Surround sound sucks

There’s a mind-blowing YouTube essay by Folding Ideas about an innocuous scene from Alien (1979) in which Dan Olson describes one of the greatest 4th-wall breaks in movies.

In the scene, Ash tries to kill Ripley after she learns the crew of the USCSS Nostromo is expendable. At one point, as the camera is tracking backwards, the camera operator bumps into a lighting fixture. Ash hears the noise and turns towards it before throwing Ripley to the ground.

I can’t be sure, but this video essay may have taught me about diegesis, which is the idea that there is a world within a movie and another world beyond the movie. If you’ve never encountered this term, here’s a fun example. Can you imagine being in the editing bay the very first time a filmmaker decided to score a dramatic scene with orchestral music? Can you imagine wondering, “Where is the music coming from? Can the characters hear it?”

I don’t think most people think about this at all. It’s so obvious now that there is diegetic music that’s inside the world of the movie — Stuck In The Middle With You during the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs — and there is non-diegetic music outside the world of the movie — when the strings come in at the end of the Normandy scene in Saving Private Ryan.

When the cameraman in Alien hits the lighting fixture, these two worlds collapse. Wait, who hit the fixture? A camera operator? And Ash, a character in the movie, noticed? Why didn’t Ridley use a different take?

This sort of thing is interesting, because it’s hard to notice but impossible to forget once you do. But it totally sucks. I’m scared a robot is going to kill Ripley and then all of a sudden I’m dragged out of the story thinking about the cameraman. That’s a failure of filmmaking.

Surround sound has the same problem.

Consider an action sequence in a World War I movie. There’s a wide shot of two armies rushing towards each other from opposite trenches. Bullets are whizzing by from all directions; you can hear their trajectory dance across the room as speakers hum and crackle around you. A mortar explodes violently in the distance, which you can hear from the speakers on your left. Wait a second. Whose left? It’s a wide shot with two groups of people running at each other. From whose perspective are you hearing the mortar? The camera’s perspective? The army on the left? The army on the right?

There’s no answer, even though the movie is inviting you to ask the question. That sucks.

So how should you think about the relationship between picture and sound, between diegetic and non-diegetic? You shouldn’t. You’re watching another world through a magic window. Light comes out of the magic window from one direction and so should sound. Skip surround sound and get a nice soundbar.