Love, Music

I hate musicals. They are trite, saccharine, and annoyingly loud, and by writing this I've virtually guaranteed that I will cover a musical sometime in the coming year.

Not today, though. Today I want to feature two movies that aren't musical so much as they are about music, starting with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008).

The film chronicles the beginning of a relationship between Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings), two high schoolers who meet on a night out in New York City. Together with their merry band of followers they search for Where's Fluffy?, an indie rock legend whose concert is set to go off at the end of the night.

I see you.

Where's Fluffy? is, of course, a MacGuffin. (A MacGuffin being the Hitchcockian device of a goal that is ultimately unimportant to the overall plot.) 

Instead it is the music, their private soundtrack, that pulls the plot forward. As Nick and Norah stumble together through the events of the night, the result is a non-quiet meditation on a young person's how to be, separately and as a part of a couple. 

What makes it memorable is itself the act of turning, and turning, and turning, until eventually ... 

... they face the same direction.

*

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) is a film that begins somewhat differently. Here the lovers are not new, not unknown, but the opposite. Indeed, they are familiars of hundreds of years. 

Tilda Swinton, Vampire.

Though they live separately, they are known best between themselves and no one else.

Tom Hiddleston, also Vampire.

Adam and Eve are thus the theoretical endgame of the Nick and Norah meet-cute.

But where Nick and Norah merely takes place in the darkness, Only Lovers Left Alive dwells in it. Coming together again, the couple discovers that what their unit suffers from most is not the dangers of the outside world, but those cultivated by their isolation.

Oh, and did I mention that Adam has a rock band?

It has some teeth.

*

Be back next week.