It’s an understandable mistake when listeners pigeonhole the music of Australian electronic musician and DJ Nick Bertke, better known as “Pogo”, into the mood of nostalgia. His music sits perfectly in the intersection of reverb-heavy, dreamy music production techniques and the English-speaking world’s Disney-sponsored childhood. One need look no further than Pogo’s first video, “Alice”, which heavily samples the 1951 Disney movie Alice in Wonderland. “Alice” was a viral hit when it was released in 2007, and has 20+ million views to date.

But spend enough time on Pogo’s channel, and you may find, as I did, that instead of a sense of nostalgia pushing you to watch more Pogo remixes of Disney movies, Pogo’s other work may broaden your own cinematic appetite. For me, this occurred after I watched “J’adore Juin”, a joint effort between Pogo (music) and goldpikpikcarrots (video). I loved the reflective descending harp line and introduction of bass line in the second half, and decided to watch The Apartment (1960), the source for most of the samples in “J’adore Juin”, for context.

I returned to the “J’adore Juin” over a year after I first watched it, having finally seen The Apartment. I wasn’t sure what I was going to get out of “J’adore Juin”; I would have simply been happy with being able to recognize the clips. To my surprise, I found a whole new insight into “J’adore Juin”. Ironically, with the context of The Apartment, “J’adore Juin” transcended its source and became an independent work. It is a critical response to The Apartment, one that eclipses its source material by capturing an emotional narrative better than The Apartment, but one that also realizes an independent standard of beauty.

To call “J’adore Juin” a critical response likely is not in line with the modern conception of criticism. The American public’s exposure to criticism today usually fits neatly into a weekly column written by someone that a publication pays to offer an informed opinion on recently released books, film, or music. The distinction between the work and the critical response is clear cut: criticism is not art; it is less than art, as the dismissals such as “everyone’s a critic” or “fuck the haters” encapsulate.

In his essay “The Critic As Artist”, set as a dialogue between two friends, Oscar Wilde collapses this distinction. Critics are artists, he contends:

To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.

And from the other side, artists must be critics as well:

Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art.

For Wilde, the distinction between criticism and art does not exist at all, “The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.” The goal of art requires both instincts working together: “… emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art …”.

To understand why “J’adore Juin” improves The Apartment, then, we need to understand their emotional arcs.

“We weep, but we are not wounded”

It’s a bit disingenuous to talk about a singular mood or tone of The Apartment. “[T]he pendulum swings from farce to tragic irony” reads one contemporary review. It helps to break The Apartment into a three act structure focused on Baxter, its protagonist:

  1. Baxter balances the demands of various executives who wish to use his apartment for their trysts.

  2. Miss Kubelik is introduced as a legitimate love interest into Baxter’s life.

  3. Baxter takes a stand against Mr. Sheldrake and quits his job.

Similarly, “J’adore Juin” breaks neatly into four quarters, approximately equal in length, based both on the music and video editing:

  1. Intro loops lasting until the clear vocal samples start around 0:58 with “What a time”. In this context, clear means without heavy effects applied. In this intro section, there are vocal samples but the effects applied on them make the words nearly indistinguishable.

  2. Clear vocal samples overlaid on intro loops ending when the piano loop starts around 1:40.

  3. Piano loop including vocal samples until the vocal samples end around 2:35 (this is not so cleanly defined: the vocal samples start about 20 seconds into this segment).

  4. Just the background with no vocal samples until the end.

This structure is somewhat arbitrary, but functions well as a device to help distill the moods of the various segments. In particular:

In The Apartment:

  1. Farce. Baxter juggles the competing demands of various executives with his own sanity and well-being, often sacrificing himself to their demands in anticipation of his expedited promotion.

  2. Tragic irony. Baxter and Miss Kubelik seem like they would be a good couple, but due to their circumstances they are incompatible.

  3. Relief. Baxter frees himself from the exploitation of his company’s executives by leaving his job, and Miss Kubelik leaves Mr. Sheldrake at a New Year’s party to join Baxter.

In “J’adore Juin”:

  1. Bustle. The sampled percussion of Baxter cleaning up his kitchen and shots of his workplace give the impression of Baxter’s sterile life dictated by his job. The dancing shots included in this section imply that while life is mostly business, he enjoys it.

  2. Professionalism. While this section features shots of Baxter with Miss Kubelik, the continued background from (1) indicates that she has no special place in his life at this point. She is just another colleague with whom Baxter exchanges pleasantries as part of his daily routine.

  3. Reflectivity, realization, loneliness: This is where the huge switch comes. The combination of the piano and the harp’s A–C–G–A (tonic: F) line creates an atmosphere of melancholy1.

    A commenter expresses an emotional reaction to the harp line.

    The editing adds a loneliness element: Baxter sits at the bar alone, Baxter works alone, Baxter walks out of his apartment at night in the cold, Baxter shivers alone on a park bench. When the “What a time” sample loop starts again, it seems to ask a question: is career ambition worth it?

  4. Fulfillment, satisfaction: The beginning of this segment continues the shots of a dejected looking Baxter, and appears to continue more of the somber loneliness that characterized (3). But a new shot appears: Miss Kubelik smiles at Baxter as she hands him a deck of playing cards at 2:45. The mood has changed. Miss Kubelik and Baxter smile as shots of their interactions from The Apartment montage. Miss Olsen, Sheldrake’s secretary, smiles, Baxter runs out of the office, and Miss Kubelik runs in the cold, smiling.

While the emotions evoked in each work are slightly different, the higher level emotion arc in each roughly corresponds to a three act story. Each begins with business as usual for Baxter. The Apartment presents it in a farcical way, while “J’adore Juin” gives us a more conventional presentation in (1) and (2): the kitchen sampled percussion combined with quick cuts of his workplace. Miss Kubelik’s introduction as a romantic interest for Baxter forces him to realize that perhaps his life is not so great, accomplished through dramatic irony in The Apartment, and through the use of lonely shots of Baxter and the piano/harp loop in “J’adore Juin”. Both Baxter and Miss Kubelik manage to push their lives forward in their respective final sections. The Apartment indicates that while their relationship may not work out, they’ve at least freed themselves, and “J’adore Juin” reminds us of the relationship-building moments they’ve shared.

“For life is terribly deficient in form”

But all this is a bit idealized, especially in the case of The Apartment. While I can attempt to condense The Apartment down to some emotional narrative, there are obviously parts left out when considering a two hour film in a few sentences per act. In doing so, I’ve perhaps presented The Apartment in too warm a light.

I was disappointed when I saw The Apartment; I certainly didn’t like it as much as others (Scaruffi, Ebert, etc) did. My analysis above smoothes over some corners I found a little sharp. I never get the sense that Miss Kubelik has real motivations; her character only seems to exist in terms of her relationships to Sheldrake and Baxter. She claims she loves Sheldrake, but only ever acts cynically toward his continued insistence that he’ll leave his wife. In their first romantic meeting, they allude to a fling that we never see and emotions we don’t understand. Baxter, on the other hand, despite his affability and nice guy exterior, comes off creepy at points. He tells Miss Kubelik that he learned where she lives by reading her insurance file, but this blatant violation of her privacy seems to have no repercussions on her opinion of him. His continuous pursuit of her despite relatively little reciprocated interest also seems to push into the gray area of sexual harassment. The film drags when she’s stuck in his apartment; there’s very little relationship development. Miss Kubelik laments not being able to find a good man like Baxter, and Baxter responds by offering comforting platitudes and trying to steer the conversation away from this sensitive topic. Other than that, we learn surface-level details about Miss Kubelik, like her inability to spell, and about Baxter, who accidentally shot himself in the leg, without any deepening of their patterns of interaction. While both Baxter and Miss Kubelik’s situations are so undesirable that we’re happy for them by the end when they can be together, the sense of accomplishment is diluted by a lack of non-superficial shared experience on which to base it.

“To the [poet] belongs life in its full and absolute entirety …”

In other words, The Apartment’s emotional narrative does not quite connect. The plot’s inconsistencies leave me confused as a viewer; a nagging sensation that parts of it don’t make emotional sense cut into effect of the narrative.

But Oscar Wilde tells us that “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises”. “J’adore Juin” obviously does resemble its critical object. It is because of this resemblance in both shot and emotional narrative that make it easier to say that “J’adore Juin” is better than The Apartment. Pogo and goldpikpikcarrots take The Apartment and extract its most core element: the relationship between Baxter and Miss Kubelik, and transform it into a new work that is not weighed down by the inconsistencies of the old. The musical cues and the editing of the video take the important emotional beats from The Apartment and distill or recycle them. The shot of Baxter shivering in the park comes at the beginning of The Apartment, the farcical section, but in “J’adore Juin”, it fits the mood of the loneliness section perfectly.

Not everything makes the cut: “J’adore Juin” does not dabble in farce the way The Apartment does. While “J’adore Juin” does capture the bustle of Baxter’s chain of calls to the executives in its beginning, it does so without any undertones of comedy. Similarly, “J’adore Juin” devotes little time trying to evoke a sense of pity for Baxter beyond that captured by his displayed loneliness. In The Apartment, Baxter contracts the disdain of the other tenants who see him as an insatiable womanizer, mistaking his employer’s executives’ sexual exploits for his own, and from Miss Kubelik’s brother in law, who believes Baxter is taking advantage of Miss Kubelik after Baxter’s executives do not cover for him. Because Baxter’s victimhood is not captured by “J’adore Juin”, it also cannot capture the sense of pride the audience feels for Baxter when he finally stands up to Sheldrake.

The Apartment’s concrete plot allows the development of concepts like dramatic irony, which are difficult to capture in anything but an abstract way in music. Lacking a plot, though, is not necessarily a disadvantage. Music, eschewing plot, avoids the trap of trying to hew too closely to reality. Wilde warns:

The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation …

Instead, to have an impact, music must pursue holistic emotional impression:

It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.

“J’adore Juin” is not solely a musical composition; the video plays an essential role in defining the emotional arc, but the video is fit to the music, so the advantages of music apply. That is, “J’adore Juin” innately avoids being too concrete. “This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art,” puts Wilde.

“Art does not address herself to the specialist”

Wilde also warns against the inverse of imitation, the danger of “realisation of the Ideal”. He claims that it is “too purely intellectual”: “For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.” I would put it a different way: realization of the ideal means instead of imitating reality, art is imitating some emotion, which may become obvious and indulgent. In a different section, Wilde seems to agree:

You see, then, how it is that the aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final.

In saying this, though, Wilde seems to have defused my point. If I’ve done my job, then I’ve demonstrated the similarities in the emotional arcs from “J’adore Juin” and The Apartment and explained why “J’adore Juin” conveys these emotions better than The Apartment. But if Wilde is right, then these interpretations must be incomplete, and in fact, coming close to the ideal emotional arc may be a disadvantage.

Wilde is right; my interpretation is incomplete. I do not attempt to capture all of “J’adore Juin” or The Apartment in it. There are parts, like the sampling of Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” in the first half of “J’adore Juin”, or Miss Kubelik’s suicide attempt in The Apartment that gets her stuck with Baxter for two days, that I do not attempt to address. Perhaps the best way to understand the incompleteness of my interpretation, though, is to know that I enjoyed “J’adore Juin” before I watched The Apartment, without any of the context the film provides. While I like to think that I have a more cohesive understanding of The Apartment by understanding its interaction with “J’adore Juin”, other critics have their own views of The Apartment that are consistent within it as well. As Wilde says, “The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes …”. It is only fair, then, to say that both “J’adore Juin” and The Apartment are beautiful. One just a little more so.

Appendix: Other “J’adore Juin”s

While I consider the goldpipikcarrots edit of “J’adore Juin” canonical due to the fact that it appears on Pogo’s channel, there are other video edits of “J’adore Juin”.

Footnotes

  1. The harp line, according to Pogo, is sampled from the surround tracks from The Simpsons episode “Krusty Gets Kancelled”, in which Krusty sings “Send in the Clowns”, a parody of the Stephen Sondheim song of the same name written for the character Desirée in A Little Night Music. Judi Dench, who played Desirée in a 1995 revival of A Little Night Music in London, describes it as “quite a dark play. It’s a play where a lot of people are with the wrong partners in the beginning and in the end, hopefully it’s going to come right …”

    Pogo explains the origin of the harp line ↩