Speeding it up, slowing it down

By now, many of you have probably heard “Slow Ass Jolene,” the viral version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” slowed down by twenty-five percent, which transforms it from a polished crossover country track to a haunting, soulful gay love song. It’s a reminder, first of all, of how great the original is—it’s probably my second-favorite country song of all time, second only to “Wichita Lineman”—and, more subtly, of how powerful a change in tempo can be. Recording artists have been aware of this, of course, for almost as long as they’ve been in the studio. Offhand, I know that the piano coda to “Layla,” a song to which I’ve devoted a lot of thought, was sped up slightly during the mixing session, changing its key from C major to somewhere between C and C sharp. The Beatles made great use of this, too: “When I’m Sixty-Four” was sped up in the studio to give the vocals a more bouncy feel, and a similar trick was used on the piano in “In My Life,” which was recorded with the tape playing at half speed and restored to normal in the mix.

Occasionally, you’ll see a similar approach taken in other media. David Mirkin, the showrunner responsible for what are arguably the greatest seasons of The Simpsons, would often speed up an entire episode very slightly rather than cut material to fit the show into its time slot, which is why the dialogue in episodes like “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” seems to zip along so quickly. Less successfully, during the editing of Terminator 2, James Cameron was having trouble getting the movie down to its contractual length when he was hit by a bright idea: why not just remove one frame of film from every second of the movie? The result, unfortunately, was unwatchable, but I at least give Cameron credit for ingenuity. (Cameron began his career as a screenwriter, and I’d like to think that this brainstorm was the result of the sort of fudging that most writers do to get their scripts down to an acceptable page count. Terry Rossio has a wonderful rundown of all these tricks—from changing the line spacing to physically shrinking the page on a photocopier—in a hilarious post on his blog.)

Nearly all these examples involve compressing the underlying material to be faster and shorter, which is generally a good impulse to follow. I’ve gone on record as saying that every rough draft ought to be cut by ten percent, and sometimes it’s the pressure of an arbitrary constraint—a television time slot, a contractual length—that forces you to make these tough choices. Their absence can lead to results like the fourth season of Arrested Development, in which nearly every episode is allowed to run ten minutes too long, often with unfortunate consequences. Yet as “Slow Ass Jolene” reminds us, it can also be good to take things more slowly. Just as the tone of “Jolene” is radically altered by a slower tempo, a slow book or movie can draw us in when a faster approach would have left us untouched. The author Colin Wilson, in his essay “Fantasy and Faculty X,” argues that the slow openings of a writer like Thomas Mann force the two halves of the brain to come into sync, allowing us to imagine the action more vividly, and I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in writers as dissimilar as Marcel Proust and John Crowley.

As for movies, I don’t know any examples of films that were physically slowed down in the editing room, but the same issues of tempo and pacing guide an editor’s selection of footage, and there are times when slower is better. There’s no better example than the first cut of The Godfather. After watching the cut, which was slightly over two hours long, producer Robert Evans reportedly said to Coppola:

The picture stinks. Got it? The Untouchables is better. You shot a great film. Where the fuck is it—in the kitchen with your spaghetti? It sure ain’t on the screen. Where’s the family, the heart, the feeling—left in the kitchen too?…What studio head tells a director to make a picture longer? Only a nut like me. You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie.

Now, this is Evans’s version of events, and he’s nothing if not self-serving. But it’s a matter of record that the initial cut of The Godfather lost much of the material, especially in the first hour, that drew us into that movie’s world, and if it hadn’t been restored, the history of cinema would be different. Knowing when to speed things up and when to slow things down is one of the trickiest questions in an artist’s life, and only time and experience can teach us the difference.

The Layla effect

I don’t think there’s a more powerful moment in all of rock music than the transition between the two halves of “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. For three minutes, we’ve been living near the heart of a man’s romantic and sexual agony: the critic Dave Marsh calls it one of those rare songs in which “a singer or writer has reached so deeply into himself that the effect of hearing them is akin to witnessing a murder or a suicide.” Then there’s a trailing off, a pause, and we’re launched into Jim Gordon’s transcendent piano coda, which takes over the rest of the track and leads us triumphantly to the end. It’s unclear how the two halves are meant to relate, or whether the coda is the sound of love fulfilled or abandoned, but the juxtaposition of the two movements creates an effect that is far more profound than either of them taken separately. The result is a song that has obsessed me—and so many others—from the moment I first heard it, to the point where I’ve written much of my current novel with “Layla” playing in the background.

This sort of synergy, in which two seemingly unrelated components are set side by side to create a larger whole, is such a powerful artistic tool that it deserves special consideration. Some of the most memorable pop songs ever written, from “Hey Jude” to “Dry the Rain,” consist of two contrasting halves joined together in a way that only seems more mysterious with time. In many cases, the pieces weren’t originally meant to go together at all: the piano coda to “Layla” was composed as a separate piece, and was joined to the first half—which had already been written and recorded—when Clapton happened to hear Gordon playing it in the studio one day. These sorts of decisions may seem like serendipity, but they’re really an expression of craft on a deeper level: I suspect that Clapton intuitively sensed that the song was incomplete without some form of resolution, and that he seized on the coda as the missing piece he needed, precisely because it seemed like a dispatch from a different world entirely.

We see this effect in other forms of art as well. I mentioned recently that many of Shakespeare’s most resonant plots—from The Merchant of Venice to King Lear—arise from the combination or juxtaposition of two previously unrelated storylines. There’s no better example of this than The Winter’s Tale, the most beautiful and mysterious of the late romances, which moves from a tragedy of sexual jealousy in Sicily to the gentlest of pastoral comedies in Bohemia. (It’s a transition that may work better on the page than in performance: the production I saw several years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, directed by Sam Mendes, did a fine job with the tormented first half, but turned the second half into an aimless hootenanny. As usual, comedy is harder to stage than tragedy, and this is never more clear than when one follows right after the other.) On a more calculated level, we find a similar transition halfway through Psycho: I’ve seen this movie countless times, and I still get a chill when I first glimpse the sign of the Bates Motel through the rain, which reminds me of which movie I’m really watching.

On one level, the impact of such juxtapositions is easy to explain: creativity, as Arthur Koestler points out in The Act of Creation, is about combinations, and when two contrasting pieces are set side by side, it’s no surprise that elements of the first half can bring out unsuspected qualities of the other. (You often see this in visual art, which has long been familiar with the power of the diptych.) But that doesn’t tell us why the pieces can vibrate so memorably in certain cases, while in others they just tend to lie there—or why two unrelated pieces are so much more effective than three, even as the rule of three works so powerfully in other contexts. A work of three parts, with its tidy tripod of effects, can come across as a piece of artistic calculation, or like the three stages of an argument, while two implies something deeper. There’s no better example than Chungking Express, with its two parallel stories of policemen in love: Wong Kar-Wai originally planned to tell three, but only had time for two, an accident for which we can all be profoundly grateful. Three stories would have come across as a narrative device, while two seem like life itself, and like the coda for “Layla,” it feels as if it could go on and on.