Two voices in Flatland — one ordained, one advertised — and why class in a score sounds like certainty rather than money.
Class in a film score is not signalled by expensive instruments, though the cliché is durable enough — strings and a chandelier for the rich, a fiddle and a foot-stamp for the poor, and you can find it in enough films to mistake it for a rule. It’s a costume, and costumes are the easy part.
My first feature was an animated adaptation of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland — a two-dimensional world where your rank is the number of sides you have. Women are line segments. Soldiers are sharp isosceles triangles. The priest class are Circles. Nobody in the book argues this is fair. Nobody needs to. It’s the shape of the world.
I scored it in two voices.
A pipe organ opened every section about the political order. Not because organs are grand, and not because the Circles are rich — wealth isn’t really the currency in Flatland; rank is inherited in the geometry itself. What the organ gave me was the sound of an institution that believes in itself — it arrives already settled, and it doesn’t argue, because from the inside there’s nothing to argue with.
For A Square at home I wrote something that sounds nothing like it — a nod to 1950s American-dream music, the register of that era’s advertising and government information films. Bright, wholesome, reassuring, faintly instructional. Life is good here, everyone knows their place, and the place is pleasant.
The assumption, hearing those two side by side, is that the second one is the human voice — the private life the system doesn’t reach.
It isn’t. It’s the same order in a different suit, doing the same work in a different room: one ordains you, the other sells to you. Both are telling you the arrangement is natural. Neither of them is his.
That’s what makes it class writing rather than a hero’s arc. He doesn’t begin oppressed and angry. He begins comfortable, scored like a man in a commercial, and the contradictions surface inside music that is still cheerfully assuring him nothing is wrong.
And what that music sells is not just a position. It’s a reality. Flatlanders know what the news tells them, which is why the story’s best joke works: when a Sphere arrives from the third dimension to explain the truth, A Square doesn’t believe him either. On the evidence available, he shouldn’t. The book keeps running the same test at other scales. There’s a sequence in Lineland, and another in Pointland, where you see what each of those worlds takes reality and truth to be — and in each case it’s exactly as much as they can perceive, held with complete confidence.
A hierarchy doesn’t sound like money, then. It sounds like certainty. That’s what I was writing in both registers: the organ certain from above, the advert certain from inside the house.
Which is also why the Circles aren’t villains, and why the point holds outside the film. Nobody in Flatland designed this. It’s inherited geometry, and everyone in it — Circle, Square, Point — is repeating something they were handed. Certainty isn’t a character flaw. It’s a function of where you happen to be standing.
A Square isn’t fighting evil men. He’s fighting a shape.