<\/p>\n
Then again, an especially good fictional song can come to feel more real than its story of origin. Lustra\u2019s pop-punk cuckoldry anthem \u201cScotty Doesn\u2019t Know\u201d has detached from the raunchy teen comedy \u201cEuroTrip\u201d (2004) and taken on a life of its own, as has the impossibly infectious title song from \u201cThat Thing You Do!\u201d (1996). Such a fate seems appropriate for two films that are largely about the pop song\u2019s twin qualities of endless iterability (\u201cScotty Doesn\u2019t Know\u201d becomes a worldwide phenomenon and follows the poor sap it was written about everywhere) and absolute singularity (\u201cThat Thing You Do!\u201d 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\u2019s work into the real-world canon, as in Whitney Houston\u2019s cover of \u201cI Will Always Love You\u201d in \u201cThe Bodyguard\u201d (1992) or, to a lesser degree, Lady Gaga\u2019s vocal performance on \u201cShallow\u201d in the 2018 remake of \u201cA Star Is Born<\/a>,\u201d which nearly makes you forget the schlock of the song and the melodrama of the movie. Perhaps only with \u201cThe Harder They Come\u201d (1972) have a film and its protagonist\u2019s real music, there sung with exquisite defiance by Jimmy Cliff, ascended to the cultural firmament hand in hand.<\/p>\n \u201cMother Mary\u201d withholds its central song, but it gives us plenty of other original music. Hathaway\u2019s 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 \u201cThis Is Spinal Tap<\/a>,\u201d or at least be satisfied for now with \u201cThe Moment<\/a>,\u201d the wan Charli XCX mockumentary that was released earlier this year. \u201cMother Mary\u201d 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<\/a>, along with collaborators such as the 1975\u2019s George Daniel and the prolific songwriter Tobias Jesso, Jr., Mother Mary\u2019s original songs are more than credible. They are simply the real thing, if not quite on par with these artists\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s character, whose government name we never learn, is constantly spinning new mythologies for herself. She shows up unannounced at Sam\u2019s 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 \u201cCut Ties,\u201d a loping number whose spoken-word intro\u2014which Hathaway tackles with her best impression of Lana in her noir voice-over mode\u2014lifts into a Gaga-style chorus, before cresting in a cacophony of distorted voices. Here she is on \u201cMy Mouth Is Lonely for You,\u201d an FKA Twigs-penned song full of burbling synth arpeggios, gamely meeting those breathy high notes.<\/p>\n These performances seem to issue from the other side of a veil; they don\u2019t feel totally contiguous with the film\u2019s here and now. This is partially due to the nature of today\u2019s 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: \u201call the old yous\u201d must be abraded away, as Sam says. And as she puts it elsewhere, more threateningly, \u201cStitch by stitch, you\u2019re obliterating yourself.\u201d 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. \u201cI let you make something of me,\u201d she tells Sam matter-of-factly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Then again, an especially good fictional song can come to feel more real than its story of origin. Lustra\u2019s pop-punk cuckoldry anthem \u201cScotty Doesn\u2019t Know\u201d has detached from the raunchy teen comedy \u201cEuroTrip\u201d (2004) and taken on a life of its own, as has the impossibly infectious title song from \u201cThat Thing You Do!\u201d (1996). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2380542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[312153,28272,349968,21800,22149,23083,357827,23681],"class_list":["post-2380541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-anne-hathaway","tag-charli-xcx","tag-movie-soundtracks","tag-music","tag-musicians","tag-pop-music","tag-pop-stars","tag-songs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/The-Art-of-the-Fictional-Pop-Song.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2380541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2380543,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380541\/revisions\/2380543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2380542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2380541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2380541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2380541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}