The Spectre of Film Music

This article explores the vaporwave aesthetic of The Neon Demon (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2016). Vaporwave is an electronic musical genre that emerged in the early 2010s, reconfiguring electronic music from the 1980s and 1990s. French philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ in the 1990s to describe a ‘thing’ from the past haunting the present, like a spectre that cannot be seen, through time being out of joint. Vaporwave music haunts The Neon Demon like Derrida’s spectre by harmonising audiovisually with the visual language of the film. I call this audiovisual harmony and haunting the vaporwave aesthetic. Set in Los Angeles in the present day, The Neon Demon follows Jesse, a 16-year-old orphan who moves to the city aspiring to become a fashion model. Jesse is lured by the vaporwave aesthetic’s futuristic, utopic guise which haunts the LA fashion industry, in the hope of achieving immortality in the industry after the decay of her traumatic past. However, Jesse is exposed, consumed, and ultimately killed by the spectral haunt of the fashion industry’s decayed capitalist utopia. The vaporwave aesthetic in The Neon Demon shows film music’s power to manipulate the film image.