‘Say Anything’: The movie that gave Peter Gabriel’s work “a second life”
For decades, music and cinema have been inseparable companions. Countless classic movie moments have been elevated and etched into history through their use of songs, which enhance the themes or particular scenes. Whether it’s Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs. Robinson’ in The Graduate, Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ bookending The Breakfast Club, or Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?’ closing Fight Club, many iconic moments spring to mind. One person who intimately understands the power of this audio-visual relationship, though, is Peter Gabriel.
As the original frontman of prog-rock outfit Genesis, Gabriel is no stranger to having his music used in media. Much of this has occurred with his solo work, including his deeply spiritual debut solo, Solsbury Hill, used in Vanilla Sky and In Good Company. However, it is work from his 1986 masterpiece, So, that has pierced popular culture most greatly due to the strength of the songs and their deeply cinematic quality being drawn upon in numerous projects on the small and big screens.
While most people remember the record for ‘Sledgehammer’, the record produced a string of other accomplished art pop hits. This includes the second single, ‘In Your Eyes’, which is undoubtedly one of the best creations of Gabriel’s career. An expansive and rousing number that contains strong elements of a rock ballad but is driven through the songwriter’s experimental prism, it is most famous for being used in the 1989 teen comedy Say Anything, starring John Cusack and Ione Skye and written and directed by Cameron Crowe.
The film follows the romance between Cusack’s underachieving student, Lloyd Dobler, and Skye’s high-achieving Diane Court after they graduate from high school. After Court’s unscrupulous father advises her to break up with Dobler, he decides to take action. Holding up a boombox at dawn, he defiantly stands under her open bedroom and plays ‘In Your Eyes’ as the camera pans ever closer towards him, bringing his sincerity and love into full view.
This comes at a pivotal juncture in the movie, as the following day, Court meets an IRS investigator examining her father’s economic dealings at his retirement home. As the legal matters worsen for her dad, Court realises her feelings for Dobler, and eventually, the pair travel to England, where she is studying.
Gabriel has spoken about the importance of Say Anything to ‘In Your Eyes’ before, and he’s aware of how that scene gave the song “a second life”. He told Rolling Stone in 2016 that he always felt it was a “special song” because it fused a standard love lyric with an African musical tradition of there being ambiguity between romantic love and the love of God.
Of Say Anything bolstering the presence of ‘In Your Eyes’, Gabriel said: “I think it definitely gave it a second life, because now it’s so often parodied in comedy shows and it is one of the modern day Romeo and Juliet balcony clichés. I’ve talked to John Cusack about that. We’re sort of trapped together in a minuscule moment of contemporary culture.”
The former Genesis leader might have downplayed the iconic moment that ‘In Your Eyes’ soundtracked the scene in Say Anything, but there is no doubt that it is one of the most profound points in the era’s cinema. A classic sequence, for many of a certain age, it brings back memories of their own heady and confusing teenage liaisons.
