So earlier today, I was engaging in my usual hobby of reading other people’s reviews of things I’ve watched / read / listened to. (This is honestly how I spend a lot of my free time. Among other milestones, by now I’m pretty sure I have read every single New York Times movie review of every movie I can remember seeing, plus a bunch of the reviews of movies I’ve heard of but never watched.) At some point I started looking through the Onion A.V. club’s reviews of old episodes of my favorite back-on-air musical dramedy, Glee, and came across this post about episode 1-10, “Ballad.”
In this review, which is not just about the episode of Glee but the ways in which Glee more generally utilizes the conventions of musical theater, Mr. VanDerWerff brings up the idea that lots of musicals use songs as temporal shortcuts, condensing what should rightfully be a drawn-out emotional development into three or four minutes’ worth of music. He then goes on to say that it is this convention of musicals that is responsible for the Glee characters’ extreme emotional whiplash from episode to episode — they are behaving normally, by musical standards, it’s just that by musical standards things move very quickly and all it takes to travel from indifference to starry-eyed love is a Dianna Ross number.
Personally, I’m not totally satisfied with this explanation for a few reasons. First and probably most importantly, even in musicals the characters are supposed to travel relatively coherent character arcs, whereas the Glee characters rubberband from one emotion to the unrelated next every single episode. (I love you! I hate you! I want you back! Just kidding! Eggs in the face.)
Second, I think VanDerWerff could have made a stronger distinction between the two different properties of music he seems to be referring to: one, music as a force that changes people — in Glee‘s case, a quasi-magical power that literally upends characters’ emotions, making them fall in love or fall apart or (forgive me) not stop believin’ from mere exposure to it — and music as a means of merely telegraphing that emotional change to the viewer. The former is what makes Rachel fall in love with Mr. Schuester while they are engaged in an overwrought performance of the duet “Endless Love”; the latter is what’s happening when Mercedes sings “Bust Your Windows” in an earlier episode to express her anger at Kurt. We’re talking about the difference, in other words, between musicals as a genre, a weird genre in which singing songs makes people do bizarre things, and musicals as a medium, in which songs are used to express the change (or the stasis) that is already taking place.
Confusingly enough, as the above example indicates, Glee operates in both capacities: the show not only uses music as a narrative medium, but it focuses a lot on the emotional effect that songs themselves have on people. Songs express change, but they also effect it. (And this is one thing I do enjoy about Glee: for all that most musicals by their nature deal extensively in song and dance, they don’t typically have much space to explore the effect that music has on the viewers, whereas Glee is all about how we relate to music and how it affects us as listeners and performers.) Still, I see this conflation between musical-the-genre and musical-the-medium a lot, and I think it’s worth spending a little time focusing not on how strange and artificial musical-the-genre can seem to some people — since people talk about that plenty already — but rather all the interesting things that musical-the-medium can do.
Unhummable 