The terrorist has all the best tunes

Writing her ini­tial impres­sions of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos from the Cannes Film Festival in May, my friend Manohla Dargis admit­ted some­thing about the pic­ture, which she largely admired, was bug­ging her: “I’m not sure what I think about all of the groovy music—but that’s what second view­ings are for.” Having had a second view­ing, she expands on her thoughts about the film’s soundtrack music in her review of the film in today’s New York Times: “Just as start­ling is the thrum of elec­tric gui­tars rev­ving up in the 1981 song ‘Dreams Never End,’ by the post­punk band New Order, which accom­pan­ies Carlos as he throws the bomb and hur­ries away. The music feels dan­ger­ously off-putting at first because it’s unclear if Mr. Assayas is try­ing to sex up the viol­ence, its per­pet­rat­or, both or neither. But as the gui­tars carry over into the next scene — a seem­ingly unre­mark­able yet cru­cial pause in the action in which Carlos listens to a report about the bomb­ing and then clutches his gen­it­als while gaz­ing in a mir­ror — the music feels a lot less like an empty device, one used simply to pump the story, and more like the soundtrack you might expect to be play­ing inside the head of a world-class self-mythologizer like this one.”

Yes, there’s that. And there’s def­in­itely more as well. Music is incred­ibly import­ant to Assayas per­son­ally, and the way he uses it in his films always reflects a mul­ti­pli­city of con­cerns. His fea­ture pri­or to Summer Hours, for instance, comes to it den­ou­ment prop­er to the strains of the Plasticenes’ peppy, dis­arm­ing bit of con­tem­por­ary Gallic elec­tro­pop “Loser,” which is very fit­ting; but it is no acci­dent that the film’s actu­al end cred­its roll up to a piece of coun­ter­cul­tur­al pas­tor­al by the Incredible String Band. 

While the film’s story begins in the early ’70s and ends with until Carlos’ cap­ture by French author­it­ies in 1994, the songs used on its soundtrack (with at least one not­able excep­tion) were recor­ded and released in the span of time that encom­passed the ostens­ible birth of punk rock (as a com­mod­ity) on one end, and the start of the Reagan era on the oth­er, that is, between 1976 and the early ’80s. The music is mostly tensile, edgy, guitar-based punk or “altern­at­ive” rock. It’s appro­pri­ate to the action, yes, cre­at­ing a par­tic­u­lar kind of trebly ten­sion that’s like a more “New Wave” ver­sion of the feel­ing cre­ated by Scorsese’s classic-rock-with-cocaine sequence near the end of Goodfellas. But the tem­por­al evoc­a­tions the music car­ries are just as sig­ni­fic­ant to mak­ing its themes felt. The film makes pretty clear, in its final third, that Reagan’s Cold War push­back against the Soviets and oth­er ostens­ible Communist and/or rogue states was not at all inef­fec­tu­al, and in fact threw quite the mon­key wrench into the oper­a­tions that men such as Carlos were largely bungling through­out their “hey­day.” So while Dargis’ point about the pos­sible soundtrack-of-my-life point for the char­ac­ter, there’s also that dimen­sion, which ties into a lar­ger music-geek dimen­sion. The use of New Order music gains in res­on­ance if/when you recall that New Order was a band that rose from the ruins of Joy Division after the lat­ter group’s lead sing­er took his life in May of 1980. These events have little to do with geo­pol­it­ics, to be sure, but they’re zeit­geist mark­ers, by the same token. 

In my inter­view with him, Assayas talks about how import­ant it was for him to use “Sonic Reducer” by The Dead Boys dur­ing the scene in which the extremely fer­vent and mur­der­ous ter­ror­ist known as Nada gets into a shootout with the Swiss bor­der patrol. Nada is the most “out of con­trol” of the ter­ror­ists we meet in the film; sim­il­arly, the sen­ti­ments expressed in “Sonic Reducer“ ‘s lyr­ics have a pretty defin­it­ively anti-social per­spect­ive. First verse: “I don’t need anyone/don’t need no mom and dad/don’t need no pretty face/don’t need no human race/I got some new for you/Don’t even need you too.” And by the finale, the sing­er boasts “I’ll be a phar­oah soon,” a slightly high­brow iter­a­tion of the up here/down there scen­ario ori­gin­ated by Question Mark and the Mysterian’s “96 Tears.” Assayas talks about Nada being the most argu­ably “punk” of her ilk. And of course the punk group the Dead Boys were a splinter of Rocket From the Tombs, a proto-punk Cleveland out­fit, the oth­er half of which became Pere Ubu; Ubu’s David Thomas wrote the lyr­ics. Thomas in inter­views intim­ates that the per­spect­ive of these songs was adop­ted from the teen angst of such tunes as Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen;” RFTT and later Ubu’s “Final Solution,” he recalls, began as an adapt­a­tion of Blue Cheer’s cov­er of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.” Having all of these asso­ci­ations boun­cing around one’s head as the scene in Carlos plays out is, for me, one of the film’s sig­nal pleas­ures. (Assayas’ use of New Order and Pere Ubu music in his early fea­ture Disorder is some­thing I may get to in a later post.)

As I men­tioned in the intro to my Assayas inter­view, I was VERY slightly and peri­pher­ally involved in help­ing the dir­ect­or out with the soundtrack; he wanted to use some music by the Feelies in the film, and was get­ting some not-inconsiderable-resistance from the U.K. record label that had recently reis­sued the first two records by that band. Via the band’s drum­mer, Stanley Demeski, who’s an old friend, I helped Assayas make con­tact with Bill Million and Glenn Mercer, the band’s gui­tar­ists and songwriters,who in fact are the licensors of that mater­i­al, and who have always had very spe­cif­ic ideas of their sound and how they want their music to be used in such con­texts, if at all. They are not known for grant­ing per­mis­sions willy-nilly, and I gath­er that there was a lot of back-and-forth before the four minutes or so of Feelies music that wound up in the film wound up there. Where Assayas did not get to use the Feelies stuff he wanted, or as he wanted, he filled in the space some­times with stuff by Wire, who were def­in­itely on a sim­il­ar cre­at­ive wavelength as the Haledon band’s back in the late ’80s; we hear the former band’s propuls­ive ’78 single “Dot Dash” at least twice in the film.

“Hey, did he ever get ‘Higher Ground’?” Stanley asked me the last time I saw him; that song is from the band’s 1988 album Only Life, made for the then-major-label A&M, and appar­ently the band itself isn’t quite sure where the licens­ing rights for that record cur­rently reside. As it hap­pens, he did not, and I’m curi­ous as to where he wanted to use it in the film, although I can haz­ard a guess (I think it would fit nicely/ironically at a par­tic­u­lar spot in the final third). He did, on the oth­er hand, get the recently depar­ted gui­tar­ist Davy Graham’s “Jenra,” one of the great musi­cian’s won­der­ful Middle-East-tinged tunes, off of the very mixed 1968 album Large As Life And Twice As Natural (this is the excep­tion I men­tioned earli­er), which kicks off with one of the most godaw­ful cov­ers of “Both Sides Now” per­pet­rated by any­one, any­where. That he made it past that anom­al­ous atro­city in Graham’s oeuvre proves yet again what an encyc­lo­ped­ist, and ardent miner, Assayas is in such matters.