William D’Antonio Dry

My thesis is an analysis of the musical scores in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which consists of 23 films beginning with Iron Man (2008). The narratives of these films are intertwined and were planned far in advance. However, the scores are not and are so disparate they contradict each other. I prove this contention by analyzing the too many musical themes, or leitmotifs, composed for certain characters. According to the Wagnerian operatic tradition that inspired composers during the Golden Age of Hollywood, a character should be known by a single musical theme that remains consistent both within a single work and across multiple works. I then examine the technological innovations and compositional practices throughout multiple eras of Hollywood to uncover how we ended up where we are today.

My analysis of the MCU and the eras of Hollywood is based on a theoretical construct that includes cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s concept of the unique and authentic aura, which cannot be mechanically reproduced; composer-scholar Murray Schafer’s pioneering idea of soundscape, or the immersive sonic environment; and theories of how music functions to immerse a viewer into the diegesis or internal narrative of a film as expressed by French critic and experimental composer Michel Chion, film theorist Claudia Gorbman, and sound and music scholar-activist Anahid Kassabian. I conclude that the immersive powers once wielded by the music of film have ceded to visual effects and their accompanying sound effects. While they may well be immersive, these effects have muddled the soundscape of the blockbuster franchise and thus deafened the viewer to the inconsistencies of Marvel’s scores.

In addition, the scores of the MCU seldom break new ground due to what I call the malpractice of temp-music scoring, where during the editing process pre-existing music generally from another film score acts as a placeholder for the newly composed soundtrack to come. Finally, the megalith Walt Disney Company, which owns Marvel Entertainment, suffers a high rate of turnover, which leads to constantly changing director/composer duos for MCU films, a multiplicity that discourages musical unity in film scoring.