ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces musical sincerity and transcendence as overlapping concepts in films that revise aspects of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics. After unpacking the notion found in the writings of Hoffmann and Wackenroder that music is a utopian, possessive, and transportative power, the chapter illustrates the connection with film through a scene from Almost Famous (2000). Many cinematic vestiges of romantic musical aesthetics over the past thirty years participate in a broader cultural negotiation between ironic and sincere modes of being, a tendency often labeled the New Sincerity. The chapter lays out two contrasting critical frameworks with relevance for film: one theorized by Jim Collins, who argues that genre films of the 1990s reacted to mass-mediation by either avoiding irony or embracing intertextuality; the other by David Foster Wallace, who advocates for sincerity in an ironic context as a type of rebellion. Four case studies show how romantic listening from the era in question served Collins's cultural poles of New Sincerity (Shawshank Redemption (1994), Philadelphia (1993)) and ironic juxtaposition (O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Beetlejuice (1988)). The chapter concludes by using Wallace's appeal to rebellious sincerity to analyze the intertextual role of Benjamin Britten's music in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012).
