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СКАЧАТЬ patients have historically had with the medical system.¹⁰ Amos’s star text and the lyrics of the song encourage audiences to consider Lopez’s pursuit of gender reassignment surgery as a brave act and to consider whether Lopez will ever achieve social acceptance, what value will be placed on bodies like hers, or if, for contemporary America, Lopez’s dream of equality is still “a sorta fairytale.” My argument here is not that most audience members will extract this meaning from the sequence; rather, it is that music supervisors and executive producers can draw on lyrical allusions and discourses of musical meaning that are tied up in genre or artist/performer identity to create evocative effects for particular groups of the audience.

      Occasionally, Murphy and Bloom decide to use classical music or no music to call attention to difficult and experimental surgeries in the series—surgeries that often fail. These exceptions bear out the rule that most of the music in the program is popular recorded music from the latter half of the twentieth century and highlight the ways that nonmusical forms of sound can be used for narrative and stylistic effect. Two examples of classical music include the surgery to separate Siamese twins attached at the head that ends in both girls dying on the table (“Rose and Raven Rosenberg”) and the face transplant surgery on Hannah Tedesco (“Hannah Tedesco”). After Hannah’s body rejects the transplant later in the episode and the transplant must be removed from the teen girl’s face, Liz says, “I can’t find any music that feels appropriate right now.” This marks one of the few times the producers chose not to use music of any kind and instead incorporated the diegetic sounds of the operating room, particularly the respirator and the heart monitor, over flashes of the surgical sequence. This notable exception to the program’s sonic style illustrates that while popular music licensing is the general trend in the program, producers do on occasion deviate in order to try something different. These deviations also illustrate that the sounds and images in all surgical sequences are carefully planned and that the musical choices in these sequences have much to tell us about the ways that Nip/Tuck constructs the embodied aesthetics of surgery.

      The use of diegetic nonmusical sound in the surgery to remove the face transplant stands in stark contrast to most surgical sequences, where the volume of direct diegetic sounds is either lowered or muted. Popular music tracks played through the Bang Olufsen stereo are diegetically motivated, but as film music scholars Claudia Gorbman and Robynn J. Stilwell argue, music often crosses back and forth between the diegetic and the nondiegetic.¹¹ While music in the McNamara/Troy operating room is diegetically motivated, the music video–style editing and shot scale choices call attention to the camera shutter and the construction of particular shots as well as the disjunction between the passage of musical time and narrative time. Diegetic music is often viewed as more organic, as it belongs to the storyworld and the characters; in contrast, the nondiegetic score is sometimes interpreted as manipulative, as the nondiegetic score is used to establish preferred readings of on-screen action for the audience. In Nip/Tuck, thinking of the music as traversing the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary raises questions about how the sounds and images on-screen are being manipulated and brings into focus the tensions between organic bodies and bodies disciplined by plastic surgery. To see music cross the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary during surgery raises the question of what constitutes the organic, “real” body. That music in the series seems to cross this boundary as surgery ensues draws greater attention to the physical boundary crossing of the scalpel penetrating flesh.

      By placing music strategically in surgical scenes, Murphy and Bloom use sound to think through the representation and politics of plastic surgery. Nip/Tuck provides an excellent example of how contemporary television producers and music supervisors craft musical sounds to fit a series and deploy popular music tracks for specific narrative effects. Series such as Mad Men or The O.C. may use popular music tracks to create a sense of a historical era or to appeal to a demographic market, but the shape and sound that music licensing takes depend on production norms and narratives. Television criticism must wrestle with the industrial norms and cultural connotations of licensed music to more fully understand how licensed tracks mobilize meaning.

      FURTHER READING

       Altman, Rick. “Television/Sound.” In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

       Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

       Cook, Nicholas. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998.

       Donnelly, K. J. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: BFI, 2005.

       Frith, Simon. “Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television.” Popular Music 21 (2002): 277–90.

      NOTES

      1  1. Tom Lowry, “Finding Nirvana in a Music Catalog,” BusinessWeek, October 2, 2006.

      2  2. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, “A Perfect Lie: Visual (Dis)Pleasures and Policing Femininity in Nip/Tuck,” in Makeover Television: Realities Remodeled, ed. Dana Heller (London: Tauris, 2007).

      3  3. Matthew Gilbert, “Nip/Tuck Is Not Afraid to Look the Ugly in the Eye; Nip/Tuck Diagnoses the Human Condition,” Boston Globe, September 5, 2004.

      4  4. P. J. Bloom, www.myspace.com/pjbloom.

      5  5. “Exclusive Q&A with P. J. Bloom,” www.niptuckforum.com.

      6  6. “Exclusive: Nip/Tuck Music Supervisor P. J. Bloom Interview,” January 11, 2008, http://rcrdlbl.com.

      7  7. Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

      8  8. “Exclusive: Nip/Tuck Music Supervisor P. J. Bloom Interview.”

      9  9. Ken Garner, “Would You Like to Hear Some Music?’ Music In-and-Out-of-Control in the Films of Quentin Tarantino,” Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K. J. Donnelly (New York: Continuum, 2001), 189.

      10 10. Joanne Jay Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

      11 11. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Robynn J. Stilwell, “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic,” in Beyond the Soundtrack, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

      7

      One Life to Live

      Soap Opera Storytelling

      ABIGAIL DE KOSNIK

      Abstract: Few genres are as associated with the television medium as the soap opera, which has populated daytime schedules for decades, often with the same shows running for more than the lifetimes of their characters. Abigail De Kosnik provides a long-term view of One Life to Live and the lifelong story of one character to highlight the unique narrative possibilities of soap operas and call attention to what might be lost if the genre continues to disappear from television.

      In 2012, only four U.S. daytime dramas, or soap operas, remained in production, while as recently as 1999, twelve soap operas were broadcast daily. The last decade has witnessed a wave СКАЧАТЬ