Friday, 10 February 2012

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Foreshadowing and Genocide and Quite a Bit More, Actually, in "Amy's Choice" (Another one of those now-more-conveniently-located posts.) One of the core assumptions of the way I teach visual rhetoric is that directors often know more than they know (or are letting on). This is because shooting schedules often don't track with air dates—for example, the episode I'm going to be discussing today, "Amy's Choice," was the seventh aired, but last one filmed in Series Five of Doctor Who, meaning that writer Gareth Roberts and director Catherine Morshead already knew what would happen in the four episodes that would follow it. The result is a kind of foreknowledge masquerading as foreshadowing: the audience experiences the latter because the writer and director possess the former. Sound obvious? That's because that's how we think foreshadowing works. Only one problem: foreshadowing doesn't require authorial intent to be visible in a work. The Jews didn't sit around writing a book foreshadowing the eventual arrival of some guy named Jesus—they wrote a book that a bunch of Christians later interpreted to contain a number of moments when the coming of some guy named Jesus was foretold. Foreshadowing, in other words, often functions as an interpretation used to bolster the authority of a particular reader. ("What do you mean you didn't see Jesus's coming foretold in the Hebrew Bible? What are they teaching at the monastery these days?") Whereas foreshadowing was once largely a matter of readerly interpretation, thanks to some technological innovations I haven't the time nor the space to get into here—it starts with books and evolves into lending libraries and marches forward—foreshadowing is now considered to be more a matter of authorial (or directorial) intervention. More succinctly, material that used to be wrenched from variably willing texts is now forcibly inserted into them. The classic example of the latter would be the medical drama in which someone suddenly feels a sharp pain in his or her head. The cause? Some writer forcibly inserted a tumor into it as a cheaps means of "foreshadowing" death. It's about as subtle as: Because most viewers prefer their foreshadowing to be a little more subtle than semaphore, writers and directors must be careful how they pace the parceling out of information. This is generally true—but it is even more crucial when, as is the case with "Amy's Choice," the previous episodes have already been filmed. Sometimes showrunners have been known to withhold information from writers and directors to enforce subtlety, but even in such cases the actors and crew can't unring those bells: a scene that would've been lit a certain way or a line that would've been delivered without a lilt will look and sound a little different after the chimes have sounded. All of which is only to say that Roberts and Morshead needed to write and direct "Amy's Choice" with a deft hand because they knew they were filming a fake version of a real death. Being that this is Doctor Who, that oversimplifies things slightly, but the scene that follows is a dry run for...
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Remembering Whitney Houston Whitney Houston burst onto the music scene in 1985 with her self-titled LP which had four number one hit singles on it, including “The Greatest Love of All,” “You Give Good Love” and “Saving All My Love for You,” plus it won a Grammy Award for best pop vocal performance by a female and two American Music Awards, one for best rhythm and blues single and another for best rhythm and blues video. She was also cited as best new artist of the year by Billboard and by Rolling Stone magazine. With all this hype one might expect the album to be an anticlimatic, lackluster affair, but the surprise was that Whitney Houston (Arista) was one of the warmest, most complex and altogether satisfying rhythm and blues records of the 1980s and Whitney herself had a voice that defies belief. From the elegant, beautiful photo of her on the cover of the album (in a gown by Giovanne De Maura) and its fairly sexy counterpart on the back (in a bathing suit by Norma Kamali) one knows that this wasn’t going to be a blandly professional affair; the record was smooth but intense and Whitney’s voice leaped across so many boundaries and was so versatile (though she was mainly a jazz singer) that it’s hard to take in the album on a first listening. “The Greatest Love of All” was one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity. From the first line (Michael Masser and Linda Creed are credited as the writers) to the last, it was a state-of-the-art ballad about believing in yourself. It was a powerful statement and on that Whitney sung with a grandeur that approached sublime. Its universal message crossed all boundaries and instilled one with the hope that it’s not too late for us to better ourself, to act kinder. Since it’s impossible in the world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It was an important message, crucial really, and it was beautifully stated on this album.

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