Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (review)

This book takes as one of its starting points the idea of the 'musical moment', a phrase that has emerged recently as a descriptor for sequences in films wherein the prerogatives of music swamp established visual and narrative imperatives.¹ Such moments invert the 'normal' (that is, habitual) hierarchy of narrative films, in which music, often unnoticed, supports a governing visual dimension, a hierarchy memorably encapsulated by the title of Claudia Gorbman's ground-breaking text, Unheard Melodies.² The phrase 'musical moment' suggests as well that such inversions, though robust, are of relatively short duration; they may, however, acquire additional narrative power through repetition. Notably, the phrase also presents a tantalising ambiguity regarding its first term. When read as an adjective, 'musical' indicates only that such moments are governed by their music, but when read as a concatenated noun, the word points to a genre in which such 'inversions' are routine – that is, the musical, which is virtually defined by its proclivity for 'musical moments'. The latter potential reading of the phrase lies at the heart of both what is most laudable and what is most regrettable about Dreams of Difference.

The idea of looking at musicals, and especially at their moments of transition into musical numbers, has many potential benefits for understanding musical moments in films that otherwise bear little resemblance to musicals. And some of that potential is realised here, particularly in Herzog's nuanced contemplation of the temporal implications of shifting into and out of musical mode, and of the sometimes off-putting artificialities of musical numbers inserted into narratives – which artificialities are at once technological, aesthetic, and political. But this partial realisation of a very good idea is undermined by a decidedly odd idea of what it means actually to look at musicals in this regard, odd because her grasp of the genre seems both indistinct and unnecessarily narrow in scope, and because nearly all the examples she chooses lie on the margins (or just outside the margins) of the genre. To be sure, the decision to work at the margins in this way is a deliberate strategy that bears interesting fruit, but it also fragments what might have been a more directed investigation into how musical moments and musicals help to explain each other.

Herzog's failure to delineate adequately the musical as a genre, on the other hand, is less about this book and its strategies than about the subfield of film-musicals studies more generally, which has nurtured the curious and misguided habit of ignoring almost entirely any relationship film musicals might have to stage musicals.³ To be sure, each type has unique features. But they are also usefully thought about as complementary extensions of each other: their histories are intertwined; each has learned to partake in some measure of the distinctive practices of the other; and to a very large extent they share fan bases and practitioners. Beyond these obvious advantages in considering them together is the often broad applicability of the questions being posed and answered: not to consider stage musicals within a study of film musicals seems particularly deplorable given that so many of the observations made specifically about film musicals in such studies (by, for example, not only Herzog, but also Rick Altman and Jane Feuer in their important contributions to the subdiscipline) are clearly pertinent to, and at times best explained by, the practices, politics, and aesthetics of stage musicals.⁴ But it is as if the idea of considering stage musicals simply has not occurred to them. Given my long-standing puzzlement over this habitual lapse, I am grateful that my reading of Dreams of Difference has led me both to realise that the problem is not unique to the academic study of film musicals, and to develop a partial explanation for it, based to an extent on my experiences in studying other once-maligned (and often still-maligned) bodies of...