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Elena Passarello is an actor and writer currently at work on a book of essays about the human voice in performance. Her nonfiction has appeared in Slate, Iowa Review, Creative Nonfiction and Ninth Letter, among other publications. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University.
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The Wilhelm Scream
Elena Passarello
1951—EXT.—SWAMP—DAY
The camera rolls. A PATSY stands waist-deep
in a soundstage mock-up of Florida Alligator
Water. Chicken eyes, hat askew, no gun.
They never give guys like this a gun.
The water around him burbles. Something’s
got his right leg. The PATSY kicks that
leg forward, throws back his hands, opens
his mouth, and makes absolutely no noise.
Most of us take our first gulp of air and immediately hurl it from our lungs in a scream. Perhaps this is a rejection of our initial breath; maybe it’s a celebration of hitting the outside world with both lungs running. Regardless, from birth, our vocal cords work like fingerprints, telling unique tales of our specific bodies. The sounds they make bounce around inside us and convert tones into nametags: Hello, my larynx is this large. Hello, my sinuses are stuffed with mucus. Hello, my diaphragm is stretched tight; listen to its shape as I spring air from it like a trampoline. Pleased to meet you.
Like breaking a box of emergency glass to pull an alarm, when we make our voices scream, the beeline of serious air buzzes not only the famous cords that create speech and song, but also crashes into a pair of second flaps at the top of the larynx: the false vocal cords. Only heavy breath can push these widely-spaced folds together. This strain is the grate that we hear in a screamer’s tone; a grate that articulates the rarity of its use. It says that a scream is physical work that we should only force on ourselves at moments of ultimatum. That’s why we know to come running when we hear a scream.
Storytelling complicates this physiological fact.
Imagine a quiet Warner Brothers sound studio in the dead of night. A man whose name we’ll never know watches the dailies of the film Distant Drums in a cloud of cigarette smoke, warming up his voice and thinking of alligators. He’s a “looper,” a vocal pro hired to re-do every un-miked sound in the film: responses to punches, crowd gibber, barroom laughter. He studies the mouths of extras, like our condemned Patsy, so he can make sounds that match their faces. On the screen before him, the Patsy dies silently in the swamp, his mouth widened almost to a grin. The looper tries to mirror this strange gape and leans into the microphone. He inhales, closes his throat, and pushes out all the air that he had just pooled inside him. Up in the booth, an engineer corrals the session tape into a can, labeling it “MAN GETS EATEN BY ALLIGATOR.”
Even without the 55-year reputation and cult-like following that has eventually attached itself to this sound clip, “MAN GETS EATEN BY ALLIGATOR” is remarkable. It scrambles up the anonymous author’s throat in an emasculating glissando, then slides back down the scale to land on a dejected “uh.” Equal parts yelp, belch, and exhale, the scream is as dire as it is goofy, a buffet of all five falsetto vowels crashing into one another, then falling down a flight of stairs. On paper, it’s impossible to render. My best guess would be: “aaaeeEAA-OOOOHUUiiuuh!”
“Hello, my leg is in the jaws of a gator,” suggests the sound, but it also offers something more. There is no such thing as a “pure” recorded sound—one isolated from the myriad tones and white noise that surrounds every environment, even sound studios. Thus, as this man identifies himself through the resonance of his belly and throat, the doggedness of analog also captures the sound of that looping chamber. The buzz of the lights, the weight and tone of the conditioned air, even the whisper-thin curls from his cigarette all stow away on the ions that transfer to the tape. Thus, the reality of this original moment embosses itself in the reel along with the wavelengths of the scream. And though we audience members will hear the anonymous screamer make this exact sound in this exact space at least 135 times in the next half-century, we’ll never be on a first-name basis with that original voice, that natural body, that primordial room.
CUT TO:
1953—EXT.—CHEYENNE COUNTRY
A posse of CAVALRY MEN rides through the
woods to save the kidnapped McKEEVER
SISTERS. As they enter enemy territory,
one soldier, WILHELM, lags behind.
SGT (shouting)
Wilhelm! Wilhelm!
WILHELM
Yeah, I’ll just fill my pipe!
CUE an onslaught of Cheyenne arrows, one
of which hits WILHELM mid-thigh. WILHELM
clutches his arrow-shot leg, opens his mouth.
The sound of a man eaten by an alligator.
For many historians, filmmakers, and sound buffs, this is where it begins. Not with Distant Drums, the first film to use the scream, but with Charge at Feather River, where a named character—albeit an insignificant one—has the scream placed into his mouth. Hence, (then and forever) “The Wilhem Scream.”
This film also marks the first use of the scream as horseplay; Wilhelm is not the only character who dies making this sound. Further into Charge at Feather River, a Cheyenne falls from a cliff while Wilhem Scream-ing. A few scenes after this, a nameless soldier takes an arrow to the heart and makes the same noise. Three sonically identical deaths in one film.
In these types of shoot-’em-ups, audiences expect a few dozen expendable deaths, be they in the bloodless, Technicolor style of the 1950s. Perhaps the film was over budget and scrimped on sound; maybe the editing crew was too lazy to check for gaffes. But my hunch is that if you spend each day taping death knells and killing people off, you feel the urge to have a little fun.
So the scream might have started as an inside joke between sound artists, who are as much Patsies as any on-screen extra. Their Wilhelm hijinks acknowledge, perhaps, the strange parameters of their nameless careers in the Hollywood system. A devious prank made even more devious because only those who know to listen for it will catch it. A middle finger right under the nose of the viewing public.
Months later, Charge at Feather River debuts at the Pantages and, as always, the sound crew gets the nosebleed seats. They watch Wilhelm shriek in pain, his larger-than-life eyes wide and pleading. As he screams that high, hysterical yelp, a smattering of ladies wince their sympathy for poor what’s-his-name, and then again for the other soldier guy, and maybe even for the injun, while the sound men laugh like hell.
Then they wonder what else they can get away with.
One-hundred thirty-three films later, the answer is plenty.
CUT TO:
Present day—INT.—THE ANNALS OF FILM HISTORY:
Hello my name is GUNMAN.
Hello my name is CREW MEMBER.
Hello my name is PASSERBY.
Hello my name is STORM TROOPER.
Hello my name is THE THIRD INDIAN.
Hello my name is MAD CHINAMAN.
Hello my name is AN ENEMY SOLDIER.
A REBEL SOLDIER.
A NAZI SOLDIER.
Hello my name is DRUNKEN CARTEL HONCHO.
Hello my name is A CLOWN.
Hello my name is A MIME.
Hello my name is A CELLO PLAYER.
Hello my name is DUCK HUNTER.
Hello my name is BUZZ LIGHTYEAR.
Hello my name is MR. BROWN.
Hello my name is KUJO.
Hello my name is THUG #3.
Hello my name is VICTIM.
Hello my name is SOMEONE.
Does it relax us to watch these types of characters perish? Moments after the theater darkens, we assign our love, our loyalty, our family ties to the principals: leading man, comic relief, wise elder, character woman, wacky best friend. Those headliners are our kin. We then prove kinship by treating extras and day-players like outsiders. Nameless henchmen are folks to whom we don’t send Christmas cards. Hard luck vagabonds are the kinds of people we pass on the street without greeting. Sometimes the relief of watching those kinds of people die, paired with the knowledge that they aren’t ours, is so palpable that we laugh with gratitude.
CUT TO: 1954—INT.—A RUN-DOWN SHACK
JAMES WHITMORE is trying his damndest
to stay caught in the unconvincing death-
grip of a GIANT ANT. He turns his face from
the camera, perhaps to tell the PUPPETEER to
tighten his hold or the scene will look fake.
Regardless of what his obscured mouth is
actually doing, WHITMORE screams for his life.
When Puccini throws Tosca from her tower, he gives her cushions of vowels to land on: O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!
These ten syllables are as wide open and as pure a series of sounds as a body can make, the rush of well-rounded air stopped by only a muted smattering of consonants. Thus, each and every Tosca dies with her soft palate lifted and her diaphragm flexed like a bicep.
The big names of Shakespeare die on rounded whole notes as well. Most of his tragic title characters sound death alarums with mouths like egg cups: Hamlet, in the Bad Quarto: O O O O. Othello, in the bedroom: O O O. Lear, after the undoing of his top button: O O O. Even Falstaff gets into the act, after half of Windsor attacks him with tapers, one easy-on-the-throat O for each excruciatingly silly poke.
The reason for this is, of course, protection. As Tosca, Maria Callas hollered her last words around the globe, evenings and matinées, for most of her adult life. As the Moor, David Garrick howled over his fake stab wound for decades. Human throats, no matter how well-oiled, can’t take the stress of everyday, professional screaming. Regular speech sends a sweet spurt of air up the trachea. When it meets the two vocal cords, they’re ready for it, bussing each other while they wait. A scream’s rush of unplanned, unsupported air is too heavy for the cords to endure. Blown back from their gentle position, they stretch necessarily or overextend, causing tissue to warp and swell.
Imagine running a half-marathon with no training, and how wobbly you’d walk for the next week or so. That’s one night of hard screaming at, say, a playoff game, after which your voice is hoarse for 48 hours. Now imagine running that distance again and again, never stretching, never hydrating. This is more like vocal damage, where the strain of unbalanced air actually causes calluses—called nodules—to harden on the vocal cords, preventing them from ever closing as prettily as they once did. This injury is a bankable one for few performers, maybe Rod Stewart. Puccini and Shakespeare must both have known that a tragic hero with a raspy, haggard throat wouldn’t sell tickets.
When my friend Jeffery had to play a man howling over the corpse of his brother, he trained for the event like a laryngeal body-builder. “I knew that I had to let out this yell every night, so, at that point, basically, [the scream] was an exercise—really using the diaphragm and my breath to get the sound out safely,” he remembers. “I didn’t have the context of the scene in my mind at all.” Instead, he pictured the same image Olivier did when playing Oedipus—an arctic ermine whose tongue had frozen to a salt lick trap. “I used that for the feeling of being totally stuck. Completely powerless,” he said.
The run of this play was short enough for Jeffery to take some physical risks with his scream. Though he supported his voice, he let the audience hear the sound of his cords scraping past each other in the gateway of his throat. When he screamed like that, it shot through the big warehouse theater space, and people jumped. They thought that sound was recorded. Because only in canned sounds, like those in the movies, can a listener be treated to something that spot-on in one take. Only in movies do we get to hear something that “real.”
CUT TO:
1954—INT.—A WELL-APPOINTED LIVING ROOM
“You know, I get pretty girlish in this
number,” beams JUDY GARLAND as she spins
around the living room. She’s dancing to a
rehearsal accompaniment record on the hi-fi.
JAMES MASON watches her as she pulls an epic
production number out of thin air. This is
the magic we expect from America’s sweetheart,
who needs only her big eyes and bigger voice
to sell a song.
Hello, my name is unsinkable pluck.
The soundtrack record is a sonic tour-of-nations.
For a verse scored as a can-can, GARLAND high-
kicks, squeezing a throw pillow like an accordion.
For the samba, GARLAND wields salt shakers like
maracas. This global medley continues: a leopard
print rug on her back for the “Africa” verse; a
lampshade on her head for “China.”
Then, in a break between melodies, Garland
mounts the fireplace mantel and strikes
a pose, and the record plays that SCREAM:
just as loud, just as anguished, just as
primal as it was in the wild.
GARLAND poses through the resting measure.
MASON leers, smoking and slurring. Neither
lover seems surprised to hear the SCREAM.
This is, after all, Hollywood.
It’s with this film that the Wilhelm Scream gets interesting. We’re not on the lonesome trail, or in the Everglades, or seconds away from being mutant ant food. We’re indoors. If the scream belongs anywhere in this picture, it’s at the end, when Mason’s character drowns himself. Instead, in that scene, we watch a soundless, buttery-soft death: Mason walking solemnly into the surf at sunset. We know he’s gone not from hearing a scream, but at the sight of a cabana robe floating, unmanned, in the seaweed.
In the actual scene with the scream, Mason is alive and convivial; he and Garland are newlyweds eating sandwiches, singing and necking and bouncing the light of their star power off each other’s foreheads. Using the Wilhelm here—in a musical number, no less—is like putting the scream on top of a chocolate sundae.
But look again. Judy Garland (née Francis Ethel Gumm) was 32 when she played the part of 22-year-old Mrs. Norman Maine (née Esther Blodgett), but she looked at least 40. Her skin was dull from pills, two nervous breakdowns, and too much liquor. The shooting schedule reports numerous scotch-soaked “sick days”: Dec. 29, 30; Jan. 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21; Feb. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26: Judy was ill and did not work.
Delivery boys arrived on motorcycles from five separate pharmacies carrying Seconal, Dexamyl, the Paraldehyde that made her smell so bad the make-up girls were loathe to touch her. Still, everyone interviewed about the harried making of A Star is Born agrees that, whenever Cukor yelled “Action,” Garland plowed through each scene like a prize fighter. Right past the camera, a psychiatric nurse posing as a “personal secretary” waited to literally catch her in between takes. And nearly all of those takes were fantastic.
How could any shiny-faced day player with a trick arrow in his leg manage a better on-screen death scene? What vowels could Shakespeare possibly string together to render this kind of life-or-death tension?
Even though, in many ways, the use of the scream in A Star is Born is the most laughable, in some ways it’s the most accurate, as well as the most important. Thanks to this film, we hear the famous death scream in tandem with an image of an actual dying person. Her real death paired with appropriated sound.
Not to mention, the sound engineers placed the scream in the song break—a moment of total silence. No hoof-beats, gunshots or pulsing screams were blended into it. This, and the fact that it’s also untainted by scoring or Foley effects makes it the purest appearance of the scream in film history. So, in the late 20th century, when Lucas, Tarantino, and Jackson included the scream in many of their films as homage, it’s likely they pirated the byte from Judy’s film and not from a master reel.
... read the rest of "The Wilhelm Scream" in Gulf Coast issue 22.1
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