SOUNDTRACK FOR THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT

Wim Mertens composed what is perhaps the most beautiful of all the film scores in Peter Greenaway’s cinematic canon. For a long time, I simply assumed it was Michael Nyman at the helm for The Belly of an Architect (1987), but after listening more carefully to the score, I can now hear how it possesses its own unique qualities, distinct from the director's more widely known composer-in-chief. Mertens’s music cleverly blends a kind of Wendy Carlos–style eeriness with Philip Glass–like fractal musical formations and Nymanesque forward propulsiveness.

Watching the film again recently—with its themes of failure, immortality, betrayal, and architecture—I found that Mertens’s neurotic and occasionally serene score perfectly captures the tragic trajectory of the central protagonist, Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy). Invited to oversee an architectural homage in Rome, Italy, to his personal hero, 18th-century master builder Étienne-Louis Boullée, Kracklite becomes consumed by what could be described as the ultimate example of navel-gazing: an obsession with his own belly—symbolic of various ideas, including virility, illness, and even sympathetic pregnancy.

The score’s cerebral and mechanistic beauty perfectly complements the film’s tone, and its looping minimalism reinforces both the obsessive and claustrophobic unraveling of Kracklite’s mental and physical state. Of course, the interior dimensions of external structures are symbolic—of Kracklite on a personal level, of Boullée on an architectural one, and, ultimately, of the cosmic tension between living and dying. Another central theme of the film—and of Kracklite himself—is the question of what one must sacrifice to achieve immortality, with the desire to leave a legacy after death often in constant conflict with the fear of being forgotten—or worse, unloved while still alive.