The Glee Monster Revisisted

Glee is everywhere, its music is among the bestselling anywhere and the show's ratings have never been higher. While I have ranted against it previously (and plan to do some more of it in a bit), I do genuinely respect one aspect of it's conception, and that is the bravery and sheer balls it took to make it a musical. The strength of musicals has always been that they are able to simply and directly convey the inner thoughts of a character, that which is so easy to describe on page but so difficult on stage and on film. Musicals have long been an interest of mine; I count some of them as all-time favorites (Singin' in the Rain, Love Songs, and  Top Hat), and a great many others as disappointments... should have beens.

What got me thinking about this again was Matt Zoller Seitz's article "Why "Glee" is this century's "Twin Peaks"." In it he goes into great detail about the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the show. Put simply, the musical moments are the only ones which don't feel shallow. He's right, all the big problems I have with the show are primarily in the non-musical drama. But, that doesn't mean I can wrap my head around the musical numbers either. My big problem is how they are treated not as moments of confession or as the aforementioned conveyance of inner thoughts (that is always portrayed as incidental, even though it is essential), but as...well, nothing more than a performance or fantasy. Matt Zoller Seitz gets to the heart of the problem by writing:

Perhaps the traditional musical moment is a casualty of modern life, which seems increasingly hostile to poetry in all its permutations. We're collectively too damned cool for any form of expression that's directly communicates deep feeling -- with any outpouring of emotion not placed in a context that hangs a label on it and thereby tames it (thus the post-MTV obsession with justifying why characters conceivably might burst into song -- the mania for justifying it as a live performance, or fantasy or whatever).

Losing the traditional musical moment is tantamount to losing the raison d'être for musicals in the first place. All that is left is the shadow of the musical, tantamount to a cultural reminiscence. Most modern musicals are nothing more than empty stylistic experiments or equally empty stage musical translations which lose any meaning in translation. This is a call for the return of the musical, a reexamination of what it is that can make them great.