The American Film Musical and the Place(less)ness of Entertainment: Cabaret’s “International Sensation” and American Identity in Crisis

Abstract

This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’s self-reflexivity. By incorporating musical numbers into its narrative, the musical mirrors the entertainment industry mise en abyme, and establishes an intrinsic link to America through the act of (cultural) performance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and its recent application to the genre of the musical, I read the implicitly spatial backstage/stage duality overlaying narrative and number—the musical’s dual registers—as a means of challenging representations of Americanness, nationhood, and belonging. The incongruities arising from the segmentation into dual registers, realms complying with their own rules, destabilize the narrative structure of the musical and, as such, put the semantic differences between narrative and number into critical focus. A close reading of the 1972 film Cabaret, whose narrative is set in 1931 Berlin, shows that the cosmopolitanism of the American film musical lies in this juxtaposition of non-American and American (at least connotatively) spaces and the self-reflexive interweaving of their associated registers and narrative levels. If metalepsis designates the transgression of (onto)logically separate syntactic units of film, then it also symbolically constitutes a transgression and rejection of national boundaries. In the case of Cabaret, such incongruities and transgressions eventually undermine the notion of a stable American identity, exposing the American Dream as an illusion produced by the inherent heteronormativity of the entertainment industry. The film advocates a cosmopolitan model of cultural hybridity and the plurality of identities by shedding light on the faultlines of nationalist essentialism.

A chronotopic approach to identity performance in musical numbers: a choreo-musical case study of ‘Rewrite the Stars’ and ‘This Is Me’

“…A substantial body of research on the Bakhtinian chronotope and a variety of text patterns and genres from cultural, anthropological, sociolinguistic and discoursal standpoints is discernible in the literature to date (see, for example, Blommaert, 2015, 2018; Blommaert and De Fina, 2017; Blommaert and Rampton, 2011; Blommaert and Varis, 2013; Dickinson et al, 2019; Karimzad and Catedral, 2018; Lempert and Perrino, 2007; Woolard, 2013, 2016) and further studies extended from literature to performance and identity work not excluding films (Blommaert, 2015; Garcia, 2014; Wirtz, 2011). Whereas literature is linear, the cinematic chronotope fleshes out on screen with specific dimensions unfolding in literal time and space (Flanagan, 2009; Lafontaine, 2014; Sammartino, 2017; Zitzelsberger, 2019). In Bakhtin and the Movies , Flanagan (2009: 57) avers that ‘Time and space, then, are the main constituents of film form, elevating the chronotope to an essential factor in any study of how cinematic texts create narrative effects.’…”

Patriotic heroes on screen; Strategy of demonstrating power: Reading police’s images in the winning films of the Police Movie Festival 2019

“…Through its films, America encouraged its soldiers to go to war, and the families of soldiers supported the advance of soldiers to fight. During economic crises, films were used as a means of entertainment (Zitzelsberger, 2019). In the multicultural era, films are used to articulate minority groups (LGBTQ, ethnic minority, disable people, and women) to spread awareness of their existence (Ma, 2019).…”