Abstract

Through a close reading of Woody Allen's Match Point (2005), this chapter describes pre-existing music's unique ability to manipulate film. Unlike the traditional film score, pre-existing music can bring to bear social, cultural, economic and/or political associations stemming from its various origins. As the use of pre-existing music in film has increased in recent years, exploration of its additive element can provide comprehensive and holistic interpretations of a given film or scene. While on the surface, the film questions socially grounded notions of divine justice, its quasi-Romantic narration criticizes normative tropes of masculinity in popular culture.

Keywords: opera, feminism, art

There's murder but it's used philosophically and not as a whodunit. I was trying to give a little substance to the story, so it wasn't just a genre piece.

Art, for Allen, represents the ultimate attempt of humans to overcome mortality.

[Allen] offers complex answers to these questions, allowing different arguments to be presented and discussed. However, it is worth adding that his moral discourse, although polyphonic, is at the same time somehow limited because it is transmitted by the stories of male characters who test their moral qualities in relations with women. [Allen’s] positioning of men and women is meaningful, as it conveys the traditional, misogynist idea that men are moral agents, whilst women are purely the objects of their actions without agency of their own. (2011: 6)