Highly Guilty and Greasy Pleasures

In my last post I admitted that I didn't really like the slow-moving bulk of Camelot. This is generally true for me and musicals. Perhaps the only two movie musicals that I've enjoyed are The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. Of course I'm not really "into" musicals and haven't watched that many (my guess is that my familiarity with the genre is just about as lay-man as things get) so it might be wrong for me to even have an opinion about these things. In an effort at full disclosure, I'll admit that I fell asleep during Les Miserables, and didn't really enjoy The Phantom of the Opera or Miss Saigon. Also noted is the fact that despite living in New York for 2 1/2 years, I didn't watch a single musical despite walking by Times Square almost every week. The closest I got to a musical in New York was standing in queue at the Mama Mia discount booth in hopes of securing a cheap seat for my mom when she was visiting. (No luck - no student tix during the summer).

Which is why I was a little confused at my setting aside an entire evening to watch (on TV) an avowedly "bad" musical made for 10-14 year olds: Disney's High School Musical. Perhaps it was the desire to watch something truly commercial and mindless or some strange nostalgia for JC (the musical's portrayal of cliques and cool while hopelessly stereotypical had moments of truth). At any rate, while I'm still embarrassed about watching (and enjoying at some level) the in-your-face emotional caricaturing that shamelessly unfolded on the screen, watching this blockbuster hit for Disney did lead to some thoughts about the culture industry that so dominates our tastes and insinuates itself in our fantasies.

Most reviews of High School Musical compare it (unfavorably) to Grease. The superficial resemblances are striking: the leads meet each other on vacation (and vaguely flirt
while singing a Karaoke number), she comes to his school as a new transfer student (and he rules the school cause he's the cool captain of the Bball team), because of their attraction to each other they manage to break out of their cliques (he from the jocks and she from the brainiacs) to do something that they both love but have hidden from the rest of the world: singing. Like Grease, this journey is not without complications as friends try to pull them back into their circumscribed social roles in a tightly straited High School. And finally, the big event that all of us wait in anticipation for is a kind of performance (the final auditions for the parts in a musical in High School Musical and the spot on an American Bandstand-like show in Grease).

Aging Well
Despite these narrative similarities, there is a profound difference in the spirit of the movies. One just needs to look at the pictures of characters from one movie mapped against their counterparts in the other:




The male leads: Troy Bolton (School's Golden Boy) and Danny Zuko (questionably and ridiculously cool)




Their female counterparts and love interests: Gabriella Montez (Genius kid who's new to the school) and Sandy Olsson ("I'm from Sydney, Australia")




Sidekicks: Chad Danforth (basketball team mate) and Kenickie (fellow gang member)








Somewhat nasty female antagonists: Sharpay (!?) Evans (who leads her own clique that consists of her brother and herself as she tyrannically dictates the Drama Club and expects to star in the school's musical) and Rizzo (chief Pink Lady).



These images (I know to do this properly I need to get the DVDs and make proper screen captures but images off the web will have to do for now) are meant to demonstrate how a 1978 movie depiction of what a High-Schooler looks like has radically shifted in about 30 years. Of course, Rydell High is a very different place from Eastside High but just the age of the actors is telling. John Travolta was 24 when he played Danny Zuko, Olivia Newton John 30 (even though she looks closest to a 16-18 year old) and Stockard Channing (Rizzo) was 34! When one watches Grease now, you're struck by how impossibly old everyone looks. The cast of High School Musical, on the other hand, all range in and about high school age, with the oldest from our list (Ashley Tisdale, who plays the Sharpay character) being an old 22. So the shift demonstrates a fascination with youth that has overtaken our collective sense of what it means to represent being in school. (For more of this, go watch To Sir With Love). Of course, one could argue that Grease, made in 1978 but set in the 50s/60s deliberately cast older looking actors to bank on the nostalgia factor and High School Musical, made about Highschoolers but aimed at Tweenagers, wants everyone to look much younger. Still, I don't think that really detracts from my point that the cultural industry has managed to install a thirst for the Fountain of Youth in the collective consciousness.

A Place to Belong
Of course the other striking thing about the two films is the way they situate the lead characters with respect to the social structures of school culture. In Grease, all the action occurs in the margins of school life with Danny Zuko and his boys comprising the T-birds while Sandy tries to fit in with the Pink Ladies. Even the institutionally sanctioned finale (the first finale of the film's triple endings - the other two being the car race and then the reuniting of Danny and Sandy), the nationally televised dance-off, gets hijacked by these characters who don't really fit into the mainstream. What defines these characters is how far they stand from being integrated into a school community as they mock the athletes, spike the punch, and of course, moon all of America when they get the chance. But in High School Musical, no one is really on the outside. Troy Bolton is right in the middle of school life and even Gabriella quickly gets picked to be part of the school's Science Decathlon team. Even if the theme of this film is how borders are crossed, they're crossed from ostensibly safe positions of well-defined and institutionally accepted identities. Even the bad guys belong, as Sharpay Evans and her very metro-sexual brother rule the Drama club and incestuously engage
in plotting against others while patting each other on the back.

"You're the One that I Want"
Indeed, this question of belonging extends into the way transformation is conceived differently by each movie. At the end of Grease, Sandy decides that she must change in order to win over Danny's heart and his clique's approval, she transforms herself into a vampish fantasy babe along the lines of the Pink Ladies (pictured left). This over-the-top metamorphosis is, of course, an ironic comment on the nature and value of transformation, for all that she needs to do really change is to wear the right clothes, get a big hair-do and don some attitude. Danny's own failed attempts to become a jock (in order to impress Sandy) earlier in the film have pretty much the same effect. In High School Musical, however, transformation is taken more (and much too) seriously. The leading characters, already stars in their chosen arenas of the basketball court and science lab, show their peers that they can do it all by turning out to be stellar singers as well. In sharing this hidden talent with each other and later with the rest of the school, Troy and Gabriella, 'discover' their true selves and true love. The fantasy here - you can be anything you want to be as long as you don't worry about what your friends think - posits the multi-talented individual as the norm, and transformation becomes a stamp of individual agency that has the power to cut across stereotypes and reformulate group relations, instead of being a superficial (yet effective) tactic that is used to mask the fear of not belonging. Even though this seems to communicate 'positive messages' (such as "Just be yourself!"), in the world of High School Musical, only the exceedingly resourceful, intelligent, and good-looking have any chance of being individuals. You can't find love by donning tight-clothes, getting big-hair or dancing in high-heels in Walt Disney's universe.

Music and Lyrics
Grease achieves witty commentary on the strange obsessions of teenagers with its silly and clever lyrics. Some element of the concrete and particular (my strange obsession) is always present whether we want the lovers to tell us more about their summer frolicking on the beach, dream about "Grease Lighting", or get advice about beauty school from Frankie Avalon. In the final sequence, when the entire cast sings "We Go Together", the frivolity of being teenagers is brought out most clearly in lyrics that go

We go together,
Like rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong,
Remembered forever
As shoobop sha wadda wadda yippity boom de boom
Chang chang changitty chang shoobop,
That's the way it should be,
Wha oooh, yeah!

The nonsensical lines that require skillful singing are precisely the point of being a teenager, of being obsessed with extraordinarily complex and esoteric trivialities that don't really matter in the long run. The spaces that these lines open up allow a certain mode of negotiation and creation even as the idiosyncratic (and highly technical) are mastered.

If the trivializing ending of Grease performs this insight into the teenage mind, High School Musical dramatizes the abolishment of that mind. The teenager is turned into a spokesperson for every kind of high-minded abstraction that modern societies idealize. In fact, Singapore's NDP planning committee should seriously consider jettisoning yet another failed attempt to come up with a "national day song" and just turn to High School Musical's fabulously Singaporean (they're even decked out in red and white) ending. With stylishly vague platitudes emoting that "we're all in this together", every tween's fantasy end to a highschool movie dovetails into the ideological template for any state that wants to dilute and eventually flush clean the heterogeneous desires and dreams of its people. Unlike Grease, which leaves us stained with its idiosyncratic observations of teen hood that, like grease, can't really be fully gotten rid of, High School Musical effaces any trace or possibility for difference:

We're all in this together
One sweet note
That we are
We're all stars
And we see that
We're all in this together
And it shows
When we stand
Hand in hand
Make our dreams come true

I am well aware that infinitely more subtle minds have taken the Disney entertainment complex apart for far more profound reasons. Amongst the most illustrious, Theodore Adorno, who found in

Disney hygiene, a funereal reading of Mickey Mouse culture and its sadomasochistic phantasms. At the tail end of Mickey Mouse's orbit around the globe, Adorno concluded that both fascism and the culture industry were "psychoanalysis in reverse". (Laurence Rickels, The Case of California 52)

I should end with this quote which seems to be a fitting conclusion to what I've been trying to get at in this post. I've definitely gone on too long indulging the guilty pleasure of re-visiting a guilty pleasure, perhaps because of High School Musical's effectiveness in dictating what counts as pleasurable. And, after all, I need to go catch the world TV premiere of High School Musical 2.