Clap Clap Convergence #3

Well, maybe less convergence and more "the two halves of a post actually coming together in real life." I.e. this plus this. What's worth talking about--although, for the record, I really had no idea that West Side Story was actually going to come up on Ugly Betty when I made my post comparing the two--is the way in which it worked, and how it was a new and different addition to the canon of great music usages in TV shows. It wasn't an "expressing the characters' inner lives" kinda thing, or a "directing the emotional mood of the scene" kinda thing, or an "ironic counterpoint" kinda thing. It was closest to the complicated dance (har har) that "Come Sail Away" does in the pilot of Freaks and Geeks (which there's a whole book to be written about), but that was more an instance of a song's different levels of emotional context playing out in and enhancing the visuals.

But this is more like when you smell cumin, and you're like, "ugh, smells like BO" and then you put it in something (hummus, roasted potatoes) and it makes it taste much more delicious, and you're like, "well, these potatoes are great, and maybe cumin isn't so bad after all." The song in question is "Somewhere" and the context (spoiler alert, obvs) is that Justin is singing it onstage in a school production as Hilda finds out from Betty that Santos, her fiancee and Justin's father, is dead. This sounds a bit cheesy, and it certainly had the capacity to be, especially considering that (as reviews have noted), Santos was far from a central character. Similarly, the song itself is close to the height of cheese, and not necessarily all that good; in the movie of West Side Story, it falls particularly flat, seeming to want to conjure a tragic sadness that's unearned by the drama or the characters.

The show seems to agree with that assessment to a certain degree, placing Justin within a realistically cheap-looking set and not giving him abilities beyond expectation, nor do they switch to a directly-delivered professional recording of the song as the camera switches focus to Betty and Hilda. The point is not the song itself but that Justin is singing it. When the news of Santos' death hits, the song suddenly earns its emotional impact and reveals itself as a lovely thing, even when delivered in an unperfect way; indeed, its unperfect delivery is a large part of its charm, since the emotional impact stems not from a melodramatic, heightened sense of loss, but an arbitrary and everyday one. At the same time, the conceivably familiar scene of someone finding out about a death is heightened by the fact that Justin is unknowingly singing a lament for his dead father. The affectedness of the song works as the only adequate way to convey a common but horrible loss, and by placing it in the middle of a realistically dingy school musical, the loss hits us as viewers in a way it couldn't otherwise. That ability to mix wonderful camp with the life that always surrounds them works here better than it does at any other point on the show so far, actually uniting the two by showing why that camp exists. It's a way of whistling past the graveyard, tragedy rehearsed so when it really comes, it feels familiar. The point is not that "Somewhere" is a great song or that Santos is dead; these things don't affect us. But the way it hits the characters, and the way it doesn't hit Justin yet, that gets to us, and that's why the moment works so stunningly well.

Labels: musicals, TV, Ugly Betty

posted by Mike B. @ 6:54 AM