The title sequence of the new Safdie brothers film, Uncut Gems, brings the moviegoer along a CGI-assisted journey through light-years of celestial mist before the camera recedes into footage from a probe deep inside Adam Sandler’s ass. Watching the opening credits fade over shots of protagonist Howie Ratner’s colon—pink and ribbed, like an aquatic worm—is bearing witness to an act that is in the macro graceful and in the micro grotesque, a confusing alloy found often in the work of the music of electronic musician, sound designer, and auteur Daniel Lopatin, usually known as Oneohtrix Point Never.
Lopatin has long blended sincerity and absurdity, the ratio of which varies dramatically per project. There was the score he did for the Safdie Brothers’ 2017 film Good Time, a one-night-in-New-York wreckage play upon which Lopatin’s sound design lavishes the serenity of being trapped in a hot elevator. There was 2010’s unimpeachable Eccojams Vol 1, under the nom de plume Chuck Person—an enormously goofy, surprisingly moving chopped-and-screwed tape of customer-support muzak and pop cheese that would predate the vaporwave hurricane by at least two years. Last year’s prolix and lore-ridden Age Of featured a track that served as his “proof of concept” for how he would score an entirely made-up Pixar story.
But there is plenty real about Uncut Gems, a movie filled with big, avian men who are always yelling at one another. This is par for the brothers Safdie, who seem to love making films about antiheroes run amok in Manhattan at maximum volume. Stark and tweaky under overcast skies, Midtown’s diamond district here acts as mayhem’s gate: a world in which sweaty bookies and graying heavies take meetings and hostages in the backs of hired cars, and promises should have been fulfilled yesterday. For our hero Howie, every opportunity is a potentially profitable one, be it a scheme to auction off a rare opal for 10 times its price, or the chance to make quick money off Kevin Garnett’s championship ring on an hours-long loan. Naturally, the peripatetic lifestyle of a gambler is bipolar—all zeniths and nadirs, the former leading directly and inevitably to the latter.
Manic as the source material may be, Lopatin’s score remains entirely surprising, which doesn’t mean shocking, per se. It’s more that it has a large blast radius in the movie, itself a funny character in an ensemble of unintentionally funny characters. Lopatin is brazenly and consistently there, replete with a choral ensemble classically trained in a cappella Renaissance music and a handful of co-conspirators (the unholy Gatekeeper among them) who beef up each scene with the baroquely doofy polysynth dressings that could only belong under Lopatin’s baton.
The sound design drapes heavily around the necks of everyone in the film. Sometimes, Lopatin’s work is mixed so loudly that I laughed out loud. (Consider a scene in which Howie, trudging a long hallway with two bloody plugs of tissue in his nostrils and a faraway look in his eyes, has an electric sax-ridden fugue blasting like a frat initiation.) At other times, the music offers a kind of counterpoint. Where there is chaos, the score might get unusually soft; where there is sex, the tones scan saccharine; where there is heartbreak, Lopatin’s troupe treats misery like a punchline. (There’s a great scene in which Ratner’s girlfriend, played perfectly by Julia Fox, storms past a long line of club-goers immediately after sort of cheating on Ratner with the Weeknd. Here, the score—and the track in question, titled “Fuck You Howard”—sounds as if a Nordic boating team was asked to contribute vocals to Animal Crossing theme music.)
Soundtracking will always call into question the way that noise can make an image feel more glib, or more concerted; how audio can apply pressure, release a valve, inspire hysteria, dread, or joy within a scene. The idea of anxiety-making via carefully orchestrated synthwork is not new, but the Safdie brothers and Lopatin seem to have gotten the art down to a science. Some of the stabbingly angular ways in which the soundtrack dispenses somatic terror can feel like a savvy interpretation of “anxiety reappraisal,” a fashionable stress-management method that asks one to reframe anxiety-producing events as exciting ones. Thinking calm thoughts during panic only seems to exacerbate things; loud and low-BPM music during a screaming match does not a soothing scene make. This isn’t to say that the score doesn’t summon disquiet through more traditional ways: “Windows”—which smacks obviously of percussionist and contributor Eli Keszler, a man who has seemingly spent his life mimicking the beautiful and complex skitter of rainwater on various roofs—lends a runaway scene on a helicopter the nervy vim necessary to set off the film’s final 20 minutes of cardio.
High or low octane, it’s satisfying to situate Lopatin and the Safdies as part of a greater legacy of director-and-musician duets formed and calcified during the 1970s and 1980s. These films—the plots of which revolved around male antiheroes locked in doomed quests to resolve their poor choices—were scored by either proggy Germans (Goblin, Tangerine Dream), glistering Italians (Sensation’s Fix, Giorgio Moroder), or spectral Greeks (Vangelis), adding new, freaky, new-age dimensions to the portrayal of male misery. “It's so strange that that became the sound of men reflecting on their nature,” Lopatin said in the wake of Good Time. The fact that the Safdie brothers have found kinship in Lopatin, and the fact that this becomes the new sound of men who refuse to look inward, does the rare work of riffing on a tradition and catapulting it into canon.
Midway through the film, woeful Howie is faced with a moment of reckoning disguised as an ultimatum. “You really put me in a bad position,” says a foe, threatening him with a fresher hell than the one he endured the day prior. Lopatin, like Howie, is a man indebted to the absurdity of circumstance. Bad decisions upon good decisions, orientations upon re-orientations—the two work in a fractal pas de deux, hunting for the hardest payoff per scene, per moment, per any opportunity presented. Ashes to ashes, nebula to butthole, what else can one do?
Buy: Rough Trade
