American Hustle is, foremost, a film about appearances, about what is real and the constant dialogue between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic, which is especially compelling at the level of sound.
Moments before David O. Russell’s American Hustle (2013) begins in earnest with a close-up on Irving’s (Christian Bale) rotund stomach, the audience sees the words “some of this actually happened” and hears a faint voice on a radio announcing “if you give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.” The film runs a lot longer than twenty-two minutes, but these innocuous few seconds, in tandem with Irving’s first scene, set up the entire narrative. American Hustle is, foremost, a film about appearances, about what is real and the constant dialogue between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic, which is especially compelling at the level of sound. Sound as voice (the characters’ voice-over and the acousmatic radio voice), sound as music (the thirty-one songs are mostly hits from the 1970s meant to underscore the reality of the time period), and the verbal MacGuffin (not an object, but rather a story within the story of the film) are the devices that drive the narrative forward and deepen the conflict between what is real and what isn’t.
American Hustle is loosely based on the Abscam affair from the ’70s; it follows two scam artists, Irving Rosenfeld and his mistress, Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who, after being caught by the FBI, wind up working with agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) in an effort to unveil large-scale corruption in the state of New York. Con artistry, sting operations, forgery, and scams – these elements are all at the heart of the film, as well as, one might say, of cinema itself. The first scene announces all of that deftly. The words mentioned above, “some of this actually happened,” are a variation of the nowadays almost ubiquitous “based on real events”; but they read as a restraint, not “all of it,” just “some.” That’s easier to believe. The acousmatic radio voice promises the audience the world. And it delivers. So this is not a complete lie. And yet it is; all of cinema is.
Sound can be crudely divided between diegetic (its source is known, seen, or can be logically inferred) and non-diegetic (unknown source, normally what we construe as soundtrack). Often, the lines between the two can be crossed, blurred, and sound/music that initially appeared non-diegetic becomes (intra)-diegetic.2 Robynn Stillwell coined the term “the fantastical gap” to define the space between these two types of sound and music, a “place of destabilization and ambiguity” (2007: 186). This fantastical gap (replicated visually by Amy Adams’ plunging cleavage) is also “a transformative space, a superimposition, a transition between stable states” (2007: 200). Jeff Smith has challenged these categories of sound and considered the possibility that all sound is diegetic, and that the aural variations have to do simply with (cinematic) space. So when the same song occurs in two separate places, as it does in the first scene, that is a perfect approximation of what Smith calls “spatially displaced sound” (2009: 14-16). Regardless, David O. Russell’s choices in this film point to a willingness to create confusion, to challenge the expectations of the spectators. In addition to the music, the intertwining of two voice-overs, Irving’s and Sydney’s, also contributes to the creation of a magical aural space; in fact, when the two characters listen to Duke Ellington’s “Jeep’s Blues,” which plays a large role in connecting them emotionally, they whisper to each other that “it’s magic.” They mean the music, but by extrapolation they can certainly mean the film, their voices, their roles. Indeed, Irving also quips, “These were the roles we were meant to play,” meaning their con roles, but his words once again take on a double meaning: the diegetic roles within the film and the extra-diegetic roles in “real” life, Irving and Sydney.
The play between the narrative levels of sound/music returns on several occasions. Irving and Carmine, the mayor of Camden and one of the targets of the FBI, sing along with Tom Jones’s “Delilah” in a bar. This scene, in which the camera wonderfully matches the rhythm of the song as it swivels and twists about the room, precedes the scene that best exemplifies the fantastical gap and the overall spatial imbalance of the film. As Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), Richie’s zany wife, cries in a restaurant, the song “Live and Let Die” by McCartney/Wings begins on the soundtrack, accompanying her mood appropriately with empathetic music. Visually, the film switches to Irving, the mayor, and some of the mafia guys in a car, while the same song sound bridges the two scenes. There is no doubt that the song is at a non-diegetic level as it covers up two different spaces. Moreover, the film cuts again to Rosalyn only to find her at home, mouthing the words of the song. Visual space and continuity are obliterated, but “Live and Let Die” somewhat holds everything together; not to mention that it has the same paratextual reach as Bale’s body – most famously, this is the title song to the eighth Bond movie, Live and Let Die (1973). Once again, the audience is pulled out of the diegesis because we make that extra-diegetic connection (just as we did with Scorsese’s films earlier). We begin to hear Rosalyn’s voice, too, and a mixture of her voice and Paul McCartney’s follows, yet the source of the song (a radio, a record player, etc.) is nowhere in sight. The song is in everyone’s consciousness. The film cuts away again to Irving in the car with the mafia guys, then to Rosalyn, who now cleans the house and dances to the music. When she finally speaks, to her son, the song regresses to the background softly, and it is finally let (to) die.
Like Richie, we wait to find out the ending of the story, of the film. In the last exchange between Richie and Stoddard, the latter yells that the former got the ending wrong. It does not matter, though. As Irving tells Richie, “people believe what they want to believe.” And that’s why the American hustle – cinema – still works.
Sources
Smith, Jeff. (2009), ‘Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music’, Music and the Moving Image, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 1-25.
Stilwell, J. Robynn. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” In Beyond the Soundtrack. Representing Music in Cinema, ed. by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 184-202.
- Of course, it was Robert De Niro who started the trend of the extreme body changes in Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980); can anyone forget that protruding gut? De Niro plays the role of the mafia overlord in American Hustle, which connects the film with Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), too. [↩]
- The beginning of Blazing Saddles (1974) is a great example: an orchestra is revealed in the middle of the desert and what was non-diegetic music until that moment becomes diegetic. [↩]
- He finally pushes through his philosophical agenda, which he failed to do in the more conventional The Fighter (2010), or Silver Linings Playbook (2012). [↩]
- Stoddard also constantly worries about money – another extra-diegetic appropriation, this time to real-life Hollywood. [↩]