Historical Markers of the Modern Soundtrack

10	Some Kind of Wonderful	1985 - Howard Deutch (USA)
	Teen energy & rhythmic propulsion	Record production as score; private listening states; rhythmic cues

The world of the teen movie - like a teenager's bedroom - is open only to those sensitive to its environ. Some Kind Of wonderful (a beautifully vague appellation for that great teen drug, love) is a cinematic environment of pure teen spirit. Every space, wall, room, corridor is built using teen energy; it will either repell you or welcome you inside.

In Some Kind Of wonderful, a pressurised love triangle releases intense emotion as formed between grease monkey Keith (Eric Stoltz), rich girl Amanda (Lea Thompson), and quirky outsider Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson) whose love for Keith is invisible to him. The film's plotted surface points to the drama between Keith and Amanda, posing Watts as a side character. But true to her moniker, Watts is the energized heart of the film in profoundly sonic and musical ways. The film starts with Watts drumming in her garage, listening to pounding electro pop on her headphones, her snare pad adorned with a huge heart. This she beats, sealed in a soundproofed domain symbolic of the reclusive domain of the teen world.

Keith is a seething though quaint ball of sexual desire, pounding away in workshops and garages, getting dirty while admiring the gleaming beauty of Amanda from afar. Yet as full as his desire is, so is it misdirected: he is unknowingly responding to the charged sexuality Watts radiates despite her churlish tomboy front. This is evident not through literary interpretation: the way pop songs - often selective instrumental passages - will occupy the full spectrum of the soundtrack simulates the waves of emotional nauseau and epiphanous vertigo expected of love's broadcast. And at every moment a song wells up, Watts is not too far removed from its occurrence and diffusion, continually linking her energy to Keith's. Amanda, conversely, generates naught. Even when Keith courts her at the art museum on a special date, the gentility of background music is the only repository of musical symbolism attracted to her. Tellingly, Keith talks sweet nothings to her in a huge empty outdoor concert auitorium - the complete inverse of Watts' deafening solitude in as she pounds out her sublimated heart beats in a desperate telegraphic pulse to deaf Keith, blinded by wrong love.

If film's have a 'drive' then Watts is the driver of Some Kiind Of Wonderful. Not by co-incidence does she swallow her pride and be the chauffeur on Keith and Amanda's special date. She embodies the pop song score in ways imperceptible to those trained to read film scores as composed appendages to a film's scenography. Watts is a paradigm of how music functions in the teen movie. As excessive consumer of the music which operates as its score, she sets up a feedback loop based on a balance between the harmony of her sexual energy, and the dissonance of her emotional anxiety. When the camera tracks in to her face as well as Keith's, the music wells to such excess it brings down the world around them. In the teen world, everything is heightened - turned up full, drowning in itself, hysterically incapable of differentiation and distinction. Some Kind Of Wonderful perfectly sculpts an architecsonic realm of teen love that is deafening, exhausting, oceanic.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.