Lip-Syncing as Forgery

I watch a typical sixties video of Peter Green singing a tune of Fleetwood Mac. We know he is the original singer, and we realise he is lip-syncing his own singing. What we get is a forgery. How? We see how he tries desperately to get his lip movements in synch with the song. His mind is with this, not with the contents of the song. So, when he sings about how much he longs for a girl’s touch, we see this is not what he is thinking about when he says the words. Instead, we see him think: “in a few milliseconds I must start, …, now” or similar thoughts: he is dedicated to the filming of his performance, not to performing the music—nor, of course, would he need to be dedicated to the singing as the sound of the tune is played form a record. Looking at the clip, though some of what one sees belongs authentically to the song sung—the singer—and some doesn’t—the apparent singing. Thus, what one sees does not prompt one to aspects of, or properties of the notes in what one hears, and, I submit, rather stands in the way of a thick listening experience.

Had Jack Nicholson been lip-synced in the passage from The Shining, where his character is threatening to bash his wife, Wendy’s brains in—his threats, a speech act, would not have worked, because part of the successful firing of the speech act consists in the manner in which the words are spoken. If you threaten someone surely your speech must overflow of conviction of your intent.

Children’s television

Children’s television broadcasts cartoons which are obviously spoken, not by the cartoon characters but by humans reading out the texts. Two ways to do this prevail. In cheaper programs people are hired to read out a text they have before them. The reading has a reading contest quality: you hear the readers do their utmost best to introduce some or other intonation. In cartoons this mostly works just fine. But here too the second form of synced speech works better: where actors are hired who put more effort into identifying with the characters. How do they achieve their finer results? They learn their texts by heart—as they would when play-acting on stage—and then, while watching the cartoon they move their bodies like their characters do, and all they have to pay attention to is the cartoon they see before them—they don’t have to look down at the text. They simply speak along their own movements. Hence the naturalistic effect.

Most recently, we see children’s programs with real children acting, and these shows too are lip-synced. Here, the difference between the two approaches has a thorough consequence, in that when the speakers read out their texts, we simply fail to believe the actors. Here is a forgery of a fatal kind.

Gimme Shelter

Alternatively, I show my students a clip from the Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter, where we see the members of the band worn out in the dressing room, while listening to their rendering of “Wild Horses”. They do not sing or play along with the music, so in a sense they seem further away from the music than Peter Green in his lip-synced performance, yet they are far closer to it. There is abundant proof in the footage that they are indeed listening to the song that we hear—their gestures and expressions are really, not just intentionally, synchronous to the music. And what we see them do is ponder about how they performed it; we see the members of the band listen-watch their own performances. This brings that performance home to us, thickly.
The Stones suitably prompt us to the nature of the music.