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The Medium

Sound Logic

Credit...Kevin Van Aelst

“The Hurt Locker” is a bomb movie that mutes its booms. It derives suspense by withholding the expected “boomala, boomala,” as an Iraqi kid puts it in the film while taunting an American bomb-squad soldier about the “cool” soundtrack of Hollywood war.

“The Hurt Locker” is not cool. It’s hot and dry, a heaving desert parable with a mounting sandstorm howl at the center. The internal explosions matter more than the fireworks. Explaining the dynamics of roadside bombs in Iraq, Paul N. J. Ottosson, the film’s supervising sound editor, told Variety, “You die not from shrapnel but the expanding air that blows up your lungs.” The top notes in the soundtrack are arid metallic clicks, snips, squeaks and creaks, the chatter of wrenches and wire clippers, as bombs are defused in air so parched as to seem combustible itself. Men can hardly summon the spit or breath to speak. Much of the dialogue — which was almost all recorded on location in Jordan (and not looped in a studio) — is delivered in headsets, as soldiers hiss into one another’s helmets across desert expanses. To listen is to enter machinery, rib cages, ear canals and troubled lungs.

Along with “Avatar,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Star Trek” and “Up,” “The Hurt Locker” is nominated for a sound-editing Academy Award. For its cerebral, abstract and still deeply romantic sound tableau — a kind of sonic Cy Twombly painting — “The Hurt Locker” should win it. Ottosson’s alignment of death and silence, instead of death and booms, partakes of an aesthetic based on the idea that you’re deaf when you die. On “The Sopranos,” a series known for its exquisite deployment of silence, Bobby Baccalieri says of dying, “You probably don’t hear it when it happens.”

Three of the other movies competing in the sound-editing category take a more nostalgic approach to sound that often bumbles into kitsch. “Up,” the elegiac 3-D Disney Pixar balloon movie with sound by Tom Myers and Michael Silvers, recycles a vintage-Disney howling wind (originally created for “A Bug’s Life”) and introduces a bird language that uses hyena and macaw calls. But the film largely eschews animation’s hyperreal sound — cane raps, claps, toe taps — becoming, instead, a pantomime for significant stretches. Its candy-colored shenanigans periodically play to nothing more than retro waltz music. Maybe this dippy dancerly quality is what gives “Up” an aura of art; the academy should not fall for this.

“Star Trek,” with sound by Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin, might gratify fans of the original series: it is filled with familiar zaps, beeps and warps, along with the sound I once associated (from the D.I.Y. “Star Wars” days) with an undulating cookie tray. The sound mix falls into pat harmonies at marching-band volume, while there’s still enough violence to pound the adrenal glands. You get breaks from the solemn, oversize score only when there is sententious or plot-advancing dialogue. Too bad. This TV-like oscillation may help shore up the “Star Trek” franchise, but it doesn’t make this installment — the would-be sexy one — special.

The third of the nostalgic sound schemes, the one in “Inglourious Basterds” is, at least, frank camp. Its polyglot script and smart-aleck score (“Für Elise” plus funk plus Ennio Morricone) give plenty to listen to. But elsewhere, the sound delivers few thrills. Wylie Stateman, a sound editor, uses overt studio sound for generic characterization — the clicks of Nazi heels and pens, notably — more than ambience. Worth a listen, however: the painstaking faux-analog sound of “Nation’s Pride,” the movie within a movie, for its sound-geek appeal.

“Avatar” alone gives “The Hurt Locker” a run for its money. Layered heavily with manufactured sounds, it is brazenly cartoonish. The sound editors Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle may be Paul Gauguin to Ottosson’s Twombly. What stands out is the whoosh of muscular — not fluttery — reptile wings as they flap and glide. This has to be the sound of flying in dreams. The dragonlike creatures vie for sonic dominance with the machinery in the film and particularly with the man-machine tanks that have their own distinctive sounds, especially in the fantasyland of Pandora, where a clash of resounding arms takes place in an atmosphere of no oxygen. For chopper sounds, the editors combined the hacking and churning of various craft. Elsewhere they aimed to make Pandora sound “intoxicating” (as Boyes told Variety) by remixing recordings made in the Amazon.

It’s intriguing that both “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” have built otherworldly environments in which humans are intoxicated — in part by being deprived of oxygen. You can hear this danger much better than you can see it, and it falls to sound editors to exploit its dimensions. What a great challenge in moviemaking: the various sounds of breath — gasping, sighing, speaking, expiring — may be film’s first and most consequential sound effect. Here’s to films that revisit and rethink the sounds of breath and breathlessness. And at the Academy Awards, may the most inspiring use of sound — did I mention “The Hurt Locker”? — win.

POINTS OF ENTRY: THIS WEEK'S RECOMMENDATIONS

EXPLOSIVE DEVICE
The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s incendiary masterpiece, is available on Blu-ray. Listen to the nonbooms — they sound like muted implosions — yourself. Get the DVD to keep; you will want to study it.

MAKE SOME NOISE
Forget GarageBand. For home sound engineers, nothing beats Audacity, the open-source, cross-platform and free digital audio editor. Version 1.2.6a or the newest beta version is at audacity.sourceforge.net.

ROYALE WITH CHEESE
The hypereclectic soundtrack to “Inglourious Basterds” elegantly lines up Ennio Morricone tracks with compositions by Billy Preston, David Bowie and Lalo Schifrin. Somehow it all works. If, that is, the strange, show-the-gears art of Quentin Tarantino is even supposed to “work.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Sound Logic. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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