Mountains, Music, and Murder

There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men are acclaimed American films released at the end of 2007, each set in the American West and thus inevitably engaging with the tradition of western films. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film concerns the oil boom in southern California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas the Coen brothers’ film depicts a nearly lifeless stretch of western Texas in 1980, where financial opportunities arise not from fertile land but from murder and theft. The musical soundtracks of these two films, both of which garnered significant critical attention, amplify and complicate the films’ depictions of the West. Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood is exceptional for the overwhelming intensity established during the opening frames and returned to frequently throughout the film. Carter Burwell’s score for No Country, conversely, is an extreme example of cinema’s unheard melodies: it is virtually unrecognizable as music, consisting of barely audible drones generated acoustically by singing bowls and electronically by sine and sawtooth waves. ¹ In each film, a crucial function of the music is to establish and comment upon the physical setting, not merely via stereotyped musical associations (as in the classical cinema, westerns and nonwesterns alike), but by investing the locale with a sonic presence, which at times takes on an omniscient quality or in some cases even seems to function as an agent guiding the action. The extreme contrast between these scores reflects two very different ideas about the West and its symbolic meanings in contemporary America.