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Lip-sync in Lipstick : 1950s Popular Songs in a Television Series by Dennis Potter

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01411890801986063

1547-7304

Joshua S. Walden,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Abstract In the 1993 television production Lipstick on Your Collar, screenwriter Dennis Potter foregrounds popular 1950s rock-and-roll hit songs, creating what he has called a “home-made musical.” Characters break out in song—but instead of singing, they move their mouths in synchrony with the voices of pop idols. A study of the effects of Potter's technique, with help from the literatures of opera and film theory and the history of ventriloquism, shows that the songs in Lipstick on Your Collar gain fresh meaning in their new context through the medium of lip-syncing, becoming spontaneous expressions of the characters' psychologies. I presented an earlier version of this article at the meeting of the American Musicological Society in Washington, D.C., in 2005, and I thank the respondents during that session and the editors and anonymous readers at the Journal of Musicological Research for their helpful comments. I am grateful to Giorgio Biancorosso, Philip Bohlman, Walter Frisch, and Christopher Washburne for their generous advice on this project at various stages of its development. Special credit and appreciation go to Susanna Berger, Christopher Doll, Judith Schelly, Daniel Walden, and Michael Walden for watching episodes with me, sharing their ideas, reading drafts, and providing support at every step along the way. Notes 1Glen Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 142. 2W. H. Auden, “Music in Shakespeare,”in The Dyer's Hand (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 522. 3A medium functions as a means of communication, and, as lip-syncing is the technique by which Potter's characters express themselves in song numbers in Lipstick on Your Collar, it is useful in the context of this study to discuss lip-sync as a medium. For a useful discussion of the study of media, see Joshua Meyrowitz, “Medium Theory,” in Communication Theory Today, eds. David Crowley and David Mitchell (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 50–77. 4Creeber, Dennis Potter, 1. 5A number of directors have taken inspiration from Potter's technique of incorporating lip-sync into his television series. For example, the American television seriesCop Rock, from 1990, employed a similar device, and the French director Alain Resnais paid homage to Potter in his 1997 film On connaît la chanson. Hollywood films Pennies from Heaven (1981) and The Singing Detective (2003) were based on Potter's series by the same names. 6Such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, who called himself a “sonic realist,” and the signatories of the 1995 Danish filmmaking manifesto Dogme 95, have often eschewed post-production dubbing on aesthetic grounds, promoting what they see as the more authentic and realist method of allowing only sounds recorded during filming to be heard in the finished product. In their ardent “Vow of Chastity,” the members of Dogme 95 promised, “The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).” Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, “The Vow of Chastity,” http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm (accessed March 1, 2007). The sound that results from this technique, often awash in the hum of the tools of filmmaking and background noises, creates a markedly different, noisier sonic atmosphere than commonly heard in mainstream commercial cinema and television. 7Emily Yu describes the techniques of sound effect production and the impacts of microphone technologies on post-production sound editing in “Perspectives: Sounds of Cinema: What Do We Really Hear?” Journal of Popular Film and Television31/2 (Summer 2003), 93–6. 8The dubbing of singers' voices over the lip-syncing of actors who are chosen for roles in film musicals because of their star status continues to the present day. In Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You (1996), for instance, Drew Barrymore, playing Skylar Dandridge, mimed to Olivia Hayman's singing voice. A thorough history of dubbing and lip-syncing in film musicals from the 1930s to 1960s appears in Marsha Siefert's article, “Image/Music/Voice: Song Dubbing in Hollywood Musicals,” Journal of Communication45/2 (Spring 1995), 44–66. In some cases, directors have even taken advantage of post-production sound design to dub one actor's speaking voice over another's body. This technique was common in the works of Federico Fellini, for instance, though the synchronization was often cursory. In Guy Madden's cult film Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Ross McMillan came to the studio after filming was completed to dub his voice over the moving lips of the actor Peter Glahn. As in the examples above of dubbing in musicals, it was intended that the inconsistency between body and voice be obscured by dubbing and synchronizing sound to the moving lips. 9Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 63. 10Chion, Audio-Vision, 64. In The Voice in Cinema, Chion elaborates on the synchronization of voice and body in film: “The process of ‘embodying’ a voice is not a mechanistic operation, but a symbolic one. We play along in recognizing a voice that comes from an actor's body as his, even if we know the film is dubbed, provided that the rules of a sort of contract of belief are respected.” Chion underestimates the potential of a viewer to believe in the synchronization of mismatched voice and body, however, when he writes, “We easily accept the dubbing of a voice onto a body as long as realist conventions of verisimilitude regarding gender and age are respected … On the other hand, spectators don't easily tolerate a voice dub of the opposite sex or markedly different age onto the body represented onscreen.” In fact, as the persuasiveness of the lip-syncing in Potter's dramas makes clear, viewers can easily “play along” with the dubbing of voice over body where race, age, and even gender are mismatched. Michel Chion,The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 129 and 132. 11Lisa de Moraes, “Ashlee Simpson and That Lip-Syncing Feeling,”The Washington Post, October 26, 2004, C01. 12In an ironic twist on the plot of Singin' in the Rain, it has been revealed that Debbie Reynolds's singing voice was dubbed in many scenes throughout the movie by Jean Hagen and other actresses (multiple stories and speculations exist about the identities of Reynolds's voice doubles). In this final scene, Reynolds is lip-syncing to Hagen, not the other way around. At the moment that lip-syncing is most obviously a construction, it is also most invisible. Peter Wollen, Singin' in the Rain (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 56. 13Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11. In his book Authenticities, Peter Kivy writes that, when we deem a performance “personally authentic,” we are characterizing it as “sincere, self-originating, original, an expression of the performer rather than of someone whom the performer is aping.” Peter Kivy,Authenticities (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 6. 14It is standard among Indian Bollywood cinema directors to incorporate numerous fantastical song numbers into a film; these musical sequences involve lip-syncing, and informed audiences are expected to recognize that the actors on screen are not the source of the prerecorded voices. But whereas in Potter's television dramas a single actor appropriates the voices of numerous singers, in Bollywood movies, countless actors have lip-synced to the voices of a remarkably small number of film song performers, called “playback singers.” As Neepa Majumdar has shown, for approximately fifty years almost every Bollywood film actress has lip-synced to the studio-recorded voice of the preeminent female playback singer Lata Mangeshkar, who is a well-known star in her own right. Majumdar explains that as a result, “one might say that during the entire lifetime of the Indian nation … the same female singing voice” has been “the ideal norm of aural femininity across numerous female bodies.” Like in Lipstick on Your Collar and Potter's other dramas that incorporate lip-sync, in which the audience is expected to recognize the incongruity between body and voice and to know the identity of the singer, Majumdar argues that “because of the star status of playback singers in Hindi cinema, the question of authenticity is cast in terms that are different from Hollywood.” Neepa Majumdar, “The Embodied Voice,” in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, eds. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 163 and 165. 15Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97. 16Wendy Everett addresses the autobiographical nature of Potter's television dramas in “Songlines: Alternative Journeys in Contemporary European Cinema,” in Music and Cinema, eds. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 99–117. 17The history of the exchange of popular music between the United States and United Kingdom is explained in detail in Laura E. Cooper and B. Lee Cooper, “The Pendulum of Cultural Imperialism: Popular Music Interchanges Between the United States and Britain, 1943–1967,” Journal of Popular Culture 27/3 (Winter 1993), 61–78. 18Cooper, “Pendulum of Cultural Imperialism,” 63. 19Graham Fuller, Potter on Potter (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 101. 20In Lipstick on Your Collar, a good deal of the action takes place in a world-within-a-world—the interior imaginary realm to which Hopper retreats, during his fantasies, from the exterior diegetic world he inhabits—in which Hopper possesses the powers of a director (or of God) that he lacks in the outer world. Thus the series can be counted among the forerunners of a cinematic genre, emergent during the late 1990s, which Victoria Nelson has described as “films dealing with the rather arcane subject of characters trapped within other characters' fabricated worlds.” Such films as The Truman Show, Pleasantville, and Dark Cityfrom 1998, and The Matrix from 1999, feature a demiurge character who possesses “powers … to govern the microcosms their playthings inhabit.” Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 273–5. In Potter's series, Hopper acts as a demiurge who manipulates his surroundings in the fantastical microcosm of the “real” world that exists in his mind. Dennis Potter's series Cold Lazarus, produced in 1996, treats even more directly the themes Nelson describes: It is an account of a scientist's search for the secrets of the human mind and faculty of memory, in a futuristic world dominated by computers and virtual reality. 21During the credit sequence that concludes each episode of Lipstick on Your Collar, the producers have dubbed the main theme from Elmer Bernstein's score to the 1956 film The Man With the Golden Arm. This musical allusion serves to associate Mike Hopper with the iconic protagonist of that film, Frankie Machine, played by Frank Sinatra. Like Hopper, Machine is burdened by responsibilities he cannot avoid (heavy debt and drug addiction), he yearns to be a drummer in a jazz ensemble, and he falls in love with a platinum blonde (Kim Novak). For both Hopper and Machine, music provides emotional escape from their daily frustrations. 22James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 36. 23Mladen Dolar, A Voice and NothingMore (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 15. (Emphasis in the original) 24Dolar acknowledges that “the voice is like a fingerprint” of the speaker's identity, but still insists, incorrectly, in my view, that “this fingerprint quality of the voice is something that does not contribute to meaning, nor can it be linguistically described.” Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 22. 25It is not inconceivable to imagine Ewan McGregor singing the songs in this series: after starring in Lipstick on Your Collar, he went on to act and sing in a number of cinematic musicals, including Moulin Rouge(2001). 26Fuller, Potter on Potter, 96. 27Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 3. 28Quoted in Richard Middleton, Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 199. 29Creeber,Dennis Potter, 141. 30Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 275. 31Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert and trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 462. 32Philip V. Bohlman, “Ontologies of Music,” in Rethinking Music, eds. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21. 33Everett, “Songlines,” 113. 34Samuel G Marinov, “Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective and Lipstick on Your Collar: Redefining the Genre of Musical Film,” in The Passion of Dennis Potter:International Collected Essays, eds. Vernon W. Gras and John R. Cook (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2000), 200. 35Marinov, “Redefining the Genre,” 203. 36Fuller, Potter on Potter, 96. (Emphasis in the original) 37Cynthia Baron, “Performances in Adaptation: Analyzing Human Movement in Motion Pictures,” Cineaste31/4 (Fall 2006), 49. 38Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113. 39In Lynch's works, as in Potter's, popular music often accompanies the nostalgic daydreaming of frustrated characters who identify with the songs' voices, lyrics, and forms, producing what Mark Mazullo has called “pop-song fantasy-nightmares.” Mark Mazullo, “Remembering Pop: David Lynch and the Sound of the ‘60s,” American Music 23/4 (Winter 2005), 499. 40Chion provides a similar reading of the film technique of superimposing a voice on the image of another's body, though in an instance that features voice-over, rather than lip-sync. In an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Chion writes that when the audience hears the voice of Norman Bates's mother over a shot of his smile in movie's final scene, “his mouth is closed, as if to suggest possession by spirits, or ventriloquism.” Chion, Voice in Cinema, 149. 41Connor, Dumbstruck, 43. 42Jonathan Rée, “Tummy-Talkers,” The London Review of Books 23/9 (2001). 43Rick Altman, “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980), 78. 44Jonathan Rée, I See A Voice (New York: Owl Books, 1999), 59. 45Rée, I See A Voice, 61. 46The racial juxtaposition at play when Dennis Potter, as a ventriloquist, matches African-American song forms and voices with White performers might be contrasted with another interracial melding that occurs in the movie Carmen Jones, from 1954. In this film, based on Oscar Hamerstein II's Broadway refashioning of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen, set in African-American communities in the South, Dorothy Dandridge, playing the title role, was overdubbed with the voice of the White opera singer Marilyn Horne. Rather than aiming to signify the authenticity stereotypically associated with African-American vocal timbres, the filmmakers presumably wanted to indicate the operatic, tragic nature of Carmen Jones—and to afford the film greater marketing acceptability and appeal among White audiences—by giving her a voice characterized by traditional operatic timbres and techniques. Siefert, “Image/Music/Voice,” 60. 47Middleton, Voicing the Popular, 31. 48George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 33. 49Hopper's borrowings of African-American vocal styles and musical forms is analogous to a larger cultural movement of appropriation. A number of the White musicians whose songs are included in the series' soundtrack similarly took African-American music and performance as their inspiration: “Blue Suede Shoes,” for instance, the hit single by Carl Perkins that was later covered by Elvis Presley, was of course based on African-American blues forms. Howlin' Wolf and other African-American blues singers were crucially influential to the styles of such rock bands as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. In 1956, the year in which the action of Lipstick on Your Collar takes place, Chuck Berry, an African-American singer from St. Louis, wrote the song “Roll Over Beethoven”; this work helped secure the reputation of the Beatles when it appeared on their second album in 1963. 50Rée, I See A Voice, 375. 51Dennis Potter, Seeing the Blossom: Two Interviews and a Lecture (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 19.