Broadly speaking (the best kind of speaking. Or not actually. Probably comes in somewhere about seventh, on a good day) there are a couple of different ways of evoking atmosphere. Not to trot out the dead horse that is the second-most long suffering metaphor of all time currently in use in modern everyday conversation after automobile engines, but it’s vaguely analogous to baking a cake. You can drop that extra sprinkle of cocoa into the pan last of all as topping, or mix it into the batter from the word go so you get a garden variety (vanilla, even?) chocolate cake.
Really, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking cinema, games, literature, dance or what have you. Structurally, the narrative and the atmospheric elements of a text should be seamlessly integrated as to make the audience unaware of the process by which each supports the other. However, there are always creative decisions to made with regard to the specifics, which of course is where things get interesting.
Today I want to look at something a bit different: Sloth racing on Saturn. I couldn't find much on that topic, though, so instead I'm going to put Tom Waits’ spoken word piece from the 1985 album Rain Dogs, titled "9th and Hennepin" under the microscope. This is quite a compact and economical snippet of dark musical poetry that begins by painting broad strokes, quite literally rounding out the scenery on all sides to create an effectively realised picture in the listener’s mind’s eye:
Really, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking cinema, games, literature, dance or what have you. Structurally, the narrative and the atmospheric elements of a text should be seamlessly integrated as to make the audience unaware of the process by which each supports the other. However, there are always creative decisions to made with regard to the specifics, which of course is where things get interesting.
Today I want to look at something a bit different: Sloth racing on Saturn. I couldn't find much on that topic, though, so instead I'm going to put Tom Waits’ spoken word piece from the 1985 album Rain Dogs, titled "9th and Hennepin" under the microscope. This is quite a compact and economical snippet of dark musical poetry that begins by painting broad strokes, quite literally rounding out the scenery on all sides to create an effectively realised picture in the listener’s mind’s eye:
Well it’s 9th and Hennepin
All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky
Like a tarp thrown all over all of this, and the broken umbrellas like dead birds
And steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs
And horses are coming down Violin Road, and Dutch is dead on his feet
And all the rooms, they smell like diesel, and you take on the dreams of the ones who slept there.
And I’m lost in the window, I hide in the stairway and I hang in the curtain and I sleep in your hat.
And no-one brings anything small into a bar around here, they all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear. One for every year he’s away, she said.
Such a crumbling beauty, ah
There’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars won’t fix
She has that kind of razor sadness that only gets worse with the clang and the thunder
Of the Southern Pacific going by
And a clock ticks out like a dripping faucet, till you’re full of ragwater, bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen
I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it all, through the yellow windows of the evening train.
The streams-of-consciousness style flow and overall structure is maintained by the continual use of “And” at the beginning of each line, which gives the piece as a whole the air of a hazy vignette, one intended to be mainly texture and atmosphere without much basis in reality. There’s a sense of disconnectedness in which the speaker realizes all of his worst suspicions and fears about the place (a real street corner in Minneapolis), but he is imagining without seeing, as Waits himself has commented in his explanation of the piece.
What’s really interesting here I think is the way Waits begins. He starts out by describing the broader picture and then moves into the closer, more personal. If this were a scene from a film it would be a long continuous crane shot that starts out above the city skyscrapers, swooping down into the streets, past the streetlights and shadows of people and into the doorway of the hotel in the story, eventually meeting the “girl with the tattooed tear” at the bar. What we have here is a sense of progression from the disconnected abstract to the specific. We shift gradually from broad strokes of disjointed atmospherics to concrete realities of character and narrative. Waits fully fleshes out the world he has created before plunking us squarely in the middle of it as one of the spun-out drunks at the bar.
This prominent foregrounding of atmospherics is a popular technique in modern cinema because it allows the filmmaker to fully immerse the viewer in the imaginary universe on the screen, before introducing the who-what-where-why of the story itself. It becomes immeasurably easier for the audience to accept and be emotionally involved in what they are seeing, if they perceive that which they are seeing to be reality, or are at least superficially unaware of its fictionality. I suppose it makes more sense to guarantee your audience will be totally under the spell and ready to listen to what you have say when you finally start to say it. Examples? I’m thinking along the lines of Wall-E. I’m well and truly sick of talking about that film though, so I’m going shut up and leave that one up to you to expand upon for the time being. Maybe after a decent interval I’ll be able to discuss it critically again without feeling like a malfunctioning gramophone. Seven posts or so should do it.
On the other side of the pancake, consider a futuristic science fiction film. Something like your Minority Report, or its similarly styled spiritual father, Blade Runner. Here we have injections of atmospheric detail at regular intervals throughout the movie. In this case, it’s largely made possible by the constant visual onslaught of what the filmmakers have imagined everyday life in the XXnd century (insert random post-noughties date of choice here) will look like. Indeed for the science fiction genre, this is precisely what makes the regular maintenance (I use that phrase completely ironically) of atmospheric detail so easy - technological change is one of those things that is all-encompassing, and will be evident in virtually every facet of the on-screen activity, from projecting quarterly reports to feeding the cat. Flying cars, or colossal urban billboards that advertise personalised consumer goods help keep the suspension of disbelief constant, allowing the viewer to fully accept the theatrical illusion. In places these immersive footnote details are even used directly as plot devices – I’m thinking, for example, of the tiny spider scout police robots in Minority Report that hunt Tom Cruise through a skid row tenant block.
On the other side of the pancake, consider a futuristic science fiction film. Something like your Minority Report, or its similarly styled spiritual father, Blade Runner. Here we have injections of atmospheric detail at regular intervals throughout the movie. In this case, it’s largely made possible by the constant visual onslaught of what the filmmakers have imagined everyday life in the XXnd century (insert random post-noughties date of choice here) will look like. Indeed for the science fiction genre, this is precisely what makes the regular maintenance (I use that phrase completely ironically) of atmospheric detail so easy - technological change is one of those things that is all-encompassing, and will be evident in virtually every facet of the on-screen activity, from projecting quarterly reports to feeding the cat. Flying cars, or colossal urban billboards that advertise personalised consumer goods help keep the suspension of disbelief constant, allowing the viewer to fully accept the theatrical illusion. In places these immersive footnote details are even used directly as plot devices – I’m thinking, for example, of the tiny spider scout police robots in Minority Report that hunt Tom Cruise through a skid row tenant block.
But in both of the films used as examples above, there isn’t really a tutorial half-hour of atmospheric acclimatization before the plot proper starts. We’re launched head-first into the who-what-where specifics of the story and characters and expected to acclimatize to the reality of the onscreen world as we go. Those little atmospheric flourishes sprinkled throughout are the one-percenters that enable us to do this. It’s a somewhat different approach to the one outlined in the Waits example, and I would say, a less risky one to be sure. Putting all the texture and atmosphere up front and then launching into specifics risks audience disconnection once the spell wears off, but a seamless transition between the two is like a well-made gateaux: a culinary one-two-punch with delicious piped chocolate icing on the top and outer sides and something exponentially more awesome in the middle. I don’t know what. This maybe:
