Sent To The Seaside For My Health

Well, it has so much heart. The implications are heart-wrenching.

Like. There are countless scenes in Ladyhawke that are never shown, right? Like how do they hunt for food? Why did she cut her hair?

But you know from what is shown that all the stuff we're not shown is unbelievably harrowing and tragic. Even the most mundane things from changing clothes to how the characters sleep to the fact that he had to find hawk bindings is Way Too Much. Because this is horror, you know? Nobody thinks of Ladyhawke as horror, but it's literally about a supernatural curse. It's a werewolf movie. It's devastating.

And any decent movie will rely on what is not shown as much as what is, but Ladyhawke has stretched that into metaphor. Powerful, horrifying, supernatural things happen in the unseen moments, but mundane, everyday things happen, too. Everyday routines forced on these cursed people—Ladyhawke is a story built on a marathon of heartbreaking compromise endured day in and day out that we never get to see but slowly come to understand.

And I think that transition gives the movie so much heart.

It's because it's genuine. It's an 80s art rock soundtrack that takes itself seriously. And so people (especially men, who are often the first to laugh at or say they hate Ladyhawke's soundtrack) find that cringe.

There's nothing at all wrong with Ladyhawke's soundtrack. It's rock music. It's theme music. And speaking as someone with a degree in medievalism, I'm quite comfortable telling you Ladyhawke's soundtrack is more historically accurate than any contemporary orchestra doomfest could ever be for precisely that reason. Rock music is proletariat music. Dancing is for the people. Storytelling is for the people. Ladyhawke is all of that.

And cringe is why countless contemporary film soundtracks are Hans Zimmer-fied. And why countless films are drained of all color and enthusiasm and anything feminine, characterful, bodied, or sincere. The hyper-masculine is frightened of those things, so it protects itself by narrowing all enjoyment down to one note, one color, one idea so it can pretend it doesn't care and isn't bothered.

Ladyhawke—namely, Alan Parsons and Andrew Powell—did care.

Here's a song from The Alan Parsons Project's 1980 album Turn of a Friendly Card, a concept album themed around fortune and gambling that makes a pile of pop culture references (from Sergio Leone to Edgar Allan Poe).

You can hear an early Ladyhawke soundtrack in this:

No one will argue Alan Parsons wasn't a gifted, passionate musician who created awesome albums. He practically invented art rock.

But we've been conditioned to think "medieval" is miserable and bleak, the darkest and most savage of times, when it definitely was not. And we've been conditioned to think all period dramas are supposed to sound like Gladiator. Elenor Janega wrote a great article about distorted western/American ideas of medievalism in her blog last April.

What people forget about movies and music is the same thing they forget about medieval history, which is that it's experienced by people, who are complex, sincere, and messy. And the fear of that mess is why Film Bros or Soundtrack Bros or whoever else react by calling it cringe.

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