GROSS/52 1961 - West Side Story - camp makes tragedy impossible
The two-hours’ traffic of our stage.
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
WEST SIDE STORY, director ROBERT WISE and JEROME ROBBINS, screenplay ERNEST LEHMAN (based on ROMEO AND JULIET by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE), music LEONARD BERNSTEIN, lyrics STEPHEN SONDHEIM, cast NATALIE WOOD, RICHARD BEYMER, RUSS TAMBLYN, RITA MORENO, GEORGE CHAKIRIS, production MIRISCH PICTURES, SEVEN ARTS PRODUCTIONS, 1961, 152 MINUTES.
When Riff (Russ Tamblyn) and the Jets exit the playground and begin to execute ballet steps as they proceed along the sidewalk; small ones to begin with and then bigger elevés and then they turn to cross the road in a series of energetic, coordinated jumps and leaps I get an odd feeling. Nausea, I think.
For decades this film lurked, neglected, in my consciousness on a list of unimpeachable, revered classics. A list of elevated artworks that engaged with popular entertainment but in a clever, self aware way and that were often supposed to be socially conscious - to represent ordinary people, hard-scrabble urban life, immigrants, hoodlums, workers and so on. You know the list I mean.
I mean how could it not be on the list? Music by Leonard Bernstein, a brilliant populiser and educator. Lyrics by Steven Sondheim, the sassy Shakespeare of Broadway. Choreography by Jerome Robbins, theatrical dance royalty. These were not silver spoon types, although two were wealthy from birth. They were second- or third-generation immigrant strivers. They remembered or had been told about the privations of the Lower East Side in the hard years. They thought they knew these streets and yards well enough to represent them vividly, honestly. They were well-meaning post-war liberals, men of their era.
So, that West Side Story fails so completely is a bit of a puzzle. David Thomson (in Have you Seen?) says it’s something to do with the plainness of the settings - if directors Wise and Robbins had amped it up with spectacular, surreal or expressionist sets it would have carried forward the energy of the stage version (he thinks the project should have been given to outrageous stylist Vincente Minnelli). I don’t think that can account for it.
I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. What’s wrong with this film?
Camp
The problem is that West Side Story is camp. Camp in the sense codified by Susan Sontag (in 58 numbered clauses) in her essay Notes on Camp. She never wrote about this movie but she did think cinema critics were implicated: “…movie criticism (like lists of ‘The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen’) is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today…”
And she could be talking about West Side Story, a drama based on ‘The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’, after all, when she says:
Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content’, ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’, of irony over tragedy.
More directly, she says “Camp and tragedy are antitheses.” And the problem here, if we go with Sontag, is that this movie adaptation of West Side Story couldn’t possibly have worked. It’s a profoundly camp work of art. Not unserious, not trivial but also, and of necessity, not tragic.
In the movie, we circulate with the Jets and the Sharks in and between oddly over-sized spaces - harsh, hard-surfaced places that look like scaled-up prison yards. We’re in a non-specific, run-down New York neighbourhood. The stage version is set on the Upper West Side, an ethnically-mixed neighbourhood parts of which were demolished for the Lincoln Center, one of those gorgeous, philanthropically-funded arts campuses dropped into rundown and war-damaged neighbourhoods all over the developed world after the war. The brand new Lincoln Center became Bernstein’s domain when his orchestra the New York Phil moved in in the year after the film was released. This is appropriate: West Side Story is a Lincoln Center movie, not a Times Square movie.
Colour
The neighbourhood we see in the movie - through which its delinquent youth pirouette, jeté, sauté - is coloured in gorgeous Technicolor pastels. Big Rothko panels of rusty red and Prussian blue. Costumes are in mustard, washed-out reds and purples, cornflower blue. Lilac and moss green. Art direction is impeccable (and Oscar-winning, like practically everything else about this movie) - jeans stop at exactly the ankle bone, collars are angled with a protractor. Sharkskin, washed cotton, distressed canvas. The ‘rumble’ takes place under a red steel mass that could be by Caro. Everything’s lovely. Once you see it you can’t not. West Side Story is a polished aesthetic act from beginning to end.
Sontag said the effect of camp is to put everything in quotation marks, to permanently raise an eyebrow. In her definition - which was hugely influential and is still a thrilling read - she is clear that camp’s not a bad thing and that it doesn’t exclude artistic validity or importance but it puts form ahead of content, style ahead of truth (she quotes Oscar Wilde: “…in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”). When it’s present it’s almost impossible to be serious. Politics, the lives of a people or a city; poverty, work, economy… all are parenthesised and drained of importance.
For a kind of grim confirmation that West Side Story belongs in the camp register and not in the realist register consider the skin tones. There’s been a lot of discussion over the decades about race in this movie (and more yet since the remake). It’s an unsatisfying mess of stereotypes, nominally liberal “why can’t we get along?” sentiment and patronising social melodrama. This is well known.
But once you’re alert to the camp nature of the film you’ll notice that this applies to everything (there’s no such thing as a partially camp work of art). Casting seems to have been done using the same decorator’s colour chart as costume design. Rita Moreno, Anita, tells us that skin colour was adjusted in make-up - even for cast members who had the ‘correct’ ethnicity - to put them in the right position on the colour wheel.
Tragedy
More damaging, the awkwardness introduced by the movie’s camp aesthetic finally undermines the tragic element. Events, as the movie reaches its climax, are obviously literally tragic. There’s no arguing with that. But we’re high and dry. The awful events that bring the story to its shuddering end cannot operate on us in the way we expect tragedy to. I’m uncomfortable reaching for this - I’m no drama critic - but the effect seems to be to rob the tale of its inevitability, its unstoppable, mechanical motion towards death and finality. Each of the three deaths that (approximately) recreate Shakespeare’s ending seems contingent: one of the possible outcomes but not in any sense inevitable, not required by fate. It’s uncanny: as if at any point everyone in the story could have just stopped and said “that’s enough death and sadness, let’s go down to Doc’s for a coke,” something you just know couldn’t have happened in the play.
Emma Smith, a Shakespeare academic, points out (in This is Shakespeare) that the events of Romeo and Juliet are so pre-determined, so unstoppable, that they’re all laid out in the play’s prologue, before the action even begins (the most drastic spoiler in all of storytelling?). She also reminds us that, in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie adaptation of the play, the prologue is preserved - read by a newsreader covering the ‘gang war’ in Verona Beach. Does this help to heighten the tragedy’s pre-programmed inevitability?
Of course West Side Story isn’t the only camp movie, the only movie that favours irony or self-parody or wit over uncontrolled, unparenthesised, spiralling reality. In fact it would be easy enough to argue that a majority of releases falls into the category. Can we talk about Barbie? La La Land? Bridesmaids? Ghost Busters? The Fall Guy? Dead Pool? Civil War? Everything by Tarantino? Everything by Wes Anderson? Fellini? Renoir? Oh, God, basically everything. It’s not all nauseating. Some of it is the greatest stuff ever but what I’ve learnt with this one is that if you’re a filmmaker it can fatally damage your project and in ways you might not even notice because you’re giving it so much love, so much attention, so much careful fine-tuning and perfecting. Tragedy evaporates.
Moreno also says, in an NPR interview:
“I remember some shots of George Chakiris [who plays Bernardo] where he looked like somebody had taken him by the ankles and dipped him in a bucket of mud. It was so thick, and it was so dark that we would — our faces would streak and show our real color underneath. And I remember saying to a makeup man once, ‘I don’t know why I have to be this color. … This is not my color.’ And he actually said to me as he was making me up, ‘What are you, racist?’ Well, talk about nonplussed. I didn’t even know what to say to him.”The prologue to Romeo and Juliet:
Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents’ rage –
Which but their children’s end, naught could remove –
Is now the two-hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.I looked for another angle when I started this. I was trying to find a dialectic, between the delicacy and other-worldliness of the dance element and the harshness of the streets. I couldn’t find it. At least it’s not a productive one, there’s no sythesis. It’s just awkward.
Shakespeare’s play typically runs to 150 minutes, the same as the movie (funnily enough, both run-times include an intermission) but the play seems to rush to its end, impatient to get there - another characteristic of tragedy. There’s no point hanging around when the ending is already known. The movie seems to grind it out, though, although this may be an effect of the necessity to drop everything and go to a musical number periodically.
When I was growing up everyone seemed to have the soundtrack album, people who’d never have touched South Pacific or The King and I. West Side Story had a different status.
If you’re in the UK, West Side Story is currently on the BBC iPlayer. It’s also on Amazon Prime. There’s a good-value Blu-Ray.
Please enjoy these reviews (and the others that I don’t publish here, like this Oedipal reading of You, Me and Dupree) on Letterboxd.