Name: What Movies Teach Us About Mozart
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T17:19:34.000Z
Duration: 9 min 48 s
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Thank you so much for the warm reaction to my announcement from the last video.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

If you haven't seen that video, I wrote a book of essays that'll be out this spring.

It's available for pre order now and you can find the links in the description below.

One of the things that makes film such an interesting art form is how it incorporates the other art forms.

For example, filmmakers for decades have used pre existing music in their movies, borrowing from and applying the emotional resonance of that music to enhance or color their story.

We know the debt movies owe to music, but what about the reverse?

Do movies give us any special insight into the music that they use?

If you watch a scene that relies heavily on music and pay attention to how that scene is making you feel, I think you can learn something important about the expressive potential potential of that piece of music.

I mean, the filmmaker chose that song or composition because they believed it was capable of accomplishing something emotionally, even if it's not obvious.

Ever listen to K. Billy's super sounds of the 70s?

For example, here's Tarantino's famous use of Stuck in the Middle with you by Steelers Wheel in Reservoir Dogs.

This is not the obvious choice for a torture scene.

It's an upbeat, propulsive tune, but that complements Mr.

Blond's psychotic glee and provides a counterpoint to the grave situation.

And then when you look at the lyrics, you find a paranoia lurking within this bubbly music.

The scene brings that undertone out in terrifying fashion.

But today I want to talk about Mozart, specifically Mozart's Requiem in D minor.

More specifically, the final movement of the third section of the Requiem, called Lacrimosa.

This portion of Mozart's Requiem Mass is instantly familiar, and

it's been used many, many, many times throughout cinema and television history.

By looking at all these various uses, we can identify a range of resonances in the music, mapping out a unique emotional terrain.

I don't want to say too much about the music because I want to hear what the movies have to say.

But I should mention that a Requiem is a Mass for the dead.

This Requiem was the last thing Mo ever wrote or partially wrote.

He left it incomplete at the time of his death on December 5, 1791.

In fact, it's believed that the first eight bars of the Lacrimosa are the final notes he ever committed to paper.

So we should probably expect some of these uses to have a somber, funereal quality.

Several filmmakers use the Lacrimosa in scenes that feature or suggest death, most notably in the movie about Mozart himself, 1984Amadeus, which lays the lacrimosa over Mozart's dead body, being unceremoniously transported and dumped into a mass grave.

In a number of instances, lacrimosa accompanies violent death, like the one in the traveler from 2010 that I showed earlier, or the Archbishop murder that sets 1996's primal fear in motion.

Or the massacre of the Mafia by the Phantom Troupe in the anime series Hunter X Hunter.

In all of these cases, there is a sense of both suspense and inevitability, which is a unique and potent combo.

See, the ascending chord progression builds tension, but it also sets an expectation of what's to come.

This makes the Lacrimosa perfect for scenes of foreboding, specifically historical foreboding, when we already know what's going to happen.

This is how the Crown used it twice, first to set set up the Great Smog of London, then in a later episode, at the funeral of Prince Philip's sister Cecily.

This scene, set in 1937, two years before the outbreak of World War II, is truly haunting.

It finds something sinister in the intensity of the music, and

it uses that sense of expectation to fill us with dread about all the horrors to come.

This is not the only time Lacrimosa is used to augment evil.

In the Watchmen TV series, the filmmakers associate the same menacing resonance with white supremacism.

Of course, these applications have an effect on the music in turn, and how we perceive it.

The repeated association of Lacrimosa with evil conditions us to think of evil when we hear it, to the point that filmmakers choose it as a kind of shorthand drawing on our memories of its past uses.

Eventually, it becomes such a trope that it works brilliantly for parody and satire, too.

In the Big Lebowski, for example, Jeffrey Lebowski is sitting solemnly in his study, staring deep into the fire as Lacrimosa plays the gravity of the scene, the song and Lebowski's speech is undercut by the Dude's aloofness.

And the majestic melancholy of the song is one of the things that makes this scene so funny.

In an episode of the Good Fight, Lacrimosa amplifies the comedy of a scene in which the lawyers get their hands on Donald Trump's alleged pee tape, making it seem like the footage is the Holy Grail.

They're also borrowing Mozart's momentousness and its association with momentous moments in other media.

But as much as movies and TV have conditioned us to hear Lacrimosa in a certain way.

I believe the source of our emotional reactions comes from the music itself, and

the best applications of the composition don't use it as a shorthand.

In the TV series Hannibal, for example, the creators place the song against another figure of evil, but

in this scene they use it to evoke a sense of loneliness.

In the 2021 movie Pig, it evokes desperation.

And in 2018's Assassination Nation, after a hacker received scandalous pictures of an anti gay politician and post them online, Lacrimosa offers us a sense of reckoning and punishment, as well as the immense unruly power of the social Internet.

In the 2016 movie Divines, Lacrimosa underscores a montage.

While Mozart probably wouldn't work for Rocky, he works perfectly here as the young lead character learns how to become a better drug dealer and petty criminal, improving at something that will benefit her in the short term but prove disastrous in the long run.

Again, Lacrimosa is able to capture conflicting feelings of triumph and defeat.

But of all Lacrimosa's many uses, the most affecting is in the 1985 anti war film Come and See, at the end of perhaps the most harrowing cinematic experience imaginable about the Nazi occupation of Belarus.

Seen through the eyes of a young Belarusian named Fliora, this teenager, who's just journeyed through a surreal landscape of horrors, sees a picture of Hitler on the ground and shoots at it in a fit of fury and revenge.

As he does, clips of Hitler's life play out in reverse, ending on an image of him as a baby, which causes Flora to stop.

This is when the Lacrimosa begins to play.

The music brings up a startling multiplicity of feelings, accomplishing more than words ever could.

In it, we hear Fliora's pain, his innocence shattered, his grief, his relief, his panic, his confusion.

We hear Hitler's hatred as well as the resilience of those who fought against him.

And we hear the radical empathy Fliora feels towards the baby Hitler, the feeling that finally separates him and all decent people from the monsters among us.

As well as all these other films and television shows teach us something about the Lacrimosa.

They open up doors in the music that maybe even Mozart didn't see.

They bring art forms together, and in these collisions, it's possible to see some really beautiful sparks.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

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