Wagner, Canned

What does postwar Hollywood cinema have to say about the commodification of musical listening and the effects of new technologies from the long-playing record to the loudspeaker on the cultural reception of Wagner? The act of recognizing excerpts from Tristan und Isolde structures the dramatic arc of Fritz Lang’s B-movie The Blue Gardenia, a noir mystery thriller made during the director’s Californian exile in 1953. The recycling of this unmistakable touchstone of nineteenth-century high culture in the context of McCarthyite America entails both a curious bleaching and emphatic reworking of its original dramatic and musical semantics. Subjected to the processes of musical atomization that thinkers like Theodor W. Adorno considered inherent to Wagner’s compositional techniques, the musical citation in the thriller offers a key case study for cinema’s multifaceted entanglements with the Romantic canon and its deeply rooted investments in musical meaning on screen.