celebrity gossip, academic style

I have a confession that’s not really much of a confession. I LIKE DANCE MOVIES. So does a lot of America, so does a lot of the world. Whether Singin’ in the Rain, old Fred Astaire and Ginger Roberts, or Center Stage, we’re suckers for synchronization on film.

Which is why I should be the perfect candidate for a movie like Step Up 3 (3D while in theaters). All dance, all the time. Indeed, it’s almost entirely eschewed plot in favor of dance, dance practice, and more dance. (The movie is an hour and forty minutes long; I guarantee at least 80 minutes of that are dance in some form). I mean, the plot’s there — there’s a double-cross, dead parents, a mortgage that’s due, adversaries with vaguely evil and explicitly racialized identities — but bygones. It’s all about the dance. Right?

Or so I thought. And so did its producers and distributors. The more dance and spectacle, the better. The more flashing lights, the more elevating Slurpee/make-out scene (has to be seen to be believed; I can only find it on YouTube dubbed in German, which makes it even more ridiculous), the more globally-marked characters (every prospective market in the world!), the more square-jawed-male-protagonists, the more immaculate the dance space (a loft devoted ONLY TO DANCING — this is like the treehouse-no-parents-allowed of dancing, filled with padded walls and foam pits and walls of boom boxes), the more complicated light-suits, the better. Plus a hot guy, a hot girl, a gangly guy who’s a good dancer, and a weird sub-plot about going to school at NYU but realizing that school is for suckers; you’ve just got to DANCE.

But here’s the thing: Step Up 3 is TOO FUCKING MUCH. Too much CGI-assistance, too much light-up dance suits, too much elevating slurpee. I never thought I’d say this, but there’s too much dancing.

It’s the same thing that gets me with Transformers, Iron Man 2, or any of the Pirates sequels: too much spectacle, not enough narrative thread. Now, this balance of narrative and spectacle has a long history — the very earliest cinema was ostensibly devoid of narrative, offering pure spectacle. (Tom Gunning famously, or at least famously within media studies, termed it the “cinema of attractions.”) These short films (usually between 20 seconds and 2 minutes) were all about anticipation, surprise, large objects doing big things that you don’t see everyday, beautiful and/or grotesque people doing unexpected or beautiful things with their bodies, and the promise of sex. Kinda sounds like an action film, right? Trains arriving at a station, a couple preparing to kiss, a vent in New York where people walked by and had their skirts blown up, a strong man flexing for the camera — it was all spectacle, and it was all appealing, especially to people who’d never seen film before. People watched these either on individual players (where you put a penny in, put your eyes to a little scope, and then watched it play out) or, as time went on, in nickelodeons, which were more like what we think of as traditional movie theaters, only in small store fronts in urban areas.

To be somewhat reductive, filmmakers gradually realized that they could make their spectacles more compelling by adding narrative. The most famous examples are the films of Edwin S. Porter (Jack and the Beanstalk, Life of an American Fireman, The Great Train Robbery) and George Melies (A Trip to the Moon), but others quickly caught on and realized that stories sold better than pure spectacle. Crucially, these narratives still had spectacle — in the Great Train Robbery, there’s still hand-tinted coloring, a big fight on a moving train, and, most famously, an end shot with a man pointing a gun at the audience and firing (Scorsese pays homage to this shot at the end of Goodfellas).

As cinema continued to develop, reaching “full length” with the likes of The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Audiences liked these films because they not only told a story, but they did so in a way that was exciting and visually compelling — these were the proto-action films, and the lessons learned from them have endured to today.

But every so often, the balance between narrative and spectacle gets unbalanced, and spectacle takes over, usually ending in critical or fiscal failure.

This can happen in a number of ways.

In the Hollywood of today, it usually has something to do with too much technological manipulation — this happens in Transformers; this doesn’t happen in Lord of the Rings. (It does, however, in Peter Jackson’s King Kong). When a technology is new, then people will go see the overweighted spectacle just for the novelty of it: see, for example, Beowulf, which was the first to really use 3D, or 300, which was the first to make historical figures looks like video game characters. But it wears off, especially when audiences fail to see the display of technology as entertaining. Thus the (relative) failure of dozens of 3D films over the past year.

But films can also collapse under the weight of their stars, as evidenced by Cleopatra, fatally overloaded by the spectacle of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton onscreen together. Tom Cruise (and the spectacle of him in an eye patch) sank Valkyrie. (Of course, A mass of stars does not necessarily sink a movie — see Oceans 11. They just need to be distributed properly). Even the spectacle of an overblown budget (and the publicity for it) can sink a film, best exemplified by the fate of Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar, Last Action Hero, Waterworld, and The Postman.

Which is all to say that when a single part of the movie — star, scandal, CGI robots — becomes “heavier” than the movie as a whole…..then usually the movie ends up stinking, as the film as a whole doesn’t equal the sum of its spectacle parts.

And that’s what’s happened with Step Up 3 — all CGI-assisted dance spectacle, no feeling. The dances in this film are a marvel to behold, but there’s very little feeling of awe. I don’t wonder how can they physically do that because I know the answer: they can’t. Computers did it for them.

Take, for example, the “final battle” scene:

Now, the first round is very non-CGI, very much something you’d see on the likes of So You Think You Can Dance — a show that, like the bulk of talent-based reality programming, is all spectacle, the same way that vaudeville and variety shows were spectacle in their respective eras. And that’s fine; I like it okay.

But then, right around 3:15, it becomes obvious that the film has been edited, sped up, accentuated, and otherwise modified to make the dancing more spectacular than it is. Now, this isn’t to say that the dancers aren’t still amazing — obviously, they are — but because this film needed to one-up what all of the other films had done, the only place to go was to digital manipulation. Which is cool, but really only as cool as watching robots dancing. I don’t feel energized by this scene so much as numbed by it.

What will make me feel something? Is it dancing on air? Upside down? On fire?

See, here’s where it gets tricky: I don’t want more. I want more affect. I want something that will make me feel something. And in that department, less can be infinitely more.

Take, for example, the famous Moses Supposes scene from Singin’ in the Rain, which essentially requires two men, a table, a chair, and some cardboard signs.

Or, even better, the dance studio scene from Center Stage — these performers aren’t gorgeous, there aren’t any specific effects, they’re just “dancing the shit” out of Stevie Wonder. In fact, they’re totally dorky looking, but isn’t there something palpable to this?

OR EVEN BETTER, the dance club scene from the first Step Up, which accounts for 92.2% of my love for Channing Tatum (the other 8.8% comes from the little-seen-but-spectacular Fighting).

Again, this is the dorkiest scene ever, and completely unbelievable, even for people who live in Baltimore and go to an arts magnet school. But wouldn’t you rather watch this like fifty times — especially that weird little part when The Tatum pops his collar — than robots with club clothes on doing, um, the robot? With LED lights on their backs? Doesn’t it make you feel something — maybe it’s excitement, maybe it’s lust, maybe it’s just ‘I want to see that again’ — in a way that the Step Up 3 dance scenes don’t?

The other reason all three of these scenes work is they each tell us something about the characters and their relationship with one another and the world around them. Put differently, it’s spectacle that advances the plot, or that is infused with plot….rather than a YouTube video in the middle of an otherwise bad narrative. The very early filmmakers had to figure out how to integrate the two, and as evidenced by the latest wrath of cold, feelingless summer spectacles, it’s a problem with which filmmakers are still (re?) grappling.

I’m not saying that I need spectacle-based films to have great plots or great acting. This is so obviously not going to happen. I don’t need complicated character development, I don’t even really need plausible narratives. But if the narrative itself doesn’t make me feel anything, then I need the spectacle to take up the slack. And when it’s all spectacle, no heart…..then you’ve also got yourself a soulless piece of art.