“There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion.”
—Francis Bacon
Bacon’s assertion is spare, eloquent, and bang-on. I saw proof of his claim today when I tuned into a summer phenomenon that I somehow missed: Paul Potts on Britain’s Got Talent. My mom told me about Potts last night, explaining that she and her colleagues have been watching his performances on YouTube at the office around a communal box of Kleenex. Now, my mom is not a reality TV person, and neither am I, so I decided her account of Potts’s effect was worth checking out. This is the video I watched on YouTube (Potts’s audition for the show):
I just regained normal breathing functions a minute ago after watching this for the fourth time. As much as I still want to jump on an airplane and hug the unlikely hero Potts for his stunning courage, tenacity, and talent, I am also able now to be a little objective about what reduced me to a pile of blubbering jelly on the carpet below my desk. It’s the way the clip highlights the complete improbability that Potts will be successful, while at the same time hinting that his success is exactly what we’re about to watch.
From the beginning, we’re made aware of Potts’s strangeness through shots of him pacing nervously in the waiting room and delivering a moving but far-from-leading-man introduction of himself to the show’s interviewers. We gulp a little when at the start of his audition, Potts tells the judges that he “wants to sing opera”—this, on a show that regularly rewards Celine Dion-like balladeers and other cheese. We witness his distress as the camera pans among the show’s skeptical judges, who look as though they’ve just smelled something unspeakably foul. And we feel his pain via several segments showcasing his confidence problems, which occur at the same time we know the judges are pondering his fate. Especially effective is the shot of Potts standing on the stage in hell as he awaits the verdict. When Simon Cowell tells Potts to go ahead, the expression on the notoriously callous judge’s face is closed and ungenerous; classic narrative tension is at an apex: all odds are against the underdog.
Now, who doesn’t love an underdog? Who hasn’t felt bullied and trodden on and swallowed by the world? Who doesn’t want Potts to wipe that dour look off Simon’s face and vindicate us all?
Within ten seconds of Potts’s performance, we know we are watching something phenomenal. Through crooked teeth, with eyes ablaze, Potts unleashes a voice powerful and pitch-perfect, a voice strengthened by the humiliations its owner has suffered over the years. It’s a voice everyone in the audience is desperate to hear; it is a salve, proof that there is justice in the world. It is a story of redemption.
The clip’s producers capture the universal, emotional response to this story by alternating between Potts, audience members shaking their heads and wiping their eyes, and the judges, whose skepticism visibly melts into willing submission and gratitude. The YouTube clip masterfully conveys the unexpected ferocity of Potts’s beauty. Potts’s voice is a marvel, but it’s the story that makes us weep.
i never heard of him either and now i am bawling.
Posted by: sarah | October 19, 2007 at 10:53 PM