Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 55 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Day For Night
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 21 | Aired on 02.25.2014
The title refers to that process where you film in the daytime and then underexpose it so it looks like nighttime, which is more interesting to me: Those terms, "Golden Hour" is another one, that are used so specifically and often that they take on this sort of nimbic glow of meaning. You can look at a movie as an imitation of life but then something that simple, a trick like that, pulls the rug out. And you can watch that movie a hundred times and see the nighttime and think, "That's actually daytime," which makes you feel smart but doesn't change the nighttime feelings you feel as you're watching it.
But what I really want to talk about is this thing I call the Devil's Beautiful Daughter, which is a motif I think we should get into all the time because it's so relevant. I went way way back looking for the Farscape recap, but it doesn't matter which one, because once you say it you get it.
If you are operating from a boy perspective, there is a conspiracy you are terrified exists, between your father and the girl you love. They know a secret and they are not telling you this secret, and that's because boys become men by understanding their anima, blah blah, you can't get to the adult form of yourself without realizing that women are people and until you do this, you will always have a horrible feeling in the back of your head that they know a secret, about you and about the world, and they are laughing behind their hands while you fumble and try to figure it out.
Okay or do you like Adventure Time? It's that thing. Marceline and Simon were always going to have a secret history, because Marceline is exactly that thing, the Devil's Beautiful Daughter, and Ice King is exactly that thing too, the shadowed or sickly father, the Fisher King in his detriment. So much of that show is about that, about Princess Bubblegum and Marceline and even Flame Princess being further along, older, better than Finn. Flip it around, and you have Marshall Lee singing to Fiona about how all she wants is for him to fucking destroy her -- that he knows this, and he's not going to yet, because she's not old enough.
Flip it around again, and you have Boardshorts: Ali has Marceline relationships with every single man on the show. She's blackmailing Byron, she's involved with Wilden and CeCe, and so on. Of course Ezra is Boardshorts, because for Aria Alison is a symbol first and foremost of the transcendent synthesis of innocence and experience. The show is about purity beset by corruption, of course, but only Alison always exists in both states: Predator and prey, hunter and hind, nighttime and daytime. Motionless and always moving. Mercutio to their Romeos -- adult/child gay/straight male/female in/out death/life virgin/whore good/evil -- and central to every nexus on which the show tilts.