Talking Heads :: This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)
Last week, I unintentionally developed a severe crush on this tune. It grabbed a hold of me as I was watching the awkward party scene in Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl (2007). Ryan Gosling’s misanthropic character is standing there sporting a sharp three-piece suit while his artificial, ductile baby-love (Bianca) sits strategically posed in her wheelchair, dancing with some other man. The camera slowly turns from her to Lars. This lesser-known Talking Heads song from Speaking in Tongues is playing. Lars feels it. He understands; he almost seems at peace with himself. Something about Byrne’s emotive chorus crooning speaks fluently to the absurdity of Lars’ plight. Have a look.
A couple of days later I was watching Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1985) and as the nostalgia of its 80s-esque aesthetic became less captivating, I shifted my attention from Charlie Sheen’s luxurious, Darryl Hannah-inspired, fashion-disaster of an apartment to, once again, this song. As it played, Charlie Sheen/Bud Fox’s new, albeit garish, abode emerges as his financial triumph, the evidence that he had indeed ‘made it.’ At that moment, my crush on This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) achieved maximum crushiness as it demonstrated its own sonic and lyrical versatility, fitting two very different films from two very different decades, so very well.
On some level, Byrne’s number is about love and home. Beyond the physical dimensions of a home there is of course the way a self resides within itself. For Lars, one can posit that his metaphoric/metaphysical abode suddenly became, however momentarily, a comfortable habitat. In the context of the film, this stasis remains for Lars an elusive end, making the magic dance-floor moment an even more crucial part of the storyline. On the other hand, Bud Fox’s newly acquired, lavish apartment, despite representing at one time the dream to which he aspired, ultimately emerged as the physical contradiction of what he was utterly inclined to be: a more or less plain and decent fellow. You just have to see it.
I am sure that when Byrne wrote this tune he had no idea that it would be appropriated for such seemingly disparate cinematic projects. While it might be an interesting endeavor to delve deeper into how the song reflects its original physical and emotional environment (or what’s unique about the 80s in general), I prefer to confront it in the broader terms of its journey from 1985 to 2007. We often consider songs to be windows through which the intimate and sometimes obscure details of a specific historical moment come into view. At the same time, the penultimate meaning of a song is not necessarily tethered to the moment during which it was conceived. Therein lie the beauty, power, and dynamism of songs and why they say so much about society and consciousness. When tunes manage to transcend the neat and easy stylistic boundaries that ostensibly separate one decade from the next, they reveal something wholly human and, to some extent, what does not change over time.
This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) (4.5MB MP3)
Talking Heads (fan site)
This is my friend J’s favorite song of all time, and knowing the history of that—imagining her 18 year old self coked up on a boat in Lake Michigan, waiting for her place in the world—changed this song from one that I was sort of annoyed by (too much synth) to a sentimental favorite. The mournful tone of Byrne’s voice as he kicks off the chorus helps, too. Thanks, Domenico.