A Film Canon

 

 

Behavior stands as pop music's answer to Proust's madeleine, justifying the Pet Shop Boys' claim to be the quintessential modernist act of the 1980s and 1990s. As such, it deals more with mnemosexuality than homosexuality; that is, sexuality as the search for sexuality, a journey limited by its own vocabulary, and so only accessible in terms of more general, ostensibly asexual, expressions of yearning. It feels as if the Boys only invoke betrayal - and, more generally, the confessional mode - as a pretext for wider reflections on the passage and betrayal of time; or, alternatively, that any desire for sexual consummation is a thinly veiled desire for mnemonic consummation, the kind of total access to the past that would render personality complete. Nowhere is this clearer than in "Being Boring", which describes three different forms of remembrance - personal, familial, and communal - and conflates them in such a way as to characterise Neil Tennant's subjectivity as a mere function of his inescapable memory, and love as a mere memory in the making. In the same way, "My October Symphony", explicates Tennant's fascination with Russian history in terms of its drastic, disorienting changes, conducive to an emotional cityscape as haunting as the London apartments described in "Jealousy", in which the past is almost architectural, so concrete is its presence. The only low point is "So Hard" which, while catchy on its own terms, feels like it was placed on the record to ensure a single, taking up space more worthy of "Miserabilism" or "It Must Be Obvious", two of the other contenders.