Thursday, May 30, 2013

Flesh and Blood

This post may be a bit raw, but there's reason for it. Just warning you if you're squeamish, you may not want to read on.


Only hours after going under the knife this past Tuesday, I found myself holed up in bed, watching two particularly fleshy dramas: Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies and NBC's Hannibal. 

Don't ask me why those were the two media outlets I latched onto after having a growth removed from my ear. You would think that while popping painkillers I would want to escape from what I had just experienced under local anesthesia, or that movies and shows about flesh and blood would not be the right comfort. But nope! I'm silly.

Two different depictions of flesh became clear while I watched--one in Warm Bodies, and the opposite in Hannibal. Warm Bodies is told from the point of view of a romantic zombie who falls for a human. I know, it sounds gimmicky, but it works, mostly thanks to Nicholas Hoult's convincing zombie/human balancing act. As his character 'R' eats human brains or receives a knife in his chest, his dead flesh and that of the humans he eats seems trivial and unimportant, just a corporeal encasing. All that matters is the heart and soul that makes up these creatures, not whether their flesh is decaying or alive.

R in Warm Bodies does not have a warm body. 

On the other hand, Hannibal is all about flesh and blood as signifier. Killers, cannibals, and even cops are defined in this show by their fascination with, ability to identify, and temptation to destroy, flesh. It's a very gruesome show, with lots of splattering and high-production-value gunfire. It's too bad the narrative tends not to explain itself well, dropping plot leads and secondary characters who could be intriguing too quickly in order to concentrate on its monotonous central pair, Dr. Lector (played by Danish heartthrob Mads Mikkelsen) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). With more investigation into the killers and less role-play between deranged psychiatrist and afflicted subject, the show could the enthralling psychological thriller it strives to be. But that's not my point.

My point is that I feel so immune to flesh and blood on screen, but in real life it's still very raw. I was awake during the procedure on Tuesday, which meant that from my reclining position I got to see my own blood get sucked into a tube and a piece of my ear get clipped off, trimmed, and reattached. As it was happening, I had the strange distance of a curious moviegoer, wondering what they were doing next and why my blood was so pink. But since I've been out of there and the pain has surfaced, I get queasy whenever I picture that sliver of my own skin lying on the surgical table.

Which is reassuring, in a way. I'm glad to realize that our cinema culture of ultraviolence has not completely penetrated my everyday relationship towards flesh and blood. I'm still sensitive, like my throbbing ear.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Melodrama and Performance in The Real L Word

You may remember my admission to a guilty pleasure a while back. Well, today's the day to indulge my newest fascination with trash television: The Real L Word.


To escape some temporary melodrama of my own (involving a suspicious mole on my ear), I started watching Showtime's very melodramatic reality series about a group of lesbian women in Los Angeles. As the title betrays, the show is the 'real-life' version of the fictional precursor The L Word. The girls are both more butch and more glam, if that's possible, than in the fiction, and the drama feels concocted and underwhelming like another namesake, MTV's notoriously bad The Real World. 

Reality drama. For some reason those two words sound oxymoronic when placed next to one another. This got me thinking about how The Real L Word creates its melodrama, because it pulls its stories from people's everyday lives. Just because the show is about lesbians doesn't necessarily mean their lives are inherently more interesting or dramatic, and of course there are those who will argue that a show like this normalizes and banalizes the queer community by focusing on a particularly femme  subset.  But in general, doesn't real life tend not to have nicely composed story arcs and narrative progression? Judging by that deduction, I'd say that reality television must capitalize on and then mold the events of these people's lives into a narrative.

Film theorist Jane Feuer writes that the key to melodrama in television, which we see most heavily in soap operas, is excess: "The concept of melodrama [is that of] creating an excess, whether that excess be defined as a split between the level of narrative and that of mise-en-scene or as a form of 'hysteria.'" In other words, melodramas exaggerate emotions, enhance climaxes, and are generally a bit excessive. 

So how does The Real L Word create melodrama out of a steady yet narratively weak stream of events?

First of all, I think the show's producers did a very good job casting people who know how to perform for the camera. Romi may indeed be a very emotional person, but she also knows how to play it up. Whitney, the most enigmatic and fascinating to watch, always has a rotation of girls in and out of her bed and head, but I wonder how much of the draw is well-oiled star behavior. These girls know how to ham it up for reality tv.

Secondly, the editing of the show is actually quite crafty for a seemingly trashy reality show (props to Showtime), because it pulls topics into episodes while still maintaining a serialized pull across episodes and seasons. For example, the first season starts each episode with a Q&A of the characters on certain 'lesbian' topics: coming out, femme vs. butch, Dinah Shore, etc. These topics then dictate the loose narrative structure of what we see for that hour, while still incorporating the larger story lines about relationships that form the center of the drama. We wait for the topic to pop up, i.e., who will be coming out on this episode? as a sort of MacGuffin that gives way to bigger themes like trust, betrayal, loyalty, cheating, and so on.  This overarching structure gives the editors the ability to play up the emotional climaxes so needed in a melodrama.

Lastly, music is everywhere. Mostly contemporary, sometimes queer, artists provide the soundtrack, which is tweaked and matched to every little emotion in there. Again, performance and editing go hand in hand when it comes to the music, so that even if we didn't feel own own, direct emotion coming mirroring a scene, the music underscores this emotion and makes us feel it.

I'm not necessarily recommending that you watch this show, but perhaps you can appreciate the way it is crafted to a particular end...