Enjoying Heroes, especially because the trailer features The End Of The World, everyone's favourite (okay - etc) Skeeter Davis song and my favourite apocaplyptic pop-country ballad. It's so resoundingly Goth it reminds me of the Pete Murphy look-a-likes that used to (still, really) hang around Yeovil College, trying to keep out of the sun (Near Dark was a big favourite, just try opening the curtains on one of them after a heavy nights drinking) and giving each other chicken scratches to ease the pain of another crap 12" by the Mission. Sweet, country voices do the end of the world better than anyone; there's already a touch of KKK fire and brimstone around the edges, lines of burning crosses like wind farms, a Rapture (for more info, see Hal) in reverse.
Skeeter nails every ventricle of the desolation of heartbreak, the spoken bit seems totally unforced, as if she simply can't keep singing... her voice sounds like she's utterly at odds with the world and is trying to maintain a little dignity in the face of totally sensory derangement and ontological disturbance, the descent into autism and egocentrism- "why does the sun go on shining? why does the sea rush to shore?" This works perfectly for Heroes, which seems to have this as a theme running through the first few episodes - I love the fact that the main characters are circling one another, not clubbing together, wanting to save the world because it's their world; there's a slight parallel with the bit of A Thousand Plateaus I'm reading (slowly) at the moment about immanence and the state of becoming animal (okay, it's a shoe-horn but the whole book is a shoe-horn into everything). There's also a chunk of Heroes that evokes the whole Marilyn Complex as well, the need to save through people...
When they become the Defenders I'll lose faith, I imagine, because I never saw Namor or the Hulk (especially Namor) ever really letting themselves be a part of a whole. I guess that was a point of irony I missed when I read the comics originally. In fact, the Silver Surfer's existential angst was all about a girl wasn't it? (I'm not going to bother looking this up - this is the internet, after all). As was the Hulks. And Namor - all fucked over in one way or another by personal loss and a hatred of humanity that stemmed directly from a hatred of one person who's not there any more. I always liked the fact that the Silver Surfer surfed - a kick in the face to the 'surfers of the world unite' mentality that's sold through the shops; his solitary approach is like the surfing community as it really is - wave rage, dissonance, feudalism, nothing remotely Swayze about it, as far as i can tell, at least not in it's British incarnation.
One day this song will be about you.
A Yousendit Wailing Wall Of Sound Production
2 comments:
The thing about Namor, really, was that he was the spawn of an interspecies one-fuck deal - I think he knew that and that was what really fuelled his 'anger', not all this crap about him suffering from some sort of oxygenosis that made him weird out on the surface, etc.
Now that you mentioned Heroes, I would like to say that NBC couldn't produce a better program than this one, I love the sequence of the story, and until the protagonists. It's fantastic!
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