Sonic Codes of Narrative Perspective in Rally
by Bridget Lewis
Created with the ubiquitous Unity game engine, Rally is a 10-minute animated thriller short about two smugglers transporting a hostage across a heavily guarded border. Driver and co-pilot communicate sparsely in a vehicle outfitted to evade detection. At the border, they trip a sensor and lose power before falling under attack. The co-pilot is shot just before the driver regains control and speeds away to complete the mission. He delivers the hostage, is paid for his efforts, and dumps his partner’s body.
The relationship between video games and film hinges on how the audience plays a role within each medium. Video games require viewers to participate as agents within their narrative, while in film, viewers are audience members. In Rally, we cycle between looking through the eyes of the driver versus those of a “narrator”. This prompts us to consider the points of view, and therefore audition, which shape a viewer’s experience with the film. From the video game perspective, we as viewers inhabit an avatar, the driver, through whom we experience the pressure of this dangerous journey and the regret from its devastating aftermath. In the cinematic authorial view, we are to understand the wider implications of the world being built by the film and how it devalues human life. The non-diegetic music aids the image track in developing the dichotomy of these embodied and disembodied views by sonically coding the two perspectives through symbolic instrumentation.
Within the first minute of the film, the sound of a flute becomes a trademark of the point of audition for the driver. Understanding the mechanics of the flute brings added value to the image track, especially to understand the several internal moments of the driver. In these shots, the camera closes in on the eyes of the driver, before our view shifts to the driver’s own perspective. These internal moments are accompanied by only the driver’s breathing, all other sound is stifled.
By focusing on his breath, we are reminded of how a flute is operated. Its notes are sustained by blowing over a hole in the pipe. Drawing this connection between the driver’s breath and the flute, brings to mind the Greek word for breath, “pneuma”, which also has connections to religious ideas of the spirit. As actors within these scenes, we inhabit the spirit of the driver and are queued to this perspective by the flute. Each instance of the flute, with low haunting trills, mimics the rhythmic iterations of the driver’s heavy breathing. We are embedded in the action of the film as an avatar of the driver, just as players are in video games.
Interestingly, after the co-pilot’s death, the wind instrument at the forefront of the score becomes the organ. It is important to acknowledge the organ’s own connections to religious ritual and the almost funereal nature of its timbre. The organ also has a similar mechanical structure to that of the flute; a hole within a pipe is the exit point of the sound.
This introduction is accompanied by wider shots that showcase the environment and remind us of the broader implications of the driver’s journey. As we watch him dump the co-pilot’s body, the organ connects us to a more public style of mourning, like that of a funeral. The darker, gritty visuals that we are introduced to exhibit the external influences within this world that may have led the driver to his path. After all, the purpose of the journey was to transport a hostage.
Although we are no longer in his avatar, the cinematic perspective gives us a broader look at how he grapples with the loss of his partner. As he takes the money and drives away in the final scene, we question our own complicity in the death of the co-pilot. Yet, now we can only watch at a distance and speculate on the mark the co-pilot’s death will leave on the driver. Will he be haunted by visions of his bloody hands and privately mourn, or will the brutal influences of his world, bent on trivializing the value of human life, cause him to leave his mourning behind at the scene of the co-pilot’s “public” funeral?
The film toes the boundary between game and story through its changing narrative perspective. We are left with an ontological paradox in which we are the driver and we are a spectator but we are also neither the driver nor a spectator. This ambiguous interpretation matches the simultaneously interconnected and disconnected nature of video game and film media. This phenomenon can be analyzed through the idea of ludonarrative dissonance, which as contended by Grasso “describes the tension between […], what we as game players are motivated to do by the rules of the game and, […] what the story tells us about the characters and the world they inhabit”. Our avatar of the driver has to follow the rules of his game by fulfilling his mission, no matter the cost. We often feel participatory in this, while the wider cinematic moments are meant to help us understand the harsh world he is living in and how this will impact his mourning process.
Video game influences in the film feel somewhat ironic given the subject matter. There is little mourning while playing video games since one trademark of the medium is the ability of a character to regenerate and subvert death. It is clear the film is self-conscious about its own medium and as such questions the value given to life within ludic worlds. The use of wind instruments to do this, particularly the flute and the organ, helps illustrate the driver’s mourning from both the private perspective of video games to the public perspective of cinema.