If having Andy Samberg around on SNL over the last few years has done anything to the program, it’s given the show a bit of a kick in the ass. Samberg, one of the show’s youngest castmembers and one of the first to recognize the difficulty of producing fresh material in the age of the Internet, has been responsible for nearly every SNL Digital Short, the distinctly non-live venture that’s brought such latter-day viral classics as “Lazy Sunday” and “Dick in a Box.” Parlaying high-concept non-sequiturs and tongue-in-cheek cameos from the guest hosts into comic gold is, seemingly, what all SNL sketches should be doing, but Samberg’s brand of humor - too grounded in an implicit critique of various aesthetic practices and cliches (music videos, exercise videos) to find much use in the necessarily staid long-shots and sets of live work - has stood out, in part because it addresses that much more penetratingly the program’s favorite subject - television and televisual culture.

With all deference to “Laser Cats! 2″ and the rightly championed “Dick in a Box,” I think “Dear Sister” is Samberg and SNL Digital Short’s most compelling contribution yet. It’s very funny, of course, but funny only carries you so far (and funny can be killed - witness the stultifying anti-humor “Lazy Sunday” parody in Epic Movie(’s trailer, which is all I care to see)).

At first the target seems soft - after all, it is, basically, a parody of The OC’s Season 2 finale, in which Marissa shoots Trey, and the show’s forceful use of Imogen Heap’s “Hide & Seek.” And that happened what - nearly three years ago? (That Heap’s song has been recycled by nearly a dozen other programs and texts - including that Zach Braff/Paul Haggis thing - is important to the short’s larger implications.)

But to take a look a little closer, I submit “Dear Sister” as part of a growing acceptance - within the boundaries of comedy - of avant-garde video works which would seek to offer radical critiques of the popular conventions of televisual and cinematic discourses. The video establishes its ground rules early on. Like The OC, which used (and reused) “Hide & Seek” as shorthand for emotionally trying moments, the song is repeated every time a gunshot goes off. But late in the video, two moments of rupture: the sister (the wonderful Kristen Wiig, here channeling Chan Marshall) is shot repeatedly, and with every shot, the song repeats from its moment of ‘eruption.’ Later, as the two cops shoot each other, each iteration of the song - one played after the other - drowns out the other. Each is given a slow-motion fall. The video seems to posture: where in this larger, drawn out set of discontinuities are we to find the true moment of rupture? Nowhere - instead the audio is reduced to obnoxious cacophony, a mirror being held up to banal discursive patterns in American television and film: the reduction of every emotional moment to a pop song. As my friend Tyson postured in an essay written for Montage about the use of music in neo-melodramas like United 93 and Syriana, “Is this the new aural interiority?” Whose perspective is “Dear Sister” told from? We don’t know, and so everyone’s death is granted its own moment of pop interiority.

A lack of specificity in the syntactical fundamentals of cinematic storytelling - a cinematic illiteracy - is what’s being addressed here. Unable to forge a connection on the basis of the visual and narrative, we are reduced to relying on the aural to cue us to emotion. And though, thankfully, this cinematic blight has a limited reach, it’s nonetheless an important part of how visual culture communicates now, which is to say the scope of “Dear Sister” is much more biting, more important than any parody of 80s home exercise videos or early 90s new jack swing sex-you-up music videos.

All of this is of course not to say that pop has no place in cinema - on the contrary, music can be used to extremely effective purposes, and the dramatically motivated use of a song can be among the more transcendent moments in a film. But “Dear Sister” forces us to confront an important question - when viewing a text, is the text earning our emotional involvement, or is it using lazy shorthand to make up for its own inarticulacy?


COMMENTS / 5 COMMENTS

i agree with much of what you write, but hugely object to one statement you make, an extension of a fundamental assumption: “Unable to forge a connection on the basis of the visual and narrative, we are reduced to relying on the aural to cue us to emotion.” Why “reduced?” The visual-centric approach to film criticism you implicitly embrace is stifling and demeaning to what essentially compromises half of the medium. Is the emotion we feel from great music less than that of a great painting? Then why is the element of sound or music in cinema any less valid than the element of the visuals? I would say that the aural inarticulateness of these filmmakers you describe mirrors their visual inarticulateness - good filmmakers manipulate sound with as much craft and creativity as they do the image.

Max added these pithy words on Apr 15 07 at 7:10 pm

I say “reduced” because a film that relies on sound alone is necessarily an inferior film to one that integrates visuals and sound in their production of meaning. Cinema is a visual medium - sound, yes, comprises one component of the medium, but remove sound and you still have cinema. Sound is an additive element of the cinematic experience, which is to say that it enhances, but is not essential to, a film. Certainly sound can enhance and give nuance to meaning in a work, and you’re correct that works which rely on music exclusively often betray as much aural inarticulacy as visual, but fundamentally, these works I refer to largely fail to impactfully convey meaning on a visual level, which is a failure at the most basic level of cinematic syntax.

There are hundreds - thousands - of important film works which exist without soundtrack. Silent cinema, for example, much of which was produced without compositions in mind, and much of avant garde cinema. There are no examples of films which completely eschew the visual, because film is at its core a visual medium - the closest I can think of is Jarman’s Blue, which is nevertheless a remarkable visual experience because of the implicit and explicit meaning of the single color tonality that makes up the film’s visual component.

Brendon added these pithy words on Apr 15 07 at 7:31 pm

Brendon, I would add to your response to Max’s comment that for me, “reduced” also connotes relying on a single, premade pop song as the sole aural component—an approach that “Dear Sister” obviously adopts as critique, but which otherwise suggests pure laziness on the creators’ part rather than a consciously minimalist manipulation. I could make a semi-parallel argument about “neomelodramatic” musical cues: that creating an ambient synth bed is simply *easier* than composing a layered classical melody with counterpoint, harmony, and all that. By “easier,” I mean that such music takes less time to create and that more people can do it to some ostensibly “professional” standard of competence. Hopefully, in my own film “Open Shores” I will avoid using either kind of music (self-call).

Tyson added these pithy words on Apr 15 07 at 10:17 pm

They say (I don’t know what they’re parodying) “you restored my faith in humanity,” in exaggerated response to something good.

In this case: “you restored my faith in the humanities.” Amy Essigmann called me, forced me to download the OC clip and watch it, forced me to download “Dear Sister” and watch it, then forced me to read your blog entry out loud to her (to make sure I actually read it). The best non-consensual blog experience yet.

Hunter added these pithy words on Apr 24 07 at 4:41 pm

What is the name of the group singing “Ooh what you say” on the Dear sister/ SNL spoof??

RM added these pithy words on Aug 13 07 at 8:03 pm

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