The Girl Can’t Help It

(Frank Tashlin, USA, 1956)

Girl Gadget (Notes from a 2009 lecture which originated in this 1980s course)

The Girl Can’t Help It is one of the great paradoxical objects of cinema.

From one angle, it’s a messy conglomeration of mid 1950s gags, songs and performers – a pure ‘attraction’ on the model of what Peter Wollen once identified as cartilage, simply one thing joined to another within an overall topic: the birth of rock’n’roll youth culture.

From another angle, though, it’s an impressively well-crafted Hollywood film – on the basis of the kind of inventive craft that only someone as gifted and temperamentally modern as Frank Tashlin could pull out of this wild array of showy elements.

However, we need to step beyond strict auteurism – which is where most writing on Tashlin, even the best of it, sits – to begin to get the full measure of The Girl Can’t Help It. For Tashlin was his own producer (within 20th Century-Fox) on this project (as well as some others), and the producer function involves/implies a different set of priorities and aims to the side of ‘individual creative expression’ per se (a free expression that, on many levels and in many ways, Tashlin believed in and proselytised for – see his later, quite melancholic, graphic novels, for instance). In particular, a producer is motivated by what will – or might – sell.

It's an early teen movie, but without many upfront teenage characters – nothing like The Wild One (1953), say. Rather, it’s about a culture-industry’s attempt to capture the youth market – when the very category of youth, let alone youth-as-consumers in an identifiable marketplace, is still in the process of formation. And it’s adults of a specific sort – businessmen, ‘suits’ – who are on the lookout for this market. They need the ‘talent’ – the performing product – to energise the burgeoning cultural empire of youth. And they also need the managers, the entrepreneurs, the ‘middle men’ who “know what kids like”. Even if, from the first moment, it’s also a matter of telling the kids what they like, and must henceforth buy.

As always in Tashlin, the film is a knowing mise en abyme, being itself exactly the thing that it depicts and frenetically sends up: a rather clueless industry in search of an amorphous audience. (J. Hoberman pegs it, a little uncharitably, as a “supremely unfunny comedy” that “congeals the hysteria of Dwight Eisenhower’s re-election” in Frank Tashlin [BFI/Locarno, 1994], p. 168.) To which we add a salient fact: the film itself in fact ‘clicked’ with this new market, alleluia! Sensibility-wise, in this regard, it’s a short step from Tashlin to John Waters some 15 years later – Waters, who celebrated the ‘Southern Rockabilly’ music in The Girl Can’t Help It as, deliciously, “almost freakish”. A tart, grinning, parodic populism – but a functioning populism, nonetheless, one that never makes the target audience feel insulted. Gainfully exploited (in the market sense), yes, but not offended.

It's often too easy to stick the label of transitional (in a cultural-history sense) onto any old film floating by – given that it’s, by definition, before something to come and after something that’s already been in its general field. But The Girl Can’t Help It is a movie that invites and richly deserves the tag of transitional film. It grabs something that has coalesced, just on the cusp of it snowballing and thus transforming itself into something else. Tashlin was remarkably good at that, doubtless partly because of his training days in cartoons, a medium always tied to the topical and ephemeral.

This is effectively one of the earliest mainstream films about rock’n’roll music – via the also relatively new, but more familiar (to the older set) scenes of nightclub and cocktail culture. And in that transition or pass-over, we see an intriguing passage from rituals of presumed ‘sophistication’ (hooked to stars including Frank Sinatra) to those of supposedly ‘uninhibited’ vulgarity and physical release (Little Richard, etc.).

The film plots (insofar as it has a coherently minimal plot!) a set of stations, generic reference-points spanning from the 1930s to the ‘50s: there’s an intrigue involving gangsters and prohibition; and an ‘ordinary girl becomes star’ premise associated with the work of Garson Kanin (whose story “Do Re Mi” was Tashlin’s starting-point, uncredited at the author’s insistence) – that same patchwork-combo will recur right through to roughly 1967 in Jerry Lewis’ films (Girl’s co-writer Herbert Baker had already worked on Tashlin’s Martin-Lewis classic Artists and Models [1955] and would then join Jerry’s payroll for various film and TV projects).

At the same time, another, less ‘reputable’ B movie tradition is dusted off and thoroughly revitalised for the era of vinyl records, radio, and – the elephant in the cinema room – television: the cavalcade or revue. With stunning confidence, the film dishes up song after song, performance after performance, to the point of dizzy excess. Managing to give that parade some kind of shape is the index of Tashlin’s juggle-all-the-balls craft.

It can seem like a non-stop musical – but be attentive, too, to the role of noise and interruption, as devices that help break things up and structure them into a vaguely ‘classical’ form. And watch for all the cartoon-style gags (Tashlin’s specialty) involving ice, milk, glasses …

Rock’n’roll itself is an extremely heterogeneous beast, in the mish-mashed way it’s arrayed for us by the film: it instantly gathers into itself (before later splittings, specialisations and refinements of ‘niche’ markets) blues, gospel, rockabilly, rhythm’n’blues … and still definitely as black, racially, as it is white. That’s part of what gives this movie its invigorating kick.

Tashlin was always right on the edge of Pop Art; everything is exaggeration, parody (not quite ‘biting satire’ in the Billy Wilder mode), ‘sampling’ … and frequently braking just before the point of becoming grotesque – star Jayne Mansfield, this unlikely ‘icon’ in the shade of Marilyn Monroe, is the emblem of that risky balancing-act; she’s all the contradictions of the 1950s condensed into one bizarre frame. To steal a phrase uttered in a late 2000s TV episode of Australia’s Next Top Model, Jane is “the girl next door with a body built for sin”, a mind-boggling mélange of innocence, domesticity (kitchen skills) and voluptuousness. Subject of sentimentality/object of the gaze, and all that. A girl gadget, as the film says.

As an auteur faced with this material, and his ‘task’ as a professional in the system, Tashlin is neither entirely ‘loving’ (celebratory) nor overly, overtly critical (he’s not Douglas Sirk). But he was, clearly, committed to delivering what Nicholas Ray once called “a whole piece of entertainment”, and that’s where the craft factor asserts itself.

All teen-musical films (of whatever format or genre) are basically in the business of sorting out, veritably baptising, categories of good and bad music, authentic and fake (ersatz) music, cheap and noble music, positive (in its effect) and negative music … By the time of something like Greg Mottola’s Adventureland (2009) – with its omnipresent, non-stop background mixtape blasting in the fairground setting – this has long been the case (see the audiovisual essay by Cristina Álvarez López & I on this case study). The Girl Can’t Help It, just at the start of this curve, has a more generous, or simply indifferent, embrace: all comers (including Edmund O’Brien doing his pastiche “Rock Around the Rock Pile”, reportedly an influence on Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock” a year later – and Baker worked on the Elvis films, too) are welcomed, everybody does their thing. It’s an open market, a veritable bazaar.

Teen-musicals are also about – they can’t help but be about – the social setting or ‘place’ of music: where and how it’s performed and consumed. How it gets to be broadcast or transmitted, and in what modes of life that signal is received and processed. And – very importantly – what music does to the mind and (particularly) the body when it goes into its listeners. Naturally, even putting it as simply as that, music is immediately a matter of media, and even what we today refer to as ‘media archaeology’. Not for nothing does Hoberman underline its “total automatic jukebox drive-in look” (Frank Tashlin, ibid).

To get ahead of my argument here – and this is something I’ve developed in my voluminous writing on the teen movie genre! – there is, previewed in The Girl Can’t Help It, a tie-up between technology, literal electricity, and all forms of human energy – sexual, individual, collective, angry, obsessive … Decades later, Joe Dante will take up this turbulent flow-chart in his retro-visions of pop-media-mad Americana. Another key film in the retroactive plotting of this diagram is Robert Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), about the inaugural live-televised performance of The Beatles on USA TV, and every kind of storm unleashed by it …

This is where the spontaneous media archaeology gets into the picture. Take good note of the glimpses of recording technology, microphones, cameras, stage spaces – even when it’s an artificial mock-up of the real thing, it’s still revealing of the changin’ times (as in Jerry Lewis’ 1960s films like The Patsy [1964]). We travel along an itinerary: bar, night club, rehearsal room, recording studio, jukebox, records, TV, and finally a jubilee mass spectacle. The ‘death of live music’ lament is an inevitable undercurrent here (which still flows today).

Tashlin being Tashlin, there’s an associative link back to an especially visionary Tex Avery cartoon, Little ‘Tinker (1948) – fairly typical of the ‘toons’ of the 1930s and ‘40s – in which the animated bodies of Sinatra and Bing Crosby enter into fluid metamorphoses with the microphone on its stand: squeezed thin, bending in the wind, close to dying … In Tashlin’s own, earlier contribution to this tradition, Swooner Crooner (1944), it’s intriguing that Avery’s diverse animal devotees of the stars are instead chickens enticed by song to lay eggs: ‘technological productivity’ has already seized hold of ‘nature’, as will be the case for Jayne Mansfield as the mama-gadget. (And, later, that entire complex gets queered for Jerry Lewis in Tashlin’s immortal Rock-a-Bye Baby [1958].)

In Avery’s gleeful phantasmagoria, it’s also the fainting animal-fans (all girls) who orgasmically levitate and then instantly plunge under the ground and their own tombstones. This idea leads to the crowning irony or ambiguity of The Girl Can’t Help It, as far over the edge as producer-Tashlin will allow director-Tashlin to go: the spectacle of the freshly-minted market of “teenage white zombies” (Hoberman), hypnotised, trained, obediently bopping to the music. All the horror-teen metamorphoses (werewolf, vampire, lost boy, monster … ) of the pop-culture-to-come begin here, in embryo.

MORE Tashlin: The Disorderly Orderly, Who's Minding the Store?, Susan Slept Here

© Adrian Martin November 2009