Ginger Submits -
The Tactile Magic of Fred Astaire
When
Fred Astaire arrived in Hollywood in 1934, he was entering a climate unfriendly
to his significant talents. This was the era of the Busby Berkeley musical-as-extravaganza,
featuring dance numbers that were composed of little or no dancing whatsoever[i],
substituting quality of choreography with the spectacular arrangement of large
quantities of beautiful women. The Berkeley numbers also often bore no direct
or chronological relationship to the narrative in which they were inserted,
instead embellishing the themes surrounding the main story. Through "working
experimentally and largely without effective precedents to build on"[ii],
Astaire reinvented cinematic choreography to suit his needs. He not only
envisioned dance as springing naturally out of the narrative, but his "more
intimate choreography required - and as the [work] hit its stride, quickly
found - correlative"[iii] intimacy
in cinematography and editing designed to make the dance feel as seamless as
possible. It is that intimacy which is most striking in the "Night and Day"
sequence from 1934s The Gay Divorcee, directed by Mark Sandrich and
starring Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their first leading roles as a team.
"Night and Day" is the rare early musical number that could be called fully
integrated: it not only functions as a crucial bridge within the narrative,
but it also serves, in the turn-of-the-Hayes Code era, the same function as a
scene of direct sexuality would in cinema today. The unusual intimacy of the
visual design allows the spectator to not only displace sexual energy through
the dance, but to locate that displacement on the physical proximity of the
dancers in space, so that, as a close analysis of the number will show, the
actual moments in which they touch become the most provocative, and the most
narratively significant.
"Night and Day"'s subtle
sublimation of seduction and consummation stands in sharp contrast to the often
wriggle-in-your-seat bawdy spectacles of musicals before (Goldiggers of 1933) and after (Broadway Melody from Singing
in the Rain). But it also serves as a kind of sweet and innocent "other
space" in a musical replete with adult themes. Astaire plays Guy Holden, a
professional dancer who becomes infatuated with Rogers Mimi after accidentally
ripping her dress in a train station. Guy pursues Mimi, who with good reason
plays hard-to-get: she has yet to successfully divorce her bore of a husband.
Coincidentally, Guys effeminate cohort Eggbert (Edward Everett Horton)
happens to be Mimis divorce attorney. At the time, adultery was the only
acceptable grounds for divorce in England[iv],
so Eggbert - without knowing that his client is the very same girl that his
buddy has been blathering about - suggests that he and Mimi go to a beachside
resort for the weekend so that he can set her up with a professional
co-respondent. Guy tags along with Eggbert, and before she has a chance to
meet her professional lover, Mimi and Guy run into each other at the resort.
Its clearly not the best time for Mimi to be dating, and she tries to avoid an
encounter with Guy by running from the dining hall into a cabana overlooking
the shore. Guy, of course, follows her, and the stage is set for "Night and
Day".
The
entirety of the song and dance to come is a negotiation. Not only does Guy need
to wear down the resolve that Mimi has put up to guard her secrets, but in this
scene they will set up what are to be the ground rules for their union. These
are not two bobby-soxers navigating first love: Mimi is a married woman and Guy
is middle-aged, and it is understood by one and all that they are leading up to
a sexual relationship. Throughout the course of "Night and Day", the two will
hammer out the power dynamics that will govern that relationship, within the
bedroom and without. Up until now, Mimi has had the lionshare of control in all
of their encounters, and in this dance Guy will have to seduce Mimi both to,
well, enjoy the fruits of seduction, but also to gain some of the power back.
Guy tries to embrace Mimi, but she
moves away, nervously saying, I'd better leave now. Worried, panicky Guy
begs: Oh please, don't leave. Mimi asks him not to ask her to stay, and when he
agrees, she, head down and half-pouting, turns to leave, until he stops her by
saying, But don't go, at which point she turns back to him with a smile. I
have so much to say to you, he says, and the music starts. After a few bars of
Guy singing to Mimi in a medium shot, we then cut to a close up of her face,
seen from over Guy's shoulder. She is half-smiling, but worriedly, as if she
knows that she best not let herself enjoy this serenade. Guy sings, So a
voice within keeps repeating you, you, you and Mimi looks down and turns away. We cut to a
medium shot of Mimi, her back to Guy as he sings night and day, you are the
one, with a look
on her face that seems to read, Can I really take this clown seriously? She
apparently needs some time alone to figure it out, and she turns her back to
the camera and passes Guy, walking upstage towards the water. Guy follows her,
and she sits down and allows him to continue to sing for a while, but is
clearly growing anxious. She cant look directly at Guy, her eyes keep darting
back and forth between him and the water, and her chest begins to heave, as
though this is all just too much. She finally gets up and we cut to a long shot
of her running towards the camera, but Guy, running alongside, stops her in her
tracks. Guy sings, his foot blocking her path, Theres an oh-such a hungry
yearning, burning inside of me and she continues to run. He crosses in front of her and
the camera starts to pull into a medium shot. As he sings, its torment
wont be through until you let me spend my life making love to you, Mimi visibly looks him up and
down, ogling him, sizing him up as a sexual partner, and then runs past him,
apparently deciding he is not up to snuff. We cut to a long shot, where he
catches up, and he chases her in several passes across the room through several
cuts, and just when it seems like it'll never end, Guy does a quick spin and
grabs her hand. We cut to a full-body-shot, Mimi taken aback by Guy's touch.
They lock eyes and, to the accompaniment of a few heavy timpani beats, Guy
shows off some steps, Mimi's eyes darting from his face to his feet and back
again. He's in the arc of a spin, his back to her, and she turns to go, him
only realizing once he has completely spun out.
Guy again grabs Mimis hand, and
this time she spins into his arms, as if helpless, as if not in control of her
own faculties. The camera tracks them as they cross the room, and as he dips
her and Mimi throws her head back in ecstasy, Guy catches a prolonged look at her
body, splayed and
limp on his arm, then spins her to give himself time to stop ogling before she
notices. They come together and their eyes lock. The music suddenly becomes
softer and Mimi appears as if in a dream, she and Guy dance as if floating,
their faces barely an inch apart. With the soundtrack just a whisper in the
background, the sexual tension fills up the rest of the space. They spin
several times, and then, as if to show off how much fun in bed he is, Guy
starts to do a bit of a jig, one arm still cradling Mimis back. This snaps her
out of her trance - she holds her arms in front of her in a protective gesture,
and looks down with an embarrassed smile. Teasingly, flirtatiously, Mimi spins
away from him. Then, as if to make up for his earlier display of bravado, he
allows her to spin him towards her, in a gesture that culminates with Mimi allowing herself to be spun
back into Guy's arms. In the next major section of the sequence, with another
round of timpani introducing the soundtrack's return to its original volume,
Mimi separates from Guy and starts to dance on her own. Guy watches her
longingly, but she teases him, her head cocked down to the side, her arms and
hands in from of her face like a peek-a-boo shield. When he realizes he can not
physically join her, he mimics her, mirroring her actions as she spins around.
His eyes stay fixed on her, her eyes stay fixed on the floor.
These elements, within what appears
to be a direct seduction number, show that Astaire and Rogers engage in the
kind of battle that "choreograph[s] their sexual relation in terms of
comparability and partnership without losing its romance and erotic charge".[v]
It is not so much, as has been argued[vi],
that dance serves as Fred Astaire's only method for seducing Ginger Rogers, but
that the duet serves as a specialized venue for Fred and Ginger, in The Gay
Divorcee and in film after film to follow, to synthesize both language and
sexual activity into performance. If the rest of this film, and other films,
deals with the misunderstandings brought on by the use of language, dance
provides the space for Fred and Ginger to reach understandings of many kinds. Sandrich demarcates
this intimate space by inserting just two cutaway shots into the diegesis of
the dance: a view from outside, through Venetian blinds, of the pair separating
as they cross the floor, and shot from inside the room with the camera
positioned under a table. Though Sue Rickard correctly observes that these
shots signal that the action has moved from a public to a private space,
giving the audience a sense that we are privy to a situation that is becoming
ever more intimate, [vii] it is
interesting that the action in the first shot shows the pair moving away from
intimacy, but in the second shot, from under the table, we see the most
intimate, if most highly coded, gesture of all. Mimi, facing Guy from several
feet apart, mimics his jig from earlier in the scene. Beaming with pride, and
excited by the realization that she can play along, so to speak, Guy mimics her
mimicry. They are moving in code, as if aware that we are watching from under
the table. Despite Astaire's resistance to cutaways, the two used in this
number provide an invaluable layer for interpretation.
When we cut, the
music drops and Guy again locks Mimi in his eyes. They trepidatiously come
together. In his arms, Mimi seems to fall apart, losing the moxie, the ability
to tease, that she held over him in just the very last cut, and yet each time
he lets her go, she's off and running. As we've seen, Mimi doesn't just melt
at the sight of Guy in motion; it is his touch under which she cannot fight
back, to which her only response is to submit to the ecstasy of dance. By the
end of the number, Mimi has stopped fighting the obvious fact that she and Guy
are an unbeatable match, and when he ever-so-gently glides her down onto a
settee, her skirt flowing between his legs, her eyes locked to his, she sinks
back and he brushes off his hands, as if to say, Job well done. It is only
then - when they've let go of each other, when they return to language as a
means of communication - that they fall into a new misunderstanding, with Mimi
mistakenly interpreting Guy as her co-respondent. You? You?!, she asks
incredulously, and the scene ends with each partner overwhelmed by the
discrepancy between what seemed to be true in dance and what is apparently true
in language. The Night and Day
sequence thus unites and divides our heroes, giving them a space to communicate
on the most intimate level, and then, like the fallout of so many bumbling sexual encounters, pulling
the rug out from under the apparent fruits of that communication.