Instructions:
– Develop a thesis statement.
– Use one literary theory to analyze three songs/music videos or three literary theories to analyze one video. Explain how each segment of analysis supports your central thesis.
– You may not use songs/music videos that you’ve analyzed in previous papers for this course.
– Write a paper of roughly 1,200 words.
– Format the paper in MLA style.
– Note that I will score this paper using the same rubric I used for all the other papers. I’ll simply double the point values for each section.
Sample Writing
A confluence of artistic factors often creates a more complex meaning than any one individual element of a literary text might suggest. The music video for Dinosaur Jr.’s song “Get Me,” from their 1993 album Where You Been, demonstrates this idea. The lyrical elements of the video, delivered with a type of deadpan despair, focuses on internal conflict and estrangement. The concurrent visual elements of the video, however, revolve around symbols of vision, communication, and knowledge. Through this pairing of visual and lyrical texts, Dinosaur Jr.’s “Get Me” works as an artistic whole to communicate a timeless paradox: people can willfully push away what they actually want most truly.
Mascis mournfully sings, “You’re not going to get me through this, are you?” This repeated lyric seems to assume the form of both a rhetorical question and a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with any rhetorical question, the asker has already formed an understanding of the answer—and the video’s visual elements suggest that the central character actively creates the reality upon which he predicates the projected answer to his own question. In the first verse/last verse, Mascis rather explicitly acknowledges this paradoxical matter of circular causation when he sings, “Is it me, or is it all you?”
The critic can better understand the text’s core paradox through a consideration of the peculiar way that the central character experiences an atypical formation of a panoptical system. In the 1700s, philosopher and architect Jeremy Bentham articulated the meaningful connections between visions, knowledge, and power—especially concerning how the assurance of surveillance gives the surveyor a power inside the surveyed subjects’ minds. Mascis’ text, however, twice subverts the expected direction and spatial orientation of Bentham’s original understanding of panoptical power: the character subjected to surveillance appears in a central location, surrounded by observation points, rather than on the edge of a centralized source of vision and power, and then the would-be subject of surveillance resists and reclaims a certain measure of panoptical power by hiding from view, turning the observed into the observer, and avoiding whatever direction his observers might wish to apply. While in the house, surrounded by fields of vision, the central character—in two senses of the phrase—hides from sight and communication. He even takes the phone off the hook and smashes the television. To resist the influence of the unconventional panopticon in which the central character finds himself, he leverages his own power by obstructing his surveyor’s view, a view he desperately wants—but a view he seems to suspect will ultimately not “get him through this.” The central character appears to recognize the futility when facing and fighting the deepest causal foundation for his sadness.
Analyzing the Lacanian reality of the above situation further supports an understanding of the video as a concerted expression of paradox by allowing the reader a possible rationale behind the central character’s self-defeating behaviors. Lacan’s theories of psychoanalysis suggest that people first experience life without understanding their existence as discrete individuals—or as lone beings unattached in mind and matter to any living entity. When infants realize the truth of their isolation, Lacan theorizes that they will experience a psychological wound that they will then spend the rest of their lives trying to heal—an exercise that Lacan argues will always fall short of full satisfaction. Rather than pursuing a way to compensate for this lingering sense of sadness, the central character in the video seems to recognize the futility of such efforts and accordingly behaves in a way that embraces the inevitability of Lacan’s prognosis: whatever we think will fill the void created by the revelation of singularity will ultimately fall short of assuaging this sadness. So the central character pushes away what he wants most. Disgusted and infuriated with the inevitability of never truly bridging the void around his singularity, he resists even trying to reach for his ultimate aim.
A consideration of the music video’s gender dynamics further supports the presence of the central paradox in “Get Me.” The concept of Gender Performance argues that people learn to act their genders through a pervasive and persistent network of socializing forces—and if they don’t comply with performing the gender associated with their biological sex, they may experience any number of sociological or psychological difficulties. In “Get Me,” the central figures occupies a traditional feminine situation and within the video’s short narrative. He appears in need of emotional or even physical rescue—perhaps in terms of an implied addiction. And he is cloistered, alone, in a house that feels gently evocative of Snow White’s glass coffin or Rapunzel’s tower in the forest. Accepting the woman’s rescue—being got—would then only extend and clarify this analogy, and thus cognitively pull on the male character’s sense of gender performance: he should not need rescued, she should need rescued, and he should rescue her. This potential could cause any male character, deeply subscribed to his gender identity, to actively resist excepting the help he most earnestly wants and even outwardly solicits.
The lyrics also imply a shade of indifference, sexual or otherwise, rarely associated with feminine behavior and masculine experience. Mascis sings, “Anytime I’m there to show you / But if it takes too long I know you / Out the door just leavin’ me screwed.” These lines suggest that the central character has deeply invested his emotions in this relationship, while his other half has maintained a more detached and opportunistic emotional state—a condition not traditionally attributed to feminine gender performance and, conversely, often expected from masculine gender performance. Occupying this non-conventional emotional space places the central character in vulnerable territory. He can, however, restore a more expected masculine dynamic and more comfortably perform his gender if he reacts to this imbalance of emotional investment by retracting even further than the women in an a reactionary attempt to underbid her level of attachment—and to do this, he needs to push away the attachment he actually wants. He needs to care less then her. He needs to push her away. Then he will feel comfortable with his gender performance.
Perhaps some measure of a more essential paradox resides in all art, an inevitable condition caught in the mental space of inspired representations—representations that provoke a feeling of a sensory experiences without being that experience. The art is and it is not what the consumer associates with the experience it provokes. Dinosaur Jr’s “Get Me,” however, proposes a less sweeping and a more specific paradox, a concept less concerned with the link between substance and experience and more interested in the peculiarities of human behavior. When viewed through the focusing framework of three different theoretical lenses, the text’s visual and lyrical elements suggest and support the idea that the lyric’s first-person protagonist and the video’s central character, one-in-the-same, actively resist what they want most—rescue.
Thoughts, Revised & Refined 