JULY GUNK (pt. 1)
a sneak peek of ur show listing + a deep dive into the steamy Challengers score
★a sneak peek of July GUNK’s tear-out middle page poster designed by Pamela Guest and printed by Secret Riso Club★
GUNK will be a lil delayed this month, as well. think of this month as GUNK’s mini summer vacation as we gear up for our one year anniversary. Crazy! This issue will also be 12 pages long (gasp) and features some really cool features, like the following by Winston Cook-Wilson that examines the score from the recent release, Challengers.
Aren’t We Always Talking About Tennis?
By Winston Cook-Wilson
Those who know Challengers only by reputation refer to it as “the horny tennis player movie,” and that is a full and accurate description. Its fans use the same phrasing, but the words drip with reverence. They get a far-off look in their eyes, like they are considering myriad beautiful and bittersweet aspects of the human experience.
Prior to seeing it, I had heard only one critique of the Luca-Guadagnino-directed film—an aside from a friend that was strange enough to inspire me to head to the theater. They liked the movie, they liked the soundtrack, but they didn’t like how the soundtrack was used in the movie. I realize this is the kind of thought that someone formulates quickly, without checking all the logical arithmetic; the idea, no doubt, is that they found the score distracting. Still, movies are one holistic thing, all at the same time. Imagining a better version of a movie with different soundtrack cues, or a different soundtrack, or no soundtrack at all, reminds me of ordering a salad and then substituting it until it is the same as a different salad on the menu.
In the theater, I found that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, which consists largely of industrial-tinged techno tracks, provided an even more crucial function than expected. It was the fourth major player in the story—its most outgoing and likable personality. I wondered how much of a movie would even be left to like if we killed that character off, and there I was, pursuing the same pointless line of speculation as my friend.
Allegedly, director Luca Guadagnino asked Reznor and Ross—stone-faced, leather-jacket-wearing types usually—to work on Challengers in a one-line email describing it only as “sexxy.” That’s about the measure of it: the story revolves around two tennis players (Mike Faist’s Art Donaldson and Josh O’Connell’s Patrick Zweig) whose love of the game is as great as their love of one woman (Zendaya’s frosty, self-possessed Tashi Duncan) or perhaps each other. The two men are classic foils. Patrick’s unbridled confidence seems to come from on high, or his alleged penis size, and is seemingly unaffected by aging and his deteriorating career. Art is more conventionally handsome, in the right place at the right time—a simp when he is most vulnerable. He is hard-working enough to be successful but never more than “really, really good.”
We watch as the young men’s desire for the stern, victory-obsessed Tashi devours their friendship, the stakes often being raised with the help of techno music. The conflict of the movie is set in motion when the incoming college freshman version of Tashi inspires Patrick and Art to embrace their romantic impulses toward one another, in the interest of getting closer to her—also to the strains of techno. The movie scrambles time, tennis games, and libidinous motivations to tell the decade-and-a-half-long story of their love triangle—always urged forward by techno.
Here, Reznor and Ross imagine electronic dance music as they did Romantic classical music in The Social Network or acoustic folk in Guadagnino’s previous film Bones and All: with a certain icy remove. Central pieces like the title theme and “The Signal” layer catchy melodic cells, coarse frequency sweeps, and foreboding, detuned pulses over chintzy, familiar-sounding drum programming. Reznor and Ross claim in interviews that Guadagnino wanted the viewer to be able to “dance to the whole movie,” but the film’s sound cues are rarely given time to develop and crest like club bangers and DJ mixes. The songs are flicked on and off abruptly, before they can fully provide catharsis. The net effect of the musical style and timing isn’t exactly ironic, but there is a canny perspective to it.
It is easy to focus on the onomatopoeic aspect of the score: The spastic synth tones vibrate and collide like bodies, balls, and other athletic equipment in motion. Often, the songs serve as gameplay music, which eventually becomes foreplay music, and then—almost never—sex music. However, it does much more than set the tempo of competition. At the best moments of the movie, it provides a sense of thematic throughline amidst narrative disorder, creating cosmic vibrations that reverberate off the drab lockers full of Head and Wilson bags, sterile Ivy League cafeteria walls, and anonymous practice courts. In the movie, Guadagnino uses Reznor and Ross’ music to create parallelism between romantic and athletic encounters, give a sensual charge to banal interaction, and caricature our basest impulses. Aren’t we such beautiful idiots? the movie seems to ask, as two or three characters make out, or imagine doing so, to washed-out house vocals and a thudding beat. Why do we want the things we want?
More often than simply underlining what is happening on screen, the Challengers score emphasizes things that the characters do not know they are feeling, or won’t acknowledge to themselves or others. Sometimes, Reznor and Ross’ beats seem to provide the only dramatic motivation for the action. A backfiring, frenetic loop kicks in when Zweig and Duncan see each other through a hotel bar window; mysteriously, they are propelled towards each other. In a reunion between Art and Patrick at the sauna, a pounding, almost stock-sounding groove creates a romantic subtext for their pre-match taunts. “We’re not talking about tennis,” Patrick says, gazing at Art with eyes brimming with sweat and possible tears, though they are, word for word, definitely talking about tennis.
Through interactions like these, we understand the desires of the characters in Challengers but not much else about them. Their motivations feel about as well-rounded as the ones we invent for celebrities when their private life is thrust into the spotlight—borrowed from patterns in typical human behavior but mythological, without texture. When the soundtrack enters—like a door has been opened into a room where it is always blaring at full volume—it reminds us of how pleasantly 2D the story really is. The score constantly refocuses Challengers, bulldozing unimportant narrative accoutrement out of the way: marriage, children, someone’s mother hanging around, the passage of time, and other things that don’t really move the needle when it comes to the central dynamic in the film.
We walk away from Challengers knowing little about how these characters came to be the way they are. Perhaps we are meant to think of Tashi, Patrick, and Art as emotionally stunted child stars. Tennis—in the literal and figurative, psychosexual sense—is something they cling onto for dear life because they’ve been given relatively few structures through which to define their self-worth, or the worth of others. (Tashi: “You’re such a fucking child.” Patrick: “Of course I am. I’ve spent my entire life hitting a ball with a racket.”) Sometimes it feels like Guadagnino is interested in the aspirationalism of the millennial generation specifically. He highlights period-appropriate logos and corporate insignia in almost every shot, to a degree that it begins to feel like these are providing more than nostalgic details and product placement.
This is all Rorschach-blot type stuff, ultimately; Guadagnino could just as easily be romanticizing these things as indicting them. As a result, New Yorker critic Richard Brody called the movie “apolitical,” in the course of wondering why the filmmakers would choose to organize this relatively cut-and-dry sex dramedy like a timeline-jumping, Oscars-baiting biopic. Why the scrambled intertitles specifying date, location, and point in the tennis match? Are arty devices like these there to overcompensate for a lack of depth?
Just like speculating about a movie without its soundtrack, these seem like superfluous questions. How much depth should we really be expecting from a naughty tennis tale like this one? Like Klimt paintings, the music of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails music is traditionally flat and brittle, but also monolithic—often beautiful. So is Challengers. Just as the score only evokes the idea of dance music, the movie often creates the illusion of movement where there is none, depth without depth. The central relationships are carefully rendered, but they are also pretty close to textbook attachment-style-quiz archetypes. We feel familiar enough with these kinds of dynamics to fill in our own context, and forget that the movie has not provided us with any.
If Challengers isn’t actually saying much that most mature and consenting adults don’t know already, the score does its best to provide a sturdy and engaging architecture. Loud-as-hell and inexorable, it is the voice that reminds us that we do know all of this stuff already—the odd, stubborn patterns and contradictions of attraction. It is an ingenious musical treatment for a movie which tells us what we want, but not why we want it. May we project our life experiences all over it, and imagine something profound and immutable glimmering off in the distance when we speak of “the horny tennis movie.”
A preview of some of your July shows, with the full listing to come in the next few days…
going excel mode…
you can reliably find GUNK at: ♡honeymoon coffee shop (ridgewood) topos (ridgewood) normas (ridgewood) milk&pull (ridgewood), little roy (bed stuy), playground zine box (bed stuy) prima (clinton hill) the lot zine box (greenpoint). baby’s all right (williamsburg), lagoon (bedstuy), bike plant (bedstuy), swallow (bushwick), East One (carroll gardens) ♡if you can’t find GUNK…we need your help with distro in your neighborhood! email us for a stack ;)
˚ ✦ . . ˚ . . ✦ ˚ . ★⋆. ࿐࿔
Our GUNK playlist has been updated by your editors feat. a lot of new songs that have been coming out in the past few days. a hot, hot summer of bangers ensues. we also are committed to balance, so we threw in a few older experimental songs like the port by italian composer maria teresa luciani. teleport urself to the port…. ˚ ✦ . . ˚ . . ✦ ˚ . ★⋆. ࿐࿔
ˋ°•*⁀➷ GUNK CLASSIFIEDSˋ°•*⁀➷
is your band (or solo act) looking to connect with other bands or performers to put together a bill for an upcoming show? send GUNK a little intro to your music (no links sorry) including an email address for a reply and we’ll publish the listings!
—> thegunkyard@gmail.com **if you’d rather your email address not listed let us know and we can get you in touch with interested parties**
✮ Thank you for supporting & reading GUNK for nearly…. a year. We feel so inspired by our community and can’t imagine a world in which this wasn’t a part of our lives. We also feel so grateful to bring our issues to you via the talented and generous hands at Secret Riso Club. They just opened up a new space on Central Ave. that you should check out if you're in the Bushwick zone. ✮
Also want to shout out Temporary State University’s 12 Hour Temporary Day Party that happened this past Saturday in Ridgewood. Ceci and I and our friend Jordan are so ecstatic with how that entire event turned out and are utterly exhausted now :’) There will be no July launch party for GUNK partially for this reason and the need to prioritize bodily rest. But we’ll see you soon in August to celebrate our 1 year. →♡←
xoxo and get to the gig
Hannah & Ceci
I love prioritizing bodily rest!