The words, narrated in the voice of Ormus Cama, a mythical rock star mourning his lost love Vina Apsara, weave grief and romantic obsession into an ethereal lament. There's a compelling reverence here; Ormus’s sorrow transcends the physical loss of his beloved, instead contending with the erosion of his entire reality — “Black is white and cold is heat / For what I worshipped stole my love away.”
This line captures the intense cognitive dissonance that comes with heartbreak, where the very foundations of one’s world, the “ground beneath her feet,” have become unfamiliar and untrustworthy. Bono channels Ormus's devastation in his vocal delivery, a plaintive wail over a dreamlike instrumental palette courtesy of Daniel Lanois’s haunting pedal steel guitar, evoking both a lament and a lingering hope for reunion.
Rushdie's lyrics invoke mythic imagery, transforming the lover into an idol and her departure into a kind of spiritual reckoning. "All my life I worshipped her / Her golden voice, her beauty's beat," Ormus’s words echo not only loss but also reverence, a modern hymn to a muse now vanished.
The character’s devotion verges on the religious, his worship blurring the lines between earthly love and divine adoration. U2, known for their ability to turn romantic language into transcendent metaphor, bring out this sense of existential questioning that is both deeply personal and universally human.
Ormus’s grief mirrors the band’s own recurring themes of loss, faith, and redemption — ideas they’ve threaded through albums from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby. The line "How she made us feel / How she made me real" suggests that this love was a grounding force, a source of identity and authenticity that now lies shattered. What we’re left with is a space in which identity itself feels fractured, and the song becomes a plea to understand the meaning of existence without the object of one’s devotion.
As the song progresses, Bono’s vocal repetition of “My oh my” feels like a ritualistic chant, an incantation to summon back the lost love or to exorcise the pain of her absence.
The cyclical nature of this refrain is trance-like, underscoring Ormus’s obsessive grief and the seeming impossibility of moving on. Lines like “Let me love you, let me rescue you” blur the lines between saving the other and saving oneself, a sentiment both desperate and tender. This notion of rescue, where the lover becomes both a source of salvation and torment, hints at the paradoxes within human relationships and the self-destructive edge of idealized love.
U2’s musical interpretation imbues this obsession with a sonic warmth, building a sense of longing that is simultaneously haunting and strangely comforting. By tying Vina’s absence to the absence of grounding, both physical and emotional, Rushdie and U2 explore the terrifying freedom that comes with loss — the knowledge that, without the stabilizing force of love, one is left to drift in a boundless, terrifying void.
In the end, The Ground Beneath Her Feet stands as both a song and a story, one in which U2 captures the ache of having lost the defining element of one’s life and the existential crisis that follows...
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In The Million Dollar Hotel, director Wim Wenders (Stay, Faraway So Close, Paris Texas) positions The Ground Beneath Her Feet as the film’s emotional and thematic heartbeat, embodying the gravity and fragility of love and loss that permeates its world.
Just as Ormus in Rushdie's lyrics grapples with the disintegration of his reality, so too does Tom Tom (played by Jeremy Davies, Lost), a character adrift in the surreal, almost dreamlike decay of a Los Angeles hotel populated by society's forgotten.
The song’s lament for a lost love echoes through Tom Tom’s tender yet desperate romance with Eloise (Milla Jovovich), a relationship that offers him brief moments of solace amid a chaotic, indifferent world. Wenders uses the song not merely as a soundtrack but as a narrative extension, capturing the protagonist's own journey through grief and longing.
It’s a final reflection on the world that U2 and Rushdie have built—a universe where love is both ground and abyss, where the desire to reconnect with what’s lost becomes the pulse beneath every moment, as steady yet elusive as the ground beneath our feet.
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