C&L's Late Nite Music Club: Aimee Mann 'Wise Up'
When I saw the movie Magnolia, in 1999, and heard this poignant and emotional song, I had to buy it.
The words and music of Aimee Mann's Wise Up reaches into your soul, rips it out and makes you look at it, blood dripping from your hands. "See what you did with your life, asshole? Stop fucking around."
In selecting Wise Up for the emotional climax of his film, Paul Thomas Anderson understood that it needn’t be interpreted specifically, that it wasn’t about anything granular at all, or at least didn’t have to be. It’s about personal crisis, painful introspection, and those rare moments of self-awareness when we realize, whatever our circumstances, that we’ve been sleepwalking through a tragedy that’s mainly of our own creation, shuffling toward the edge of the cliff that we’ve always been able to tell ourselves isn’t really there, always, that is, until right this minute.
Just now, just for a moment, we see it clearly. Maybe at that point some of us make changes, though I’m reminded of the closing line of Eliot’s Prufrock: Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
It's rare for a song from a movie to evoke such emotion.
Here's the clip from the movie