Bum-Bum-Bum, Waaah-Wah

The musical score’s entrance performs its own sleight of hand: documentary train-yard noise resolve seamlessly into a drum tick, so we can’t be sure where one leaves off and the other begins. John Carpenter’s most celebrated eccentricity may be his insistence on composing his own scores, which tend to feature an idiot savant repetitiveness, along with synthesized sounds that, to some ears, date badly—a thrifty man’s Tangerine Dream. I treasure them, myself.

They Live’s score may be the most tauntingly circular in film history, short of The Third Man’s zither or Eyes Wide Shut’s one-finger piano: a rootsy but menacing three-note bass line, ascending and descending along a blues scale, joined by taunting saxophone and a long-suffering, rueful, old-man harmonica: Bum-bum-bum, waaah-wah. Drum and synth join to raise the pulse when cops or guns walk through the door. The bass line is ominous enough to claim “something’s happening here,” undercut only by the harmonica’s rebuke: “same old, same old.” Ultimately, the blues motif telegraphs the film’s underlying air of nihilistic resignation. It lightly mocks Nada’s (and the viewer’s) panic at the film’s revelations. You knew this already, didn’t you? No? Really? (Or, as Nada groans when he glimpses the Reagan-ghoul, “It figures it would be something like this.”) If the film’s opening evokes some kind of homeless advocate’s public-service documentary—or at least an attempt at blue-collar vérité, like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep—the music warns that it may skip past ordinary fiction to become a kind of fuck-you cartoon: Waaah-wah!