In Beyonce’s “Pray You Catch Me” music video, she employs what McMillan describes as “temporal ambiguity.” The video weaves together clips in black and white and in color. The 19th-century fashion, tunnel shot, and southern setting all suggest a reference to slavery, but these are all meshed in with contemporary elements, blurring the temporal boundaries of the narrative.
By blurring past and present, Beyonce is able to capture how, as McMillan writes, “what has come before is not contained in the past, but is continually erupting.” Beyonce’s video highlights how Black history and Black grief inform present-day experiences of Black womanhood. In the poetry voice-over, Beyonce says, “you remind me of my father… in the tradition of men in my blood you come home at 3am and lie to me. What are you hiding? The past and the future merge to meet us here. What luck, what a fucking curse.” She draws parallels between her experience of adultery and generations of Black trauma. The emotional affect of both experiences comes through in the way the subjects in the video are depicted.
Read through McMillan’s framework, the women in the video can be seen as both objects and agents. Their white formal attire contrasts with the setting which could have once been a plantation with Black slaves. In this sense, it is a reclamation of space and power. Yet, the women appear stuck, they don’t speak or move, and their expressions are solemn. In their statue-like nature, they are objects. This intentional performance of objecthood (in McMillan’s terms) draws attention to the tension between oppression and subjectivity, trauma and reclamation/redemption. Like Beyonce, stuck between love and deceit, hurt and forgiveness, the women in the video occupy a liminal space. In one striking clip, a woman rocks on the porch, her face obscured by a leaf. Her pose is comfortable and powerful, yet her gaze is blocked. Is she hidden or hiding? I’d argue both – or maybe neither.
It is in this elusive portrayal that I really understand the application of McMillan’s avatar. She is abstract and atemporal, but her affect is palpable, almost tangible. Like the rest of Lemonade, she offers a beautiful exploration of the messiness of pain, pleasure, power, love, and oppression.
One reply on “Objecthood and Temporality in “Pray You Catch Me””
I struggled some with McMillan’s invocation of polytemporality. As they used it, it seemed mostly in reference to the structuring of their book (of which we only read the introduction). Your analysis (both here and in class) has provided lots of clarity in the ways avatars can be liminally anchored in different, distant time periods. I thought your exploration of the tension between subjecthood and objecthood was apt, especially in the framing of the second shot. Describing them as (anachronistic?/time appropriate?) statues would normally be an objectifying statement – saying they are there to be looked at – but it is equally true, as you note, that they are perhaps frozen in an act of spatial reclamation. Makes me question if they are supposed to be read as present in their timeline just as they are present in ours?