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December 3, 2009
I HAVE TO ADMIT SOMETHING
I have to admit something: I am obsessed with a one minute clip from a TV show I know nothing about. It is a show that is mostly disreputable and that contains over about 1000 footage I have no intention of watching. The background music is a song by a band I know nothing about, nor have ever heard another song by. I don't know any of the characters' names. It is a scene that was ridiculed prominently and famously by Andy Samberg on Saturday Night Live - it is:
The "Hide and Seek" scene from the OC
I have watched this clip over thirty times. Seriously.
I don't know why, but I think this scene is masterfully edited and that the music matches the scene both ironically and emotionally. I recognize that perhaps because I know nothing about this show, and have not seen a bunch of mildly talented generic good looking probably whiny young adult "actors" muff it with absurd rich-kid melodrama, that it gains some of its power. But as a one minute clip, this is pretty great stuff.
What a weird and awesome match of music and moment! I'm struck by everything about it: the darkness and shadows of the room, the suspense over the dude who is going to hit the guy who looks like Russell Crowe with a telephone (!), the girl who holds the gun like a girl who has never a gun, the way the unusual music and the manipulated, peculiar voice of the singer kicks in right when the bullet hits and both jars and makes more potent the impact, the way the blood cakes on the shirt and then drips, the way dude turns toward her, the symmetric layout of bodies on the floor as the music becomes a bizarre angelic chorus, the wordless eye of God last shot of a bunch of characters looking at the scene as the music provides no commentary whatsoever. The fact that this is apparently the last scene of a season, and that it fades out afterwards.
People tend to write me off as a high-culture contrarian or, at best, a high-culture contrarian wannabe. True, I guess; I don't watch reality TV and I find professional wrestling repugnant and uninteresting. I attempt to validate myself and my taste by expressing my genuine love for Burt Reynolds movies, but also comes across as ingenuine, and then my snobbishness is challenged as an affectation. I spend a lot of time wondering whether I am, in fact, a pseudo-intellectual poser who finds rhetorical means and aesthetic theories to validate the things that I think should be considered objectively good (like Neutral Milk Hotel and MOBY-DICK) but I wonder if I'm only liking stuff because other people like it.
And I just don't know what to do with this scene.
I'm writing a paper on THE FEDERALIST PAPERS about the linguistic/rhetorical/syntactic concept of "iconicity" - where "discursive form often enacts representative content" - that's working at the sentence level, of course, but its basically when form and theme work together so well that the former not only enhances the other (which it is supposed to do) but seems to make the implicit meaning absolutely indispensable and ultimately persuasive.
And I don't know, I feel like this scene kind of does this. It may not be a perfect match of background and foreground, but it works pretty beautifully.
I am thinking of going to see a mental health professional.
| By Andytown | 10:28 PM