Steven Cohan,
Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value and the MGM Musical.
Duke University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 8223 3595 6
US$23.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
Steven Cohan’s critique of MGM musicals in the 1940s and 1950s is resounding confirmation of fellow film theoretician Alexander Doty’s conjecture that queer readings are meant to show that “certain films are not the exclusive property of straight culture – that these films are as queer as they are straight… no film is safe” (Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. Routledge, 2000, 15).
To show no film, studio, or era is safe, Cohan develops an idea first suggested in Screening the Male(Routledge, 1993) which he co-edited with Ina Rae Hark, and whose starting point, in turn, is Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Screen 16, 1975, reprinted in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Columbia University, 1986).
Mulvey contends that film codes the erotic into the language of the dominant culture, in which the male figure is active but cannot bear objectification, and the female is passive, displayed, and connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Cohan problematizes this feminist position by citing the Hollywood musical, which consistently displays the male figure, and so also gives it “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Rather than conclude that Fred Astaire rebuts Mulvey’s thesis, Cohan argues that the musical depicts “an alternative style of masculinity – grounded in spectacle and spectatorship” (Screening the Male, 66).
What characterizes that alternative masculinity? Cohan’s answer: where film noir has visual spareness; the musical has visual excess. Incongruous Entertainment is an extended and scholarly elaboration on “visual excess,” or camp.
The MGM musical is camp: the flamboyant style of gay men passing as straight during the studio era, when musicals flourished but homosexuality was censored. Susan Sontag brought the term to intellectual notice in her 1964 essay “Notes on camp,” explaining the term as a sensibility that exalts artifice, exaggeration and extravagance, but not dwelling on its connection to homosexuality. Incongruous Entertainment asserts that camp was well-established theatrical slang for gayness by 1920 and that MGM musicals have a cultish value for gay men today. Indeed (quoting Brett Farmer), “in gay subcultural argot, the term musicals has long been used as a coded reference to homosexuality” (1-2).
In the studio era, of course, this equivalence went quite unnoticed by the moviegoing public. Musicals were family fare, and MGM produced the most lavish ones. Today these musicals are a gaudy, dated, and niche commodity – they are incongruous entertainment.
The segue from family to gay cult fare is not illogical when one considers that MGM’s reputation was built by a large employee force of homosexual, lesbian and bisexual artists, notably associate producer Roger Edens, choreographer Charles Walters and director Vincente Minnelli (46-47). Since the dominant culture was heteronormative and the Motion Picture Code was in force, these artists constituted “a closeted labor force which articulated its presence through a distinctive camp style” that served to undermine the categories of gender and sexuality that marginalized these people (9).
Cohan’s explications of film stars, scenes, costumes and dance numbers are cheeky, intriguing, and revelatory, but often marred by the same excess he ascribes to camp.
His observations are most astute when he enumerates the camp elements in the performances of female stars. Judy Garland, whose enduring gay following is documented in the last chapter, actually lacked feminine glamour: she was short, pudgy, looked androgynous in tramp or clown outfits, and lacked heterosexual rapport when she danced with boys. Debbie Reynolds was tomboyish in overalls. Ann Miller delivered a different sort of incongruity: so brassy and aggressive that dance partners jumped out of her way as she tapped and sang of wanting “any Tom, Dick or Harry,” but most of all, a “Dick.” Eleanor Powell’s trademark tuxedo made her visibly one of the boys; after a backbend and somersault, she “comes to rest with her legs wide apart – a confident stance considered male because of its violation of feminine decorum” (101; 135-136; 142-143). But surely this last statement is injudicious. Legs-wide-apart is also Gwen Verdon’s signature stance in Damn Yankees (US 1958), but while her Lola lacks decorum, she is most emphatically not male.
Cohan has a fashion reporter’s eye for detail – the pink feathered headdress, henna-dyed hair, brocade sequins and standard crotch shots in Ziegfeld Follies (US 1946) – but his conclusions are more open to dispute. The film, he says, reveals “the problematic value of heterosexual femininity in the spectacle of … ostrich feathers [and] glamorized white showgirls … [Lucille] Ball’s interaction with the cat-women unexpectedly raises some queer intimations” and so alerts audiences to the visual incongruity, exaggerated theatricality and ironic wit informing this MGM take on Ziegfeld (56-57). In sum, camp choreography, color, sets and costumes were a distinctive idiom designed both to exploit MGM entertainment values and to undermine their heterosexual bias.
But Ted Sennet, author of Hollywood Musicals (Henry Abrams, 1981) and other books on the performing arts, offers a more skeptical account. As the studio had enlisted every major star on the lot, shooting had to be arranged around conflicting schedules, costly sequences were filmed and then scrapped, others were retained for reasons never made clear. “Out of confusion, helter-skelter decisions, and occasional pandemonium, a musical revue finally emerged, but one so buffeted by the winds of change that it could not be released until February, 1946, nearly two years after production began” (Hollywood Musicals, 225). The outcome was bizarre, bewildering, and unintentionally hilarious.
Cohan’s recklessness is most pronounced in his analysis of Gene Kelly’s “alternative” masculinity. The preponderant view is articulated by collaborator Stanley Donen (“the only song-and-dance man to come out of that period who had balls”), choreographer Twyla Tharp (“massive and much needed vitality, masculinity and athleticism”) and Kelly himself (“What I wanted to do was dance …the way a truckdriver would dance … or a bricklayer, or a clerk, or a postman.”) Not so, says Cohan: musicals craft a “homosocial persona” for Kelly through pairings with male buddies like Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh (US 1945) and Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain (US 1952) who figure as importantly as the female co-stars, and who, set against Kelly’s physique and bravado, appear effete and effeminate. Moreover, since Kelly’s macho posturing attracts the weak male but initially turns off the female (Kathryn Grayson in Anchors Aweigh, Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain), “a tacit homoerotic admiration underlies the buddy bond” (185-166).
Cohan may well be the first film critic to discern effeminacy in a Sinatra performance, but he doesn’t stop there. In Anchors Aweigh‘s “The Worry Song” featuring Kelly with Jerry the Mouse, Kelly’s figure-hugging T-shirt and sailor pants eroticize his body but do not heterosexualize it: “after all, Kelly is dancing with a male mouse and the number is being imagined by a boy’ (171). Which implies that Kelly’s dancing has tinges not just of queerness but of pedophilia and bestiality as well.
And what of Kelly in the greatest film musical of all time? Since Singin’ in the Rain begins with Kelly already coupled with male friend, dance partner and collaborator Donald O’Connor, the numbers that feature the two men with Debbie Reynolds “choreograph multiple possibilities of sexual combination” and the title number, danced solo, “does not express … heterosexual desire as much as … autoerotic pleasure” (188-189).
A simpler, more straightforward reading exists, and it happens to be Kelly’s own. “The reason for the dance is his happiness in winning the girl” (quoted in Tony Thomas, The Films of Gene Kelly, Song and Dance Man, Citadel Press, 1974, 139). And dance numbers that feature multiple partnerings need not signal endless sexual randomness; check out the barn-raising contest in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Cohan says much that is well-researched and thought-provoking, as in his discourse on how Singin’ in the Rain‘s recycling of the Freed and Brown song catalogue mirrors numerous less authorized borrowings from other composers and artistic traditions. But his overall argument remains vulnerable because it diverges so radically from more canonical approaches.
This is not to say that mainstream interpretations are invariably more valid; only that peering too assiduously through a particular lens can distort one’s vision. Other critics approach musicals with a different aesthetic, one that values above all the integration of music, lyrics, character, story line, and dance. Arthur Jackson hails the decline, after Showboat (US 1951) of “interpolated songs … added, dropped or switched around” at the director’s discretion (The Best Musicals, Crown Publishers, 1977, 15). Alan Jay Lerner pays tribute to Cole Porter’s exquisite balancing of sense, rhyme and tune (The Musical Theatre, Collins, 1986, 96). Ethan Mordden lauds George Abbot’s mastery of “how a musical must unfold – what kind of number goes here, when to cue in the dream ballet … how to cut when the scene is sagging” (Coming Up Roses, Oxford, 1998, 38). Pauline Kael celebrates the American musical tradition’s “light satire, the high spirits, the giddy romance, the low comedy, and the unpretentiously stylized dancing” (I Lost it at the Movies, Bantam, 1965, 131). Cohan largely ignores these elements, intentionally reads against integration, and focuses on flamboyance, excess, and incongruity.
Cohan’s findings will appear off-center to audiences brought up on more mainstream readings. Still, they render an overdue service to a marginalized artistic community at MGM half a century ago, and should delight film fans who feel that for too long, they too have viewed from the margins.
Jaime S. Ong
De La Salle University, Manila.
Created on: Monday, 13 November 2006