When is a musical not a musical?

In studies of film genre, the musical is nearly always presented as a case study for analysis. Scholars and critics have spent a lot of time seeking to define what constitutes a film musical, but the more I think about it the more I feel they are asking the wrong question. Rick Altman's The American Film Musical (1987) is a seminal text not only in studies of the musical but in genre studies per se, and his structuralist narrative categorisation is still used. In its most basic form, the musical according to Altman stages the formation of the heterosexual couple through music. This often takes the form of a plot that starts with a man and a woman who dislike each other, but as soon as they sing or dance together they fall in love. Every Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie shares this narrative. In Shall We Dance (1937), for example, Astaire is a ballet dancer and Rogers is a tap dancer; their dance styles, as well as their personalities, seem incompatible but they discover in dancing together that they are in love. This plot was reversed in The Band Wagon (1953), with Astaire as the tap dancer and Cyd Charisse as the ballerina. Again, they don't get along until they dance together. There are plenty of musicals, though, that don't involve this narrative or even where it breaks down, but which everyone would still call a musical, so there is clearly something amiss with this categorisation (to be fair to Altman, he does recognise this). In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) the heroine and hero never sing together in the final film (their only duet was cut). One could argue that this leaves a hole in the film, and the boy-next-door John Truett does always seem a bit of drip when compared to Esther. John never sings at all, and non-singing characters in musicals never seem fully-realised. In The King and I (1956) and My Fair Lady (1964) everyone sings but the leading man and lady never have a duet. In both of these cases, though, something stands in the way that would not allow a marriage to take place within the world of the film and, significantly, the world of the original audience (race difference, class difference, age difference). The lack of duets in these cases is actually using the convention against itself, the exception that proves the rule.

If we decide to define the musical based on this narrative structure (boy meets girl, boy and girl fight, boy and girl sing/dance together, boy and girl get together) we run into some troublesome cases. This is exactly the structure of David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (2012), but not many people would call it a musical. (That said, I'm sure some producer somewhere is thinking at this very moment of adapting it for Broadway.) Why not? Though there is a lot of music in the film, it is all diegetic, 'real' within the world of the film. The characters never break into song or dance spontaneously, without being able to see/hear a band or recording accompanying them. Raymond Knapp calls this MERM, musically-enhanced reality mode. So let's re-define a musical as being a film in which MERM occurs. That way we include all of the couple-narrative musicals as well as the ones without that plot (Annie [1982] comes to mind). Yet there are plenty of film 'musicals' that do not evoke MERM. One such is Cabaret (1972); nearly all of the music (in the film, though not in the stage musical on which it is based) takes place within the cabaret itself, where it is entirely diegetic. Even though director Bob Fosse intercuts cabaret scenes with outside scenes, the cabaret can always be conceived of as going on in the background. Cabaret does not fit the narrative pattern either; Sally (Liza Minnelli) and Brian (Michael York) never make music together, nor do they get together at the end. So we need a different definition that will fit something like Cabaret. Perhaps a musical is best defined as a film that features a lot of musical performance, which can be based either in MERM or in reality. That sounds good at first, but the complications continue. Take the recent example of Inside Llewyn Davis or its stylistic prequel O Brother Where Art Thou, which do indeed feature many musical performances but which most viewers probably wouldn't consider to be musicals. A definition needs to be found that includes Cabaret but excludes Inside Llewyn Davis, so we need to think about the difference between the two films and their use of music. In Cabaret the music, even though it is diegetic, comments directly on the story (cabaret numbers as symbols of Weimer-era decadence), while in Llewyn Davis the music itself serves a plot function in that the characters are musicians but its subject matter does not do much plot-bearing in its lyrics or notes. Of course there is some connection; a song in one part of the film wouldn't work as well in another part, but without the songs Cabaret would have a very different plot (it would be like John van Druten's toothless play I Am a Camera, on which the musical is based) while Llewyn Davis would have the same plot (though it would be a pretty dull film). So can we define a musical as a film where music has an important plot function? That fits everything we've seen so far, but exceptions can be found. In some of the early Busby Berkeley musicals like Footlight Parade (1933) the music has no plot function at all, and  musical scenes are usually just tacked on at the end when we see the big show the characters have been working on throughout the film. Footlight Parade is about putting on cinema prologues, big musical stage shows that were performed in large cinemas before the movie in the early days of sound film. The musical numbers have no bearing on the movie's plot: the film is about the process of staging the numbers, not the numbers themselves, and the only music is whatever the characters happen to be working on at the time. Footlight Parade is more like Llewyn Davis than like Cabaret, but most would still consider Footlight Parade to be a musical.

I could go on searching for a definition of a 'musical film' but I think I've made my point: when dealing with generic categories there usually isn't a single blanket definition that can fit everything that it needs to. Genre is best seen as a constellation of definitions that overlap depending on the audience. And yet 'musical' seems a relatively straightforward category! In the film world 'film noir' is much more contentious, and the music world is chock-a-block with problematic genres. There's a very good article by Joti Rockwell that deals with some of these questions in relation to bluegrass:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8711239. But if it's so problematic, what's the use of the concept of genre anyway? It is of course of great use: without categorisations like genre we couldn't talk to each other about much of anything. Think of the word 'tree', which is really a generic category. There are some things that we can all agree on as being trees, and there are other things we can all agree on as not being trees. The California redwoods are definitely trees just as Shall We Dance is definitely a musical, and a water lily is definitely not a tree just as Taxi Driver is definitely not a musical. Genre allows us to say things like 'New Zealand has a lot of trees' without having to spend hours saying exactly which trees are in New Zealand. If every different tree had a different name, if every pencil had a different name, if every piece of paper had a different name, we could never get anywhere because we would always be listing things. But even these seemingly foolproof categories like 'tree' can break down. Outside my front door is a plant that I assumed was a bush when I moved in, but in December it bloomed with bright red bristly flowers: my bush was actually a pohutukawa tree disguising itself as a bush. I still resist calling it a tree because it fit so well my previously-established category of 'bush', being a short dense plant with leaves close to the ground. It's the Silver Linings Playbook of the plant world. To sum up, I think that we should stop thinking of genres (or any other categorisation) as autonomous platonic concepts and start seeing them as socially-constructed concepts. Much more interesting than trying to decide once and for all what a musical really is is to ask why it is perceived as such. What is the history of the category? Where did it come from? How has it changed over time? I can't come up with a good concluding sentence, so here's what is probably the best of all the couple-forming scenes, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in 'Dancing in the Dark' from The Band Wagon.