Independent Thinking: The Freaky Good Music of "Little Miss Sunshine"

Y'know, I do sometimes bitch a bit about an organization as monolithic and completely opaque as BMI being permitted to outright purchase music panels at indie film festivals, but I admit that they usually put on a good show—a highly entertaining line-up of directors, music supervisors, composers et al. Nevermind that BMI buying panels at an indie film fest is a little like the teamsters buying time at Bumbershoot to talk up the virtues of Mack trucks. The people are damn fascinating regardless, and it's fun to hear such a rarefied group of industry specialists banter about their art. They may not always explain things to their audiences of aspiring filmmakers in the most instructive way possible, but whatever—it's one hour, they're not teachers, and how often do music supervisors get to do the anecdote thing in public?

Last year this panel at IFP Market was particularly great. Music supervisor Susan Jacobs talked about how she and Mychael Danna had worked with the band DeVotchKa to rework some of their material specifically for Little Miss Sunshine. She referred to the results as "scource" music—a combination of the words "score" and "source"—which I thought was an interesting term, and one that has stayed with me. A lot of filmmakers would have been content to simply fade out the track when it started to be out of sync with the scene, but the Little Miss Sunshine folks are such craftspeople that they called up the band and asked if it would be possible to rerecord some of their music with slightly different arrangements to better fit the film. And if film were fabric, my friends, this is the point at which we'd now be discussing the difference between prêt-à-porter and haute couture. These people are decidedly not messing around.

Still, maybe more than any recent work since Napoleon Dynamite,  Little Miss Sunshine proves my standing point that the truly classic film-music moments of history simply do not belong to music that is written to fit a film, but rather to the antithesis of that. When you think about the most memorable moments of Little Miss Sunshine, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Before we get into that, consider first that in both film and music, the word "independent" seems lately to refer more to certain aesthetic choices than one's budgetary affiliations. Little Miss Sunshine had an eight million dollar budget and was not only deemed an indie film, it was allowed to define the category. The Decemberists' last album was released on Capitol, but their music will likely continue to be identified as "indie rock." Like DeVotchKa's, is still that oblique flavor of rock often cultivated by labels like Merge and Matador: sometimes cerebral and dreamy, sometimes angular and brooding, certainly far too often "shimmering," "bittersweet," and "sepia toned' according to reviewers, but always scruffy and eclectic.

One thing's for sure: if there is now such a thing as an "indie" aesthetic in music or anywhere else, then the song "Superfreak" is about as far away from it as you can possibly get. The song was released in 1981 by one seriously charting Rick James on Motown Records—a label that James had almost singlehandedly restored to its former glory in the 70's. The freaking Temptations do backing vocals on this track, and with the possible exception of Chinese opera, could music ever be more stylized than a nasal glam cadet being backed by the pop-soul act known known for its fine-tuned harmonies?

In all likelihood, Rick James wouldn't have liked indie rock if it had sat on his face, and it probably tried to at one point.

What's more, the scene in which "Superfreak" plays in Little Miss Sunshine is in no way one of tender reflection or poignant utterances. It is not elliptical, hushed, cerebral, literate, modest, timely, downcast, autumnal, relationship driven, or anything else that people sometimes try to identify as inherently "indie" qualities. It is a straight-up plot payoff toward which the entire film has literally been hurtling itself for 90 minutes, and when little Olive shakes her 8-year-old money maker all up and down that catwalk to the nasty funk stylings of Mister Rick Cocaine-Is-A-Powerful-Drug James, it's absolutely unforgettable—indelible even—a heady mix of horror, fascination, and joy.

At first glance, the moment may seem to work so well merely because of how catchy the tune is and how cute and unembarrassed Olive is as she's doing her wildly inappropriate dance (and nailing it I might add), but there are layers here—many that just could not have been there were it not for that dirty cartoon of a track. For instance, we have just watched a chilling pantomime of innocence be performed by a series of Jon Benet-like pageant contestants, so when Olive starts bouncing around to a song about the deeply unconventional sex life of a very kinky and possibly bi-polar lady, her own genuine innocence becomes that much more radiant and miraculous...like seeing a unicorn. And how funny that the judges and parents are so scandalized by Olive's musical choice and her moves, when they are the ones who have been sexualizing little girls by rewarding them for dressing, talking, and moving like grown women.

(It's worth mentioning here that directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris  hired actual, circuit-working child beauty contestants to be in the pageant scenes. It turns out that no one can act that way, they realized. They have to be made that way over the course of several years.)

Like us, Olive's family members are blown away by her dance, and when they tell Olive that she was "great," "better than great," and "incredible," they are being utterly sincere. Her performance was every bit as epic as the song itself because it credibly transformed this disaffected collection of malcontents into a real family, and they know it. They are genuinely in awe of her accomplishment.

Because they run all throughout a film, original film scores have a really hard time carrying off such moments as these. To some degree, the success of such moments can depend on the improbability of the music, and composers understandably have a hard time making improbable music when they're being paid to write it for a film. There are exceptions, of course—Queen's music for Flash Gordon, for instance—but in most cases it takes an outside piece of music—one that has had a life and external meaning of its own—to really live up to a moment as distinctive as Olive's pageant dance. Michael Nyman's score to Jane Campion's The Piano is devastatingly beautiful, but do you remember whether or not it was playing when George cut off one of Ada's fingers? Probably not.

You'll always remember that it was "Superfreak" playing for Olive's big dance number in Little Miss Sunshine though, and that's an accomplishment on the part of every single artist involved in crafting that moment. I know it came out over a year ago, but I'd felt I'd be remiss to not mention it right off the bat in a blog about music in film.

By the way, I didn't make it to IFP Market this year, but I understand the BMI-purchased music panel featured Moby (who just did the soundtrack for The Bourne Ultimatum) and Tom Dicillo, whose most recent feature, Delirious, I saw last night. More on that later!