Why we love pop music that works in movies
One of the chief pleasures of James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” is the pop music on the soundtrack.
That’s not surprising given that Gunn is known for his soundtrack choices, especially in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies he made while he was affiliated with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Drafted to craft a similar (though darker, edgier, sexier) product for the DC universe, he manages to go the radio-ready ’70s rock of “Guardians” one better, with a curated soundtrack that balances the familiar (Johnny Cash, the Pixies) with the surprising (Louis Prima, San Francisco punk band Culture Abuse) to underscore the emotional content of a scene or to provide an ironic counterpoint.
Gunn famously writes the songs he wants to use into his scripts and often plays the music on-set while filming the scenes he intends to use them over. Additionally, on “The Suicide Squad,” he worked with film composer John Murphy on scored music cues before shooting of the film began, in order that the actors could hear these cues as they shot their scenes.
Gunn isn’t the only film director known to obsess over the songs heard in his movies.
Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino are similarly choosy about their soundtracks. Edgar Wright — whose most recent project is the documentary “The Sparks Brothers,” about brothers Ron and Russell Mael and their 50 years as the core members of the avant-garde band Sparks — also makes feature films (“Baby Driver,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”) with snappy pop soundtracks. The Maels’ latest project is the rock opera “Annette,” a collaboration with French director Leos Carax that stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard in singing roles.
The use of pop music in movies is ubiquitous today, which makes it difficult to imagine that it wasn’t always so. While music was a part of the movies from the beginning — with in-theater pianists or organist providing the score, until the 1960s — almost all music heard in the movies was specifically recorded for that particular movie.
A GOLDEN AGE
After World War II, the Hollywood musical enjoyed a golden age, and in the 1950s, the invention of the teenager as a marketing demographic gave rise to the youth sploitation film, a subgenre of which was the rock ’n’ roll movie. Youth sploitation films included 1955’s “Blackboard Jungle,” which famously propelled Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Rock” (three different versions of which were used in the film) up the pop charts; 1956’s “The Girl Can’t Help It,” and the 1957 Elvis Presley vehicle “Jailhouse Rock.”
The songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were commissioned to write the songs for “Jailhouse Rock,” but — the story goes — didn’t do any work on the project for months. Finally they were called to a meeting in New York in April 1957, three weeks before the film was to start shooting. When they confessed they hadn’t yet started writing the songs, Leiber and Stoller were sequestered in a hotel suite by Jean Aberbach, director of Hill & Range music publishing company. Aberbach blocked the door with a chair and took a nap, telling the writers they couldn’t come out until they’d fulfilled their contract.
Four hours later, Leiber and Stoller emerged, having written “Treat Me Nice,” “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care” and “Jailhouse Rock.” They’d write one more song for Presley to sing in the film — “I Want to Be Free.” Rock ’n’ roll must have been pretty easy.
“I can’t say that the songs were overworked,” Stoller told Australian writer Ken Sharp in 2020. “We didn’t have time to overwork them. We were in too much of a hurry to get out of that hotel room.”
In the ’60s, Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night” changed the game by presenting 36 fictional hours in the lives of the Beatles, with a soundtrack peppered with their music (including instrumental versions performed by “the George Martin Orchestra,” which consisted of the Beatles’ producer and classical sidemen).
NOW COMMON TECHNIQUE
The “Can’t Buy Me Love” segment in the film borrowed stylistically from Lester’s 11-minute short film from 1959, “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film,” which pioneered the now common technique of cutting the images to the beat of the music. The “Can’t Buy Me Love” sequence is an obvious precursor of MTV-style music videos, which led to some suggesting that Lester is the father of MTV.
The director wasn’t impressed by that. In the mid’80s, when someone referred to him as MTV’s daddy, he asked for a paternity test.
But whether or not “A Hard Day’s Night” can be credited or blamed for MTV, it directly led to the idea for “The Monkees” a television sitcom that started out as four musicians-turned-actors portraying musicians in a struggling rock band. (While I would argue that the Monkees became one of the most important bands of rock ’n’ roll’s second generation — their influence is hard to overestimate and their records, regardless of who was playing on them, are very good — we will leave that discussion for another time.)
Even more importantly, with “A Hard Day’s Night,” Lester created what Roger Ebert called “a new grammar” of filmmaking that embraced quick cuts, obviously handheld cameras and pop music playing over documentary (or faux documentary) action. “A Hard Day’s Night” is a genuinely iconoclastic film, and it ushered in an identifiably modern pop style.
DON’T BOGART THAT JOINT
I’ve heard it said that Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” (1968) is the first film to use “found” music — previously recorded songs on its soundtrack — but there’s at least one earlier example. In 1963, Kenneth Anger’s experimental “Scorpio Rising,” a 28-minute short with no dialogue, had a soundtrack that contained 11 pop songs, including Ricky Nelson’s “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread),” Elvis’ “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise,” Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack” and the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out.”
“Easy Rider” is significant as it features an exclusive contemporary rock soundtrack and contains no original scoring. Hopper specifically looked for songs to comment on the action of the movie. And while some of that might feel a little on-the-nose to modern audiences (as when Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” plays over the opening drug deal scene), it’s a technique widely employed in current films. You might groan or smile or do a little bit of both as Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” opens with the live version of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” playing over the opening shots of Michael Rooker as supervillain Savant bounces a rubber ball around the yard at Belle Reve prison a la Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape.”
DO YOU BELIEVE IN ROCK ’N’ ROLL?
Maybe the best thing about Cate Shortland’s movie “Black Widow” is its prologue.
We are in Ohio, in 1995, where a blue-haired 11-yearold (Ever Anderson, daughter of actor Milla Jovovich and director Paul W.S. Anderson) glides her bike down a suburban street past kids swinging on a tire swing. It’s all very Midwestern mainstream … ranch dressing, corn on the cob and a younger sister (Violet McGraw) in the dappled late-afternoon sunlight. Maybe it’s only our vague knowledge of the title character’s backstory that makes it feel ominous, a slight echo of the opening sequence of Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 suspense film “Don’t Look Now.”
“Don’t Look Now” is about grief; about a couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) trying to recover after the drowning death of their daughter. Its opening sequence also features an androgynous 11-year-old on a bicycle and a little sister, the one who drowns. (Nicholas Salter, the little boy on the bike, never made another movie. He died as a young adult, hanging himself in the mental health unit of London’s notorious Brixton prison, a place the inmates named “Fraggle Rock.”)
No one literally drowns in the opening moments of “Black Widow,” but the “family” of these girls is about to be obliterated. It turns out it’s not a real family at all, but an assembled team of Russians on a three-year deep-cover spy mission, analogous to the family in the FX television series “The Americans,” which was inspired by real-life Russian operatives who posed as Americans.
The father figure, Alexei (David Harbour) reveals they’re about to go “on an adventure.” Mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and older sister Natasha know what this means, but 6-year-old Yelena seems to have an incomplete understanding of the situation. Which is that she is part of a mission in which Alexei and Melina have been engaged in stealing some sort of mind-controlling technology from a U.S. government subcontractor (Hydra, which Marvel Comic fans understand to be the predecessor to S.H.I.E.L.D.).
IT’S TIME TO GO
Now they are feeling the heat; it’s time to go. There’s no time to pack, there are fruit roll-ups in the car.
They roll out, past the incoming spycatchers. Yelena feels the tension. She asks Alexei — who she still believes is her real father — to play “her song.” He dutifully inserts a cassette tape into the car’s deck. Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie” begins to play.
The song, famously a nostalgic paean to a time of lost innocence, before “the day the music died,” plays out the family’s last moments in America as they pass a high school football stadium and head toward an old airfield and the small airplane they’ll fly to Cuba, on their way back to the Motherland.
Natasha understands (while Yelena doesn’t) that the girls will be drafted into a espionage training program called the Red Room from whence they’ll eventually graduate as highly efficient killing machines in service of the evil General Dreykov. Natasha has already spent time in the Red Room and likely understands her “family” has been a sham all along. She means to try to save Yelena by any means necessary.
But she can’t. She’s an 11-year-old girl. Alexei, for all his big-heartedness, is at base a narcissist who wants, as the costumed super-soldier Red Guardian, to be considered the Russian equivalent of Captain America. He goes along with the program. The family — what had passed as family — is broken up.
“Black Widow” goes on to take the shape of a comic-book movie, driven by action and smart only in that peculiar nerdy way that comic books reward the persistent attention of obsessives. You might have better things to do than watch the movie, but if it’s your thing, there’s plenty to drill deep down into.
A CHEESY POP SONG
I liked the way it used a cheesy pop song that probably deserves to have applied to it the all-purpose derisive “pretentious” as a means of connection between Alexei and Yelena. Later, when the adult girls team up and break him out of prison and the faux family is reunited on Melina’s farm, Yelena insists that their time together in Ohio was never real. She stomps off, and Alexei follows her into Melina’s bedroom.
She unloads on him, saying that although she idolized him as a child, she’s now disgusted by him. Were she and Natasha just his cross to bear in America? She tells him to get out.
In the original script, Alexei was to mumble something and leave. But Harbour had a different thought.
“I felt there’s gotta be something a little more profound,” he said during the press junket for the film. He suggested a backstory for Alexei and Yelena. She’d been taken from her family and placed with Alexei and Melina when she was 3; naturally she had anxiety about the situation. To comfort her, Alexei would drive her around in the car and play “American Pie,” which became her song.
So when they’re escaping, she’d ask him to play it. And now, when he’s struggling to reconnect with her, he starts singing the song.
“He’s a failure as a father; what can he do at the end of this scene? This narcissist who also has a big heart,” Harbour said. “And so he brings up the song, basically as him saying, ‘I tried.’”
And he wins her over — at least to the degree that she starts to sing along with him.
I’m not sure anyone expects or appreciates well-observed moments like this in comic-book movies, but the makers of “Black Widow” obviously cared about making as good a film as they could within the conventional parameters of the genre. And the way they use pop music in the film is interesting. In this context, “American Pie” isn’t bloated ersatz-Dylan pop posey, but a genuinely poignant pop artifact.
It may well have caught the ear of a 6-year-old in 1995 with its strong melody and lyrics that could pass for nursery rhymes. And while any similarly durable classic rock song might have worked in this context, its yearnful lyrics about innocence lost rhyme with Yelena’s experience. “Black Widow” recontexturizes Don McLean’s would-be epic as it demonstrates one of the real world uses of pop music.
Pop songs can become part of our private languages; we use them as shorthand to remind our significant others of significant moments and times in our relationship. When Alexei sings “American Pie” to Yelena, he’s not thinking about Buddy Holly or the Big Bopper or about any of the various interpretations that have been assigned to the lyrics. He’s thinking about Ohio and driving Miss Yelena.
That’s how music sometimes works, and one of the reasons we love it.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com