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Monday, May 30, 2005
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FORTY YEARS ON Faithful readers know that UD is a die-hard fan of the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music, and that it was a high point of her academic year when she took two of her Novels of Don DeLillo students to a Sing-a-Long at Lisner Auditorium at GW a few months ago. It is now the fortieth anniversary of the film, and a writer for the New York Times wrestles in today’s paper with the enigma of its massive success (“in inflation-adjusted dollars, it remains the third-biggest-grossing film of all time at the domestic box office.”). “Christopher Plummer, Captain von Trapp himself, is said to have called it ‘The Sound of Mucus.’" Pauline Kael was the first person to light on this felicity - she used it in her notorious review of the film. Mad Magazine made the phrase famous by titling its satire of the film “The Sound of Mucus.” UD has fond memories of long car trips with her family when she was a kid, during which lusty group renditions of The Sound of Mucus were enjoyed by all. “[F]rom the very beginning, the public lapped it up. Ms. Kael lost her job as movie critic for McCall's after her infamous panning, and the film has since survived innumerable television reruns (Ronald Reagan once skipped reading an economic-summit briefing book to watch it), cast reunions and high-camp ‘Rocky Horror‘-style sing-alongs that began in London in 1999, with audience members dressed as brown-paper packages and tea with jam and bread.” UD would like to differentiate as cleanly as she can between the high-camp singalong and the other stuff the writer tosses promiscuously into this paragraph -- the low pathos of Reagan lapping up the movie instead of running the economy; the lower pathos of aging von Trapp children. ‘"Whom could [The Sound of Music] offend?" [Kael] asked in her famous McCall's drubbing. "Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated.”’ The genius of the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music is that it both acknowledges and ridicules that manipulation. There’s no denying the film’s powerful emotional manipulations (“Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, who estimates that anniversary-related activities surrounding ‘The Sound of Music’ have occupied more than 90 percent of his time in the last two months, [says]: ‘In retrospect, it's a very good story, with very good tunes. The score doesn't really sound like a score written by 60-year-old men. There's a kind of youthfulness and honesty to the songs, about how to learn music, but also how to break down barriers. It doesn't sound like someone's trying to phony something up.’”), but, equally, there’s also no denying its outstanding absurdity. The Sing-a-Long keeps the manipulation and the absurdity going very nicely. |