Finnegan

Twice, during the YA series, we see the blackboard in Finn's classroom: once in episode 1, when Will walks in to ask Finn for a chance to retake Rawley's entrance exam; and again in episode 3, when Finn accuses Will of having stolen a video camera from the Dean's office. On each occasion, a single phrase is chalked on the blackboard.

The phrase on Finn's blackboard in episode 3 reads: "and come with a strange liberty." That is from the second sentence of "Solitude," the fifth chapter of Thoreau's Walden: "I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself." Although Antin may intend YA to serve as a kind of Walden Pond for viewers, the phrase fits with what Finn is teaching in that episode.

However, the phrase on Finn's blackboard in episode 1 seems anomalous. It does not fit with Finn's lesson plan; indeed, it falls quite outside the scope of Finn's task "to edify you about the superstars of literature, like Faulkner, like Shakespeare, and Hemingway, and Steinbeck." The phrase reads, "My love she speaks like silence," and it is the first line of a song, "Love minus zero/No limit," that Bob Dylan wrote about his fiancée in the winter of 1964-65. The song's complete lyrics and an interpretation may be viewed here. Its lyrics begin and end as follows:

Does this song seem to bear on love as depicted in Young Americans, and, if so, how? In particular, might any character in the series seem aptly described by his or her lover as "true, like ice, like fire" but "like some raven at my window with a broken wing"?

wolkenfuehlen

You know, to my shame I have to admit I never paid any attention to what was written on the blackboard - or if I did I simply forgot about it again.

How odd that the phrase in ep 1 is a lyric though, and not a literary quote. I am absolute crap with song meanings and such, so thank you for that link. I did like what it said on that website, especially this part:

I think this you can see at least in certain parts of the show. Those unwritten rules of what is "allowed" and "accepted", and what isn't. It's such a big deal for the poor boy from town that he is not on the same "level" as the rich girl he likes, and so he makes up lies that in the end almost ruin their relationship before it even started. Or the boy who thinks he's gay and beats himself up over it for half a season, and only when he admits his feelings and is "true" to himself and to the boy (well, girl) he likes does he find love.

Finnegan

Thank you, Anja. I think one sees it throughout the series, and I surmise that the first line of Dylan's Love Minus Zero/No Limit is on Finn's blackboard in episode 1 of Young Americans in order to highlight the view of love that the series develops.

In my view, the most distinctive quality of Young Americans is that its characters are incredibly full of loving-kindness (caritas / αγάπη / חסד). In real life, fifteen-year-olds rarely are so good morally: "Of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age," as Thornton Wilder (to whose play, "Our Town," the title of YA's second episode refers) famously observed in A Woman of Andros. Unlike other WB youth-market shows of its era, YA idealized adolescence, of which it was less descriptive than prescriptive, focusing always on "possibilities" for "surpassing expectations." That the actors nearly all look both far older than fifteen and impossibly beautiful physically are superficial incredibilities that complement, by obscuring, the deeper moral incredibility of the series -- the awe-full disbelief by the actual of the ideally possible, by what we are of what we can and should become.

The protagonists in Young Americans consistently help and support one another; they do not betray one another -- are "true like ice, like fire" -- and exhibit little selfish indifference or casual irresponsibility. Theirs is of a standard of virtue seldom attained in maturity. Art can surpass nature in moral vision, and YA offers hope that youth need not be what it generally is, or what one's own youth was. In episode 1 Finn asserts:

That is descriptively false and prescriptively true. In fact, few adults long to relive adolescence, which most recall as a trying time full of failures to do and become what one should; to be young again, as one was, is not particularly attractive. However, to be young with the moral strength of full maturity is a beguiling idyll of rebirth, and of that YA offers a glimpse. Matthew 18:3–5 and 19:13-15, Mark 10:13–16, and Luke 18:15–17 come to mind.

In this communion of saints, the two morally flawed exceptions -- Grace and Ryder -- serve to bring forth greater good; Antin, no less than Milton or Goethe, theodicizes evil.

-- Grace's irresponsibility in losing Bella's jacket in episode 6 gives Will an opportunity to recover his laptop and win a scholarship and gives Scout an opportunity to grow to feel brotherhood with a member of the working class, which this "future President" (episode 2) needs more than he needs a girlfriend. Similarly, Grace's gross irresponsibility on the night of the cotillion in episode 4 gives Sean an opportunity to show loving-kindness that wins him Bella's affections. On both occasions, the theodicy is explicated in the dialogue. In episode 6, when Scout opines of the result of Grace's irresponsibility, "That's not good," Will replies: "Maybe it is." And at the close of episode 4, after the cotillion, Sean voices the memorable pun: "Grace is Grace." That, of course, applies equally to Hamilton's experience at the cotillion: he is saved only by Grace from a fate he understandably fears, but has the courage to accept.

-- Ryder's maliciousness, too, repeatedly brings forth greater good. In episode 3, it awakens Finn to his responsibility not to destroy the Fleming family. In episode 7, it offers Will an opportunity to win Caroline's affection by showing how character matters more than money. Moreover, in depicting the only nasty character in the series as foreign -- Ryder, a Brit, repeatedly is deprecated by other students as an "import"-- Antin boldly equates moral virtue with being American. This is now uncommon; it hearkens back to the "New Jerusalem" and "City on a Hill" aspirations of early New England. Antin seems to suggest, in the manner of John Winthrop, that to be an American is to be called to a commitment to an exemplary community of loving-kindness, and to be a Young American is to be called renew that commitment.

Each of the protagonists in Young Americans is "like some raven at my window with a broken wing," in the sense of Dylan's song, chiefly because to strive to be so good and loving-kind while still so young is exhaustingly difficult. Scout, Will, Hamilton, Bella, Jake, Sean, and Caroline are all wounded by trying to be "true, like ice, like fire," although each suffers in a different way. Each needs to be loved in order to have the strength to give love, as the series' theme song, "Six Packs" by The Getaway People, suggests. In both Thoreau's Walden and Matthew Arnold's "Self-Dependence," Finn holds up the goal of relying less on the love of others; but, as Finn says in episode 3, "Let's face it, the life of a philosopher poet is a pretty solitary gig." In Young Americans, notwithstanding all the bare skin on screen, the role of eros, passion, is generally to nurture agape, compassion.

This all well and good, and better than eros for its own sake. Nevertheless, the sexiest and most moving relationship of the series, involving its most broken-winged, spiritually injured and vulnerable character, seems to present a quite different relationship between passion and compassion. That, however, is another story; this post is already too long.

Finnegan

Id like to try again to elicit some response to at least the premises of my general argument above before trying to discuss the Jake-Hamilton relationship in context of it:

-- In Episode 1, Finn says "My job is to edify you." Doesn't YA seem to be trying to edify viewers by by depicting a morally exemplary community?

-- Morally, aren't YA's 15-year-old protagonists generally "too good to be true,"? Aren't they incredibly compassionate and full of loving-kindness?*

-- That is, isn't YA prescriptively idealizing adolescence rather than describing it?

(* For anyone who may suspect that money makes prep school kids saintly: it doesn't. I went to university with many alumni of New England's better prep schools, and have known a lot more since then. Few indeed were nearly so good morally as the protagonists in YA, even at more advanced ages.)

wolkenfuehlen

Oh definitely. I was 16 when I saw the show, and while I can't exactly remember what I thought about this aspect of the show, I do remember how amazed I was and still am whenever I rewatch at how much the characters "dwell" on the morals of their actions, most prominently Will through his voiceovers. I wasn't like that at that age, and I still am nowhere near that.
What I think is remarkable of the show in a way is how many "moral" situations exist. Surely it's a tv show and it needs to show a certain amount of dramatic scenes and situations, but there's just so many on the show, and that just in 8 episodes. There's rich vs poor, townies vs Rawley, responsibility vs irresponsibility; incestuous relationships, adultery, prejudices, deceit, secrets, and oh so many lies. And in almost all of the cases, there's a clear distinction between what is "(morally) right" and "(morally) wrong", and the "right" option usually prevails.

There's few tv shows I can think of right now where the entire core cast gets along so well. The only exception to that would be Scout and Sean, and even they get over their differences in the last episode because they realize helping their friends/girlfriend is more important than any dislike/jealousy that exists between them.

Finnegan

By far the most broken-winged character in the series is Jake Pratt, who arrives at Rawley deeply wounded in mind and spirit. As her mother understates the matter at the end of episode 5, Jake has not been happy. She is engaged in diverse risky, unsustainable, self-destructive behaviors: hacking into websites, changing schools every year, and, now, cross-dressing and enrolling in school as a boy. Given that she is heterosexual, her cross-dressing in a gender-segregated school must both heighten and frustrate her erotic desire; and her enrollment under false gender pretences renders her stay at Rawley and any friendships she might make there likely to be brief. It distances her even from her mother, whose attention it ostensibly is intended to gain. In sum, Jake is a love-starved girl isolating herself from all realistic hope of love -- emotionally suicidal behavior. Her intense sexuality flows from open psychological wounds, and is so compelling because it betokens desperate vulnerability, as is signified by her "Primal Scream" poster, seen in episode 5.

Hamilton's response to Jake's seduction seems a redemptive miracle beyond hope. Hamilton's response to Jake has to overcome daunting obstacles that are changed but not necessarily reduced when he finds out that Jake is a girl; fear of being gay is replaced both with fear of being perceived as gay and by fear of Jake's gender being discovered by school authorities. What, then, attracts Hamilton to Jake powerfully enough to overcome those obstacles?

Love defies rational analysis, and the sources of Hamilton's attraction to Jake are deliberately ambiguous, never explicitly articulated. Nevertheless, "clicking chemistry" (even if based in part on shared gender ambiguity), although clearly necessary for that attraction, seems insufficient to explain it. Hamilton, far from being impulsive, is habitually circumspect; he routinely pauses to think before speaking or acting, and he plans carefully, e.g., in allowing himself a night to find out where the groundskeeper has put Jake's bike before meeting her to retrieve it. Even when he "takes the plunge" at the cotillion, he is far from being overcome by passion: he pauses, before kissing Jake in the men's room, to make sure that the toilet stalls are empty -- hilariously claiming to be "throwing caution to the winds" while engaged in an act of prudence.

What attracts Hamilton to Jake is clearly Jake's soul, not Jake's body. Jake's cross-dressing, entailing Hamilton's presumption that Jake is a boy, coupled with Hamilton's distinct preference for girls, is what makes that clear. The artful irony is that Jake's "queerness" in cross-dressing is what reveals Hamilton's love to be pure, spiritual, innocent. Moreover, this purity and innocence, once having been established, cannot subsequently be sullied by erotic indulgence. Antin devises from cross-dressing and homophobia a plot mechanism for freeing sex from guilt -- for returning to Eden. Hamilton sanctifies his heterosexuality by sacrificing it on the altar of his love for Jake's soul, whence by sheer Grace it is restored to him. That is what makes the Jake & Hamilton relationship so uniquely powerful. Antin finds, in trial-by-homosexuality, a fire that purges of paganism, that Christianizes, the ancient Dionysian view that sex can be spiritual. The artistic brilliance of this feat cannot be overstated, and was wasted on a teen-TV show.

No less plainly, given that Hamilton loves Jake for her soul, the nature of Hamilton's love for Jake is to be found in the nature of Jake's soul, of Jake's emotional character, to which Hamilton's love responds. Since Jake's spiritual condition is one of emotional distress, of inner suffering, of neediness, it must be this to which Hamilton's love responds. In Hamilton, compassion (agape) engenders passion (eros). By episode 4, Hamilton simply cannot bear to see Jake suffer, to cause Jake emotional pain; he pushes aside his fear of being gay and follows Jake into the men's room at the cotillion because he cannot bear Jake's dejection at his rejection of Jake's love. Whether Jake be boy or girl, whether others think Hamilton gay or straight, whether their relationship last a day or a lifetime, Hamilton will love Jake -- because Jake needs his love desperately. She is a raven at his window with a broken wing, and ultimately he is compelled to try to heal her.

This reverses what Christian and post-Christian cultures have considered the normal and healthy relationship between eros and agape, in which physical love serves to engender and sustain spiritual love (as it does for all the other YA protagonists). Such reversal is widely mistrusted for good reasons. Those who merit our compassion, e.g., the sick or the poor, rarely want or would benefit from our erotic attention. Moreover, it is all too tempting for any sexual indulgence to claim to be pure and spiritual in origin; that is why the early Church crushed the Dionysian and other orgiastic cults.

Nevertheless, there can be cases in which erotic passion is born of compassion and serves compassion well. In the Jake & Hamilton relationship in Young Americans, Antin depicts such a case, and responsibly depicts it as exceptional. Moreover, he establishes that Hamilton's love for Jake is such a love by testing it with a new version of an old test for the claim of any sexual love to be of spiritual origin and purpose. The old test is: "If your lover were to change physical form into one you find far less attractive, (e.g., by changing gender) would you still love him/her?" Chaucer posed that as the test of true love in The Wife of Bath's Tale by changing a beautiful woman into an old hag. Folk tales have posed it by changing handsome princes into frogs. And real life poses this test to every married couple as they age. Antin, doing explicitly what Shakespeare dared do only implicitly in Twelfth Night, poses it by by having Jake cross-dress; the dramatic virtue of this new form of the old test is that cross-dressing requires neither magic nor aging. It can realistically be posed at the start of a love affair; and a love that passes this test stays innocent despite its subsequent passion.

Finnegan

Anja,

On the Somerhalder board of this forum, back in 2005, you started a thread titled: "Jake/Hamilton Appreciation Thread - They're as perfect as Adam and Eve ."

That seems strikingly similar to what I posted above:
Did you mean it in anything like that sense?

wolkenfuehlen

I'm pretty sure the reason behind the title was nothing of the likes, but rather a manip that one of the posters, nki, did of Kate and Ian years ago, that featured them as a sort of Adam and Eve:

Finnegan

Thanks, Anja. Looks like I should redirect my "Eden" question to Nki, then, if she ever shows up here again.

Meanwhile, another question, as well asked here as anywhere, given this board's lack of an "Ed Quinn - Finn appreciation thread:" Whence comes the very odd name, "Finn"?

Mustn't it be short for "Finnegan"? And doesn't it seem likely to refer to "Finnegan's Wake," the old Irish ballad from which Joyce's intractable novel takes its name?

So doesn't Antin's choice of "Finn" underscore the theme of moral rebirth through recapturing youth's potential to "exceed expectations" that "Finn" voices in episode 1? And of moral rebirth through the redemptive power of love that seems to be the general theme of Young Americans, dramatized particularly in the characters of Will Krudsky and Jake Pratt, both of whom seem "reborn" thanks to love at Rawley -- to agape from Scout and Finn in Will's case, to eros born of agape from Hamilton in Jake's case?

(These musings underlay my choice of moniker for this forum, obviously. My chief focus here is on what Antin was doing in YA, and Finn seems largely an alter-ego for Antin.)

wolkenfuehlen

nki hasn't really been around since she stepped down as mod here but who knows, maybe she'll stop by again at some point?

I'd never even thought about where any of the names come from and whether there was any deeper meaning behind them Your interpretation certainly seems possible And I had always wondered if your username here had any connection to "Finn". Hee.

ria26

Thanks for the nice picture.

wolkenfuehlen

Hey there, welcome to the board! As I said, the picture is nki's, but I'm glad you enjoy it!

Finnegan

Why did Antin choose a prep school for rich kids as his setting for a series about the possibilities of youth?

In Young Americans, is wealth a metaphor for youth, not just in Finn's homily to the crew team, but throughout?

Doesn't Krudsky, whose final voice-over at the end of the last episode speaks in the past tense of "that summer," seem like an alter ego for Antin in attempting to recapture the possibilities of youth? He cheats to get in .. feels he doesn't belong ... but is reassured that "it's all in his head." And doesn't he seem nearly as reluctant to lose his childhood almost as to lose his scholarship?

Don't the poor townies, obliged to work for a living, seem a bit like grown-ups? Doesn't Bella respond more maturely than Scout to their putative-incest predicament? And the townie-townie relationship (Sean-Bella) climaxes with an quintessentialy adult act of responsibility: standing in to receive a petrol delivery. Isn't the contrast between that and the fairy-tale "Frog Prince" climax of the preppie-preppie (Jake-Hamilton) relationship, both in episode 4, startlingly like that between maturity and childhood? The former is mundane; the latter is magical.

The contrast between Will and Bella is interesting in this context. Will wants to be at Rawley (as Antin wants to recover by art the possibilities of youth), but Bella is quite content to remain working-class (and to forgo that recovery). In the end, she chooses not to question the putative incest taboo and love a rich Rawley guy because she's content with her life, and is concerned to defend it rather than to escape it. Similarly, many adults recover youth chiefly not by art but rather by having children. However, that Will, unlike Bella, may personify a metaphor for seeking to recover youth through art does not imply that Krudsky is less "straight" than Bella sexualy; recovering youth by art and recovering youth by childraising are not mutually exclusive but potentially complementary.

Finnegan

I recently came upon, and would appreciate other participants' opinions about, an article about Young Americans, titled "Reality Lite," by Jane Rosenzweig, a professor of creative writing then at Yale, now at Harvard. Rosenzweig, who holds an M. Litt. from Oxford, has served as an editor of The Atlantic Monthly and on the fiction staff of The New Yorker. Although her article on YA is available online only on the website of The American Prospect, where it is misdated "November 2002," its content makes clear that it was written shortly before and and first published soon after July 12, 2000, when the first episode of YA was aired.

Rosenzweig seems to like YA for much the same reasons I do: she is struck by its edifying moral tone, its depiction of youth not as it is, but as we wish it were. However, Rosenzweig sees YA as sharing this idealizing moral tone with WB teen TV dramas, specifically including Felicity and Dawson's Creek. In contrast, my impression is that YA is more explicitly moralizing, and far freer of backstabbing and betrayal than Felicity, and substantially more so than Dawson's Creek (although I agree that WB teen TV generally struck a higher moral tone than most other teen TV of the late 1990s). On the other hand, Rosenzweig's article was occasioned, not by just any WB teen drama, but by the first episode of YA, which suggests that even YA's first episode epitomized for her what she found good in WB teen TV.

Rosenzweig wrote her article based on only the unaired pilot episode of YA, which had a markedly lower moral tone than that episode and the rest of YA as aired; Rosenzweig describes the pilot episode as including not only incest and gender deception but also adultery, but adultery was absent from the aired version of the pilot, present only in the unaired version. My sense is that the moral tone of YA's unaired pilot is indeed comparable to that of Felicity or Dawson's Creek, but that that of YA as aired is far more demanding. On the other hand, although I sometimes watched Felicity and DC to keep my wife and children company, I liked DC only a little and Felicity less, and have never watched all their episodes. Consequently, although I have reason to suspect that Rosenzeig might have found YA morally less typical of WB fare after watching YA as aired, I cannot assess with as much confidence as I should like the extent to which YA morally exceeds the expectations of WB teen TV.

Hence I should appreciate the views of others, better acquainted than I with late 1990s WB teen TV shows generally: Is YA, as Jane Rosenzweig suggests, morally typical of WB teen TV fare, although perhaps epitomizing it? Or does YA, as I think, strike a markedly higher moral tone than other WB teen TV shows, including Felicity and DC?

Below I cite selected passages from Rosenzweig's article, and with one of my own posts earlier on this thread that expresses appreciation of much the same aspects of YA that Rosenzweig appreciates, but sees YA as having less in common with other teen TV of the era (including WB TV) than Rosenzweig does.

Unrelated Postscript: Regarding the song from which this thread's title is taken: It occurs to me that the presence of the first line of Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" on Finn's blackboard in YA episode 1 may suggest that Antin wanted to use that song in the soundtrack of the aired pilot -- but either couldn't obtain or couldn't afford to buy permission to do so. Does that seem likely? If so, Antin must have been quite distressed at his inability to use the song, if he troubled to compensate by substituting an allusion on a classroom blackboard. For what scene(s) of the aired pilot might it have been used as the soundtrack? Perhaps instead of "A Stroll in the Park," which Antin snagged from the soundtrack music library at FirstCom -- his only resort to such a source in YA's soundtrack -- perhaps when he found he couldn't use the piece he wanted?

Finnegan

I've got myself a new signature, chiefly because I realise I've been blind for months to the extent to which Antin, in Young Americans, is talking about his art. Like much serious art, YA is self-reflective.

On this thread I've been pondering the meaning of Antin's scrawling of the first line of a Bob Dylan song -- "My love she speaks like silence" -- on Finn's blackboard in episode 1. Meanwhile, I've posted elsewhere about YA's amazing ability to portray Hamilton's love for Jake almost wordlessly -- he never fully speaks his mind, and we must make inferences from his body language and from considerations of consistency. Yet a phrase about love speaking silently, presented in context of one of YA's two most verbose characters assigning an essay to the other and judging him, upon reading it, "a writer," has failed to arouse my sense of irony. Part of what Antin means by that is surely that words cannot do justice to the kind of love, passion born of compassion, that Hamilton bears toward Jake: to try to capture "sacred" love in words is to profane it. It must speak in silence. And so must ordinary love, insofar as sacred love succeeds in edifying it, insofar as it partakes of the sacred.

Similarly, I've spent weeks mystified by the weird and apparently multiple time settings in YA, indicated by all the anachronisms and by Krudski's belated confession in his last voice-over that he's not living but reliving his youth in YA. However, I haven't put that into context of what Antin said repeatedly that he was trying to do in YA: to re-tell old tales ('classic stories") in new (young) ways. The duality of temporal perspective resulting from Krudski's return to his youth merely responds to the larger and deeper duality of temporal perspective entailed in reviving ancient stories like The Frog Prince and Orpheus and Eurydice. Rawley's re-telling of those old tales to us in new ways is, after all, what makes it rejuvenating and what draws Krudski back there in maturity.

At the core, it's all about the stories. Stories of rebirth through sacred love, through passion born of compassion, to be sure, but still stories. Old stories becoming young by being retold with less resort to words in a new medium -- moving photography. About the art of scriptwriting with high purpose.

I've been blind to all this until quite recently. At the risk of perpetuating an unpleasant youth-pop phrase, all I can say is: "duh ..." (and pray pardon the three consecutive posts.)