“This Is The New Year”
This is why I watch this show.
I feel like I’m going to be talking about this video forever, regardless of how they use it in the episode, although I suspect it’s the last number in the episode (since the calendars are already produced) and that a lot of resolutions or imagined resolutions will have happened here.
But one of the things I cannot get over, other than just how great this track is (and you should check out the original which is just as powerful, musically very similar and yet moving in a different way in its video presentation), is Blaine’s body language in it.
I’m always super responsive to body language because I’m a dancer first and how we move doesn’t just tell other people what we’re feeling, it informs the feelings themselves.
And Blaine here, in the opening segments when he’s just staring into the camera. That’s someone who’s decided to be brave and hopeful and is terrified, not because it’s hard but because it feels so new. There’s a lot of meta going around about Blaine really starting to come out of what was pretty clearly a depressive episode that began probably around “Michael” and was actually visible around “On My Way” and I definitely feel like I’m looking at someone waking up from that experience, who is happy and relieved at it, but also scared because that has become more familiar to him than whatever all this giddy life is.
This is a Blaine who can fight for Kurt instead of beg for Kurt. This is a Blaine who can do something other than wait. This is a Blaine who realizes he can survive no matter which way it shakes out and isn’t made sad by that fact. This is a Blaine Kurt can, when he’s ready, feel like he can say yes to. This is, I think, what I wanted “Some Nights” to be, but of course that was a song of people acknowledging the battle, not coming out the other side.
Around the time of “On My Way” there was a lot of discussion, in part because of a physical gesture Blaine made at one point, about whether Blaine has ever experienced suicidal ideation. I think we, the audience, will never know. It think if he had pre-Dalton/WMHS, Blaine may never actually have told anyone we know on the show about it now. I think there’s a chance Blaine’s not even actually sure quite how serious some of the darker places of his depression have been and may not know how to articulate them to others — worried he’d be exaggerating or upsetting people. When he’s not feeling that way it is, I think, hard to remember for him what that feeling was like.
But even if he can’t remember what was happening for him at his worst, in this song, it’s clear that he’s not there now. Listen to the lyrics he has lead on. This is watching someone feeling like they can choose to live, feeling like they can walk away from mourning (not just the relationship, but himself), and standing on some shaky newborn foal legs to do it.
We’ve all had those movie magic moments where we’ve got a soundtrack in our head and we feel like we look great and we suddenly know with absolute terror, at least for a few moments, that we can transform our worlds.
This is, in that weird way Glee does things (we’re watching someone have a movie magic moment on TV), Blaine having that moment in his head and in his life.
It’s incredibly powerful and also so essential, because Kurt’s death work and transformative stuff is a natural environment for Kurt, but really, really bad for other people. Blaine always had to be something else and when he couldn’t be his own person in the face of Kurt, couldn’t hold his own light (yes, I’m referencing exactly what you think I am), everything fell apart.
Every time I watch this video I feel it right in my sternum, in my chin held just a little too high, in the idea that even after everything anyone’s eyes can be that wide and guileless. It’s such a good performance, and it gives me all these little micro-feels about stuff that’s not spelled out on Glee, but that’s been happening in these performances all along.
Sometimes fighting doesn’t feel like throwing a punch. Sometimes fighting feels like standing like this. And we’ve never seen Blaine stand like this before. And that matters.
In which lettersfromtitan picks out and articulates basically everything that made me happycry about that video.
sothinky this is actually for yesterday’s theme for Glee Meta Week. Still my favorite piece of song meta. Because sometimes meta gives us feelings and helps put together things in our heads that aren’t just about Glee and how to read it. It can be a type of art too <3.
