Abstract of Brian McMillan’s ‘Complicitous Critique: Dancer in the Dark as a

Postmodern Musical’ - by Gowreesh VS

McMillan in this essay ponders on the idea of Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark being a
postmodern musical. He begins the essay by asking himself whether the film is an anti-musical,
because it may appear “sordid” in its ways of subverting the conventions of the genre. As he
quotes Von Trier, it is revealed that the director does not intend the film to be a subversion or
as an anti- musical, but attempts to tap the possibilities of musical genre while reconfiguring it in
contemporary. The careful bricolage of cinematic reality and imaginary makes Dancer…
according to McMillan a “bittersweet homage” to the genre of musical, making it a postmodern
musical.
McMillan’s idea of postmodernism is derived from Linda Hutcheon ‘s The Politics of
Postmodernism and Umberto Eco’s “Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable”, which is “rapprochement
of sorts of traditions after the antagonism of modernism”. To him, ‘pleasure’ appears a key
concept in looking at postmodernism in musicals. To arrive at the conclusion that Dancer…. is a
postmodern musical film, he begins by looking at certain classifications put forward by scholars
in defining the genre of musical. According to Rick Altman, factors like narrative style, acting,
romantic coupling, dual focus plot, music as an expression of communal joy, a happy ending etc.
are essential components that constitutes a musical. As for Jane Feuer, musicals did not just
show dance and music but were about dance and music; and for her this genre prioritizes these
elements over the other and do not merely use these elements as a subsidiary. Feuer finds
musicals a self-reflexive category that primarily invests in evoking pleasure through its screen
activities. For Richard Dyer, musicals were not about what utopia could be or providing models
of it, but about an unabashed acceptance and embracement of it. In Musicals: Hollywood and
Beyond, editors Bill Marshall and Robyn Stilwell tells that any film can be regarded as musical
which has music integral to its storytelling. While listing out these requirements and how
pleasure runs important in musicals, both overtly or covertly, through these classifications made
by several authors, McMillan says that, Dancer… works differently. Whether it comes to its
adherence to the conventions of musical genre and or in its methods of stimulating pleasure.
McMillan is of the opinion that Dancer… is neither a modernist or traditional melodrama, but is
a postmodern musical with its different intervention in pleasure creation and mainly in its
critical perspective. Dancer…with its forced closure of narrative and its protagonist, Selma’s
mental escapades presented in a musical form, is read by McMillan as peculiar combination of
musical and melodrama. To explain on this the author firstly concentrates Von Trier’s play with
contrasts. Von Trier pictures Selma’s pain-stricken routines in hand held documentary style
which appears grainy and dull, whereas her daydreams portrayed as musical pieces are shot in
high quality film stock and with multicamera setup. While Selma’s life is acted out with the
technique of improvisations, which is the usual method that director devices, he does it
differently with Selma’s moments of escapades, in which the acts are preplanned and rehearsed
to materialize into song and dances. Unlike traditional musicals, Dancer... has clear separations
of its on-stage and off-stage music performances and also it does not hide the labor in the
production of entertainment, a necessity in the former. The film only shows excerpts from
practice sessions of Sound of Music (that too an extremely flawed version to create irony) by a
local production of which Selma is also part of, but we never see the performance fully
materialize on stage. It also happens that in one of these sessions a transition occurs from the
original text of Sound... to Selma’s personal musical. As McMillan observes the film is replete
with such contrasting tropes which he views not as interruptions but as enhanced alterations to
situations where location, costumes and characters remain unchanged. These enhancements
that borders between reality and fantasy are one reason why according McMillan thinks
Dancer… is postmodern in its approach.
McMillan also believes that Hollywood musicals are reflexive of the fact that there is a gap
between the producers and consumers. Although this is the case, they aspire to be mass art
which inculcates qualities of folk art and tries to circulate inside an imagined community of
users and producers. Dancer… makes this awareness apparent by portraying Selma as an active
consumer and ideal producer as she makes her own musical within the film, but ironically, she
playing a musical character also acknowledges the gap that exists between the producer and
consumer of cinema. This projection of mass art/ folk binaries is another postmodern function
that Dancer… performs according to McMillan.
Finally, McMillan uses Feuer’s analysis of Pennies from Heaven which she considers as a
modernist musical, to elaborate how Dancer…. different and is a postmodern musical.
Macmillan maintains that both these films have identical climaxes and story situations, where its
lead characters are wrongly convicted of murder and waits for their impending death. But it the
climactic treatment is his focus, which makes crucial differences to their existence as modernist
and postmodernist.
The protagonist of Pennies… Arthur Parker, is a salesman who finds his faith in optimism of Tin
Pan Alley songs. The specialty of this film is that, it is in tune with ‘epic theatre format’ where
“words, music and setting become more independent of one another” the characters and their
musical expressions are often disconnected, the songs are taken from a different time period
and also they are sung by the actors themselves. The film as it hat tips to earlier musicals of
Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire, it also shows how props like canes carried by the chorus
turns into prison bars symbolically to reveal that the couples in the film are in peril outside the
realm of fantasy. As McMillan believes, though as a Brechtian critique of the form, Pennies…
compromises to adhere to the conventions of musical, by showing the union of the couple in
the end, saved from the sad consequences that were awaiting them.
In Dancer…, songs are tailormade and are sung by Bjork herself who plays Selma, therefore
foreclosing the possibilities of evoking nostalgia unlike Pennies... In the climax of the film, there
are no disconnect from locations or character functions and no spectacular backdrops for the
story to unveil as opposed to Pennies... While the latter abandon the tragic resolution in the
climax in subservience to musical tradition, Dancer… ends with Selma, singing “Next to last
song”, singing her way to death turning utopia into reality. Selma dies and the song continues,
while camera pans its vision from Selma’s lifeless body and the prison guards into the darkness,
releasing her voice, the melodramatic narrative and the audience to a new world. This swinging
from reality to imaginary, the tragic resolution and its ability to do away with or to use the
norms of the genre differently are what makes Dancer.. stand out as post modern musical for
the author.