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by Kevin Ott

Remember the 80s? Sure you do! Remember those great John Hughes movies that we all loved and identified with as wealthy white suburban kids? Remember that one scene in that one movie when John Cusack or possibly one of those actors named "Judd" held up a stereo outside of his girlfriend's window, and then some other stuff happened? Remember that? Remember? Wasn't it great? Remember?

Shut up. Of course it wasn't great. It was monumentally stupid, watching someone who had the potential to be a good actor standing there dressed like a Street Person, holding up a boom box in the middle of a suburban development, thinking this was a viable way of getting a woman to like him. It was awful.

But the song.

The song was Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," and it did a lot to make the scene as a whole acceptable. I mean, there was John Cusack, looking all pre-Columbine in his tweed trenchcoat and backwards baseball cap, looking like a world-class dorkus, with this great song blaring from his radio that made it all okay.

And that's the impact that music has on the movies we watch. With just the right score, just the precise amount of crescendo, just the appropriate voice to highlight what we're seeing on the screen, we can watch a mediocre scene that somehow becomes memorable.

It's not all the music, of course; Cusack's scene in Say Anything will always have a profound and memorable effect on viewers (an effect that, sadly, I seem to have missed). But imagine if the song had had lyrics other than this:

In your eyes

The light, the heat

In your eyes

I am complete

I see the doorways of a thousand churches

The resolution of all the fruitless searches

Oh, I see the light and the heat

Maybe in the 80s we took John seriously because he looked rakish yet brooding in his trenchcoat with the sleeves rolled up, or because of the bold statement he was making in doing whatever the hell it was he was trying to do. But today, we take him seriously because he's still standing there playing a song that not only tugs at our heartstrings, but drags us around town by them and ties us to a chair with them.

It probably wouldn't be so persistent had he been playing the Bay City Rollers.

I'm thinking that there are four categories that soundtracks and scores can fall into:

• Those that are inextricably linked to their parent films. Rocky. Star Wars. The Godfather. Simple enough. These are tunes that immediately call to mind the movies they came from. Not all scores can do this -- listen to the music the next time you're watching a movie trailer that features orchestral music. Often, music from older films that can't usually be recognized on its own will be used. The scores from historical epics and period pieces like Braveheart and The Last of the Mohicans is often used to preview similar films before their own scores have been completed. It'd be hard to do that with the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Those that are really catchy but unrecognizable. See above. Often we’ll hear great music in a commercial or on a TV show that we recognize but can’t place. You probably saw it in a movie first. Probably a movie that you at least marginally liked.
• Good soundtracks somehow linked to remarkably bad films. Ever see The General's Daughter? Don't. John Travolta overacts like he was getting paid by the decibel. Lousy plot too. But Carter Burwell's score was perfect. A perfect meld of the rhythms of the Deep South and the technocracy of modern warfare, this score is something Moby would be proud of. Its spiritual southern chants and slide guitars match nicely with the family matters present in the story, while its techno remastering intersects with the perils facing military forces at the end of the 20th Century. Incidentally, Burwell also did a great score for Fargo, an orchestral epic that matched the landscape of the film and contrasted nicely with its small-time story, while at the same time underscored the universal themes already present.
• OK, for some reason I really liked the music in the American Pie movies, even though I usually hate that kind of post-punk stuff. (Why do the bands always have numbers in their names? Blink 182? Sum 41? SR-71? Am I missing something?) Maybe it's because the music is inextricably linked to youth culture and college life, something I miss desperately. I dunno. But anyway, I'm a big proponent of embracing your shame, so I decided to give mine a category of its own.

I could go on all day about how Danny Elfman should be given credit for saving Planet of the Apes along with makeup artist Rick Baker, or about how Simple Minds was the best thing to come of The Breakfast Club, or how I'm really starting to like those Japanese apple-pears (well, it's not all about the music), but I won't. Just remember: The next time you go to the movies, listen to the music.

And if you forget, just let me know. I'll get my boom box and trenchcoat, and I can be at your house the next morning.