Evocation of a Certain Time and Place

”I like this job. I like it.”
—the Joker

This job has its share of perks, but I can’t get complacent. Now that I finally have a decent job that pays the bills and allows me to take a breather now and then, I have to start looking at the long-term. Time to seriously look at career goals and life plans, and how to accomplish them.

Usually—not always—I work from 10 PM to 6 AM. I sleep the same hours you work, and you sleep the same hours I work. So we both still have our evenings open, which is a huge perk for me personally. Some nights I’m teaching piano lessons, but other than that I’m pretty free to do other things.

My new routine hasn’t started, though. I’m still on shaky ground, settling in. My apartment isn’t squared away, and my sleep schedule is messed up thanks to NyQuil. It’s been an unhealthy week, replete with junk food and malaise. I can’t wait until I feel like pulling the ears off a gundark, at which point I am looking at starting my “mornings” by exercising at 4:30 PM on the days I don’t have piano lessons. But for now, I can barely get myself out of bed at all.

All of this is preamble, however. Now, I’m going to flip this blog post around and talk about something completely unrelated. The thing about this job is that I hardly ever see sunlight. Most of my driving is night driving. The days are short during winter, so my conscious time is from dusk till dawn. From Dusk Till Dawn. A movie that sucked.

Know what else sucked? Broken Arrow. What a stupid movie, with acting performances that approach self-caricature, not to mention one of the worst Hollywood endings I’ve ever seen.

That’s right, now we’re talking about Broken Arrow. I was listening to Hans Zimmer’s score to Broken Arrow yesterday, which I hadn’t heard in a while. It’s one of those scores that has specific associations in my mind, and it isn’t quite as enjoyable for me at night. I guess I develop the habit of listening to certain scores at certain times or in certain situations, and it becomes a matter of mental association. Air Force One, for example, I have a very hard time listening to unless it’s at night. Daylight somehow detracts from the listening experience for me.

So I’m listening to Broken Arrow on the way to work, and I’m transported to another time and place. Kirksville, MO, circa 2002-3. At some point, I made it a habit to put in Broken Arrow on that stretch of road between Macon and Kirksville on the drive back from my parents’ house to the university. There came a point, I remember, where if I was driving on a summer day back to Kirksville, I compulsively had to put in Broken Arrow on that stretch of boring highway (before they built extra lanes). To me, Broken Arrow will always sound like dusty roads, country summer sky, and bachelor freedom. No deadlines, just so long as you end up at Point B by the end of the day. Just enjoy the music and driiiive.

Broken Arrow is something of a guilty pleasure for me. It might be a little cheesy by today’s standards, but I love it. It was made in 1996, but the music sounds more like 1992. Let me see if I can qualify that statement…

I first discovered the movie (and, by extension, the score) in 2001. At the time, I thought, “This is what Top Gun would have sounded like if it had been scored by Hans Zimmer instead of Harold Faltermeyer.” By that, I was referring to the choice of keyboard bells pervading the score, of which more descriptive terms elude me at the moment. Overall, the patches Zimmer used don’t sound as… mature as those in The Rock, also 1996. It sounds like it’s almost outdated even for its time. The mixing is murkier, too. In certain passages, it is less clear who has the melody.

And for some incomprehensible reason, the guitar lick was ripped off for Scream 2. Don’t ask me.

Another noteworthy element of Broken Arrow is the repeated use of the manipulated vocals singing "agnus dei," a patch that was also re-used by Harry Gregson-Williams in Armageddon and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Here is what I think is its debut appearance.

Anyway, the thing about the Broken Arrow score album is that the music just keeps spinning, unraveling itself in a manner that maintains my attention from start to finish. While Crimson Tide (1994) sounds bolder, darker, and more serious, it has too many starts and stops to keep me from skipping around unless I’m in a particularly patient mood. And see, that’s the remarkable thing—Broken Arrow is actually a fairly redundant score. But for some reason, it grabs my attention like a shiny mobile in a baby’s crib, and I’m on board for the whole ride.

And because I’ve inadvertently created my own mental association through repetition, the music always transports me back to northeast Missouri, dusty roads, blue sky with perhaps a slight overcast, temperature in the 80s, enjoying the solitude of both my car and the final destination of a relatively vacant college town. Maybe I’ll stop off for a Coke. Suddenly I’m 22 again and my yoke is easy, my burden light.

But it certainly does not sound to me like I’m driving to work at ten at night, battling stoplights, in Texas, 29 years old, and over-burdened.

This is the best exegesis I can give as to why Hans Zimmer’s Broken Arrow appeals to me. I don’t even think it’s one of his better scores, but it sure tastes good.

Hmm… my music reviews are wildly different from Herr Vogler’s.