The Lacrimosa was a Bold Choice: a Quick Oscars Reflection

Three thoughts on the Academy Awards, two of them very brief:

One. As someone who lives just south of Hollywood, I’m always glad when the ceremony is over and the weeks of street closures come to an end.

Two. Anora was my favorite film of the year. The final fifteen minutes of the movie left me in tears, and I’ve rented the film on Amazon just to watch those last “Ani and Igor” scenes over and over again. On reflection, Anora offers the most romantic conclusion to a film I’ve seen since Lost in Translation. I recognize this is not a universally held opinion, but I’m glad the Academy chose as it did.

Three: The Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem was not the right choice for the Oscars’ In Memoriam segment. Yes, the Lacrimosa has been used in movies very well before — Amadeus, of course, and this year’s delightful Babygirl. It is undeniably moving, and whoever directed and edited the segment matched the music to the images down to the millisecond.

Here’s the full clip from last night’s broadcast. The Lacrimosa begins at about 1:20, after Morgan Freeman’s speech.

Mozart died while writing the Requiem, as folks who saw Amadeus will remember. When he died, the Lacrimosa was only partly finished, and most scholars think it contains the very last music the great one composed. (It was finished, ably by Franz Süssmayer.) But some of us can read and understand Latin — and even those who don’t can probably gather that the Lacrimosa is part of the Roman Catholic Mass. It is a sacred text that makes specific theological claims:

Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus

Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus

Huic ergo parce Deus
Pie Jesu, Jesu Domine

Dona eis requiem
Dona eis requiem
Amen.

English:

That day will be filled with tears
When the guilty man shall rise
from the ashes to be judged

Therefore spare him, O God,
Merciful Lord Jesus,
Grant them eternal rest. Amen.

The tears (the lacrimosa) are not of the living for the dead, but of terrified souls facing a final judgment. The tears are not those ardent movie fans weep for Gene Hackman, Maggie Smith, or Donald Sutherland — some of the notables whose deaths the Memoriam sequence somberly observed. They are the tears that will be shed by Gene, Maggie, and Donald and the others when they bring their guilt before God. It will be so for all of us — or so both the text of the Requiem and the theology that informs it claim.

I am quite confident that not every dearly departed member of the academy affirmed Catholic eschatology. Does it matter? It’s a moving, striking piece of music sung in a language most people don’t understand. Can it not be repurposed for a secular solemnity?

Perhaps. My children (and maybe yours) regularly reclaim the obscene lyrics of rap songs — tributes to indiscriminate violence, misogyny, and greed — and turn those words into joyful, innocent celebrations of rhythm and youth. I will never, ever, ever forget my eight-year-old daughter and her friends performing a skit at Hebrew School to the sounds of Ariana Grande’s 2016 hit, Side to Side. The song is about a woman rendered unable to walk properly after enjoying the, um, vigorous and repeated attentions of a well-endowed lover. Heloise, Chana, Sara, and two Esthers turned it into a celebration of walking through life with friends at one’s side, arm-in-arm against all comers. The girls did not hear the suggestiveness of the lyrics. They only grasped the theme that love of any sort could make you walk differently, with your very gait reflecting joy. Were the children wrong? A few parents were scandalized, though the Israeli moms and dads who didn’t understand the English thought it all very charming.

Can our own feelings and emotions repurpose art? Heloise and her friends stripped the lasciviousness right out of Ariana’s song — did the Academy perform an equally successful excision with the Lacrimosa? Did a sacred text with very specific claims just become something very pretty and moving, devoid of any claim beyond solemn grief?

I shall let the jury be out on that, but though I would have chosen the same Best Picture, I would have made a very different choice for the Memoriam.