Old songs in new skins - use of old songs in movies - Column

Interview, April, 1999 by Greil Marcus

With those last words, Wilentz recovered the voice of the song that, through blind quotation, he had made part of the official historical record of the nation - a voice of suppressed and bitter fury. ("I got tired of Henry Hyde describing Clinton as if he were William Zantzinger," Wilentz says.) In his way, Wilentz was singing a Bob Dylan song as badly as Michael Caine sings "It's Over" in Little Voice - and as fully.

I can't listen to Roy Orbison's original anymore; compared to Caine's version it sounds bloated and strained, where Caine's is all sweat and self-loathing. The song itself may be over - or, rather, definitively appropriated, never to be given back. As for Dylan's song, like Etta James's, you can think it has just begun to travel, a mutant now, limbs fallen off, strange sores appearing, the sores growing into whole new bodies.