Williams must have an immense, cross-referenced database in his brain, arranged so that a handful of keywords - desert, clan, swordfight, moonlight - yield up a menu of symphonic moods. Orchestral music was the CGI of the 19th century: Stage machinery could only do so much, so it was up to composers to conjure windy tundras, fearsome hordes, hallucinatory dawns, elven creatures, forest combat, and world-conquering loves. The original Millennium Falcon was constructed out of model-kit tank and Ferrari parts Williams glues together bits of Dvorák, Sibelius, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Ravel. Like the battered droids and early-model lightsabers that reappear in the latest installment, Williams’s score is a mash-up of the old-fashioned and the thrillingly whimsical. John Williams’s multipart Star Wars tone poem, 40 years in the making, continues heaving heroically through The Force Awakens. Jackson and Kurt Russell in The Hateful Eight) struggling through a Western blizzard, accompanied by, yup, foreboding strings. I’ve watched an injured man (Patrick Wilson in Bone Tomahawk) drag himself over miles of Western desert, accompanied by foreboding strings another injured man (Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant) drag himself over miles of Western snow, accompanied by foreboding strings and a group of soon-to-be-injured men (including Samuel L. Music has a way of throwing clichés into relief. I get impatient when directors treat music profligately, slathering it from title to credits, and appreciate those who use it surgically, to sharpen a silence or finesse a transition. Sifting through the fall harvest, I grumble at scores that jangle cloyingly along, heightening a scene’s banality. I’ve been listening to movies lately, to the ways a composer can tell us what characters are feeling or thinking, what they aren’t thinking but should be, what we in the audience ought to feel, or what’s going to happen. Absent the soundtrack, what’s left is a scene that isn’t portentous, evocative, or emblematic at all - just real life, a nonfictional man walking an actual dog in the city’s approximation of silence. Wait, what music? An anxious, deadline-is-looming buzz? A fanfare of inspiration? An innocent ditty suggesting this pleasantness can’t last? A melancholy swell, redolent of lost love? What is this movie, anyway? The writer - that’s me - presses pause, yanking out his earbuds, unplugging all the narratives and stylized emotions. Weak sunlight pushes through the mist, illuminating the carpet of foliage and highlighting the man’s white dog in the middle distance. A sleepy, middle-aged male writer trudges through a wintry park.

Photo: Andrew Cooper/Courtesy of The Weinstein Company Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Bruce Dern in The Hateful Eight.

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