Strains of utopia: gender, nostalgia, and Hollywood film music

Abstract

Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality. Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the way Hollywood genre films - particularly film noir and melodrama - sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism in film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.

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