As a child, I lived in musicals. We had a three-foot-high stack of pirated VHS by the video player: Gigi, The Sound of Music, On the Town, Annie, Easter Parade, Hello, Dolly!, Oliver!, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris (boring: too much jazz ballet), Grease. I am pretty sure that my eternal ebullience and optimism stem directly from being raised on these, practically from the moment I hatched out of my egg. In all musicals, a generally working-class heroine rises up to joy and success in almost exactly ninety minutes. That was what I thought life would be like when I was an adult. And you know what? It should be.
“Why can’t life be like a musical?” is a mug slogan I have a lot of time for. To be honest, more often than not I’m pretending my life is a musical anyway. When I wake in the morning, I’m Tracy Turnblad singing “Good Morning Baltimore” to the rats in the street. When I’m in a self-pitying mood about work, I like to channel Christ in Jesus Christ Superstar—when, in “Gethsemane,” he’s on his knees doing a power air-grab with his hands and screaming, “WHY? Should I DIE???” at God. And whenever I’m losing an argument, I’m Barbra Streisand in Hello, Dolly!, in a massive gold-feather headdress, shouting, “Horace—DON’T TRY TO STOP ME!” as the put-upon Walter Matthau just walks away, shrugging.
And I’m scarcely alone in this—for nearly all women love musicals. It’s one of the things about us—like having tits and being a bit oppressed. Rare is the tipsy woman who won’t give you her “Edelweiss” at one a.m. Rare is the woman who has not, at some point, hung on till tomorrow, come what may.
Last week, I realized just why it is that women—particularly of my age and older—love musicals. And it’s very simple: it’s because classic musicals were the first feminist movies—way before we had The Hunger Games and Thelma & Louise. If you were raised on whatever movies BBC2 showed on rainy Saturday afternoons, musicals would be the only films you ever saw where you got to watch women actually doing stuff—instead of just “being.”
Watching female characters just be is one of the most depressing things for a young girl to absorb: all those women—usually played by Olivia de Havilland—who make their first entrance at the top of a flight of stairs, pausing to stare bashfully around the room as we clock the reaction of the leading man, which might best be described as “Respectful hubba hubba. She make clean, quiet wife.”
She then spends the rest of the movie being inspiring by speaking in an annoyingly “gentle” voice and having lovely hair. She never argues. She never has her own plans. She’s just there as a prize, for boys to win. At some point the silly bitch will probably faint and have to be carried somewhere to recover—which is usually the moment the leading man kisses her. What a rubbish pulling technique—being unconscious. For any unkissed girls out there—I heartily disrecommend it. Stay conscious all the time during the romantic process—that’s basic but necessary advice. That’s “Being a Human Being 101.”
Compare all this, then, to the women in musicals. The first time their leading men see them, they’re in a bar with a gun (Calamity Jane), sailing out of the sky with an umbrella (Mary Poppins), mind-fucking a load of spoiled, feral kids (The Sound of Music), driving a cab and ogling sailors (On the Town), dancing with a load of black teens in segregated Baltimore (Hairspray), or sassing a drunken customer in a bar (Easter Parade). They argue. Their plans are usually the entire plot of the movie. And they never faint—because they’re insanely charismatic, super-fit tap-dancing athletes, bouncing off the ceilings, and flying across floors, and dancing through the night, with blood in their shoes, until the sun comes up over Hollywood, and it’s time for them to rescue Gene Kelly’s ill-fated talkie.
The thing is, in musicals, women do stuff. They show off their talent—you know, the way men do in man-movies, when they’re fighting each other or solving crimes. Indeed, their talent usually dwarfs that of their male costars. Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were the two biggest male musical talents ever seen—and while they undoubtedly dance like the definition of joy, everyone’s a bit “Oh dear” when they start singing.
The female musical stars, on the other hand—man, they do everything. Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Liza Minnelli, Doris Day, Ann Miller—those dames could sing and dance and act, and they all have the oddly modern, adroit comic timing of a Jennifer Aniston or Tina Fey. Indeed, they were so talented they didn’t just make musicals, like Gene and Fred—they could do “straight” drama, too, and make bestselling records, and do sell-out concert tours. Inspiring as the saying is, women in musicals were never just doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels. It was “backwards, in heels, with three other careers, and being fifty years ahead of their time.”
Why do women love musicals? Because a list of “The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time” will be 90 percent male leads, while “The 100 Greatest Musicals of All Time” will be 90 percent female. Musicals are one of our unique cultural aberrations—the sole, mad, Technicolor, joyous oasis where women make the weather and call the shots. If life were more like a musical, half of feminism’s work would be done.