‘Moulin Rouge,’ ‘Knight’s Tale’: Making New Rules in Musicals

Hey, kids, let’s deconstruct a musical!

Well, actually, let’s deconstruct two musicals: “Moulin Rouge,” and “A Knight’s Tale.”

But, you are saying, “A Knight’s Tale” isn’t a musical, it’s a teen-toned “Rocky” about a kid from the wrong side of the tracks getting his shot in the tony world of tournament jousting circa 1400, give or take a century.

It is. But it’s also a movie whose best and only trick is based upon its use of music, which happens to be exactly “Moulin Rouge’s” best (but not only) trick as well: Both combine story materials set definitively in the past with music set definitively in the present. The result is a paradox of postmodernism, a kind of topsy-turvy sticking together of elements without much thought to logic or probability.

In the movie musical, the arrival of postmodernism could easily be missed, because no form is more artificial than this one. It is by its very nature anti-realistic--unless in your office or breakfast nook, trained singers and dancers are apt to burst into spontaneous but brilliantly choreographed numbers (if that’s so, then you have more problems than I can help you with).

But audiences have odd tolerances for things, or sometimes lack of tolerance: It is said that in South America during the ‘30s, musical sequences had to be cut out of imported American films, because audiences there simply couldn’t accept the conceit. They thought it was ridiculous. What they didn’t know, but you and I do, is that you can’t break the rules of a musical because there aren’t any. There are only traditions.

In fact, both “A Knight’s Tale” and “Moulin Rouge” seem to be onto something new: They represent at least the fourth development in the movie musical as it has bumbled and stumbled, gamboled and rambled its way through the years, almost dying in the ‘80s and ‘90s, until this moment in time, which is one of those boomlets like the one the war movie is undergoing.

So what we are looking at here isn’t a history of the musical, but a history of the concept of the musical. How the form spoke to the audience, how the form changed, how the audience hustled to keep up with it, adjusted, how it changed again, and the process began anew until we arrived at May 4, 2001, the first public glimpse of the moment in “A Knight’s Tale” that will determine whether you can get with it or must get out of it.

That’s during the first jousting contest, when we are in the old-movie past, full of mud and horses and pennants and pasty-faced women in tight bodices, and knights are thundering this way and that, calling up old-story memories of Howard Pyle’s majestic illustrations and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s mock-classical music passages from “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”

Then, suddenly, the music comes up and it’s not Korngold at all: It’s Queen, Freddie Mercury’s Queen, ‘70s Queen, and it’s blasting out “We Will Rock You”--and what’s more the medieval people in the film hear the music and begin rocking and jiving and squiggling to it. Then they start the Wave. What place is this? Where are we now?

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It’s only recently that the makers of musicals have felt so free. In fact, the first generation of musicals--on screens shortly after Al Jolson promised “You ain’t seen nothing yet” in the first sound film, “The Jazz Singer” (1927)--were exactly the opposite. They were stolid, clumsy, inextricably linked to the musical theater, the world of Broadway.

Their fundamental concept--the backstage musical--was literal, almost naturalistic. The dancing and singing that broke out were not spontaneous; rather, they were encountered in the only place in the world where they would be natural. Most film musicals before the liberating arrival of “Oklahoma!” on Broadway in 1943 were set on Broadway or were about Broadway, or were at least about show people. Many hardly bothered with a story at all, like “Broadway Melody of 1936”: all singing, all dancing, all stupid.

The fabulous “Wizard of Oz” (1939) might be seen as a transitional movie, which began to pull the form away from the theater stage to the more magical realm of pure film. The filmmakers (director Victor Fleming but more likely producer Mervyn LeRoy) had an understanding of the different subliminal meanings of cinematography: a gritty black-and-white for the real world, giving way to a candy-colored, brilliantly fake sound-stage world that was self-consciously an illusion. It was stage-like in its indoor quality, if not technically on a proscenium stage. So you might have thought it drew a distinction between real world--black and white--and musical world: color sound stage. But it didn’t.

No, the first song, “Over the Rainbow,” was sung in Dorothy’s farmyard in depressing Depression Kansas. It may have been as electrifying a moment to audiences of the time as the moment when Rhett told Scarlett that he frankly didn’t give a damn. There were precursors for this: Shirley Temple, for example, didn’t play a child actress, yet her character sang anyway. But Judy’s Kansas serenade in “The Wizard of Oz” was one of the first violations of the basic, if unstated, tradition of the musical, which connected music with the stage world, not the realistic one.

And “The Wizard of Oz,” in that way, indicated the directions in which the musical would go. That is, like the larger category of the feature film, they would step into the real world, they would take their stylizations on location; they weren’t stage-bound. The great musicals of the ‘40s and early ‘50s really had little connection with the stage.

The next change was the logical outgrowth: If the musical could be set in the real world, its materials could also be of the real world. In other words, it didn’t have to have a happy ending, and be solely about juvenile concerns like true love and true love and, of course, true love.

The new, darker musical came first to Broadway--notably in “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein. But in the brilliant film version, directed by the ever-versatile Robert Wise along with choreographer Jerome Robbins, the city’s reality was everywhere. It began with visual panache as the camera, moving high above, reduced the actual New York City to geometric patterns, suggesting that the subject of the movie was patterns, in this case a pattern called a tribe. Then it moved with great fluency and ease between sound-stage antirealism, with its symbolic, theatrically lit sets, and the streets themselves where many of the numbers were filmed, including the sensational opener, “The Jet Song.”

Probably the musical that most strikingly pushed the line of real-world despair and tragedy was Bob Fosse’s great adaptation of “Cabaret” (1972), set in Weimar Germany as it eroded toward Nazism. It was fascinated with real-world issues like political violence, sexual decadence and, most of all, the pure wondrous sleaze of show biz--although it reverted to the most primitive musical form, the backstage melodrama. So perhaps a better example is its director’s own strange autobiographical coda, “All That Jazz” (1979), in which a super-talented choreographer (who wore Fosse’s then-rare goatee, black turtlenecks and boots, and smoked just as much as Fosse did) examines his own life and character and finds both wanting, finds himself doomed (as Fosse indeed was) and wonders about the meaning of it all.

This is something weirdly conceived: musical as a kind of autobiographical rant, with its own antihero’s flaws blown up hugely on-screen. It didn’t work, of course, even with a few show-stopping numbers like “Air Erotica,” because the book was so weak and so personal and could go only to one destination.

But really, what a Taj Mahal to the self: a multimillion-dollar indulgence, set in really nowhere other than the main character’s id, the whole thing so removed from the original tradition of the musical as to be almost unimaginable. Critics called it bold and audiences stayed away.

It seemed the musical was dead, except in bogus forms like “Saturday Night Fever” (if the characters don’t sing, is it a musical?) or MTV-propelled dance frenzies like “Footloose.” There were two heroic attempts to re-create the glories of the old form by major directors: Martin Scorsese in “New York, New York” and Francis Ford Coppola in “One From the Heart.” Neither film quite worked, perhaps because the film-obsessed directors were themselves too enchanted with re-creating the taken-for-granted theatricality of the old movies, and so the films became about process rather than about song, dance or book.

Woody Allen also kidded the old form in “Everyone Says I Love You” but no one said “I love you” to that attempt, which featured performers without the highly refined musical theater skills necessary to do it right. Allen meant it as a joke, having non-dancers dance and non-singers sing, but the whole thing came off as somewhat disrespectful and pointless.

That is why the arrival of “Moulin Rouge,” by the innovative director Baz Luhrmann, seems like such a big deal. I will not review the movie here, but regardless of whether it’s any good, it’s a new thing. Luhrmann builds on the past even as he twists it. The movie has it all, twice: the real world of slums and whores; flagrantly inappropriate musical selections (“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and the Police’s “Roxanne,” for example, being sung in art-nouveau Paris of 1900); sex, violence, bohemianism; Greek myth (Orpheus descends into the underworld, though the part is played by Ewan McGregor, who you just have to believe has already been there); and Tom Cruise’s ex-wife coughing blood. And all of it is presented in a helter-skelter rush that fractures filmic storytelling practices.

In an introduction to a lavish picture-book version of the film that was sent out to film critics, Luhrmann confesses his true inspiration: not the Hollywood musical, but the Bollywood musical. In other words, the imitation-Hollywood musicals turned out by the hundreds on the Indian subcontinent, where Western film traditions were never taken seriously and the result was extravaganza without form or discipline.

You have probably seen clips of these on the tube, where they’re occasionally shown for humorous content--and, to our eyes, they are very funny, because they’re as wild as Hong Kong gangster movies, with music. Anything goes--very much the aesthetic of “Moulin Rouge.”

Here, then, is the prototype New Musical: a high-tech Western imitation of a low-tech Eastern imitation of a high-tech Western form that was unreal to begin with.

As the man said: You ain’t seen nothing yet.