Last fall, I went with friends to see a popular British rock band at Madison Square Garden. I went in a fan of the group, but with every interchangeable song, every self-important gesture, I grew farther apart from the crowd around me: The more they enjoyed the music, the more it bored me. I had been pulled into a conversation with 20,000 other people, but I had nothing to say. By the first set break, I wanted to leave; by the third, I needed to escape.
Cooper (Josh Hartnett), the protagonist of M. Night Shyamalan’s recent thriller “Trap,” probably knows how I felt. A hunky, hopelessly square man in his 40s, Cooper has taken his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see her favorite musician, Lady Raven. Cooper is a model dad, bringing his daughter to the special matinee and searching for the perfect concert T-shirt — but whatever his desire to support her fandom, he can’t share it. Instead he spends the concert wandering the arena halls, surreptitiously listening to something else.
Lady Raven is played by the independent pop musician (and daughter of the director) Saleka Shyamalan, who wrote a full album of original songs for the film. She has been cast as the kind of blandly contemporary pop star who might reasonably appeal to teenagers. Glimpsed in brief, her music comes across as snappy, dutiful and necessarily muted, each melody just memorable enough to register without pulling our focus from Cooper.
This being a Shyamalan film, there must also be a twist. The model dad is in fact a notorious serial killer with a victim in his safe house. The concert has been set up to trap him. Yet you don’t side with the police: Listening to Lady Raven with him, you sympathize with Cooper’s need to get out.
“Trap” is hardly the first film to make use of fictional music — fake pop songs that let directors and musicians create alternate cultural realities in the shadow of our own. Many of cinema’s made-up hits are genuinely catchy. But they rarely transcend pastiche: Mostly, they convince us via their similarity to songs we already know.
Some of the best come from spoofs. In “This Is Spinal Tap,” from 1984, the titular metal group is captured in a low moment — failing albums, low ticket sales — but a survey of their past hits, like “(Listen to the) Flower People” and “Gimme Some Money,” reveals how absurd their popularity has been all along. (The music, though, is easy to believe in: Silly as they seem, Spinal Tap rocks.) Similarly, the Lonely Island’s songs from “PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping” (2016) combine undeniable hooks with ridiculous content: a braggadocio anthem about humility, a sex jam about a woman with an Osama bin Laden fetish. The punchlines wouldn’t land if the songs supporting them were not fluent in the language of contemporary pop-rap; to properly spoof this kind of music, you have to love it, at least a little.
In more realistic films, songs must convince us not only of their quality but also of their (fictional) popularity. It helps to have an actual pop star in the movie. The “Star Is Born” films, for instance, let the audience’s familiarity with Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga do the work. (It’s easy enough to imagine “Evergreen” becoming a hit onscreen; with Streisand behind the mic, it became one in real life, too.) And of course not every pop phenomenon lasts. “That Thing You Do!” from 1996 told the story of the Wonders, a mid-60s rock ’n’ roll group who record one perfect song before breaking up. The title track, written by Adam Schlesinger, is widely considered among the best original movie songs, in part because it walks a fine line: It is catchy enough to have been a mid-60s sensation but also just generic enough to have become a forgotten one.
Her songs comfort no one, least of all herself.
Of course, film is a visual medium, and our belief in these hits is itself a form of manipulation: We watch the crowds go wild, and we join them. With its gleeful satire of the corporate music world, “Josie and the Pussycats” took this manipulation as its subject, envisioning pop music circa 2001 as a mind-control conspiracy. The movie laughs at its fictional boy-band DuJour, positioning them as beneath the title group’s girl-power pop-punk — but their hit song “Backdoor Lover” sounds so much like the Backstreet Boys that it only registers as outrageous once you look at the title.
However silly the songs in these movies might be, we are typically supposed to like them. Very few films are bold enough to let their fictional pop sound as hollow and bland as the real thing can. Some, like “Almost Famous,” turn this mediocrity into tragedy. (Once you’ve heard that movie’s ’70s arena rockers Stillwater, you can believe they won’t make it.) Others play it for laughs: When Dirk Diggler tries to pivot to pop stardom in “Boogie Nights,” it only proves that he should stick with his adult-film career.
But only one film that I can think of has been brave enough to own up to the catastrophic implications of a pop hit’s emptiness. Celeste, the singer in Brady Corbet’s 2018 “Vox Lux,” explodes onto the public stage after surviving a school shooting as a teenager. Yet this does not result in deep, meaningful music. Celeste’s songs (as written by Sia) are heavy on flash and light on anything else. “I don’t want people to have to think too hard,” she explains to a lover. “I just want them to feel good.” In acting the role of a national healer, Celeste must stunt herself, a bargain that Corbet presents as essentially Faustian. Her music is the waste product of a culture of violence, a civilization capable only of reproducing tragedy as trashy Europop. Her songs comfort no one, least of all herself. When Celeste returns to her hometown for a climactic concert, the effect is hardly triumphant: All that movement and spectacle does nothing to paper over the void.
This choice was a real gamble, and it did not pay off: Some critics hated “Vox Lux,” and audiences did not pay to see it. Yet it is the only one of these movies that does not try to curry your favor with earwormy pop songs. Even industry satires like “Josie” and “PopStar” can’t risk alienating the audience. Only “Vox Lux” goes all the way, serving up the poison heart of pop music and daring you to bite down.
For all its imagery of killers draped in concert merch, you won’t find any such self-criticism in “Trap.” Shyamalan’s film serves as a love letter to and power fantasy for his daughter. Saleka’s solo music has a slinky quality reminiscent of early-00s R&B, but her self-released 2023 solo debut made little impression, and to date her most prominent songs have all been in her father’s films. Unable to fill an arena on her own, he has booked one for her.
Yet he will not stop at making her a star. In a third-act twist, Cooper escapes the concert with his daughter, kidnapping Lady Raven and riding in her limousine. She then turns the tables on him, first leveraging Riley’s adoration to invite herself to the family home, then using social media to mobilize her fans, a digital army of teenage sleuths, to rescue Cooper’s latest victim. At this point, plenty of art, from “Der Fan” to “Stan,” has covered the dangerous ways some fans identify with their favorite musicians. Yet in Shyamalan’s film, there’s nothing more virtuous than this relationship.
What a far cry from the days when “Josie” could imagine pop fandom as a corporate mind-control conspiracy! In “Trap,” the pop star and the fandom empower each other to feats of heroism — a long way from how we’ve seen fans actually behave online. For all their mob mentality, Swifties at least have a history of bops to defend. Lady Raven’s music offers nothing but a little distraction while the SWAT team closes in.
Robert Rubsam is a freelance writer and critic.
Source photographs for illustration above: Neon, Universal Pictures, Columbia TriStar/Getty Images, Warner Brothers/Alamy.
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