silence. It almost feels like an industrial song. In an interview about the piece, Zimmer says he “never did the big evil chords thing. It was much more of a punk attitude….” His idea was never to offer resolution within the music. The audience, he felt, should constantly be anticipating a conclusion, but it never shows.
In 2016, the Suicide Squad was released, starring Jared Leto as the Joker. The theme for this movie is composed by Steven Price. Price is best known for his Oscar-winning score for Gravity. This piece features some of the same carnivalesque clownish music that has shown up in past musical portraits, combined with the heavy rhythms of the Zimmer Age. It also makes repeated use of the tape stop dropout effect and epic choirs.
Leto also appears as the Joker in the music video for Purple Lamborghini by Skrillex and Rick Ross, which was featured in the movie and possibly written from the character’s perspective.
Up until this point, the Joker themes have been getting progressively darker. From a simple passing tritone to a piece with grating noise stretched out without resolution. The Suicide Squad Joker, judging from the music, seems more mischievous and driven by material wealth than other versions of this character. I haven’t seen the film yet.
The lights go out again with the score to the latest Joker movie. The film is scored by the Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. She is known for her work with bands such as Throbbing Gristle and for touring with Sunn O))). She provided the score for Chernobyl in 2019.That year, she also won the Oscar for Best Score for Joker. Only one other woman, Anne Dudley, was awarded the honor since Rachel Portman’s win. Dudley won for The Full Monty. The score combines her artistry on the cello with pulsing, distant rhythmic elements. Dissonance abounds in this work. It is often sparse and always haunting. This is the darkest Joker to appear in our shared cultural experience. It is fitting that the score should also venture further into a kind of endless, cold sadness.
As was true of the Dune trailer, I decided not to listen to the officially released music for this trailer beforehand. Not surprisingly, I chose a different direction than the original composed by Matthew Chastney. Most of the trailer makes use of Jimmy Durante’s Smile. Its use provides a similar juxtaposition to that of the waltz heard in the 1989 Batman movie. It also happens to be a beautifully arranged song.
My intention with the music was to create a mood in which the character was less linear. Arthur Fleck is a character with a lot of dimensions. I started with a soft, gentle celesta piece. A tuba was added to the progression as the voiceover tells us his purpose - to make people laugh. The tuba is, of course, different from the sad trombone sound often associated with clowns. I felt it had a similar effect, though, without being too on the nose.
The strings that follow Arthur’s assault by teenagers move through several emotions. There is a foreboding sustain, followed by a warm, hopeful swell; chimes enter as he is seated with his love interest —only to transform again into the chaos of Penderecki strings as he approaches Arkam State Hospital. The subway ride is meant to convey the character’s descent into madness, and the brief string and percussion piece that follows displays a more hurried mania, perhaps a delusional narcissism, as he stares into the mirror, arms outstretched.
The final theme for synthesizer and piano was written as my first knowingly (lite) chromatic piece. It has the playfulness and unsettling nature that often comes attached to our modern interpretation of the clown. The music begins around an e minor chord, so it would be more conclusive to end the piece there as well, but as the Zimmer piece and the entire Guðnadóttir soundtrack show, sometimes it is better not to give the audience that conclusive ending. I end the work a half step lower. This little move is not nearly as bold as vast barren cello landscapes or notes stretched beyond comfort, but it is still interesting to see what shared sentiments I have with others who have engaged musically with the character.
I will release a single of my Joker theme that appears at the end of this re-imagined trailer. It should be on the front page of the website and my Bandcamp in the coming days. I may call it something else and strip it of many of the dramatic embellishments of the trailer version. I appreciated how fast the music came to me, and I also think it has some value beyond a ‘practice trailer.’ It felt like a little gift from elsewhere.
Here is my take on the Joker trailer:
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