Post by rbnn on Dec 11, 2008 20:19:16 GMT -5
SCC episodes usually have a layered structure. At one level, they tell us something about the plot. But typically, at least in the great episodes, they have many hidden meanings, other layers that are there to be found if only we pay attention. When we understand an episode, we cannot only worry about the single superficial meaning of plot: we must understand all the other layers of meaning.
I will illustrate this process of uncovering layers of meaning in SCC by considering a few lines from one of the most intricate episodes: Self Made Man, which was episode 11 of season 2. I will quote the lines, and go over some of the many different levels of significance these lines have.
In Self Made Man Cameron befriends Eric, who is confined to a wheelchair after a bout with Ewing's sarcoma. The lines I will explain occur when Eric is sitting with Cameron in the film vault of a
library:
The scene begins with a bravura bit of cinematography, as the camera tracks left over shelves packed full of reels of old film, finally alighting on the haunting image above, where Eric, the only living thing in the room, seems overwhelmed by the film reels.
(It's worth emphasizing, before getting into some textual analysis, how beautiful and powerful some of these images are - it's very rare in television to have such powerful cinematography.)
Anyway, this essay is about Eric's next statement. He says:
The rest of this post will simply discuss various aspects, or levels of Eric's statement. What did Eric's statement mean and what does it tell us about him, about the film – and about us?
1. First, it's worthwhile just to look at the literal meaning. Eric is staring at the films in the film vault, describing how they are preserved in silver nitrate, the formulation for films in the 1920s. He compares the immediacy of these films to modern DVDs, and gently mocks the "tricks" that todays' filmmakers use. He notes that they "never age" and speculates how nice it would be, also never to age. Finally, he compares the situation to an A.E. Housman poem.
2. Even if Eric is speaking literally, at least at first, there is a clear secondary reference: Eric's words also allude to Cameron, who, like the images on the silver nitrate films, are "beautiful, healthy, strong" forever (or for a very long time, at any rate). And while Eric is ostensibly talking about silver nitrate, the camera lingers, not on him, but on Cameron. Cameron looks upset and is probably contrasting her own permanence with Eric's transitory nature:
3. That Eric's comments allude to Cameron leads us to the next intepretation: Eric is also alluding to the T-888, Myron Stark, sitting unmoving – frozen, in Eric's words – behind a wall.
Cameron's discovery of Myron is a crucial surprise in the episode, clarifying much of what came before, namely Myron's schemes in the 1920s. But in theory, a sufficiently careful viewer, knowing that Eric's metaphors were carefully chosen, could have inferred that he was referring to Myron, and could have deduced Myron's plans from those words. In any case, Myron's discovery gives new significance to Eric's comments about being "frozen in time."
4. One key to interpreting Eric's speech is his reference to A.E. Housman, a late 19th/early 20th century British poet. Housman's poems mainly concern the fleeting nature of youth and the advantages of death in avoiding the decay associated with life. So Eric might have been alluding to Housman's general work. In fact, however, Eric has one of Housman's most famous poems specifically in mind: To an Athlete Dying Young. That poem describes the funeral of a young athlete, and argues that the athlete's death is not so bad because his achievement will now never be sullied.
Housman's poem begins by recounting the excitement surrounding one of the athlete's great triumphs:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place...
The verb "to chair" is British and means to carry, usually in acclaim. So the initial image of this poem is of the athlete's being carried triumphantly. Eric must have had in mind this poem (which is one of Housman's most well-known) because this moment was his first visit to the film vault: he had been carried there – chaired there – by Cameron, as the image below shows (note Eric's gleeful expression, linking to the athlete's triumph in the poem).
The poem's next verse contrasts the joyous chairing of celebration with the athlete's being carried in the coffin at his funeral:
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
After recounting all of the decay and tragedy and disappointment the athlete avoided by dying young, the poem evokes an image like Eric's "frozen in time" phrase, to emphasize that, in death, the athlete would always be triumphant:
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
These stanzas show that Eric is alluding to this particular poem of Housman's, as well as to Housman's general body of work, and so our next question must be: what does this tell us?
5. The next way to analyze Eric's statement is to realize that even though he says that the people captured on the silver-nitrate films in the film vault are "frozen in time," in fact they can become unfrozen: the films can be played, the people move, as indeed they do later in the episode. So in fact this also hints that the frozen terminator will itself spring to life, like the frozen people on film. And it suggests that art too can spring to life and affect living people.
6. We can infer certain plot details from the fact that Eric cited the poem he did. Eric showed many symptoms of a recurrence of his sarcoma: weakness, chill, loss of appetite, and loss of weight. In a key scene, Eric seems to get angry when Cameron points out these symptoms to him. But in fact, Eric must have known exactly what these symptoms signified. Eric knew the sarcoma had recurred when he cited Housman's poem. Eric thus knew his death could be prolonged but did not want to endure the decay and suffering that treatment for the metastasized sarcoma would have entailed. He is alluding to the Housman poem because he wants to be remembered for his triumphs: for his work in the library; for his helping Cameron; for his generally normal and productive lifestyle – and not for the debilitations of the sarcoma.
This link between the plot we see and the poem also resolves an otherwise ambiguous question: whether Eric actually dies at the end when he does not show up for work. The poem here would not make sense if the athlete just recovered; similarly, for the poem to have been cited correctly, Eric must actually, like the poem's subject, die.
7. The SCC series in general, and this episode in particular, are very concerned with blurring two boundaries: the boundary between human and machine, and the boundary between past and future. Eric's statement also blurs these boundaries: between the dead people on film stars who re-live, in a way once played, and living people; between terminators and humans; between death and life.
When Eric plays the old films, Cameron and the viewer give new meaning and significance to the comments of the people on the film who, unbeknownst to themselves, were describing the appearance of a terminator in the future.
By replaying the films, Eric not only affects the future (because Cameron uses that information to stop Myron Stark) but also reinterprets our understanding of the past. In the same way, Eric, by reminding viewers of the Housman poems, is replaying those poems too. Like the replayed films, the poems now seem to be talking about completely different. None of us can ever now read "To an Athlete Dying Young" or With Rue My Heart is Laden or If It Chance Your Eye Offend You or any of the other classic Housman poems without thinking of this particular interpretation: of a terminator as a kind of instant of frozen time, of Eric struggling with his sarcoma.
So the Housman interpretation affects the future – we can use it to predict Eric will die, and to predict the Stark finale – but it also affects the past, in that our interpretation of Housman is forever now altered. This process is roughly depicted in the diagram below (if readers will excuse my artistic skills) which is intended to show some of the interplay between cause and effect, and between art and understanding, in the plot of the episode and in our understanding of the Housman poem:
The top block in the diagram refers to the world depicted in the episode, that is the plot of the episode. The arrows mean "affects". The rightward pointing arrows point in the direction of forward time. Thus, in the plot of SCC, the events in 1920 affected the world of 2008 via Myron Stark; the actions of Cameron and John in 2008 affect the post-Judgment Day future. It is these effects that the episode is concerned about.
The leftward pointing arrows point to the past. In SCC, the future of Skynet affects the 2008 present, due to Cameron and all the other time-travelers. The 2008 present does not directly affect 1920 (although the future does) - but it affects the characters' understanding of the events of 1920. The events in the film vault and the films that are played change the characters' understanding of 1920.
The lower block in the diagram refers to the viewer's understanding. The horizontal arrows now denote "affects the interpretation of." Thus, the viewer's understanding of Housman's poem, "To an Athlete Dying Young," as we saw, affects his or her understanding of the actual plot of Self Made Man. And because the images in Self Made Man are so powerful, the viewer now, on reading the poem, will have in mind the episode. Thus, the viewer's understanding of the past (that is, of the poem) is affected by his or her understanding of the episode. More speculatively, in the viewer's future, he or she will view Self Made Man differently, as his or her own understanding changes. If the episode is successful, it will impact how, in the future, the viewer reads and understands the episode, the Housman poem, maybe even other films. In any case, it is the goal of a great work of art to affect the viewer in the future, to change how the viewer looks at the world: if successful - and I would argue Self Made Man is very successful - the art actually affects the future of a real person, just like the frozen images Eric talked about eventually spring to life, and affect the living characters on the show. This interaction between the blocks, between the viewer's and the SCC world, is denoted by the vertical arrows between the respective boxes.
In conclusion, we've shown how an apparently straightforward conversation has many different subtle layers of meaning. The seven layers I have discussed here are summarized in the diagram below:
These meanings are couched seamlessly within a complex and interesting mystery, framed by gorgeous and haunting cinematography. It is this combination of depth of thought and craftsmanship in execution that makes SCC, in its best moments, so fascinating.
Thus, I encourage viewers to strive themselves to elicit the layers of meanings that lurk behind the dialog in the best episodes within SCC.
I will illustrate this process of uncovering layers of meaning in SCC by considering a few lines from one of the most intricate episodes: Self Made Man, which was episode 11 of season 2. I will quote the lines, and go over some of the many different levels of significance these lines have.
In Self Made Man Cameron befriends Eric, who is confined to a wheelchair after a bout with Ewing's sarcoma. The lines I will explain occur when Eric is sitting with Cameron in the film vault of a
library:
The scene begins with a bravura bit of cinematography, as the camera tracks left over shelves packed full of reels of old film, finally alighting on the haunting image above, where Eric, the only living thing in the room, seems overwhelmed by the film reels.
(It's worth emphasizing, before getting into some textual analysis, how beautiful and powerful some of these images are - it's very rare in television to have such powerful cinematography.)
Anyway, this essay is about Eric's next statement. He says:
Wow, look at all this. DVDs are all right, but this is the raw deal. Silver nitrate, raw, before filmmakers figured out all the tricks. Pure humanity on film. . .
All these people, captured, frozen in time, they never age, I mean a hundred years could pass they'll still be here, still look exactly the same. It would be nice wouldn't it? Freeze yourself in a moment, the best moment of your life? Have things never change. Be beautiful, healthy, strong.
Anyway, don't let me get all A.E. Housman on you.
All these people, captured, frozen in time, they never age, I mean a hundred years could pass they'll still be here, still look exactly the same. It would be nice wouldn't it? Freeze yourself in a moment, the best moment of your life? Have things never change. Be beautiful, healthy, strong.
Anyway, don't let me get all A.E. Housman on you.
The rest of this post will simply discuss various aspects, or levels of Eric's statement. What did Eric's statement mean and what does it tell us about him, about the film – and about us?
1. First, it's worthwhile just to look at the literal meaning. Eric is staring at the films in the film vault, describing how they are preserved in silver nitrate, the formulation for films in the 1920s. He compares the immediacy of these films to modern DVDs, and gently mocks the "tricks" that todays' filmmakers use. He notes that they "never age" and speculates how nice it would be, also never to age. Finally, he compares the situation to an A.E. Housman poem.
2. Even if Eric is speaking literally, at least at first, there is a clear secondary reference: Eric's words also allude to Cameron, who, like the images on the silver nitrate films, are "beautiful, healthy, strong" forever (or for a very long time, at any rate). And while Eric is ostensibly talking about silver nitrate, the camera lingers, not on him, but on Cameron. Cameron looks upset and is probably contrasting her own permanence with Eric's transitory nature:
3. That Eric's comments allude to Cameron leads us to the next intepretation: Eric is also alluding to the T-888, Myron Stark, sitting unmoving – frozen, in Eric's words – behind a wall.
Cameron's discovery of Myron is a crucial surprise in the episode, clarifying much of what came before, namely Myron's schemes in the 1920s. But in theory, a sufficiently careful viewer, knowing that Eric's metaphors were carefully chosen, could have inferred that he was referring to Myron, and could have deduced Myron's plans from those words. In any case, Myron's discovery gives new significance to Eric's comments about being "frozen in time."
4. One key to interpreting Eric's speech is his reference to A.E. Housman, a late 19th/early 20th century British poet. Housman's poems mainly concern the fleeting nature of youth and the advantages of death in avoiding the decay associated with life. So Eric might have been alluding to Housman's general work. In fact, however, Eric has one of Housman's most famous poems specifically in mind: To an Athlete Dying Young. That poem describes the funeral of a young athlete, and argues that the athlete's death is not so bad because his achievement will now never be sullied.
Housman's poem begins by recounting the excitement surrounding one of the athlete's great triumphs:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place...
The verb "to chair" is British and means to carry, usually in acclaim. So the initial image of this poem is of the athlete's being carried triumphantly. Eric must have had in mind this poem (which is one of Housman's most well-known) because this moment was his first visit to the film vault: he had been carried there – chaired there – by Cameron, as the image below shows (note Eric's gleeful expression, linking to the athlete's triumph in the poem).
The poem's next verse contrasts the joyous chairing of celebration with the athlete's being carried in the coffin at his funeral:
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
After recounting all of the decay and tragedy and disappointment the athlete avoided by dying young, the poem evokes an image like Eric's "frozen in time" phrase, to emphasize that, in death, the athlete would always be triumphant:
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
These stanzas show that Eric is alluding to this particular poem of Housman's, as well as to Housman's general body of work, and so our next question must be: what does this tell us?
5. The next way to analyze Eric's statement is to realize that even though he says that the people captured on the silver-nitrate films in the film vault are "frozen in time," in fact they can become unfrozen: the films can be played, the people move, as indeed they do later in the episode. So in fact this also hints that the frozen terminator will itself spring to life, like the frozen people on film. And it suggests that art too can spring to life and affect living people.
6. We can infer certain plot details from the fact that Eric cited the poem he did. Eric showed many symptoms of a recurrence of his sarcoma: weakness, chill, loss of appetite, and loss of weight. In a key scene, Eric seems to get angry when Cameron points out these symptoms to him. But in fact, Eric must have known exactly what these symptoms signified. Eric knew the sarcoma had recurred when he cited Housman's poem. Eric thus knew his death could be prolonged but did not want to endure the decay and suffering that treatment for the metastasized sarcoma would have entailed. He is alluding to the Housman poem because he wants to be remembered for his triumphs: for his work in the library; for his helping Cameron; for his generally normal and productive lifestyle – and not for the debilitations of the sarcoma.
This link between the plot we see and the poem also resolves an otherwise ambiguous question: whether Eric actually dies at the end when he does not show up for work. The poem here would not make sense if the athlete just recovered; similarly, for the poem to have been cited correctly, Eric must actually, like the poem's subject, die.
7. The SCC series in general, and this episode in particular, are very concerned with blurring two boundaries: the boundary between human and machine, and the boundary between past and future. Eric's statement also blurs these boundaries: between the dead people on film stars who re-live, in a way once played, and living people; between terminators and humans; between death and life.
When Eric plays the old films, Cameron and the viewer give new meaning and significance to the comments of the people on the film who, unbeknownst to themselves, were describing the appearance of a terminator in the future.
By replaying the films, Eric not only affects the future (because Cameron uses that information to stop Myron Stark) but also reinterprets our understanding of the past. In the same way, Eric, by reminding viewers of the Housman poems, is replaying those poems too. Like the replayed films, the poems now seem to be talking about completely different. None of us can ever now read "To an Athlete Dying Young" or With Rue My Heart is Laden or If It Chance Your Eye Offend You or any of the other classic Housman poems without thinking of this particular interpretation: of a terminator as a kind of instant of frozen time, of Eric struggling with his sarcoma.
So the Housman interpretation affects the future – we can use it to predict Eric will die, and to predict the Stark finale – but it also affects the past, in that our interpretation of Housman is forever now altered. This process is roughly depicted in the diagram below (if readers will excuse my artistic skills) which is intended to show some of the interplay between cause and effect, and between art and understanding, in the plot of the episode and in our understanding of the Housman poem:
The top block in the diagram refers to the world depicted in the episode, that is the plot of the episode. The arrows mean "affects". The rightward pointing arrows point in the direction of forward time. Thus, in the plot of SCC, the events in 1920 affected the world of 2008 via Myron Stark; the actions of Cameron and John in 2008 affect the post-Judgment Day future. It is these effects that the episode is concerned about.
The leftward pointing arrows point to the past. In SCC, the future of Skynet affects the 2008 present, due to Cameron and all the other time-travelers. The 2008 present does not directly affect 1920 (although the future does) - but it affects the characters' understanding of the events of 1920. The events in the film vault and the films that are played change the characters' understanding of 1920.
The lower block in the diagram refers to the viewer's understanding. The horizontal arrows now denote "affects the interpretation of." Thus, the viewer's understanding of Housman's poem, "To an Athlete Dying Young," as we saw, affects his or her understanding of the actual plot of Self Made Man. And because the images in Self Made Man are so powerful, the viewer now, on reading the poem, will have in mind the episode. Thus, the viewer's understanding of the past (that is, of the poem) is affected by his or her understanding of the episode. More speculatively, in the viewer's future, he or she will view Self Made Man differently, as his or her own understanding changes. If the episode is successful, it will impact how, in the future, the viewer reads and understands the episode, the Housman poem, maybe even other films. In any case, it is the goal of a great work of art to affect the viewer in the future, to change how the viewer looks at the world: if successful - and I would argue Self Made Man is very successful - the art actually affects the future of a real person, just like the frozen images Eric talked about eventually spring to life, and affect the living characters on the show. This interaction between the blocks, between the viewer's and the SCC world, is denoted by the vertical arrows between the respective boxes.
In conclusion, we've shown how an apparently straightforward conversation has many different subtle layers of meaning. The seven layers I have discussed here are summarized in the diagram below:
These meanings are couched seamlessly within a complex and interesting mystery, framed by gorgeous and haunting cinematography. It is this combination of depth of thought and craftsmanship in execution that makes SCC, in its best moments, so fascinating.
Thus, I encourage viewers to strive themselves to elicit the layers of meanings that lurk behind the dialog in the best episodes within SCC.
