Among the most culturally instructive areas of enquiry are failures and embarrassments, which theatrically disclose the ideologies and expectations that drive ‘normal’ life. This imaginative study takes as its topic ‘situations where music and cinema misunderstand each other’ (p. 14). The argument is that these moments reflect transitions in labour relations within the film industry and in global production processes. The case studies are rock ‘n’ roll movies of the 1950s, Ken Russell's music biopics, video nasties and pop stars who crossover into acting – some overlap between the last and the first, in which Elvis is a strong presence. The surveys of the larger economic changes are based on intimidatingly broad research and the case studies are refreshingly off the beaten track of film and popular music research.
Their appeal is much enhanced by the author's imaginative and energetic drawing of a ‘long bow’. When so many academic arguments nuance themselves out of existence, Dickinson pursues an ambitiously original and clearly articulated objective. In the chapter on video nasties, all the strengths of her ebullient style and imaginative hypothesis formation converge in a pyrotechnic tour de force, one of the most impressive contributions to the field I have read. The connections between post-industrial de-skilling and the defleshed synth music (and, it may be added, in many cases, the subjects) in these videos, are established with magisterial momentum. The brevity of my encomium is itself a tribute to the bold assurance with which she secures difficult territory. Apart from paraphrase, there is little that can be said about something so consummately achieved. The trade-off with boldness is risk, and elsewhere she is less sure-footed as she approaches the ‘texts’. The long bowshot seems shy of its target, or at least we are hurried away from the butts before seeing where the arrow actually lands. The tenuousness of some of the textual analyses is often exacerbated by the volatility of the prose. The analysis of some of the music is rather schematised to the requirements of the argument, especially the generalisations intended to discriminate rock ‘n’ roll through Fordist analogies (e.g. pp. 50, 53, 57). The style might have been usefully chastened by a firm editor, who could also have done something to rein in the metaphor stampedes that sometimes drive the argument (and, incidentally, have monitored infelicities and solecisms of which there are more than we expect from this imprint).
The strengths and weaknesses can be illustrated by reference to the treatment of Ken Russell biopics, The Music Lovers, Mahler and Lisztomania. Dickinson's analyses are refreshingly and enthusiastically revisionist, but in closing in on the actual texts to draw parallels with labour relations in the UK at the time the films were made, she is always interesting, often ingeniously thought-provoking, but not always convincing. Some are carried along by adventitious resemblances, conceits and, most vulnerably, by the kind of selectivity that avoids inconvenient data. It is noted that all the films involve ‘employee isolation as against collectivity’ (p. 5); ergo, they are Russell's ‘response to contemporary labour relations, active participants in what was happening at the time’ (p. 90). ‘What was happening at the time’ is a big orchard from which to choose cherries. Dickinson reviews GATT and the draining away of US investment in British film, reflected in Russell's meagre budgets, but it is less convincing to suggest that the labour rationalisations of multi-nationals are also referenced in the lack of capital backing and the ‘job insecurity’ suffered by Liszt, Mahler and Tchaikovsky, especially when we are reminded, in support of another point elsewhere, that the latter enjoyed the handsome patronage of Mme von Meck (p. 99). Noting the parlous labour environment of the 1970s, Dickinson writes ‘it is hardly surprising that themes of solitude and alienation enter these films’ (p. 91). Maybe the particular subjects of the movies also have something to do with this.
Referring to the dwindling of ‘large-scale planning and production’, the author asserts that this ‘economic state of affairs is shared by the historical period that Russell portrays’ (p. 91). Where, exactly? In nineteenth century Europe and England? In which sectors? Colonial ventures? Industrial manufacturing? Rather nebulous, as also the generalisation that Romanticism ‘prized direct individualism as a response to an uncaring although increasingly interconnected world’ (p. 92), which is reflected in the three composers' indifference to ‘macro-politics’. The parallel is glib, especially given the rather furtive parenthetical concession that this doesn't actually apply to Liszt, nor Wagner, who is also significant in the film. Score: two out of three. Or two out of four if we include Wagner. Not the firmest foundation for the claim that ‘There seems to have been a tangible concord between [these films] and the broader histories with which they interacted’ (p. 94).
Dickinson has set herself a considerable challenge, so it is not surprising that there is sometimes the crunch of hammering the square peg of the movies into the round hole of a thesis. Tchaikovsky is shown streaming with sweat at the piano; a parallel with Russell's own workaholism and with increasingly ‘arduous’ labour conditions in the UK (p. 97). But then again, Russell's choice of subjects is simultaneously a turning away from manual labour towards the culture industries (p. 97). And all this subsumed to an enfolding thesis about disjunctions between film and music. Recalling Karl Popper, I sometimes found it hard to imagine what kind of evidence would test rather than support the argument. Often ‘might be’ and ‘could be’ quietly modulate into an implied ‘is’. For all this, however, I admire enormously the ambition and originality of the study, much preferable to something safe but soporific. Notwithstanding the falterings that are inevitable in this kind of enterprise, it opens up imaginative lines of enquiry, and changes the way you think about music, film, and the specific cases deployed here. She has also introduced into my imagination a new category of film music, and set me looking for things I had not hitherto thought to notice.
