[Ed. Note — the following was composed between 5am and 7am in a bout of insomnia only partly propelled by the topic)
Over the last two months or so I’ve been experiencing a resurgent envelopment in the music of Broadcast. It marries the swirling contours of Ye-Ye music, the suspenseful noodling of Francois de Roubaix and the avant kraut-prog of Can to the white-noise glitch-outs of, say, Fennesz or Oval. Over winter break, on impulse (one primarily informed by Harmony in Ultraviolet at dusk by some beachside palm trees), I ordered Morvern Callar in hopes of watching it again, immediately. By the time it arrived, etc., the action only materialized earlier this week on a somewhat morbid, if palate cleansing birthday watch. Though Broadcast’s music is used sparingly (maybe one or two fragmented instances), the film seemed to present a vessel with which to frame their primary appeal for me.
Appropriately, it’s a film of constantly shifting structural limitations and minor, through-the-cracks liberations. The titular character comes home to her boyfriend’s suicide that with it carries some attachments: a floppy disk with his manuscript, a note to “be brave” (while sending it out to the following publishers), and, of course, a mixtape. Morvern, a less overtly literary working class girl, is stuck at a dead-end job in a supermarket stocking worm-ridden vegetables, deeply understanding the cosmic insignificance of her position there and the diminishing returns of local dives and house parties. Writer-Director Lynne Ramsay, herself a working class girl that constantly derides the classist behavior of film industry types, makes a connection between the debilitating drudgery of the supermarket job and the narcissistic entitlement of Morvern’s male novelist boyfriend, fully supporting the incorrigible-in-other-hands decision to replace his name with her own, get rid of the body, and blow the money he left for a funeral on a trip to ibiza.
The film further messes with the structural entitlement of her boyfriend’s ornamental suicide by passive-aggressively incorporating his mixtape into the soundtrack. Intimations of Can, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and their disorienting bleeps and psych-outs serve as an extension of her boyfriend’s affected alienation while also creating an idea of how he might’ve framed Morvern’s existence in his head (one can only imagine what the novel, which a publisher applauds for its “female perspective”, has to say about her). During the burial sequence, the fluttering rush of one of the songs is turned off mid-run by Morvern, giving way for the non-orchestrated sounds of her surroundings to define themselves. The Broadcast song included, “You Can Fall”, is a taunting dismissal of haters and beggars alike wrapped in a play on the false comforts of phrases like “you can call.” Morvern’s boyfriend both fell and called to a similar non-avail.
Released in the same year as 24 Hour Party People, I’d be hesitant to label anything in the film as responsive, but there’s a bit where she’s going through her dead bf’s record collection and the first LP visible (if I saw correctly) is Joy Division’s Closer. Not to undermine the credibility of that record’s bleak power, the movie almost feels like a riff on the knowing absurdity of an existential lad hanging himself to Stroszek and The Idiot, in a way taking the piss out of the boy’s club shenanigans on which 24 Hour Party People’s legends are written. Though Broadcast’s “Colour Me In” is not on the soundtrack, its narrator’s submission to the potential of a lover’s deferred definition of herself is relevant to what Morvern, and to an extent the film’s clipped and fragmented usage of the soundtrack, grapples with.
What happens once she leaves town is a decent counterpoint to the navel-gazing mysticism of travels into exoticized otherness that Eat, Pray, Love is only the tip of. Most of what would signifiy transcendent spirituality is here reduced to temporary, if necessary, amusements, from a Cab driver’s aimlessly India-drenched accoutrements to Ibiza’s rhythmic thumping, the latter of which has the subtlety of an accident at a manufacturing plant. The bathrooms are addled with drugged-out wastrels, behind the debauchery lays mordant grief (as a one night stand with a fellow, loss-fueled raver suggests) and personal reinvention lies in the disemboweled remains of a self-absorbed lover’s identity. There’s barely any words to convey the proceedings, but the film is less elliptical than intrinsically clear. Under the banner of death and disenfranchisement, Morvern Callar crystallizes into blossoming potential, even as her relevance to her surroundings fades into oblivion.
Similarly, Trish Keenan (RIP) keeps an unusual calm amidst the fracturing chaos of the music’s aural textures. Her voice is soothing, hypnotically so. There’s a new-agey, meditative quality to it, the kind possibly summoned by a West Californian guru in a minor astrological dome as they ask that your mind drift for a moment into the aether. When people use the term Lynchian to describe something disjointedly haunted, and gaunt in its abstracted femininity, what they’re missing is that Lynch is a transmeditative goofball that throws money at praying palaces in hopes of bringing world peace. Of course, along the way, he dredges up the worst, grainiest stowaways from our psychic recesses. Broadcast, I think, is a far better articulation of the liminal space between spiritual transcendence and mental/physical self-negation, recalling a time when girl groups, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the shifting identities of the Cold War all waded through the same fog.
Broadcast, in sound, vacillate between frustrating and enhancing Keenan’s sojourns into meditative tranquility, creating a soundscape of landmines for her increasingly diffuse notions of self to bob and weave their way around. Her lyrics run a babbling brook through deathbeds of disjointed signals, skeletal remains of trip-wire melodic threads. ”Corporeal” has Keenan crooning about instrinsic physicality taunting recontextualization by a round robin of external classifications while the bass ripples against electrocuted frisson. Even ”Tears in the Typing Pool,” one of their least dissonant tracks, uses the language of a hastily finished novel to describe the broken landscape of a fractured relationship. Her voice is resilient, if slightly weary, and imbues in the listener that same guarded confidence while the surrounding structure chips away at itself, and us in the process. I didn’t really feel much wiser on my birthday, had little to report when asked (“if you’re in stuck a non-empirically shitty existential rut, read Cosmos for a few pages!”), but there’s a kind of mature practicality to the reserve with which Morvern and Keenan respond to life’s seam-pulling disorientations that seems worth keeping in mind.
