Music, Literature, and Cinema: When the Score Guides the Narrative

This essay scrutinizes little-discussed aspects of intermediality by working with contamination and strategies of estrangement. Drawing on scholarship on intermediality at the intersection of literary theory and comparative literature, such as Elleström’s Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, Rajewsky’s Systemkontamination, and Fornäs’ “Intermedial Passages in Time and Space,” four works of art are analyzed: Fitzgerald’s short story “Three Acts of Music,” two movies—Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and Larraín’s Jackie, and Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. My aim is to show how the employment of music in both cinema and works of literature affects the narrative process and structure, and how elements belonging to different artistic genres interrelate. In literature and cinema, contamination is based on the union of different media, and in exposing this phenomenon, I want to explore a middle ground where the absence of boundaries creates an intermedial interrelationship. To understand the role and effect of this interrelation, the discussion of a series of examples reveals the process of recontextualization of songs and the perceptions of their audiences.