FURTHER READING
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 12th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2019.
Butler, Jeremy G. Television Style. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Edgerton, Gary R. Mad Men: Dream Come True TV. London: Tauris, 2010.
NOTES
1 1. The Japanese woodcut is Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, and the abstract painting is an untitled one by Mark Rothko.
6
Nip/Tuck
Popular Music
BEN ASLINGER
Abstract: Most analyses of television programs focus on a program’s visual and narrative construction but neglect the vital element of sound that is crucial to any show’s style and meaning. Ben Aslinger listens closely to the use of music in the FX series Nip/Tuck, exploring how it helps shape the program’s aesthetics and cultural representations.
Nip/Tuck’s pilot episode featured an extended sequence in which The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” plays as Sean McNamara and Christian Troy perform a facial reconstruction on a man who they find out later is a child molester trying to mask his identity. Most reviewers of the pilot drew attention to the importance of popular music to the program’s style, noting “the eerie use of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’ to dramatize a facial reconstruction even before mentioning the plot or the performances.”1 Nip/Tuck’s emphasis on surgery, style, and music was even reinforced in promotional materials, most notably the flash-based “Can you cut like a rock star?” game on the FX website. The uses of popular music in Nip/Tuck distinguish the series from older medical dramas such as Dr. Kildare and more recent series such as ER, as well as pointing to the ways that industrial imperatives surrounding popular music licensing affect the formal properties of contemporary television texts.
Some critics have argued that the tracks used in Nip/Tuck are perfect sonic illustrations of the skin-deep, youth-obsessed, superficial Miami culture chronicled by the program. However, television scholars should be skeptical of critical commentaries that sum up popular music licensing and scoring practices in broad strokes but fail to pay sufficient attention to specific production practices. While such trade and popular press pieces might work to get at a superficial sense of a show’s use of music, they fail to address the complex ways that popular music interacts with visual elements to convey meanings, and the multiple ways that producers and music supervisors use licenses to strategically add weight to key plot points, visual sequences, and dialogue exchanges.
FIGURE 6.1. The fundamental link between music and Nip/Tuck’s “edgy” style was reinforced in promotional materials such as this game on the show’s website.
Feminist media scholars have analyzed the ways that Nip/Tuck works to define beauty in dominant terms that privilege whiteness and an unattainable size and shape.2 These scholars have analyzed gender performances in Nip/Tuck and makeover shows that enlist the medical gaze in order to create aspirational narratives and police beauty standards; however, analyses of television textuality must take into account not just visual elements and scriptwriting practices, but also the ways that television sound is constructed for meaning-making effects. By addressing the popular music soundtrack in Nip/Tuck, I add to previous analyses centering on the visual culture of the program and further explore how program producers imagined surgical and embodied aesthetics in the series. Popular music tracks work in Nip/Tuck to initiate surgical sequences, to “soften” surgical sequences by aestheticizing the penetration of the body, and to bridge Nip/Tuck’s focus on appearance with psychological interiority and character identifications. In order to connect industrial imperatives to textual outcomes, I begin by discussing how executive producer Ryan Murphy’s collaboration with music supervisor P. J. Bloom created strategies for deploying popular music tracks. I then draw on existing scholarly work on the soundtrack in order to analyze how specific examples of licensing work to complicate viewer perceptions of Nip/Tuck’s narrative and diegesis (the storyworld it creates and inhabits).
Critical to establishing Nip/Tuck’s “edge” was the way the series used popular music and editing strategies to turn surgeries into televisual spectacles.3 Murphy had previously produced Popular for The WB, a network that was influential in establishing the importance of popular music to 1990s definitions of “quality” production practices and strategies for targeting niche demographics. By drafting P. J. Bloom as the series music supervisor, Murphy worked to make the series edgy and to emphasize the meaning-making capacity of the popular music soundtrack.4
According to Bloom, music supervision typically abides by certain norms and conventions that are defined by the producer and are specific to a particular series. Given the timeline needed to secure music licenses, prepare temp tracks, and create a final, polished soundtrack, a clear sonic palette expedites decision-making and the production process.
Bloom argued that setting up the “sonic fingerprint” and “musical tone” for the series was one of the strategies that guided his work as a music supervisor.5 “Most of the time, we try to use songs that speak lyrically to the procedures being conducted in the operating room,” he said. “On occasion, we’ll use music that speaks to the characters’ individual tastes; but most often the songs are a satirical look at whatever cosmetic procedure the patient is undergoing.”6
According to Bloom, two major strategies for Nip/Tuck were to use “classic” rock tunes for ironic and/or satirical effect and to use “cool” newer tunes (mainly electronic music) to depict the superficial, slick world of South Beach and certain surgeries. Murphy and Bloom also repurposed songs that older audiences would remember from their original contexts and that could be viewed during the burgeoning 1970s and 1980s nostalgia trend by audiences too young to remember their original radio and MTV airplay. The series’ Miami location and the use of classic rock and pop songs may have reminded older viewers of the strategic deployment in Miami Vice of popular songs such as Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” but Nip/Tuck depicted a much grittier Miami than the earlier “big three” network series, which was produced during the decline of the classic network system, whereas Nip/Tuck was produced during what Amanda Lotz calls the transition to a “post-network era.”7
Bloom and Murphy decided to use the Bang Olufsen stereo in the operating room as a character of sorts in the series, and the music that the stereo plays is an important part of most surgical sequences.8 These sequences often begin with either anesthesiologist Liz Cruz or one of the nurses waving a gloved hand in front of the device in order to activate it and then zoom in on a spinning CD that is also the sync point for the start of the master recording. In effect, the program’s surgical sequences are set in motion by powering up audio technologies.
In addressing the textual and stylistic importance of highlighting the selection of music and the handling of listening technologies on the screen, Ken Garner argues that Quentin Tarantino’s films, especially Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, devote screen-time to the act of musical selection in ways that heighten the meaning of the music played, linking the process of playing music more directly to on-screen actions, character identifications, and narrative incidents.9 Extending Garner’s point to television style in Nip/Tuck, we
