MUSIC SEEN – remembering some of our favorite confluences of music in movies, television, video games, anything. Pairing the moving image with musical notes is a time honored craft – about which, we will clumsily say is pretty awesome and pretty cool.
“Auto Rock” (Mogwai) in Miami Vice (2006)
Why this movie? Why this song in this movie? Why now? So many questions.
Michael Mann re-made his 1980’s TV show in 2006 with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, alongside an underrated supporting cast of pre-Moonlight Naomie Harris, pre-Leftovers Justin Theroux and an ahead-of-its-time visual aesthetic, both surrealistic and gritty. It’s not a perfect movie, by any estimation. But it does do some things very well. Take music for instance.
“Miami Vice” in the 1980s was a phenomenon on TV – one that was launched with a famous scene of Tubbs and Crockett driving in their 1980s car in 1980s Miami at night, while Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” famously drove to its famous drum solo – turning the vampy synth-mood song into a jam. So any recent tackle of MV would have to nail the music. Specifically, I want to talk about nailing the ending. Mogwai and Michael Mann.
Since Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “East Hastings” scored the apocalyptic realization in 28 Days Later (2002), the genre of “Post-Rock” (where vocals are shunned, left in a wake of guitars and strings building to a crash) had a moment in movies. Think also the movie or TV show, Friday Night Lights (2004), with emotional lifts from the guitar swimming band Explosions in the Sky, another Post-Rock stalwart. Enter Mogwai – Mogwai are the Scottish godfathers of Post-Rock, and didn’t have their big film moment until after these other bands.
The song “Auto Rock” starts simple with plinky piano repeating a simple melody – as what happens often in Post-Rock, the song reaches a crescendo where keyboards, guitar wails, and a string section takes the melody into completion. And it’s fitting that the song is paired with the montage ending of the movie. There is little dialogue or sound effects as “Auto Rock” binds together the completion of the different storylines. Like a music video, the scenes last for barely a second, before getting a glimpse of the next one.
I can kind of compare Mogwai’s ending scene here as the bizarro-Requiem for a Dream (2000). No shots fired at Requiem, but the running montage of everything coming together is aligned with the beautifully cathartic crescendo in Vice – in the upside down world, Clint Mansell’s Requiem score is aligned with scenes of every character falling apart in the ending, with the song building to peak chaos and anxiety. Both pieces fit the movies they serve.
Also fitting with that comparison – this same year, Darren Aronofsky (Requiem director) paired Clint Mansell with Mogwai for The Fountain soundtrack (which is phenomenal), which came out five months after Vice. Weird.
In conclusion, it’s not the best movie, but it’s a scene I think about often. It’s visually pretty awesome and the music is pretty cool.
