Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 83 Historicizing Chicago’s Resurrection of the Film Musical, or, Thinking in Fragments, from Vaudeville to MTV
Vagelis Siropoulos
Abstract:
With its 2003 Oscar triumph and its success in the international box office, Chicago managed to resurrect the film musical. One of the reasons for the film‟s success is its dynamic visual vocabulary, which exhibits the influence of a postmodern mode of fragmentation, best exemplified in MTV videos. Chicago uses this video aesthetic in order to communicate the dynamism of the vaudeville act, which, interestingly, was the first form of mass entertainment that systematically explored the dynamics of the fragment as an aesthetic device. In this way, Chicago creates a sense of diachrony that invites us to reconstitute a history of the fragment from the “primitive” popular culture of the early-twentieth century to the digitalized one of the twenty-first.
Résumé:
Le triomphe de Chicago aux Oscars 2003 et son succès commercial international ont signifié la résurrection du film musical. Une des raisons du succès du film est le dynamisme de ses images, qui trahit l‟influence de la mode postmoderne de la fragmentation déjà illustrée par les clips de MTV. Chicago se sert de l‟esthétique vidéo pour communiquer la vivacité des numéros de vaudeville, sans doute la première forme de divertissement populaire à explorer le dynamisme du fragment comme technique esthétique. Chicago fait naître ainsi une conscience de la diachronie du genre qui nous invite à reconstituer l‟histoire du fragment depuis les formes « primitives » de la culture populaire au début du XXe siècle aux formes numériques du début du XXIe.
Keywords:
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 84 In the Academy Awards of 2003, the film adaptation of Bob Fosse‟s hit Broadway show, Chicago, achieved an amazing coup. It resurrected the film musical, a genre that most Hollywood executives considered dead. Chicago gathered the majority of the awards, including the top honor of the night for Best Picture, and so became the first musical in thirty-four years to win the Oscar for picture of the year.
Chicago‟s Oscar triumph expressed vividly the willingness of the industry‟s insiders
to welcome back the musical as a valid cinematic form for the new Millennium. The worldwide audience also expressed the same willingness, as the film became a big hit in the international box office with its grosses exceeding $300 million.
One of the reasons for the film‟s success is the dynamic cinematic language it uses throughout the song-and-dance sequences. Every musical number is almost a short film within the film, with its own distinctive color palette and its editing obeying the rhythm of the music. This visceral cinematic language is, actually, heavily influenced by video aesthetics as exemplified in MTV videos and TV commercials. This is where we find this kind of musical, rhythmical editing, the obsessive foregrounding of the image‟s texture and, above all, the systematic exploitation of the dynamics of the fragment as an aesthetic device that can achieve an aesthetic quality of great intensity in the most limited amount of time. A similar exploitation of the fragment also characterizes the contemporary blockbusters (or event-movies, franchise films, tent-pole pictures), which constitute nowadays the culturally dominant and most lucrative form of filmmaking. These films employ a highly stylized, video-friendly vocabulary that comprises quick cuts, brief shots frantically, almost hysterically edited, especially during their action sequences. Known as set-pieces, these sequences are fragments abstracted from an aesthetic whole, demanding a peculiar semi-autonomy from the rest of the picture: they are the widely advertised, hyped attractions of the show, often pre-designed and even with their complex technological details publicized before the actual script of the movie is ready. Each of these fragments functions as a unit further broken to many minimal fragments, the required shots, usually extremely brief in duration and imperceptible but, nevertheless, carefully storyboarded during pre-production in such a way that their
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 85 sequencing becomes a mini-plot in its own right. By employing a similar language for the conception and execution of its musical numbers, Chicago was designed to resonate with postmodern audiences. Through their exposure to blockbuster films as well as TV commercials and video clips, which include an extraordinary number of distinct images in a time frame that ranges from one-half to three minutes, postmodern audiences are accustomed to expect the highest possible affective intensity from the most minimal and fragmented aesthetic forms.
Most importantly, Chicago uses this cinematic language in order to communicate through a mediated form of entertainment the dynamism of a live act, and specifically the vaudeville act. All the musical numbers take place on the vaudeville stage, which, interestingly, was the first form of mass entertainment that systematically explored the dynamics of the fragment as an aesthetic device. By using contemporary video aesthetics in order to communicate the power of the vaudeville act, Chicago creates a sense of diachrony that invites us to reconstitute a history of the fragment from the “primitive” popular culture of the early-twentieth century to the digitalized one of the twenty-first. Is there an aesthetic of the fragment that informs the representational structure of such diverse forms of popular art as vaudeville and variety entertainment in general, musical theatre and the movie musical, blockbuster action films, TV commercials and MTV videos? Is fragmentation in the aesthetic domain somehow connected with what Georg Lukács defines as reification, that is the fragmentation of social experience in capitalist society? Does the fragment have something to reveal about the relation between economy and aesthetics that enables us to theorize the aesthetics of capitalism? By taking us back to the American vaudeville stages, Chicago becomes an ideal starting point for this historical analysis and sociological contextualization of an aesthetic of fragmentation that will finally bring us full circle back to Chicago and its resurrection of the film musical in the new millennium.
Vaudeville and the Industrialization of Entertainment
Set in the 1920s, the film tells the story of Roxie Hart, a naïve young woman married to a “dumb mechanic” but dreaming of becoming a vaudeville star. Instead she ends up in jail after killing her lover, who supposedly had connections in the vaudeville circuit, but was actually taking advantage of her naiveté in order to have some “fun.” In prison, Roxie is educated in the ways of the world and hires a
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 86 Machiavellian lawyer, Billy Flynn, who knows how to manipulate the mass media of the era, press and radio. He transforms her into America‟s sweetheart and after a sensational trial-cum-show, acquits her. Roxie wants to capitalize on her hard-earned publicity and realize her dream, but finds out that in a world that searches feverishly for the next big thing, she is old news. In an act of desperation, she joins forces with her former inmate and nemesis, Velma Kelly, notorious murderess and forgotten vaudeville star, and finally her dream comes true. Their “murderous” double act truly rocks Chicago!
“The first time, anywhere, there has been an act of this nature. Not only one little lady but two! You‟ve read about them in the papers and now here they are – a double header! Chicago‟s own killer dillers – those two scintillating sinners – Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly.” These are the words of the announcer introducing the dynamic duo in the end of the film. The whole story and especially this finale may seem too exaggerated to contain even a hint of realism, but they are not. Apart from the fact that Chicago is roughly based on a true story, “freak” acts like Roxie and Velma‟s were quite frequent on the vaudeville stage. Vaudeville historian Robert W. Snyder gives us an all-too-real example: “When chorus girls Lillian Graham and Ethel Conrad were released on bail after shooting Graham‟s wealthy lover, the Victoria put them onstage as „The Shooting Stars.‟ They packed the house” (90). Apart from newsmakers and faux celebrities aspiring to their own fifteen minutes of fame, the bill could also include everything from dog acts, acrobats, gymnasts, jugglers to major stars of the legitimate stage, like Ethel Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt, presenting extracts from their famous roles, as well as many comic sketches, and, of course, elaborate song-and-dance routines.
So, what exactly was vaudeville? Nothing but “a series of individual acts strung together to produce a complete bill of entertainment” (12). Although “[t]o an outsider, the sequence of acts looked as random as the scenes glimpsed from a trolley car on a busy city street” (66), the whole performance was carefully structured, so that the succession of the individual acts would lead to a climax, which invariably included a performance from the biggest star of the bill. Not all performances were for all kinds of audiences. There were big-time and small-time circuits: the first attracted “respectable” middle-class audiences with star performances, more tasteful and less risqué acts in theatres located in major shopping and entertainment districts; while the second enticed the working-class and the ethnic groups with cheaper prices, more
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 87 boisterous and vulgar humor in neighborhood vaudeville houses. This hierarchy shows that the vaudeville business was a well-organized one, bureaucratic and centralized. It was, in fact, the first “nationwide entertainment industry” (Erdman 43), the first form of “mass-marketed, centrally planned, industrially organized entertainment” (47), that brought “the field of entertainment into the age of big business – or perhaps, vice-versa” (64). Whereas before vaudeville, “staged entertainment had … been an ad-hoc assemblage of localized theaters and short-term contracts, there was now a large, bureaucratic entity that delineated and controlled nearly every aspect of production and marketing” (61).
This kind of control was achieved through booking syndicates, the most powerful of which was UBO (United Booking Office), founded mainly by impresarios Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee. A Standard Oil-type of trust, UBO counted some two hundred theatres nationwide in its ranks and it was the major mediator between performers and managers, directing acts around the circuits. Moreover, it tried to standardize its product as far as possible by “control[ing] who could perform, where they could perform, how much they were paid, and … what they could do on stage” (Snyder 34). This management, administration and bureaucratic organization quickly erased the amateurism, which characterized the mid-nineteenth century concert-saloons, from which vaudeville originated. Performers had to give their best (whatever that was) because they were aware of being watched, scrutinized, evaluated: “Detailed, almost scientific reports were kept on each act, its performance, reception, and length, and filed with the central booking syndicates” (Erdman 59). The sense of being immediately replaceable and the threat of being blacklisted created the urge to perfect and standardize the act, to achieve the maximum efficiency of expression within the minimum amount of time and provoke the most intense audience response; to develop, in other words, to the maximum an instrumental, means/ends rationality and conceive the means of artistic expression as a tool mastered and directed towards the achievement of an immediate practical end. This demand for absolute mastery over one‟s tools led to the association of the brilliant performer with a perfect machine.
Such an association is not just a metaphorical schema without any grounding in historical reality. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century was the age in which the discovery of the quickest, most economical means of achieving a specific end was a project of paramount significance in every kind of business. In this age, the
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 88 systematic organization and instrumentalization of human activity in terms of greater efficiency is not restricted in the factories, but tends to engulf the whole of the social. The industrial systems of efficiency are applied both in the organization of state apparatuses and modern corporations, creating the new image of a bureaucratic, administrative world. In this way, the bureaucratic organization of society tends to replicate the structures of the factory; and as Lukács points out: “[t]he internal organisation of a factory could not possibly have such an effect – even within the factory itself – were it not for the fact that it contained in a concentrated form the whole structure of capitalist society” (90). For Lukács, this subjection of every aspect of social experience to the laws of greatest efficiency, instrumentality and, hence profitability, produces a fragmented social totality, analytically decomposed and compartmentalized into many self-regulating institutions, which are further fragmented into many autonomized, self-sufficient component parts. The fragmentation of social reality into “the parts, the aspects of the total process that have been broken off, artificially isolated and ossified” (184) is called by Lukács reification, and is the outcome of a vast transformational process of the social, whereby capitalist economy remolds the world in its own image. By subjecting every social activity to the process of instrumentalization with a view to a smooth and thorough commodification of social life, capitalism creates a world where every social activity, in turn, exhibits the structural characteristics of the commodity form - if the commodity is defined as a fragment abstracted from a concrete socio-economic process and is felt to be alienated from human action.
Problems of Integration
In light of Lukács‟ theorization, we can view the vaudeville business as emblematic of how reification is reflected in the area of mass-cultural aesthetic production. Vaudeville‟s reorganization of stage entertainment in terms of a strict means/ends binary logic gives rise to the vaudeville act, which does not only function as a commodity, but also exhibits the structural characteristics of the commodity in its aesthetic form. It is an autonomous aesthetic fragment, a frame-like, clearly demarcated and aesthetically complete mini-sequence, a dynamic mini-performance that achieves its full potential in an intense dramatic present, totally disconnected from a dramatic past or future. Taking as an example the musical number, one of the most popular vaudeville acts, the effects of reification can be discerned immediately.
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 89 In melodic terms, the number is totally emancipated from any complex and extended musical structures, bequeathed by nineteenth-century forms of light musical theatre, like operetta, and functions as a musical statement in the present, as the melody becomes now coextensive with the chorus or refrain, which is often an oft-repeated hook melodic phrase (Knapp 78). Accordingly, the lyrics are also organized around the repetition of a key phrase, which is often the title of the song, serving as a built-in jingle that could sell the song commercially (78). This telegraphic simplification and condensation of both musical and verbal meaning is often matched by an explosive performative dynamism, which is systematically explored in the revue, the more expensive and aesthetically ambitious form of variety entertainment that finally surpassed vaudeville in popularity in the US in the 1920s. The revue is famous for its elaborate musical sequences, combining song with a followup dance by an all-female chorus line, raising the adrenaline level with its high-kicking routines. When song and dance are combined with a more interactive use of set and light design in big production numbers, which transform a musical sequence into an ever-evolving tableau, one has the impression that the number does not only aspire to be a small and all-too-powerful performance in itself but also a total work of art in itself: a minimalist version of the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunst, the merging of all arts in an all-inclusive, synaesthetic art form of the future.
Variety entertainment‟s effort to achieve the maximum aesthetic density and affective intensity in representational fragments, providing the minimum amount of performance time, is actually a response to the new phenomenological richness that the fragmented experiences of the individual acquire in the early-twentieth century capitalist societies. As Walter Benjamin has shown, this phenomenological richness is the outcome of the invasion of everyday life by capitalism‟s new technological forces (automatic movement and electricity); as well as of capitalism‟s transformation of urban space, through the proliferation of advertising images, gigantic billboards, window displays, mannequins, illuminations and palatial department stores, into a phantasmagoric three-dimensional stage, upon which the spectacle of mass consumerism is enacted (Buck-Morss 78-109). The sensory overload that the new techno-aesthetic cityscape provokes puts linear-successive temporality into crisis, as fragmented, isolated experiences in the present overwhelm the senses, challenging the attempts of the individual to systematize the external data and control the affective stimulation they generate with a view to the future. This crisis of linear-successive
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 90 temporality is evident in traditionally narrative-driven forms of light musical entertainment, like the musical comedy, which, in the twentieth century, adopts a variety-like structure and disregards overall narrative organization. It is not accidental, then, that most historical accounts of the Broadway musical start with problems of integration (see for example McMillin 1-30), as the musical numbers appear to be (especially in the musical comedies of the 1920s and 1930s) too anarchic and claim an extraordinary autonomy, refusing to obey a narratological necessity and become integral parts of a narrative totality. Even the so-called integrated musicals of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s never manage to fully tame the musical number, whose autotelic nature always disrupts and retards the flow of events, as developed in the prose sections, creating an antagonistic relation between the narrative and musical sequences that results in a stop-and-go discontinuous structure.
The Hollywood musical, which emerges with the advent of the talking pictures in the late 1920s, exploits and manipulates this discontinuity to the point that it becomes the defining characteristic of the genre. In the film musical, and especially the ones written directly for the screen, from Warner Brothers‟ backstage musicals of the 1930s to the more ambitious productions of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM during the 1940s and 1950s, the musical numbers constitute a universe of audio-visual excess and affective plenitude, which is clearly separated from the everyday “realistic” world of narrative action, the world of prose and, hence, the prosaic. The climax of these films comes with the extended big production numbers, depicting dreams, daydreams or impossibly extravagant stage performances, which open up a realm of pure visibility and pure sensibility, by radicalizing the perceptual dynamics of the cinematic medium itself. One should only remember Busby Berkeley‟s abstract sexual extravaganzas in films like 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Footlight Parade (1933) and Dames (1934), where, through the use of extreme
high-angle photography, mirrors and careful floor painting, the chorus girls‟ legs and faces become “parts of a great transformational machine: the „shapes‟ are like kaleidoscopic views which contract and dilate in an earthly or watery space, usually shot from above, turning around the vertical axis and changing into each other to end up as pure abstractions” (Deleuze 60-1).
Over the years, the Hollywood musical acquires self-awareness of its role as the most technologically progressive and aesthetically ambitious commercial film genre and becomes bolder and self-consciously “artistic” in the conception and design of its
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 91 big production numbers. For example, in the climactic nearly twenty-minute ballet of Vincente Minnelli‟s An American in Paris (1951), love‟s labor is both won and lost against an impressionistic Paris, as the luminescent styles of the nineteenth century‟s great impressionist painters become the stylistic backdrops for each mini-sequence in the ballet, creating a succession of tableaux vivants able to impress even the more visually sophisticated postmodern viewers who would ultimately experience the film on videotape or DVD. In their exploration of phantasmagoric dreamscapes, sequences like this exemplify the raison d’ être of the film musical and Hollywood aesthetics in general: the transportation of the audience to an alternative utopian domain, where reality is transcribed in highly aestheticized, even ultimately unrealistic terms. The film musical achieves this goal more successfully than any other genre. Through the combination of music, dance, stylized set design and dynamic, even groundbreaking camerawork, it creates an artificial universe in which not only do the social conflicts of everyday reality find utopian resolutions, as it happens in every Hollywood film, but also the real itself is denied in favor of the surreal or the hyperreal. It is exactly this excessive utopianism that is responsible for the genre‟s popularity during Hollywood‟s “golden” era as well as its demise, once commercial cinema moves to more realistic and dystopian representations of society in the late 1960s and 1970s.
MTV Aesthetics and Postmodern Fragmentation
However, not long after the film musical‟s decline, the musical number was reborn in a new and more dynamic form. In the early 1980s, the cable channel MTV changed not only the music industry but mass culture in general, by popularizing the music video - essentially an elaborate commercial, promoting the products of the music industry, that acquires a cutting-edge aesthetic quality through the use of a progressive visual vocabulary derived mainly from avant-garde cinema and experimental video. Crucial to the theorization of MTV aesthetics is Fredric Jameson‟s understanding of reification not so much as a static condition, but rather as a dynamic process that intensifies over the years. In this way, the development of mass-cultural aesthetic forms must be seen as an ongoing process of internal differentiation, decomposition and autonomization, redividing and rearticulating itself in order to analytically dismantle more organic and narrative-driven structures and reorganize them into more efficient and further fragmented systems (Jameson 155-61). In the case of the MTV video, Jameson‟s theorization of reification as an
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 92 intensifying process of fragmentation is evident not only in the status of a three-minute sequence as a fully developed art form, but also in the internal organization of the music video, which continues from where the film musical left off, as far as camerawork and editing techniques are concerned. The basic innovation that music videos – and, more specifically, non-narrative music videos - introduce is that the individual shot acquires a prodigious autonomy by being liberated from any obligation to form intelligible sequences or scenes. Instead, miniscule shots of the briefest possible duration are juxtaposed with each other through a disjunctive, fast-paced montage, which privileges jump-cuts instead of match-cuts and the rhythmical editing of the images on the musical tempo. The aim is to overwhelm the senses through a relentless succession of disjoined moments of the highest possible aesthetic density, mainly achieved through the use of vibrant, absorbent, super-saturated colors. In this way, the spectator is discouraged to impose a meaning on the stream of images and encouraged to indulge in an intense sensory, synaesthetic experience that approaches the state of dream and hallucination. This dream-like and hallucinatory sensation is further accentuated by the symbolic density of the imagery employed and the intertextual references to a variety of mass-cultural texts, which transform every video sequence into a seemingly endless stream of irreducible allusions and associations.
The influence of MTV aesthetics is, nowadays, discernible in most mass-cultural products. For example, the “cool” TV commercial, by absorbing the stylistic vocabulary of MTV, becomes not only an art form in its own right, but also more efficient in the way it delivers its message. It gradually abandons the classic advertising strategy of trying to rationalize the pseudo-needs that the product cultivates and focuses instead on the creation of a style, a mood, an atmosphere (associated with the product) that “hooks” the future consumer on a more subconscious level. Similarly, most American prime-time TV series (from Miami
Vice to 24, Prison Break and Lost) often place a disproportionate emphasis on visual
style and maximize their affective potential by accelerating their tempo, especially during aesthetically autotelic video-clip-like mini-sequences that comprise miniscule shots edited to the rhythms of popular music. The influence of video aesthetics on prime-time TV is discernible not only on the level of aesthetic form but also of narrative content, which is fragmented into a multitude of disparate and often incompatible narrative signals from different genres. TV series tend to be increasingly
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 93 intertextual and multigeneric. This overabundance of generic signification is often coupled with an overabundance of action, including many dramatic reversals and suspense-filled moments. All these sensational plot turns make little sense in the long run, but nevertheless maximize the impact of each individual episode. In this way, the viewing time is fragmented in many intense (both dramatically and aesthetically) present moments that are released from their connections to a narrative past or their extensions to a narrative future and can be separately enjoyed in their isolated splendor.
Such an aesthetic of fragmentation is further and more systematically explored in blockbuster action films, which, as we have already seen, are broken down into extended and disconnected set-pieces, short films within the film extracted from the narrative continuum and raised to peculiar prominence. As both directors and audiences alike become more and more impatient with the narrative pretexts needed for the preparation of the action set-pieces, narrative time shrinks to the point that it may become just an excuse for the suspension of a perpetual present of visual thrills. This high-tech aestheticism in terms of film production and the concomitant fascination of the audience with the surface qualities, the materiality and texture of a phenomenologically dense and rich visual image is only possible in a culture where “the promise of rich sight” or “sight itself as richness” can become “the ground for extensive experience” (Dana Polan qtd. in Mulvey 1996: 12). Such a predominantly visual culture flourishes in our late-capitalist societies, where commodity production and consumption are so intertwined with image production and consumption that technologically mediated spectacle is not only an object of contemplation, but becomes a lived experience, radically altering the way the individual relates to the world. As constant advances in software design enable digital technology to penetrate and reorganize every kind of human activity as a fascinating multimedia aesthetic experience in its own right, reality becomes totally aestheticized, gradually approximating the status of virtual fantasy. This erosion of the boundaries between reality and fantasy in the postmodern “society of the spectacle” enables us to understand the libidinal gratification that the consumption of autonomized techno-aesthetic form provides. By making the distinction between spectacle and spectator, art and life, and, most importantly, fantasy and reality an obsolete one, the highly hallucinogenic “special effects” aesthetic affirms the fundamental narcissistic longing that structures human desire: that fantasy is the ultimate reality.
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 94 It is not accidental, then, that the film musical made a triumphant comeback in our days. As we have seen, this was the most utopian of all genres, affirming the transformation of reality into highly aestheticized fantasy through extravagant forays into surrealistic hallucinatory dreamscapes. In this respect, the film musical was the first Hollywood genre that fully embodied capitalism‟s promise to create a totally aestheticized society; a promise, that as Benjamin showed, was first articulated in the late-nineteenth century, when the modern cityscape started morphing into a phantasmagoric stage upon which the spectacle of consumer capitalism was enacted. Now that this process is complete with the current triumph of high-tech fantasy over everyday mundane reality, the comeback of the film musical was only a matter of time. However, the millennial film musical did not come back with its aesthetic form untouched and unaltered. By contrast, the brilliance of Chicago lies in the way it reimagines the aesthetic form of the genre for the new millennium. One of Chicago‟s innovations is that, instead of offering one culminating big production number, like Berkeley‟s abstract sexual extravaganzas or the Arthur Freed unit‟s ethereal dream ballets, it conceives almost every music and dance sequence as a big production number – a strategy that allows an orgiastic mise-en-scène throughout the film. The colors intensify and acquire a sculptural, tactile, almost corporeal dimension. Breathtaking shifts of perspective are achieved through abrupt alterations between extreme close-ups and wide shots. And a rhythmical and disruptively rapid editing of brief shots, offering multiple, near-simultaneous points of view on a particular sequence, places the spectator amidst the frenetic action.
This stylistic excess is justified by making most of the numbers the products of the heroine‟s imagination. Roxie‟s mind is filled with images, filled with theatrical idealizations of the real world, transubstantiations of the actual into the virtual through the employment of an elaborate mise-en-scène. This is established from the beginning of the film, during the first musical sequence, “All That Jazz.” Roxie, still a housewife struggling for her big break in the vaudeville business, attends Velma‟s vaudeville act with a mixture of awe and desire. The camera fixes on her hungry eyes that devour everything that happens on stage. And suddenly for a brief moment we see Roxie on the stage dressed in Velma‟s clothes and performing her act. This brief fantasy sequence establishes Roxie‟s vivid imagination, which becomes more delirious, once her downfall begins. Every time the cruel reality presses on her, she escapes in a world of her own where reality is transformed into a glamorous
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 95 vaudevillian number: the other “merry” murderesses of the Cook County Jail become lethal burlesque queens, her victimized husband a tragic clown, the street-wise, ruthless matron a Red Hot Momma, who knows exactly how to get what she wants. Similarly, her trial becomes a circus, whose main attraction is the moment she takes the stand, her lawyer‟s manipulation of the press a puppet show and her transformation into his mouthpiece a ventriloquist act. By making the musical numbers the products of Roxie‟s imagination, the film creates an alternative musical dreamscape. However, in contrast to the classic Hollywood musical, where the worlds of reality and fantasy are clearly separated, in Chicago these two worlds constantly overlap to the point that the “realistic” sequences acquire the same editing musical rhythm that the song-and-dance fantasy sequences have. In this way, Chicago overcomes the film musical‟s traditional demarcation of narrative action and spectacle, prose and musical numbers, creating a universe that oscillates between the real and the ideal, the actual and the virtual, much like the ones that postmodern culture creates. By achieving these smooth alternations between the worlds of fantasy and reality, Chicago becomes the prototypical and most compelling postmodern film musical.
Works Cited
An American in Paris. Dir. Vincente Minelli. Perf. Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar
Levant. Loew‟s Incorporated, 1951.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project. Cambridge: The MIT P, 1989.
Chicago. Music by John Kander. Lyrics by Fred Ebb. Dir Rob Marshall. Perf. Renée
Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere, Queen Latifah. Miramax Films, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: The Athlone P, 1989.
Erdman, Andrew L. Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of
Amusement, 1895-1915. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland &
Company Inc. Publishers, 2004.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-
1998. London and New York: Verso, 1998.
Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2005.
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 96 Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT P, 1972.
McMillin, Scott. The Musical as Drama. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006. Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. London: BFI, 1996.
Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New
York. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Vagelis Siropoulos received his BA, MA and PhD from the School of English of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His publications and research interests center on the Marxist-historicist analysis of culture and aesthetic/ literary texts, with particular emphasis on the historicization of the ideological boundaries between high and mass culture as well as the erosion of such boundaries in postmodern culture. His PhD thesis analyzes the cultural logic behind the British musical theatre‟s appropriation of a representational logic that derives from elitist, avant-garde forms of postdramatic theatrical performance. His interest in musical theatre and popular culture extends beyond the theoretical domain. He has conceived and directed many musical shows for the Theatre Group of Aristotle University and presented his work in The Netherlands and Germany. More recently, he has worked as a lyricist for EMI Records and as artistic manager for one of the biggest PR companies in Athens. Email:esiropoulos@yahoo.gr
