There are few
more powerful combinations
than when just the right song meets
just the right scene. To put all our favorites
in one place, The Dissolve compiled 50
remarkable combinations of pop
music (broadly defined)
and moviemaking.
Not Fade Away
“Roadrunner” by Sex Pistols
David Chase is notorious for the way he concluded his TV series The Sopranos, but he upped the ante on odd endings with his feature filmmaking debut, Not Fade Away. A meandering but bracingly personal look at how the counterculture infiltrated suburban New Jersey in the late 1960s, Not Fade Away takes its hero, Douglas Damiano (John Magaro), from garage-rock glory to hippie-infested Hollywood, where he plans to give up the drums and pick up a movie camera. As he walks near the Capitol Records building down trash-strewn Los Angeles streets, he hears a broadcast from the future, playing Sex Pistols’ cover of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner.” Then his teenage sister—the movie’s occasional narrator—steps out to tell the audience that rock ’n’ roll can change the world. Her dance to “Roadrunner” cuts to an old black-and-white TV performance of black and white pop singers dancing together, illustrating with astonishing clarity and profundity just what the primal, communal power of music can achieve. —Noel Murray
Halloween
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult
Blue Öyster Cult enjoyed its biggest hit in 1976 with the macabre—and, yes, cowbell-assisted—“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” a seeming ode to suicide. Part of what makes its appearance in John Carpenter’s Halloween so effective is how little of the song is used. Carpenter confines it to a few bars, heard coming from the radio of a car like an omen of the bad things about to come down on an unsuspecting small town. A clever bit of understated scene-setting, it sends a chill before the really chilling stuff begins. —Keith Phipps
Nowhere To Hide
“Holiday” by Bee Gees
Most of the events in Lee Myung-se’s 1999 South Korean thriller—a heavily stylized cops-and-robbers saga—stem from a murder that takes place on the “40 Steps,” a prominent staircase in Busan. Though it’s a violent scene, Lee presents it in a dreamy, impressionistic daze, focusing as much on autumn leaves and spattering rain as on the killing itself. To accentuate that quality, he sets the whole thing to “Holiday”—not the Madonna hit, but an early Bee Gees single, predating the group’s disco superstardom by a decade. Mournful and minor-key, but featuring a lilting nonsense chorus (“dee dee da dee dee dee”), it ideally suits what’s happening visually—which the killers themselves must have understood, as we see one of them insert a disc into their car’s CD player (reflected in his shades) just before the song begins playing. —Mike D’Angelo
The Devil’s Rejects
“Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
Taking a fluid approach to genre that even Quentin Tarantino would envy, Rob Zombie followed up his sleazy 2003 horror film House Of 1000 Corpses with the ultraviolent “killers on the run” movie The Devil’s Rejects, turning the villains from the earlier film into the sort-of heroes of the second. And as part of Zombie’s experiment in audience identification, he ends The Devil’s Rejects with bittersweet flashbacks to his rogues in happier times, before they drive out to face a police roadblock and certain death. It’s a beautifully shot, horrifically bloody climax, scored to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s defiant country-rock anthem “Free Bird.” The song choice underscores how B-movies and rock ’n’ roll both have a way of getting otherwise law-abiding people to feel empathy with bad birds who cannot change. —Noel Murray
Dogtooth
“Flashdance… What A Feeling” by Irene Cara (as interpreted by Older Daughter)
In Yorgos Lanthimos’ discomforting allegory Dogtooth, a Greek family keeps its children literally walled off from the outside world, making up stories to explain the strange objects and animals (and words) that sometimes drift into the compound. The movie takes place when the kids are young adults, and getting harder to protect. When the unnamed eldest daughter (played by Aggeliki Papoulia) gains access to videotapes of Hollywood movies, she imitates them at odd moments, such as when she and her sister perform a sloppy dance in honor of their parents’ anniversary, and the eldest suddenly breaks off and starts doing Jennifer Beals’ bump and grind from Flashdance. Her mother angrily stops her, but it’s too late: the delicious poison of popular culture has seeped in. —Noel Murray