How Margaret Keane inspired Lana Del Rey classic ‘Big Eyes’
Margaret Keane’s 1986 court battle inspired the 2014 Tim Burton movie Big Eyes and, subsequently, provided Lana Del Rey with ample inspiration for the two tracks she co-wrote and performed for the film. Sadly, the artistic legacy of Keane was overshadowed by the bitter legal battle with her ex-husband, Walker, who had been fraudulently claiming her work as his own.
The art that Walker Keane tried to pass off as his own were paintings of subjects with huge eyes, dubbed “big-eyed waifs”. Keane was inspired by the work of Amedeo Modigliani, whose haunting portraits often included subjects without eyes. Outside of the eye motif, Keane was influenced by the palettes of Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh, and primarily, women, who dominate her focus and remained her primate subject for her entire career.
Del Rey paid homage to Keane on the first song, ‘Big Eyes’, which plays halfway through the film. As producer and co-writer Larry Karaszewski explained to Billboard: “Women, in particular, seem to get the movie, and Lana really got the movie. The whole thing is about a woman who can’t find her voice.”
The song begins with an instrumental when Keane, played by Amy Adams, sees her own paintings being sold in a supermarket. It builds into a trademark Del Rey vocal backed by a rousing beat as Keane returns home emboldened – ready to develop a new style of painting. The vocal fades when her husband returns to confront her, an extension of the idea he was stealing her artistic voice.
The halfway point it plays over is a significant moment where it almost becomes a musical. “Lana’s song expresses what Margaret is feeling so perfectly, it’s like a soliloquy of her inner thoughts.”
The song was originally intended to be the closing credits song. But producers felt it was slightly too subdued to send audiences out on, and soundtrack composer Danny Elfman found the moving ballad to be a perfect fit for the film’s halfway mark.
Del Rey said the line that triggered the writing process came to her only on. “I guess I had a couple of couplets that came and I guess the verse: ‘I saw you creeping around the garden/ Where are you hiding’,” she said. “Melodically, it was something that came quickly to me, and I liked the idea of trumpets coming in for the chorus making it a little bit weird and jazzy.”
To add to the weirdness and put her own spin on it, Del Rey incorporated whimsical, outdoorsy metaphors for being free. “I always like to mix in something I like: the garden and the trees, even though she wasn’t always painting outside,” she explained. “‘Big Eyes’ was meant to sum up her tale with a bit of my own personal imagery.”
