she needs it to stop

Here is a little story with a moral afterwards, a moral that you might not expect from the subject matter.
A song got stuck in my head at work today. Not one of the usual songs, but a woman singing “he needs me, he needs me, he needs me, he needs meee” over and over. She sounded a little like Shirley MacLaine.
Oh, yeah. I remembered that sometime in the previous week, my boyfriend and I had heard that song while watching something-or-other, and we both thought it sounded familiar, but we couldn’t place the song. We agreed it sounded like a show tune, so it was odd that my boyfriend would find it familiar because he avoids musicals like the plague.
And I’d meant to find out more about the song, and had forgotten until it got stuck in my head. I decided to run some searches while on my lunch break.

I typed “he needs me song” into Google to see what would appear. “As Long as He Needs Me,” no, that certainly wasn’t it. (I can’t stand that song and I wanted to smack the chick who was singing it in Oliver!) When I found out where the song was from, I was terribly amused.
The song is called “He Needs Me” and Harry Nilsson wrote it for a sad flop of a movie—Popeye. Remember? Directed by Robert Altman? With Robin Williams as Popeye? That wasn’t Shirley MacLaine I was hearing in my head, it was Shelley Duvall.
I was surprised that I remembered the song at all. I hadn’t seen the movie since it was in theaters. And my boyfriend remembered it too? How odd.
I realized then that I’d forgotten where we’d heard the song last week. I recalled hearing the song but not where we were and what was playing.
I thoguht it should be easy enough to figure that out, though, since we hadn’t watched very much television in the past week. We saw three movies: Out of Sight, Spider-Man 2, and Giant. And we watched a ton of Simpsons episodes. That was about it. I figured it had to be The Simpsons.
I started another Web search, this time with “simpsons” in the phrase. A lot of people track Simpsons minutiae, so I was surprised when the search results pulled up nothing.
However, I did learn that the song was used in Punch-Drunk Love, which my boyfriend and I both saw, so that would explain why we both remembered it. But we hadn’t seen that movie in the past week or even month, so that wasn’t the answer.
After a few variations on search phrases, I determined it probably wasn’t in a Simpsons episode. Okay. Well, it obviously wasn’t in Giant. It could plausibly be in Spider-Man 2 because “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” was in that movie and after that anything is possible. I tried some searches on that. I checked IMDb. Nope. Couldn’t find a thing.
I tried another generic search and pulled up Harry Nilsson’s official Web page. And after some navigating, I found the answer.
The song “She Needs Me” was most recently used in a Nike commercial.
A Nike commercial that we’d seen in the movie theater before Spider-Man 2. I remembered the commercial. I remembered remarking on how I found it annoying and somewhat patronizing to women. I remembered trying to ignore it but then being lured by the somewhat familiar song playing in the background.
A week after we’d been to the movies, I remembered that damned commercial.
If we’d seen Spider-Man 2 at an Alamo theater, we wouldn’t have heard the commercial, because they don’t play commercials before movies. But no, we went to a Regal chain theater, Gateway to be precise, because we thought for a big summer action movie like Spider-Man 2 we needed a bigger screen and bigger sound than Alamo Village. (If it had been playing at Alamo Lake Creek we would have gone there. I don’t quite understand why the biggest blockbusters have been playing at Village, which is older and has smaller screens, and not at the much nicer Lake Creek, but that’s irrelevant to this story.)
I had my eyes shut through most of the commercials and the whole in-house packaged commercial thing that Regal shows while you’re waiting for the movie to start, because that thing is a migraine trigger. I’m not being funny. What’s it called, The Twenty? Whatever it is, it features a lot of strobe lights and zooming cameras in a way that would give anyone a headache. I wanted to be able to make it through the movie itself headache-free, so I tried to ignore as much of the pre-movie crap as possible.
But it didn’t work, obviously. I didn’t get a headache but I was unable to ignore the screen entirely.
And there’s my moral: You can tell me that I should just relax and ignore commercials before movies. You can tell me they’re inevitable and harmless. But you’re wrong. I had this stupid little song stuck in my head at work and it was all because we went to a theater that shows commercials before the movie. Advertisers love movie theaters because they have a captive audience. You can shut your eyes to avoid a migraine but you can’t turn down the volume, you can’t plug up your ears, and if you try to arrive at the last minute you might not get a decent seat. So you’re fucking stuck with it. And those commercials will stick in your head and come back to you later, like it or not.
What you choose to do about this is up to you. Me, I choose to avoid giving these theaters my money whenever possible. That’s the last movie I’m seeing in a Regal chain theater for a long, long time. I’m so thankful that I have alternatives.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put on my Dead Milkmen CD. “Punk Rock Girl” is the only song I know that will drive out any other earworm music, and “She Needs Me” is earwormy beyond belief.