ABSTRACT
Different versions of U.S. American nationalism underpin Lethal Weapon 2, The Hunt for Red October, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Each organizes what it means to be American, as they uniformly call it, in terms of race and gender, but not identically. The Hunt for Red October was released in 1990 to great response on the part of spy-thriller fans. Tom Clancy’s book made what a popular video guide book called an “edge-of-your-seat winner” (Martin and Porter 1992: 897) about a Lithuanian sub captain who defects with a new high-tech Soviet stealth sub and its crew. The audio track seems perfect for a spy film; it is overwhelmingly sneaky, in two senses. First, it sounds like a spy film, in that much of the music is short repeated chromatic figures (see example 4 below). Second, the music constantly edges in under the omnipresent ambient noise of the subs, beginning as a barely audible hum that lasts for long seconds before the musical cue seems to come from nowhere. This technique, called “sneaking,” is central to classical Hollywood practice; it protects the score from being noticed. Because it uses extremely heavy ambient noise, because it blurs the distinction between sound and music, and because much of its music is very small repetitive figures, the overall sound of Red October is very thick and organized by an emphasis on sound over music.
