The Music of Chance

(Philip Haas, USA, 1993)

This text extends the voice-over component of the audiovisual essay Chance and Destiny by Cristina Álvarez López and me which appears on the 2022 ViaVision DVD/Blu-ray of The Music of Chance. The film’s celebrated writer, Paul Auster – who also co-directed Blue in the Face (1995) with Wayne Wang – died 30 April 2024.

What does it mean for a film to double its fictional characters and their actions – and to double them in a different form, by way of an embedded story or image or form of representation?

Twenty-two minutes into The Music of Chance, we are introduced to the favourite pastime of Willy Stone (Joel Grey): his richly detailed model of a city. Willy’s dream is grandiose: this is his City of the World, so he can control it like a God – and even populate it with multiple versions of himself, seen at different, decisive moments of his life (such as buying the lottery ticket that made him rich).

Willy’s city also projects his own social values: the rather sinister ideology about work, happiness and freedom that he shares with his live-in companion, Bill Flower (Charles Durning). One odd project leads logically to another for these two wealthy gentlemen: they graduate from constructing model figures to building, reconstructing something in reality.

But there is also an empty, unfinished section of this model city – something that remains to be conceived and executed, some part of a story that is yet to be written. It is the mystery of this part-to-come that sets off the essential intrigue of The Music of Chance.

But let’s linger, for a few further moments, on the imagery of this City of the World. Any reduced model – of a person, a place, a moment in life – can be seen as literally belittling, derisory, mocking. It’s the real world, phenomenal reality – but frozen and reduced to the level of pure cliché.

Such an extravagant diorama is also the potential sign of an insane, tyrannical consciousness, a veritable Dr Mabuse at work – turning all humanity into pathetic, manipulable puppets. All these levels will figure in Philip & Belinda Haas’ screen adaptation of Paul Auster’s 1990 novel.

The register of irony and ambiguity is signalled even in the décor of the room housing the model: coloured, stained glass windows give dramatic lighting to the model – but in a constrained, rigid, over-determined way, nothing like the spiritual vision aspired to by a cathedral.

Forty-seven minutes in: a hand – the demiurgic hand of Willy – places a mini-trailer in the model landscape, mirroring the real one that now figures in the unfolding action outdoors. At 60 minutes, there’s another variation on the same manoeuvre. Is this a simple gesture of including something by depicting it, allowing it a representation within an artwork? Or is there a type of narrative voodoo going on here?

Did Jim (Mandy Patinkin) bring down some curse on himself and Jack (James Spader) by stealing one of these sacred, iconic model figures? Does the act of Willy introducing the model trailer or the wall-in-the-making cause a result in reality, actively creating that reality? If so, this music is not of chance at all, but of something much more malign: Fate or Destiny.

Narrative, by its very nature, always plays on the thin line between Chance and Destiny. We often want to believe that a story is simply occurring, moment by moment, by chance, and that its characters are free to react as they please, make choices, follow their own path. A cinema of the Eternal Present, as it has often been celebrated (by the filmmakers and fellow travellers of the Nouvelle Vague, for instance).

But the story has already been plotted, filmed and edited, and its ending has long been foreseen by the makers, its true narrators. The very idea of a music of chance is, in this sense, a deliberate paradox: for the musical shape of the narrative is (as it were) pre-scored, predetermined. Like Fate or Destiny.

Much modern or modernist storytelling in the 20th century has as its goal precisely to show or admit to this beguiling contradiction or interplay between chance and destiny. To immerse you in an illusion of freedom and then suddenly pull you further out, so that you can observe the entire mechanism. This is exactly what is meant when we say that a film is reflexive: that’s the process of the film somehow displaying its own mechanisms to you, the spectator.

Haas as a film director (his other best-known work in this medium is Angels and Insects [1995]) and Auster as a novelist inhabit similar positions on the cultural spectrum. In some sense (this was the gist of critic James Wood’s complaint concerning Auster as a postmodern writer), they almost constitute a certain comfortable, contemporary middlebrow of taste and achievement – but, for all that, an intriguingly sophisticated middlebrow.

Both Auster and Haas spin entertaining, immediate stories that draw from the handy resources of popular genres: mystery, thriller, action. Yet, equally, in and through the storyline, they deal in formal surprises and symmetries, reflexive games, evidently playful structures: all the trademarks of modernism in the arts.

At a first, casual glance, The Music of Chance would seem to be a relatively naturalistic film in its acting styles, and its overall, unostentatious manner of presentation – which betrays the televisual nature of its American Playhouse origin. But the more we look, the more we see how extremely patterned, structured and stylised everything is.

This is evident in the film’s only scene involving a woman (Samantha Mathis as a prostitute): beginning in the expected naturalistic key, it deliberately breaks form to showcase Patinkin singing – with excessive art and emotion – an angelic ode to the “arrows of desire” (from William Blake’s “Jerusalem” – the same words also provide a title for Ian Christie’s 1985 book on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger).

Two sets of men are mirrored: Jim and Jack, Flower and Stone; even the names are stylised. But with a twist: Jim and Jack, who sound like they should be alike, are completely opposite in character and manner; while Flower and Stone, who sound like opposites, are essentially the same being, fused and united in their matching white suits! On both sides of that line, the film leaves any queer implications unstated, suspended in the air.

There is much in The Music of Chance that veers toward the realm of the artificial, the geometrical, the surreal and the absurd. Building a wall in the middle of a field, for no practical purpose whatsoever, is almost a pop parody of the famous mythological, existentialist image of Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill until it comes rolling back down – and Jim & Jack have to suffer the same kind of repetitive cycle of resisting, and then submitting to, such exploitative drudgery.

The Music of Chance is a film with an unusual narrative trajectory and shape. For its first 40 minutes or so, it’s a story of gambling, of winning and losing – therefore, the pure domain of chance. Then we plunge into the strange venture of Jim & Jack building the wall. At this point, Stone & Flower begin to be seen or referenced less in the plot, and eventually they have vanished altogether, gone off-screen to Europe, never to be seen again.

The work foreman Calvin (M. Emmett Walsh) takes the place of Stone/Flower in the story, eclipsing their function. Calvin is then doubled in this function by his son-in-law, Floyd (Chris Penn) – thus forming a third male pair.

We see Jack escaping at the 78-minute point, and then he immediately turns up back in the field, nearly beaten to death: another, seemingly magical manipulation by an unseen and malign Hand of Fate.

Recall the tantalising remark made early in the film by Willy: he envisages making a model of the room which houses the model itself; therefore, the City of the World would have to be meticulously duplicated, doubled – but this time as a presumably microscopic miniature.

This is the type of regressive, infinite nightmare – very popular and current all through the 1980s – that filmmakers including Peter Greenaway, Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg, and philosophers including Jean Baudrillard, imagined. It’s a nightmare of eternal simulation, copies inside copies … until the entirety of the real world has been hollowed out and swallowed up.

If The Music of Chance as a film can be assimilated, beyond the memory of modernism, to the gyrations of a pop-postmodern culture, it sits less in 1990s cinema (where the Matrix franchise was on the way) than in the slightly more innocent debut of that trend in the ‘80s – the time of Tim Burton’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), for instance. But without the gags.

Haas’ version of the story doesn’t, however, end with the horror vacui of a precession of simulacra (the title of a 1981 Baudrillard essay). It leaps instead to another kind of modernist device: the recursive loop, the story that starts all over again, but re-set just slightly differently – with a new player, a blue car instead of the initial red car, and, this time, Jim on the road, rather than behind the wheel.

Is this the final pirouette the music of chance, or the swansong of destiny? Stone & Flower, as the manipulative masters, may have disappeared, but note who is now the driver at that wheel: it’s the master-author, Paul Auster, himself.

MORE Haas: Up at the Villa

© Adrian Martin May 2022