ABSTRACT
In a blog post dated 22 September 2014, Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh explained his views on the importance of ‘staging’ in film (Soderbergh 2014). Commenting that he operated “under the theory a movie should work with the sound off,” he accompanied the posting with a complete version of Raiders of the Lost Ark (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1981) minus its color and sound, but with an added score, which appears to be taken from the film The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010). Soderbergh’s aim in adjusting Spielberg’s original was to reveal something about the way it works, and it was for this reason he changed the music, noting that it was “designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect.” Although focused on the visual language of Raiders of the Lost Ark, his experiment might be said nonetheless to reveal the important role played by what is absent: the sound design, and John Williams’s score. Conceptually, then, Soderbergh’s version of Spielberg’s film might be thought of in terms of Gérard Genette’s hypertext, which refers to a text derived from a pre-existent text (the hypotext) that transforms the original in some respect (Genette 1997). Methodologically, though, it suggests we might examine film hypertexts created for a variety of purposes (including homage, satire, or pastiche) and, by comparing and evaluating their use of music with the original hypotext, learn something about the way in which the music for a film works. Although the value of these hypertexts does not lie solely in their ability to illuminate the workings of a precursor cinematic text—Miguel Mera is quite correct in disavowing the idea that reinvented texts should simply be seen as parasitical (Mera 2009: 2–3)—they are undoubtedly useful in this regard. For films with a high degree of cultural valency that have often been recreated in some hypertextual form, we may even learn as much about music’s role through investigating other media types as we might by immersing ourselves exclusively in the cinematic text. In this chapter, then, I want to examine a number of hypertexts that graft themselves onto a particular scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark (hereafter Raiders). These hypertexts can be found in professional media contexts such as television—as part of original programming that nonetheless references the film—or licensed video games. They can also be encountered, however, in a proliferation of ‘home-made’ fan recreations uploaded to video-sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo, using live action or stop-motion animation. Some of these hypertexts reuse John Williams’s score (either legitimately or by infringing copyright) or ‘recreate’ it by recognizing and 532copying its essential gestures, but all of them, in demonstrating their audiovisual difference from Raiders, help us understand how Williams’s music functions in the original film. In particular, as I will discuss, they reveal the importance of synchronicity to the film’s musical strategies.
