Stephen is Laguna Beach for me, and the story of Season 2 is the story of Stephen’s dented swagger. (I’m concluding the Laguna Beach series with this post about Stephen. LC will have to wait until I watch The Hills). Read more below.
Tag Archives: Essays on MTV’s Laguna Beach
Taylor
3 May
Tay’s face is like Magritte’s Empire of Lights: at first take, one sees only the sunshine and none of the darkness. Later, one marvels at their coexistence. Read more below….
The Shot
3 May
They meet on the bare rocks by the sea in December.
Here, they meet face to face for the first time since Kristen has broken up with Stephen on the phone. The greatest shot in the show is not this one above, but the one after it: as Kristen walks out of the shot, the camera holds on the jagged, barren rocks beneath them. There are nothing left in the shot but the underlying terrain, and it says more about the relationship than anything they could have uttered.
Ugh. Devastating.
The Master’s Presence
3 May
The presence of Antonioni’s eye in Laguna Beach is obvious. So much comes from this one man’s work!
Laguna Beach explicates relationships between guys and girls through the framing of their physical/spacial relationships — relationships to each other and to the frame itself.
You can understand what is going on in each of the photos below whether or not you’ve watched the work it comes from — click below:
Jason
26 Apr
This guy is a troglodyte like none I’ve seen before – so much so that he’s absolutely puzzling to watch.
His personality is that of a rock,which is remarkable largely because of his ability to remain rocklike in situations which, in others, would inspire empathy or sensitivity or shame. Jason is a robot who can’t undo his programming.
Of course, at first, like the girls in the show, I liked him because his physical presence is so magnetic to women. But as the season wears on, you start to see his robotic little two-step for what it is: compliment the girl generically, then cheat on her, then be indignant and carefree when confronted. She will always take him back. Rinse, repeat.
As the show progresses, however, he too is ravaged by time. He begins to date increasingly more mature women, walking up a staircase from Jessica to Alex and eventually to Lauren, who shreds him on the spot for his all too predictable infidelity — and then crushes him after he tries to apologize later in her driveway.
Like Kristin, Jason has found a style of loving that feels like a heroin rush in the moment-to-moment, but holds no promise of future happiness for him. Like so many of the characters, he pushes away what he wants most.
While his most embarassing to watch moment is the basketball court conversation with Alex, the most complex moment is his drive down the hill from Lauren’s, and the rorschach of his opague emotions.
Kristin
25 Apr
An exemplar of her generation, Kristin has an epic centerlessness. In the moment to moment she’s all pursed lips, always two steps ahead, and socially dominant over the people around her. Only when you step back to look at the larger pattern of her life do you start to see inside of her.
The great paradox of Kristin is that she seems to manipulate others largely for the purpose of manipulating herself, as if to shoo away anything that might become her core. She delights in her fickleness, and her only joy is in the spoils of unattachment. She’s averse to anything that might make her care — anything that might risk defining her. One of the first lines she speaks in Season 2: “I LOVE not caring.” One of the last songs in the season comments: “we push away / the things we need the most”.
Her great power is that she acts as if she’s free of the constraints that the rest of us have. The problem with this, of course, is that it works: once people believe this about you, your life must always seem to be perfectly free – even if the things you want most in your life can only be found by being constrained, by being vulnerable. Kristin is the gaunt wolf with no collar, so adept at avoiding the cages of life that she’s constructed her own.
From my extensive knowledge of this, it is the worst cage of all.
Lo
25 Apr
All women have a physical tell-sign that is fascinating: they are socialized to raise the pitch of their voice when they want to appear less threatening.
As a consequence, Lo is like a Cezanne of shrieking.
She is fiercely intelligent in the raw processing power kind of way (not the wisdom way), maybe more intelligent than everyone else on that show put together, including the producers. As a consequence, her primary mode of communication seems to be a semaphore of squeaks and hugs. One gets the sense that she knows not to unleash her intelligence on the rest of them: instead, she’s chosen to eek, squeak, shriek, and flatter her way through life in every conversation with another woman.
Lo will never truly let go and be her full, incredible self until she meets a man who, himself amazing, makes it safe for her to be amazing. He will be the safe space of her becoming.
[fair warning: I know she's in The Hills, but I haven't watched it yet. So if she slaughters bunny rabbits there, you know, I don't know yet.]
Shallow Conversation
25 Apr
The normal knock on LB is that it’s filled with spoiled rich kids, petty drama, and — most of all — shallow, meaningless conversations.
If great art were always about poor, disadvantaged characters facing financial challenges and discussing Dostoevsky, that would be a very valid point. Luckily for all of us, it’s not.
Laguna Beach is not about what’s said. It’s about what’s not said — or, more accurately, the gap between what is said and what is felt. Instead of the conversation carrying the meaning of the show, it’s in the faces, the pauses, the in-between moments. The show takes place in the silences, in the eyebrows of the listeners rather than the mouths of the speakers, in the gaps, in the absences, and in the resonances of things past. The show mines below the surface — underneath the ubiquity of flattery, the duplicity of paramours, the thinness of friendship — to get at the core of being.
In real life, what is said has very little connection to what is felt and meant. The real story of our lives is told in our bodies: in the fidgets, the high-fives, and in the minutia of a woman’s lips.
One way the show tries to get you, the viewer, to understand this is by often cutting out the audio or the visual altogether. You’ll see characters speaking to each other, but you suddenly can’t hear them as music comes in to tell another part of the story. Or, you see extended shots of the non-speakers in the scene. Do you understand the genius of a show that eschews conversation as the primary mode of communication and instead simply shoots the physical manifestations of the emotional lives of its characters? Our physical presence is the part of us that, in moments that matter, cannot be acted or falsified. Our bodies are the only sanctuaries of our truths.
The show is about something else that matters: about how the passage of time ravages us, revives us, and then ravages us again. So many of the show’s most important moments of transition take place at the beach, and as the characters discuss their futures, the steadfast eye of the camera is always showing us waves tossing about and retreating — the most obvious of metaphors for the lives and loves of these characters who are experiencing change at a rate they’ve never experienced before. The title of the show itself is referring to this. The setting is the coastline, that never-constant boundary between land and water, between ourselves and the rest of the world.
The characters are not high school seniors by accident: here, the boundaries are most fluid. You are on the precipice of living your own life, half-stuck between craving the freedom of the future and craving the insular bubble of an idyllic upbringing. It is the one moment in every person’s life (including yours, reader) when you know for certain that, within one year, your life will be unrecognizable. How powerful is that?
The internecine mixture of excitement and anxiety surrounding this fact are ever-present in the show, and an astonishing amount of dialogue shows them wrestling with the complications of it.
In this show, nothing brilliant is said. Instead, there are novels written in the hands and lips and bare shoulders of these characters — amidst a breakup they never saw coming or a graduation they’ve waited their entire lives for — confronting a future which they can barely imagine.
The Laguna Chronicles
25 Apr
A couple years ago, I told everyone that Laguna Beach Season One was a work of cinematic brilliance, and I meant it. I was laughed at.
Well, get your laughing muscles ready. I just watched Season 2.
I’m not joking when I say that this season belongs on the list of the 100 greatest films of all time. The first episode is an absolute artistic masterpiece, and just in case you disagree, I’m going to walk your doubting mind through the steps.
Remember: many of what are now considered the greatest films were laughed at (literally) when they premiered because people didn’t understand the new visual language. LB is so, so, so sophisticated that it’s gone completely over everyone’s head.
Now, I love hanging out with my friends too much to spend any time breaking the show down into shot-by-shot analysis, but I am going to write a series of posts exploring the show’s meaning, its technique, and its characters.
So go change into a bikini (if you’re a girl) and get your surfboard ready (if you’re a guy), put your sunglasses on, and get ready to get some hotness!
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