Music, the Musical, and Postmodernism in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge Author(s): Ann van der Merwe Source: Music and the Moving Image, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Fall 2010), pp. 31-38 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/musimoviimag.3.3.0031 Accessed: 21-10-2018 20:29 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Music and the Moving Image This content downloaded from 146.57.3.25 on Sun, 21 Oct 2018 20:29:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms From Music and the Moving Image Vol. 3, Issue 3. Music, the Musical, and Postmodernism in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge Ann van der Merwe This essay examines Baz Luhrmann's approach to preexisting music in Moulin Rouge within the broader contexts of the Hollywood musical and postmodernism. Six musical quotations are analyzed in detail, demonstrating specific techniques Luhrmann uses and how they contribute to the work as a whole. Signature elements of the Hollywood musical and of postmodern film are readily identifiable in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge (2001). Its characters not only sing and dance; they do so in the traditional guises of the film musical. Songs function as narrative, as dialogue, and—in the special manner of the backstage musical—as show-within-a-show production numbers. Similarly, Luhrmann's abundant use of pastiche, a typically humorless or blank treatment of preexisting material, exemplifies postmodernism as defined by Fredric Jameson.1 Combined with his disjointed camera work—one manifestation of the fragmentation also recognized by Jameson and others as a hallmark of the postmodern— and his unconventional treatment of time and place—the story is set in Paris circa 1900, but any sense of historical context is minimized by anachronistic references—the film seems an unusually strong candidate for the label postmodern. But if it is a musical, and if it is postmodern, does it follow that Moulin Rouge is a postmodern Hollywood musical? James Leve, in his discussion of the 2002 film version of Chicago, has suggested that director Rob Marshall and his collaborators "understood that the postmodern Hollywood musical needed to incorporate music more realistically than did its Broadway counterpart, and that one does not hear, or listen to, songs in film in the same way as one does in a Broadway musical."2 As a result, Marshall constructed the film so that all of the production numbers—originally situated in a nonrealistic theatrical space known as "limbo"—take place in the imagination of one of the leading ladies, thereby facilitating more realistic storytelling in the context of musical film. Characters do not burst out in song and dance except in Roxie Hart's mind. Marshall's approach, as Leve suggests, was probably the one best suited to Chicago. The realism that makes it work, however, makes one question whether it is truly a postmodern version of the Hollywood musical. The film is innovative, adding freshness to a piece already noteworthy as a departure from the conventions of musical theater and film, but it does not seem postmodern. By virtue of its obvious postmodern traits and its adherence to most conventions of the film musical, Moulin Rouge comes closer to embodying the notion of a postmodern Hollywood musical than does Chicago. Yet even it defies postmodernism in one key way. For someone who relies so extensively on preexisting material, Luhrmann has left an unusually distinctive mark on the film.3 Notably, it is not the eclectic nature of his score that accomplishes this. As he himself recognizes, variety of musical style is certainly germane to his work, but it is neither his most obvious stamp nor his invention. He even acknowledges that his process of song selection is largely indebted to the work of his predecessors. The use of anachronistic musical style, for example, is "a very old idea in musicals," he says, "like when Judy Garland sings 'Clang clang clang went the trolley,' in Meet Me in St. Louis, that's set in 1900. She is singing big band music from the 1940s, the music of her time, to let you into the characters of another time and another place." He further acknowledges that "in an old musical, the audience had a relationship to the music generally before they went in."4 Thus, he recognizes that the incorporation of familiar melodies into a new musical is hardly innovative. Where Luhrmann departs from both the traditions of the Hollywood musical and the collage techniques common to postmodernism is in his choice of songs that cannot be considered popular standards in the conventional sense. The relationship his audience has with these songs is unusually specific. They are not recognizable simply as the romantic ballad or the up-tempo comedy number but as unique entities, songs belonging not only to another time and place but to another performer. They are not only—like "The Trolley Song"—stylistically disconnected from the story's setting; they are also full of connotations related to their original performance contexts. Their interpolation into the film thus carries these meanings into Luhrmann's story and enhances it. It is this dimension of Moulin Rouge that makes it special, for it shows that Luhrmann is as eclectic in his methodology as he is in his musical tastes. He does more than weave together diverse musical strains; he intertwines the scoring practices of the Hollywood musical with the more recent soundtrack film and— perhaps to a lesser extent—the Bollywood musical. This makes his authorial voice unusually present for a postmodern filmmaker, but it also exemplifies the spirit of postmodern eclecticism on a deeper creative level. In the soundtrack film, as Ronald Rodman has articulated, compilation scores "decentre the role of the unique musical work, and draw upon discourses around the musical work such as style and celebrity."5 Luhrmann's score is no different; his musical quotations evoke images of the original performers and their respective celebrity identities. Notably, This content downloaded from 146.57.3.2531 on Sun, 21 Oct 2018 20:29:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms these are frequently as important to his storytelling as are the melodies and lyrics themselves. Every element of the original is significant for Luhrmann, and he went to great lengths to find the best possible matches for his plot. As he notes, he and his collaborators "spent a great deal of time scanning, scanning, and scanning songs to identify which song would actually tell a particular moment or reveal a character."6 In Bollywood, songs play an even more central role than they do in the Hollywood musical. As Heather Tyrrell and Rajinder Dudrah point out, songs come first in the Indian film industry, both literally and figuratively. Film soundtracks are released well before the films in which they will be heard, and the "song-picturisations"—choreographed song-and-dance numbers—are shot before anything else in the film.7 Bollywood productions are thus more similar to the revues and musical comedies seen in American theaters in the early twentieth century than to the Hollywood musicals from a decade or two later, for they are more intimately connected to the marketing of popular songs. Luhrmann's compilation score for Moulin Rouge may not have been designed to popularize the songs represented within it, but its content certainly suggests the kind of marketing more common to Bollywood, Broadway, or even the soundtrack film than to the Hollywood musical. For example, recording stars who do not appear in the film contributed significantly to the marketing of its soundtrack. Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya, and Pink even starred in a music video of "Lady Marmalade" used to promote the film and this new version of the song. Music is also unusually central to Moulin Rouge. It has a symbolic significance and omnipresence found in relatively few musicodramatic works. Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607) is one such example, and one that shares its inspiration with Luhrmann's film. Both are based on the Orpheus myth, a tale ripe with musical references and thus unusually well suited to musical treatment.8 Luhrmann further demonstrates his familiarity with earlier versions of the Orpheus myth when he includes music from Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld (1997). Indeed, Luhrmann's knowledge of opera also shines through in his rather extensive dramatic extractions from La Bohème and La Traviata. Christian may be largely extracted from the Greek myth, but Satine is as similar to La Traviata's heroine as she is to Orpheus's beloved Euridice. He attempts to save her from the Underworld of the Moulin Rouge in Orphic fashion, complete with music. She, however, is not a largely undeveloped character but a courtesan, who—like Verdi's Violetta— falls in love only after considerable convincing and dies before she can fully enjoy her reconciliation with Christian. Of course, setting the film against the backdrop of the Moulin Rouge adds another dimension to the musicality of the plot. Such a locale automatically creates a backstage musical, and several of the songs function as performance numbers within the nightclub.