Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films

4 All Shook Up: The Classic Hollywood Musical, Male Desire, and the “Problem” of Rock ’n’ Roll

 All Shook Up e Classic Hollywood Musical, Male Desire, and the “Problem” of Rock ’n’ Roll Although many discussions of the musical in the 1930s consider its communal celebration as an attempted antidote to Depression worries, rather few have gone beyond the analysis of later individual films to address the relation of the genre to subsequent cultural events. This is perhaps explained by the general consensus that by the mid-1950s the “golden age” of the musical had ended, and that the musicals made after this period are by and large greatly inferior to their predecessors. But it is surprising that so much criticism of the musical has virtually ignored the genre’s relation to the rise of rock ’n’ roll, a phenomenon of popular music that at least equaled, if not surpassed in its impact, the cultural acceptance of Swing twenty years earlier, and that happened simultaneously with the decline of the musical film. Since Thomas Doherty’s 1998 book Teenagers and Teenpics, a few others have addressed some aspects of the complex relationship between popular film and popular music.1 However, the work that has given us useful paradigms for understanding the musical as a genre have failed to take rock ’n’ roll adequately|   | CHAPTER  into account. Jane Feuer’s otherwise excellent book, The Hollywood Musical, for example, provides a good deal of useful information about musical theater and popular dance, and how these forms influenced the film musical, but, except for one passing reference, it is as if rock ’n’ roll never existed.2 Conversely, the few critical discussions of rock movies that have appeared, although generally entertaining and informative, fail to address the relation of these films to the musical as a genre.3 Rick Altman’s hypothetical remark, “When is a musical not a musical? When it has Elvis Presley in it,”4 seems to express a more entrenched critical opinion than one might expect—perhaps because of the apparently still widely held view that rock music is a more “lowbrow” cultural form. In this chapter, then, I want to look closely at how rock ’n’ roll impacted the musical film. My argument is that rock ’n’ roll, initially antithetical to both the musical’s themes and conventions, nevertheless was rather quickly fitted to the genre’s established elements, thus safely modulating the aggressive masculine sexuality it connoted. Thematically, musicals have been concerned with articulating a sense of community and defining the parameters of sexual desire, the two themes of course being intimately related. As much of the important work on the musical has demonstrated, the genre’s notion of community is addressed and worked out in both the plot and musical sequences in a number of specific oppositions , the most crucial being social (elitist/democratic) and sexual (desire/ restraint).5 Both conflicts are typically embodied in the two romantic leads, their difference in outlook resulting in their inability to commit themselves to a relationship. The social opposition is often defined as the conflict between elite and popular art, and is resolved by formulating an ideal of middlebrow entertainment. Examples range from the tap versus ballet conflict in Shall We Dance (1937) to the political dimension added to Silk Stockings (1957). Narrative closure is attained when the couple’s differences are somehow resolved, usually through the mediating power of musical performance; often, then, a marital union or its promise brings with it an integration of the plot’s conflicting values. This social conflict and its resolution are parallel to the genre’s other ideological function whereby the socially acceptable limits of masculine desire are defined and delimited. Unrestrained sexual desire obviously poses a threat to the dominant ideology of heterosexuality and monogamy insistently represented in classic Hollywood cinema generally and musicals most emphatically. All Shook Up |  Musicals acknowledge such desire but only for the purpose of containing it.6 In musicals, desire is pushed into the background, much like the shadow doubles of Gene Raymond and Dolores del Rio in Flying Down to Rio (1933), who express the secret longings of the “real” characters. “The apotheosis of romance,” as Pauline Kael has described it,7 the genre consistently depicts people offering expansive yet controlled expression of their feelings. One of the essential satisfactions provided by the musical, then, is that it seems to celebrate the exuberant expression of sexuality (metaphorically in the production...