TVNZ has obviously invested a lot of money in the miniseries The Pacific because its advertising has permeated through a range of its other programming across channels. The respectable TVNZ 7 channel is playing real documentaries about the war in the Pacific to promote this miniseries – the ads say so themselves. One News also cashed in on the action, reaffirming it as a top quality source of tabloid-grade drivel. Also this week, Breakfast went to the set of Grey’s Anatomy… followed up by a Close Up feature on the same thing. TVNZ is becoming quite the oxymoron.
Recently, I had the privilege of witnessing the embodiment of teenage love and the inexpressible emotions contained therein through the observation of a music video: Justin Bieber’s Baby. It happened one day as I was pedalling away on an excercycle at a reputable recreational establishment. Every reputable gym has at least one TV tuned to C4 or Juice TV (preferably both for maximum impact). The music videos displayed on these channels make me want to claw my eyes out if the music hasn’t already made me want to rip my ears off. This song, however, was different. Its profundity bypassed my eyes and ears; it spoke straight to my heart.
For centuries, great minds have pained themselves on describing, often in excrutiating detail, the torment of that universal base emotion which rests precariously on the precipice between reason and madness. This song put past attempts to shame by succinctly articulating the inarticulable. Its deep and meaningful chorus goes something like this: “baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, baby, baby, no, like, baby, baby, baby, oh”. Freud and Darwin would be proud, for what, after all, is love but the desire to produce offspring?
The music video features a young male studmuffin professing eternal and undying love by repeatedly assaulting and harassing a girl. Upon her refusal to be intimidated, bribery is employed: the young boy pledges to purchase for the young lady “anything” and to buy her “any ring”, the funds for procurement presumably extracted from his mother’s purse. Well, in this case, it would be from currencies acquired by young girls from their mothers’ purses for the explicit purpose of purchasing Justin’s albums, after Def Jam Records have extracted the appropriate fees, of course.
Next, the music video indulges in a little cultural stereotype as an African-American starts breakdancing, obviously so deeply touched by his white friend’s plight in getting a girlfriend that he can do nothing other than employ that natural rhythm all members of his ethnic group instinctively possess. Actually, the African-American homeboy is physically shoved by the video’s protagonist into an empty space as if being physically coerced to bust a move. Both male and female posses subsequently start dancing in a face-off. There is some praiseworthy gender-neutrality, as the breakdancing African American is also shoved back by a girl. But that’s OK, because we have a positive African American role model coming up – Ludacris. Perhaps the girl could have utilised a melody from Ludacris’ earlier work and told our young infatuated hero to “get back”. Ludacris proceeds to impart his wisdom as the salient sensei, the artificer and paternal guide to the young hero talks about his first love at the tender age of three and ten. His contract to partake in this ditty little number likely involved a deal with Starbucks, because he drops their name in there, for all those other times when you’re not in love, and this is positively reinforced by Justin shouting ‘whoo’!. After treating us to the catchy chorus a few more times, we see Justin shake hands with his sensei; the girl has been won over and the story is concluded as the two walk out of the mall to a bright young future together (mostly lit by the neon lights of the city)… which incidentally involves walking past a Starbucks. What a coincidence!
The music video is shot in a bowling alley, suggesting wholesome white middle class pursuits of a leisurely nature that presume a certain disposable income and an acceptance of the shopping mall as communal facility. You try dancing in the alleys and lanes in real life and see how you get on. The wholesome, innocent, leisurely middle-class message is prevalent throughout, ignoring the tensions of sexual frustration and wrapping them up in a consumerist package instead. Copulation is not mentioned, although little Justin briefly appears to stick out his crotch… when he’s dancing by himself. Disposability is endemic in this diabetically sugary pop: disposable income, disposable cups from Starbucks, disposable girlfriends (a new model for every music video), even disposable celebrities to bask in the reflected glory of (another video features Justin casually calling Usher on his iPhone).
Now, you may rightfully ask why I’m picking on some dandy in need of a good noogie… with ninja claws. Of course, I write this bitter, vindictive piece because, deep down, I’m jealous of Justin. By finding fault with every aspect of the video, I am displacing my own misery. You see, when I was his age, I could never impress the girls with a hyper-edited dance sequence, or a Holywood perm. I didn’t have anyone in my posse to start breakdancing when my heart was breaking, and we never went bowling. These experiences, when compared to Justin’s, leave me an acerbic, misanthropic, hollow shell of a man.
To think that my childhood deprived me of this...
It was reported to me from a highly reputable source that Baby was blasting out of the sound system at a recent Law faculty do. Imagine 20-something year old students listening (or, heaven forbid, dancing) to Bieber’s Baby. It just shows the timelesness of his message: the mark of a great artist.
Note: This piece was intended to satirise both the video and deconstructive readings of videos themselves.
Today I saw the opening sequence to Jane Campion’s film adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady. After watching the entire film, it’s still the thing that really sticks out for me.
The sequence begins with pink credits appearing on a black background. We hear voices of five women sharing intimate thoughts about their relationships. Music (‘My Life Before Me’ by Wojciech Kilar) fades in and then we see a top-down shot of numerous of girls and women lying down on a field. The sounds of birds chirping is laid over the music. The rest of the opening involves a montage of filmic ‘portraits’ of multicultural girls and women: some happy, others sombre or gloomy. These are clearly modern women, although the discman that the first girl rocks to would be considered pretty ancient by today’s standards. That perhaps best of all makes the film dated; by including what was then a modern piece of technology, Campion makes the film vulnerable to the planned obsolescence of rapid postmodern technical advancement.
Discman aside, this isn’t the kind of introduction one would expect to lead into a film about a 19th century novel. Why is it there? And what is it trying to say?
Needless to say, it is a highly artificial, constructed sequence. The power of music to add an inarticulable depth to what may otherwise be a bland or strange scene struck me anew when I saw this. Within the confines of the sequence, these girls and women embody a kind of innocence onto which we are invited to project the troubles of the world that they face, thereby explaining some of their gloomy expressions. Viewers are led to make a comparison between the projected lives of these women and the life of Isabel Archer over a century beforehand.
The sequence can be read as a feminist assertion over a book that was written by a man; the opening is all about women, for women, by women. That this story is the product of a man’s imagination is sidelined in the matriarchal bubble of the opening title’s geography. We can also read it as an attempt to make the relevance between the 19th and 20th/21st centuries more explicit: the modern mixed with the pre-modern.
Another way of reading it is linked to the title of the book: The Portrait of a Lady. It is perhaps echoed by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A portrait is an artist’s impression. The portrait suggests one artist’s impression – that is, Henry James. A lady is very vague: which lady? Does it matter? Perhaps any lady would do, if the artist is talented enough to paint a stunning portrait. Maybe, in the end, the book is all about Henry James showing off his prowess as a writer. The title sequence might be picking up on this; we do not see a single lady: we see many ladies, each of whom might lend herself to a fascinating portrait. Can we then universalise Isabel Archer? Is she some archetypal lady? I hardly think so: maybe this is the postmodern message of the title sequence: by portraying a diverse range of women, it resists the singularity of Isablel Archer. An oppositional reading might suggest that such diversity is subsequently narrowed and directed toward Isabel Archer (if we are to take her as an archetypal figure).
Looking to the rest of the film, there is an interesting black and white sequence of Isabel’s travels. It plays like a silent film, with music being added afterwards by someone playing the piano as the film plays in a cinema. There are a number of other directorial twists added to the film (for what is a film adaptation but a particular reading of a text). Their enchantment lies in their ambiguity (some being less ambiguous than others of course). Like the 3 year gap in the book (and the film), they invite projection, and that is perhaps the reason why the title sequence is so interesting. That there is not necessarily a right or wrong reading is part of the appeal.