“One of the things I do when I am starting a movie, I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie,” Tarantino once said. Tarantino reunited with the Reservoir Dogs cast earlier this year (Photo: Getty) The soundtrack-first approach “Reservoir Dogs is a fantastic example of the concept of synergy, whereby the film becomes a platform for selling other things – the soundtrack, posters, action figures.”įor a recent example of this in practice, Guardians of the Galaxy’s medley of pop hits hit No.1 on the US Billboard charts, selling over 2.5 million copies on release. “It was responsible for such subsequent soundtracks as Watchmen and Suicide Squad,” says Carroll. This trend is experiencing a renaissance in modern cinema, and it can be traced back to Reservoir Dogs. The gang discuss Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ (Photo: Dog Eat Dog Productions/Live Productions) Tarantino’s soundtracks become as much of a character in his movies as the on-screen characters themselves. The opening scene has the gang discussing the lyrics of Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’. The film is stacked not only with pop songs, but references to them too. Reservoir Dogs kick-started a wave of ultra-cool, self-aware movies released in the 1990s. The Beach Boys accompany Colonel’s prison cell beating in 1997’s Boogie Nights, while Duran Duran’s ‘Ordinary World’ plays over a brutal cafe attack in Layer Cake. Contrasting scenes of violence with upbeat pop favourites certainly appeared more often after the release of Reservoir Dogs. That said, Tarantino likely helped popularise the technique in more recent times. The Nashville group Bedlam also recorded original songs for the film. The Third Man represented one of the first examples of contrapuntal music in cinema (Photo: London Film Productions)Īs well as Stealers Wheel, the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack also renewed interest in songs like Harry Nilsson‘s ‘Coconut’, The George Baker Selection‘s ‘Little Green Bag’, and Blue Swede‘s ‘Hooked on a Feeling’. “Earlier films such as The Third Man is a great example of a film whose music, an upbeat zither in this case, remains unchanging and at odds with the more nefarious scenes unfolding visually,” says Carroll. Tarantino was not the first director to use the contrapuntal technique to subvert audience expectations. This meant he could play with audience expectations.” “They were largely all a few decades old at least by the time he made the film.
“The other thing to consider is the age of the songs that Tarantino chose for Reservoir Dogs,” notes Carroll.
“I started thinking about this weird little thing Jimmy Cagney did in a movie that I saw, that’s where it came from,” explained actor Michael Madsen in an interview earlier this year. The twangs of southern rock as Blonde dances around his victim make for deeply unsettling but unforgettable viewing. That is so evocative.”Ĭontrapuntal: the use of music opposite to the emotion expected from the scene (also known as ‘soundtrack dissonance’)
“Not least for the contrapuntal use of sound in the Stealers Wheel scene. “The use of music is interesting,” says film and music theorist Beth Carroll.