The Best Uses of Lou Reed's Music in Movies

Lou Reed was one of the most influential musicians the world has ever seen. With pioneering New York band the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, Reed has an enormous catalog that spans over forty years. It's no surprise that numerous filmmakers have found that the elusive song they absolutely need to make the scene work has turned out to be a Reed composition.

In a 1998 BOMB Magazine interview with Tim Nye, Lou Reed, in response to a question regarding analyzing artists' lyrics and their meanings, said, "If I went and defined it, there are listeners out there who would be very disturbed... I think people ought to be left alone to have fun with records." And so we've had the privilege of watching Reed's music accompany a variety of scenes, working with the myriad contexts and intentions of different filmmakers. From Danny Boyle's Trainspotting to Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, among others, each Underground/Reed song added value to scenes that are now almost inseparable from the songs themselves.

To honor to the legend, here are The Best Uses of Lou Reed's Music in Movies.

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From the album: Transformer (1972)

Adventureland not only used a number of Lou Reed songs, it made him an integral part of the plot. Revered among the titular theme park's underpaid employees, park mechanic Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds) is rumored to have once jammed with Lou Reed. It's a rumor Connell has no problem perpetuating. The film's protagonist, James (Jesse Eisenberg), is something of a literary romantic, which means he's also a huge Lou Reed fan, and is immediately impressed by his older coworker. (He's also heartsick, which means we get scenes soundtracked by songs like the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" and Reed's "Satellite of Love.") One of the film's funniest moments, though, comes at the end, when James realizes that everything he's admired about Connell may not have been what it seemed, as Connell boasts about performing a Lou Reed song that doesn't actually exist. Oops. —David Drake

From the album: The Velvet Underground (1969)

It makes sense that Julian Schnabel, a New York artist with ties to downtown pioneers like Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others, would have an affinity for Reed's music. In an interview with The Playlist, the filmmaker talked about using the Velvet Underground in his film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

"I always listen to music, carry it around with me. I know [certain songs] are going to pop up [in my films] some time or another. I always thought "Pale Blue Eyes" was going to play in that scene on that boat."

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly stages the subjective experience of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French journalist who chronicled living with locked-in syndrome. Bauby, trapped in his body, spends much of the film lingering in memory, revisiting his life before his stroke. The contemplative mood of "Pale Blue Eyes," one of the Velvet's most beautiful songs, matches the mood and pace of the movie perfectly. Really, all of Schnabel's musical selections are great, the Tom Waits numbers especially. Still, there's no question the strongest song on the soundtrack is "Pale Blue Eyes." —Ross Scarano

From the album: Transformer (1972)

Todd Haynes's glam-rock valentine, Velvet Goldmine, follows the rise of a Bowie-like star named Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). During the impressionistic scene that sums up his love affair with the Iggy-Pop-esque Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love," from his glammiest album, Transformer, plays. Wild and Slade race around in tiny cars through a dark tunnel lit by brief flashes of color. Of course this is what love looks like. —Ross Scarano

From the album: The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)

In Last Days, a film all about being overcome by your demons, hearing Lou Reed sing, "Severin, your servant comes in bells, please don't forsake him/Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart" it's perfectly foreboding and sad.

Gus Van Sant's haunting film, the third and final installment in his "Death" trilogy, is a semi-biographical account of the isolated days leading up to Kurt Cobain's suicide. Here the rock star is named Blake, and he's played like wounded sleepwalker by Michael Pitt.

The title "Venus in Furs" is named after the book of the same name written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the man who inspired the word "Masochism." Appropriately, the scene the song is featured in is one of the last moments in which Blake, however absent he is, has his close friends spend time with him.

From the album: N/A

Lou Reed made pretty music. Of all the talk of drug dealing and assorted New York grime the obits will harp on, there's no mistaking how he loved a little sweetness. "Stephanie Says," an unreleased gem from 1968, is one of the nicest sounding pieces of music Reed ever wrote. The guitar and viola work in contrast to the bitter lyrics: "Stephanie says that she wants to know/Why she's given half her life to people she hates now." In Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, the song is played during a crucial moment of honesty between Royal (Gene Hackman) and his son Richie (Luke Wilson). Richie admits to being in love with his adopted sister, and Royal regrets his lackluster parenting. Mordecai, Richie's old pet hawk, comes in on a wing from nowhere. The bird cries over the guitar. It's weird, improbable, and bittersweet. Just like Reed's music. —Ross Scarano

From the album: The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)

"All Tomorrow's Parties" set against an image of a Satanic Virgin Mary? Genius, right? When it comes to movies, Rob Zombie is a mad scientist who loves to spin the most batshit images he can think of, splash them with most vivid color, and pair with an unexpected tune. Which is what he does in the final sequence of The Lords of Salem.

The film follows a Salem radio DJ, Heidi (Sheri Moon Zombie), who receives a record from a mysterious band called the Lords of Salem. The record leads to a highly anticipated Lords of Salem concert in town. However, the truth is that the Lords of Salem are coven of cursed witches. Of course, the show becomes part of their master plan, as a possessed Heidi, fresh from giving birth to demon baby, takes the stage on top of a hill of naked bodies. "All Tomorrow's Parties" is a celebration song for the coven, whose savior has finally arrived. The next day, the newspapers tell of a mass suicide at the concert.

It's either that, or it's all some kind of metaphor aboud addiction and drug abuse. In which case, the Velvet Underground makes even more sense. —Tara Aquino

From the album: Till the Night is Gone (1995)

Pop music in movies can suck when it's too obvious. (Playing The Velvet Underground's "Heroin" while people shoot up heroin in Killing Them Softly is a recent example of a pairing so uninspired, it makes you want to punch yourself in the face.) And yet this scene in Lost Highway, when Patricia Arquette, in the bleached blonde guise of Alice Wakefield, emerges from a convertible in a sunny garage, the overhead fluorescents vibrating on her face—well, it really is a magic moment. That Lou Reed's cover of the classic, originally recorded for a Rhino tribute to Doc Pomus, is off-kilter and strange helps make the scene work. But ultimately there are no subsitute for idiosyncratic talents, and Reed and Lynch are two of the greatest in American history. —Ross Scarano

From the album: Street Hassle (1978)

"Sloppy catharsis" is a phrase music critic Ann Powers used recently, writing about Lou Reed and what she looks for in music. She writes that Reed's music, and the song "Street Hassle" in particular, "taught me that getting just what I wanted from a song (uplift, for example, or sloppy catharsis) wasn't always the best thing."

Noah Baumbach gets this, too. He closes his best film, The Squid and the Whale, with the opening instrumentation, those stately and mechanically moving violins, and first verse of "Street Hassle." This is the film's big moment, when its protagonist, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) finally ditches his bastard of a father (Jeff Daniels) and races to the museum he used to visit with his mom (Laura Linney) when he was a kid. He's looking for what scared him, the depiction of a squid fighting a whale. There are messy metaphorical implications here. Do the underwater monsters symbolis for his divorced parents? Something less concrete?

Baumbach doesn't get tricky. His camera follows Walt. Walt stops before the scene. You see Walt's face. Beyond keeping his eyes open, a change from how he engaged with the exhibit as a kid, Walt's not giving the viewer much else to work with. What's he thinking? How is he feeling? Then the movie ends, with closure (or lack thereof) that's more typical of a short story than a feature-length film. That's why it's perfect. —Ross Scarano

From the album: Loaded (1970)

What's a movie about a record store-owning man-child without a Velvet Underground music moment? In the most pivotal scene of the film, an adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel of the same name, John Cusack's Rob Gordon is getting his heart smashed to pieces as a meeting with his ex-girlfriend Laura confirms that she's been sleeping with another man. Cue Lou Reed crooning, "He ain't got nothing at all," as a depressed Gordon treks through the rain back to his apartment, where only his vinyl will comfort him. It's like Lloyd Dobler's all grown up, grown out of his Peter Gabriel phase, and graduated to a more plainspoken way of articulating struggle. —Tara Aquino

From the album: Transformer (1972)

When Ewan McGregor's heroin-addicted Mark 'Rent Boy' Renton runs off to his drug dealer's apartment for another hit, despite his family's efforts to help him, Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" is there for him. As he nearly succumbs to a fatal overdose, as his friend drags his body down the broken, dirty steps to the taxi driver who then unloads him on the concrete outside the emergency room, the song's lyrics follow like a sad procession. "Oh, it's such a perfect day."

"You're going to reap what you sow" repeats as Rent Boy wakes up, having survived the overdose. Whether the song was always about Reed's own drug abuse, as long-standing rumors indicate, remains up for debate and beside the point. Few songs have soundtracked this particular nightmare so well, made for such an unforgettable music video. That's what matters. —Frantz Rocher