If you’ve seen 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, you know that one needle drop holds sway over all others in the film. The climactic sequence, set to Iron Maiden‘s “The Number of the Beast,” is a head-banging portrait of chaos, shifting power dynamics, and final acts of bravery. It’s a hell of a moment, but as cool as it is that Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is down with Maiden, that’s not the only one of his character’s music choices worth studying.
SPOILERS for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple ahead!
Early in the film, long before the “Number of the Beast” sequence brings the house down, Nia DaCosta‘s narrative checks in on Kelson, who’s still busy tending to the Bone Temple of the title. Sweaty, dirty, his skin painted with iodine, he’s dragging bodies around and doing his research while singing…Duran Duran? Yes, as Kelson’s own record collection makes clear later, he’s a Duran Duran fan, and his meager record collection has at least three of their albums: 1981’s self-titled debut, 1982’s smash sensation Rio, and 1993’s sorta-comeback self-titled release, known among fans as The Wedding Album. His ownership of those records also means we get to hear three of the band’s most identifiable singles: “Girls on Film” (1981), “Rio” (1982), and most strikingly, “Ordinary World” (1992).
Why does Duran Duran matter so much in the context of this film? Well, on a very basic emotional level, it’s just kind of fun to see this eccentric doctor walking through an apocalypse, singing pop hits from Duran Duran under his breath as he hauls around corpses. The use of “Rio” and “Girls On Film,” both dance-pop hits that cemented Duran Duran as part of the Second British Invasion of British pop, is then contrasted with the ballad “Ordinary World,” a song about grief and trying to get used to loss. Even if you know nothing about Duran Duran’s music going in, you can feel that in the film.
But I think these needle drops run a little bit deeper than a handful of brief emotional touches, and to understand why, all we need to do is think about the kind of world Kelson grew up in. Ralph Fiennes was born in 1962, so if we assume Kelson is of the same approximate age, we understand that he came into adulthood right at the beginning of the 1980s in Britain, as Duran Duran’s star was on the rise. Whether he was initially a fan or not, you can picture him as he begins his medical school career surrounded by Duran Duran’s music on the radio and on telly. The early 1980s were saturated with it.
At the same time Duran Duran was rising, though, another key piece of British culture fell into place as Margaret Thatcher rose to power as Prime Minister. Anyone who knows anything about modern British history (or anyone who’s watched The Crown) understands the pain that so many Brits endured under Thatcher and her policies, and while Kelson doesn’t ever really regale us with the personal politics he held in early adulthood, he seems like the kind of compassionate soul who would’ve chafed at her more austere, authoritarian measures at the very least. We have to take certain leaps of understanding and interpretation, but for Kelson, Duran Duran seems to symbolize, at its poppiest, the kind of music that reminds him of his days as an ambitious, hopeful young man.
But there’s more to excavate here than just the political context in which Duran Duran rose to stardom. The band is recognized as one of the musical contributors to the New Romantic movement, which was a reaction to and a shift away from the punk rock that had so thoroughly transformed the British music scene in the late 1970s. More glam than punk, the New Romantics emerged at a time when Britain, like most Western cultures in the 1980s, was emphasizing image and polish and aspirational thinking.
In some ways, you can even link its rise with Thatcherism, with its own focus on image and projecting prosperity above all else, no matter what was really going on. The link’s certainly there in some aspects of the New Romantics, but it gets more interesting when you consider that lead singer Simon Le Bon once said Duran Duran wanted to be “the band to dance to when the Bomb drops.” They were a band very aware of the darkness in their culture, even if their early hits were more about girls than geopolitics. That alone is enough to add heft to Kelson’s sing-alongs while he’s working. The bomb’s already dropped, and he’s still dancing.
Then comes “Ordinary World.”
That particular single emerged in the wake of Duran Duran’s fade from pop superstardom as the 1980s ended. Like many bands of their era, they were struggling to adapt to changes in musical tastes and the wider culture, and their previous album, Liberty, was a major letdown. “Ordinary World” was written amid that disappointment and sense of loss, and to hammer the point home, the lyrics are about one of Le Bon’s departed friends.
It’s a song about the weight of loss, and the nagging feeling that you might never be able to make it back to an “ordinary world” when the weight wasn’t so crushing. Kelson would have first heard the song when he was about 30, his medical training probably concluded, his own practice as a doctor still in its infancy. He would have faced loss in those years, whether it was loved ones or patients or both, and like so many Duran Duran fans, the song would’ve been a balm. Now, 28 years after the Rage Virus swept through his home, it’s still a rallying cry, because Le Bon’s vocal offers an alternative for when the ordinary world isn’t there: “I will learn to survive.”
Nothing is accidental in the 28 Years Later film. The bits of history, of pop culture, of music that leak through from the old world (the ordinary world, if you will) are deliberate choices by the creative team. That tells us Duran Duran’s music means something to the filmmakers, and by extension, Dr. Kelson. Even after all these years leading his monastic existence, Kelson still remembers who he was as a young man, what he hoped for, what he thought possible. He remembers the songs that buoyed him, and buoy him still, and even if he can’t survive, he’ll keep trying, and he’ll leave this world with his soul intact.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now available on Digital.