Oscar Horrors: Flatliners (1990) Sound Editing
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 at 8:00PM Boo! It's "Oscar Horrors". Each evening we'll look back on a horror-connected nomination until Halloween. Here's Sean Donovan on an atypical player...
I miss Joel Schumacher. Aside from two episodes of House of Cards in 2013, the man who brought bat-nipples, bat-codpiece, and lots of bat-ass to the original Batman film franchise has been largely distant from our screens today. Say what you will about Schumacher’s ability to craft fine cinematic art; his movies are fun. And for me, Batman & Robin and the gorgeously camp vampiric coming-of-age tale The Lost Boys more than earn him a spot in Hollywood’s gay hall of fame (do we have one of those?). Is there a more gloriously queer gesture than taking the Batman franchise, one of the sacred cows of straight male comic book fandom, and lathering it in trashy homoerotic leather daddy gear?
Flatliners, Schumacher’s 1990 near-horror falls inbetween The Lost Boys and his Batman era...
It’s also his first film to catch Oscar’s eye, earning a nomination for Best Sound Effects Editing, a category more concisely termed “Sound Editing” nowadays. Flatliners was not received with much critical acclaim, so it was hardly carried by prestige to Oscar glory, although the film glances at heady-enough topics, namely, death.
The film follows five medical students, ringleader Nelson (Kiefer Sutherland) and his colleagues Rachel (Julia Roberts), David (Kevin Bacon), Joe (William Baldwin), and Randy (Oliver Platt), who become increasingly addicted to stealthy medical experiments aimed at experiencing the afterlife, for just a moment, and coming back to life to tell the tale. I don’t use “addicted” lightly - Flatliners plays with a discourse of addiction as our medical junkies grow and more desperate to get their flatlining fix, experiencing, as Platt’s Randy describes it, “the musky mist of death.”
None of this adds up specifically to a horror film, especially because the characters’ various journeys into death usually lead to an Ebenezer Scrooge-esque commitment to coming to terms with their sins in the living world, shuffling in-and-around the mortal coil with unabashed hopefulness. If there’s anything “horror” about Flatliners, it’s Schumacher’s instinct for dramatic staging and campy excess. Why are the students conducting their experiments in a dimly lit steampunk dungeon? Why is every bar and convenience store in this city painted in neon colors and completely deserted? Why is the musical score a mix of thunderous classical wailing and cheesy neo-noir synth? Because it’s fabulous goddammit. Every Schumacher film is a drag version of itself.
And sound editing, which was the only place Oscar chose to acknowledge Flatliners, ends up as one of the film’s flashiest devices. The beeping and whirring of medical devices, the strangely disembodied sound of the characters’ breath, the dramatic breach between life and death: all of this is a feast for Flatliners’ sound team, creating the “sound” of the life/death divide as an utterly new yet strangely familiar composite. And please don’t confuse the perfectly professional sound work with Flatliners’ heinous original song- “Party Town” by Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys. It’s used in the film as the soundtrack for a rollicking Halloween party - add it to your upcoming party’s playlist!
In fact, watching the film in preparation for this post and lingering on the aural structure of Flatliners, I couldn’t help but think about Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which shares a similar affinity for mixing sound patterns throughout simultaneous “levels,” life/death here, dreams within dreams within dreams in Inception. Perhaps Nolan, widely hailed for restoring the grim severity to Batman that Schumacher fiendishly destroyed, took more from that purveyor of cheesy camp then he’d like to admit.
Season 3 Oscar Horrors is a Wrap
The Bad Seed - Supporting Actress
Bram Stoker's Dracula - Makeup
Dr Jekyll & Mr Mouse -Animated Short
Fatal Attraction - Film Editing
Kwaidan - Foreign Film
Misery - Actress
Pan's Labyrinth - Production Design
The Sixth Sense - Picture
Sleepy Hollow - Production Design
Sweeney Todd - Best Actor
The Uninvited - Cinematography
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? - Cinematography
Reader Comments (2)
All I remember about Flatliners is the beauty of Billy Baldwin and of course big hair Julia.
love this piece, Sean. brought back a film i hadn't thought of in ages.
Also brave to shout out love for Schumacher! :)