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What's entertainment? Recent writing on the musical

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Charles Wolfe
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Teaches in the Film Studies Program , University of California , Santa Barbara
Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Charles Wolfe (1985) What's entertainment? Recent writing on the musical, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 10:2, 143-152, DOI: 10.1080/10509208509361256

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 What's Entertainment?
Recent Writing on the Musical
Rick Altman, ed. Genre: The Musical. London:
Charles tion of the Hollywood film,
Wolfe as a genre in which
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 228 pp. $9.95 questions of particular relevance to the study of
paper. Hollywood cinema—the cultural function of en-
tertainment, the interplay of narrative and spec-
Jane Feuer. The Hollywood Musical. Blooming- tacle, the representation of the female body as a
Downloaded by [University of Montana] at 09:30 03 April 2015

ton, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1982. 131
pp. $7.95 paper.
Clive Hirschhorn. The Hollywood Musical. New
York: Crown, 1981. 456 pp. $17.95 cloth.
Ted Sen nett. Hollywood Musicals. New York:
Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981. 384 pp. $50.00
cloth.
Ethan Mordden. The Hollywood Musical. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1981. 260 pp. $15.95
cloth. $8.95 paper.
Reviewing The Pajama Game in 1958, Jean-Luc
Godard described musicals as the idealization of
the kinetic potential of cinema, a genre in which
"everything becomes simply a pretext for the
lines which displace movement.' r/1 Contempo-
rary analysts have refined this notion so as to
treat musicals more specifically as the idealiza-
specular object—are foregrounded, at times
thematicized. If in the past the musical was likely
to be dismissed by sociologically oriented critics
as too slight a genre (in contrast, say, to the
western or gangster film) to warrant systematic
appraisal, the musical has emerged in recent
years as an exemplary object of critical inquiry
by virtue of its ostensible frivolity. The genre's
overt insistence on the "pure" pleasure of song
and dance, of entertainment for entertainment's
sake, desire for desire's, has itself become a
starting point for closer inquiry, as if the very
promise of musicals to entertain and entertain
only might mask the mechanism through which
Hollywood films produce pleasure and repro-
duce ideology.
Two recent publications from the British Film
Institute—Rick Altman's Genre: The Musical and
Jane Feuer's The Hollywood Musical—have
played a major role in consolidating this new
criticism, defining its contours and drafting a
 144 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Spring 1985
roadmap for future work. They are in a sense
complementary books. In Genre: The Musical—
published by Routledge & Kegan Paul as part of
the BFt's Readers in Film Studies series—Altman
assembles thirteen essays, most of which were
first published in English, American, and French
film journals between 1969 and 1981. The range
of topics and critical approaches is broad, and
the degree of theoretical elaboration varied, but
Altman's commentary teases out the relevance of
each essay to the larger question at hand and
provides a useful connective thread, knotted at
the front of the book by a preface and at the
back, loosely, by a postscript. Eager to keep the
field of inquiry as open as possible, he is more
likely to reel off a series of questions than offer
answers; in lieu of offering a conclusion his
postscript outlines four areas for future investiga-
tion. Feuer's book—based on a dissertation writ-
ten under Altman's supervision at the University
of Iowa, and popularized to fit the BFI's some-
what more accessible Cinema Series—picks up a
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theme from Altman's anthology and develops it
into a sharply focused, concentrated argument
about the genre. "The musical is Hollywood writ
large," Feuer asserts in her preface. "Once we
see it this way, the door swings open." From this
vantage point she constructs a theory concerning
the social function of the genre grounded upon
the paradoxical notion that musicals are at once
se If-reflexive and illusionary, formally bold and
thematically conservative, and deftly pursues the
implication of this thesis through a discussion of
specific topics (mass art as folk art, spectatorial
positioning, the function of song lyrics, levels of
fantasy) offering an interrogation of the genre that
never loses sight of—indeed, takes as the genre's
central attribute—its pleasurable effects.
A major premise of both books is that, musi-
cals, long neglected by serious critics, must be
rethought in terms of contemporary theory, and
theory in turn rethought in light of what we
discover about musicals. A recurring observation
by Altman in this regard is the failure of current
theories of the classical Hollywood film, with
their emphasis on linearity and transparency, to
account for the formal structures or aesthetic
effects of musicals. This idea is central to the
essay Altman contributes to the anthology, in
which he argues that New Moon (MGM, 1940)
and Gigi (MGM, 1958) are structured para-
digmatically around sets of cultural oppositions
instead of in a linear, cause-and-effect chain.
Sample transparency, moreover, is explicitly
challenged as an appropriate model for the mu-
sical in essays by Alan Williams on songs and
recorded sound, Jim Collins on modes of address
in the Asta i re-Rogers cycle, and Feuer on self-
reflexivity in three films scripted by Betty
Comden and Adolph Green at MGM (The
Barkleys of Broadway [1949], Singin' in the Rain
[1952], and The Band Wagon [1953]). And it is
implicitly challenged in articles by Robin Wood
on Silk Stockings (MGM, 1957) and Martin
Sutton on the relationship between numbers and
narrative in musicals in general, both of which
stress the capacity of song and dance to exceed
the limits narratives define.
None of the authors argues that these devia-
tions from the classical model constitute radical
breaks: Wood suggests that they allow certain
ideological limits to be momentarily tran-
scended; Altman, Feuer, Collins, Williams, and
Sutton all propose that they can be seen as
elaborate strategems to fix the spectator more
securely within ideological boundaries. But the
possibility that musicals may open a certain
space for critical work, may offer—in contrast to
works that are more unified and less formally
complex—a privileged glimpse at the underlying
processes of pleasure production in Hollywood
cinema is a notion the authors included in this
anthology are repeatedly drawn to consider.
What exactly is at stake then in analyzing the
challenge musicals offer to the notion that Hol-
lywood films are invariably linear, homoge-
 WOLFE / What's Entertainment?
neous, and transparent? Is there anything more to
be noted here than the neglected complexity of
the genre? Can musicals, as earlier critics have
argued for melodrama, undermine as well as
reinforce dominant beliefs?2
Thomas Elsaesser's dexterous essay on
Vincente Minnelli, written for the Brighton Film
Review in 1969, is particularly intriguing with
respect to this question in that the conceptual
framework he constructs for dealing with the
director centers on the relationship between
Minnelli's musicals and melodramas. The logic
of Hollywood films, Elsaesser proposes, is built
around psychic rather than intellectual patterns
of coherence, and in that respect Hollywood
cinema resembles music. Thus musicals might
be said to tap most directly the fundamental
drives underlying all Hollywood films. While the
quest formula that is repeated across genres like
westerns and gangster films rationalize or subli-
mate the psychical pressure of desire, musicals
allow that pressure to play on the very surface of
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the text. In Minnelli's films this is thematicized
through the aspiration of characters (artists and
neurotics) to find material form—a mise en
scène—to live up to the boldness of their imag-
inations. While Minnelli's melodramas place
these values in conflict with another order of
reality, his musicals provide a space where they
can triumph; the melodramas thus can be seen
as musicals turned inside out. But the triumph of
mise en scène in Minnelli's musicals, Elsaesser
notes, is not a resolution, is not "achieved," but
rather it is "radically relativised as process—a
permanent becoming."
Altman places Elsaesser's piece as the lead-off
essay in his anthology, and one can immediately
see why. Composed at a key juncture in the
evolution of criticism of the Hollywood film,
when auteurist study was yielding to genre crit-
icism, it uncannily anticipates the shift toward a
psychoanalytic explanation for the pleasure of
film spectatorship later in the decade.3 More-
145
over, Elsaesser makes a clear case for the música
as a privileged genre, as exploiting most directly
the structures of desire that make film viewing
pleasurable and difficult to analyze. (The world
of musicals, he observes, consciously reworking
Godard's earlier assertion, is "a kind of ideal
image of the medium itself, the infinitely variable
material substance on which the very structure of
desire and the imagination can imprint itself,
freed from all physical necessity."4) Finally,
Elsaesser touches on, albeit somewhat obliquely,
the central difficulty of reading musicals as
wholly progressive or regressive forms: unlike
melodramas, musicals are not bound by material
social limits, nor do they propose how the Uto-
pian visions they trade in can be achieved. What
then does one make of the genre's acknowledg-
ment of a desire that "ordinary" social systems
leave unfulfilled, and that "logical" plots repress
or sublimate? Writing in 1970 within an auteurist
framework, Elsaesser attributes this ambiguity to
Minnelli's fundamental "morality," to the
auteur's social sense. Elsaesser's fascination with
the genre is thus circumscribed by his respect for
the director. (In a brief introduction to the essay,
written for its republication in Altman's book,
Elsaesser offers an incisive analysis of his own
critical footwork in this regard.) Rereading the
piece in the context of the issues that Altman's
anthology raises, we might wonder what this
suggests about the genre itself, its capacity to do
something other than reinscribe the spectator
within the status quo.
This question is confronted directly in a later
entry in Altman's anthology, Richard Dyer's "En-
tertainment and Utopia" (first published in
Movie in 1977). Dyer, like Elsaesser, posits the
existence of a deeper level of structuration in
musicals, manifest in what Dyer refers to as the
"non-representational." The feeling of utopia in
musicals, he argues, is dependent upon the
orchestration of elements of music and mise en
scène that respond to the coded modes of per-
 14ft QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Spring 1985
ception of a given era and culture, elements
which need to be distinguished from the repre-
sentational (plot, character, settings) if we are to
understand the problematic relationship be-
tween musicals and ideology. While elements of
Utopian sensibility respond to real inadequacies
in society (abundance to scarcity, energy to
exhaustion, intensity to dreariness, transparency
to manipulation, community to fragmentation),
these needs are delimited and defined by the
commercial apparatus through which Holly-
wood films circulate. The power of capitalism to
deny the legitimacy of certain needs and reaffirm
the importance of those it is prepared to meet,
Dyer argues, should not blind us however to two
sets of contradictions in musicals: first, contra-
dictions between the inadequacies defined by
the narrative and the Utopian sensibility of the
numbers; second, between representational and
non-representational signs themselves. In Funny
Face (Paramount, 1956), for example, the num-
bers offer another order of experience where
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narrative conflict between art and entertainment
is suddenly dissipated, a perfect example of what
critics of the genre would label escapism. But,
Dyer notes, there are also contradictions within
the utopia of the numbers, between the represen-
tational dreariness of a night club and the non-
representational "oomph of music and move-
ment," or between the representational allusions
to manipulative fashion photography and the
non-representational transparency of Astaire's
singing. Thus even as Funny Face unspools a
conservative scenario, in which an "intellectual"
heroine (Audrey Hepburn) finally capitulates to a
fashion plate image cast for her by a photogra-
pher (Fred Astaire), its contradictions remain
visible. Most musicals may try to make these
contradictions disappear, Dyer argues, but they
often do not succeed.
Dyer's own example of a progressive musical
(on a relative scale) is not Funny Face, but On the
Town (MGM, 1949) a film that "shows people
making utopia rather than just showing them
from time to time finding themselves in it."
Drawing on Ernst Bloch's distinction between
"dramatic" and "lyrical" modes of utopianism—
between the temporal movement toward the
moment of utopia and a spatial sense of that
moment's content—Dyer calls for musicals that
mix the "historicity of narrative" (dramatic, tem-
poral) with the "lyricism of numbers." One
might, take exception to his example here (in
what sense do we see the three sailors in On the
Town, in any logical sense, "making" utopia?),
but the broader question raised here is instruc-
tive. Dyer splits the notion of musical signs into
representational and non-representational cate-
gories in order, in the final analysis, to make a
new argument for the importance of the return of
the representational in any progressive reading of
the text; Utopian sensibility must be "integrated"
into the narrative, must be wedded to social
action. Thus while textual disruptions or contra-
dictions may demonstrate the complexity of the
mechanisms of musicals, they do not clarify the
matter of progressive or regressive ideology.
Jane Feuer in The Hollywood Musical comes to
a similar conclusion. Musicals are se If-reflexive,
she proposes, not simply because they often take
as their subject matter the nature and importance
of the experience of singing and dancing, but also
because they frequently contain the kind of
"alienation" effects—fragmented space, multiple
diegeses and divided characters, direct address—
that are associated with modernist, non-trans-
parent art. Yet these strategies appear to serve a
profoundly conservative notion of what a trans-
formed, Utopian world might consist of. "The
goals of musicals and those of Godard must surely
be opposed," she notes. "But—as in the case of
direct address—their methods are identical. How
can this be?"5 The answer, she proposes, resides
in matters of context, both the broader operations
of the text in which a specific figure like direct
address operates, and allusions to a tradition of
 WOLFE / What's Entertainment?
entertainment to which an instance of direct ad-
dress might refer. (She illustrates this with per-
suasive analyses of The Bandwagon, Gigi, The
Pirate [MGM, 1947] and Dames [Warners,
1935].) Thus while Feuer borrows the vocabulary
and the conceptual framework of much contem-
porary theory concerning narrativity and ideol-
ogy, she also challenges the dichotomy between
"classical" and "modernist" cinema, Hollywood
and the avant-garde, upon which this theory has
in part been constructed. One lesson to be
learned from studying the musical closely, she
proposes, is that ideology cannot be determined
simply though an analysis of formal strategies. In
the case of musicals, strategies of démystification
serve to establish an illusion of revelation, of au-
thenticity, which in turn serves the goal of
remystification to which the genre is invariably
committed.
Underlying these varying assessments of mu-
sicals and ideology, then, is the modernist/realist
polarity that has pervaded ideological criticism of
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the arts throughout much of this century. For if
these authors challenge the classical model,
which places Hollywood films on the "realist"
side of the paradigm, they also appear rather
transfixed by it: Why be surprised by the conser-
vative function of modernist effects unless one
assumes that modernist effects are progressive in
the first place? Here the call to rethink theory in
light of the evidence of musicals could not be
more to the point. What is necessary, and for the
most part lacking from this criticism, is a theory of
spectatorship, and a theory of historical change,
which might make an interpretation of social
function less speculative and less ambiguous.
What, for example, is the relationship of a
historicized spectator to the various patterns
dissected by these critics? When we speak of
social function, is that function assumed to be
true for a general audience during a film's initial
distribution? For a general audience today? For a
contemporary audience sensitive to contempo-
147
rary critical issues? Are contradiction, or ruptures
in the text, at some level apparent to all general
audience? When Altman claims in his introduc-
tion that "Not only is the musical a Gesamt-
kunstwerk, an art form more total than even
Wagner could imagine, but it regularly invites us
to consider why we spend our time watching
films, what we find in them, how they form our
values and psychology," who does he assume
" w e " to be? Students of the musical only? Are all
invited, but only a few prepared to respond? Or
does even the casual viewer participate in a
musical differently from the way he or she par-
ticipates in watching other kinds of films? Altman
hedges his bets (and considering the state of
contemporary theory it is not a bad bet to hedge),
settling for a notion of the musical which recov-
ers the ambiguity in the etymology of "entertain-
ment"—at once an invitation to a conversation
and a strategy of diversion, perhaps delusion. He
seems reluctant to take a stand as to whether or
not the social function of the genre is regressive;
his position is somewhere between that of cele-
brant of the genre's complexity and communal
values and that of the social analyst warning us
of its traps. His answer to this paradoxical posi-
tion, finally, is to argue for the pleasure of
intellectual engagement with the intricacies of
the form, for the value of studying it critically in
light of its complexities as a formal and social
object and the potential yield of that study for
future criticism.
Eloquent and persuasive in situating her argu-
ment within contemporary critical debates,
Feuer is similarly vague concerning the exact
role of the spectator in the process of remystifica-
tion. A symptom of this fuzziness is the varying
ways the term "cancellation" is used throughout
the book.6 On occasion, Feuer seems to mean by
the term that strategies of mystification nullify
those of démystification before the audience is
aware of them. Thus she proposes: "Engineering
as the mode of production of the Hollywood
 148 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Spring 1985
musical is cancelled by a content relying heavily
upon bricolage. We lose all sense of the calcu-
lation lying behind the numbers and we gain, as
a bonus, the aura of absolute spontaneity/' 7 On
other occasions, she uses cancellation in such a
way as to suggest a temporal process whereby
material elements of production are counterbal-
anced, neutralized. (Hence not simply mystifica-
tion, but remystification.) Feuer analyzes the
"Get Happy" number from Summer Stock
(MGM, 1950), for example, in terms of the
sequence's capacity to close a certain gap be-
tween audience and performer and to renegoti-
ate the economic agreement between spectator
and Hollywood; or claims of A Star Is Born
(Warners, 1954) that "Démystification splits
open the narrative, exposes the world backstage,
speaks in the first person. But the narrative gets
sutured back together again for the final bow." 8
On the one hand, she seems to want to argue that
the ethos of entertainment and pursuit of plea-
sure that fuels consumption of the musical in
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effect prohibits the possibility of any spectatorial
distance on the performances and the structures
supporting them ("all sense" of calculation is
lost, spontaneity is perceived as "absolute"). On
the other hand, a primary motive for writing the
book appears to be her conviction that spectato-
rial activity for a musical film is fairly complex,
that the fluctuation between démystification and
remystification makes the operations of the mu-
sical particularly compelling. Her superb analy-
sis of the way in which musical passages that
have already been "naturalized" in nontheatri-
cal settings often are blocked out so as to call our
attention to mock prosceniums—doorways, win-
dows, and balustrades—before a sense of pri-
vacy and intimacy is reestablished, would sug-
gest that it is not simply the desire for
transparency which is at the center of Hollywood
musicals' particular appeal and power, but rather
the sensation of working through artifice. Or
perhaps there is a certain tensile play between
artifice and authenticity, qualities which at cer-
tain moments mutually support one another in a
state of "utopian" suspension. At the very least it
suggests that remystification is the by-product of
a dynamic exchange between film and spectator.
Equally in need of development is a way of
conceptualizing changes and mutations in musi-
cal form. Altman claims in his introduction that
the anthology sheds new light on the musical's
history, theory, and meaning, but while the
essays greatly illuminate the last two topics there
seems to be scant coverage of the first. Those
essays that do raise questions of historical deter-
mination (Mark Roth's discussion of communal
relations in the Warners-Berkeley musicals, and
Collins's highly suggestive analysis of modes of
address in the Asta i re-Rogers cycle) basically rely
on conventional assessments of the escapist lure
of thirties musicals during the Great Depression.
And it is only in Altman's postscript that specific
historical questions (most provocatively in terms
of technology) get raised.9
In her final chapter, "The History of the
Hollywood Musical: Innovation as Conserva-
tion," Feuer addresses the question of historical
change head on, but she does so only to
minimize its relevance to her account of the
genre's function. She briefly considers a model
for "internal" change within genres based on a
series of successive stages—experimental, clas-
sical, parodie, and deconstructive—but argues
that the musical, in contrast to other genres, is
"congenitally self-reflexive" (neither more or
less so early or late), and that its explicit function
to glorify American entertainment forecloses the
possibility of its assuming a self-critical or
socially critical posture. Musicals thus use
intertextual allusions differently from other
genres: through a process of "quotation and
cancellation" musicals allude to past forms only
to deny any difference from those of the present;
innovation in musical entertainment may be
played off quainter forms from the past, but a
 WOLFE / What's Entertainment?
Utopian resolution effaces all discontinuities in
the representation of history within the text.
In order to hold fast to her thesis on the level of
genre history, Feuer is forced to become increas-
ingly abstract. She does not attempt to analyze,
for example, changes in the syntax, structure, or
subject matter of musicals over time; or divisions
of class, age, or gender in the audience; or the
transformation of the mediating systems through
which musical entertainment is transmitted. She
acknowledges these differences exist, but as-
sumes these changes to be less important histor-
ically than what she perceives as the unchanging
function of the genre. To keep a fix on this
constant factor, it is necessary for her to see
musicals both before and after the "golden age"
of the 1930s and 1940s (from which she draws
most of her examples in the preceding chapters)
as aspiring to the condition of those to come or
those now past. She sidesteps the question of
changes in styles of music—and also audiences
for music—in the 1950s by noting that Fred
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Astaire in the "Ritz Roll and Rock" number from
Silk Stockings seems unaffected by any cultural
divisions. If the "energy and heart" seemed to go
out of the film musical in the 1950s, she argues,
this is simply because the center of the musical
as entertainment form was shifting to television.
Film musicals are treated in the end as a
subgenre of a broader entertainment form that
embraces theatre and electronic media as well as
movies. The historical context Feuer works with
here thus is wholly defined by the transition from
folk to mass art forms in the 19th century; in the
aftermath of this transition there is only one,
all-embracing intertext—commercial entertain-
ment—which never truly changes, but simply
finds different technological guises.
However useful this may be to the construc-
tion of a broad theory of entertainment and mass
culture, this shift to higher level of abstraction
renders her original object of study—the Holly-
wood musical—indistinct, muting the impressive
149
specificity of her earlier criticism. Moreover, her
notion of the inviolability of the entertainment
juggernaut comes close to enveloping her own
critical analysis: with disarming candor she lists
the very book she is writing as an example (along
with television shows, star biographies, and
sound track albums, and the MGM Grand Hotel)
of the quotation and recycling of musical mate-
rial across different media. But surely Feuer
does not believe that her own work "quotes"
only to "cancel." In lieu of the insistent (and
frequently recycled) musical assertion, "That's
Entertainment," Feuer and Altman both pause to
consider what entertainment might be thought to
be in the first place. Why study musicals? Be-
cause, these critics reply, musicals are uniquely
marked by contradictory impulses and formal
complexities which can tell us something about
Hollywood cinema and our theories concerning
it. What one needs is an angle, a perspective on
the material, and this Feuer clearly provides.
If a historical approach to the film musical has
not been recently favored by critics housed in
academia, it may in part be because of the
reputation that genre history has acquired from
the glut of survey books catering to a nostalgia
for old Hollywood. Several recent books of this
kind, published concurrently with those of Alt-
man and Feuer, illustrate in interesting ways how
musical material, as Feuer proposes, becomes
recycled in different forms. Within the general
category of the "coffee table" book, Clive
Hirschhorns The Hollywood Musical and Ted
Sennett's Hollywood Musicals claim special sta-
tus; Hirschhorn's on grounds of comprehensive-
ness ("1,344 Films Described and Illustrated . . .
Every Hollywood Musical from 1927 to the
Present Day," the cover informs us), Sennett's in
terms of "quality" (the color and density of the
photographs, the texture of the paper, an overall
grandness of scale). These specific—and lim-
ited—claims are justified. Hirschhorn's book is a
 150 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Spring 1985
valuable sourcebook: the range of titles clearly
exceeds all other reference guides in combina-
tion, and the book is thoroughly cross-indexed
for song and music titles as well as "creative"
personnel. (My only complaint is that one must
wade through a prose description of each film in
order to locate the credits, and Hirschhorn—in
contrast to John Russell Taylor and Arthur Jack-
son in The Hollywood Musical (1971), a less
comprehensive forerunner to Hirschhorn's vol-
ume—rarely notes who performed which songs,
and makes no mention of running times.)
Sennett's book similarly will not disappoint any-
one interested in meticulously reproduced pro-
duction stills. Little space is wasted on facts and
figures, but the overall design is luxurious; it's a
great book to visit if you want to examine the
graphics of a lobby card, or recall what a set
looked like, or the color of a gown. A work of
nostalgic reverie marketed as an Abrams
artbook, it seeks to win respect for genre—as an
MGM musical from the forties might have tried—
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by the grandeur of its production values.
What are we to make, then, of the writing of
these authors, of Hirschhorn's introductory sur-
vey or of the text accompanying Sennett's illus-
trations? One might simply ignore these, except
that what both authors offer is precisely that
compendium of cliches and received knowledge
that conventionally passes for history, and both
write in the assured tone of complete authority.
They reiterate the standard decade-by-decade
"evolutionary" approach of survey history—Ex-
perimentation in the late Twenties, Escape from
the Depression in the Thirties, the Golden Years
of the Forties, the Decline in the Fifties, Near
Extinction in the Sixties and Seventies—with
"creative geniuses" responsible for major inno-
vations along the way. Sennett's commentary,
which is more extensive than Hirschhorn's, is not
entirely unperceptive about specific films, but a
historical sense of the genre's form or social
function is lacking. Indeed, Sennett's overt at-
tempt to invoke the experience of musicals for
his readers supports Feuer's argument concern-
ing the inclination of musicals to erase historical
boundaries, to transcend any notion of past and
present. "The music is beginning. The credits are
starting to roll," Sennett writes in his introduc-
tion, and with the directness of a musical song
lyric invites the reader to "Come celebrate with
me." Then, having exhausted his decade-by-
decade assemblage of production stills, Sennett
notes in his final paragraph that even though it
may be rare to find an "acceptable" musical
today, "the treasure trove of Hollywood musicals
from the past remains a glowing gift every gen-
eration can inherit . . . By now they have moved
beyond memory, beyond nostalgia, to carry us
aloft forever on wings of songs."10 Now that's a
happy ending.
Ethan Mordden's The Hollywood Musical is a
work of greater literary ambition. Mordden's
criticism is meant to dazzle, not the grey, dupey
illustrations clustered at several points through-
out the book, and he is willing to at least strike
the pose of a revisionist historian, to challenge
the orthodox historical surveys by decentering
the canon of the purported "golden years." He
places much greater stress, for example, on the
variety of forms to which the genre was open in
the early years of talkies, and offers a detailed
appraisal of the social and aesthetic implications
of operetta and rock musicals, two subgenres
that celebrants of the MGM musicals in the
1940s have had a difficult time assimilating into
any overall theory of appropriate musical style.
More often than not, however, Mordden sim-
ply indulges in glib taste-making, praising this
film, dismissing that, at times even resorting to
name-calling (anyone who doesn't find
Pinnochio as moving as the author, we are told,
is a "jerk"). He frequently seeks to imitate the
telegraphic style of a show biz producer ("Do
like The Sound of Music: big Broadway property,
big stars, big score, big money, big hit") and he
 WOLFE / What's Entertainment?
has a penchant for dropping articles ("Still,
where's pizazz?) and using adjectives for nouns
("Too much nice dulls The Harvey Girls . . . "),
tactics no doubt designed to give the book some
punch, but which result in prose that at times
seems both vulgar and arch. And whatever
Mordden's ambitions to expand the scope of
discussion about musicals, his history follows the
same evolutionary model. Feigning an a priori
viewpoint on unfolding developments, he invites
the reader to imagine Hollywood searching for
that "something" that will allow the musical to
find its "true" form, then notes how the musical
"loses" and "regains" its center at various key
moments over the years. 42nd Street remains the
watershed film: before it musicals are "chaotic
but rich in spontaneity"; after they bear the
"touch of the assembly line." The Asta i re-Rogers
dance musicals reorder the genre's priorities.
Some new stars carry the ball into the forties as
the "story musical" allows the musical to regain
its formal identity. And so forth, on into the
Downloaded by [University of Montana] at 09:30 03 April 2015
decline in the fifties and sixties. Mordden covers
many more musicals, and different kinds of
musicals, but he sticks close to the standard
catalogue of types and chronology of key events.
Interestingly enough, at the end of the book
Mordden comes up with a formula for historical
change in the musical that bears a certain resem-
blance to Feuer's. Consider the following pas-
sage:
[Bette] Midler and The Rose are, in a sense,
the latest event in a history of transformation
through stasis: Jolson, in steady helpings,
broke the ground for West, while Astaire
readied the stage for Kelly, while Chevalier's
finesse necessitated the clumsiness of
Crosby, and then Garland grew up to con-
nect the aggressiveness of Eleanor Powell
with the innocence of Alice Faye, and then
Streisand claimed Brice's unplayed cards,
dealing in Midler, while Minnelli took over
151
for Garland by right of genes. Nobody
changed character from role to role: that's
stasis. But each role-player enlarges possi-
bilities in the game.11
Mordden, like Feuer, is attempting here to con-
ceptualize the relationship between change and
continuity by focusing on the legacy of an enter-
tainment tradition, on the internal processes of
the musical's "intertext" rather than social or
technological transformations. But their descrip-
tions of this process—Mordden's "transforma-
tion through stasis," Feuer's "innovation as con-
servation"—while responding to the paradox
inherent in the very concept of genre as a
historical (that is to say changing) form, read this
paradox somewhat differently, Mordden imply-
ing that roles are transformed despite stasis,
Feuer that innovation is a cover for the status
quo. Moreover, while Mordden's application of
his paradoxical formulation places us wholly
inside this process, enjoying both the
role-playing and the enlarged possibilities of the
game, Feuer offers a critical perspective, warning
us that a sense of enlarged possibilities is an
illusion, part of a game whose boundary lines are
difficult to see.
Yet for all of Mordden's delight in the game
here, it is interesting to note that he insists on
ending on a pessimistic note about the genre's
future, and finally succumbs to nostalgia in the
vein of Sennett and Hirschhorn. If the musical
hasn't much of a future, Mordden concludes,
let's enjoy its past, because: "Nice thing to have,
a past. Nice to consider who you were, in times
when it isn't easy to be what you are," 12 This is
considerably more sober than Sennett's finale,
but Mordden nevertheless makes it clear that his
is a work of preservation and connoisseurship in
an age of uncertainty, perhaps even psychic
dislocation. In contrast, Feuer in the end ex-
presses hope that her book has provided a con-
ceptual framework for dealing with the central
 152 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Spring 1985
contradiction fueling the genre's survival. Alt-
man, moreover, ends on a veritable flurry of
questions yet to be addressed, a utopia of bound-
less work to be done. Dissecting the genre
instead of embalming it, Feuer and Altman pro-
pose a future of scholarly and critical engage-
ment.
Charles Wolfe teaches in the Film Studies Pro-
gram at the University of California, Santa
Barbara.
NOTES
1. Godard on Godard (New York: The Viking
Press., 1972)., p. 87.
2. See for example Elsaesser's own, highly influ-
ential, essay, "Tales of Sound and Fury" (Monogram
No. 4, 1972, pp. 2-15) in which he draws a connec-
tion between discontinuities and contradictions in the
Downloaded by [University of Montana] at 09:30 03 April 2015
Hollywood melodrama of the fifties and the demise of
an "affirmative culture" in America. Also see David
Morse, "Aspects of Melodrama," Monogram No. 4,
1972, pp. 16-17; Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Minnelli
and Melodrama," Screen 18:2, Summer 1977, pp.
113-18; and Laura Mulvey, "Douglas Sirk and Melo-
drama," Sirk, Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972.
3. Elsaesser's argument, composed several years
in advance of Raymond Bellour's formulation of a
blocage symbolique—the blocking out of all narratives
around an Oedipal scenario—thus proposes that mu-
sicals foreground a deeper, more abstract, level of
structuration than psychoanalytically informed models
of the classical Hollywood text have generally ac-
knowledged. Patricia Mellencamp has similarly sug-
gested that spectacle in musical might be thought of as
a "primary process," and narrative and the filmic
apparatus as "secondary processes." See "Spectacle
and Spectator: Looking Through the American Musical
Comedy," Cine-tracts No. 2, pp. 27-35.
4. Elsaesser in Altman, p. 16.
5. Feuer, p. 36.
6. In earlier versions of this formulation, Feuer
has the term "erasure" instead of "cancellation." See
Feuer's "Mass Art as Folk Art," Jump Cut No. 23, pp.
23-24; and her dissertation, The Hollywood Musical:
The Aesthetics of Spectator Involvement in an Enter-
tainment Form (University of Iowa, 1978).
7. Feuer, p. 7.
8. Ibid., p. 44.
9. Altman has recently proposed a model for
generic transformation based on the shifting relation-
ship between "semantic" elements and "syntactic"
bonds as a genre changes shape over time. Thus the
history of the musical film during the period 1927 to
1930, he notes, can be mapped in terms of a backstage
semantics being wedded to a melodramatic syntax,
with new syntactic structures based on coupling, com-
munity, and the acknowledged pleasures of entertain-
ment emerging during the course of the following
decade. See Rick Altman, "A Semantic/Syntactic Ap-
proach to Film Genre," Cinema Journal 23, No. 3,
Spring 1984, pp. 6-18. A forthcoming book by Altman
on genre criticism, history, and theory as seen through
the study of the musical film (to be published by
Indiana University Press) promises to develop this
model much more fully.
10. Sennett, pp. 14, 367.
11. Mordden, p. 231.
12. Ibid., p. 232.