As Wings to a Bird: Pride and Prejudice, Annihilation, and the Magnetism Musical Scores Bring to Film

“As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar.” —Gerard de Marigny

Whether you’re a film aficionado or a casual viewer, if you’ve ever watched a movie, you have inadvertently been impacted by its musical score. A contributing factor to many films becoming classics since the industry began incorporating sound in the mid-twentieth century has been the presence of a soundtrack that clings to the mind for hours or days or weeks, reminding one of the film for which it was created every time. Most of the films that have managed to make a lasting impact on our cultural consciousness have been bolstered by soundtracks crafted with immense skill and subtlety.

As far as iconic soundtracks go, one of my favorites in recent history is that of Pride and Prejudice (2005), an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel by the same name directed by Joe Wright. Composed by Dario Marianelli and performed by Jean Yves Thibaudet, the entire score is, in my opinion, something of a triumph. The film alternates between light, mellifluous tracks spun by pianos and violins and upbeat, swirling dance accompaniments. There is a seamless nature to the way that pieces such as “Dawn” layer over a visually stunning scene of a woman standing silhouetted over a cliff, or thumping drumbeats evoking the approach of a squadron of British army officers. 

As a film, Pride and Prejudice entices you to enter a new world (or an old one, as it were) quite apart from both regency-era Britain and our present-day world. Wright’s direction and Marianelli’s composition combine to invent a universe of beauty that flows from one season to the next, elevating even the dullest of sensations to transporting and beautiful. As Andy Trudeau mentions in his piece about the soundtrack, Marianelli adheres to three elements of music he says are made for Austen adaptations: “a taste of the English countryside, music of classical elegance and a dramatic sequence.” Certainly the score he’s created is infused with a combination of the three, but there is something else in the notes that captivates, a strand of melancholy mixed in with the homage to passion and nature and liveliness. Despite the movie being, ultimately, a story of joy, the touch of lonely contemplation that Marianelli draws out over the course of the score with drifting strings deftly ties both the movie and the album together.

Indeed, if Pride and Prejudice itself has become a kind of cult classic on the Internet, then the soundtrack has also gained a facet of fame of its own. It is easier than ever in the modern day for a film’s score to exist as an artistic unit outside of the film: ready access to soundtracks on streaming services and video sharing websites are a given, and it’s no small wonder that current composers like Ramin Djawadi and Hans Zimmer have become incandescently famous on the strength of their work for films and television. 

Then again, many certainly still argue about the ability of a score to exist independently from its original purpose, that of complementing a visual piece. This opinion was held by noted composer Igor Stravinsky, whose contempt for soundtracks was famously documented—in one case, he called the genre nothing more than “wallpaper”. Ironically, one of Stravinsky’s own compositions for ballet, “The Rite of Spring”, was used as part of the score in Disney’s Fantasia (1981) to great popular and critical effect. But his questions about the idea of soundtracks remain—can they be distinguished from film as a work of art in themselves or are they, as he claims, merely window dressing?  

I’ve personally found myself returning to Marianelli’s work for Pride and Prejudice again and again throughout various stages of life. That said, I can’t deny that listening to it inevitably invokes memories of the film for me: it’s always multifaceted sensory experience. As a friend who shares my fondness for the film says, simply hearing a particular piece from its score makes her want to walk into a meadow on an early morning, just as the film’s heroine does in the scene that accompanies the piece. But I don’t believe that this link to the images brought to life onscreen diminishes the music itself. On its own, the soundtrack remains evocative and glittering in effect—the fact that the emotions and tenor of each piece are shaped by a story being told in another medium is simply another lens, an added layer of meaning.

On the other hand, I do believe there are certain scores that are intrinsically wrapped up in the artistic project of the film they were created for, music that could exist on its own but without nearly the same glorious, wide-ranging impact. For me, the score of Annihilation (2017), composed by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, is one such album. For a movie that deals heavily with the uncanny—aliens, altered states of matter and odd, twisting character relationships—it comes as no wonder that the score is a slippery beast to describe. Much of the first half, as with the film, is a quiet build, relying not necessarily on overtly inhuman whistles or screeches but rather on seemingly simple sounds, like guitar finger-picking in the style of blues and country music.  

Barrow and Salisbury indicate this themselves in an interview with Rolling Stone, stating that “we knew the film had to go from suburbia to psychedelic insanity. You have to get there, but you can’t get there by front-loading it all in the score.” In order take the film from an eerie but deeply human atmosphere to the incredible, unearthly explosion it becomes, the compositions are purposefully, at times, rather muted in effect. This of course makes it all the more stunningly intense when the climax comes, accompanied by the 12-minute long behemoth of a track entitled, simply, “The Alien.”

“The Alien” is a piece that has terrified and captivated many—in the weeks following the film’s release, social media was awash with mentions of how effective and chilling the score was during the penultimate scene. There is a specific sequence, a sort of standoff with an alien entity, that people—including me—find at once deeply unsettling and deeply magnetic. Despite the way the loud, white noise-esque sounds paired with scratchy synth bounce off each other to create a veritable cacophony of strangeness, something in it is just terrifying enough to appeal to humans’ natural curiosity. It is, in my view, one of the most memorable pairings of film and music I’ve seen, and while I’ve listened to the score of Annihilation on its own, there is no comparing to the impact it has in the actual space of the film. 

Thus the score Barrow and Salisbury have created is designed to do something unlike Marianelli’s composition—it seeks to unsettle, to reach deep into our psyche and pull some lever we didn’t know existed. But then again, perhaps it simply hopes to introduce us to another world as well, this one a surreal, misshapen parallel to ours. And in their own, very disparate ways, these scores are examples of the way music breathes life into a movie, turning it from a collection of noises and visuals to a rippling, living creature, flush with the senses and the thrill of interacting directly with an audience. As color to a painting, or as wallpaper to a room, or, of course, as wings to a bird.