Sound and Vision
An essay by Dilan Gunawardana
When I was about fifteen, a strange sound materialised in the sky above my bedroom. It resembled a long amelodic blast of horns accompanied by a swarm of humming wasps, both eerie and grand, tinged with longing. I was at the juncture of dozing and sleep, curled up tightly under my quilt cocoon, so it took me a minute to register what I had heard. I sat up and listened in the silence that followed. I wanted to find out where it was coming from, so I slipped out of bed and threw on a hoodie.
My mother had planted a rose bush outside my window in a futile attempt to stop me from breaking out at night to see my friends. I had learned to lift my legs and thrust myself outwards from the window ledge, rolling as I hit the ground. From the backyard, tree silhouettes loomed unusually still, their dark forms like a cut-out shadow puppet backdrop. A silence hung over the scene like a curtain.
I found myself drawn to the high school and its vast sports oval across the street from my house. As I approached the low metal fence that encircled the grounds, the sound of the buzzing cornet sliced through the air once more. I vaulted the fence and looked up. There was nothing to see. I had pictured something with a body, perhaps—crystalline yet fleshy. As the sound reverberated through my skull and chest, I imagined purple-grey clouds scraping past each other, and a humming, swirling river of gold. It felt akin to an ecstatic language I had never heard before.
About ten seconds later, it was gone. I waited and listened—would there be more?—before my breathless fear ebbed away. I was left with a feeling of reverence. I laid down and the night’s dew squelched under my back. Tears began to form in my eyes as I sank into my cradle of grass and endless night. What was I doing here? The cold damp had begun to seep through my jumper, prodding my bare skin. Nothing. All I could hear was the squish of wet grass when I shifted my head. A few lights were on in the houses across the road, but their curtains remained motionless. Not a single car passed by.
Back home, in the remainder of the night and until the next day, my mind began its work of manufacturing meaning. It yearned to anchor that phenomenon in something tangible, in things I knew: jet engines, trains, electricity in the atmosphere, that optical illusion where ships appear to hover metres above the horizon. Could the sound of a ship’s foghorn be dislocated? The nearest shoreline was twenty kilometres away.
As the Sound morphed into memory over the following days and months, it began to attach itself to films I had seen. When I first watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) as a teenager, I was perplexed by Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) and his obsessive attempts to recreate Devil’s Tower with mashed potato and then with junk. In the film, this monolith, a striking natural landmark in Wyoming and a loci of creation myths for the First Peoples in the surrounding Black Hills [1], serves as a visual anchor to the enigmatic. It is implied that the extra-terrestrials Roy encounters early in the story—at the beginning of his journey of gnosis—implant the notion in his mind that this sacred place is where he will transcend his current state. That film was my first experience of the sublime. I now understand Roy’s mania as a desperate, human attempt to grasp at something gnawing at the back of his mind after witnessing phenomena beyond his understanding. As I walked back home on the night I heard the Sound, it occurred to me that if I couldn’t understand, recreate nor explain what I had experienced, then there was little chance of convincing anyone else that it had happened. It was a dream, or you hallucinated it, or it was probably a plane. The most I could hope for was a sympathetic ear.
As a young adult, I was obnoxiously opposed to any form of schmaltz or sentimentality. Now in my late thirties, I often seek its comfort. On a recent viewing of Contact (1997)—which I had avoided for years because critics [2] [3] were quick to point out its schmaltzy elements—I discovered an uncanny resonance with my own experience as a teen. In the film, Jodie Foster’s character Dr Ellie Arroway’s claims of an intergalactic alien encounter are met with incredulity, her detractors citing her lack of tangible evidence even though we, the audience, know the truth. The conflict between Arroway’s adherence to science and Christian philosopher Palmer Joss’ (Matthew McConaughey) devotion to the unmeasurable—love, the belief in a God—is heightened when Joss points out the irony of Arroway asking people to believe her encounter based on faith, something she as an atheist had dismissed as irrational. Arroway then carries her experience inside her like a private belief and retains hope that in the vastness of space there remains the possibility of connection or understanding—this gives her some measure of peace.
✷
If I wanted to create a sound imbued with sorrow and animal and elemental outrage, I would coat a leather glove in pine-tar resin and run it across the strings of a cello. This was how the composer Akira Ifukube created a sound suitable for Ishirō Honda’s filmic metaphor for the nuclear devastation that visited parts of Japan at the end of World War II: Godzilla [4]. For Japanese theatregoers, Godzilla (1954) was not just a monster sci-fi flick; it was a confrontation with the recent past [5], embodying the trauma of indiscriminate destruction and loss in a tangible, kaiju form. Their response to Honda’s film was one of profound disquiet, a reaction to the imagery of buildings and structures obliterated by an impassive monster looming over the cityscape with its lumpen head resembling a mushroom cloud, and the helplessness of humanity faced with overwhelming power. Godzilla, with his primal, guttural scream, was born from Japan’s collective anxiety, a symbol crafted from ancient myths and gods—Umibōzu [6], Ryūjin [7], Susanoo [8]—and the modern tragedy caused by the atomic bomb at the time. Godzilla’s roar, then, was more than sound; it was a cry from the depths of Japan’s cultural psyche, a lament, a cautionary tale.
Seventy years later, across thirty-eight films in the franchise, the tone and composition of Godzilla’s roar change as frequently as his allegiances [9]. The central message in the films also vary, oscillating between ‘the bomb is bad’ in the first incarnation in 1954, to ‘the bomb will protect us from other bombs’ in the 60s and 70s. to ‘the bomb is a grumpy pet, but he’s our grumpy pet’. After Godzilla returns in all his horrific glory in Shin Godzilla (2017) and in Godzilla Minus One (2023), he tumbles out of the cultural washing machine in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) adorned with pink glowing spines resembling the garish LED lights on a gaming PC. The bomb is a grumpy pet, but he’s our grumpy pet.
✷
When I was twenty-seven, I took a meditation class. Sleep for me back then was two to three fitful hours when my eyelids had the courtesy to remain shut, before I woke up trembling and anxious. I didn’t want to take any tablets. A few months prior, I had a disastrous time with anti-depressants, made worse by my choice to stop only after a couple of doses—something you are strongly advised against doing. On some nights, as we lay on our backs on the floor with our eyes closed and palms open, I would hear the soft, gasping sobs of one of my middle-aged classmates. It’s okay if you can hear noises, our teacher would interject, like car noises outside or the sound of the air-conditioner. Just regard them for what they are and nothing more. Focus on this: om mani padme hum. Keep saying it in your mind. Say it in time with your breathing: om mani (breathe in) padme hum (breathe out). Focus on your heartbeat. After a few weeks of these classes, the trembling stopped.
We ended the tenth session with a half-hour meditation on the floor, on our backs. By then, I was accustomed to slipping into a meditative state, likening this transition between cognisance and quiet to a cloudy plastic film covering my thoughts. But this time was different: a few moments after I went under, a tiny opening emerged in the plastic, and inside it, a gently humming and swirling bright gold liquid. One second after I became aware of it, elated by its presence and smug that I had materialised it, it disappeared.
✷
Modern cinema and television—particularly the later interpretations of more resonant works—begs us to suspend our disbelief. Watching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022 –), I find the inside of my skull itching when a full-blown orchestral swell occurs as characters spout empty platitudes. This series apes the rich tapestry of dialogue, characterisation, imagery and music from the early 2000s trilogy, while neglecting to allow its score to evolve alongside its heroes and weave a sense of profundity or jeopardy into their journeys—nothing like Howard Shore’s masterful composition [10].
Other cinematic sounds create that same itch in my skull. In Jurassic Park (1993), the T-Rex’s roar resonates with a feral grandeur as she turns towards the camera in the film’s climax. This iconic sound is the product of a meticulous collage: growls, huffs, and bellows from a whale, an alligator, a lion, and an elephant [11], each layered on top of one another to evoke a primordial dread. It taps into our deepest, subconscious fears of being killed indiscriminately or predated upon, yet we remain transfixed by its magnificence. In the Jurassic World trilogy, CGI monstrosities often stop chasing the films’ protagonists just to roar in their faces.
In the realms of sci-fi and fantasy, cinema can be a vessel for the sublime. The most memorable films (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Alien) in these genres walk the tightrope of reality and imagination, their big ideas taking root in our shared cultural consciousness: we’re not alone in the universe; we’re not alone on Earth; our origins are mysterious; we’re not at the top of the food chain; there’s an unfathomable darkness inside each of us; we have an endless capacity to love; we can transcend our bodies.
If, as Alan Moore asserts, ‘art is the dismembered corpse of magic’, then the dismembered corpse of art is a slurry of ideas and images that are unable to coalesce to form a bridge between the boundaries of feeling and unfeeling.
✷
On Monday nights my partner and I sink into our sofa and watch House of the Dragon (2022), a series rich in sublime imagery. Dragons are the ultimate expression of power and grandeur, of forces beyond our control. In House of the Dragon, they are scene-stealing and awe-inspiring, treated in the narrative with the same reverence as demigods or atom bombs. On social media, I’m endlessly barraged with George R.R. Martin dragon lore videos spun by content creators, all because I once looked up ‘how big is Vhagar?’
During the show’s duller moments, we hear the streets of North Melbourne outside percolating into our living room: the ding and rattle of the 57 tram around the corner; the clip-clop of high heels and ebullient laughter; confused and anguished howls from folks who have spilled out from nearby halfway houses and onto the paths of yuppies making their way home; the faster clip-clop of high heels.
I gently run my hand in circles over my partner’s stomach, and we imagine ourselves as parents in a few months’ time. I’m the distracted klutz and she’s the perennial worrier. We laugh over our responses to imagined parenting scenarios and after difficult workdays, we declare to each other that we’re tired of adulting. Often, I press my ear against her belly and ask, how’re you doing in there, buddy? I never know what else to say other than I love you; my own dad didn’t say very much. We are children making children.
A month after we are conceived, our cells begin to arrange themselves into receptacles—our nose, our eyes, our ears—for perceiving the material world that we’ll soon be introduced to. Then, small indentations begin to appear on the sides of our head where auditory nerves start to form connections with the brain. At this point, we can hear and feel our mother’s heartbeat. Weeks later we can make out voices and music, and a few weeks after that, distinguish between our mother’s gentle crooning and our father’s chortling laughter. What does our baby make of the sound of my hand whooshing over the soft walls of its womb-cradle? Do they perceive our voices as light and dark? Do they hear my snoring at night, or the sounds of dragons roaring and swords clanging coming from the TV? Or the sonorous twang of a fork falling onto the floorboards, oil crackling in a frying pan or the whirr of the robot vacuum? I wonder if these sounds wake them from their slumber, and if, for decades to come, they hold these sounds deep inside them.
Works Cited
‘Devil’s Tower: American Indians’, National Park Service,
Martin, Adrian. Contact review [https://www.adrianmartinfilmcritic.com/reviews/c/contact.html]
Sarah Kerr, ‘Fetal Attraction’, Slate, 12 July 1997.
‘What's In A Roar? Crafting Godzilla's Iconic Sound’, NPR, 18 May 2024.
J Hoberman, ‘Godzilla: Poetry After the A-Bomb’, Current, 24 January 2012.
Pamela Allardice, Myths, Gods, and Fantasy: A Sourcebook. Dorset: Prism Press, 1991. p. 209.
Jeremy Roberts, Japanese Mythology A to Z, Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki, Princeton University Press. pp. 89–90.
‘Evolution of GODZILLA roar |1954–2024’, The Movie Surgeons, YouTube, published 22 March 2024.
The Lord of the Rings - How Howard Shore Makes Us Care [https://youtu.be/Azd7lyJ4918?si=d4EUhwbSeP9Jqlgo]
‘Jurassic Park T-Rex sound design explained by Gary Rydstrom’, INDEPTH Sound Design, YouTube, published 4 August 2020
Dilan Gunawardana is the Digital Editor at ACMI, Australia's national museum of screen culture. He manages the ACMI website, oversees its YouTube channel and leads its online publication Stories & Ideas. Dilan's reviews and essays on arts and literature have appeared in Australian Book Review, where he was formerly Deputy Editor (digital/arts). Holding a Master's Degree in Communications and Media Studies, his research explored social transgression through online media in post-revolutionary Iran.