Time Passages: Musical Signposts in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights

Music. Score.

For 1997’s Boogie Nights, director Paul Thomas Anderson used music as a “scene partner.” Early on, ‘70s soul (“Best of My Love”), pop (“Brand New Key”), funk (“Jungle Fever”), rock (“Spill the Wine”) and disco (“Boogie Shoes”) represented the frivolity of the sexually liberated era.

Soundtrack on Capitol Records.

“Jack Horner, filmmaker.”

Set amid the production of pre-A.I.D.S. adult films, Burt Reynolds’ Jack Horner is the creator of “exotic pictures,” which were shot on film at that time, lending, as Horner would argue, artistic credibility.

Far Gone

While his “family” of fragile performers are kept close, it literally takes just a few seconds before the countdown to 1980 for Boogie Nights to go from glory days to gory nights, with William H. Macy’s Little Bill committing a series of disturbingly matter-of-fact violent acts at a New Year’s Eve party. It’s also Horner’s “wife” and “kids” descending into drug addiction, and the arrival of a new “cheap” format known as videotape, that signify the start of the downward spirals.

Bad Vibrations

Anderson begins to add harmless ‘80s pop into seriously unsettling scenarios to create further disconnect, and to convey a non-sexual loss of innocence for Mark Wahlberg’s Eddie Adams and John C. Reilly’s Reed Rothchild. (Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” and Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” have never quite sounded the same since.) Yet Anderson’s most effective use of music is the faint, pulsating bell chime that serves as a warning that the past has come back to haunt Adams. His Dirk Diggler alter ego resorting to back-alley exhibitions like the ones he did as a dishwasher in the Valley in ’77.

Rolling in the Deep

However, this ominous alarm is at its most anxiety-inducing during a scene involving Horner and Heather Graham’s “Rollergirl” in a limousine joy ride with a random guy as part of a new adult series, to be recorded on grainy videotape no less. Boogie Nights’ cinematographer, Robert Elswit shoots part of this scene as if the viewer is looking through the videocamera’s viewfinder, bringing us into the backseat, watching the moment Brandy’s past comes back to haunt her as well.

Amber Waves of Pain

It also marks the beginning of Brandy’s future that may play out like Julianne Moore’s Amber Waves (Maggie as she’s known from her previous life as wife and mother) and Don Cheadle’s Buck, both of whom deal with public scrutiny as they attempt to rebuild non-porn private lives. The “heyday” has reached The End, or more fittingly, its climax.