Listening to violence: Point-of-audition sound, aural interpellation, and the rupture of hearing

Abstract

This chapter takes up the relation between sound design and subject positioning by exploring cinematic moments that dramatically stage point-of-audition sound, focusing on several films that ask audiences to listen to the sound of violence. In films such as Saving Private Ryan, Three Kings, The Pianist, There Will Be Blood, Children of Men, and Cop Land, point-of-audition sound is foregrounded through moments of trauma, when the sound of violence ruptures the hearing of characters, thereby testing the limits of aural interpellation. The chapter argues that listening to violence on screen may be heard most clearly, ironically, when hearing itself is endangered-both within the frame for characters suffering from their loss of hearing and beyond to an audience subjected to that very same loss.