Gleeful Exegesis

I don't watch Community: please understand that. I'm not a member of the elite cadre of virtuous souls that has kept this show alive as long as it has lived. I've seen a smattering of episodes. the first I ever watched was the Dungeons and Dragons episode, since I heard it was pretty good and I like role-playing games - and I'm here to tell you, that episode is probably the best portrayal of role-playing games I've ever seen in any sort of video format (among the most positive as well, but that's not what I mean, I mean the most accurate and engaging). I could go on, but I'm going to hold back, because the point is that I want to let you know that all of the below is not informed by a great deal of familiarity with the show.

I watched episode 3.10 of Community because my friends couldn't stop talking about this song that the character Annie sings:

I watched that video a few times and thought it was pretty funny, but more than that I was just enormously confused (and intrigued!) about the context. What the hell is going? Why is she seducing him with a parodical book number? What are regionals anyway?

So I watched the whole episode on Hulu, enjoyed it immensely, watched all the songs on youtube over and over again... and then I had this thought about how the songs themselves reinforced the theme of the episode, and my English degree let out a mighty roar... and I began to compose an exegesis.

So. Every song in this episode is, in itself, fundamentally false and deceptive. The plan that Abed and Troy hatch to undermine Christmas is explicitly hypocritical, since Troy plans to go on celebrating Christmas forever ("I might have to dedicate my life to Christmas / And act just like I love it til the day I die"). Baby Boomer Santa, as Annie points out, relies on revisionist nostalgia to flatter Pierce's "generation's well-documented historical vanity." Annie's song to Jeff is, as Jeff perceives, a "bit." The song that infects Shirley is a cynically saccharine concoction designed to push her buttons, lampshaded in the line about baking but also present in the political lyrics, which sound so out-of-place coming from children. The original song about glee is a lie Mr. Rad tells Abed, which Abed then repeats himself, and this lie is the central one examined and exploded throughout the episode: the idea that "everything's cooler when cameras are spinning," or said more plainly, that things are better when you disguise the truth, when you "try to make things brighter."

None of these songs are "heart-songs" that come from deeply felt emotions. Sometimes they're a lie the singer tells the listener, such as Annie telling Jeff she's sexually available, or Troy and Abed telling Pierce his generation created everything worthwhile. Sometimes they're a lie the singer tells him- or herself, such as Troy convincing himself celebrating Christmas is consistent with his religion, or Abed telling himself that glee will bring his friends "to a healthier place." The fundamental act of lying is present in each song.

Abed is aware that they're all being deceptive throughout the episode. Lines like "Glee / Is what I'll spread to my friends, like a virus..." and "I might have a loophole" suggest that, unlike the others, he remains aware that what they're doing is fundamentally dishonest. But he's willing to be dishonest in order for everyone to be together and (at least apparently) happy at Christmas. At the glee club performance at the end of the episode, however, Mr. Rad makes him realize that once you start lying it can be hard to stop. Rad's obsession with regionals mirrors Abed's obsession with Christmas: they're both milestones that have become personally important, but are actually intrinsically meaningless. (Actually, the sign-off at the end of the episode - "we'll see you all after regionals" - might be understood as making that equivalence explicit, since it could mean "after the holidays.") Rad won't be satisfied with regionals; there will always be another milestone that has to be reached at any cost. In the same way, having everyone happy at Christmas won't ultimately satisfy Abed, because in itself it doesn't fundamentally change the group dynamic; if Abed wants the Christmas lies to have a lasting effect, he has to keep telling them. "This is what we do now," says Rad as Jeff and the gang jabber like idiots onstage, an idea that horrifies Abed.

Fortunately, Abed has the perfect tool to unravel all of the accumulated falseness: ugly truth. As I mentioned, I don't know much about the characters in terms of their arcs and underlying identities, but I do gather that Brita is an iconoclast, and I wonder if Rad's abhorrence for Brita has something to do with that, with a fundamental fear that she'll destroy the icons that make up his world. In any event, Abed tells Brita to sing her from her heart, and she uncynically does. Obviously the words of Brita's song don't express any deeper truth, but her singing, sans glamor and accompaniment, exposes the emptiness of the whole gleeful enterprise. Even more, it brings forth a much uglier truth from Rad himself, revealing that living so disingenuously is not only empty, but actually dangerous. If your life becomes devoted to lies, you're forced to become more and more callous towards real people in order to maintain them.

Incidentally, I found the coda scene of this episode, with the cast singing "The First Noel" for Abed, a little disappointing on first viewing. It just didn't pack the emotional wallop I was looking for. But I think that's the point. The episode can't end with swelling music and a group hug, because that's not where the group is. But it can end with a sweet gesture and a choice to be together, however reluctantly made. The choice of the carol is a very nice touch: "The First Noel," being about the first appearance of the angels to the shepards, emphasizes the arrival of salvation in a time of great darkness. Using this song makes the point that music can be honest without being hopeless, that our communication with each other can be both truthful and kind. This isn't one of my favorite carols, but the more I think about it the more I like its use here. Some other good choices might have been "We Three Kings," the first verse of which is about a journey to get to Christ, or the wonderfully ambiguous beginning of "O Little Town Of Bethlehem":

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the restless stars go by

But in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight 

I used to wonder what friendship could be!

Alright, let's deal with it out in the open. I sure enjoy me some My Little Ponies: Friendship Is Magic. It's no Avatar: The Last Airbender, sure, but it's a bright, sweet, hopeful show with a varied cast of likeable female protagonists. I like the characters, the dumb jokes, the cute songs, and even the pleasant ritual of writing a letter to Celestia - i.e. delivering a moral - at the end of every episode.

The morals are the thing I want to talk about just at the moment. So morals at the end of the episode are the worst thing in Western animation, amirite? You know how every story is going to end a few minutes after it starts because the lesson is always obvious from the premise. Worse, moral lessons can be the death of humor and of human truth. Worst of all is what TV Tropes calls a "broken aesop," a moral that doesn't actually follow from the story you've just told - all too common, in my experience.

What MLP:FIM does very well is build the lesson into the story, and support it through out. Actually, sometimes the lesson is there, but the end-of-episode letter to Celestia misses it, or at least doesn't capture everything that happened in the episode. That's part of the genius, though: sometimes the real lesson is built into the very premise of the episode. In "Winter Wrap Up," for instance, the stated lesson is "Everypony has hidden talents." To me, though, that's hardly the main thing the episode teaches. The big lesson is right there in the musical number at the very start of the episode, before the characters have started learning anything.

It's all there. "Winter Wrap Up" is one of the most heartfelt odes to work I personally have ever seen. Every pony has a job, something they do, that they excel at; every job is valuable, and every pony is proud of, even excited about, their job. Rainbow Dash loves to see the sun's "warmth and beauty... glow" after she chases all the clouds out of the sky. Fluttershy takes great satisfaction in waking up the animals "so quietly and nice." Applejack's pride in feeding the whole town is palpable. Twilight Sparkle desperately wants in on this work. "What does everypony do?" she asks pleadingly, earnestly pledging to "help with all of my heart" and to "do my best today." And yes, then there's a plot about her finding her unique skill that lets her make a really great contribution, but to me, the central lesson has already been taught: work is good. Work helps people, and doing good work feels good, and doing the right work for you makes you the person you want to be. That's the real lesson of the episode, and I think it's one we could all stand to take to heart, honestly.

I don't mean to give the impression that the show is a never-ending font of enduring wisdom. Some of the episodes and lessons are silly, or simple, typical children's tv fare. The episode where they realize they all saw the same rainbow (actually a rainboom, don't ask) as children is cute and all, but "Friends share a special connection, sometimes even before they meet" is more sentimental BS than a real lesson to carry close to your heart. My favorite episodes, though, are the ones where I think the show is going to veer off into that most horrible of sins, a broken aesop, and then surprises me by really committing to their lesson. Take a recent episode, "The Mysterious Mare Do Well."

In this episode, hot-blooded pegasus Rainbow Dash, widely regarded as the most awesome of the Mane Cast, makes a habit of using her incredible flying skills to help other ponies in Ponyville. After a few dramatic feats, she notices that she's getting cheers and a big fan club, and it goes to her head. She starts milking it, showing off and leading her own cheers. Her friends start to get frustrated with her showboating.

Enter Mare Do Well, a mysterious masked superhero who seems to come out of nowhere and manages to outdo Rainbow Dash in a few successive crises. Mare Do Well seems to be stronger, faster; she can fly just as well, and do unicorn magic on top of all of it. The town's adulation shifts to Mare Do Well, and Rainbow Dash makes it worse with her grandstanding for attention, which the other ponies find more and more annoying.

Mare Do Well's identity is, of course, a complete non-mystery, especially as she starts revealing more and more different skills: all of Rainbow Dash's friends are wearing the mask at different times, solving problems perfectly suited to their own particular skills. I started to doubt the episode at this point, for two reasons. First, Rainbow Dash is a really cool, strong character, and I hate to see her take it on the chin over and over. Second, I was dreading the inevitable reveal, where her friends take off their masks and totally humiliate Rainbow Dash in the name of "helping her learn," i.e. cutting her down to size.

I should have had more faith. There is a scene where the ponies gently hint to Rainbow that maybe there's something she can learn from Mare Do Well's anonymous heroism, but it's not carried too far. In the end, Rainbow learns their identities because she chases down Pinkie Pie and tears off her mask, not because the other ponies reveal themselves to teach her a lesson. Once she realizes that they are her rival, her friends do share a lesson with her, eventually summed up as "It's great to be good at something, but it's important to act with grace and humility." The difference is in motivation.

See, the ponies didn't plan for Rainbow Dash to learn who they were so that she'd learn she wasn't better than them; their only plan was to set a good example for her to follow, and to do some anonymous good deeds in the process. They get excited about their own personal contributions to the plan, but without asking for praise. As they explain their motivations to her, they affirm three separate times that she should be proud of her abilities ("Of course we want you to be a hero!" "It's natural to celebrate your accomplishments," and "It's great to be really good at something,"). They just wanted her to realize, from Mare Do Well's example, that she had gone a little bit overboard with her own hype. It's not a complicated lesson, but the sincerity with which it's delivered, with no meanness of judgement on any of the characters' part, really sells it in a way that I think is pretty unique to this iteration of My Little Ponies.

For the record: the pony I admire the most is Applejack, and the pony I find the most entertaining is Rarity, but my favorite pony is definitely Fluttershy.