Cue-by-cue – EXISTENZ (Howard Shore)

Howard Shore’s score to David Cronenberg’s movie eXistenZ is one of my favourite. RCA Victor’s release of the score in 1999 is typical for a non-speciality label’s release of a soundtrack. Unlike speciality labels such as Film Score Monthly and Intrada whose releases usually features an in-depth run-down of each track (including a summary of action in the film covered by the specific music of the track), there was no in-depth information on how the music fitted with the film. All the information contained in the 4-page CD booklet amounted to some music credits, thanks to various people, a tracklisting and some black-and-white film publicity shots.

With films and music that I like, I very much enjoy seeing how the music fits into a film and I remember spending far too much time in front of the TV watching (and re-watching) films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, noting down what was happening in each track. Recently, I decided to do this for eXistenZ and so below is a cue-by-cue rundown of each track of the film with a summary of what’s happening in each track. (All timings relate to the CD times.)

CRASH – Howard Shore

Original review by Alan Rogers

Howard Shore’s score to David Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 movie Crash is a very difficult listen. Based upon J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same name, Cronenberg’s movie explores another extreme of human behaviour; in this case, the human fascination with death and the tendency to eroticise danger. In the movie, James (James Spader) and Catherine Ballard’s (Deborah Kara Unger) sex life is reduced to recounting tales of mutual infidelity. Then, after being involved in a head-on collision James Ballard finds himself increasingly associating with a “cult” of car crash fetishists. The rest of the movie is a series car crashes (or their aftermath) juxtaposed with sex scenes, all in an effort to provide a “cautionary tale of industrial society’s tendency to dull the human senses.”

Shore has taken the opportunity to experiment with his music. In the liner notes he explains that “…75% of the score was composed while 25% was mutated after the music was recorded”. His approach here is to focus on the emotions, or more specifically, the lack of emotions being played out on-screen.