celebrity gossip, academic style

Glee is this television season’s most talked about new show. Sure, Modern Family is funny, and Vampire Diaries manages to faithfully reproduce the hype of Twilight and Buffy, but Glee, despite only middling ratings, is the only show to truly break out, both as a subject of discourse and as the first successful network musical since, well, Cop Rock. (For more on this season’s crop of television shows, including ratings forecasts, see Jonathan Gray’s recent posts on The Extratextuals). The identity politics of the show have sparked the most heated discussions – see Amanda Ann Klein’s insightful reading over at Judgmental Observer, Jezebel’s take-down, and Kelli Marshall’s most recent musings.

I’ll say that I find the show incredibly funny. Especially Jane Lynch (did you see that zoot suit this week? Incredible.) I also think critiques of the stereotypes are misguided, as they’re supposed to be stereotypes – that’s part of the satire — and the show has been taking its sweet time in breaking each stereotype down, instead of immediately hitting us over the head with the quirk and spark that individuates each character. I love the song choices, in part because many of them hail from my own junior high/high school years, as well as the rendering of small town, small school cultural hierarchies. (Full disclosure: I was a cheerleader, and although Jane Lynch wasn’t our coach, we, along with the football players, certainly enjoyed social perks. And while I never slushied anyone, and Glee is certainly hyperbolic, this is a vision of high school, chastity club included, with which I am unfortunately too familiar.)

The songs and dances would never cut it in an actual high school, but this is a musical, people – do we forget the way that musicals are allowed to stop and circumvent time, reality, and fate? Some of the performances are motivated by the narrative, but some, such as Quinn’s torch song or Mercedes’s “Bust Your Windows,” shatter the diegesis. And that’s okay, just as the risqué song selections are okay, because, again, this is neither realism nor reality TV. This is a musical, complete with all of the musical’s attendant genre conventions.

Mercedes Breaks the Digesis (and Busts Your Windows)

Which brings me to the topic of star formation. Musicals are perfect star builders: in part because they allow a particular actor to hold the spotlight for a sustained amount of time, but also because they provide a forked path to identification. Put differently, we are encouraged to identity with the star’s performance within the narrative, as she navigates the various obstacles (usually related to love or success) that cross her path, just as we identity with most protagonists. When Rachel declares in voiceover that “You may think that every guy in the school would, totally, want to tap this, but my MySpace schedule keeps me way too busy to date” or when she actively pines for Finn, or when she submits to blackmail (e.g. hands over a pair of her undergarments) from the dorkiest kid in the school in order to protect a certain piece of information from reaching the blogosphere, we are meant to sympathize and/or empathize with her. As a type-A ambitious female, my ambitions may not have been to make it big on Broadway, but her perfectionism and marginalization provide a prime point of identification.

Type-A Rachel Berry

At the same time, Rachel gets some of the most moving, emotive, and transcendent solos of the series. I know we’re talking pop music and show tunes, and maybe I’m just a sucker for ‘80s hits, but when she sings her part in “Don’t Stop Believin’” and, more recently, “Somebody to Love,” it does something to me, something akin to shivers. It’s a phenomenological response, evoked by the combination of musical harmonies and earnestness: it’s the same unnamable something that makes a song, or a voice, our favorite. To adpt Linda Williams’ conception of the ‘body genres’ – e.g. genres that make our body react physically, either through laughter, fright, or arousal – I would posit that the music alternately incites feelings of viscerally felt pathos and, well, glee.

Put differently, the musical numbers and solos, especially those coupled with choreographed dance, arouse something unnamable and unexplainably pleasurable. I don’t know exactly why I feel happiness watching the finely calibrated movements of a group of dancers – whether paired with Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, Astaire and Rogers in The Gay Divorcee, or Glee’s competition dancing to Amy Winehouses’s “Rehab.” But I do. Similarly, I don’t know why I feel the flipside of that pleasure – a pure and sorrowful sadness/yearning – when I watch Rachel emote, or Judy Garland sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” or Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman sing “My Dying Day” in Moulin Rouge.

The Pleasure of Synchronicity

The musical thus encourages a cerebral and physical engagement with the star: I like and identify with the character; I feel inexplicably, viscerally moved by the musical performances. Thus I don’t feel drawn to a particular Glee character until he/she is featured in a solo: when Puck sang “Sweet Caroline” last week, I was his forever.

Puck Sings Neil Diamond…and wins me over.

Which perhaps explains at least part of the cult of fandom around musical figures, whether Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, or, to some extent, Michael Jackson, who certainly participated in his share of musical narratives. It might even help to explain the cult of Audrey Hepburn (also evoked in this week’s episode) who, with the help of the magic of dubbing, sang her way through My Fair Lady. (It also explains the way that American Idol narrativizes the lives and development of its contestants – their performances will make us like them, but it’s the narrative, including tidbits of past experience, strife, and success, that permits identification).

Most movie stars require interviews, profiles, and photo shoots to flesh out the ‘ordinary’ compliment to their extraordinary roles. Yet the musical star provides the extraordinary/ordinary paradox each and every time she appears. In other words, Rachel gets to be ‘ordinary’ during the majority of the show – walking down hallways, washing Slushies from her hair – and ‘extraordinary’ the moment she breaks into song. A third ‘real’ layer may further embellish the equation, providing a feedback loop of self-referential material (see Garland and Streisand). But it is not truly necessary. The dual-layered performance is sufficient.

Since its premiere, the Glee publicity team – both for the show itself and for the individual actors – have attempted to court media attention. The move has proved moderately successful – as Lainey points out, the leads got ‘papped’ the other day, they’re on the recent cover of Entertainment Weekly, and Lea Michele was featured in a front end US Weekly fashion spread.

What’s more, nearly all of the actors — and all of the young ones — are active on Twitter. At this point, however, the stars are enough of unknowns that the ‘real’ them is predicated almost entirely on their ability to reproduce the other ‘real’ them – e.g. the ‘real’ characters on Glee, the ones visible when not performing. Thus Chris Colfler, who plays the flamboyent Kurt, is conveniently homosexual in ‘real life,’ and his recent call for Twitter followers to come up with Sue Sylvester jokes launched her name into the Twitter trending topics. Why? Because it reproduced the Kurt image the show – the selfsame image that people want to believe characterizes the quotidian life of Cofler.

This conclusion might seem contradictory, as I’m at once asserting that the stars of musical are, by default, stars – but, at the same time, they cannot escape their picture personalities, which is usually a sign of the non-star. So be it. It’s contradictory, but it’s the musical – and I should probably just evade the contradiction, as musicals are wont to do, by breaking into song: