This is the third installment in “Music Mondays,” a new weekly music column from WHRC, the Bi-Co’s student-run community radio. Featuring music news, album and concert reviews, playlists, recommendations, and more.
Project Hail Mary and Barry Lyndon are incredibly different, a fact that is obvious without needing to watch either film. However, as I saw them only days apart at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, I couldn’t help but search for common ground. Both narratives strive for some version of the word “epic,” though with significant divergence. Both are adaptations of books, neither of whose book accuracy I can attest to in the least. Funnily, both leads are blonde men named Ryan (Gosling and O’Neal, respectively). Aside from these somewhat random facts, though, is the true “similarity” I found between these two stories: the importance of their music.
The score for Barry Lyndon is widely acclaimed, having won an Oscar in the category against the formidable competition of Pete Townshend himself for Tommy in 1976. The amalgamation of the classical compositions, Irish folk, and military marches fleshes out Barry’s character and his journey to personage to the extreme; it felt as if I was being shown this man under a microscope despite the generally irreverent and somewhat distanced atmosphere of the film. The music plays this crucial role in drawing the viewer in and keeping them surrounded by the story. Similarly, given the irreverence especially in regards to the period aspect, the very temporally-appropriate music helps to keep the viewer’s immersion and separation balanced. From an analytical standpoint, the score is simply perfection.
The score of Project Hail Mary, on the other hand, was swooping and cosmic and grand, but ultimately unremarkable to me. It was exactly the soundtrack you’d expect for a hopeful and sentimental movie about a man trying to save the world in space. It was just perfectly successful in accomplishing its goal of creating a narratively and thematically congruous soundscape for the film. Having a score that appropriately matches the stakes and visuals is extremely important, but it also feels like the bare minimum — not much more. This begs the question: why am I writing about the music of the film if I don’t particularly care about the score? The answer: my experience of Project Hail Mary’s musical genius is not based on its score at all. Instead, there is a single scene with a single song a ways through the movie’s duration that I haven’t been able to shake. In fact, I was so desperate to extend my near-trascendent emotional state post-screening that I walked home listening to said song on repeat. I think I might have been dancing a little bit, if anybody was walking on North Merion Ave at 10:30 on Thursday night. It is in this song that the film’s heartbeat — and heartbreak — can be found. And while I won’t spoil the context of the scene, I can share, with just a twinge of embarrassment, that the song is “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles.
For context, I was a massive One Direction fan in childhood. This followed me for a bit into adolescence, and while mostly keeping its distance, the obsession still lingers (as any good obsession does). “Sign of the Times” has always been somewhat of a guilty yet not-really-guilty-at-all listen for me. The fact that my emotional resonance was grounded in something coincidental — simply the fact that I have a prior relationship to the song — might seem to be diminishing the more universal success of the music in this moment. However, I would argue this is the function of music, and of art at large. It is only the combination of a film’s own aspects with whatever you are bringing into the theatre that ultimately makes up the whole of the experience. There is space in every film for the viewer, quite literally, and that space is not a void. When “Sign of the Times” began playing and I sat deathly still in my seat on the brink of tears, my childhood love and adult endearment for Harry Styles was meant to be that final coat of paint, the last layer on the emotional underbelly of the movie. I wouldn’t have reacted that way if I was watching something horribly made that just happened to include “Sign of the Times;” it was the accumulation of the whole project leading up to this tender moment of musical catharsis that inspired such a reaction. The beauty of mass consumption of a piece of art is that there is a whole plethora of other reasons from a whole plethora of other people to be moved by that moment. The making of the scene is the making of a well-decorated vessel or vase — something sturdy on its own, but only complete once filled.
My feelings-driven reaction to Project Hail Mary might be overshadowing the joint custody Barry Lyndon has over this article’s supposed topic, but the two films together are still vital to my point. My “point,” of course, is less of a point and more an obvious reality that I felt the need to expressively reaffirm: music is a universal aspect of the human condition, something bonding us and our creations. To a certain extent, this universality means I could have written this article about any two movies. However, the way in which Project Hail Mary and Barry Lyndon differ in their reliance on and execution of a musical foundation is rather perfect for this comparison; they remain far-flung and adrift, in their musical approaches and beyond, but ultimately are still affixed by how their use of music defined my viewership. A single song or whole score — either way, music gave each movie its movement.
