I was in high school from like 1999-2001. I don’t know if you remember, but these were pretty dark times for pop culture, especially in the teen-oriented market. I was totally impatient with the tepid teen flicks my friends were dragging me to at the movies and wound up devoting all my fantasy space and energy to classic Hollywood films. Especially old musicals. I was totally fascinated by the whole system, the way that assembly-line-style studio production was able to facilitate such brilliance, the way artists were able to squeeze so much rich meaning between the strict rules of the Hays Code. I loved reading about the ways directors skirted the lines and tried say things that they weren’t strictly allowed to say. I read a lot about Hitchcock and trains going into tunnels. The strange thing is I really only half-knew what they were hinting at; obviously I knew clinical definitions of sex, but the world behind the fireworks and the oceans hitting the shores was still basically obscure to me.
One of my favourites was The Pirate, directed by Vincente Minnelli in 1948, with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. It’s not Minnelli’s best work, and it’s not even the best thing Kelly and Garland did together (For Me and My Gal and Summer Stock are both superior movies, in their ways). It was kind of a debacle at the time, both a financial and critical failure. The Pirate is basically about a woman who has a vague, fairytale idea of sex that is eventually replaced by a much different reality, that is way more fun. It’s one of those M-G-M musicals that takes place in like an alternate reality that’s vaguely associated with a historical place and time. Gene Kelly wears a lot of tight pants. It’s very, very camp. No one in real life would ever wear this:
The Pirate is a Technicolor love story involving hypnotism, desire, mistaken identity, and pirates. I tend to think it’s actually a pretty tremendous metaphor for female sexual awakening. Judy Garland has a fantasy about what romance really is (involving this famous pirate called Mack the Black), and is convinced she has met him in Gene Kelly. Her fantasy guy is rebellious and criminal and exists outside the traditional social order – on the open sea. However, she’s engaged to this really boring bourgeois businessman who is socially acceptable, will afford her a totally stable – and sedentary – life. But then! It turns out that the guy she thinks is a pirate is actually a circus clown, and the real pirate is the boring bourgeois businessman. The message isn’t so much that the dark fairytale sexuality you’re dreaming of is fake so you should settle, so much as that the reality of sexy is the (ridiculously handsome) clown. It’s not a rebuke: it’s an inversion. The putative message is that the real thing is way better than the fantasy could ever be – but there’s so little that’s “real” in this movie that it’s hard to imagine anyone walking away thinking that.
They first meet at the sea, which, judging from Garland’s expression, has a sexual draw of its own.
He, well, he circles her and makes her hat floppy.
Even though Garland’s character is engaged to a successful businessman, she still really can’t help but be drawn to this actor. Despite herself, she goes down to his show that night and is hypnotized into…performing a song. He uses a conch shell to remind her of the sea, and her sea associations bring her to Mack the Black’s badness and “a flaming trail of masculinity”.
It’s not just that she’s performing, it’s that she’s expressing desires. And she’s doing it…a bit excessively.
Anyway, so, eventually the circus follows her back home and the actor Serafin realizes her fiancé is Mack the Black, and pretends to be the pirate himself. She believes him and eventually “sacrifices herself” to him to save the town, as in her wildest fantasies. In the midst of this is her fantasy sequence.
This is heady stuff. In the fantasy, she’s kneeling in front of him, totally powerless and he sort of menaces her with a sword, and there’s a lot of fire (which appears in the mise-en-scene whenever her passion is flaring). He’s wearing really small shorts. (I think this is the least Gene Kelly ever wore on screen, not that I’ve made a study of it or anything.) It ends with her being overpowered in an indefinable way.
None of this stuff is really why the movie stuck with me though. It certainly built up a certain energy, but when I think of The Pirate, I think of one scene: after she realizes that he’s lied and threatened her whole town, Manuela throws a bunch of statues at Serafin until he’s knocked out. Then she immediately regrets what she’s done and runs over to him and holds his head while she sings him a song about how he can do no wrong.
The song is pretty forgettable as these kinds of songs go, but the scene itself is luscious. Their faces are so close to each other and the camera is so close to them and the overwhelming sense is one of proximity, which is something I didn’t have, and so, so badly wanted. When I think of that scene, I don’t remember the song very well, but I do remember the sound of Judy’s voice, and the way the camera held close to both of them. I leaned forward on the couch unconsciously, straining to be closer to them. I wanted to reach out and touch them, to touch that. I understood instinctively that I was on the outside of something, that the camera was pressing as close as it could but could never really get there, and all I wanted was to get inside.
The film closes with Garland’s character “performing” her love for Mack the Black, now that she knows Serafin is really just an actor. They get pretty into it.
I recently watched a TV documentary about sexuality in British Victorian art – and one of the things the presenter talked about was the use of fairies as a way of dealing with all sorts of perverse, morally complex, aspects of sexuality that couldn’t be portrayed in more literal images. I feel like The Pirate is the 1940s version of that thing; the “historical Caribbean” used as a setting might as well have been a similarly fantastical space, so little did the characters and locations have to do with the actual historical Caribbean. (I realize that erasing the actual history of the Caribbean is pretty offensive to those people who were actually still suffering from that history at that time, and please understand I’m not being nostalgic, but thinking of the movie I did when I was a teenager, with the same total lack of social and political consciousness that the movie was made with. I was a teenager. I don’t know what Minelli’s excuse was.) Anyway, the Hays Code sort of re-Victorianized Hollywood, meaning that sex — and, more importantly, ambiguity — could only ever be hinted at and danced around (in many cases literally) to be dealt with in Hollywood. Not all musicals were about sex, and certainly a lot of the films came from extracinematic sources, but I do think it’s fair to say that all that aesthetic excess was a way of managing all the prohibitions. The bright colours, the over-the-top set pieces, the giant fantasy spaces where the numbers took place. These weren’t spaces of reality, they were spaces of possibility. There was a sense of license. If the rules of space and time didn’t have to apply, anything was, potentially, possible. The meanings of the big ballet numbers that Gene Kelly loved (like the famous one at the end of An American In Paris) always had pretty blunt narrative meanings, but the passion and grace with which they were executed was always completely out of proportion with the requirements of the story. Think of that big scene with him and Cyd Charisse and the giant scarf in Singin’ in the Rain. It has nothing to do with anything. It’s a reverie. It’s a fantasy within a fantasy.
For me as a teenager, those open spaces and open meanings were almost better than the real thing.