These are likely two truths about Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion: (1) effectively no one saw the film, and (2) Burial’s score will never have an official release. While I can’t fault people for skipping out on the film (my own feelings on it are, at best, mixed), it means that Burial’s score will probably be lost to time, before anyone even had a chance to find it. I regularly lament how much film music is unavailable, but the burying of Burial’s score for Baby Invasion is made even worse given that it’s among the best of the year.
The plot here is pretty sparse, and frankly pretty inconsequential. A VR game is released, which then makes its way to the dark web, where players stream themselves murdering and robbing people. Only, is it their avatars doing this in-game or are the players doing it in real life? The question doesn’t really matter, and it’s barely explored, even if it’s pitched as part of the core premise of the film. What matters is that we’re mostly watching a stream of a first-person shooter, featuring armed robbers with babies’ faces (hence the title) and constant hallucinatory incursions.
Burial’s score plays almost like the music you’d hear during the stream. For those readers not as familiar with online gaming, you’ll often run into players who will blast music nonstop (some of whom do so while streaming). The frequent cuts to the player behind this stream remind us that we’re watching someone play a game; since the player never talks or interacts with his chat we assume that the music is in-world, thereby explaining why he doesn’t talk or interact.
It then admirably fills this dual role of score and gamer music. Gnarly, glitchy electronic music blares for almost 80 minutes straight. And when I say it blares, I mean it, this score is LOUD, often overwhelming nearly everything else in the mix (again why it feels like it’s in-world). In doing so, it’s the driving force behind the whole film, which is filled with sequences whose only forward momentum is through Burial.
The score often simultaneously balances its danceable elements with violence. The bass pounds away, hitting deep in your chest and forcing a head bob, while synths saw away at your psyche. Though one could imagine Burial’s score playing at some after-hours club, there’s something sinister going on. About halfway through the film we briefly see a demon, smiling away and hinting at an underlying evil pervading both through and from the game, eventually spilling into reality. Burial’s score, then, serves both as the music of the unnamed player and of the evil of Baby Invasion, of the world’s penchant for viewing violence and depravity through a lens of entertainment.
Though it doesn’t quite feel like the sort of forbidden, malevolent music that has been conjured into existence, rather than made by man (such as an Arizmenda album), it gets close. While listening to this you feel dirty, tainted, and yet you can’t help but have a little fun.
I’ve been really enjoying Korine’s use of music in this and AGGRO DR1FT, so I can’t help but end on a brief tangent. I recently saw someone rhetorically ask whether Korine knows he can just direct music videos, but the statement misses a fundamental difference: in music videos, Korine makes a video for someone else’s music; in film, someone else makes music for Korine’s video. Korine has long kept close to various music scenes – hell, I remember watching him play basketball with Riff Raff* almost fifteen years ago. It’s easy to offhandedly say that he’s making glorified music videos given how much score has driven his recent films, but really it’s an opportunity for Korine to work with musicians he’s presumably been a fan of for years. And although score has been the key component in films like Baby Invasion, it’s music made for Korine.
*Let’s be real: no matter what James Franco may say, his character in Spring Breakers is 100% based off of Riff.
