Soundtrack to the CITR Movie That Never Was

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Q_fYuMZdA

Angel in the Snow, by Elliott Smith

I chose this song for the scene when Holden is thinking of throwing a snowball out the window but then decides against it. I think this song exemplifies Holden's respect for all things delicate--he respects girls ("When you're coming pretty close to doing it with a girl...she keeps telling you to stop....I stop. Most guys don't" (92). The girl Elliott Smith is singing about is delicate -- "all crushed out on the way you are" -- and in Holden's mind, Jane is a delicate girl, and so he cares for her, and it is important to him that she be respected: "I was so damn worried....If you knew Stradlater, you'd have been worried, too....He was unscrupulous" (40). He respects children, like Phoebe, and the girl he meets in the park ("I gave her a hand with [her skate]" [119]), as is evident in his dream of being the catcher in the rye: "I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field...I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff...that's the only thing I'd really like to be" (173). Also, obviously, the perfect snow is a very delicate thing, and it is another one of the few things Holden respects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WanOEidDWEQ

Talking to Mary, by Elliott Smith

Talking to Mary is a song about a girl who understands a man's problems, even though they might strike other people as weird or abnormal. "She sees behind that dirty look." This expression personifies Phoebe and Holden's relationship. On page 67 of Catcher in the Rye, Holden says, "I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you're talking about." I would match this song to the scene in which Holden and Phoebe are talking in the middle of the night, because Phoebe knows intuitively that Holden got kicked out of school again, and she can tell that his problem is that he doesn't like anything or anyone: "She can hear what you're thinking/ Like you were saying it right out loud." This song would again be appropriate when Phoebe packs her bags and decides to go with Holden out West: "It was her that followed down every stupid turn that you took."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AsmXykRsHg

I Love the Unknown, by Clem Snide

I picked this song to be the soundtrack for the scene when Holden is walking through the snow to the train station so he can go to New York. "I decided I'd take a room in a hotel in New York--some very inexpensive hotel and all--and just take it easy till Wednesday" (51). Not many sheltered 16-year-olds decide to go wing it in a big city by themselves in the winter without much money, but that's all Holden wants to do: wing it. I think this song really describes Holden because he loves the unknown, and he pursues it, both consciously and subconsciously, in the way that he leaves school after school and is so impulsive in his ways. "I didn't have too much difficulty at Elkton Hills," he tells Spencer. "I didn't exactly flunk out or anything. I just quit, sort of" (13).