Before the song begins, an operating room controversy erupts when a nurse tells Sean that Sophia has smuggled in something underneath her gown. Sophia confesses, revealing a picture of her son Raymond, and Sean tells the nurse to wrap the framed picture in a sterile bag and let Sophia hold it in the surgery. As Lopez counts back from ten while Liz administers the anesthesia, “A Sorta Fairytale” begins playing.
This sequence exhibits one common pattern of music licensing in contemporary television drama, where an extended song clip accompanies a montage to close the episode. Thus, while Amos’s “A Sorta Fairytale” may be perceived as diegetic music, occurring within the fictional world of the program (although we don’t always see the stereo being turned on in every surgery scene), the song becomes part of the nondiegetic soundtrack once we leave the operating room and we see Sean and Christian in their homes. In the operating room, Amos’s song calls attention to the politically contested nature of embodiment. The content of the song, about an emotional breakup, is far from the romantic fairytale implied by the song title and refrain. Amos’s performance on the Bosendorfer piano and backup musicians’ performances on acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and drums work to create a kind of dreamy soundscape. While the refrain invokes Lopez’s fantasy of social acceptance, the repetition of the lyrical refrain, “a sorta fairytale,” along with the plaintive to wistful to morose quality of Amos’s vocals call attention to the fact that even after this surgery, Sophia Lopez will have to fight for social acceptance and for bodies like hers to be valued in the public sphere.
The song, together with the visuals—the framed picture of the patient’s son, our previous knowledge of Lopez as a recurring character in the series—highlight the economic, psychological, and physical struggles faced by transgender men and women, and calls attention to the precarious and ambivalent relationship transgender patients have historically had with the medical system.10 Amos’s star text and the lyrics of the song encourage audiences to consider Lopez’s pursuit of gender reassignment surgery as a brave act and to consider whether Lopez will ever achieve social acceptance, what value will be placed on bodies like hers, or if, for contemporary America, Lopez’s dream of equality is still “a sorta fairytale.” My argument here is not that most audience members will extract this meaning from the sequence; rather, it is that music supervisors and executive producers can draw on lyrical allusions and discourses of musical meaning that are tied up in genre or artist/performer identity to create evocative effects for particular groups of the audience.
Occasionally, Murphy and Bloom decide to use classical music or no music to call attention to difficult and experimental surgeries in the series—surgeries that often fail. These exceptions bear out the rule that most of the music in the program is popular recorded music from the latter half of the twentieth century and highlight the ways that nonmusical forms of sound can be used for narrative and stylistic effect. Two examples of classical music include the surgery to separate Siamese twins attached at the head that ends in both girls dying on the table (“Rose and Raven Rosenberg”) and the face transplant surgery on Hannah Tedesco (“Hannah Tedesco”). After Hannah’s body rejects the transplant later in the episode and the transplant must be removed from the teen girl’s face, Liz says, “I can’t find any music that feels appropriate right now.” This marks one of the few times the producers chose not to use music of any kind and instead incorporated the diegetic sounds of the operating room, particularly the respirator and the heart monitor, over flashes of the surgical sequence. This notable exception to the program’s sonic style illustrates that while popular music licensing is the general trend in the program, producers do on occasion deviate in order to try something different. These deviations also illustrate that the sounds and images in all surgical sequences are carefully planned and that the musical choices in these sequences have much to tell us about the ways that Nip/Tuck constructs the embodied aesthetics of surgery.
The use of diegetic nonmusical sound in the surgery to remove the face transplant stands in stark contrast to most surgical sequences, where the volume of direct diegetic sounds is either lowered or muted. Popular music tracks played through the Bang Olufsen stereo are diegetically motivated, but as film music scholars Claudia Gorbman and Robynn J. Stilwell argue, music often crosses back and forth between the diegetic and the nondiegetic.11 While music in the McNamara/Troy operating room is diegetically motivated, the music video–style editing and shot scale choices call attention to the camera shutter and the construction of particular shots as well as the disjunction between the passage of musical time and narrative time. Diegetic music is often viewed as more organic, as it belongs to the storyworld and the characters; in contrast, the nondiegetic score is sometimes interpreted as manipulative, as the nondiegetic score is used to establish preferred readings of on-screen action for the audience. In Nip/Tuck, thinking of the music as traversing the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary raises questions about how the sounds and images on-screen are being manipulated and brings into focus the tensions between organic bodies and bodies disciplined by plastic surgery. To see music cross the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary during surgery raises the question of what constitutes the organic, “real” body. That music in the series seems to cross this boundary as surgery ensues draws greater attention to the physical boundary crossing of the scalpel penetrating flesh.
By placing music strategically in surgical scenes, Murphy and Bloom use sound to think through the representation and politics of plastic surgery. Nip/Tuck provides an excellent example of how contemporary television producers and music supervisors craft musical sounds to fit a series and deploy popular music tracks for specific narrative effects. Series such as Mad Men or The O.C. may use popular music tracks to create a sense of a historical era or to appeal to a demographic market, but the shape and sound that music licensing takes depend on production norms and narratives. Television criticism must wrestle with the industrial norms and cultural connotations of licensed music to more fully understand how licensed tracks mobilize meaning.
FURTHER READING
Altman, Rick. “Television/Sound.” In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Cook, Nicholas. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Donnelly, K. J. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: BFI, 2005.
Frith, Simon. “Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television.” Popular Music 21 (2002): 277–90.
NOTES
1 1. Tom Lowry, “Finding Nirvana in a Music Catalog,” BusinessWeek, October 2, 2006.
2 2. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, “A Perfect Lie: Visual (Dis)Pleasures and Policing Femininity in Nip/Tuck,” in Makeover Television: Realities Remodeled, ed. Dana Heller (London: Tauris, 2007).
3 3. Matthew Gilbert, “Nip/Tuck Is Not Afraid to Look the Ugly in the Eye; Nip/Tuck Diagnoses the Human Condition,” Boston Globe, September 5, 2004.
4 4. P. J. Bloom, www.myspace.com/pjbloom.
5 5. “Exclusive Q&A with P. J. Bloom,” www.niptuckforum.com.
6 6. “Exclusive: Nip/Tuck Music Supervisor P. J. Bloom Interview,” January 11, 2008, http://rcrdlbl.com.
7 7. Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University