The Star-Spangled Banner

The Star-Spangled Banner appears as the centerpiece of a staged patriotic broadcast that turns national ceremony into grotesque farce. Its familiar promise of unity is strained by a broken performance, a stream of official denials, and a technician’s efforts to control what the audience sees and hears; when the monument concealing the replacement singer collapses, the broadcast’s polished authority gives way to an exposed, unruly spectacle.

Broadcast and Ceremony

The scene begins on a platform draped with the American flag. An elderly diplomat in striped trousers and a cutaway coat presides over a full orchestra while a tenor, dressed as Daniel Boone, sings the anthem with a slight lisp. The song is not presented as an ordinary musical interlude: it accompanies the diplomat’s formal reading from a long, growing scroll of ticker tape, turning patriotic performance and official statement into parts of one public ritual.

The tenor’s voice breaks as he reaches the song’s opening words, rising abruptly into falsetto. The technician, watching from the control room, responds by mixing bicarbonate of soda and belching into his hand before condemning the singer’s performance. The contrast is immediate: a ceremony arranged around the national flag and orchestra is governed behind the scenes by a technician whose crude, impatient judgments determine who is permitted to represent the nation on air.

Censorship and Replacement

The technician orders the tenor taken off the air and dismissed, then demands a substitute. His improvised search for a costume moves through a succession of national and military images: an Indian routine, a Civil War uniform combining North and South, Buffalo Bill, Paul Revere, a soldier, or the Unknown Soldier. Rather than settle on a coherent representation, he chooses to cover the performer with a monument so that the audience will not have to look at her. The sequence makes national symbolism an expedient costume department: identities and histories are invoked, rejected, and rearranged as practical solutions to a broadcast problem.

The replacement is a woman called the Lesbian, concealed inside a papier-mâché Arc de Triomphe. The technician’s response to the original tenor has thus not restored the ceremony’s composure. It has exchanged one disruptive voice for a performer hidden inside an oversized emblem, while the official set continues to insist on patriotic decorum. Her concealed presence makes the gap between the show’s authorized image and the body it tries to contain visible before the monument even falls.

The Anthem and the Collapse of the Image

The Lesbian fills her lungs and releases a powerful bellow, continuing the anthem with the line, "Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave..." Her voice tears the papier-mâché Arc from top to bottom. As the diplomat puts a hand to his forehead, he continues reading from the scroll, now extending the denial to the claim that any male citizen of the United States has given birth in Interzone or anywhere else. His bureaucratic sentence proceeds alongside a performance that has already broken open its visual concealment.

The singer carries the song through its final exaltation, "O'er the land of the FREEEEEEEEEEE..." The prolonged note coincides with the collapse of the scene’s systems of address. The diplomat’s mouth moves, but no one can hear him; the technician clamps his hands over his ears, and his dental plate begins to vibrate, flies from his mouth, and eludes his attempt to catch it. The official statement has not merely been interrupted by a louder performance: speech, hearing, and bodily composure all fail together as the anthem overwhelms the broadcast’s capacity to regulate it.

The Arc crashes down and reveals the Lesbian on a pedestal, wearing a leopard-skin jockstrap and an enormous false-bosom costume. She smiles and flexes her muscles, now fully visible where the technician had intended the monument to spare the audience from looking at her. The sequence reverses the logic of concealment: the attempt to make the performer disappear inside a symbol ends by displaying her beneath the wreckage of that symbol.

Political and Formal Significance

The scene makes patriotic imagery inseparable from its staging and censorship. The flag, orchestra, Daniel Boone costume, monument, ticker tape, and anthem are all components of a managed show; none can guarantee a stable or dignified national image. The technician’s succession of proposed costumes reduces historical and civic emblems to interchangeable props, while the diplomat’s expanding denial tries to preserve official authority through language even as the performance makes that language inaudible.

The anthem’s escalation supplies the scene with its central reversal. A song meant to affirm a collective national identity becomes the force that defeats the broadcast’s control over its voice, its image, and its bodies. The monument is both disguise and failed barrier; once it falls, the performer whom the technician tried to hide occupies the stage openly. By making a familiar patriotic ritual veer from formal ceremony to comic exposure, the episode presents national unity not as a settled reality but as a spectacle maintained through editing, costume, and denial—and vulnerable to the very performance it attempts to contain.