Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.L.A.
Degree Name
Master of Liberal Arts (M.L.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Humanities and Cultural Studies
Major Professor
Maria Cizmic, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Amy Rust, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Andrew Berish, Ph.D.
Keywords
desire, Frank Skinner, non-diegetic music, space, tonality
Abstract
In this project, I analyze the relationship between music and narrative in Douglas Sirk’s 1950 film All That Heaven Allows. Sirk’s melodramas are held in high regard by film scholarship, but their scores, especially those composed by Frank Skinner, are often dismissed as lazy or mere atmospheric mood assistance. I argue, however, that the score of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows builds protagonist Cary both a home—and a “home key”—through its tonal structure, rejecting a rigid boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic music as a whole by offering a fluid musical space to express the conflict between Cary’s emotional home and romantic desires. I demonstrate that the score uses relationships between musical keys to define, and eventually indirectly resist, the social and familial conventions of postwar suburban America that dismiss the relationship between Cary and Ron. Analyzing the recurring musical themes based on Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Robert Schumann—as well as the film, the cue sheet, the conductor’s score, and Skinner’s own scoring guide, Underscore (1950, 1960)—I demonstrate that the score and its home-building properties can be read as an informative narrative resource, offering an opinionated tonal structure much more intricate than a contribution to the film’s overall mood. In order to analyze the score’s possibilities, I implement Susan McClary’s explanation of tonality and the flat sixth degree. Then, through the ontological lens of Martin Heidegger’s “dwelling,” I demonstrate that the score dissolves boundaries between public/private and outsides/insides that exist and become entangled within the postwar home. The result crucially proves the score to be a generative analytical tool that, in turn, releases the home from the fixed and closed melodramatic interpretations of space.
Scholar Commons Citation
Donovan, Meredith, "The Boundaries of Melodramatic Film Music: Redefining Home through the Score of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows" (2024). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10181
