Robert Neville's Playlist

There's a little movie coming out this week. You probably haven't heard of it unless you happened to turn on a TV or open a newspaper. If you're from NYC, you have warm memories of the production laying siege to Washington Square Park and other locations throughout Manhattan. The Mayor's Office of Film has stated that I Am Legend was the biggest film production that the city had ever hosted.

It will be the third film based on Richard Matheson's gem of a book, and if it is faithful to the original text, we'll see two onscreen firsts for Will Smith. We'd ruin the film if we gave away the first, but it's not much of a spoiler to say that the second would be the sight of Will Smith listening to Arnold Schoenberg.

Yes, throughout the novel, Robert Neville, the last man on earth, gets through his evenings by drinking whiskey and listening to records. And what a fascinating list of records. Quite frequently, the music is a reflection of Neville's mood, and on a couple of occasions, the titles referenced are vicious puns.

Here's the playlist in its entirety:

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 3
Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 7
Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9
Arnold Schoenberg, Transfigured Night
Roger Leie, The Year of the Plague
Johannes Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 2
Leonard Bernstein, Symphony No. 2 (The Age of Anxiety)
W.A. Mozart, Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter)
Irving Berlin, The Near Future (How Dry I Am)
Maurice Ravel, Daphnis and Chloe, Suites 1 & 2
Franz Schubert, Symphony No. 4 (Tragic)
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2

Neville's days are spent killing vampires in their sleep with wooden stakes through the heart (as per legend). He loathes the practice. Much of the book is spent searching for an alternative method of dispatch. At one point, as he's making a new set of stakes, their purpose brings a sense of dread to his mind and he silently thanks his mother for teaching him to appreciate Beethoven which helps 'to fill the terrible void of hours'.

When he is holed up in his house at night, the vampires try to lure him outside by calling his name. When he looks through his peephole, the female vampires make lurid come-ons, which disturb Neville deeply because they very nearly work on him.

...the women had seen him and had started striking vile postures in order to entice him out of the house. He didn’t want to look at that.

He put down his book and stared bleakly at the rug, hearing Verklärte Nacht play over the loud-speaker. He knew he could put plugs in his ears to shut off the sound of them, but that would shut off the music too, and he didn’t want to feel that they were forcing him into a shell.

The joke about a transfigured night is clever enough, but you have to wonder just how deep Matheson intended it. Is he riffing on Dehmel's poem itself? Sexual indiscretion v. redemptive virtue?

The punning on Schoenberg continues though, as Neville tries vainly to drown out the vampires by blindly grabbing another record off the shelf and putting it on the turntable. It turns out to be a dissonant atonal work, like Schoenberg's later music:

"The Year of the Plague" by Roger Leie, filled his ears. Violins scraped and whined, tympani thudded like the beats of a dying heart, flutes played weird, atonal melodies.

With a stiffening of rage, he wrenched up the record and snapped it over his right knee. He’d meant to break it long ago.

Surely, Matheson speaks for the masses with that last sentence. As far as we can tell, the Leie is fictional, but perhaps more industrious bloggers can turn it up. It would be the only fictional musical reference in the book. The title is another joke, as the vampirism in the book is caused by an airborn bacteria that Neville just happens to be immune to.

One particularly sardonic pun comes in the form of his neighbor Ben Cortman's doorbell, which chimes 'How Dry I Am'. In one flashback, the tune plays incessantly as Neville visits Ben's deserted house. In the present, Ben is now the vampire who hounds Neville the most vocally each night. Part of the way Neville copes is by drinking heavily.

The Bernstein provides yet another word gag:

He sat staring with dead eyes at the mural while "The Age of Anxiety" pulsed in his ears. Age of anxiety, he mused. You thought you had anxiety, Lenny boy. Lenny and Benny; you two should meet. Composer, meet corpse.

It's interesting to note that Bernstein's Second Symphony had only been written four years before Matheson published I Am Legend. This was brand new music, and it was based on Auden's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic where four barflys get really drunk and search for the meaning of life. Here, it's tough to think that Matheson was joking with the Schoenberg reference earlier, because the parallels again are so strong.

Neville is beset by a lack of purpose. He's gotten used to the horror of his surroundings, but what eats away at him is the boredom and loneliness. He gets fixated on little projects, like taking in a stray dog, and discovering the source of the vampire disease. In the end, like Auden's drunks, his quest for a purpose eludes him, but, well, that would lead us back to that spoiler we said we'd avoid.