When you hear the phrase “ASMR,” you might immediately picture a Youtube video of someone whispering into a microphone or tapping their acrylic nails against a hard surface. These Internet videos first gained traction in the early 2010’s and have boomed in popularity ever since. Common themes among them include whispering, scratching, tapping, massaging, makeup application, and a sense of personal attention toward the viewer.
The phrase “ASMR,” coined in 2010 and short for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” describes a relaxing feeling of well-being combined with a tingly sensation in the scalp and spine in response to specific stimuli, often sounds. There is plenty of anecdotal information on ASMR but little scientific explanation for it. Some people experience it while others do not, no one really knows how it works or why. Steven Novella, a clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine writes, “ASMR could just be a way of activating the pleasure response. Vertebrate brains are fundamentally hardwired for pleasure and pain — for positive and negative behavioral feedback… Add to this the notion of neurodiversity — the fact that all of our human brains are not clones or copy cats, but vary in every possible way they can vary."
Film directors such as Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, and Paul Thomas Anderson have all utilized the pleasant second-hand effect that certain soft images and satisfying sounds can have on a viewer in their recent films. In Dayton and Faris’s 2018 Battle of the Sexes, they intentionally employed an ASMR effect in the scene where the film’s protagonist meets her love interest to emphasize the subtext of tenderness, and recognition. Whereas Dayton and Faris employed ASMR in one scene of Battles of the Sexes, I’d argue that Anderson employed it throughout the entire 2 hour and 11 minute runtime of his 2017 film Phantom Thread to build a world that is subconsciously comforting from start to finish. The warm, inviting, ASMR-like feeling that Phantom Thread induces in viewers can be attributed to the film’s visionary color grading and sound design.
Phantom Thread is a film about an artist-muse relationship with a twist. Reynolds Woodcock is a renowned couturier in post World War II London with a painstakingly meticulous routine. He is in his mid-to-late 50’s and has run through many young female muses throughout his life. Alma Elson, about twenty years his junior, at first succumbs to his well-rehearsed method of seduction but refuses to let the spell of her desire wear off over time. She and Reynolds, both madly in love but woefully mismatched in many obvious ways, engage in a series of masochistic maneuvers that demonstrate their unfurling psychology and begs the question: Is their relationship one of collaboration or competition?
By all accounts, Phantom Thread is a technically stunning and beautifully made film and, as with all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, the look and feel are deeply rooted in the importance of shooting on analog film. Before filming began, Anderson decided that the definitive version of the film would be a 35 mm print. According to an article on Phantom Thread from the post-production company Roundabout, “Colorist Gregg Garvin and Color Scientist Jerome Dewhurst spent many hours working on the best scanning and grading techniques, which also involved projecting a print side by side with the digital files to ensure that all the details were being emulated.” This also meant that all the visual effects were created digitally and then scanned into 35 mm negatives to match the rest of the film’s aesthetic, a reportedly challenging and time-consuming process.
Anderson’s choice to shoot on film and the painstaking color grading done by Garvin and Dewhurst do not go unnoticed. The 35 mm lens creates a texture and color scheme that place the viewer right into Reynold Woodcock’s world of pinpoint precision. Although a majority of the film takes place during the winter months in London and occasionally neighboring Yorkshire, the color palette of Phantom Thread can seldom be described as cold. Take the frame below, captured two minutes into the film, for example. Although this scene was shot outside in brisk weather, the use of the vintage lens combined with the juxtaposition of the cool and warm colors evoke a feeling of nostalgia and comfort in the viewer as well as a desire to follow the women into the house from which the warm light is being emitted.
Throughout the film, Reynolds and Alma speak in a soft, tempered way that’s naturalistic to the film’s time period and soothing to the viewer. On their first date, rather than rush to fill in any silence with getting-to-know-you chitchat, they engage in long, almost exaggerated pauses in their conversation just to look at one another. During one such pause, illuminated by the light of the fireplace, Alma announces in her soft German accent, “If you want to have a staring contest with me you will lose.” To this Reynolds chuckles and says nothing.
There is a certain inexplicable tenderness on display when, after their first date is finished, rather than try to seduce Alma, Reynolds fits her for a custom dress. As he slowly and attentively takes her measurements, chooses her fabric color, and moves her hair out of her face, the audience can feel the blossoming love between the two characters. On Youtube, this scene is featured in multiple ASMR video montages. It’s especially beloved by the ASMR community because Reynolds gives Alma his undivided attention, speaks in a slow and deliberate register, and there are numerous soothing foley noise occurring in the background, including the slicing of scissors through fabric, the creak of old floorboards, clasps being buttoned, and the sound of pins being dropped into a metal bowl. The film’s head sound editor Christopher Scarabosio told the online magazine The Credits in 2018 that, “We played with the idea that Woodcock’s house is a character unto itself, so we developed this language of creaks and pops."
The film’s soundtrack, written and composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame and performed by a string orchestra and percussive pianist, creates an atmosphere which is haunting and familiar, accentuating the moments of austere beauty while creating tension during moments of confrontation. Spin magazine describes the soundtrack’s main theme, “House of Woodcock,” as, “a series of florid orchestral swells which seem to evoke the light streaming in through the dressmaker’s tall windows.” This particular song is a recurring motif throughout the film and it contributes to the overall sound design by creating a dream-like environment for the characters to exist in.
Phantom Thread is a film to be felt as much as watched. It’s a multi-sensory experience. I’d wager I’ve seen it at least five times in the three years it’s been released. It’s a film I return to often because it gives me an inexplicable feeling of comfort and peace. Between the whirling piano, delicate foley noises, magnificent look of the 35 mm film, and palpable tenderness and care felt between the two main characters, it definitely elicits some of the sensations in me that are commonly associated with ASMR.
As Sara Bivigou writes for BFI, “So much of the magic of cinema, of why certain films become our favourites, has to do with a very personal way they make us feel good. An indefinable quality is an essential part of the enjoyment of films.” Everyone has a film that they return to time and time again for whatever inexplicable reason. Whether this film makes them happy, calm, nostalgic, excited, reflective, or emotional, the reasoning is beyond narrative, time, or anything else you can hold in your hands. Our favorite films make us feel different inside and out, and perhaps ASMR has begun to give us a language for this sensation, if not yet a full understanding of it.
