It feels like something from your childhood, a distant memory of a hand curled around your tiny palm.
—Kat Trout-Baron on ‘Clair de Lune’Dancing in the Twilight: the allure of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ in the movies
From Ocean’s Eleven to Twilight, few pieces of music are as ubiquitous in cinema as Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. Fran Hoepfner dances in the moonlight of movies past and present to understand the emotional connection.
When beloved character actor Carl Reiner passed away in June 2020, there was an impetus—as there is with many Hollywood icons—to share the most memorable parts of his work on Twitter. For Reiner, an actor with hundreds of credits to his name, many relied on one of the most moving moments from his work: the conclusion of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven in which each lovable cad stands at the Fountains of Bellagio in Las Vegas. Reiner, the eldest among the gentleman thieves, stays the longest to take in all the glory of the moment. The lights twinkle, the night air is warm, and softly, in the background, Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ plays.
Debussy’s short piano work is one of the most reliably used, if not overplayed, classical songs in film history. Need a small romantic moment? A sense of accomplishment? The need to feel big or small in a world too small or big? Then why not fall back on ‘Clair de Lune’? Barely more than five minutes long (depending who’s playing) it’s a piece so melodic and evocative that the first few notes conjure not only a lifetime of other films, but memories.
Letterboxd is rife with lists tallying Debussy’s cinematic omnipresence, ranging from “new releases that have clair de lune in them and made me cry in seat 11 row H of filmscene” by Kat to “clair de lune jumpscare” by Jas to Molly’s “Movies with Clair de Lune-centered moments” (“Go Clair, I guess,” Molly adds). From the aforementioned Ocean’s Eleven to Twilight, from Atonement to The Game, from The Right Stuff to the original The Purge, ‘Clair de Lune’ has made an undeniable impact on the past 40 years of filmmaking, recently packing a gut-punch in Best Picture-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. But is Debussy’s piece a stroke of genius or hackneyed short-cut? I was determined to find out.
Though often played in isolation, ‘Clair de Lune’ belongs to Debussy’s four-part piece known as Suite Bergamasque, written first in 1890 and published in 1905. The suite’s title is taken from both geography and moment: the Italian region of Bergamo was known for popular street theater performances of commedia dell’arte which became known as “Bergamask” or “Bergamasque”.
Debussy, coming out of a generation of Romantic composers, is compelled by this, no doubt. On the cusp of the Romantic and Impressionist eras, he is motivated not only by feeling and emotions, but also nature and travel. “When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous and ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me,” the composer once said in an interview with Henry Mahlerbe.
“The Romantics were obsessed with Italy,” a friend once told me, which is how you get a Frenchman in his late twenties writing about Italian street entertainment for piano. ‘Clair de Lune’ is one of four parts to Debussy’s suite; while its three siblings take inspiration from dance, the famous Clair is based on a poem from Paul Verlaine. Its title translates to “moonlight” (apologies to anyone who thought it might be about a person named Claire), and reads as such:
Moonlight
Your soul is a select landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.
The moody, forlorn tone of Verlaine’s poem is a bit reminiscent of none other than Twilight’s Edward Cullen, who just so happens to have ‘Clair de Lune’ playing on his stereo when he brings Bella home for the first time. “‘Clair de Lune’ is great,” she mutters, as any high schooler from the early aughts would. They touch hands, dance slowly in Edward’s bedless bedroom, the scene right out of the Italian streets that Verlaine might have pictured as he wrote.
Verlaine’s poem and Debussy’s piece are infused with a similar wistfulness: “They do not seem to believe in their happiness.” Is this true of Bella Swan, of Danny Ocean’s team? The emotional resonance of ‘Clair de Lune’ in context is often much more nuanced than its composer could have intended—but what is that resonance?
I am telling on myself when I say my own personal affiliation with ‘Clair de Lune’ is Ocean’s Eleven’s moving conclusion, its saccharine happily-ever-after. To this day, it remains my favorite use of the piece, although I had no knowledge of it having been brazenly lifted from The Right Stuff. “It’s a pretty direct theft from The Right Stuff, which is why I thank Philip Kaufman in the end credits,” Soderbergh tells Letterboxd. (“Wow, that is really nice,” Kaufman said, at the time of the film’s release, of Soderbergh’s recognition.)
In Tom Charity’s BFI classics book The Right Stuff, about the 1983 film and its history, Kaufman related his use of ‘Clair de Lune’ during Miss Sally Rand’s dance as less bergamaskers and more in reference to “the shamanist rituals in The White Dawn but it refers most immediately to the Aboriginal dance performed before Gordo during Glenn’s flight.” It is kitsch, but it is glorious kitsch. (The Right Stuff’s composer Bill Conti had himself had been instructed by Kaufman to hew as closely as possible to the temporary track the director had used during the film’s editing: Holst’s ‘The Planets’ and Henry Mancini’s theme from Kaufman’s film of a decade earlier, the aforementioned The White Dawn.)
But I hadn’t seen The Right Stuff when I saw Ocean’s Eleven. I didn’t know this reference. I was ten years old upon its release, and it very well could have been the first PG-13 rated film I saw. Though I was a classical music-obsessed child, I never considered it was a piece written by anyone other than Conti, the film’s composer. Jake Cunningham, host of the Ghibliotheque podcast, has similar memories of this moment. “I didn’t know what the song was or who the composer was, and honestly, that it wasn’t part of the film’s original score,” he writes to me. “I have a vivid memory of using a very early version of Amazon, when you could preview a snippet of songs on a soundtrack album, and worked my way through all of the tracks until I ‘discovered’ this amazing song. What a hidden gem!”
Cunningham created a tongue-in-cheek Letterboxd list pairing Ocean’s Eleven and The Right Stuff, under the heading “Films featuring a scene in which a group of men who have been working towards a common goal and when they succeed are then shot in close up, as they communally look up at something whilst ‘Clair[e] De Lune’ plays”. Elaborating, he explains, “Both of these moments happen with a large group of people around a momentous occasion. There’s a sense of achievement in the song, it’s tender but rousing at the same time, and there’s a romance to it that gets dialed up or back depending on the version.”
Like Paul Verlaine’s bergamaskers, there is a sense of finality to ‘Clair de Lune’: every dance has to come to an end. This mix of achievement and sadness, completion in all its facets, sits in the space between the notes of Debussy’s piece. The gentle lift suggests a deftness of hand, a weightlessness through space.
I admit I’m inclined, in recent years, to find the use of Debussy’s piece a failsafe, an easy pull at available heartstrings, but something Cunningham writes burrows its way into my brain like a 19th-century earworm: “Depending on the version.” In its amorphous, nostalgic form, ‘Clair de Lune’ is played on piano, hands not so much trawling but bouncing off the keys as they might on the moon. That’s not always the case, however, and not all piano interpretations share this light sensibility. In truth, no listen of ‘Clair de Lune’ is ever the same as the one before it, a century-plus game of telephone rambling on.
Consider the adaptation of ‘Clair de Lune’ used in Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon, played not by a solo pianist but the San Francisco Saxophone Quartet. This instrumental transposition lends the piece a jazzier, urban interpretation, less a wistful Italian small town and more a sunset at the end of a long work day. The breathy, winsome nature pairs beautifully with the breathless quality of the film, its uncle-nephew duo chasing each other around the United States on a grand, exhausting journey of family and understanding.
For Kat Trout-Baron, maker of the Letterboxd list “new releases that have clair[e] de lune in them and made me cry in seat 11 row H of filmscene”, the song conjures feelings of closeness. “It feels like something from your childhood, a distant memory of a hand curled around your tiny palm,” she tells me. “It might not be from that time, but it has the same type of faded sweetness. It makes your heart pull for the embrace of a loved one or a confession beneath the stars. It makes me feel lonely and it makes me feel whole.”
Say what you want about ‘Clair de Lune’, it is an undeniably earnest piece of music. Son Lux, who composed the score for the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once, used the classic cue to infuse the action-comedy with genuine feeling. “I was following another directive from Daniels, which was that the music in most cases in this film needed to try to earnestly convey that their love was serious and sweet,” Son Lux guitarist and producer Rafiq Bhatia told Slashfilm.
Of course, an emotionally loaded ‘Clair de Lune’ needle drop is not always as effective as a filmmaker hopes it will be. In Courtenay's review of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the use of Debussy’s piece is the subject of ribbing: “Society has progressed past the need to use ‘Clair de lune’ to score emotional scenes in media.” In our correspondence, Courtenay speaks to that moment a little more: “[W]hen I saw EEAAO, I remember feeling, like, a little groan when I heard it in full in the climax. I felt the movie (which I did like!) had already successfully created all these other moments that made me feel emotional without relying on something so rote, especially in a movie that was trying to be so unconventional.”
That EEAAO’s use of ‘Clair de Lune’ plays on audience expectations—this is a song we know, and for which we feel the weight of nostalgia—is a useful way to consider how scoring works in film. It is not as though ‘Clair de Lune’ appears on a lark, that every filmmaker or music producer thinks of it for the first time every time.
For Isi Litke, who lectures on art, politics and the avant garde, the overuse of ‘Clair de Lune’ in modern film is “almost never effective.” She tells me, “This piece, maybe more than any other, always brings to mind Adorno’s writing on film music and the regression of listening. It's the perfect example of a fatally popular (to use Adorno’s term) bit of music that serves as an easy and all-too-recognizable cue, signpost, or shorthand for stock dramatic or emotional beats. (Atonement contains a particularly egregious example of this.)”
But that doesn’t mean ‘Clair de Lune’ is always drawing on a similar emotional shortcut. Consider, in that vein, the use of Debussy’s piece in the opening of the 2013 film The Purge—the first in its long-winded franchise—to score scenes of gleeful, miserable violence on security camera footage; the ways in which DeMonaco bends our expectations of the piece.
“It’s a moment that captures what [writer/director James] DeMonaco was initially horrified by—that violence is a widespread tragedy in a nation that adores weapons as a means of protection, and that answers to fear with hatred, not compassion,” writes Nick Allen for RogerEbert.com. The ‘Clair de Lune’ cue in that opening suggests a warm fondness for weapons, for mass violence, for chaos. The twist on expectations only enriches the depth of the piece’s pathos: our own weakness for impressionistic music can be used against us, to make us sentimental for all that we loathe.
‘Clair de Lune’ can haunt as well. In Federico Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On, Debussy’s piece is one of many famous classical music pieces that punctuate his film about a troupe of opera singers and company who board a luxury ship from which they intend to scatter the ashes of one of their own. Whenever the beloved deceased, Edmea Tetua, is invoked, ‘Clair de Lune’ drifts into the background of the scene, her presence the ever-watchful moon above (sometimes literally). Fellini said of his scoring that he “went searching for the striking and indestructible emotions, whether seductive or saddening” that music provided him over the course of his life.
For Courtenay, one of the more ingenious uses of ‘Clair de Lune’ is on HBO’s Watchmen. “Not only is the rendition really beautiful, its use (like nearly everything in the series) is perfect. Ozymandias is on Europa, and it’s chilling and beautiful. It’s also a little silly and macabre, and I think ‘Clair de Lune’ pairs well with that.”
When a film’s score is original, its composer works from the text and context of what’s on screen to form the sound and shape of the music. These scores can range from the rote and traditional—sweeping strings, blaring horns—to something a little more odd, original, like the work of Mica Levi for Jackie or Michael Abels’ work for Jordan Peele’s films. Consider the oddness in imagining an infamous score like Howard Shore’s for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in any other movie.
Pre-existing classical music in film generates a canon of its own, tethering all sorts of films—good, bad, soft, violent, magical, realistic—together in one big universe. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony was a focal point of both TÁR and Decision to Leave, two films that could not be more different, minus both their affinities for women who do nothing wrong (I’m kidding). We’ll hear the Fifth again in Bradley Cooper’s forthcoming Maestro, which explores the life of Mahler-loving composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre.
On that note, the one significant attempt at a biopic of Claude Debussy is a 1965 Ken Russell-directed work of British New Wave metafiction, starring Oliver Reed as an actor learning to embody the composer. More a deconstruction of the narrative biographical form, The Debussy Film, as Carlos Valladares writes in a review, uses the composer’s “writhing, melodramatic life as the starting point for an ambitious exploration of ideas of reality and fiction in film.” Debussy’s is not the only music on the soundtrack, Guss Van der Peet notes: “Of course any classical composer’s biopic must contain a Kinks needle drop quickly followed by a pair of panties landing on the record player during a stripping scene.” (To Debussy’s ‘Danse sacrée et danse profane’, no less.)
Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ would and does not work in just any context—it’s not heard at all in The Debussy Film—and even some of its most infamous uses are flawed, or predictable. But consider that no performance of the piece is exactly the same, all dependent on the room, the mood, the player, and the audience.
Rather, I return to the words of Jake Cunningham, who at the time of writing was soon to be getting married. “I’ve got four separate playlists that all kick in at different points across the day, the final playlist coming in for the last hour of the whole thing. I’m sure in those dwindling, slow-moving, dance-floor, smoking area-stuffed moments there will be a sense of achievement, teamwork, nostalgia, hope and romance,” he told me.
Of course, what could be a more perfect song for that than ‘Clair de Lune’?
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