The Laundromat

The trailer for Netflix’s The Laundromat, a Steven Soderbergh-directed, Meryl Streep-starring satire about the Panama Papers, arrived just last Friday; it owns a playfulness in its dialogue and narrative that is matched in the way it so effusively engages in an interdiegetic interplay between voice and music.

What’s unique in this trailer is its creative use of multiple production music tracks to achieve a multilayered, compositional effect. In essence, this positions the trailer editor as a true musical collaborator. While this has always been true to some extent, the way it occurs here is more analogous to the creation of a mashup set by a disc jockey. This sense of playfulness plays accordingly to the tone the trailer sets.

In the first three seconds alone, the narrator intones that this is “a story about money,” and in a call-and-response manner, singers shout “money, money” in kind. If that isn’t enough, two huge titles underscore the point. It’s all completely on the nose.

As the “money, money” musical motif becomes a refrain, we hear ticking—which is, as said perhaps too often now, a staple of trailers of late. At 0:20 the music, whose refrain is extended slightly (“I just can’t get enough”) cuts out for Streep’s comedically enthusiastic mannerisms, her older character juxtaposed somewhat with the tonal thrust of the music. The track is “Money Money”, a 2018 production music track by Extreme Music that clearly approximates 70s funk / R&B.

At 0:41 the trailer evades monotony by changing to another library track by production company Extreme Music, with the 2018 track “Gimme That Money,” a trap music track. By directly mixing it with the first track, interest is sustained and the trailer continues to successfully navigate the line, staying charmingly fun without becoming overly obnoxious (depending, of course, on who you ask).

Note at 0:49 the interdiegetic games continue as the dialogue states “somebody has to sound the alarm”—and the soundtrack obliges with the sound of an alarm bell. Moreover, there’s a bit of fourth wall trickery going on as an on-screen character suggests it’s “time to rinse and repeat,” and then various scenes from the trailer are literally rewound on screen, in imitation of a rewinding VHS tape. The music, accordingly reverts from the later trap-styled music to the 70s piece.

One way that production music houses can have some advantage over other avenues for synchronization licensing, then, might be how a library can have interoperable pieces that coalesce into a greater creative whole. To what extent this was by design, one can only speculate. However, there’s no denying the mixing of these two production music tracks has resulted in a stronger creative whole, bolstering the visual storytelling.

— Curtis Perry