So, I totally geeked out earlier this week when Ta-Nehisi posted the music video for "When Doves Cry":
It wasn't so much that I have associations with the video itself--I was, um, born the year Purple Rain came out--but that the song plays a key role in one of the first movies to make a significant impact on me, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Luhrmann is a master of using pop music to make a sentimental point, and he does so nowhere better than in the "Time After Time" sequence in Strictly Ballroom (which, of all the movies in all the world in which girls take off their glasses and are revealed to be true beauties, may be the best). But, at all of 12 years old, the Quindon Tarver cover of "When Doves Cry" in Romeo + Juliet absolutely slayed me:
I've never pretended to be anything other than whitebread, folks. And I don't think I got at the time how genius the use of the song was. Hell, I was just excited to be allowed to see the movie. I remember the debate with my mother, her examination of the section in the Boston Globe that explained how appropriate certain movies were for kids, the promise of "muted love-making" or whatever the phrase was. I had no idea about what attraction actually felt like, except for the faint stirrings of something about a kid named Robbie in my Spanish and Music classes, who never gave me a second thought. I thought Leonardo DiCaprio was dreamy (he hadn't bulked up in the interests of seriousness yet), and Claire Danes was ethereal.
Then I actually watched the damn thing. I fell in love with Harold Perrineau, who as a gorgeous, cross-dressing Mercutio gave me a whole other sense of what a man could be. The visceral nature of John Leguizamo's performance freaked me out and fascinated me. To this day, those performances, and those actors, resonate with me. They broadened my sense of the scope of human emotion. The image of Leo and Claire laughing and blotting out the world under the sheets was part of a gradual process by which the movies convinced me that sex could be, you know, fun. I was a pale, book-loving little girl when Baz Luhrmann got me, and the color, and energy, and histrionics of the movie widened my perspective permanently (which tells you a lot about about where I started out from).
But I also really loved the cover of "When Doves Cry," which in its choral arrangement (quite literally, the song shows up in a church) sounded delicate and sweet to me. It's probably the only instance of me listening to a pop song, ever, and paying much more attention to the sound than to the words. And so I entirely missed the song's use as a lovely and terrifying omen. "Maybe I'm just like my mother," and "maybe I'm just like my father" have, um, different connotations when your parents are the Montagues and the Capulets. Luhrmann was smart enough to have the church choir play oracle to the happy couple. And I was young enough to misinterpret the oracle, who was warning they were doomed. I'll never be that young again, but I don't regret letting myself get swept away in a fantasy all those years ago.
*In honor of my middle and high school friend Laura, with whom I had dinner last night.