Why Dr Horrible Rocks My Socks - Act I

[tealin]

There aren't many things I really really like, so when I find one, I try to figure out why. I've tried to keep this down to writing and directorial affairs, avoiding reference to the acting as best I can – it's fantastic and important but not what I'm trying to pick apart here. I'm trying to figure out what they did, and how they did it, in the hope that someday, somehow, I can use what I've learned. If I go on a bit too long, well, I'm just trying to process things.

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog went online literally right after I had written up some notes on a work-in-progress screening at work, and it effortlessly excelled in nearly all the things that I felt the first thing did poorly, so if it seems like I have a bone to pick in certain areas, well ... I do.

Before I get into specifics, I have to introduce the idea of 'yelling at the screen.' I use this to signify audience involvement: when you're really involved in a movie and invested in the characters, you want to communicate things to them, like 'Look behind you!' or 'Don't do that, stupid!' or 'Oh crap!' Sometimes people actually do yell this at the screen, but usually it's just something you yell in your head, trying to communicate to the character through force of will alone. When you're really invested in something, this is what you do, but when you're not, you just don't care. If the audience isn't connected to what's happening then you're doing something wrong. The goal of good filmmaking is, in many ways, manipulating the audience's emotions – this is the bread and butter of horror movies, because if you don't have the audience in your clutches you can't scare them and what, otherwise, is the point of being a horror movie? But other genres can use those techniques as well, to their own ends, and generally the more successful they are at doing so, the more fun they are to watch. I also ought to introduce the term 'dramatic irony.' This is when you, the watcher, know something that the characters do not. This is a technique that can make you yell at the screen, but it has to be used judiciously because if the audience knows everything then there's no suspense. It should tread the fine line between what in literature would be the first person limited (you only know what the character knows) and third person omniscient (you see and know everything and everyone). If you are so removed from the character that you are omniscient, it's much harder to identify with them and get emotionally involved, but if you only know what they know there's nothing you can tell them that they need to hear. Usually musicals open with an establishing musical number that sets up the world and often the principal character(s). A song (and the excuses it gives for rapid scene changes and montages) is a marvellously efficient way of doing this, as it can throw a large number of things at you but by being entertaining it doesn't feel like a checklist of things you need to know. Dr Horrible isn't like this, though. It is first and foremost a blog – the musical aspect is secondary. There are things you need to know, but by exposing them in blog form (video blog, because this is in fact a visual medium and that should be taken advantage of) they establish both the facts and the conventions of the blog – the lighting, the camera angle, the set; things that will signal, later, that what we're watching is a blog entry, i.e. his diary, or more directly, his bared and honest soul. By having a few minutes' heart-to-heart with the audience, it also gives us time to get into the world and the character before we have a musical number thrown at us, which might be too distancing at first. This is a character piece after all, so our connection with him is more important than the catchy soundtrack. It's not just ticking off a checklist of 'things to establish' either. It's all shown, not told, and implied through example. We don't need to know that the gold he transported from the bank vault turned into sludge, but in telling us that story we learn that his technology is flawed. We don't need to know what his evil laugh is, but showing us how he's been working on it implies a lot about his character and how he is going about his quest for supervillainy, like someone working towards a merit badge or tryouts for the football team. We learn who his nemesis is and what their relationship is like, and in trying to cover up his discomfort about it he reveals how not-very-hardcore his villainy is ('there are kids in that park'). But the most important thing that's established in the opening email segment is Dr Horrible's character: we see him as a human being before the 'villain' image can take hold, and he's constantly reinforced as an otherwise likeable guy who we can identify with, just playing at being a villain, right down to little touches like adjusting his goggles,* so we're immediately on his side no matter how 'evil' he may claim to be. AND IT'S FUN. It's not a chore, establishing all this, it's entertaining and funny and engaging. It helps to have such a charismatic actor in the role, but aside from that the anecdotes are amusing, his fallibility is endearing, and the writing is clever. *as if to underline how important this gesture is, it even gets a supplemental squeaky sound effect Once the character is established, we can move onto matter of importance #2: Penny! Notice that this is when the music starts. When writing a musical, songs are usually strategically used in moments of heightened emotion, when mere speech is inadequate to express the intensity of feeling. All the business about being a villain was delivered in plain speech, but the mention of Penny triggers a song, and informs us that this is what really matters. All through the rest of the show, the songs are usually reserved for points in the story that have to do with her, and villainy moments are done straight. Even 'A Man's Gotta Do...', while ostensibly about being a villain, is, in context, sung to reassure himself that his perception of his priorities is in fact the correct one and making headway with Penny is not as important as stealing the Wonderflonium – but the very fact that he has to reassure himself at all makes it clear where his heart is. Music only starts genuinely crossing the divide when Dr Horrible confuses his priorities and the villainy supercedes Penny. Until then, even when he thinks he's singing about villainy he's really singing about her, something which is clear to us but not to him and is crucial to how the story plays out. Now that we're comfortable with the characters and the world, they waste no time in setting up the central dilemma: Penny vs the E.L.E. Dr Horrible's song about Penny is interrupted by Moist bringing in the mail, jarring us back to the world of villainy. Dr Horrible brings up Penny again, only to be interrupted by the letter from Bad Horse. Then Penny interrupts the heist asking for signatures. There's never a smooth segue from one to the other, there's always some sort of violence to the transition, heightening the conflict between Dr Horrible's two objectives and suggesting they cannot be reconciled. It starts fairly subtly but of course the petition/heist scene plays it up a lot more, making the dilemma more immediate and the stakes higher, and as the first scene with real character interaction and emotional resonance it's the first time we find ourselves yelling at the screen. It's clearly presented in this scene that Dr Horrible has to choose between Penny and the E.L.E. (via the Wonderflonium) and a lot of the agony in the scene comes from not wanting to make that choice, a feeling familiar to all of us so it's easy to put ourselves in his shoes. At the same time, we want him to succeed with Penny and it's agonizing to watch him drop the ball so often with her. Over and over again an opportunity arises and they get so close ... Shake her hand! we yell. Listen to what she's saying! 'If we can't stick together' is an invitation; pick up on it, you idiot! Daah! None of the villainy scenes have this sort of genuine audience involvement, they're much more playful and generally set up to be watched from the outside, not experienced from the inside. There's more of this in Act II, but it starts here, and it's significant because its grip on our heartstrings cements the Penny storyline as being What Really Matters. It's bookended by silliness, which throws it into even sharper contrast. Little things keep taking you out of the moment during the whole heist setup, from the ludicrously impossible CG when he tosses the receiver onto the van to 'Wonderflonium: Do Not Bounce', and of course the cartoony action music.* When Penny appears, the filmmakers draw you in by dropping the music, focusing on expressions and acting, and mostly eliminating anything fantastical – you don't even see the screen of his remote. As soon as we leave the genuinely awkward Penny scene and are back in villain territory, things get silly again in a hurry, full of little clues that feel like the filmmakers pushing you away – Dr Horrible is back in costume (there's even a little tinkle of chimes in the soundtrack after his costume change, just in case you were still taking things seriously), we've got funny little gadgets, and finally the silliness ante is upped further by the introduction of Captain Hammer! *And yet somehow, these things just make it fun, they don't take us completely out of it ... HOW?? Is it just because they're winks, that we know the filmmakers know how silly they are and they're not even trying to make it realistic or expecting us to take them seriously? So few people can do this well, it's got to be more complicated than that ... Contrast his introduction with Dr Horrible's: he's singing his own praises, striking gallant poses and standing on a moving vehicle. No humanizing here, this guy is pure cheese, and he's instantly recognizable as such by fulfilling all our expectations of that sort of caricature. He only turns up the volume as he goes, chatting up a random woman on the street (showing us that he doesn't really care about what the van does), and finally throwing Penny onto a pile of garbage – it's a quintessential act of heroism, knocking someone out of the way of a threat, but it's done in such a violent and thoughtless way that it exposes the character behind it. They don't sit back and let him coast on his prior establishment as Dr Horrible's nemesis for one minute, but are right in there making him as abrasive and annoying as possible without going so far as to make him unbelievable as a 'hero.' Again, it stays on the silly side until Penny gets involved (or that is to say, until Penny and Hammer 'connect' – the double-take at 13:15 to be precise), and then we're back into more genuine emotional territory (though admittedly here it is mostly carried by the acting) and The Dilemma: stay and try to intervene between Hammer and Penny, or take the Wonderflonium and run? We've seen how pointless it is to stand up to Capt. Hammer so it's understandable why he chooses the way he does but it doesn't make it any less painful, especially because we've all been there, too. Understandable as it is, though, it falls right into the pattern established from the beginning: when faced with a choice between Penny and the E.L.E, which keeps happening, he always chooses the E.L.E., and it is this pattern that sets the story in the direction it goes and gives the ending the resonance it has.

Comments

[chainedwind.livejournal.com]

Your meta gives me great joy.

(Metas are the my show-withdrawal morphine.)

[chainedwind.livejournal.com]

And extraneous articles are my bestest friends.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

LOL. :D

[raddishh.livejournal.com]

Wow. You really picked up on a lot of subtle devices the filmakers used that I hadn't even considered. That was a fantastic analysis. I can't wait to read part 2.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Act II has some of my favourite subtle manipulative techniques (by which I mean one technique in particular that I would never have noticed if I hadn't been so dorkishly obsessed that I recorded the audio track off the show to listen to while working) so I'm looking forward to that too.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Excellent! My only contribution to this would be that Dr. Horrible always picks the ELE because he thinks it is the route to Penny. Whenever there's a situation where a way to Penny is open, Horrible's own self-consciousness doesn't allow him to see it, thinking in the privacy of his mind (and blog) that he won't be worthy of Penny unless he proves to himself that he's good (or, er, NOT good) enough to get into the ELE.

And, of course, we as an audience want to kick Horrible for this, as we know from what we've seen that he's very nice and very sensitive and gets along well with her already. Alack, Horrible does not think his personality will suffice and that status is more important - probably confirmed in his mind when she falls for Cap, who is an asshat, but an IMPORTANT and FAMOUS asshat. He needs to prove to both himself and Penny he's better than Cap, I think.

Er, that ended up longer than intended. I kept thinking of more things as I typed. Whoop!

[tawabids.livejournal.com]

IT HAS PICTURES. I enjoyed reading this very much. BECAUSE OF THE PICTURES Because I love to see things dissected. Make of that what you will.

[aysquid.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed reading this essay. It brought up a lot of things that've never occurred to me, and I can't wait to hear what you have to say about Act II!

I think the "winks" you mentioned in the second footnote work as beautifully as they do because of the relationship between the way the world is set up in the first place, (talking about a horse in charge of a league of supervillians like it's totally normal, and then heading out to the laundromat), and the giddy joy that suffuses the entire project. There's a sense that the people making the video are doing it because they think it's the most fun in the world, and are doing everything they can to make themselves laugh, and so the viewer is treated like a buddy who's in on the joke.

[eyemage.livejournal.com]

ah but how about the costuming choices?

The white gloves and boots for the armature villain against the black gloves and boots for the professional hero...

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

This is a very good point, which deserves mentioning (so thank you for doing so). I'm sure part of it was just down to lab coats usually being white, but the white gloves and boots were not necessarily par for the course and of course all of Capt. Hammer's costume would have been designed to counter Dr Horrible's. There's also something about the way it makes him look small and fragile, too, which makes him look more sympathetic ... the gloves and boots are just too big and his neck looks so much skinnier coming out of the collar of the coat than out of his t-shirt, and the goggles dwarf his face ... very clever and subtly suggestive.

[shadowmaat.livejournal.com]

I also think it's significant that when he finally upgrades his costume (or is allowed to by the ELE) he chooses red rather than the traditional black. Kinda symbolic in its own way.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. But we haven't gotten to Act 3 yet. :)

[shadowmaat.livejournal.com]

Patience?! Pfft! Patience is for sissies! ;)

[harbek.livejournal.com]

♥ ♥ ♥

[themarinator.livejournal.com]

You are making me like this miniseries again, for which I am glad :)

[isaluna.livejournal.com]

I discovered Dr. Horrible through your LJ, and now I shall thouroughly enjoy reading your dissection of it! Can't wait till act II!