BODIES OF WORK: THE PRODUCTION OF WORK, CLASS AND GENDER IN FILM MUSICALS A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English By Kathryn D. Jett, B.A. Washington, DC April 25, 2008 The influence of community is always inextricable from class identity. I would like to thank the communities of strong women who have influenced my thinking and my work from my hometown in Guymon, Oklahoma to my academic home here at Georgetown University. Special thanks belong to Dr. Pamela Fox for her guidance and inspiration. By introducing me to working-class studies, she has given me the critical tools I have been seeking all along. A large part of this work however, is drawn from the ultimate community of women in my life—my mother, grandmothers, sisters, aunts and cousins. Their ceaseless work, their love of music, and their subtle feminism are all woven into my thoughts and my words. To my mother and my Grammy Dee, thank you for showing me that a woman’s work can be as beautiful as her music. Kathryn Jett ii Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….. 1 Working Titles ……………………………………………………………………… 20 Hand-Made Expressions ………………………………………………………...…. 24 Mechanized Bodies …………………………………………………………………. 33 Commodified Bodies ……………………………………………………………….. 45 Resistant Bodies …………………………………………………………………….. 55 Contradictions and Conclusions ….…………………………………………………. 64 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………… 70 iii Introduction The stage musical is widely acknowledged as a purely American art form. Taking its roots from black minstrelsy, ethnically diverse Vaudeville, and New York’s Tin Pan Alley1, musical theatre has always been rich with the class, race, and gender related themes that reflect a complex and often fractured American culture. The archetypal story of a hopeful hoofer making it big became the success story narrative of the genre itself as the musical made its transition onto film in the Twentieth century with the advent of sound technology. The Hollywood musical was born at the intersection between the American institution of musical theatre and the impending explosion of the American film industry. Both of these staples of popular culture represent the nation’s desire for entertainment and the massive industry that can grow from that need. While baseball may be the all-American pastime of sports, the film musical is definitely the all-American pastime of entertainment. In his overview of entertainment and its effects on American culture, Richard Dyer explains that 1 Black minstrelsy and Vaudeville were both popular forms of entertainment at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Both operated off the objectification of lower classes, but they also served as a valuable source of income for African Americans and lower-class and immigrant families. Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the music district in New York City where sheet music was often sold through live demonstrations. Like Vaudeville and minstrel shows, it offered a source of employment to struggling creative artists and is credited with being the birthplace of the musical style that would become the classic Broadway musical. (Flinn and Broadway) 1 “entertainment is difficult to define because everyone knows what it is, because it is a common-sense idea . it is resistant to the probings of those who want to ask what such-and-such means” (Dyer iv). Still, we must enter into the discussion of the meaning of these forms of entertainment because they are the roots of contemporary culture. Inspecting the systems of “common sense” at work within entertainment should shed light on the ways that a nation’s cultural history can be at once universal and altogether fragmented into subcultures. The American experience is stratified in terms of difference, and while those in the hegemonic majority often dictate what is commonly considered popular “culture,” members of the minority have often woven their voices into those same texts. Within the history that all Americans share—in the form of popular medias such as film, television, and literature—are multiple representations of uncommon culture. Within the mainstream there will always be subcurrents and undertows that defy the norm. Working-class subculture within American society has gained increased academic attention in recent years. Like Dyer’s inability to define entertainment, class is a demographic category that resists definition. Some of the same reasons apply, for it is just as much an act of common sense to define one’s own class position as it is to define personal preference for entertainment. Class awareness grows over a lifetime of learning who works and how. Class is also difficult to define because it is closely related to religion, region, race and gender and a multitude of other social factors that play into individual identity and social power dynamics. According to the 2 Youngstown State University Center for Working-Class Studies2, “Neither Working- Class Studies as a field, nor the Center for Working-Class Studies, advocates any single definition of what constitutes the working class. We recognize, instead, that the term has multiple meanings and associations” (“What is Working-Class Studies?”). However, just as Dyer implies that there is a whole group of individuals (including himself) who seek to decode the meaning of entertainment, there is an equally active field of scholarship devoted to investigating class and its effect on individual and national identities. To that end, we must develop a working definition of class, and for the purposes of this study, a working definition of working-class representation in literature and art. Working-class film theorist Peter Hitchcock claims, “while class is constantly being rethought vis-à-vis the social, it is generally undertheorized in terms of the literary” (20). His objective to “encourage an expanded lexicon” for the analysis of working-class representations dovetails with Janet Zandy’s call for innovations in what is commonly considered a working-class text (23). Working-class film, literature, art, or music can constitute either representations of working-class people and situations or representations by working-class people. This definition does not imply that they must be distinctly positive or negative in nature, but simply calls for identification and 2 The Youngstown State University Center for Working-Class Studies has been a valuable resource in the forming of this project. I was first inspired to work with the class implications of musicals when I found The Pajama Game stuck in between dramas and documentaries on a list of working-class films on the Youngstown website. 3 recognition. According to Zandy, the field of working-class studies promotes identification and reclamation. In order to decode the history of the social effects class has had (and still has) in America, we must first reclaim the literary and visual artifacts of class as a social institution and identify them as working-class texts. Zandy identifies working-class texts as those which are “distinct from bourgeois literature . in [their] emphasis on the physicality of work . workers--so many hands--and physical labor are foregrounded” (Zandy 43). This definition applies directly to texts that represent labor visually, positioning the worker as the object in view. Zandy goes on to show that the worker is also the producer of the text in that working-class art “involves the stitching of beauty onto the ordinary, the joining of use and aesthetic value, and the enlargement of circumstances for creative expression” (65). In this way, almost anything that is “hand-made” or “home-spun” can become a site of reclamation for the working-class theorist—an artifact of a worker’s life, a diary of labor. The texts I have chosen for my study hardly fit this definition. They are not explicit depictions of the harrowing struggle of men and women who have sacrificed their time, their energy and their bodies to produce the goods we all depend on. Nor are they produced in the fleeting spare hours between one shift and another. They are not the documentaries, diaries, or dramas so pivotal to the working-class film canon. I have chosen to work with musicals—a genre that is not commonly seen as working-class oriented—with the goal of reclamation and expansion. The value of reclaiming these 4 texts lies in their unique combination of labor through the use of song, dance, costuming, and humor. My study will focus on three film musicals: The Pajama Game (1957), Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), and Hairspray (2007), which were produced in Hollywood studios by well-paid actors and directors. They rely on humor, dance, song and general excess to represent a world that is more fantastic than real, yet they are expressive of working-class subculture at distinct moments in the past half- century. The theatre history that precedes film musicals establishes a precedent for why this genre might lend itself to class-based representation or even to the expression of class-oriented resistance. I will use close readings of these three texts to show detailed instances of those representations and eventually discuss the ways that the film industry itself has been complicit in some of the same class subjugation and objectification that is revealed in the films. Film is a complex medium in that it is not “hand-made” in the singular, but produced by “so many hands.” No one author can be identified as responsible for every frame of the final product. For this reason, my analysis will generally implicate the film itself—not individual producers, directors, or performers—within the cultural or ideological effects it has on any given audience. Reading films on multiple levels is not new to twenty-first century audiences. Critics with an eye to racial or sexual discrimination identify resistance to societal norms in film texts ranging the entire history of the genre.