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The
Pirate
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The Pirate – released in a
superb Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection in late 2020 – deconstructs
itself faster than any analyst possibly can. From its first seconds, a chorus
on the soundtrack calls fervently for “Macoco!” Macoco, all-powerful pirate of
the high seas, feared by all. As we soon see in the illustrated, turned pages
of a book, this “Black Macoco” – or “Mack the Black” as he is immortalised in
song – is, fairly obviously, black. And one hell of a man: indeed, a “flaming
trail of masculinity”, as besotted Manuela (Judy Garland) will eulogise him.
In the course of the plot, another man, acrobatic (and
how!) travelling player Serafin (Gene Kelly), will hypnotise Manuela and
convince her, for a while, that he is
really Macoco. But he’s not a pirate, and not black. Then another character
steps forth to declare: I am Macoco!
(If you don’t know who this character is, you need to see the film pronto.) But
this second guy, although he’s telling the truth, doesn’t look anything like
Macoco. Macoco is who he was. Now
he’s fat. And he’s not quite black, either: sporting a mild tan, maybe. Michael
Jackson before his time? The moment that this ex-Macoco finds himself yelling
“If you want to worship Macoco, worship me!”,
you know it’s all over for him. Black Macoco shouldn’t have to argue the proof
of his own, magnificent, male identity.
So Mack the Black meets Jack the Lack. The point of The Pirate is this: no one, no man, is
ever in the place of Macoco. Or rather, they might grasp at it, claim it for a
moment or a scene, but they can’t stay in it for very long. It’s an impossible
ideal, a myth, a fiction, a story-book in pictures. The Phallus. Towering above
everyone, never “on the ground” … Is this an unfair recourse to interpretive
psychoanalysis? Buddy, this is a movie where hypnosis takes centre stage, as it
will again, 22 years later, in Vincente Minnelli’s On a Clear Day You
Can See Forever. And what a thoroughly possessed song-and-dance (for
the performance of “Mack the Black”) that hypnosis unleashes in The Pirate … a true summit of cinema.
Cole Porter’s especially commissioned songs are a riot
of exotica riffs and clever, punning lines. They, too, pursue the all-pervasive
work of deconstruction. As we hear many times: “By the CaribBEan or CarIBean sea” … how many songs, in musicals or anywhere else – apart
from “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” by the Gershwins – are centrally based on
differences of pronunciation? Porter even jumps in and stretches the
equivocation out – “By the CaribBEan
… or if you’re not agreein’ …”. You want to scream with delight at Cole, just
as Serafin yells at Manuela as she relentlessly trashes a room on, over and
around him: “You’re overdoing this!”
That exclamation is pure camp, and The Pirate is probably the supreme
Hollywood masterpiece of knowing, not inadvertent, camp. It doesn’t need to be
appropriated, read-against-the-grain or “subtextually” decoded as camp: from
the first note, it’s totally exaggerated, histrionic, nudge-wink stuff. “Niña”,
Kelly’s immortal number, is a veritable delirium of sexual innuendo and double
entendre: “Til I make you mine, til I make you …”. The song is also decked out
with fashionable pop-psychoanalytic references to schizophrenia and
neurasthenia – well, both afflictions rhyme with Niña, if you give that the
proper Spanish twist. Pronunciation-deconstruction again.
Personally speaking: The Pirate, what a strange path I had to take to meet you! I have
always, since first seeing it in early teen years, found it a wonderfully
energetic, exhilarating film. Garland and Kelly are sensational as a
chemically-emulsified screen couple. But by the time I was really getting to
grips with its wonderment, a few years later, I was in over my head at the university
library shelves of grand Film Theory. From the mid 1970s to the early ‘80s, The Pirate could be found, pinned under
the analytical microscope, in many sites: conference papers, classroom
demonstrations, journal articles. It was – and genuinely is – a seething
cauldron of “the gaze” and the voice, of fraught entry into the Symbolic Order,
of place and identity and masquerade, of gender and genre, of Freud and Jack
the Lack and Althusser … what else could the Macoco story be?
The film apparently found pride of place in the
historic “Cinema and Psychoanalysis” event at the Edinburgh Film Festival in
1976; Kelly’s ultimate direct address into camera (“Don’t move! There’s more!”),
cutting off the tidy plot-resolution and hurling the final “Be a Clown” reprise
at us, must have had that diegetically-aware crowd reeling. Kelly’s exclamation
is somewhere between a mercenary sales-pitch and a Brechtian lesson: the kind
of crazy cultural mix that Peter
Wollen later located in the
discombobulated formal mix-and-match “cartilage” of Kelly-Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952) …
I have a fond, sentimental memory of this brief but
beautiful cultural moment I lived through, when film theory danced with the “golden
era” Hollywood musical (especially of the 1940s & ‘50s Arthur Freed/MGM
variety). I am not really speaking here of the genre analyses of Rick Altman or
Jane Feuer, fine and influential as they were (and are). I’m talking about the
intimate tussle of “textuality”: really inhabiting the shifting texture, the
gestures, the rhythms and energies, and especially the heterogeneity (man, I love this word) of films including The Band Wagon (a favourite of Lesley Stern, and the
subject of a masterly mid ‘70s essay by Dennis Giles), On the Town (a revelation for me), Singin’ in the
Rain (to which the sadly departed digital-era pioneer Adrian Miles devoted
an early hypertext) … through to stranger musical mutations like
Powell-Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955) and Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man (1961). Raymond Bellour, too, has spent his entire adult life writing about
Minnelli, from the latest releases at the end of the ‘50s to The Pirate’s hypnosis scene in his 2009
magnum opus Le corps du cinéma (“Serafin
reveals the desire for theatre-cinema seemingly inscribed via the performers
onto each cinema spectator”).
As an enthusiastic spectator and dutiful student
during the ‘70s, one was caught in these films like a spinning top, catching
and losing this or that identity, this or that place in the social order … and
giving oneself wholly over to what we liked to call, in those days, the excess of sound and image, performance
and style. Not quite realising, as it happens, that most musicals – and a good
portion of Hollywood cinema tout court – are so excessive in their standard operating mode that, after all, excess
constitutes a kind of norm. Alleluia!
But a certain over-seriousness had inevitably
overtaken me, after all this microscopic frame-analysis on The Pirate, in classrooms, on conference floors and at the
university library table. Somewhere in the 1990s – I registered this in a
notebook of the time – I stumbled upon it once again, after a suitable absence,
on TV or VHS. And I was amazed to realise for the first time that it was not
only spirited and funny but … super-camp. Everything in it was camp! Macoco
included. Perhaps I had unconsciously resisted this evident truth of the film
because a strain of camp culture, well exposed in Melbourne during that era,
was (in my mind) the absolute antipode to seriousness, or at least to a
particular sort of interpretive analysis wielded by semiotic film theory. Hypnosis,
seduction, fascination … were these matters of camp? (I had yet to read
Jean-Pierre Coursodon’s careful sorting-through of the campness of Johnny Guitar [1954], which is “not
sublime ‘at the risk’ of becoming ridiculous, it is sublime because, and only
inasmuch as, it is ridiculous. The distinction between the two opposite notions
is really not in the film at all but rather in the eye of the beholder”.)
When it came to writing a short capsule on The Pirate almost 30 years ago, I
somewhat hedged my bets. I argued that it is, by now, a movie that probably
belongs more to critics, scholars and students than it does to any mass,
mainstream audience (David Hare has noted that, as a troubled production, it’s
“never made its money back to this day” – wow, Hollywood sure keeps lasting
account books!). I’d like to think that some perfectly ordinary filmgoers went
for it, too, in its time and ever after – but who really knows such things? It
is, for sure, a perverse and extreme manifestation of Hollywood’s most
stylised, expressionist impulses – and apparently its most extreme point was
the ultra-sexed-up “Voodoo” number that hit the cutting room floor, alas (that
would have made three stage-performance songs for Judy, instead of the two we
have – and would have made more sense of the crowning exclamation from Aunt
Inez [Gladys Cooper]: “Not again, Manuela!”)
So, encyclopedically, I juggled The Pirate between four “diverse reasons” – and subcultures – that
had claimed it across time. First, the Minnellian auteurists, from Robin Wood
and Tom Ryan to Thomas Elsaesser and Jacques Rancière, who embrace it as a
vivacious tale of desire, dream and repression within a familiar but beloved
directorial template – with song-and-dance clocking in as the superb mise en scène of liberation. Second, the
theorists of heterogeneous Hollywood entertainment, with its life-and-death
struggle for what Serge Daney (another Minnelli fan) called the “place of the
spectator”, as outlined above. Third, the more sociologically-minded
musical-as-genre crowd, sketching a proto-Cultural Studies approach, for whom
the story of The Pirate is mainly a
scaffolding (or cartilage) on which to hang a typical Hollywood homily about
the sterling role of spectacle and entertainment in our society and in our
daily lives – a typically Pirandellian paradox (stage within film) and a
distinctly populist homily, as immortalised in the two rousing versions of “Be
a Clown” (the first featuring the Nicholas Brothers, only two of the many black
players who wander around the margins of this tale of the weirdly whitewashed
Macoco). Fourth: all those for whom the film is, first and foremost a camp
classic, not only for the histrionics of its stars or the sauciness of Porter’s
lyrics, but also because the whole affair sends up gender roles and shopworn
movie clichés (on this plane, it’s a direct continuation of the Eddie Cantor-Busby
Berkeley parodic romps of the ‘30s) with a rare gusto.
Now I see that these four Pirates are, indeed, one Pirate.
There’s no necessary contradiction between the different ways of taking or
reading it: straight, queer or camp; dream, identity or showbiz – it’s all part
of the same warp and weft. Illusion, artifice, hypnosis, desire, belief: this self-deconstructed
masterpiece wears every glove, and turns them all inside-out as well. It’s an
eternal, dazzling display.
MORE Minnelli: Brigadoon, Madame Bovary, Some Came Running, Meet Me in St Louis book review Minnelli: Directed by Vincente Minnelli © Adrian Martin August 1994 / January 2021 |
