Uh-Huh, Man: Even Fake Bands Sing Real Songs

Sometimes songs are written as themes for movies, or to be sung by a character for plot development purposes. Songs written for films can live an interesting sort of half life: writers may pen one verse or chorus to be shown in the film, or they may compose an entire song, even though less than a minute of it may appear on screen.

In Yes Man, a romantic comedy starring Jim Carrey as a depressed loner who learns to open himself up to new experiences, the on-screen band Munchausen by Proxy plays a brief concert montage. Despite the band's brief appearance, four of the 13 songs on the soundtrack are original pieces by the fictional group.

While the song "Yes Man" is played over the movie's end credits, the other three songs barely feature in the film. Nevertheless, they're some delightful synth-rock numbers that tell some interesting stories--including the story of a bad break-up the romantic interest references obliquely in the film.

"Uh-Huh," sung by actress Zooey Deschanel--who in real life forms half of the musical duo She and Him--forms a little appendix to Yes Man. It tells you exactly what happened in Allison's (Deschanel) love-life before Carl (Carrey) showed up.

There isn't enough of a story to justify another movie, but the song's ironic observations about cyber-fighting and stealing the noodles when you're moving out more than justifies the song's existence. It creates a life of its own.

If you came across "Uh-Huh," or any of Munchausen's songs, on the internet, you wouldn't necessarily know they were written for a movie. Let's just hope no one's stuck out there trying to buy tickets to see Munchausen by Proxy.

Hey You: Pink Floyd Rides the Whale

While "Dream a Little Dream of Me" used a sequence of songs to set a mood in the story, The Squid and the Whale uses the repetition of a single song to explore a theme.

The Squid and the Whale deals with the divorce of Bernard and Joan Berkman and its effects on their sons Walt and Frank. Walt, a highschooler starstruck by his author father, decides to assert his own genius by writing a song.

The problem is that the song he wants to write has already been written by Pink Floyd: it's "Hey You."

The song is introduced as Walt practices it in his room, played again when he shows his "composition" to his parents, and takes center stage when he "debuts" it at his school's talent show.

The lyrics--"Hey you, out there in the cold...can you feel me?"--seem to start as Walt's triumphal offer of hope to the people feeling lost around him, but after he is exposed as a fraud the nature of the song changes as he himself becomes lost.

The tonal shift which the movie's circumstances give the songs is dramatic, but what is most interesting is to see how one song can represent both sides of Walt so well. On the one hand, it allows him to present a facade of confidence, but on the other it represents his deepest insecurities--his uncertainty that anyone is listening to him.