Locked out – The ‘locker’ metaphor (example: “Young Royals”)

There came a time in my film analysis travails when I had left the literal plane behind (and God knows that took me an embarrassingly long time to do), stopped taking everything I saw on screen literally and arrived at a sort of midpoint on my journey: definitely in the vicinity of the right track already, but not truly seeing the pathway in the dark forest of symbolism surrounding me.

At this midpoint, I was already noticing details and metaphors, but I was interpreting them the wrong way. I had yet to pass through the daunting gates of hell that lead you down into the metaphorical subtext threatening to devour your every waking hour.

You see, the reason why I couldn’t find the right path through the dark woods, the mistake I was making (and I’ll freely admit that I still make it from time to time) is what I like to call ‘The Fallacy of the Missing Context’.

I would notice a detail (say, a prop or a certain costume choice) on screen, look up its symbolic meaning and then make broad, sweeping assumptions about what this prop might mean for the character who either owned it or was handling it in the scene.

Maybe you know this phenomenon, and perhaps it has happened to you, as well: You see a character hold a four-leaf clover in his hand and decide that Lady Luck must smile on this character. You see a character with a heart symbol on her T-shirt and come to the conclusion that she must be a real sweetheart, warm-hearted and full of love. You see someone release a white dove and decide that this character is at peace with themselves and with all the other characters around them. (Boy, have I been on the wrong track when it comes to white doves and ‘Young Royals’, by the way, but more on that in a later installment of this analysis series.)

The problem with all these interpretations is that they’re sort of halfway there but can still lead you down a dead end road in a heartbeat because this is just not how films and TV shows operate. What’s missing in all of these approaches is the context:

In what scene specifically is the character holding or handling said object? What shot even? What lines of dialogue run over the shot (if there is any dialogue)? Most importantly, what other objects appear in the same shot? Because those other objects might be metaphors, as well, and if they appear in the very same shot, you can bet on the fact that they’re metaphorically interacting with the prop you’ve just discovered and that the meaning doesn’t just emanate from that prop alone but from this precise interaction.

If you fail to consider this context, you will either miss entire chunks of meaning or you might even draw the wrong conclusions about the scene in question or the characters themselves (and again, this used to happen to me a lot in the past and admittedly still does sometimes).

Take the clementines/satsuma oranges (or whatever they might be) that Simon likes to snack on throughout the show. If you just look up their symbolic meaning and then immediately jump to the character, trying to connect them to Simon somehow because he’s the one who can be seen eating and handling them more than anybody else, then you might arrive at something like this: Oranges represent good fortune and prosperity in Chinese culture, so this shows us that the character in question will end up becoming rich and powerful. (I don’t want to insult your intelligence, I promise. I’m just specifically choosing a really simplistic example to illustrate what the problem is with this approach.) As you can clearly see, this is obviously the wrong way to go about film analysis. What we have to do instead is: We have to painstakingly look up every single scene in which clementines appear in the frame and watch out for other objects they interact with, say, a letter with an invoice from the school that Simon is trying to hide. It’s only through this type of context-based analysis that we can uncover what clementines on the show mean. We also have to realize in what state clementines appear on screen: Sometimes they’re peeled; sometimes they’re unpeeled – in that invoice-scene, for example, they’re completely unpeeled. It’s only after we’ve taken all of this context into consideration that we can come up with a hypothesis as to what clementines on this show might mean, and that’s when we have to go back and check out if this hypothesis fits with any of the other ‘clementine’ scenes (we’ve been over this).

Let me give you another example: Imagine you watch a scene like the one in which Sara is handling and sniffing Felice’s perfume bottle. 

At this point, you have already left the overly literal reading of the show behind, so you know that an explanation à la ‘Sara just wants to know what scent Felice uses’ doesn’t quite cut it because neither Sara nor Felice are real; they’re both fictional characters, and everything they do requires an active decision by one of the show’s creators (a writer, director, etc.). You also know that, on screen, details are supposed to be meaningful (otherwise they wouldn’t appear at all) because setting up a shot costs time, effort and money. This is why you look out for details and have become quite good at spotting them; you notice the perfume bottle straight away, and you hypothesize that it must mean something. 

Here’s where you commit the ‘Fallacy of the Missing Context’, though: You look up the brand name of the perfume and then jump straight to the character, i.e. you start to infer meaning from said name and immediately apply it to Felice’s characterization (because she owns the bottle) or Sara’s characterization (because she’s handling it in the scene), never realizing that said bottle appears on screen about a second before Sara picks up August’s photo from the same windowsill. (By the way, when I say ‘you’, I don’t mean you specifically, dear reader. Maybe this never happened to you. I mean ‘you’ in a general sense. Mistakes like the one described above used to happen to me all the time.)

Approaching a prop like the perfume bottle in this way would mean that we’d miss an entire metaphor and mistakenly assign meaning where there is none. The two props (the perfume bottle and the photograph) metaphorically interact with each other on screen, and taken together, they explain what the ‘nose’ metaphor on this show stands for – sexual attraction, longing and desire. (After all, the show’s creators couldn’t very well have had Sara sniff August’s picture itself. This would have looked weird. So, having her smell the perfume bottle right before touching the photo was the simplest solution here.)

Again, when I say ‘you’ in the examples above, I don’t mean you personally; it’s perfectly possible this has never happened to you at all. What I’m saying is: This is what used to happen to me – a lot: I would spot some detail and then I would jump immediately to the character in question, applying the meaning of the detail to his or her characterization. Sometimes I would come pretty close to what it probably meant, and sometimes I would come to a completely wrong conclusion, wondering how on God’s green earth I had ended up on this dead end road.

It’s a very common mistake. And it’s particularly common with objects that only appear on screen once or twice: You see a character handling some prop, and you assume there’s a direct link to his or her characterization in the story instead of first considering the context of the specific shot in which the prop was shown to the audience.

Even with props that appear repeatedly on screen, we have to be careful not to draw too general conclusions too quickly. (While I would indeed argue, for example, that Simon’s backpack does carry metaphorical meaning for the character in general simply because it appears on screen so very often, I think it’s still worthwhile to explore each and every specific scene in which the backpack makes an appearance.)

What we have to keep in mind about the way cinematography works is that details are usually context-dependent and our interpretation of them should thus be context-driven, i.e. we have to first examine what the prop tells us about the particular shot it appears in, then about the scene in which it appears and only then connect it to the character more broadly.

The reason why I’m bringing up ‘The Fallacy of the Missing Context’ at all is the metaphor we’re going to talk about today.

This metaphor is, in fact, connected to a very conspicuous prop used on this show – a prop that can lead us astray very quickly if we’re not careful and don’t consider the context it appears in. It’s only when we don’t commit ‘The Fallacy of the Missing Context’ that we’re even able to realize there’s a metaphor directly interacting with this prop. And it’s only at that point that we will be able to unlock that metaphor (and yes, the pun is very much intended here).

You see, the prop I’m talking about is Simon’s infamous keychain…Oops, I’ve almost made the mistake myself again: I called it ‘Simon’s keychain’ as though that were its primary function in the text, as if the only purpose that prop served were to shade out Simon’s characterization…

The keychain doesn’t appear on screen all that often, so we better make sure we don’t read it just as ‘Simon’s keychain’, but as a detail in a very specific shot that carries meaning for that specific shot.

I’m saying this because all too quickly we could just look at that infamous middle-finger keychain and decide, “The keychain means Simon doesn’t care for the rules and regulations at this conservative school. As a matter of fact, he defies those conventions and traditions because he is a strong, independent-minded person who’s ‘out and proud’. So, he’s giving the school and its conservative traditions the finger.”

Just to be crystal clear: This would be the absolutely wrong interpretational approach to deciphering the meaning of the keychain because we’ve just jumped from the prop straight to the character instead of considering what context the prop was placed in. (This is just to give you one simple example of what the ‘Fallacy of the Missing Context’ might look like in the wild.) 

If this were, indeed, the meaning of the middle-finger keychain, why wasn’t it shown to us in the same shot as, say, the House Rules of the school or something? The show’s creators could have easily given us a close-up shot of that infamous Hillerska ‘Etiquette’ booklet lying on Simon’s writing desk with said middle-finger keychain carelessly thrown on top of it. Problem solved, visual metaphor achieved. We would have instantly had the proper context for that middle finger. But it wasn’t shown in that context.

Or (just to give you another example of how the filmmakers could have visualized this) they could have given us Simon, gesticulating (seemingly by coincidence) with his keychain in hand while standing in front of the infamous sign on the wall of the hallway at Hillerska: ‘You own the school. You are responsible for its legacy.’ Once again, the context the prop in question would have appeared in would have instantly explained its meaning. 

But that’s notably not the context the keychain appears in. (We will see in a moment how the actual context it is placed in is key to interpreting its meaning, if you will allow yet another pun here.)

(Don’t get me wrong, I do think Simon doesn’t care a great deal for the conservative traditions of this school. It’s just that that is not why the middle-finger keychain exists and is shown to us in the brief scene we’re going to discuss below. That’s not its meaning.) 

Another tempting (but equally false) explanation for the middle-finger keychain would be the following one: “The character being introduced to us here displays a zero-Fs-given attitude towards what other people may think of him. He’s openly gay; he’s ‘out and proud’, and he doesn’t give a flying you-know-what about what others think about him or his sexuality.”

It’s a tempting proposition, right?

But in drawing this conclusion, we have once again committed the same cardinal crime against proper film analysis: We have taken an object and immediately connected it to the character owning it, instead of considering it in the context of the shot in which it appears.

This kind of approach will invariably lead us down a path that is either wrong or at least wrong-adjacent, so to speak.

Let’s not even talk about the fact that the characterization of Simon I gave you there comes dangerously close to hero worship and sounds suspiciously like wishful thinking: a male Mary Sue character without flaws who’s uncomplicated and open about his sexuality, an idealized gay-rights champion who leads his life the way he wants and doesn’t give a damn about what other people think of him – when in reality this show doesn’t deal in simplistic Mary Sues (of either sex), but excels at creating complex and brilliantly flawed characters instead. So, putting something like this into the text and into the prop really doesn’t fit the show’s overall tone and style.

(Again, I’m not saying you ever did that, dear reader, I’m saying this is the kind of mistake that I used to make a lot. And you can probably see how it’s tempting to analyze films and shows like that, right?)

Thing is…his sexual orientation is virtually the only thing that’s uncomplicated about our dear Simon. It’s also pretty much the only thing he’s open about. There is a lot of stuff that Simon is hiding. In later installments, we will also discuss how the show tells us subtextually that Simon cares a great deal about what other people think and say about him and that he carefully manages the perceptions people have of him.

Simon might not be in the closet about his sexuality, but there are a lot of skeletons in his closet, nonetheless. And he is one of the most secretive (perhaps even the most secretive character) on this show. Simon hides things. From his mother, from his father, from his sister, from Wilhelm – and most importantly: from us, the audience (as we will see in a minute).

Simon has serious secrets. And by that, I specifically don’t mean the fact that he lies about the private tutoring or the fact that he’s stealing his father’s medication or that he’s secretly dealing at his school or even the fact that he doesn’t tell his sister he stayed in touch with their dad. I don’t mean any of this.

Simon has a capital-letter type of SECRET, a big secret, a dark one. A big, dark secret™, so to speak, a secret that’s integral to understanding his character and his motivations but that the show hasn’t yet disclosed in its plain text at all. A secret that needs more than just a closet to remain contained.

This secret will only be disclosed to us in season three and has never been mentioned literally in the script (although there are plenty of hints as to what’s going on with Simon in the show’s subtext; this will be a major point in my character-centred posts).

But for now: Do you want to know how I even know he has a big secret like that?

I said above that Simon’s big, dark secret™ needs more than a closet to remain contained. Look at the scene in which the infamous middle-finger keychain makes an appearance: 

Simon is unlocking his locker with it!

A locker is a place where you lock things, a place where you can keep them safe from prying eyes, a place unauthorized people cannot unlock, a place that only you have access to.

This makes lockers perfect candidates for being used as ‘hidden-in-plain-sight metaphors’ for secrets, which is exactly how they’re often used in cinema and on TV. The only other thing that comes even close to a locker’s metaphorical heft is a bank safe (or a strongroom or vault that’s really, really difficult to get into). And that’s how secrets are often presented on screen. Rule of thumb: Whenever there’s a locker or a safe of some sort, assume that it’s a metaphor for a secret, and you’ll be right about 75 percent of the time. (Ask me about the other 25 percent at some other time because this is actually a fascinating topic.)

Well, and since ‘Young Royals’ is a boarding school drama and not, say, a story about a bank heist, the show’s creators went with the good, old, time-proven idea of the ‘locker’ metaphor.

And there’s no shortage of ‘locker’ scenes on the show to demonstrate this. Consider the following examples, please:

Episode two of season one ends with Wilhelm and Simon kissing in a darkened hallway. The very next scene we get in-universe (i.e. the beginning of episode three of season one) starts with Wilhelm in front of his locker.

Because Wilhelm has a secret now!

He has kissed a boy, and nobody knows about it (yet). And Wilhelm is intent on keeping it that way. Nobody is allowed to find out. Consequently, Wilhelm can be seen walking from his locker right over to Simon in the music room, where he proceeds to tell Simon that Simon isn’t supposed to play the soprano part (i.e. behave like a girl) and remind him that he’s a tenor (i.e. that he’s a boy). He specifically exhorts Simon to stick to the sheet music (a thinly veiled metaphor for convention and tradition this show uses). We’ve discussed all of this.

The fact that the scene starts in front of Wilhelm’s locker (instead of by the door to the music room, say) is no coincidence: The locker is the physical manifestation of the secret that Wilhelm has now.

You can practically see it: At the beginning of the scene, the camera moves up from the locker to Wilhelm’s face. So, visually, it’s the locker (not Wilhelm’s face!) the whole scene (and the whole episode) starts with. In other words, if you cut out the credits at the end of episode two, you visually jump from Wilhelm and Simon’s dark silhouettes kissing…right into that dark locker at the beginning of episode three. 

Wilhelm has a secret, and that kiss is the secret, the camera work suggests here.

Episode two of season two includes a callback to that scene at its very beginning: Wilhelm is drifting over from the lockers to the music room again (where Simon can already be heard singing and playing and is later even shown to be sitting at the piano again). 

At this point in the show, the secret has got much more difficult to deal with: Wilhelm has been forced to give a statement of denial, i.e. keep his relationship with Simon a secret, and Wilhelm’s mother is now insisting (over the phone) that he talk to her, presumably about the speech he will have to give – a speech that is just one further step in trying to get the Crown Prince under her and the Court’s control after the statement of denial, one step further into the darkness of secrecy; Wilhelm’s secret is supposed to stay buried according to these people, and consequently we see him in front of those lockers again, but now the length of those ‘lockers walls’ is much more emphasized by the shots we get. There are lockers, lockers everywhere.

We get a particularly evocative shot of him in this scene as the headmistress tells him to pick up the phone and talk to his mother: Wilhelm (and his bodyguard) standing there, trapped between two such massive ‘locker walls’ – the secrecy is suffocating, it seems, and he’s trapped in it, looking over his shoulder at the place (off-screen) where Simon’s music is coming from (and, as always, ‘music’ is a metaphor for love, of course).

Or think of that scene in episode five of season one in which Sara observes August doing something nefarious on a library computer, something which she doesn’t fully comprehend yet, but which will connect these two characters going forward and will mean they’ll share a secret for a very long time to come: A really big, really dark secret. Enormous and very impactful for the plot of this show, as a matter of fact. 

In this context, we get one of the most beautiful shots I remember on this show: Sara looking at August with suspicious eyes through the window wall of the library, a structural element of the wall providing a natural-looking black frame for the whole medium close-up of her face and upper torso, making the whole set-up look like a portrait painting. And the entire background of said ‘painting’ is just filled with lockers! There’s a whole wall of them behind her, as if to highlight the enormity of the secret that is being conceived at that precise moment in time between these two characters who are just silently staring at each other in the dark.

Note also that the writers could have easily sent Sara over to the library for a completely different reason, so she could stumble upon August there. (She could have been looking for a dropped hairpin underneath the bookshelves or Heaven knows what.) But no, it had to be a look from the lockers over to the library, so they could specifically show us that shot of Sara’s face with all those lockers as a backdrop. The lockers represent this enormous secret these two characters do share now.

We get a subtle callback to this shot later on in episode six of season one when Sara hurries over to the other girls at the library at the beginning of the episode. A few moments later, Sara will realize that there are investigators there who are already confiscating the offending computer, and then she will put two and two together. As she walks over to the girls, she’s specifically filmed passing that wall of lockers again and she is again filmed through that glass pane – a shot that would be completely unnecessary were it not for the metaphorical meaning of the lockers. After all, the writers could have just had Sara show up in the library and greet the other girls. No need to show her walking in. But it was apparently important to include this subtle callback to the ‘locker shot’ from episode five: Sara’s secret is still in its infancy. Hell, she is still working it all out at this point, but it is already the most important and most impactful secret on the entire show. So, we get lockers upon lockers again and Sara being filmed through that same window wall.

All of the above-mentioned ‘locker’ scenes are scenes with considerable narrative weight, but some of the more lighthearted scenes feature lockers, as well. And in doing so, they make clever use of an already established metaphor:

Remember how the girls receive their valentines in episode four of season two? The show’s creators made sure those letters weren’t shoved under the doors of the girls in question, and they didn’t just appear on the desks of their respective bedrooms either. The valentines are specifically discovered in the lockers because there is a certain degree of secrecy attached to them: Neither Fredrika nor Madison know who wrote their letters. It’s a secret. They were sent by secret admirers.

In the context of this Valentine’s scene with the girls in episode four of season two, we get another great callback shot with Sara, as well: Sara is once again shown to be framed (like in a portrait painting) by the big window wall of the library as she looks at August, who in turn keeps throwing her furtive glances through the glass pane, just as they were doing at that crucial moment when she discovered him leaking the video – only this time there’s obvious infatuation in both their eyes instead of suspicion and the shock of discovery. And once again, Sara (inside that ‘framed portrait’) is presented in front of a whole wall of lockers. 

Translation: These two have a secret that they share. It’s a massive secret, as a matter of fact. Their love and their sexual relationship is just one part of it; the other (much more impactful) part is the fact that they share the secret of the leaked video. And consequently, Sara is once again framed and shown with those lockers behind her.

A special shoutout goes to the ‘workies’ scene in episode two of season two: The entire scene, in which Wilhelm keeps furtively glancing over at Simon, was set in front of the lockers – what a fitting filming location for a scene playing with the notion of a secret and so far barely conscious desire. The scene notably ends with August enquiring as to what is going on with Sara and what medical conditions she might have. He doesn’t say why he wants to know that: August has a secret. He’s been abusing ADHD medication and is now addicted to it. He doesn’t tell Felice anything about that in this scene, of course, and consequently his shifty expression is further emphasized by the lockers on the left side of the frame to highlight the secret involved here.

You can probably find more of these ‘locker scenes’ if you go through the show with a fine-toothed comb, but I think I’ve made my point: The lockers are a metaphor. They represent secrets.

Now, let’s return to that certain ‘middle-finger shot’ of Simon in front of his locker in episode one of season one.

I mentioned above that I think the locker in this shot represents more than just the secrets we already know about (Simon lying to his mother about the private tutoring, Simon secretly staying in touch with his father, Simon stealing his father’s medication, etc.). I am, in fact, convinced that this shot tells us there is a big, dark secret™ in Simon’s backstory, a secret that we, the audience, don’t know anything about yet because it hasn’t so far been mentioned in the show’s plain text.

So, why do I think that…

Did you notice this shot of Simon in front of his locker is actually quite unusual?

In any other show or movie of the boarding school (or even just highschool) genre, in stories that are set in military or sports contexts, what’s the typical kind of shot you would expect to get in a ‘locker scene’?

Well, typically lockers are shown to the audience, right? By which I mean: We’re typically shown the inside of the locker (and the inside of the locker door).

This can include quite elaborate displays (think: stickers, posters or photographs all over the inside of the locker door or pin-ups when the story is set in the military or in a sports context, the contents of the locker itself are often visible, etc.), but it’s also possible that it’s just a moderately interesting shot of a dark locker and the inside of the door. In any case, the point of these types of ‘locker shots’ is that the camera is usually positioned on the other side of the locker, i.e. in such a way that the locker door doesn’t obstruct our view of the locker itself; the locker scene is shot from the other direction, so we can get a peek inside the locker.

This is notably not the case in our ‘middle-finger shot’ of Simon in front of his locker in episode one of season one. As a matter of fact, throughout the show, we never seem to really get a peek inside Simon’s locker. Curious, right? What’s more, the locker door seems to obstruct our view all the time.

Well, and there’s a reason for that, of course:

Please compare this ‘middle-finger shot’ of Simon in front of his locker with the shot we get of Wilhelm in front of his locker in episode three of season one.

Wilhelm’s locker is specifically shot from the other side! 

It’s filmed from the left hand side of the locker. What’s more, Wilhelm’s scene specifically starts with the locker (as we’ve noted above): The camera’s journey starts with the dark inside of the locker and only then moves upwards to Wilhelm’s face. Our journey in that scene starts with the secret (metaphorically: the locker) and progresses from there.

We can see inside the locker because we, the audience, are privy to Wilhelm’s secret! 

We know what happened at the end of episode two of season one: He kissed a boy, and we saw it happen. The other characters in-universe might not know anything about it, but we, the viewers, know all about it. Wilhelm might have a secret (hence the locker) that nobody is allowed to know anything about, but we, the audience, are privy to it nonetheless. It’s only a secret in-universe; we, the audience, take an auctorial narrative perspective here in which we know things that are largely unknown to other characters in the universe the show has created.

Which is why we’re not excluded from the shot; we’re a part of it. We get a ‘normal’ locker shot and can look inside Wilhelm’s dark locker (read: secret) from the right direction, i.e. we’re not ‘locked out’ of the secret. The locker door doesn’t block our view.

This cinematic approach to the ‘locker’ metaphor is obvious in Sara’s scene during the Santa Lucia celebrations, as well. A few moments before she discovers August and becomes a witness to his crime (in that beautiful ‘portrait shot’ we’ve already discussed), she can be seen opening her locker: The camera is once again positioned on the left hand side of the locker, i.e. in the right spot for making sure the locker door doesn’t block our view. The shot tells us that we could step right up to the locker if we so pleased, i.e. we will know all about Sara and August’s secret because here we see it being created in real time; we see it in its inception phase. This secret will come into the world and will haunt the characters for quite a while. And consequently, the shot of Sara opening her locker is not filmed from the same direction as Simon’s ‘middle-finger shot’. We, the audience, won’t be locked out of Sara and August’s secret. We will all be part of it. We will get a front-row seat to everything that will unfold over the next couple of episodes and far into season two.

Even the more lighthearted Valentine’s scenes with the girls are set up in this way. Please compare these scenes: 

Fredrika receives a valentine. She doesn’t know who it is from. The letter was sent by a secret admirer…but it’s only a secret in-universe! The truth is not being kept from us, the audience. We know who sent it almost immediately. The reaction shots of Stella’s face are very telling in that scene, and even if we hadn’t understood those straight away, a direct, verbal confirmation is already on its way: Stella will explicitly tell Sara that she wrote the letter and why, not so long after that ‘locker scene’. So, the secret is being kept from Fredrika, but not from us. Consequently, the camera is positioned on the left hand side of the locker as Fredrika opens it. The locker door doesn’t obstruct our view because we, the audience, know.

Now, compare that to Madison’s Valentine’s scene: Madison opens her locker and is filmed from the other direction! The locker door prevents us, the audience, from peeking inside the locker itself, from even getting a full picture of the shot. And sure enough, we never find out who sent her that valentine. The whole thing remains a secret that’s being kept not just from Madison and the girls, but from us, the audience, as well.

By the way, Fredrika’s Valentine’s scene is a bit more nuanced than I was letting on: It’s a bit of a both-and scene, if you will: While the moment Fredrika opens the locker is filmed from the left, so the locker door doesn’t obstruct our view (implying that we, the audience, should know who the secret sender was), there are quite a few other girls in front of her in the shot; Fredrika is at the very back of the frame, and we can’t make out her locker that well. This was probably done to tell us that, technically, we don’t know who the secret sender is yet – although we all sort of get it instantly, anyway.

To top things off, the reaction shots of Stella are very curious, as well: Stella is filmed from the other direction, i.e. she is half-hidden by a locker door herself! In other words, technically, the secret has not been revealed to us, the audience, yet. We don’t know who sent that valentine at this point – although we can guess. Which is why this scene has both elements: Fredrika opening the locker in a way that signifies that we, the audience, are privy to the secret, and Stella hiding behind the locker door because we, the audience, haven’t been told explicitly yet (even though we can, of course, guess). It’s a very clever little scene.

There is actually another rather curious little scene in episode five of season two: Simon has just stormed out of the gym after Jan-Olof shot down his solo and his song, and Felice and Simon are talking, standing right next to their respective lockers.

The dialogue in this scene is fascinating: Felice tells Simon that the lyrics of the song are ‘kinda personal’. While the surface of the text suggests that the secret they’re discussing is the fact that Simon’s love for Wilhelm has to remain a secret, the wording is interesting; it suggests that personal things have to stay personal.

Consequently, we are once again not shown the inside of Simon’s locker. The camera is once again positioned on the right hand side of the locker, so the locker door obstructs our view. (Simon has another secret, a secret that has nothing to do with Wilhelm and the song, a secret that’s kinda personal, too.) Felice, too, is shown to be opening her locker in this way. The camera stays on the right hand side of the locker, so the door of Felice’s locker obstructs our view as well, suggesting that she, too, has secrets that are kinda too personal to be told out loud. This might surprise us at this point in the story because we’ve never heard of any personal secrets Felice might be keeping from us, the audience. (But then again, that’s the point of the whole locker door imagery: Whenever the locker door is obstructing our view, the show alludes to the fact that there’s a secret that we, the audience, have never heard about and don’t know anything about yet.)

Then something interesting happens: Just as Felice is closing the locker, there’s a cut. The camera jumps to the left of the locker, giving us a reverse shot from the other side and almost, almost revealing the inside of Felice’s locker, suggesting that, at least as far as Felice is concerned, her personal secrets might not remain hidden from us, the audience, for that much longer. And sure enough, in the next episode, she spills the beans and unloads some of those personal things on Sara.

In other words, the position of the camera in those ‘locker scenes’ tells us if we, the audience, are ‘locked out’ of the secret or not. If the locker door is between us and the locker itself and thus obstructs our view of the inside of the locker, then we, the audience, aren’t privy to the secret. If the camera is positioned on the other side, so we could (at least theoretically) peek inside the locker, then it might be a secret from some or even all of the characters in-universe, but it’s certainly not being kept a secret from us, the audience.

Now, let’s return to our ‘middle-finger shot’ with Simon in front of his locker in episode one of season one.

What we have to understand about this shot is: What is its function in the text at large?

You see, in films and television series, there is such a thing as an establishing character scene. It’s the scene in which a character is truly introduced to us, the audience, and it usually reveals the character's core traits and motivations. It tells us what drives the character.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the first moment a character appears on screen (but it often is). It can be an entire scene or just a brief sequence of shots, but whatever it is, it usually has a metaphorical underpinning. In short, it illuminates the way we should perceive the character in question from now on.

Let me give you an example: 

A classic and very conventionally written establishing character scene is the one in which August first appears on screen in episode one of season one in front of the school. Even if you don’t pick up on the ‘baggage’ metaphor right away, you’ll certainly have an instant hunch as to what this character will represent on this show.

With Simon, things are quite a bit more difficult for a very good reason.

Simon is first shown to us in that infamous scene at the church in episode one of season one. We instantly get a feel for this character: the young man who is freely giving us his voice (both literally and metaphorically). We understand that this is someone who isn’t hiding a core part of his identity (like Wilhelm has to). We can feel the music (love, cf. the ‘music’ metaphor) emanate from his body. And we also see that he won’t back down in the face of adversity (when he’s being publicly heckled and humiliated). His response to abuse is resilience and perseverance.

All of these (openness, resilience, having a voice of one’s own) are very admirable traits, and I won’t deny that Simon shows signs of all of them – all in all, he’s a very brave young man.

There’s just one problem with this scene: It’s made rather clear to us that this is Wilhelm’s point of view. Wilhelm is admiring this young man’s music (read: falling in love at first sight with him). Wilhelm clearly finds this boy’s resilience and backbone fascinating, lovely, inspiring and admirable…but that’s Wilhelm. So, at least a tiny little grain of salt is permitted here, I think.

Simon might be Wilhelm’s knight in shining armour (or rather his angel appearing to him above the church pews), but we, as viewers, should always be aware of the fact that Simon is still a normal teenager, a kid, and most importantly a brilliantly complex character with flaws, problems, fears and secrets. This show is too well-written to tolerate any Mary Sues (male or female) in them, so Simon (just like any other character on this show) has flaws even if Wilhelm doesn’t yet get to discover them in that scene at the church.

So, seeing as the show couldn’t exactly introduce us to Simon in all his complexity in that first character establishing scene, it decided on a rather unconventional approach: It basically split the character establishing moment in two and gave us two separate introductions to this important and complex main protagonist:

The church scene provides us with a lot of insights into Simon’s character (and none of those admirable traits we noted above are actually ill-fitting when applied to Simon; he definitely is all of those positive things, to some degree). And the brief scene in front of the locker gives us the rest of Simon’s character establishing moment, the rest of his introduction.

The locker scene isn’t the second time he appears on screen (that would be the moment he is shown to be leaving the church and becomes the target of the third-years’ bullying once more), but it’s pretty close. If you count Simon’s singing scene and the scene in which he leaves the church as one big church appearance, then you basically arrive at setting No. 2: The locker.

And the locker is now what gives us the other half of his character establishing moment, that other hidden part of his characterization:

Simon has a secret! 

The secret is notably one that we, the audience, don’t have any knowledge of. The locker door is obstructing our view; the scene is shot from the right side of the locker. Not only don’t we know what that big, dark secret in his backstory could possibly be, we don’t even know it exists at all, that locker door is telling us. It resolutely shuts us out of the subtext here.

And seeing as this is Simon’s second character establishing moment, it must be something pretty big (there are actually more reasons to assume it’s a big thing, but we will get to that in later installments of this analysis series). This isn’t just some small thing. It’s an integral part of his backstory, a key element of his motivation as a character (or else it wouldn’t be shown to us as part two of his character establishing moment).

…and it has so far remained completely hidden from us. The plain text isn’t telling us anything about it. So far we can only find out more about it by closely examining the subtext (which is what we’ll do, no worries). And if we don’t examine the subtext, we’ll have to wait until season three to find out because that’s when Simon’s backstory and his secret will most likely be revealed to us.

Quick side note here: You know what would make a lot of sense in season three? 

Whenever a writer establishes a metaphor at the beginning of a show, it’s always great to get some payoff later on. (Remember how I said that we will know what the writers’ ideas for the monarchy are by keeping a close eye on Wilhelm’s suitcases? If they are damaged and become unusable in season three, then the monarchy is toast. And while ‘The Palace’ metaphor is a bit more vague, I’d still argue that, if it were to burn down, this can’t mean the monarchy will survive the way it stands right now.)

So, personally, I would love to get an otherwise insignificant side plot in season three in which Simon suddenly discovers that his locker was vandalized and broken into, some of his belongings having been stolen in the process. 

A little scene like that in the middle or at the beginning of an episode (with a notably frustrated Simon) could serve as great foreshadowing: At the end of the episode, the big reveal could then happen, with Simon’s big, dark secret™ finally being explicitly disclosed to us before the episode ends and the credits roll…

Obviously, this is just me speculating. But with a metaphor as brilliantly and carefully presented as the ‘locker’ metaphor, it would be great to get some payoff.

Now, I haven’t forgotten about the middle-finger keychain, don’t worry. 

It’s time to connect it to our ‘locker shot’ of Simon, don’t you think?

As I said in the introduction to this article, it’s very important to understand when a prop is interacting with another prop or the setting in general because it might be interacting with yet another metaphor.

Simon’s middle-finger keychain isn’t shown to us while he’s opening the front door to his home. We don’t get an introduction to it as he throws it onto the kitchen counter after entering the Erikssons’ house either. No!

The keychain is specifically connected to the locker – the secret. Simon’s big, dark secret™, that we, the audience, have never been allowed to see (so far).

Have you ever watched an action movie in which, say, the villains of the story were trying to break into some supersecret facility in the middle of the night? Perhaps they were cutting their way through a chain-link fence and a heavy lock on the gate with some bolt cutters; perhaps they were attacked by dogs on the other side of the fence…That type of thing?

Just know that supersecret facilities on screen are virtually always metaphors.

What you might have noticed is that one of the things that is routinely shown in a scenario like that is a close-up shot of a sign on the gate reading, ‘Keep out!’ or something in that vein.

On the superficial plot-level of the text, this just means the intruders who are about to break into the supersecret facility are hereby told to stay away.

But on a more subtextual (or should I say metatextual?) level, the sign communicates with the audience…with us!

The facility itself (whether its a chemical plant or a bank vault) is usually a metaphor. And it’s the viewers who are watching the show who are, in a sense, the intruders here. They are being shown the sign. That’s also why it’s often shown in a close-up that is shot from an angle that makes it impossible for the intruders in-universe to see: The sign isn’t directed at the fictional intruders in this fictional universe. The ‘Keep out’ sign is turned towards the audience!

In short…it’s irony.

The movie or show is asking its audience to stay away from the subtext. And, of course, the filmmakers know that the viewers won’t do that. If the audience is clever enough to understand the sign, it will definitely keep examining the subtext. And if the audience doesn’t get it, then it won’t know what subtext is in the first place. So, the sign is basically useless. But…it’s funny.

It’s both pointing out the metaphor, but also coyly hiding it, telling the audience to stay away from the writers’ precious subtext, but also making it visible by referencing it in this way.

That middle-finger keychain is doing something very similar in that shot of Simon in front of his locker in episode one of season one:

The thing the middle-finger keychain is directly interacting with is the locker, i.e. the secret.

After all, the keychain isn’t being thrown onto the Hillerska ‘Etiquette’ booklet (as we’ve already noted above); it’s specifically connected to Simon’s locker, i.e. Simon’s secret.

To be more precise, it’s connected to the locker door. That same locker door that (as we’ve already seen) is crucial for understanding if we’re dealing with a secret that’s only a secret in-universe or also a secret that we, the audience, are ‘locked out’ of.

In that specific shot of Simon, the position of the camera in relation to the locker door indicates that this character has a secret that we, the audience, don’t know anything about, and then, to top things off, the show is showing us the middle finger!

Look at the way the actor puts that key into the lock. You can practically tell he was instructed to do it in a way the finger would end up turned specifically towards us, the audience.

We’re the ones who are being given the finger here!

That’s the whole reason that keychain even exists: This middle finger is the equivalent of an ironic ‘Keep out’ sign. This is the show’s way of telling its audience, “Nah-naaaah, nah-nah-naaaah! Simon has a big, dark secret. And we’re not telling you what it is!”

On a show that has its main protagonist break the fourth wall at the beginning and the end of every season, this shouldn’t surprise us in the slightest. The show’s creators like to communicate with their audience.

They do so with the fourth-wall breaks, and they do so when they visually tell us that sometimes the screen will just lie to your face (i.e. that the screen will tell you someone is winning a competition when that’s not the case at all; we’ve discussed this). This show even has its main protagonist make a ‘finger frame’ with his hands and mime looking through the viewfinder of a camera in its infamous football pitch scene in episode four of season one, just to tell its audience something about the frames in that scene.

This show is very self-aware and often subtly or even overtly meta.

We are visually shown that Simon has a secret. By making the shot a second part of his establishing character moment, i.e. his introduction as a character, the show’s creators imply that it must be a pretty big thing. And then they set up the shot in a way that explicitly excludes the audience, ‘locks it out’, so to speak, with the help of a locker door that metaphorically obstructs our ‘view’ of the secret. Then they even attach a middle finger to the locker door itself, telling us to…well, go where the sun don’t shine. The show gives us the finger, tells us to keep our mitts off their subtext, but, hey, at least it does so with an ironic twinkle in its eye, knowing full well that we won’t behave.

And just to give us the icing on this whole metaphorical cake made of gall and cheek, the show’s creators then have Simon pull out his backpack from said locker. The backpack we already know is his metaphorical ‘baggage’ (because, boy, does that teenager have a lot of baggage!).

So, in other words, they’re teasing us. They’re showing us the backpack, they’re pretty much implying that Simon’s ‘baggage’ is what’s inside the metaphorical ‘locker’, i.e. his psychological and emotional baggage in life is what the secret is all about. The secret contains the baggage, so to speak. But they won’t tell us what it is (hence the locker door), and they even have the cheek to give us the finger.

I appreciate the visual joke, of course. And I admit I had a good chuckle or two when I first saw it, but I don’t like being told what to do, so I will most certainly not stay away from the subtext of this show. I won’t behave. I’ll specifically misbehave in this respect.

As a matter of fact, by now, I think I have a pretty good idea what’s inside Simon’s metaphorical ‘locker’ and thus inside his metaphorical ‘backpack’, and that’s one of the destinations of this article journey of mine…

~fin~

Yours truly will be away on a trip this weekend. I had originally planned to just take a break from writing this week, but I’d feel bad if I just left you all hanging for two weeks, so I have made sure to line up a little snack-sized bite for the coming weekend while I’m away.

To make up for its brevity, the weekend after that, you will get two (and if I type really fast, even three) articles on the same day. Those will be the first two (or three) character-centred posts on this blog; they’ll come out on the weekend of 6./7. October together.

That’s the good news. Now as for the bad news…

I have been pondering this question and struggling to make up my mind for quite a while, but I’ve finally made my decision: I will lock all the character-centred posts (the entire series), so they will only be accessible to the paid-subscriber group.

There are two reasons for this:

For one, they are currently taking an enormous amount of time and effort to write (much more than the metaphor post series).

The main reason is a different one, though: This blog has been getting the wrong kind of attention, and I don’t like it.

Don’t get me wrong, the overwhelming majority of reactions I’m getting are lovely, often fascinating, inquisitive, sometimes sceptical, but virtually always interesting, engaging, courteous and very kind.

I won’t hide, though, that there seems to be a small, but very dedicated group of people who keep sending me private messages after each and every single article containing a surprisingly vitriolic level of hate, the tenor of them being that I’m taking a show that belongs to them as true fans and doing something with it they distinctly dislike: namely, taking it apart.

I do understand that people sometimes develop a deep attachment to a show or movie or book and dislike the idea that something they feel has been such a personal experience for them (for virtually years already) is then suddenly brutally butchered by an outsider who isn’t even a proper fan, taken apart and dissected like a corpse on a slab. I get that.

It can be upsetting to hear that something is a metaphor when you’re emotionally attached to the idea of it being a literal thing. I do understand that. But the level of outrage something as simple as the ‘water’ metaphor seems to provoke in some people I had so far exclusively associated with the ire of religious fundamentalists at being told to read the Biblical Adam-and-Eve story as an allegorical tale instead of a literal account of times gone by.

I am both surprised and a bit at a loss as to what to do in this respect, especially since I don’t understand why people willingly keep seeking out something that upsets them so much. These messages don’t go away; they’re spewing abuse every week, and they keep arriving in all my inboxes very reliably and regularly and are virtually impossible to block or ban due to changing account names.

Just to make this crystal clear, the character-centred post series will deal with very, very sensitive issues (some of them touching upon the topic of teenage sexuality and problems in the bedroom department). If a simple fact like the one that the lake is just a metaphor already draws this amount of weekly outrage and provokes this level of fury in people, I shudder to think what will happen once we start to discuss the sexual subtext of this show in earnest.

In short, I don’t feel like discussing this on main. In fact, I have only got more and more sceptical of this idea as time went by.

Some things are meant for small audiences and will only reach small audiences, and that’s okay. Some things don’t need to be posted all over every public forum there is and draw the ire of some of my aforementioned rather literal-minded ‘fans’.

If you’ve ever stood before a lecture hall of students (full disclosure: I have), then you know that sometimes you will be perfectly fine with a student approaching you and asking you whether they can record the lecture for a sick and absent friend. (You will say yes, knowing full well that your lecture will probably end up getting posted all over youtube)…and sometimes you’re just not okay with this idea because the topic you’re discussing on that specific day is intended for a small classroom of people, and this is where it’s supposed to stay. The character-centred posts will be that: something for the class but not for the vast void that is the internet at large. In other words, the character-centred posts are not the kind of material I would allow the student in question to record and upload onto every public internet platform there is.

This blog is a hobby of mine – or rather a passion project, seeing as film analysis and cinematography are exactly that for me: something I love passionately. And I don’t feel like pondering every week whether this thing is still worth it, worth reading another handful of messages filled with obscenities, or not.

What does this mean for you as a reader: The snack-sized little post next weekend will be the last freely accessible article on this blog for quite a while. The weeks after that will (mostly) feature only locked articles (of the character-centred variety).

I understand that this is frustrating for some people who enjoyed the free content, but over the course of the four months that I’ve been working on this project, I have written 20 articles, 17 of which are freely accessible and will remain so indefinitely. I promised I wouldn’t lock any of those retroactively, and I intend to keep that promise (unless things get completely out of hand in my inbox). So, you will always be able to reread whatever you liked or whatever you felt needed another careful read-through.

I’m very grateful to anyone who has read them, liked them and commented on them. Rest assured that, when I vented my frustration about that small group of literal-minded readers, I most definitely didn’t mean you.

~~~

P.S.

I would also like to take this opportunity to once again point out what it is that I’m doing on this blog: This is an analysis-centred blog, not a criticism-centred blog! This blog is all about film/cinematography/literary analysis and specifically NOT a film criticism blog. If you find this confusing, think:

Film analysis: going metaphor by metaphor, literary device by literary device, shot by shot, frame by frame, until you’ve taken the whole thing apart like a clock.

Film criticism: gender criticism, ethnic criticism, psychological criticism, ideological criticism, structuralist criticism, etc. In short, social commentary as applied to a specific film or television series.

And even though there is always a certain amount of overlap between the two, they’re mostly two different beasts.

I engage exclusively in the former, not the latter around these parts. Largely because there is already a lot of the latter out there that does the criticism part excellently and in depth, and I don’t feel like I could add anything interesting to that.

Also…it’s simply not my cup of tea. This blog is neither a social commentary blog, nor a political activism blog. And even though the particular show I’m dissecting right now has an LGBT character at its centre and the topic will therefore come up from time to time, this will usually happen in connection with a metaphor or some other stylistic device. I won’t lie: If I were dissecting a show with, say, a very unpleasant mass murdering, psycho nutcase as its main character, I would do it in the exact same way, looking at the exact same metaphorical subtext, and I would look at the character with just as much enthusiasm as I do right now. Because I’m interested in films, what parts they’re made of on the inside, what holds them together and how all of these elements interact. That’s it.

This blog was never intended as a sociological project, and it will never be one.

If you think of films and TV show as a car, then there are two types of people: the ones who take the car apart and the ones who drive it. (It’s true that the ones who take it apart probably have a license, as well, and can drive it a little. And it’s true that the ones who mainly drive it, can recognize and name some car parts on sight, too. There is some overlap. But it’s not huge.)

So, please think of me as the equivalent of your grumpy old car mechanic guy: I like taking it apart and finding out how all the parts in it work and interact with each other. Where you drive the thing (a public social justice rally or the nearest winery) is entirely up to you and has never been nor will ever be a part of this hobby of mine.