It was fifty years ago today that American Bandstand changed the way a generation listened to music and brought rock and roll into American living rooms. … Even today the show is influencing pop culture, changing people’s lives. American Bandstand may not be on the air now, but it’s in our hearts forever.
—Good Morning America, August 5, 2007
For a show that left television in 1989, American Bandstand was very busy in the 2000s. In 2007, Time Life promoted “Dick Clark’s American Bandstand 50th Anniversary Collection” through television infomercials.1 This twelve-CD box set, like the dozens of other compilations over the past half-century, marketed the history of rock and roll under the American Bandstand and Dick Clark brands. Numerous media outlets also paid tribute to American Bandstand’s fiftieth anniversary, including Good Morning America, which described Bandstand as a generation-defining show for baby boomers and traced Bandstand’s influence on the contemporary reality television program American Idol.2 Two months before this anniversary attention, Washington Redskins football team owner Daniel Snyder bought dick clark productions, including the rights to the American Bandstand name and over eight hundred hours of footage, for $175 million. Snyder, whose private equity firm also owns Johnny Rockets, a 1950s-themed hamburger chain, told USA Today: “[w]e feel there’s an Americana synergy between Johnny Rockets and American Bandstand and can visualize a video box system in our locations featuring our content.”3 Snyder is also the chairman of the board of Six Flags amusement parks, and the company’s chief executive officer told the Washington Post that he “envisions the 877 hour-long ‘American Bandstand’ reruns being broadcast on plasma screens across Six Flags parks.”4 Given these developments, the commercial profitability and longevity of American Bandstand will extend well past its fiftieth anniversary year.
While it is impossible to predict how future visitors to Johnny Rockets or Six Flags will understand the history of the American Bandstand era, two recent productions take up these questions directly. The Emmy award–winning television drama American Dreams explores race relations in early 1960s Philadelphia on and around American Bandstand. And the musical film Hairspray tells the story of the struggle over segregation on Baltimore’s version of American Bandstand. As commercial productions, the stories of the past presented in American Dreams and Hairspray have reached, and continue to reach, millions of viewers in dozens of countries. During its three seasons, American Dreams drew an audience of 8 to 13 million viewers each week, and the first season of the show is available on DVD.5 The 2007 film version of Hairspray, meanwhile, grossed over $110 million in the United States and $80 million internationally and earned another $100 million in U.S. DVD sales, and the USA network paid $13 million for the cable rights to the film.6 Although Hairspray does not mention American Bandstand by name, many film critics described Hairspray’s Corny Collins Show as an “ American Bandstand-style” program.7 Even the American Bandstand 50th Anniversary Collection booklet notes that “Hairspray … chronicles the integration of a fictional Baltimore-based Bandstand-type TV series.”8
Whereas the link between Hairspray and American Bandstand was obvious for several reviewers, for younger viewers who were drawn to the film by teen stars Zac Effron (High School Musical) and Amanda Bynes (The Amanda Show), Hairspray might be the first introduction to American Bandstand-era dance shows. Likewise, American Dreams appealed to young viewers with cameo performances by contemporary popular music stars portraying artists from the 1960s. For this younger generation, the history of American Bandstand starts not with the images of the show itself, but with representations of the era in American Dreams and Hairspray. As such, these recent productions are crucial to understanding how the popular history of the American Bandstand era is being articulated in the 2000s.
There is much to recommend both American Dreams and Hairspray. While selected images from American Bandstand have long circulated in popular media, American Dreams and Hairspray provide narrative context to show how televised teenage dance shows became historically important for young people in particular times and places. Both productions use historically informed representations to tell stories in which television plays a central role. This is not to argue that these productions rely strictly on verifiable data or aim for the level of accuracy that one expects of written history. Rather, American Dreams and Hairspray juxtapose familiar televisual themes from the American Bandstand era with fictionalized characters, dialogue, and televisual representations. The resulting narratives present the history of the American Bandstand era in a way that inextricably links the subjects that are central to my project: teenage television, music, youth culture, urban space, racial discrimination, and civil rights. Although American Dreams’ and Hairspray’s respective methods of historical storytelling are tuned to commercial audiences, both productions use moving images, music, and dancing to celebrate and critique the mediated history of American Bandstand in ways that are not possible in written history.9 At their best, American Dreams and Hairspray approach the history of televised teen dance shows with more nuance and complexity than Dick Clark’s popular histories of American Bandstand. At the same time, however, American Dreams and Hairspray frequently use this nuance and complexity in the service of comforting narratives about interracial unity and white innocence.
The producers of both American Dreams and the Broadway version of Hairspray cited September 11 as the event that made their nostalgic stories of interracial unity and white innocence in the American Bandstand era relevant in the 2000s. In his commentary on the pilot episode, American Dreams’ creator Jonathan Prince reflected on the connections between September 11 and the 1960s:
When I wrote the pilot and I turned it in in August, a month later I got a phone call from one of the guys at NBC who had been helping me develop [the show]. … [He] called me and said, “are you watching TV?” … And I turned on the TV, and its September 11th, and I’m watching buildings in flames, and he said, “I think your show just got a lot more relevant.” Because there was a generation of people who didn’t know what it felt like to lose President Kennedy. This is, where were you when you [sic] walked on the moon? Where were you when President Kennedy was killed? Where were you when Martin Luther King was shot? … We have a generation who lived pretty much without that … but this was epic, the tragedy of losing President Kennedy was epic … there are these moments that unify us as a people and often they’re tragedy, sadly. And this was one of them.10
The pilot episode of American Dreams shows characters reacting to news of the assassination of President Kennedy before closing with black-and-white footage of NBC’s live coverage of the event from 1963. Here, American Dreams shows people unified across racial and generational lines in the face of a tragedy, and this historical narrative offers a “relevant” model for viewers after September 11. Jeff Zucker, NBC’s president, agreed that while the series “was not developed in response to what happened [on September 11] it resonates with what happened.”
David Rockwell offered similar comments regarding his work as a set designer on the Broadway production of Hairspray: “The heart of Hairspray—both the movie and the musical—encompasses John Waters’s belief in racial, sexual, class and body-type tolerance. Although it went unspoken, as a result of September 11, 2001, every member of the Hairspray family realized the significance of transferring John’s vision of empowerment and hopefulness to the stage.”11
Critics also reviewed American Dreams and Hairspray in the context of post-September 11 entertainment. When American Dreams debuted in fall 2002, it was joined by another show on the 1960s (the comedy Oliver Beene), remakes of three 1950s and 1960s era programs (Dragnet, Twilight Zone, and Family Affair), two shows about men reliving their high school days in the 1980s (the comedy Do Over and the drama That Was Then), and retrospective specials on Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Lewis, and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. Commenting on this fall schedule, New York Times critic Caryn James wrote:
What we’ll be watching in the fall suggests that programmers believe the mood to be overwhelmingly nostalgic and backwardlooking. … One after the other the networks—rarely adventurous to begin with—wrapped themselves in the flag, offered schedules dripping with nostalgia and announced shows that will play it safer than ever.
Even in this context of nostalgic television programming, American Dreams’ promotional material stood out. NBC promoted American Dreams heavily during its 9/ii anniversary coverage, encouraging viewers to “Remember the innocence. Remember the music.”12 As part of the first television season developed after September 11, American Dreams was part of what media studies scholar Lynn Spigel describes as an effort to channel “the nation back to normalcy—or at least to the normal flows of television and consumer culture.” “The return to normal,” Spigel argues, “was enacted not just through the narrative frames of news stories but also through the repositioning of audiences back into television’s fictive time and places.”13 Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, noted that this emphasis on nostalgia and a comforting return to normalcy extended to both Hollywood and Broadway, where
producers have decided Americans want … nostalgia—the logic being that people in times of trouble will gravitate toward entertainment that reminds them of simpler, happier times [such as] the candy-colored Broadway musical ‘Hairspray’ and the much hyped new NBC show ‘American Dreams [which] draw on fond remembrances of the ‘American Bandstand’ era.14
One of the interesting things about the renewed attention to the American Bandstand era in the 2000s is that both producers and critics of American Dreams and Hairspray took it as self-evident that stories about race relations in the 1960s would be comforting and nostalgic for viewers in the years after 9/11. Left unsaid in the promotion and reception of these productions was that both American Dreams and Hairspray looked to the familiar domestic black-white racial binary at a time when the dimensions of race in the United States had become increasingly multiethnic and transnational. Viewed in this light, the narratives of innocence and interracial unity featured prominently in American Dreams and Hairspray can be seen as comforting because they are not about the geopolitics of the contemporary United States. As media studies scholar Marita Sturken argues,
American national identity, and the telling of American history, has been fundamentally based on a disavowal of the role played in world politics by the United States not simply as a world power, but as a nation with imperialist policies and aspirations to empire. This disavowal of the United States as an empire has allowed for the nation’s dominant self- image as perennially innocent.15
Similarly, with narratives that solve the problem of black-white racial tensions in the 1960s through interracial cooperation, American Dreams and Hairspray could also be comforting because they were not about the political and cultural citizenship struggles of Muslims and Muslim-Americans. Focusing on these citizenship struggles in the context of 9/11 and U.S. imperialism, scholars like Sunaina Maira, Evelyn Alsultany, and Malini Johar Schueller have reiterated the “problems of imagining the nation as singular community.”16 The racial profiling and detention of Muslims and Muslim-Americans may seem far removed from the American Bandstand era, but that, in some ways, is the point. More research is needed to understand how civil rights narratives are being used after 9/11, but at a time when other racial dimensions were emerging, American Dreams and Hairspray located their narratives of national unity and innocence safely in domestic black-white racial tensions in the 1960s.
While both American Dreams and Hairspray portray racial conflicts to raise the dramatic tensions, both productions manage these racial conflicts so as not to offend the “fond remembrances” of contemporary viewers. American Dreams cuts between overlapping story lines to present multiple perspectives on racial conflicts, but refuses to criticize white racism. Hairspray, meanwhile, locates racism within a single villainous character. Both productions, moreover, are organized around the coming of age stories of teenage protagonists. Encouraging viewers to identify with these innocent characters, American Dreams and Hairspray make a virtue out of historical naivety regarding race. Presented in this way, the American Bandstand era becomes part of a simplistic history in which changing racial attitudes in the 1960s produced a color-blind and fully equal society.
In this respect, American Dreams and Hairspray are part of a much larger struggle over how the history of the civil rights era is remembered. As media studies scholar Herman Gray argues, “the civil rights subject performs important cultural work since it helps construct the mythic terms through which many Americans can believe that our nation has now transcended racism.”17 These popular histories of the civil rights era, Gray notes, say as much (or more) about the present as the past, producing raced subjects “who fit the requirements of contemporary circumstance.”18 For viewers in the 2000s, American Dreams and Hairspray provide narrative proof that individual racial prejudice existed “back then,” but was overcome through the racial tolerance of whites and the successful assimilation of African Americans. Scholars like Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Paula Moya, Hazel Rose Markus, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have described how narratives such as this provide the foundation for claims that in the post-civil rights era, the United States is a color-blind or post-racial society. Hall traces the logic and implications of this narrative:
In the absence of overtly discriminatory laws and with the waning of conscious bias, American institutions became basically fair. Free to compete in a market-driven society, African Americans thereafter bore the onus of their own failure and success. If stark group inequalities persisted, black attitudes, behavior, and family structure were to blame.19
With limited consideration of the structural aspects of racism, the narratives of interracial unity in American Dreams and Hairspray too easily bleed into narratives that take color-blindness to have been the singular objective and most important legacy of the civil rights era. My point here is not that American Dreams and Hairspray are bad history. Rather, I am most interested in the ways American Dreams and Hairspray look to the American Bandstand era to tell stories about the past and present, and how these productions foreground narratives of white innocence and interracial unity that work against structural understandings of racism.
In looking to the music, television, youth culture, and race relations of the American Bandstand era, American Dreams’ producers offered the show to advertisers and viewers as a series that could be both entertaining and educational. In a speech at a broadcasters’ meeting, American Dreams producer Jonathan Prince said that in addition to commercial success in ratings and advertisements, “what we want is to make a difference. What we want is to know that people are watching. And not merely watching, but talking about it.”20 Unlike I’ll Fly Away or Home-front, early 1990s civil rights dramas that earned critical praise as “quality television” but failed to draw large popular audiences, American Dreams promised to be serious enough to prompt conversations regarding race relations while remaining commercially viable.21 As part of this commercial appeal, Prince gained Dick Clark’s permission to use old clips from American Bandstand.22 Prince and Clark became co-executive producers of American Dreams, although Prince led the day-to-day series production. American Dreams also featured contemporary musical artists portraying historical performances on American Bandstand (e.g., Usher as Marvin Gaye, Vanessa Carlton as Dusty Springfield, and Kelly Rowland as Martha Reeves).
Through historical footage and recreated per formances, American Dreams established the importance of American Bandstand, and television more broadly, to the social life of the 1960s. Television, moreover, is central to the social and economic dreams of several of the show’s characters. The program examines the lives of a white family (the Priors) and a black family (the Walkers) in early 1960s Philadelphia. The social life of the show’s teenage protagonist, Meg Prior (Brittany Snow), revolves around American Bandstand. The economic well-being of both families, meanwhile, hinges on the success of Jack Prior’s (Tom Verica) television store, where Henry Walker (Jonathan Adams) also works. By making television central to how the show’s characters have fun, earn a living, and learn about the news of their city and the nation, American Dreams fused television history and local race relations in a provocative way. Regardless of how different viewers interpret American Dreams or the show’s portrayal of American Bandstand, the program demands that these interpretations account for television as a medium that mediates, records, and reenacts history.
Unlike Dick Clark’s popular histories of American Bandstand, which detached the show from the social history of postwar Philadelphia, American Dreams offers a more nuanced history of American Bandstand by situating its story line in the context of early 1960s Philadelphia. The first scene in the pilot episode, for example, opens with a caption reading “Philadelphia, 1963” and immediately shows teens waiting to be admitted to American Bandstand. Next, the program shows two of its teenage protagonists, Meg Prior and Roxanne Bojarski (Vanessa Len-gies), running home to watch American Bandstand on television. As these teens race home, the camera cuts to Meg’s mother and sister in the living room watching a locally broadcast cooking show. The scene moves through the television, from the living room to the WFIL studio, where a camera crew is shooting the cooking show. This television-as-portal shot is used a second time, to move from the WFIL studio to Jack Prior’s television store, where kids are gathering to watch American Bandstand. The scene then returns to show Meg and Roxanne running home as the crew of American Bandstand counts down to airtime inside the WFIL studio. The reenactment of American Bandstand opens with a soft focus on the actor playing Dick Clark in the background, and a hard focus on the black-and-white historical footage of Dick Clark on the television monitor. After the “historical” Clark introduces Martha and the Vandel-las, the scene shifts among three sets of dancers: Meg and Roxanne dancing at home, kids dancing in Meg’s father’s television store, and teens dancing in the American Bandstand studio. Within the first six minutes of the debut episode, American Dreams portrays the complexity of the production and consumption of American Bandstand through this range of televisual representations.
American Dreams, unlike Clark’s histories, downplays the question of integration on American Bandstand’s. American Dreams’ version of American Bandstand occasionally includes two or three black teenagers in the crowd, but all of the regular dancers are white. The racial demographics of American Bandstand’s studio audience are noted in the third episode of American Dreams. During a scene in the American Bandstand studio, Meg learns a new dance from a black teenager. The camera pans to the right to show that this interracial pair is dancing in front of the WFIL studio camera, which is presumably broadcasting the image to television affiliates across the country. The camera pans further to the right to find two middle-aged white men in suits watching the couple on the WFIL studio monitor. The show identifies the two men by signs on their chairs that read “sponsor.” Gesturing toward the monitor featuring the image of the interracial couple, one of the men asks “Are we on the air here?”23 This concerned sponsor is assured by his partner that the show is broadcasting a commercial and not the studio image. These two sponsors, portrayed by present-day NBC television executives, are identified in the credits as the “Ad Guys” and do not appear in any other episodes of American Dreams.24 Their brief appearance in this episode is the most direct reference American Dreams’ producers make to American Bandstand’s racial representations. This scene implies that sponsors exercised a great deal of control over the images American Bandstand broadcast and blames these sponsors, rather than Dick Clark or the rest of American Bandstand’s production staff, for the show’s racial segregation.
While this “blame the sponsors” trope is familiar, this scene is interesting because it presents a more historically accurate picture of the “integration” of American Bandstand, one that casts Dick Clark’s claims about ending the show’s racial segregation in a different light. Rather than “charting new territory” or “going where no television show had gone before,” as Clark has previously contended, this scene suggests that one or two black teens very occasionally made it into the studio and that producers consciously kept black teens off camera. In this view, American Bandstand reluctantly practiced token integration, and through selective camera work, even this token integration would have been invisible to television viewers. This definition of integration is a far more modest claim about American Bandstand’s role as a “force for social good,” but it helps explain how Dick Clark could believe that he integrated American Bandstand while the show continued to discriminate against black teenagers.25
Although American Dreams does not address American Bandstand’s racially discriminatory admission policies, by portraying American Bandstand amid the racial discrimination and tensions in Philadelphia, American Dreams encourages its audience to consider the role television played in mediating daily life in the 1960s. To bolster the show’s historical accuracy, American Dreams employed two full-time researchers to find specific details of Philadelphia in this era.26 This research is most evident in the show’s portrayal of the riot in North Philadelphia in the summer of 1964. The climactic riot scene in the first season’s final episode opens with historical American Bandstand footage of Dick Clark introducing Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. The scene moves from this black-and-white footage to the recreated American Bandstand studio, where the band portraying the group performs a rock and roll version of “C.C. Ryder.” The scene then cuts repeatedly between the studio and a street in North Philadelphia, while the song plays continuously in the background. In the street scene, a middle-aged black man and woman are arguing, first with each other and then with two police officers. The police forcibly arrest them for being drunk and disorderly while a number of black motorists and passersby watch the incident unfold. The show’s producers packed this scene with historical details, using the real names of the woman who was arrested and the police officer who arrested her.27 The scene is shifting, therefore, between two historical reenactments. The first is a reenactment of a musical performance that originally broadcast on American Bandstand in 1966 and resembles the musical reenactments featured in almost every episode of American Dreams.28 The reenactment of the altercation and arrest that sparked the Philadelphia riots, in contrast, portrays a moment that happened outside the view of television cameras in the summer of 1964. The latter reenactment is the show’s most specific portrayal of a historical event in Philadelphia other than American Bandstand. The juxtaposition of these reenactments is important because it asks viewers to watch and remember American Bandstand in the context of Philadelphia’s simmering racial tensions.
As the riots develop, the episode continues to move between reenactments of American Bandstand and dramatizations of the different interpretations and implications of the riots. The scene immediately following the arrest cuts among the American Bandstand studio, a group of young black men in North Philadelphia talking about the arrest, and a group of white police officers in a diner doing the same. While the police jokingly recount how the drunken woman hit one of the officers on the scene, the black men express anger and frustration at what they see as police brutality. One of the men, Willie Johnson (Nigel Thatch), appeared in earlier episodes encouraging his peers to develop intra-racial solidarity, using language that resonates with the rhetoric of black nationalism popularized by Malcolm X.29 Henry Walker’s nephew Nathan (Keith Robinson), who is drawn to the racial consciousness encouraged by Willie Johnson, gets the last word in the street corner exchange:
Ain’t nothing right about this. Up in Harlem, police killed that boy James Powell. You think that boy deserved to die? What for? They ain’t got no reason. None. We’re supposed to just stand back until they murder one of us? That’s in Harlem, that’s in St. Augustine, it’s Rochester, it’s Chicago, it’s North Philly. Ain’t never gonna change.30
This scene grounds the anger and frustration of these young black men in historically specific incidents of racial violence. Regarding the place of this scene in the series, Prince added, “[f]rom the very beginning, I told NBC that I wanted the final episode to be the riots. … The idea of the end of episode 25 was to show how one event, the riots, brought everybody together, white, black, old, young.”31 More specifically, American Dreams uses the riots to bring its characters together in a common story line, but the show does not attempt to resolve what the riots mean for the characters, or how viewers might interpret either the historical riots or their fictional portrayal.
Televisual representations are the primary way American Dreams links different characters without erasing their different perspectives on the riots. Willie Johnson and Nathan are the only characters who see the riots start in person, whereas all of the other characters learn about the riots via black-and-white footage on television (the actual footage is of the Watts riots, but the events are here described as taking place in North Philadelphia).32 American Dreams uses these televised images of the riots as a way to locate the show’s characters in relation to the event. Meg’s mother and younger siblings watch the riots unfold on television from the safety of their living room. In American Bandstand’s studio, the show’s producer watches the riots on a monitor in the control room and makes plans to send the studio audience home. Jack Prior and Henry Walker see footage of the riots in the television store, and leave the televised riots behind to find their teenage children, Meg and Sam, in the streets of North Philadelphia. Riot images are also on the televisions in the North Philadelphia store, where Meg and Sam (Arlen Escarpeta) are boarding up the windows in anticipation of the riots reaching their block. For American Dreams’ characters, these historical television images convey both the reality and proximity of the riots. For the show’s television audience, this scene also links American Bandstand as one of several sites with an emotional and geographic relationship to the riot.
The final riot scene also threatens the burgeoning interracial friendship between Sam and Meg. Sam is last shown with his cousin Nathan, kneeling over Willie Johnson who has been shot by a police officer. While Sam stays with Willie, Meg’s uncle removes her from the riots. The first season closes with Meg looking back at Sam from the back window of her uncle’s police car. Of this ending, Prince suggests, “[t]o end the first season with Meg in the back of a cop car, staring out, that’s a different girl than the girl who was watching Bandstand in that first pilot episode, filed with nothing but hope.”33 Although this link between American Bandstand and the riots is not, in fact, historically accurate (American Bandstand moved to California several months before the Philadelphia riots in 1964), by portraying American Bandstand in a racially charged local context, American Dreams encourages viewers to see American Bandstand as part of the social history of Philadelphia.
This riot scene, however, also highlights how American Dreams seeks to manage racial tensions to avoid offending contemporary viewers. Producer Jonathan Prince has suggested that, by cutting between the different stories of the event that sparked the riot, he intended to leave the interpretation of the scene open to the viewer. In his DVD commentary on the episode, Prince said, “When I wrote it I just thought, I want to hear both people’s point of view, because somewhere in the middle lay the truth.”34 By giving American Dreams’ representations of history an air of uncertainty, Prince suggests, he intended for viewers to engage more closely with the history and memory of this era.
More simply, however, American Dreams’ narrative ambiguity supports the show’s broad appeal as a commercial network television program. American Dreams pursues the widest possible audience by presenting an array of different characters with whom viewers could identify or not on the basis of age, race, gender, class, religion, or political opinion. The show attempts to appeal across these marketing demographics without offending anyone. The challenge of trying to sell to all of these demographic groups is that viewers’ reactions to the riot scene and the series would vary based on each viewer’s memory, knowledge, and interpretation of what happened before, during, and after the summer of 1964. This is important, especially for a show called American Dreams, because as political scientist Jennifer Hochschild has shown, race and class shape how people understand the American dream. “African Americans increasingly believe that racial discrimination is worsening and that it inhibits their race’s ability to participate in the American dream,” Hochschild argues. “[W]hites increasingly believe that discrimination is lessening and that blacks have the same chance to participate in the dream as whites.”35 Similar to the survey data Hochschild analyzed, a 2002 Gallop poll found that members of different racial groups have very different views of police and the criminal justice system. Eighty-four percent of whites said that the criminal justice system respects the civil rights of black citizens, compared to only 33 percent of blacks.36 This opinion poll, from the same year American Dreams debuted, is indicative of the different ways of seeing race, crime, and policing that viewers would bring to the riot episode. In short, American Dreams approaches race in terms of marketing demographics (e.g., accumulating different viewers from different racial groups), without consideration for the ways race shapes how viewers understand the show’s narratives and even the show’s title.37
American Dreams’ strategy of narrative ambiguity frequently introduces different points of view, but refuses to criticize white racism, even when it takes place “back then” in the diegetic past of the 1960s. The intersecting story lines in the riot scene, for example, present police brutality and black nationalism as equivalents. Willie and Nathan are cast as the dangerous black characters who jeopardize Henry and Sam’s efforts at integration. These representations, Herman Gray notes, look back to portrayals of black people in the civil rights era as either “decent but aggrieved blacks who simply wanted to become a part of the American dream, or as threats to the very notion of citizenship and nation.”38 Setting the “bad” black characters against the “good” black characters presents viewers with a simplistic view of black opinions regarding integration and racial equality.
Closing the season finale with Meg being rescued from North Philadelphia, moreover, reemphasizes the show’s commitment to the innocence of white characters and viewers. Whether Meg has learned anything about race relations or racism in her city is, in the narrative, less important than the fact that she is a “different girl than the girl who was watching Bandstand in that first pilot episode, filed with nothing but hope.”39 Meg’s loss of innocence, marked by her inability to be a carefree teenage consumer, receives more emphasis in the finale than the police brutality and economic, social, and political inequality that precipitated the riots in Philadelphia. Focusing on the danger Meg faces during the riot also echoes the use of urban riots by conservatives as evidence of the failure of liberal antipoverty programs and of the dangers posed by urban communities of color. In response to these perceived dangers, “law and order” became a favorite slogan of conservative politicians during and after the 1960s. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, for example, articulated this argument in the speech that launched his 1964 presidential campaign:
It is on our streets that we see the final, terrible proof of a sickness which not all the social theories of a thousand social experiments has even begun to touch. Crime grows faster that population, while those who break the law are accorded more consideration than those who try to enforce the law. Law-enforcement agencies—the police, the sheriffs, the F.B.I.—are attacked for doing their jobs. Law breakers are defended. Our wives, all women, feel unsafe on our streets.40
This prospect of urban spaces being unsafe for white wives and daughters was a recurring theme in the law and order rhetoric and is evident when Meg is in danger in the riots. Since viewers are encouraged to identify with Meg’s dreams and fears throughout the series, the image of her, clearly scared, driving away from North Philadelphia and looking back at riots is a powerful one. The power of this image, however, draws on ideas about black lawlessness and white innocence that shape American Dreams’ story of the riots.
Similarly, Prince’s suggestion that American Dreams was looking for the truth among multiple viewpoints also underestimates the cultural meanings viewers are likely to ascribe to the idea of urban riots generally. The use of television footage of the Watts riots is important here. This historical footage, appearing on television screens in the Priors’ home and stores, connects the different characters and the audience to the immediacy of the “live” riot. Presumably, Prince elected to use coverage from the Watts riots, the most famous urban rebellion of the decade, because this footage was more plentiful and visceral than similar footage from the Philadelphia riots. American Dreams’ substitution of Watts for Philadelphia, however, is suggestive of the ways in which viewers would bring their own cultural knowledge of urban riots, and urban space more generally, to this episode.
As historian Gerald Horne has shown, the Watts riots became a cultural symbol of urban crisis and influenced the way politicians and citizens talked about race, poverty, and cities in the following decades. Similarly, media studies scholar Steve Macek argues that film, television, magazines, and newspapers have promoted images of “economically depressed urban centers like Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit” as “vast landscapes of fear.”41 Rather than asking viewers to engage critically with their own assumptions about urban riots and, more broadly, race, poverty, and cities, American Dreams’ riot episode presents both “point[s] of view, because somewhere in the middle lay the truth.”
Alternatively, American Dreams might have provided more context for viewers to understand why the show’s black and white characters held different opinions of relevant issues, such as police surveillance and brutality. In his foreword to R&B musician and civil rights activist Johnny Otis’s history of the Watts riots, for example, American studies scholar George Lipsitz writes:
Otis asks his readers to view the destruction in Watts in August 1965 as a product of pressures built up over centuries. Rather than viewing the riots as the product of deranged or criminal elements in the community, Otis depicts the uprising as a political statement by people deprived of any other meaningful way of getting their grievances heard.42
Rather than offering a comforting story, Otis’s Listen to the Lambs challenges readers to understand the everyday realities that produced urban uprisings in places like Watts and Philadelphia. Without this historical context, American Dreams praises its audience for engaging with a serious and dramatic historical moment, but ultimately uses the riots as stage dressing for a story of lost innocence that reinforces what viewers already think about the riots and the American Bandstand era.
Like American Dreams, Hairspray focuses on music, television, youth culture, and race relations in the American Bandstand era. Hairspray revolves around the Corny Collins Show, a fictionalized version of the Buddy Deane Show, which broadcast in Baltimore from 1957 to 1963. Like the film’s fictional Corny Collins Show, the Buddy Dean Show was segregated. The station allowed only white teens to attend the weekday broadcasts, with the exception of one Monday each month when black teenagers filled the studio.43 Unlike American Bandstand, whose producers insisted that their racially discriminatory admission policies were color-blind, the Buddy Deane Show’s policy of segregation was explicit. In 1963, the Civic Interest Group, an integrationist group founded at Morgan State University and made up of college and high school students from Baltimore, challenged this policy by obtaining tickets for black and white teens to attend the show on a day reserved for black teenagers. After the surprise interracial broadcast, the television station received bomb and arson threats, hate mail, and complaints from parents of white teenagers.44 Facing controversy over the possibility of more integrated broadcasts, the station canceled the Buddy Deane Show in the fall of 1963.
John Waters, who grew up in Baltimore and was a devoted fan of the Buddy Deane Show, drew on this history to write and direct the original film version of Hairspray in 1988. Waters’s earlier films, low-budget camp comedies like Pink Flamingoes, earned him a following among independent movie fans. Waters brought a milder version of his deadpan camp aesthetic to Hairspray, which had a $2.7 million budget and was his first film to receive a family-friendly PG rating.45 The Wall Street Journal’s film critic commented that “the strangest thing about [Waters’s] latest picture, ‘Hairspray,’ is how very sweet and cheerful it is.”46 In Waters’s film a fat teenage girl, Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake), dreams of being a regular dancer on the Corny Collins Show.47 After achieving her goal, Tracy realizes that the show’s policy of segregation is unfair and joins with the black teens who have befriended her to integrate the program. Unlike the tensions that followed the real protest and integration of the Buddy Deane Show, Waters’s Hairspray ends with the protesters succeeding triumphantly. The television news reporter covering the Corny Collins Show’s integration in the film sums up the scene: “You’re seeing history being made today. Black and white together on local TV. The Corny Collins Show is now integrated!”48
Before making Hairspray, Waters helped to publicize the history of the Buddy Deane Show’s segregation in an essay on the program in his 1986 book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters. Commenting on the film’s revisionist history, Waters freely admitted that “I gave it a happy ending that it didn’t have.”49 In a 1988 interview Waters said he believed a major Hollywood production would have downplayed the show’s segregation. “I felt that to ignore that fact would be really inau-thentic,” Waters argued. “[I]f Hollywood would have made this movie, they would have had blacks on the show and just ignored the fact that none of the shows … did then.”50 While Waters imagined a happy ending contrary to historical events, his film is clear about segregation on the Buddy Deane Show.
Hairspray’s happy ending also gave the story a narrative arc that appealed to Broadway and Hollywood producers. Broadway producer Margo Lion, who also grew up watching the Buddy Deane Show as a teenager in Baltimore, approached Waters in 1999 about making a musical from his film. Lion brought in a team of musical composers, lyricists, and writers to bring the show to Broadway. The resulting show maintained the basic structure of Waters’s story, but fitting its transition to Broadway, the new Hairspray featured over a dozen original songs that conveyed the show’s narrative.51 This stage production earned eight Tony Awards, including best musical, and paved the way for a second film version, a musical comedy closely modeled on the Broadway version.52 The 2007 film version of Hairspray is indebted to Waters’s original, but it differs in two important respects. First, with a larger budget, wider distribution, and a well-known cast, the new Hairspray’s commercial goals went well beyond those of Waters’s film. As Michael Lynne, CEO of New Line Cinema noted of translating Hairspray into a big budget Broadway musical and film, “you take a film that was a cult film and you translate it to a medium where it must be a blockbuster if it’s going to succeed. There is no cult version of a Broadway musical.”53 Second, the new Hairspray makes greater use of music, dance, and reconstructions of historical television programs to appeal to a larger audience.54 The way the 2007 version of Hairspray navigates between these commercial aspirations while remaining faithful to Waters’s story makes it the focus of my analysis. The resonance between the Corny Collins Show and American Bandstand, moreover, makes Hairspray a part of the mediated history of American Bandstand.
Hairspray raises the topic of racial segregation early in the film while introducing the Corny Collins Show (unless otherwise noted, all reference to Hairspray in the rest of this chapter are to the 2007 version). Like American Dreams, the scene opens with Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) and her best friend Penny (Amanda Bynes) rushing home from school. As the girls run home, the scene cuts to the Corny Collins Show dancers and crew getting ready for the start of the program. The two girls arrive in the living room and turn on the television in time for Corny Collins’s (James Marsden) opening monologue, “Hey there teenage Baltimore. Don’t change that channel, because it’s time for The Corny Collins Show.”55 As the film’s audience joins Tracy and Penny in watching the black-and-white recreation of Baltimore’s local teenage dance program, Corny opens the show by singing “The Nicest Kids in Town.” The song’s lyrics introduce the television program and slyly reference the show’s segregation:
Every afternoon you turn your TV on
And we know you turn the sound up when your parents are gone
And then you twist and shout for your favorite star
And once you’ve practiced every step that’s in your repertoire
You better come on down and meet the nicest kids in town
Nice white kids who like to lead the way
And once a month we have our Negro Day!56 (emphasis added)
The film calls attention to its use of anachronistic racial terminology by having Corny sing “white” clearly and sharply, and by having all eighteen of the teenage Corny Collins Show dancers join in to sing “Negro Day.” During the song, the film cuts from the Corny Collins Show’s studio where the song is being performed to the living room where Tracy and Penny are dancing along with the show, and to Tracy’s television broadcasting black-and-white images of the Corny Collins Show. Tracy and Penny dance throughout the scene, and the lyrics about the show’s segregation do nothing to break them out of their afternoon routine. In his comments on the film, producer Neil Meron suggests that this normalcy was intended to stand out to the film’s viewers:
I think young people have a really eye opening experience when they’re watching this movie, just in terms of the racial divide that existed then and about how shocking things were then that aren’t anymore. They want to know if these things actually existed. … There is a truth to Hairspray that really tells young people what it was like, and how far we may have come on certain issues.57
The lyrics about segregation in “The Nicest Kids in Town” are intended to be both humorous and educational for the film’s audience, but they are presented as part of the everyday order of things for Tracy, Penny, and the teenagers on the Corny Collins Show.
The film’s audience learns more about the segregation of the Corny Collins Show in the next scene, where Tracy and Penny watch the program on several televisions displayed in the window of an electronics store. As the girls look on, Corny introduces Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah), the host of the one day a month when the show opens its studio to black teenagers. “I’m Motormouth Maybelle,” she says, “reminding [sic] the last Tuesday of the month is rhythm and blues day. That’s right, Negro Day will be coming your way.”58 Before Maybelle can finish her pitch, the camera drifts to Amber Von Tussle (Brittany Snow), the film’s blonde teenage antagonist. Maybelle says “ah, over here,” reminding the cameraman to refocus on her. In this scene, as in “The Nicest Kids in Town” sequence, the film moves among images of Maybelle on the set of the Corny Collins Show, Tracy and Penny watching Maybelle on the television, and close-ups of the televised picture of Maybelle. The shifts between scenes of the Corny Collins Show being produced and scenes of the film’s characters watching and dancing to the program establish the “liveness” of television within the film’s narrative. The film situates television as central to the lives of the characters even when they are not in the television studio. In turn, the importance of television to the characters’ lives helps to explain their protests against segregation on the Corny Collins Show.
The musical number “New Girl in Town” highlights the stakes of protesting segregation on the Corny Collins Show. This montage scene contrasts the whiteness of the Corny Collins Show with the show’s segregated Negro Day. “New Girl in Town” also introduces an interracial romance subplot between Maybelle’s son, Seaweed (Elijah Kelley), and Tracy’s friend Penny. Producer Neil Meron described these intersecting story lines in his commentary on the film: “so much happens during this song, which is one of the beautiful things about doing movie musicals that you can’t do on stage … you can accomplish so much during a song visually, storytelling wise.”59 The visual and musical storytelling in “New Girl in Town” starts with Amber and two other white teens performing the song on the set of the Corny Collins Show. Halfway through the song, the scene cuts to a black female trio, the fictional Dynamites, singing the song on Negro Day. This transition, coproducer Craig Zadan noted, “shows you the difference between a vanilla version of the song, with the white girls, and then the soulful version of the song, the sassy version of the song, on Negro Day.”60 In highlighting this change in musical styles, this scene juxtaposes reenactments of the Buddy Deane Show’s segregated white and black days. Unlike the one Monday a month when black teenagers were allowed on the real Buddy Deane Show, Hairspray presents the performances on Negro Day as being more dynamic and original than those on the Corny Collins Show.
While Waters’s film both accentuated and satirized the distinction between “square” white teenagers and “hip” black youth, Hairspray (2007) uses the different dancing and singing styles to highlight the Corny Collins Show’s appropriation of black culture. Unlike Waters’s film and the Broadway play, which mentioned but never showed Negro Day, this scene is the audience’s first glimpse of Motormouth Maybelle presiding over the black teen dance telecast. After the Dynamites finish singing, the camera focuses on Maybelle as she reads a promotion for a fictional hair care product, “Nap-away” (“Every kink will be gone in a blink”). Queen Latifah plays the Maybelle character with the confidence and energy she displayed in her career as a hip-hop artist, but in this scene she registers disappointment as she reads the advertisement. Zadan argues that in the scene viewers “get to see how much Motormouth Maybelle is happy to be hosting Negro Day, but at the same time how demeaning it is to be doing this ad for this hair product.”61 Maybelle’s negotiation of the limited opportunities offered by this segregated television program is made explicit in the exchange between Maybelle and the program manager, Velma Von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer), that closes the scene:
VVT: How dare you pick the same song [“New Girl in Town”]!
MM: They [The Dynamites] wrote it.
VVT: You watch yourself. You are one inch from being canceled. You know what your demographic is? Cleaning ladies and lawn jockeys. (Velma walks off)
MM (to her teenage son): A foot in the door, that’s all it is. One toe at a time.62
This exchange explicates the montage scenes during “New Girl in Town.” Maybelle’s matter-of-fact line, “they wrote it,” identifies the Dynamites as the writers of “New Girl in Town” and references the numerous historical examples of white artists reaping financial gains by covering black rhythm and blues songs.63 This scene is also the film’s most explicit confrontation regarding racism. Director Adam Shankman called Velma’s “cleaning ladies and lawn jockeys” statement “the most dangerous line” in the film, and Zadan said that they wanted the characters in this scene to go “very, very far with the racism issue.”64 Through this unsubtle exchange, the film reveals Velma to be a racist character and exposes the segregated Corny Collins Show to be a site of racial discrimination. This exchange also establishes the film’s approach to racism. In treating racism as an attitude and locating racial prejudice in a single character, Hairspray makes it possible for the narrative to fix racism through interracial cooperation.
“Welcome to the Sixties,” a song at the film’s midpoint, foreshadows the resolution of these racial tensions. The Dynamites are integral to the visual and musical composition of the scene, which focuses on Tracy’s convincing her agoraphobic mother, Edna Turnblad (John Travolta), to leave the house and embrace the future. Tracy starts the song, singing “Hey mama, hey mama, look around / Everybody’s groovin’ to a brand new sound,” before turning on the family’s television set to reveal the Dynamites performing dance steps in time with the song.65 As Tracy delivers the title of the song, “Hey mama, welcome to the sixties,” she points toward the television, and her mother’s face registers surprise at the black-and-white image of the Dynamites on the television. While Tracy cajoles her mother, the film returns to the televised image of the Dynamites twice more, and the singers join the vocal track of the song.
The Dynamites’ visibility is heightened when Tracy finally gets her mother to leave the house. The Dynamites take on a more prominent role in the vocal track, and, through special effects, still images of the group come to life from advertisements on a building, a bus stop, and a billboard. The group also appears on several television screens in a store’s display window. Throughout “Welcome to the Sixties,” the Dynamites get the top billing, which the Corny Collins Show denied them just minutes earlier during the Negro Day segment of “New Girl in Town.” The extreme visibility of this black singing group on television and in public advertisements represents, in the film’s narrative, the progressive changes that await the characters in “the sixties.” Tracy, who initiated these changes, emerges as the integrationist hero to counter the racist villain, Velma.
The film further establishes television as a site of struggle for racial equality, and Tracy as a champion of integration, through a protest march on the station that broadcasts the Corny Collins Show. The scene opens on a neighborhood street where Maybelle and dozens of black community members are gathering with picket signs reading “Integration, Not Segregation,” “TV Is Black and White,” and “Let Our Children Dance.”66 Tracy emerges from the crowd and tells Maybelle she wants to join the march. The two characters have a brief exchange that establishes what Tracy, the only white person at the rally, stands to lose by challenging segregation:
MM: You’re going to pay a heavy price.
TT: I know.
MM: You’ll never dance on TV again.
TT: If I can’t dance with Seaweed and Little Inez [Maybelle’s son and daughter], then I don’t want to dance on TV at all. I just want tomorrow to be better.67
Given the importance the film assigns to Tracy’s dream of dancing on the Corny Collins Show, she risks a lot by joining the protest. Although the film does not portray who organized this protest, Maybelle is heard giving directions and encouragement as the camera pans across the crowd. Maybelle is clearly established as the protest leader when she sings “I Know Where I’ve Been.”
Producer Craig Zadan describes Maybelle’s ballad as “[t]he emotional core of the movie” and “the number that moves people the most.”68 There is no equivalent song in Waters’s film, which eschews sentimentality in favor of camp humor. “I Know Where I’ve Been” draws instead on the stage version of Hairspray, which raises the story’s emotional stakes in order to make the successful resolution in the final act more joyous. Hairspray (2007) encourages this emotional reaction by presenting the song in a serious tone without any of the verbal or visual jokes found in the film’s other songs. The film also links the song with a protest march that gives the scene a visual component resembling historical images of civil rights marches. In contrast to the dance numbers in the rest of the film, Maybelle delivers a slow and soulful version of “I Know Where I’ve Been,” with backup vocals by an offscreen gospel choir.69 As Maybelle leads the crowd to the television station, dozens of black Baltimoreans join the protestors, and these marchers lip-sync the choirs’ part. At several points in the scene, moreover, the camera films the crowd from the front so that Maybelle and the protestors are singing and marching directly toward the screen. Through the growth of the crowd and the rising emotion of the song, the film further establishes the protest against segregation on television as a major civil rights issue for the film’s characters.
This scene also differentiates the film’s segregation theme from the main character’s struggle to become popular as a fat teenage girl.70 Waters’s film, which satirizes discrimination against black and fat teenagers, does not clearly distinguish between the two. In the DVD commentary for the new film, moreover, Waters suggests: “If we’re making a movie about outsiders, black people and integration, then what’s even further? I think a fat girl gets more hassle than a black girl. If you ask any really fat people, they say they walk down the street and nobody looks at them.”71 In contrast to Waters’s suggestion, Hairspray (2007) does not treat racial discrimination and anti-fat prejudice as equivalents. While Hairspray (2007) also uses Tracy’s weight to universalize her outsider appeal, the film assigns more emotional power to the segregation subplot and to Queen Latifah’s character than to Tracy’s pursuit of acceptance and popularity. Rather than suggesting that all outsiders face similar struggles as Waters’s film sometimes implies, Hairspray (2007) focuses more attention on the injustice of racial segregation and discrimination.
Hairspray (2007) also downplays the provocative gender casting decisions in Waters’s film. Whereas Hairspray (1988) cast Divine, best known for playing drag queens in Waters’s earlier films, as both Tracy’s mother and the racist (and male) television station owner, Hairspray (2007) toned down these challenging gender representations by casting John Travolta to play Tracy’s mother. Director Adam Shankman noted that Hairspray’s (2007) producers cast Travolta with an eye on the film’s commercial prospects:
In the tradition of “Hairspray,” which started with John [Waters], obviously, casting Divine, it’s one of my favorite things that Edna’s played by a man because it’s anarchistic. And when [the producers] told me that they were talking to John [Travolta], I strangely immediately understood, because knowing that they were wanting to make a big, commercial hit movie out of this, and it’s a musical, what man are you going to go to that’s the biggest musical star that we have? And because of “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever,” it is John Travolta.72
Here again, Hairspray (2007) smoothed away the transgressive edges of Waters’s film to appeal to the largest possible mainstream audience. As a result, the new film foregrounds the segregation story line more so than the original. By using a civil rights story as a commercial attraction, Hairspray is the latest in what filmmaker and media studies scholar Allison Graham and media studies scholar Jennifer Fuller have identified as the long line of civil rights-themed films and television shows since the late 1980s.73
While “I Know Where I’ve Been” is Hairspray’s most serious portrayal of civil rights, the film’s concluding song resolves the issue of segregation on the Corny Collins Show with an upbeat and humorous dance number. Tracy kicks off “You Can’t Stop the Beat” with her performance in the Corny Collins Show’s “Miss Teen Hairspray” competition. Tracy’s performance fulfills her dream of being the lead dancer on the Corny Collins Show and sets the program’s integration in motion. Tracy’s dance partner, Link Larkin (Zac Efron), invites Maybelle’s daughter, Little Inez (Taylor Parks), out to dance. As Little Inez holds center stage, becoming the first black teenager on the Corny Collins Show, the film cuts between her dancing and a table of telephone operators who tally votes on the dance contest from the show’s viewers. After Inez’s performance, the film’s interracial couple, Seaweed and Penny, pick up the song.
After the two teens finish singing, they kiss, and the scene shifts from the Corny Collins Show’s studio to the show’s image on a television in Penny’s mother’s living room. Penny’s mother tries to wipe the black-and-white image of the interracial kiss off television screen with a handkerchief while Corny intones to the camera, “Live television, there’s nothing like it.”74 Penny’s mother’s resistance to her daughter’s interracial relationship and televised kiss is portrayed as a comically retrograde viewpoint. Her viewpoint, moreover, is not shared by the viewers of the Corny Collins Show. Unlike the real Buddy Deane Show, which received hate mail and bomb threats after its sudden integration, Inez receives a “tidal wave of calls” of support from the film’s Baltimoreans.75 After Inez is named the winner of the “Miss Teen Hairspray” dance contest and the lead dancer on the show, Corny declares: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Corny Collins Show is now and forever officially integrated!”76 The film depicts public support for this integration with a shot of an interracial audience watching the show on television at a clothing store, and a second shot of a television reporter breaking the news outside of the studio. In front of a mostly white group of teenagers celebrating on the sidewalk, the reporter announces: “Interracial dancing has broken out at the WYZT stage. Just look at the crowd reaction.”77 By cutting among these scenes, the film uses three televisual representations to reimagine the historical struggle over the Buddy Deane Show’s segregation. The film shows the integration inside of the Corny Collins Show’s studio, how different viewers reacted to the televised image of the show’s integration, and how the show’s integration itself became a television news event.
The finale of “You Can’t Stop the Beat” closes on a similarly triumphant note. In contrast to the stark division of black and white dancing styles in “New Girl in Town,” the teenage backup dancers perform steps that producer Neil Meron suggests are meant to reference the show’s integration:
What’s great about [Adam Shankman’s] choreography [in “You Can’t Stop the Beat”] is that, subtly, the black dancers and the white dancers have the same choreography. When all the choreography in the movie prior to this was segregated by race, and now it’s all together, which is a very, very subtle reference to the theme of this movie.78
In the musical film’s diegetic world, this integrated choreography is as important as the successful visual integration of the television program. The film’s teenage characters not only overturn segregation on the Corny Collins Show; they immediately erase the film’s earlier distinctions between “square” white teens and “hip” black teens. The film reinforces this subtle reference moments later when Corny Collins invites Maybelle out to sing the final verse of the song. Corny declares “this is the future” and tells Maybelle that “this is your time.”79 Maybelle sings: “You can’t stop today as it comes speeding down the track / Child, yesterday is hist’ry and it’s never coming back / ‘Cause tomorrow is a brand new day and it don’t know white from black.”80 In the film’s narrative, this utopian vision of a color-blind future solves the problem of segregation and racial injustice. Unlike the narrative ambiguity at the end of American Dreams’ first season, Hairspray’s narrative is fully revolved and unequivocally happy. Hairspray also uses the Corny Collins Show’s television camera to expose Velma Von Tussle’s attempt to switch the tallies so that her daughter, and not Inez, would win. As the camera captures Velma’s confession, the film cuts to an interracial group watching the program on a set of televisions in a store’s display window. The film’s protagonists, therefore, not only succeed in integrating the television show; they use the medium to prove the dishonesty of the show’s racist producer.
This happy ending, of course, runs counter to historical events. The television station that broadcast The Buddy Deane Show canceled it shortly after civil rights activists successfully integrated a single episode. Hairspray’s ending resembles the utopian sensibility that film scholar Richard Dyer has identified as fundamental to musical films.81 Hairspray presents a utopian version of early 1960s Baltimore that is more racially integrated and fair than the real era’s history. John Waters created this particular vision, but more commercially minded producers and their audiences have shared in this ideal. Like Waters’s film and the stage show, Hairspray’s (2007) historical representations and utopian conclusion have the potential to mislead viewers about the level of racism in the early 1960s, the rate of success for civil rights activists, and the integration of televised teenage dance programs like American Bandstand. Viewed in this way, Hairspray endorses a view of the civil rights era in which an innocent white teen (Tracy) joins forces with a progressive medium (television) to vanquish racism, located, in the end, in the attitudes of a single character (Velma).
Without minimizing the dangers of this film to promote a simplistic view of history, it is important to differentiate Hairspray from films like Mississippi Burning (1988), which erases the grassroots local activism of black Mississippians, and Forrest Gump (1994), which intervenes in major historical events of the 1960s and 1970s in order to emphasize the innocence of the United States.82 Hairspray, in contrast, does not ask its audience to view it as historically accurate (like Mississippi Burning), nor does it trivialize the historical era it celebrates and satirizes (like Forrest Gump). In other words, Hairspray encourages viewers to take the struggles over segregation on teenage television shows seriously, without claiming to be a historically true civil rights story. While Hairspray also foreground narratives of interracial unity and innocence, this utopian vision of the American Bandstand era is ultimately more successful than the narrative ambiguity of American Dreams. Unlike the narrative ambiguity of American Dreams, which encourages viewers to embrace what they already think, Hairspray’s utopian vision of the American Bandstand era is less likely to encourage viewers to see the film as a completely accurate representation. Along these lines, producer Craig Zadan suggests that
the wonderful thing about the movie … is the fact that while we are dealing with some very serious subject matter, we’re doing it in such a highly comic and entertaining way. So you never feel like we’re on a soap box, or we’re preaching to you, or we’re saying this is the lesson you need to learn. You’re laughing and you’re smiling and you’re enjoying all of it, and yet, hopefully, you come away from it with something serious to talk about afterwards.83
There is no guarantee that viewers of Hairspray will discuss the film’s serious subject matter as Zadan suggests. The film, however, makes it difficult to overlook racism with regard to historical television dance shows, and, at the very least, provides a starting point for viewers to learn more about the American Bandstand era.
A 2008 production by the World Performance Project at Yale University offers a final example of the relevance of American Bandstand in the 2000s, one that engages more critically with the American Bandstand era than either American Dreams or Hairspray. Developed through a seminarstudio course taught by dramaturges and professional dancers, Don’t Look Back! A Rock ’n’ Roll Orpheus used televised teen dance shows and popular music and dance from the 1950s and 1960s to create and perform a multimedia version of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As the basis for this production, students conducted research on American Bandstand, Baltimore’s Buddy Deane Show, Washington, D.C.’s The Milt Grant Show and Teenarama, and Hairspray, as well as rock and roll and civil rights. What is interesting about Don’t Look Back! is that it used historical media and representations from the American Bandstand era without suggesting that the problem of race was solved in the 1960s. One way Don’t Look Back! did this was by directly engaging with the idea of the 2000s as a post-racial era. “As rehearsals and scriptwriting began,” the producers note,
it became clear that creating a frame through which the modern post-racial identification of students could enter the past would be as necessary as keeping our audience mindful of the present. The success of the piece depended on our ability to transport the audience and the student-performers back to the 1950s … without fully obscuring the time/space reality of the [present].84
The play tried to accomplish this by having the teen performers portray both American Bandstand dancers and modern actors using camcorders to send live feeds to projection screens above the stage. The resulting production mixed period media from the 1950s and 1960s (including footage from American Bandstand), live portrayals of American Bandstand era dancing, and live present-day commentary on both of the former. This approach encouraged the teen performers and audiences to move back and forth between the American Bandstand era and the present, using each as a lens to examine the other. This helped Don’t Look Back! avoid the easy nostalgia for national innocence of American Dreams and tempered the utopian interracial unity of Hairspray. Finally, recognizing the complexities and dangers of representing historical race relations in an era when many of the teen performers and audience members viewed themselves as post-racial, Don’t Look Back! used a mix of historical and contemporary media to directly address and challenge these viewpoints. Perhaps because it was not a major commercial production like American Dreams and Hairspray, Don’t Look Back! encouraged its teen performers and audiences to do more than remember the innocence of the American Bandstand era.
My focus in this chapter has been on how American Dreams and Hairspray engage with the history of the American Bandstand era. Despite their limitations, both American Dreams and Hairspray present the history of the American Bandstand era with more nuance than did previous popular histories of the show published by Dick Clark. For my undergraduate students, Hairspray and, to a lesser extent, American Dreams are primary points of reference for this era. I view this as an opportunity rather than a handicap. Similar to my project, both American Dreams and Hairspray encourage viewers to examine the histories of television, music, youth culture, and civil rights concurrently and in relation to specific urban spaces. I hope, however, that my students will be suspicious of the narratives of innocence and interracial unity at play in both productions. These narratives can too easily be taken as endorsements of a color-blind racial ideology in which racism is strictly a problem of individual prejudice and in which this prejudice has disappeared since the 1960s. Still, suspicion of these narratives can also provide the basis for critical analysis of the American Bandstand era and a more nuanced understanding of race and racism in a supposedly post-racial era.