In 2001 Uncle Pat returned a favor to dad with a DVD player.
The family crowded around the TV awaiting a revelation in picture and sound. A blue sky, clearer than life, with pure white clouds filled the screen, background for a monolith that read “Sony”. In an azure box in the screen’s top right corner: “Insert DVD”.
That’s when we realized we had to buy DVDs.
An eternity later mom took us to Sam’s Club. As we passed the DVD section, I, at my mother's side, like a four foot Wormtongue, noted that some $29.99 DVDs were marked down to $17.88.
Mom never bought one of us a twenty dollar item because then she’d have to buy five of us a twenty dollar item. But somehow, the wholesale price, my excitement and the $300 paperweight in her living room changed her. She bought Unbreakable for me.
They don’t make DVD cases like Unbreakable’s anymore. A black and blue sleeve with a window to a beautifully designed “Unbreakable” logo: reflective gray lines and jagged blue smoke evoking broken glass and the supernatural. The case folded out. Two DVDs - one for the movie, one for “special features”, whatever those were.
Most memorable was the FBI warning, which unexpectedly shattered into pieces with a crack I used to show off DVD quality sound.
The DVD player's remote had dozens of buttons, each linked to functions I later used to dissect my favorite movies. There was an “AB Repeat”, used to watch Trinity’s first jump on an endless loop. “Step” pushed the movie forward one frame at a time so I could make flip book recreations of The Phantom Menace's lightsaber duels. The “Next Chapter” button skipped to all my favorite Fellowship of the Ring parts in seconds (before that you had to fast forward through the whole damn tape). I slow motioned every fight scene, becoming aware of the editing tricks.
All this would come later. But it all started with Unbreakable.
Unbreakable means even more to me. My father was a cop. When I was young he never spoke to me about patrol, but I’d hear snatches of stories, of him wresting a gun from a criminal, of shots in the streets, of ramming fugitive motorcycles in the patrol car. I’d see the worn leather holster on his ankle when he sat down to dinner, and hear him unload his revolver before he went to sleep, hear the bullets fall into his hand.
My dad was a cop, a good one, who risked his life to help people. He was over six foot and built like a rugby player. I was an undersized, bookish kid. If you’ve seen Unbreakable, you know how I could relate to its father-son dynamic.
But it was more than that. Specific moments of the film were ripped from my life, like the benchpress scene. Sometimes before work dad went down to the basement to lift weights. He’d be on the bench while I sat on the stationary bike reaching for the pedals. He’d tell me while he benched, “pushups are the way to go, don’t worry about benching. Pushups are the full body work out”, which was his way to discourage me from trying out the bench when he wasn’t there. He’d give me a hand grip strengthener, saying it was the most important: “If, when you first grab the bad guy, your grip is strong, you scare the shit out of them, they won’t mess with you”. As he curled his fingers around the bar, my dad told me, almost exactly as Bruce Willis does: “If anything bad happens, get Mom”.
On top of that, Unbreakable's weightlifting scene appealed because it is masterfully filmed. Bruce Willis’s character David Dunn adds more and more weight to his bench at the prodding of his son, so that they can determine his max. Finally, all available weights are attached to the bar. Dunn seems to struggle, but he benches this impossible weight several times. It’s almost proof that he has superhuman capabilities.
Dunn’s so strong, he even benches the weight of the camera: as he drops the bar down the camera falls; as he pushes up, the camera lifts. On his next rep the camera forgets this convention and settles in disbelief on Dunn's face. Great filmmaking.
But even better than the camera was the score.
All the above, the specific manner in which I related to this scene, I didn’t realize that was happening. I just felt a compulsion to watch the scene over and over. From the same impulse I found and downloaded the music to the scene, which is called “Weightlifting”.
For years I’d listen to "Weightlifting", most of the time in the car or in bed, just visualizing the scene, syncing it to the music in my head.
At some point, I read about a piece of music in film, how it developed with a character, and reached its full form when the character did (it was from soundtrackreviews.com, a site, that while at times pretentious and dismissive of non-orchestra music, is remarkable for its reviews’ focus on musical analysis).
So my first step in unravelling the mystery of this song’s power over me, was recognizing that its central conceit is the development of a theme, Bruce Willis’s character’s David Dunne’s hero theme.
You can here a full rendition of the theme at :22 in “The Orange Man”.
There are two parts to the theme. Part A is the build from :23 to :29. Part B, :30 to :37, is a repeated flourish that overflows that build. The A build is not much more than a D note, to a dominant 5th A, to a higher D. That may seem like it has no meaning to you, but it does. It’s a known progression that somehow sounds elemental and heroic. John Williams’ Superman theme manipulates the same note proportions, as does the beginning of Strauss’ "Also Sprach Zarathustra".
So Howard picked an elemental and heroic set of notes for his hero. Then he played them at a rate that matches the hero’s arc. The first two notes are held for a long time, then the following notes come quick: the A part of the theme is hesitant to take on its full heroic nature. Just like David Dunn, we are uncertain for a long time as to whether the theme will accept that it is a hero.
The B part of the theme plays around that high D note, that is, plays around the fulfillment of the heroic nature, and repeats, restates its own heroic nature: it’s accepted that it is a hero. The theme’s composition is an outline for David Dunn’s character progression, his acceptance that he has superhuman abilities.
Whenever the theme is fully stated in the movie, it’s when David Dunn accepts that he has superhuman capabilities. But, for the most of the movie he doesn’t accept this. So, for most of the movie, Howard only gives us quiet or truncated versions of this theme.
Nowhere is this more apparent than “Weightlifting”. In the piece, we keep getting weak versions of the theme, or halves of it.
At the very the beginning, there are two repetitions of the A part of the theme (not part B). Dunn has the realization that he can bench an unexpected amount of weight. Something remarkable happened, but not out of the realm of normal possibility. Dunn is not convinced that he is superhuman. So only the A part of the theme is played, and it’s played vaguely and with minimal accompaniment.
Then at :41 the A part of the theme comes back twice, stronger. Once as a lone trumpet, once as a bunch of strings with accompaniment. This coincides with Dunn being able to bench even more weight.
At 1:01, we finally hear the B part of the theme, but it’s high and vague, almost spectral, and unnaturally extenuated, trailing off.
At 1:17, the A part repeats twice. There is something interesting rhythmically going on underneath. We’ll come back to it soon.
Finally at 1:42 the hero theme plays, still not in full grandeur, but with strong accompaniment. It’s the first strong statement of the full theme. It coincides with Dunn lifting what is almost certainly a superhuman amount of weight.
But more happens at 1:47. There is a dramatic lift to the music here that comes from something other than the choice of instruments or their volume or the playing of the theme.
I remember being on a 12 hour trip in my family’s E-350, listening over and over to this part, trying to figure out what gives this section its extra left.
The answer is rhythm. Contrast the rhythm of the song from 1:17 to 1:47, with from 1:47 on. Rhythm is hard to nail down, but just feel the music and see how your foot taps to it. From 1:17, my foot taps to the piano rhythm, that delicate, tentative, but magical piano. It’s a quick rhythm, to me it sounds like…for example, from 1:18 to 1:21 (one cycle of the piano piece) - that sounds like 6 beats to me, three sets of 2 beats (the first four of which sound like a ping pong between two notes on the piano). That pattern is repeated until 1:43.
Now there is an almost rhythmless span between here and 1:46. This is the precise moment in the film when Dunn lifts the weigh off its rest and lets the weight drop.
Rhythm is a very soothing aspect of music, because it lets us know what our immediate future will be: our future will be this beat, over and over. But right here, we come to a part in the movie where the future isn’t certain: will Dunn lift the weight? Accordingly, the rhythm becomes less certain.
Right at the end of 1:43, a big drum sounds. This is an amazing touch.
Do you lift? There is a moment after you lift the weight off its hold when you feel the weight come down on you: that’s what that drum represents. The end of the quick, weak piano rhythm marks the moment when Dunn’s made the decision to go into the unknown and lift the weight; that drum at 1:43 is the moment an instant later when he can feel the full weight press down on his palms.
The rhythm of the next section, the section that finally strongly states the hero theme, becomes apparent at 1:47, with a drum beat and a sustained bass harmony. It’s a much slower rhythm then the piano rhythm we had before, and I think that’s what gives this section so much more strength.
The rhythm is so slow that the first beat is at 1:47, but the second doesn’t come until 1:49. That doesn’t seem slow on paper, but it’s an eternity in sound. Consider that from 1:18 to 1:21, we heard 6 full beats of the weak piano rhythm. Here, it takes almost 2 seconds for 1 full beat.
That longer beat, along with the muscular, singular bass emphasizing it, gives the undercurrent of the first statement of the theme so much more strength. Each beat is holding up seconds of music, instead of fractions of seconds.
The difference in rhythmic strength is like the difference between New Year’s Resolution John blasting 6 reps of just the bar (the weak 6 beat piano measure from 1:18 to 1:21) vs. Arnold doing 5 slow, controlled reps of 200 lbs. (the 5 beats from 1:47 to 1:59).
So Howard sonically recreates the experience of lifting a large amount of weight, mostly through rhythm: the nervous expectation is in the quick, weak rhythm of the piano; the feeling of the weight crushing down on you is in that first drum beat at 1:43; the growing strength and resolve of a well done rep is in that strong, slow rhythm and bass from 1:47 on.
The use of rhythm here was a revelation for me, laying on that car bench on a long road trip. It came to me through feel: I observed how my hand impulsively waved to the music, how from 1:17 my hand moved quickly with the piano, and how from 1:47 it moved slowly and deliberately with the bass and drum.
Up until this point, I was a fair observer of melody, but barely registered rhythm. This piece changed me. “Weighlifting”’s rhythmic shift had been playing on me for years without my notice, keeping me coming back. Its effect still leaves me speechless, even though its mystery is gone. Melody is interesting. Rhythm is powerful. People are the same as music. Unnoticed rhythms drive our feelings and actions. Do you hear them?
EXTRA: "The Wreck", from 1:00 to 2:30, is another highlight. There’s this descending bass of dread that marks Dunn’s fear for his girlfriend and an anxious hopeful build at 1:35, especially in the violin flourish from 1:44 to 1:47, when he sees there is a chance to save her.
All the while a strange rhythmic uniformity builds great tension. At 1:59 a violin hit cuts through the tension, and then everything but the strings falls out as we see Dunn use his superhuman strength to save her. A powerful rendition of the theme gathers.
The 1:59 violin hit that coincides with Dunn bending the door is one of my favorite moments in film. I think it’s because, before that point, the music scores ours and teenager Dunn’s dread. But after that point, it scores ours and present-day Dunn’s recognition that Dunn is superhuman.
I think what gets me is that while we experience that recognition through this triumphant music after 1:59, the teenager Dunn of the memory doesn’t recognize it. On screen underneath the triumphant music, we still see an extremely anxious Dunn. He is oblivious to the fact that he just did something impossible. He is so focused on saving the girl.
To me that is beautiful. To push yourself to do something that every single person who witnessed it would see as superhuman, but to not notice it yourself, because you are so focused on helping someone else. His self disappeared. That’s love. This emotional aspect is not visible in the visuals, the music communicates it.
