Irony in Film Music

When I first heard about "The Facebook Movie," I must admit I was skeptical.  Sure I've loved most of David Fincher's movies and often imagine myself speaking Aaron Sorkin's dialogue when I'm teaching, but a movie about Facebook?  Come on.

Then I saw this trailer:

Do you know why this trailer works?  It's the music.  The images are nothing special in and of themselves - the standard teaser images we are used to seeing.  But notice how the music works with the images.

The song sung by the choir, "Creep," was originally recorded by Radiohead in the early 1990s (you can hear it here if you are not familiar with it.)  As much of Radiohead's early material, "Creep" feature a hard driving, heavy guitar sound, the opposite of what you hear in the trailer.  The lyrics basically describe a man obsessed with a woman who cannot figure out how to talk to her and sees himself as he believes she sees him:
"But I'm a creep,
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doin' here?
I don't belong here."
Musically, this obsession plays out in the relentless modal ostinato that rocks between the tonic, sharp 3rd, and 4th scale degrees.  Even the intrusion of power chords around the chorus do nothing to stop the driving nature of that harmonic figure.

If the trailer's designers had decided to use Radiohead's version of "Creep," the impact would have been similar, but muted.  By using the Scala & Kolacny Brothers Bulgarian girls chorus version from the album "On the Rocks" instead, they highlighted one of the most marvelous things music can bring to an image that moving pictures have a hard time creating on their own - irony.  We are used to seeing how music can work with an image, but sometimes it is more effective to have the sounds consciously go against the image.

For instance, the trailer opens with images taken from Facebook user profiles while the choir sings about wanting control and a perfect body and wanting people to notice us (all matching the images we are seeing).  Because of cultural conditioning, we hear the resonant girls' voices and simple keyboard accompaniment as heavenly or other worldly - as though we were getting an outside comment on our current cultural condition.  But then, just as the chorus begins to kick in with "I wish I was special," the face of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pixilates into view and we slide into a traditional trailer.  At this point, the music falls down in the mix and instead of working with the images, creeps toward irony.  As we see a young man create a transformative website and have the standard movie-issued problems that are associated with success (jealously, mis-understanding, rivalry, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll), we hear the choir sing that he is a creep.  We accept the sounds which seem to float above the images as truthful and when we should be admiring the self-made man, we begin to question him.  Then notice where the music stops - as Zuckerberg asks for recognition.  The choir returns with one final comment - " I don't belong here" - a thought that contradicts the trailer's written message of having 500 million friends.  The images, lyrics, and sounds all work together to create an additional layer of meaning to the trailer that at once distances us and makes us want to see the film.  It is a masterful use of music, and I only hope the film's music is as smart as its trailer's.