Baby Driver: Sound and Silence

The second time I saw Edgar Wright’s wonderfully fun, fast, iconic take on the heist film genre, I noticed how surprisingly much of BABY DRIVER does not have music under it.   Several pivotal scenes, notably some flirty business between young getaway car driver Baby (Ansel Elgort)  and Debora (Lily James), the impossibly cute and charming waitress in Bo’s Diner (where, we learn, Baby’s mother worked while struggling to be a singer), play without backing by the songs that ingeniously drive so much of the rest of the film.   Instead of music, those diner scenes give us the adoring visuals of young love: huge closeups of the would-be lovers’ faces.  

The thing is, after seeing this glorious mix of music and movement the first time, you’d swear that one well-chosen musical number after another played continuously throughout it.  I was tempted to write, after one viewing, that the film is essentially a 113-minute music video.  Indeed, that catches a slice of the spirit of BABY DRIVER, which saw an early version of its life in a 2003 music video of British band Mint Royale’s “Blue Song.”  In that video, played mostly for laughs, we see a distinctly British getaway car driver jiving to his song, his car idling, waiting in a parking garage while his passengers are off making hay.  The unseen heist is timed to the song, and the driver enjoys clacking the windshield wipers and the sun visor to the beat while he’s waiting.  At one point an overhead pigeon flings a slimy one on the car’s hood.  Or bonnet. Sorry, mates.

The main idea of this very simply-photographed video is beautifully recast into the opening sequence of BABY DRIVER.  An across-the-street shot of a classic Atlanta bank building is eclipsed by red bumper and fender and big black wheel of a Subaru rolling in to block it. A hand holds an iPod up against the car’s steering wheel, thumb hits PLAY.  Pairs of percussive chords play as we see each of the car’s occupants.  A young man in sunglasses and white Apple earbuds sits in the driver’s seat, while three passengers, all in black, all in shades, wait their cue.  On the young driver’s signal the robbers open doors and hit the street. . .and Baby, the driver, continues listening—and variously jiving to—his music.  The music is loud over the soundtrack, and it is driven, rhythmic, chaotic, at times funny.   The tune Baby has chosen is “Bellbottoms” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.  

We are hearing it loud because Baby is hearing it loud.  He drums on the steering wheel and on the car door, plays sweeping air violin, clacks windshield wipers and at one moment perfectly lip-syncs to the singer’s mock-announcer tones: “Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen!  Right now I got to tell you about. . .the Fabulous. . .most groovy. . .Bellbottoms!” We see as he sees scenes of gunfire and mayhem through the bank windows across the street.   The music cranks up as the action cranks up.  The three, hauling weapons and huge duffel bags, explode from the building, cross the street and into the car as Baby revs it into tire-squealing action with a growing phalanx of cop cars never far behind.

What follows is one of the film’s justly-praised driving scenes, this one just preceding the opening credits sequence.  It all unrolls to the continued assault of “Bellbottoms,” which has now amped up to become high-octane sonic frenzied craziness.  Much has been made of the film’s thrilling, palpable stunt driving, done with real cars on real streets and highways.  There is not a speck of computer fakery to be seen, we are told.

So, in that first scene we have the model for much of the film:  Baby’s music, heard in headphones or over the car radio, becomes the soundtrack to some pretty terrific driving and action as the gang flees the scene(s) of the crime(s).  Sometimes it feels more choreographed, sometimes less:  in a few scenes the gunfire erupts in rhythm to the music.  Some writers have even called this movie a musical.  

Watching the film a second time boosted my appreciation for Edgar Wright’s discrimination and restraint in how he does use music, however.   In that very first robbery/getaway scene the timing of action to music is a bit looser, played down compared to some later scenes. It is not like the characters’ footfalls as they cross the street sync to the music. Not yet. But the cutting of shots and most of the action does.  If this quality of very tightly matching specific actions to music locked the whole film, if it looked the same throughout, it would become annoying quite quickly, it seems to me.  And so, Wright structures the scenes to the music, but in different ways and to different degrees as the film’s action develops.

And of course many types of music are used to paint different moods, sometimes undercutting the action, sometimes pumping it up.  An ill-fated visit to an arms dealer unfolds to “Tequila.”  One of the heists devolves to a footrace to the weird manic yodeling and screaming guitars of “Hocus Pocus” by Focus (1971).  At a significant moment, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas sing that there is “Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide," perfectly synced to the passing white lines on a nighttime highway. One of the planning meetings sees Doc (Kevin Spacey) explaining the next job while Baby is playing prodigious air piano to Dave Brubeck.  After the car-crushing scene (more on this later), when Baby is feeling the call of freedom from this life of crime and driving, he luxuriates, right there in the junkyard, to the Commodores singing “Easy.”  His “killer track,” the one he can always come back to:  Queen’s “Brighton Rock.” There is 60s soul and r&b, alternative rock, some familiar tunes, some unfamiliar ones, different cuts of some.  The soundtrack adroitly uses some 30+ songs in all. Deep analysis of the use of music in BABY DRIVER is a ripe subject.

If this use of music was just a mechanical exercise, however, the film might be fun, but would forever be filed under “music video.”  

But it is much more than that.

We start to feel a little depth when we hear the reason Baby is so often plugged into his headphones.  He needs to listen to music, we are told, to drown out the tinnitus he was cursed with after a childhood car accident. (“He has a hum in the drum,” abbreviates Doc, the criminal mastermind behind each heist.) Ah, that might explain the driving habit as well.  When we further learn that his mother and father were killed in that accident things get a little deeper.  Add to it that his mother was a singer who worked at times at Bo’s Diner where he hangs out and meets waitress Debora, and a few more threads fall into place.

BABY DRIVER is archetypal and iconic, following the plot and even the look of many heist films.  It will remind you of a bunch of different movies at different times.  It is a movie that is proud of its forebears, and one that honors them in its story, its characters and its look.  I kept thinking of RONIN, John Frankenheimer’s glorious 1998 crime adventure, featuring practical, on-the-street driving sequences even more impressive than those in BABY DRIVER.

(And I loved Wright’s nod to the film’s worthy grandsire, another coming-of-age-in-crime film laced with terrific music. Baby eventually gets a pizza delivery job. The outfit he drives for: Goodfellas Pizza.) 

So, you could say that there is nothing new here. But what’s new is the style, with most scenes looking and feeling and sounding as they do because we are getting them through Baby’s consciousness and through his music.

At its heart, BABY DRIVER is a coming-of-age-in-a-life-of-crime story, and it knows it.  The hard men and woman that he drives to the next job look, act, think, talk, and dress differently than Baby.  If they ever were angels, they now are distinctly fallen angels.  Baby has yet to fall, and this movie is the story of his heading, perhaps reluctantly, in that direction.  His foster father, Joe, knows it only too well, and after seeing Baby stash some more loot underneath the floorboards, tells him “You don’t belong in that world.”  The line comes back again, near the end of the film, when, after one irrevocable act, Baby says to Debora, “You don’t belong in this world.”

It was a pleasure to see a film with such a tightly-wound screenplay in terms of plot and the intricate way music drives it.  The dialogue is delightfully sharp, clever, and expressive of character.  It crackles with bad guy talk.

Early on after the first bank job, the crew meets for payment and for planning.  Griff, played by Jon Bernthal, is extra-curious about this odd duck, Baby, who clearly doesn’t fit.  He states the film’s major plot movement in a couple of lines:  “You can’t be in crime without being a little criminal,”  and, later, a prediction: “One of these days, Baby, you’re gonna get blood on your hands.”

Some of the better lines are spoken by Jamie Foxx as Bats, whose craziness keeps the rest of the crew on edge.  When they are still sniping suspiciously at Baby and someone asks if he has “mental problems,” Bats makes it clear, “I’m the one got mental problems in the crew.  Position taken.”  Bats states his philosophy with a warning in the car while holding a gun on Baby: “In this business, the moment you catch feelings is the moment you catch a bullet.”

Kevin Spacey as Doc, the brains of the outfit who plans and explains each heist, gets his share of good lines, too.  His dialogue, spoken always calmly and without attitude, often harshly underlines his control over the group, and especially of Baby.  After one botched job, Doc and Baby talk in the parking garage.  Baby has finally paid off his many years’ debt to Doc, and feels he is free of the whole business now.  As an unsubtle hint of how connected he still is, Doc gestures over to a nearby car.  “You need to sunset that ride.”  In the car’s trunk we see the bloody corpse of one of the crew from the recent job that nearly went wrong.   But there is a disconnect in our minds:  this guy, JD, was not killed during the job.  Without Doc saying it, the pieces fall into place:  he himself killed JD, for leaving his shotgun behind at the crime scene.  The next scene depicts what it means to “sunset that ride”:   Baby watches the car, JD’s final resting place, being crushed into a cube at the scrapyard.  That simple line, “you need to sunset that ride,”  was not a request but an order, reminding Baby who he still works for, with the dead man in the trunk graphically demonstrating the results of running afoul of Doc.

In case we’re not clear on it, Doc has a little discussion with Baby when he asks him to come back for another job.  They talk outside the fancy restaurant where Baby has taken Debora with his first paycheck from Goodfellas Pizza.  Baby does not want to do the job, but Doc has other plans.  He delivers this line to Baby in an offhanded manner, not even looking at him, never raising his voice: “Now I don’t think I need give you the speech about what happens when you say no, how I could break your legs and kill everyone you love, because you already know that, don’t you?”  Just a simple question, simply stated.  The epitome of Doc. And it is chilling.  He goes on, “So what’s it gonna be:  behind the wheel or in a wheelchair?”

There is a lovely little bit early on, where a simple exchange between Bats and Doc shows exactly who these characters are and how they each feel about Baby:

Bats: Well, ain’t ya’ll cute?

Doc: (proudly, paternalistically):  That’s my Baby!

Bats: Fuck your Baby!

Though BABY DRIVER is deftly laced with music, each scene orchestrated around a song or songs, its very structure hangs on its silences, too.  In fact, the film often counterpoints images or plot elements of sound and silence, of hearing vs. deafness.  There is Baby’s tinnitus, which in a way drives the whole film.   His foster father, Joe, is deaf, communicating with Baby by sign. But Joe shatters stereotypes of deafness by being one of the sharpest characters in the film.  He understands Baby as no one else does: with perfect clarity.  In a touching scene where Baby drops Joe off at an Assisted Living facility for his own protection, Baby speaks a message into a voice recorder for his caregivers, telling them who he is and lovingly voicing a list of things he likes, including peanut butter spread all the way to the edges.  Sound and silence.  At a couple of moments, once from a gun fired right next to his head, Baby temporarily loses his hearing, and the soundtrack becomes a world of muffled sound.  Baby is riding in a car with Debora, but can barely hear, until he puts his hand on the car speaker.  Then, loud and beautifully, he hears the song that’s playing:  it is his mother’s rendition of “Easy,” the song that for Baby means freedom.

BABY DRIVER is a film about the many ways we use music sometimes to fill, sometimes to enhance, our silences.

Time Machine

We often can benefit from other people's obsessions.

Nowhere is this more truly or more often dramatically demonstrated than on the internet. How many times have you just discovered or been told about what to you was a new, bizarre, but fascinating topic, only to find that there is an extensive Wikipedia article about it, as well as a healthy selection of websites where variously driven people have explored the obscurantist subject thoroughly?

One of these came to me today by way of my brother, Roger, in Germany.

Roger is a big baseball fan. He also has a burrowing mind that delights in origins, in history, in the roots of things. Through an investigation of the source of the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," Roger chanced upon a marvelous page of old recordings.

Here's where the obsession comes in. Glenn Sage, who apparently is behind the site www.tinfoil.com, is gloriously obsessed with and very knowledgeable about old recordings.

And when I say old, I'm not talking lps or 45s or even 78s. This is a site entirely dedicated to wax cylinder recordings, an early improvement on the very first recording medium, invented by Thomas Edison.

In case you have never heard of or seen these amazing, original recordings, there is an excellent, concise, illustrated history of them at the tinfoil site. But briefly, Edison invented the pioneer recording machine in 1877. With the first device, a needle scratched grooves in tinfoil strips wrapped around a 4-inch-diameter cylinder. This primitive and ephemeral tinfoil recording medium was replaced ten years later by a more durable standard: 4-inch-long and 2-inch-diameter waxlike cylinders.

[A brief detour back to my New Jersey childhood. Following a family outing to Edison's laboratories in West Orange, that same brother, Roger, maybe 11 years old?, built a replica of the original recording machine. It recorded on aluminum foil wrapped around a tin can. And it actually worked! I'm pretty much in awe of my brother!]

Edison used the machine to record hundreds of bands, performers, and speakers. And Edison's was only one of dozens of companies that recorded on wax cylinders during the last years of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century.

The delicious, wondrous bounty of the tinfoil site, however, can be found at its Cylinders of the Month Archive. Since 1997, Sage has been posting detailed information about one interesting or special wax cylinder recording each month. So now we have this mammoth page, a compendium of all the past Cylinders of the Month. Just click on the highlighted date to the left of each entry's title and you are transported to a detailed page about that particular recording.

Best of all, though: from the detailed page it is only one more click to the recording itself. Yes, you can LISTEN TO any of these more-than-hundred-year-old audio documents!

And taken together, they compose an enchanted aural time machine! These are songs, speeches, comedy bits and musical numbers such as you have never heard, and that you'll never hear anywhere else. Just listening to the scratchy, ancient recordings takes you back to another time, and the content of the pieces places you firmly there. We're not in Kansas anymore.

Or, technically, we ARE in Kansas in one comic song that spoofs the violent temperance reformer, Carrie Nation. It's called "Carrie Nation in Kansas." There are "ethnic specialities" here that have long ago fallen to the axes of political correctness. Listen, for instance, to an Irish comedy bit, "Casey as Umpire at a Ball Game." (I found this piece--from 1898!--hilariously pertinent, considering the recent Detroit Tigers "near perfect" game debacle!) Where else would you be able to listen to several hundred-year-old "minstrel" numbers?!

The "category" column of the Archive page indicates the variety you'll find here. In just a random listing, there are selections tagged as "Band," "Clarinet Solo," "Hebrew monologue," "Talking & banjo," "Baritone," "Tenor solo," "Serio-comic song". . ."Minstrels." Here you'll find orations by William Jennings Bryan and William H. Taft, numbers by Sophie Tucker and "Sousa's Band" (Stars and Stripes Forever March recorded in 1901!). But mostly you'll see no-longer-familiar groups such as Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette, Issler's Popular Orchestra, Herr Dr. Professor & George Donahue, and many individual performers.

Though there is tremendous variety here, I found that all the pieces I listened to worked mysterious magic on my nervous system, transporting me, for two or three scratchy, pop-punctuated minutes at a time, to a strange world of very different assumptions, ideas, and styles than our quotidian own.

It is a trip well worth the taking.

Two-Headed Monster

Talking to my brother, Roger, on the phone earlier this evening, I had another weirdly humorous reminder of the deep and sometimes strange connection between us.

I say "sometimes," because the two of us have long since come to laughingly take the whole thing for granted, expect it to happen, even, preternatural as its manifestations may be.

You have heard stories about oddly deep connections between twins even when the twins have been physically separated for most of their lives. Well, though we were born 15 months apart, with Roger and I, it's like that, too. Just like that.

To put it scientifically, the power of genetics is manifest in our lives.

First, there are the similarities you expect from brothers. We are both big, fat guys with roundish, chunky, cheerful heads. Our distinctive, buzzing voices sound the same. (This is a quality shared by our third, seemingly mutant, thin and wiry brother, Bill. It has something to do with our northern New Jersey upbringing.) In fact, when Roger and I still lived in the same house, we would occasionally try to fool callers by subtly pitching our very similar voices.

It goes beyond just the sound of our voices, though. It's the way we use those voices, too. We both have a digressive and discursive, detailed way of speaking that can be frustrating to more direct-speaking friends and acquaintances. On any subject that matters, we might start with what we consider important deep background. That is, we take it back to when we were little kids in New Jersey. Or further. Then we illustrate, we progress, we take side trips, backtrack, remember important details we should have put in earlier. We take, in short, the long way around.

That's what I gather, anyway.

So, Roger and I look and sound alike, or very similar. If you swapped my often longish, thick, unruly grey hair and goatee for his self-cut, wispy, one-time blond and pencil-thin Gable mustache, we could take a respectable crack at fooling people.

These kinds of things you might expect from brothers. Even Bill, whom at first glance a stranger might think is from a different family, exhibits some similarities. Some of these grow more and more obvious as the three of us grow older. When I uncovered my now-adult face for the first time in my life by shaving off my beard some years ago, I came to realize that, yes, Bill and I do look alike in some ways.

But then there are the odder manifestations I mentioned earlier.

Roger lives in Germany. He has been there since 1983. We are in almost constant contact by phone and on the internet. We love our instant messenger sessions together.

On the instant messenger it is a common occurrence that we'll both type the same thing at the same time and send it nearly simultaneously. Our wording might be slightly different, but we've both come up with the same comment or question. Often this seems like a new or unique statement to each of us, a new subject or drastic veer away from what we were just talking about. . .until we read that that other brother came up with it, too. Our brains followed very similar paths from whatever we last talked about to arrive at this same place. It has happened like that so many times that we hardly note it anymore.

Then there are the thoughts and even activities that we seem to be doing "independently together."

So, you got your car inspected on the same day I did?
You are also reading about the Civil War?
I had no idea that you, too, were a fan of the Pretenders.

When the weight of these "coincidences" becomes sometimes hilariously annoying, we might seek to assert our own individuality. And of course, Roger and I are different in many ways. Roger is a genius with his hands, with planning projects and following through with them. He is a brilliant maker. I am a ham-fisted dunderhead in this department. Roger is very much more talented musically than I am. He is adept at picking up instruments and noodling around with them, at figuring out songs. I have never been very musical. I try, but it is a struggle for me. Roger might say that I am better with words, but I'm convinced it is just a matter of where we put our attention.

But inevitably, the similarities return:

We are both birders, though Roger, as in most things, is far more diligent and serious about it than I am. We both have favorite birdwatching spots outside of the cities we live in. Both places are lakes. And one of the typical activities for each of us involves making our way to a wooden observation structure to get a better view of waterfowl on the lake. We didn't plan it this way.

To add another layer, in the "tape days"--the years when we frequently exchanged cassette tape letters--we'd sometimes find ourselves listening to a tape of the other brother's birding expedition while we ourselves were driving out to our own lake.

These types of correspondences, though amusing, are understandable considering our shared interests and basic outlooks on life.

The phenomenon is at its most amazing when it has nothing to do with opinions or values, but comes, rather, as a strange echoing of trivial events in our quotidian lives. Some silly thing that happened to me, or that I do in a certain way, I find that Roger experienced also or does the same way. The very unimportance of these events is what makes their correspondence startling, and, to us, usually hilarious.

Why would it turn out that we shave using not only the same type of razor, but the same shaving pattern? On our tapes some years ago, we kicked around the subject of odd things we do that we have never told anyone. That is how we found out that we are both sometime "step-counters": we habitually count our steps when walking from place to place. We both bought cars with sunroofs. We had never talked about sunroofs.

There is a paradox here, though: the more unimportant the action or event we share, not only the more amazing the coincidence, but the more difficult it is to remember! Who remembers these littlest of activities, sometimes as small as gestures or odd, inconsequential thoughts? So, even when Roger and I do weirdly share one, it tends to slip away quietly and disappear. They are the lint of the mind. They blow away in the merest puff.

I've been struggling with this, in fact, in working on this piece, and I have to apologize. I have been trying for quite some time, with Roger's help, to remember some of the more amazing examples of this correspondence between us. And what I have come up with arrives like lukewarm drizzle or small beer. Not that impressive, somehow.

But that doesn't mean the phenomenon is not real. It is very real. Roger and I feel it deeply and experience these funny echoes often. It feels, sometimes, like we are two parts of the same being, living different aspects of one life. It feels like we are a chunky, pleasant-headed colossus, one foot planted firmly in Berlin, one in Denver, spanning the Atlantic!

So, earlier this evening we were once again on the instant messenger, typing away about this and that and nothing in particular. Near the end of our conversation I was talking about my recent efforts to pick out the guitar introduction to "Stairway to Heaven" on my ukulele. I had only gotten as far as the first line or two (the first line repeats as the second), but was delighted how the iconic, oh-so-familiar opening notes of the song came out so easily on the uke. And I wanted to share it with Roger.

In a typical exchange of this two-headed, intercontinental monster:

Jim: Grab your uke and I'll talk you through it.

Roger: Grabbed already!

So we picked through the first 5 notes of the song, Roger getting it much quicker than I did, of course. Then came time for us to sign off the computer, as Roger needed to go to bed.

But he wanted to phone me first to explain something, which involved a little story of when he first left the country to go vagabonding in Europe. He wanted to actually hear my progress on the "Stairway to Heaven" intro, as well.

Well, this involved balancing my cell phone on a pile of books, papers, and so forth, so that it was close to the sound hole of the uke. I plucked a few strings to see if Roger could hear it.

And here came the occurrence that amazed me.

Roger had his uke in hand as well. He was plucking a few strings. And our instruments were in tune. Perfectly.

This would easily be explained if we both had tuned our ukuleles properly, to a pitch pipe or some other source. But we hadn't.

Or, at least I hadn't. Last time I tuned the instrument, I just tuned the strings to each other, and to a pitch I found pleasing. After failing to find my 40-year-old pitch pipe, I said to myself that the key doesn't matter. I'll just make sure the strings are tuned to each other, and forget about the actual key overall. After all, I was not playing it with anybody.

And it turned out that Roger's uke was tuned haphazardly, as well, a tone or two flat of the proper tuning.

I do not have perfect pitch or absolute pitch, or whatever. I don't even know the difference between the two.

But, like so many small occurrences in our mysteriously shared lives, like our lives themselves, our instruments were in tune.

Perfectly.

5-year-old boy plays "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash

Here is a delightful and hilarious video. I hope it makes your day. While you are at it, see also my entry "O Albele Panchhi. . ."

O Albele Panchhi...

This delighful little number is from the 1955 Bollywood film DEVDAS. The little boy and girl are singing to a "Wonderful Bird." They try to make the bird come to them, perch in the branches of their own tree, eat grain from their hands. . . but have to realize that the bird is a freedom-loving, independent being. All this symbolizes what will happen later between the grownup childhood friends.

I have been nuts for this song since I saw the film. This is the essence of cute! That little girl's smile could light up all of Mumbai!

I'm frustrated, though, in looking for the lyrics online and especially for an English translation of them. The film version I viewed DID give subtitles for the song lyrics, but I haven't found either subtitles or written-out lyrics online.

I have watched this video over and over again. I hope you do too!