A friend emailed me the following after my post below on Donnie Darko—the song “Mad World,” which I mentioned there, plays over a montage scene of the sort she describes.

A lot of movies have songs with this certain quality (delicate-melancholy-cadence-kind-of-thing) playing over scenes in which the camera pans to each of the main characters, who reveal, by their expressions, whatever their states of mind are in that critical plot moment (usually right before or after the climax). American Beauty, Duets, Election, uh…Titanic or so I’ve heard heh-heh, um…almost every episode of Ally McBeal (not that I would know…but it seems to be a David E. Kelley thing in TV). Anyway, I feel like I should think scenes like that are hackneyed and cheaply manipulative (except, of course, in Magnolia, when the characters actually sing along to that great Aimee Mann song—brilliant).

But instead, it gets me in the gut every time—the idea that, well, everything’s fucked up right now, for different reasons for each character, and each character feels totally isolated in her own space… but you, the audience, see the concurrence of these moments (you see it as this moment). You hear the unifying text—this is the song. You know the grotesque beauty that is the human condition (as defined in the film). I’m sure I sound overwrought, but like I said, it moves me every time.