The Aesthetics of Sex and the Death of the Hollywood Musical
He’s fallen in love with the girl next door, pretty but not a knockout. We’ll cast, say, Sandra Bullock or Meg Ryan in this role. The sequence leading to our scene involves the man discovering that he has fallen in love with the woman and that, even better, she loves him back.
Still, she being a nice girl and he being an All-American guy, they do not consummate the relationship. Our hero, however, is so wired up with the electrical signals of love and so overcome with sexual desire that he simply has to release it or risk going insane. He leaves her at her doorstep and steps into the car. So overcome with “the need,” he pulls down his pants and proceeds to masturbate.
What’s that, you say? This scene is completely unimaginable? You could never get a star of the magnitude of Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks to resort to autoeroticism rather than actually getting the girl?
Perhaps.
Okay, let’s instead go back to, say, the 1950s. Instead of Hanks or Cruise let’s cast another All-American type actor, Gene Kelly. And we’ll cast one of the cinema’s last true Sweethearts, Debbie Reynolds, as his girl.
Overcome with love and lust, Gene just has to release that pent-up energy. So he leaves little Debbie at her doorstep and walks into the street and…masturbates in the most beautifully symbolic fashion ever put on the screen in America.
The wasteful sperm-like falling water, the phallic umbrella, the fact that he is dancing and singing ALONE and then of course the kicker ending: Being caught by an authority figure-a policeman, no less-and being made to close his umbrella with that perfect little guilty shrug that Kelly adds. If the most famous scene in movie musical history isn’t a masturbatory fantasia, I don’t know what is.
Anyone who has ever seen the sequence where Cyd Charisse undresses and dresses in Silk Stockings has clearly been witness to a far more erotic piece of cinema than watching Demi Moore’s silicone-injected breasts bouncing up and down in all their seminude glory in Striptease.
Cyd’s dance scene is a masterpiece of simplicity. Just Cyd doing her amazing moves alone in a room with some fairly standard music sans lyrics. There’s no need for her to sing for us to know what’s going on in her mind.
Her elegance and clothing tell us all we need to know about her character: This cold Russian fish is getting ready to lose her virginity. And she does so spectacularly to none other than Fred Astaire himself just a few minutes down the road in the famous scene in which she sometimes is wearing a dress and she sometimes is wearing culottes.
No matter what she’s wearing, however, there’s still far more eroticism at work when Cyd Charisse is dancing than there is watching any actress who came after her slink around in her underwear or less.
Before the introduction of the R-rated movie, the only place filmgoers could go to watch uninhibited sex scenes (to a point) were musicals. Whether it was Astaire and Rogers engaging in classy foreplay or Gene Kelly and any number of partners in outright jazzy intercourse, the classic Hollywood musical was really the only movie genre in which unmarried partners were allowed to touch, fondle and make love, if only symbolically.
Take as an example the rousing and rightly famous barn-raising scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This little gem contains in miniature the entire courtship ritual, including girlish flirtation, macho strutting and a competition at which males show what tricks they can do with their tool.
(An axe in this case, which is jumped over and tossed blade-side up at a waiting target). Contrast this with any number of recent movies which are in total about nothing more than the courtship rituals among teenagers.
Yes, there’s certainly more flesh being shown and the innocence of a 50’s musical is far from view, but when it’s all over which versions linger in the memory? Forty years from now will anyone be able to remember which guy Jennifer Love Hewitt could hardly wait for? Yet few who have ever seen Seven Brides are likely to forget the sheer exuberance of the barn-raising dance scene even if they don’t fully grasp the subtle sexual undertones of the scene.
The point being made here is that with few exceptions there have been no successful musicals made in Hollywood since all the taboos began falling away in the 60s. There seems to be a reason for this that goes beyond the tired old explanation that there just aren’t any more creative songwriters left in Hollywood.
Disney’s yearly bacchanalia of moneymaking animation certainly proves that wrong, almost annually winning the best score and best song Oscars. And what of Broadway, which every year or two seems to produce yet another enormous hit musical which enters our collective unconscious even if we’ve never seen it or even heard a song from it?
I know few people who could name a song besides “Memory” from Cats but I know even fewer who have never heard of the musical in the first place.
So we know there are talented songsmiths still out there who would probably jump at the chance to pen some hits for a new old-fashioned musical, just as there are no doubt thousands of writers who would sacrifice their firstborn for the chance to write the book. And don’t sit there and look me in the eye and tell me that there aren’t untold numbers of actors and actresses who’d be chomping at the bit to become a latter day Gene Kelly or Cyd Charisse.
So why did the classic old-fashioned Hollywood musical die? Sexuality has always existed in the movies even if it hasn’t always been as explicit since the fall of the old Hays Code. Sexuality was touched upon implicitly and subtly in just about every genre, from gangster movies to screwball comedies. But it was in the big budget musicals that sexuality came closest to being explicit. Dancing has always been regarded throughout history as an exceptionally emotional art form.
You can almost guess from the way the person is dancing exactly what emotion he or she is feeling. This was made even more obvious in the movies with the lyrics being sung over the dancing sequence.
Astaire and Rogers were consummating their innocent relationship every time they stepped out on the floor together. They were saying to the audience, “We can’t really show you what we want to do to each other, but we’ll give you a great big hint when you watch us trip the light fantastic.”
The movie musical is both the corniest and the most sexually explicit movie genre in Hollywood’s long history. It was also one of the most successful and yet for all intensive purposes it died in the 1960s.
Why?
The fall of the Hays Code and the rise of truly explicit sexuality onscreen coincide with the last gasp for the classic Hollywood musical. The 60’s began with the incredibly successful West Side Story, which contains several musical sequences designed to show the sexuality at work in teenagers in New York. The 60’s ended with a handful of big budget glossy musicals that bombed both critically and commercially.
Oddly enough the only successful musicals of the late 60s were The Sound of Music and Oliver!, two saccharine stories of children and their overseers. Between West Side Story and The Sound of Music came such “adult” dramas of sexuality as The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and, especially, Midnight Cowboy. Audiences no longer had to guess what the lovers onscreen were doing, they were being shown exactly what lovers do when the sexual tension becomes too great to handle.
My theory is that with the lapse of a moral code to keep sexuality from being shown in greater detail on the screen there came a lessening need for the musical genre and its metaphorical display of the sex act. Audiences grew disenchanted with a style of movie that was becoming dated and hackneyed.
The sophistication of the movie going public was growing greater and they expected more from Hollywood than just people tapping out love signals to each other. They wanted to see everything and Hollywood was supplying sustenance to that need by becoming more and more open with the aesthetics of sexuality as the years went by and the musicals started coming around less and less.
Interestingly, two of the three most successful musicals of the 70s were quite explicitly about sexuality: Cabaret and All That Jazz. These were movies in which the dance sequences were quite explicit in what they were supposed to be about, there was no denying or hiding from the truth.
The third musical which captured audiences’ imagination in the 70’s was Grease, a movie that was a throwback to the simpler musicals of the 50s and which became successful in part because of the sexual tension involved in many of the dance sequences and in part because of the general corniness of the rest of the movie.
The general expense of a musical, the lack of the kind of talented songwriters who existed in the ’30s and ’40s and the rise of rock and roll as the music of choice among the young may all have played a part in the death of the Hollywood musical genre, but I think a more accurate reading of what caused the downfall lies in the theory that the musical was a sexual form of expression that became obsolete with the increasing explicitness of sex scenes in other genres.
Perhaps this also explains why the musical is still Broadway’s bread and butter. Although sex scenes have gotten more explicit onstage, they are nothing like the sex scene in your average movie.
There may still exist an audience that wants to see the sexual act portrayed more subtly and with greater skill than is seen in most movies.
The film version of Bob Fosse’s Broadway hit Chicago was quite successful, both commercially and critically. It will be interesting to see if this sexually energized work will pave the way for a regeneration of the musical genre.
