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hannah-writes · 6 years ago

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The Semiotics of Roswell (aka why Malex is Endgame because the camera says so)

One of the things I’m most grateful for about the Roswell fandom that I’ve met through Tumblr is the renewed passion I found for my degree subject, something I thought I’d fallen out of love with because of the pain associated with my time at university. Turns out I just needed to separate what I’d learned and what I loved from what I’d experienced. And Roswell (and @signoraviolettavalery, in particular) really helped reshape that.

Now, I know y’all are here for some meta, and this is just boring exposition. I’d originally planned on just keysmashing something as I’ve done in the past on other people’s posts and re-blogs but I thought I better try and be consistent.

One last thing before I dive in, like any other interpretation of a text, semiotics is influenced by the viewer, their experiences, their history and their take. It means that people might - and probably will - disagree with the way that I’ve viewed this, but discourse is discourse and I’d be interested to hear other views. For further reading on semiotics, I’d suggest starting with any of these books ( Metz, Christian (1974). Film language: A semiotics of the cinema. University of Chicago Press. Monaco, James (2000). How to read a film: the world of movies, media, and multimedia: language, history, theory. USA: Oxford University Press. Chandler, Daniel (1994). Semiotics for Beginners.).

I’m gonna work an episode at a time and will be focusing mainly on the visual narrative of Malex, since that’s predominantly my ship, but also looking at it through the way it’s parallelled with Echo and Michael/Maria which means there will probably be a fair bit of Echo content. What started out as a way of making a friend feel better is now a monster. You can blame her.

This is gonna be image heavy. You have been warned!

The first time we’re introduced to what we know will be a romantic pairing is Max and Liz at the checkpoint. This is a well-known trope for heterosexual couples; two characters of opposite genders meet in a location in the first episode you can be pretty confident that they’ll hook up before the show is over. Same goes for movies; boy meets girl, there’s bound to be love there somewhere. Or at the very least, sex.

What this also does is begins to set up a visual narrative that lasts across the show that can be referenced when we know a romantic pairing is going to be on the screen. (NB: this is important to note that there will always be other shots where characters are in this position that are not romantically linked, however, the regularity of their placement is what is being called out here, and in Malex’s case - which I’ll get to eventually, so stick with me - there’s an absolute consistency in their framing which is too precise to be accidental)

Max is shown on the left-centre of the frame here, and Liz on the right-centre. Compare these two images with the ones below.

Both are completely on the same side of the shot which in terms of reading the framing indicates that, romantically, they are no longer on the same page. There’s an unevenness in the camera angles here, too which is partly about perspective (i.e. when we look at Max, we’re looking up as Liz is and vice versa) but in a wider context, it also shows a power dynamic (and this is important for later). In this scene, as a police officer, Max has the power. (Think later to the scene in 1x13 where Max and Liz are intimate and a vast majority of the camera angles are shot up at her from Max’s position).

The closeness of these shots is intimate; if we didn’t know the setting of these, we might not have assumed that there’s a physical barrier between them as there’s no real indication of one. The close-up shots are tight on their faces and not so much on the environment around them, focusing the audience to narrow in on their faces.

It’s also a highly unusual move to have a switching POV shot keeping the same angle regardless of who’s POV we’re seeing the scene from which just further highlights that this is telling us categorically that Max and Liz - though romantically entangled (TV Trope 101) - are not right now on the same page. If they were, ironically, they would be on opposite sides of the screen.

When we bring another character in, Sheriff Valenti is more centralised in her framing, and the angle at which she is shot (from Liz’s POV still as we’re inside the car) is immediately less intimate, there’s more space and as an audience we’re made aware of the barrier of the frame of the car door. The close up is even a little less intense here, we see more of Sheriff Valenti’s shoulder in the over-the-shoulder shot of Liz’s face, and we see more of Liz’s car. It’s a reminder, it’s breaking that spell of MaxandLiz that we had earlier by physically creating distance.

What is important, though, is this shot below and it took me a while to realise but Max is reflected in her car window and here is a perfect example of them sharing a shot with a defined side. It’s literally seconds, but they’re on either side of the shot here and even though we can’t see Max (other than in his reflection - and honestly I only noticed when looking through screencaps), we know she’s looking at him. The obvious imagery here is that Max is, literally, in her rear window; he’s part of her past, but it also shows that he’s a part of her life despite her having attempted to move on.

This image is also key in another way; it sets up the beginning of the visual dynamic for this show’s couples that I’m going to call Your Side My Side.

One of the other on screen romantic (sort of) dynamics set up in this is Liz and Kyle. Comparing their framing (over the shoulder, opposite sides) to the Max and Liz (over the shoulder, same side) gives us a clue into the route their relationship is going to take. He’s framed similarly to Sheriff Valenti; Kyle’s in the middle of the shot here, when it would have been just as easy to have him off to one side of the frame and it would have lost no narrative impact. However, there’s none of the my side your side here, since the two of them share the middle of the screen.

In this shot (haha, and it’s a terrible screencap of Jeanine’s beautiful face and for that I AM SORRY), Liz is pretty much bang-smack in the middle of the shot, but both she and the back of Kyle’s head are sharing the same space in the frame and they’re on the same side of the image. You never see Echo or Malex sharing the same side of the shot while they’re both in it, they’re always paralleled on opposite sides (which we’ll see, for example, in the first toolshed scene where they’re sat side-by-side but on either side of the frame).

What’s set up with Kyle & Liz is a narrative that they are not to be framed romantically. Though they hook up, their shots are largely framed in a similar way with them sharing space in the frame.

Now, the reason you’re all here: Malex.

This next few screenshots don’t need as much dissection as the kissing ones, but hey, we’ll spend some time looking at everyone’s pretty faces :D

Michael and Alex have their own sides of the screen - Alex on the right, Michael on the left. What’s interesting here is the closeness of the shots, the character that isn’t in focus is just as dominant on the screen as the one that is; Michael takes up almost half of Alex’s shot (above) and Alex does take up half of Michael’s shot (below)

After they both look at Master Sgt Manes (which is a shot of the two of them in the middle, Master Sgt looking on - setting up the voyeuristic element Malex that I touch on in the video break down) the camera gives them some distance from each other, though the focus and shot type doesn’t change, Alex and Michael barely fit in the frame with each other.

Though we don’t fully know what’s going on, past Michael’s spiteful comments about being a ‘real Manes man’ (and since he’s set up as a fuck-authority character it’s easy to assume that it’s all it is, he’s angry at the fact that The Man is on his property telling him what to do, fuck the man! Well, fuck that man in particular, please, in the airstream I missed you so much and how dare you be here with him.) it’s not until the ‘run and tell your daddy’ that we as an audience realise that there’s likely more going on here. The shift in framing is indicating that it’s Alex putting distance between them, which is a common theme in their relationship for the rest of the season. His face is still in Michael’s shot (above), but only Michael’s shoulder is in Alex’s (below).

Though we’re setting up a precedent for Alex putting distance between them, Michael’s the one that shuts down the interaction in this scene by disappearing into the airstream. He’s the first to break it.

Having set up the my-side-your-side dynamic for Malex in their first interaction, their meeting again at the reunion is interesting because it shows a shift - already - in their interactions. We find that the right-left dynamic is constant unless there’s a power shift or something significant, both of which we see before the Malex kiss.

Here, they’re shot on the same side of the frame (Alex’s side). Alex has come to the reunion thinking that Michael’s doing something wildly illegal considering what his scientists found (and honestly, with Carina confirming Alex’s costume was wrong in the pilot and then in 1x02 seeing Alex with Captain Bars on his collar it makes me so happy he’s outranked his shit-bag father). They’re no longer even remotely on the Same Page. Alex is angry and confused and disappointed; Michael is better than some back-alley meth lab in the middle of a dairy ranch.

The sudden shift in their camera angles - the mid-shot that falls back further when Alex grabs Michael’s arm (as Michael’s looking to get away from Alex again, for the second time in this episode) and holds him close gives us another dizzying shift.

The my-side-your-side changes (below) and the camera pulls in intimately close for the ‘you’re wasting your life’ and ‘does the macho cowboy swagger thing ever get old’.

Alex is turned into Michael (above) but Michael’s not facing Alex, not turned away. “you tryna hold my hand, private?” even though he doesn’t have the physical distance - and the camera doesn’t let him have that either, it’s close and tight and suffocating and Michael can’t escape it even if he wanted to - he can joke, he can look away, he can keep distance between their heads.

Alex has the power in that screenshot above; Alex is the one that grabbed Michael. Alex is the one still holding him.

In the below shot, however - this is a split second before Michael says ‘did it get old for you?’ - we’re treated to the same shot as above but reversed. They’re back on their own sides of the screen and Michael’s reclaimed the power in the scene. When using ‘private’ in an offensively flirtatious manner didn’t work, he drops his voice and all but purrs in Alex’s ear a question (that probably was meant to be mocking and actually ends up being a little more broken than he intended it to be (is that why you left? did you get bored of me? was I not enough?) but it’s enough. Alex is visibly rocked by it and the camera - since it stays so tight on them, swings out a second later to reveal Michael walking away to wrap his arms around another girl, with the framing still being quite visibly your-side-my-side.

Now, let’s talk about the real reason everyone’s here; the Malex kiss. I can’t work out how to embed a youtube video in an already image-heavy post and as I was writing I realised that fuck I have too much to say about it to stick into this already busy as heck post so I’m gonna dissect that separately and focus on stills here, but I’ll link to that post, too. (It’s here, by the way, if you wanna see it and breaks this scene down into TINY PIECES).

The my-side-your-side is constant here, and honestly, the video post I made explains it in a lot more detail but I’ve started so I’ll finish. The blue wash of this entire scene is meant to encourage a sense of calm - and how we move from Alex being backlit with red (below, where he’s saying ‘we’re not kids anymore, what I want doesn’t matter) to being completely swamped in blue like Michael is is representative of the change in Alex from ‘must not kiss Michael’ to swaying into Michael’s orbit and holding onto him because he needs it as much as Michael does. (You can tear the headcanon that they’re soulmates and linked on a fundamental, cosmic level from my cold dead hands).

We’re meant to focus more on Alex’s face in this section, which is why Alex has a few more close-up shots (and eh, who can blame us for wanting more of Tyler’s pretty face? Pfft) and we’re able to watch the journey of resistance (red) to acceptance and calm and serenity and home (blue) as he moves forward into Michael’s space and accepts Michael into his.

This kiss is epic. You can’t deny that. The framing is soft-focused and the camera lingers, allows us to really zoom in on the moment and focus on what’s happening: the intensity of the moment. I’ve talked about this a lot, but the way the camera swings to catch up with Michael as he surges into Alex and then goes still is - imo - representative of how Alex stabilises Michael’s world, soothes it right down. The world rocks on its axis when their lips first touch, when their bodies collide, but then it all goes still and calm as Michael’s entropy changes. The blue helps foster that, too, it’s calming and soothing and tranquil. It’s safety and security. And it’s home.

With Jesse Manes’ words about love being spoken over this (below) shot and not over Echo (who have a cute handprint moment but it’s not the same), the show is choosing to put a focus and emphasis on the fact that this, right here, is a cosmic, epic love that cannot - and will not - be denied. Alex can’t run from who he is (as the soundtrack said while he was looking at a picture of his out-and-proud teenage self) and they can’t run from this (as the soundtrack says, again). This is it for them. And this is it for us, too, as viewers. We’re getting it set up in the very beginning that this is a cosmic love story, that it has history and pain but that it is love. That’s important to remember: we are told at the very beginning that Michael and Alex love each other. It doesn’t matter that they also sets up a paradigm of the two of them almost saying what they mean but never actually saying the words. “What I want doesn’t matter” - I want you. “I never look away, not really” - I love you. “It was late, I was tired” - I stayed because this is safe for me, you are home. What we are TOLD EXPLICITLY is that Michael and Alex love each other.

Hold onto that, folks. Because the visual narrative does not change.

(tagging, by request, @i-never-look-away, @stydiaeverafter, @signoraviolettavalery, @saadiestuff. If you wanna be tagged in future meta, let me know!)

#roswell new mexico #rnm #roswell new mexico cw #alex manes #michael guerin #max evans #liz ortecho #hannah uses her degree #hannah writes #malex #echo #maria deluca #semiotics #roswell cinematography #i have no idea what else to tag this as #semiotics of roswell #meta #my meta #visual meta

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