I’ve been watching a lot of romantic comedies recently. By “a lot,” I mean “all of them.” Everything from “A” (Adam’s Rib) to “Z” (Zack and Miri Make a Porno). Technically, I started even before “A,” with 10 Things I Hate About You and 27 Dresses. And just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve edited together some of the most awww-inducing moments in Hollywood history.

In the 40 Inspirational Speeches montage, those speeches weren’t actually the climaxes of their films. They were what got the characters fired up to take on the opposing army/rival team/preppy frat house. But in a romantic comedy, the big speech is the main event. You have two people who clearly love each other (that much was obvious from the poster). But for some reason, one of them is taking that job in Hong Kong and/or getting back together with Chad (curse you, preppy frat house!). There’s only one thing to do: run across town, show up panting in the nick of time, and pour your heart out. I find it comforting that even in this age of 3D CGI madness, the denouement of a romantic comedy is almost always a big block of dialogue.

You might even say that these climactic speeches are the whole point of a romantic comedy. We want to see someone bridge that gap between “it will never work” and “happily ever after,” armed only with the power of words. And the way you cross that chasm is by not caring if you fall. You have to lose your cool, drop your guard, and swing for the fences. It’s interesting that there’s often an element of public humiliation to these declarations. In Keeping the Faith, Ben Stiller has to woo Jenna Elfman via speakerphone, with her whole office listening. In Hitch, Will Smith stops Eva Mendes from leaving town by jumping in front of her car. In Made of Honor, Patrick Duffy actually interrupts the girl’s wedding to another man, and does his whole “I’ve loved you forever” monologue right there in the church (he is eventually punched). In Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise arrives home to find his living room full of strange women, but he barely hesitates. “If this is where it has to happen,” he says, “then this is where it has to happen.” And that is exactly the point. These men don’t give speeches like this because it comes naturally to them. They do it because love has left them no other choice.

These people are not just expressing love, they are putting themselves at risk. And it’s that combination of what they say and what it took to say it that lifts us up where we belong.

THE RULES: Characters must be speaking directly to their beloved (no talking to a third party), no actor can speak more than once (but some people did appear more than once), no TV shows (even though Spike had an amazing speech in the finale of Buffy).

NUMBER OF CLIPS I STARTED WITH: 285

CATEGORIES I ORGANIZED THEM INTO: Basic I Love You, Compliments, How I Feel, Forever, Random

CLIP MY GIRLFRIEND REALLY WANTED ME TO INCLUDE THAT I HAD TO CUT: Singles. “You… belong… with… ME!”

CLIP I REALLY WANTED TO INCLUDE THAT I HAD TO CUT: Conan the Barbarian. “If I were dead and you were still fighting for life, I’d come back from the darkness, back from the pit of hell to fight at your side.”

EDIT I’M PROUDEST OF: In The Notebook, the two characters are standing right at the edges of the frame. The problem is that I had to cut out the edges of the frame to crop the clip to 16:9. So I used my After Effects kung fu to actually remove the MIDDLE of the frame. See?

Before.

After.

ORIGINAL FINAL CLIP: The Simpsons. Marge: “Best kiss of my life.” Homer: “Best kiss of your life so far!”

Related Posts

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• Episode 137: Re-Gagafication
• The Walking Extinct
• Episode 126: They’ll Get Past It
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→ Download Episode 189 (MP3)

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Further Reading

The Vow on Rotten Tomatoes

Channing Tatum on Wikipedia

Magic: The Gathering

Whitney Houston on Wikipedia

Good Hair on Amazon and on IMDb

Us Magazine

Rock Hudson

Charles Limb: Your Brain on Improv

Full Coverage of Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour Dark Ascension

Related Posts

• Episode 150: Bacchanal in Baku
• Amanda Palmer, Author of “Creep”
• Episode 186: Wrong Enough to be Human
• To me, boxing is like a ballet, except the there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.
• The Musical Talmud: “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO

→ Download TFT Episode 57 (MP3)

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Overthink Something Else

• Overmurdering It 2009
• NY Comic-Con: Asian American Superheroes to the Rescue!
• Episode 40: Despite Our Best Efforts
• IMDb Top 250 Movies List Analysis, 4th Edition
• From Scooby to Scrappy: An Analysis of Cartoon Doghood

OK. Though I’m sure most people will be lining up for the 3D re-release of Phantom Menace, I’ve been kind of looking forward to Safe House, which was on the 2010 Black List (a yearly compilation of favorite unsold screenplays). It’s getting decent notices: ”a rollicking smash-and-crash chase movie that happens to be surprisingly well acted”, and, despite similarities to the wily black veteran/naive white rookie dynamic in Training Day, looks like it’s going to be pretty fun.

Over on the forums, we’re celebrating Trailer Overload and Belinkie wonders whether he should take his six-year-old to see Episode 1.

And we’ll be launching something very special early next week… of the video variety… so stay tuned.

How are you celebrating the impending V.D.? (That’s Valentine’s Day.) Sound off in the comments (yes, we still have them), for this is your… Open Thread.

An unruly mob living in tents, regularly forced to relocate, demanding respect from corrupt elites, beaten and sometimes killed by the de facto authorities. Until we get a closer look at the style of tents or the way they dress, we could be watching a scene in Zucotti Park, Tahrir Square, or the latest original show on AMC, Hell on Wheels. Mark my words, lives will be lost, and pepper will get in someone’s eyes.

AMC couldn’t have picked a better time to air a show about desperate people working killer industrial jobs for “The One Percent.” When conservative pundits write off Occupy Wall Street protesters as hypocrites for owning iPhones or other brand-name gadgets, Hell on Wheels is the show that should be running on those devices to keep them motivated.

At first glance, the show fits the typical Western formula: our anti-hero Cullen Bohannon wants revenge on men who murdered his wife. But much of what we see is his day job with the railroad, taken as a cover so he can get close to the murderers. Like most of us (somewhat less than 99%?), he sells his labor to get by, but he’s alienated from the product and the profits. It’s a day job which he barely maintains, sometimes shirking his work duties in pursuit of a man who needs killing. As a bonus for viewers who hate crappy jobs and crappy bosses, we follow Bohannon as he attempts to murder his immediate superior in the first episode. Another disgruntled worker beats him to it. Later we get to see a worker take down his boss in a bare-knuckle boxing match.

Lily Bell almost gets killed with her surveyor husband because of an unsafe work environment, or you could call it a failure to clear their development plan with disgruntled local residents (the Cheyenne). She spends a few episodes letting her late husband’s employer dangle before she hits him up for workers’ compensation pay for the death of her husband, using his precious survey maps as leverage.

Other working stiffs on the show include several ladies of negotiable virtue and some Irish brothers in the Magic Lantern entertainment industry, already making forays into pornography. They may be independent operators, but presumably all of them have to pay protection to madams, pimps or local bosses like the Swede. There’s a young man facing the dilemma that many of us have with jobs, whether to follow the traditions of his family (become chief like your father, defend against invading white men) or his chosen career path in the church.

The reason 99% of these people are sweating and straining in the mud is that Thomas Durant and a few faceless investors stand to profit from it. He’s our Wall Street whipping boy. An abridged list of Durant’s crimes or dick moves on the show include demanding his men keep working when payroll is two weeks late, bilking the government, extorting and bribing a senator, embezzling, and pushing extra arrows into a dead employee so it will look like a more brutal massacre in news photos. Although his second in command The Swede believes Bohannon committed murder, Durant effectively pardons him, not because he considered the merits of the case, but because building the railroad is more important to him than justice.

If Durant hasn’t demonstrated every transgression the Occupy movement attributes to Wall Street, he probably did it off-screen or hasn’t got around to it yet.

Hell on Wheels doesn’t show protests in forms familiar to a modern audience, but it’s a history of the One Percent giving the 99% good reasons to protest. Only a few of these characters behave in ways that you’d confuse with protesting. Reverend Cole’s message of nonviolence and morality makes him sound like a modern activist, but he doesn’t focus on the morality of economics like Occupiers do. He’d be content if all the workers got baptized, quit their whoring and drinking, and peacefully continued building Durant’s railroad through Indian Country. Ferguson might be the closest thing to an activist on the show, constantly pushing for more rights, becoming apparently the first Black “walking boss” in the company, brazenly attempting to desegregate the whore house, and walking off the job when payroll is delayed.

The other character who would fit perfectly into an Occupy encampment is Bohannon. In some episodes, he’d be the cop telling protesters to unlink their arms, pick up their junk and clear out. Like the modern enforcers for Wall Street, Bohannon doesn’t share the massive wealth of Durant or the One-Percent, but he’s compensated by them for keeping workers in line. He’s willing to get down in the dirt and wrestle with Ferguson to stop even one person from striking.

In other ways, Bohannon seems to have a lot in common with Occupiers. He has legitimate grievances like they do. His wife was killed and probably raped by Yankees, who also burned down his barn with his son and the freed slave who raised him hiding inside. Bohannon knows he won’t get justice by working through the Yankees’ system. Like Occupiers, he faces a monolithic, entrenched enemy that stands in the way of his goal. Unlike the Occupiers, he might be able to get a taste of justice without directly confronting the system.

I don’t know exactly what the Native American storyline has to do with Occupation, or marginalized people pushing back against an overreaching ruling class. Okay, maybe they’re a little related. The Cheyenne don’t seem to include non-violent direct action in their repertoire of protest tactics, so they’re different in that way. Like the protesters, their chances of unbalancing the One-Percent seem slim, but they will probably do some damage before the dust settles.

Enough with the similarities. What lessons does HoW have for #OWS?

First, contrary to what Bohannon advises the freedman Elam Ferguson, don’t forget your past. You probably won’t be able to anyway. Go ahead and dwell on it. If you’ve been treated like property or three-fifths of a human all your life, use that to fuel your fight with the system. Ferguson and Bohannon bring a lot of pain down on their own heads while trying to get justice, because they can’t forget their past. But so far they’re making progress toward their goals.

More importantly, Occupiers can learn from Hell on Wheels that violence gets results. Reverend Cole tries to head off violence with negotiation, but he’s only delaying the confrontation. Bohannon resorts to violence in the very first scene of the series, and plenty of situations along the way. So far it’s helped him get information, rescue Mrs. Bell and get revenge on a few killers. It didn’t get the results he wanted in the boxing match with Ferguson, but we see lots of success from Ferguson’s perspective when he resorts to violence. He gets revenge against Johnson and wins the fight against Bohannon. Without his threat to walk off the job and backing it up with a fight, he might not have been promoted to walking boss by Bohannon, and Durant wouldn’t have given ten cases of whiskey to the workers as a kind of interest on their delayed payroll. The Swede even allows freedmen into the saloon for the fight, “for one night only,” presumably the first time it has been desegregated, again thanks to Ferguson’s willingness to fight.

The one situation where aggrieved characters might not get positive results from the use of violence is when the Cheyenne eventually confront the Army. So far, their use of violent tactics has generally paid off. Maybe the lessons will change in future episodes.

The last lesson is that this historical fiction about our past could be a vision of our dystopian future. In lawless lands, before law was established in a territory, an organization like the Union Pacific took it upon themselves to act as local sheriff and executioner. They fill the gap where laws should be. Durant issues laws. The Swede and other middle-managers enforce Durant’s law. After the attempted lynching, it seems like Bohannon and Ferguson have become outlaws and fled. But there is no law in the camp, no one authorized by the government to enforce laws. They’ve violated the will of the Swede, and have to act like outlaws because the Swede acts like a lawman.

But that’s history. At some point, law was established and everything got better. Laws were written by people fairly elected, who authorized police or military or bureaucrats to enforce the laws, and it was about as good as it could get. Maybe we’re still in that heyday.

(To say that law was “established” when Whites conquered the territory assumes that the humans already living in that area had no laws of their own, or that their traditions were not cool enough to count as laws. Maybe the attacks by the Cheyenne count as enforcing their laws. Without trying to pin down a definition of “law” or looking up a history of actual Cheyenne traditions, let’s just say that not many Whites would have obeyed the laws of the Cheyenne either way, so it was lawless land as far as they were concerned)

In a fantastical future world where corporations and One-Percenters acquire more power and elections become more entangled with money, elected officials or their appointees would no longer represent the will of the people. Corporations would take over. Or they’d keep the government around as a public relations department, to convince their subjects that it’s still a democracy and everything is fair. Their arbitrary rules would lack the authority of laws created by a democracy. It would become a lawless land where plutocrats could take it upon themselves to write their own rules and appoint sociopaths like the Swede to enforce their rules.

But maybe there are some actions Occupy Wall Street could take to make sure that wacky dystopian vision of the future remains as implausible as Zardoz or Robot Holocaust.

[Does Bohannon represent the modern dilemma to either climb the social ladder or embrace one's proletariat roots? Should these laborers be telegraphing their grievances, 160 characters at a time? Sound off in the comments! - Ed]

A screen test report on Rob Northrup by the serials department of Republic Pictures is reported to have read: “Can’t sing. Can’t mashup videos. Can write a little.”

Related Posts

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In most cases, you suggested a band (which to be fair is what I asked for), so I picked the song to listen to by the highly scientific expedient of using the first video for each band that has an embeddable youtube link.  (When possible, I tried to pick something with an actual music video rather than a fan dub.)  If you suggested a specific song, though, I listened to that one.

N.B.  This post doesn’t follow our general policies on clean language and adult situations, which is why the rest of it is behind the cut. Only appropriate for a rock n’ roll piece, I guess.

1) The Vaccines:  Post Breakup Sex

(recommended by Babybiceps)

•  Once upon a time, a band called The Strokes appropriated a sound and approach to music from The Cure, and skunged it up a little bit into something that, for a while, at least, in 2001, seemed vital and new.  The Vaccines basically seem to have just de-skunged it right back into being The Cure, except without all that charmingly idiotic naivete that makes The Cure worth getting into in the first place.

•  I assumed that this song was going to be about post-breakup sex with your ex:  like, you broke up with him/her, ended up having coffee, and ended up screwing in a gazebo.  Instead, it’s essentially about rebound sex, which is a much less interesting topic.

•  WHERE IS THE MASHUP OF THIS SONG WITH BIRTHDAY SEX BY JEREMIH? WHERE? Because I would prefer to listen to that version.

•  On the plus side:  this is a really well crafted song.  The melody, the form, the arrangement, the couple of little self-consciously raw touches (like that awkward “Ah-aaah” bit at the end of the bridge) are all solidly satisfying. It sounds like what a song’s supposed to sound like, and if that means it never quite surprises you, well, there’s worse things. I will be filing these guys together with Oasis, Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, and Cole Porter in the great Spotify playlist of my mind. And that’s not an insult, by any means.

2) The Joy Formidable:  Cradle

(recommended by Babybiceps)

•  So someone apparently read my crossover fanfic where Veronica Mars is Draco Malfoy’s bratty little sister and made it into a rock band.  And that’s fine. (I am basing this characterization entirely on her haircut and outfit, which, to be fair, is all I’ve got to work with.)

•  The visual gimmick of this video is pretty clearly supposed to be that Post-Punk Malfoy Mars over there is on a teeter totter with all the various other people, and that’s fine.  But it’s sort of fun to try to imagine what else might be going on.  Are they all posting on horses? Jumping on a trampoline? Nodding really, really enthusiastically?

•  I liked this a whole hell of a lot, truth be told, but I think about %90 of my enjoyment is coming from the lead singer’s voice.  The guitar solos and whatnot were totally fine, and I actually quite like the ethereal little “ooweeoo” vocals, but the song almost lost me whenever she stopped singing.  Not a great sign for my future enjoyment of a band — I find that typically a really great voice can get me to like just about exactly one album all on its own, but after that it’s diminishing returns.

•  On the plus side:  in this song, at least, her voice sounds awesome.  It’s partially a function of how she’s recorded, I think — is there an chorus effect of some kind, there, or an overdub? And partially a function of the difference between the extreme presence and brittleness of her voice, and the extreme distance and suppleness of the backing vocals.  But mostly it has to do with the way her voice falls away from the pitch after hitting it, which turns a song that only has three notes in it, properly speaking, into something complex and sonically interesting.  Autotune has its place in music, but let it be said, pitch correction of ANY kind would squash this song like a bug.

• I have my reservations, but I will be listening to at least another song or two by these people.  Here’s hoping they stick the landing.

3) The Black Keys:  Tighten Up

(Recommended by Babybiceps)

•  Good things about the video:  I like that the Glasses family carries donuts around in their pockets to use as friendship tokens.  Little kids flipping eachother off and shouting (silently) “Mother FUCKER,” and going all feral and murderous is an old joke, but one I’m not tired of yet.  The way that the reveal of the adult woman is keyed to the awesome breakdown in the song is just brilliant, and a good example of how a video can bring out the best in a song.

•  Bad things about the video:  Women being sly and conniving and playing dudes off against each other is an old joke that I am, to be honest, pretty tired of.    Here as in the video for Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You,” the director seems to think it’s cuter if you do it with kids.  But it’s not.

•  Good things about the song:  Everything.  This totally goes into the rotation.  So funky, so crisp, so soulful!  And that breakdown, as already noted, is pretty choice. (I’ve got rather a soft spot for songs that change, then end, rather than going back to the A section.)

•  What’s bad about the song:  Alas, it gets disqualified on a technicality.  I can’t count this as “getting excited about a new rock band,” because based on the evidence of this song, The Black Keys are a soul band, and I get excited by that kind of music all the time.  Imagine Otis Redding or Sam Cooke singing this, and ask yourself whether you’d have to change anything else about the arrangement. Listen to this and Gnarls’ Barkley’s “Crazy” back to back, and tell me there’s a generic distinction to be made between them.  Still, that was a treat to hear, and it’s nice to know about these guys.

4) McLusky:  Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues (There’s the adult situation.  The song-picking algorithm, she is a harsh mistress).

(Recommended by Babybiceps)

•  Interesting title, to say the least.  I find myself wondering what “Lightsabre Cocksucking” is.  Does one… does one put the lightsaber in one’s mouth?  That seems extremely unsafe.  Or does “cocksucking” modify blues, so that it’s really just an intense case of the lightsabre blues?

• More to the point, I’m always intrigued by songs that reference a form of music that they aren’t.  This isn’t a blues song, it need hardly be said.  So what’s the word doing there?  Off the top of my head, it feels like a reference to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”  And yeah, there’s a sense in which hardcore (or this band, at least) can be seen as a successor to Bob Dylan.  One particular aspect of Dylan’s style that is, developed as far as it could possibly go, and all else discarded.

•  So, as the singer for Joy Formidable is to pitch, this guy’s voice is to rhythm.  It’s not… quite… there, in a way that’s probably actually super hard to pull off.  It’s quite wonderful, really. But again, I worry about this band’s ability to hold my attention over the long run.  Can McClusky make a song that isn’t basically this song wearing a fake moustache? I will have to find out.  And the trouble is, if there other songs really are quite different, it’ll probably feel like they sold out and went corporate.  You’re damned if you do…

•  I tried listening to two other Mclusky songs, “Falco vs. the Young Canoeist” and “Undress for Success.”  My fears were justified.  The first one sounds too much like “Lightsaber Cocksucking Blues” (although this may be a function of me not knowing enough about hardcore to recognize all the subtle expressive differences.) The second one seems so disappointingly normal alongside the other two.

And that’s it for this installment.  In a couple of weeks, I’ll pick up with Timothy Swann’s suggestions.  Going into this, I set an artificial limit for myself of only listening to one song by each band before writing the post, with the idea that if I found myself unable to stop myself from breaking the rule, it would mean that I had found a band that I was really into.  Mclusky was interesting enough that I broke the rule, and although I didn’t like what I found enough to say “done and done, resolution fulfilled,” I feel like I’m halfway there.

Related Posts

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Episodes 1 and 2

THE MIDTERMS

While Josh recovers from surgery, the staff launches support for midterm Congressional races. Charlie gets distant with Zoey, Toby obsesses over the extremists responsible for the attack, Bartlet obsesses over a former rival, and Sam urges a friend to run for office.

From the standpoint of craft, I admire the use of the midterm races as a narrative device to speed up time and get Josh back on his feet. It’s eminently plausible that the White House would spend twelve weeks in crisis mode, defending incumbents and boosting challengers. This keeps the audience from having to jump back and forth between Josh’s bedside and the Oval Office, which is fortunate.

I also admire how Sorkin tells the story of Charlie shying away from Zoey almost entirely off-camera. When I saw how that arc began, I grew dangerously bored. There are few tropes more rusted than a hero choosing to keep his love at bay because of (bitter sigh) his enemies. Thankfully, not only is it resolved within an episode, it’s resolved almost entirely off-camera! Zoey passes through rooms, looking for Charlie but not finding him, and at one point even addresses a question to Leo, off-screen, while another scene is starting. We forget all about it until the happy ending, where they make out on the White House porch.

(Since these are the first episodes of The West Wing I’ve seen, I never realized how much of a coup it was when Matthew Weiner landed Elizabeth Moss for Mad Men. She’s a gem of an actor)

Speaking of anticipating my objections, the plotline with Sam recruiting his college buddy to run for office is a refreshing change from last week’s idealism. Sam brings Tom and his wife Sarah to the White House, pitching them on a golden opportunity: the chance to run for Congress with the President’s endorsement. Given Bartlet’s record approval ratings, it seems like a sure thing.

Except, of course, it isn’t: a few sticky details in Tom’s past prevent the President from endorsing him, which costs him the race. The scene where Leo breaks the news to Sam hurts, especially because of its inevitability. Sam made the promise to Tom in good faith, but can’t back it up. It’s not a case of him choosing between his friends and the White House – he can’t choose. It has to play out the way it does, in disappointment. Serving the interests of an institution forces you to make shitty calls sometimes.

That said, while I love the direction I have a hard time with the tone. I’m glad they didn’t make Tom an overt racist, instead sprinkling his past with spinnable elements – a preference for white juries, membership in an all-white fraternity. This is good, because we shouldn’t be supporting Sam for casting aside his racist chum; we should be sympathizing with him for letting a friend down. And yet – jury selection? an old fraternity? These are the elements that cost a candidate the Presidential seal of approval? Did Sorkin actually know who was in Congress at the time of writing?

Also, while the scene where Tom and Sarah confront Sam in his office is great, Sarah unloads an awful lot of venom. This over a Congressional run that wasn’t even a dream of theirs three months earlier. I have several friends who’ve made failed Congressional bids, and they all have successful careers, happy marriages and the support of their friends.

But, of course, the point of the scene isn’t to be realistic but to forebode. Something tells me that this is going to come back to haunt Sam, perhaps the thunder pounding outside and the dark-eyed woman snarling, “If we ever get a chance to screw you in the future …” Is this what passes for foreshadowing in Sorkin’s writing? Was the gun that Josh got shot with stolen from above his fireplace in S1, perhaps?

I find Toby’s concerns about the legality of his proposed witch-hunt even more quaint than Leo’s concerns about Tom. What would an 18-year-old watching this show for the first time – someone whose political consciousness was formed during the War on Terror – think of this story arc? There might be a statute that prevents the FBI from going after people tangentially connected with an extremist group? Cheap shots at the [last / current / next] administration aside, this was old news even when The West Wing was being written. The Clinton Administration had no problem going after domestic terrorists (of which there were a few in that time), or using tools like extraordinary rendition.

I can’t swallow that someone who researched the details of the White House as meticulously as Sorkin did could be so wrong on the tone of its staff. But of course, Sorkin isn’t wrong, because he’s not telling a story about real White House staffers. He’s telling a story about conflicted, passionate heroes who happen to work in the White House. Sorkin’s protagonists are always deeply passionate people, whether they’re working in sports broadcasting (SportsNight), sketch comedy (Studio 60 …) or social media (The Social Network). Sorkin’s acknowledged embellishments in the story of the founding of Facebook don’t make The Social Network a less compelling story and, I suppose, neither do Sorkin’s embellishments of how Democrats act when they have power.

This is also the episode where Bartlet goes off on a rant to a Dr. Laura stand-in. I mention it now but I’m going to talk about it later, because it ties in better with “And It’s Surely to Their Credit.” But here it is, since I know you love it so:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD52OlkKfNs

The episode ends with the staff sitting on Josh’s stoop, passing a bottle of wine and saying, “God bless America.” And they mean it, too. I would have written it off as cheap fluff were it not for my girlfriend sitting next to me, who observed (unprompted) that that’s the sort of thing White House staffers probably say. And while I’m not sure I agree with that, it’s definitely the sort of thing we might hope White House staffers would say (especially if it’s an administration we like). And to take it one further, it’s the sort of thing a White House staffer might say, not out of deep sincerity but out of a conscious imitation of what they imagine a White House staffer is supposed to say. We are all conscious of the roles we’re expected to play to varying degrees, and sometimes we make choices based on the role rather than our desires. I imagine you can’t get to the White House, the most powerful office in the history of the human species, without being very conscious of the meaning of roles and images.

Sitting around with your coworkers and saying, “God bless America” with throaty solemnity is simultaneously unrealistic and very likely to happen. That’s the sort of weird pageantry that the White House and The West Wing demand of us.

IN THIS WHITE HOUSE

Sam’s humiliation on TV at the hands of a conservative writer gets compounded when Leo offers her a job. CJ panics over a slip of the tongue to a junior reporter. Toby and Josh coordinate a summit between the President of an African country and a panel of pharmaceutical CEOs on lowering the price of HIV drugs.

You wouldn’t think a show this dense with plot, character and verisimilitude would need to pad out a script with fluff. But consider this exchange between Leo and Ainsley Hayes when he offers her a job:

AINSLEY
Yes, sir. I’ll ask again: for what purpose was I brought here today?

LEO
So I could offer you a job.

AINSLEY
I’m asking because I do not think that it is fair that I be expected to play the role of the mouse to the White House’s cat in the game of, well, you know the game.

LEO
Cat and mouse?

AINSLEY
Yes. And it’s not like I’m not, you know… the fact that I may not look like some of the other Republicans who have crossed your path does not mean I am any less inclined towards…

LEO
Here it comes.

AINSLEY
Did you say offer me a job?

LEO
Yes. Associate White House counsel. You’d report to the Deputy White House Counsel, who reports to the White House Counsel, who reports to me.

AINSLEY
I’m sorry… A job in this White House?

I know that’s Sorkin’s attempt at being clever, but it just drags. It adds nothing to the narrative. We know, before the scene even begins, that Leo’s going to offer Ainsley a job. We can guess, based purely on what we know of her character, that her feelings will be conflicted. There’s no reason that this scene had to take three minutes. There’s no reason it couldn’t take 30 seconds.

This is one of my least favorite Sorkin tricks. It’s his homage to screwball, the machine gun patter of Cary Grant comedies of the 30s and 40s, but it rarely works. I never thought I’d find myself missing the laugh tracks of Sports Night, but at least they gave a script room to breathe.

It’s not purely a stylistic flourish, of course. It’s important that everyone in a Sorkin script be smart. We see lots of characters who act as villains, or as obstacles, or as comic foils, but they’re very rarely stupid. Ainsley may be confrontational, and she may be defending people that Sam considers reprehensible (gun owners), but she doesn’t mouth hollow rhetoric. She has smart, or at least clever, rejoinders to every point he makes, rejoinders that she deploys with lightning speed in her Round 2 with Sam outside Leo’s office.

You think because I don’t want to work here it’s because I can get a better gig on Geraldo? Gosh, let’s see if there could possibly be any other reason why I wouldn’t want to work in this White House? This White House that feels that government is better for children than parents are. That looks at forty years of degrading and humiliating free lunches handed out in a spectacularly failed effort to level the playing field and says, ‘Let’s try forty more.’ This White House that says of anyone that points that out to them, that they are cold and mean and racist, and then accuses Republicans of using the politics of fear. This White House that loves the Bill of Rights, all of them – except the second one.

This works even with the pharmaceutical company CEOs, who make it out of “In This White House” without being painted as venomous lizards. Yes, they’re stiff white assholes who are out of touch with the people their HIV medication serves – sub-Saharan Africans, who have a rate of HIV infection that makes the Black Plague look choosy. But there are legitimate reasons why flooding the nation of Kundu with HIV drugs won’t work. The CEOs may be callous but they’re not villainous.

No character in The West Wing, whether on the side of the angels or not, ever lacks for a comeback. This makes for stimulating dialogue and gives everyone depth, or at least the appearance of depth. But it can also make the conflicts fake and stagey. When all you have is Final Draft, everything looks like a monologue. No one expresses their feelings through a hurt look, or quiet reflection, or a wordless gesture, when there’s an opportunity to rant.

“The Midterms” was a sharp, strong episode, because everything flowed into one theme: the merit of holding fast, even when it seems like your efforts are futile. Sam’s faith is tried when he has to disappoint his friends; Toby’s faith is tried when the FBI can’t hunt down extremists. But everyone cleaves together because they believe that the system has merit.

In contrast, “In This White House” doesn’t have as strong of a theme. Ainsley tries to provide one with her clunky capstone monologue – that, despite disagreements, the staff of the Bartlet Administration are “righteous.” But where does CJ’s adolescent evasion of a feared felony charge fit into that theme? Or the existentialist muddle that comes from trying to aid African politics? The moral of this story is …?

AND IT’S SURELY TO THEIR CREDIT

Ainsley Hayes deals with her first week of working in a hostile White House. CJ chases down a disgruntled general. Sam tries convincing Josh to sue the white supremacists behind the men who shot him. Bartlet tries recording the weekly radio address despite several distractions.

If “In This White House” was a setup to the developments in “And It’s Surely to Their Credit,” I get what Sorkin was trying to do. It’s not the best choice, since an episode should stand or fall on its own merits, but it makes “And It’s Surely …” that much stronger. There is a theme to this episode, unlike “In This White House,” and it’s a theme that strikes right at the heart of the series.

This episode is replete with people rattling off trivia to win arguments. When CJ is facing off with the retiring General Barrie, she answers each of his criticisms of the President, and of recent defense strategy, with not just a string of facts but with meaningful insight as well. Sam tries to excite Josh about suing the Klan by delivering a series of precedents (all real, by the way). Abbey forestalls Bartlet’s excitement by launching into a list of historical women whom the U.S. has yet to honor. And there’s a recurring debate over whether a lyric came from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance or H.M.S. Pinafore.

GENERAL BARRIE:
Two divisions, the 10th Mountain Division at Ft. Drum and the 1st Infantry in Germany, have been rated C4. That’s the lowest of four possible readiness grades. It means, “Unfit for service.”

C.J.: No sir. Again, with all respect, I hate to disagree, but it means unfit for service based on the Pentagon’s “two war” doctrine. It’s based on how fast these divisions would be able to extract themselves from their peacekeeping mission, retrain on home bases, and ship off to a second of two, full-scale Gulf-War-sized conflicts.

In three of these four instances, victory goes to whoever has the best grasp on the trivia at hand. Abbey gets Bartlet to mention women who need to be honored in his radio address. C.J. gets the general to back down, not only answering his points but also leveraging some knowledge about military history to extort his silence. And Sam convinces Lionel Tribby that “He is an Englishman” comes from Pinafore, not Penzance by citing his history with the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

Having a more complete knowledge of precedent is the key to victory over your opponents in The West Wing. We see that in a few other places, and will doubtless see it again, but it’s bold here. You prove that you’re right by proving that you know more about the subject than the other guy, and you prove what you know by reciting it at hummingbird speed. He who has the best memory for quotes wins.

This brings me back, as promised, to Bartlet’s rant to the Dr. Laura stand-in at the end of “The Midterms.” Bartlet proves he knows the Bible better than she does by rattling off a number of barbaric punishments, chapter and verse. The implication, unspoken but obvious, is that Exodus and Leviticus are full of lots of monstrous trivia that nobody lives by today. The President wins because he has more data on his side. “That’s how I beat him,” he tells Toby at the end, referring to an earlier political opponent he’s been stressing over.

I’m leaning on this point because it’s a distinctly Sorkin choice. The staffers of the Bartlet administration are heroes because they have facts and precedent on their side. But we could just as easily imagine a staff that was heroic because they disregarded precedent. “To hell with tradition,” Sam might say. “So what if no one’s ever sued the Klan because of a tenuous connection to some lone wolf assassins? Let’s beat a new trail!” It wouldn’t even be that jarring of a story. We’re more accustomed to our heroes doing new things than wrapping themselves in the mantle of the old.

Or let me put it another way. Suppose Leviticus 18:22 said homosexuality was an abomination, but none of the other chapters of Leviticus said anything too bad. Would Dr. Jenna have won that face-off?

But The West Wing isn’t about breaking with tradition. It’s steeped in tradition. The staffers aren’t pioneers; they’re magistrates. They know all the twists and turns of the institution of democracy, and they prove it by keeping every obscure detail at their fingertips.

This, I suspect, is a large part of The West Wing‘s appeal. It tells smart people that their mastery of details is not only valuable, but a sign of goodness. It’s a Kantian ethic: right emerges not from right ends, but from correct action. Correct action – fidelity to the facts; knowing Pentagon readiness standards or Leviticus verses better than anyone – naturally flows into right ends. The categorical imperative tells us to keep our eyes on the path; that way, we’ll know we’re doing the right thing.

We must live and act morally, per Immanuel Kant, not because it makes us feel good but because it is our obligation. Acting to attain pleasure or satisfaction or just the warm certainty of rightness is utilitarianism, the way of Locke and Bentham and J.S. Mill. But doing right simply because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of how it makes us feel, is deontological. We do the right thing not because we derive pleasure from it, but because it is our duty.

Duty is the other major theme of “And It’s Surely …”. When arguing with Ainsley about Penzance, Lionel cites “Penzance or Iolanthe … one of the ones about duty.” “They’re all about duty,” replies Ainsley. This observation pops up more than once in the episode. Gilbert and Sullivan’s musicals are all about duty. They all involve formal societies, whether under the flag of England, Japan or a pirate fleet. The protagonists are torn between their hearts and the obligations of their social status. Fortunately, comic twists at the end allow them to fulfill both (you’re secretly a noble! everyone marries everyone else!).

Ainsley Hayes joins a Democratic White House out of a sense of duty. She feels drawn to the pomp and tradition of American government and will jump at the chance to serve it, even if it’s under an administration she disagrees with. General Barrie claims that it’s his duty to alert the public to “staggeringly dangerous vulnerabilities” in the American defense posture. CJ points out, however, that the General is following his heart, not his duty, and that his own sense of protocol is weak. Everyone argues about and wonders over what their duty entails and how best to live up to it.

And that’s one of the most striking tones of The West Wing. Conservative critics may have struggled with the show due to Sorkin’s liberal politics, but the characters are hardly radical. Nothing they propose is radical. Rather, they spend significant portions of each episode arguing over which of them hews closest to tradition. Toby looks for a legal precedent to justify sending the FBI after the Klan. CJ panics because she thinks she’s leaked grand jury information. And everyone in the White House staff has an opinion on Gilbert and Sullivan.

It’s easy to throw an old framework up against the wall and put a bullet in its head in the name of revolution. It’s hard to work within the system and still get the changes you want. And while yours truly would say that working within the system isn’t always worth it, I still recognize the appeal.

Related Posts

• OverWinging It: Season 2, Episodes 1-2
• Underthinking It: Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
• The Death of the Author and of Katy Perry
• The West Wing: Where To Begin?
• Episode 170: Guy who makes the craft services who feeds Aaron Sorkin

0:00–6:59 Question of the Week.
7:00–20:00 Marketing strategy; dogs, robot factories, and The Avengers.
24:00–27:59 Puppy Bowl’s Socratic purity.
28:00–34:00 Half time show.
34:01–41:59 Epic poetry of Ahmad Bradshaw.
42:00–56:59 David Beckham’s underwear and thresholds of potential rejection.
57:00–1:09:00 Old Navy ad deconstruction.

→ Download Episode 188 (MP3)

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Further Reading

Micro Bio-Spin^® Columns with Bio-Gel^® P-30

Polar Soda’s Conflict with Coke

Watch 2012 Super Bowl Commercials

Puppy Bowl VIII

“Anxiety relievable by purchase,” from David Foster Wallace, and other quotes about advertising on GoodReads

Bizarro, on the Superman Wiki

“Bizarro,” from Sealab 2021

Related Posts

• Episode 84: That’s Not Sexy!
• Episode 136: Reprehensible and Not Even All That Sexy
• “Super Bowl” vs “Superbowl”: An American Spelling Crisis? Update: AVERTED
• Bad Things Happen To You When You Use Our Product
• Open Thread for February 5, 2010

→ Download TFT Episode 56 (MP3)

References

• Milgrom, et al., “The Role of Institutions in The Revival of Trade”
• Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology
• Emerson, et al. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (2 ed.)

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Related Posts

• Episode 15: Santorum
• Episode 54: Pascal’s Wager
• Episode 53: Chekhov’s Bag Of Peas
• Episode 50: Chivy League
• Episode 49: Voodoo Smash

Is it Katy Perry herself, drawing on her intensity of emotion to speak truth to her own condition? Is it the social psychology of gender, speaking from a deep rooting in the minds of many? Is it an echo of Paul Simon? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? Russell Brand?

"I will be part of your interpretive discourse. Always."

Roland Barthes begins his seminal essay “The Death of the Author” with a similar question related to Balzac*. His answer to his own question seems extendable to the literature of celebrity, from the accounts of their thoughts an actions, to their own statements in the public sphere, to the murmuring curiae across all professional, amateur and social media, to the very names and identities that appear in our lunchtime conversations:

We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”

- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

That is to say, nobody is really “saying” that Katy Perry unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter. We are reading it, but once it is down in text (or really, any medium that is subject to interpretation by a reader), it is no longer attributable to an active, talking person capable of will and intent. Because she is not alive in this context, “Katy Perry” is dead, as are any individuals who might claim to speak for her or about her with authority. Their intentionality no longer exists with regards to this story, or in the collected discourse that makes up the myths, tales, gossip and songs around the literature of Katy Perry’s celebrity existence.

(Russell Brand the celebrity is also dead in this same way, but because of social forces and also because he is somewhat less well-liked, more controversial, and more prone to self-destruction, this is somehow less shocking.)

Dammit Jim, I’m a Doctor, Not Perez Hilton.

Bones McCoy needs a Zooey Deschanel-esque portmanteau, a la "adorkable", that combines "spacefaring doctor from the future" with "homespun country wisdom" -- and also "grizzled."

Announcing the deaths of things people like is one of the ways philosophers and theorists socially alienate their involuntary readers — so to step away from Barthes’s postmortem, let’s talk about what it means — in the act of literary interpretation — for identities to shuffle off their mortal coils, for intention lose its claim on meaning, and for the writer to be “dead.” The death of the author is to one degree or another taken for granted in the trendy study of literature these days, and at risk of making the jump from good blogger to bad graduate student,  it seems just as clearly so in the interpretation of celebrities.

After all, the interpretation of celebrities and the argument over the meaning of celebrities are a great deal more popular and enthusiastically practiced these days than up-close-and-personal encounters with Balzac*.

But let’s be clear what we’re talking about, because if we don’t, we end up feeling sheepish next to the Wolfenstein 3D enthusiast in the “Neitzsche is dead… God” t-shirt.

We are not saying Katy Perry does not exist as a corporeal being — that she no longer walks, breathes, lives, loves or feels in her brain, a distinct object with its own phenomenology. No, Katy Perry’s physical existence can be experimentally confirmed (though only the very creepiest of logical positivists would make the attempt).

We are not saying Katy Perry deserves no credit for her work, that she is unpraiseworthy, or that she shouldn’t necessarily be paid royalties for “California Gurls,” so long as we live in a society where people possess intellectual property rights — and/or the authority to extend such rights — for which currency is exchanged.

We are not saying that she is irrelevant, or that what she does is meaningless or unimportant.

We are saying that, with regards to the literature that is Katy Perry — and specifically interpreting and attempting to discern the meaning of that literature — Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.

More importantly, since Katy Perry isn’t generally in the business of this anyway, nobody else can step forward and claim to derive that same authority from knowing her intentions.

“I know what this article means, because I am Katy Perry’s number one fan. I know her heart, and I know how she feels about Russell. This is what it really means,” is nonsense.

In saying Katy Perry is dead, we say she isn’t alive and present as a celebrity exerting her intentions through celebrity gossip about her. The many influences on it and the maelstrom of ideas, preconceptions, echoes, references, marketing meetings, Facebook wall posts, and everything else associated with it, once they are literature, aren’t really derived from the willful acts of a celebrity anymore. There are too many intermediaries between the writing and the reading of a text (or, again, any interpretive medium) for the reader to allow for this sort of authorial authority to preside over meaning and interpretation.

The Walking Tall Tale

But what do I mean when I say “the literature that is Katy Perry?” Katy Perry is a person, right? And all this talk we go about doing with regards to her being a person doesn’t make her any less a person, does it? Let’s look back to Barthes:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

Definitions of literature in literary theory, whether relative or absolute, tend to flock around this general area — literature is information that doesn’t have to correspond to reality, but can have an effect, whether that is beauty, truth, tension, sublimity or any of the other familiar or exotic goals of literary pursuits, without needing to do anything else.

Poetry is a form of literature. Drama is a form of literature. Film is a form of literature. I’m positing, and I can’t reasonably be the first person posit it, but that doesn’t matter, (especially in discussions of the death of the author — because, after all, as you read this, I am not present in or in relation to it as a living being either) that celebrities themselves have these days so far transcended a relationship with reality that they have become a form of literature themselves, supported by the discourse around them across media and platforms.

Why do these people have a show? They’re just famous for being famous.”

- Every curmudgeon who thinks he is clever but is really just having a bad day, including me sometimes, about the Kardashians

By “the literature that is Katy Perry” I mean that Katy Perry as we read and interpret her — the body of information that we encounter that has this name associated with it in which we look for a certain meaning and/or significance — is far less a corresponding description of a person than a literature in itself, endeavoring in these same familiar and exotic literary pursuits.

Dasein In the Membrane (A.K.A. I Don’t Know If This Rhymes, Because Nobody Uses This Word In Actual Conversation)

As I’ve noted in previous articles and podcasts, I find the term Dasein, drawn from Martin Heidegger’s Being And Time, useful in discussions like this, because it doesn’t bog us down in scientific argument over the qualities of a person or of cognition, or of the functionality of the mind, and concerns us primarily with the thing capable of  experiencing “stuff.” Dasein refers to an entity which, “in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being.”

Sein und Zug

People who are alive in the world are Daseins. Philosophical zombies, theoretical beings who are materially indistinguishable from people but who do not possess subjective consciousness (which I find to be a problematic term because it sidetracks us into discussions of emergent properties and information theory), are not Daseins. Trains are not Daseins. Thomas the Tank Engine, were he to be real, would be a Dasein.

Daseins can be authentic or inauthentic. It is generally believed to be a good thing to be authentic as you’re going about the business of being-in-the-world. Celebrities, especially heavily managed and choreographed ones, with teams of publicists, stunt marriages, scripted interviews, meaningless but lucrative endorsements of useless products, and other such Kardashian endeavors, are often seen as inauthentic. They are fake, phoney, and emotionally detached, their pictures are heavily Photoshopped, their bodies are virtually cybernetic — the litany is familiar; they are not being honest.

I would take it one step further and say that when you see something like this:

"You gotta have blue hair." - Strong Bad

You’re not looking at an image of an inauthentic Dasein — Hell, you’re not even looking at a person anymore. There is so much interference and cultural interplay in this information that you return to an act of reading as described by Barthes, divorced from the act of writing. You are looking at something “narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself” — you are looking at literature with a dead or absent intentionality.

Why Arguments About Objectification So Rarely Actually Go Anywhere Productive

Now, this of course, brings up a major problem. The idea of the death of the author runs afoul of complaints about objectification.

And as much as it may sidetrack me, I have to mention it here, because after posting that picture people are going to yell at me about it anyway in the comments (except I’m not here! And my intentionality does not exist in this work as you read it, ‘natch!).

The idea behind objectification is that by understanding a representation of a person as less than a fully realized person, we instrumentalize or use that person, which, in a Kantian sense, is a crime against the dignity they ought to be afforded as rational beings, and in a Marxist sense, sets up a dialectic that subjugates and alienates them, most likely for the economic benefit of your own class of people.

However, if you want to look at an image of Katy Perry (or even a darker, sparser corner of the Internet where people actually look at Balzac*) and employ judgement in relation to the “thing-in-itself” through any number of rational formulations, or if you are seeking to lift up Katy Perry from her subaltern place in socioeconomic discourse, you will be sorely disappointed, because you are knocking on the door of an empty house. And, no I’m not saying she’s dumb (I’m sure she’s very smart).

Katy Perry isn’t actually there. That image is a literature of Katy Perry, and if you’re looking at it, the intentioned Katy Perry with whom you are seeking to interact with is already dead.

So, arguments about objectification often run into this problem, as for political reasons people continue to will that literature be capable of producing its causal agent for redressing, redefinition or redemption, when that agent is long absent and even asking for it is an incoherent act.

This of course does not mean objectification is good, or that protesting it is bad — but just that most of the time it is quite difficult to do anything about it, except to try not to allow systematic trends in its use to create deleterious effect on people’s standards of living.

The important thing to remember here is that these problems are intrinsic to the act of interpretation and finding meaning. One of the ways to try to get out of this is to not try to find the meaning in things, but to engage in art in different ways. That in the rest will have to be covered in another article.

Katy Perry Is A Commercial Enterprise

You may notice this advertisement exemplifies pretty much everything I've been saying. You might.

You might have stopped earlier in this article when I said something that was clearly and knowingly incorrect, or at least incomplete:

Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.”

-Me, “Earlier In This Article (We were all so young then. Look at the hair I had! Crazy!)”

If you’re paying attention, you might have stopped here and said of course she can! Dammit, she is Katy Perry!

And indeed you would be right — Katy Perry could indeed step forward and make an authoritative statement about what the article saying she unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter actually means, and she’d have the power to back it up. She could have her lawyers send a cease and desist. If you did the wrong thing with her celebrity, of which she did not approve, she could sic Chris Dodd on you. I don’t get the sense that Katy Perry is mean-spirited enough to do these things, but people who would lay some claim to her celebrity intentionality would.

Regardless, let’s say she did do it, would she be doing it because she is correct?

Far from a refutation of the death of the author, this power is one of the big reasons why the essay “The Death of the Author” exists — because this sort of act is not an act of interpretation, but an act of intellectual tyrrany — that if you aspire at all to freedom or dignity in the human mind, you should find it abhorrent that in capitalist societies and other similar societies people of wealth, power and influence get to step forward and claim to everybody else what something means just by virtue of them being the “author,” which is of course cognate with the word “authority.”

If celebrities are the modern-day folk heroes — the lenses through which people see their own lives, craft their relationships, and plan their own rituals, it the literature of their day-to-day is in celebrity gossip — what right that derives from truth rather than power does Katy Perry or one of Katy Perry’s lawyers have to come along to a random dude or lady reading People magazine at the checkout line and insist on what it means?

It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author… The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author…”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

If celebrity is literature, and I think it is, and the act of interpreting celebrity is confined to the reader of celebrity, which I think it is, and if all the confounding factors make intentionality in the creation of celebrity untransferable, which I think they do, then for an interested party (including the Dasein associated with celebrity of the same name) assert authority over readings of the literature of that celebrity by virtue of authorship or celebrity itself is an act of economic and social power — not interpretive value, reading, or meaning.

It’s bullying. It’s not nice. And I’m gonna tell Roland Barthes**, so nyah.

Let’s finish with something from the end of Roland’s essay, for symmetry:

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

**- Roland Barthes is dead. Unfortunately. PBUH

*- Always pun intended. Always.

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• Episode 10: The End of Hipstery
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