The soundtrack of a leader: scoring a psychological portrait of megalomania

ABSTRACT

This article presents an analysis of the original score for the 2015 film The Childhood of a Leader, which was composed by the enigmatic and reclusive popstar-turned-avant-garde-experimentalist Scott Walker. In particular, the analysis here considers that important function that Walker’s score plays in illuminating the central protagonist’s evolving megalomaniacal state. The film’s narration of a would-be Fascist leader’s childhood is punctuated and enhanced by Walker’s challenging and aggressive composition, which aurally complements and symbolises the growing disquiet in the youngster’s mind. Focussing firstly on the significant influence of European art and culture on Walker’s musical style and the role of European cinema and aesthetics in Brady Corbet’s direction of the film, the understanding of Walker’s sonic techniques and their use in the film become contextualised with a specific grounding in ‘European Imagination’. The article also explores the combination of sound and images through conceptual and theoretical notions such as Gilles Deleuze’s ‘any-space-whatever’; the use of avant-garde sound techniques such as cacophony and distortion in the composition and sound mixing; before concluding with a textual analysis of the film’s primary creative mode of aligning music to the characterisation of a megalomaniacal mind.

KEYWORDS:

• Scott Walker
• soundtrack
• European imagination
• The Childhood of a Leader
• Fascism
• Brady Corbet
• Gilles Deleuze

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Matt Selway

Matt Selway is senior lecturer in Media and Film Studies in the school of Humanities at York St John University. His research concerns the representation of mental disorders in the media (primarily, though not exclusively, the biopic film), with a particular focus on the intersections of mental illness with other discourses of identity such as national identity; race; gender; and class, and how narratives focussed on mental illness can be interpreted in ways that tell us more about the wider social context in which they were produced. He holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of East Anglia and currently teaches a wide variety of Media and Film Studies modules.