Hell’s Angles — J.D. Connor

One of the great pleasures of early sound era aerial films is their manipulation of absence, of invisibility and inaudibility. Combat in three dimensions—or more since speed, acceleration, G-forces, and Doppler effects work upon pilots as nearly independent vectors of attention and response—is exponentially more complex than the 2D, planimetric battlespace of the strategic table at Dragonstone (or “The Big Board” in Dr. Strangelove, or the literal bird’s-eye-views of Alexander or Napoleon), or the 90s–era CGI map in Suicide Squad Isekai.

Set in an era before advanced avionics, House of the Dragon has started to recapture parts of that Hell’s Angels/Dawn Patrol niftiness. The repertoire is limited but supple (like all classical Hollywood): ground views of planes/dragons above; skimming shadows on the ground; the strafing run along the ground; head-on view of the pilot (usually involving rapid scanning of the skies, usually disrupted by a sudden burst of fire or teeth); over-the-shoulder, over-the-dragon’s head speed shot/dive bomb; chaotic, non-oriented dogfighting/dragonfighting at close range; overhead views of the planes/dragons from above at varying distances from limited-third-person to god’s-eye. Each of these can be edited with or against the characteristic dragon sounds (silence, wingbeats, cries, fireballs) to create mounting action, suspense, surprise, or moments of grand calm. In Dawn Patrol the silences of the planes that do not return are as significant as the sounds of those that do. The soundscape of 1930s air combat movies (and newsreels) was synthetic, generated in the studio when field recording equipment was bulky and insensitive, and the aim was always to render the effect of the combat whatever its reality. The soundscape of contemporary dragon combat is nearly as synthetic—what with there being no actual dragons—but sound libraries are built out of complex hybrids of recorded and synthesized sounds. In this case, sound designer Paula Fairfield built dragon-soundmarks out of multiple animals across multiple “voices”: “You're shaping a performance, and you want to believe the nuance of emotion….I prefer to use real animals that are expressing primal emotion. Now, the thing is, I'm taking these emotions and slotting them into places where, if I had an animal who could talk to me and translate what is in the piece, probably, it is horrifying.” (24:26)

Rhaenys’s death (S2E04) partly replicates Fry’s plunge from the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (Universal 1942). The camera drops with her at the start, then as she gathers speed she falls away. The plaintive strings on the score highlight her acknowledgement of her death, as does her letting go of the pommels. The digital fringe around the compositing has a touch of the characteristic Hitchcock fake-iness, too. As Rhaenys falls away, Meleys’s neck curls through the frame as a reminder of the dragon’s scale, performing a mobile, digital version of the statue’s arm. The diegetic sound is all but absent until we cut to the ground view. Then the rushing of the wind against the dead dragon’s wings serves as an arrhythmic reminder of the power it no longer has. It lands with an explosive boom-rumble-and-burn before we ascend again. None of these moves is particularly novel, nor is their combination. But in the wake of generations of techno-ascetic renunciations (“Use the Force, Luke”) or tech-and-countertech battling (Top Gun 2), it is energizing to return to cloud combat that does not mediate via screen. (Apple was counting on this to drive formal interest in Masters of the Air; it was, by Apple TV’s standards, a success.)

(Apologies for the low quality clip.)

Rhaenys and Meleys smash into a stone fortification outside the main castle, ever-so-slightly reminiscent of Fort Wood upon which the Statue stands. But in Saboteur, the Statue’s jutting arm and the seam of Fry’s fraying sleeve slash through the screen at modernist angles, just as the Statue’s stoic face and Fry’s rictus contrast up to the very end. What HotD loses in that play of facial scale it gains in the character-kaiju of the dragons. They are partners, faithful steeds, elephantine in their implied intelligence. The planes of the WWI flying aces have none of that frisson. But like the dragons, they are able to whirl against the air. We can lose sight of them or lose sight of where we are. Hitchcock keeps us oriented, even at his most modern.