Terminal Bach: Technology, Media, and the Goldberg Variations in Postwar American Culture

Abstract:The curious link between Bach’s music and psychopaths in English-language film can be traced back to at least Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Black Cat (1934), but this cinematic trope regained horror credibility in the late twentieth century with Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Lecter’s creator, author Thomas Harris, gave his cannibalistic serial killer preternatural intelligence and a taste for fine culture, including the keyboard works of Bach, most notably the Goldberg Variations. Scholars and fans alike have investigated almost every aspect of Lecter’s persona, including his musical preferences, yet a broader question arises: how exactly did we get to Lecter’s Bach? What cultural factors—musical and otherwise—might have influenced Harris to fix on Bach, Gould, and the Goldberg Variations specifically for his supervillain?This investigation considers significant events of the postwar period that likely played a role in the evolution of the Lecterian Bach: 1) the modernist turn in Bach reception, performance practice, and recording in the United States between 1945 and 1968, especially as evidenced in the sensational albums of Glenn Gould and Wendy Carlos; 2) the twentieth-century cinematic association between Bach’s music and destructive drives, particularly as redefined from the early 1970s via the use of Variation 25 in Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and The Terminal Man (1974); and 3) the postwar boom in computer science and the significance of Bach’s music to related discourses such as the development of artificial intelligence. All of these threads intersect with a phenomenon of modern, industrialized American culture that Mark Seltzer describes in his Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (1998) as “techno-primitive.” The life process and machine process are integrated “such that the call of the wild represents not the antidote to machine culture but its realization.” As a superhuman genius who kills like a machine, Lecter undeniably represents the techno-primitive. Yet, his cultured intellectualism (including his love of Bach’s music) taps into postwar popular understanding of the composer’s work as the highest expression of musical logic, ideally suited to the technological age.