Passion Of The Dialogue

I recently purchased ‘Themes from the Passion – Single (Special Radio Re-Mix)’ from The Passion Of The Christ by John Debney off of iTunes. Debney’s score is very good and it still remains a mystery to me why mainstream success seems to elude him, but there’s another aspect to this track I want to touch on.

The few radio singles from orchestral scores that come out these days usually include dialogue from the film and this one is no exception. As a fan of film music, I don’t see the need for that other than as a feeble attempt to get a few non-film music listeners to connect to the music and hopefully run out and buy the soundtrack (but as a collector, I love this kind of stuff). The big difference here is that The Passion Of The Christ was filmed with the majority of the dialogue spoken in Aramaic and Latin and subtitled in English. Let me rephrase that: it’s not in English. Or Spanish. Or any other language widely spoken in the US, where the single was solicited to classical music (and possibly religious) radio stations.

Now that’s fine for the movie itself, where the filmmakers are trying to keep it historically accurate and the audience can read the subtitles to follow along. But how many people can hear a passage in Latin (especially which has been disembodied from the visual source material) and think “Oh yeah, I loved that part”? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Look, if the major record label marketing machine wants to put out stuff like this, that’s fine. If it gets a few more people to buy score albums who wouldn’t normally, that’s great. But I just wonder what the thought process was behind this particular decision: “who cares if you can’t understand what they’re saying, we can put it on the radio”.

Maybe that’s how they feel about popular music too.