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Old 02-19-2010, 01:23 PM
  #14
Finnegan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by broken|smile (View Post)
Very good observations... I like how much attention you pay to the details of the show.
Thanks, Brokensmile. For such flattery, I offer a "little thing" of pure lust: in episode 4, ever notice how Jacqueline's eyes move up and down Hamilton's body as he walks away after saying "I'm history"? It's 14:09 to 14:11 minutes into this clip. This eye gesture foreshadows that the girl is about to break, that when Jacqueline tells Hamilton, at the cotillion, that she has to talk with him, "but not here," she needs to tell him she's a girl. That, in turn, implies that Hamilton responds to her at the last possible moment when his response can pass the test of cross-dressing-as-test-of-true-love.

Let others rave about the kissing scenes in YA, or all the raw flesh on the docks. I find nothing in the series so "hot" as the eye interaction between Pratt and Fleming in their three pre-cotillion scenes in episode 4, in each of which Hamilton sinks deeper into helpless acceptance of a partly-illusory fate.

More generally, though, I don't see how to understand the characters of Jacqueline Pratt and Hamilton Fleming without attention to non-spoken details. The characters of Finn and Will are fully articulated; their very essence is words. Scout, Bella, and Sean also are relatively transparent. But Jacqueline seems too hurt and confused to be able to do be honest even with herself, and Hamilton seems usually too cautious to reveal himself fully to anyone, including Jacqueline. So often we see Hamilton thinking, but we don't know what he's thinking. I've offered one possible construction of his motives in my third post on this board's thread, "Raven at my window with a broken wing," but ambiguity is inherent in the character, and almost certainly deliberate. On the other hand, my view, that Hamilton consciously accepts, on the night of the cotillion, to play an "emotional savior" role despite its poor prospects of success, implies he cannot tell Jacqueline what he is doing; playing that role entails expressing his own neediness fully, but masking his awareness of Jacqueline's greater neediness. Is this 15-year-old behavior? Clearly not, at least not in contemporary American culture. But then, what in YA really is?

Last edited by Finnegan; 02-19-2010 at 07:36 PM
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