Bryce Dessner

Humanist Heroics and Masculinized Music

published in The Wire online, April, 2026, London

When people cry at the movies, I wager music will be inducing the tears. The oft-neglected magic of music is that it can irrationally, apolitically and even randomly upset. Many read their tears as a sign of innate capacity to ‘be human’. I read such music as a triggering mechanism, artfully deployed to exploit pre-conditioned sentimentality. There’s nothing wrong with being manipulated in this way. Some movie goers pride themselves on always being in control of choosing what they deem good in art, but everyone falls prey to being manipulated by music.

If music can be so tricky in its snaring of one’s emotional state, is that why some people are repelled by any music that resembles populist styles and well-worn techniques of melodious manipulation? Personally, I’m comfortable with music overriding my rational control of experiencing a movie. It’s what allows me to rail against default humanist tacks in film scoring, while also accepting that some composers and directors can collaborate to produce humanist sentiments without being cloying.

That’s a lengthy preamble to contextualize the scores of Bryce Dessner, moonlighting guitarist from The National. Importing his band’s shimmering ‘wall-of-indie’ guitar sound, Dresser produces languorous scores shaped by open-ended passages of harmonious strumming. The band’s loping Knopfleresque barn-church sonics are not my preference, but Dresser’s aesthetic has been clearly and successfully incorporated into a number of independent films.

Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon (2021) demonstrates this well. The score’s instrumental aura evokes an Elizabethan broken consort: harmonium, recorders, audible breathing and pumping, spiced with occasional whammy-pedal pitch jumps drenched in abbey reverb. Its dronal ambience evokes an acoustic rendering of Brian Eno’s Another Green World (1975), sans drum machines or percolating rhythms. The result is an Appalachian Zamfir, which conjures stillness and soft tension. This mirrors the uneasy reservation radio journalist Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) holds as he is forced to look after his pre-teen nephew Jesse (Woody Norman). The multi-tracked voices and delays (“Who’s Taking Care Of Jesse?”; “The Orphan”) matches the emotional layering which almost suffocates Johnny as he attempts to figure the level of Jesse’s autistic behaviour, yet the warmth of the music maintains a felt connection Johnny’s efforts.

Things get decidedly mushy in We Live In Time (2024), a tragic love story involving a wedding, having children, and ovarian cancer. It’s a tear jerker that doesn’t require music to pull the strings. However Dessner’s plaintive guitar suite strikes an elegiac balance with the script’s overdetermined beats of pathos. OK—to be frank, Dessner’s score here does resemble music currently piped on airplanes before take-off or through phones on-hold. Orchestral Muzak ® died a long time ago, to be replaced by the spirit of humble Arthouse harmoniousness, such as that evident in We Live In Time. Joseph Lanza’s seminal book Elevator Music (1995) is threaded with his observation of how the marvel of flying in an airplane had been psychologically tinged with fear not of death, but of being transported to heaven through a fiery end, hence the angelic quality of so much music designed to distract one from corporality and mortality. We Live In Time certainly falls in line with this death erotic of beautiful melodies: the unabashedly romantic tenor of the chugging cellos, uppity drums and twangy guitars are often buoyed on a sea of 101 Strings.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo – False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths (2023) bears a score by Dessner co-composed with Iñárritu himself. A visually opulent tale of Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), an aged ‘docufiction’ filmmaker returning to Mexico to receive a national cultural honour, the film hovers next to his encounters with Mexican residents who discourse on politics and poetics through their terse dressing-down of his return. Like most of Iñárritu’s movies, Bardo trades heavily in ‘the human condition’ while flagrantly muddying the straits separating fantasy from reality. He did so superbly in Birdman, 2014, with its drum score by Antonio Sanchez; here the results are bloated and cliched, even though that might be intentional.

In a self-mocking tone, Dessner and Iñárritu’s score features brass band tracks which reference the pomp and pretention of Mexican military music. Numerous historical epoch films from Mexico and Italy have presented Mexican brass ensembles—from the glisteningly professional to the grimy depleted—as a malfunctioning façade of imperial dreams courted by successive Mexican regimes shape-shifting from colony to empire to republic to revolution to federation. Bardo’s ironic brassiness recalls David Byrne’s score for Robert Wilson’s The Knee Plays (1984) and Goran Bregovic’s music for the 1990s films of Emir Kusturica.

The rest of Bardo’s score mimics Morricone at his Cinecitta best. “Mateo’s Freedom” overflows with a religiousness not dissimilar to that of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America (1984): thick with strings, flutes and muted trombones; breathing, sighing, soaring, cascading. “Liminal” is Morricone trembling at his own mortality: high violin vibrato crying like a gypsy caravan at a funeral. “Dreaming Of A Dream” sounds two- and three-note lines, uttered as discrete phrases, leaving silences within which a dark resonance rings like a liturgical response sounded deep underground. It’s uplifting and grounding at the same time. Dessner’s touch seems to diffuse Bardo’s self-centred heroics, especially so in “Silverio Last Train” and “Bardo Finale”.

Dessner’s most recent score for Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (2025) pushes his chordal passages into chamber-like formations. The film traces the hard life of logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) working in the 1910s for the Great Northern Railway. The score’s cues crank the trilling pianos, and cycle the strings on a sugary high. Elsewhere, tracks like “Placing Stones” return to the familiar psychoacoustics of an upright piano doodled with the sustain pedal on, recorded in an old school room, transporting listeners to an imagined childhood at school. That sounds clichéd, but Dessner’s music ennobles the sad plight of Grainier.

Taken together, these films recoup masculinity through music. Each features central male characters who, despite their heroic aspirations, are portrayed as fragile, insecure, and prey to adverse elements shifting around them. Modern literature and theatre of the past few centuries has tackled the gendered problem of heroics with greater temerity than the shorter history of cinema. Movies, by comparison, tend to inflate heroics—through narrative condensation, visceral thrills, fetishized cinematography, and musical slathering. Indeed, movie music’s endless French-horning of male heroes has possibly developed through overcompensating for the vapidity of film scripts which attempt to deepen a hero’s journey only to flatten it for blunt audience identification. Unnoticed by cinema elites, Arthouse movies which seek to redress the imbalance caused by idolising the male hero often utilize a similar ‘musical lathering’ to Hollywood spectacles: they replace grand orchestras with humble ensembles, European classicism with American stylistics, and belted dynamics with massaged touches.

I’m being critical here of the lumpen application of (at its worst) U2-ish Americanazak in scores for indie movies, not of Dessner’s contribution. What is it about ‘strummery’ indie rock that jangles the jollies of sensitive visual artistes in love with honouring the fragility of life? Ragnar Kajartansson’s ‘performative installation’ at MoMA PSI in New York in 2013 engaged The National to perform “Sorrow” for six hours continuously. The 9 LP limited edition has been uploaded to YouTube: it gives new meaning to the term ‘wallowing’. This type of unregulated streaming of poetic angst coddled in emotionally forlorn aesthetics has been persistent for decades. Udo Rondinone’s It’s Late … (1999-2000) is a celebrated a six-channel video installation projected around the walls of a room bathed in light from a blue Perspex ceiling. But nowhere do museum catalogues declare the source of the work: sections from Fassbinder’s Gods of the Plague (1970), accompanied by (if memory serves me correctly) a very long and softly jangling track unreleased by Tindersticks, possibly titled “Happy Hour”. Here the emotional faucet was wedged open in the name of Contemporary Art, pouring a mashed 4AD/Lynchian sound into the glowing blue room while Harry Baer’s louche photographic stud dissolutely wanders empty urban environments.

The sticking point here is how the arts-sanctioned legacy of reverberant jangly guitars is often plastered like flocked wallpaper to overwhelm the listener with signified emotional weight. Indie cinema and Arthouse cinema—like their musical counterparts—are only better than their mainstream forms if one fortifies ideological barricades. Overly ‘sensitive’ film music can aid in tagging a film’s independent spirit and its artistic aspirations, but it can just as easily deflate a film. Bryce Dresser’s scores notably escape this emotional pitfall and still bring on the tears.

Text © Philip Brophy 2026. Images © respective copyright holders.