Weekend Music Break: Dark, and Ry X’s “Thunder”

[Video/audio: montage from S2E2 of the Netflix series, Dark]

The German television series Dark is that, and then some: not really a cultural experience to indulge in when you need cheering up, unless you (as I do) revel in the intricacies of a story’s plot and character aside from its “subject.” Here’s the capsule description from Wikipedia, to save you a trip there:

Set in a fictionalized version of the town of Winden, Germany, Dark concerns the aftermath of a child’s disappearance which exposes the secrets of, and hidden connections among, four estranged families as they slowly unravel a sinister time travel conspiracy which spans three generations. Throughout the series, Dark explores the existential implications of time and its effects upon human nature.

Yes, time travel — in that sense, I guess, you could think of Dark as a science-fiction series. But the “science” is almost incidental, consisting (like so much time-travel SF) of a certain amount of hand-waving; it centers around a mysterious, mysteriously portable steampunky machine invented, and refined, and re-refined over the course of decades…

(That’s one of the ingenious time-travel gimmicks, as it turns out: all that tinkering with the machine occurs and then re-occurs, iteratively: if it needs to be “better” — fine-tuned somehow — then because it’s portable, one of the characters can simply take it back to an earlier year to be improved, over and over, as long as it takes… because “as long as it takes” to get the machine just right is compressed into just a few decades of nominally real calendar time.)

I don’t want to talk too much about Dark, per se, because you may be curious enough to turn to Netflix and dive into the series yourself; one of its (dark) pleasures is the pleasure of tugging at all the knots of paradox on your own, unassisted.

But I will say that it could have almost no other title than Dark. Most of the action doesn’t take place at night, but it does take place in setting after setting of subdued lighting. I’m not sure I remember an episode in which the sun shone, even a little. (I’m a little over halfway through Season 2; Season 3 is scheduled for release this June.) In fact, regarding the weather, I have to say that the series sure doesn’t represent much at all of a love letter to the wooded German landscape it shows — anymore than do classic Grimm-style tales of witches and monsters which lurk in the same surroundings.

The soundtrack, too, is haunted. Like many people, I often obsess over earworm songs to which I’ve been introduced — or of which I’ve been reminded — by television series and films. But these songs are generally, y’know, catchy: upbeat, bouncy, rhythm-driven things. In Dark, by contrast, the earworms by themselves are almost trance-inducing. And they blend so well sonically with the visual foreground that you can almost forget they exist…

…until one comes along like this one: “Thunder,” by an Australian performer known professionally as Ry X.

The lyrics (especially in the closing refrain) have nothing to do with what’s taking place onscreen at the time. Rather, taken on their own terms, they paint a picture of some mysterious love gone wrong, of bitter disappointment with the course of romantic (and counter-romantic) events. But if you’ve been following the series, and you encounter the song during this scene towards the end of Season 2’s second episode, you may find in “Thunder’s” words many echoes of what you’ve seen so far, and in the montage onscreen at the moment: contrasts between the awful present and even a recent sacred past, cataclysms occurring under the skin, and expressions — relentless, hammered in, real and figurative — of the number 2…

I was so happy to find that someone had posted the entire montage on YouTube. (“Officially,” the videos which associate the song with the series feature clips from the episode, but not the exact sequence over which the song plays during the episode.) I have no idea if you will appreciate it quite so much, but the song has been playing over and over in my mind for a month now (it came in the door like thunder, laid me down in wonder, shook the walls like thunder), and it’s about time I wrote about it… and, perhaps, relegated it to my past.

[Aside: and yes, it’s probably true that the series and the song speak to the present moment in what passes for the “real” world.]