It's On Your Face

Fox's new show Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth, should be fluffily entertaining and satisfying, but it pretty much isn't; it's kind of dull. However, I'm just babbling out loud and surely not the first person to snarkily observe that the show depends on the ability of its main characters to spot miniscule facial movements that are involuntary even in people who are presumably practiced liars who are prepared for the fact that they're going to lie, to the extent that the main characters can also call out when people are faking emotions they're not feeling, like sorrow or surprise. The show isn't un-nuanced about the realities of this - I saw an episode where at first they think somebody's lying, but then they realize that she's using Botox - and I presume that at some point they're going to engage with somebody who's both a practiced and a knowledgeable liar, somebody who knows the tells Tim Roth's character looks for (or is really, really innately good at it). But the show also depends on the ability of a large number of guest actors every episode to accurately sell all these emotions that they're not actually experiencing.

There's any number of directions to take that essential paradox, either to complicate or to resolve it, but in brief I think it's a nifty illustration of one of my hobbyhorses: how what's actually real and what seems to be realistic have a complicated and fractious relationship in a fictional context (if not outside of one as well).

Intentionally Misreading Songs

Sometimes when I'm not really paying attention to the lyrics of a song, I'll automatically interpret a particular line as having a given meaning, when in fact in the context of the entire lyric I realize it means something quite else. Other times I'll be listening to a song and realize that the whole thing could be put in quite a different light.

An example of the latter would be the Beatles classic, "She Loves You." I've always thought someone should - probably someone has - covered this song but altered the arrangement to highlight the potential sadness of the titular line. (Basically, return to the intro, which repeats the lyric three times over an Em | A | C | G chord progression, and instead play Em | A | C | C over and over and over.) Now it's not simply informative - "hey, dude, she loves you" - but it's more about the singer - "she loves you [and not me, so don't fuck it up because you don't deserve it]". It wouldn't make the song better - though I don't think it'd make it worse - but it's the song I'd have written if I were them, which I'm not, which was just as well for them, because then they wouldn't have written any songs probably to begin with.

Or, to take an example of the out and out misreading, I've several times heard the Foo Fighters song "Best of You". On actually paying attention to the lyrics the song seems to be about overcoming adversity and fighting the things that hold you back. the phrase "is someone getting the best...of you?" seems to mean "the best" in the sense of being defeated, like "he got the best of me in the negotiations, and now I'm broke and the company is in shambles." I like the way the song sounds, but the lyrics I could take or leave - which, barring a few songs, is sort of how I feel about the Foo Fighters; I've never sought them out, but any time I actually hear a few songs I usually think "hey, you know, this is alright." ANYWAY, before I paid attention to the lyrics, all I ever noticed was the line, repeated over and over, "Is someone getting...the best of you?" And I though the song was about romantic jealousy. (Is there, maybe, a theme to my misreadings and rereadings of songs?) In this case, I think I would like that other song much more than I like this - I think it's a nice lyrical way of phrasing the idea I have in mind that Dave Grohl didn't.