send a flood
a lot of what passes as ‘critically acclaimed’ film and television recently is depressing as hell, delving into the darkness of humanity. and to be honest, i’m as tired of it as i am tired of watching stuff with homogenous casts. which is why i tend to be a sucker for musicals. and even moreso if they explore themes that really resonate with me; like, the downtrodden and outcast discovering their inner power, realizing their potential and overcoming prejudices. cheesy and cliche, perhaps, but i’d say those are themes that get at my heartstrings. but what it is about a musical that really gets to me, in contrast to the dark and depressing productions coming out of hollywood, is its celebratory force.
celebration is different from victory. victory is an aggressive concept; it’s antagonistic– it assumes someone else’s defeat. victory is a binary result and dismisses the complexity of relations between forces– not opposing forces, just different ones. sure, many narratives conclude in victory. but what gives me the feelz are the narratives that are a celebration. the victory is a moment of clear resolution. the celebration, on the other hand, lasts for a duration and intends not for resolution, but for expression. celebration is the process of mourning, but joyfully. it’s recalling all the affects stored in one’s body, and in a joyful event, expressing all that energy and enacting the body’s power. in this act of celebration even negative affects are transformed into positive ones– this is the phenomenon of catharsis. and this is what i feel from musicals.
[ok, i’m as cynical as the best of them. yes, i understand there’s a formula for generating desire via music and visual media, and profiting off of the deferral of its fulfillment– this is basic psychoanalysis of capitalism. i get all that. but my cynicism is equally matched by my understanding of the reactive forces that engender this cynicism, which renders me somewhat of a romantic. meaning, i’m honest about my cynicism. there’s honesty in terms of transparency, and then there’s honesty in terms of vulnerability. me writing this is a display of both. i’m easily affected. i’d like to think we all are. but let’s be real, we’re rarely honest with our feelings, cause we’re so disconnected from our bodies (dudes especially). but the feminine in me embraces all that– all the affects that engender cynicism to romanticism. it’s not contradictory, it’s just complex. anyways, enough with the apologetics.]
(disclaimer, this is not a review. and as is stated elsewhere on this site, we're not interested in facts or the truth, this is not the news; neither are we interested in any authoritative claim on what qualifies as 'good', nor do we care for winning any arguments. rather, we're interested in exploring the expressive force of affects that are the extension of complex bodies.)
in Greatest Showman we not only have the singing, but the dancing to go with it. i’d argue singing is not fully realized without dancing, and vice versa– but not many bodies are capable of such tremendous outputs of affective energy (which would raise an interesting analysis into how ‘disabled’ bodies dance in their own empowered ways). our culture is saturated with repressed bodies, bodies that mime and reproduce normative representations of what bodies are permitted to do in space. but the musical disrupts such normativity, or to use lyrics from ‘this is me’ (video below)– in musicals, bodies are free to realize their potentiality of “bursting through the barricades.”
song and dance has become relegated largely to the private realm of experience. just one train ride through nyc and you’ll notice everyone with their earbuds in, isolated from the world and disconnected from everything but their phone. but living in nyc, one can’t blame them, life is tough in this city and people wanna be left alone. point is, during a time when people constantly ‘share’ music via social media, the music isn’t really being shared, just consumed. when everything is input without output, this leads to a lot of internally stored and repressed energy.
which brings me back to the musical and why it’s a reminder of how things could always be other than the way they are. for sure, the musical is a display of fantasy that perhaps many of us secretly desire to be a part of. but like all art, it has a transformational quality to reconfigure our relation to things, people, places and ourselves. in musicals, characters sing. they don’t just speak. singing is the expression and exercise of affect, of feelings. while speaking also conveys feelings, singing does it on another level of intensity. there’s a catharsis to singing, the release and exercise of energy that something like talk-therapy also induces. (but on the flip-side, if all you’re doing is singing 24/7, all that output without input reeks of egotism and identity-inflation.) and what follows singing is dancing, for dance is the energy of the music flowing through the body– dance is the expression of body and mind in harmony, and the tremendous joy that flows from this harmony.
oh yea. and it’s not like it’s just one person singing and/or dancing by themselves. for example, in the clip below, it’s a huge celebratory dance party. a multiplicity of bodies and souls enacting and voicing their affects together in harmony.
to return to what i started off saying, what gets to me about musicals are themes about empowerment, and what makes musicals specifically suited to telling empowering stories of overcoming negative affects…are characters finding their voices. they literally find their own voices by singing and dancing their way through the narrative. the singing isn’t merely performance. it’s symbolic and real all at the same time. this is exemplified in the musical number, “this is me”. it encapsulates all i’ve said above about celebratory force, and the process of mourning joyfully, and together with others:
how do we rewrite the stars?
ok, with the above as a preface, i’d like to discuss the musical number “rewrite the stars” (i encourage listening to it first before reading further– video is below). it hasn’t been since roger and mimi implored us to ‘forget regret’ (rent) that i’ve felt this way, or felt like part of my story and experience had been expressed on screen. what the song, the scene, and the story behind the voices express is the tension of potential energy right before something new and original happens. something that is the result of a mixture of two disparate worlds, or celestial bodies, colliding. essentially, the song is asking: “if we go off-script, how can we make it work?” and the mxdflz interpretation is, how do we navigate through a world when we’re the first, or only one, of our kind (non-binary subjectivity free of identity coercion)? since going ‘off-script’ is essentially to freestyle the rest of the way, without a script, and not being able to turn to or reference anything else that has come before you… indeed, the most creative people are often the most courageous, and loneliest. and that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all.
zac efron’s opening verse pretty much nails what i felt when i first became romantically affected by my partner years ago. we were from disparate worlds in every sense. still today, we walk down the street together and most people would not think to assume we were 'together'. i think this is something about us that most people who know us take for granted, but it makes sense. how could those in a binary world possibly understand what they themselves have never experienced? like, for most people there’s no disconnect between their reality and the way in which the outside world would view it. but for us, there’s always a dissonance of perception by the outside world, if only because the differences between us are so pronounced.
“you know i want you / it’s not a secret i try to hide”
my affection for her wasn’t a secret i was hiding. i was in full pursuit, and i think anyone who knew us back then was fully aware of it. i tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. and perhaps they sat back and watched our drama unfold not unlike watching it in a movie theater, for ours was a narrative so different from anything they’ve seen. anything i’ve even yet to see. i’m not sure to what extent people were expecting us to fail, or how often they thought ‘this won’t last’.
“you claim it’s not in the cards / but fate is pulling you miles away / and out of reach from me”
there’s too many reasons why one would think that ours was a relationship that wouldn’t work out. and i think my partner saw many of them. we had no examples of other relationships like ours. and our families were wildly different. but to emphasize again, social and ethnic divides notwithstanding, we couldn’t have been more different; and we’re still that different today. at the time it felt like it just wasn’t in the cards for us. nor in the stars. we were long odds.
“what if we rewrite the stars?… / it’s up to you / and it’s up to me / no one can say what we get to be / so why don’t we rewrite the stars? / maybe the world could be ours
i wasn’t consciously thinking these sentiments at the time perhaps, but unconsciously, i likely was. all of my actions would’ve expressed such a sentiment. all that i was doing to try to bring myself closer to her and vice versa was an active attempt at rewriting the stars. taking the script that our lives were supposed to follow, taking what fate (the stars) had planned, and deciding to risk following the heart and soul rather than submit to logic and doubt… “no one can say what we get to be”. together, we’re still navigating our way through uncharted waters. and it really is up to us to make of this what we want…which, in many ways also expresses what mxdflz is about.
and then zendaya’s verse comes in:
“you think it’s easy / you think i don’t want to run to you / but there are mountains / and there are doors that we can’t walk through”
damn. i was the idealistic and hopelessly romantic one that hoped for us to work out, hoping for ‘love’. but she saw the reality of our situation. sure, our relationship would be nice in theory, as a fictional story, as an abstraction. but would it pan out in the real world that’s grounded on binary ideology?
“i know you’re wondering why (there are doors we can’t walk through) / because we’re able to be / just you and me / within these walls / but when we go outside / you’re gonna wake up and see that it was hopeless after all”
when we were together, and alone, there was safety and comfort in that space we carved out for ourselves. but she knew that outside of that bubble was a world that was binary. a world that would not take kindly to us. a world that would be alienating and lonely. the chorus is then flipped, instead of efron’s hopeful chorus, zendaya sings:
“no one can rewrite the stars / how can you say you’ll be mine / everything keeps us apart / and i’m not the one you were meant to find / it’s not up to you / it’s not up to me / when everyone tells us what we can be / how can we rewrite the stars?
and the song ends melancholically. no tidy resolution. like zendaya’s character, my partner was realistic. she came from a hard life. she was never supposed to have come so far. at least, not on her own. but together, we’ve elevated one another.
in a sense, this is what we’re all about with MXDFLZ. for what comes after the celebratory and emphatic declaration of “this is me” is the work of “rewriting the stars”. (it’s no coincidence that the two songs are performed in that order) rewriting the stars is the work of taking what is, what fate has resigned us to, and transforming/remixing– taking control of– our narratives and creating something bold and new that results from our impossible story together.
“all i want is to fly with you / all i want is to fall with you / so give me all of you / is it possible? / it’s impossible / say that it’s possible
like efron and zendaya sing, kruz and i have “flown” and “fallen” with one another repeatedly. “is it possible? / say that it’s possible…” that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? in a world that has become entirely determined and predictable despite its growing complexity (big data, how people consume what they input, rendering behavior utterly determined), realizing possibilities has seemingly become an impossibility. which brings us back to the ethical question being asked here, how can we rewrite the stars?