Pop Culture Rewind: Begin Again and the Paradoxical Place of Music Films

So, after the brutal, disturbing viewing experience that was Squid Game, I decided to venture into some feel-good territory. Netflix suggested Begin Again, and I thought "Mark Ruffalo? Keira Knightly? Adam Levine? How have I not seen this?" The answer is - I might have - but it was released in 2013 which was the year of postpartum depression and a breastfeeding infant - so if I saw it, I forgot about it. 

But I decided to give it another shot and now I CAN'T. STOP. Thinking about it. (BTW - I will spoil this if you haven't seen it - just so you know) 

First, let me say I don't think this film aged particularly well - much like a lot of music films. I'm the first person to defend Empire Records because I LOVE it, yet I'm highly aware that it didn't age well and is a product of its time (but I will always be down for Rex Manning Day). Begin Again is in the same boat for me - its core argument that the internet will free artists from labels taking their money and messing up their artistic vision isn't wrong exactly. It just feels outdated given that Alexa is now streaming the whole soundtrack for me as I write this. 

That said, what captivated me so concretely about this film were the delicate performances Ruffalo and Knightly managed that developed an intimate, meaningful relationship that told a different kind of love story. It's not about boy meets girl and happily ever after - it's about boy meets girl when they are both broken and somehow meeting manages to help them both become better versions of themselves. They confront their internal faults, discover their own weaknesses, and working creatively together makes them stronger and more functional humans. Isn't that a real love story? 

Levine is clearly not an actor, but he did pretty well, especially when scenes allowed him to use musical performance in lieu of dialogue. The other characters in the film are basically thin caricatures (except for Catherine Keener, who is woefully underutilized, isn't given much to work with and still manages to be brilliant). 

Probably what hit me the hardest is the music. If you have ever worked with musicians or have a musical brain at all, you've had those interactions where someone "hears" things others don't. Early in the film, Knightly sings a super depressing acoustic guitar piece at an open mic night and is basically panned by the crowd. It's just her, a very simple melody and a guitar. She knows it kinda sucked and she can't get off the stage fast enough. Then you see the scene again through Ruffalo's character, and I've never seen a better capture of how a musical brain works - he hears the score and the harmony over Knightly's performance and is captivated. As the audience, since you saw version one and then see version two, you now see what the musical brain sees: 

Given that this film seemed to appear and fade away without much fanfare, it obviously wasn't music that took the world by storm. But my colleague Jenn Billinson and I wrote about how soundtracking a story, even with music you wouldn't think stands alone well, can fundamentally change both the story and the emotion in a visual piece. And even when the music has quite literal meanings connected to the story - as is the case for the songs in this film - the layers of relational development allow you to read the pieces against more than what they are penned to mean. It's been damn near impossible to get out of my head. If you like music films and you haven't seen this - or it's been a while and you forgot about it - maybe revisit it. Perhaps you'll see something new and it'll unlock something for you emotionally like it did for me.

Squid Game, the Death Lottery and the Pandemic

So, when my students started asking, "Have you seen Squid Game yet?" I had the same reaction I did to their obsession with You. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't need to see some dude stalk and kill women. As far as I could tell, Squid Game was another version of that kind of thing - a needlessly violent poor choice of entertainment. But after weeks and weeks of chatter, I decided to give it a try when I saw the number of Squid Game costumes at Halloween and reading that it now surpasses Bridgerton (which is right in my wheelhouse) as the most successful television series on Netflix. So, I watched it. And now for the first time in like - well, seven years - I felt I needed to put some blogging out into the world. 

 ***There will be (blood) spoilers. If you don’t want them, don't read further*** 

The premise of Squid Game is sort of like The Hunger Games, but with a few key differences. In The Hunger Games, you got picked to play basically out of bad luck. It sucks to be you - you did nothing wrong, but there are coaches, engineers and audience "helpers" that are able to give you some advantages here and there. In Squid Game, there are some questionable, yet plausible, issues related to consent and social contracts as to you "choosing" to play in the games. In essence, every character in Squid Game is in some kind of financial crisis *of their own making* (supposedly), and the premise is that winning the game would change their lives financially. 

So, here's where I've been so tripped up by the narrative - what seems to have resonated with most US American viewers is the supposed critique of capitalism and financial systemic inequality, particularly given Korea's history. I just don't see the critique of capitalism as strongly as others - how is it a critique of capitalism when you are basically substituting the financial purchase of a lottery ticket with a signature of your life? Your life apparently still has capital value that they are willing to take and then translate literally into cash money when you die. They literally show the money falling into the pig after you die. That's what you were worth. Basically, Squid Game is a Death Lottery where the audience is gonna laugh at you like WipeOut when you die because you deserved it for being the dumbass that signed up. 

Like entering the lottery, the odds of winning in each game are rigged. At one point in the fifth game, a character we've been introduced to as a math teacher is standing calculating his risk chances of crossing a bridge of glass - pick the right pane, make it safely, pick the wrong one, crash through it and fall to your death. He does some figures in his head and comes up with some astronomical number and knows he has basically no chance of surviving (this person did the math). 

Those hosting the game describe it as the "last fair chance" people have of making their own way in the world without systemic advantages. But there are advantages - some contestants cheat, and they get ahead - sure they punish one, but they never caught the others. Some are betrayed by human emotion - trusting people at the wrong moment. And the fact that the narrative says these advantages don't exist because they've leveled inequality is just flat out wrong unless you only see inequality as financial - not racial, gendered, social, emotional, legal, etc. It's far more intersectional than that - I mean, anyone that watches Sang-woo betray Ali and doesn't get that missed the entire point (To be fair, I don't speak Korean - I do speak Japanese though, and, thus, the honorifics, though different, did translate for me, which made the Sang-woo/Ali betrayal all the more devastating). The fact that Gi-hun talks about maybe there being some advantages to having women on their teams, only to have every game NOT have an advantage for women just goes to show that women who signed up were in a shittier position to win. 

So, a lot of the "down with capitalism" critique for me really read like a shoji screen for let's make this as dramatically gory and bloody as possible without really challenging anything about the issues we say we're challenging. What did resonate more strongly for me rather than this larger capitalism argument was the visual representation of despair at being unable to control and alter one's life circumstances - that the illusion of choice is not only seductive by deadly. I mean, if this image doesn't capture that, I don't know what does:

I was struck by how many of the storylines featured either 1) addiction as the downfall of these people economically (the protagonist is a gambling addict, the antagonist clearly addicted to gambling in a different form, the lady nobody likes is apparently also addicted to nicotine -- I mean, if I had a choice to smuggle one in thing through my vagina after seeing this place the first time, I don't think five cigarettes would have been my first choice) or 2) social isolation as the main culprit (the girl escaping North Korea, the Pakistani man left disabled by poor labor laws, the big bad guy has several references to drugs and other crime syndicates). It's this aspect of the series that I think resonates quite strongly with pandemic life - whether you are in a "post" or a "still ongoing" place in your ideology. No matter what choice you have in front of you, neither one is good. No one in a position of power is actually going to help you or explain your choices in a manner that allows you to feel like you have actual agency over the outcome. People with more who could help are willing to hoard and keep what they have for themselves. 

So, from that lens, the end of the series where the bet is on whether or not there is any good left in humanity holds some appeal. Perhaps the most powerful moment of coming full-circle is from our opening scenes of horseracing, to when Gi-hun declares that these are people, not horses - maybe that's what it feels like at the moment to live in contemporary society. A lot of us feel like the horses - we're either working and/or being experimented on - and ultimately those with the wealth to solve a number of problems simply won't. Honestly, the subplot of organ harvesting had all of its own issues especially when you read it through the lens of addiction or social failing - the idea that these people don't have a *right* to their bodies any more - that they would be more appropriately used by someone else - was jarring given our legal discussions around vaccines, women's bodies, etc. And after watching the number of people literally eat each other like zombies in the game holding cell and compare that to if this random person stops in the cold to help someone, it's like the same thing? Not exactly. But some parts of it felt a little too real - and maybe that's where the appeal comes from.