Hack Spotting
I should preface this by saying I haven’t seen Hamnet, nor do I intend to see Hamnet.
I did initially find Chloé Zhao’s cinema exciting, with the free-flowing improvisatory nature of Songs My Brothers Taught Me a decent attempt at capturing Terrence Malick’s style and working process, and that leading into the genuine masterpiece The Rider. Nomadland, however, raised serious questions about whether her Malick Americana had real substance to it, and Eternals, like anything in the (thankfully dying) superhero craze, didn’t interest me.
I won’t speak further of my skepticism of Zhao’s work as I haven’t seen a new film by her since 2020, but one thing I will speak to is a trend she is a part of, one which uses classical music—in particular, contemporary classical music—in a manner deprived of its context.
The ending of Hamnet has re-lit the spark of a years-long debate about the overuse of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” a string-quartet piece composed for his masterful and devastating The Blue Notebooks. The piece has been used enough times in 21st-century cinema that it garners listicles and polemics against it, yet these observations and criticisms usually point to the idea that the song’s become a cliche as a sad piece of music to drive the emotionality of a scene, rather than the more egregious fact that the filmmakers who use it do so in a way which ignores the politics of the piece.
The Blue Notebooks were conceived by Richter in 2003 as a work of anti-war music to protest the invasion of Iraq. The delicate strings and echoing electric keyboards of its main compositions are reverberations of a fragile country crumbling under its own self-made destruction, where life is replaced by the ash fluttering in the wind after the bomb goes off. The occasional interludes contrast this world of post-destruction with that of the quaint everyday, where leaves rustle and birds fly overhead.
What’s frustrating with “On the Nature of Daylight” turned into a piece of emotional stock music, as has happened with Beethoven’s 7th or the memetic impulse in people’s use of “Ride of the Valkyries,” is that the music is already imbued with so much meaning and political heft—to excise its depths and only utilize its surface deprives it of meaning.
This is what separates the geniuses from the wannabes, the masters from the hacks.
John Boorman doesn’t just use Wagner in Excalibur because Parsifal is of the same Arthurian legends, he does it because "Siegfried's Funeral March” from Götterdämmerung (played during Arthur’s death and promise to return) and the “Prelude” from Tristan und Isolde (used during Lancelot and Guinevere’s tryst) thematically align with the narrative as well as emotionally enhancing the images. The same goes for Visconti’s use of Wagner, or practically any citation by Godard.
These references don’t have to be one-to-one, though. For instance, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s use of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima in Twin Peaks: The Return, setting its disharmonious wailing over the image of the Trinity test conveys a similar terror towards the destruction of humanity (in Lynch’s sense, at least partially spiritually) as Alfonso Cuarón’s use towards the end of Children of Men, even though the latter film has nothing to do with the symbolic meaning or literal use of the atom bomb. In this sense, one might excuse Scorsese’s conjuring of “On the Nature of Daylight” in Shutter Island, a film of personal psychological destruction in the wake of the industrial genocide wrought by WWII. In less skilled hands, “On the Nature of Daylight” becomes mere shorthand for simple emotion. It’s effective like sugar—it gets the tears welling no matter what—but also like sugar that’s refined to remove any flavor its cane once held beyond its most basic function, it no longer means anything of substance.