Project Runway - 3x08 "High Flying Fashion"

1. I'm sure I'm not the first to notice that the music on the show often gets -- how should I put this -- referential. Obviously, the show saves money getting its music guy to approximate certain songs rather than licensing those songs. But perhaps more surprisingly, the music is quality stuff. The most conspicuous example was when the designers arrived in Paris -- cue the faux–Yann Tiersen! You know, the Guy Who Scored Amélie, and for reference, he's the song that's being referenced: A Quai.



Of course, long-time Runway viewers/music nerds will also have recognized the occasional Massive Attack shout.



However, what really gets my indie snob engine revving is the music that plays during model elimination. To my ears, Music Guy is channeling Pan American's "Code." (Pan American, for those of you less cool than me, is the solo recording name of Mark Nelson, he of Labradford fame.) See for yourself -- I looped the video to the actual soundtrack, and to Pan American:



Who knew that a fan of experimental dark ambient dub works on a reality tv show!

2. Ok, here's the part where I get boring academic again -- and the argument is only partially thought out here. In my previous post, I thought out loud about the liveness of the candid interviews, and so with the last episode, I expressly kept an ear open for the verb tenses of the candids. The upshot? Putting together a coherent narrative is more complex than simply starting at point A and ending at point B.

Here, we have Jeffrey speaking in the past tense about events in the past:


Note that Jeffrey's dialogue starts in the diegesis of the show, continues in the candid interview, and ends back in the diegesis. (By "diegesis," I mean the actual proceedings of the show, like Laura proclaiming an Uli explosion.)

Compare that to Michael expressing his concerns in the present tense, or Angela here speaking to the camera from within the show's diegesis but not in a discursive candid interview:



So sometimes the show grabs designers in medias res to talk straight to the camera, sometimes the show approaches them when they're in a more reflective mood.

One last bit: Angela's makeover. You can see that her hair is short in one shot before she says that she wants it to get blown out. Then she says she wants her hair blown out and we see her with curly hair again.



And for good measure, here's Angela in a candid that occurs in the show before her makeover.



"So what," you ask impatiently. So producers weave together different chronologies into a "seamless" narrative, and I wonder if it's seamless simply because of the similarity of the content of the segments -- e.g. they can meld stuff from two different points in time together without too much problem because so-and-so is talking about the same thing in both cases -- or if something deeper is happening.

Until then, watch out for more PopMatters articles by ME.

Indie rating: sunnO))) and Boris - "Fried Eagle Mind"