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quinaraHas there been a better thing on television in a long time? I really don't know because this is just so clever. I can't even sum it up, just...
OK, so we start with the industrial revolution, with all its dark satanic mills and dreams for the future - are we Blake dreaming of a world without industry (just cricket), or Caliban!Brunel dreaming of a world of noise and riches? No matter the answer we go through to the 50s (ish) anyway, getting noise and darkness and yet achievement, the Olympic rings wrought out of steel.
We then get to 'Second to the Right and Straight on till Morning': the NHS, children, fantasy literature and the moment between sleep and waking - still caught up in dreams and nightmares. Through jazz and the outfits this is also definitely pitched as a historical transition between the Industrial Revolution and the digital age pageant later. It's like an investigation of what the Industrial Revolution produced - the end of infant mortality as a fact of life (labour, if we imagine child labour, transforms into children being looked after in bed and at GOSH) plus the rise of literacy. Put these two together and the main threat to childhood shifts from actual death to fantasy figures, Voldemort like a pantomime grim reaper and Mary Poppins the image of childcare and education. Everything ends happily like a fairy tale; 'childhood' as a safe bubble away from work and threat is banishable even as a nightmare. But this is even undercut by the nurses doing folk dances, as if they're pretending to still live in the idyll. Which we know has gone.
This establishment of childhood and safety then inevitably spreads to produce Youth Culture as a whole in the digital age, which gets it's own celebration in 'Frankie and June Say Thanks, Tim'. (The whole ceremony is about handing over to the next generation; the narrative of the show is about how that happened with cultural authority.) But even that's shadowed by this tension between illusion and reality (all the dancing backdropped by fictional representations of life that is constructed media culture, embellishing on children's literature), and this sense of darkness. I can't catch all the lyrics in the chronological montage, but it's so heavy once you get past the romance:
Talking bout my generation
I can't get no satisfaction
- (but) -
My boy lollipop, you make my heart go giddyup
Girl, I want to be with you, all of the time
She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah
(with a love like that, you know you should be glad)
That's neat, I really love your tiger feet
--- (? - this track lost me)
- (but) -
Stop your messing around, better think of the future
There's a starman waiting in the sky; he's told us not to blow it
Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? (no escape from reality)
- (but) -
so you think you can stop me and spit in my eye???
Oh, we're so pretty - we're vacant
(I don't believe illusion, 'cause too much is real;
stop your cheap comment, 'cause we know what we feel)
- (but) -
How does it feel, to treat me like you do?
- Relax, don't do it
Back to life; back to reality
Sweet dreams are made of this; who am I to disagree?
- I'm a fire-starter!
(--- Trainspotting and aaaaaall of its stuff about addiction and escape)
I'm forever blowing bubbles (and like my dreams they fade and die)
(In the words of David Cassidy...)
Woo hoo!
And then it's just Dizzee, set up as the conclusion:
I wake up, every day is a daydream; everything in my life ain't what it seems
I wake up just to go back to sleep; I act real shallow but I'm in too deep
And all I care about is sex and violence; a heavy bass line is my kind of silence
Everybody says that I gotta get a grip; but I let sanity give me the slip
So even with this massive upheaval, from rural idyll through industrial pain through childhood's invention and welfare and Teh Yoof taking control; the shift in power from Top Hat Man to Multicultural Dancing Everyone, we're still caught up in this dark, fearful, shifting space between reality and illusion, dreams and hope and dissatisfaction. (The defiance in this section - And we don't care / I just think I'm free / We will be victorious - only comes to segue into uncertainty - Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not, abide with me.)
... So, that's just how I read it (expressed very badly). But I can't help but think it's one of the most interesting national portraits I've seen in a long time. I like this bloke Boyle... :D
(God, I have do something today... Why haven't I done anything?)
OK, so we start with the industrial revolution, with all its dark satanic mills and dreams for the future - are we Blake dreaming of a world without industry (just cricket), or Caliban!Brunel dreaming of a world of noise and riches? No matter the answer we go through to the 50s (ish) anyway, getting noise and darkness and yet achievement, the Olympic rings wrought out of steel.
We then get to 'Second to the Right and Straight on till Morning': the NHS, children, fantasy literature and the moment between sleep and waking - still caught up in dreams and nightmares. Through jazz and the outfits this is also definitely pitched as a historical transition between the Industrial Revolution and the digital age pageant later. It's like an investigation of what the Industrial Revolution produced - the end of infant mortality as a fact of life (labour, if we imagine child labour, transforms into children being looked after in bed and at GOSH) plus the rise of literacy. Put these two together and the main threat to childhood shifts from actual death to fantasy figures, Voldemort like a pantomime grim reaper and Mary Poppins the image of childcare and education. Everything ends happily like a fairy tale; 'childhood' as a safe bubble away from work and threat is banishable even as a nightmare. But this is even undercut by the nurses doing folk dances, as if they're pretending to still live in the idyll. Which we know has gone.
This establishment of childhood and safety then inevitably spreads to produce Youth Culture as a whole in the digital age, which gets it's own celebration in 'Frankie and June Say Thanks, Tim'. (The whole ceremony is about handing over to the next generation; the narrative of the show is about how that happened with cultural authority.) But even that's shadowed by this tension between illusion and reality (all the dancing backdropped by fictional representations of life that is constructed media culture, embellishing on children's literature), and this sense of darkness. I can't catch all the lyrics in the chronological montage, but it's so heavy once you get past the romance:
Talking bout my generation
I can't get no satisfaction
- (but) -
My boy lollipop, you make my heart go giddyup
Girl, I want to be with you, all of the time
She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah
(with a love like that, you know you should be glad)
That's neat, I really love your tiger feet
--- (? - this track lost me)
- (but) -
Stop your messing around, better think of the future
There's a starman waiting in the sky; he's told us not to blow it
Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? (no escape from reality)
- (but) -
so you think you can stop me and spit in my eye???
Oh, we're so pretty - we're vacant
(I don't believe illusion, 'cause too much is real;
stop your cheap comment, 'cause we know what we feel)
- (but) -
How does it feel, to treat me like you do?
- Relax, don't do it
Back to life; back to reality
Sweet dreams are made of this; who am I to disagree?
- I'm a fire-starter!
(--- Trainspotting and aaaaaall of its stuff about addiction and escape)
I'm forever blowing bubbles (and like my dreams they fade and die)
(In the words of David Cassidy...)
Woo hoo!
And then it's just Dizzee, set up as the conclusion:
I wake up, every day is a daydream; everything in my life ain't what it seems
I wake up just to go back to sleep; I act real shallow but I'm in too deep
And all I care about is sex and violence; a heavy bass line is my kind of silence
Everybody says that I gotta get a grip; but I let sanity give me the slip
So even with this massive upheaval, from rural idyll through industrial pain through childhood's invention and welfare and Teh Yoof taking control; the shift in power from Top Hat Man to Multicultural Dancing Everyone, we're still caught up in this dark, fearful, shifting space between reality and illusion, dreams and hope and dissatisfaction. (The defiance in this section - And we don't care / I just think I'm free / We will be victorious - only comes to segue into uncertainty - Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not, abide with me.)
... So, that's just how I read it (expressed very badly). But I can't help but think it's one of the most interesting national portraits I've seen in a long time. I like this bloke Boyle... :D
(God, I have do something today... Why haven't I done anything?)
(no subject)
Date: 29/07/2012 02:26 (UTC)I didn't actually tune in to what he was doing with the lyrics until midway through "Pretty Vacant" and then I was all...wait, hang on this can't be accidental. Ah ha! I see what you're doing here, Mr Boyle! (he also slid OMD's Enola Gay in there somewher ebut I can't quite remember where it fit - porbably aorund the Frankie Goes to Hollywood & Eurythmics). *G*
I think it plays out as a really personal history for people of a certain generation (me included, Boyle is 7 years older than me) but I'd be interested whether it has the same resonances for someone in their teens to late twenties or someone in their mid 60s. *G*
(no subject)
Date: 29/07/2012 09:21 (UTC)And hee! When I watched it on the night I was too busy bopping along to really notice anything (Pretty Vacant and Sweet Dreams buy me off very quickly) - I still can't quite believe he managed to have a coherent collage and keep it to what people would straightforwardly have wanted in the sequence. But I suppose that's part of the point, that this does say something about what we're like.
I'm in my early twenties, so I wasn't very good on most of the 80s stuff (while all of the 70s and before definitely resonated with me as the music my parents would play in the car all through my childhood!), but looking up Enola Gay on YouTube... I think that was in the getting ready bit? Or afterwards on the way to the party? 'We got your message on the radio, conditions normal and you're coming home'... I love all the play about with the media!