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Phoebe O’Connell

Gender and Sexuality Through Music

Maria Sonevytsky

May 16, 18

The Breaking of Parallels Through Movie Musical Dream Sequences

The American Movie Musical successfully ties the magic of dance, music, and film into one production. From extravagant dance sequences to colorful sets and costumes, movie musicals had the power to draw Americans to the movies to indulge in a couple hours of glamorous story telling. The compelling but lighthearted stories would allow one to believe that movie musicals lack the depth of other styles of film that were coming to the surface during the same period. The shiny exterior of movie musicals might encourage these assumptions to be made, but through the power of music and dance, a deeper section within the film can be analyzed allowing for more complex plots and realizations to be made by the characters.

Unpacking the values that are depicted both overtly and covertly in most movie musicals show the heteronormative relationships of the characters to one another. Gender roles are made evident through all interactions between the male and female leads.

Costumes, dialogue, and relationships between characters reinforce heteronormativity.

All movie genres that shared the same golden era as movie musicals cannot be excused from the same criticisms. Gender stereotypes and expectations that are still shown in films today were unquestioned when shown in films from this time era.

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Although movie musicals adhere to gender norms, movie musical dream sequences create a space that can be occupied by the viewer no matter their gender or sexuality. The dazzling first impression that serves as the first impression of the film, would allow the audience to make the assumption that storylines of movie musicals are generally more surface level. The premise of almost all movie musicals comes down to a love story that is told through song and dance. There are moments and sequences within movie musicals that allow for the exploration of deeper and more complex emotions that challenge the main characters as well as the rest of the structure of the film. During movie musical dream sequences, the main characters are often depicted through the body of another dancer. Another person replaces the body of the main character. This opens up the space to be occupied by anyone. Because the main character becomes someone else, the audience can occupy the body of the stand in. The parallel structures that have been established throughout the entirety of the film are broken as a result of the replacement of either one or both of the main characters. This exchange allows for all audience members, no matter the gender and sexuality that they identify with, to have the opportunity to occupy the body of the main characters.

“The Broadway Melody was described in MGM publicity as an ‘all talking, all singing, all dancing dramatic sensation’ (my emphasis), while Warner Bros. characterized The Desert Song as an ‘all talking, all singing, operetta’ (my emphasis).”

(Altman, 31). Broadway made its name starting in the early 1900’s in New York City.

The stage is where the majority of shows that have been readapted for the screen began.

Movie musicals started in the late 20s with smaller production films that do not reflect O’Connell 3 what most would associate with movie musicals today. It was the birth of sound in pictures that allowed for the take-off of the movie musical.

“Commentators on the early history of the musical have generally assumed that the genre is a direct import from Broadway, predetermined by new technology. The circumstantial evidence certainly points in that direction: not only are Broadway songs and plots reused, but even when Hollywood produces its own original musicals it simply borrows Broadway personnel to get them off the ground. This debt is clearly reflected in the Broadway orientation of early musical titles (The Broadway Melody. Broadway, Broadway Babies, Broadway Scandals, , Broadway Bad, Broadway Thru a Keyhole, Broadway to Hollywood).”

The next decade for movie musicals opened the floodgates for studios looking to compete with each other to cater to the demand from the public for musicals.

“Studios competed to outdo one another with over the top spectacles, churning out a glut of formulaic musical revues. However, cash-strapped audiences suffering through the Great Depression quickly tired of such repetition and demanded more.”(Fieisher, “A Brief History Of Musicals On Film”)

The lack of new content led to an innovative style that emphasized the dance aspect of the film. Busby Berkley was trained as a dancer and developed a new style of filming by setting his cameras in motion “using custom-built booms and monorails, making the audience/camera a part of the choreography.” (Fieisher, “A Brief History Of Musicals On

Film”)).

Berkley’s style encouraged studios to sign contracts between the studios and an experienced dancer that would only act in movies under their signed studio. Dancing was now one of the signifying attributes of movie musicals. Movie musicals hit their peak in the 40s through a combination of Berkley’s style, established actors and dancers, and the O’Connell 4 overall grim sentiment towards World War Two that led to an overall increase in ticket- sales. Some of the most iconic movie musicals were released in the late thirties and into the forties including Meet Me In St. Louis, On the Town, and The Wizard of Oz.

Movie Musicals took the same hit as all genres of film when the television became a household item by the late fifties. Although movie musicals such as Grease and Chicago became a box office hits post the movie musical golden era, there was never another era as successful for movie musical after its height of popularity.

The music and dance aspect of movie musicals become the heart of the film after the influence of Berkley. Critiques of movie musicals make the assumption that the style of film is meant to wash over the viewer without having to think critically about its story lines and structures. The predictable interaction between male and female leads allow for a standard formula to be used by most movie musicals. “The same configurations are ceaselessly repeated, with only the context changing. Even before anything approaching meaning can be ascertained or established, this process of repetition has created the pattern within which meaning will be inscribed.” (Altman, 33) The centering around the relationship between the male and female lead is what leads to the conflict and a series of songs and dances that result in the films resolution.

As suggested by writer Rick Altman, the plot lines of movie musicals that address these conflicts can be broken down to a series of parallels. Parallels in movie musicals are shown through the relationship between the male and female leads, highlighting their relationship to one another and reinforcing heteronormativity. The base of the parallels start at the male and female relationship and expand through shots, songs, relationships, storylines, and secondary attributes, all encouraging female, and male pairing. O’Connell 5

“Hardly a musical exist that does not at some point literally cover the screen with dancing couples. The American film musical seems to suggest that the natural state of the adult human being is in the arms of an adult human being of the opposite sex. Pairing-off is the natural impulse of the musical whether is be in the presentation of the plot, the splitting of the screen, the choreography of the dance, or even the repetition of a melody. Image follows image according to the nearly iron-clad law requiring each sequence to uphold interest in male-female coupling by including parallel scenes and shared activities.” (Altman, 32)

Altman goes into depth on multiple aspects of film that reflect this duality stating,

“almost any category can be used to underscore the musical’s basic male-female duality”

(Altman, 33). The long list of categories that prove the duality between the leads can be easily applied to Fred Zinnemann’s 1955 based on the 1943 stage musical

Oklahoma!, and and ’s 1952 production Singin’ in the Rain.

Setting constructs a parallel that are obvious because they are the spaces that the male and female lead occupy. Earlier movie musicals provided the male and female lead with similar settings such as their dressing rooms or apartments, when studios were granted larger budgets and were able to go on location shoots, films were able to expand on the parallel setting that their characters were existing in. “Hollywood now turned to associating each of the main characters with a specific and highly differentiated locale and activity.” (Altman, 33). In Oklahoma! Laurey’s setting is the home; Curly’s setting is riding through the range. The settings that have been assigned to the male and female leads are accurate to the time that the movie is meant to take place, but reinforce and perpetuate a cycle of expected gender roles.

The setting of the characters is a parallel that can be drawn that focuses on the background of the character, their activities, and job, establishing the environment that O’Connell 6 the characters will most commonly show when they are separate from each other.

Another parallel that Altman brings forward is the “personal style” of the character. The personal style of the actors is a combination of the personality of the character, which often gets repeated across multiple films by the same actor, their style of singing and their style of dancing. The “personal style” shows the most over exaggerated personality traits of the character.

Altman’s concept of the “personal style” of the characters is show through the relationship between Gene Kelly playing Don Lockwood and Debbie Reynolds as the character Kathy Selden in Singing in the Rain. The two get off to a start when Don

Lockwood jumps into the back of Kathy Selden’s car to escape a mob of crazed fans. It is established that Don is a Hollywood heartthrob and Kathy is a struggling stage actress as they drive to the junction of Sunset and Camden. The character Don Lockwood is portrayed as cocky and entitled as he slyly puts his arm over the shockingly outspoken

Kathy Selden. Don begins to express just how lonely a big time stars get as he slyly puts his arm around Kathy. When Kathy realizes Don’s intentions she calls him out for coming onto her. After Don’s attempt to entice Kathy She is quick to criticize Lockwood for his lack of talent, clearly a critique that Lockwood is not used to hearing, especially from women. Their relationship returns to a common motif, the overly confident man and the woman that challenges him. The unlikely pair begin as enemies but expectedly end up falling head over heels for one another. The tone of the relationship is set in this scene but parallels between the two continue to be shown through the personal dance styles and singing duets between Kathy and Don. O’Connell 7

Oklahoma! and Signing in the Rain are just two examples that highlight two of the many categories that Altman uses to support the parallels that are shown in movie musicals. These two movie musicals include dream sequences that disrupt the rhythm of the rest of the film. Movie musical dream sequences are also referred to as dream ballet sequences. The sequence does not include any dialogue and strictly showcases the capability of the dancers and the score done by the movie’s musical composers. Dream sequences allow for those that are included to flaunt their talent as well as create a break in the film. During these scenes, the dancers face the conflict that has reached its climax at this point in the story. When the scene ends, the conflict that has been addressed in the dream world most often reaches its resolution in the scenes proceeding the dream sequence.

In Oklahoma! the dream sequence is a result of Laurey taking a sleeping potion that will put her into a temporary deep sleep. Laurey ingests the potion with the hopes of gaining some clarity on the love triangle that she is tangled up in. Through what she sees in the dream she hopes will help her come to a conclusion about her relationship dilemma. When the dream begins, Laurey finds herself walking towards a version of herself. The audience knows that they are a reflection of one another due to the matching costumes and hairstyles. They also make it clear through their mirrored motions until they break away from each other, leaving the Laurey that is played by a dancer and not by the actress Shirley Jones to interact with Curly’s dancer equivalent. The same exchange of actors to dancers is shown when actor Gordon MacRae places his hand on his dancer counterpart. Once the exchange from actor to dance avatar has been made, the dream sequence can officially begin. O’Connell 8

Through the motion that establishes the exchange of characters to actors, the audience witnesses a completely different person taking on the part of the actors that have been on screen until this point in the film. Through the use of a smoke machine and orange and pink lighting and backgrounds the dance is comically whimsical, making it truly a dream sequence. The obviousness of the dreamlike qualities of the scene disrupts what the audience has seen thus far. Altman’s parallels still exist in these sequence through the literal male and female interaction between “dance” Curly and “dance”

Laurey, but it is also breaks past the parallels to show that other people can be in the same conflict and have the same interactions due to the replacement of characters.

The dream sequence in Singing In the Rain that is titled “Broadway Melody” does not replace both of the main characters like the dream sequence in Oklahoma!. Instead,

Gene Kelly is included in the dream sequence but plays a different character than Don

Lockwood. Debby Reynolds is not shown once in the ten-minute dance number and is not substituted by someone else that is meant to represent her. Instead, famous dancer

Cyd Charisse, plays the female lead of the dream sequence. The dream sequence shows

“an imaginary screening launched as Kelly pitches his concept for a number… giving

Kelly strong heterosexual credibility as he meets the sexual challenge offered by Cyd

Charisse in two pair dances.”(Whitesell, 839). The length of the sequences allows for different interactions amongst many dancers as well as an elaborate display of multiple sets that look more like stage sets than movie sets. The set, the dance numbers, the colors, and the costumes emphasize the dreamlike qualities of the “Broadway Melody” that allow for an exaggerated distinction between the real world and the dream world, which also allows for the seduction of the audience through aesthetics and body language. O’Connell 9

Kelly serves as the star of the dream sequence but Cyd Charisse, who pops up multiple times throughout the number, is impossible to forget. Charisse portrays a seductive temptation that Kelly is unable to resist. Although the audience is introduced to a new plot line through the dream sequence, they are not far removed from a connection to the story because Gene Kelly still remains the star. The scene can still evoke emotions from the audience because a familiar face from that has existed throughout the entirety of the film is still there. The new unfamiliar additions are with Cyd Charisse and a new story.

“Undoubtedly, Charisse’s performance exerts a climactic allure, but if you’re not interested in the mating ritual she remains a creature of fascination for different reasons. In her first appearance, as a gangster’s moll: those leg extensions! Those sharp punctuations! Her physical prowess and crushing hauteur; her use of props to toy with Kelly’s masculinity in one outrageous taunting gesture after another. A disregard of sexual content clears the way for sensory and symbolic pleasures offered by the texture of performance (in both dance and music) – matters of artifice, stylization, and the command of cultural codes.”

Once again the parallels that have been laid out by Altman have the opportunity to be questioned in the dream sequence.

There has been no character development between Charisse and Kelly because she is introduced within the realm of the dream world. The replacement of characters does not allow for the same connection that has been made with Kelly and Reynolds to be made between the audience and Charisse. The introduction of the new lead pushes the audience to understand the feelings expressed through the relationship of new main characters not through a developed story line but instead through the dancing and the O’Connell 10 music that Kelly and Charisse engage with, allowing for all viewers to understand the feelings of both Charisse and Kelly.

Both Oklahoma! and Singing in the Rain dive into a new and undiscovered world when they transition from the main plot line of the film and into the dream sequence.

Oklahoma! and Singing in the Rain allow the audience to put themselves into the bodies and plotlines of the main characters by both physically and mentally replacing the main characters with their dancing doubles. This allows for the viewer no matter their resemblance to the character, their gender, or their sexuality, to have the opportunity to temporarily inhabit the character. If the audience becomes witness to the character being replaced, then they too can occupy the body and situation of the character.

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Bibliography:

1. Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1989, c, 1989. EBSCOhost, ezproxy01.bard.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true &db=cat03691a&AN=bard.b1259731&site=eds-live&scope=site.

2. Fieisher, Keith. “A Brief History Of Musicals On Film.” Tams Witmark, www.tamswitmark.com/blog_items/a-brief-history-of-musicals-on-film/.

3. Judith Peraino, and Suzanne G. Cusick. “Music and Sexuality.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 66, no. 3, 2013, pp. 825–872. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2013.66.3.825.

4. Zinnemann, Fred, director. Oklahoma . 1955.

5. Kelly, Gene and Stanley Donen, directors. Singin' in the Rain. MGM, 1952.