Danny Elfman
Ever the cinephile and Kubrick-esque recluse that is Sam Levinson, he would pick out for comparison from current history the composer who may be assumed to be nothing without his director.
And yet, even outside of him, the right hand to his left – Tim Burton – we very well know the following, as well as the aforementioned name, all by itself: Danny Elfman.
Such is no doubt because, as synonymous as he may be with our childhood memories of stop motion, Halloween, and the overall Burton image of an incessantly gothic world, laddening on more black upon our person and our minds as we then knew it, he just as well flourished a signature of his own. One that became the audible equivalent of catching a glimpse of someone we swear we know, amidst a room full of friendly faces that we do not.
His brass is his calling card, his minute sections of melancholic strings his sad seduction of scenes necessitating black, running tears. One could not be more recognizable without an image, and yet one of their most expert skills is to create one with what they have declared for the past 30 years to be their medium – sound.
A most ambitious comparison, indeed, on Levinson’s end.
And yet, he went ahead… And actually made the grand journey, as well as the revelation, of finding one that was not only worthy of being a nearly unrecognized successor of such a person as Elfman, but even better:
He presented with great and colorfully somber design, one that already had a name to be reckoned with.
And it was Labrinth.
The Choir
Shake from the ready and available mind, if you can, the black and white memories that have since been instilled.
Danny Elfman, legend though he is, has with the utmost formality left the room now; taking with him his ravens and crows and spindly fingers of influence that equate a once feared darkness with something young and lovingly misunderstood.
What shall now take its place is something much more frighteningly high and ethereal; even blinding. And so is befitting the nature of what it belongs to.
‘Euphoria’, the hit HBO Max TV series, officially graced our screens – via cable or streaming – precisely 6 years ago. And its soundtrack, which came floating alongside it like a soft, weeping specter, may as well have laid its hands just about the temples and above the eyes, so that all that we may view from then on would be seeped in such hues as fleshy, almost womb-like and internal pinks, and blues and purples the shades of bruises and wounds.
In plainer words, the music transported us before we had really any time to grasp what it was we were about to follow – these journeys into the mountains and valleys of adolescents of each individual character; most of all Rue, who was to be our Odysseus, mentally and physically tested at each turn by threats seemingly greater than herself.
And most of all, by her own addiction, that – because of Labrinth – had a siren’s call.
Emphasis on call. Unlike many of his current contemporaries, Labrinth uses voice and choral accompaniment as purposeful as one would insert dramatic pauses in the midst of a scene where words are not enough.
To put it simply, the essence of a human voice, or many, in the thick of a scene wherein uncertainty once debilitating is giving way to a hunger that is not so much carnal and veracious, but pleading and in tears – such is the insertion of Labrinth and his workings, whenever Rue even spares an inkling of a thought on using, or altogether relapsing.
With perhaps an unknowing Shakespearean stroke, he summons them where they can be very rightly heard, and practically pointed out on display, like one would find the narrating chorus of one of said originating literary’s plays. Only, instead of being lined up along the dark fringes of a stage, and calling out clear and with every breathful from the lungs, this clamour of voices beckoning arrives on screen in the form of colors, at the behest of decisions to be made.
Depending upon Labrinth’s direction of harmony or dissonance, said decision is either a sound choice, or a mistake to further be defined in the episodes to come.
And almost as if a reminder, it will cry its tune in the background every single time, as it does for ‘All For Us’. Only at the full arrival of the song, and its bombastically dream-like musical number that crowns the end of the first season, do we as the listening and visually enraptured audience realize that the song itself has been following Rue; throughout her to-and-fros between painful sobriety and embracing vices.
And in its completion – standing at a curling inward yet pronounced attention, and before the composer that is Labrinth – do we realize that its influence was never meant to be shaken.
Plainer still – it was never meant to be ignored by the likes of, not just Rue, but everyone that finds themselves within her reach, of which extends the hold of all things irreparably irresponsible, damaging, and fuzzy with the dual hues of teenage hope for all things to just… end, so that the pain may stop.
In fact, if it were not meant for more than just the one character, there would not be so many voices at all.
The End
All encompassing though he is in his audible presence, so much so that that and his sound may as well be characters that are central to the story of ‘Euphoria’ itself, Labrinth is – as displayed before – instrumental in taking the reins when it comes to the end of our journey.
Whatever form it shall be in by the time we are stood before it.
At the end of the first season, it is almost a mephisto waltz. Not so much in regards to genre and style, but in a fashion that is danced at what could be the end of the world as one knows it. Or in the case of a high school marching band, followed by clone red-hoodie-clad singers and sparkling faces, the end of trying so hard to maintain a false teenage normalcy.
The visual, as well as the routine, inebriatingly plays with it; masked in it.
All the while, Labrinth mourns it in the home-going fashion of sending it off in one great gesture.
Always to be reminded of in the back of one’s mind, so echoey and covered in a sheen of drug-induced memory.
And most of all, never to be forgotten.