"God Only Knows" where we'd be without Brian Wilson
RIP to one of the finest songwriters of all time, who will live forever in perfect music cues
“It’s one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it. It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian. It’s the greatest song ever written.” -Paul McCartney
I wouldn’t dare attempt to write an actual obituary for Brian Wilson, whose death at 82 was announced this morning. Apart from the fact that my musical vocabulary runs about as deep as identifying the chorus, and saying “I liked it/I didn’t like it,” someone like Wilson — a musical genius, a child of abuse, a drug addict, a lover of ‘Norbit’ — presents far too complicated a figure to try and capture over two to three thousand words on a Substack mostly dedicated to taking potshots at Apple TV+ sitcoms. This is not the place!
HOWEVER… I have seen a lot of movies and a lot of TV shows, many of which have featured the songs of The Beach Boys and/or Brian Wilson, and I thought that one way I could celebrate so towering a figure in American music would be to highlight some of the times his work — in this case the masterpiece “God Only Knows” — has amplified someone else’s.
What follows is hardly an exhaustive list, merely what I could remember (with some group text assists). Have another favorite “God Only Knows” cue? Or another favorite Wilson song moment entirely? SOUND OFF IN THE COMMENTS!
NOTE: Most of the clips I found on YouTube have been modulated in some way to escape copyright detection (and some won’t even play on Substack, for age-restricted reasons1), so I encourage you to both push through and seek out the original work, wherever available!
‘Love, Actually’ (2003)
I’d wager this is the first “God Only Knows” cue that comes to most people’s mind, bringing all the many love stories2 of Richard Curtis’ 2003 holiday staple to a close. How it works for you depends entirely on how you feel about both the movie in general, and its individual storylines. If you hate ‘Love, Actually’ — and many do! — then what you’re watching is a TARGET COMMERCIAL produced after a NATIONAL TRAGEDY, the most saccharine shit imaginable. As a mid-tier enjoyer of the movie, my own emotions fluctuate. Emma Thompson putting on a brave face accented by a melancholic choir of Wilson brothers? Hell yes! Liam Neeson living vicariously through his mop-topped stepson as Claudia Schiffer says “it’s cool” with all the chutzpah of a Fembot? Hell no!
But I think that fluctuation is exactly why “God Only Knows” works so well here, a pop masterpiece that can be dressed up or down, like the right pair of Nike Killshots. It fits every one of these character wrap-ups, whatever their level of earned sentiment. And then, finally, Curtis pulls back from his cast to show us (ostensibly) real people reuniting with their loved ones, no longer without but with someone, at least for one more holiday…
Somehow all of it works. This is MAGIC music, a Technicolor Dreamcoat of sound.
‘Big Love’ (2006)
So I have never in my life actually seen an episode of ‘Big Love’, which premiered after ‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Six Feet Under’ came to an end but before the final season of ‘The Sopranos’, effectively a bridge show between the Golden Era of HBO and what ‘Game of Thrones’ would usher in five years later. I can’t speak to whether “God Only Knows” encapsulates the themes of the show, either at the outset or where it would land two seasons later.
But I CAN speak to the way these opening credits literalize many of the lyrics to “God Only Knows.” For starters, in a show about Mormons, God is very present. He’s always there, always knowing stuff. “I may not always love you.” With three wives, that love’s gotta waver, right? There’s only so much to go around, and inevitably you (Bill Paxton) find yourself with a bit of a horse race situation. “You never need to doubt it.” They will! I can almost guarantee they will!
Yes, it’s “just a love song,” as Sir Paul said, but pertinent to ‘Big Love’, there’s implied threat in there, too. Love is just as likely to break as to bind, and baked into every declaration of love is the threat of it going away. All that’s left to do is pray — over and over again, as the song’s closing lyrics do — that it doesn’t.
‘Boogie Nights’ (1997)
For my money this is “God Only Knows”’ best-ever deployment, which I admit is probably influenced by seeing ‘Boogie Nights’ at an impressionable moment (eighteen years old, studying film, finally watching a movie I’m pretty sure had been banned in the Fog household), and aided by the nostalgia inherent to a montage full of actors who are now dead. RIP Robert Ridgely, Ricky Jay, Burt Reynolds, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Actually, screw that, this is cinematic perfection. Paul Thomas Anderson, all of 26 goddamn years old when he made ‘Boogie Nights’, uses Wilson’s paean to love and all its possibilities/miseries to drive home a story of — altogether now! — Found Family, and the manifold ways those family members fuck up3 in their search for home. PTA’s characters are defined by their pornographic work, and either desperately trying to escape it, or make their peace with it4. Roller Girl tries to get her GED. The Colonel gets the shit slapped out of him in prison. Reed embraces his love of magic. Buck and Jessie produce a child. It’s funny, sad, pathetic, and hopeful — every flavor of the human experience in one three minute montage, narrated by Carl’s voice and Brian’s words. There is grace and beauty in the mundane.
‘The Leftovers’ (2017)
A man literally kills his own twin here, tearing through flesh until the latter is bleeding out on the floor, but THIS isn’t age-restricted? Sex and violence, man, we’ve got it all backwards in these United States of America.
“Take this thing out of me.”
“Why?”
“So we can’t ever come back here again.”
Kevin Garvey is a man who, ever since 2% of the world’s population disappeared, has been torn in two. There’s the outwardly together lawman, keeping it together for his community and, to a lesser extent, his family. Then there’s inner Kevin, a bundle of anxiety who in Ann Dowd’s succinct diagnosis “wants to fucking die” and seems to do so, numerous times, in his visits to the Other Place. (This show is actually far more approachable than things like “The Other Place” would suggest!) Is he trying to reconcile these disparate parts of himself? Or is he just looking to escape the pain of living, and the pain of being seen?
In the end, Kevin kills himself. Or rather, this version of himself that keeps him tethered to a sort of permanent suicidal ideation, one foot out the door of his own life. “God only knows what I’d be without you” is, in the vernacular of ‘The Leftovers’ a challenge: can you extricate yourself from all this accumulated shit that’s dragging you down? Because only through (in this case literal) self-confrontation can you actually move on and start living, maybe even reconciling with your girlfriend who’s off doing her own potentially obliterative soul-searching.
Oh right, spoilers.
‘The Wonder Years’ (1991)
Special thanks to Lifting Fog super-fan Leslie Fog for reminding me about this ‘Wonder Years’ scene, which aired when I was only five years old (so I wouldn’t be able to fully emotionally process it until at least two years later, a precocious seven). Music was essential5 to Kevin Arnold’s 60s coming-of-age story, which chronicled all kinds of firsts: first kiss, first job, first love. Can you guess what first we’re dealing with here, in an episode called “Heartbreak”??
A little on-the-nose for my 39-year-old taste, but then this gets a pass as the first chronological usage of “God Only Knows” featured in this roundup. Also, it must be said — buses are just great vessels for sadness.
BONUS: ‘Bioshock Infinite’ (2013)
Okay, so this one’s less load-bearing than the previous examples, which is why we’ll call it a bonus. In ‘Bioshock Infinite’, a videogame, you play a 1910s private eye with a checkered past tasked with searching a floating city in the sky (just go with it) for a girl named Elizabeth, who as it turns out can rip “tears” in the space-time continuum (keep going) that may or may not be able to unmake reality. Naturally, you kill a ton of people with both guns and telekinetic powers along the way.
But before any of that telekinetic murder can take place, you’re just traipsing through the aforementioned floating wonder city, during which time you have the option of listening in on a barbershop quartet. Singing the 1966 hit “God Only Knows.” In 1912. Whu? How?
It is, to say the least, a bit of an anachronism that will be explained after 10-12 hours of wanton violence. Without giving any of ‘Infinite’s mindfuck story away, it also does serve as a bit of a thematic refrain for a main character who’s struggled to see what good living would do him without someone else, and doesn’t know who he is — literally!!! — without them. Do yourselves a favor and go play the whole game, currently available for $9.99 on the PlayStation store, to find out more!
read: bewbs
except the Laura Linney one because FUCK that storyline, my God
and just, you know, fuck
Some of them didn’t even make it out of 1979! RIP Little Bill (but not William H. Macy, who is still very much alive)
SO essential, in fact, that licensing rights prevent the show from ever being watched now with all its original tracks
Critical omission: Uncle Jesse singing "Forever" to Rebecca in Season 4, Episode 19 of Full House ("The Wedding")