Film Scores in Crouching Tiger and Iron Monkey Compared

Introduction: Music as the Fabric of Film

We still use aesthetic terms from the days in which the musical accompaniment of a film consisted primarily of a pianist or organist sitting in the theater, taking cues on what to play by watching the silent action on the screen. And yet, in other and probably more important ways, we have come no real distance at all, for music now—as it has since the very first movie—helps to determine the overall emotional impact of a film. This paper examines the film scores from two productions: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Iron Monkey.

The musical score for a film helps knit together all of the different technical and thematic elements of a production. As one scholar has put it:

"Picture and track, to a certain degree, have a composition of their own, but when combined they form a new entity. Thus the track becomes not only a harmonious complement but an integral, inseparable part of the picture as well. Picture and track are so closely fused together that each one functions through the other. There is no separation of 'I see in the image' and 'I hear on the track.' Instead, there is the 'I feel, I experience,' through the grand total of picture and track combined." (Flinn, p. 46)

Jack of All Trades and Master As Well

The musical score for a movie performs at least a half-dozen distinct roles. Each of those roles will be assessed here for both films: the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score by composer Tan Dun, and the score by James L. Venable Newman for Iron Monkey.

The first function of the score is simply to connect the individual musical elements—motifs, themes, harmonies, and colors—to the non-musical elements of the film: to the characters, the events and places, the physical objects that make up the worlds of the characters, and to the overall motifs and themes of the narrative. The score also serves to connect the viewer to the characters and to the visceral feeling of watching the film itself. Music draws both the audience and the characters into the moment of the action.

The Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score is especially adept at this last function. The musical score helps to create an overall feel for the movie, calling to mind a specific era and a specific place with great effectiveness. One of the strengths of both the film in general and of the score in particular is its ability to be so evocative of a place that is not entirely real.

It is, after all, relatively easy for a filmmaker, armed with all the tools of modern cinema, to recreate a particular moment in history—verisimilitude is difficult, but it can be achieved with care. However, it is a much more difficult task to create a feeling of unity and cohesion when the world being depicted is a land of the imagination.

The music is not as visually beautiful as the movie—at least not to Western listeners—but it provides a sensory basis for the film, in the same way that rocks on a shore are necessary to produce the beauty of water-spray and prismatic light. As one critic observed:

"If the score by Chinese-American composer Tan Dun does not immediately strike one as being particularly distinctive, it may simply be that it perfectly evokes exactly the sound one imagines for an epic-scale historical Chinese romantic adventure. To Western ears this might be the archetypal Chinese film score, with all the characteristic devices of films such as The Last Emperor (ironically composed by the Japanese Ryuichi Sakamoto and American David Byrne) present and correct. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is elegant, majestic, spare, haunting, epic and somehow timeless, summoning vast landscapes and a world centuries gone by with what seems like consummate ease."

The Iron Monkey score, on the other hand, is less effective at connecting the audience to a particular time and place but is generally more effective at connecting us to the main character of the film. This is not a criticism of either film, for Iron Monkey is less concerned with a particular individual and more about an era, while the reverse is true of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—which is about the couple at the center of the story but also about their effacement. In each case the score reflects this focus.

In both films, the music acts as a kind of narrative, helping the viewer adjust to the ways in which time is sped up or slowed down by the director. The music tends to slow in both films—but especially in Iron Monkey—at psychologically key moments. We experience the way in which time itself seems to decelerate during those moments when a character is called upon to make a crucial decision, because the music we hear draws us along with the characters on the screen.

Music and film are both capable of manipulating time: they can speed it up or slow it down in ways that are simultaneously obvious yet effective. This is something that plays—or plastic forms of expression such as paintings—either cannot do or cannot do convincingly. Both films take advantage of this fact. It is especially true of the flying sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it is also true of less obvious scenes, such as those that explore the ways in which light falls across different surfaces.

Providing Transitions and Connections

In both films, the score helps to provide transitions between parts of scenes as well as between different scenes entirely. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this is accomplished through connections between color and timbre as well as harmony in the music of adjoining scenes. In Iron Monkey, it tends to be used in a somewhat more utilitarian and pedestrian way—underscoring action that the audience has already witnessed on screen. Such underscoring does make the action more interesting and more developed, but it is still not a particularly sophisticated use of music.

One of the most common functions of a score is to parallel the action of the film, also known as underscoring. Instead of the composer taking the general route of writing a suite of music that represents the mood of an entire scene, he or she maintains a near frame-by-frame musical match to the visuals. As one commentator notes, not all current composers are well trained in music theory, so they take advantage of the fact that paralleling the visuals is a relatively weak function: musically, it gives the viewer what is already apparent from watching. Its only job is to tell a viewer what he already sees; any development of or commentary on the scene is unnecessary.

In other words, the music serves an essentially mimetic function, mimicking what we see on the screen rather than creating an additional and at least slightly alternative vision that we can then blend with the ideas presented to us visually.

This overall cohesion that marks Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is not present in Iron Monkey. It is not entirely clear whether this is intentional or whether the director deemed it a necessary sacrifice to allow the visual elements of the movie to shine more strongly.

It should be noted that Miramax added a written prologue and epilogue to Iron Monkey for its U.S. release, along with newly translated subtitles, a new music score, and other new soundtrack elements—reportedly under the supervision of Yuen Wo Ping. As one reviewer remarked: "What makes Iron Monkey great isn't just that it is action-packed but that the action is choreographed, photographed and edited so well. There's a world of difference between the noisy, confused action sequences found in American movies like Swordfish and Don't Say a Word and the ritualistic, poetic, almost balletic duels of Iron Monkey."

Both composers use the score to create a sense of unity and continuity. This is especially true in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in which the harmonics of the music—both the score itself and the introduced musical elements—tend to blend together. There is in this score the same sense one has when looking at a watercolor, as if a single final wash of the brush had bound and connected everything together.

The one exception to this seamlessness is the introduction of a jarring pop element. As one critic put it: "Everything one could want from an intelligently crafted epic film score is here, except perhaps vast scale. Even the big action set-pieces have a restrained grandeur, in refreshing contrast to the over-the-top bombast of many current Hollywood scores. The difference is taste, this being an eloquent score from a composer sufficiently confident to know that less can be more, yet also able to provide plenty of musical excitement. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a very fine score, written with integrity for what looks as if it should be an outstanding film. A shame then that the almost inevitable pop song rears its ugly head."

In contrast, while the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tends to bind the film together and draw the audience toward the main characters, the score of Iron Monkey tends to be more effective in creating—and controlling—the cinematic space of the film, which in turn creates a distance between spectator and screen. The score in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a siren song, luring us in to overwhelm us once we have become too dazzled to pay attention. The score in Iron Monkey keeps us at arm's length, warning us that this is not a world to enter casually.

The use of music in Iron Monkey is also far more ironic than it is in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, because the new score that Miramax added for the U.S. release plays with conventions of American musical theater. While the action in Crouching Tiger is truly choreographed to its music, in Iron Monkey the martial arts sequences were originally written to be supported by a different soundtrack, and so there is often a disjunction between score and action or score and overall emotional effect. As one reviewer noted:

"The fight scenes in Iron Monkey operate as kung fu counterparts to, say, the dance sequences in an MGM musical or the death-defying slapstick of a Buster Keaton comedy. What's more, the characters in Iron Monkey bring grace and dignity to all their movements. This is best illustrated when the wind blows some papers loose inside Dr. Yang's home. Yang and Miss Orchid collect the floating papers through a dazzling and seemingly effortless series of leaps and twirls that will have viewers laughing with delight."

In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, what we see and what we hear are in fundamental ways the same, with the result that the movie draws us in as alluringly as a dream—or a drug. In Iron Monkey, that seamlessness has been broken so that the movie plays more effectively as an action picture, which is an essentially artificial format (as is the musical).

Conclusion

Music—from the opening credits onward—helps to make us receptive to the message that the director wants to convey. It acts as a kind of drug, making us far more susceptible and far more suggestible than we would otherwise be. Both scores accomplish this task, providing just a small but potent measure of pleasure to the audience. Music plays such an important part in the opening titles of a film not simply or even especially because it provides information, but because it provides that moment of anticipation. Music draws us in with the same trembling eagerness that an addict feels in the instant before the drug enters the body—that moment of expectation that is often better than the reality can ever be.

A well-constructed musical score—and both of these certainly qualify—transports us to the reality of the film and allows us to understand the world through the eyes of the characters while never letting us fully abandon our own perspective. More than any other element of a film, the music that enters into us and that we carry away with us allows us to merge our inner reality with the subjective vision of the filmmaker. We see in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and at least in some scenes of Iron Monkey, the full effect of the power of an intelligent and challenging musical score.

Works Cited

Flinn, Caryl. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.