You’re going to sell drugs.
As you exit your car it becomes clear, your friend has brought a gun.
You’ve never been to this house before and you were already nervous. Now, because of this gun, you’re understandably more nervous.
It certainly doesn’t help that, as soon as you enter this house, you find a slight man casually throwing around fire crackers every 5 to 10 seconds.
This does not help your anxiety. If it did…congrats I guess? Your like, immune to crazy shit.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece Boogie Nights hit me at a very pivotal time in my life, and this scene has stuck with me for the – time is a son of a bitch – 22 years since it was released.
This was one of the most tense scenes I had ever seen. The dialogue, the characters, the way the camera snakes around the room following boxes filled with guns, zooming in on drugs being smoked…all of it is climactic chaos.
But it’s the firecrackers. It’s always the firecrackers.
At one point in the “Christian Sister/ Jessie’s Girl” scene from Boogie Nights, the drug buyer plays russian roulette with himself.
While the gun is under his chin and he’s laughing maniacally…another firecracker goes off.
All 3 protagonists on the couch jump. I jumped. Everyone jumps when they watch this scene.
But Why Firecrackers?
What I didn’t realize at the time, what seemed like an eccentric character choice to my teenage mind, was actually a tried and true method to raising the tension of a scene by adding background noises.
But not just background music. And not even just well edited sound effects.
I mean, a character, or an object, that is introduced organically and goes onto make noise it would be naturally expected to make (ok, small guy lighting firecrackers indoors isn’t an “expected” thing in most day-to-day life) and that noise, that repetitious sound, goes onto add tension to the scene it’s in.
Taxi Driver: From Diner to Death
In the “Diner Scene” of Taxi Driver, the moment a gun is mentioned, (specifically, the moment Travis Bickle’s “colleague” recommends that Travis buy a gun – “It’s a good thing to have just as a threat”) Travis drops an alka-seltzer in a glass of water and the camera zooms in.
The scene – already tense due to Travis’ awkward social interactions, his comments about a knifing he heard about, and how he seems to size up the black pimps in the diner, who in turn size him up – is now back dropped by a constant, and seemingly increasingly loud white rush of noise.
In this case, the fizz – or the background noise – rises to the fore front, an allusion, or perhaps direct display, of Travis’ scattered psyche.
The alka seltzer – itself used for heart burn, or tension in the chest – embodies the tension of the entire scene. This metaphor, rising white noise as the violence within Bickle, is emphasized further with the fuzz sound dissipating as the conversation turns away from guns.
Later on, in the legendary climax scene, Travis shoots what appears to be a John (a man who’s paid for sex) in the hand.
The John immediately starts yelling, “I will kill you” repeatedly, incessantly, as Travis guns down more bad guys.
This scene was already going to be one of the most powerful action scenes in movie history, simply in the revolutionary way it filmed violence, but this annoying, upsetting phrase being said over and over brought the tension over the top.
The John’s yelling of “I will kill you” is the only sound in the scene besides that of the gunshots and Iris’ shrieks. There is no music.
Only when the police come upon the scene with guns drawn is music reintroduced, and suddenly casts a bloody and still-bleeding Travis in a light we’re more familiar with: horror movie monster.
Scorcese touches on this verbal repetition later in his career with the ending of The Aviator.
Johnny Greenwood vs A Fucking Dog With Fucking Papers
Now a great score cannot be overrated in terms of adding tension to a scene but In-World background sounds can be more effective than music because:
1) at some subconscious level, however well written and mixed, music in a movie still reminds us we’re watching a movie. Life doesn’t have a score.
but also,
2) having a character within a scene creating an uncomfortable noise gives the tension a real world base on which to build, i.e., other characters react to the annoying sounds, multiplying their impact.
We’re annoyed by firecrackers, and loud fizz, and yapping dogs.
Violins make pretty sounds even when they’re playing scary melodies.
The repetition (“I will kill you, I will kill you” or a firecracker explosion) is a key element to how In-World background sounds add tension.
As humans, funny things start to happen when 1 sound is repeated over and over. Over and over. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
When it happens with words we call it Semantic Satiation: the repetition of a word to the point where it no longer makes sense.
When a word reaches this point of satiation, it loses its meaning. In essence the word ceases to be a word and instead becomes just another sound.
All sounds seem to have this ability to change meaning with excessive repetition, morphing into an instrument of irritation for filmmakers to deploy at will onto the ears of unwitting audiences.
It’s no coincidence that the Coen Brothers decided to add a small dog to the background of a scene where a gun is drawn during a bowling league game.
As far as moving the plot forward, this dog’s main purpose is to add tension to the climax of Smokey and Walter’s argument, when Walter pulls a gun on Smokey (“flashing your piece out on the lane”).
But not only do we get tension via barks and yips, that tension is organic because the dog’s presence feels organic, even though it should feel out of place. A bowling lane, as The Dude astutely elucidates, is no place for a dog.
To see how the Coen brothers made a dog on a bowling lane feel natural, let’s reverse engineer this scene.
You would start with this conceit: by the end of the scene, Walter whips his piece out on the lanes.
From there, you would ask, what can I do to create even more tension when a gun is pulled out on a bowling lane?
A tail pipe backfiring? Pretty common technique.
Someone slams the jukebox because it’s not working? Pretty common as well, but neither of these are repetitious sound. Neither gives you more than just a split second, jump-scare.
Q: Why not a dog barking?
A: Ok, at least its repetitious.
Q: But why is there a dog at the bowling alley?
A: Walter is dog watching. If this was his dog, he would’ve brought it every week and The Dude would not be surprised by its presence and therefore not ask any questions. Let’s make it his ex-wife’s dog which has the added advantage of adding a layer of oddball texture to Walter’s personality, tellings us something about him we didn’t know before.
Q: But why did Walter bring the dog?
A: Because “this is a fucking show dog with fucking papers, you can’t board it, it gets upset”
Q: And how do we make this dog at the bowling alley feel natural?
A: It feels natural because
1) The Dude specifically asks, as a normal person would, why Walter brought his dog bowling (“I didn’t rent it shoes”),
2) Walter’s response tells us a lot about him via his relationship with his ex-wife, and so we’re paying attention to his answer and not just the dog, and,
3) Smokey’s infringement pulls us away from that conversation and makes us forget, momentarily, about the dog.
Ultimately though, the absurdity of these two characters and their situation leads to hilarious, realistic banter because the Coen brothers are generational talents at writing dialogue.
Notice the dog only barks when Walter points the gun at Smokey and stops barking as soon as the scene reaches the peak of its tension. This is in-character for the dog who sees it’s part-time owner getting upset and gets upset with him.
I’m not saying the Coen Brothers invented the Pomeranian (which is actually a Yorkshire Terrier) and Walter’s entire ex-wife backstory just to add tension to this scene, I’m just saying, given how effective In-World background sound adds tension to scenes, it would be a worthy reason.
Now I’ll leave you with this oft-cited-as-annoying scene from Once Upon a Time in America. The fact the viewer gets irritated watching this scene, just shows the power of repetitious sound; the telephone being perhaps the most natural of all examples in this article.
The phone ringing never lets the viewer relax, emphasizing the very un-relaxing imagery of a PTSD flashback on screen.