“If fits it so perfectly”: the 1962 movie David Lynch called the perfect marriage of music and imagery
David Lynch might have had a distinctive, idiosyncratic style, but music formed a big part of this, and he relied on close collaborative relationships with the likes of Angelo Badalamenti and Dean Hurley to bring the sonic worlds of his films to life.
The Twin Peaks theme is arguably the greatest to ever grace television (don’t even get me started on how good the rest of the soundtrack is), while every Lynch movie featured such a memorable collection of songs, both original and pre-existing, that you were simply sucked straight into his surreal landscapes.
In fact, you only have to listen to a playlist of songs used in his movies, like ‘Wicked Game’ by Chris Isaak, ‘I’m Deranged’ by David Bowie, or ‘I’ve Told Every Little Star’ by Linda Scott, to feel yourself transported into a Lynchian realm.
No one who has seen Blue Velvet can listen to ‘In Dreams’ by Roy Orbison without Dean Stockwell’s lip-sync coming to mind, and Elvis’ ‘Love Me Tender’ is now inexplicably linked to Nicolas Cage because of his performance in Wild at Heart. Lynch knew how important music was to electrifying a scene, to stirring memories and concocting the right atmosphere, which often led him to work on the music for his own films, composing some pretty intoxicating tracks for Mulholland Drive with John Neff.
The filmmaker’s dedication to a cinematic world where music is just as important as visuals and dialogue only heightened his cult following, as it showed him as an artist who truly cared about every minor aspect, every fine detail, of his work, where a song was never thrown into the mix without meaning, without serving an emotional purpose.
When Lynch considers some of his favourite music moments from movies, a Stanley Kubrick film comes to mind, although it might not be the one you’d first think of. While he delivered some pretty unforgettable cinematic music moments in 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and even Eyes Wide Shut (Jocelyn Pook’s ‘Masked Ball’ is unforgettable), it’s Lolita that Lynch favoured most.
Calling it his favourite Kubrick movie, he highlighted how perfect the pieces of music were within it, most of which was composed by Nelson Riddle. “The theme is a kind of a piano thing, so beautiful, [and] it fits so perfectly. I don’t know who wrote that, but then there’s Lolita’s theme as well, which is a kind of strange rock and roll, but it also works so perfect,” he revealed during an interview with Wintergasten.
The soundtrack is pretty memorable, from the opening theme with its sweeping strings and tender declarations of romance, which conceal the true horrors of the movie, to the playful ‘Lolita Ya Ya’ and the suspenseful ‘Quilty’s Theme’. “It’s filled with all kinds of things…I don’t know what word I would use but it’s a story about, I guess, a time in America. And sure, it’s got cynicism swimming in there for sure, it’s very funny, but it catches something under there somewhere, it catches hidden things, and it’s an absurd sort of story but with incredible performances,” he said, discussing his love for the movie.
You can see parallels between Lynch’s ‘women in trouble’ preoccupation and the themes of tragedy found in Lolita, which follows a middle-aged man as he falls in love with a 12-year-old girl, even feigning love for her mother so he can move into their house. Decades on, Lynch would centre a similarly heinous relationship in Twin Peaks, with Laura Palmer certainly carrying an essence of Lolita.
