If the Nightingale Could Sing Like You
Musicals enjoy a sort of exalted, exceptional status, depending as they do on an approach to drama that has little in common with the Robert McKee-certified story structure form.
I’m not here to kick Eyebrow Man McKee, many of whose “rules” are reasonably commonsensical analyses of how Hollywood dramas in fact work, with every scene contributing to the development of the narrative and the exploration of character. But it’s perhaps significant that the McKee model came to prominence in a time when the movie musical was moribund. Because nothing about musicals really fits in McKee’s thinking, and it’s pretty hard to make them connect smoothly to basic Platonic conceptions of drama.
In a musical, every scene may or may not continue the plot, but it is certain that musical numbers do not have to (see the various examples of musicals that had their songs deleted before release, with no impact on the actual comprehensibility of the narrative). What seems to happen in the typical song, if the song is well-integrated into the story, is that the emotion evoked by a scene is frozen and its moment extended into a musical sequence. The Dennis Potter TV series and film Pennies from Heaven extrapolated this out into treating the songs as daydreams, with everything returning to the point it was at as soon as the song finished. This allowed Potter to explore a more realistic story world while still allowing himself Hollywood-style fantasy.
But most musicals don’t make this explicit, apparently taking place in an alternative universe where people can simply erupt into spontaneous but well-crafted songs in the midst of their daily life, with passers-by getting caught up in the thing as in a kind of mass hysteria.
What these sequences do not do is deliver plot developments. The whole of Gene Kelly’s celebrated Singin’ in the Rain number illustrates only the fact that he’s happy. The encounter with a cop (who, by virtue of his police training, is immune to the song’s infectious properties and merely stares at Kelly like he’s an escaped lunatic) cannot be said to be plot, since it comes from nowhere and leads nowhere (the cop doesn’t even recognize Kelly’s character as the famous movie star he is).
So musical comedies proceed in fits and starts, their narratives interrupted by sudden… well, not digressions, more like extensions. It’s actually helpful if the plots are not too complicated or dramatic, since they’re liable to be interrupted at any moment (which may be why Scorsese’s New York, New York can be uncomfortable viewing at first, not because it tries to merge Cassavetes’ style naturalistic intensity with Freed Unit musical eruptions, but because the story is too anxiety-producing to be put on pause for a tune).
Even when Hollywood was churning out musicals by the dozen, this format was little understood. The otherwise perfect Singin’ in the Rain had one song deleted before release, Debbie Reynolds’ romantic solo being an interruption too far. It’s the kind of thing the filmmakers couldn’t know until they tested the film on an audience. This kind of storytelling had limited use for McKee-style principles of construction, and simply depended on its capacity to deliver varieties of pleasure to an audience, narrative and musical, in the correct proportion, with no formula available to determine how many songs was ideal.
At they exact time that precisely-callibrated pleasure machines like The Band Wagon or The Wizard of Oz were being made, Hollywood was producing many shambolic, ill-thought-out films in which the song-pleasure completely swamped the story-pleasure, with weak narratives incapable of sustaining any sense of forward movement. In The Gang’s All Here, we do not rub our hands with anticipation at the end of a song, replete with pleasure of the musical-visual variety and eager to get back to the plot. We merely tap our feet impatiently, waiting for the next Busby Berkeley routine.
Many films with adequate stories were sunk by a proliferation of production numbers that had no connection whatsoever to their plotlines. Novelty acts would be shuffled on to pad out a movie at random: Lena Horne was assigned to many of these jobs, since it was felt that the southern states might not welcome a film constructed around her: put her in as a cameo and they can delete her if they want to.
Esther Williams was MGM’s biggest box office draw, but she could scarcely dance, her singing was usually dubbed, and her raison d'etre, her spectacular water ballets, were not the kind of entertainment you could easily fill thirty minutes of screen time with. So her movies are perpetually being crashed by guest artistes, be it Ann Miller, Debbie Reynolds or stunt organist Ethel Smith. The effect is generally to disintegrate the movie, turning it into a kind of revue, in which case you have to either resent the story or the interruptions.
Unsuccessful musicals show how strange and difficult the form is, while successful ones seem to just magically work in a gravity-defying way.
The only other film forms which seem to behave like the musical are the porn film and the Dario Argento-style horror movie, each of which depend on the stringing together of set-pieces which can be appreciated without any regard for their narrative surroundings, and which may or may not connect logically to those narratives.
It’s noteworthy that Mr. McKee has had precious little to say about those genres, also.
by David Cairns