Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [36]
The components of a good tragic plot are: reversal, recognition, and suffering. These roughly amount to: 1) things go from good to bad for the characters 2) the characters come to learn something they didn’t know and 3) the characters are then left to endure pain and loss.15
Given this definition of tragedy, it may seem like a comparison with the music of Radiohead is a non-starter. Most Radiohead songs don’t have a “plot” in any obvious sense like “Don’t Take your Guns to Town” or “Frankie and Johnny.” However, we can recognize characters in many Radiohead songs, even if they are fragmentary or vague. And even if there’s no obvious plot, the songs frequently sketch situations that suggest stories. For example, in “Fake Plastic Trees”, we see a woman and a man (apparently a plastic surgeon) in the midst of personal exhaustion: “she lives with a broken man . . . who crumbles and burns”; “it wears her out”; “it wears him out.” “Exit Music” features a scene of two young lovers rising early to escape from their parents: “wake from your sleep . . . today we escape.” There’s the threat of violence and a sense of desperation: “pack and get dressed . . . before your father wakes, before all hell breaks loose”; “breath, keep breathing, I can’t do this alone.”
Often the principle character in a Radiohead song is the narrator, as in “Exit Music” or “The Bends.” Other times, as in “High and Dry,” a character is spoken to in the second person: “drying up in conversation, you will be the one who cannot talk, all your insides fall to pieces, you just sit there wishing you could still make love”. Or again in “15 Step”: “You used to be alright. What happened? Did the cat get your tongue? Did your string come undone?”
To be sure, these are not full-blown plots or developed characters. But there are glimpses of individuals and their stories, snippets of human existence. Moreover, these characters are typically marked by the experiences of suffering and breakdown, confusion and loss. What confronts us in Radiohead’s music is a version of what we encounter in tragedy: depictions of people in dire circumstances, scenes of struggle and failure, the disintegration of meaning, the onset of despair.
Emotion in Its Right Place
In a successful tragedy, scenes of reversal and misfortune evoke pity and fear in the audience. According to Aristotle, we experience pity at the character’s sufferings because we see the characters as essentially decent people (not thoroughly corrupt) and because we see their sufferings as undeserved. In that way, our response to tragic suffering is different from the satisfaction we feel at the sufferings of a villain who, at the end of a story, finally receives his comeuppance. However, the sufferings of tragic characters are not entirely undeserved. For in a well-constructed tragedy, the suffering comes about through some error (hamartia) on the part of the character, such as Oedipus’s arrogance and anger in killing Laius at the crossroads. Of course Oedipus does not know he is actually killing his father, but he errs nonetheless. The sufferings of tragedy are not random misfortunes, like traffic accidents or pianos falling from windows. Rather the sufferings arise from the character’s own agency, with the result that the characters are implicated to some extent in their own downfalls. Or, as Radiohead puts it in “Just”: “You do it to yourself. You and no one else.”
Tragedy would not elicit emotion as it does if we did not identify in some way with the characters. We feel fear because we recognize the individuals portrayed as like us, and therefore we see in their misfortune something that might befall us. This does not mean that we see the characters as exactly like us, or that we are literally thinking of ourselves, instead of the story, when viewing tragedy (which would make us poor audience members!) But we do see the characters and their experiences as relevant to our own lives. Their fates could be ours.
For Radiohead—and pop music, generally—music allows a particularly intense form of identification: