by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
In the fabric of the serial murdering, the mysterious visitor and a jealousy-riddled detective story, Simon Joyner finds Alfred Hitchcock essentially interested in people.
When Joyner, the Omaha singer-songer, live scores The Lodger on Thursday as the penultimate installment of Film Streams’ The Hitchcock 9 series, he’ll see reality more as a collection of priorities than a set of realistic plot points and actions.
“I think it's a variation on the same thing I do,” Joyner says. “I think Hitchcock is trying to capture essential truths about the human experience and all these sensational fictions are working in service of that aim. Same with writing songs about fictional characters who tend to act like people you know in real life.”
Joyner, the writer of 13 critically acclaimed albums of sometimes difficult and dissonant folk music, will perform an instrumental score Thursday night with The Ghosts Collective, an offshoot of his band The Ghosts which he assembled in 2012 for his record Ghosts. With Joyner on nylon string guitar, the ensemble will include Michael Krassner on electric guitar and keyboards, Megan Siebe on cello and vibraphone, Michael Friedman on pedal steel, vibraphone, and electric guitar and Kevin Donahue on drums and percussion.
With Krassner hailing from Phoenix, this week marks the first in which the whole outfit has been able to rehearse together. Previously, parts of the “mostly composed” score were emailed back and forth while they practiced alongside time-stamped versions of The Lodger.
The 1926 piece is one Hitchcock himself once called the “first true Hitchcock film” with themes and plotlines of murderous intrigue that firmly create the bottom level of the director’s career-long thriller pyramid. In the vein of Jack The Ripper, London has fallen plague to a serial killer called The Avenger who preys on beautiful, young blonde women. In a film shrouded in English fog, Hitchcock fixates on a dangerous love triangle comprising Daisy (a young model and would-be victim), her police officer boyfriend and a stranger who is staying with Daisy’s parents. The closer Daisy and The Lodger grow romantically, the more Joe suspects her parents’ house guest may be the night-stalking monster.
For Joyner’s part, The Lodger was the first silent Hitchcock film he ever watched, his first choice to score in The Hitchcock 9 series. There’s a family connection, too. Joyner describes his daughter Frances as an ardent Hitchcock fan, the kind of cinephile who named her hamster Ivor after Ivor Novello, the 1920s matinee idol who plays the movie’s title character.
“[And] we have a Corgi named Bates after Norman Bates,” Joyner says. “I knew Frances would be upset if I didn't do this one. She's studying in France until June and very upset to be missing this whole series. We may have to Skype her in on Thursday.”
For its place in Hitchcock’s larger filmography, Joyner says he finds some of the director’s visual techniques in The Lodger — with all the film’s washed out, discordant lighting and quick, eerie cuts — to be the tools of a burgeoning storyteller, not a visual artist playing around.
“What I like about The Lodger is how dark it is, visually and thematically. It has a story arc that works on its own and the techniques he's developing are serving the story more than the story is an excuse to experiment with technique. Not all his early silent films work on all levels like that. There are a couple incongruous cuts in The Lodger that make you realize he hadn't mastered the form yet, but I only noticed them because I've watched the film twice a week for a couple months. Otherwise, he seems to have come right out of the gate a genius.”
Joyner’s own work, including the critically celebrated The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll, has unquestionably pledged allegiance to darkness and introspection at times. The plucks of his guitar and the turns of phrase can be beautiful, but Joyner has told Hear Nebraska previously that his songs intentionally favor disruption to cleanliness. On Ghosts, for instance, there are moments when Joyner is able to orchestrate the volume and relationships in his whole band into the complicated sounds of a poet reciting his verse in the middle of an industrial war.
He sees Hitchcock as someone similarly interested in toeing, and then unexpectedly crossing, the lines between beautiful and ugly.
“Hitchcock always has moments of levity and definitely makes it easy to find the beauty in things,” Joyner observes. “That's part of his set-up, then he pulls the rug out from under you.”
However, Thursday night’s screening and scoring of The Lodger is not a Simon Joyner album. The fact that it represents a one-off performance in the airspace of another artist’s canonical work presents Joyner with its own kind of performance tension. The songwriter expresses gratitude toward Film Streams for the opportunity and excitement for Thursday night, and yet, anxiously, he’s an earnest guest in the house of Hitchcock.
“It's strange, I've worked as hard on this project as any other, I think,” Joyner says. “I was talking to Dan McCarthy and Ben Brodin [previous performers in The Hitchcock 9 series] about how nervous I was about this and they didn't really understand, given that I perform in front of people all the time. I told them that the shows I did opening for Bright Eyes where I had to go out on stage with just a guitar in front of a thousand people in an old theater in Europe was easy for me, but there's something about this that makes me uneasy. I think it's the fact that it's someone else's art that my group is entrusted with. Our job is to support Hitchcock's film and that's a pretty heavy burden. I don't take it lightly.
After all, he's not alive to give his permission, so I already feel we're out of line even trying to add our two cents.”
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.