This article contains spoilers.
At the very end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” there’s an unmistakable riff that makes you want to start bopping your head. For many, that guitar line followed by a propulsive drumbeat is immediately recognizable as the opening of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl.”
With just a few notes, the movie’s final music cue enters the canon of great Anderson needle drops, a list that includes Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” in “Boogie Nights” and Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” in “Magnolia.” But beyond the groovy sounds of Petty’s wail, “American Girl” is an especially potent choice for Anderson’s latest epic, both because of the lyrics’ thematic power and because of the song’s own cinematic history.
On its surface, “American Girl” can seem like a jaunty celebration of our country, but listen closely and you’ll find a song about desperation and broken dreams — one perfect for Anderson’s saga.
In some ways, “American Girl” is not necessarily the deep cut you might expect from Anderson, an audiophile as much as a cinephile. It’s not only a wildly popular number that’s been covered by Taylor Swift, among others, it also pops up a lot in movies and television shows, to varying degrees of success.
It ended the first season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” — the America in that case being Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Gilead, where women are sexual slaves. It’s the first thing you hear in the rom-com “Chasing Liberty” (2004) as the president’s daughter, played by Mandy Moore, flirtatiously gets ready for a date. (Get it? She’s so much of an American girl that she’s primping in the White House.) In Season 6 of “The Sopranos,” Carmela (Edie Falco) plays it for Tony (James Gandolfini) to try to wake him from a coma. She reminisces about a trip to Long Beach Island, where it was constantly on repeat in his car.
In “One Battle,” the song plays as the teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) leaves the California home she shares with her father, Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), to drive three hours away to a protest in Oakland.
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The post How ‘American Girl’ Enhances a Scene in ‘One Battle After Another’ appeared first on New York Times.
