Naomi and I sat through the Finn Hudson memorial episode of Glee last night in pieces. Boy it was agony to watch. Did you see it? It was a uniquely weird reality-fiction crossover, and I can’t think of another example quite like it right now (it’s 2:30am – I’m going through another spell of insomnia, so my brain is not up to full operating standards).
Glee is one of our (my) guilty pleasures. We’ve watched it since the first season. After we had children, Naomi and I stopped being able to endure the horror movie marathons that formed the basis of our courtship. We’d become hyper-sensitised. An hour of High School kids singing on the cafeteria tables was the exact opposite of an hour of Dario Argento, and a brief antidote for all of the new worries that come included in the packaging with new babies.
Glee also appealed because it taps the nostalgia button, the series owing a lot to Fame (the movie and the series), which, if you were in primary school in the early 1980s, you watched (I watched). The part of me that mourns being utterly unable to sing responds to Glee in the same way that the part of me that mourns being unable to fly watches Superman.
Naomi and I were in the car pulling into a multi-storey car park in Cambridge when we heard on the news that the actor Cory Monteith, who plays Finn Hudson in Glee, had died of a drugs overdose. It was sad and tragic of course, but made especially so because the news piece revealed that Cory had been dating Lea Michele, who plays Rachel Berry, in real life as well as in the series.
We’d watched Finn and Rachel fall in and out of love and put each other through all kinds of pleasure and pain over the last few years. That this was mirrored to some extent in the actual actors’ lives made Cory/Finn’s death slice right through the membrane that keeps reality and fiction separate.
And that was exactly what this weekend’s memorial episode of Glee did, prising open this slice into an hour-long window of demi-real grief. Were the actors all buddies in real life too? When they were singing songs in memory of Finn – their friend, their student, their son – was it the characters singing, or the actors, or a fusion of both?
It made for an uncanny TV experience. Naomi and I wept onto her towelling dressing gown over someone we’ve never met, but who we’ve also known very well, watching as he came of age and graduated and struggled to make something of himself in the show. But of course, we weren’t weeping just for him, but for the agonising idea of losing one of our own children. And when our kids did their usual routine of coming downstairs saying they couldn’t get to sleep, we hugged them extra tight.
I concur with your assessment of the impact of this recent episode of
GLEE. Perhaps its reach is so deep because of the waste of another
talented youth to addictions. Perhaps it’s testimony to the power of
fiction and more generally, the arts, on emotion. Through music, dance
and story, GLEE has done more to address social issues than most TV.
Further, in this episode and show in general we had a collision of
fiction with real life in that the stars of the show had on and
off-screen relationships. Cory Monteith, a Canadian, will be missed.
Cindy Matthews