Ultravox

Ultravox matters in the novel through “Vienna,” a song and video that briefly gather Bret, Thom Wright, and Jeff Taylor inside a shared mood of loss. Its slow, elegiac sound and theatrical images do not explain their lives so much as give their separate troubles a form they can inhabit together.

The video at the space

At the Melrose video space, Thom playfully tackles Bret while Jeff urges him on. They laugh and wrestle on the carpet until the video for “Vienna” begins; Thom lifts himself from Bret’s chest, and the two look up at the projection. The familiar images arrest the movement in the room. The song’s slow drum-machine beat, mournful piano, and synth bass accompany a horse crossing a fogbound cobblestone street, lightning, an empty city, and a singer in a trench coat. Its world expands into an embassy party, a white baby grand beneath a chandelier, grotesque guests drinking martinis, a tarantula crawling over a passed-out guest, and a child playing violin. Lovers are exposed by paparazzi, and a figure is shot on an opera-house staircase. The video’s ornate, ominous tableaux make loss feel at once stylized and intimate.

The song is too slow and too long, yet the three friends remain absorbed. Its abstraction allows it to become a “launching pad for our separate longings”: Thom’s pain over his parents’ divorce and his father’s move across the country, Jeff’s distress over his father’s alcoholism, and Bret’s sense of defeat in the role of a son his father continues to ignore. The video does not resolve those differences. Instead, its language of absence lets them recognize a common condition without having to disclose it directly. They remain silent until the song ends.

Music as private memory

“Vienna” belongs to a larger pattern in which songs attach themselves to moments of change. Earlier, driving back from the stables with Thom and Susan Reynolds, Bret hears REO Speedwagon’s “Time for Me to Fly.” Though he would not admit to liking the sentimental ballad, at seventeen he understands it as a song about leaving one realm for another. The afternoon at the stables matters in memory not because anything happens there, but because it leads into the night when the name of Robert Mallory, a new student, first enters their lives.

The contrast between the songs is telling. “Time for Me to Fly” gives Bret’s transition a forward motion; “Vienna” holds the friends in a suspended recognition of loss. Both show how a pop song can become more than background music in retrospect: its meaning is made by the listener’s circumstances, not confined to the song’s apparent subject. For the boys at the video space, the song becomes a shared emotional signal even as its meaning remains particular to each of them.

Sound, silence, and uncertainty

The novel also places music beside sounds that resist interpretation. At Buckley, Bret sits in his car at night as Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” builds against the dark campus; he then notices a lone flashlight beam moving over trees near the library. The music shapes the atmosphere of the moment, but it does not identify who is there or what the light means. Elsewhere, a Maxell cassette begins with recorded wind, distant waves, and a crackling fire before a voice repeatedly orders someone to eat. Those sounds become evidence of a frightening recorded encounter, but their source and circumstances remain uncertain as Bret listens.

Against those unsettling soundscapes, “Vienna” offers a different kind of ambiguity. Its images and lyrics do not provide factual answers; they allow the friends to feel that their separate griefs belong to the same moment. That shared silence is the song’s decisive effect: music briefly gives shape to what the characters cannot explain aloud, while leaving the losses themselves unresolved.