Josh Schwartz has always been accused of having autobiographical characters in his shows, and this is meant as a criticism. Seth Cohen on The OC and Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl are gifted, misunderstood, self-important teenage nerds, and the shows seem to take them as seriously as they take themselves, arguably to their detriment. But the main character on his other show, Chuck Bartowski, is just as autobiographical, but in a more mature and perhaps more revealing way. Where Dan and Seth represent an artist remembering an adolescence many people can relate to, Chuck is his way of telling the story of his adult life, and as a television producer, this shouldn't be something most people can relate to. By masking autobiography in metaphor, however, he makes his story more inclusive, tells a personal story in a decidedly impersonal medium, and launches a subtle critique of the system that made him what he is today.
This will make more sense with two pieces of context. First is the context in which the show itself appears. Chuck, along with Gossip Girl, is one of two new shows Schwartz created after the cancellation of his first show, The OC. That show had a monumental first season overstuffed with drama and disasters, but couldn't keep up the impossible pace, and in the middle of its fourth season it was announced that it would not be returning for a fifth. The OC was always regarded as a trashy teen drama, but the two new shows reveal that there were, in fact, three elements to The OC: melodrama (which was obvious, and which now resides on Gossip Girl), action (fires, overdoses, earthquakes, all now on Chuck), and, perhaps counterintuitively for viewers who missed the excellent final half of The OC's final season and the relationship between Ryan and Taylor, comedy. These three elements worked in harmony only briefly on Schwartz's original show, but broken out into their own series, they can flourish.
Secondly, there is Josh Schwartz's biography. A child of Rhode Island toymakers, he was a junior in the film school at USC when he sold his first script for $500,000. After two failed pilots, The OC became a massive success. Schwartz was 27 when it premiered, making him "the youngest person in network history to create and produce his own one-hour series." He was so young that he had never been a staff writer; all of his television credits were as a show creator and producer. In a very real sense, he was plucked from obscurity and thrown directly into the maelstrom of the TV business.
It's important that where Schwartz's two other fictional doppelgangers are teenagers. Tolstoy to the contrary, all unhappy adolescences are basically the same, and what makes them so ridiculous in hindsight is that every single unhappy teenager thinks they are going through something totally unique. Seth and Dan certainly do, and this makes them less appealing to adults. But Chuck Bartowski is an adult, and as an adult, you're responsible for yourself. You can't afford the luxury of a generic unhappiness, nor the simple pleasure of believing you are special. Because adults must find their own unhappinesses, Chuck is a much more interesting and complex character. When you're a teenager, you welcome drama with open arms; as an adult, you try constantly to keep it at bay, so when it comes, it's something new.
Where Seth and Dan were characters heady with the excitement of firsts, Chuck is a character settled into smallness, a big fish quite content in a small pond. Seemingly the one member of his class at Stanford not to get a high-status job, he is now the alpha nerd at a fictionalized Best Buy ("Buy More"), living with his sister and hanging out with his loser friend Morgan. When his college roommate Bryce implants a treasure trove of government secrets into Chuck's brain, he falls under the protection of a mildly sociopathic NSA agent named John Casey and a CIA agent, Sarah Walker, who also poses as his girlfriend. As he now has the only copy of these secrets, he is enlisted to assist on spy missions, which he fumbles through successfully in roughly the same way Seth Cohen fumbled through adolescence. At the same time, he stays within his old life, and the conflicts between that and the spy world drive the show's emotional drama.
Removed from the particulars, the setup of Chuck is more familiar than one might expect from ass-kicking espionage. A normal guy with a normal life is suddenly thrust into a world of power, secrets, and action, and must survive within a system that could easily crush him. In other words, he's thrust into Hollywood--a whole world of power, secrets, and action that a newcomer must negotiate without knowledge of the immensely complex interpersonal histories that inform every interaction, without any training and with only the most cursory advice as to what's expected. This is not unlike the story of a college student who gets offered $500,000 for a script and ends up producing his own primetime network show without any prior experience--Schwartz's story.
In the third episode, Chuck returns to Buy More from a mission he feels he's botched. A pile of old computers awaits repair, and though his friend offers to help, Chuck demurs. "It'll be nice to do something I'm good at," he says. For "creatives," especially those who work day jobs, this is sure to resonate. You spend your nights trying to figure out this immensely complex system, whether it be record labels, the art world, magazines, publishing houses, or movie studios, and, most of the time, you aren't very good at it. You make a fool of yourself in public, commit horrible faux pases with people of influence, and seem to repeatedly sabotage your own prospects. It's nice, in that situation, to just come into the office and pump out a spreadsheet, because it's simple and straighforward, and when it's done, you did it right. This is the life of a writer before he gets discovered, and as Schwartz found out, success comes all at once, when it comes. You are a failure right up until the moment you succeed.
The fourth episode introduces a DEA agent named Karina. When Sarah gets captured by the enemy, Chuck tries to convince Karina to rescue her. Karina replies, "You know this thing of ours? We're all in it for ourselves. It's what we do." This is not entirely true, in context; spies are at least partially in for their agencies and the policy goals of the government they represent. But it is quite true of Hollywood, which is the real "us" of Karina's statement. Before they leave, she tells Chuck, "It's our job. We shed identities like people shed clothes." Who is speaking here? Is it the character, or the actress playing the character? Where is the mask?
This is Schwartz's way of writing about his experience without being accused of solipsism or whininess. (And if there's any doubt that Chuck is autobiographical, by the ninth episode he's dating a girl named Lou, played by Rachel Bilson, who also played the love interest of Seth, the Schwartz-surrogate on The OC; Chuck even gets into a double-dipping problem with her, as did Seth.) He has constructed an unfamiliar metaphor that nevertheless speaks powerfully to his particular experience and the experience of the struggling writers with whom he ultimately identifies. After all, in a sense he is the loser from his college class: in a program that prepares its graduates for art, he spends his time writing about spoiled teenagers and secret agents.
It is college, significantly, that opens up a new thematic avenue for Schwartz. In the seventh episode, Chuck is forced to return to Stanford, a school that expelled him in his junior year. The autobiographical angle here is obvious--both Schwartz and his surrogate left college in their junior years. But there would seem to be a disconnect in that where Schwartz left on his own terms to pursue success, Chuck's departure was a kind of failure. As the episode continues, though, the strands come together. Chuck thinks he was kicked out because Bryce told a professor that Chuck cheated on an exam. But as we find out, Bryce got Chuck kicked out for his own good: the professor was going to recruit Chuck for the CIA, and Bryce didn't want his friend to face that awful life. So as it turns out, Chuck left to go on to bigger and better things too--it was just against his will, and it took a while. Then again, it did for Schwartz, too.
If we read the CIA as a symbol for Hollywood, this episode changes the scenario significantly. Chuck is not, in fact, an innocent brought into this system against his will; he was implicitly part of the CIA all along. As the professor says, "He's in no matter what." And Chuck would never have been recruited--or made friends with Bryce--if he hadn't gone to a particular college. This is just like Hollywood, which only brings you in if you have a connection, and just like Schwartz, who wouldn't have been creating network shows if he hadn't gone to a very specific college (e.g., USC film school). Despite all the business about the two worlds colliding, it turns out that Chuck's world was always part of this larger system. He just didn't know it yet.
This episode leaves little doubt that the world of espionage is Schwartz's autobiographical metaphor for Hollywood. And this reflects back on the show's depiction of the intelligence game, making it into a subtle critique of Hollywood. When in the next episode Chuck's sister randomly encounters a rogue agent and is poisoned, this is a comment on the way a Hollywood career inevitably intrudes into your personal life. In the sixth episode, Chuck meets a guy named Lazlo who was recruited by the agency as a teenager and had since been locked underground; when he finally escapes, he has gone crazy, a joke about the way Hollywood ruins child stars. Chuck tells Lazlo that Sarah and John can help him. "They're the good guys," Chuck says. "There's no such thing in this business," Lazlo replies, and note the pointed use of the word "business."
Thomas Schatz wrote of "the genius of the system." But while the products of that system may be wonderful for those of us outside it, and while we may admire the almost mechanical process by which those products are created, for the human beings within that system, it can feel crushing even as it enables them to do what they do. Schwartz is not only telling his own story but carefully expressing ambivalence about the business that has made his dreams come true, because it is also a daily horror to actually deal with: the ruthlessness, the power plays, the lies. Schwartz offers the perspective of a "creative" within this system, and speaks for them convincingly, in a language perhaps only they will recognize.
Schwartz also, in the end, demonstrates a way to keep your sanity within the system by being a smartass on occasion. In November of 2007, NBC, the network on which Chuck runs, had a "green week," during which "network logos turn green, on-screen graphics offer tips for reducing carbon emissions and television episodes emphasize environmentally friendly plot line." Chuck did its part, with two of its actors appearing in a promo spot and sporting numerous environmentalist elements in its seventh episode. One of these involved the new manager at Buy More starting a recycling program. He explained why: "Tree-hugging is all the rage these days. I plan on exploiting the burgeoning conscience of the American consumer." This is funny, but it's also a fairly accurate take on the ridiculous spectacle of "green week." Schwartz did his duty to the system by, in effect, trying to undermine its message.
Josh Schwartz is no fool. As a writer-producer, he is a member of an extremely select club, and he uses his position to not only make art, but to tell his own story in a new kind of way. But he also has to be honest, and honesty demands criticizing that which surrounds him. Chuck may not be the best show ever--and to be honest, I have largely stopped watching it--but the fact that Schwartz is able to do all this while still making a reasonably satisfying spy show is a testament to how much thought he puts into his entertainment products.
Labels: chuck, gossip girl, media studies, the oc, TV
If there's anything notable about how
Gossip Girl's debut episode opens, it's that it's so aggressively un-notable. Our introduction to Serena ("the blonde female lead") is a shot of her attractively wistful face staring out a train window; our introduction to Dan ("the dark-haired male lead") is a scene in which he tells his father he's hungry. There's nothing about this that would make us want to keep watching. After Serena gets off the train, a voice-over tells us that Serena is getting off the train in a tone that implies but does not explain importance--as if we should know already--and the Humphreys' conversation suggests a pre-existing but essentially uninteresting tension with their mother. We're not built up but dropped in.
Why in the world would you make the opening of your brand new television series un-memorable? Well, the fancy term for starting a narrative in the middle of the action is
in media res, and as anyone who's read the
Aeneid (or seen
Pulp Fiction) can tell you, it can be very effective, as long as the middle you're being dropped into is exciting. This is not the case with Serena and Dan in the goddamn train station. So why, then? Well, because it's TV, and because TV is serial. The opening of
Gossip Girl is doing an interesting thing: it's taking an assumed familiarity with the genre of teen dramas, within which the show is explicitly situating itself, and making that into a continuous thread rather than one cut off at the barriers of individual shows--making the whole genre into a serial narrative. It's using the very familiarity of its setting to dispense with the normal necessities of set-up. It safely--and, really, correctly--assumes that if you are watching
Gossip Girl, you have watched other shows like it, and so with a few spare gestures it's able to tell you what the conflicts that already exist. Whereas most narratives employing the technique of
in media res drop you in the middle of action that has been going on within its own fictional world, out of sight of the viewer,
Gossip Girl's opening drops you in the middle of a world you already know: the world of teen dramas. And as we'll see, it doesn’t merely drop you in the middle of conventions and stories you already know about, as most genre shows do, but quite literally inside the (comic-style) universe created by other shows.
The solid proof for this comes a little later in that first episode, with a seemingly innocuous shot of Dan getting on a bus. Now, the entire scene that follows takes place on that bus, so we can safely assume that the particular bus was chosen deliberately--they had to first acquire the bus, then shoot on it, and probably pay for it. The particular appearance of that bus is no accident--the producers chose it very deliberately. So it is highly notable what ad is plastered on its side. It's an ad for
Smallville--a show that, like
Gossip Girl, is on the CW network.
Normally, characters on a TV show seeing an ad for another TV show would simply indicate that the show takes place in the real world, and undoubtedly
Gossip Girl does: it's set in a very recognizable present-day New York City. But context matters. The fact that it's on the CW, née the WB, is highly significant, and the fact that the ad in question is for the show
Smallville is even more so. In the CW's universe of teen dramas,
Smallville is an anomaly, because it does not take place in the real world but in the explicitly fictional world of the comic book from which it originates. The creators of that show could have made it more realistic by ditching the made-up town and city names, but Metropolis is still Metropolis, not New York. This is not in our world. In contrast, most of the CW's other shows take place very much in reality; even if the towns in which they're set don't actually exist, the characters will then take trips to places we're all familiar with. Some of the shows even use real people playing themselves.
At the same time, though, these shows are fictional, as are the characters on them, and they don't exist within the real world. But they do exist in a strong dialogue with our world, often presenting a one-to-one correspondence with familiar landmarks of our reality. This relationship is apparent in the genre's contemporary wellspring:
Gilmore Girls. Though the stylistic fount of the CW teen drama is undoubtedly
Dawson's Creek,
Gilmore Girls is the uniter, the one that brings them all together. Unintentionally, one assumes, that show was a workshop for male leads on teen dramas: if you dated Rory, the daughter of the lead character, you got your own show. Milo Ventimiglia, who played Rory's first boyfriend Jess, got his own WB show (the sadly-canceled
The Bedford Diaries) before moving on to
Heroes; Jared Padalecki, who played Rory's second boyfriend Dean, now co-stars in the CW's
Supernatural; Chad Michael Murray, who merely had a crush on Rory, nevertheless became the co-star of
One Tree Hill. And though he only dated Rory's friend, Adam Brody jumped from
Gilmore Girls to the male co-lead on
Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz's previous show,
The OC, where he played a character, Seth Cohen, that
Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino has (with some cause) accused of being exactly the same character he played on
Gilmore Girls. In other words, it wasn't just that the actor changed shows; the character changed shows as well. Rory's boyfriend moved to Cali.
Now, Schwartz has returned the favor. Though
The OC was on Fox, he's put his new teen drama on the CW, practically an acknowledgement that
The OC did take place in the CW universe. (
Gossip Girl being, after all, basically
The OC: East Coast Edition.) And by having a scene early in his new show's pilot wherein three character ride a bus sporting an ad for Smallville on its side, he provides the rope to tie that universe together. If these characters are aware of
Smallville, the show on the CW that explicitly takes place outside our reality, that means they might
not be aware of the CW's other shows, which would make sense if those shows all took place inside the characters' semi-realistic reality. This is why you can start a series
in media res and expect viewers to stay tuned:
Gossip Girl is, ultimately, just a continued depiction of the world these viewers have already been watching. We're dropped in the middle of the action because, by watching the CW, we are already in the middle of the action. The pilot might as well have begun with a caption: "Meanwhile, in New York…"
Though it's true that the actors play different characters when they jump to different shows, often the characters are practically identical (even if the names change, most actors in teen dramas are incapable of playing more than one personality). We're still talking about the same people, on the same channel, in the same sorts of situations. It's also true that the characters on different shows don't refer to each other, in the way that the characters in, say, the DC Comics universe do. But they really have no reason to know each other, after all; all the shows deal with fundamentally small-town concerns, even when the small town is the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as it is on
Gossip Girl. Why would, say, a girl in Connecticut like Rory Gilmore know about a high school basketball player in North Carolina like Lucas Scott? This is a realistic universe, after all, and these aren't superheroes, but ostensibly regular kids.
Still, these kids all face similar concerns and all seem part of the same social and geographic circle.
The OC was an anomaly not just in its choice of channel, but in its choice of milieu: California. The CW's teen drama world is an east coast one, so by setting his new series in New York City, Schwartz is, once again, bringing the world back together, symbolically tying it up. Rory's last boyfriend on
Gilmore Girls, Logan, was a rich kid from Manhattan (one as yet without his own series), just like the characters on
Gossip Girl; presumably when she would visit the city last season, she could've run into Blair or Serena. But Logan was an Upper West Sider and the girls who gossip are Upper East Siders. The universe includes them all, but by divvying up the characters into separate series, boundaries are created.
And so from its first episode,
Gossip Girl makes its intentions clear: it means to perform genre criticism on the very genre in which it is firmly and unironically situated. For example, one of the stranger aspects of the CW's teen dramas is their treatment of sex. For all the teen characters, virginity is a continually fraught subject. Whether or not to have sex for the first time is a question they struggle with over multiple episodes, and often when they do take the plunge something horrible happens--they break up marriages, lose their jobs, fall into ruin. What in real life is generally an awkward and uncomfortable situation you just want to have over with becomes, on the teen drama, an issue of almost secular faith, in which you have to stay pure or face smiting by the CW universe's unseen hand.
On Gossip Girl, Blair ("the dark-haired female lead") keeps trying to lose her virginity to Nate ("the lighter-haired male lead"), her longtime boyfriend. In the context of the teen drama, this is bad enough--the conflict isn't over whether she should lose her virginity, but
how fast--and she then compounds the offense by making her attempts in especially trashy ways. To have a character so vigorously and unapologetically pursue sex will not do. But instead of merely punishing her after the fact, we get something even better: for almost seven episodes, the show simply
does not allow her to lose her virginity. Every time Blair tries to make it happen with Nate, they're either interrupted, have a fight, or get distracted. On a teen drama, you can't lose your virginity until you've suffered, and by not allowing Blair to lose her virginity outside of the expected narrative, the show comments on the conventions of the genre.
Nate, meanwhile, isn't refusing Blair's advances because he's worried about her making the right decision, but because he's just not that into her. Virginity isn't a big deal to him, either. When Chuck encourages him to "seal the deal" with Blair, Nate responds, "Who says 'seal the deal?'" Secondary male characters on teen dramas, that's who! This is nothing less than an explicit joke about teen dramas' prudish obsession with virginity.
Finally, at the end of one episode, Blair is allowed to lose her virginity. Significantly, though, she does not lose it to Nate, who just dumped her. Instead, she runs off in tears, gets drunk, and loses it in the back of a limo to Chuck Bass, Nate's man-whore best friend. So after she's suffered for her sexual desires, Blair finally gets to have sex, but only in a way that she immediately regrets and that will cause the maximum number of possible complications. To drive the point home, the first scene in the next episode finds Blair in a confessional, telling a priest what she's done--while also admitting that she's not Catholic. But of course! God is not her problem. What she really needs to worry about it the avenging hand of the teen drama.
While it may be commenting upon and even mocking the conventions of its own genre (seriously, I could go on with these),
Gossip Girl still utilizes them. By not allowing Blair to have sex until she's suffered for it, the show makes a joke about teen dramas while simultaneously creating the delicious dramatic tension that virginity obsessions can generate. And this sort of intertextual two-edged sword of faking it so real can only happen within the CW's teen drama universe. There's strength in numbers, and by creating a galaxy of teen dramas whose realities could plausibly co-exist, the unrealities that necessarily populate those shows begin to glow with a contextual realism, like photoluminescent fish swarming together in the deep sea to create the illusion of a sun: a mirage, to be sure, but it nevertheless casts a certain light.
Labels: gossip girl, the oc, TV
Below is my EMP paper as it was originally presented, followed by a new afterwards.
"It Doesn't Matter Which You Heard": the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"by Michael Barthel
Let me take you back to the long-ago time of mid-February, 2007. Popular emo band Fall Out Boy had the number one album in the country and, being a responsible music critic, I of course illegally downloaded it. As my train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I reached track five on the album. And I heard this:
Fall Out Boy - "Hum Hallelujah" (clip) What they're singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call "twaddle," is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal--the hippie--said, "I'm beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me." Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.
What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called "Hallelujah."
What's now considered the definitive version of this song is by dreamy, dead troubadour Jeff Buckley. (Some people are even under the impression that Buckley's cover is the original version.)
Jeff Buckley - "Hallelujah" (clip) It's an almost unbearably sad song in this incarnation—slow, keening, and heartbroken. But originally it was something different.
Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah (original)" (clip)
This is more like your uncle's band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there's no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book's name is the same as the album on which "Hallelujah" originally appears.
It's a weird little song in this incarnation.
Check out this sound. It's not sad--in fact, it's kinda funny. The entire performance is so hyperserious that it's almost satire. Certainly there's a healthy dose of irony here, especially in the sneeringly wry line "but you don't really care for music, do ya?" Cohen sings: "There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah," and the lyrics, far from being unremittingly dour, explore these different Hallelujahs—holy, broken, profane, transcendent.
On Cohen Live, an album recorded in part on a 1988 tour, Cohen radically revises the song. The tempo slows down drastically:
Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah (live)" (clip)
More importantly, Cohen adds three new verses. Whereas the original begins with some light musician humor, the new first verse ends with the line "it's a cold and a very broken Hallelujah." Combined with the slower tempo, the overall effect is considerably sadder.
At the same time, Cohen explores even more Hallelujahs: a verse containing the line "I remember when I moved in you" is unambiguously about sex, and the final verse --also the original's final verse, and the only verse they share--is defiant, coming as close to shouting as Leonard Cohen can while declaring "Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand right here before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."
John Cale - "Hallelujah" (clip) John Cale's cover of "Hallelujah" for the 1991 tribute album I'm Your Fan clearly refers to this live version. Since Cale's cover dates from before the release of Cohen Live, Cale most likely saw Cohen perform this new version in person, on the 1988 tour from which that recording is taken. It's almost as radical a reworking of the song as Cohen's own.
Cale preceded the three new verses of the live version with the original first and second verses, while speeding up the tempo to the more natural andante of the original and simplifying the arrangement to just voice and piano. He also changes the last of the three new verses in small but important ways.
Where Cohen says "It's not a complaint," Cale says "it's not a cry." Cohen's "It's not the laughter of somebody who's seen the light" becomes just "It's not somebody who's seen the light." And finally, "It's a very lonely Halellujah" becomes "it's a broken Hallelujah." Where Cohen depicted bittersweet regret, Cale has utter despair: a complaint becomes a cry, laughter is gone, a shot that could miss becomes a murderous hit, and it's not just a lonely Hallelujah—it's a broken Hallelujah. Moreover, this verse now ends the song, taking the place of the I-will-survive statement Cohen used to end his versions.
And so when Jeff Buckley decided to cover "Hallelujah," he didn't really cover Cohen, he covered Cale; the form and lyrics of their versions match almost exactly, while none of the three previous versions (Cohen studio, Cohen live, Cale) match at all.
Musically, though, he slowed the tempo back down again, and let it float in a way that Cale's regular piano arpeggios didn't.
Jeff Buckley - "Hallelujah" (clip) The effect was to flatten the song emotionally, to take out all the different Hallelujahs Cohen depicted and reduce them to one: the cold and broken, which appears here twice. Even the "you don't really care for music" dig sounds more wronged than cutting, and the sex is now the ecstasy of the brooding artiste, an image Cohen always seemed careful to subvert.
This simplification resulted in a torrent of covers. Following Buckley's version in 1994, we see a slow but steady increase, until it becomes a veritable tsunami around the turn of the century.
If Buckley was covering Cale, there's little doubt that almost all of these people were covering Buckley. And no one was really covering Cohen anymore.
It took a while longer, but Buckley's reductio ad despairium also inspired musical directors to include the songs in their filmed entertainments. Here's a list of all the usages.
And here's a graph showing the usages by year.
If we overlay that onto the graph of covers by year, we see that, while it took a while for TV and movies to catch up, they undoubtedly did.
The first significant use of the song in a soundtrack was, somewhat logically, Cale's version in Basquiat (1996), followed by, totally illogically, Cale again in Shrek (2001). While it seems clear that the gradual revision of the song is what made it appealing as a soundtrack device, it's also possible that when directors saw that the song was so potent, it could impart gravitas on a cartoon Ogre voiced by Mike Myers, it could make even the shallowest character seem tragic.
After these two uses of Cale in movies, the song, almost always Buckley's version, begins to pop up on television shows. The West Wing is the only usage in 2002, but in 2003 it was everywhere.
"Hallelujah" appeared in the fourth episode of Zach Braff's medical dramedy Scrubs, and twice in the first season of teen drama The OC, including an extremely prominent use in the finale. This established it, and it popped up regularly in every subsequent year, in numerous different versions, as artists like K.D. Lang and Rufus Wainwright recorded their own covers. (Wainwright's is nearly indistinguishable from Cale's, suggesting that perhaps Cale had begun to refuse usage requests and Wainwright was brought in as a ringer.)
Why was it used so frequently? Featurettes on the DVD sets of Scrubs and The OC talk about the music used on these shows, and the OC's creator, Josh Schwartz, says that "the music was going to be expressing the characters' inner lives." Why did they pick the music they did? Schwartz says that, for the first five or six episodes, "it was everything that was on my iPod"--echoing "Hallelujah"'s appeal as a personal discovery, a secret hidden in plain sight. Interestingly, though, they at no point in the featurette mention the song "Hallelujah," despite using it twice in the season they're ostensibly discussing, and once in the third episode, which is when Schwartz himself was soundtracking the show. Are they embarrassed about it? They shouldn't be. To say that using "Hallelujah" to express sadness is unoriginal is like saying a picture hanger using a level is unoriginal: the point is not novelty, but functionality. The damn thing just works so well, you'd be a fool not to use it.
The usage was so pervasive that, based on the numerous OC Mix CDs that were released, it seemed to inspire musicians to create their own soundalike songs, and to boost those artists who had already been working that sound. (This was the "indie rock boom" that the OC supposedly instigated, bringing sensitive-crooner bands like Death Cab For Cutie to fame and fortune.)
The most prominent example is Imogen Heap, someone who I, at least, had not heard of since a cassingle was mailed to me in 1998. But Heap's song "Hide and Seek" soundtracked the final moments of the OC's second season, the slot occupied a year before by a full rendition of Buckey's "Hallelujah." This pairing was so successful that, for the finale of season three, the final moments were accompanied, once again, by Heap, this time covering --and, to be clear, I am not shitting you--"Hallelujah." This is the point where the OC consumes itself whole, and it is a sickeningly gorgeous thing to watch.
(Incidentally, Heap is also a member of Frou Frou, a group who gained prominence by Zach Braff's including their song "Let Go" in his film Garden State, the other indie-boom instigator.)
What's fascinating about all this is not simply the song's ubiquity on TV dramas--it's that it's used in the exact same way every time. Songs can be used sincerely, ironically, as background shading, as subtle comment, as product placement. But "Hallelujah" always appears as people are being sad, quietly sitting and staring into space or ostentatiously crying, and always as a way of tying together the sadness of different characters in different places. In short, it's always used as part of a "sad montage."
Now, I could go into details about how exactly the "sad montage" is constituted, but it's more efficient and probably more effective just to show you a montage of the montages. You'll see what I mean.
"The Sad Montage, in Brief" (video, 27 megs)
The way Hallelujah is being used here is the auditory equivalent of a silent film actress pressing the back of her hand to her forehead to express despair—emotional shorthand. It's sometimes called a needledrop, and it's an element of visual grammar that signals the mood of the scene loudly and unmistakably. In the Scrubs musical featurette, creator Bill Lawrence says, "How are we gonna make a show where a lot of the comedy comes from broad, silly jokes switch gears on a dime and suddenly be dramatic? What we found is we were able to make that transition quickly if we chose the right song."
But it doesn't work if it's too explicit. That theatrical gesture of hand to forehead has no obvious connection to the emotion of despair, and neither does "Hallelujah." It gets used in scenes more obviously soundtracked with songs called, say, "We Are In a Hospital And Everyone is Dying Or Facing Difficult Choices." But that would be too explicitly about sadness, whereas the chorus of Cohen's song was designed to apply to a range of emotions—the different Hallelujahs. It can both reinforce and counterpoint.
If its use is becoming less common, that's because its overuse has erased the line-by-line, verse-by-verse meaning and replaced it with an overall feeling of sadness. You hear those opening chords now and the words hardly matter. The visual emotions it was used to counterpoint have overtaken the lyrical content. This is the nature of tools--they are imprinted by their materials--and there's nothing wrong with tools per se, but making a Matisse into a washcloth would erase some of the details, and Hallelujah's overuse has had a similar effect.
In twenty-five years, Leonard Cohen has gone from a punchline on a TV show to a sideways joke mixed with a tribute in Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea"--"give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally"--to a totally serious starring role in a song by Fall Out Boy, a band not especially known for their irony. It seems like this has been accomplished by an emotional flattening--reducing a song about the varieties of grace to a mere lament. But this is not the only direction the song could have gone in. Something of Cohen's defiance, sensuality, and triumph could just as easily inform a cover. A cover such as this one:
Michael Barthel - "Hallelujah" (excerpt)This is the beauty of the pop song: it's an artistic hooker with a heart of gold, always willing to be used. It can become a tool, but a song isn't a Matisse—if it's used as a washcloth, just wring it out and it's good as new. We may call something the "definitive version," but it's not, not really. It's just the temporary consensus, a beautiful beach house built always within reach of the next great flood. There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, and every song contains a thousand possibilities—or, at least, the great ones do. Hallelujah's place in the pantheon was assured only by the song's mutability; were it not open to change, it would have remained an ignored album cut. Instead, it went on to function as a performance standard, a perfect piece of visual grammar, and even a raw element of creation for an entirely new song. Among all those covers and all those montages, Fall Out Boy's reappropriation of Hallelujah is undoubtedly the most radical, interesting, and adventurous. It reminds us that if you disagree with the journey a song has taken, the original and all its revisions are always there, waiting to be born again.
(many, many thanks to Alta Price for helping with the video.)
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Afterward
The above is the as-presented version of the paper, which should probably be preserved for purposes of historical veracity and so on and so forth. ("Where did the tide finally turn against the evil that is Jeff Buckley?" future historians will no doubt ask, and I want to make sure they have the answer.) But there were a few points that I wanted to expand on, and a few comments I received before and after I delivered the paper that deserve addressing.
Mainly I will be playing off two things:
1) "Hallelujah's appeal as a personal discovery, a secret hidden in plain sight."
2) "the 'indie rock boom' that the OC supposedly instigated"
Christopher Monsen left a comment on my blog that goes like this:
The influence of Buckley's version is especially strong here in Norway. Not only does buying his Grace album seem to have become some kind of rite of passage for the average University student, it also seems to be the one record that every non-record buying person owns. Last year, a group consisting of two ex-Norwegian Idol contestants, a one-time Prince-wannabe turned producer, and a fourth guy recorded a live version of 'Hallelujah' based on Buckley's - taking turns singing the verses. The subsequent record named after the song went on to become the biggest selling album in Norway last year - almost solely on the strength of 'Hallelujah.'
While, as I say above, the song's popularity as a soundtrack device seems to be winding down, the song itself is more popular than ever. Why is that?
Musically, I am almost certain I once wrote a whole dissection of the song, which I of course cannot find at the present time. Nevertheless, the gist was that Cohen et al employ a fairly classic chord progression (in my cover the bassline during the verse is meant to evoke the doo-wop songs that also used this shift), but then instead of trying to disguise it or merely riding it, Cohen calls attention to not only the chords he's using, but their very commonality: "the minor fall, the major lift." Note the definite article there--it's not just some sort of minor chord, it's the iconic minor fall, which it pretty much is; you can find this progression, in the abstract, in all sorts of pop songs. By calling it out, he both makes you aware of its pop status while simultaneously apologizing for it and mythologizing it as not just chords, but a sort of Biblical imperative. But then, when he gets to "composing," there's an atypical chord, an E major, that doesn't fit in the C major key we've been in so far, and this is the little bit of novelty that turns the song from the pop of restatement to just pop. This ability to turn the common into the timeless while leavening it with something to set it apart is a big part of the song's appeal.
The non-musical appeal of "Hallelujah," though, must be understood in the context of generations X and Y, who are the ones responsible for the song's canonization. The people for whom Cohen's song (in Buckley's version) is a generational touchstone are not the people who consider other Cohen songs, like "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire," generational touchstones. They're not Cohen's original audience, and are unlikely to have paid much attention to a weird synth-crooner album by an old folkie when it came out in 1985. And so for them, it was something always existing, way out there in an area they wouldn't usually venture; an object to be discovered.
However you come to the song, it's got an aura around it. If it's through Buckley, well, he's this beautiful dead boy with an apparently "ethereal" voice, and he's singing this song that sounds like a long-ago thing. Cohen himself is distant enough at this point to be symbolically equivalent to an old blues guy: mysterious, wise, world-weary. Buckley's martyrdom cleanses him of the "dude with a guitar who signed to a major label in the 90s" status, and Cohen, cheesy though he may be at times, comes from the pre-corporate past of the music industry, and is untainted by its commercialism.
This is all awfully contextual, though. What about the song itself? The religious imagery and language should be a hindrance among the sensitive college students (and, as mentioned in the quote above, the secular-humanist Europeans) who make up the song's fanbase. But, certain acquaintances' "Christians are fucking weird" attitudes to the contrary, the Bible has an enduring appeal to millions of people, for whatever reason, and no matter how sensitive a college student you are, the thing can still work its magic. (Like vegetarians really wanting a steak every once in a while--doesn't mean you’re a meat-eater again, just that people who love it aren't fools, after all, just bad people.) Shorn of the offensive trappings, old time religion looks pretty awesome, and indeed people who like Jeff Buckley also like the idea of fire-and-brimstone preachers and dilapidated churches and gospel choirs. Unfortunately, actual gospel music doesn't shed those trappings. It tends toward the cheesy rather than the "earthy," and the words seem more interested in talking about how great Jesus is than in exploring the mysteries of faith or making Moses jokes.
"Hallelujah," though, offers all those great, resonant Biblical signifiers and intense religious emotions without the proselytizing or the attempt at a modern updating. Spiritually, it keeps things at a nice distance and doesn't ask too much. In Cohen's hands, this makes sense, since it's explicitly a literary exploration into an alien culture. And for Buckley, it works as a signifier of depth, allowing him to take on the symbols of an old country preacher, in keeping with his attraction to Sufi mysticism: whirling dervishes are nothing if not pentecostal. In sum, "Hallelujah" is able to function as a kind of accessible gospel music, smart and beautiful and allusive to classic themes without demanding any kind of actual faith or any translation from evangelicalese. It presents the emotional experience of religion shorn of the cultural barriers.
And this particular--and particularly amazing--trick is a big part of why, no matter how it comes to you, "Hallelujah" always manages to seem like a discovery. It can pass through a thousand corporate paws and be marked by them all, arriving at its destination in the form of a TV show or a mass-market major-label CD or a bunch of pop idols. The song is just so strange--so alien, so smart, so densely packed with signifiers--that it doesn't seem possible that it's actually part of mainstream culture, no matter how much mainstream culture embraces it. Clive Davis himself could hand it to you, but this would just seem like evidence of Clive's human side rather than another slime-dripping part of the corrupt music industry. Its strange incursion of Biblical poetry (as well as, to be honest, Buckley's unusual guitar work, curse him) seems like nothing more than an anomaly. It's the Teflon song.
And this is why it's interesting that it popped up so many times in The OC. Once is just, as I say, a tool, something you whip out to enhance a mood, but generally you can only use it once without it ceasing to be a tool and starting to be a character, or at least a symbol of something. The fact that The OC used a song immune to the appearance of co-option so many times means something--it meant that a network TV show was trying for legitimacy. This is both unusual and seemingly nonsensical--even shows that achieved some sort of genuine subcultural capital like Saturday Night Live or David Letterman didn't feel the need to defend or generate cred, since the shows themselves were the sources of credibility--the writing and the performances, in other words, not the accoutrements. But The OC was clearly concerned with this, a fact demonstrated most ably by their apparently sincere championing of Death Cab for Cutie, who were on Sub Pop and had a ridiculous name and were thus quite credible. Much of the show concerned the awakening of Seth Cohen, an unreconstructed geek character (comic books, unpopularity, social awkwardness, intelligence, embarrassing bedroom accessories) who suddenly found himself inching towards coolness, and this was the character championing Death Cab. The use of "Hallelujah" here was like wrapping a strange new vegetable in bacon: you know this is good/true/right, so why not try what goes along with it?
The song had a different meaning every time it was used. The second and third times it was notable for the repetition and referred to all previous uses--number two (on the season 1 finale) was "OK, we have come into our own" and number three, when Marissa died at the end of season 3, was a completing-the-cycle thing--but that first usage made The OC what it was, like the thread of saffron that turns rice and seafood into paella. There's the cliché as banality, like in Scrubs, fulfilling its role precisely and simply echoing what's around it, the very heightening it performs becoming workaday in its predictability and obviousness. And then there is the cliché as element of transcendent over-the-topness, when there are so many iconic elements that the cliché makes it an identifiable context and ties everything together.
The first time "Hallelujah" appears on The OC, the situation is as follows: on his last night in town, a good-hearted but troubled wrong-side-of-the-tracks kid who's in a fish-out-of-water situation has been visited by a all-wrong-for-him skinny blonde rich girl who's defying her parents by professing her feelings for him, but he turns her down in an act of noble self-sacrifice only to have the rich-kid boyfriend pull up in a jeep and start a fight, and then the house he's in catches on fire. Through all this, "Hallelujah" plays. This willingness to go for the jugular so quickly and so shamelessly is one of the many reasons the OC was so great, and also, not coincidentally, why it wasn't so great for the next two seasons.
To put it another way, it was Casablanca, at least as Umberto Eco
described it:
When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the
height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion
border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a
glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If
nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.
What's interesting about The OC was that there was a particular specificity to some of the clichés. Seth Cohen, for instance, was both a stereotypical social outcast character and a character actually stolen, along with the actor, from another show--Adam Brody, who played Seth, played an almost identical character on the show Gilmore Girls. (There is an entire paper to be written about the Gilmore Girls teen-drama diaspora, what with all of Rory's boyfriends that have gotten their own shows.) This brings up some interesting issues about art's tendency toward referentiality also being a tendency toward clichés as building blocks, and if this might not cause us to reconsider the merits and uses of both, but more importantly it shows just how densely packed The OC was as a TV show. It was essentially an intensification and acceleration of everything about the established genre of teen dramas, and as such, it acted as a center of gravity to attract all sorts of new things, like, I suppose, Andy Warhol. (The CW = The Factory.) Like in cooking or geology, its density created something new, and novelty creates more novelty, so the things that attached themselves to the show by the time it ended earlier this year could serve as a checklist for the tenor of our times. This acceleration and concentration was, as I say, a good thing for the first season and a bad thing for the next two, when the show felt decidedly burnt out. This served as an object lesson for just why teen dramas don't go to such heights, and subsequent shows have not really approached its pace, perhaps wisely. The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.
Its status as cultural big-bang helps explain why The OC served as year zero for the indie-rock boom. But it's also a big part of why it was dead in the water before it even began. The 00s indie boom and the 90s indie boom, which we also call grunge, were qualitatively different. Nirvana appeared as a separately-constituted incursion, a band of a piece making its way into the mainstream, whereas the most recent boom came through the debased form of network TV (or, to a lesser degree, movie soundtracks). Hackles were raised from the start, but the products of the boom still maintained their credibility, which raised even more hackles. The problem seemed to be that instead of having whole albums you could buy and shows you could go to and bands you could support, now there were singles you could download and soundtracks you could buy, clothes you could wear to signal your sympathy that were, unlike grunge, not really all that different from what people already seemed to be wearing. It was not an activity but an accompaniment--not something you listened to but something you watched other people listening to. In other words, it's lifestyle music.
But what's wrong with that? All sorts of styles have served as lifestyle music in the past without it debasing the styles themselves, from crooners to bebop to bossa nova to R&B to dance; hell, even Kanye West recognizes that Talib Kweli is something you play primarily to get girls to have sex with you, which is I guess the definition of lifestyle music.
Still, as I say, "Hallelujah" is a weird fucking song (and "Death Cab for Cutie" is a weird name for a band), and whether in Buckley's version or Cohen's version, it does not seem like it would function in the same way that something like, say, Johnny Mathis or Gilberto Gil does. And yet it does. How? Well, the short answer would be "the 90s," but there's also the fact that Jeff Buckley kinda sounds like Johnny Mathis, and that another name for indie is "college rock," which admits its lifestyle status right in its name. Essentially, no matter how hard it may struggle against it, any genre achieving some sort of mainstream popularity is inevitably brought to a fully commodified state, as indie clearly has become given that no one really uses the term "sellout" anymore.
But wasn't the whole point of the 90s that things shouldn't be commodified, especially culture? Wasn't the rule that you picked hot emotion over cool style, grit over lifestyle, ethics over aesthetics? How did the tide turn so completely? To put it simply, the 90s ended, and when we all looked back, we realized that we were being ridiculous. It's all style in the end; a flannel from JC Penny's is indistinguishable from a vintage flannel after a few wash cycles, and we don't therefore conclude that the style of dress doesn't matter, but that the point of origin doesn't. These songs we were being so precious about served essentially the same purpose as clothes do: to express our true inner selves. In other words, they were, like clothes, just tools of expression. We couldn't really use music to feel or seem cool, because it's just music, and instead saw it worked best as a way of quickly expressing what we are truly feeling: I am sad, so I am playing a sad song; I am horny, so here are so slow jams. And this, of course, is exactly how "Hallelujah" is used on TV. It expresses my inner life as surely as it expresses that of Seth Cohen, and that's amazing: the way art uses it is the way we use it, which is true for very few things.
The fact that aesthetics won is indicative of how the 90s lost. By focusing their moral and political critiques on aesthetic forms, they guaranteed morality and politics would be subsumed by aesthetics. If authenticity is merely a stylistic choice, then how could it matter very much? Seriously applying political issues to music inevitably trivializes them, and indeed, here were are in the apolitical present.
Jeff Buckley had to reach back to an artist of the 60s to touch the kind of consensus that "Hallelujah" has generated and maintained; nothing escaped the 90s similarly unscathed except Sleater-Kinney and Biggie. When we demand purity of our art, all art is inevitably impure, and possibilities are closed off; when we recognize the beauty of ambiguity, as in "Hallelujah," a universe opens up.
Labels: emp, hallelujah, jeff buckley, john cale, leonard cohen, political theory, pop, scrubs, the oc, TV
