So what, you ask, allowed me to start and finish at a peak position of the movie's overall quality?
A little song called "Dancing On My Own" by Robyn.
If you don't know "Dancing On My Own," well -- I actually can't even entertain that as a possibility.
Few songs released in the last 20 years have ascended to unanimous banger status like "Dancing On My Own." When I discovered the song and put it on my annual mix in 2012, just two years after it was released, I was ahead of the curve, part of a small community of people who knew there was nothing better than this at getting your body moving. But it also had that secret ingredient that helps a song become great, which is that the lyrics were perfect to sing along with, as loud as you could manage without attracting attention, because they were poignant as fuck. Everyone can imagine themselves on a dance floor while watching someone they love kissing someone else across that floor. It's even happened to many of us, including me.
It was maybe about five years ago that I started noticing it everywhere. The moment I felt it really crossed over was when Boston Red Sox players began singing it at the top of their lungs during their 2021 playoff run, which made it three series deep though short of the World Series. I mean, that was my own moment, though it surely wasn't that moment for people who weren't following the Red Sox. But others were having similar moments around that time, related to whatever thing they cared about. I never suspected that this song I loved, more likely to be a gay anthem than one chanted by macho athletes, would arrive like this. It was now not only among my favorites, but among everyone else's too.
Five years later, Voicemails for Isabelle has adopted it -- late to the party, but still seeking some of the reflected glow.
And you know what? Because the song is so great, it works.
In the world of this movie, it's the anthem the main character, Jill (Zoey Deutch), shares with her cancer-stricken sister, the titular Isabelle (Ciara Bravo). It factors heavily into a pre-credits montage of them at younger ages, when different actors play them, before no actor plays Isabelle at all, since she passes from the disease. (Not a spoiler, it's in any synopsis of the movie.)
I tell you, I was primed for something great at this point, something a lot more than a guilty pleasure. Thanks, song.
Screenwriting 101 requires a good callback, so of course, "Dancing On My Own" gets a place of prominence at the end as well. Don't need to spoil the circumstances of that one, because the movie is worth seeing, only just.
The reason it's only just worth seeing rather than just not worth seeing?
You guessed it: "Dancing On My Own" by Robyn.
It's a pretty cheap, and possibly desperate, trick to hang the feels of your movie on a great song. Though to be fair, that requires a sequence of events around this movie that probably doesn't exist. I'm sure the good people at Netflix did not look at Voicemails for Isabelle and say "It's not going to make it on its own, but write 'Dancing On My Own' into it and you've got a hit." But whoever did decide to include it, they knew how much work it would be doing, whether the movie needed it or not.
Some people look down their noses at needle drops, feeling like they tell us how to feel too much. Me, I love them, if they're used well -- which, granted, is a big if.
This isn't exactly a needle drop, as it's diegetic music -- music that actually exists for the characters in their real world -- rather than music in the soundtrack that just tells you how to feel. However, "Dancing On My Own" is certainly doing the same kind of work.
So is this a cheat?
It's a good question. I sometimes ask myself why a movie gets to choose to associate itself with some undeniably great thing from another medium. Like, how did someone decide that Julie Taymor's 2007 film Across the Universe would get to be a jukebox musical comprised of Beatles songs? Wouldn't anyone who had the chance to do that want to make a movie with that sort of reflected glow?
On the other hand, what are you supposed to do, put bad songs in your movie? That's not a great idea. If you have the cash to pay for the rights, there's a certain skill in finding a song that will not only be just perfect for the mood you're going for, but also something that's already beloved in the culture.
But the trick is, not too beloved, right? If your usage of this song just makes us roll our eyes, you've lost. Great songs do wear out from overuse. If anyone ever makes another Vietnam War movie, they just can't use Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth." They just can't. It's still a great song, but it's worn out now.
How in danger of happening is this for "Dancing On My Own"?
No danger yet, but it has the potential to get there. When I googled what movies this appears in, AI gave five movies, all since 2018, including Voicemails for Isabelle. There are two others I'm aware of, Babygirl and Spoiler Alert, that I haven't seen yet, and one I have seen, Long Shot. The last is a movie I've never heard of, Teen Spirit. But then AI, in an italicized message below the results, tells me that other discussion communities have mentioned it appearing in the films Rosaline and Deep Water, both from 2022, the latter of which I also saw. Apparently these results are unverifiable, hence the parenthetical mention, or maybe just incorrect altogether, but AI is too polite to say so.
The funny thing this is that I am actually aware of another movie that AI isn't. The first time I remember seeing it was in one of two movies I saw in 2021 called Swan Song, in which Udo Kier's character dances to it in a club with a lampshade on his head -- an image that sounds funny, but again, because of the song itself and because of what's going on in the narrative, it's poignant as hell. That was a movie I already really liked, and Robyn may have pushed it up to where it finished the year: #20 out of all the movies I saw that year. Incidentally, this is one of the two documented uses -- or at least, documented by me -- where it functions in the gay anthem capacity I mentioned earlier, the other being, I assume, Spoiler Alert, in which the characters are gay.
Robyn's song is so great that I don't know if it will ever wear out, for me. I'll always want to get up to dance and shout lyrics that remind me of the time some girl on the dance floor was kissing another guy and broke my heart.
But if it starts showing up in every other movie, then indeed, we will have lost something, collectively.
So Voicemails from Isabelle got in there while the getting was still good, and more power to it, I guess. Unfortunately, it's pretty unexceptional outside of this exceptional song.
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