second round

(10) Limahl, “The Neverending Story”
torched
(2) Vangelis, “Theme from Chariots of Fire”
236-153
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/23.

BEATITUDES OF CHEESE: j.r. mcconvey on “Chariots of Fire: Titles”

Last summer, I got a vasectomy. On the clinic’s recommendation, I brought headphones, so I could listen to music to distract myself during the procedure. As I lay there with my underwear around my knees and a brittle napkin draped over my exposed groin, staring at the acoustic tile and waiting for the doctor to arrive, I was able to run through three full plays of the tune I’d carefully chosen to precede the elective incising of my scrotum—the perfect soundtrack to induce a mix of calm, determination, melancholy and triumph.
As I barreled toward the finish line of my fertility, with my wiener double-taped to my abdomen, reader, nothing else would suffice: it had to be Vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire”.
Why, you ask? Well, yes, in part, because I’d chosen to write about it for March Fadness. But the selection of this resilient gem from the dawn of the 1980s hinged on a much bigger and more consequential truth—one that helps explain why, more than forty years after its release, the song can still conjure indelible images of funny-looking British men in white shorts running through the surf of an English beach in the cloudy dawn; and in doing so, lift our nervous, battered hearts.
We hate to admit it, but nothing is more comforting than cheese.

men running on a beach in chariots of fire but everything is made of cheese

*

The definition of cultural cheese is hard to pin down. It’s silly; it’s embarrassing; it’s garish; it’s maudlin or sappy or sentimental. It’s usually a “we know it when we see it” thing—and there is no question, on watching the opening title sequence of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, that Vangelis’ theme is gloriously, triumphantly cheesy. Formally titled “Titles”—far too quotidian a name for its musical majesty—the tune is perhaps the apex of the late 1970s analogue synth soundtrack game, and a precursor to many of the cheesy ’80s soundtrack hits featured elsewhere in this competition.
Working on the gustatory premise that being surrounded by cheese brings happiness, let’s assume there are as many subtle varieties of cultural cheese as there are the edible kind. Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou—the man who, understandably, called himself Vangelis—was Greek, born in the small town of Agria on the Pagasetic Gulf. But his “Chariots of Fire” is much too ethereal to be a briny feta, which better embodies a salty hunk like Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, born in Athens to a Greek mom; or George Michael (née Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou) whose defiant 1990s hits always added a hint of tang to the salad. Perhaps “Titles” is instead a creamy Manouri, or a firm, smoky Metzovone? Does the nationality of the composer even matter? Chariots is a profoundly British film and story; maybe its theme is a sturdy log of Dorset White, or a redolent wedge of Stinking Bishop?
Perhaps it’s the sound of the music that defines what we might call the “terroir” of what we might, in questionable taste, call “Ear Cheese”. In “Titles”’s emotional majesty, its ambition, its combined timelessness and evocation of a particular era and sound, is Vangelis’ masterwork more akin to one of the so-called King Cheeses—a Brie de Maux, or a wheel of mighty Parmigiano Reggiano? Or, circling back to the great Hellenic cheeses, what of Halloumi, whose divine squeakiness echoes Vangelis’ tinkling chimes; whose refusal to melt in the face of direct heat speaks of the same solid strength of will that thrums through his anthem’s booming timpani and swelling synths?
The milk, the curd, the rennet, the rind: these are what we seek, arms outstretched, chasing cheese dreams across the salt-lapped shore. 

halloumi shall not flag or fail, it shall char on until the end

*

“Chariots of Fire” is an early audiovisual meme. If you put this music on speakers, spread your arms out and run in slow motion while making a stupid face, most people will know what you’re getting at, even if they can’t name the tune. Maybe they’ll know it from one of the dozens of riffs that have appeared in film and television. There are whole websites dedicated to what TV Tropes calls “Parodies of Fire,” variations of which have appeared on The Simpsons, Married… With Children, Sesame Street and dozens of other shows and films. (Being of a certain age, I will always be partial to its appearance in National Lampoon’s Vacation, when it accompanies the galloping Griswolds on the last leg of their fateful journey to Walley World.) Maybe it’s just found its way into their heads through cultural osmosis, the kind of mass penetration that serves as a collective memory, so that even those who have never experienced a work directly can be said to know its secrets, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Citizen Kane, or that ten-minute Taylor Swift song about a scarf. It’s even possible they know it from an echo in a dream, a fragment they picked up somewhere without consciousness, made of nothing but an insistent synth, a swelling of strings, a ghostly piano melody, and the rhythmic LinnDrum whisper that punctuates every other, impellent backbeat: ch-CH-CH-ch-ch… ch-CH-CH-ch-ch… ch-CH-CH-ch-ch…
Howsoever it claimed its mantle, Vangelis’ theme has transcended its origin as part of a film to attain its own meaning. It ripples through decades, speaking of how we chase dreams, how we yearn for the feeling of freedom. It helps us live, this paean to joy pursued and revelation attained. 

*

To cut more deeply into the centre of this dense, rich wheel, I asked a trio of musicians to analyze, compare and offer their thoughts on “Chariots of Fire” and some related representative examples of cheese from three distinct musical genres. First, the realm in which Vangelis frolicked: 1980s synthesizer-based soundtrack music from movies and TV (including Chariots of Fire). Second, the cry of clogged and/or broken hearts struggling to be unburdened by heartbreak and/or desire—the mighty power ballad. Finally, the sound of glow sticks whizzing through the dark and sweaty teenagers squeaking against each other: trance music from the turn of the millennium, when no one had to worry about whether they might get caught on video totally blissing out to some ridiculous-but-sublime Tiësto mix and end up as a TikTok fatality. 
For the first group, I enlisted my friend Mike De Eyre, who a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who played bass for the emo band, The Black Maria. (He now works in mortgages.) For the power ballads, my brother, Kevin McConvey, a high school vice principal and former music teacher. And, for trance anthems, Matt Davis, who does music and sound design for TV, specializing in kids’ programming, and who is most definitely recorded on static film somewhere, looking sketched out in furry pants. Each was asked to analyze a small selection of representative tracks from their assigned genre. (A full list of tracks is below).
The results of their analysis across genres yielded three key findings:

1. Cheese is predictable, which makes it comforting. It uses typical chord progressions, and follows certain obvious patterns.

MD: “Most tracks have an identical structure: mix-in/beat, breakdown, buildup, drop/TRANCE, then the same thing over again one more time… They also have super-simple chord structures that are very easy to follow. The music goes exactly where you expect it to go. I think that’s a hallmark of cheesy music, at least for some listeners.”

MDE: “Major chord overload! Everything follows some pattern involving the 1st, 4th, and 5th chords (with some additions). The major third is featured prominently in the melody, and in any chord it can fit itself into. There’s also this recurring trick where the bass note drops to a minor third but the other instruments continue a major chord progression (in the relative major key)… see beginning of ‘The Greatest American Hero’ for example. Uniquely cheesy!”

KM: “Build is a must. It’s common to start with synth, then bring in piano, and to build dynamically. (I’m not sure if you go here or not, it could be argued that power ballads are all musical sexual interactions.) In all of these songs, you find the Deceptive Cadence—the act of making it seem like we're going to land on the tonic chord, but instead going to the minor vi chord—as well as the "Cadential 6-4”, playing the Dominant in the bass (the fifth note of the scale), with the tonic chord above it, followed by the upper notes also settling on the Dominant chord. Both of these add great drama.”

Repetition is a kind of training. Social media, with its slot-machine mechanic, is a great and terrible example of this: swipe to refresh, and you (might) get a notification, like, or comment that triggers a dopamine hit; now do it again. On a more dramatic level, when Steph Curry arcs up a three pointer at the buzzer, we may put our emotions on a very thin line and feel that contraction as the anxiety of anticipation. When our anticipation pays off, the endorphin rush can be awesome. Steph drains the bucket. The dealer turns over an ace. Your latest video goes viral. Or, in the case of music, after a carefully crafted build-up of tension, the big moment finally comes. Witness, if you will, the final chorus of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”, as it wallops its way out of the drum-and-guitar breakdown like a teenaged Mike Tyson berserking through a suburban mall in a lush, copper Alanis Morrissette wig before landing its huge knockout punch. Clarkson’s tune and its juicy hammer of a chorus speaks to how pop music—and cheese, especially—leans so hard on repetition. The big chorus makes us feel great because we know it’s coming. The more often a song can feed the serotonin and norepinephrine receptors in our amygdala, the more it can lift us. Cheese, like drugs, gives us an easy hit, over and over again.
One particular chord pattern turns out to be present in a significant number of songs that one might call cheesy. The I-V-vi-IV chord progression is foundational in a lot of overwrought pop music. The comedy troupe Axis of Awesome catalogued its prevalence in a famous video, and the array of tunes in the mix is mind-bending. The song that kicks it all off is Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”. I’ll take the liberty of assuming most readers would identify this song as, in some way, cheesy. And yet, about two minutes into the mix, the Axis drops a fragment of The Beatles’ “Let it Be”—a song that I would guess the majority of respondents would never identify as such. It’s simply… too good? So, although the I-V-vi-IV chord progression and its particular melancholic sweep is the backbone for songs like Elton John’s Gorgonzolic “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”, Bon Jovi’s family-sized block of Cracker Barrel jack, “It’s My Life”, and a bunch of middling Havarti from the likes of Weezer (dill), Blink 182 (jalapeno) and Avicii (“Mediterranean herbs & spices,” or something), it is also present in “Let it Be,” a legitimate modern secular hymn, and can therefore not be said to be inherently cheesy.  
To be fair, this would probably prove true for just about any chord structure. Music is music; there are days when “Fat Bottom Girls” can reduce me to tears for no good reason. Structure alone does not give us solids; it is milky, watery, undelicious. For the holy reaction to occur, we need structure, plus what might be called presentation, or aspect. The cheeseball must sit with confidence amid its more reasonable cousins in snackdom, saying YES, I am crusted in nuts. And PROUD OF IT. 

blink-182 as jalapeno havarti cheese, in a realist style

 

2. Cheese is informed/shaped by enthusiasm for technology of the time, thereby coming to define and evoke a specific period or era.

MDE: “First consistent thing I noticed is the unapologetic ‘artificial’ sound of the synths and drum machines… the technology had just become widely available in the ’80s so it sounded new and novel, but it aged quickly and poorly.”

KM: “Synth and piano are key elements. Reverb. Space. Fills, solos, drums—captured in the bombastic style of the time—all create space and grandeur, timbre and texture.”

MD: “There are a ton of sounds in these trance tracks that sound super dated… System F’s terrible snare, Robert Miles’ over-reliance on his piano delay, and the shitty flute lead in Braveheart, which probably sounded passable at the time but sounds super fake now.” 

The quality of cheese that gives it its sharp edges—its salty crystals and weirdly pleasing molds—is how suspension in time creates a fine rind of nostalgia. Creators trying to capture a moment end up creating time capsules instead, sealed by the shiny red wax of their enthusiasm for new technologies that won’t be new for long. But age often improves cheese. Everything trends eventually, and younger generations are curious about the ones that preceded them. Even fresh cheese tends to be marinated in cloudy memory, and often pays homage to traditional values or bygone times. (This is what gives us “retro”.) The future can be cheesy, but generally only as a projection of some utopia based in archaic ideals; The Jetsons are cheesy and Elon Musk is stank-ass cheese (dick cheese?), whereas the creeping existential threats of climate collapse, mass extinction and nuclear war resist the cast of cheese. (Too depressing!)

 

3. Cheese is self-serious, which can make it feel hollow but also bolsters its ability to comfort us, because it confirms to us that what we think of as our stupidest, scariest or most vulnerable feelings are valid.

MD: “A minor key doesn’t necessarily make something cheesy, but it does speak to the self-seriousness of trance music. It’s cheesy because it thinks it’s cool, and it’s such goofy music.

MDE: “The chorus always seems to be a full-blown explosion in the major key—they sound triumphant without earning it.” 

KM: “Both the Deceptive Cadence and the 6-4 are very common musical tools, used often in classical, pop, R&B, etc. They just aren't often found in rock music, and their use in power ballads seems to bridge a style gap. They are overt, in-your-face, and lack nuance, and that they don't usually appear in rock music lends these songs a type of insincerity that is endearing, accessible—and somehow, paradoxically, sincere.”

The final active enzyme in good cheese is more nebulous and harder to define. The truest and most potent power cheese inhabits is a big-eyed emotional guilelessness that approaches the nirvana of Zen Buddhism. This special magic lies beyond technicality. Its mere existence is a rebuke to the weight that comes with judgment, with the merciless human tendency to compare and rank everything. Cheese repels shame.
Cheese is never gonna give you up. It believes—truly, madly, deeply—that heaven is a place on Earth. As demonstrated by “Titles”, “Hooked on Classics,” “Theme from Hill Street Blues” and other instrumental cousins, cheese is more than words. It wants to know what love is, even if love hurts. It can’t fight this feeling anymore. It just called to say I love you. Cheese is airplane dancing to Tiffany, and loving it. It’s cranking Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” from Working Girl and imagining that you’re Melanie Griffith in a shiny 1980s office tower, putting your feet up on the goddamn desk like the goddamn winner you are. It’s pulling out that old Phil Collins Greatest Hits CD and facing the fact that, for no reason beyond its raw cheesiness, “Against All Odds” can still crush you like a massive shoe slowly coming down over all that you know and love, except that you and your family end up in a deep tread, escaping doom: it leaves you terrified, but newly alive. Put it on loud and try not to air drum, friend. In fact, don’t—that’s the third element doing its thing. Pound the sky with Phil. Let your partner see the tears roll down your face as you do it. Let go of every time anyone ever told you had bad taste, or raised their eyebrows at a thing you loved; every barb and snark about your stupid hair or goofy dress, every crack about your blemishes, every time you failed in bed, every time you fell short and felt ten years old again, filled with terror about the miserable person you might become. Let the electric piano and rattling cymbals pound all that shit out of you—all that weight—so that you find yourself lifted off the ground. So that you feel holy. And say it out loud, so everyone can hear: TAKE A LOOK AT ME NOW.
The ridiculous as the sublime, and the sublime in the ridiculous: this is the balance, the secret, the essence and affinage of the finest-quality cheese.

*

In conclusion, we can glean from this admittedly limited and pretty random sample that, formally, cheese relies on a few standard tricks. In its familiar, repetitive structures, its embrace of the newest sounds, and in its implacable confidence that, with enough will, you can emote your way through the darkest of storms, Ear Cheese tells us the future—or at least tells us that it’s there.
If the 1980s is the defining decade of cheese, it’s probably because of the birth and evolution of the synthesizer—but also because it was the last unbroken decade. In the 1980s, what we now call the climate crisis had only just begun to poke its unassuming little head through the hole in the ozone layer. There was pollution and acid rain. But there was no global warming yet, and no one was afraid of it. Y2K wasn’t even a thing, because not many people had computers. The millennium and the widening gyre it brought was still 20 years away, far over the horizon. So, cool new synthesizers? Nifty vocal effects? Yes please. How better to soundtrack America’s shining city on a hill, or the icy sheen of Thatcher’s Britain, than with music that was futuristic and gut-grabbing and filled with possibility? It was the 1980s. What could possibly go wrong?
If we peg the peaks of Ear Cheese to major clicks in the Roman calendar, and consider earlier octarian centuries (perhaps searching for cyclical patterns in hope that 2080 might offer our surviving children a rip-roaring time to look forward to), the evidence does present some theoretical solace. The 1880s produced huge crumbly hunks such as Grieg’s bombastic “Hall of the Mountain King” and Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” through which nostalgia marches like an overcaffeinated gorilla in full military dress. Is it possible that Pachelbel’s revered Canon in D—which dates to 1680, features the harpsichord as an auditory signature of the Baroque, and happens to include a variation on the I-V-vi-IV chord progression—might be not only the original one-hit-wonder, but also the progenitor of cheese in the western classical tradition: the Godfather of Goudas, Boss of Beemsters, Master of Muensters?
Although it is tempting to think so, the truth is that cheese is a modern invention: a simulacrum, a metaphor based on a by-product—a feeling we can categorize as we like. At its best, cheese offers us the good parts of populism, the ones where people feel comfortable getting together to believe in something, in a real, exposed kind of way. (The astonishing success of Choir! Choir! Choir! is a good example of this.) It gives us the goofy smile. It brings butterflies to our stomachs. It makes us feel naïve. It makes us young. What better proof than a finely aged cheddar that age is merely a luscious ripening of youth?
Yet, suddenly, some among us—from our vantages on the gurney of the vasectomy clinic, or the hospital bed, or just countless nights on the couch—are starting to be able to see the end of the movie. The freeze frame that comes just before the credits roll. And, like all the best cheese, the sublime nugget that Vangelis left as his masterpiece gives us permission, as we charge down the beach, splashing madly toward the finish line, to want what everyone wants, deep down inside. With unconditional faith, it cheers us on past judgment, shouting from the heavens: Run for all you’re worth, and finish with your hands in the air.

APPENDIX 1: SONGS FOR ANALYSIS

 

1980s SOUNDTRACKS

 

POWER BALLADS

TRANCE

*Tracks 1-3 from Ferry Corsten’s classic Trance Nation 1 compilation:

APPENDIX 2: CHEESY GREEK COMPOSERS THAT ARE WORSE THAN VANGELIS

  • Yanni

J.R. McConvey’s debut short story collection, DIFFERENT BEASTS, won the 2020 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for speculative fiction. His writing has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize and the Bristol Short Story Prize, and appeared in publications including Joyland, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Weird Horror. He is also a media producer who works in documentary and virtual reality. He grew up in the 1980s, but to be honest, he’s a 90s guy who still wears Nine Inch Nails T-shirts to Christmas dinner. He lives in Toronto with his family, and is online @jrmcconvey & jrmcconvey.com.

FANTASIA ON THE DANCE FLOOR: LIMAHL AND MIRACLES OF “THE NEVERENDING STORY” BY ERIN KEANE

If you heard the song before you saw the movie, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in for a simple good time. “Turn around,” Limahl croons to the buoyant beat, drawing out the final vowel of the opening line into a gleeful run. “Look at what you see.” Giorgio Moroder, our Father of Disco, was onto something when he composed his “Never Ending Story” fantasy anthem’s shimmering flourishes, its soaring peaks and valleys carrying Keith Forsey’s lyrics like a flight on a Luck Dragon’s back. We needed this confection, a dose of misdirection from the anguish we will first endure.
Do you feel a twirl coming on? I do. I want to rush a dance floor in a storm of balloons, dedicate this one to my lost friends. When I dance, I always close my eyes. I can bring them all back that way.
“It’s still a song I play as a DJ and people still love it, especially the girls,” Moroder, that mad genius of timeless soundtracks, said in a 2018 interview. “The ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, they all heard the song when they were children. It stays in their head. They love it.”
When Beth Anderson layers in on, “Make believe I’m everywhere, I’m hidden in the lines,” it sure sounds romantic. That’s how Stranger Things season 3 sells it anyway, when, to coax a crucial piece of information out of his genius long-distance girlfriend Suzie, unlikely hero Dustin engages in this duet over a radio with all his skeptical friends listening in.
What do the girls—the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so—really love about this song? The movie set off a chain reaction for me: The NeverEnding Story raced a snail so Labyrinth could dance so The Princess Bride could joke so Shrek could ruin “Hallelujah” so Stranger Things could weaponize our fantasies into horror. Unlike later tracks Stranger Things pulled out of the crates of my youth, “Never Ending Story” is not an alienation anthem, as its big TV moment shared by two dorks in puppy love underscores. It presupposes connection, tapping into a feeling less retro and more like ancient, despite its disco-meets-New Wave sound. Like all of Giorgio Moroder’s big soundtrack hits—consider Blondie’s “Call Me,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”—the song and the movie are impossible for me to separate. And so, no matter what age I am when I hear this song playing, it takes me back to a time before cool, when we were Childlike Empresses waiting open-hearted for our new names, or Atreyus on a quest to find Bastian, the one who could bestow them.
The singer, Limahl—he of the gravity-defying hair, the baby-soft features, the gentle seeking eyes, a perfectly safe gay crush for the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, to have tended in their girlhoods thanks to Wolfgang Petersen’s video—is a one-hit wonder only in the strictest sense of the term. Born Christopher Hamill before he gave himself a faux-exotic stage name, an anagram of his last name, Limahl was also the front man of the English band Kajagoogoo, whose lead single “Too Shy” off their debut album White Feathers rose to Number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And then the band fired him. Over the phone. “I was absolutely betrayed,” he said in a 2019 interview. To be flying so high one minute, only to be left behind. It is a story any girl who has navigated the dumpster treachery of school feels hard.
And about a year later, Giorgio Moroder’s people called. When “Never Ending Story” broke through on the charts, it put Limahl in rare company. He became not a two-hit wonder, but rather a one-hit wonder twice over. I’ve by no means exhausted the research on this matter but it seems terribly difficult to do what Limahl did, to achieve one-hit wonder status as both a member of a group and as a solo artist. You could say CeeLo Green. You could get deep in the weeds on Dave Stewart if you pretended the Eurythmics didn’t exist. Safe to say it’s uncommon. You have to respect it.
Not that Limahl had a lock on the job. “Never Ending Story” is a bit higher than Limahl’s vocal sweet spot, and as he tells it, he partied the night before his audition and arrived hungover to Berlin where he kinda blew it at first. That’s the thing about second chances: We’re not always great at recognizing the door when it opens. Moroder, who knew what he wanted from a movie soundtrack theme, was patient, teased it out of him, and on the second try, Limahl nailed it. Two hits—one under Kajagoogoo, and one under his chosen name—should disqualify Limahl from a conversation about one-hit wonders, but if anyone knows the power something as simple as a name change can bring about, it’s The NeverEnding Story fans.
It's become common to look back on ‘80s movies for kids and wonder at the earnest, unfiltered emotional brutality of them, but it’s hard to say what an acceptable alternative would have been. We watched the things we couldn’t talk about and spoke in a shorthand collage that nodded to those indelible scenes. Parents for the most part were not our best friends. Who even had a therapist? The world felt strange and unknowable and adults acted like we couldn’t hear them talking. That scream of Bastian’s, the one that crossed dimensions? I heard it, too.
Step off the dance floor with me. Turn around. Look at what you see: An attic, jumbled with maps and skeletons and taxidermies, a secret hiding place at school where this average sad boy could hide from the world with a book that he swiped off a grumpy antiquarian who knew what he was doing. (If you don’t think you would have taken refuge in such an attic and let yourself be swept away into an epic tale by candlelight, I don’t think we can be friends.) Before this book, the average boy woke up next to the one he fell asleep reading. His dad is all business. This boy, Bastian, tells dad that he dreamed about his mother. Business dad doesn’t want to hear it. “We can't let Mom's death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?”
At eight, nine, ten years old I didn’t understand that dead parents are just a trope in children’s stories because otherwise there’s too much supervision, too much security, too much love. When my father died, I took those stories personally. Bastian and me, we were going through it. I understood all too well why he couldn’t bring his head out of the clouds. We knew there was no such thing as a story that never ends. It was midnight in the Howling Forest all day long, and we were supposed to give it our all, what, in gym class? I needed any refuge from the Nothing I could find.  
Turn the radio off for a minute. Sit down and watch with me. See the Nothing as it rolls in. It obliterates everything. Creatures large and small are on the run and their only hope is a champion named Atreyu, who will fight to save the Childlike Empress, the being whose energy powers Fantasia and who is losing that energy to the Nothing.
Turn around. Look at what you see: Atreyu is just a little boy on horseback, armed with a bow, his courage and an amulet designed to protect him. Atreyu is being asked to do something impossible, but kids are always being asked to do things that seem impossible at first.
We can't let the encroaching Nothing be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?
How does the song go again? “Rhymes that keep their secrets / Will unfold behind the clouds,” Limahl and Anderson sing in ethereal harmony. Pull up a blanket. Find the matches, light the candles. Ration this sandwich as a hedge against the hunger. You probably know what time it is.
We have to talk about Artax, Atreyu’s horse and best friend, drowning in the Swamp of Sadness.
“Everyone knew that whoever let the sadness overtake him would sink into the swamp.” The warning didn’t make it any easier to watch.
Turn around, Atreyu: Look at what you see. Artax is stuck, his own weight pulling him down. Atreyu tries to pull him out, but the muck is too strong, and Artax doesn’t have the strength.
“Artax, you’re sinking! Turn around!” Atreyu screams.
“You have to try. You have to care,” he pleads. He’s just a boy, sent on an impossible quest. This is our champion? Or, of course he is. He just doesn’t know what his real mission is yet.
Atreyu looks into the camera, tears running down his face. Cut to Bastian in the school attic who looks up from the book, tears streaming down his face. Cut to me as a child, watching for the first time, utterly unprepared to witness this. Atreyu, our hero, could fail? And Artax could sink while Atreyu walks out on his own feet? What was Artax carrying that Atreyu couldn’t see?
Cut to me now, watching again as an adult. We can’t let Artax’s death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right? Tell me what we couldn’t see unfolding behind the clouds. Even Bastian and I, who thought we already knew what there was to know about how stories end, were devastated by the unfairness. Atreyu was wrong when he thought Artax was dying because he didn’t care enough. I hear Morloch the Mountain’s resigned sigh—“we do not care … whether or not we care”—not as apathy now but as the raw material that builds a defensive shell. But Morloch the Mountain is also stuck, that shell too heavy to ever lift into the air.
I will let Giorgio Moroder and Limahl in on a secret: If it weren’t for their song, then that moment—Artax in the swamp, Atreyu trying and failing to save him—would be the only thing, pretty much, I would remember about this movie. The story would begin in the swamp and end with Morloch, with Atreyu defeated, feeling it was all for nothing. It’s the song that helps me remember what happens next:
Atreyu turns around. He trudges back through the waters that claimed Artax with a wolf on his heels, and who should swoop down to save him from the swamp or the black dog or whatever we’re calling despair today but Falkor, the Luck Dragon. Look at what you see: Falkor is a miracle incarnate, made of all good things, both wise and innocent, fearless and tender, nurturing and fierce. If this song had a texture I could run my fingers across, Falkor’s incandescent feathery fur would be it. I can forget this as easily as I can forget how the film ends,  with Bastian soaring through Fantasia on Falkor’s back: In the beginning, it is always dark. That’s when we’re free to build.
Bastian shouts Moon Child’s name and becomes a champion; his scream across dimensions brings Artax and Atreyu back to life. Moroder gives Limahl a second chance at his audition, and he’s back on Solid Gold.
Years later, Limahl’s second chance had its own comeback thanks to Dustin and Suzie’s duet on Stranger Things. Charts look different now, and so does a hit: A surge in streams of “The NeverEnding Story” put it almost to the top of Spotify’s U.S. Viral 50 chart, and YouTube demand for the video increased by 800 percent.
It is tempting to point to this resurrection as proof of the song’s timelessness, of it having earned its neverending status. But what if I told you it didn’t need a second life to prove its worth? Without Falkor, the swamp wins. Without the song to remind me of Falkor, all I can remember is Atreyu’s anguished witness, not Bastian’s eventual triumph. Look again at the name we gave the phenomenon of the singular hit. Consider what an honor it is to bear it. Wonder is another way of saying miracle, which is to say—for three minutes and thirty glorious seconds, before you beg the DJ to play it again—a mirror of your dreams.

Erin Keane is the author of RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (Belt Publishing), one of NPR's Best Books of 2022, as well as three collections of poems. She is Chief Content Officer at Salon and teaches creative nonfiction, poetry, and professional writing in the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. 

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