Ugly Betty and a certain song

The funny thing is, for a while now I was meaning to talk about Ugly Betty again. Specifically, I wanted to mention how happy the clap clap household is about Marc's boyfriend, Cliff, a photographer who's sweet in a gruff kind of way. (He reminds us of various kindly creative people we know, half of whom I suspect Miss Clap has had a crush on at some point.) He and Marc have an affectionate relationship that rings very true, and it's been immeasurably pleasing to watch them approach each other, not in a of Mulder and Scully "they have to hook up!" kind of way, but more like when your friend is hesitantly growing closer to someone you know will make them happy, and it's like kittens falling asleep on the couch together or something: you don't want to make too much noise or you'll frighten them away.

In the most recent episode, there's a lovely sequence when Marc's gotten jealous of Cliff and tells him that they're through. Then later, he reconsiders and says he wants to get him back. Amanda, his hag, says something to the effect of, "You should make some big, dramatic gesture, like making a mad dash to the airport, tearing through security, and just about as the plane doors are about to close, you yell, 'Cliff!'" To which Cliff, who as it turns out is standing nearby, replies, "Yes?" "Or," Amanda says, "you could just go talk to him."

This is a joke on Amanda's part (she knows Cliff isn't getting on an airplane, and she's making fun of Marc for being such a drama queen), but it's also a joke about television conventions, a joke which you can ascribe to, I guess, the show itself. There is an awful lot of running to the airport done on TV, and not only is that unrealistic in that no one in the real world has ever made a mad dash to the airport--it's also unnecessary. If you have a real relationship with someone, grand gestures are never really needed. Imagine if you had done something so bad that the other person was leaving on an airplane, and then you simply showed up at the airport, and they changed their mind. How dysfunctional is that, right? You've done something so bad that the other person wants to escape to at least another state, if not another country, but when you make the effort of basically braving traffic, they cancel their non-refundable plane ticket and take you back? That, it's safe to say, is not a healthy relationship.

But what happens next moves it even beyond a joke and to a real moment of connection. While running to the airport is a TV convention, so is talking it out: there's a conflict, both people say they're sorry, there's a kicker joke, and that's the end of the scene and the conflict. And so you expect Marc to do something like that, which wouldn't be bad at all, but it would be fairly conventional. But instead of talking to Cliff, he just leans in and gives him a hug, wordlessly, and that resolves the conflict just as easily but far more honestly. In a relationship, fights generally aren't fights so much as chillings, distancings, subtly (or not so subtly) withheld affections. You can both come out and say you're sorry, but apology isn't really the issue, it's forgiveness; not the offering of the apology, which may have been proffered for some time, but the actual accepting of it, the yielding of individual pride to the pleasures of connection. In a real relationship, fights are two people who would ideally like to be smooshed up next to each other holding back on that impulse because they feel hurt, and they don't want to be close to the person who hurt them. And in that situation, a hug says a lot. It can say, for instance, "I was dumb, let us be smooshed again." Wordless gestures tend not to happen much on TV, for perfectly reasonable institutional reasons, but this one worked because it rang so amazingly true.

What's interesting about Marc and Cliff is that, in the context of the show, they seem like such an unlikely couple. The show's gotten a lot of drama out of the fact that Marc is supremely, openly, and happily superficial above all else, but Cliff is schlubby and messy and not very concerned with his appearance. Marc has always been the most unreal character on the show precisely because he was all surface, and it's interesting that he's ended up with the most true-feeling relationship. But it feels true, I think, precisely because it's not a conventional TV relationship. The rhythms of television are pervasive enough that if two people you know have, say, a Ross-and-Rachel relationship, even if the relationship itself is totally genuine and serious, it still feels a little unreal. Marc and Cliff's relationship upends a number of conventions, not least the one about gay men only having tragic, shallow, or bitchy relationships. The only similar relationship that springs to mind from TV is Dan and Roseanne on Roseanne, but she would've had to be skinny and pretty for it to really work in the same way. Cliff actually seems flown in from another show, like Northern Exposure or Men in Trees or something, except he's a gay fashion photographer living in New York. The fact that he's a new type does a lot. But at the same time, of course, it's not accidental that he's named Cliff. He does share a lot with Cliff Clavin on Cheers, a show that was (also) very good at simultaneously dodging and exploiting conventions. And so it works in these two ways, making a joke about TV but also depicting a truth.

It was a lovely moment. But then, at the end of that episode, something else happened.

It was the wedding episode. The wedding episode is something any series with any sort of soap opera/melodrama aspect is required to have at this point. It's always a big episode, an event episode, and the show had really built up to this episode through the season. If you haven't been following, perhaps some background. Bradford Meade, the aging owner of the fashion magazine where the show is set, was engaged to marry Wilhelmina Slater (played, of course, by Vanessa Williams), the director of the magazine. Bradford's son Daniel was opposed to the marriage, and Bradford's ex-wife broke out of prison and repeatedly tried to kill Wilhemina in order to stop her from marrying her ex-husband. At the beginning of the season, the wedding was off, but Wilhemina engineered things to get it back on. She doesn't actually love Bradford, and is just marrying him for control of his magazines.

So. In the course of the episode, Daniel (who is on the outs with his father) finds out that Wilhemina is sleeping with her bodyguard. He bursts into the wedding and demands to talk with Bradford. They go into the hallway, Daniel accuses Wilhemina, Bradford doesn't believe him, they yell, he starts sweating, and then he goes back into the chapel. (Interrupting an amazing comic routine by Amanda, who was singing "Milkshake" because Quincy Jones was in the audience and got really into it.) After retaking his place on the platform, he sees the bodyguard in the audience, the sound starts to go blurry, and we hear heartbeats getting faster and faster. Suddenly he collapses, clearly having a heart attack, and Wilhemina tries to revive him, but they pull her off.

Then there is a montage: Daniel on his knees, performing CPR; the priest, crossing himself; Bradford's lifeless face, pulling out in a spiraling overhead shot to register the entire wedding party, filled with grief; Betty's family watching it on TV, looking shocked; and Betty herself watching it in Times Square, registering disbelief.

And what song do you suppose is playing over this montage?

"Hallelujah." The Jeff Buckley version.

Now, obviously, I'm biased, as I wrote an entire paper on covers of "Hallelujah" and their use in TV shows. But I'm pretty sure this is the very first ironic usage of "Hallelujah," because the situation over which it's playing is, in context, not particularly sad. First of all , the very next thing we see is a preview for next week's show, in which Bradford is alive and well in the hospital, so he's fine. Also, people have been actively trying to kill Bradford, mainly his son-who-became-a-daughter Alexis, who is in fact by his side when he gets the heart attack (she got amnesia and forgot that she hated him). Usually when you hear "Hallelujah" playing, it's because something actually tragic has happened, because a major character has died (as in The OC), or because everyone is sad about different things. Bradford is a total dick who people wanted dead anyway, and he's not even dead, so it's neither actually tragic nor a major death. Betty is sorta sad because she just got fired, but her dad just became a US citizen, and Marc has this cute new boyfriend, and more importantly, Christina is actually in a tragic situation (her ex-husband shows up out of the blue with a liver problem that will kill him unless he comes up with $100,000) and she's left out of the montage.

That's why the use is ironic. Like with the above situation with Marc and Cliff (and countless other times over the course of the show), it's a subtle joke about TV. More specifically, it's a joke about "Hallelujah" and the way it's used, mocking the situation and indicating that the show thinks it's as hilarious as I have for some time now. I could be wrong, but there were no major usages of "Hallelujah" at all last season, as everyone working in TV seemed to realize that it's become a cliche. So why bring it back now except to use it as a cliche, to make fun of the very cliche-ness of the situation while at the same time milking it for all it's worth? It's functionally equivalent to casting Posh Spice, except instead of making fun of Posh (as they do relentlessly and with her consent in this episode), it's making fun of the gesture itself. "Hallelujah" is as much a punch line as Posh Spice, but unless you already regard it as a cliche--and even if you do!--it still functions in exactly the way it always has. Nothing serious has happened and the guy it happened to deserves it wholeheartedly. But it's the big episode, the wedding episode, someone collapses at the end, you play "Hallelujah," and bam--you feel sad, right? You feel like something major and important has happened. It's the end of the wedding episode and so you need a big, dramatic moment. Instead, you get a parody of big, dramatic moments--the priest crosses himself, Times Square, Jeff fucking Buckley--that is so well-designed that it in fact does work as a big dramatic moment.

It's brilliant, but it's also an encapsulation of what I love about this show. Lots of shows make fun of TV conventions, but they often do so with a nudgy-nudgy self-congratulatory tone that can be very funny but which denies the real dramatic power and utility of many of these conventions; I love The Simpsons and South Park, say, but you simply can't use them in the way you do Gilmore Girls or, if you're into that sorta thing, ER or Friends. This makes it seem like you either have to mock the way TV is made or submit to it. But Ugly Betty dances on some microscopic line between camp and drama that allows it to mock TV conventions while simultaneously exploiting them to the fullest, so we can not only use it in the exact same way we do a soap opera, but we can enjoy it without feeling like we're compromising our standards, which in the end makes those moments of truth far more devastating than they would be in any other setting. (See, for instance, the Hilda business in the season premiere, which deserves its own post.) I still don't quite know how it does it, but I never cease to be impressed by how well it does it.

And holy shit, Hallelujah.

ADDENDUM: Argh! As commenters on Michelangelo Matos' TV Club post about this episode have pointed out, the actor who played Bradford also played the evil dad role on The OC, where "Hallelujah" got its real push into cultural shorthand, and where he did die of a heart attack. That's the final nail in the coffin of my argument that it's an ironic usage, I think. Don't believe I missed that.

Labels: hallelujah, TV, Ugly Betty

posted by Mike B. @ 4:28 PM