Lately I’ve been unwinding with Bravo’s re-runs of the The West Wing, a show I’ve followed off and on over the years. Tonight’s episode, “In Excelsis Deo” (original airdate 12-15-99), is worth a comment. The A-plot involves White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler arranging a funeral for a homeless Korean war vet who is found frozen to death on the National Mall wearing a coat Ziegler had once donated to goodwill (with business card still in pocket, hence the connection). It’s the final sequence, in which the vet’s funeral at Arlington is juxtaposed with a boy’s choir carolling the “Little Drummer Boy” at the White House that’s really exquisite. The genius is in the visual and audio editing, not the writing. As the camera builds its parallels between the honor guard and the choir, between Toby and a handful of others grave-side and the festive White House staffers, between the flag-draped casket and the decorated tree, the choir music binds it all together. The way Toby (a veteran himself) and Mrs. Landingham (the President’s Secretary, who we’ve learned has lost two sons in Vietnam) flinch—flinch violently—as the honor guard fires its volleys is also extraordinary.
Please understand that this usually isn’t the sort of thing I go in for: it’s awash with boomer sentiment, there’s nothing subtle or politically aware about it—but it’s also just about the most effective thing I’ve seen on network TV.
Posted by mgk at August 28, 2003 12:22 AMInteresting, later in the day after reading your post about "affect by montage", i just had to conduct a search using Google and the string "sentimentality digital"
And I be George Williams would have lots to say about the textual construction of the sentimental. The "sentimental" being one of those great 18th century categories.
Posted by: Francois Lachance at August 28, 2003 04:54 PM | Link to CommentI remember that show. Vividly. Particularly that ending.
Posted by: Liz at August 30, 2003 02:03 PM | Link to CommentMatt,
There is almost a "proleptic" anticipation in your West Wing meditation on your future meditation on the WTC towers:
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000152.html
I wonder if the digital world and the actual world saturized by the interventions of digitalized products and digitalizing media are open to the affective responses to the sublime and the beautiful that the 18th century captured in the literature of sensibility.
Out of the scriptorium of Lauren Caines, Kevin Hull and Alison Kidston
http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/18c/33360102/finlwebs/GSQNX/group.htm
comes their selection from Janet Todd's book Sensibility: an Introduction, in which Todd writes, "This fiction initially showed people how to behave, how to express themselves in friendship and how to respond decently to life's experiences. Later, it prided itself more on making its readers weep and in teaching them when and how much to weep."
Montage and cinema also is meant to tutor the viewer.
Jay Caplan in _Framed Narratives_ picks up Michael Fried's art history work on the position of the beholder to argue that Diderot's narrative creates a kind of sacraficial mise en abyme where the reader is in the position of the absent one in the depicted scene. Just where does a camera invite the viewer to situate themself? Just how does the cross-cutting come to be establish as a single unified narrative point of view or ennunciatory instance?
Could the framing contribute to these effects of reader and viewer identification?