Tonight I'm going to see Rheingold in Bayreuth, which among many other things reminds me of the way film and tv sometimes manage to use opera. It can be embarassing (for example, the sequence in Pretty Woman where Richard Gere's character puts Julia Roberts' to the opera sensitivity test - see, she may be a hooker, but she's an unspoiled girl who can really react to the classics!) or it can be so good that the next time you hear the aria or recitative or bit of orchestration in its proper context, i.e. in the opera it came from, you still can't help associationg the tv/movie images. So, here are my favourite examples of the later, in no particular order, with spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, Heavenly Creatures, Apocalypse Now and (very very vaguely) American Gothic.

- Giles finds Jenny's dead body to the sounds of La Boheme by Puccini, in the BTVS episode Passion. It works both within the story - the whole arrangement is something Angelus would come up with - and on a meta level, with Giles being as oblivious as Rodolfo to the fact his beloved is doomed/dead at first. The combination is heartbreaking and stunning.

- more Puccini: the humming chorus from Madama Butterfly is played in the climactic sequence from Heavenly Creatures when Pauline and Juliet lead Pauline's mother to her death; the eerie peacefulness of the walk through the park is underscored by the music, and as soon as chorus ends, the actual killing begins, which is all the more shocking in its naked brutality for this preparation. Peter Jackson, who directed Heavenly Creatures, said he copied himself took this sequence as inspiration for the way he filmed Boromir's long death in Fellowship of the Ring, using a again a chorus in the background.

- the last minutes of The Getaway, season 2 of Alias, show us Arvin Sloane walking on a beach to the sound of Charles Gounoud's Faust (specifically, to the sound of an aria Faust sings about Marguerite/Gretchen) meeting his wife Emily. This is both one of the big time stunning revelations of the show - Emily is alive, and far from killing her, Sloane has faked her death to save her life and tricked villains and heroes alike to make the getaway from the title - and with hindsight a warning. Because Faust, when singing this, has already sold his soul to the devil, and no matter Faust's intention, it's Gretchen who is going to suffer for it.

- actually a film whose production I find more interesting than the end product itself, but yes, that particular sequence is insidious that way: Apocalypse Now with its use of The Ride of the Valkyries (from Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, the second of the Ring operas which I'm going to see tomorrow) to the sequence of the helicopters attacking. It's hubris and satire in one, and more acid a comment on the US in Vietnam than, say, Oliver Stone's earnest sequence in Platoon where Willem Dafoe dies in a Christ-like posture.

- not strictly opera, but still: Carl Orff's Carmina Burana used for the climactic sequence in the season and, alas, show finale of American Gothic: the confrontation between father, son and the holy angelic spirit, aka Lucas Buck, Caleb Temple and Merlyn... and it's just the reverse from what you expected it to be in the pilot. Perfect combination of music and action. Lucas Black, who played Caleb, still gets my vote for best child actor ever.

So these are my favourites. Any other suggestions?