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Journal Title: Only entertainment /Richard Dyer
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MontWYear: 2002Pages: 19-35
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Article Title: Entertainment and Utopia
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Further reading
Brunsdon, Charlotte (1990) 'Problems with quality'. V^ I ( h: d~~90.
Caughie, John (2000) 'Small pleasures: adaptation and tlx- pas: in the classic serial in
Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and Brtthb (.'/,//,>>-t. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 203-25.
Geraghty, Christine (1991) Women and Soup ()j\>\i. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wollen, Tana (1991) 'Over our shoulders: nosralun m. re<.-n furious for the 19<S()s', in
John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (eds) Rutofrt^ .n:J //.»v/./vi: ( r.,.../,rn«/» <>t Kitwnal
Culture, London, Routledge, 178-93-
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This article is about musicals as entertainment. I don't necessarily want to disagree with those who would claim that musicals are also 'something else' (e.g. 'Art') or argue that entertainment itself is only a product of'something more important' (e.g. political/economic manipulation, psychological forces), but I want to put the emphasis here on entertainment as entertainment. Musicals were predominantly conceived of, by producers and audiences alike, as 'pure entertainment' — the idea of entertainment was a prime determinant on them. Yet because entertainment is a common-sense, 'obvious' idea, what is really meant and implied by it never gets discussed.
Musicals are one of a whole string of forms - music hall, variety, TV spectaculars, pantomime, cabaret, etc. — that are usually summed up by the term 'showbiz'. The idea of entertainment I want to examine here is most centrally embodied by these forms, although I believe that it can also be seen at work, mutatis mutandis, in other forms and I suggest below, informally, how this might be so. However, it is probably true to, say that 'showbiz' is the most thoroughly entertainment-oriented of all types of performance, and that notions of myth, art, instruction, dream and ritual may be equally important, even at the conscious level, with regard to, say, Westerns, the news, soap opera, or rock music.
It is important, I think, to stress the cultural and historical specificity of entertainment. The kinds of performance produced by professional entertainment are different in audience, performers and above all intention to the kinds of performance produced in tribal, feudal, or socialist societies. It is not possible here to provide the detailed historical and anthropological argument to back this up, but I hope the differences will suggest themselves when I say that entertainment is a type of performance produced for profit, performed before a generalized audience (the 'public'), by a trained, paid group who do nothing else but produce performances which have the sole (conscious) aim of providing pleasure.
Because entertainment is produced by professional entertainers, it is also largely defined by them. That is to say, although entertainment is part of the coinage of everyday thought, none the less how it is defined, what it is
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assumed to be, is basically decided by chose people responsible (paid) for providing it in concrete form. Professional entertainment is the dominant agency for defining what entertainment is. This does not mean, however, that it simply reproduces and expresses patriarchal capitalism. There is the usual struggle between capital (the backers) and labour (the performers) over control of the product, and professional entertainment is unusual in that: (1) it is in the business of producing forms not things, and (2) the workforce (the performers themselves) is in a better position to determine the form of its product than are, say, secretaries or car workers. The fact that professional entertainment has been by and large conservative in this century should not blind us to the implicit struggle within it, and looking beyond class to divisions of sex and race, we should note the important role of structurally subordinate groups in society - women, blacks, gays - in the development and definition of entertainment. In other words, show business's relationship to the demands of patriarchal capitalism is a complex one. Just as it does not simply 'give the people what they want' (since it actually defines those wants), so, as a relatively autonomous mode of cultural production, it does not simply reproduce unproblematically patriarchal-capitalist ideology. Indeed, it is precisely on seeming to achieve both these often opposed functions simultaneously that its survival largely depends.
Two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as 'escape' and as 'wish-fulfilment', point to its central thrust, namely, utopianism. Entertainment offers the image of 'something better to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don't provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes - these are the stuff of Utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized.
Entertainment does not, however, present models of Utopian worlds, as in the classic Utopias of Thomas More, William Morris, et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized. It thus works at the level of sensibility, by which I mean an affective code that is characteristic of, and largely specific to, a given mode of cultural production.
This code uses both representational and, importantly, non-representational signs. There is a tendency to concentrate on the former, and clearly it would be wrong to overlook them - stars are nicer than we are, characters more straightforward than people we know, situations more soluble than those we encounter. All this we recognize through representational signs. But we also recognize qualities in non-representational signs - colour, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camerawork - although we are much less used to talking about them.
The nature of non-representational signs is not, however, so different from that of representational. Both are, in Peirce's terminology, largely iconic;
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but whereas the relationship between signifier and signified in a representational icon is one of resemblance between their appearance, their look, the relationship in the case of the non-representational icon is one of resemblance at the level of basic structuration.
This concept has been developed (among other places) in the work of Susanne K. Langer, particularly in relation to music. We are moved by music, yet it has the least obvious reference to reality' - the intensity of our response to it can only be accounted for by the way music, abstract, formal though it is, still embodies feeling.
The tonal structures we call 'music' bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling - forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm or subtle activation or dreamy lapses — not joy and sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of both - the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience; and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure measures, sound and silence. Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life.
Such formal analogy, or congruence of logical structures, is the prime requisite for the relation between a symbol and whatever it is to mean. The symbol and the object symbolized must have some common logical form.
(Langer 1953: 27)
Langer realizes that recognition of a common logical form between a performance sign and what it signifies is not always easy or natural: 'The congruence of two given perceptible forms is not always evident upon simple inspection. The common logical form they both exhibit may become apparent only when you know the principle whereby to relate them' (ibid.). This implies that responding to a performance is not spontaneous - you have to learn what emotion is embodied before you can respond to it. A problem with this as Langer develops it is the implication that the emotion itself is not coded, is simply 'human feeling'. I would be inclined, however, to see almost as much coding in the emotions as in the signs for them. Thus, just as writers such as E. H. Gombrich and Umberto Eco stress that different modes of representation (in history and culture) correspond to different modes of perception, so it is important to grasp that modes of experiential art and entertainment correspond to different culturally and historically determined sensibilities.
This becomes clear when one examines how entertainment forms come to have the emotional signification they do: that is, by acquiring their signification in relation to the complex of meanings in the social-cultural situation in which they are produced. Take the extremely complex history of tap dance - in black culture, tap dance has had an improvisatory, self-expressive
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Table 5.1
Energy
Show-biz forms
Sources of show-biz forms
Golddiggers of 1933
Funny Face
On the Town
Westerns
TV news
Capacity to act vigorously; human power, activity, potential
'Pettin' in the Park' (tap, roller skates; quick tempo at which events are strung together)
'Think Pink'
'Clap Yo' Hands' (tap)
'Let's Kiss and Make Up'
(tap, and Astaire's
longevity) Cellar dance
'New York, New York' 'On the Town' 'Prehistoric Man' 'Come Up to My Place'
Chases, fights, bar-room brawls; pounding music (1960s onwards)
Speed of series of sharp, short items; the 'latest' news; hand-held camera
Abundance
Conquest of scarcity; having enough to spare without sense of poverty of others; enjoyment of sensuous material reality
'Pettin' . . .' (leisure park) 'We're in the Money'
(showgirls dressed in
coins)
'Shadow Waltz' (lavish sets; tactile, non-functional, wasteful clothing; violins as icon of high culture, i.e. expense)
'Think Pink' (use of materials and fabrics)
'Bonjour Paris'
'On How to be Lovely' (creation of fashion image)
'New York, New York' (cf. 'Bonjour Paris')
'Miss Turnstiles' (woman as commodity-fantasy)
Land - boundlessness and/ or fertility
Technology of news-gathering - satellites, etc.; doings of rich; spectacles of pageantry and destruction
Dance - tap, Latin-American, American Theater Ballet; also 'oomph', 'pow', 'pizazz* qualities of performance
Tap - black and white folk culture; American Theater Ballet - modern dance plus folk dance plus classical ballet
Spectacle; Ziegfeld, Busby Berkeley, MGM
Court displays; high art influences on Ziegfeld, Cedric Gibbons (MGM); haute couture
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r^/ŕ 5.1 (cont.)
Intensity
Transparency
Community
Experiencing of emotion directly, fully, unambiguously, 'authentically', without holding back
'Incandescent' star performers (Garland, Bassey, Streisand); torch singing
A quality of relationships ■ between represented characters (e.g. true love), between performer and audience ('sincerity')
'Sincere' stars (Crosby, Gracie Fields); love and romance
Togetherness, sense of belonging, network of phatic relationships (i.e. those in which communication is for its own sake rather than for its message)
The singalong chorus numbers
Star phenomenon in wider society; the Blues
Star phenomenon in wider society; eighteenth-century sentimental novel
Pub entertainment and parlour balladry; choral traditions in folk and church
'Forgotten Man' 'I've Got to Sing a Torch Song' (Blues inflections)
'Shadow Waltz' (Keeler and Powell as couple in eye-to-eye contact).
Showgirls (wisecracking interaction, mutual support — e.g. sharing clothes)
'How Long Has This Been Going On?'
'Funny Face'
'He Loves and She Loves' ' 'S Wonderful'
(?) Cellar dance
'A Day in New York' ballet; climactic chase
Confrontation on street; suspense
Emphasis on violence, dramatic incident; selection of visuals with eye to climactic moments
'You're Awful' (insult turned into declaration of love)
'Come up to My Place' (direct invitation)
Cowboy as 'man* - straight, straightforward, morally unambiguous, puts actions where his words are
(?) 'Man of the people' manner of some newscasters, celebrities and politicians
(?) simplification of events to allow easy comprehension
'You Can Count on Me'
Townships; cowboy camaraderie
The world rendered as global village; assumptions of consensus
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function similar to that in jazz; in minstrelsy, it took on an aspect of jolly mindlessness, inane good humour, in accord with minstrelsy's image of the Negro; in vaudeville, elements of mechanical skill, tap dance as a feat, were stressed as part of vaudeville's celebration of the machine and the brilliant performer. Clearly there are connections between these different significations, and there are residues of all of them in tap as used in films, television and contemporary theatre shows. This has little to do, however, with the intrinsic meanings of hard, short, percussive, syncopated sounds arranged in patterns and produced by the movement of feet, and everything to do with the significance such sounds acquire from their place within the network of signs in a given culture at a given point of time. Nevertheless, the signification is essentially apprehended through the coded non-representational form (although the representational elements usually present in a performance sign - a dancer is always a person dancing' - may help to anchor the necessarily more fluid signification of the non-representational elements; for example, a black man, a white man in blackface, a troupe, or a white woman tap-dancing may suggest different ways of reading the taps, because each relates to a slightly different moment in the evolution of the non-representational form, tap dance).
I have laboured this point at greater length than may seem warranted partly with polemic intent. First, it seems to me that the reading of non-representational signs in the cinema is particularly undeveloped. On the one hand, the mise-en-scene approach (at least as classically developed in Movie) tends to treat the non-representational as a function of the representational, simply a way of bringing out, emphasizing, aspects of plot, character, situation, without signification in their own right. On the other hand, semiotics has been concerned with the codification of the representational. Second, I feel that film analysis remains notoriously non-historical, except in rather lumbering, simplistic ways. My adaptation of Langer seeks to emphasize not the connection between signs and historical events, personages, or forces, but rather the history of signs themselves as they are produced in culture and history. Nowhere here has it been possible to reproduce the detail of any sign's history (and I admit to speculation in some instances), but most of the assertions are based on more thorough research, and even where they are not, they should be.
The categories of entertainment's Utopian sensibility are sketched in the accompanying Table 5.1, together with examples of them. The three films used will be discussed below; the examples from Westerns and television news are just to suggest how the categories may have wider application; the sources referred to are the cultural, historical situation of the code's production.
The categories are, I hope, clear enough, but a little more needs to be said about 'intensity'. It is hard to find a word that quite gets what I mean. What
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I have in mind is the capacity of entertainment to present either complex or unpleasant feelings (e.g. involvement in personal or political events; jealousy, loss of love, defeat) in a way that makes them seem uncomplicated, direct and vivid, not 'qualified' or 'ambiguous' as day-to-day life makes them, and without intimations of self-deception and pretence. (Both intensity and transparency can be related to wider themes in the culture, as 'authenticity' and 'sincerity' respectively — see Trilling 1972.)
The obvious problem raised by this breakdown of the Utopian sensibility is where these categories come from. One answer, at a very broad level, might be that they are a continuation of the Utopian tradition in western thought. George Kateb describes what he takes to be the dominant motifs in this tradition, and they do broadly overlap with those outlined above. Thus:
when a man [sic] thinks of perfection ... he thinks of a world permanently without strife, poverty, constraint, stultifying labour, irrational authority, sensual deprivation . . . peace, abundance, leisure, equality, consonance of men and their environment.
(1972: 9)
We may agree that notions in this broad conceptual area are common throughout western thought, giving it, and its history, its characteristic dynamic, its sense of moving beyond what is to what ought to be or what we want to be. However, the very broadness, and looseness, of this common ground does not get us very far — we need to examine the specificity of entertainment's Utopia.
One way of doing so is to see the categories of the sensibility as temporary answers to the inadequacies of the society which is being escaped from through entertainment. This is proposed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his 'Constituents of a theory of the media'. He takes issue with the traditional left-wing use of concepts of 'manipulation' and 'false needs' in relation to the mass media:
The electronic media do not owe their irresistible power to any sleight-of-hand but to the elemental power of deep social needs which come through even in the present depraved form of these media.
(1972: 113)
Consumption as spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear. The deceptive, brutal and obscene features of this festival derive from the fact that there can be no question of a real fulfilment of its promise. But so long as scarcity holds sway, use-value remains a decisive category which can only be abolished by trickery. Yet trickery on such a scale is only conceivable if it is based on mass need. This need - it is a Utopian one - is there. It is the desire for
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Table 5.2
Social tension/inadequacy!absence
Scarcity (actual poverty in the society; poverty observable in the surrounding societies, e.g. Third World); unequal distribution of wealth
Exhaustion (work, as a grind, alienated labour, pressutes of urban life)
Dreariness (monotony, predictability, instrumentality of the daily round)
Manipulation (advertising, bourgeois democracy, sex roles)
Fragmentation (job mobility, rehousing and development, high-rise flats, legislation against collective action)
Utopian solution
Abundance (elimination of poverty for self and others; equal distribution of wealth)
Energy (work and play synonymous), city-dominated {On the Town) or pastoral return (The Sound of Music)
Intensity (excitement, drama, affectivity of living)
Transparency (open, spontaneous, honest communications and relationships)
Community (all together in one place, communal interests, collective activity)
a new ecology, for a breaking-down of environmental barriers, for an aesthetic which is not limited to the sphere of the 'artistic'. These desires are not - or are not primarily - internalized rules of the games as played by the capitalist system. They have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle is — in parody form - the anticipation of a Utopian situation.
(ibid.: 114)
This does, I think, express well the complexity of the situation. However, Enzensberger's appeal to 'elemental' and 'physiological* demands, although we do not need to be too frightened by them, is lacking in both historical and anthropological perspectives. I would rather suggest, a little over-schematically, that the categories of the Utopian sensibility are related to specific inadequacies in society. I illustrate this in Table 5.2.
The advantage of this analysis is that it does offer some explanation of why entertainment works. It is not just leftovers from history, it is not fust what show business, or 'they', force on the rest of us, it is not simply the expression of eternal needs - it responds to real needs created by society. The weakness of the analysts (and this holds true for Enzensberger too) is in the giveaway absences from the left-hand column - no mention of class, race, or patriarchy. That is, while entertainment is responding to needs that are real, at the same time it is also defining and delimiting what constitute the legitimate needs of people in this society.
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I am not trying to recoup here the false needs argument - we are talking about real needs created by real inadequacies, but they are not the only needs and inadequacies of the society. Yet entertainment, by so orienting itself to them, effectively denies the legitimacy of other needs and inadequacies, and especially of class, patriarchal and sexual struggles. (Though once again we have to admit the complexity and contradictions of the situation — that, for instance, entertainment is not the only agency which defines legitimate needs, and that the actual role of women, gay men and blacks in the creation of show business leaves its mark in such central oppositional icons as, respectively, the strong woman type, e.g. Ethel Merman, Judy Garland, Elsie Tanner, camp humour and sensuous taste in dress and decor, and almost all aspects of dance and music. Class, it will be noted, is still nowhere.)
Class, race and sexual caste are denied validity as problems by the dominant (bourgeois, white, male) ideology of society. We should not expect show business to be markedly different. However, there is one further turn of the screw, and that is that, with the exception perhaps of community (the most directly working-class in source), the ideals of entertainment imply wants that capitalism itself promises to meet. Thus abundance becomes consumerism, energy and intensity personal freedom and individualism, and transparency freedom of speech. In other (Marcuse's) words, it is a partially 'one-dimensional' situation. The categories of the sensibility point to gaps or inadequacies in capitalism, but only those gaps or inadequacies that capitalism proposes itself to deal with. At our worse sense of it, entertainment provides alternatives to capitalism which will be provided by capitalism.
However, this one-dimensionality is seldom so hermetic, because of the deeply contradictory nature of entertainment forms. In Variety, the essential contradiction is between comedy and music turns; in musicals, it is between the narrative and the numbers. Both these contradictions can be rendered as one between the heavily representational and verisimilitudinous (pointing to the way the world is, drawing on the audience's concrete experience of the world) and the heavily non-representational and 'unreal' (pointing to how things could be better). In musicals, contradiction is also to be found at two other levels — within numbers, between the representational and the non-representational, and within the non-representational, due to the differing sources of production inscribed in the signs.
To be effective, the Utopian sensibility has to take off from the real experiences of the audience. Yet to do this, to draw attention to the gap between what is and what could be, is, ideologically speaking, playing with fire. What musicals have to do, then, (not through any conspiratorial intent, but because it is always easier to take the line of least resistance, i.e. to fit in with prevailing norms) is to work through these contradictions at all levels in such a way as to 'manage' them, to make them seem to disappear. They don't always succeed.
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I have chosen three musicals (Golddiggers of 1933, Funny Face. On the Town) which seem to me to illustrate the three broad tendencies of musicals - those that keep narrative and number clearly separated (most typically, the backstage musical); those that retain the division between narrative as problems and numbers as escape, but try to 'integrate' the numbers by a whole set of papering-over-the-cracks devices (e.g. the well-known 'cue for a song'); and those which try to dissolve the distinction between narrative and numbers, thus implying that the world of the narrative is also (already) Utopian.
The clear separation of numbers and narrative in Golddiggers of1933 is broadly in line with a 'realist' aesthetic: the numbers occur in the film in the same way as they occur in life, that is, on stages and in cabarets. This 'realism' is of course reinforced by the social-realist orientation of the narrative, settings and characterization, with their emphasis on the Depression, poverty, the quest for capital, 'golddigging' (and prostitution). However, the numbers are not wholly contained by this realist aesthetic - the way in which they are opened out, in scale and in cinematic treatment (overhead shots, etc.) represents a quite marked shift from the real to the non-real, and from the largely representational to the largely non-representational (sometimes to the point of almost complete abstraction) (Figute 5.1). The thrust of the narrative is towards seeing the show as a 'solution' to the personal, Depression-induced problems of the characters; yet the non-realist presentation of the numbers makes it very hard to take this solution seriously. It is 'just' escape, merely' Utopian.
If the numbers embody (capitalist) palliatives to the problems of the narrative - chiefly, abundance (spectacle) in place of poverty, and (non-efficacious) energy (chorines in self-enclosed patterns) in place of dispiritedness - then the actual mode of presentation undercuts this by denying it the validity of 'realism'.
However, if one then looks at the contradiction between the representational and non-representational within the numbers, this becomes less clear-cut. Here much of the representational level reprises the lessons of the narrative - above all, that women's only capital is their bodies as objects. The abundant scale of the numbers is an abundance of piles of women; the sensuous materialism is the texture of femaleness; the energy of the dancing (when it occurs) is the energy of the choreographic imagination, to which the dancers are subservient. Thus, while the non-representational certainly suggests an alternative to the narrative, the representational merely reinforces the narrative (women as sexual coinage, women - and men - as expressions of the male producer).
Finally, if one then looks at the non-representational alone, contradicrions once again become apparent - e.g. spectacle as materialism and metaphysics (that is, on the one hand, the sets, costumes, etc., are tactile, sensuous, physically exhilarating, but on the other hand, are associated with fairyland,
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Figure 5.1 Women as abundance: Golddiggers of 1933
magic, the by-definition immaterial), dance as human creative energy and subhuman mindlessness.
In Funny Face, the central contradiction is between art and entertainment, and this is further worked through in the antagonism between the central couple, Audrey Hepburn (art) and Fred Astaire (entertainment). The numbers are escapes from the problems, and discomforts, of the contradiction — either by asserting the unanswerably more pleasurable qualities of entertainment (e.g. 'Clap Yo' Hands' following the dirge-like Juliette Greco-type song in the 'empathicalist', i.e. existentialist, soiree), or in the transparency of love in the Hepburn-Astaire numbers.
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But it is not always that neat. In the empathicalist cellar club, Hepburn escapes Astaire in a number with some of the other beats in the club. This reverses the escape direction of the rest of the film (i.e. it is an escape from entertainment/Astaire into art). Yet within the number, the contradiction repeats itself. Before Hepburn joins the group, they are dancing in a style deriving from Modern Dance, angular, oppositional shapes redolent in musical convention of neurosis and pretentiousness (cf. Danny Kaye's number, 'Choreography', in White Christmas). As the number proceeds, however, more showbiz elements are introduced - use of syncopated clapping, forming in a vaudeville line-up, and American Theater Ballet shapes. Here an 'art' form is taken over and infused with the values of entertainment. This is a contradiction between the representational (the dreary night club) and the non-representational (the oomph of music and movement), but also within the non-representational, between different dance forms. The contradiction between art and entertainment is thus repeated at each level.
In the love numbers, too, contradictions appear, partly by the continuation in them of troubling representational elements. In 'Funny Face', photographs of Hepburn as seen by Astaire, the fashion photographer, are projected on the wall as background to his wooing her and her giving in. Again, their final dance of reconciliation to ' 'S Wonderful' takes place in the grounds of a chateau, beneath the trees, with doves fluttering around them (Figure 5.2). Earlier, this setting was used as the finish for their fashion photography sequence. In other words, in both cases, she is reconciled to him only by capitulating to his definition of her (Figure 5.3). In itself, there is nothing contradictory in this - it is what Ginger Rogers always had to do. But here the mode of reconciliation is transparency and yet we can see the strings of the number being pulled. Thus the representational elements, which bespeak manipulation of romance, contradict the non-representational, which bespeak its transparency.
The two tendencies just discussed are far more common than the third, which has to suggest that utopia is implicit in the world of the narrative as well as in the world of the numbers.
The commonest procedure for doing this is removal of the whole film in time and space - to turn-of-the-century America {Meet Me in St Louis, Hello Dolly!), Europe {The Merry Widow, Gigi, Song of Nonaay), cockney London {My Fair Lady, Oliver!, Scrooge), black communities {Hallelujah!, Cabin in the Sky, Porgy and Bess), etc. - to places, that is, where it can be believed (by white urban Americans) that song and dance are "in the air', built into the peasant/black culture and blood, or part of a more free-and-easy stage in American development. In these films, the introduction of any real narrative concerns is usually considerably delayed and comes chiefly as a temporary threat to Utopia - thus reversing the other two patterns, where the narrative predominates and numbers function as temporary escapes from it. Not much
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happens, plot-wise, in Meet Me in St Louis until we have had 'Meet Me in St Louis', 'The Boy Next Door' 'The Trolley Song' and 'Skip to My Lou' - only then does father come along with his proposal to dismantle this Utopia by his job mobility.
Most of the contradictions developed in these films are overridingly bought off by the nostalgia or primitivism which provides them with the point of departure. Far from pointing forwards, they point back, to a golden age — a reversal of utopianism that is only marginally offset by the narrative motive of recovery of Utopia. What makes On the Town interesting is that its Utopia is a well-known modern city. The film starts as an escape — from the confines of navy life into the freedom of New York, and also from the weariness of work, embodied in the docker's refrain, 'I feel like I'm not out of bed yet', into the energy of leisure, as the sailors leap into the city for their day off. This energy runs rhrough the whole film, including the narrative. In most musicals, the narrative represents things as they are, to be escaped from. But most of the narrative of On the Town is about the transformation of New York into Utopia. The sailors release the social frustrations of the women -a tired taxi driver just coming off shift, a hard-up dancer reduced to belly-dancing to pay for ballet lessons, a woman with a sexual appetite that is deemed improper — not so much through love and sex as through energy. This sense of the sailors as a transforming energy is heightened by the sense of pressure on the narrative movement suggested by the device of a time-check flashed on the screen intermittently.
This gives a historical dimension to a musical, that is, it shows people making Utopia rather than just showing them from time to time finding themselves in it. But the people are men — it is still men making history, not men and women together. And the Lucy Schmeeler role is unforgivably male chauvinist. In this context, the 'Prehistoric Man' number is particularly interesting (Figure 5.4). It centres on Ann Miller, and she leads the others in the takeover of the museum. For a moment, then, a woman 'makes history'. But the whole number is riddled with contradictions, which revolve round the very problem of having an image of a woman acting historically.
Table 5.3
Self-willed	Mindless
Miller as star (R)	Miller's image {'magnificent animal')
	(R)
Miller character - decision-maker in	Number set in anthropology museum
narrative (R)	— associations with primitivism (R)
Tap as self-expressive form (NR)	Tap as mindless repetitions (NR)
Improvisatory routine (R/NR)	
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Figure 5.3 Constructing transparency: Funny Face
ENTERTAINMENT AND UTOPIA
If we take the number and her part in it to pieces {Table 5.3), we can see that it plays on an opposition between self-willed and mindless modes of being; and this play is between representational (R) and non-representational (NR) at all aesthetic levels.
The idea of a historical utopianism in narrativity derives from the work of Ernest Bloch. According to Frederic Jameson, Bloch
has essentially two different languages or terminological systems at his disposition to describe the formal nature of Utopian fulfilment: the movement of the world in time towards the future's ultimate moment, and the more spatial notion of that adequation of object to subject which must characterise that moment's content . . . {These} correspond to dramatic and lyrical modes of the presentation of not-yet-being.
(1971: 146)
Musicals (and Variety) represent an extra ordinary mix of these two modes - the historicity of narrative and the lyricism of numbers. They have not often taken advantage of it, but the point is that they could, and that this possibility is always latent in them. They are a form we still need to look at if films are, in Brecht's words on the theatre, to 'organize the enjoyment of changing reality'.
Movie 24, 1977
References
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (1972) 'Constituents of a theory of the media', in Denis
McQuail (ed.) Sociology of Mass Communications, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 99-116. Jameson, Fredric (1971) Marxism and Form, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kateb, George (1972) Utopia and its Enemies, New York: Schocken. Langer, Susanne K. (1953) Feeling and Form, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Trilling, Lionel (1972) Sincerity and Authenticity, London: Oxford University Press.
Further reading
Altman, Rick (ed.) (1981) Genre: The Musical, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Altman, Rick (1987) The American Film Musical, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
Feuer, Jane (1982) The Hollywood Musical, London: Macmillan.
Flinn, Caryl (1992) Strains of Utopia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gaines, Jane and Herzog, Charlotte (eds) (1990) Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body,
London and New York: Routledge. Geraghty, Christine (1991) Women and Soap Opera, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lovell, Terry (1980) Pictures of Reality, London: British Film Institute. Modleski, Tania (1982) Loving with a Vengeance, New York: Methuen. Williams, Linda (1990) Hard Core: the Frenzy of the Visible, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
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