Then things change.

The opposition gets its act together, rallying around issues that have little to do with the legislation in question.  Those attacks and a sense of inaction drive the President’s approval ratings way down. It’s an election year, so members of his own party start pulling away, refusing to support the President’s agenda for fear of riding a sinking ship into election day.

Sound familiar? It’s the plot of both 2010’s cable news channels and of the 1995 film The American President.

Notorious Hollywood liberal types Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin made The American President, the romantic story of a widower Democratic President Andrew Shepherd, who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist. Their courtship becomes a major political issue as his reelection campaign heats up, driving down the President’s poll numbers, derailing his legislative agenda, and threatening his chances of reelection. Yesterday, Mr. Perich posted a great piece on the traditional romantic comedy theme of love vs career.  The American President exemplifies that sort of movie, but when the career in question is the Presidency of the United States of America, you’ve got to wonder if love is the answer in this particular case.  Given the consequences for the country and the world, the political suicide of Andrew Shepherd makes this film not only a sort of political pornography for liberals, but a full blown tragedy as well.

The American President was made in the middle of President Bill Clinton’s first term, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of the Clinton presidency. It takes a firm stand on the issue of whether or not the public has a right to know about a politician’s personal life and parodies the hysteria over Hilary Clinton’s influence over the President’s decisions.  In his internal struggle over whether to fight the fights that need fighting or the fights that he can win, Shepherd echoes the liberal criticism of Clinton’s early years, when instead of health care reform, America got NAFTA.

In the 1992 campaign, James Carville famously said “It’s the economy, stupid,” but in the early 90’s, the other hot-button political issue of the day was crime. With the Soviets out of the game, we needed something else to be afraid of, so pundits made their fortunes predicting soaring murder rates as a generation of angry teenagers took to the streets (this was also only a few years after Dukakis got beat by Willie Horton).

As the film opens, President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) has responded with “the crime bill.” Polling shows that the administration’s high approval rating (63%) will plummet if he can’t get the bill passed. All we know about the bill is that his staff thinks it won’t be effective because it doesn’t do anything to limit handguns or assault weapons. He’s leaving the guns out because he knows that the National Rifle Association (NRA) will crush the bill in Congress if those provisions are included.

As his staff has just discussed:
A. J. MacInerney: Oh, and Leon, don’t be the nice, sweet guy from Brooklyn on this one. Do what the NRA does.
Leon Kodak: What, scare the s#!t out of them?
A. J. MacInerney: Exactly.
Leon Kodak: I can do that.

For those who don’t know, the NRA is probably the most effective lobbying organization in the United States. Founded by the gun industry decades ago, they’re incredibly well funded, have a rabid base of supporters all over the country and can cost a politicians thousands of votes if they decide to take him/her out. In a close race, the NRA can make the difference. They haven’t been in the news too much lately because nobody’s introducing any legislation to even inconvenience people looking to buy guns. In other words, they’ve won.

The other bill in the film is bill #455, which will reduce the emissions from fossil fuels by 20%. 15 years later, it would still be the most significant piece of environmental legislation in history. Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening), a hired gun lobbyist for the fictional Global Defense Council, first meets the President while lobbying for this bill. It’s love at first sight.

As their relationship progresses, it becomes the target of media scrutiny, with the whole world wanting to know about the President’s girlfriend. Presumptive Republican nominee, Senator Bob Rumson (played by Richard Dreyfuss -- this was before Bob Dole started his acting career), starts activating his base, questioning the influence of this left-wing lobbyist who’s literally in bed with the President. When she’s caught after spending the night in the White House and a picture surfaces of a younger Sydney standing behind a burning flag at an Apartheid protest, even the independents start questioning the morality of having a “First Mistress” and the patriotism of President Shepherd. Within weeks, his approval rating drops from 63% to 41%.

President Shepherd drops from 63% to 41% approval in three months.

Positioning themselves away from Shepherd, moderate Democrats with tough reelection campaigns start bailing on the crime bill. Michael J. Fox channels a future White House Chief of Staff and calls one cowardly Congressman a “chicken s#!t lame-ass.” Fox is clothed at the time. Desperate to pass the bill, the President cuts a deal to shelve the climate bill in return for three votes. Sydney dumps him. Recognizing that he’s made the wrong choice, the President storms into the press room less than an hour before the State of the Union address and delivers this climactic speech:

With 35 minutes to go and the approval of Helen Thomas, they rewrite the State of the Union, Sydney comes back, and Congress stands up to applaud wildly as the President walks in the House chamber to deliver his speech.

Warm, fuzzy feelings abound. With this single speech, we’re led to believe, President Shepherd has saved his relationship, his presidency, his party, and the American dream.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s that soaring rhetoric can start a movement, but it’s only the beginning.  Fiery speeches started the American revolution, but there was still a war to win.  Obama inspired a nation, but we’re still working on health care.  Shepherd’s speech was inspiring, personal and powerful, but it was only the beginning of the end.

Here’s what really happened next:

With major changes to his State of the Union made at the last minute and his attention focused on Sydney, Shepherd has had no time to practice the new draft. With only seconds to load it into the teleprompter and no time for copy-editing, the speech itself is rife with errors, its flow and transitions shot to hell. He’s a professional, so it’s not awful, but there are a couple of fumbles and the speech doesn’t do anything to shift the focus away from his personal life.

Then the fun begins.

The blogosphere wasn't around in 1996, but Matt Drudge had already started doing his thing.

When Shepherd made the deal to get votes for the crime bill by sacrificing the climate bill, it became clear that there was at least some bipartisan support for an anti-crime package – traditionally a Republican favorite. The NRA was ok with it, and presumably Shepherd, because he left guns out of the bill. He’s now thrown the bill out, enraging the NRA in the process by saying he’ll “go door to door” to “get the guns.” He has deprived Democratic Members of Congress a vote that could make them look tough on crime and replaced it with a purely partisan vote on a climate bill that the Republicans will call a “job-killer.” Meanwhile, the big oil companies, which spend millions of dollars a year fighting any sort of climate legislation are now going to be spending that money against vulnerable Democrats who support #455 (FYI: The oil and gas industry spent more $168 million on lobbying in 2009).  States that produce a lot of fossil fuels and lots of gun owners suddenly start moving into Rumson’s column -- West Virginia (5 electoral votes), Michigan(18) and Pennsylvania(23).

Meanwhile, Senator Rumson has been attacking Shepherd for putting an unelected left-wing lobbyist in an incredibly sensitive and powerful position. How does Shepherd respond? He makes a major policy decision for the sole purpose of making his girlfriend happy. In private, he tells Sydney that he didn’t do it for her, but that’s not what the public record says.

The next morning countless news stories will recount the public details: Wade dumps Shepherd, Shepherd admits that he’s lost her in that press conference, then announces that her bill is the new priority for his administration, then she shows up with him at the State of the Union. The advance copies of the State of the Union had gone out to the press hours before the revisions were made, so they will be able to compare the two speeches and give specific examples of the power of Sydney Ellen Wade.  Add the premarital sex scandal into that and more culturally conservative states like New Mexico(5) and Arizona(8) start looking bad.

Shepherd has just proven Rumson right beyond a shadow of a doubt, a fact that the right is going to be crowing about for the next 10 months. Older men tend to vote Republican, and even those who do vote Democrat are more likely to suspect a woman in a powerful position.  Then the morning talk shows start parsing the press conference, pointing out that Shepherd went on the attack, publicly criticizing Rumson while standing in front of that big White House symbol. Tradition has always held that a President shouldn’t campaign from the White House and older women voters who traditionally lean Democrat, also tend to be turned off by violations of this kind of tradition and can be turned off by personal attacks, reducing their likelihood of turning out to vote. That hurts Shepherd, but also hurts other Democrats in close races. Even the White House press corps frowns on this sort of thing coming from the Administration.  Older voters abandon the Democrats or stay home -- now you’re losing aging states like Ohio(21) and Florida(25).

But he’s not done – he hasn’t patronized middle America yet. In a dismissive, mocking tone, Shepherd describes Rumson’s strategy: “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and character.” Those middle-class, middle-income voters are bound to start wondering what’s wrong with family and American values.

Think the Midwest value voters still like you too much? Why not combine two sensitive topics: flag burning and children. “The symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest,” Shepherd says. “Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.” The newspapers may be looking at policy shifts in the Shepherd Administration, but Rush Limbaugh spends the next week talking about the President’s plan to teach America’s children to burn flags. There go the veterans and the soccer moms.  Say goodbye to Iowa(7).

So let’s take a look at the score:
It takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency.  In 1996, in addition to the usual blue states, Clinton won the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia -a total of 112 electoral votes.

Clinton beats Dole 379 to 159 in the Electoral College.

In this single speech, Shepherd alienated voters in every one of those swing states.  Meanwhile, the climate bill stalls when moderate Democrats refuse to sign on and the President’s agenda flounders for an entire year. Rumson, riding a tide of moral outrage and policy failures, spends his massive campaign war chest in the right places.     In November, Shepherd loses them all, earning a total of 267 electoral votes to Rumson’s 271.   He and Sydney retire to Wisconsin, emerging only to film bipartisan pleas for assistance with Dave and the other fictional Presidents whenever there’s a big natural disaster.

Thanks to Shepherd’s love for his girlfriend, Compassionate Conservatism gets a four year head-start.  That’s a tragedy, in my book.

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Now onto the questions!

Question 1: Like the B-story in last week’s episode, Recon’s alt-plot seemed like a pilot to a spin-off series.  Which of the following Lost spin-offs would you most like to watch on a regular basis?  Hangin’ With Dr. Linus?  Straume & Twang (my name for USA’s new quirky cop show, starring Miles Straume & James Ford)?  The Good Shephard (a new Everwood-type show about a big-city doctor with daddy issues who learns about faith and family after moving to Provo, Utah)?  [Insert your own punny Kate- or Locke-based show here]?

Question 2: So, are we going to talk Un-Locke’s word for it on his mommy issues or what?  Is he talking about real-Locke’s crazy mom, or is he talking about someone else?  Tawaret, mayhaps?

Speaking of crazy mommies…

Question 3: What are we thinking about Claire now?  Is she crazy-evil or just crazy-crazy?  Did the “infection” make her go nutso, or did the supposed Aaron-napping do it?  And can she ever turn back to the light side?

Question 4: Who’s Sawyer?

See you next week.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A man is on track to succeed in his career through natural talent and hard work. However, he’s also in love with a young woman. Circumstances force him to choose between his career and the woman he loves. In the end, despite uncertainty and pressure, he chooses the woman. The two of them stare fondly as the credits roll.

Which movie did I just describe? Good Will Hunting? The Family Man? Regarding Henry? If we reverse the genders, we can add Sweet Home Alabama, The Devil Wears Prada, You’ve Got Mail and a dozen others to the list. You saw it in Felicity and you saw it on Friends. You see it every time you turn on the television.

But you don’t see it in real life.

Love.

By this criteria, good movies are those which engender the strongest reactions in us. Looking at the IMDb Top 250 validates this notion. While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or the AFI might have exacting critical standards, moviegoers always prefer the extreme, the stirring and the accessible. No film critic worth his Moleskine would call The Shawshank Redemption the greatest movie of all time. Whether that says something about the simplicity of the movie-going public or the snobbery of critics, I’ll leave to another discussion. Suffice it to say: when you ask people to list their favorite movies, they list the ones that make them feel the strongest feelings.

Love (NY socialite is her career, technically).

(This is also a pat explanation for the well-known “newcomer effect” on IMDb rankings, where a new movie will vault to the Top 250 early on and then settle into an established rank. We react strongly to variety; the shock of the new biases us. Even if The Dark Knight tells the same story as High Noon, we esteem it higher. The fresh evokes stronger feelings than the remembered. Unless you’re Marcel Proust)

So we can classify movies by which emotions they’re meant to stir and how strongly the movie stirs them. Comedies evoke joy (see Caddyshack). Horror films evoke fear (see The Exorcist). Action films evoke anger (see Taken). And romances, romantic comedies and most dramas evoke love. We don’t fall in love with the fictional people on screen. But we sink into that same pleasant high which being in love engenders. Tears well up in our eyes, our breath becomes tight, our chests start to ache.

Love.

Romantic movies are merely the latest medium in a tradition that dates back to the dawn of human civilization. From the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise, the epic poetry of the Roman de la Rose, the comedies of Shakespeare and the poetry of Lord Byron, we get the moral that love is a rare gift. If you come across love in the wild, you should drop everything you’re doing to pursue it. From this notion, we get tales of knights, peasants and adventurers who risk everything in order to be with someone they love. This gambit can end happily (Twelfth Night) or tragically (Tristan et Isolde), but the gambit’s always there.

I don’t intend to turn this into a discourse on whether or not True Love exists (though have at it in the comments if you like). Whether or not it exists isn’t important. What matters is that, for more centuries than we’ve had pants, artists have believed that it does. Not only that, but they’ve believed that True Love is a jewel beyond price, against which anything else – family, property, honor, community – takes a distant second. And they’ve filled the Western canon with so many works of art that support this thesis that we have profound trouble imagining it could be any other way. “What would you suggest? That someone can find the love of their lifetime and pass them by? What kind of cynic are you?”

What makes this theme of True Love interesting again is the Industrial Age.

The whole business of love, and love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. Love is very sweet, very pretty [...] [b]ut it’s the affair, commonly, of very young people, who have not yet character and experience enough to make them interesting. In novels it’s treated, not only as if it were the chief interest of life, but the sole interest of the lives of two ridiculous young persons; and it is taught that love is perpetual, that the glow of a true passion lasts for ever; and that it is sacrilege to think or act otherwise.

- William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

For the bulk of human history, the notion of “choosing a career” would have made no semantic sense. The teeming underclass worked the career they were born into, or the career their parents auctioned them off to a guild to apprentice for, or farmed. The aristocracy had pastimes (poetry, singing, hawking) and duties (service to one’s liege or to the Emperor), but didn’t have to earn a living by the sweat of their brow. And even the middle classes gained wealth in the trade they were raised in: wealthy textile traders came from the ranks of tailors, wealthy land barons from the ranks of farmers.

Career, then love.

The Industrial Revolution changed that. While the tide of new technology destroyed a lot of old jobs, it replaced them with a variety of new ones (read your Schumpeter, people). Dramatic increases in power meant increases in production capacity, which meant increases in goods produced, which meant the creation of new markets, which meant a need for new jobs. The world vaulted into the singularity of consumerism that it still enjoys/suffers today. The explosion of markets, combined with the startling return to democracy (the U.S., France and the zenith of the British Empire) meant a lot of people were now looking for jobs. Peasants were no longer as tied to land. Now, any healthy young lad could tie his belongings in a kerchief and strike out to seek his fortune. (Women could certainly try this as well, but it was less likely to succeed)

Only once it became possible for someone to choose a career could the dilemma of “His Career or His True Love” enter into art. And once it did, it latched on.

The problem with this dilemma, of course, is twofold. First, it’s a false dichotomy. Someone who truly loves you should be able to accept the job you work in. Failing that, if you elect to stay in your career, you can still love someone deeply without being in a relationship with them. Failing that, maybe the object of your affections could compromise a little, hm?

Love.

Second, and pardon your correspondent for sounding jaded, but there are things more important than love. There are. The fact that there are half as many divorcees as married couples in the U.S. suggests that it takes more than love to keep a marriage together. It takes emotional stability, a lot of patience, and the ability to provide. Money smooths over many of these hurdles. Many, many people might be better off marrying someone other than their True Love, or staying single, if marriage means abandoning a career that’ll keep them fed.

And yet the notion baffles modern audiences. You never see it in movies. Check that: you see the hero choosing his Career over his Love plenty of times, but you never see it end happily. Casablanca’s the textbook example: Rick chooses his true calling – running guns for the Resistance – over the chance to flee Casablanca with Ilsa. In Shakespeare in Love, Viola stays with her husband (which was a noble woman’s career in Elizabethan England) rather than live in sin with the man she truly loves: William Shakespeare. Every time the hero or heroine chooses Career over Love, it is with bitter necessity and tears.

In fact, I can think of only one movie where the hero chooses Career over Love and it’s a happy, non-ironic ending: Rounders. Matt Damon plays a former poker hustler who, losing everything in a bad night of cards, falls back on his law school ambitions and the support of his girlfriend (played by Gretchen Mol). When circumstances force him to return to poker, she abandons him. At the end of the movie, he’s given up on his plans for law school and sets off for Vegas. His girlfriend forgives him and they part on understanding terms.

... career?

So why does the myth of Love vs Career persist? Maybe as a palliative to the drudgery of the industrial age. Maybe as the latest incarnation in the tradition of Love Vs. Whatever Else Literate People Do that has dominated art for thousands of years. Maybe because love feels good. Maybe because love is tricky. Regardless, you can say with confidence that drama will not be truly revolutionary until both sides of the scale become equally weighted.

Thousands have lived without love; not one without water.

- W.H. Auden, “First Things First”

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I want to suck (your blood).

Welcome to the desert of the vampire.

Oh, you thought Twilight had driven a stake through vampire mythos – that with its sparkly, daywalking Christian Rock Emo vibe, it had finally cast asunder the resonance and insight of the vampire myths and left them in shards on the dry, dusty ground of a vast cultural wasteland.

Well, you haven’t seen Vampirum Ad Absurdam – the true return to dust of Romania-via-Ireland’s tortured legacy – until you’ve seen the video to the late-2009 Timbaland single, “Morning After Dark,” featuring French recording artist ShoShy and sometimes, depending on the version, that sultry creature of the night: Nellie Furtado. Observe:

Count Dracula
Lestat Di Lioncourt
Blade
Angelus
Ultraviolet
Edward Cullen
Timbo “Crazy Eyes” McGee

Witness the final descent of vamp. And yet…

As any archaeologist can tell you, there is a lot of wisdom to be found in a ruin. Why has vampsloitation sunk so low? Why does it just not make any goddamned sense anymore? What are the key contradictions that have spoiled the saga of the bloodsucker?

What confusions and conflicts in our own society are reflected in this garbled attempt to serve so many masters at once?

All this, and a vampire who thinks “You’re dope enough yep,” and says “I’m like wow,” after the jump –

Apocryphal Preamble

The reason for the season.

There are actually two recorded versions of this song – the U.S. launch single with just SoShy and Timbaland, and the international/album/video version, which takes out a useless verse by Timbaland and replaces it with a much more interesting, if still relatively chaotic and confused, appearance by Nellie Furtado.

Perhaps the fact that Timbaland is 10 years older than SoShy, and that sexual tension between the two of them isn’t really believable, is why the original single doesn’t really work. Of course, the original single includes this very firmly vampiric preamble:

Hello Mr. Mosley, I’m glad you’re my maker
My Loyalty lies in your hands, you’re my breath taker
Your body, your kiss is in unknown demand
So take command, go Timbo

Yeah, thinking of this random French girl kissing Timbaland is kind of gross. Timbaland is a classy dude with a more reserved, mature sexuality that borders on a nostalgic boredom with it all, even when he’s being crass. Compared with somebody like Li’l Wayne he’s practically … adult. When Timbaland sings “Promiscuous” with the only six years younger than him Nellie Furtado, it’s reasonable that he’d discreetly take her back to his apartment, where he’d have a really nice, well put-together place, and they’d go have some nice merlot and light some candles and do their adult thing without anybody watching.

I really don’t believe for a second he’s exacting an “unknown demand” on this girl with his kiss – Timbaland tends to make his demands known, and they tend to be phrased as polite requests among consenting adults – again, if crass ones.

Which is reflected in the video, because the eyes will sometimes not allow what the ears will tolerate – SoShy and Timbaland are portrayed more as partners in crime and sidekicks than as lovers, and they appear to be protecting the protagonist rather than preying on her – except that they’re creatures of the niiiiiight and are scaaaaaary!!!

But we’ll get to all that. For now, note two things about this preamble, which doesn’t appear in the “canonical” version of the song:

1.It establishes right off the bat (get it?) that this song is about vampires.
2.It sets up a parallel between an older man having sex with a younger woman and a record producer introducing a new talent, because that’s what Timbaland is doing with SoShy for the American audience in this song.

So yeah, sex is parallel with death, which is parallel with contemporary pop music production, where autotune removes the vivacious and organic influence of the human animal’s natural noisemaking apparatus (i.e., voice).

See, Timbaland is SoShy’s “breath taker” because he’s the producer who records her voice and uses it in his songs. Also, he cuts the irregularities out of the track and homogonizes it, “taking” her “breath.”

Pretty clever, huh?

Oh, right, but this isn’t in the canonical song. Let’s go to the canonical song, which, for both the music and the video, is divided into several key sections that don’t have much connection with one another.

It creates monsters.

Section 1 – The art director has a smoke machine

Seriously, I totally got a smoke machine. It’s wild. It’s like, filling this whole place up with smoke, man. It’s totally got that Twilight thing going on.

Also note that, at the very beginning of the video – in the first 20 frames or so – there is an Italian flag hanging on a building to the right, instantly establishing that we are following what looks like an American exchange student in the exotic land of Italy. There are also vegetables and Vespa scooters sitting around in conspicuous places and a second Italian flag just to make it really clear we’re in Italy. So that’s established. Somebody thought that was important, and somebody had to go to the loading dock to go pick up the frickin’ Vespa scooter so it could sit on a soundstage for six hours to be in five seconds of this stupid video. This another reason why I never underestimate the amount of thought and effort that goes into disposable entertainment. Somebody had to spend a whole day doing everything.

Well, while in Italy, our protagonist is always looking concerned because exotic European men are going to bite her neck / have sex with her against her will except she really wants to at least make out with an exotic European man or else why would she go to a trashy dance club by herself in the first place / etc.

It’s all kind of a nightmare for feminism, but whatever. When it comes to nightmares and things this song does wrong, the feminists can get in line with everyone else. There’s enough blame to go around.

So, let’s look at the lyrics of the first section of the song:

Go Timbo!

I’ll be the same when it all goes up
I’ll be the same when it all goes down
Not the first one, open it up
I’ll be the last one closin it out
Don’t know if I’ll give you a shot yet
Lil’ momma I’m peepin your style
Do I think you’re dope enough? Yup!
One way of findin it out
The way you came at me, boo
Don’t care, not afraid I’m like “Wow!”
Really want it all head to toe
Question -- is she gon’ let it out?
Anyway the hour glass go
I don’t worry anyhow
Why don’t we see where it go?
Let’s figure it out

This verse establishes two things:

1.Timbaland likes to arrive at clubs in the evening and stay until they close. Fair enough. This is a pretty common thing. “Hey, let’s go to a club at 7 pm, order some $10 drinks at an empty bar, and go to bed before 10:30! Woo hoo!”

2.There’s a short or young woman who really likes Timbaland and has approached him at the club. He doesn’t really like her that much, but he likes her enough to keep talking to her, and is considering whether he’s going to engage in physical intimacy of some sort with her or not.

This in turn leads me to two thoughts.

1.This is a lot of windup. The song isn’t really about anything right now. In fact, there’s so much windup that I’m beginning to doubt the song is about anything at all. It’s as if these are the words Timbaland has to say, and he says them at this point out of force of habit, the artistic impulse more or less absent.

Throughout the video, he’ll seem distracted and be playing out the beats with his fingertips as he produces the song in his head – this is an act of “assembly” for him – getting all the pieces in the right place to make a hit, hopefully. He doesn’t take it very seriously – thus the crazy eyes.

I will  say that the crazy eyes are probably the thing that pushes this video over the top into overthinking territory. They speak volumes to me about Timbaland’s concept of himself as an artist and a performer – that he is not taking himself too seriously at all, and that he is following an impulse not dissimilar to that of The Living Theatre, the seminal American alternative theatrical performance group – that he’s destroying his art form at the same time as he is creating it, and he’s kind of mocking his audience’s relationship with other rappers, who take themselves so seriously and whom the audience tends to take so seriously.

2.This verse might imply something about vampires when put in context (say, with the preamble, or in the video, which establishes it much more quickly), but as of right now, just from the beat and lyrics, there’s no reason to believe this song is about vampires at all. This will change, awkwardly.

At this point in the song, Timbaland reveals unambiguously in the video that he is an Edward/Angelus-like protective vampire, doing the little Vampire scoot to stop the wall-walking, Metalocalypse reject from biting on the American Exchange student.

Transition – Chorus

When the cats come out the bats come out to play, yeah
(In the morning after)
The dawn is here, be gone be on your way, yeah
(In the morning after)
When the cats come out the bats come out to play, yeah
(In the morning after)
The dawn is here, be gone be on your way, yeah
(In the morning after)

Owww (oooohhh) owww, c’mon SoShy!

So, this my best guess as to what this chorus is about:

When women (cats) go out on the town, men (bats) chase them around.

Except that bats don’t chase cats. Bats are small rodents. Cats would eat bats given the opportunity – the cat is the predator in this situation.

Oh, except that the bats are really vampires, because this song is suddenly about archetypical animals with connections to the occult, and the intonation of Timbaland’s voice strongly implies he is being a little bit Vincent Pricey.

But why are the vampires going after cats? Have they gone all Gordon Shumway on us?

So, okay, the bats are vampires, but the cats are women. Except that the vampires are also guys. So the guys are chasing the women. The guys get two layers of metaphorical representation, but the women only get one. This puts women roughly on the same level of reality as unicorns and gryphons. This might make sense in a hip-hop (or really any pop music) worldview, where women are often portrayed as exotic kept beasts who battle the heroes and stand vigil in treacherous or sacred places, like basement parties or the hoods of cars.

Except none of that is going on, because actually this is all over already, and everybody has to go home. This song isn’t about the cats or the bats going out on the town, it’s about what happens the morning after men and women have one-night stands.

Except in the last verse, Timbaland was just getting started. Have we really skipped all the good stuff?

Phase 1. “Hmm, she’s attractive, and she likes me, I guess I’ll talk to her.”
Phase 2. ???????????????
Phase 3. “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!”

Odd and unsatisfying, and not really how vampires behave.

Oh, except it’s dawn, and the vampires have to leave because the sun is coming up.

Except this is a call and response between a man and a woman, and Timbaland is the one telling us that the dawn is here and you have to go on your way, which implies that it is the cats, or women, who are nocturnal, and the men, who are vampires, need to get up and make breakfast.

Timbaland actually says both things which are temporally inconsistent – that this is a song about going out at night, and that this is a song about going home in the morning. And the woman identifies a third time this happening – the morning after, presumably after the vampire/catwoman has left your house.

But this does make sense because Timbaland was by far the less enthusiastic of the people in the nightclub seduction in the first verse – so maybe the woman was the predator, and the man was the willing victim, and now he’s sending her home.

Cats are usually representative of females for a variety of reasons (again, some crass), but “cats” can also mean men, and “bats” can also mean women.

So, it’s a bunch of jazz musicians having sex with a bunch of old ladies. Got it!

This would also explain why they get up at dawn. If there’s one thing jazz musicians and old ladies have in common, it’s going to Denny’s.

The morning after dark.

No mas! No mas!

See, here’s the problem with the vampire story: It’s been subverted and reversed so many times during the Hollywood era – especially since Ann Rice – that the subversions become cyclical. Is a vampire a good guy? A bad guy? A threat? A reluctant, antiheroic protector? In the post-Buffy era, who, the human or the vampire, the man or the woman, is the predator, and who is the prey? And the post-Darla era, in which women aspire to vampirehood and vampires are chic and current, is the vampire even really a threatening allegory of male sexuality and old-world mischief anymore?

Well, no. A vampire is window-dressing. It can frame any story you want, as long as, on some level, the story is about sex. Which is pretty easy, because almost all stories are about sex – of course, not to the exclusion of being about other things, but that’s why you have Xander.

Why, then, is it such an oft-relied upon symbol, if it has been so blurred in its consensus meaning?

I think this speaks to a larger anxiety and confusion around gender roles and international politics. As nice as social change can be, and as positive as the shifts have been that have led to the erosion of the vampire myth (the decriminalization of female sexuality, the net ebb in xenophobia in a globalized world, the fading Anglo-Irish-American memory of centuries upon centuries of Continental European atrocity and bloodshed, the modernization and opening of Eastern Europe, to name a few), seismic social change comes with pain. People adrift become alienated, angry, easily manipulated, confused, and, overall, nervous.

So, the “vampire” in this song, and in the cheaper social resonances of the symbol, is little more than a red flag that something is forbidden or wrong, but we don’t really know what. People are enthusiastic that there are things that go bump in the night, but they don’t know what they are, and they don’t know whether they want to join in.

And this sense of being lost with a set of fake teeth is reflected in the chorus of this song, which doesn’t make any sense.

Section 2 – SoShy rides a public bus

Swing low, sweet chariot.

SoShy – the French recording artist who is the whole reason this song exists – makes her dramatic entrance … riding a bus and not doing much of anything. Oh, she’s watching the Asian dude, who is either a vampire or a lawyer (Is there a difference? Yuk yuk yuk. I’ll be here all week.) and singing about sex and romance for no discernible reason.

I got a little secret for ya
I never sleep when comes the night
But everytime I snap my fingers
I switch back into the light
My moon belongs to your sun
Your fire is burning my mind
Is it love or is it lust?
Something that I just can’t describe (ah)
Am I the one and only (ah)
Cause you’re the only one (ah)
It felt so long and lonely (ah)
Waiting for you to come
It’s lookin bright and early
I’m willing to close my eyes
This is the unusual story
Timbo and SoShy

Okay, here the song is sort of getting to its point. I think it’s safe to say that this verse is in dialogue with the first verse, and SoShy is supposed to be the woman in the first verse who really likes Timbaland a lot, but about whom is a little more than ambivalent.

The first three lines are straight-up virgin/whore dichotomy – or, if you think sexism is Ludacris, “a lady in the street, but a freak in the bed.” She stays up late devilishly, but she can play the good girl whenever she wants and make the transition effortlessly.

Maybe the feminists should edge closer to the front of that line.

The moon and sun stuff is straight-up sexual subordination – the man generates the light, the woman just reflects it.

Oh, except, of course, the man is a vampire, so it doesn’t make sense for him to be the sun, because the sun is at lest an inconvenience for vampires, even these days. We’ll set that aside for the moment.

But there is the moon and mind-burning fire, which again are associated with the occult – not, I think, for any representational reason, but as I mentioned before, because I think they reflect social anxiety about the fact that none of this actually means anything anymore and Timbaland and SoShy, along with the four other songwriters who worked on this song, have no real idea what it means or why it is popular – just that it is.

The love/lust dichotomy seems a bit out of place in the landscape of pop-music hedonism – almost quaint. The conclusion, though, is that this is neither – it’s an obsession bordering on codependency. Or straight-up dependency, with no “co” about it.

Except that it isn’t really just about sex or vampires – it’s also about SoShy’s role in Timbaland’s stable of performers. The part of this song that is about show business is actually more honest than the part that is about sex or vampires.

“The one and only” / “only one” dichotomy is actually pretty interesting. “The one and only” is ambiguous, referring both to a romantic soulmate “My One and Only Love” or somebody who is famous “The One and Only … Barry Manilow!” And “the only one,” can either mean “the only person you are having sex with,” or “the only person like me” in a more general sense.

But it’s not as interesting here as it is in section 3.

Here, SoShy gets even more confusing in the light/dark imagery – that she’s descended into a sort of conjugal darkness to get involved in pop music, but at the same time she has been made so happy and satisfied by her business relationship with Timbaland that it’s like she’s going to sleep on a Sunday morning with him – the time when she, as a cat/vampire/French woman, is most vulnerable.

And I have no idea why everybody but SoShy leaves the bus and there is a light coming out of the bus bathroom. Maybe it is an expressionistic portrayal of her discovery of the light she found in collaboration with Timbaland. Maybe everybody left the bus because the bus bathroom was full of solid potassium that is on fire now because somebody got water on it. Your guess is as good as mine.

Transition – More Chorus

SoShy has stopped the Asian lawyer from getting off the bus, so the American exchange student isn’t going to be served with a subpoena to Vampire Court – which, if I made it into a movie, would make me a million dollars.

Vampires. I think.

Section 3 – Let’s go to a cool dance club and hang out in the kitchen

This is where the video gets seriously convoluted. There is an innocent-looking guy in a cardigan over a sweater-vest over a dress-shirt with tie, a blond girl who is probably a vampire with a necklace of a solar eclipse, a bunch of capoeira-inspired breakdancers who are probably also vampires, SoShy is wearing a beret and showing off sick tattoos with Timbaland in a cross-dance floor vampire confrontation that isn’t a confrontation at all, somebody has a fancy camera phone (the second time a smartphone of some sort has shown up in this video) and Nelly Furtado hanging out with the kitchen staff – who are only barely tolerant of her presence – dressed up like she was just on a 1986 episode of Star Search.

Hey, hey, hey
Frikki-frikki-frikki go Nelly!

I need some R.E.M. but
I don’t like sleepin alone
So come and pick me up as
soon as you put down the phone
I wanna get into trouble
Later you’ll carry me home
I wanna go undercover
I just wanna rattle your bones
Yes I’m the one and only,
But I’m not the only one
So let’s work overtime
On this shift – it ends with the sun
Maybe we can start a riot
Maybe we can bomb this town
Maybe I’ll be your vampire
We can figure it out!

“We can figure it out,” indeed.

We finally see the word “vampire” in the song on a big prosodic place of emphasis, which retroactively puts in context all the times it was being referred to obliquely (like how Timbaland gets up late, goes home late, and has an hourglass rather than a clock or watch or smartphone) and confirms some of what we suspected about the cats and bats from the chorus, while not really elucidating any of it.

I think this is by far the most direct and sensible verse in the song – Nellie basically owns up to wanting to have a one-night stand and makes the hard sell. See, Nellie has worked with Timbaland long enough for their meta-sexual (not actually sexual, as far as I know) collaborative relationship to take on a more mature, somewhat jaded, comfortable and unapologetic angle – she’s not wowed like the younger SoShy is by the prospect of being made famous.

We see the “one and only” / “only one” dichotomy again, but instead of being used to pursue true love, it’s a boast and a rejection of monogamy. Yes, she’s famous and worthwhile, but no, she’s not the girl you’ll bring home to mom. By extension, she also has realized that Timbaland actually does produce other acts, and just because you happen to be his current star, that doesn’t mean you’re going to keep the title. Sometimes you have to humble yourself and do workmanlike things — like sing the extra verse in the second version of a disposable pop track that’s sort of about vampires.

Is this a cautionary tale for the young SoShy? Doesn’t really seem like it. The verse seems like a bit of a non-sequitur in the larger narrative; she’s identified as Nellie, she’s not implicated in the lyrics in any relationship with Timbo or SoShy. She wants what she wants – and when the sun comes up, it’s over.

At this point, you may have figured out the song that is the ideological predecessor to this one. It’s similarly sloppy (though superior in most ways), and has some pretty sick riffs, which match up with this song’s pretty sick beats. Oh, and it has the original Crazy Eyes McGee of pop music. If you haven’t figured it out yet, here it is in all its glory:

I could write a whole other article about the similarities between Timbaland and Meat Loaf. Perhaps I will someday.

I do really love how horrified the blond girl appears to be when she sees Timbaland and SoShy. In this fictional universe we will very soon and blissfully leave forever, they are apparently incredibly badass vampires, despite the fact that all they do is ride the bus and make crazy eyes at people. Heck, I passed at least a dozen people who do that all the time on my way home from the subway tonight.

This vampire carries guns.

Section 4 – Oh, the last minute and twenty seconds of the song is filler

And then they repeat the chorus a whole bunch of times, with Timbo making fun of his faux-sentimentality and begging somebody not to leave him in the morning (Nellie? SoShy? Unclear.).

There’s a palpable lack of meaning that courses through a lot of this song – just so much going through the motions and repeating cliches for the sake of having something commercially palatable to say –  which is I think why we can fit in this awful, tacked-on vampire thing in the first place.

And that speaks volume as well. Like an adolescent who wears triply thick eyeliner in a nonspecific attempt to fill a void or patch up an uncertainty or confusion in life – to shore up identity which feels under threat from parts unknown – the country and the world go pseudogoth when they have nothing better to do, when there’s a sense that there ought to be a meaning in a place where there really isn’t.

In that sense, the vampire phenomenon as it is makes particular sense among older people as an eternal youth fantasy, or among modern religious people as an abstinence fantasy. Speaking as somebody who saved sex for marriage for a long, long time before giving up on it, it can be very disorienting and saddening to realize that something you really care about and made part of your identity – like young love or sexual abstinence – passes just like anything else in this modern world, without much remark or the comfort of genuinely intrinsic value.

You want it to mean something. You want it to mean something so badly. So you associate it with resonant fantasy images. You look for ways to season it with undeniable purpose — and to raise the stakes, like slathering the trappings of mythology over it. You’re not just a late bloomer — you’re a hero who held out. You didn’t just give up out of boredom — you were seduced by a vampire! It’s all part of our quest to make things that we are not comfortable with demystifying less mundane than we know they are. But since we know they are mundane, we do not require of our fantasies that they be robust and purposeful, so long as they provide the appearance of it. So, it’s a hollow, incomplete fantasy -- an echo of a story that once mattered.

See, now here I am going all vampirish. Somebody give me some pomade for my widow’s peak and call Timbaland. I want to make a music video about nothing in particular, because I’m adrift – a vampire who doesn’t even know whether it’s nighttime or morning anymore; and to whom it no longer matters. Bring it on, Crazy Eyes!

What has been seen ... cannot be ... unseen ...

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Yeah, I know: this is an Overthinking Lost post.  We should be talking about Egyptian mythology, or Jungian psychology, or, I dunno… Jesus?  But today I’d like to take off my former-English-major hat, if only for a moment, and replace it with my writer hat.  Because, damn, people.  That was a well-written episode.*

Irony in Lost: A Retrospective.

In Ancient Greek, the word “eironeia” (a.k.a. “irony”) means “deception,” so what better episode to discuss this concept than one about Ben Linus, the most deceptive character in the history of ever?  Almost every millisecond of Dr. Linus was infused with some brand of irony:

Verbal irony: Miles’s delicious “UH OH!” before the title screen.

Situational and/or cosmic irony: Lapidus missed Oceanic 815 because he overslept, but he still ended up crash landing on the Island, anyway.

Another example of situational irony: Now RICHARD is the screwed-up suicidal unbeliever and JACK is the one with all the answers.

“Ironic echo”: When Miles repeated Ben’s line about seeing someone standing over a body with a bloody knife.

An example of what I like to call “meta-level” irony: That moment when Miles mentioned Nikki, Paolo, and the diamonds, which made me chuckle and say, “Hey, the writers DIDN’T forget about them, after all!”

But really, the big winner in this week’s “irony contest” was Aristotle’s favorite: dramatic irony.  In case your memory is foggy, that’s the type of ironic tension that occurs when the audience knows something that the characters do not.  For instance, when Othello says, “Man, Iago, you’re a really great friend,” that’s dramatic irony.  And when Oedipus says, “I’m going to catch that bad man what killed my paw!” that’s dramatic irony, too.

It’s also type of irony that I think I’m going to begin referring to as HA!-type irony, because if you look at my notes from this week’s Lost episode, this is what you will see:

• HA! Alterna-Ben’s talking about Napoleon’s exile on an Island!  (Alterna-Ben doesn’t know he’s a Napoleon figure.)
• HA! Alterna-Ben is an idealist who cares about the children!  (He doesn’t know that, in 2007-World, he’s a selfish, amoral pragmatist who murdered the Dharma children and let his own teenage daughter die.)
• HA! Alterna-Ben is lovingly gassing his dad!  (He doesn’t know that, in the other Universe, he killed his dad by gassing him.)
• HA! at “Dr. Linus, you’re the best!”  (Alterna-Ben doesn’t know that, in the other Universe, Alex loathed him.)

And so on.

Also ironic: in Sideways Universe, Ben dresses like Mr. Rogers.

We Lost fans are always going on about how little we, the audience, know in comparison to how much the writers know and withhold from us. That’s obviously a huge part of Lost, but Dr. Linus reminded me that it’s not the best part.  No, Lost is at its best when it operates the other way, when the viewers know more than the characters do, not the other way around.

I’d argue that this is why Lost’s season 1-3 flashbacks were so popular.  Yes, it’s always great to have background information to round out a character.  But you know what’s better?  Knowing things about a character that the other characters do not know! Shocks and surprises are loads of fun—remember when Sun started speaking English out of nowhere?  Pretty great, wasn’t it?  But wasn’t it also great to watch Sun try to not speak English in front of Jin, even when we, the audience, knew that she could?  Mmm, the dramatic tension!  Didn’t you just want to eat it up?

Lost’s dramatic irony became even more pointed during season 4 when the writers started making use of the flash-forward.  On Island, we saw Jack saying, “I’m going to get these people home to the mainland, and we’re going to have our happy ending, damn it!”  But we already knew from the flash-forwards that only six of them were going to be saved and that Jack wasn’t going to be happy about being home.  Dramatic irony: the stuff flash-forwards are made of.

Dramatic irony, then, was the reason I originally thought the flash-sideways were a fun idea.  Okay, some of them didn’t work so well (*cough* Kate’s), but the best of them show how Lost can wield dramatic irony like a knife, not only in a superficial “ha-ha” way but in a tragic “if only they knew!” way.

Don’t you agree, Dr. Linus?

"Totally."

Irony in ”Sundown” and “Dr. Linus.”

This is the reason I liked this week’s episode so, so much more than last week’s.  Sayid and Ben have long been two of my favorite Lost characters, so I should have appreciated their “centric” episodes equally.  But Sayid’s episode, for all of its sound and fury, fell flat for one simple reason: it lacked irony.  Let’s compare and contrast, shall we?

Sayid’s story has always been the same.  It’s a tragic tale of thwarted redemption.  Sayid has tried harder than anyone, since the beginning of the series, to make up for his violent past, but, time and again, he falls back into his old patterns.  “My name is Sayid Jarrah, and I’m a torturer.”  Tragic, man.  Just tragic.

But by the sixth season, I wanted to see something new in his story.  In the flash-sideways of other characters, we saw their old stories from a new angle.  Jack’s flash-sideways in Lighthouse, for example, looked at his old themes of daddy-hatred, but this time Jack was the father, not the son.  We also saw that, contrary to what 2007-Island-Jack said, he actually has the capability to break the cycle of abuse, move past his daddy-issues, and become a better father.  That’s dramatically ironic, but in a more subtle way: we, the audience, now know something Island-Jack doesn’t know about himself.  To me, that’s really satisfying.

Likewise, this week, we learned something about Ben that Ben didn’t know about himself: that he could be selfless.  That’s not “ha-ha funny,” but it is ironic.  We know more about a character and his situation than the character knows himself.  For once, we had a leg up on old Ben Linus.

"Don't be so sure, bub."

Sayid’s flash-sideways, on the other hand, merely rehashed his old story.  Nothing new was learned, either by Sayid or by the audience.  Oh, he’d kill for Nadia?  Shrug.  He had already shot himself for her back in season one.  So color me unsurprised when he shot Keamy, a character almost anyone in their right mind would shoot without a second thought.  This isn’t dramatic irony.  This is repetition.  Boring, bleak repetition.

Here, look at this chart I made.  It’ll probably make my point better than my paragraphs ever could:

Click to read.

If Sayid’s flash-sideways had included more dramatic irony, I might have bought his Island-side conversion to the Dark Side a little more.  If I had written Sundown, the chart would have looked a little more like this:

2007-SAYID THINKS: That no matter how hard he tries to be redeemed, he’s fated to be a murderer

WE LEARN FROM THE FLASH-SIDEWAYS: That Sayid never actually wanted redemption at all; he just wanted Nadia

HOW WE LEARN THIS: The flash-sideways starts the same way as the one we saw in Sundown, except Keamy DOES kill Omer.  Then alter-Sayid steps out of the shadows and says, “Well done, Keamy.  Here is your payment.”  And THEN he shoots Keamy in the chest.  The end of the flash-forward is at Omer’s funeral, where evil!Sayid comforts the bereft Nadia.  (This fake episode would get bonus irony points if Nadia said something like “Sayid Jarrah, you are a good person” before the credits rolled.)

My version of Sundown would be just as bleak as the real version, but—with the Power of Irony!—it would develop Sayid’s character more and make his turn to the Dark Side more believable.

Conclusions.

I’m not saying that irony is the most important tool in a writer’s literary arsenal, although others might agree with that statement.  But Lost’s writers have long shown that they know how to use dramatic irony better than any other writing staff on TV—and dramatic irony only gets better and easier to use the longer a story goes.  Once you have such well-established characters with five seasons of backstory on their shoulders, adding little ironic twists and flourishes is a way to surprise the viewer, to make her cry, to delight her.

[Agree? Disagree? Want to continue gushing about how good Michael Emerson is?  Let loose in the comments!]

*Okay, the episode wasn’t perfect, writing-wise.  The “Ben Linus, schoolteacher” storyline arguably had a couple of holes in it, and, as the AVClub said, some of the dialogue was a little “on the nose,” as it were.  But, honestly, the rest of the episode was so good that I could overlook those little hiccups.  Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

Related Posts

• Overthinking Lost: The Fate/Free Will Showdown
• The Overthinking Lost Open Thread: “Recon”
• The Overthinking Lost Open Thread: “Dr. Linus”
• The Overthinking Lost Open Thread – “Sundown”
• Overthinking Lost: Season 6 Episode 4

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• Dan O’Bannon, Unsung Co-Creator of the Modern Zombie

In rap news, Lil’ Wayne began his one-year jail term this week, pleading guilty to attempted weapons possession. The obvious joke is that doing a bid can only help a gangsta’s career, but that actually hasn’t been true. It certainly hasn’t helped Mystikal’s career any, though he only just got out.

Question: what should Lil’ Wayne do with his year off from recording (other than reflect on his crimes, rehabilitate, blah blah etc)?

Mr. Carter entered the following statement in his defense: I keep it real crisp like Kellogg, stack it like Lincoln Logs, then I drive my Lincoln over your dog, dawg.

Second, have we all taken a moment to let our jaws drop over the Tron Legacy trailer? Because really, wow.

Question: A revanchist Alice in Wonderland; a mature Tron sequel; and even that trailer for The Sorceror’s Apprentice looked a little edgy for a movie inspired by a Fantasia cartoon. Has the success of Pirates of the Caribbean inspired Disney to treat its properties in a more adult manner? If so, what does this suggest for the future?

Finally, we doff our bandannas for Corey Haim, who apparently succumbed to a drug overdose earlier this week at the age of 38. Best known for his adolescent attitude in such 80s classics as Lucas, License to Drive and The Lost Boys, Corey had regained some D-list cred by teaming up with Corey Feldman in “The Two Coreys” and a cameo in Crank 2: High Voltage. Fame treats few of us kindly, and young Mr. Haim worse than most.

This is how he'd want us to remember him: making out with Lala Sloatman.

Man, Lil’ Wayne doing a bid, Corey Haim dying: does OTI have any good news this week? As it happens, we do! Overthinking It is sending correspondents to PAX East, Penny Arcade’s East coast convention and gamer expo! OTI staff will be wandering the floor, documenting the happenings on the official Overthinking It Twitter account.

“But Perich,” you’re asking, “how will I recognize the OTI crew? Or how can I identify myself as a loyal Overthinker?” Well, you could always buy an official Overthinking It branded T-shirt!

Well, ACTUALLY ...

Are you coming to PAX East? Do you want to catch up with the Overthinking It staff? Sound off in the comments, since this is your … open thread.

Related Posts

• Open Thread for October 23, 2009
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• Open Thread for February 26, 2010
• Overthinking Lost: Season 6 Episode 3
• Overthinking Lost: Season 6 Episode 1

I own a copy of this poster, framed, and signed by Kirs Kristofferson, Ernest Borgnine, and C.W. McCall. I am very proud of this.

On my bookshelf, there’s an old VHS tape with a faded, hand-written label. It says, “Convoy, 1st Gen.” This is because in 2000, when I tracked down and rented a copy of the 1978 Sam Peckinpah movie, after years of searching, I was so excited that I made two copies of it. Then I made another six copies off of those two copies, and gave them away to friends. (I am blessed with the sort of friends for whom a bootleg copy of Convoy is a great gift.) Anyway, the “1st Gen” on the copy I’m looking at indicates that this one was dubbed right from the original. I’ve lugged it from apartment to apartment over the last ten years, even though I haven’t always had access to a VCR.

But I probably won’t ever watch it again. If I wanted to see Convoy now (and I kind of do, after writing the last paragraph), I could just put it on the top of my Netflix queue. They’d send me a nice new DVD that would look ten times better than my old videotape. Actually, I don’t even have to wait for the DVD. Convoy is currently a “Watch It Now” movie on Netflix, so I can stream it right to my computer. Or I can use my XBox to watch it on my TV. And if I wanted to buy it, the DVD is $13 via Amazon.

This is simultaneously awesome, and a teeny bit sad.

It’s easy to forget that only 15 years ago, finding a movie was a very different experience.

Here were your options:

• You went to Blockbuster. If they didn’t have the movie you wanted, too bad.
• You went to Suncoast, Tower Records, or another then-thriving-now-bankrupt movie store. If they didn’t have what you wanted, maybe they could order it for you. But probably not.

Internet killed the video store.

And that’s it. I know this seems unthinkable to those of you under 20, but as recently as the late 90s you only had access to the movies you could drive and pick up. In those dark days, a well-stocked video store was a geek’s best friend. I will always have a deep fondness for Best Video, located in Hamden, CT. At Best Video, you stand little chance of finding anything without one of the clerks to help you. For instance, the Comedy section is divided into “Comedy” and “Best Comedy.” But there are also comedies in “Best of the Best,” and certain directors have their own shelves. I preferred to wander aimlessly, discovering movies I had never heard of but couldn’t wait to see. There were days when I’d rent ten tapes, watch five of them, and dub the other five to watch later. I was a kid in a candy store.

My favorite find there was a horror movie from the Philippines, called The Killing of Satan. The cover asked one of my favorite questions of all time: “What power should a man possess to challenge the Prince of Darkness?” It’s the word “should” that really makes it work for me.

He's gonna need a sturdier shirt.

Back in its heyday, Best Video would rent movies by mail as well. You could literally have them mail you a single VHS tape, which you’d watch and mail back in a week. Geeks all over the country happily took advantage of this. In the days when watching anything more bandwidth-intensive than the Hampster Dance seemed impossible, Best Video was the only way to see some of these rare imports and limited editions. The video store is still around, but they’ve shut down the mail order rental business. Between eBay, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, and BitTorrent, almost anything ever made can be yours to watch, in days if not instantly, at little cost. For instance, The Killing of Satan can be had for under $10.

Once again, let me make it clear that this is a good thing. I love movies, and I love having them at my fingertips. But something has been lost. Part of being a movie geek is priding yourself on seeing the obscure stuff that lesser geeks and mere mortals don’t bother with. This used to be challenging. Today, a movie can have cult status because only a small group of people like it… but not because only a small group of people have access. Finding the movies is never a challenge (finding the time to watch them is another story).

But what I really miss is the sense of community. Back in the day, the best way to expand your movie-going horizons was to find friends with the same passion, and borrow, trade, and share each other’s collections. There’s even an episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse discover Comic Book Guy’s secret room of bootleg videotapes, and make serious money by charging admission to screenings. I have totally been to parties like that. The episode aired in 2001. Less than five years later, it was completely obsolete. Nowadays, Comic Book Guy’s random clips wouldn’t be on VHS tapes--they’d be all over YouTube. And the people of Springfield would watch them at home, alone.

In 1999, I got a copy of Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles off of eBay. This is a spoof of the Muppets that he made at the tender age of 28. An early scene features a puppet cat performing oral sex on a puppet walrus. The whole thing is very funny and strange and wonderful. When it arrived in the mail, I watched it with 20 people, and again the next week with 20 other people. Now, you can see the whole thing on YouTube:

Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue is a half-hour special produced in 1993, in which a dream team of Saturday morning cartoon characters join forces to help a teen give up drugs. My favorite part is when Alf threatens to eat Garfield. When I got a copy of that one, I had to reserve my dorm’s common room for a giant screening. Once again, it’s on YouTube now:

And then there’s the Star Wars Holiday Special. This was George Lucas’ fantastically ill-advised 1978 variety show, in which Harrison Ford tries to get Chewbacca home to his family in time for “Life Day.” The most jaw-dropping of many painful moments is probably Bea Arthur, singing a song in the Mos Eisley cantina. The Special was aired exactly once, and (unsurprisingly) never released on VHS. For years, it was a kind of geek legend. No one I knew had ever seen it, but everyone had heard stories from friends of friends. “One day,” us young geeks told each other, “we will get our hands on a copy of that!”

And now, it’s on YouTube:

This all applies to more than movies. When I was a kid, my brother was a giant Phish fan. And any real Phish fan knows their commercial CDs aren’t where the special sauce is--you need to listen to live performances, where they could spend 45 minutes playing one song.

Because you can never have too many versions of Golgi Apparatus.

So Danny would hit up the tape trading websites. While he was doing his homework, he’d be running off dubs of his collection, to exchange with fellow Phishermen. And when a new tape arrived in the mail, he’d put aside whatever he was doing, run into his room, and emerge two hours later humming meandering guitar riffs to himself. He even had a special rack for storing his carefully organized Phish bootlegs.

Nowadays, you can get all your concert recordings online, no communication with other human beings required. TapeTrading.com is actually for sale. I doubt anyone will buy it.

Overnight, we’ve come to expect any movie ever made to be available at the click of a button, and we usually get our wish. It’s an amazing embarrassment of riches. But when entertainment flows as freely as water from a faucet, we start to take it for granted. We don’t get the pleasure of seeking it out, and we don’t bother sharing it with friends. Part of the fun of watching obscure movies used to be the thrill of finding something rare… but in the Internet Age, no movie is rare. And like I said before, that’s a good thing that makes me a little sad.

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Before getting to the episodes on Disc 4, let’s take a quick look back over the series so far, which is just, just over halfway done.  (I’m cutting this off after Jupiter Jazz, the literal halfway point.)

Note that when I say focus character, I mean more than just who gets the most screen time.  I say that the episode is focused on a character if we derive significant insights into their motivations or backstory, or if it plays an important part in their character arc.  So while Spike doesn’t do a whole lot more in Waltz for Venus than he does in Gateway Shuffle, his stepping in as a mentor for the hapless Rocco is a really important moment for his character development.

The balance of “light” and “dark” episodes is pretty interesting.  But more significant I think is the way that we get exactly one episode dedicated to each of the main characters other than Spike.  The series thus far is tidy.  It’s not mechanistic or anything, but you could definitely imagine the writing team sitting down to work out this general structure ahead of time (even if, as some of our more anime-savvy commenters have pointed out, that almost certainly didn’t happen).  You could also make a much, much more complicated version of this chart that also includes thematic links between the episodes, like the music boxes that show up in 1, 5, 8, and 12/13, or the big food sequences in 1, 4, and 11, and so on.  But I’m not totally sure that there would be anything to gain from this other than the “Okay, it’s all a dense tapestry” factor.

Anyway, the second half of the series is, for want of a better word, a lot sloppier.  I’m still not quite sure what to make of that.  The individual episodes are still fun, but the stakes just aren’t as high, and the connections between them are a little harder to figure out.  If one were feeling uncharitable, one could suggest that the show had jumped the shark. That the writers had run out of good ideas, and were simply spinning their wheels.  One could also blame pressure from the network censors:  Cowboy Bebop was very nearly cancelled after thirteen episodes because of concerns over adult themes and situations.  And The second half of the series is a lot more, uh, laid back.  Most of the time.  But plausible as they seem, I think that both of these explanations are mistaken — that there’s more to these later episodes than meets the eye.

One thing to note:  in the first half of the series, Jet, Faye, and Ed each got exactly one episode dedicated to their antics.  In the second half – well, I haven’t actually finished it yet.  But on this disc alone, Jet and Ed get an episode each, and Faye gets two.  And I guess Spike just takes a cigarette break, or practices Jeet Kune Do, or something.

15)  My Funny Valentine

This disc leads off with a Faye episode, in which we finally find out the truth behind her backstory.  Sort of.

The facts – presented in flashback and dream sequence over the first half of the episode – are these:  in 2019, a young woman was put into cryogenic storage.  When she woke up fifty-four years later (a couple of years before the show proper begins), she had no recollection of her identity or why she was frozen in the first place.  The doctors that thawed her out couldn’t help much, although they were able to give her a name – Faye Valentine – and to slap her with a 300,000,000 medical bill.  Harsh!

(Longtime readers will of course remember that Faye’s debts were brought up in the first episode she appeared in.  At the time, we were given to understand that she owed money to the mafia.  Turns out it was the Blue Cross Blue Shield.  Make of that what you will.)

So as you can see, we don’t get to learn much about Faye’s past at all.  In fact, as we’ll learn later on, even these minimal “facts” are mostly fabrications:  the doctors were running a scam where they pulled random bodies out of cold sleep and stuck them for massive medical fees, and the name “Faye Valentine” was assigned more or less at random.  In a typical Cowboy Bebop move, the “Faye Valentine Origin Story” episode turns out to be about how Faye Valentine doesn’t really have an origin.

However.  If we accept the idea that our personalities are largely the product of our past experiences (which is generally accepted in life, but relatively uncommon in fiction, which tends to posit some sort of essential, transcendental “selfness”), then yeah, this is an origin story.  Faye comes out of the freezer a blank slate, and her current personality is shaped by what happens to her afterwards.  Which means that most of her personality comes from a whirlwind romance with this guy, Whitney Hagas Matsumoto, who Faye refers to as “the guy with the thin eyebrows.”

The eyebrows, they... do not look so thin. Incidentally, the writer of this episode has admitted that he told the art department to make Whitney look as much like George Clooney as possible.

Whitney is a lawyer assigned to Faye by her medical insurance company to help her fight the massive lawsuit that they’re slapping her with.  I don’t think you actually get an attorney appointed to you in a civil suit.  I certainly don’t think the insurance company that is suing you would have to provide you with one.  But hey, maybe the legal system has changed with the times.   (Plus – spoiler alert – it turns out to be a fraud.) Anyway, Whitney also has the job of getting Faye acclimated to life in the 2070s.   This leads to a cute little scene here where he tests Faye’s memory by having her identify various objects in the room

"A Monitor."

"A hot water pot."

"A mobile phone." (Ha!)

only to flip the script on her and reveal that these are actually

A washing machine

A makeup remover

and a probe thermometer.

It’s kind of like that Family Guy parody of Ricki Lake:  “I’m not actually a horse, I’m a broom.”

Faye’s reaction to all this is to run away.  Well first she faints, but then she runs away.  And this is pretty understandable, all things considered… but it’s no real way to deal with your problems.  Whitney tracks her down and convinces her to try to make a new life for herself, and pay off her massive debt a little at a time.  “And if you hang in there, maybe you’ll meet someone wonderful!” he says, staring soulfully down at her, from under his conspicuously normal-sized eyebrows.  And I’m thinking:  “Worst.  Lawyer.  Ever.”

It turns out that he is pretty bad, at that.  Because after a brief romance montage, Whitney fakes his own death in order to trick Faye into assuming responsibility for his own not-inconsiderable debts.  And this, honestly, explains a lot about Faye.  Her mercenary nature.  Her instinctive distrust of anyone who tries to help her.  Her tendency to cut and run.  And so on.  Compared to this, the second half of the episode – where Jet drags in a minor bounty who happens to be Faye’s ex boyfriend, and she busts him out of the brig in hopes of getting some answers about her past – is relatively uninteresting.  Well, it’s uninteresting if you already know that no answers are forthcoming.  And I already told you that.

Diagnosis: Fan Service.

So much for the tale.  Let’s back up and talk about the way that it’s told.  Like I said already, this is basically about the development of Faye’s personality.  And this story arc informs the visual vocabulary of the episode in some interesting ways.

Pictured above is one of the first shots in the flashback – maybe not the very first, but it’s pretty much our introduction to the world of the narrative.  What’s important here is not the pointless leering at breasts:  it’s the fact that this is from Faye’s POV.  Now we have had POV shots in Cowboy Bebop before, and pretty frequently.  It’s such a standard part of the cinematic vocabulary that it would be hard to avoid them.  But the whole flashback here is absolutely riddled with shots from Faye’s point of view, and what’s more, they call attention to the fact that they are POV shots as such, by including parts of her body in the frame, or by tracking with her vision, shakey-cam style, as she glances around the room.

This is a neat trick because it encourages the audience to identify with Faye as she encounters the (to 1998 audiences) strange new world of the 21st century.  Somewhat unusually for sci-fi, Cowboy Bebop has never been a technophilic or a technophobic show.  Rather, technology is simply there, always taken for granted.   My Funny Valentine is the only episode I’ve seen where this is not the case.  Because Faye is a stranger here herself, she is startled and amazed by each new technological wonder.  And we, the audience, are along for the ride.  (In a series with different priorities, this would have been an ideal pilot episode.)

It's like the whole audience is groping the hologram along with her.

And I think – I still haven’t seen the end of the series, but I’m guessing, here – these POV shots also suggest that we should start shifting our major emotional identification in the show off of Spike and onto Faye.  Because they aren’t just in this episode alone, as you will see.

The other interesting thing about the episode is the musical montage, set to another Yoko Kanno original called “Flying Teapot.” Start at around 1:40 in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqug6wIflYA

I’ve got to say, this one does not do a whole heck of a lot for me as music.  It sounds like a kind of middling Sondheim knockoff with really awkward lyrics (“Look at them, they are cheeky/ they are never worthy,” with melodic accents on the final “y” of cheeky and worthy, is not the kind of text setting a native speaker of English would be likely to come up with).  And even Sondheim’s music is – I mean, it’s wonderful stuff, but it’s there to serve the lyrics, always, so a Sondheim song with bad lyrics would not be a very good song.  I’ve managed to develop a certain grudging, perverse affection for Flying Teapot through repeated exposure.  But it’s certainly not the striking thing about this sequence.  What is striking is the way that Faye starts out infantilized, literally riding piggy-back in a childish nightgown, and comes out of the song as a fully fledged adult in a va-va-voom dress.  They don’t quite run her through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it’s pretty close.  First you see her eating, still in the nightgown (physiological needs), then learning to read while wearing clothes with a late adolescent vibe (not something Maslow specifically mentions, as far as I know, but it fits into the basic control over one’s environment that characterizes the “safety” stage), and then finally shopping for a nice dress (symbolic of financial security, although we all know she doesn’t have that, which is again a “safety” thing) before she can open up her heart to her (creepy) (father-figure) lawyer, and finally move on to the final stage of the pyramid:  getting chased by a helicopter.  I kid, I kid.  Obviously we have to take this analogy with a grain of salt. But it’s at least interesting, certainly, that she sort of gets “blocked” at the love/belonging stage, and never gets as far as self-esteem or self-actualization.  Which again would explain a fair amount about the character.

If we’re going to take the psychoanalytic reading and run with it, let’s also revisit the whole “that’s not an X, it’s a Y!” sequence I mentioned before.  This scene has Faye basically as a newborn.  She’s unaware of her self (in that she doesn’t remember anything).  She’s unaware of the world (in that she has no idea what year it is).  Also, and this is the tricky one, she has not yet learned how to see. By which I mean that she has not learned how to associate visual data with objects in the real world.   By which I mean that, yes, the photons bouncing off of the machine are hitting her eyes, but she does not have a symbolic concept of washing-machine-ness to map those images onto.

Trying to talk around the idea is brutally hard.   It’s probably much better just to watch that sequence again (an English lanuage version of the episode was floating around youtube last I checked, but it didn’t allow embedding), and try to keep in mind that there was a time, for all of us, when every object in the world was just as mysterious – that we, like Faye, had to learn to see the washing machine.  And then think about the fact that while watching the episode, you were not actually seeing a washing machine, but a representation of a washing machine! And we all had to learn to do that too.

One last thing is worth mentioning.  On the more immediate level of character development, it’s significant that Faye seems to forgive Whitney at the end and begin moving on with her life.  I mean, she throws him in jail, which is not exactly consistent with forgiveness… but something about the way it’s framed and performed still gives you a pretty clear impression of forgiveness.   This is probably significant.

All right, that does me for now.  Tune in tomorrow for discussion of the other three episodes on the disc.

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Let’s call this season “Greatest Hits.”  So far, we’ve been to the hatch (although it was a little, erm, exploded), the Barracks, the caves, and, this episode, the beach camp, the Dharma sub, and the Black Rock.  Plus, Smokey went and told us that we’d be hanging out with him and his buddies at the Hydra Station soon.

Question 1: What classic Lost location would you like to return to before the season is out?  I’m quite positive we’ll be seeing the frozen donkey wheel again, but the place I’d really love to see, if only for a second, is the “pile of notebook-filled canisters where the pneumatic tubes end.”

Question 2: So, whose lips wobbled when Ben said, “Because he’s the only one who will have me”?  Come on.  Raise your hands.  Don’t be ashamed.  (For the record, my notes read: “Ben!  WAAAHH!”  Not that I could see what I was writing.  I had, um, something…sniff…in my eye.)  And for those of you who aren’t buying Linus’s transformation into epic woobie, why aren’t you buying it?

Question 3: So Miles FINALLY got something meaningful to do in this episode.  Welp, I guess he’s a goner now.  So, is Miles going to receive a karmic death for stealing Nikki and Paulo’s diamonds or what?

Question 4: Widmore!  Okay, that’s not really a question, but… Widmore!  He’s here!  He’s made his way to the Island!  What do you think’s going to happen?  Will he join up with Crazy Jack and His Island Boppers?  Why did Jacob want him to come to the Island, anyway?  And where are Penny and Desmond?!  For GOD’S SAKE — WHERE ARE PENNY AND DESMOND?!

Question 5: I can’t come up with a good question about Richard. Can YOU?

See you on Monday.

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