The creator of "
Young Americans" (YA),
Steven Antin, stated, in press interviews in the summer of
2000: "I wanted to tell classic stories
... about young people at that time of life when the possibilities seem endless ... and about the moments of life when you look back on your youth." Among the old tales that Antin seems to re-tell in a young way in YA are: (a) the ancient
Greek myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice, a tale of redemptive love effected by art (song); and (b) the old
European folk-tale of "
The Frog Prince," best known in the version recorded by the brothers
Grimm. "The Frog Prince" is similar to other old tales including "
Beauty and the Beast,"
Apuleius' tale of "
Cupid and Psyche,"
Chaucer's "
Wife of Bath's
Tale," and the tale of "Gawain and Ragnell" from the
Arthurian legends. All these stories pose an age-old "test of true love," namely: would you still love your beloved if he/she were changed into a repulsive physical form? Antin, drawing on
Shakespeare, especially his "
Twelfth Night," substitutes cross-dressing for a magical enchantment in re-telling the old "test of true love" story, and so renders it newly credible for moderns.
In YA, the
Orpheus and "
Frog Prince" stories are interwoven in a single story-line, the love between
Jacqueline ("
Jake") Pratt, an emotionally desperate heterosexual girl pretending to be a boy at an all-boys prep school in
New England, and
Hamilton Fleming, the heterosexual son of the school's dean. Fleming's love for Pratt is a passion born of compassion, a kind of love long distrusted by
Christianity and neglected even in post-Christian literature and drama. For Fleming, kissing the frog (Pratt) entails an Orphic descent into first a sexual-identity hell and then
Pratt's emotional hell; like Orpheus' descent, it ends, foreseeably, in loss and heartbreak.
Whether it ends in failure is ambiguous: YA stresses that "true love," while it may be calculating, is not outcome-contingent.
The Pratt-Fleming story-line is allotted far less time in YA than the less unusual but no less star-crossed love between
Scout Calhoun, a charming, Kennedy-like preppie, and
Bella Banks, a townie who works in her stepfather's gas station. Their love, which founders on an incest barrier that ultimately proves merely putative, is ordinary but necessary "profane" love in which compassion arises from passion; its failure may betoken the need of such love for inspiration by the mythic, "true," redemptive love that Fleming exemplifies. The paucity of time allotted to "true" love may betoken its rarity and sacredness.
In YA, both a story-line and the narrator's perspective develop a love that is not star-crossed, arguably the central love affair of the drama: the love of the narrator, Will Krudski, for the prep school, Rawley. The most conspicuous feature of YA is that Rawley and the people there are generally too good to be true, in the usual, descriptive sense of truth (which Rawley's school motto challenges): YA seeks to edify us to become better than we are, not to describe what we are or were in our teens. But Rawley is a redemptive moral utopia because we see it through the eyes of Krudski, ostensibly a brilliant working-class townie and aspiring writer attending Rawley on scholarship. To understand what more Krudski is, why he is so desperate to go to Rawley, and why he loves Rawley so passionately, is arguably the key to appreciating YA. Much makes little sense until this is understood, but, although many hints are offered, the answer is given plainly only in a seemingly casual change of the tense of narration at the end of the last episode.
Anton gave us one such hint in a summer 2000 press interview, quoted above: YA is not just about being young, but also about revisiting one's youth. The narrator seems to have a dual perspective, both as adolescent and as adult: he personifies the deliberate ambiguity pervading YA, which, like many tales ostensibly for children, also has a burden for adults.
The four paintings or sculptures shown on this clip are:
Jean Raoux's Orpheus and Eurydice (c. 1720), in the
Getty Museum,
Los Angeles;
Antonio Canova's "Orpheus and Eurydice" (
1776), in the
Museo Correr,
Venice;
C. G. Kratzenstein's "Orpheus and Eurydice" (1806), in the Ny
Carlsberg Glypotek,
Copenhagen; and "
The Head of Orpheus" by
Jean Delville (1893), in the Gillion Crowet
Collection,
Brussels.
The two instrumental pieces on this clip are
Hans Neusiedler's "Gassenhauer" [ tune heard on the street] (c. 1536), and
Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer nach Hans Neusiedler" (c. 1935), an
adaptation of Neusiederler's lute piece for play by several children chiefly on xylophones.
Hans Zimmer's "
True Romance," used in YA as the musical theme for the Pratt-Fleming story-line, the crew rowing team, and recapitulations of previous episodes, is adapted from
Orff's "Gassenhauser."
--
Ichabod Grubb, July
2010
- published: 21 Nov 2010
- views: 1952