5 Clever Song Lyrics That Foreshadow Big Movie Moments
Movie and TV soundtracks usually aren't exactly subtle. You get a triumphant orchestra when the heroes defeat the evil king and you get a Doors song whenever you're flashing back to the 1960s. But sometimes, composers will get clever and insert cues that practically give away the ending. If, that is, you're paying close enough attention and have an encyclopedic knowledge of both popular and classical music. For example ...
A Piano Piece Gives Away The Surprise Villain In Iron Man
Iron Man is probably best remembered for being the movie which kick-started the Marvel cinematic juggernaut and reminding everyone that Robert Downey, Jr. hadn't died in prison. The film's supervillian is a regular, real-world bad guy (at first): Obadiah Stane, Tony Stark's former partner and an unabashed war profiteer. However, since this is a summer blockbuster, he's also responsible for more traditional villainy, like kidnapping, terrorism, bombs exploding, and a giant mech-suit battle in the sky. You know, the usual.
The audience doesn't officially learn that Stane is secretly trying to kill Tony until the third act or so, but the movie actually reveals it way earlier, right after Tony gets back from being tortured in a cave and announces that he doesn't want to build weapons anymore. After a hilarious montage of Tony injuring himself in his workshop with his new Iron Man equipment, he comes upon Stane playing a baby grand piano, because villains are irresistibly drawn to giant Steinways like bugs to lamps.
"Oh, don't mind me. I'm merely diddling around with 'Movie Spoilers In D Minor.'"
If you know your 18th-Century composers (you do, don't you?), you'll recognize the piece as Antonio Salieri's Piano Concerto In C Major. If you also know your 1980s movies, you'll recognize Salieri as the guy who killed Mozart in Amadeus, a movie about a bitter older rival insidiously destroying the young, brash upstart composer. Throughout the film, Salieri is tortured by the fact that he can't do work on the same level as the young genius, just as Stane bemoans his inability to reverse-engineer Stark's invention. ("Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps!")
Luckily, Tony didn't also posses the world's most annoying laugh.
Oh, and Salieri's master plan (in the movie -- there's no indication he killed Mozart in real life, or even hated him) was to steal Mozart's final piece of music and claim it as his own after death. You know, the same as how Stane stole the arc reactor right out of Tony's chest. The whole "Jeff Bridges is secretly the bad guy!" twist is laid out in these few seconds of music, as is the fact that filmmakers do in fact put a lot of thought into shit like this.
Fans and non-fans alike complained that the later seasons of Lost were a jumble of ridiculously unbelievable reveals, the end result of too many random choices made for shock value's sake. The primary culprit behind most of the show's shark-jumping moments is the Smoke Monster, aka the Man in Black, who can shapeshift to look like dead people and wants to kill his similarly godlike brother, Jacob, the protector of the island who is also preventing him from leaving and destroying reality. Simple enough!
Sponsored by Excedrin!
In Season 5, the Smoke Monster impersonates the dead John Locke -- you know, the dude who looks like that one gym teacher you had who got fired for throwing a basketball at a kid's head -- to try to get one of the main characters to kill Jacob. However, we don't know it's the Smoke Monster in disguise until the end of Season 5. For many fans, this was yet another random "why not" late-stage decision in a long line of shit they clearly made up to keep viewers guessing. Except it wasn't. This was foreshadowed in the first minute of Season 5.
Season 5 starts with a Dharma scientist playing a song called "Shotgun Willie," which is from a 1973 Willie Nelson album, and the lyrics hint at Locke's secret persona. The second verse, about a character named John T. Fours, isn't heard as the record skips, itself arguably mirroring the characters on the show, who were left skipping through time. But the song's lyrics refer to John T. Fours as a man who's "working for the Ku Klux Klan," highlighting that a man called John cannot be trusted.
EVIL!
A guy called John working with a dubious group of people -- sound familiar? But, you presumably say, the character on the show is John Locke, while this is someone called John Fours. Precisely. Remember those stupid goddamned numbers that kept showing up? Well, those six numbers -- 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 -- referenced people. Jacob made a list of all the people who could potentially replace him, and the ones assigned those numbers were the last six alive. And what was John's number? Four.
John Fours.
Jacob kept this list in a lighthouse scribbled on the side of a giant compass that was connected to a one-way mirror
which showed everyone's childhood house so he could watch them grow up. So thoughtful!
Lost may have turned into the craziest pile of directionless nonsense ever produced, but at least for one brief moment, the writers included some genuine foreshadowing. With a Willie Nelson song.
Sherlock's Moriarty Gives His Scheme Away With His Crime Soundtrack
Sherlock is a TV series starring two adorable crime-solving British men practically begging to have erotic fanfiction written about them. Their nemesis is the evil genius Moriarty, who specializes in creating elaborate crimes which only a Sherlock Holmes could solve, for no particular reason.
Now, if you hunt for music cues that give away Moriarty's schemes, you could start with the easy one. The ringtone on his phone is "Stayin' Alive" by the BeeGees (which we hear at the end of Season 1), and in fact it appears that, two full seasons later, he's faked his death somehow (or at least, it's hinted as such at the end of Season 3). But we're guessing that virtually none of you spotted the show's other piece of musical foreshadowing, which can be heard in the final episode of Season 2:
Here, Moriarty orchestrates his big break-in at the Tower of London to get the Crown Jewels, which, in addition to demonstrating his criminal mastery, also demonstrates that this show is extremely British. The fancy music is from the opera La gazza ladra, which translates to "the thieving magpie." It helpfully summarizes the rest of the upcoming plot, for the six people in the audience who recognized it.
The opera is about a girl who's falsely accused of stealing a silver spoon, based on the fact that she was seen selling a silver spoon before the theft occurred (as you can guess from the title of the opera, the real culprit is a mischievous magpie). The girl is convicted of the theft and sentenced to death, as spoons apparently used to be way more valuable than they are now. Her friends try to save her on the day of her execution (discovering the nest of the asshole bird), but before they can intervene, they hear shots ring out and presume her dead. But in the end, it turns out that she survived and the owner of the spoon could finally eat soup again.
"Tumblr want us to do what with a spoon now?"
Well, if you've seen the that episode of Sherlock, you know it unfolds into the revelation of Moriarty's master plan, in which Holmes is falsely accused of staging the very crimes he solved. This is substantiated by a crime he solved earlier, as some little kids who were kidnapped say their kidnapper looked exactly like Sherlock (which is outlandish, considering you could never possibly mistake Benedict Cumberbatch for anyone other than himself, or possibly a wizard). Sherlock gets thrown in jail, escapes, but appears to die when we see him fall from the roof of a building. We don't want to spoil whether or not he survives like the girl in the opera, but we will say that they're shooting Season 4 right now.
Metal Gear Solid V Gave Away Its Entire Plot With the Song In Its Trailer
Metal Gear Solid V has a bizarre, complex, unfinished plot, but here's the gist: A legendary soldier hilariously named Big Boss has had his entire army destroyed and falls into a coma. Nine years later, when he wakes up, he sets out to destroy those who destroyed him, including the Hungarian leader who plans to deploy a parasite which attacks those who speak English. Ultimately, Big Boss rebuilds his army and stops the bad guy. However, in one final twist, you discover that the guy you've been playing as isn't Big Boss, but a medic who had surgery to look and think like him, and speak with the voice of Kiefer Sutherland.
The game was first announced in 2013 with a hyper-realistic trailer which featured hospital scenes, explosions, and gritty dialogue over the song "Not Your Kind of People" by Garbage. If you listen closely (or look it up on Genius), the lyrics tell the entire plot of the game. First verse: You seem kind of phony, Everything's a lie. As in, you're not truly Big Boss, and the whole game wasn't what you thought it was. The second verse: When you build a shell, Build an army in your mind, which is what most of the game is about -- rebuilding your army. Then it goes on to mention "speak a different language," referencing the villain Skullface's beef with English.
He said ... in English.
But it goes deeper. In audio logs, it's revealed that Big Boss, Revolver Ocelot, and even the big bad of the series, Major David "Zero" Oh (honestly, having read those names, we want to kill English too), watched over Big Boss and the medic when they were comatose. It's the emotional heart of the story, and once again, the song's lyrics point to this: You dropped by as I was sleeping, You came to see the whole commotion. Basically, the creators based their entire game on a Garbage song.
Finally, the game ends with Big Boss leaving a tape for the medic explaining that he needs a double, because two Big Bosses can achieve twice as much and build a far more powerful legacy (We are extraordinary people). Sort of like when waiters work communally so they can get better tips, only a thousand times more weird and uncomfortable.
Furthermore, the game itself opens on David Bowie's "Man Who Sold the World" -- a song about a man who has a strange encounter with another version of himself. However, the version in the game isn't Bowie's original; it's a cover by Midge Ure. So the opening has you playing as a copy of the hero, whilst listening to a song about a copy of the hero, which in itself is a copy of the song. It's like an 18-layer meta lasagna.
The people behind Friday The 13th fully admit that it was nothing but a hastily-filmed cash grab inspired by the original groundbreaking Halloween. That's why we can forgive the franchise for being fairly bare bones in terms of plot, character, and everything that isn't inventing new ways to murder teenagers. Really, any film franchise which spends an entire installment wondering what a zombie serial killer would do in outer space isn't likely to put a lot of thought into subtle storytelling tricks like foreshadowing.
Turns out that murder ghosts in space behave a lot like murder ghosts in the woods.
That said, the original film does have a few cinematic bona fides. The thoroughly shocking and unusual plot twist, wherein the killer turns out to be a bereaved middle-aged mom, was a risky move which paid off. However, audience members could have shielded their eyes and still picked up on the big reveal well ahead of time simply by listening intently to the creepy recurring whisper played throughout the movie.
Faced with a super tiny budget and zero budget for singers, the film's music director Harry Manfredini performed the revealing lyrics himself (listen at 0:50).
LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!
The echoing syllables Ki ki ki ma ma ma are meant to be an allusion to the phrase, "Kill her, Ma!" We're essentially hearing what Jason's mother is hearing inside her mind as she stalks the camp counselors who allowed her son to drown, giving away the twist over and over again long before Mrs. Voorhees is revealed. See? Even if you're watching a movie that could have been titled Here's Ten People Getting Stabbed In Various Ways, it helps to pay attention to the little things.
Ed would like to thank Adam and his good friend Dom for the MGS tips. Carolyn spoils all the movies on Twitter.
For more spoilers you had no idea were spoilers, check out 5 Movies Plots Given Away By The Characters' Names and 5 Brilliant Clues Hidden In The Background Of Movies.
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