7.26.2005

No secret at all, 2

This is the second in three posts about "The Fly." We last left our anti-hero splatted against some Elevation screen, and I didn't think we'd ever see the Fly again, given the song's omission from the Best of 90-00. But he's back, thanks to the Vertigo Tour's inclusion of a ZooTV set, presented almost as a greatest-hits nostalgia bit with period imagery. But this time, unlike during Elevation, the band all but vanish for the entire song as they are dwarfed by the visuals, which deliver neither the Zoo era's unmanageable message-chaos nor the Elevation era's trenchant simplicity, but a dramatic metanarrative of spiritual warfare against the culture.

I say visuals, and I'll be linking several pictures. However, in reality it's all text, which someone will probably email me and point out is an awfully Protestant way to inculcate a dramatic metanarrative of spiritual warfare against the culture. The presentation is extremely visceral as an experience, yes, but it's still all text.

I think I'm the first person to write about this anywhere, so if you plan to steal the onscreen text or any of my ideas about it, I'd really appreciate being cited and linked.

Before I really launch into discussing the new treatment, a few caveats. I don't know when it began, and I don't know how much it is still changing. I am sure that it always picks up on the slogan-visuals of the 90s and on two repeated concepts in the lyrics: "secret" and "love." If we had a DVD already and the material were thus well known, I could just make some shorter analyses, but since we don't I'm going to go through some sections of the text in my next post and let it speak for itself (the amount of searches I'm getting just on the few phrases I posted the first time shows there's curiosity about what's going on.)

What I'll be working with, I want to emphasize, is not the complete text (in particular, I have not included the side-view sections of rapid-fire phrases mimicking the 90s version, and I haven't bothered to signal the various random-letters sections.) Also, parts seem to change from show to show. However, I feel fairly confident that I've figured out, as they say in homiletics, the moves. I'll write more about them in my next post.

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