The Truth About Hollywood Musicals

Of all the popular American art-forms the Broadway/Hollywood musical is well-known to be the most 'liberal', as Americans would say. It's easy to write a list of the big-name musical movies that stand against racism: in Showboat, for example, the plotline is kicked off by miscegenation laws forcing a mixed-race couple to leave their employment, leading directly to the hiring of Gaylord Ravenal and the singing of Old Man River. South Pacific is about corny wishy-washy liberal failure to deal with prejudice against the child of a mixed marriage (though it analyses racism in terms of prejudice of course), Fiddler on the Roof charts the passive resistance of an oppressed Jewish community in fear of Tsarist pogroms - and the plot also turns on a mixed marriage between an orthodox Jewish woman and a Goy socialist activist sent to Siberia for his part in the 1905 revolution (do you think they are trying to tell us something?) - and then of course there's Cabaret, which hardly requires comment from me.

But there is more! Look closely enough with eyes schooled in the correct use of soap and you can find political messages secretly embedded in almost any piece of musical theatre or film.

• Oklahoma! tells us that the Farmer and the Cowboy should be friends, promoting working-class solidarity. Though the treatment of the Lebanese peddler leaves something to be desired on the anti-racist front. And the ballet - Oh the bloody "ballet" - can only be regarded as incitement to rise up and massacre the decadent middle-class intellectuals who call themselves "artists".
• Annie Get your Gun is about the tactics of populist feminist resistance.
• Gigi is a harrowing expose of sex-slavery and people trafficking.
• The Gay Divorce of 1932 predicts Civil Partnerships (and introduced us to Fred Astaire and "Night and Day") It is also notable for being a portmanteau of two films in one, whilst at the same time making a point about the arbitrary but standardised connection between the signifier and the signified - altering the diacritical marks on the title changes the political content of the entire film even though its form - the pictures and dialogue - remains the same. The message is the medium.
• My Fair Lady explores the political awakening of a mild-mannered middle-class academic linguist through his contact with members of the working class, in particular with the autonomist political philosophy of Mr Doolittle, thus providing template and inspiration for the later career of Noam Chomsky.
• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers investigates the irrelevance of both traditional paternalistic notions of marriage and of supposedly radical alternative of polyamory to the real objective material conditions of exploited forest product workers. The only permanent answer to oppression is the collective action of the organised working class united around a revolutionary programme.
• The Muppets Take Manhattan is simple revolutionary wish-fulfillment as Kermit and his comrades bring about the fall of capitalism in its unofficial citadel. A dream-sequence flashback to the early lives of the Muppet Babies roots their developing political consciousness firmly in their experience of an being rescued from impoverished circumstances by the Nanny State, capitalism's half-hearted attempt to divert the workers from revolutionary action by ameliorating their conditions by returning to them some part of their production in the form of welfare "benefits". As if they were not the legitimate property of the working class to start with!
• Barbie's the Princess and the Pauper updated Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty using both post-modern and meta-surrealistic techniques to self-reflectively undermine the conformist consumerism of American mall culture. In the accurate words of IMDB: "Plot Synopsis: This plot synopsis is empty. Add a synopsis" All viewers make their own plot.
• The Unsinkable Molly Brown charts the course of the lead character through a feckless life as the trophy wife of a corrupt and exploitative mine-owner, by way of a voyage of discovery on a decadent bourgeois Ship of Fools to her encounter with inescapable physical and historical reality leading to self-realisation as a science fiction and horror writer living in the south-east of England.
• The Care Bears Movie is the heartwarming tale of the struggles of three aging and hirsute gay comrades to make a space for themselves within the residential social-care community of the 1980s. Its set against a dark background of Tory cuts and increasingly restrictive and personally intrusive legislation and medicalised persecution of persons living with HIV. The three bears struggle towards personal self-realisation while at the same time remaining fiercely protective of the fragile emotional and social world inhabited by their clients.

There is an essential disconnect between the supposed post-modernist view of the world as made up of elements of narrative with no over-arching metanarrative, and the more fundamentally Marxist line that there is an objective reality "out there". Marxism, like Christianity, must inherently speak from a critical-realist position in order to make itself heard at all - though Christianity, unlike Marxism, is inevitably committed to a stance of dramatic irony in relation to its fundamental texts (of which the entire physical universe is one.) The Marxists collectively believe themselves to be reading the world as it in fact is, only one reality allowing of only one objectively correct political analysis. Individual Christians are looking to the world to for a message embedded in it by its creator that is not necessarily the same message others are intended read from the same text this is not a phenomenon of subjectivity but one of divergent significations in one text targeted at different readers its omniscient Author - so my message objectively isn't your message. A Marxist is forced to reject that pre-modern view of the world as created by transcendent personality external to it as much as they are forced to reject a post-modern view of the world as interpreted by isolated and fragmented personalities emergent from it. Objective analysis is required!

So where is that objective analysis to be found?

If you are going to be a fellow-traveller it makes sense to travel with someone riding First Class. Go where the money is. And the most popular Hollywood musical here in Britain is Grease, a superficially little story about some petit-bourgeois teenage girls who take to wearing tight leather clothes to attract the attention of lecherous wastrel lumpen-proles . Together the two groups waste the entire summer lazing around on the beach, fighting amongst themselves, eating ice-cream and drinking lager without once paying the slightest attention to rising against their exploiters or making any attempt at all to fight back against the divide-and-rule regime of the bosses.

Comrades, the political message of Grease is obvious.

By deconstructing the hedonistic discourse of the classic period of Late Capitalism it is bringing us back home and forcing us to boldly grasp the Fundamental Principal of British Leftism perceptively named by world-famous-musical-theatre-songwriter-and-great-comrade-of-ours Berthold Brecht as "Das UrUnterGrunderEngelsSocialismusBundenschaftsPfissPrincip and encapsulated in the immortal words of world-famous-musical-theatre-songwriter-and-great-comrade-of-ours Alex Glasgow: "As soon as this pub closes, the Revolution Starts!"