Mountain airs, mockingjays and modernity

Mountain airs, mockingjays and modernity Songs and their significance in The Hunger Games Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward Songs play a significant role in the narrative and thematics of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008), its 2012 film adaptation of the same name and ancillary media texts released to support the film. One particular diegetic composition, known as ‘The Meadow Song’, plays an important role in the novel’s and film’s audioscapes, serving to evoke the complex cultural associations of the Appalachia region that has transitioned into District 12 in The Hunger Games’ dystopian future. Ancillary media texts, particularly the film’s lead promotional single, Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars’ performance of ‘Safe and Sound’ (and its accompanying music video), reinforce this connection. Additionally, the melody of ‘The Meadow Song’ plays a key role in representing the interaction of humans with the bio-engineered woodland arena in which extended combat tournament occurs (particularly through the futuristic conceit of biologically engineered birds that imitate human song). In this manner, songs represent an unusually important thematic element of the early franchise’s various media texts, demonstrating how song elements can be closely integrated with plot and thematics, rather than simply serving as peripheral sonic adornments. Keywords: The Hunger Games, mockingjays, soundtrack, songs

Introduction

Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games (2008) is set in a future, dystopian fragment of the United States named Panem. It relates the experiences of a 16-year-old girl, Katniss Everdeen, who represents her region, referred to as District 12, along with a male companion, Peeta Mellark, in an annual gladiatorial contest fought between representatives of each district as an annual reparation for the regions’ earlier rebellion against the national base, referred to as the Capitol. The novel is divided into three principal sections. The first introduces the reader to the locale and milieu of District 12 and the protagonists’ families. The second moves the action to the Capitol, where each district’s representatives (referred to as ‘tributes’) are prepared for combat, and the third occurs in an outdoor forest arena where the combat takes place, covered live on television. A short final section deals with the aftermath of the contest, in Science Fiction Film and Television 8.1 (2015) © Liverpool University Press

ISSN 1754-3770 (print) 1754-3789 (online) doi:10.3828/sfftv.2015.4

76

Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward

which Katniss and Peeta emerge victorious, confounding the contest’s rules that there can be only one winner and only one combatant left alive. Collins’s book has achieved significant success in both anglophone and other markets, being translated into over 50 languages to date. In mid-2012, the book’s publisher, Scholastic, estimated global sales at 23 million. Two further volumes that extended and completed the narrative have also achieved significant success: Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010) have thus far sold, respectively, 14 and 13 million copies.1 Collins collaborated with screenwriter Billy Ray and director Gary Ross on an US$80 million film adaptation of the first novel, released in 2012. Critically praised, not the least for the strong performance of (then relatively unknown) actress Jennifer Lawrence in the role of Katniss Everdeen, it grossed in excess of US$691 million in theatrical release alone.2 Notwithstanding the necessary contractions and modifications required to modify the novel’s narrative into a (142-minute) feature,3 the film substantially replicates key themes, scenarios and narrative elements from its literary progenitor. Among those elements is the representation of District 12 as the region currently known as Appalachia. This (actual) region is a sociocultural aggregation of areas of the central and southern Appalachian mountain chain that runs parallel to the Atlantic seaboard from the south of New York state down to northwestern Missouri. The area has a rich and contested symbolism: as an unruly (and largely pre-modern) backlands/badlands; as a site of rural coal mining and subsequent post-mining economic depression; as the nurturing ground for rugged, resilient individuals and communities; and as a repository of traditional song, dance and crafts practices and repertoires.4 All of these elements inform Collins’s representation of District 12 and the sensibilities, skills, virtues and actions of the narrative’s protagonists. The first section of this article concentrates on one element of the novel and film that has particular resonance within the thematic clusters referred to above, the significance accorded to a song text and its incorporation into the acoustic environment of the arena. Appalachia is well known for being a 1. Scholastic press release, May 2012. http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/press-release/scholasticannounces-updated-us-figures-suzanne-collinss-bestselling-hunger-games-tril. Accessed 5 Sep 2014. 2. The Box Office Mojo website: http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/. Accessed 7 Sep 2014. The follow-up, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, directed by Francis Lawrence, grossed US$864 million (ibid.). 3. And additions such as an increase in the prominence of the Hunger Games’ co-ordinator, Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), in the narrative. 4. See Higgs, Manning and Miller for a comprehensive introduction to aspects of and perspectives on Appalachia.

Mountain airs, mockingjays and modernity

77

repository of Anglo-Celtic ‘folk’ songs (such as ‘Matty Groves’ and ‘Barbara Allen’) brought over by early waves of settlers from the British Isles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and perpetuated in the vernacular repertoire of rural communities. These were ‘discovered’, collated and publicised by English researchers such as Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles and American Olive Dame Campbell in the early 1900s (a process that was fictionalised in Maggie Greenwald’s richly rendered Songcatcher (US 2000)). Along with the traditional song material recognised by early folklorists, the region was also a repository of a variety of other musical materials, such as African American song and instrumental material, which remains less celebrated although nonetheless as significant (an imbalance that is also perpetuated in Collins’s trilogy). While not overtly referenced in the novel, the pre-modern Anglo-Celtic tradition, and the ‘cultural capital’ of the economically impoverished Appalachian community that retains it, lends symbolic weight and context to the role of song in the novel and film, evoking a cultural continuity and dignity for the inhabitants of District 12, and Katniss Everdeen in particular, that stands in stark contrast to the shallow and superficial world of the Capitol, with its garish fashions and modern media fixations. Complementing this aspect of the book and film, the second section of this article considers the film’s ancillary audio-visual texts, and particularly the song and promotional video for Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars’ song ‘Safe and Sound’, analysing the manner in which they reinforce connections with the rural southern heritage that gives symbolic weight to the narrative of District 12’s resistance. Song, narrative and thematics

Although the film’s producers emphasised the film’s fidelity to the original novel, its opening takes pronounced liberties with its source. It not only previews the media coverage of the Games that is prominent only in latter parts of the novel but also introduces a short song sequence into its earliest stages. The film opens with a 30-second credit sequence that combines sustained electronic sounds, slow repeated melodic motifs on hammered dulcimer and swelling orchestral string chords – creating a mix of synthesised and organic/analogue musical elements that capture the fundamental binary polarities of both book and film:

78

Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward districts vs Capitol humanity vs inhumanity organic vs inorganic low-tech vs high-tech pre-modern vs futuristic

The analogue sounds used in the opening score sequence are evocative of place and of cultural history. The Mixolydian5 quality of the chord progression (a descending sequence of two major chords a tone apart) provides an early hint of Anglo-Celtic folk music influence,6 while the ‘natural’-sounding timbre of the dulcimer provides an aural link to Appalachian folk traditions7 (as well as to the post-Second World War American folk revival).8 This music continues while a 20-second text sequence explains the origins of the Hunger Games (with the dulcimer part dropping from the mix as the explanation progresses). At the end of this sequence, when the text explains that the contestants will be ‘transferred to a public arena where they will Fight to the Death, until a lone victor remains’, a sudden shift to the parallel minor key enhances the sense of foreboding associated with the Games event (a technique that is subsequently used regularly throughout the film). This is immediately followed by a short – and ideologically loaded – extract from a television interview from the Capitol with the Games’ current designer, who refers to the Games as a national healing tradition that ‘knits us all together’. The interview sequence is then dramatically interrupted, just as the designer takes a breath before replying to the interviewer’s question as to what defines his ‘personal signature’. Instead of a reply, the scene cuts to action underway in District 12. Positioned at the precise moment when the audience anticipates hearing the designer’s reply, the audience instead hears a female child’s anguished scream. Mixed over bird 5. The Mixolydian mode sounds like a major scale with a flattened seventh degree. Major chords are produced on the tonic (I) and flattened seventh (bVII) when the scale is harmonised. 6. See Kidson and Neal for examples of English folk tunes employing Mixolydian (and other common) modes. 7. Charles Seeger notes that the term ‘dulcimer’ has been employed to describe both ‘the fretted zither and the hammered dulcimer’ (47). He describes the early Appalachian dulcimer (a relative of the zither) as a ‘fretted cordophone’ that is ‘known as an instrument in fairly general use since 1900, and probably for some time before that, by musically nonliterate rural and small-townspeople in the mountains and foothills of southeastern United States’ (48). 8. A revival of interest in traditional music and musical instruments began after the Second World War and ebbed and flowed during subsequent decades. Paul M. Gifford provides an account of the revival of the hammered dulcimer that began in the 1970s.


79

The Hunger Games. Lion’s Gate Home Entertainment, 2013.

song and insect noises, it sounds over an exterior shot showing an unmade road with wooden carts and wooden shacks in a tree-lined mountainous landscape. Dropping the environmental sound from the mix, the image cuts to an interior scene where Katniss is comforting her younger sister, Primrose (Willow Shields), who is having nightmares about being picked for the Games. Primrose whispers a request to which Katniss agrees, leaning over her sister to sing the opening lines to a song, ‘Deep in the meadow / under the willow’, before Primrose joins in with her to sing the next two lines, ‘A bed of grass / A soft green pillow’. The song (henceforth referred to as ‘The Meadow Song’) and context are redolent of pre-modernity. As Peggy Langrall observes, traditional Appalachian ballad singing was usually unaccompanied, and ballad singers ‘typically sang at home alone or for a friend or two with a private kind of directness, totally absorbed in their songs’ (38). Katniss’s brief duet with her sister represents just such a moment of domestic intimacy and absorption in the act of singing. The (Aeolian)9 melody she sings is articulated very softly,

9. The Aeolian mode is the equivalent of the so-called ‘natural’ minor scale (tonic, major 2nd, minor 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, minor 6th, minor 7th).

80


and the girls’ vibrato-free, untrained voices enhance the ‘folkiness’ and humanity of the scene. After singing these four lines, Katniss seeks Primrose’s affirmation that she remembers the song before leaving her to go out hunting in the woods. In a somewhat allusive echo of her song, the outdoors scene that she encounters, of miners going to their early morning shift and of other people moving through the landscape, is first accompanied by another simple, folk-style (D) Aeolian melodic idea in the film’s instrumental score – this time in the form of a short, two-part wordless vocal sequence (sung by Greek-Belgian singer Mariana Tootsie) with parallel fifths to end the phrase. As Katniss slips away into the forest, a sonically complex (and uneasy) ambience is created through the combination of sustained instrumental tones and prominent environmental sounds – including the ubiquitous birdsongs, footsteps, running water and a rattling fence. When Katniss enters the forest through the fence (ignoring a ‘no access’ sign) the D Aeolian melody reappears in the score, now as a series of (four) separated, two-bar melodic phrases sung to nonsense syllables (‘do do’). This simple, folk-like melody uses mostly step-wise melodic movement with only occasional leaps, and like the diegetic vocals sung earlier by Katniss and her sister, the non-diegetic vocals have a gentle, organic quality that derives from the use of a natural-sounding female voice with no vibrato or dynamic variation. The tension rises as Katniss stalks a deer, enhanced by the re-presentation of the melody as a two-part canon (one part metaphorically ‘chasing’ the other), together with the occasional use of sudden pizzicato string sounds. The prominent music and supporting environmental sound mix only drops when Katniss is interrupted by the arrival of her friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), suggesting that the vocal score sequence represents Katniss’s own organic inter-relation with the woodlands in which she hunts. Positioned so early in the film narrative, in a rapidly changing sequence, the performance of ‘The Meadow Song’ with her sister seems an incidental element of narrative colour, emphasising Katniss’s nurturing role. In terms of narrative function, the early position of the song serves to overcome the absence of narrated commentary that the novel allows and, specifically, the narrated commentary that accompanies the song’s performance at a later stage of the narrative. The use of vocal duets – in both diegetic form (as Katniss sings with her sister) and non-diegetic form (as part of the forest-scene underscore) – might also be seen as symbolic of the centrality of the human relationships within the film and the interdependence of the main characters in their struggle for survival. One of the scenes that most vividly crystallises the connection between


81

dystopian, high-tech modernity and pre-modern tradition occurs in the Games’ arena following the death of Rue (Amandla Stenberg), a young female tribute from another District whom Katniss has befriended. As Rue lies dying from a spear wound, she asks Katniss to comfort her by singing to her. Initially hesitant, Katniss thinks of something to sing and decides on ‘The Meadow Song’, described in the novel as a simple lullaby, one we sing fretful, hungry babies to sleep with. It’s old, very old I think. Made up long ago in our hills. What my music teacher calls a mountain air. But the words are easy and soothing, promising tomorrow will be more hopeful than this awful piece of time we call today. (283–4)

The lyrics of Katniss’s song – as in their earlier rendition in the film – gently urge a child to fall asleep in a daisy-strewn meadow where all is ‘safe and warm’. While the novel includes four verses of the song, the second iteration of the song in the film features only the first three lines of the song, before fading out after: Deep in the meadow, under the willow A bed of grass, a soft green pillow, Lay down your head, and close your eyes [followed by an indistinct fourth line]10

In contrast to the film’s earlier, unaccompanied rendition, Katniss’s emotionally choked, faltering delivery is supported by an instrumental bed, stitching Katniss’s diegetic delivery into a lengthy, poignant section of underscore. Mirroring the sound combination used at the very opening of the film, the instrumental bed employs an evocative mix of synthesised and organic/ analogue musical elements – including sustained electronic tones, orchestral string-section chords and a prominent nylon-string acoustic guitar melody. The Aeolian vocal melody is now based on A, but the supporting harmony hovers enigmatically around an F(VI) chord before eventually settling on the tonic A minor chord as the tender, spacious acoustic guitar melody comes into the foreground. The underscore rises in volume as Katniss’s voice fades, and the guitar timbre has a velvety richness and warmth that perfectly underscores the range of emotions (from tenderness to deep sadness) attending Rue’s death scene. Katniss’s voice re-emerges within the sound mix, this time in the form of desperate wordless sobbing. Then, in a subtle piece of sound editing, Katniss’s angry screams are entirely muted in a deliberate aural understatement that 10. Which the novel indicates as ‘And when again they open, the sun will shine’ (284).

82


helps to focus viewers’ attention on the visual manifestations of her obvious distress. Lending symbolic weight to the moment by switching from diegetic to non-diegetic mode, orchestral strings take over the melody and lead it higher in pitch and volume as Katniss turns and signals defiantly to the cameras ‘hidden’ in the Games arena. The music reaches a climax as the watching crowd in Rue’s home, District 11, is shown responding, at first silently, and then with violence – with loud, dramatic diegetic sounds (such as shattering glass and crashing scaffolding) joining the expressive underscore. The sound of marching footsteps ushers in a violent police response, and the scene ends with a frenzy of visual images supported by loud diegetic sound and an orchestral crescendo. In the book and film, the song, and her vocalisation of it, reconnect Katniss to her cultural heritage of ‘mountain airs’. The meadow described in the song’s lyrics has particular resonance since it is both a metaphorical safe place and an actual location in District 12 where Katniss goes to hide when she is distressed or requires privacy.11 While the song lyrics featured in Collins’s book are invented ones, they are congruent with aspects of Appalachian song traditions.12 But the simple and touching rendition of an implicitly pre-modern song to a dying girl also carries associations with the bio-engineered world of Panem in the form of the mockingjay, a (fictional) species of bird that is a key motif throughout the trilogy (and one that gives its name to the third volume). One of the key elements of its symbolism is the manner in which it represents a victory of natural elements over human attempts to manage and control them. Collins’s authorial voice, personified by Katniss as the book’s narrator, describes how Capitol scientists created a (male) bird, known as the jabberjay, that could remember the sounds of human conversation and subsequently vocalise them (as, effectively, an organic audio-recorder) thereby giving the Capitol insights into the attitudes and plans of dissident groups within the community. The birds fell out of favour as an intelligence tool when the rebels learned to feed them false information. Abandoned by their creators, the jabberjays ‘went native’ and cross-bred with endemic North American mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) to create a new hybrid, the mockingjay, endowed with particular expressive skills. As Katniss explains in the novel, the resultant hybrids could replicate both bird whistles and human melodies. They had lost the ability to enunciate words but could still mimic a range of human vocal sounds, from a child’s high-pitched warble to a man’s deep tones. And they could recreate songs. Not just a few 11. See Granger for further discussion. 12. The song also invokes comparisons to traditional material such as ‘Over in the Meadow’, which details the comfort a woodland meadow offers to the various creatures who inhabit it.


83

notes, but whole songs with multiple verses, if you had the patience to sing them and if they liked your voice. (52)

The mockingjays and their mimetic abilities have a particular emotive appeal for Katniss as they remind her of her father, who died in a mine accident. As the book recalls, he used to interact with the birds around District 12: My father was particularly fond of mockingjays. When we went hunting, he would whistle or sing complicated songs to them and, after a polite pause, they’d always sing back. Not everyone is treated with such respect. But whenever my father sang, all the birds in that area would fall silent and listen. His voice was that beautiful, high and clear and so filled with life it made you want to cry and laugh at the same time. (52–3)

On one level, Katniss’s recollections primarily express an idealisation of a lost parent, of his vocal abilities and ‘soulfulness’, and the mockingjays’ particular respect and recognition of these attributes. On another, they express a particularly integrated and interactive relationship between humans and birds in a pseudo-natural environment that recalls the highly integrated sonic relationship between humans and forest environments and species discussed by anthropologists such as Steven Feld. The crucial difference is that the mockingjays’ abilities are an unintended consequence of bio-engineering ‘gone feral’, a factor that illustrates that nature cannot be easily predicted and manipulated and that, sometimes at least, fortunate consequences can follow from malign intent. This latter point is an important one in a dystopia where the Capitol is otherwise – and particularly at the beginning of the trilogy – seen to be in firm and stifling control of the districts that service it. In this context, the mockingjay is a potent symbol of hope. Fittingly, in this regard, Primrose presents Katniss with a decorative mockingjay pin (‘to protect you’) shortly before she departs to participate in the Games. She wears the pin throughout the narrative, and the mockingjay goes on to become a symbol of her later rebellion against the Capitol. The pin also serves as a visual cue in the film narrative that prompts Rue to demonstrate to Katniss how the two might communicate their safety to each other when they split up in the forest. In the novel, the ever-practical Katniss reacts with surprise when Rue tells her that music is her favourite thing, stating, ‘In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness’ (255). Rue replies by telling her how she sings melodies for the mockingjays to repeat in order to communicate to her fellow workers, announcing the end of work shifts, for example. In the film Rue demonstrates a similar approach by singing a simple four-note melody that the birds imitate. Katniss also tries this, whistling the four-note tune at a different pitch and in a slightly modified form, upon which

84


the birds imitate her rendition. The two decide then decide to use this process to signal to each other. This scene is recalled twice in the book, once shortly after the interaction when, immediately after she finishes her rendition of ‘The Meadow Song’ verses to the dying Rue, the birds take up the melody and sing it in the woods. The film dispenses with this in favour of the previously described instrumental passage accompanying images of Katniss’s grief, although a prominent four-note sequence (an inverted version of Rue’s earlier melody) on cellos – audible in the underscore just after Katniss’s muted scream – offers a subtle reference to the earlier scene. Similarly, in another scene omitted in the film, when there is only one other tribute, Cato, left to fight, Katniss recalls Rue’s fondness for the mockingjays and sings one of Rue’s melodies. The birds initially take it up and create a warm, embracing soundscape that rapidly sours: In the trees at the edge of the plain, I can see the mockingjays flitting about. Bouncing melodies back and forth between them like brightly coloured balls. I open my mouth and sing out Rue’s four note run. I can feel them pause curiously at the sound of my voice, listening for more. I repeat the notes in the silence. First one mockingjay trills the tune back, then another. Then the whole wood comes alive with the sound … The music swells and I recognise the brilliance of it. As the notes overlap they complement one another, forming a lovely, unearthly harmony … For a while, I just close my eyes and listen, mesmerized by the beauty of the song. Then something begins to disrupt the music. Runs cut off in jagged, imperfect lines. Dissonant notes intersperse with the melody. The mockingjays’ voices rise up in a shrieking cry of alarm. (399–400)

The hybridised mockingjays are reacting to one of the book’s more dramatic moments, the intrusion of large, vicious, wolf-like mutations bio-engineered from the cells of fallen tributes and let loose on the remaining competitors. Whereas the mockingjays represent a bio-engineering experiment that failed in its functionality and interbred harmoniously with natural birds, the mutations that attack the last three tributes have no such redeeming attributes.13 Ancillary songs

The end-credits of The Hunger Games film are accompanied by three original song texts that have thematic congruence with the narrative. While their contribution to the film text itself may be marginal (primarily maintaining the impression of the film in the audience’s consciousness as they transition from auditorium to street, or else switch from DVD or television-watching to their 13. In the film the mutations attack at night, when the mockingjays are silent.


85

next activity), their presence as an addendum to the film serves to legitimise their connection to it when circulated independently as part of the film’s multimedia presence and marketing strategy. Most notably, the three tracks in question also feature prominently on a CD album of material inspired by the film (entitled The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond) that constituted a highly successful extension to the Hunger Games franchise in its own right,14 and, in the case of Swift and The Civil Wars’ ‘Safe and Sound’ and its accompanying video, were prominent in the film’s initial marketing blitz. The first song in the film’s end-credits, Arcade Fire’s ‘Abraham’s Daughter’ (which is also the first track on the CD) features lyrics that attempt to give allusive symbolic weight to The Hunger Games’ narrative within a musical context that dovetails with and extends vocal and musical aspects of the film, and particularly its introduction. The lyrics draw on the Old Testament ‘Book of Genesis’ and the story of Abraham taking his son, Isaac, to the desert to offer him in sacrifice to God, only for the ‘angel of the lord’ to interrupt him (and to provide a ram as an alternate offering). Arcade Fire’s song (written by Win Butler and sung by Régine Chassagne) describes a scenario in which it is Abraham’s (unnamed) daughter who intervenes and stops the sacrifice by drawing her bow and threatening her father. Butler has described the song as ‘as a weird, alternate-universe version’ of the Genesis story ‘where it’s as if Abraham had a daughter’, offering ‘a metaphor for Katniss’.15 The song’s rendition is highly complementary to the film’s soundtrack, beginning with heavy, sustained tones on distorted guitars and an ominous-sounding rhythmic riff, before Chassagne’s multi-tracked vocals enter with the main melody. Mirroring the vocal timbres used at the beginning of the film, the vibrato-free voices have a natural, untrained, almost-childlike quality, and the simple, on-beat melody moves up the Aeolian mode in a sequential pattern identical to the pattern of intervals sung by Rue to demonstrate the imitative powers of the mockingjays in the film. The second end-credits track, ‘Safe and Sound’, performed by high-profile country/pop performers Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars, merits particular attention here on account of its function as the focal promotional single for the film and for its re-articulation of song themes from The Hunger Games’ diegesis. Commissioned by the film’s music producer T Bone Burnett, the song 14. The CD was the best-selling film soundtrack release of 2013 and also registered the highest all-time number of weekly digital sales of any soundtrack release shortly after its release (Farber). 15. Interview on DWTC Hunger Games Fansite (3 Feb 2012). http://hungergamesdwtc.net/2012/03/ listen-to-abrahams-daughter-arcade-fires-contribution-to-the-hunger-games-soundtrack/. Accessed 5 Sep 2014.

86


played a key promotional role in the film by both cross-associating it with the (Grammy-winning) celebrity of its composer-performers and through representing the song in a music video that was released in a high-saturation campaign on the internet and television during the lead up to the film’s cinema premiere. Swift has identified that the production company, Lionsgate Films, wanted a song ‘from Katniss’s point of view’, and that she and her songwriting collaborators (The Civil Wars and T Bone Burnett) ‘wanted the song to be about the empathy that goes into this film and the undertones of sympathy and human compassion’.16 Appropriately in this regard, the song’s lyrics take a direct cue from Katniss’s role and emotional experiences in the narrative and from the lyrics of the ‘mountain air’ Katniss sings to her sister and to the dying Rue (indeed, Swift has referred to her song as ‘something of a “death lullaby”’).17 This particular aspect of the novel and film is the element that is specifically emphasised and reinscribed in the song and in its gentle acoustic country-pop styling. After an introductory verse that is ambiguous and inclusive in alluding to Katniss’s emotional commitment to both her sister and Rue, the chorus draws on and closely resembles elements of Collins’s lullaby, as in the following: ‘The Meadow Song’

‘Safe and Sound’

Lay down your head and close your eyes

Just close your eyes

And when they open, the sun will rise

The sun is going down

Here it’s safe, and here it’s warm

You’ll be alright

Here the daisies guard you from every harm

No one can hurt you now

Here your dreams are sweet

Come morning light

and tomorrow brings them true

You and I’ll be safe and sound

Similarly, Swift’s fragile vocal tone (which is more delicate than that featured on many other of her other recent recordings) and the similar supporting tones of The Civil Wars’s back-up vocals combine with the gentle acoustic accompaniment to enhance the emotional impact of the song and to invite association with Katniss’s fragile vocal delivery of her song in the novel and film. Further enhancing the overall mood is a gentle acoustic guitar part featuring folk-style 16. Interview with MTV. http://hungergamesmovie.org/category/hunger-games-soundtrack/ taylor-swift-safe-sound/. Accessed 5 Sep 2014. 17. Cited in Clever TV news item. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9i-lYLntCs. Accessed 5 Sep 2014.


87

‘hammering’ and ‘pull-off’ techniques.18 The delicate interplay between Swift’s melody and the contrapuntal guitar lines provides yet another example of the musical duet idea, while the use of lengthy wordless passages of melody (sung to ‘oo’) in ‘Safe and Sound’ bears comparison with the evocative wordless vocals in the underscore during Katniss’s deer-hunting scene. The song’s promotional video, directed by Philip Andelman, predominantly features Swift lip-synching while wandering through a wintry rural landscape, barefoot in a vintage-styled long white dress and visiting a graveyard intercut with shots of The Civil Wars performing the song in a rustic cabin in front of a fire. Towards the end of the video, in explicit linkage to the novel, Swift enters a deserted cabin and picks up a mockingjay pin. The overall impression is of the song being performed in a present-day context reflecting on historical events, messing with perceptions of the past, present and future by implicitly placing the action of The Hunger Games in a historical (rather than future/ futuristic) context. The film producers’ choice of the song (and video) as a key promotional device for the film has a number of significant elements. One is to effectively render Swift (or, at least, the Swift persona represented in the song and its accompanying figure) as a musical surrogate for Katniss and for Jennifer Lawrence’s performance of the character in the film (an aspect enhanced by Lawrence’s and Swift’s similarly slim, facially attractive photogeneity). Another is to privilege the emotional poignancy of Katniss’s experiences over the dystopian, action-heavy elements of the book and film. Indeed, there is nothing in the song or its arrangements that in any way suggest the sf themes of the novel and film. In this regard, the video and song are significantly different to the (first) trailer for the film,19 which opens with an ambient sound-heavy sequence of Katniss and her friend Gale in the woodlands of District 12 before rudely interrupting this with the arrival of a Capitol surveillance hover-plane and its loud engine sounds. After a title caption, the trailer presents a montage of scenes of the selection of the tributes, of the high-tech futuristic Capitol and combat training before ending with the tributes arriving in the combat arena. This sequence emphasises the film’s action and futuristic/sf aspects. Accordingly the trailer’s musical soundtrack emphasises the drama of the narrative by using thick orchestral textures, loud percussive patterns and 18. For the hammering effect, a left-hand finger sounds a new note by hammering forcefully onto the fretboard – without any concurrent articulation by the right hand. To sound a ‘pulled-off’ note, a left-hand finger releases a held note with a ‘snapping’ sound – again without any right-hand involvement. 19. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9a5V9OduY. Accessed 5 Sep 2014.

88


prominent sound effects as regular intrusions on the brief moments of audiovisual respite. At the end of the trailer, the loud underscore evaporates suddenly, exposing a whistled variation of Rue’s mockingjay call – an unambiguous nod to the (symbolic and narrative) significance of the mockingjays within the movie. With regard to their different emphases, the song/video and film trailer might be best understood as offering a diversified marketing strategy, with the Swift/The Civil Wars song and video representing an element that might be understood (within traditional perceptions of differential gender sensibilities) to appeal to the female audience that was a central demographic for the novel, and the trailer aimed at a broader audience with a greater interest in action and sf elements (see Hughes). While markedly less prominent in the film’s marketing, the final track in the end-credit sequence, The Civil Wars’ own ‘Kingdom Come’, is similar in style to ‘Safe and Sound’ and has lyrics that express similar sentiments, in lines such as ‘Don’t you fret my dear / It’ll all be over soon / I’ll be waiting here for you’. One key difference to the band’s collaboration with Swift is its featured overlapping vocal duet, with male and female singers (John Paul White and Joy Williams) singing with a notably emotional style of delivery over a folk-style strummed and picked guitar instrumental bed that suggests Katniss’s intense interactions in the film with the two male protagonists, Peeta and Gale. Conclusion

The discussions advanced above address the manner in which a song, characterised by the novel/film as a traditional Appalachian ‘mountain air’, functions as a narrative and musical motif in the novel and film that binds Katniss and her District 12 to a (mythical) pre-modern, pre-dystopian past that gives her the strength to confront and battle the dystopian modernity represented by the Capitol and its inhumane, gladiatorial imposition. The song, subsequently interpreted and re-inflected by Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars in their lead promotional music release, thereby forms a central emotional essence to the extended media package of The Hunger Games franchise. As also discussed, this element is not simply separated from the highly technologised world of the Capitol and its mechanisms of control over the districts but is one that has infiltrated these through the hybridised mockingjays, a product of the unforeseen miscegenation of the bio-engineered jabberjays with endemic mockingbirds. This element of the novel and film is one that is rendered subtly in the novel’s narrative and in the film’s audioscapes, forming a poignant


89

sonic colouration that complements and enriches the action-orientated arena sequences and the emotional complexities of the tributes’ violent engagement with each other. In these aspects, despite The Hunger Games film’s lack of overtly ‘futuristic’ sf music – within the somewhat formulaic traditions of that tradition (see Hayward) – it offers an original and well-realised deployment of sound for narrative and thematic purposes that does more than simply signal future difference and/or dystopia. Acknowledgement This article is dedicated to the memory of Rebecca Coyle (1956–2012), for whom the novel and the film’s soundtrack had particular significance. The authors would also like to gratefully acknowledge her role in mentoring their research in screen sound studies. Thanks also to Amelia Hayle for her insight into aspects of the novel and film.

Works cited Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Farber, Jim. ‘“Hunger Games soundtrack,” music review’. New York Daily News (19 Nov 2013). http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/hunger-gamessoundtrack-music-review-article-1.1520943. Accessed 5 Sep 2014. Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. Gifford, Paul M. The Hammered Dulcimer: A History. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2001. Granger, John. ‘Mockingjay Discussion 15: The Hanging Tree’. Hogwarts Professor: Thoughts for Serious Readers (25 Aug 2010). http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/ mockingjay-discussion-15-the-hanging-tree/. Accessed 5 Sep 2014. Hayward, Philip. ‘Sci-Fidelity: Music, Sound and Genre History’. Off The Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Philip Hayward. Eastleigh: John Libbey/ Perfect Beat, 2004. 1–29. Higgs, Robert J., Manning, Ambrose N. and Miller, Jim Wayne, eds. Appalachia Inside Out Volume 1: Conflict and Change. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1998. Hughes, Mark. ‘Why “The Hunger Games” Proves Young Adult Novels & Female Audiences Could Rule the Box Office’. Forbes (22 Mar 2012). http://www.forbes. com/sites/markhughes/2012/03/22/the-hunger-game-represents-emerging-opportunities-for-film-studios/. Accessed 5 Sep 2014. Kidson, Frank and Neal, Mary. English Folk-Song and Dance. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Langrall, Peggy. ‘Appalachian Folk Music: From Foothills to Footlights’. Music Educators Journal 72.7 (1986): 37–9. Seeger, Charles. ‘The Appalachian Dulcimer’. The Journal of American Folklore 279 (1958): 40–51.