A little film music, please...

The other day I was watching a n episode of the cop series Blue Bloods, and a character came into a room where a woman was rehearsing a song for party. The song was Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

All I could think was that the producers were running a bit late. It was about five years ago that I concluded that the FCC had passed a new rule requiring every TV show to feature "Hallelujah." It was getting bizarre there for a while. They even put it one of the Shrek movies. A great song yes, but children's music? Not hardly.

Anyway, that got me thinking about songs in TV and movies. I am not talking about musicals, but songs that pop up in non-musical shows, either because one character starts singing, or because it simply appears in the soundtrack. Happens all the time, of course, but sometimes the combination is so synergistic that it changes how I feel about the song. So here are a few of my favorites.

An episode of The West Wing called "Two Cathedrals" ends with the staff rushing off to a press conference where they will discover whether their boss intends to launch what they think will be a doomed run for re-election. The music is Dire Straits "Brothers In Arms" which both captures and sets the tone of a determined team going to a crisis.

I used to have friends who played Irish music in an Irish bar. Audience members would often ask for "Danny Boy," which they loathed. They always pointed out that it was written by an Englishman (okay, the tune was Irish traditional). But now when I hear this song I always think of this scene from one of my favorite movies, Miller's Crossing. Amazing use of the soundtrack, no? (By the way, if you haven't seen the movie, and think you might some day. please skip this clip. I don't want to spoil one of the best scenes.)

In this episode of Scrubs the hero, J.D., makes friends with a woman who is waiting for a heart transplant. She tells him that her dream was to be a Broadway star, but she couldn't sing. The song was written by Colin Hays, and like all the songs in this column, it was NOT written for the show.

And now we get back to my favorite Jewish Canadian Buddhist. The first three songs on Leonard Cohen's first album were "The Stranger Song," "Winter Lady," and "Sisters of Mercy." Those are also the songs that appear in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. It's almost as if Robert Altman grabbed the first album he saw and slapped the first few tracks into his movie, except that they work perfectly as themes for the title characters and the prostitutes, respectively. A friend of mine was astonished to hear that there were three songs in the moviie. Not a fan of Cohen's voice, he thought they had all been the same one.

So, what shows changed the way YOU look at a song?

At the end of your trope

So, all you writers out there: have you ever been tempted to hang a lampshade on  a weak point in your plot?  Have you ever been reduced to the use of oven logic?  Or do you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about?
If the latter than you might want to discover a cool webpage called TV Tropes.  It is a wiki and, as the home page explains, it is "a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction."  Don't think it is limited to TV, by the way.  There are plenty of examples from literature, movies, comic books, and even video games.

If I have a problem with the execution it is that they love clever names for the tropes, which can make it hard to find the one you are looking for.  (If you find one that is almost what you are looking for, check the related tropes at the bottom.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Absence of Evidence  In mystery fiction this is known as the dog in the night-time. 
Black Best Friend  Doesn't need much explanation, I guess.
Bolivian Army Ending  As in Butch Cassidy.  Nobody here gets out alive.
Bond Villain Stupidity.  I found this one in the index by typing in "Goodbye, Mr. Bond."  The villain (not necessarily in a Bond movie) at long last captures the good guy, sets up an elaborate death trap, and then doesn't stay to see if it works.  The movie Austin Powers mocked this perfectly.
Bus Crash  A character is killed  retroactively, that is, after the actor has left the show (and therefore doesn't get a dramatic death scene).  Most famously, I think, Henry Blake on MASH.
Crazy enough to work  As the wiki noted, this is practically Captain Kirk's middle name.  I hate when it shows up in a story, but what about when it happens in real life?  Apollo 13, anybody?
Lampshade Hanging You have a plot point so weak or unlikely the audience may refuse to bite.  So, illogically, you call their attention to it.  As the page points out, even Shakespeare hung a lampshade or two.
Mr. Exposition  Hello, hero.  Let me tell you everything that has been going on, which you probably know, but the autdience doesn't.
Oven Logic  Old comedy  premise.  We need to cook it faster so double the temperature and half the time!

Red Shirt Army  If you ever watched Star Trek you understand this one.  Why can't the storm troopers ever shoot straight?

Tomato Surprise  A specific kind of twist ending, one that depends on the audience suddenly learning something that some of the characters have known all along.

And finally....
Not worth killing   The bad guy lets the puny mortal go, as not worth his attention.   But what I was looking for and couldn't find was the situation where the hero is about to destroy his career/violate his code by killing the bad guy in cold blood and the side kick says "Don't do it!  He's not worth it!"

I hope you find TV tropes to be worth your time.

Metamorphosis

I've been watching the first episodes of Case Histories on Masterpiece Mysteries. I should say that Kate Atkinson is one of my favorite writers, and that I approached the BBC production with mingled hope and trepidation. Would Atkinson turn out to be one of the lucky writers whose work thrives on tape or celluloid or would the gods of mystery turn against both her and Jackson Brodie?

No sure thing either way. Some writers and some detectives have famously been improved by the tube. John Mortimer is a good writer, but I suspect that I am not the only reader to find the Rumpole stories a tad on the thin side without Leo McKern's rotund person and orotund phrasing, not to mention the wonderful supporting case embodying Gutherie Featherstone, Claude Erskine-Brown, The Portia of Our Chambers and, of course, She Who Must Be Obeyed.

More recently I felt that Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen was more effective digitally than on the page. Rufus Sewell's stubbornness, his watchful passivity and sudden violence made sense of a character who is too often opaque in print. The screen plays of Vendetta, Cabal and Ratking streamlined Dibdin's meandering plots and produced good drama.

Of course, some popular writers have been, like good horses, virtually bomb-proof. Every decade brings another series of Miss Marples from across the water, and I imagine that there is a queue of actresses of a certain age waiting to play the elderly sleuth of St. Mary Mead. But only one to my mind has suggested a really exceptional intellect. Joan Hickson, who was genuinely old when she essayed the part, played Miss Marple in 12 eisodes and got an OBE and plaudits from the Queen for her efforts.

Christie's Hercule Poirot has been lucky, too. He's had some heavy weight interpreters, including Peter Ustinov, Ian Holm and Albert Finney, but it is safe to say that David Suchet has made the part his own with the long running series on Masterpiece.

Other writers have had mixed fortunes. Tony Hillerman was most unlucky with the 2004 series, starring Adam Beach as Jim Chee and Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn. I don't remember them being particularly poor, but the bleached out colors and dusty landscape on the tube captured none of the splendor of Navaho territory in the novels. Background counts, especially in Hillerman's work, where the harsh but beautiful landscape grounds so many of his detective's attitudes and beliefs.

Even successful series with admirable production and good scripts depend heavily on the charisma of the leading characters. P.D. James' Inspector Dalgliesh novels have been beloved both on the page and on Masterpiece, but there is no doubt that it was Roy Marsden who made the ideal inspector. Sensitive but chilly, gangly, bright-eyed and reflective, Marsden really was believable as both poet and detective. A subsequent performance by Martin Shaw in the role showed the difference.

Sometimes a performer simply seems miscast. Elizabeth George, like P.D. James, has been popular across platforms, but the transition to the small screen has produced a shift in the balance between her two detectives.On screen Sharon Small makes Sergeant Barbara Havers much more appealing and attractive than she is in print, attractive enough so that Lynley seems a bit of a dolt not to notice. Nathaniel Parker, who has been funny and effective in other roles, is either miscast or seriously misdirected as the stiff and rather stodgy inspector.

So where does my favorite Kate Atkinson fall on the metamorphosis scale? Somewhere in the middle, I'm afraid. Edinburgh and its environs are beautiful, as might be expected, and Jason Isaacs certainly looks the part, although he has a Brando-ish tendency to mumble that we could do without.

The minor parts are lively and some of the dialogue has the real northern humor, but I am not sure that Atkinson's work is destined to be transferred smoothly to visuals. The strength of her novels lie in her eccentric and unexpected characters and in a plotting talent to rival Christie's. She also has a lightness of touch that is hard to mesh with the realism demanded by TV.

The script, alas, has only one of these virtues. The production seems to fear that we will forget Jackson's lamentable childhood and the traumas which have made him obsessive about protecting the vulnerable. Clips of his discovery of his dead sister appear with almost tedious regularity and serve not to deepen his character but to give a too easy explanation for his sometimes irrational reactions.

So Case Histories is entertaining and handsome but not to be compared to the novels. Read them first and then enjoy the more modestly successful efforts of Jason Isaacs and the rest of the cast.