Ingmar Bergman said that the marriage of music to film was “barbaric,” but—despite Cameron Crowe’s repeated efforts to prove him right—it’s still about as accepted as barbarism gets. And if I’m leery of a world in which no film is allowed to have any music, I understand the concern: music provides not only emotional cues but emotional manipulation; it’s the easy way out; it lets any hack have his way with an audience’s heartstrings. When it’s used to punctuate or enhance points on a dramatic arc (when music conveying a particular emotion is shoehorned into an emotional journey just to remind you where you are) things get tricky, but what if there’s no arc; what if it’s a poem rather than a novel, a song rather than a symphony? What’s wrong with backing up a work of a single tone with another work of a single tone? What’s wrong, in short, with trailer music?

There are two kinds of movie trailers: those set to pop songs and those set to Carl Orff’s “Fortuna Imperiatrix Mundi.” We are concerned today with the former, though it should be noted that you can’t go wrong with the latter, especially if you fade into and out of black ten times during the first half. Here, then, are three songs that aren’t in trailers but should be, and the trailers they should be in:

Johnny Boy - Bonnie Parker’s 115th Dream
For a political thriller, one containing enough exotic location shots and intent men in sunglasses to do justice to the song’s roiling energy and sinister freneticism. The trailer, like the song, peaks at the 3:47 mark, where the cocky acceleration of the previous forty-seven seconds, which have supported a series of incomprehensible shots of airplanes, explosions, and oak desks, give way first to impossibly urgent wails of “I’m a believer,” as very important people look over their shoulders with dreadful resolve, then at last to the churn of the final chorus, which stampedes across the audience in Dolby Surround and leaves behind nothing but a simple “coming soon.”

Sparks – Metaphor
The filmmakers advertising their product here will have worked quietly and increasingly deftly for years, sticking steadily to the kind of delirious, smart-alecky absurdism that survives in a major studio only because too few people are watching to make it really unpopular. No Ebert and Roeper reviews, no garment-distribution deals with Hot Topic, no applications of the phrase “festival darlings,” no opportunities for backlash. Just a steady background thrum of goofy playfulness, delivered in regular packages like this song. The insular showtune arrangement and bizarre lyrics, which aren’t so much clever as so removed from standard pop-song concerns that they induce mild awe, will run parallel with the bizarre but utterly straight-faced nature of the movie—it’s not exactly that it’s funny it’s just that it seems to have been shuttled in from another universe, where it was accused of being formulaic but made decent box office. Novelty is rarely this professional.

Andrew Bird - Fake Palindromes
People come of age, preferably several of them, preferably during autumn, preferably in Wisconsin. Forget for a moment the ironic menace of the lyrics, and listen to the sound: the Moeibus-strip riff opening and closing the song is precisely the kind of exultant glory one can get away with in pop songs and trailers but rarely in movies; and the sepia-toned verses will be played over backwoods Capture the Flag games, confused rain-soaked kisses, and quiet looks over breakfast, precisely because it is the music you wish would play while you play Capture the Flag or kiss people in the rain or look quietly at them over breakfast. The film, with its dramatic obligations, will be forced to adopt tones besides autumnal resignation, but for these three minutes it’s all about the falling leaves and quiet smiles. Such is the beauty of the brief evocation. Such is the beauty of the trailer.

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