Love is like a sin my love For the ones that feel it the most/Look at her with her eyes like a flame/She will love you like a fly will never love you, again. “Paradise Circus”—Massive Attack
I came to Massive Attack through the BBC crime series “Luther.” In London, terrible madmen roam the streets sometimes wearing Punch and Judy masks reminding us of Vendettas and perhaps even Guy Fawkes. All I know is that police detective John Luther has his hands full trying not to fall in love with a serial killer named Alice. Hell, he has his hands full trying not to be a serial killer himself, and the main difference I see between him and Miami Beach’s favorite serial killer “Dexter” is the music. Dexter doesn’t have Massive Attack, but thank god Luther does.
Is it possible to like a TV show or a movie mainly for its soundtrack? Or even for one song: a song that not only creates a mood for the plot or that underscores the “hero,” but that almost becomes a character itself?
I don’t remember the episode of Luther where MA’s “Dissolved Girl” appears, but it doesn’t matter. Listen to “Dissolved Girl” once, or maybe a few times, and you’ll probably be able to come up with the story—Luther throwing an apple over the prison hospital wall so that the incarcerated and deranged Alice might find it and extricate the secret he’s imbedded in it. Her smile when she finds it. It’s all too delicious.
Massive Attack’s first record, Blue Lines, was re-released last year, but only on vinyl. I’ve listened to it repeatedly and see massive new “Luther” episodes coming.
I feel about “Luther” and the music that haunts it like I do about the TV show that helped break the ground for such inescapable faire: Twin Peaks, ABC and David Lynch’s early 90’s creation about the psycho-killer of the small-town beauty queen, Laura Palmer. I loved the show and actually hosted a Twin Peaks party with my wife back in the spring of 1990. I was pony-tailed “Leo,” my wife was the “Log Lady,” and our baby daughter was the “Log.” People are strange but maybe we were all made crazy by the soundtrack, sounds composed by Angelo Badalamenti with songs sung by an unknown crooner, Julee Cruise. Not to give any plot points away, but in the greatest scene of the series—the most haunting five minutes of network TV--the killer is about to strike, while investigating agent Dale Cooper sits at a roadhouse bar with Sheriff Harry and the afore-mentioned Log Lady. A Giant dissolves into the place where Cruise has been performing to tell Cooper that “It’s happening again.” Cooper looks as if his mind is breaking, while in other parts of the bar, James and Donna, who desperately love each other, cry over a lost friend, and bad Bobby looks like he finally gets that this town, this life, has been punctured so badly that no plug or tape or replacement town will ever heal it. All these feelings, these epiphanies, these helpless forebodings, happen as the most lush and beautiful and hypnotic songs fill in the troubled town of Twin Peaks.
Don’t worry. You’ll see the murder.
And the mirror.
But I’m still thinking of these songs, mainly, “The World Spins.” Songs written by Lynch, and I could quote some of the lyrics for you, but they’d be so badly out of context. Still:
Moving near the edge of night Dust is dancing in the space A dog and bird are far away The sun comes up and down each day. Light and shadow change the walls Halley’s comet’s come and gone The things I touch are made of stone Falling through this night alone.
Love, don’t go away. Come back this way. Come back and stay forever and ever.
Of course it’s Laura Palmer the song is referring to. But my associations aren’t so much with the characters or horrors of Twin Peaks.
We used to put our daughter to sleep by playing Twin Peaks music. No matter what puzzle she was constructing, what stuffed top she was talking to, she’d drift off to these tones, to Cruise’s softly echoing voice. I miss those days of driving to see relatives and needing her to sleep. “Put on Julee,” my wife would say, and in a few minutes, the magic happened. No matter how many times it worked, no matter how many times our daughter’s head slipped to the side in deep sleep as she sat in her car seat, we’d keep listening with the tape on repeat; we never got tired, even late at night when we’d sometimes stop at the Krispy Kreme whose “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign blazed so brightly in our little version of Twin Peaks.
There are other movie-themed songs, too. I knew I’d like Wes Anderson’s Rushmore the second Max Fischer donned his red beret. But at the film’s end, when Max signals the DJ at his cast party and then The Faces’ “Ooh La La” attacks, I could barely stand the beauty.
And then there was Sofia Coppola’s wisdom in having Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson kiss to Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” at the end of Lost in Translation. How did she know to pick that song? I would have liked the movie anyway, but when I heard that song just after I saw the lovers whisper what we can never hear or know, I almost cried.
Coming out of the theater that night, our daughter was waiting for us. She had elected to see something more age appropriate.
“Was that movie bad,” she asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“Well, the people who came out just ahead of you said it was the worst thing they had ever seen.”
I just shook my head.
And then there’s Mad Men, whose creator Matthew Weiner continually gets his score right. The way each show ends, sometimes with seemingly filler music that plays into the credits but which always seems to complement the bittersweet or offbeat way the characters face or don’t face their problems. And the music is so soft that it’s deafening. It’s Husker Du in reverse. I can’t stand watching it with people who have to talk during the show, especially at the end. Can’t they hear the quiet? Don’t they want to?
In one of the last episodes of this season, “Flood,” Don falls in love for the first time with his son; New York City explodes after Dr. King’s assassination; a Jewish man tries setting his workaholic son up with a nice Jewish girl. And the song that ends it all is Paul Mariat’s “Love Is Blue,” which features a harpsichord and was number one on the pop charts in 1968, no small feature for any instrumental. I don’t remember which Beatles song it replaced, but does that really matter? Maybe to Matthew Weiner, it does. It must for he decided to use it and not “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”
It’s happening again. My daughter, now a woman of twenty-three, recently asked me to watch The Perks of Being a Wallflower with her. I didn’t need much convincing as I had wanted to see it when it was released last year but got lazy, and like most movies of its sort, it left our cinemaplex too soon. So she and I watched it in her urban apartment, a former tobacco warehouse. While I fell into the plot and The Catcher in the Rye angst of the central character, Charlie, and his particular “Jane,” played by Emma Watson, not only was it the music that got me, it was the music that “got” the characters, too.
Watson’s character, “Sam,” is riding with Charlie and her half-brother Patrick through the autumn Pittsburgh night, and as they cruise the interstate and hit the tunneled underpass, a song comes on the radio.
“What is this song?” Sam cries. But no one knows. As she turns it up, she climbs through the truck’s opened rear window and stands in the flatbed, arms outstretched, reaching for all the things one of “those songs” causes us to reach for. She’s in bliss, and Patrick and Charlie smile and are in love.
I love that it takes the rest of the movie for them to find the song again, for of course by then, they’ve finally and truly found each other. I also love that they never name the song, because the film’s set in the late 1970’s and don’t we all know the song by now anyway?
I also love that life back then was like that. Radio DJ’s didn’t always announce the song titles and artists, and I hated when I’d hear one of “those songs,” and then be left with no recourse of how to find it, how to buy it. By sheer luck I might hear it again; it might even become a hit, leaving me wondering what I ever worried about. But more often, it would just slip away somewhere, would vanish forever in those days before “You Tube,” and “Google,” and all the ways we have now of putting our finger on what we love.
Thinking of Sam and Charlie and Patrick making mixtapes and listening to The Smiths and to Bowie’s “Heroes,” I thought of one more movie song, one that develops over the course of the plot, though caught up in the wonderful window of movie time as we are, we can’t know, don’t even wonder what it is or means.
It’s in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where we see a musical composer in an upper apartment across the courtyard from “hero” LB Jeffries (James Stewart) working on a new piece. He struggles with it, gets drunk with it, seems finished with it, in the bad way. But he doesn’t quit. At one point Lisa (Grace Kelly) hears the tune and asks Jeffries “What’s that music?” She thinks it’s marvelous, transcendent. And it is. It saves “Miss Lonelyhearts,” gives her reason to live, though it endangers Lisa herself.
We learn only in the credits that the song is “Lisa’s Theme,” composed by Franz Waxman, one of only two compositions he wrote for this, his final film with Hitch.
What indeed is that music? Why does it move us so? And what meaning would these movies and TV shows and our lives have without it?
Which brings me back to “She will love you like a fly will never love you, again.” I don’t know what that line means, and maybe I’m not supposed to. All I know is that this song forms the opening credits for “Luther.” And in the moody, romantic seductiveness it creates, I wonder if we’re not, in the end, only that fly and nothing more. Listening to sounds we can’t explain, to words that send us off to sleep. To those places in the back of our memories where we can ride through the flowing air around us and be heroes “just for one day.”