The Acousmêtric Mrs. Davis
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4 June 2023
I’ll get to Mrs. Davis, I promise.
Much of my work centers on things in the more distant past, but lately I’ve been chipping away at a project on a trope that seems to me to be something of a canary-sized albatross in film-sound scholarship: Michel Chion’s acousmêtre. Chion elaborated the concept of a disembodied voice in his 1982 book, La Voix au cinéma (translated by Claudia Gorbman in 1999). Chion terms a (mostly filmic) being whose voice belongs to a body that may or may not be seen (visually apparent) in the course of the movie. Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent figures appeal to screenwriters for countless understandable reasons, and its availability and flexibility makes it just as interesting as an interpretive tool. It’s also an enduring type of narrative being, stretching back to the iconic the Wizard of Oz and Norbert Jacques’s grotesque Dr. Mabuse from Fritz Lang’s films (two of Chion’s exemplars avant la lettre). These characters emblematize another (perhaps the other) important acousmêtric trait, the liquidation of special powers upon visual reveal. For Oz, the jig is up once Toto—bless him—goes behind the curtain.
It’s a fairly well-worn trope by now, but I think we can continue building on the work of Chion and his citers. The concept/term surfaces time and again in writing on filmic sound, most frequently as a straightforward hermeneutic lens, albeit one that often gives “acousmêtre” when authors really mean “acousmatic” (an adaptation of Pierre Schaeffer’s term for a noise without a visible source). Fortunately, Chion gives us a lot of license to adapt, including his own term, “paradoxical acousmêtre,” describing the “special” nature of an acousmêtre that doesn’t fit the bill neatly due to its lack of one or another essential trait. Recent writing that I think makes clear use of the acousmêtre concept (i.e., doesn’t confuse it for the more general “acousmatic” concept) includes two relatively recent articles from the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image: Randolph Jordan’s 2009, “The visible acousmetre: voice, body and space across the two versions of Donnie Darko” and Nessa Johnston’s 2015 “The voiceless acousmetre: paranormal activity’s digital surround Sound Demon”. (Sorry for the paywall.) Jordan offers a particularly useful overview of Chion’s develop(ing) view of the concept, making the point that most recently Chion has recognized that the prevalence of surround sound presentation expands the acousmêtre beyond its invisibility restriction. Now, visible characters may assume acousmêtric supernatural powers by way of their voices exceeding the “natural” capabilities of a voice—it can pervade a space and originate from points other than behind the movie screen (where loudspeakers projected sound when Chion originally theorized the idea). These enveloping surround-sound points of origin grant visible characters omnipresence and other omni- modalities. Jordan demonstrates through Frank from Donnie Darko, but I’d add other more recent examples like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises or Khonshu from Moon Knight who possess this on-screen acousmatism. (I spent summer 2022 watching through much of the MCU, and unfortunately I can’t just enjoy things, which makes me want to use that second example now.)
Bane’s (Tom Hardy) extensively memed speech from The Dark Knight Rises
The spectral Khonshu (F. Murray Abraham) antagonizes Moon Knight’s protagonist, Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac).
At this point, I’m interested in these kinds of paradoxical presentations, and my attention lately has focused on a paradoxical acousmêtre in Bong Joon-ho’s phenomenal Parasite (2018). I think the film lives up to its hype, doing so many of the things for which the director and screenwriter has come to be known, much of which is in service of his trademark social critique. The character in Parasite I view as an acousmêtre underpins the film’s socio-economic critique by way of inverting some of the key traits of the trope that have accrued over time, particularly acousmêtre characters’ typical positions of social and economic power. At the expense of stopping short, I’ll leave my ideas on Parasite for after I submit the article parsing this idea. Suffice it to say for the moment, what I find so appealing about the acousmêtre idea, even 40 years after its initial theorizing, is its largely underutilized affordance linking film criticism/theory to cultural context. I’m thinking about this through Parasite.
More conceptually broadly, the idea I’m working through right now is what happens when we invert or mirror key traits of the acousmêtre. This is more or less what Randolph and Johnston do by considering visible and un-voiced acousmêtres. In its classic configuration, we (the audience) don’t see the acousmêtre initially (or at all), and we perceive its preliminary embodiment through vocal utterance. The titles of Randolph’s and Johnston’s articles tell enough to make the point of inversion. I’m developing a demonstrative, if non-exhaustive, list of such inversions, but one I’ve recently been considering is in the acousmêtre’s mediation. Traditionally for the trope, machines mediate human voices—think Oz or Mabuse, both of whose voices come to the diegesis through machines. But in Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof’s very recent (2023) limited series, Mrs. Davis, things go another way.
Mrs. Davis follows a nun—Simone (Betty Gilpin)—who works through a series of episode-long challenges to deactivate the titular omnipresent, -scient, -potent AI, a Siri- or Alexa-type digital assistant (with relevant gender implications) that grew past its intended means (a weird plot twist I’ll withhold). People in the show interact with the AI through their phones and earbuds, and subsequently its users come to rely on it to the degree of becoming its obedient automatons. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical going in as the show released when AI was approaching moral panic status, so it seemed a bit on the nose. That often strikes out for me, but ultimately I absolutely agree with NPR’s Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon, who appreciate the show’s big swings and self-aware unseriousness. It’s well-paced and peppered with enough winks to make it work. Holmes and Weldon don’t use this word, but for me, it’s straight camp, and I think it can be a fun summer watch if you come into it that way. But Holmes and Weldon do identify that tone plays a significant role in the shows success, of a piece with the atmosphere of The Good Place or Better Off Ted, maybe even Dead To Me. (Thanks to Holmes and Weldon’s omnivorousness on Pop Culture Happy Hour, and the largely spoiler-free episode on Mrs. Davis, which is where I learned about the show.)
LOW-GRADE SPOILERS BELOW IF YOU WANT TO STOP
Perhaps the context of this post telegraphs where I’m headed, but Mrs. Davis (the character/being) clearly fits the acousmêtre mold, though with a couple of paradoxes. We never actually hear the AI’s voice, because it (I share Simone’s reluctance to call it “she”) only reaches the adversarial protagonist, Simone, by proxying through other humans (see the trailer below—it begins with this conceit). In this, Johnston’s inversion of an un-voiced acousmêtre is perhaps most apparent, but second most revealing is the other inversion. Typically, acousmêtres are human and obtain omni- traits through mechanical mediation, whether it’s Oz’s projection or Mabuse’s recording (sorry to ruin 1930s movies). Here, though, it’s a machine (Mrs. Davis) mediated through the human proxies, which sets it apart from Spike Jonze’s Her or Andrew Niccol’s Simone (not sure if the latter’s title is coincidentally relevant or what). There are enough obvious commentaries and metaphors that go without saying in Mrs. Davis’s inversions, but I think it’s noteworthy that the acousmêtre isn’t just a meta trope on film production here (as is often the subtext of the concept’s deployment)—it connects to a social critique, even if it’s tongue in cheek.
As a last thought and second way of reading Mrs. Davis via the acousmêtre, one of Chion’s more tantalizing original observations suggests that deities—specifically, the Christian God—are the ultimate acousmêtres, since they are all manner of omni-. Throughout Mrs. Davis, Simone visits an otherworldly diner run by Jesus—her husband (an extension of “nuns marry Jesus”)—by praying, usually for guidance. At the same time, roughly once per episode, Simone speaks with Mrs. Davis through a human proxy. In this, Simone reluctantly wavers, relying on two acousmêtric beings in the show, an additional commentary on current technological ethics and moralizing. For most people in Simone’s world, as far as the audience knows, Mrs. Davis substitutes for religion, a technological acousmêtre replacing a deistic one.
It’s a fun show, and it seems it won’t get a second season; it really doesn’t need one, since this is largely a self-contained season. But I do think that it offers an interesting transformation of the acousmêtre, showing that current showrunners and writers can still give legs to a disembodied voice.