all the world's a montage

God bless Fox. For years the network has incurred the wrath of large portions of its audience by waiting until after the World Series to premiere its prime-time line-up. I guess that when you consider Fox's overall audience share this hasn't necessarily been the worst sort of public bad, but for anyone who was as devoted to the X-Files as I was, waiting until November for a David Duchovny fix was unremitting torture.

This season, though, new episodes of some of my favorite shows are already up and running and providing a much-needed distraction from my growing suspicion that we're only a few CO2 emissions away from a real-life The Day After Tomorrow.

Last night Bones and House premiered. Rather surprisingly, Bones wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. David Boreanaz deserves particular mention for only hitting a 4 on the bad-acting scale. (Which, by the way, I'm pretty sure runs from 1 to David Boreanaz.) And House was, as always, a tight if formulaic hour of television. I would happily watch Hugh Laurie watch paint dry, so it's hard for House to do wrong by me.

Both shows, however, showed a profound and surprisingly upsetting musical incompetence.

Musically, House is usually quite strong - hell, it uses Massive Attack to great effect in the opening credits, the very sequence that first incited an incipient flutter of affection in my jaded, television-viewing heart. But somebody made the lazy and borderline offensive choice to use Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah in last night's closing montage. This begs the question: why hasn't somebody called an industry-wide moratorium on this song yet? The only instance that I can possibly imagine it ever being effective again is if the folks at Arrested Development appropriate it. That, I might cherish. Otherwise, I never again need to hear the following phrases issuing angstily from my television:

1. the minor fall and the major lift

2. her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

3. love is not a victory march

4. halleluu ... uuuuuu ... jaah (you know the one I mean)


There are dozens of other depresso songs that would have worked equally well and that haven't already been used ad nauseum. Hell, there are dozens of other depresso songs by Jeff Buckley alone, not to mention by Leonard Cohen if the music coordinator wanted to get all crazy-like. A really great, effective montage succeeds because it manages to wed a unique dramatic moment to a unique and compatible musical moment. If the music is cliched or overexposed, it just doesn't work.

For instance, every time I hear Full of Grace, I am immediately reminded of the second season finale of Buffy, in which we saw Buffy's tender little Slayer heart all smashed to tiny Chosen pieces. The emotional memory of the scene magnifies my emotional response to the song to the point that I forget that I should really be embarrassed to be listening to Sarah McLachlan, much less enjoying it. But if that same song had also been used on the West Wing and ER and Friends and Frasier, the connection wouldn't be nearly as strong, because I'd be remembering several different scenes and several different purposes. And, no doubt, I'd also be thinking, as I was during House last night, "Not this fucking song again."

Bones failed on another front. In this case, I hadn't heard the songs at all before. Its two painfully bad contemplation-set-to-poignant-pop sequences were set to Thirteen Senses, which seems to have built a moderate fan base by sounding exactly like Coldplay, and Howie Day, whose vocals reminded me rather unpleasantly of a male Natalie Imbruglia. Apparently, plenty of viewers enjoyed these songs - enough, at least, to post about them on the Fox message boards where I dug up the information. Now, I didn't cringe at the music in Bones because I didn't like it. (Although let's be clear on this: I didn't.) The reason the montage in Bones was so laughably bad was because they tried to use music as a substitute for emotion instead of as an intensifier. The song-scene pairings were as contrived as the sexual tension between Bones and Boreanaz - that is to say, unbearably so.

A great montage needs to achieve a sort of audiovisual symbiosis: for better or for worse, the music needs to match the moment and vice versa.

The closing music in the finale of Six Feet Under was a monumentally sappy song called "Breathe Me". It's sort of the musical equivalent of Love Story, engineered for unabashed sadness and vague embarrassment. And the writers were keenly aware of this fact - the deeply unhip nature of the song was practically a subplot. But when played in the closing scenes, the music gained a depth beyond its superficial sap, and the glib velocity of the montage was grounded in something that felt more real.

The ingredients seem simple enough. A poignant circumstance. Somebody, somewhere, staring off into the distance. Add some sidelight, a few languid close-ups, a song in a minor key and voila: five minutes of compelling filler without the need for silly old dialogue. But it's not that simple. You just can't fake good montage.

Although, god help us all, I'm sure they'll keep trying. As excited as I am about the new Fox schedule, I should have prepared myself for at least some disappointment. September, November, May - it doesn't matter. Death and taxes and lazy writing: there's never any convenient time for any of them. (More)