Just Say Yes

I'm sure everyone's discussed this already, but I'm just now hearing Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is absolutely fantastic. And, of course, there is the twist ending: Romeo and Juliet live! And this was intentional:

I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn't so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story. Except for the ending. I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it's a tragedy. I thought, why can't you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?

I love this, of course, but it also sounded weirdly familiar. And then I remembered that it's sorta how I ended my piece on Hamlet 2. To quote myself, if I may:

That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself.

It seems disrespectful to make a sad ending happy. But if art is really important to you, if you really love it, then it should feel real to you, it should feel like it's part of your life, because you are so intimately engaged with it. Part of the power of these made-up stories is that they seem believable, and when weighted with the kind of aesthetic power that a great artist can conjure, they take on the feeling of prophecy. Change the story and change your destiny, or that's how it feels. And it feels that way because the tragedy of the situation speaks to you a little too strongly. That Steve Coogan's character in Hamlet 2 was able to change his life is the happy ending, but the sad part is that he identified with Hamlet in the first place, in all his emotionally disturbed, hallucinatory, father-issue-having glory. Sure, he was eventually redeemed, but that's just a story too. When you get to that key change at the end of "Love Story" it really does kill; as manipulative and base a move as it is, it really fucking tugs at something. And when it's over, and you look back, you have to think about why Swift is identifying with Romeo and Juliet at all. It's not actually that great of a love story; it's much more a story of infatuation and manufactured drama. But that's what feels real to teenagers. By enacting a happy version of the play, Swift is admitting her own enmeshment in the original Romeo and Juliet story, and that's sad, in a way.

These sort of fantasies are all over pop (see also Twilight), and they tend to get dismissed as escapist or illusory. That seems unfair to teenagers. Few, if any, really think they live in these worlds pop creates, and while I'll certainly admit there's danger in their very real assimilation of some of that world's attitudes (see also Twilight), I think there's also value in the way they actually use them. Life for teenagers already is a Shakespearean tragedy, at least to them, and to pursue art that took on that worldview would simply be to strengthen their own self-image in a not particularly salutary way. If a kid can do this--can take something that reflects their life and reimagine it into something good--that seems like a remarkable act. Just as we have fantasies of the bright-eyed kids turning dark, it seems worth wondering what would happen if an angsty teen (and no teen worth knowing isn't angsty) were able to imagine transcendence.

The thing is: there's an angsty teenager inside all of us, a grumbling undercurrent insisting that the world is shitty and we are all diseased and there's no one you can trust. To that inner goth, pop screeches and wails with dissonance. But it doesn't have to. Cultural critics worry that things distract us from reality, help us avoid reality, obscure reality. But sometimes reality, as they say, bites, and to take that tragedy and turn it into a comedy would not be the worst thing. Pop's power is, in no small part, its ability to imagine a world much like this one, but shinier--and to make it, whether you submit to its charms or not, believable.

Labels: hamlet 2, pop, taylor swift

posted by Mike B. @ 9:18 PM