Davison and Reyland’s chapter offers a critical analysis of Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s music for the Channel 4 serial Utopia, written and directed by Marc Munden. Utopia explores the frightening problem of our planet’s overpopulation. Rather than encouraging straightforward identification and empathy with the unlikely group of heroes seeking to uncover the conspiracy at the show’s heart—plans to sterilize most of the human race—Utopia’s music and narrative entwine unconventionally. Groovy rhythms and unique timbres draw attention to themselves, cues encourage empathy and anempathy by turns, and audio-viewer assumptions about right and wrong, hero and villain, are manipulated, challenged and inverted. Davison and Reyland theorize the term anempathetic empathy to encapsulate the unique qualities of this important example of recent, high-end TV scoring. by Annette Davison (University of Edinburgh) and Nicholas Reyland … Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score to seasons one and two of Utopia is one of the more significant recent achievements in television scoring because, in part, of its unconventional conventionality. The serial’s music energizes a continuum of possibilities between heard and unheard, the expected and the surprising, cueing responses that range between straightforward empathy and the induction of what, developing Gorbman’s line of thinking, we might term anempathic empathy for characters and situations in the show. This strategy, as the analysis below will argue, parallels storylines and character arcs in the serial, many aspects of which relate, thematically, to the name and purpose of the sterilisation serum, Janus, central to the plans of the show’s meta-governmental conspirators The Network. (Taking its title from the Greek god with two faces, Janus’s components are designed to sterilize most of humanity in order to combat overpopulation, reset the Earth’s ecosystem, and save the species.) Utopia thereby represents a shocking fictional solution to a terribly real problem – the planet’s population will reach an unsustainable 10 billion by the end of the present century (Emmott, 2013). Tapia de Veer’s strategies encourage the audio-viewer to experience the Janus-like discomfort of crisscrossing empathy and anempathy. Conventional subject positions are destabilized as one’s fictional loyalties and personal views are called into question by the show. The journeys into and out of the darkness of The Network’s envisaged solution (or is it darkness?) for characters including Wilson Wilson/Mr. Rabbit No. 2 (Adeel Akhtar) and RB/Pietre (Neil Maskell),1 create concomitant experiences of sympathy/disavowal, the audio-viewer’s allegiances changing suit like the characters’ names and allegiance to The Network/humanity. This, then, is one source of the show’s political heft: its dramatization of questions about overpopulation and humanity’s fate, and the manner in which, amplified through the show’s developments of televisual style, it induces the audio-viewer to join in the questioning. Tapia de Veer’s scoring, allied with other televisual innovations in Utopia – such as its extravagant art design (all those eye-popping chromatic polarisations of yellow and blue) and landscape cinematography (long shots isolating lonely figures in the countryside open many episodes) – energizes this polemical process. The significance of Tapia de Veer’s Utopia score, therefore, is not merely its bringing of art film strategies into recent network television (albeit relatively avant-garde cult television on the publicly-owned, commercially-funded public service broadcaster, Channel 4). It is significant because, unlike the vast bulk of original music in productions from the new ‘golden age’ of serial television drama, it actually does something interesting with the musical conventions of the medium. A peculiar facet of the prestige tradition emanating, above all, from HBO’s influential The Sopranos and The Wire, is that original non-diegetic music is often absent from ‘TV3’ drama – indeed, its absence is a hallmark of these flagship HBO productions, in much the same way that using no non-diegetic music, or using it sparingly but unconventionally, is a hallmark of pockets of art cinema including films directed by Mike Leigh, Krzysztof Kieślowski and the Dardenne Brothers. This may be, in part, an attempt to signify difference (from more mainstream texts), and thus quality, by demonstrating a commitment to avoiding obvious strategies of audience manipulation. … continue reading: read the full text here (published in 2016) Tags: Channel 4, Cristobal Tapia de Veer, Marc Munden, The Crimson Petal and The White, Utopia series, UtopiaChannel4
