Last night, CBS aired another annual installment of the AFI's 100 years series. This year's program was entitled "100 years 100 songs," and the AFI counted down what they decided to be the 100 greatest songs to appear in film, the only criteria being that the song had to have lyrics. I was intrigued by the idea, and I had taken a gander at the AFI website which had listed the 400 nominees. There were a few interesting and creative choices. Sadly, these more interesting nominees were, for the most part, overlooked.
It seems to me that the AFI often placed more value merely on the song, rather than on the juxtoposition of moving image and song. For evidence of this, I point to certain songs that were awarded which appeared in their respective films only in either the opening or closing credit sequences. The song "Nobody Does it Better," which corresponds to the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, for example, is a song that appears at the opening credits. And while the opening credits to James Bond films are visually interesting, it is not what the program talked about. "Rock Around the Clock" was another song that was awarded. It too is a song the merely corresponds to the opening credits, in this case to a 1955 film entitled Blackboard Jungle. Representing 8 Mile, a film that I have seen, was the number 93 song by Eminem, "Lose Yourself." This song does not appear until the very end of the film as Rabbit walks away and the credits begin to roll.
I think that "Lose Yourself" is a pretty amazing song. I'm not upset that it was awarded, but it goes to show that the AFI did indeed emphasize the song over the sometimes ingenious way in which a song is used to enhance the viewing experience. The latter I would have found much more interesting. The AFI overlooked what I believe are some of the most incredible uses of song in film. They failed to honor the ways in which the film-school generation filmmakers of the New American Cinema often reinvented the concept of popular music in film.
Take the Doors' song "The End," for example, which was one of the initial 400 nominated songs, as it appears in Coppola's Apocalypse Now. There could not have been a more perfect score to accompany the beginning and ending sequences of that film than this song. The haunting doomsday lyrics of Jim Morrison, coupled with the mystically eerie yet simple guitar work of Robby Krieger, coupled with the organs and every other aspect of the song, create an already unforgettable piece of music. Now couple this to the images of the film itself, Martin Sheen's borderline psychotic character moving around like a drunken martial artist, completely strung out and losing all sanity in a hot and humid Saigon hotel room. Fast forward to the end of the film, in which Sheen's character once again assumes this bizarre and horrifying persona, on his way to brutally assassinate the enigmatic Kurtz. The Doors song plays again over the unforgettable shot of Sheen slowly emerging from the still river like a silent predator. This is art!
There you have it, an example of how the use of song enhanced the cinematic experience in a profound new way. There are other directors besides Coppola who have acheived incredible cinematic moments through song. I am immediately reminded of two very similar, both incredible, montage sequences in two of Martin Scorsese's mob pictures, Goodfellas and Casino, that utilized pop music to help tell the sad and fateful stories of how the mafia was destroyed by the very reckless behavior that made it initially powerful. The former is carried along by the second half (without lyrics, I admit) of the song "Layla," the latter film using, quite fittingly, "House of the Rising Sun." What did Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" really do for film? It sold a bunch of CD's, made some people lots of money and annoyed most of us Americans for a few weeks.
This is my humble opinion. I have no problem with "Over the Rainbow" being the number one song. But there could have been a much more interesting variety selected in the top 100, that would have challenged viewers to think about the many different ways in which the historical combination of song and film has influenced the cinematic experience of the present day.
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