CHICAGO 2002

For me, the history of CHICAGO  has always been inextricably linked with that of A Chorus Line. CHICAGO premiered on Broadway on June 3rd, 1975; A Chorus Line, six weeks later, on July 25th. CHICAGO opened to mixed reviews and struggled at the boxoffice; A Chorus Line was met with raves, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. CHICAGO was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, won 0; A Chorus Line was nominated for 12, won 9.

CHICAGO and A Chorus Line also happen to be linked together in my memory. Certainly, I remember that day in August of 1975 when I went to The Gramophone, a gay-owned and operated record store on San Francisco's Polk Street, and purchased the Original Broadway Cast Recording LPs of both shows. Although I hadn't yet heard a single note from either score, I was so fired up from consuming all the After Dark Magazine-fed hype surrounding the opening of each production (that invaluable, homoerotic, national entertainment magazine being my sole West Coast pipeline to what was happening on Broadway), that I was almost smug in my confidence that my two blind purchases were far from being a gamble. 

August 5, 1975 - $4.88 each
Both were single LPs in glossy gatefold jackets loaded with photos & liner notes

Given that Broadway musicals don't crop up with the regularity of movies, the appearance of the highly-anticipated shows was quite a big deal to me. Before CHICAGO & A Chorus Line captured my imagination, the last Broadway cast album I'd purchased was Sondheim's A Little Night Music, a musical meal I'd been dining out on since 1973. Having committed every note and melody of that splendid score to memory by then, I could scarcely believe my good fortune that 1975 held forth the promise of TWO major Broadway musical releases I could submerge myself in. 

Back in the day, all the smart money was on CHICAGO. The only familiar names A Chorus Line boasted were composer Marvin Hamlish, then all but unavoidable after his recent Oscar win for The Sting (1973), and director-choreographer Michael Bennett, whose name was familiar to me from the liner notes of the library-borrowed cast albums of Company and Follies. CHICAGO distinguished itself as the musical with the Broadway heavy hitters and showbiz pedigree. It marked the Broadway musical return of Gwen Verdon (her last Broadway musical was 1966's Sweet Charity)! The professional reunion of husband & wife collaborators Verdon & Fosse! The reteaming of Fosse with his Cabaret and Liza with a Z collaborators: the composer-lyricist-writing duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb! And best of all, CHICAGO marked the first-time pairing of two genuine Broadway legends…Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera!

Illustration by Sam Norkin -1975

Wanting to start with the "sure thing," I listened to the CHICAGO album first, which became one of those rarer-than-rare occurrences where one's extraordinarily high expectations are met and exceeded. Hearing that incredible score for the first time...every single song a showstopper...not a clunker in the bunch...was such a thrill. The songs and their often hilarious lyrics set my imagination on fire... I could practically see the entire production in my head. I was instantly attracted to the storyline--the phoniness of show biz reflecting the phoniness of the American legal system. And if the cynicism at CHICAGO's core struck me as caustic and pessimistic, consider that I was just 17 at the time (sarcasm and snark are like crack cocaine to a teenager) and that it was the summer of '75. The summer that saw the dynamic downer duo of Nashville and The Day of the Locust released to movie theaters just weeks before. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. CHICAGO was simply riding the crest of the zeitgeist. 

May 6, 1976

That's Jane Fonda speaking at a Tom Hayden rally in Sacramento and 18-year-old me in this, the only photo I have of my beloved official CHICAGO T-shirt I wore for years until it disintegrated. An image captured mere moments before Ms. Fonda graciously signed the Barbarella photo I've got secreted away in the book you see tucked under my arm (The Busby Berkeley Book). The memo is an affirmative reply to my written request to NY's 46th St. Theater inquiring about the possibility of purchasing a CHICAGO T-shirt (mail-order Broadway merchandise was yet to be a thing). It cost a whopping $5 plus $1 shipping. 

Next, I listened to A Chorus Line, optimistically resigned to the certainty that it couldn't match my CHICAGO experience. Jump ahead several hours. Me on the floor in front of the family stereo, headphones on, in a theater geek's state of transcendence, eyes red and nose runny from listening to A Chorus Line three times in a row and bawling my eyes out. 

And there you have what was then, and continues to be, the essential link in my relationship with CHICAGO and A Chorus Line. They're culturally joined at the hip for me. Iconic templates of a particular time and place in my life--I'd graduated high school in June, I'd been "out" to myself for about two years (4 more years to go for family), it was the summer of Jaws, it was the summer of my independence. And these two shows, listened to as regularly and relentlessly as though they were on a loop, were the soundtrack of my adult-adjacent freedom. 

June 7, 1976
I saw A Chorus Line when the National Company came to San Francisco's
 Curran Theater in May. Ever the autograph hound, my friend and I became
stage-door Johnnies for the show's entire run

But CHICAGO was always the diamond…sharp, dazzling, and cold, while A Chorus Line was always the heart (a vision of Lauren Bacall singing "Hearts, Not Diamonds" in The Fan just popped into my head). To me, A Chorus Line was a dark, almost melancholy show... a Follies for theater gypsies...but unlike CHICAGO, it was humane and compassionate. And that made listening to it a poignant and exhilarating experience—all goosebumps and waterworks. Each musical, reflecting as they did, opposite yet equally valid faces of our culture (post-Watergate disillusionment & "Me Generation" introspection), also appealed to the contrasting sides of my own nature. CHICAGO and A Chorus Line complemented one another. 

It wasn't until 1992 that the opportunity arose for me to actually see a production of CHICAGO on stage for the first time. The Long Beach Civic Light Opera put on a fabulous, faithful-to-the-original production starring Juliet Prowse and Bebe Newerth, utilizing Tony Walton's original set designs, Patricia Zipprodt's costuming, and featuring two members of the original 1975 cast. It was astoundingly good. This may explain why I was never very fond of the pared-down, anachronistically costumed look of CHICAGO's phenomenally successful 1996 Broadway revival. An antipathy reinforced when I saw a 2012 production starring Christie Brinkley (by this point, stunt-casting was the only teeth the show had left).

Since 1975, A Chorus Line's cultural grip has weakened a bit. Thanks to a monumentally mishandled 1985 movie adaptation and the musical's once-innovative confessional format feeling almost quaint in the modern climate of social media oversharing. Meanwhile, CHICAGO, a show once criticized for its relentlessly downcast gaze into life's sewers, has hung around long enough for its down-in-the-gutter perspective (I hear Candy Darling in Women in Revolt "Too low for the dogs to bite!") to be precisely eye-level with what mainstream American culture has come to normalize, reward, and elect.   

And something happened that, for the longest time, I had given hope of ever seeing...after decades of false starts and empty rumors (Liza and Goldie! Goldie and Madonna!), and against impossible odds (non-animated movie musicals were given the death knell) CHICAGO, at last, had been made into a movie. Twenty-seven years after its Broadway debut. 

Renee Zellweger as Roxie Hart

Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma Kelly

Richard Gere as Billy Flynn

Queen Latifah as Matron Mama Morton

John C. Reilly as Amos Hart

CHICAGO, the Bob Fosse/Fred Ebb/John Kander musical vaudeville about two amoral, overaged, gin-soaked jazz babies on murderers' row, desperate to parlay their 15-minutes of criminal infamy into show biz careers, was made into a $45 million major motion picture. Who was the director tasked with reviving the viability of live-action musicals? None other than Rob Marshall, the Tony Award-nominated choreographer-director of that 1992 Juliet Prowse/Bebe Neuwirth Long Beach production that knocked my socks off.  

It's impossible to overstate how excited I was that Friday morning in December of 2002 when my partner and I, returning home from a Christmas trip, stopped off at our place just long enough to drop off our luggage so we could hightail it to Century City and be among the first audience to see CHICAGO on its December 27th opening day in LA. When the film was over and we were handed our evaluation cards by anxious-looking marketing people (the film wouldn't open wide until January), I thought I had died and gone to stage-to-screen heaven. We were both so euphoric over what we'd just seen, after exiting the theater, we swiftly got right back in line to see it again.

Chita Rivera as Nickie
Broadway's original Velma Kelly makes a cameo appearance as a Cook County Jail inmate.
Her name is a nod to the character she played in Fosse's 1969 film Sweet Charity.

Rob Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon avoided several pitfalls from the outset by not trying to reimagine the show for the screen. Instead, they came up with a device (the musical numbers erupt out of Roxie's fevered fantasies) that made the highly-stylized, stage-bound show more cinematic. Boasting spectacular cinematography, a sensational cast, and dazzling choreography, they succeeded in bringing the CHICAGO I loved to the screen. (It had been my gravest fear that the "Victoria's Secret meets International Male" Broadway revival version of  CHICAGO would be the only surviving template for future generations.) 

The film became a major boxoffice and critical hit, garnering a whopping 13 Oscar nominations that year, winning 6, among them Best Picture. CHICAGO revitalized the movie musical.

Taye Diggs as The Bandleader

Christine Baranski as Mary Sunshine

But writing this now, in 2022, it's clear my once all-encompassing ardor for CHICAGO has cooled a bit over the years. After the dust of anticipation settled and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief that the screen adaptation wasn't a botch job like A Chorus Line: The Movie, only then did I notice that somewhere along its 27-year path to the screen, CHICAGO had become neutered. 

When I look at CHICAGO today, the film's black comedy subtext targeting the institutional corruption of the media, penal system, politics, and law, doesn't hit nearly as hard as how sympathetically Roxie and Velma are portrayed. 

Gwen Verdon & Chita Rivera gave us a Roxie and Velma who were genuinely "...older than I ever intended to be." The undeserving pair's hunger for vaudeville fame was a last-gasp act of desperation and resentment after a lifetime of failure and rejection. The Roxie and Velma of the film are both so young and beautiful (and talented) that we're left with the impression that life, indeed, has been unduly dismissive of them. Each suffers so many humiliations, setbacks, and exploitations that by the finale, we're rooting for them and have forgotten (or stopped caring) that they are remorseless murderers. This is obviously the whole point, and the film stays true to that notion... academically. But rather than leaving the audience with a bad taste in its mouth for its complicity in the amorality, I know I was just happy to see these two exploited sad sacks seeing their dreams come true. It was a feel-good ending passing itself off as hard-knock cynicism. 

Fosse/Verdon (2019)

Bianca Marroquin and Michelle Williams

CHICAGO rehearsals 1975

Bob Fosse: "And I'm saying that it would be better for the show if the…."

Gwen Verdon: "Better for the show? Oh, really? Better for the show… Is that really what you think? I'll tell you what would have been better for the show: opening four months ago with a director who wasn't hellbent on turning it into two hours of misery for the audience."

The above exchange may be fictional (from the splendid miniseries Fosse/Verdon), but it reflects a genuine issue that plagued the original production of CHICAGO from the start: concern that Fosse had simply made the show too bitter and misanthropic for its own good. 

Hollywood had no such concerns. When the time came for the film adaptation, far too much Hollywood money was riding on CHICAGO for the studio to even consider taking a chance on having another Pennies from Heaven on its hands (1981's mega-depressing megaflop about another amoral character who uses musical fantasy to escape reality). Miramax insured its $45 million investment by making sure that with this CHICAGO, a good time was going to be had by all. Even if it was a musical about murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery, and treachery--all those things we all hold near and dear to our hearts.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

No one can say Rob Marshall didn't understand the assignment. He was hired to deliver a hit movie musical, and he did. Brilliantly. It really wasn't his fault that the CHICAGO he (and I) fell in love with back in 1975—labeled by many critics at the time as mean-spirited and ugly—had long given way to the forget your troubles, c'mon get happy crowd-pleaser CHICAGO of today. The revamped 1996 Broadway revival of CHICAGO turned Fosse's 1975's ambivalent success into the 2nd longest-running musical in Broadway history. And it didn't accomplish that by making visiting tourists and blue-haired theater parties uncomfortable. It became a hit by submerging the show's unsavory attributes under layers of glamour, sex, and style. Yes, with nary a trace of irony or self-awareness, CHICAGO had become Fosse's "Razzle Dazzle" number.

CHICAGO's themes remain relevant, but its contemptuous 

view of America and humanity no longer discomfit

PERFORMANCES

Casting a movie in ways that invite comparisons to a show's original cast can be problematic. Since there IS no other Roxie Hart for me but Gwen Verdon, I was actually pleased that the film went with an entirely different take on the character. I hadn't seen Renée Zellweger in anything before, but her Roxie has a Glenda Farrell quality—tough, quirky, wisecracking—that feels both period-perfect and suits the film's concept. Catherine Zeta-Jones is dynamic as Velma Kelly, but the lovely woman hasn't a coarse bone in her body. The "foul-mouth broad" part of her performance never convinced me. It's impossible to take your eyes off of her when she's onscreen, but when she tries for Velma's lowbrow vulgarity, the best you get (and here she isn't alone) is Damon Runyon-esque posturing of the Guys and Dolls sort. The entire cast of CHICAGO is exceptionally good, Richard Gere--the most animated I've seen him onscreen since Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)--being a particular delight, displaying even more playful showmanship at age 52 than in that online clip of his 1973 appearance in Grease.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The thrill and terror of seeing any movie adaptation of a favorite show is discovering what they did with (or to) the songs you loved best. Sometimes your favorites don't even make it into the finished film (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever's baffling decision to excise its sole lively production number "Wait Till We're Sixty-Five"). Other times you'll wish they hadn't (don't get me started on A Chorus Line: The Movie again). From the very first time I listened to the CHICAGO Broadway cast album, "Funny Honey," "The Cell Block Tango," "Roxie," and "Nowadays" became my favorite songs in the show. How did their transfer to film rate? 

"Funny Honey"-    B

The movie goes for a sultry, torchy interpretation of this number and scores high points for how it cleverly establishes the film's visual vocabulary for Roxie's fantasies. It only earns a "B" grade because as good as Zellweger is, she simply can't touch Gwen Verdon for comedy delivery. An observation that's less a jab at Ms. Z than a tip of the hat to Verdon.  

"The Cell Block Tango"-  A+

Every detail about this inspired fever dream of a number works magnificently for me. I especially love that Marshall includes the "victims" in this death tango, and the way the prison reality is intercut with the fantasy. The number is theatrical, it's cinematic, it's a scarlet wall of women behind bars. My favorite number in the movie.

"Roxie"-  A+

Roxie is a singular sensation to herself in this narcissist's anthem that becomes a terrifically glossy and stylish production number in the style of the classic Hollywood musicals. It's deliciously old-fashioned, and Zellewgger shines in it. Literally. 

"Nowadays/Hot Honey Rag"- A+

Gangbusters! Because "Hot Honey Rag" wasn't on the OBC album, I only became aware of it when Verdon & Rivera performed it on variety shows, and then I think it was just called "Keep It Hot." Anyhow, it's now a standard part of revival recordings and a "new" favorite for me. "Nowadays" is given its due as both a solo & duet, and the electric staging of "Hot Honey Rag" had me thinking of the flappers in Thoroughly Modern Millie. And seriously, the lyrics to "Nowadays" are out of this world.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

In spite of that dreadful, written-for-the-film, Oscar-bait song "I Move On," I'll always enjoy the movie version of CHICAGO. It's an incredibly well-crafted musical that I credit for rescuing the genre from animated singing teapots, and I genuinely think it deserves all of its success. (Though Marshall revealing in the DVD commentary that personal fave-rave Toni Collette was almost cast as Roxie was a bit of "what if?" news I didn't need. OMG...can you imagine?! Be still my heart.)

But through no fault of its own--after all, the movie didn't change, I did--CHICAGO just doesn't stand the test of time for me as what I might consider a classic musical. When I revisit Cabaret (1972), even after all these years, it's a film that continues to offer me a full-course meal. Rewatching  CHICAGO recently was like having a sorbet dessert...thoroughly delightful and pleasant, but there wasn't anything for me to chew on. 

I told you that CHICAGO and A Chorus Line are eternally linked for me. Here it is 2022; both shows have been made into films, yet when I really want to have my best experience of either and both...I still go back to listen to those original Broadway cast records I purchased in August of 1975.

BONUS MATERIAL

There's a wealth of material about CHICAGO on YouTube and throughout the internet. You can see clips from the original production, the 1992 Long Beach production, the 1996 Broadway revival, and the deleted "Class" musical number from the motion picture. Any footage you can catch of Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivers performing is guaranteed to be pure magic. 

Also available on YouTube (for the time being) is the silent film version of Chicago (1927)
 and the Ginger Rogers remake/reworking of Roxie Hart (1942) - Thanks, Cinefilia

My favorite curio is an audio track from the 1975 Philadephia tryouts that features cut songs and the original lyrics to "The Cell Block Tango" (wherein we discover "Lipschitz" initially referred to Jacques Lipschitz, the cubist sculptor). Listen to it HERE.  

"Minsky's Chorus" by Reginal Marsh - 1935
The painting that inspired the original CHICAGO poster art

Clip from "The Cell Block Tango"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2022

MIDSOMMAR 2019

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial

plot points are revealed and referenced for analysis. 

Like every other Black family I knew growing up, I was raised in a household that normalized living with a savagely tortured semi-naked white man. On the wall of the hallway leading from our living room to my bedroom hung an ornately-framed painting of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross. This meant that the first thing I saw each morning and the last thing I saw before bed was the gruesome spectacle of a bearded, emaciated man captured in the throes of unspeakable agony from having spikes driven through his hands and feet, and thorns crammed into his skull. This nightmare tableau was illuminated by a tubular electric light attached to a heavy, gilt-metal frame, and, as it was one of those lenticular, Vari-Vue™ prints much-coveted among the Catholic set at the time, when you stood in front of it and moved side to side, Jesus’ pleading, heavenward-cast eyes would close and open.

That the painting’s over-the-top kitschiness disturbed me more than the pious torture porn it depicted speaks to why, in later years, my Catholic status graduated to lapsed. I always had a problem with what I came to view as the religion's glorification of suffering and the preponderant role violence plays in children's spiritual instruction. The alignment of violence and morality makes it all too easy to convince people to accept, justify, and even legitimize all manner of cruelty, repression, and brutality. Provided there's the reassurance of said carnage being carried out in the name of a perceived sense of righteousness, a presumed moral authority, or unquestioning fealty to religious dogma.

In the minds and hearts of many, the humane assumption exists that spirituality and violence represent a paradox and that they are inherently and at once at odds with one another. In the alternatingly glorious/grotesque very grim fairy tale that is Midsommar, director Ari Aster posits the dualist theory that spirituality and violence are, in actuality--and as one finds in all aspects of nature--symbiotically linked. Intensely and inextricably joined...dark and light, despair and joy...the winter and summer of human experience.

Midsommar's first image, which serves as a panel-curtain opening for this pagan passion play, is this disturbing mural by Taiwanese artist Mu Pan. Its content is impossible to comprehend the first time you see the film, but revisiting it reveals that the entire plot of the film you're about to see is laid out in drawings that take us from winter to summer. This spoiler is the first of the film's many instances of foreshadowing.

Director Ari Aster hit a horror home run with his breakout film debut Hereditary (2018), a harrowing shocker about a dysfunctional family crumbling under the weight of grief, mental illness, and the insidious machinations of a demonic cult. By contrasting the chaotic dynamics of an unstable family with the regimentally orderly rituals of a Satanic sect, Hereditary drew discomfiting parallels to the intersections of religion/cult, devout/fanatic, and tradition /predeterminism. 

With Midsommar, we see Aster continuing to explore the world of single-word titles, family dysfunction, cultism, mental illness, how we process grief, unhealthy relationships, and the shriek factor of head trauma. The focus of this, his unsettling and sure-footed sophomore effort, has four American grad students visiting a Swedish commune to witness a 9-day midsummer celebration. The plot places Midsommar as a contemporary blood-descendant of Robin Hardy’s 1973 folk-horror classic The Wicker Man. But where The Wicker Man contrasted Christian extremism with pagan zealotry, Midsommar sees Aster casting his twisted gaze on our culture of isolation and souls left untethered and adrift in the pursuit of individualism. Then, provocatively juxtaposing it with the spirituality-based interdependence of a Swedish pagan commune. 

Florence Pugh as Dani Ardor

Jack Reynor as Christian Hughes

Vilhelm Blomgren as Pelle

William Jackson Harper as Josh

Will Poulter as Mark

Midsommar begins in winter. The heavy snowfall obscures the film's opening titles, forecasting the emotional cold front piercing the nearly four-year relationship of New York graduate students Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh) and Christian Hughes (Jack Reynor). Christian, an anthropology student with a sub-major in waffling and gaslighting, has been angling towards a breakup for a year but lingers out of fear of the alternative. Dani, an anxiety-prone psychology student who pops Ativan to cope with panic attacks and dysfunction-stress linked to her family in Minnesota, is an exposed nerve so steeped in denial about Christian’s emotional abuse she fails to notice half the content of their conversations consists of her apologizing. 

Alas, at the precise moment when it's most evident that the dissolution of this relationship would be the healthiest outcome for all parties involved, a devastating tragedy sends Dani into an agonizing spiral of grief and despair. And in an instant, we realize the bonds of emotional neediness and the shackles of guilty resentment will be added to this already toxic union.   

(Top) Christian consoles a traumatized Dani after the death of her entire family, his face betraying his feelings of entrapment. On the rare occasion when men in movies are shown bearing any of the emotional weight of a relationship, it tends to be depicted as a burden (1971’s Play Misty for Me [pictured] and Fatal Attraction -1981 come to mind). But male-gaze identification is subverted in Midsommar—as Dani’s anguish speaks more eloquently than Christian’s “good guy” sense of aggrieved obligation.

Six months later—winter to summer—finds Dani still traumatized and frozen in the process of her bereavement. Meanwhile, Christian, by way of a profoundly hurtful and pusillanimous move, is on course to forging a passive breakup by surreptitiously accepting an invitation from fellow anthropology student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) to join friends Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter) on a trip to Hårga, Sweden for study. When Dani accidentally discovers Christian’s plans, only codependency and utter isolation account for her accepting his brazenly reluctant, 11^th-hour invitation to join them on their all-boys excursion. In an amusing touch that feels deliberate for a film in which the necessity of family is a major theme, scenes depicting the journey to Pelle’s “hometown” perfectly capture the traditional joyless torpor of "Are we there yet?" family vacations.

In an inversion of colonial tradition, Josh, a Black anthropology student, is conducting a study of a primitive white culture. The side-eye he's giving here is due to Pelle's veiled response to Dani's foreshadowing statement, " See that, Pelle, you've managed to brainwash all of your friends."

The arrival of the Americans to the hippie-like village of Hårga, a sunny paradise of smiling faces and flowers! flowers! everywhere, signals Midsommar’s entrance into The Wicker Man folk-horror territory. And if that sounds like a spoiler, it is. Midsommar’s horror doesn’t come from the shock of the unexpected (although there’s plenty of that to go around) so much as the dread of the foreordained and perhaps inevitable.

Since we know we’re watching a horror film, the depiction of Hårga as an idyllic, welcoming place of tranquility is discordantly unsettling from the get-go. A feeling compounded as details of the lives and traditions of the Hårgas come to light via elaborate ceremonial rituals that grow increasingly bizarre. Things initially perceived as benign—those wide-eyed smiles, the blissed-out solicitousness—take on a sinister air as the village’s overriding atmosphere of compliant conformity begins to feel less like being in the presence of worshippers of ancient pagan religion and more like being trapped in the clutches of a hyper-cheerful death-cult.

London lovebirds Connie and Simon (Ellora Torchia & Archie Madekwi) are guests of Ingemar (Hampus Hallberg). That the affable, baby-faced fellow's invitation masks a petty personal grievance (outside of the ethnic targeting thing) makes him one of the film's most amusingly creepy characters.

There’s a scene in Woody Allen's Hanna & Her Sisters where Max Von Sydow's character comments on having just seen a TV program about the Holocaust: "Intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. They can never answer the question 'How could it happen?' It's the wrong question. The question is, 'Why doesn't it happen more often?'"

In Midsommar, Aster uses nature’s inalterable earth schedule of changing seasons and the phase cycles of the sun to metaphorically comment on humanity’s own predetermined…even destructive…cycles. We accept that it is in our natures to seek connection, community, family, faith, and the shared expression of love and sorrow. But is it also an equal part of our human hard wiring to be desirous of and susceptible to codependence, collectivism, religious populism, and moralized violence? The blood-stained global record of history repeating would say yes.

"You're out of the woods, you're out of the dark, you're out of the night. Step into the sun,
step into the light." Midsommar's The Wizard of Oz moment.

Hereditary was my favorite film of 2018, so after seeing Midsommar’s poster (it seems like ever since Naomi Watts in tears served as poster art for 2007’s Funny Games, crying faces came to replace screaming faces on horror movie posters), I was uncommonly stoked for its June 24, 2019 release. 

My reaction to seeing Midsommar for the first time was a kind of mental loss of equilibrium. So much of it played out like an extended anxiety dream I had to watch it twice just to appreciate how Aster built such a compellingly unique and disturbing film out of what is essentially a dramatization of a psychotic break (Ari Aster is the king of Nervous Breakdown Horror). The movie is so hallucinatory and weird that when my partner and I watched the 24-minutes-longer director's cut a year later (it was his first time, my fourth), he was certain the film would end (like The Wizard of Oz) with everything revealed to have been a dream.

The difference between the theatrical and director’s cuts lie chiefly in the latter’s ability to expand on a few themes (the cult viewed through the prism of white supremacy and Anglo-European nativism, for example) and provide broader context and insight into the unhealthy dynamics of Dani and Christian’s relationship. 

Swedish actor Bjorn Andresen as Dan, a man at the end of his Harga life cycle in Midsommar. At age 15, Andresen portrayed Tadzio, the symbol of youth in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971). 

I loved every minute of Midsommar. So grateful that once again Aster was expanding the concept of what "horror" films can be and impressed by how...no matter how far out the film went...the psychological drama remained the most dynamic and moving element.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Loaded with challenging themes and disturbing images, there’s so much to unpack in Midsommar. It's hard to even nail it down to a single genre, much less walk away with a singular sense of what it’s all about. Like Jordan Peele’s US (2019), Midsommar is a puzzle of a film that, by staunchly refusing to explain itself, courts ambiguity and invites multiple interpretations. As one of the film’s creators remarked in an interview, what one comes away with after seeing Midsommar has a great deal to do with what one came to it with. 

At its most elemental level, Midsommar is a story about the worst breakup on record. Many saw the film as a woman's journey of empowerment, leading to a cleansed-by-fire finale that brings our heroine the love and acceptance of a chosen family. At a price.

Another view places Midsommar as a tortuous treatise on the need to feel, express, and process grief. Dani's impulse to repress her feelings so as not to scare Christian away with her neediness is a denial of her humanity. This denial of humanity was emphasized when I watched this film during the summer of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests. Impressed by how seriously grief and bereavement are treated in Midsommar, I reflected on how Black grief is minimized in American culture. Its psychological & emotional scars are trivialized in favor of the societal fixation on needing to see a display of the traumatized forgiving and embracing their abusers. An encouragement to see the oppressed move quickly past their pain and grievances to affect a superficial unity. Just like many a toxic relationship.

Another persuasive take is that the film explores the pernicious allure of religion and cultism to the vulnerable. Drawing black comedy parallels between the elements of dysfunctional personal relationships (codependency, brainwashing, control, isolation, making self-negating sacrifices) and religious addictions. This view finds the ending to be far from a happy one, as Dani is seen to have traded one codependent attachment for another.

Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) tapped into the reality of the danger white spaces pose for Black lives. This perspective sees Midsommar equating the all-white commune's obsession with blood purity (and its quick dispatch of the ethnic couple Connie & Simon) as reflective of the current climate of exploit-then-erase racism, anti-immigrant nationalism, white supremacy, and the proliferation of hate groups. 

The thing that grounds all these scenarios and makes them work, no matter how high-flown or fantastic, is the emotional truth & depth of the character of Dani. As written, and especially as portrayed by the remarkable Florence Pugh, Dani’s recognizable humanity tethers Midsommar’s nightmare landscape to an authentic, shared emotional reality that anchors the film to the real world.

Another cryptic entry: In a drugged haze after being crowned May Queen, Dani hallucinates seeing her dead family at the festivities. The loving look from her father contrasts dramatically with the harsh stares of her sister and mother. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Memories of my Catholic upbringing kicked in big-time watching Midsommar, specifically concerning the role sadistic violence and death play in Hårga tradition. Like the grisly Christian artwork that greeted me each morning as a child, the walls throughout the Hårga village are covered with violent biblical/religious imagery. In the film, every ritual human sacrifice and blood offering to the gods share one thing in common: cruelty seems to be the point. That none of those sacrificed are dispatched mercifully or in even remotely humane ways (indeed, some methods appear to be needlessly sadistic) reminded me of when, as a youngster, I was told that stories in the Bible were so violent and full of death and suffering because they wanted to convey God's wrath and power. A sort of "Scared Straight" method of discouraging sin. 

Midsommar proposes something similar in suggesting that the violence embraced in the Hårga rituals is a form of acknowledging nature's power and ultimate dominance. Fine, but then the human element enters into it. When we learn that resentment is a motive behind Ingemar's sacrifice selection, the point is reinforced that people have always twisted and perverted spirituality and religion to fit their own needs, justify their prejudices, and morally rationalize their innate brutality.

In many ways, the commune of Harga is an outdoor iteration of the Old Dark House horror movie trope: a handful of characters confined to a large, often haunted, house, discover its limited avenues of exits during the traditional finale that has the sole survivor running through the house looking for escape. In The Stepford Wives, another movie about an epically terrible breakup, when Katharine Ross recognizes the danger she's in, her escape is thwarted by the hemmed-in confines of a dark mansion. Turning another horror trope on its head, in Midsommar when Christian awakens to his peril, he finds himself equally trapped, but in wide-open spaces and in broad daylight. 

It's so nice to be insane. No one asks you to explain.

The above line is a lyric from the 1975 Helen Reddy song "Angie Baby" and clues you into my particular take on Midsommar's famously ambiguous final image. I take the position that mental illness has always been a struggle with Dani (when Pelle asks her if she’s studying psychiatry--Dani: “Psychology. That’s how you know I'm nuts.” Pelle: “Yeah. Also, that funny look in your eye”). Given Dani's family history (her sister's bipolarism), the emotional toll of her family's death (Dani's anguish is laceratingly deep), and what she 'settles for' in her relationship with the emotionally unavailable Christian, all indicate that she is in no mental condition to process the horrors visited upon her psyche at the commune. Something in her would have to give in order to make sense of all gory the madness. 

It's my opinion that Dani has most definitely lost her mind at the end (a descriptive passage from the screenplay reads --"She has surrendered to a joy known only by the insane" ). Still, it appears her break from reality brings her a freedom and sense of peace heretofore elusive in her life. It also places her among and on even footing with the demented Hårga death cultists with whom she has finally found love, community, family, and acceptance. 

It’s a monstrously sad/happy ending quite fitting with Midsommar's perversely optimistic view of fatalism. I don't see how any sane person could keep their sanity long in Hårga (and it's unlikely they would ever have allowed her to leave and possibly tell others about this place of ritual murder), so, in its way, the ending is also quite merciful to Dani, a character I came to like and care a great deal about over the course of the film. I agree with those who have called the ending horrible and beautiful.

It is. Just like Midsommar.

Here's something to chew on: Midsommar ends on something like the 4th or 5th day of a 9-day midsummer festival! What the hell could they have lined up next on the schedule?

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020

JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS 2001

I remember reading an article about a social-media feud between two contemporary recording artists popular with teens a few years back. Even now, I have only the most superficial awareness of either singer, but what drew my attention to the article was a specific aspect of the pair's very public internet beef. It seems one artist (a music industry "veteran" of all of 10 years) was questioning the career legitimacy of a rival upstart who, in approximately half the career time, had already amassed platinum records, Grammy nominations, and other bragging stats comparable to and (the real crux of the grievance) surpassing those of the complainant: the barely-out-of-diapers recording star for whom 10-years of iTunes downloads qualifies for Billboard Lifetime Achievement Award consideration.

Both "stars" are equal-opportunity music offenders to my geriatric ears, so their one-upmanship feud struck me as largely moot. But what stood out about their dispute was the degree to which each referenced things like concert venue size, number of awards won, Twitter follower numbers, and quantity of endorsement deals as the final word, bottom-line determiners of credibility. Conspicuously missing from this materialism-fed back-and-forth was any mention of their music. No talk of their love for what they're doing, devotion to craft, belief in the integrity of their expression, or even a commitment to its quality. The entire swath of recording artist legitimacy rested on fame, popularity, and marketability.  

The thrill that'll getcha when you get your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone -  Dr. Hook

It got me wondering whether this has always been the case. Have music, merchandising, and materialism always been bedfellows? After all, I remember way back in the '60s, at the height of the anti-establishment, don't-trust-anyone-over-30 movement, pop star Donovan's 1967 hit "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" was licensed for T.V. commercials featuring Geraldine Chaplin hawking Love Cosmetics products. The Beatles in their day were merchandised to the heavens; I remember when Blondie's "Rip Her To Shreds" was reworked for a clothing ad; and in the '80s, David Bowie and the band Heart were featured as "The Coffee Achievers" in an ad campaign by the American Coffee Association.

Maybe music has always been used to sell us stuff...but at least in the old days, the con was kept on the down low. With authenticity and rebellion as their buzzwords, recording artists made reams of money by convincing their fans that money was the last thing they cared about. In those days, the absolute worst thing you could say about a rock band or folk singer was that they had "sold out." Now,  music hopefuls by the thousands flock to American Idol and The Voice clamoring just for the mere opportunity to sell out.

The Year of the Cat

Music & Marketing: In 1967, pop singer Donovan went Madison Avenue corporate while still working his persona as the ultimate flower child. That same year, the insta-fame, pre-fab commercialism of the music business was satirized in the British film Smashing Time: an ultra-mod, cartoonishly silly, proto girl-power musical comedy starring Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham as pop stardom hopefuls. 

Set in London at the tail-end of the Swinging Sixties, Smashing Time tanked at the boxoffice due—at least in part—to its having been marketed to the wrong audience. Hoping to capitalize on the '60s mania for all things British, the film was pitched as a mad, mod, Carnaby Street romp for the youth market. But it was actually a fairly brutal satire of pop culture, the easy gullibility of teenagers, and the whole media-driven "England Swings Like a Pendulum Do" thing. In essence, it was a movie that was taking the piss out of the very people it was being sold to. The targeted audience neither understood it nor appreciated it.

History Repeating: Hello, Josie & the Pussycats! 

Rachael Leigh Cook as Josie McCoy (Vocals & Guitar)

Rosario Dawson as Valerie Brown (Bass)

Tara Reid as Melody Valentine (Drums)

Alan Cummng as Wyatt Frame

Parker Posey as Fiona

Hollywood's mania for cannibalizing its recent past hit a $30 million snag with the 2001 live-action film based on the Archie comic book spin-off: Josie & the Pussycats. A market-minded, high-concept project born of the trend in cartoon-based movies flooding multiplexes at the time--The Flintstones, Casper, Mr. Magoo, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle, and Dudley Do-Right.

Still, Josie & the Pussycats had a lot of things going for it.

First off, it was about an all-girl band (Me: Hey!...just like The Carrie Nations in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls!!), and they called themselves The Pussycats (Me: Hey!...just like the larcenous go-go dancers in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!). So despite being an entire generation too old for the tween demographic it was targeting, I was on board with the Pussycats movie from the word go. 

Further upping the attraction quotient: the film featured an appealing cast of talented and charismatic up-and-comers; celebrity cameos (now so obscure they've become inadvertent emblems of the film's "fickleness of fame" theme); a terrific soundtrack of original songs produced by multi-Grammy-winner Kenneth 'Babyface' Edmonds (Waiting to Exhale); and to counterbalance all that clean-cut Riverdale sincerity, a couple of edgy, indie darlings cast as the over-the-top villains of the piece. 

In an ironic twist that even Wyatt Frame would appreciate, a movie summarized (not inaccurately) by a cast member as "A sociopolitical statement about materialism and our hype-driven society" bombed at the boxoffice because it was so poorly marketed 

Under circumstances not dissimilar to those surrounding the release of Smashing Time 34 years earlier, Josie and the Pussycats—hyped to the skies in shimmery shades of purple and bubblegum pink that all but dared anyone who was not an 11-to-13-year-old girl to take an interest—sold itself as an ultra-hip, cartoonishly silly, girl-power musical comedy set in the rockin' world of tweenage punk-pop. In actuality, it was an adult-targeted, scathingly acerbic, subversively cynical, sharp-eyed satire that poked fun at the commodification of music, the synthetic fabrication of celebrity, and the omnipotent influence of advertising. More than a decade before it became normalized, Josie and the Pussycats delivered a tongue-in-cheek cautionary fable about a time when bands and recording artists would be little more than market-researched commercials for merchandise brands. 

Josie and the Pussycats was poised for success with a great release date (spring break), a well-publicized soundtrack album, and untold merchandising licenses lurking in the wings. By rights, it should have spawned a hit single, a sequel (I sincerely would have loved a Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space movie), and an inevitable T.V. series. But for some reason, 13-year-olds failed to warm to a movie that mercilessly mocked trend whores and teenage faddism and the effortlessness with which media and marketing can lead 13-year-olds around by their soon-to-be-pierced noses.

Gabriel Mann as Alan M (aka Alec N or Adam 12)

Written and directed by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont of the modest teen hit Can't Hardly Wait -1998 (for me, it was Can't Hardly Watch), Josie and the Pussycats—while ultimately lacking any real claws—is cleverly conceived, often hilarious, and delightfully offbeat in a way that should have made it as popular with 2001 teens as Heathers was in 1989 and Clueless in 1995. I most appreciated how the film didn't take itself too seriously and was willing to send everything up, including the rock 'n' roll musical genre.  

Alas, perhaps because the powers at MGM and Universal were so fixated on Josie's broad-appeal, toy-friendly franchise potential, it overlooked its niche appeal to an older demographic. After all,  Josie and the Pussycats had the highest name recognition among parents and boomers who were likely tweens in 1970 when the Josie and the Pussycats cartoon aired on Saturday mornings on CBS.

Missi Pyle and Paulo Costanzo as siblings Alexandra & Alexander Cabot

Fear of looking like a middle-aged perv kept me from seeing Josie and the Pussycats when it came out (I envisioned being the only adult in a sea of little girls...little did I know, I'd likely have had the theater all to myself), but it appeared on DVD a scant four months later. Due to the near-unanimous panning it got from critics, when I finally received my Netflix DVD in the mail (red envelope!) I kept my expectations low. When it was over, I was left wondering whether the critics and I had seen the same movie. I wound up watching Josie and the Pussycats three times before mailing it back, and by year's end, it had made my personal 2001 Top Ten List

Gosford Park
In the Bedroom
Mulholland Drive
The Others
Training Day

Josie and the Pussycats

Pauline and Paulette
Moulin Rouge

The Piano Teacher
Monsters Inc.

(National year-end boxoffice charts for 2001 ranked Josie and the Pussycats very near the bottom at #123, sandwiched between those classics Joe Dirt and Freddy Got Fingered.)

A candy-colored, TV-commercial-glossy vision of consumer culture on steroids, Josie and the Pussycats looks like it was filmed inside the head of a Madison Avenue ad executive. Lensed with flashy panache by Matthew Libatique (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream), the film's comic-book version of reality depicts a hyper-stylized world where immersive advertising has been carried to a surreal, comically literal-minded extreme. A world populated almost exclusively by parentless, purposeless teens with nothing but disposable income and a fad-driven devotion to the almighty gods of Capitalism.

 

Its story follows the adventures of the titular small-town trio, a struggling female punk-pop group hastily recruited by oily Megarecords executive Wyatt Frame to be the anybody-will-do, last-ditch replacements for the recently-ditched boy band DuJour. Swept up in the world of instant fame and success, The Pussycats (now called Josie and the Pussycats thanks to a Diana Ross-esque ploy by Wyatt) have no idea they are really the unwitting pawns in a conspiracy to brainwash the youth of America through pop music. The scheme hatched by Megarecords CEO Fiona is slightly similar to what the Future Villain Band (Aerosmith) had in mind for America's youth in that other pop music movie bomb Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978).

"They come and they go...pop stars." -  Performance (1970)
The soon-to-go boy band DuJour (Alexander Martin, Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, and Donald Faison) interviewed by Entertainment Tonight host Jann Carl

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Growing up, teen rock 'n' roll movies came in two varieties: One was the jukebox musical (Don't Knock the Rock, Twist Around the Clock) which aimed to promote rock and R&B while reassuring concerned (and racist) parents that rock 'n' roll wasn't going to corrupt their clean-cut kids and turn them into juvenile delinquents. The second was the musical fake-out (Bye, Bye Birdie, The Girl Can't Help It). These films featured rock 'n' roll music, but their overall outlook was so condemnatory of teenagers and their music that they wound up being essentially anti-rock 'n' roll musicals. 

I had most of the songs from Josie and the Pussycats committed to memory by the time I got around to seeing the movie. The songs remind me of the '80s/'90s sound of Blondie, Josie Cotton, E.G. Daily, The Bangles, & The Go-Gos. Josie's vocals are by Kay Hanley, lead singer of the band Letters to Cleo

The music of Josie and the Pussycats isn't kidding around, but much of the film's humor is at the expense of teenagers and the kind of manufactured, by-the-numbers corporate pop that was clogging up the charts at the time.

Since I've never cared much for teenagers—even when I was one—and the '90s represented for me the very last decade of listenable music (I've turned into my Dad!)...Josie and the Pussycats' riotously scornful view of ad-susceptible adolescents and the assembly-line practices of the music business quickly became my favorite thing about the film. I liked the characters of Josie, Valerie, and Melody a great deal...the relaxed chemistry between the actresses goes a long way toward making them a likable trio of heroines you could root for. Personal fave-rave Parker Posey walks off with each of her scenes, playing the power-mad music CEO like a high school bully.

But the minute I saw him remorselessly decide to let a boy band perish in a plane crash, I knew Alan Cummings' Wyatt Frame would be the character I'd most identify with. 

Fashion-forward Fiona and snide Wyatt scheming, scheming, scheming.
As is often the case with villains, Posey and Cummings are Josie's MVPs

Movies whose concept threatens to veer too close into corny, sincere, or sentimental territory often defuse the situation by featuring a character who serves as the surrogate voice of those audience members least willing to suspend their disbelief. In Josie and the Pussycats, that character is Alexandra (Missi Pyle, absolutely priceless), a one-woman Greek chorus of wry put-downs and possessor most of the film's funniest lines. 

Another means of keeping potential fluff afloat is to keep the action moving so fast that no dust of doubt has time to settle on anything. I'm convinced one of the reasons Josie and the Pussycats was so misunderstood on initial release was because so many of the jokey asides and visual gags flew over all those pre-adolescent heads. For example, it's my guess that few teens picked up on the film depicting the character of Alexander as gay (in the comics, he's Melody's boyfriend) because none of the indicators were underlined. In one scene, when under the influence of subliminal brainwashing, Alexander blurts out his immediate desires: a vintage tee shirt and Heath Ledger. In that order. Later in the film, when a member of the boy band DuJour makes a surprise appearance, Alexander utters a muffled "I love you, Les!" 

Pussycats manager & wannabe music mogul Alexander Cabot reading the biography of gay music mogul David Geffen that was penned by openly gay Wall Street Journal writer Tom King

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Where Josie and the Pussycats won me over and proved itself so persuasive as a cannily self-aware send-up of pop culture is how effortlessly it established and sustained a consistent comedic tone and point of view throughout. The film strikes a chord that combines the paradox of neo-nostalgia (We're back, but all new! Just the way you remembered us!) and the pop-group-makes-a-movie tropes virtually invented by Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (Slow-motion trampoline jumping! Success montages!). 
The Pussycats themselves arrive updated but unchanged. Appealing Rachael Leigh Cook assures Josie is still the sensible, charmingly nerdy redhead. Tara Reid keeps Melody's sweet-natured optimism while subtly defanging the character's archaic "dumb blonde" origins. And brainy Valerie is still perceptive & sardonic, but as embodied by Rosario Dawson, also drop-dead gorgeous.

To my dying day, I'll never understand how so many outraged grown-ass critics at the time failed to "get" that the film's blatantly exaggerated product placement was precisely the point. 

Since this film marks my first time seeing any of these actresses, for me, they ARE the real-life incarnation of The Pussycats, and I can't imagine anyone else in the roles. But some fans—and with good reason—saw Dawson's casting a problematic example of the filmmakers light-washing a Black character heretofore always depicted as being dark-skinned (Beyonce, Aaliyah, and Lisa Lopes lost out on the part, so it seems colorism was definitely on the casting menu). 

On a similar note, the character of Valerie is also ill-served by a story arc in the film that has Wyatt, in a divide-and-conquer move, singling her out for exclusion by constantly forgetting she's around or part of the group.

Narratively, we get it: Wyatt wants Valerie gone because, as the smart one, she's the one most likely to catch on to Fiona's scheme. But since the erasure of Black women and women of color is common practice in Hollywood and the music industry (where the Black sound is coveted...but not from Black artists), it appears not to have occurred to anyone that with Dawson being the only lead ethnic character in the film, all these scenes have a slightly cringy subtext.

What's New, Pussycat?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I've little doubt that a movie version of Josie and the Pussycats was green-lit for its franchise potential and marketability. In which case, I suppose its eventual decimation at the boxoffice could be looked upon as a kind of corporate hubris victory. But now that the film has gone on to find cult success, it's nice that instead of being celebrated for how much money it made for the industry fat cats (hee hee), Josie and the Pussycats can instead be championed for being a female-driven major motion picture about three women in the boy-centric world of rock 'n' roll who ultimately triumph because of their loving, dedicated friendship.

 And the whole "Be happy with yourself as you are" message isn't bad, either. 

"Jerkin!"

BONUS MATERIAL

The first human incarnation of Josie and the Pussycats was a trio of singers assembled, Monkees-style, to provide the singing voices for the animated series and a tie-in LP. Left to right, we have Patrice Holloway as Valerie, future Charlie's Angel Cheryl Ladd (then Cherie Moor) as Melody, and Cathy Dougher as Josie. The character of Valerie almost didn't get the opportunity to make T.V. history as the first Black female main character in an animated series. Hanna-Barbera wanted to make The Pussycats an all-white trio, but the album's producer (Danny Janssen) refused to cooperate, leading to a three-week standoff during which time Hanna-Barbara ultimately came to their bigoted senses. 

In 2017 another flesh-and-blood Josie and the Pussycats materialized, this time in the T.V. series Riverdale and portrayed as a Black female trio. Left to right: Hayley Law as Valerie, Ashleigh Murray as Josie, and Asha Bromfield as Melody. I've never seen Riverdale, a position that's unlikely to change any time soon, but let me tell you, I'm here for a Black Josie and the Pussycats.

Any and everything you could ever want to know about the making of Josie and the Pussycats is available in the remarkably comprehensive podcast Josie and the Podcats. But watch out for subliminal messages!

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020