People who wear as many hats as I cannot allow themselves to turn into all-work-no-play types. Free time, even if carefully scheduled, is an absolute must. Years ago I learned the consequences of trying to stay on the productive treadmill 24/7. So I take time off, pure unsullied time off with absolutely nothing to do except float, wander, vegetate, and rusticate.
In my case, that means that I’ve now spent three evenings watching and re-watching Steven Spielberg’s wonderful movie Lincoln. The thing has gripped me mostly due to its extraordinary detail, with every little jot and tittle in place. How many art directors, I wonder, would take such excruciating care to distinguish between the gaslights and candles in White House rooms? The gaslights have gas pipes running into them, and the candles flicker while the gaslights stay relatively steady. Hell, you can even tell that the gaslights are a lot newer than the candle sconces, as they would be in 1865. It’s that kind of film.
But nothing is utterly perfect, and my repeated close-up viewings of Lincoln, courtesy of the crystal clarity of a Blu-Ray disc, have revealed a few minor goofs. These have all stemmed from the Virginia State House and its main Assembly room standing in for the US Capitol and House of Representatives. That was a smart idea; the Virginia building being a very close copy of the US Capitol interior as it was back then, they didn’t have to try to build a convincing replica of the 19th century US Capitol. But the Virginia State House isn’t a museum; it’s very much a working 21st century building, still the home to the Virginia Assembly, and as such sports all necessary modern impedimenta. The crew did a great job of removing references to the building’s modern-day incarnation, but they missed a few trifling things.
Those trifling things were mostly automatic door-closers—those jobbers that have a scissor-type pair of braces, one fastening to the door frame and the other terminating in some kind of pneumatic box on the door proper. Their purpose is to prevent the door from slamming shut. In the old days the door part looked like a little cauldron; nowadays it’s usually a rectangular box along the top of the door. I looked it up; the first one was invented in the 1880s. Thus automatic door-closers are an anomaly in what is supposed to be the 1865 US Capitol building.
They missed three of them that I could tell: two on the doors to Thaddeus Stevens’s office, and one on a door in the background behind Stevens and a Representative in the hall outside the House chamber. That last door-closer is particularly glaring because it’s a brand-new one, big and rectangular and aluminum. It’s not as obvious as, say, a bright green-lit EXIT sign or a security camera, but still.
Another minor goof happened during a pan of the balcony in the House of Representatives. For most of the movie, Spielberg’s cameraman had been meticulous about avoiding including the underside of said balcony in the picture frame, because the 2013 incarnation of said balcony sports contemporary recessed spot lighting and what looks suspiciously like smoke detectors. But in one pan he caught a glimpse of it, albeit for just a few frames.
That fact that I didn’t notice any of those minor gaffes on my first two viewings makes it clear that they aren’t the sort of thing your average movie-goer is going to spot. Nor do they matter. Lincoln is a movie, after all; it’s an artifical, made thing, not a record of time-travelling. So these trifling goofs do not lessen my appreciation of the movie. In fact, I’m all the more impressed that the producers were able to turn the Virginia State House back to its 1865 incarnation as well as they could. Perhaps even more so when I noticed that the pneumatic door closer had disappeared from Thaddeus Stevens’s office door in a different scene; apparently somebody else had noticed it during the filming.
In fact, watching a movie closely can be revealing, not for the goofs (which are usually trivial) but for the care and skill that goes into making it all happen. We aren’t supposed to notice it while watching the movie, but it’s all there and ready to be discovered should we wish to take the time to explore. We can get up close and personal and find out what makes the thing tick.
Which is why I never understand when I hear a student bleat that he/she doesn’t want to analyze a composition because that’s going to “take the magic out of it.” Now, I wasn’t exactly born yesterday and I understand that the complaint usually means: it’s going to make my head hurt and I don’t want to do it. I refer to those rare times that it is meant sincerely. (Or at least I think it is, and yes, maybe I’m not quite the graybeard I fancy myself to be.) My reply is always that analysis cannot possibly spoil the magic. It can only add to it. When you get up close and personal, when you start seeking the underlying connections and forces that hold a piece of music together, when you start getting a grasp on the myriad of forces that go into creating a piece of music—whether cultural, literary, pictorial, harmonic, contrapuntal, structural, whatever—you can’t keep from being amazed at the amount of information a single piece of music can manage to contain. Or how much you, as an analyst, can glean from patient and imaginative study.
Oh, sometimes you can follow the white rabbit down the hole a little too assiduously and wind up, not in Wonderland, but in CloudCuckooLand where all sense has been squandered in an orgy of unsupportable fancy and supposition. But that’s OK; it’s the analytic version of some wacky performance that breaks every rule of propriety and yet manages to be compelling in its own screwy way. A screwy analysis is far preferable to a dull one.
The important thing is to get in there and dig. To try, to look and listen and imagine and think and risk. To have fun. Above all, to want to know.