The chart-topping hits you hear in movies can stretch the limits of belief. On the “Mother Mary” soundtrack, Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff capture the real thing. Mitch Therieau writes.
“The best song will never get sung.” So sang Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy more than two decades ago, in a track about a fictional rock band. He was making a joke about rock snobbery—his statement is the logical end point of the hipster’s search for evermore obscure tunes and bands to annex to their private kingdom of refined taste. Still, the point might be more broadly true. Literature is filled with great music that has never been sung or played, at least outside the world of the text. No one has ever heard the Vinteuil Sonata that so captivates the young Marcel in Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” or the piping of Kafka’s mouse singer Josephine, or the haunting song that the protagonist of Jean Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” hears in jail.
The notional songs work their magic at an unbridgeable distance; all you can catch is a stray spark or buzz. The movies are more willing to indulge our curiosity. Unlike musical theatre or opera, where the music often advances the plot or at least has some kind of narrative content, the cinema of pop-and-rock stardom extrudes fake songs incidentally, almost as a waste product. Sometimes this leads to performances that stretch the limits of credibility. Could anyone who heard the title song in “Marry Me” , performed onscreen by Jennifer Lopez and Maluma, really believe that this anodyne slab of synth pop could ever top the Latin charts, as it apparently does in the film’s world? Because you can hear the song, you can judge for yourself, and you may find yourself feeling differently from the scores of cheering extras in the audience.
Then again, an especially good fictional song can come to feel more real than its story of origin. Lustra’s pop-punk cuckoldry anthem “Scotty Doesn’t Know” has detached from the raunchy teen comedy “EuroTrip” and taken on a life of its own, as has the impossibly infectious title song from “That Thing You Do!” . Such a fate seems appropriate for two films that are largely about the pop song’s twin qualities of endless iterability and absolute singularity .
Sometimes the sheer charisma of a performance is enough to bring a fictional artist’s work into the real-world canon, as in Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” in “The Bodyguard” or, to a lesser degree, Lady Gaga’s vocal performance on “Shallow” in the 2018 remake of “A Star Is Born,” which nearly makes you forget the schlock of the song and the melodrama of the movie. Perhaps only with “The Harder They Come” have a film and its protagonist’s real music, there sung with exquisite defiance by Jimmy Cliff, ascended to the cultural firmament hand in hand.
“Mother Mary” withholds its central song, but it gives us plenty of other original music. Hathaway’s character is an alt-pop superstar in the vein of Gaga and Lana Del Rey, with a dash of Lorde. This is an archetype that has been around for long enough that it could easily be a subject of parody or pastiche, arguably the default modes for the fictional-pop-music film as a genre. The turgid self-seriousness of a pop star who insists that what she is doing is high art, who shushes singing fans at concerts, who turns social-media beef into lyrics: there is more than enough material here for even the laziest parodist. But we will have to wait a bit longer for an alt-pop “This Is Spinal Tap,” or at least be satisfied for now with “The Moment,” the wan Charli XCX mockumentary that was released earlier this year.
“Mother Mary” does something more radical: it enlists the musicians and producers who shaped the sound of progressive pop in the twenty-tens to create its fictional music, sung by Hathaway herself. In the hands of Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs, along with collaborators such as the 1975’s George Daniel and the prolific songwriter Tobias Jesso, Jr., Mother Mary’s original songs are more than credible. They are simply the real thing, if not quite on par with these artists’ greatest work. Listening to them is an uncanny experience, as though you are unearthing a suppressed memory of something you heard on a playlist years ago, or discovering a viral trend that somehow passed you by. These performances seem to issue from the other side of a veil; they don’t feel totally contiguous with the film’s here and now. This is partially due to the nature of today’s multimedia pop performances, which tend to present themselves as a whole world apart, self-contained and all-encompassing. But this sense of disconnect is also precisely the problem that Mother Mary is trying to solve. She is out of time, between eras. She needs new myths. To create them, she will have to slough off her old ones: “all the old yous” must be abraded away, as Sam says. And as she puts it elsewhere, more threateningly, “Stitch by stitch, you’re obliterating yourself.” Mary is willing to be annihilated and remade.
“I let you make something of me,” she tells Sam matter-of-factly. “Spooky Action,” the film encourages you to think at first, could be a rare musical expression of the real Mother Mary. From the way she talks about it, it is clear that it’s a raw and personal song. The closest that you get to hearing the demo is in an arresting dance sequence that she performs for Sam; it is meant to be the choreography that will accompany the song, but all we hear are footfalls and breath. Her movements start out lurching and ugly and grow progressively more frenzied, until she is almost inhuman, demonic, before collapsing in sweaty exhaustion. Apparently Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX had not yet fully settled on a sound for Mother Mary before they saw this scene. Only after they reviewed footage of Hathaway’s “thrashing and jerky” movements, as Charli XCX recounted to Vogue, could they start feeling their way into the music in earnest.
In a sense, then, all the music in “Mother Mary” is a distorted negative image of “Spooky Action,” or at least a product of its quantum force. This force reverberates outside the story, too. Hathaway herself has reported an increase in spooky experiences in her life since joining the “Mother Mary” cast. Lowery has called the film “a doorway into believing, yes, there’s more out there.” In the flashback that opens the second half of the movie, a medium, played by FKA Twigs, appears to tear open a doorway between the film’s world and another. A diaphanous red blob somehow both enters Mary’s body and hovers outside it, pursuing her on tour. Both Mary and Sam say that they have felt its presence, even at a distance. At the film’s climax, they stage an exorcism: Mary carves a gaping wound in her chest, and Sam pulls out a piece of billowing red fabric, like a magician. What previously could have been a shared delusion now takes on a solid form in the world. This, ultimately, is what the pop song is for “Mother Mary”: it is a form of dark magic, a portal between realms.
Another film might want to demystify its spell and show you the creaky machinery under the surface—the bumbling ineptitude of the industry suits, the little humiliations of touring life. For better or for worse, “Mother Mary” really wants you to believe. ♦
Music Musicians Movie Soundtracks Songs Charli Xcx Anne Hathaway Pop Stars
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