The Art of the Fictional Pop Song

Then again, an especially good fictional song can come to feel more real than its story of origin. Lustra’s pop-punk cuckoldry anthem “Scotty Doesn’t Know” has detached from the raunchy teen comedy “EuroTrip” (2004) and taken on a life of its own, as has the impossibly infectious title song from “That Thing You Do!” (1996). Such a fate seems appropriate for two films that are largely about the pop song’s twin qualities of endless iterability (“Scotty Doesn’t Know” becomes a worldwide phenomenon and follows the poor sap it was written about everywhere) and absolute singularity (“That Thing You Do!” is the sole hit song by the appropriately named fictional sixties band the Wonders). Sometimes the sheer charisma of a performance is enough to bring a fictional artist’s work into the real-world canon, as in Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” in “The Bodyguard” (1992) or, to a lesser degree, Lady Gaga’s vocal performance on “Shallow” in the 2018 remake of “A Star Is Born,” which nearly makes you forget the schlock of the song and the melodrama of the movie. Perhaps only with “The Harder They Come” (1972) have a film and its protagonist’s real music, there sung with exquisite defiance by Jimmy Cliff, ascended to the cultural firmament hand in hand.

“Mother Mary” withholds its central song, but it gives us plenty of other original music. Hathaway’s character is an alt-pop superstar in the vein of Gaga and Lana Del Rey, with a dash of Lorde. This is an archetype that has been around for long enough that it could easily be a subject of parody or pastiche, arguably the default modes for the fictional-pop-music film as a genre. The turgid self-seriousness of a pop star who insists that what she is doing is high art, who shushes singing fans at concerts, who turns social-media beef into lyrics: there is more than enough material here for even the laziest parodist. But we will have to wait a bit longer for an alt-pop “This Is Spinal Tap,” or at least be satisfied for now with “The Moment,” the wan Charli XCX mockumentary that was released earlier this year. “Mother Mary” does something more radical: it enlists the musicians and producers who shaped the sound of progressive pop in the twenty-tens to create its fictional music, sung by Hathaway herself. In the hands of Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs, along with collaborators such as the 1975’s George Daniel and the prolific songwriter Tobias Jesso, Jr., Mother Mary’s original songs are more than credible. They are simply the real thing, if not quite on par with these artists’ greatest work. Listening to them is an uncanny experience, as though you are unearthing a suppressed memory of something you heard on a playlist years ago, or discovering a viral trend that somehow passed you by.

Mother Mary is an apt choice of alter ego. The alt-pop of the past fifteen years has delighted in over-the-top personae and world-building. Hathaway’s character, whose government name we never learn, is constantly spinning new mythologies for herself. She shows up unannounced at Sam’s estate in the English countryside, demanding that her former collaborator make her a dress for a special comeback performance following a long hiatus. As the two women pick at their shared history, we learn that Mother Mary, like Taylor Swift, divides her career into eras, each with a distinctive look and sound. (The one visual constant is halo-like headdresses, straight from a Quattrocento Madonna.) Each era seems to reside in a piece of costume, some of which Sam still has on hand. It all comes back to us via flashbacks: someone will brush an old accessory and suddenly we are back there and then, watching a former version of Mother Mary performing. Here she is singing “Cut Ties,” a loping number whose spoken-word intro—which Hathaway tackles with her best impression of Lana in her noir voice-over mode—lifts into a Gaga-style chorus, before cresting in a cacophony of distorted voices. Here she is on “My Mouth Is Lonely for You,” an FKA Twigs-penned song full of burbling synth arpeggios, gamely meeting those breathy high notes.

These performances seem to issue from the other side of a veil; they don’t feel totally contiguous with the film’s here and now. This is partially due to the nature of today’s multimedia pop performances, which tend to present themselves as a whole world apart, self-contained and all-encompassing. But this sense of disconnect is also precisely the problem that Mother Mary is trying to solve. She is out of time, between eras. She needs new myths. To create them, she will have to slough off her old ones: “all the old yous” must be abraded away, as Sam says. And as she puts it elsewhere, more threateningly, “Stitch by stitch, you’re obliterating yourself.” Mary is willing to be annihilated and remade. In fact, in the first half of the film, we come to understand that the source of her star power is not her charisma so much as her blank, twitchy impassivity. She is an icon precisely because she is malleable. “I let you make something of me,” she tells Sam matter-of-factly.