00:02
[Alex] The Ride of the Valkyries
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has appeared in hundreds of movies,
00:07
TV commercials, television shows, and other media.
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[Ride of the Valkyries]
00:15
[Commercial Narrator] By doing your taxes-
00:17
[Ride of the Valkyries]
00:31
What does it say about Hollywood
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that it has such a love for this piece by Wagner,
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who remains so notorious for his anti-Semitism,
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and his role in Nazi propaganda?
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I’m Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker,
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and we’re going to use the Ride of the Valkyries
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to take a chronological journey through the past century.
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On the twisting, and sometimes dangerous track,
00:51
of Wagnerian excitement.
00:54
[Ride of the Valkyries]
01:00
So why is this music so appealing to movies?
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For one thing, Wagner had a huge influence
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on how music was used in the cinema, from the outset.
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His system of so-called leitmotifs,
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melodic fragments that recur throughout a work,
01:14
instantly became the model for film music.
01:16
One musical director defined leitmotifs this way,
01:20
To each important character,
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to each important action, motive or idea,
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and to each important object,
01:25
was attached a suggestive musical theme.
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The film scholar James Buhler says
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that leitmotifs were useful because they gave
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viewers a red thread of orientation
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through long form visual narratives,
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which were very unfamiliar at first.
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And the visual attached to the Ride of the Valkyries,
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scenes involving horses.
01:56
[Ride of the Valkyries]
01:57
But something much more ominous happens
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in D.W. Griffith’s colossally popular silent film,
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The Birth of a Nation.
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Griffith was telling a profoundly racist story
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of the Civil War and Reconstruction;
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with the Klu Klux Klan riding in at the end
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to save a town and a white woman
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from alleged black oppression.
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The Klan members gallop in to the music of the ride.
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Whether Griffith and his composer were aware
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of Wagner’s own racist views isn’t known.
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It’s more likely that they were following
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the habits of the leitmotif system.
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But, this deployment of Wagner
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in the service of white supremacist propaganda
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makes you think about parallels
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between American and German racism
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in the early 20th century.
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When Hitler took power in 1933,
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Wagner’s image in Hollywood forever changed.
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Excerpts from Wagner’s music
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became part of Nazi ritual
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at the Nuremberg Party rallies and elsewhere.
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By the end of the ’30s,
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when we began to see anti-Nazi messages
02:56
surfacing in Hollywood,
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Wagner became a kind of shorthand for Nazi menace.
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The question of what Wagner means in the movies
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gets cloudier and cloudier.
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[Ride of the Valkyries]
03:15
I’m sorry, sir, I must’ve taped over that.
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[Alex] And here’s the famous scene
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that brings all of these wildly
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conflicting associations together.
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We’re coming low under the rising sun.
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And about a mile up we’ll put on the music.
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Yeah, I use Wagner.
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It scares the hell out of the slopes.
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[Alex] He uses a racial insult which sets up the idea
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that this spectacle is something other than
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a pure fight of American good against communist evil.
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Another clue to the agenda of the sequence
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comes when the music kicks in.
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The first shot are timed to downbeats-
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[Ride of the Valkyries]
03:51
[helicopter engine roars]
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But then the pattern breaks,
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as we see that the bewilder faces
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of two African American crew members.
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There’s a subtext here, if you wanna read it.
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The entrance of a main Valkyrie motif
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coincides with a wide shot of 14 helicopters in flight.
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[Ride of the Valkyries]
04:09
The crazy idea of an American helicopter squadron
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playing Wagner in Vietnam
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was born in the mind of John Milius,
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who listened to Wagner and The Doors
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while he was working on the street play in late 1960s.
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Could he have been thinking back to The Birth of a Nation?
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Was this some kind of sardonic commentary?
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Milius says he wasn’t aware of the usage.
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Another wide shot coincides with the gleaming B-major chord,
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after which the trombones take over the theme.
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[Ride of the Valkyries]
04:44
Then comes a brilliant struck,
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devised by editor Walter Murch.
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One bar before the trombones complete their phase,
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the camera cuts away to a Vietnamese village
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which is about to be devastated by missiles.
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The adrenaline rush of men, machines and music
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as the camera lands on a quiet courtyard
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We know the assault is about to begin
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when we hear Wagner seeping in from a distance.
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[bells chime] [helicopter engine running]
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[Ride of the Valkyries]
05:28
The trombones finish their statement
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and the Valkyries enter with their
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[speaks in foreign language].
05:34
[woman singing opera]
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[Soldier] What a shot!
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It’s pretty clear that the filmmakers
05:42
intended a critique of American hubris in this scene.
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At least Coppola emerged it.
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But the shear visceral excitement of the filmmaking
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blunts the edge of that critique.
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And soon enough, something really extraordinary happens;
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this scene became a military fetish object.
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And the Wagner scene started influencing real life behavior.
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Black Hawk helicopters blared the Ride during
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the invasion of Grenada.
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Loud speakers mounted on Hungies boomed out
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the Ride at Fallujah.
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And in one really dizzying moment,
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this Wagnerization of the American military
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ends up getting depicted in Sam Mendez’s movie, Jarhead.
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Which has a scene where Apocalypse Now fires up
06:24
a group Marine Corps trainees.
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[Ride of the Valkyries]
06:28
[soldier trainees hums along]
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There was a scene where the soldiers
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watch Apocalypse Now,
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to get them charged up
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and I thought, is this really something I should be doing?
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Because it’s taking a sequence
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that I edited in Apocalypse Now
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and they’re getting psyched up about it.
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Whereas the original intention in Apocalypse Now
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was for you to be excited but horrified.
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It did give me that,
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a little bit of a extra sensory feeling.
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I felt like I was little outside of myself.
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[Ride of the Valkyries] [soldiers shout]
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And so there we have it.
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It’s an astonishing cultural transformation.
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The Ride of the Valkyries made over as an anthem
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of American military supremacy.
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It’s rather chilling when you think about it.
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The German will to power gives way
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to God Bless America imperialism.
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Has any piece of music, classical or popular,
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ever been so dangerously charged.
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Wagner was president at the very birth of movies
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and it seems to be no way we can escape him.
