Proto-Postmodernity
and the Music of Recursion: a Case Study
By E.W.
Wilder
A recent Google search of “postmodern definition” yielded
around 1,990,000 hits. Aside from the sites that simply reference each
other or refer back to the inevitable Wikipedia entry, this search represents
possibly as many definitions as there are hits. It’s a very postmodern
problem, this: the definition of what has come after what was unfortunately
labeled “Modernism” should be both simply defined and impossible
to define. William Harmon and Hugh Holman’s A Handbook to
Literature 11th edition (2009) notes the term “postmodern”
appearing as early as 1914, so it is easy to see what we’re up
against (430): Modernism, as we currently understand it, was barely
even formed by the time its successor was already named.
Sources note the definition of postmodernity variously as works involving
decentering, fragmenting, fracturing, and either a slavish devotion
to objective reality or a slavish devotion to utter subjectivity. Postmodernism
is defined both as the rejection of symbol and metaphor in pursuit of
total truth and the use of symbol and metaphor to undercut meaning itself.
Postmodernism in the visual arts cuts as wide a swath, from complete
abstraction to performance art to photorealism. In other words, to meta-define
it (meta-art being one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, according
to some), postmodernism is a cipher and a tabula rasa, a null-set
referencing itself in a recursive spiral of meaning/non-meaning. In
other words, we can’t define postmodernism because we’re
living in it, and we can’t live it until we’ve distanced
ourselves enough from it to define it.
Its terminological difficulties aside, most commentators place the
beginnings of postmodernism as a practice at about 1965 and lump the
likes of Tom Stoppard, Thomas Pynchon, and Donald Barthelme into it.
This is as fine a place to begin as any, I suppose. But as a way of
demonstrating its precursors, and in typical postmodern fashion reading
cinema as text, there’s an even better place to start: Singing
in the Rain, the Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen musical of 1952.
The narrative begins fractured, with a flashback and proceeding to
the diegetic present of 1927 Hollywood. The timing is important, as
the advent of talkies is at hand, and with it the displacement and decentering
of silent movie actors. This also sets the stage (puns intended) for
Singing in the Rain’s recursive nature. Arguably, the
recursive nature of a Modernist text such as Finnegan’s Wake
or, before it, Heart of Darkness, is a precursor to the utter
narrative collapse of something more solidly postmodern, like Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22. The latter example is a relatively
clear one: the governing concept has become as familiar to us as the
title of the book, another form of life/art recursion that plagues Singing
in the Rain (see also the career of postmodern performer Andy Kaufman).
In a similar vein, and of similar subject matter to Heller’s novel,
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is recursive and self-referential
from beginning to end, with the author interjecting himself as part
of the fictive storytelling and, indeed, sutured into the narrative
as a minor character and as the narrator, appearing as he does in the
book’s first and last chapters, which, numbered as chapters, are
clearly not meant to be read as foreword and afterword.
Similar techniques can be seen in the later films of Godard and in
Fellini, notably in 8 ½, but Singing predates
them all. From the opening scene, the musical moves apace in a way we
might expect a showbiz musical to proceed. The star, Gene Kelly’s
Don Lockwood, falls in love with an ingénue, Debbie Reynolds’
Kathy Selden, and at first they don’t get along, but soon they
acknowledge their love. Naturally, there are complications, in this
case Lina Lamont as played by Jean Hagen, Lockwood’s longtime
co-star. In a pre-Marshall McLuhan moment, Lamont has become convinced
by the Hollywood tabloids that she and Lockwood are, in reality, in
love. Thus the mediated experience of reading the tabs is shown to be,
in some sense, real, and a decentering takes place in Lamont’s
mind between the loveless actual relationship with Lockwood and the
one reported to her by her preferred medium. But this is also a recursive
decentering, one that literally revolves (and eventually devolves) around
the relationship on screen.
Likewise, Lockwood’s actual love interest, Kathy Selden, expresses,
early on, her disdain for silent movie actors such as Lockwood by calling
it all a bunch of “dumbshow,” at which point she strikes
various melodramatic poses parodying the acting of the (diegetic) time.
In so doing, she references the subject of the film in a miniature play-within-a-play
mummery similar to the silent play-within-a-play-referencing-a-plotpoint-in-a-play
of Hamlet’s The Mousetrap in the film version of the
undeniably postmodern Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
But Selden’s character is soon to be revealed as just as decentered
as Lamont’s: her “stage” career is actually as a burlesque
performer who jumps out of a cake at Monumental Studio’s reception
after the premiere of the latest Lamont/Lockwood blockbuster. Selden
also reveals, later, her devotion to the very fan magazines that Lamont
allows to create her reality for her, and thus to her assumption that
Lamont and Lockwood are, in fact, an item.
But this aspect of the film's recursion is actually indicated at the
beginning as Don Lockwood is interviewed by a society reporter at the
premiere of the latest Lina/Lamont venture. In the interview, Lockwood
recalls his past career as “dignity, always dignity” while
flashbacks reveal anything but: Lockwood and his best friend Cosmo Brown
(Donald O’Connor) busking as children, the two as a cut-rate vaudeville
act, and finally Lockwood's stint as a stuntman prior to breaking into
film. The flashback also reveals that Lamont's interest in Lockwood
only occurs after Monumental Studio head RF Simpson (Millard Mitchell)
takes an interest in him as a film star. In order to do Hollywood and
believe in it as “real,” Lamont must have Hollywood's blessing,
either through the tabloids or through a VIP like Simpson. Lockwood's
flashbacks are self-referential but again decentered; they are the “real”
versus the Hollywood “real” which, despite his move from
an undignified beginning is then revealed as actually undignified when
later in the film talking pictures show a picture that is, indeed, more
“real.”
That historical touchpoint, the premiere of The Jazz Singer
in 1927, serves as a backdrop of the revelation and provides one of
the main conflicts of the film. Thus, the Hollywood of 1952 comments
on the Hollywood of 1927 through the eyes of the created characters
of 1927. When RF Simpson feels forced by the success of The Jazz
Singer to turn the Lamont/Lockwood film that is then in production
into a talkie, Lockwood is thrust into an identity crisis. His old,
improvised dialog will no longer suffice as it is revealed through sound
to be absurd. Worse, the voice of his co-star, Lina Lamont, is revealed
in all its squeaky, high-pitched, undignified, untrained squeal. The
problems faced by Monumental Pictures' first talkie are the actual problems
that plagued early sound pictures: heartbeats being picked up by microphones
placed close to bodies, exaggerated sounds on the set marring dramatic
moments, loss of synchronization, loss of vocals when actors' faces
are not in the line of the mic.
Up to this point, I have studiously avoided writing about the song
and dance numbers that make up so much of Singing in the Rain.
Once we have established the more subtle elements of recursion and self-reference,
the sense in which Singing is parody and commentary on the
genre but also a prime example of the genre can be more easily explored.
In a scene in which Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden bare their hearts
to one another, they find themselves conveniently next to a studio soundstage.
Don feels it is easiest to express his adoration through the use of
the materials he finds on the stage. Thus he creates for her out of
the elements of stagecraft moonlight, a soft breeze, and a “balcony”
out of a ladder. Don cannot be “real” without being of the
stage; he himself is a product of recursion, of using the elements of
film to comment upon/stand-in for his actual life. In this sense, Lockwood
is no different than Selden or Lamont: all of them exist only in that
they see themselves reflected as products of film. Thus the following
pas de deux is more than just a stand-in for sex; it is a revelation
of recursion: the medium of filmmaking is the message of their love.
It can only exist as an extension of the studio.
This is echoed in a later scene in which Don, Kathy, and Cosmo figure
out how to make the in-production Lamont/Lockwood talkie into a success
despite Lamont's impossible voice: they turn it into a musical. This
musical is revealed, later still, to be “about a young hoofer”
making his way on Broadway, thus referencing Lockwood's own career,
the beginning of the film, the subject of the film, and the
film's genre, and, in the end Gene Kelly's own career as well. (But
more about that later.) Cosmo's brilliant idea is to dub Kathy's more
cultured voice over Lina's post-production, thus creating a more “real”
effect through the magic of filmic fakery and stagecraft, echoing again
the way Don Lockwood is only able to express the “true”
feelings of his love through the illusioneering of Hollywood's studio
toolkit.
But the film gets even more weirdly self-recursive. Because the voice
of Debbie Reynolds, who plays Kathy Selden, was, in reality, not considered
as cultured as that of Jean Hagen, who plays the squeaky-voiced Lina
Lamont, in those scenes in which Kathy is shown dubbing Lina's lines,
it is actually Jean Hagen dubbing Debbie Reynolds dubbing the character
being played by Jean Hagen. All this happens in the film-within-a-film,
the in-production Lamont/Lockwood talkie (The Dancing Cavalier)
within the film Singing in the Rain.
But back in Don Lockwood's house, as Don and Kathy and Cosmo hatch
this plot, the inevitable song and dance number ensues (this is a musical
after all) which reveals, as it moves through the house, that the house
itself is a set; the walls are clearly false. And so the film Singing
in the Rain, through a song and dance number, reveals quite self-consciously
that it is in fact a film called Singing in the Rain, a musical
that makes fun of musicals and that is unafraid of the fact of itself
as a musical. Since this takes place through revealing filmic fakery
it decenters the characters as diegetically “real” and shows
that the viewer herself is an active participant in the deception of
all fiction, the willing suspension of disbelief.
This movement to include the audience in the self-referential cycle
of recursion is hinted at before in a slightly more subtle way, and
in so doing, the recursion is revealed to be decentered; as it goes
along it gets more and more self-referential, more and more obviously
a film aware of itself as a film. Cosmo Brown, in an attempt to lift
the spirits of Don Lockwood during his identity crisis, uses the tools
of filmic fakery, stripped of their deceptive qualities, in his “Make
'em Laugh” song and dance routine. Donald O'Connor, who plays
Cosmo, dances with a dummy, runs up walls painted to look like tunnels,
and, eventually, crashes through a fake wall painted to look solid and
real. All the while he is providing the stuff of an actual comic routine:
pratfalls and weird faces. The “Make 'em Laugh” sequence
is, in reality, a tour-de-force of physical prowess masquerading as
physical comedy; at the same time, it is physical comedy, and
as the song that he sings (dubbed in later, of course) reveals, it is
also a self-referential number revealing Cosmo's character to be, in
essence (if “essence” even makes sense in this case), comic
relief. The number acts as comic relief in the film, and it also acts
as comic relief to the character of Don Lockwood in the funk of his
identity-crisis. It also references Don and Cosmo's vaudeville days,
referencing the beginning of the film, parodying the decentered (and
decentering) notion of “dignity, always dignity,” the expression
of reality through stagecraft, and the reliance of silent films on physical
humor through the further decentering framework of a musical
number.
Likewise, the “Singing in the Rain” sequence, which, significantly,
follows the scene in Don Lockwood's house, is a product of filmic fakery:
the buildings in it are all fake; set at night, it was filmed during
the day; and the “rain” that falls is a mixture of water
and milk, as that showed up better on camera. As the film's title sequence
it alludes to the film on the whole. It also embodies the film's
title as Don Lockwood/Gene Kelly “sings” in the “rain.”
But, in the recursive nature of the film, which is about Hollywood and
the movies, the song “Singing in the Rain” is not even from
Singing in the Rain but from Hollywood Music Box Review
of, significantly, 1927 (“Singing in the Rain (1952)”).
Recursively, the song was used in four other movies before becoming
the title song for this one, Singing in the Rain.
All of this adds up to the wickedly recursive and self-referential
“Broadway Melody” number to which I alluded earlier. As
previously mentioned, it involves a “young hoofer” who makes
his way to Broadway during the 1920s. Note the subtle reference here
to Kathy Selden’s concerns about stage versus screen actors in
the film’s opening scenes. But this sequence is not a stage play;
rather it is a filmic version of the pitch Don Lockwood gives to RF
Simpson of the re-creation of the in-production Lamont/Lockwood talkie
as a musical. That earlier picture, now titled The Dancing Cavalier,
becomes a part of the film about the “young hoofer” at his
point being pitched, in fact a dream-sequence within it (a plot device
thought up previously by Cosmo Brown). In theory, then, the filmed sequence
the audience of Singing in the Rain is watching is actually
the dream of Don Lockwood that exists as a cinematic recreation of his
description to Simpson. That sequence, the “Broadway Melody”
sequence as far as the film Singing in the Rain is concerned,
is then instantly obliterated after it takes place when RF Simpson,
in response to the sequence we have all just seen says “I
can’t quite visualize it,” and in so doing also comments
on the in-production Lamont/Lockwood talkie, The Dancing Cavalier.
Lockwood describes the “Broadway Melody” sequence as a
“modern” dance number, one concerning a love triangle between
our young hoofer, a gangster, and the gangster’s moll. But the
singing and dancing therein are not modern for 1927, when the story
of both the “Broadway Melody” sequence and Singing in
the Rain are set, but modern for 1952, when the film Singing
in the Rain was made. By using the word “modern,” Kelly/Lockwood
actually comments on the film Singing in the Rain, not The
Dancing Cavalier, weaving self-reference solidly into the plot
(however, into a notably unstable plot). Inside the “Broadway
Melody” sequence are several dance numbers set as stage shows,
referencing the “Beautiful Girls” sequence of earlier in
the film, which was itself a parody of the Busby Berkeley movies of
the 1930s and to the vaudeville beginnings of Don Lockwood shown (in
flashback) at the start of Singing in the Rain. All the sets
in the “Broadway Melody” sequence are painted and in differing
levels of abstraction, a “Modern” touch for an era of abstract
art, 1952. They reference the film’s “reality” as
stagecraft, as stuff of cinematic fakery, here, as in the sequences
in Don Lockwood’s house, laid bare.
Within the “Broadway Melody” bit, the young hoofer fantasizes
about a pas de deux with the gangster’s moll with whom
he has fallen in love. In this sequence-within-a-sequence, which is
itself a description of the imagination of Don Lockwood about a movie-within-a-movie,
the young hoofer/Lockwood/Kelly dances as an idealized version of himself
with an idealized version of the gangster’s moll in an idealized
version of reality. The set design is spare and mainly white, with a
few lines suggesting stairs and soft shadows. There is a faint glow
of a reddish hue. The gangster’s moll, played/danced by Cyd Charisse,
is a somewhat idealized version of Kathy Selden, her character decentered
here through the use of the many-layered imaginings. In this way, this
pas de deux represents an idealized version of the previous
one between Selden and Lockwood, but instead of stagecraft laid bare,
this is bare stagecraft, with only the most basic elements necessary
to give a sense of space. This dance sequence is balletic, and therefore
an idealized version of the modified tap of the Selden/Lockwood sequence,
but also one more timeless; as the level of idealization increases,
so decreases the references to specific spaces and times. Thus the idealized
is essentialized into the “real,” and only when the various
loops of recursion collapse in upon themselves can this happen: this
is singing and dancing, finally, for its own sake, no longer a plot
device, but two masters of the form doing what they do best unencumbered
by story or scene.
But as we pull back, the sequence gets even more complex. Most of the
dance numbers in the “Broadway Melody” bit are references
to previous Gene Kelly works (notably Summer Stock, The
Pirate, An American in Paris, and Words and Music),
and the original pas de deux with Kathy Selden is lifted almost
entirely from prior Kelly numbers (“Singing in the Rain
(1952)”). Thus the film parodies not just talkies but allows Kelly
to parody himself, adding a layer of self-reference that extends beyond
the theater walls into the reality we know. The “young hoofer”
is Kelly.
Towards the film’s end, and in order to quash Lina Lamont’
s attempted takeover of Monumental Studios, RF Simpson, Cosmo Brown,
and Don Lockwood raise a stage curtain at the premiere of The Dancing
Cavalier, the instantly successful Lamont/Lockwood talkie, to reveal
that Kathy Selden is the voice of Lina Lamont. Of course, the song being
sung at this point is “Singing in the Rain,” and thus the
film becomes again a film; having collapsed within the vortex of its
own recursion, it is now spinning back outward, toward the audience,
who are now symbolically sutured into Singing in the Rain by
being shown as a movie audience in reverse-shot to the stage reacting
to the revelatory sequence of which I write. The themes re-form into
something seeable: Singing in the Rain the film uses its medium
recursively to reveal movies for what they in fact are: stagecraft.
But they remain that: in this singing sequence and others, Debbie Reynolds,
playing Kathy Selden dubbing Lina Lamont, is actually being dubbed by
the unaccredited Betty Noyes.
Naturally, when all is said and done, in the film’s closing shot,
Kethy Selden and Don Lockwood admire a billboard with their faces and
names on it, aptly advertising the first Selden/Lockwood extravaganza,
a movie musical starring Selden and Lockwood called Singing in the
Rain. Thus we are left with the self-referential image and the
opening scene in the postmodern age.
One could argue, I suppose, that this popular film is not, as the “high”
art we usually associate with postmodernism, intentional in its experimentalism.
But it would be more accurate to say that those pieces of high art are
intentionally postmodern. Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris did not
intend to create cubism; it just was what they were doing, and their
critics labeled it. Clearly, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen were aware
of what they were doing and intentional in collapsing the distance between
high and low art, as the fantasy-within-a-film-pitch-within-a-film sequence
with Cyd Charisse demonstrates. Whether or not Kelly and Donen considered
this film cutting-edge is immaterial: it is. And in being what
it is, it ushers in postmodernism, ironically, from stage right.
Works Cited
(Note: the facts about the film that I reference here that are commonly
referenced in reference materials are not cited, even though, as one
has come to suspect, they are no doubt simply instances of self-referencing
recursion within all the reference materials referenced.)
Harmon, William and Hugh Holman. “Postmodern” A Handbook
to Literature 11th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2009. 430-1.
Print.
Singing in the Rain. Dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. Perf.
Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Donald O’Connor. MGM,
1952. DVD.
“Singing in the Rain (1952) – Hollywood’s
Greatest Musical!” The Picture Show Man. Key Light Enterprises,
2004. Web. 20 Nov. 2009.
