And a good morning to you, Overthinkers.

First, THE DEAD HAVE RISEN AND ARE MAKING ALBUMS. Not literally, of course, but a new album of rare and unreleased Jimi Hendrix tracks, “Valleys of Neptune,” debuted at #4 on the Billboard charts this week. Also, Michael Jackson’s estate signed a deal with Sony for $250,000,000 in exchange for ten albums over seven years. “In exchange” is perhaps a misnomer, since Blanket probably wouldn’t be in the studio cutting new hooks.

Second, MEN WITH GUNS ARE COMING FOR YOU, if you’re a protagonist in any of the movies opening this weekend that is. Repo Men (not to be confused with the cult classic), The Bounty Hunter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid open this weekend. Additionally, last year’s Swedish adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens to limited audiences in the States this weekend. If it’s half as good as the novel, see it.

Sorry for all the misleading headlines; you know we’re not normally like that. But THE BUS IS SPEEDING OUT OF CONTROL! HURRY UP AND SAVE YOUR … open thread.

The President’s popularity soars. His ambitious legislative agenda seems inevitable. His party is united behind him while his opposition is disorganized and ineffectual.

Then things change.

The opposition gets its act together, rallying around issues that have little to do with the legislation in question.  Those attacks and a sense of inaction drive the President’s approval ratings way down. It’s an election year, so members of his own party start pulling away, refusing to support the President’s agenda for fear of riding a sinking ship into election day.

Sound familiar? It’s the plot of both 2010’s cable news channels and of the 1995 film The American President.

Notorious Hollywood liberal types Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin made The American President, the romantic story of a widower Democratic President Andrew Shepherd, who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist. Their courtship becomes a major political issue as his reelection campaign heats up, driving down the President’s poll numbers, derailing his legislative agenda, and threatening his chances of reelection. Yesterday, Mr. Perich posted a great piece on the traditional romantic comedy theme of love vs career.  The American President exemplifies that sort of movie, but when the career in question is the Presidency of the United States of America, you’ve got to wonder if love is the answer in this particular case.  Given the consequences for the country and the world, the political suicide of Andrew Shepherd makes this film not only a sort of political pornography for liberals, but a full blown tragedy as well.

The American President was made in the middle of President Bill Clinton’s first term, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of the Clinton presidency. It takes a firm stand on the issue of whether or not the public has a right to know about a politician’s personal life and parodies the hysteria over Hilary Clinton’s influence over the President’s decisions.  In his internal struggle over whether to fight the fights that need fighting or the fights that he can win, Shepherd echoes the liberal criticism of Clinton’s early years, when instead of health care reform, America got NAFTA.

In the 1992 campaign, James Carville famously said “It’s the economy, stupid,” but in the early 90’s, the other hot-button political issue of the day was crime. With the Soviets out of the game, we needed something else to be afraid of, so pundits made their fortunes predicting soaring murder rates as a generation of angry teenagers took to the streets (this was also only a few years after Dukakis got beat by Willie Horton).

As the film opens, President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) has responded with “the crime bill.” Polling shows that the administration’s high approval rating (63%) will plummet if he can’t get the bill passed. All we know about the bill is that his staff thinks it won’t be effective because it doesn’t do anything to limit handguns or assault weapons. He’s leaving the guns out because he knows that the National Rifle Association (NRA) will crush the bill in Congress if those provisions are included.

As his staff has just discussed:
A. J. MacInerney: Oh, and Leon, don’t be the nice, sweet guy from Brooklyn on this one. Do what the NRA does.
Leon Kodak: What, scare the s#!t out of them?
A. J. MacInerney: Exactly.
Leon Kodak: I can do that.

For those who don’t know, the NRA is probably the most effective lobbying organization in the United States. Founded by the gun industry decades ago, they’re incredibly well funded, have a rabid base of supporters all over the country and can cost a politicians thousands of votes if they decide to take him/her out. In a close race, the NRA can make the difference. They haven’t been in the news too much lately because nobody’s introducing any legislation to even inconvenience people looking to buy guns. In other words, they’ve won.

The other bill in the film is bill #455, which will reduce the emissions from fossil fuels by 20%. 15 years later, it would still be the most significant piece of environmental legislation in history. Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening), a hired gun lobbyist for the fictional Global Defense Council, first meets the President while lobbying for this bill. It’s love at first sight.

As their relationship progresses, it becomes the target of media scrutiny, with the whole world wanting to know about the President’s girlfriend. Presumptive Republican nominee, Senator Bob Rumson (played by Richard Dreyfuss -- this was before Bob Dole started his acting career), starts activating his base, questioning the influence of this left-wing lobbyist who’s literally in bed with the President. When she’s caught after spending the night in the White House and a picture surfaces of a younger Sydney standing behind a burning flag at an Apartheid protest, even the independents start questioning the morality of having a “First Mistress” and the patriotism of President Shepherd. Within weeks, his approval rating drops from 63% to 41%.

Positioning themselves away from Shepherd, moderate Democrats with tough reelection campaigns start bailing on the crime bill. Michael J. Fox channels a future White House Chief of Staff and calls one cowardly Congressman a “chicken s#!t lame-ass.” Fox is clothed at the time. Desperate to pass the bill, the President cuts a deal to shelve the climate bill in return for three votes. Sydney dumps him. Recognizing that he’s made the wrong choice, the President storms into the press room less than an hour before the State of the Union address and delivers this climactic speech:

With 35 minutes to go and the approval of Helen Thomas, they rewrite the State of the Union, Sydney comes back, and Congress stands up to applaud wildly as the President walks in the House chamber to deliver his speech.

Warm, fuzzy feelings abound. With this single speech, we’re led to believe, President Shepherd has saved his relationship, his presidency, his party, and the American dream.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s that soaring rhetoric can start a movement, but it’s only the beginning.  Fiery speeches started the American revolution, but there was still a war to win.  Obama inspired a nation, but we’re still working on health care.  Shepherd’s speech was inspiring, personal and powerful, but it was only the beginning of the end.

Here’s what really happened next:

With major changes to his State of the Union made at the last minute and his attention focused on Sydney, Shepherd has had no time to practice the new draft. With only seconds to load it into the teleprompter and no time for copy-editing, the speech itself is rife with errors, its flow and transitions shot to hell. He’s a professional, so it’s not awful, but there are a couple of fumbles and the speech doesn’t do anything to shift the focus away from his personal life.

Then the fun begins.

When Shepherd made the deal to get votes for the crime bill by sacrificing the climate bill, it became clear that there was at least some bipartisan support for an anti-crime package – traditionally a Republican favorite. The NRA was ok with it, and presumably Shepherd, because he left guns out of the bill. He’s now thrown the bill out, enraging the NRA in the process by saying he’ll “go door to door” to “get the guns.” He has deprived Democratic Members of Congress a vote that could make them look tough on crime and replaced it with a purely partisan vote on a climate bill that the Republicans will call a “job-killer.” Meanwhile, the big oil companies, which spend millions of dollars a year fighting any sort of climate legislation are now going to be spending that money against vulnerable Democrats who support #455 (FYI: The oil and gas industry spent more $168 million on lobbying in 2009).  States that produce a lot of fossil fuels and lots of gun owners suddenly start moving into Rumson’s column -- West Virginia (5 electoral votes), Michigan(18) and Pennsylvania(23).

Meanwhile, Senator Rumson has been attacking Shepherd for putting an unelected left-wing lobbyist in an incredibly sensitive and powerful position. How does Shepherd respond? He makes a major policy decision for the sole purpose of making his girlfriend happy. In private, he tells Sydney that he didn’t do it for her, but that’s not what the public record says.

The next morning countless news stories will recount the public details: Wade dumps Shepherd, Shepherd admits that he’s lost her in that press conference, then announces that her bill is the new priority for his administration, then she shows up with him at the State of the Union. The advance copies of the State of the Union had gone out to the press hours before the revisions were made, so they will be able to compare the two speeches and give specific examples of the power of Sydney Ellen Wade.  Add the premarital sex scandal into that and more culturally conservative states like New Mexico(5) and Arizona(8) start looking bad.

Shepherd has just proven Rumson right beyond a shadow of a doubt, a fact that the right is going to be crowing about for the next 10 months. Older men tend to vote Republican, and even those who do vote Democrat are more likely to suspect a woman in a powerful position.  Then the morning talk shows start parsing the press conference, pointing out that Shepherd went on the attack, publicly criticizing Rumson while standing in front of that big White House symbol. Tradition has always held that a President shouldn’t campaign from the White House and older women voters who traditionally lean Democrat, also tend to be turned off by violations of this kind of tradition and can be turned off by personal attacks, reducing their likelihood of turning out to vote. That hurts Shepherd, but also hurts other Democrats in close races. Even the White House press corps frowns on this sort of thing coming from the Administration.  Older voters abandon the Democrats or stay home -- now you’re losing aging states like Ohio(21) and Florida(25).

But he’s not done – he hasn’t patronized middle America yet. In a dismissive, mocking tone, Shepherd describes Rumson’s strategy: “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and character.” Those middle-class, middle-income voters are bound to start wondering what’s wrong with family and American values.

Think the Midwest value voters still like you too much? Why not combine two sensitive topics: flag burning and children. “The symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest,” Shepherd says. “Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.” The newspapers may be looking at policy shifts in the Shepherd Administration, but Rush Limbaugh spends the next week talking about the President’s plan to teach America’s children to burn flags. There go the veterans and the soccer moms.  Say goodbye to Iowa(7).

So let’s take a look at the score:
It takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency.  In 1996, in addition to the usual blue states, Clinton won the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia -a total of 112 electoral votes.

In this single speech, Shepherd alienated voters in every one of those swing states.  Meanwhile, the climate bill stalls when moderate Democrats refuse to sign on and the President’s agenda flounders for an entire year. Rumson, riding a tide of moral outrage and policy failures, spends his massive campaign war chest in the right places.     In November, Shepherd loses them all, earning a total of 267 electoral votes to Rumson’s 271.   He and Sydney retire to Wisconsin, emerging only to film bipartisan pleas for assistance with Dave and the other fictional Presidents whenever there’s a big natural disaster.

Thanks to Shepherd’s love for his girlfriend, Compassionate Conservatism gets a four year head-start.  That’s a tragedy, in my book.

Not much to say about this week’s episode, which was decent but a bit filler-y for my tastes.  My favorite Sawyer episodes are the ones that con the audience (i.e., me), so I was a wee bit disappointed that Recon was so straightforward.  On the other hand — Miles and James are cops now!  Charlotte and James totally bone in the alter-verse!  I really dug Evangeline Lilly’s acting for once!  Un-Locke may or may not have a crazy mommy!  And Widmore’s doing… well, actually, I have no idea what he’s doing.  But, still: Widmore!  In other words, in a not-totally-spectacular episode, a lot of fun moments shone through.

Now onto the questions!

Question 1: Like the B-story in last week’s episode, Recon’s alt-plot seemed like a pilot to a spin-off series.  Which of the following Lost spin-offs would you most like to watch on a regular basis?  Hangin’ With Dr. Linus?  Straume & Twang (my name for USA’s new quirky cop show, starring Miles Straume & James Ford)?  The Good Shephard (a new Everwood-type show about a big-city doctor with daddy issues who learns about faith and family after moving to Provo, Utah)?  [Insert your own punny Kate- or Locke-based show here]?

Question 2: So, are we going to talk Un-Locke’s word for it on his mommy issues or what?  Is he talking about real-Locke’s crazy mom, or is he talking about someone else?  Tawaret, mayhaps?

Speaking of crazy mommies…

Question 3: What are we thinking about Claire now?  Is she crazy-evil or just crazy-crazy?  Did the “infection” make her go nutso, or did the supposed Aaron-napping do it?  And can she ever turn back to the light side?

Question 4: Who’s Sawyer?

See you next week.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A man is on track to succeed in his career through natural talent and hard work. However, he’s also in love with a young woman. Circumstances force him to choose between his career and the woman he loves. In the end, despite uncertainty and pressure, he chooses the woman. The two of them stare fondly as the credits roll.

Which movie did I just describe? Good Will Hunting? The Family Man? Regarding Henry? If we reverse the genders, we can add Sweet Home Alabama, The Devil Wears Prada, You’ve Got Mail and a dozen others to the list. You saw it in Felicity and you saw it on Friends. You see it every time you turn on the television.

But you don’t see it in real life.

While the ballots are still being counted on why people regularly go to the movies, a popular theory is catharsis. People love watching movies because they love being exposed to larger-than-life situations and feeling emotional extremes. Aristotle introduced us to the notion of catharsis through art in his Poetics, in which a play put its protagonists through an emotional wringer and left the audience drained. While Aristotle focused on tragedy, we can see the same emotions at work in any other genre. A comedy heightens the emotion of joy. An action movie exacerbates the feeling of tension and sometimes anger: we cheer when a true bastard gets his comeuppance. A horror movie builds the sensation of fear to an unbearable clip.

By this criteria, good movies are those which engender the strongest reactions in us. Looking at the IMDb Top 250 validates this notion. While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or the AFI might have exacting critical standards, moviegoers always prefer the extreme, the stirring and the accessible. No film critic worth his Moleskine would call The Shawshank Redemption the greatest movie of all time. Whether that says something about the simplicity of the movie-going public or the snobbery of critics, I’ll leave to another discussion. Suffice it to say: when you ask people to list their favorite movies, they list the ones that make them feel the strongest feelings.

(This is also a pat explanation for the well-known “newcomer effect” on IMDb rankings, where a new movie will vault to the Top 250 early on and then settle into an established rank. We react strongly to variety; the shock of the new biases us. Even if The Dark Knight tells the same story as High Noon, we esteem it higher. The fresh evokes stronger feelings than the remembered. Unless you’re Marcel Proust)

So we can classify movies by which emotions they’re meant to stir and how strongly the movie stirs them. Comedies evoke joy (see Caddyshack). Horror films evoke fear (see The Exorcist). Action films evoke anger (see Taken). And romances, romantic comedies and most dramas evoke love. We don’t fall in love with the fictional people on screen. But we sink into that same pleasant high which being in love engenders. Tears well up in our eyes, our breath becomes tight, our chests start to ache.

Romantic movies are merely the latest medium in a tradition that dates back to the dawn of human civilization. From the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise, the epic poetry of the Roman de la Rose, the comedies of Shakespeare and the poetry of Lord Byron, we get the moral that love is a rare gift. If you come across love in the wild, you should drop everything you’re doing to pursue it. From this notion, we get tales of knights, peasants and adventurers who risk everything in order to be with someone they love. This gambit can end happily (Twelfth Night) or tragically (Tristan et Isolde), but the gambit’s always there.

I don’t intend to turn this into a discourse on whether or not True Love exists (though have at it in the comments if you like). Whether or not it exists isn’t important. What matters is that, for more centuries than we’ve had pants, artists have believed that it does. Not only that, but they’ve believed that True Love is a jewel beyond price, against which anything else – family, property, honor, community – takes a distant second. And they’ve filled the Western canon with so many works of art that support this thesis that we have profound trouble imagining it could be any other way. “What would you suggest? That someone can find the love of their lifetime and pass them by? What kind of cynic are you?”

What makes this theme of True Love interesting again is the Industrial Age.

The whole business of love, and love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. Love is very sweet, very pretty [...] [b]ut it’s the affair, commonly, of very young people, who have not yet character and experience enough to make them interesting. In novels it’s treated, not only as if it were the chief interest of life, but the sole interest of the lives of two ridiculous young persons; and it is taught that love is perpetual, that the glow of a true passion lasts for ever; and that it is sacrilege to think or act otherwise.

- William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

For the bulk of human history, the notion of “choosing a career” would have made no semantic sense. The teeming underclass worked the career they were born into, or the career their parents auctioned them off to a guild to apprentice for, or farmed. The aristocracy had pastimes (poetry, singing, hawking) and duties (service to one’s liege or to the Emperor), but didn’t have to earn a living by the sweat of their brow. And even the middle classes gained wealth in the trade they were raised in: wealthy textile traders came from the ranks of tailors, wealthy land barons from the ranks of farmers.

The Industrial Revolution changed that. While the tide of new technology destroyed a lot of old jobs, it replaced them with a variety of new ones (read your Schumpeter, people). Dramatic increases in power meant increases in production capacity, which meant increases in goods produced, which meant the creation of new markets, which meant a need for new jobs. The world vaulted into the singularity of consumerism that it still enjoys/suffers today. The explosion of markets, combined with the startling return to democracy (the U.S., France and the zenith of the British Empire) meant a lot of people were now looking for jobs. Peasants were no longer as tied to land. Now, any healthy young lad could tie his belongings in a kerchief and strike out to seek his fortune. (Women could certainly try this as well, but it was less likely to succeed)

Only once it became possible for someone to choose a career could the dilemma of “His Career or His True Love” enter into art. And once it did, it latched on.

The problem with this dilemma, of course, is twofold. First, it’s a false dichotomy. Someone who truly loves you should be able to accept the job you work in. Failing that, if you elect to stay in your career, you can still love someone deeply without being in a relationship with them. Failing that, maybe the object of your affections could compromise a little, hm?

Second, and pardon your correspondent for sounding jaded, but there are things more important than love. There are. The fact that there are half as many divorcees as married couples in the U.S. suggests that it takes more than love to keep a marriage together. It takes emotional stability, a lot of patience, and the ability to provide. Money smooths over many of these hurdles. Many, many people might be better off marrying someone other than their True Love, or staying single, if marriage means abandoning a career that’ll keep them fed.

And yet the notion baffles modern audiences. You never see it in movies. Check that: you see the hero choosing his Career over his Love plenty of times, but you never see it end happily. Casablanca’s the textbook example: Rick chooses his true calling – running guns for the Resistance – over the chance to flee Casablanca with Ilsa. In Shakespeare in Love, Viola stays with her husband (which was a noble woman’s career in Elizabethan England) rather than live in sin with the man she truly loves: William Shakespeare. Every time the hero or heroine chooses Career over Love, it is with bitter necessity and tears.

In fact, I can think of only one movie where the hero chooses Career over Love and it’s a happy, non-ironic ending: Rounders. Matt Damon plays a former poker hustler who, losing everything in a bad night of cards, falls back on his law school ambitions and the support of his girlfriend (played by Gretchen Mol). When circumstances force him to return to poker, she abandons him. At the end of the movie, he’s given up on his plans for law school and sets off for Vegas. His girlfriend forgives him and they part on understanding terms.

So why does the myth of Love vs Career persist? Maybe as a palliative to the drudgery of the industrial age. Maybe as the latest incarnation in the tradition of Love Vs. Whatever Else Literate People Do that has dominated art for thousands of years. Maybe because love feels good. Maybe because love is tricky. Regardless, you can say with confidence that drama will not be truly revolutionary until both sides of the scale become equally weighted.

Thousands have lived without love; not one without water.

- W.H. Auden, “First Things First”

Welcome to the desert of the vampire.

Oh, you thought Twilight had driven a stake through vampire mythos – that with its sparkly, daywalking Christian Rock Emo vibe, it had finally cast asunder the resonance and insight of the vampire myths and left them in shards on the dry, dusty ground of a vast cultural wasteland.

Well, you haven’t seen Vampirum Ad Absurdam – the true return to dust of Romania-via-Ireland’s tortured legacy – until you’ve seen the video to the late-2009 Timbaland single, “Morning After Dark,” featuring French recording artist ShoShy and sometimes, depending on the version, that sultry creature of the night: Nellie Furtado. Observe:

Count Dracula
Lestat Di Lioncourt
Blade
Angelus
Ultraviolet
Edward Cullen
Timbo “Crazy Eyes” McGee

Witness the final descent of vamp. And yet…

As any archaeologist can tell you, there is a lot of wisdom to be found in a ruin. Why has vampsloitation sunk so low? Why does it just not make any goddamned sense anymore? What are the key contradictions that have spoiled the saga of the bloodsucker?

What confusions and conflicts in our own society are reflected in this garbled attempt to serve so many masters at once?

All this, and a vampire who thinks “You’re dope enough yep,” and says “I’m like wow,” after the jump –

Apocryphal Preamble

There are actually two recorded versions of this song – the U.S. launch single with just SoShy and Timbaland, and the international/album/video version, which takes out a useless verse by Timbaland and replaces it with a much more interesting, if still relatively chaotic and confused, appearance by Nellie Furtado.

Perhaps the fact that Timbaland is 10 years older than SoShy, and that sexual tension between the two of them isn’t really believable, is why the original single doesn’t really work. Of course, the original single includes this very firmly vampiric preamble:

Hello Mr. Mosley, I’m glad you’re my maker
My Loyalty lies in your hands, you’re my breath taker
Your body, your kiss is in unknown demand
So take command, go Timbo

Yeah, thinking of this random French girl kissing Timbaland is kind of gross. Timbaland is a classy dude with a more reserved, mature sexuality that borders on a nostalgic boredom with it all, even when he’s being crass. Compared with somebody like Li’l Wayne he’s practically … adult. When Timbaland sings “Promiscuous” with the only six years younger than him Nellie Furtado, it’s reasonable that he’d discreetly take her back to his apartment, where he’d have a really nice, well put-together place, and they’d go have some nice merlot and light some candles and do their adult thing without anybody watching.

I really don’t believe for a second he’s exacting an “unknown demand” on this girl with his kiss – Timbaland tends to make his demands known, and they tend to be phrased as polite requests among consenting adults – again, if crass ones.

Which is reflected in the video, because the eyes will sometimes not allow what the ears will tolerate – SoShy and Timbaland are portrayed more as partners in crime and sidekicks than as lovers, and they appear to be protecting the protagonist rather than preying on her – except that they’re creatures of the niiiiiight and are scaaaaaary!!!

But we’ll get to all that. For now, note two things about this preamble, which doesn’t appear in the “canonical” version of the song:

1.It establishes right off the bat (get it?) that this song is about vampires.
2.It sets up a parallel between an older man having sex with a younger woman and a record producer introducing a new talent, because that’s what Timbaland is doing with SoShy for the American audience in this song.

So yeah, sex is parallel with death, which is parallel with contemporary pop music production, where autotune removes the vivacious and organic influence of the human animal’s natural noisemaking apparatus (i.e., voice).

See, Timbaland is SoShy’s “breath taker” because he’s the producer who records her voice and uses it in his songs. Also, he cuts the irregularities out of the track and homogonizes it, “taking” her “breath.”

Pretty clever, huh?

Oh, right, but this isn’t in the canonical song. Let’s go to the canonical song, which, for both the music and the video, is divided into several key sections that don’t have much connection with one another.

Section 1 – The art director has a smoke machine

Seriously, I totally got a smoke machine. It’s wild. It’s like, filling this whole place up with smoke, man. It’s totally got that Twilight thing going on.

Also note that, at the very beginning of the video – in the first 20 frames or so – there is an Italian flag hanging on a building to the right, instantly establishing that we are following what looks like an American exchange student in the exotic land of Italy. There are also vegetables and Vespa scooters sitting around in conspicuous places and a second Italian flag just to make it really clear we’re in Italy. So that’s established. Somebody thought that was important, and somebody had to go to the loading dock to go pick up the frickin’ Vespa scooter so it could sit on a soundstage for six hours to be in five seconds of this stupid video. This another reason why I never underestimate the amount of thought and effort that goes into disposable entertainment. Somebody had to spend a whole day doing everything.

Well, while in Italy, our protagonist is always looking concerned because exotic European men are going to bite her neck / have sex with her against her will except she really wants to at least make out with an exotic European man or else why would she go to a trashy dance club by herself in the first place / etc.

It’s all kind of a nightmare for feminism, but whatever. When it comes to nightmares and things this song does wrong, the feminists can get in line with everyone else. There’s enough blame to go around.

So, let’s look at the lyrics of the first section of the song:

Go Timbo!

I’ll be the same when it all goes up
I’ll be the same when it all goes down
Not the first one, open it up
I’ll be the last one closin it out
Don’t know if I’ll give you a shot yet
Lil’ momma I’m peepin your style
Do I think you’re dope enough? Yup!
One way of findin it out
The way you came at me, boo
Don’t care, not afraid I’m like “Wow!”
Really want it all head to toe
Question -- is she gon’ let it out?
Anyway the hour glass go
I don’t worry anyhow
Why don’t we see where it go?
Let’s figure it out

This verse establishes two things:

1.Timbaland likes to arrive at clubs in the evening and stay until they close. Fair enough. This is a pretty common thing. “Hey, let’s go to a club at 7 pm, order some $10 drinks at an empty bar, and go to bed before 10:30! Woo hoo!”

2.There’s a short or young woman who really likes Timbaland and has approached him at the club. He doesn’t really like her that much, but he likes her enough to keep talking to her, and is considering whether he’s going to engage in physical intimacy of some sort with her or not.

This in turn leads me to two thoughts.

1.This is a lot of windup. The song isn’t really about anything right now. In fact, there’s so much windup that I’m beginning to doubt the song is about anything at all. It’s as if these are the words Timbaland has to say, and he says them at this point out of force of habit, the artistic impulse more or less absent.

Throughout the video, he’ll seem distracted and be playing out the beats with his fingertips as he produces the song in his head – this is an act of “assembly” for him – getting all the pieces in the right place to make a hit, hopefully. He doesn’t take it very seriously – thus the crazy eyes.

I will  say that the crazy eyes are probably the thing that pushes this video over the top into overthinking territory. They speak volumes to me about Timbaland’s concept of himself as an artist and a performer – that he is not taking himself too seriously at all, and that he is following an impulse not dissimilar to that of The Living Theatre, the seminal American alternative theatrical performance group – that he’s destroying his art form at the same time as he is creating it, and he’s kind of mocking his audience’s relationship with other rappers, who take themselves so seriously and whom the audience tends to take so seriously.

2.This verse might imply something about vampires when put in context (say, with the preamble, or in the video, which establishes it much more quickly), but as of right now, just from the beat and lyrics, there’s no reason to believe this song is about vampires at all. This will change, awkwardly.

At this point in the song, Timbaland reveals unambiguously in the video that he is an Edward/Angelus-like protective vampire, doing the little Vampire scoot to stop the wall-walking, Metalocalypse reject from biting on the American Exchange student.

Transition – Chorus

When the cats come out the bats come out to play, yeah
(In the morning after)
The dawn is here, be gone be on your way, yeah
(In the morning after)
When the cats come out the bats come out to play, yeah
(In the morning after)
The dawn is here, be gone be on your way, yeah
(In the morning after)

Owww (oooohhh) owww, c’mon SoShy!

So, this my best guess as to what this chorus is about:

When women (cats) go out on the town, men (bats) chase them around.

Except that bats don’t chase cats. Bats are small rodents. Cats would eat bats given the opportunity – the cat is the predator in this situation.

Oh, except that the bats are really vampires, because this song is suddenly about archetypical animals with connections to the occult, and the intonation of Timbaland’s voice strongly implies he is being a little bit Vincent Pricey.

But why are the vampires going after cats? Have they gone all Gordon Shumway on us?

So, okay, the bats are vampires, but the cats are women. Except that the vampires are also guys. So the guys are chasing the women. The guys get two layers of metaphorical representation, but the women only get one. This puts women roughly on the same level of reality as unicorns and gryphons. This might make sense in a hip-hop (or really any pop music) worldview, where women are often portrayed as exotic kept beasts who battle the heroes and stand vigil in treacherous or sacred places, like basement parties or the hoods of cars.

Except none of that is going on, because actually this is all over already, and everybody has to go home. This song isn’t about the cats or the bats going out on the town, it’s about what happens the morning after men and women have one-night stands.

Except in the last verse, Timbaland was just getting started. Have we really skipped all the good stuff?

Phase 1. “Hmm, she’s attractive, and she likes me, I guess I’ll talk to her.”
Phase 2. ???????????????
Phase 3. “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!”

Odd and unsatisfying, and not really how vampires behave.

Oh, except it’s dawn, and the vampires have to leave because the sun is coming up.

Except this is a call and response between a man and a woman, and Timbaland is the one telling us that the dawn is here and you have to go on your way, which implies that it is the cats, or women, who are nocturnal, and the men, who are vampires, need to get up and make breakfast.

Timbaland actually says both things which are temporally inconsistent – that this is a song about going out at night, and that this is a song about going home in the morning. And the woman identifies a third time this happening – the morning after, presumably after the vampire/catwoman has left your house.

But this does make sense because Timbaland was by far the less enthusiastic of the people in the nightclub seduction in the first verse – so maybe the woman was the predator, and the man was the willing victim, and now he’s sending her home.

Cats are usually representative of females for a variety of reasons (again, some crass), but “cats” can also mean men, and “bats” can also mean women.

So, it’s a bunch of jazz musicians having sex with a bunch of old ladies. Got it!

This would also explain why they get up at dawn. If there’s one thing jazz musicians and old ladies have in common, it’s going to Denny’s.

No mas! No mas!

See, here’s the problem with the vampire story: It’s been subverted and reversed so many times during the Hollywood era – especially since Ann Rice – that the subversions become cyclical. Is a vampire a good guy? A bad guy? A threat? A reluctant, antiheroic protector? In the post-Buffy era, who, the human or the vampire, the man or the woman, is the predator, and who is the prey? And the post-Darla era, in which women aspire to vampirehood and vampires are chic and current, is the vampire even really a threatening allegory of male sexuality and old-world mischief anymore?

Well, no. A vampire is window-dressing. It can frame any story you want, as long as, on some level, the story is about sex. Which is pretty easy, because almost all stories are about sex – of course, not to the exclusion of being about other things, but that’s why you have Xander.

Why, then, is it such an oft-relied upon symbol, if it has been so blurred in its consensus meaning?

I think this speaks to a larger anxiety and confusion around gender roles and international politics. As nice as social change can be, and as positive as the shifts have been that have led to the erosion of the vampire myth (the decriminalization of female sexuality, the net ebb in xenophobia in a globalized world, the fading Anglo-Irish-American memory of centuries upon centuries of Continental European atrocity and bloodshed, the modernization and opening of Eastern Europe, to name a few), seismic social change comes with pain. People adrift become alienated, angry, easily manipulated, confused, and, overall, nervous.

So, the “vampire” in this song, and in the cheaper social resonances of the symbol, is little more than a red flag that something is forbidden or wrong, but we don’t really know what. People are enthusiastic that there are things that go bump in the night, but they don’t know what they are, and they don’t know whether they want to join in.

And this sense of being lost with a set of fake teeth is reflected in the chorus of this song, which doesn’t make any sense.