Good Films
Psychological integrity and the integration of sound, image, score, and craft in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
THE LIVING FILM
The Living Film is my conception of cinema as an organic expression of a character’s interior life.
When a character struggles, consciously or unconsciously, toward a life that has remained unlived, the film begins to generate its own dramatic necessity. That struggle produces the character’s actions and the unfolding narrative, but it also organizes the entirety of cinematic expression: performance, framing, movement, design, rhythm, editing, sound, and music. These are dimensions of the same interior dramatic event.
A living film takes its form from within. Its world emerges from the particular nature of the character’s becoming: what they fear, desire, resist, discover, and cannot yet bear to know. The filmworld is therefore more than a setting for the drama. It is the drama extending into image, sound, space, and time.
Whether the character’s quest succeeds or fails, it is their active struggle with the unlived life that gives the film its vitality. The Living Film proposes that the unity of a cinematic work arises from this organic principle: the whole expressive world grows from the interior dramatic life of the person at its center.
MATURATIONAL NARRATIVE
Maturational Narrative explores the dramatic process through which a person encounters, and potentially begins to live, possibilities of themselves that have previously remained unlived.
Every character enters a story with an established psychic organization: characteristic ways of feeling, perceiving, defending, relating, and acting. This organization has made their existing life possible, while leaving other possibilities of being outside their lived experience. Drama brings that existing person into consequential contact with circumstances that place their familiar ways of living under pressure.
Each successive action arises as the character’s most available attempt to manage the feelings and consequences of what has just occurred. Those actions generate new circumstances, new experiences, and further choices. Narrative progression therefore acquires a deeper continuity: the unfolding logic of the character’s psychic life.
Through this process, a previously unlived possibility of self may become enacted in the world. The character may embrace it, resist it, partially integrate it, or fail to accommodate it altogether. Maturation does not necessarily mean improvement or happiness, and the earlier self does not simply disappear. Dramatic becoming concerns the changing relationship between the person who has lived and the person who might yet live.
In this conception, drama makes possible personhood real through consequential action. Its fundamental movement is the encounter between an existing life and the life that remains to be lived.
BLOG
Reflections on cinema, dramatic life, character, music, and the films that inspire me. Some are developed essays; others are observations, discoveries, and thoughts in progress.
Biometallica
Howard Shore’s Crash score, its erotic and technological sonic world, and its relationship to film images.
Integral Punch
Character, consequences, and Barry’s inner music in Punch-Drunk Love.
Maternal Unity
Attunement, image, rhythm, and John Williams’s score in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Heat Conceit
Independence and human connection as the opposing mental principles of Neil and Vincent in Heat.
Postmod Junkies
The contrasting musical and narrative worlds of The Usual Suspects and Pulp Fiction.
Innocence Polarity
Vulnerability, institutional cynicism, and human fragility in A Most Wanted Man.
Genderflip
Gendered character roles and the integrated visual, sound, and score language of The X-Files Season One.
Wobbly Mayor
Mayor Vaughn’s character change and the protagonists’ different journeys in Jaws.
Postmod Junkies
The Usual Suspects and Pulp Fiction inhabit diametrically opposed musical universes, each film’s sonic landscape embodying its narrative ethos and aesthetic lineage with almost diagrammatic clarity.
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Postmod Junkies
The Usual Suspects and Pulp Fiction inhabit diametrically opposed musical universes. Each film’s sonic landscape highlights the other and clarifies their respective and brilliant approaches to embodying narrative ethos and aesthetic lineage.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
John Ottman’s classical orchestral score is not just a throwback but a living ghost of Old Hollywood. It is almost constantly present, like Golden Hollywood’s Herrmann or its heirs, John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith.
Ottman meticulously conjures the solemnity, dread, and operatic scale of noir worlds and Hitchcockian suspense with orchestration, melody, and harmonic lusciousness. It is all chromatic, in the sense of multicolored.
He drapes the film’s labyrinthine plot with equally complex layers of strings, woodwinds, and symphonic tremolos. The score operates as narrative glue, knitting together all the disparate timelines, while it deepens the collective sense of mythic fate, even as the film ultimately dissolves its own reality. While we lose our sense of what is real, the score pounds relentlessly on; it is our anchor. Without it, perhaps the narrative’s deconstruction of itself might not hold our mental attention.
There are virtually no pop song cues—the diegesis is hermetically sealed, timeless. In this way the soundworld reinforces the aura of the closed, fatalistic system within which each of its characters is trapped.
PULP FICTION
Tarantino has confirmed that he doesn’t want to give a composer the aesthetic power of defining the soul of his films. This displays a proper understanding of the function of original music in film. It carries a power that reinterprets the nature of the whole. Just as with Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction embodies this approach: it destroys the notion of the “original score” altogether.
Tarantino, ostensibly acting as “composer with songs,” builds a kaleidoscopic jukebox of surf rock, soul, vintage pop, and cult obscurities. It’s a bricolage of pre-existing music that functions simultaneously as soundtrack, cultural quotation, and structural device.
Every track—the exotic scales of Misirlou; the daring excitement of Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon; the liberation and promise of Son of a Preacher Man—acts as character, mood, ironic commentary, and time-stamp. They work to embed the film within a specifically American pop-psyche.
The total absence of a commissioned score is a radical authorial gesture: Pulp Fiction’s musical world is entirely extrinsic, source-driven, making the film feel porous, open, and wittily self-aware. It loosens the sense of a gap between us and the film. What could be more seductively convincing than an artwork that has no boundary between itself and you?
The two films’ musical approaches are not simply different but antithetical:
The Usual Suspects: Orchestral, inward, mythic, classical — music as a vessel for narrative gravitas, interior meaning, and emotional manipulation.
Pulp Fiction: Pop, outward, postmodern, referential — music as cultural collage, commentary, and mood engine, with no authorial “voice” save the curator’s.
Both approaches are totalizing and saturate their film with meaning from start to finish. Where The Usual Suspects conjures the haunted interior of cinema’s past, Pulp Fiction channels the omnipresent external world of American pop, flattening high and low, past and present, into one anarchic Now.
Dramatic Form
The Craft of Enacted Thought
Dramatic Form explores how a film acquires its dramatic life through the unfolding relationship between character, action, and the world.
Every scene places a character’s existing ways of feeling, knowing, and relating under pressure. Their response creates a new state of affairs, which becomes the starting condition of the next scene. Narrative develops through this continuous movement of psychic cause and consequence, as characters encounter experiences that challenge their established sense of themselves and their world.
The course examines the relationship between individual dramatic scenes and the form of the whole film: how genre establishes a world of possibilities and moral values; how dramatic encounters reveal and develop the psychological texture of characters; and how successive actions accumulate into a larger process of transformation, integration, or tragedy.
For writers, directors, and film creatives, Dramatic Form offers an understanding of dramatic structure as something generated from within the unfolding life of the film itself. Its central concern is cinema as enacted thought: the transformation of interior human experience into consequential dramatic action.
Explore Dramatic FormDramatic Score
A Cinematic Sensibility
Dramatic Score explores film music as a form of dramatic insight: an expressive intelligence participating in the inner life of cinema.
Music can embody a character’s experience, reveal what remains unspoken, conceal a truth, deepen an ambiguity, or contradict what the image appears to tell us. It can reinforce, complicate, or transform our understanding of a dramatic moment. In these ways, music becomes an active participant in the film’s thinking, rather than merely an accompaniment to its images and emotions.
The course approaches cinema as an integrated expressive organism, in which character, story, performance, image, editing, sound, and music belong to a single developing world. It examines how musical choices acquire their meaning through their relationships with that world: its particular psychology, values, tensions, rhythms, and unfolding dramatic life.
Designed for composers and filmmakers, Dramatic Score develops cinematic sensibility: the ability to perceive what a film is, what it needs, and what music can uniquely contribute to its dramatic becoming. Its central concern is the composer’s capacity to think cinematically, discovering music that arises organically from the film’s own interior life.
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