Super Heroes and The Phonograph

This passage from Adorno’s 1927 essay, “The Curves of the Needle”:

“With its movable horn and its solid spring housing, the gramophone’s social position is that of a border marker between two periods of musical practice. It is in front of the gramophone that two periods of musical lovers encounter each other. While the expert examines all the needles and chooses the best one, the consumer just drops in his dime—and the sound that responds to both may well be the same.”

Setting aside the sort of dated yet often repeated point that the audience member enjoys not the film or music she goes to see but the money she spent on it, I think the real brilliance of this passage lies in the conflation of the audition with the auditor, and the needle with the curves–no matter what is played, the sound remains the same to all. What is the selfsame sound that each type of musical lover hears? It is, of course, the sound of the dime dropped to purchase the needle. It is the sound of the music subsequently enjoyed in the privacy of the home. And it is the sound of the needle itself, that is to say, those crackles and shifts in pitch that reveal the actual machinery of reproduction. This triad of commerce/sound/technology will most likely structure any discussion on the semantics of listening in popular culture. Today, the latter two terms, sound and technology (along with the listener floating ambiguously somewhere in between), create the most productive and interesting tensions.

Adorno goes on to say of the apparent improvement in the quality of sound reproduction technologies that “The moment one attempts to improve these early technologies through an emphasis on concrete fidelity, the exactness one has ascribed to them is exposed as an illusion by the very technology itself.” The rhetoric of technological fidelity is a productive paradox. Constant improvements such as Hi-Fi or Dolby 5.1 are not necessarily steps forward in sound quality, but a shift towards a new style of hearing things. This point was made in Sound Theory Sound Practice, I believe it was. This is to say that the spectacular sounds that accompany the otherwise awful Spider Man 3 straddle many points of audition. The recent spate of super hero movies humping claims of realism (the “this could actually happen!” aesthetic) are not only rehashing/warping the Frank Miller led The Dark Knight Returns aesthetic of the 80s, but are constantly making an argument for the medium through which these mythologies are now pushed.

I met Jonathan Lethem (see his list of the five most depressed superheroes) at a book signing and nervously asked him something inane like, “what do you think about the new Superman movie?” In my defense, the teaser trailer was absolutely breathtaking—it looked like a scene right out of the 1940s animated serials, an aesthetic that would pull cgi and tights out of dimensions other than the ostensibly real. He said that he had learned not to stop getting his hopes up for comic book movies, as there is something in the medium that is inherently untranslatable.

But the superhero is not a medium, it is a perfectly translatable commodity–television, action figures, games, costumes, film, books, etc. The mythology of superheroes today is squeezed through the nascent field of digital cinema ever proclaiming its fidelity to the our world so that we can look up walking the streets of New York and half expect to see a red and blue blur sling overhead. Going into Spider Man 3, I expected the cgi to be significantly improved on the previous film, there having been years elapsed and most likely technological leaps made. Spider Man always looked a little awkward and unnatural in 1 and 2. It wasn’t until halfway through the movie that I realized not only have the graphics not really changed, but their verisimilitude is not what matters anymore. The sound of Spider Man 3 seems to take an unprecedented amount of control, to the degree that the most spectacular way possible to defeat Venom at the end of the film is, and I’m not making this up, with sound. Spider Man discovers the symbiot’s weakness to sound waves, and beats a series of metal pipes, driving the black goo away.

While the plasticity of the image has been made virtually infinite thanks to cgi and digital film, it is still strangely anchored in some rhetoric of ever greater fidelity to the real or photographic. Sound is employed to an ever greater degree in recent popular film as a sort of filler, enhancing these images through synergism and sync points and added dimensions that allow the spectator relief from the images that often fail, look flat, seem taken out of a video game. And this is why digital film today is such an exciting sound medium. While cgi is bogged down in claims to verisimilitude, sound is free to improvise in countless dimensions with breathtaking results, making up for the mistakes of the clumsy image. Seriously, go see Spider Man 3 and listen to the Dolby TrueHD.