Wading in the Velvet Sea

I love musicals more than perhaps any artistic genre you can throw my way. More than pure theatre, more than cinema, more than interpretive line dancing…you name it, and musicals will supercede it. This all coming from a guy who can’t sing or dance worth a lick. I respsond to a well-done musical more than anything else. I can’t explain it, and I really don’t care to really get into the “why” of it, since that’s really besides the point. I’ve identified the locus of happiness and ran with it.

What was striking in the list, though not terribly surprising, I suppose, was the fact that nearly every post-1965 clip shown featured musical overdubs versus performances—that is to say, they’d show a clip of “Easy Rider” featuring “Born to Be Wild” versus Bing Crosby belting out a number. With very few exceptions, musicals have been the hallmark of Broadway and the theatrical stage in my lifetime. It’s all well and good to see some Swayze/Moore clay lovin’ set to “Unchained Melody”, but watching Bob Hope sing “Thanks for the Memories” moved me much more as I sat on my couch last night.

The two objects of pop culture with which I identify most viscerally with are, as should be no surprise, “Moulin Rouge” and the musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, entitled “Once More with Feeling” (OMWF). Not only do these does pieces of art fulfill my innate need to have viable musicals during my generation on the large and small screen, but both are astute commentaries on what exactly makes a musical so special to me.

OMWF is one of the most self-aware musicals ever written. The characters consistently comment on their place inside the genre. The music itself calls on the listener to reference other works in the oeuvre. And because of this awareness, not despite of it, the musical works brilliantly.

In OMWF, a demon has been summoned unwittingly by one of the characters, and the demon forces people’s emotions to come out through song. What seems like a hackneyed, sweeps-driven stunt gets its rug pulled out from under it, however, once people start burning up from the inside through the overwhelming emotions that the songs bring. The episode features witty throwaway bits (one character comments on watching the police taking “witness arias”), but also serves to answer the question, “Why do people sing in musicals, anyway?” As the demon Sweet explains (in song, of course):

All these melodies, they go on too long.
Then that energy starts to come on way too strong.
All those hearts lay open— that must sting.
Plus some customers just start combusting.

What Joss Whedon (writer/director of the episode) is doing is in fact commenting on why people sing in musicals in the first place: namely, people sing what they cannot simply say. The emotions and the passions are so large that they MUST come out in song. (It's what Sky Masterson says in "Guys in Dolls": "I'm full of foolish song/And out my song must pour"...) As such, not only are people forced to express emotion, they are expressing emotions that normally would not even bubble to the surface. While none of the major characters die in the episode, all of them are burned: everyone by episode’s end has revealed a secret that until that point they had tried to keep hidden. As Buffy sings in the end,

Life’s a song
You don’t get to rehearse.
And every single verse
Can make it that much worse.

There are bad notes, and unrhymed lines, and misplayed chords, and we don’t get a second chance to go back and fix a particular bar most of the time. And once a particular verse has been sung, it often changes the tune of your life. OMWF not only excelled as a stand-alone, “beat the bad guy by the credits” episode, but also as an episode that resonated throughout the entire 6th season. Plus, hey, it had a dancing goat demon, and that never sucks.

“Moulin Rouge” features no dancing goat demons. It also has about 73 others things that I don’t like about it. Doesn’t matter. Couldn’t care less. No movie’s made me happier to be alive. (Maybe “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder”. Nah.) It’s an imperfect mess of a movie that infuriates many, and I can understand why. My poor mother can’t make it through the first 15 minutes of whiplash editing and silly sound effects. I can understand that intellectually, really, I can.

Thing is, though, musicals bypass me intellectually and hit me right in the emotional gut. To wit: in early 1999, I worked on a musical called “Once on this Island”. The big ballad in this musical is called “Forever Yours”, and features a young peasant girl praying to her gods after placing the love of her life behind a tent. Halfway through the song, the shadow of her love appears behind her, filling in the harmony:

[TI MOUNE]
I am a tree
Holding away the storm
Here in my arms
I'll keep you safe and warm
Even the gods
Won't dare to cross this line
Where my life is forever yours

[TI MOUNE]
And you are mine
[DANIEL]
And you are mine

[BOTH]
Mine...
We'll race away in a car
As silver as the moon
And the storn will turn to sun
On an island where the earth and sea
Are one...

And it’s one thing to hear this on a CD and get goosebumps. And it’s quite another to finally get to tech and see your lights (blue pinspot from behind to get his shadow projected, fierce sharp white sidelight to sculpt her frame) and the direction (the two of them moving in mirrored symmetrical motion) meld with the song and prove to yourself that you’re really fucking alive. (UPDATE: The director kindly reminded me there's an image of this scene here. More pics of the entire show here.)

“Moulin Rouge” left me feeling pretty much the same way. I walked out of the theatre drunk on life and incredibly pissed that I didn’t get to see it with Jenny. (Course, I called her that night and we somehow nearly broke up, but that’s another story.) I envied everyone who got to see that movie with someone they loved. I completely identified with Ewan McGregor’s Christian in a way I’d never done with a cinematic character. Sure, I wanted to be Han Solo or Maximus, but I never truly identified with them. I wasn’t going, “Yes, yes, when Maximus charges the Germanians, I see myself on screen, yes…” But in Christian, I had a self that was both idealized and yet somehow accessible. There were direct, one-to-one correlations there, both in terms of things I’d done and things I wish I could do.

See, I’ve always said here that if you’re a newbie to the site, and want to get a hold on my basic psychology, then the cinematic codex you needed was simple: “High Fidelity” and “Chasing Amy”. Combine the John Cusack and Ben Affleck characters and you had me pretty much down as a first-pass assessment. Well, I’ll amend that today and add Christian to the trifecta here. And I’m adding that almost entirely because of his version of “Your Song” by Elton John.

I guess maybe I should hate, and not love, “Moulin Rouge”, since it’s set the bar so personally high for myself. I not only expect, but sometimes demand that my own relationships be as dizzyingly operatic as Christian/Satine’s relationship is. In the end, though, I mainly just want someone to look at me the way Satine looks at Christian as he begins to sing this song. Christian, Baz Lurhmann’s version of Orpheus, literally awakens both the romantic spirit of the movie (as well as nearly every light in Paris, for that matter) with his singing of, “My gift is my song…” It’s the absolutely perfect example of what Whedon also stated: some emotions are too powerful not to be sung. Christian’s stumbling about with the Elton John lyrics before this, unsure of himself, completely unmusical, completely ignored by Satine. But once he starts to sing, he not only gets her attention, but for the first time can really say what he wants.

And it’s one thing to see Christian’s almost naïve love come through on this song, but it’s quite another to watch an until-this-moment ice queen Satine completely melt in front of him. It’s Lurhmann’s gift to show as much of her reaction as his action—it’s what makes the song so powerful. Christian is singing, yes, but he’s above all else communicating. If the characters in OMWF fight the communicative nature of musicals, Christian freely embraces the narrative possibilities. He even composes a song for them (“Come What May”) that becomes, above all else, a secret language for the two of them.

And the beauty of this language lies in the fact that it is at once completely accessible and completely subjective. The Duke can hear the words to “Come What May” but cannot hear the meaning. Couples in the audience of “Moulin Rouge” hear the same song but listen to very different things. Hearing is physical, listening is emotional. Doing the former is not enough in truly great musicals.

As for me…well, I tried my Christian moment back in December. You might remember me talking about it then, though hardly in romantic tones. The song selection that night wasn’t arbitrary. It wasn’t chosen through a drunken bet. It was chosen because for the first time in years I felt enough emotion to truly sing. Not “belt out ‘Like a Prayer; at a party” singing, which is all well and good, but not really what we’re talking about here today.

And even though she wasn’t there, I hoped she was listening. I went out into the alley after my performance and let her know what I had done. Again, I hoped she was listening. And well, I guess all she did was hear me. Not quite enough. Not enough by a long shot.

Doesn’t really matter though. Not the emotion, mind you: the emotion’s at times ALL that matters. But I couldn’t make her listen, anymore than anyone can make ME listen, or anyone can make anyone really listen. I made a choice to sing that night, and it’s something I don’t regret for a minute. And I still will pop in “Moulin Rouge” on my DVD, go right to the scene in question, and think. Think about the past, for sure, but think about the future as well.

Come what may.