There are thirty-eight characters in the stage show of West Side Story, and every single character has a name, a personality, and identifiable traits. There is no such thing in West Side Story as an undifferentiated mass of people without agency. Nobody is there just to take up space.
If there is one thing the very greatest art does more than anything else, it is to give us that sense that all voices can be heard. In the very best of Shakespeare and Mozart and Chekhov, there is no such thing as a character without a space for us to recognize something of ourselves in them, and West Side Story is another of those miraculous works that takes in every ounce of humanity from the broadest possible cross-section.
But part of what great art does is that it complicates our perceptions. It infects us with ideas that are directly contradictory to each other and forces us to acknowledge the possibility that both ideas may be right.
So at the same time that West Side Story gives us a full gamut of humanity, there is no ignoring the fact that stereotypes are baked into West Side Story at the innermost layer. If the show's Latinos don't seem oversexed, it's a very bad performance. If Bernardo does not hit the roof at the idea of some gringo kissing his sister, there's literally no play. And if Anita and her compañeras do not bark like dogs as they dance in 'America', half the audience will go home thinking Anita is a bad actress. Whether these stereotypes are worth accepting for the price of the show, and they are, these stereotypes are there, and if you put the show on, there's no getting rid of them.
There's a lot of venerated art out there that plays to stereotypes, and a lot of it plays to stereotypes because they are not nearly as good as their reputations. But for better or worse, there are also great works out there, relatively a lot of them, which are great not just in spite of playing to stereotypes, but because they play to stereotypes. Why? Because stereotypes can also be used to make audiences recognize the humanity in people whom they'd otherwise never recognize as human.
So on the one hand, West Side Story is, as we Jews say, 'traif.' And for many people in 2021, approving of West Side Story is about as likely as observant Jews eating bacon. On the other hand, bacon is there for the rest of America, and it clearly isn't going anywhere. If a Jew decides to eat bacon, it's the easiest thing in the world to buy.
West Side Story is as American as a breakfast burrito, and whether you ever order West Side Story from the menu, some of your kids will eat it every day, and they'll love it as much when they're 76 as when they're 16. And whether Breakfast Burritos were ever Mexican, they're now as American as Apple Pie.
But even were there no new COVID threat, you couldn't possibly make a movie for 2021 which less people would want to see. The young have no memory of the classic showtunes and cocktail lounge songs to which West Side Story took a sledgehammer - jazz, mambo, big band, it all might as well be Beethoven to young ears. Everything subversive about West Side Story has so long since become the establishment who tells you all kinds of things you don't want to hear. And as for older people, they never saw what was wrong with the old West Side Story movie, which most Americans grew up regarding as a classic. Never mind that it sucks...
Why does it suck? Y'know... aside from the really awful Tony and Maria and the head-ache inducing blare of the orchestral sound and the fact that all the special effects dated within six months and that all the teenagers look 40 and the first piece of American music theater to never have an overture has A TEN MINUTE OVERTURE! I could go on for a while....
The reason the original movie sucks is that nearly everything which was revolutionary about the show was taken out of the movie. Jerome Robbins, the original stage director, was fired as movie director within six weeks because he took too long to rehearse, and to replace him came Robert Wise, the same Hollywood hack who was hired to cut what would have been Orson Welles's best movie to ribbons.
West Side Story exists to disturb people, but since that movie, generations of American girls have gone around singing 'I Feel Pretty' without remembering that Maria was singing about being loved by a boy who'd just murdered her brother. Rather than make people be mindful of gang violence, the movie almost made gang violence seem cute.
The stage and screen are almost the opposite of each other. On the stage, everything is about style. But on the screen, everything is about substance. On stage, everything has a physical impact, on camera, there is no physical space to impact. A camera doesn't capture motion, it records the spirit behind the motion, so it follows that a camera doesn't capture dance well, what it captures is the impulse behind the dancing.
So movies are very good at making dance seem joyful, because dance is usually a joyful act. But why represent agony and violence through dance when the camera lets you show the real thing much more easily than onstage? On stage, violence through dance is a lot more intimidating than realistic representations of violence, but on film, 'dance violence' is just weird... The violence of Scorsese and Coppola were just around the corner, but it's not like 1961 would let Hollywood show any realistic violence - so the only scenes where the impact of dance really comes through is in the joyful scenes like 'America' and the Mambo.
West Side Story was not a huge hit when it first premiered. It was a success, but it was hugely promoted, and relative to the expectations promoters had, it was a disappointment. It left Broadway audiences intimidated and ambivalent, the same Broadway audiences who simultaneously made My Fair Lady a megablockbuster. The irony is that My Fair Lady similarly defanged a play by George Bernard Shaw. Shaw's original play, Pygmalion, was a searing takedown of the British upper class, and My Fair Lady made it into a loving tribute to them. Pygmalion is a great play, and My Fair Lady is... lame.
So the original movie is the My Fair Lady-ization of a very disturbing piece of theater. It koshered West Side Story for the mainstream and made it into the hit it probably never could have been, and it's a thoroughly rotten piece of culture.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
West Side Story was originally 'East Side Story', and East Side Story was about dueling gangs of Irish Catholics and Jews on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Maybe it would have worked as a Scorsese movie, or an opera with lots of church hymns and cantorial music, but a musical juxtaposing gangs that dance to Irish jigs and Klezmer music would have caused a Broadway flop so lame every producer would pronounce it dead in the pitch meeting.
There are two fundamental facts about West Side Story's authors - all its creators were gay or at very least bisexual, and all its creators were Jewish. Except for that guy, Ansel Elgort, nobody is objecting to West Side Story's sexual content, but everyone's objecting to the racial content.
East Side Story was first conceived of in 1950, six years after Auschwitz's liberation, during a period when American Jews could still not imagine the heights of prosperity to which they would soon rise. The fact remains, portraying the Sharks as Puerto Rican is, in part, a way to talk about being Jewish in a country that would never believe, then as now, that Jews have more in common with people of color than white people. That was true even when white people hated us, how much more do people believe it now?
But whether or not Jews seem white, in another three generations, when all the secular Jews have descendents who are no longer Jewish; and when all the Jewish men wear black hats and the women wear wigs, who will accept Jews then? The average white person will find a few Jews useful in professional life and the social company of Jews distasteful. And the average person of color? Jews will be thrown into all the same cramped tenement housing and decrepit apartment buildings. And they'll probably feel about Jews exactly the way Cossacks felt about Jews in the shtetl. With all the same antisemitic violence... and if 22nd century American Jews here are luckier than they were in Europe, they'll be allowed to fight back like Sharks do in West Side Story.
-----------------------------
The controversy of West Side Story began before its premiere. Puerto Rican organizations complained of the line in 'America' calling Puerto Rico an 'island of tropic diseases.'
The problem was, ostensibly, the idea that Puerto Rico was disease-ridden. In a sense, that's true ,because every place has a rate of disease proportional to its proximity to the equator - that's obviously its own problem, but that wasn't not the real problem. The real problem was the double implication that Latinos are a particular source of venereal disease, and that Latinos immigrating to this country will bring their various diseases with them and infect the rest of us.
But why were people leaving Puerto Rico to begin with?
Why do people leave anywhere? To seek a better life, and in that sense, West Side Story used Puerto Rico as a standin for the entire American story. The story and hardships of Maria, Anita, and Bernardo is the story of every immigrant group. But West Side Story made very plain that success in America is barely more likely than it is anywhere else, and many immigrants would have been better off remaining in the old country.
One could make the argument that the Puerto Rican experience was not West Side Story's to take just as Puerto Rico was not the US's to take. I'm sure some Puerto Ricans see West Side Story the most public example of their imperial pilfering by Americans. But realistically speaking, in the world as it is and not as it should be, would Puerto Rico really rather be anything other than American? Even as degraded as they've been, especially in the Trump era, would they really rather have been like the Dominican Republic? Cuba? Haiti? However unfortunate it is to be a Puerto Rican, it's worse to be from nearly any other country in the Caribbean. And rather than dictators slaughtering them by the tens of thousands, they have the second largest per-capita income of any Caribbean island, they may well produce the first Latino-American President, and are championed and celebrated as the ultimate immigrant experience in the greatest work of theater ever created in the most powerful country the world's ever experienced.
Progress can never be measured in absolutes, it can only be measured in relation to what already exists. We don't make the rules of the world, we just live in it and change it fraction by fraction. It's very hard being a person of color in the world, but in a long history filled with horror and humiliation, Puerto Rico is a success story with a continually upward trajectory. May that success continue and not have definitively stopped with Trump.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment