‘Anything can happen’: Narrative Ambiguity and Musical Intertextuality in THE HOLIDAY

Romantic comedies are not renowned for intricate storytelling and have rarely been deemed worthy of the sustained scholarly attention of analytic ‘close readings’. What applies to the genre as a whole applies no less to its music, which has yet to be discovered by film musicology as a field of enquiry. But genre films such as romcoms can be highly self-conscious and self-reflexive, and can show a playfulness in their use of cinematic techniques that may be as much fun for the analyst as for the audience. A good example is the pre-role and credit sequence of THE HOLIDAY (2006), written and directed by Nancy Meyers, with original music by Hans Zimmer – a sequence which introduces the principal theme of the movie, establishes all of the primary characters and their stories, and forges an intimate bond between the viewer and the narrator/character, and a sequence that is characterised by the complex, shifting nature of the relationship between music and the diegesis, showing intriguing structural and thematic facets relevant for the relationship between this opening and the film as a whole. A brief synopsis of THE HOLIDAY: Iris (an English journalist played by Kate Winslet) and Amanda (an American film trailer editor played by Cameron Diaz) swap houses for the Christmas vacation in an attempt to escape their ‘guy-troubles’. Whilst at each other’s homes, they meet Miles (an American film composer played by Jack Black) and Graham (an English book editor played by Jude Law) respectively. Ironically, th