Inter-planetary soundclash: music, technology and territorialisation in Mars attacks!

This article concentrates on one particular textual and thematic cluster within the Hollywood feature film Mars Attacks! (1996), Tim Burton's big-budget homage to Cold-War era Science Fiction cinema — the affectivity and significance of musical sounds (and sound technologies). In particular, with reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) and the application of aspects of their work to uses of music in contemporary cinema in Murphie (1996); it considers the role of sound passages (and their associations) as territorialising refrains which eventually clash to produce the film's narrative denouement.