Bits & Pieces — Musical Score, “Young Sherlock Holmes”

by Gabriel Valdez

One of the most exquisite and overlooked musical scores in film history belongs to Harry Potter Year Zero– er, I mean Young Sherlock Holmes.

When the 1985 film is thought of, it’s for its Academy Award-nominated special effects: it featured terrific stop-motion animation and brought to life cinema’s first fully CGI character – a stained glass knight. Written by Chris Columbus, its boarding school mystery mechanics would also one day serve as a rough draft for the first two Harry Potter films, which he would write and direct.

The standout for me was its music. I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw Young Sherlock Holmes. It was years after its original release – I was six, maybe seven. I’d encountered music that was beautiful as a child, and I had a particular fondness for classical, but music had always been accompaniment for something else. The score by Bruce Broughton was the first that made me yearn and hope, fear and loathe. The main theme could make me content in a moment, while its assertive suspense themes could rile me into nervous attention in a heartbeat. Listen to the ceremonial chant of “Waxing Elizabeth”:

Housed inside this scene is every fear I had as a child, suffused and purified into a single sound. It was as if every time I listened to it, I matched myself against some magical otherness and came out the other side. Why? Look at how the main theme is used throughout the rest of the film.

It’s often used playfully. Watch this scene from Holmes’ Defense Against the Dark Arts class as Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy look on- I mean watch this scene from his fencing class:

The beauty of the score is how well it backgrounds the main theme to nearly everything else that’s going on. No matter how aggressive or creepy its other themes get, the main theme will find a way through. This is pretty important for a children’s movie (and Young Sherlock Holmes was a pretty dark one).

The main theme is the very first thing a child anchors to in a movie. It doesn’t symbolize a character or a thematic quality to a child, it doesn’t even symbolize hope – to a child, it just means normality, the starting point of a story. Normality is safety. So long as that safety is present, a child can let his or her mind run wild with the darkest and most dangerous possibilities. Listen to how that main theme is factored into the movie’s finale (the clip contains MAJOR SPOILERS):

That musical through line says, “Don’t worry, I’m still here.” It’s a musical trail of breadcrumbs that reminds children their starting point still exists. We forget that, as kids, we make a lot of decisions concerning how scared we allow ourselves to become when we encounter movies, books, and games. Young Sherlock’s musical reminder allows young viewers the room to be open-minded about getting scared. It’s what lets the film get away with a number of horror elements.

The only time that theme doesn’t poke its head out is during “Waxing Elizabeth.” It’s the one time that subconscious safety net is yanked out from under the viewer, but it’s executed with such captivating grandiosity and at such a crucial moment in the film that the viewer has no choice but to remain. It forces children to make the decision: I will go forward without a safety net. Here’s the full soundtrack version (complete with nonsense ancient Egyptian lyrics):

It still sends chills up my spine, even if I’ve seen the movie 20 times, but its impact in the film lies in glancing around, not finding my musical trail of breadcrumbs, and deciding to continue ahead anyway. The score is unique in that way. It asks children to be braver and trusts that they will be. Broughton’s score is a fine accomplishment on its musical merits, but how it interacts with children on a storytelling level by asking them to take an emotional chance – it’s risky and it’s textbook all at once. As far as watching movies goes, it was the most crucial musical moment of my childhood.

Bits & Pieces is a series that highlights overlooked technical and cultural accomplishments in under-seen films:

Fight Choreography as Philosophy, Jackie Chan

Rhythm Editing, Ariana Grande’s “Problem” and Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up”

Fight Choreography as Myth, “Troy” and “Serenity”

Dance Choreography, “Footloose” (1984) and “Footloose” (2011)

Production Design, “Curse of the Golden Flower”

Top 10 — The Books That Stay With Me — Vanessa Tottle

I wanted to make lists. Gabe’s against lists. Why make lists? I’m a PhD. Half my life is lists. We took a vote. 5-to-1, we’re making lists.

Our very first is based on a meme that recently made the rounds. It asked readers to list the 10 books that have stayed with them. Not the best books. Not the books everyone else will recognize. The books that stay with you.

I only need to list one book. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. How else to deter tsunamis and earthquakes but to avoid the negative thought wavelengths that naturally attract them? Why am I even bothering with this PhD?

OK, no. For real, here are the 10 books that have stayed with me:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll

The mother of all fantasy worlds and the most innocent. This meant a lot to me very early. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read it. It has never lost its power to help me escape, or turn a drab, muddy weekend into one full of possibility.

Harry Potter series
by J.K. Rowling

Looking back, I see in Harry’s being an orphan a choice I would one day face when severing ties with much of my family. Harry’s not in a book. Not really. That’s how you first meet him, but he’s a child I grew up alongside, who helped me understand the very difficult reality that not every child experiences life the way it’s sold on TV and in commercials. I was strong enough to know it was OK to be different and to survive a destructive background. Harry made me realize it isn’t just OK. He taught me it’s heroic.

The Awakening
by Kate Chopin

It’s not the best book, but it is very important. It was reviewed well until religious men got hold of it, and then they manufactured a controversy over Kate Chopin’s portrayal of a woman’s strength in dismissing her family and place in society.

All these years later, her critics are dead. So is Chopin. But The Awakening survives because of that controversy, and some shy, gawky girl read it a decade ago. She became captivated by those “dangerous” ideas and how they were met. I had to learn more. I wonder how many young women have felt the same in the century since The Awakening was published. I wonder how many feminists Chopin has created, and how many more her detractors have inspired with their backwards reactions.

The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin is an anthropological storyteller. In The Dispossessed, she imagines an anarchical society that doesn’t use the possessive in their language. Nobody owns anything; everyone shares. She finds a scientist in that world. As their functional anarchy is challenged, this scientist seeks to reconnect with his people’s homeworld. The obstacles he faces aren’t violent; they’re obstacles of language, misunderstanding, and acceptance. They’re the obstacles we face every day, but Le Guin rests whole societies on them. At a point, you realize that’s not the science-fiction element. It’s the most real part of the novel.

The Beauty Myth
by Naomi Wolf

I don’t agree with everything in it, but Wolf opened a window that helped me understand so much about how expectations are created and enforced for both women and men. I had thoughts around the themes she spells out. She helped me solidify those thoughts into ideas for the first time.

No Logo
by Naomi Klein

How is our post-modern world constructed through ads and branding? How do we develop loyalty to identities we had no hand in shaping? Naomis Klein and Wolf together lent me a scary view of how the world is organized to benefit those already in power, and how identities are constructed with faith and confidence in that power, identities that are created to be helpless before it.

American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis

There is psychology, and there is satire. The latter helps you understand the former all the better. There is no better, more dangerous satirist today than Ellis. He helped me understand control and how losing it brings panic. He helped me understand how the modern world shapes us, how violence can be mistaken for the foundations of an identity, and why the most violent are sometimes the most helpless among us.

Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville

Obsession. This is the book that scares me so much about all the parts I inherited from my parents. Anger and vengeance and single-mindedness. I can be ruthless and manipulative. I can hurt people. I have never found a way to eliminate these parts of me. Fear of what I can be at my worst keeps it at bay, like it’s locked in a cage. Moby-Dick is like visiting that cage and poking what’s inside. It is a connection to all the parts of me I am scared I will never reclaim.

Analogue: A Hate Story
by Christine Love

Analogue is a visual novel. Some people call it a computer game. I think it is something new. There is much more reading than playing. As you read, you uncover information about how a generation ship cast adrift in space falls into a patriarchal society dominated by misogyny. What happens when a society based around misogyny is allowed to develop in isolation, and is then visited by a woman from a more progressive age? What’s the endgame of so much hate? What happens if the misogynists win?

Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake is what happens if the misogynists win. It is what happens when patriarchy and abuse are so accepted, so ingrained in young boys’ lives, that they’re the ones who doom the world and shape the next one. Margaret Atwood’s weird, wild, wonderland post-apocalypse is captivating in its bleakness. In describing what happened to make the world this way in the first place, she draws the plot out slow like torture. It is an unbearable book to read; I could never take my eyes from it. It requires you take a cold shower and a hard look in the mirror afterward. It requires that you cry and talk to someone else about it and make them read it so you have someone to share fresh scars with.

Art shapes us. These are the books that made me what I am, that gave me hope and took it away, and frightened me and emboldened me. It’s easy to pick 10 books. It is unsettling to figure out why these 10 exactly.

– Vanessa Tottle