The Needle and the Lens by Nate Patrin
Songs can make a movie, even when the movie isn’t a musical. That’s the simple point made by a new book, The Needle and the Lens, about the symbiosis that can occur when a well-chosen song is dropped into just the right scene. But author Nate Patrin looks deeper than that into the relationship between song and image, as well as the cultural context of the songs and films he explores. There is wisdom on almost every page.
Patrin begins with Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) and winds across the decades through Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) with stops for movies and songs that span many genres. Anger chose post-Buddy Holly, pre-Beatles pop for his suggestive portraits of biker gang members, conjuring disjunctive levels of meaning through the juxtapositions. With good reason, Patrin cites Scorpio Rising as a forerunner of music videos.
Director Mike Nichols had greater immediate influence in using a preexisting song to convey a cinematic mood. Nichols chose Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” to open The Graduate (1967), its haunting words and timbre following Dustin Hoffman down the airport’s moving sidewalk. The song had no apparent relation to the screenplay, and yet somehow established the protagonist’s ennui. Patrin catches how Quentin Tarantino echoed The Graduate in the opening airport scene of Jackie Brown (1997), deploying Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street” to suggest Pam Grier’s nostalgia for the future promised in her past.
Sometimes a song occupies the place in the screenplay where dialogue might be expected. In Easy Rider (1969), the songs “served as their own form of plot commentary” far better than any potentially clumsy exposition. Steppenwolf pitched two songs into Easy Rider’s soundtrack, “The Pusher” and “Born to be Wild.” “The latter song’s afterlife as shorthand for comedic faux rebellion has dulled its power in dispiriting ways,” Patrin writes. “The Pusher,” on the other hand, in distinguishing between pot and smack and the people who sell them, hasn’t lost its edge.
Patrin displays Greil Marcus depth as he explores cultural continuity and connections. Nostalgia, at its most harmful, prevents us from understanding the past. And by sanding off the hard edges of history, we become “comfortable revisiting the past because at least we know how it ends—unlike the present we’re stuck in.”
The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock’n’Roll to Synthwave is published by University of Minnesota Press.
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