I’ve only seen 8 1/2 once, back around 1989, so I only remember two things about it: 1) My favorite moment had an annoying character suddenly getting hanged1Or dropped into a bottomless pit? I said I don’t remember much about it, and am too frustrated with Kanopy’s interface to try and find the scene again. with no comment from the other characters, and 2) It’s a surreal interpretation of Frederico Fellini’s struggles to make his ninth movie.
Frankly, I feel that that movie has been surpassed by the decades of movies that were inspired by it. But back in the late 1980s, just the idea that a movie was “allowed” to be so happily self-referential was like pure Chucknip.
And I also still love the idea of songs that are aware that they’re songs. “Simple Song” by the Shins doesn’t wallow in self-reflection, but it still does quite a lot with the premise. With just a couple of acknowledgements, it sets up the idea of looking back at a young love, struggling to find a way to encompass how significant the “small” moments turned out to be throughout his life.
The most extreme example is Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Your Song,” which is still such a wonderful way of expressing in song how you can be so full of love for someone that a song feels incapable of expressing it.
My favorite version of the song is still Ewan McGregor’s from Moulin Rouge, because it uses the self-reflection of the song — McGregor just narrates the entire first verse, as if he’s composing it on the spot — and then turns it into self-reflection for the movie.
Everything in Moulin Rouge up to that point had been broad, loud, chaotic, and so, so affected. I distinctly remember the urge to walk out of the theater, it was so relentlessly too much. At the start of the scene, Nicole Kidman is going completely over the top2In case it’s not obvious: deliberately over the top. Her performance hinges on the idea that she can never show anyone the “real” her, but just the affectations. — over-acting as an actress in a movie scene about an actress over-acting — about how stories feel perfect and powerful, because here, they are. Then McGregor practically unhinges his jaw like a python to let the song pour out, and she, along with the rest of Paris, is forced to stop and pay attention. It’s just such a wonderfully sincere and earnest expression of how difficult it is to be sincere and earnest.3And if you’re wondering whether watching that scene again, completely removed from its context, still made me tear up at my desk in the middle of the afternoon: I assure you that it did.
And my apologies to Carly Simon, who probably thought this post was going to be about her.