about the movie:

Three themes wind through this musical score. "The Swamp" - the unknowable, the primordial soup of doubt. "The Ghost" - the unattainable object of desire. "Creation" - the great process, which is always the unfolding of some earlier creation, suggesting a spinning wheel of recursion. Hopefully these themes are general enough that they can apply simultaneously to the characters in the narrative of the film, and also to the processes of evolution and adaptation which they study and within which they are bound.

Musical equivalents evolved to help with this. The inharmonic overtones of struck metal and the plaintive sound of english horn suggested the random walk of mutation and the endless losses of natural selection, while also playing the confusion and sadness of the characters. Cyclical structures in the score mimic the meaningless engine of life and death, sad on the personal level but so awfully necessary for life itself, while also playing the spinning wheels of the creators of the story.

Is there anything entertaining about looking into the mind of a creator? Wasn't postmodernism supposed to save us from considering the creator at all by seeing creation only in the eye of the beholder? Isn't it hopelessly modern for writers to write about the act of writing? And why do I have to write my own liner notes?
I didn't want the music to state what the film is "about", since this ambiguity is one of the film's attractions, but to write these notes I have to pretend that I do in fact know what it's about. Unknowable, primordial soup of doubt? Meaningless engine of life and death? Would I have made any of these ridiculous claims if I didn't have to write these notes? And what's with all these rhetorical questions? Who do I think I am, Socrates? If he was so great, why didn't he make it to the final cut of the film?
In the end, I guess that's the moral of the story, of evolution. That's why you read this. I made the cut.
Carter Burwell