by Chris Feil
Say what you will about its hipster, ukulele verve, but “The Moon Song” from Her is one of the most deserving Best Original Song nominees of the past decade. Some of the reward may be carryover from songwriter Karen O missing out for Where The Wild Things Are’s equally deserving “All is Love”, but both prove essential to the emotional experience of their films. Seriously, Karen O, please make more music for films and not just those from Spike Jonze.
This song is a deceptively simple ditty, a longing love song that slips into the deep melancholy and faint whimsy of the near-future that Jonze creates in the film. It belongs to Her’s manic pixie dream AI Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), but also the romantic imagination of Joaquin Pheonix’s Theodore. Every couple needs a song, even if one of the parties is solely digital.
Her examines loneliness in the modern era, particularly for the heterosexual male that longs for authentic connection but still gets mired in behaviors of projection and not seeing past their own bullshit. Samantha’s self-discovery is crucially independent from the unconventional love that grows between them, revealing Theodore’s flawed attempts to connect with the world around him. Similarly, “The Moon Song” is both a blank slate of projectable feeling and meaningful precisely for what can be grafted onto it. As much as it feels like the kind of song that Theodore can transplant his own particular needs onto or divine what interpretation fulfills his void, the song’s true, deep well of longing can’t be ignored.
The feeling the song conveys also helps gloss over the track’s simplicity and its nursery rhyme quality. But when you think it reduces true feeling to twee sentiment, you hear in its moon lyrics the story of the theoretically miles between people wishing to connect, where wishing for kinship is its own romance that can be confused for the real thing. Right when you think you have reduced it down to something dismissable, it then reveals its humane depth of people passing eachother in the night with arms reaching.
Like the song’s fantastical vision, Her makes you question what is genuine and what is false in relationships, and how much what we think we feel is just us wanting to feel that way. It’s all too real and too precious to be true, something Karen O captures in the song’s sweetness that flows seemlessly with the film’s score by Owen Pallett and Arcade Fire’s Will Butler. It’s rare that a song can help unpack a film’s complexity or inform the nuance of what we are watching without overplaying its hand. The song is also lovely enough for us to sigh into along with its lovers.
And it’s impactful for Theodore to have a love song to chase its sentiment, making us think about how we respond to the sway of music as he does. How much of love is us simply chasing a feeling? Even in real love, is half of what we feel simply wanting to be in love?
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