Month: September 2012

Does anyone remember what happened the last time Kurt didn’t pick up his phone?

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way (and I’ll confess, I was tempted to make tonight’s post that single sentence, but that seemed excessively cruel), I want to talk about the new adults on Glee, Cassandra and Isabelle. They are both powerful, magical, and, potentially, very frightening.

Cassandra is, in many ways, obvious, and we don’t need, necessarily, to devote a lot of time to analysis here; after all, her name tell us she is the mad woman who knows the truth and sees the future. Because she sees the future, she has no future herself. She is without second chances and her words, no matter how widely broadcast, are only listened to by the select few.

Isabelle, on the other hand, is slightly less obvious. Her name means “My god is a vow,” and in some ways this positions her similarly to Cassandra — spiritual, knowing, and, for that, alone. She is also a maker of things (and makers are also always unmakers — they cut the fabric; they kill the animal), as the last name Wright indicates.

While both character types — the harsh taskmaster who secretly wants you to succeed and the fairy godmother who appears to show you the road previous unnoticed — are staples of New York City success fantasies, Kurt Hummel’s current existence at the intersection of their narrative functions is particularly fascinating and speaks to his youth, to his magic, and to the troublesome nature of being an acolyte.

As the person who tells Rachel Cassandra’s back story (and why didn’t Rachel just Google her?), Kurt shows an awareness of the professional world Rachel has entered and he has been at least temporarily barred from without understanding that world at all. Kurt knows who Cassandra is, which puts him a step ahead of Rachel, but he provides the information only to scoff and to reassure Rachel that her difficulties in the course don’t matter, because Cassandra is simply someone who can disregarded regardless of the institution she represents.

Somewhat similarly, Kurt also knows who Isabelle is, but in this case views her as an inspiration. He is familiar with her in a way that leads to surprising familiarity; Kurt rarely reaches out to others physically first, even when he knows them, but here launches himself at Isabelle, in part, I suspect, because of how familiar she is to him in his own mind.

This familiarity however, doesn’t mean that Kurt is any more able to heed her warnings than he is able to heed (or encourage Rachel to heed) the cautionary tale of Cassandra. When Isabelle speaks to Kurt of never losing his wide-eyed Lima, Ohio innocence, you can see his discomfort; this innocence — at least as associated with Ohio — is what he’s come to New York to shed the last vestiges of (the first layer of it was shed with his NYADA rejection).

So Kurt doesn’t really listen to what Isabelle is saying, even if the audience does. As the worlds of childhood and adulthood uncouple on Glee, that innocence is lost is obvious.

But Kurt’s innocence isn’t just a concept, it’s also a person. Blaine, who opened the season forcing himself into a more childlike role first to help Kurt move on and then to keep himself from having to accept his own adult pain at the feeling of that transition, is the personification of Kurt’s wide-eyed Ohio innocence.

Blaine fills this role not just because he’s younger, but because he’s the one that shows Kurt the innocence he gives up on time and again. He does it when he texts Kurt courage; he does it when he gives Kurt a first kiss that really counts; he does it when he dances with him at the prom, when he holds his hand in the hall, when they sleep together for the first time and it isn’t, presumably, like the things that had horrified Kurt about porn the year before.

Because Blaine keeps breathing Kurt’s innocence back into him, Kurt is now an untrained magician newly arrived in a city full of magical creatures and demigods. And he’s not just visiting this time, relying on serendipity to take a piece of stolen magic back to Ohio with him. This is the real deal now, and you can’t learn to conjure the same way you read a magazine — by starting at the back and flipping through, only stopping to read what’s of the most interest.

Yet, despite having all the tools and information it takes to realize these things, and being apprenticed to someone who has already taken her own vows and lives with the price of them, Kurt doesn’t understand this yet. Because nothing’s been taken from him yet, there’s been no price of admission (the Ferryman’s bill is still in the mail), Kurt has not yet (to mangle Sei Shonagon) knelt on the book of his life until his knees bled.

But he will, soon. And the agony won’t be what happens, but that he didn’t see it coming when he was surrounded, finally, with people just like him — uncanny, wounded, and Other — showing him the way.

Finally, because I only think it fair to explain myself after an opener like the one at the top of this post: I don’t actually think Blaine will canonically experience suicidal ideation in the wake of whatever happens between him and Kurt in “The Breakup,” but I am certain we as audience members are supposed to see the parallel between this series of missed phone calls and the ones from Karofsky. As viewers, we need to, in order to empathize with the horror Kurt’s going to experience when he realizes the significance of his own — natural, reasonable, inevitable, age- and situation-appropriate — inability to listen to the very powers he, knowingly or not, has spent his life seeking out.

Since about a week after the last episode of Glee‘s third season, I’ve been getting people asking me what I thought would be the main themes and events of this season, despite the fact that if you read back through my predictive posts about season 3, other than nailing the events of “On My Way,” I made the wrong calls on some pretty big narrative elements, even if I did manage to see most of the clues. In short, I understood that the Ferryman always takes a toll, but completely missed who would have to pay, with what, and when.

But that, obviously, hasn’t stopped me from wanting to engage in conjecture about this season. I was just hesitant to do it in the data-free zone of the recently ended hiatus. And, while I hadn’t thought that I’d put out a thematic theory of the season (or at least its front half) until after episode 4.03 or 4.04, I think this episode — which largely focused on the parts of the narrative I don’t spend a lot of time with — actually made Glee’s upcoming themes astoundingly clear.

Because what this episode was about, not just in Brittany’s fall, but also in the reactions to that fall, as well as in the narratives taking place in New York was life in public, and whether you self-injure in the name of making yourself more or making yourself less. It’s why this episode, which I think most of us expected to be bubblegum, was so hard to watch.

The scrutiny and control narrative is everywhere. Brittany, in the episode’s most unsettling moment, is under both general scrutiny and is accosted by WMHS’s one-man media machine, Jacob ben Israel. Her violent freak out in response, felt, at least to me, like watching a panic attack. Despite the way it was meant to refer to and send up actual events (remember the “leave Britney alone” video?), it didn’t, actually, feel like satire.

But scrutiny, control, and consequence in this episode isn’t just about Brittany. Jake is also under scrutiny — from the popular kids, from Marley, and from Will Schuester. And it’s arguably that scrutiny that drives him, in part, into the fight he gets into in the cafeteria in the defense of Marley’s mom. That narrative, about whether Marley should keep her mother a secret (Marley can’t manage to, but her mother thinks she should try) is also central to this theme.

Additionally, scrutiny, control, and consequence are also on display in Cassandra July’s back-story, in Rachel’s yelling at her, and in their eventual detente. The world of second chances is one Rachel won’t be in much longer, Cassandra points out, and, like Brittany says at the opening of the episode, “Sometimes tough love just feels mean.” Brittany’s not wrong, but then again, neither is Cassandra July.

Scrutiny, control, and consequence are also littered throughout the episode in smaller, yet critical ways as well. Blaine, whose very tight self-control displayed some pretty impressive (and inevitable) cracks in Season 3, is the person who closes the curtain on Brittany’s lip-synced performance and the one who takes verbal responsibility during Schuester’s scolding even if it really wasn’t his fault (After all, Artie gave him the role of the new Rachel, not any sort of actual captaincy like the one pretended to by Finn; the situation isn’t Blaine’s responsibility, but his own sense of being scrutinized, needing control and duty-bound response to the spectre of consequence makes it so).

Meanwhile, Unique and Tina also scold Marley for not being able to control (and suppress) her interest in Jake, and let’s not forget that Unique was a subject of the scrutiny, control, and consequence theme about her gender presentation in 4.01. I think we can now be 100% certain that topic will definitely be back.

Puck also shows up in this episode to remind us all of what a disaster he was. It’s a strange scene (what’s he doing out in California that he had enough money to fly out to Lima just to deal with this?) that I think is supposed to be funny, but contains one of those throwaway data points that returns us to Glee’s many narratives around sexuality and consent when he says he had his first threesome at seven, highlighting just how much Tina, Sam and Joe’s performance of “3” was very much clever children playing at what they don’t understand; they’re not in the real world of consequences yet, no one’s looking too hard. But they will be soon.

Also in the department of scrutiny, control and consequence was a throwaway line from Kurt that likely contains some significant foreshadowing that may well underscore just how this theme will continue as the season moves forward. Kurt’s remark to Rachel to appreciate the gift of freedom Finn has given her can only bode poorly for episode 4.04, which anyone who follows Glee spoilers now knows is called “The Breakup” and features not only surprise visits from Blaine and Finn, but some ugly couples moments and No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.”

That Kurt later turns over his shoulder to watch as Rachel — after she musters her self-control and strength — paints over Finn’s name in a heart is made even more jarring by the deconstructed sweater Kurt is wearing; his world is unraveling, and he doesn’t even know it yet. It makes me strongly suspect that whatever transpires between Kurt and Blaine in 4.04 is at least some of will be driven by the idea of a breakup as, like the situation between Rachel and Finn, an act of generosity.

Each of show’s characters currently face situations in which they have the option to hurt themselves. Sometimes, those acts of self-injury may be to the good — if Rachel practices for Cassandra July’s class until her toes bleed, that’s a very different choice of self-injury than the one where Cassandra July downs a drink everyone time one of her students shows up to tell her they’re going to be on Broadway when she’ll never be so again.

Even characters who haven’t shown up yet seem to fit this narrative bill: Isabelle, Kurt’s soon to be boss at Vogue.com has been described as “kind of a mess” and as someone Kurt mentors as much as she mentors him. That sounds like high profile and not in control and dealing with the consequences all over to me.

One of Glee‘s many functions, on- and off-screen has been to make a certain type of ambition to performance, fame, and success seem cool — and possible — to people who might have previously thought otherwise. The Glee Project, one of the whole property’s weirdest interactions with the fourth wall, only underscores this particularly in its use of Chris Colfer’s real life journey to fame story as something of a template.

But if you’re going to make people dream, and if you want to tell the whole story, you also have to warn: your toes will bleed; your heart will hurt; you will be criticized body and soul; and, if you make it, you may feel like you are in a cage.

Glee asks if, knowing that, you still want to dance.

Cassandra July says yes. Everyone else is still figuring it out.

During the airing of “It’s Time” last night the general consensus in my apartment, other than “man, I could not jump rope and lip-synch,” was “Wow, Zach Woodlee was in a weird mood when he choreographed that.” But now that I’ve watched it again, the use of the jump ropes and the cup game make a lot more sense to me, both in terms of where Blaine is now, and the narrative structure the fans have had to install around him to account for his incredible de-aging process.

Just to review, for anyone that missed it, Blaine was originally supposed to be an older mentor to Kurt; then we all assumed they were the same age; and then when he showed up at McKinley he was a year behind Kurt in school. While the problem of characters’ ages (and drivers licenses and college applications) is hardly a new one for Glee or an isolated problem in hot pop-culture properties, the Blaine thing is a particularly extreme example and a subject of a great deal of fandom annoyance (although if you were Ryan Murphy and the reaction to “Teenage Dream” dropped into your lap, what would you do?).

Of course, that annoyance has led to speculation from “Blaine was held back a year due to school missed around the Sadie Hawkins attack and subsequent transfer to Dalton” to “Blaine exhibits some age-inappropriate behavior around sex that may be indicative of other issues.” Even ignoring those two themes, it’s hard not to say that Blaine was anything other than working hard at (clumsily) being a little adult at Dalton — from his not that great advice to Kurt, to his “let’s sing about sex toys” moment at the Gap, to his talk with Burt Hummel about Kurt and sex.

Since those events, and Blaine’s transfer to Dalton, we have in many ways seen him act more the age he is now assigned, even if that’s been shown through his seeming to sink into himself and try too hard in ways that are, often, explicitly transparent. Insecurities around Finn, his brother, and Kurt’s departure, as well as the no longer hidden height difference between Criss and Colfer, have also helped sell us on the idea that Blaine is neither older, nor wiser than Kurt. Serious and adult issues that are often a part of the limminal nature of being a teenager — including suicide and sexuality — also have helped to bring Blaine’s characterization more in line with his narrative age.

But even as the viewing audience has gotten on board with that (or at least been invited to get on board with that), the question has remained whether Blaine has any idea that he’s still a kid. Somehow, in “It’s Time” we realize that he does, in fact, finally know just how young he is and just how much he’s not ready for the big scary world yet.

The choreography of “It’s Time” is suffused to nods at youth — the “cup game,” which I was unfamiliar with and people who watch the show in my house insist is something they played at camp, and the jumping rope are both things associated with childhood. So are the pigtails the girls performing the jump rope tricks are wearing. In “It’s Time” Blaine is suddenly a child amongst children, and the song is less about Kurt needing to spread his wings and fly, and more about a world closing to him, that Blaine is ready, or perhaps even unwilling to leave yet.

The number feels emotional, not because Blaine lets go, but because the worlds he and Kurt inhabit are uncoupling, which will only cause more consternation later. After all, while Kurt will visit Ohio, it’s like his father says — he could come back, but he won’t — not really, not to be a denizen of that time and place. And yes, Kurt and Blaine can Skype, but how do you send an email to Brigadoon? How do you pass letters in and out of a faerie ring that divides two worlds that run on different times?

With the significant filming spoilers fans are aware of regarding episode 4 (and Ryan Murphy’s declaration that he will swim gloriously in a pool of fandom tears), and Murphy also having tweeted last night that Blaine will sing with the Warblers again in episode 7, it’s easy to suspect that once the uncoupling of Kurt and Blaine’s worlds begins it will also accelerate, with Blaine pulling back into the mists and Kurt living in the bright, metallic, and too fast world of New York.

The question after that inevitability then becomes, what will pull them back together? And will it be something that echoes out of the Kurt’s world or Blaine’s? And if it does originate in Blaine’s sphere, is that a place Kurt can still access? Or no longer lost, and no longer a boy, will be barred from Neverland?