Contemporary Traces of the Modern Soundtrack

1	Talk Radio	1987 - Oliver Stone (USA)
	Voice & ether	Wave transmission; ghost effects; vocal timbre; studio space design

Audience's initial impression of voices on the radio likened them to spirts and ghosts speaking from the beyond. The presence of a voice in one's shared acoustic space minus its face and body attributed a phantasmogorical aura to the medium of radio. Talk Radio superfically appears to be a realist text coded with an array of topical and societal concerns, but its sound design connects it back to a mysticism born of radio's sonic apparition.

Barry Chaplain (Eric Bogosian) is a blunt, aggressive talk radio host, maniacally fielding callers, feeding off their ignorance and feeding into their prejudices. The feedback of live talk radio is his perfect medium. Talk Radio methodically creates a radiophonic space for Barry's world and his voice (the two are interchangeable) whose production design and camera work are actively engaged in 'listening to' the film's sound design.

Barry's control booth evidences this starkly. Set atop a skycraper, his broadcast suite is a centralised hexagonal room with glass walls all round. Through them, he can see adjoining control rooms, offices of his management, and the city to which he broadcasts every night. The cinematogrphy is bound to aligning internal political machinations (framing his bosses' attempts to suppress his voice) with projected social agendas (symbolized by his gaze across the nightscape) as he speaks into the ever-present microphone. Both Barry's face and those of the station personnel are superimposed on each other, granting us a variety of lap-dissolves which simultaneously show talker and listener. This doubling of perspective figures Barry's speech as a collapse of monologue into dialogue: he mostly speaks in double senses, imparting something to a caller over the phone while inferring something else to his staff at the station.

Barry is at the centre of his own world - spatially, sonically and visually - as confirmed by the camera's cricular arcs from his point-of-view. His ego is certainly not restrained, and his energy is such that it requires this bizarre glass cage to both release it as a hyper performance and to entrap it for dissemenation. His hermetic world - part acoustic tomb, part idealistic incubator - gives Barry's voice its strength. When he speaks 'live' at a basketball game, his voice is acoustically blurred by the cavernous space; the audience is a restless din; they boo and hurl paper cups at him. Similarly, Barry's sense of self and his relationship to others is threatened whenever he steps out of his glass bubble of babble. Conversely, when Barry lets the outside world into his control zone - the crazed fan, Kent (Michael Wincott) - Barry is confronted with the reality of those whom hitherto were an indistinct mass.

When the red light is illuminated as Barry is 'on air', he lights up his cigarette. The hypertactile sound of these energy flares indicates the dimensional warp we pass through to come into contact with Barry's psyche. Prophetically and tragically, Barry's death at the hands of an inflamed listener similarly blasts Barry 'off air'. Shot on the rooftop carpark of the station, he falls dead directly at the foot of the broadcast tower. As we survey the cityscape at night as a twinkling carpet of invisible listeners, a montage of their voices serves as a wake in rememberance of the voice of Barry Champlain - now a part of the ethosphere of talk radio.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.