I hadn’t had a holiday for a year, so after having finished a big research project at the end of June, I eagerly seized a friend’s invitation to go to Sydney for a few days. On our itinerary was seeing Hairspray, a musical my friend is extremely fond of in all its incarnations, but one I hadn’t previously heard much of.
So, on a cold and windswept Saturday night, we ventured out to Star City. And had our hearts well and truly warmed!
My purpose isn’t to write a review of the show. Suffice it to say that it’s wonderful, and you should see it if you have the chance.
What interests me in this post is the cultural politics of Hairspray.
One of its marketing themes, and points of identification, is with 60s nostalgia. That nostalgia (as with all such imaginary clusters of memories) is by necessity a collective re-imagining of what the 60s ‘meant’, whether or not we were around to form our own judgements.
Hairspray, though, is set – deliberately – at a point of change. The scene in Baltimore in June 1962 is one of transformation: of the evolution, or better the revolution, through which the 50s melt into the 60s, with the civil rights struggle as the crucible.
Tracey Turnblad’s teenage desire to dance, and to audition for the Corny Collins show, sets in motion a series of events which sees a slice of the pop cultural scene integrated, accompanied by the full panoply of corrupt politicians, corporate machinations, arrests, protests and conflict.
It’s clever stuff, and immensely enjoyable. It’s also spot on in honing in on how change is driven by an upheaval in everyday life, and social and cultural relations – the quotidian as well as the world-historical. As Emma Goldman famously said, “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”.
Part of the nostalgia, no doubt, is for an era when social change seemed both straightforward and possible.
The stakes on the Hairspray stage are simple: justice figured as equality. And revolution as pushing open a door that’s already ajar.
What’s intriguing about the transposition of the Hairspray story to the Australian context is the way the show appears; the way the colour lines are written on the Antipodean actors’ bodies.
In American productions, one presumes, Little Inez, Motormouth Maybelle, Seaweed J. Stubbs and the aspiring dancers are black – African-American. Just as in Baltimore 1962, it’s a binary racial politics, resolving itself into a fantasy of unity at the end. No doubt, in its American setting, all sorts of images of reconciliation, the intent to recover purpose and clarity in dealing with racial politics, anticipations of Obama’s rhetoric, and much much more could be read into the phantasmatic politics of the Hairspray world.
In Australia, the black characters are played by actors variously of Latin American, Pacific Islander, Indian and African heritage. While the white power structure still presents itself as a unity, the other side of the racial dichotomy is in fact a multiplicity. And it’s a multiplicity (and this, for me, was one source of joy) that looks like what we see on the streets of our CBDs, a visual (and all singing and dancing!) representation of how our country actually increasingly *is*, one that’s all too rare.
But, of course, that raises the thornier issue of how to meld all into one, or whether that is at all desirable.
If it’s better to see globalisation and the post-colonial world as producers of a dichotomy between homogenisation and hybridity than as a one way ‘Westernisation’ (and even if you don’t like seeing it that way, it’s a fact), then you have to also confront the forces which mesh everything together. In Theodor Adorno‘s terms, the processes of societalisation, the means by which the plural and the contingent start to become one.
Like many other things, that can either be a positive or a negative. Hairspray represents its final moment of celebration as mediated by love (Amor Vincit Omnia!) on one hand, and commerce on the other. Harriman F. Spritzer, Corny Collins’ sponsor, comes to realise that integration is good for business.
So what we have is a very liberal narrative of racial politics – with its antecedents stretching back at least as far as Adam Smith and other Enlightenment figures’ celebration of the civilising and pacifying power of truck, trade, and interchange. It’s pretty much how Paul Keating used to justify multiculturalism, and in the clipped coin of today’s debate, how the big business side of the ‘immigration debate’ does its thing.
On the other hand, we might be seeing something like Gudrun Axeli-Knapp’s perception of societalisation – “the increasingly irrational dominance of the general over the particular”. That is to say, a homogenisation of love and the dollar mediating equality, and incorporating difference ever more cleverly and insidiously into one cultural and social field. The culture of capitalism demands that everything be the same, even if the colour palette becomes more diverse.
There is no doubt that in addition to the projection of political power, globalisation entails a mixing of populations, driven both by the redistribution of labour around the world and by a partial equalisation of hierarchy, where traditional and nationally bound attributes of status give way to the liquid equality of wealth.
Social relations are just as important, we must remember. In negotiating the everyday, in forming and sustaining intimate unions, in sharing joy and hope, we become the subjects of our own stories, not just the ones commerce and cultural appropriation write us into.
But, and this is one of the things I liked about thinking about the cultural politics of Hairspray, the actuality of the dancing subjects on the stage suggests something real that subverts the narrative, and maybe, just maybe, acts as a harbinger of a *different* form of *equality*.
In a very real way, that form of equality in difference may have already appeared on the historical horizon.
One thing, though, is for certain: it’s not as simple as the re-imagined 60s might suggest. On the other hand, we might be blind to think that change hasn’t already happened. It’s awaiting its moment for someone to dance the new tune into existence. And that change may surface in our imaginations through dancing rather than through marching in the streets.
I’ve never been especially interested in seeing this show before, but these aspects of the cultural politics subtexts definitely intrigue me. Thanks for that!
No worries!
Hmm. It is said that we live history forward but understand it backwards.
Do you mean “seemed” or “seems”?
1960s folks were as uncertain about how the future might look as anyone else. No more “seemed” “straightforward and possible” to them than it does today.
However, if you mean “seems” then you are talking about how the 1960s has been represented by folks who had the luxury of hindsight.
And in that case, this representation of an imagined past is at least partly a way of both trivialising and dismissing the 1960s as a model for present-day cultural upheaval: “Yeah, well, that was the 1960s. Change was easy then. But don’t try it today. And in any case look what happened. Do you really want that to happen again?”
Well, Katz, I think that’s precisely the dynamic that goes on in the current imaginary of the 60s, so perhaps I do mean “seems”.
To be more precise, I think:
(a) the text of the show does suggest that integration and the civil rights struggle were pushing at an open door, though the subtext I think subverts that interpretation in several interesting ways;
(b) what I think we have lost is the ability to see how to bring about bigger change from present changes, if that makes sense.
The message I’ve summarised as (a) is, though, the overall gist or general message, but it’s a little more complex, in that there are some suggestions textually that things are not so easy after all, but they’re sort of dissolved in the final resolution.
I didn’t realise Hairspray was set in Baltimore, in fact I don’t know much about Hairspray at all. I visited Baltimore a couple of years ago…mostly I just intended to stop by for because I wanted to see the Museum of Outsider Art, but I decided to stay a few days. I think it’s a fascinating city, for me it was the most honest place I visited in the USA, [in spite of it’s very gentrified harbourside]. There are some wonderful museums there, and it really brought home some of the reality of the history of race relations in the USA for me. Hmm, maybe I will check out the movie sometime soon.
Here is some historical background to the musical, which memorialises a show called the Buddy Deane Show in Baltimore:
From here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-IcynqylFicJ:www.law.umaryland.edu/programs/initiatives/arts/documents/hairspray_book.pdf+Bandstand+and+desegregation&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com.au
I haven’t seen the musical, but I might be interrogating the politics of any re-imagined representation of history which elides the messiness of the past. However:
I really like the possibilities in this. I take it you are referring to the multiplicity of otherness, the proliferation many identities which has fractured the dichotomy. That’s an astute observation. The reality that it did arrive in some way, in a more complex way than described in the musical and is yet to arrive in a greater way. It indeed would disturb the simplistic closures of the narrative wouldn’t it?
Great post, Mark.
Thanks, Casey, and yes, that’s right, I think.
I hadn’t known about the historical analogue. That adds another dimension. The ending of Hairspray suggests the Corny Collins Show will go on, but it could also be a false dawn. Knowing what actually did happen on Baltimore tv enables another sort of reading.
Are you sure it’s Baltimore, because I’ve been reading Anne Tyler’s novels, all set in Baltimore, all my life and I’m sure I don’t remember any Black characters in any of them.
More seriously …. I hadn’t thought of this before, but I guess it was American blacks that raised our consciousness of our own Aboriginals. If you grew up in middle-class suburbia you almost never saw an Aboriginal, and certainly not on TV. But the American civil rights movement was everywhere, with very articulate, charismatic leaders, and very glamorous supporters. So, while I was ready to join in demos for Aboriginal land rights, I had no idea about – well, just no idea. I was sort of demonstrating for ideals rather than for the rights of people who had a definite identity or reality to me. What a strange world Australia was back then. And how powerful was that music!
Russell, it’s definitely Baltimore – it’s referenced quite a bit, not to mention the song “Good Morning Baltimore!” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LOYbhl0_es
Baltimore is a black majority city – 63.3% in the 2010 census:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore#Demographics
Before Hairspray was Polyester, with the never forgettable Smellorama, which. sadly, never caught on.
At first I was thinking “that wasn’t the story” because I was thinking of a Julie Christie/Warren Beatty film – I had to Google to find the film was Shampoo, not Hairspray. Good film.
Mark, I was making a kind of parallel – Tyler’s Baltimore which is all white, with 1960s Perth which was all white too (depending from where you looked.)
Russell, yep, I don’t know when Tyler’s books were set, but I strongly suspect that if Baltimore is now a black majority city, they weren’t invisible in the 60s in the same sense that Aboriginal people were in 60s Perth.
This is an interesting piece on the history of race relations in Baltimore:
http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/the-elephant-in-the-city/Content?oid=1246619
“The scene in Baltimore in June 1962” that is the same year that American Graffiti was set in (Modesto, California). I never made that connection before. I can’t remember the music from Hairspray too well, but that the line from AG, “Rock and Roll’s been shit since Buddy Holly died” has a new meaning.
Of course, Baltimore was the setting of the brilliant recent TV series, “The Wire”. Maybe it depicted the dark side to Hairspray’s light..?
See here:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Ride_(Australia)
Before the Civil War, Baltimore and DC were cities of refuge for freed slaves and runaways. Baltimore was at that time the largest Afro-American city. Perth’s Aboriginal population was always vanishingly small by comparison.
Wow. Good essay Mark.
I just want to say I’ve always loved John Water’s movies since that first time I saw “Pink Flamingoes” at the Valhalla Cinema in Glebe some point in the early 1980s.
You do know the original version of the movie was were Ricki Lake got her big break, right? Also if you like Hairspray and Polyester (mentioned previously) you’ll definitely love Cry-Baby, starring Johnny Depp.
Mark — to add something (I hope) to your comments about the imaginary of the 60s presented in Hairspray, it’s worth noting that the Broadway show writer, Marc Shaiman, was born in the unfashionable, depressed and then-very-Jewish city of Newark, New Jersey, in 1959…
Apart from that, I have nothing to offer but fanboi ravings.
I condemn this essay for being insufficiently ebullient about the tunes! The toe-tapping, aisle-dancing, Ohrwurming tunes!
I was devastated to arrive in NYC only to find the original Broadway show had closed its last show the previous week.
The (remake) movie version has given us Christopher Walken dancing the tango with John Travolta in drag — possibly the finest moment in the history of cinema.
Oh, and I second TR @17 re: Cry-Baby.
If there was a revolution in Australia in 1962 I missed it.
Sounds like a very interesting show, Mark. Thought provoking post. I don’t remember 1952 as being much different from the rest of the 50s. My impression was that the revolution was a couple of years away yet.
oops. 1962 not 1952.
A very interesting post, Mark.
Paul B, as a young man in the 1960s I was thinking the same thing. In the early 60s I would have been aware of moves to integration in the US, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring etc, but it was not until a few years later that there was a broader social/cultural movement that impinged on Australian consciousness. Immanuel Wallerstein sees 1968 as the year of a world revolution and the watershed of change.
Working in government from 1969 was a time characterised by hope and a feeling that we could change the world.
It’s interesting to hear about a musical based on the early beginnings.
Yes, Brian, I tend to agree with that. Think we saw the berginnings of it here c. 1954, though I wouldn’t want to be precise about the date, with the music of Dylan, the Beatles etc. And certainly, at least in King’s Cross it was well under way by 1966. It came a bit later to some other parts of Oz, I gather.
Gee, and I just went along and enjoyed the music. I didn’t even try to make parallels with Australia, seeing it purely as about USA racial politics. And the plot seemed thin, even for a musical. So I focussed on the singing and dancing rather than being critical at all.
I think that like scientific revolutions, major changes in social attitudes largely come about through generational change. Which is a polite way of saying that we have to wait for the racists to die. In some ways it’s comforting that in the circles I move in (oldest members ~40) multiculturalism is not so much thought about as lived. Ditto sexual pluralism (albeit the sexual-preference minority in my house is the heterosexuals), and to some extent the arguments have moved to science-vs-mysticism and topics like polyamory (which IMO is a poor choice of topic for the anti-gay-marriage crowd, because most of the under-30 crowd just go “consenting adults. Get over it”.
Thanks, Merc, Tyro and Brian, and Merc – that’s another interesting con-text!
John Waters is a very interesting character and the setting of Baltimore is essential for how his films work. The dagginess, the not-Hollywoodness of them all is partly what they’re about. The earliest ones were populated by Waters’ friends; the freaks, weirdos and drag queens of Baltimore.
Now his work is a lot smoother accessible, but the freakiness is still there. His touring Australia in a live show later this year which, I’ve been told, is very funny.
I still have to see the film!
Oh Mark, thats a travesty! You havent seen the film!!!?? The stage show looks so sanitised and neat compared to the fabulousness of the John Waters film. Divine as Tracey’s ‘MOM’ brings so many more levels to the story. I couldnt imagine seeing the stage show without her! Or John…
Well, Trevor Ashley as Tracey’s mum was superb!
… Like I said, I’d been pretty much unaware of Breathless before the idea to go to Sydney arose!
This maybe of interest.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1673697/
A new Australian film; ‘The Sapphires’ about an Indigenous all-girl singing group who go to entertain the troops in Vietnam. Stars the wonderful Deb Mailman and directed by Wayne Blair.
Mmm, the politics of race and lots of gorgeous ’60s frocks.
… Just like Hairspray – a good combo!