This year, only two songs even received Academy Award nominations - " Real in Rio," a Sergio Mendes-driven rhythm fest that had no apparent life beyond the kiddie matinee, and the winning " Man or Muppet," which is really a parody of a Big Movie Ballad. But I do think the environment in which mainstream pop is created and received has radically changed since Cameron first did in his boat, making it tough for its products to become icons. I don't mean this to exalt "MHWGO," which, like most critics, I find manipulative, and haunting only in the way that acid reflux is haunting. What strikes me about the difference in pop now, both within the Hollywood milieu and beyond that, is how nothing comes close to having that iconic impact. The revival has inspired several vigorous defenses of both the film and the song, and my brilliant peer Carl Wilson (who's written a whole fantastic book about the many meanings of Celine Dion) has weighed in to say that "MHWGO" is on its way to becoming a folk artifact - "a song that travels everywhere." Now Titanic has resurfaced, bringing Dion's buttery howl back with it. Robinson" or "White Christmas?" No.) Horner's brilliant marriage of elements from his score within Dion's rendition, along with Will Jennings's plot-extending lyrics, powerfully showed how a theme song could carry a screen narrative's emotional impact beyond the confines of the theater and into the larger moving world.
I'd dare say that half of the songs at the top of the American Film Institute's list of "America's Greatest Music in the Movies" no longer evoke strong memories of the films that bore them. A film's theme song may be a huge contemporary hit and an enduring favorite, but its tether to the film that first gave it meaning often frays fairly quickly. In Titanic, the most powerful icon is a voice. That's why even fans sometimes come to resent them. Even when we encounter them accidentally - even against our will - they bring us back.
From Springsteen's jeans-clad backside and Michael Jackson's zombie dance, backward to Rhett and Scarlet's poster-worthy kisses and Dorothy's clicking ruby slippers, these elements intensely revive the feelings viewers or listeners had when they first experienced these pop phenomena. They do so, in part, through iconography. True blockbusters exert a superhuman grip on our common consciousness that defies the disposability of most mass entertainment. The song suggests that, like the singer's absent lover, the film may come to haunt them in their dreams, becoming a constant presence in their heart and lasting for a lifetime." "After James Cameron's signature credit, which seems to assert male authorship and authority, Celine Dion's song again places us within the subjective experience of a woman. "The end of the film provides us with a remarkable commentary on the relationship between cinema and life," wrote film historian Peter Kramer in a 2004 essay.
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" As teary viewers confront a black screen full of scrolling names, Dion's voice becomes their conduit back to the film, instantly transformed into an ever-present past by the song that they'll hear again and again. Only then comes that dramatic murmur: "Every night in my dream, I see you, I feel you. Sissel and the whistle form musical motifs that Horner brings to fruition only as the final credits run, after Rose has gone to her dreamy rest with Jack in that big sinking ballroom in the sky. And we do hear a voice but that more delicate soprano belongs to the Norwegian enchantress Sissel, who was employed by composer James Horner to engender ambient moodiness throughout the film's score. Beyond the moviehouse, it served as a kind of weather radio, signaling the onslaught of Dion's Titanic tornado, the theme song "My Heart Will Go On," in every mall, restaurant or minivan into which it so violently tootled. The film's score includes the haunting pennywhistle that announced the song's omnipresence in the late 1990s. Here's an example: Until last week, when I caught the 3D reissue of Titanic, I'd completely forgotten that Celine Dion's leonine wail never factors into the actual film. Images, sounds and storylines slide toward each other in a cataclysm of memory, like the cargo on a massive ship that's split in half and tilted on its side (you know where I'm going with this). An uncanny thing happens when we remember blockbuster cultural events - for example, massively popular movies of the last century.
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