Cultural Gap Film #23: The Sound of Music

Relevant elements: Too many to list

Why it resonated: It's a family-friendly Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set in a striking location with a touch of historical drama 

General comments on the film: Here it is: the film that kicked off this whole enterprise. For whatever reason, The Sound of Music has become associated with Easter, and I was able to take advantage of the film being shown on ABC Family this weekend. I only bring up the manner of viewing because it raises a point about the essential nature of the film and perhaps why I hadn't seen it. 


This is a family movie, which means that for a male film consumer, there is a substantial blackout window for it. If a person somehow is not exposed to it as a young child, the odds of viewing it collapse to near zero from the tween years through at least young adulthood. Since my parents and my sister never insisted on The Sound of Music as a family viewing selection during my childhood, I entered into that span in which it was not likely to be something I would seek out. Given a choice, I imagine most young men would opt for Pulp Fiction rather than any family film, let alone one with a reputation for wholesomeness above all else. Unless and until there are children around to be shown such a movie, there isn't much of an impetus for its viewing, and the circumstances of my family were such that there weren't many younger relatives about once I entered the blackout period, leaving the film a cultural gap that I am only now filling out of intellectual curiosity.


So I went into this viewing experience honestly wondering how much the popularity of The Sound of Music was a self-perpetuating phenomenon set into motion by the Baby Boomers. Because it was released in 1965, it is a film that would have been pretty much mandatory viewing for the Sally Drapers of the world (my new figurehead for that generation). And because it was one of the last major films before the seismic shift into more provocative filmmaking--1966 being the year when movies like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? raised industry-changing deliberations about "adult" films, and coincidentally the year Walt Disney died--it can be seen as the final great "movie for all audiences" before the moviegoing public began substantially segmenting when films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider arrived. In other words, The Sound of Music came at the end of the true era of culturally relevant films--movies that literally almost everyone who watched movies would have seen. Today, a film like Avatar would be considered a massively popular movie, and a lot of people have seen it, but because there are so many other films to be seen and the marketplace is so fragmented, there are also a lot of moviegoing folks who haven't seen it, including me. 


All of that made me consider the possibility that the reason The Sound of Music has persisted so strongly in our culture is not just its own merit but its historical situation. Baby Boomers have greatly determined the course of American popular culture over the past fifty years, so a film that was pitched directly at them when it was released would have an inordinately powerful cultural position. As a treasured part of their youth, they would be likely to champion it going forward and make sure that successive generations saw it. The fact that it is a family film only intensifies the likelihood of such a movie surviving, since children are less likely to judge a film on its actual quality. Baby Boomers would make an important item of their childhoods an important part of their children's childhoods, and so on. The persistence of truly terrible children's movies supports this theory, as I have seen some of my peers revel in making their children watch things they freely admit are terrible just because they fondly remember watching them as children. Such a lack of quality control in family films led me to be apprehensive about The Sound of Music. How much of its popularity derives from its previous popularity? In other words, if it were released for the first time today, what would be its chances of survival?


As it turns out, I think The Sound of Music hasn't been coasting on Baby Boomer cred. That's not to say that I enjoyed it, because frankly I didn't enjoy it much at all. But how much I like a film has never been an important consideration during this project. My goal has always been to better understand the culture in which I partake by examining the fittest specimens--the items that have survived and become essential to the culture's sense of itself. The Sound of Music is not really to my taste, but it does have qualities that I think would have appeal for successive generations of people. Pre-ironic viewers (i.e. children) would likely have no problem with its corny nature, and the bones of the story encourage young viewers to put themselves in the position of the von Trapp kids. Children would also be less likely to share my annoyance at the repetition of songs, particularly in the second half of the film. 


Speaking of the songs, I found myself constantly surprised at my simultaneous familiarity and lack of familiarity with the movie's soundtrack. For nearly every song, I realized that I had heard the first ten seconds about a million times, but had never heard past those opening lines. It's the same experience I've had with songs included on those compilation albums that used to be advertised in heavy rotation on television. The commercials would play short clips of several songs, so today I am intensely aware of those snippets, but if I hear another part of the tune, I often won't recognize that it's the same song because I've never heard the whole thing.


That actually sums up my experience of the movie as a whole, since I already knew the outlines of just about everything in the film. Watching it just filled in details, some of which I could have done without, such as the creepily hallucinogenic yodeling goat puppet show. But now at least I have viewed this iconic film, and will never again have to hear an incredulous "You've never seen The Sound of Music???" aimed at me.