Culture Clash: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Serve Up Class Commentary with Challengers’ Frenetic Score

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are, at this point, staples in the soundtrack world. Starting with The Social Network in 2010, the duo have garnered an impressive two Academy Awards for their work. With the score for Challengers (2024, dir. Luca Gudagnino), it’s easy to see why. Their work on this soundtrack does what all film scores should do. It integrates seamlessly with the narrative, yet also somehow provides a new vector of meaning to the film that would be entirely absent without it.

Without spoiling the plot, Challengers is a film about power. Really, it’s a film about tennis, but the narrative unfolds around a central notion that tennis, power, and sex are all inextricably linked. At the behest of Luca Guadagnino, Reznor and Ross produced a soundtrack embracing thumping techno beats, “like a heartbeat that makes the movie fun.” While rave music might not feel like an intuitive backdrop for a film about an upper-class sport, Reznor and Ross pull off the contrast excellently.

If anything, the chaotic nightclub that Reznor and Ross evoke produces a perfect counterpoint to the pristine nature of the country club world the characters float in and out of. This contrast reveals an additional layer of meaning to the film, something about the way the body might understand what the mind chooses to suppress. Sure, the characters on the screen profess to follow the intricate rituals that comprise a tennis match, but barely under the surface is the simmering tension of desire, a feeling felt in the body, played out through crunchy techno beats.

The friction between the soundtrack and the visual elements of the film reveals an underlying tension the film’s audience can intuitively grasp as people who experience social class every day.

Tennis as the subject matter for a film about power is itself a strong choice because tennis embraces power in a more removed sense than other sports. The players never physically touch each other on the court; while physical power might be at the center of a sport like American football, tennis exists in its own odd mental universe. Then, of course, there’s the symbolic power that tennis holds within the wider society as a symbol of luxury; it’s associated with class and refinement in a way that a sport like Basketball just isn’t. The symbolic nature of power within tennis makes it the perfect realm to explore themes of power as they might pertain to the wider world. 

The issue with this angle is that a large chunk of the population simply finds tennis boring. It can be difficult to sell the appeal of a sport that is so obsessed with its own ritual and tradition, especially as a filmmaker to a wider audience. However, this is precisely why Reznor and Ross’s soundtrack is so crucial to the structural integrity of the film as a whole. The fusion of genres like electroclash, techno, and house punctuate the actual tennis being played, allowing the audience to emotionally and intuitively understand the sport in a way that mere words will never accomplish. 

The friction between the soundtrack and the visual elements of the film reveals an underlying tension the film’s audience can intuitively grasp as people who experience social class every day. The characters in the film are costumed according to social class; tennis champion Art is dressed in a pristine white uniform while relative failure Patrick wears ill-fitting and mismatched clothes the entire film. This intentional visual contrast is undermined by the gritty visceral nature of the score, which implicitly compares the competitive nature of tennis to the sort of unity produced through dance. Even in competition, the soundtrack seems to tell us, there is unison. 

This contrast opens the film up to an entirely new angle of interpretation which simply wouldn’t be possible without it. There is an argument here, about the way bodies cannot be subsumed into the fussy symbolic rituals we construct in the face of power. We might suppress our desires to conform to a particular set of social norms, but our bodies act along a diverging set of impulses that are more inscrutable, more difficult to control. Even as an audience member, I felt compelled to dance along even though I couldn’t, as I was watching in the cinema, a place where social norms are strictly observed. 

The Challengers soundtrack provides a refreshing example of the way in which music itself can provide new layers of meaning to the realities that audience members experience every day. Through its replication of the gritty underside of movement and desire, the soundtrack is the perfect counterpoint to the commentary on class and repression that happens on the screen. Indeed, there’s something thrilling and addictive about being submerged in the flow of music, of letting your body carry you where your mind won’t. The soundtrack extends this idea from music to sport, communicating it with perfect sonic fidelity.