My head's in the game, but my heart's in the song
It's time to talk about High School Musical.
I know, I know - when isn't it time to talk about High School Musical? But it's time for me to talk about High School Musical, because it's been one of the defining themes of my year, and when else am I going to have even the slightest excuse for posting 2200 words arguing that HSM is basically an enormous live-action role-playing game/collaborative theatre piece, and that in experiencing it you are asked not just to watch a movie and give Disney your money, but to become an imaginary member of an imaginary high school and thereby help to create, very temporarily, the world that the movies envisage?
The most and least important things about High School Musical
So. High School Musical. The most important thing about High School Musical is that it's about high school students, but it's not for high school students. Its enthusiasts are overwhelmingly younger children, some of their parents, and childless women in their twenties.
The very least important thing about HSM is the storyline. All of the movies - and the theatre shows, and the Ice Tour - have the same basic plot: romantic leads Troy and Gabriella compete against self-centred manipulative Sharpay for the roles in a musical production created by put-upon Hat Guy (Sharpay's brother) and Piano Girl; eventually, Troy and Gabriella's blander, slower versions of the songs win out against Sharpay's peppier arrangements, and Sharpay learns the error of her ways, at least until the next movie. The tension is non-existent, and the storyline advances not at all from one film to the next. Instead it's the budget that changes, as the exuberant choreography outstrips by an increasing margin the technical capacity of the leads: "hey," each subesquent movie says, "we've got money, where did that come from? Quick, put the camera on a crane! Now spin it around! We still haven't spent it all - send in a chorus line of fifty dancers in sparkly pink hats, they can do high kicks!". The message of the production choices made is the same as the message of the movies themselves: "having fun is good - let's do that! AS MUCH AS WE CAN!"
Towards a critical framework for High School Musical
High School Musical, then, is aimed at non-adolescents, and it portrays an idealised adolescence that has never existed. This is of course not an unusual thing for a movie to do. Where HSM differs is that it doesn't just portray this ideal: it invites its enthusiasts to enact it, movie cycle as pop-culture LARP. "Hey," it says, "wear red and black. Wave pom-poms. Scream out GO WILDCATS. Not you, real teenagers, in your strange awful world where everything matters so much, where your stress-filled suddenly-ugly friend-fraught days are filled with all those superficial or genuine problems you can't escape yet; go and get on with your homework, or writing bad songs, or whatever it is you do. We can't help. But for the rest of us, wouldn't it be fun to pretend?" When ten-year-olds queue around the block for a day to scream at the actors at the premiere of HSM3, when their parents have a go with the pom-poms at the ice show, this is not about watching a ridiculous high-school-as-it-never-was-nor-will-be; it's about creating it.
This means that High School Musical cannot be approached critically by a mere observer; reviewing it after watching it would be like reviewing a video game because you happened to be in the room while somebody else was playing. The HSM experience is an active process, not a passive one. To talk about High Schol Musical, therefore, is to talk about my experience of the cycle.
High School Musical
Early this year I watched the first High School Musical on a weekend afternoon, sitting on a sofa with roz_mcclure, both of us unprepared for just how great it would be - how enthusiastic, how wholehearted, how relatively free of pop culture's usual background sexism, racism, fat hatred and other lazy biases; how a couple of the songs would be surprisingly catchy, how the choreography would mean everything so hard.
High School Musical 2
So as soon as possible, maybe a week later, we watched High School Musical 2. This time we were ready with cake and fizzy wine and anticipation. The budget was obviously bigger than before; it was, in some ways, not quite as great, with a couple of moments of idle sexism, and the male lead proving either pretty dumb or pretty willing to sell out his friends for his own advancement (it's never quite clear which; I go for "choosing to be dumb so as not to confront what he's doing", but it's ambiguous, and that's unusual and not entirely welcome for the HSM cycle). But there's also more incredibly exuberantly choreographed numbers, starting off with "Summertime" and reaching the high point of the whole series with "I Don't Dance", a gleeful song with a gorgeously choreographed accompaniment that is (1) a coherent baseball game, (2) an intrinsically cheering well-executed dance, and (3) a phenomenal dance fight about whether baseball or dancing is better that's playing loudly inside your head right now, if you're me, and several times a week into the bargain.
High School Musical: Sing It
Part 3 comes with High School Musical: Sing It!, a Singstar-a-like with the songs from HSM1 and HSM2. The game deviates from the classic Singstar mould by the inclusion of a "story mode" following the storyline of the first movie. There's also a limitation on the available songs: you have to unlock many of them by getting a certain number of points on the earlier songs, playing in story mode. This deviation is interesting, because it's a rare mis-step for the HSM franchise; it was widely deplored, and they've backed off from it in the Singstar release for HSM3 [apparently, I haven't played it]. It's an understandable mistake, because as I've argued above, HSM is about enacting the world of the movies; but the mis-judgement fails to realise that nobody cares about the story, we just want everything to be bright and cheerful and full of song and dance and unself-conscious delight.
High School Musical on stage
Part 4 comes with the High School Musical stage show, a theatrical adaptation of the original HSM1. We bought the cheapest possible tickets and sat in the very back row, with a pair of pom-poms which we split between us. "No light-sabres allowed in the auditorium", a sign said, and this was wonderful: first that they thought it necessary, and second that it was so massively unenforceable and unenforced. HSM-themed light sabres flashed, pom-poms whirled, the glee of the audience buoyed the whole production up through the dubious decision to add a narratorial student-radio character. Two dozen basketballs dropped from the ceiling. "REVISIONISTS!", we shouted critically at the end from the back of the auditorium as Unnecessary Narratorial Student-Radio Character took his bow; unheard above the massed cheering, of course, but still, a shockingly thoughtless thing to do that again was only possible because HSM had shifted us into an imaginary teenager world where if you say what you think, and mean things a lot, and have fun, then everything is okay. We shook the pom-poms some more as the actors roused us to our feet for "one last High School Musical party".
High School Musical 3
Part 5 is HSM3. We went to a 9pm showing in Wandsworth on opening night, with no idea whether to expect massive crowds (opening night!) or the whole auditorium to ourselves (movie whose primary audience is under 12 years old, at 9pm in Wandsworth!). To be on the safe side we booked tickets in advance and arrived half an hour early, dressed in East High black-and-red. To fill the spare time we bought a bottle of fizzy wine and some cheap glasses from the Sainsbury across the road.
Twenty minutes later it was time to go in, and we'd only managed half a glass each, too distracted by anticipation to drink quickly. An American and an Australian, we had no idea whether the bottle would be confiscated at the cinema doors.
"I know," roz_mcclure said. "Your bag's pretty big. I'm good at carrying open bottles in bags and not spilling them."
"Um. I suppose?" I said. "I'm a bit nervous about this," I added as she leant the bottle in among my phone, purse, books, notebook and miscellaneous papers; and then inspiration struck. I took the wine out and rummaged in my bag. "I've got a balloon in here somewhere. We could put it over the top of the bottle to stop it spilling."
I found the balloon - yes, really a balloon, this is not a bowdlerised version; it was pink, and a friend had given it to me a few weeks earlier. We stretched it over the top of the bottle, Roz nestled the bottle in the bag with only the very top poking over, and we went into the cinema.
I mentioned earlier that this bottle contained fizzy wine, and some of you will, as we did not, already have spotted the problem.
"Um," Roz said. "The balloon's... expanding."
"Er," I said, as the bubbles continued to fill it.
We'd brought the pom-poms; Roz rested them over the bright pink balloon that was sticking out of the top of the bag, slowly increasing in size. The pom-poms were silver and shiny red, it might be worth noting: the manner in which they were supposed to draw less attention to the balloon is unclear.
It all turned out fine, of course, like everything always does in High School Musical land: the balloon didn't burst, the wine got in unconfiscated and apparently unnoticed, the auditorium was almost empty (eleven people including us, all adults). And the movie was astonishing: negotiating that awkward first-song-in-a-musical moment by opening with a song-and-dance basketball game to decide the championship, the plot culminating in the characters making a High School musical about their own year, even about the process of making the musical; sometimes playing themselves, sometimes each other.
HSM3 all but openly discusses the dependence of the cycle on an enactment of fantasy lives by its viewers/participants. The best song-and-dance of the movie, The Boys Are Back, takes Troy and Big Hair Guy into the junkyard that was home to their childhood adventures. Once there, they sing about the joy of imagining possible lives for a couple of hours at a time: "to solve a mystery, fight the battle, save the girl! No one can stop us now, we're the ones who make the rules". They disappear behind a window and take on different guises in silhouette; at one point they roll under a derelict car and come out the other side as five-year-old versions of themselves. For the one moment in the whole series that actually portrays peers of HSM's primary audience, they are explicitly play-acting fantasy lives, and being celebrated for it.
And if this wasn't a clear enough indication that HSM's appeal is one of imagination and enactment, there's the very last song. High School Musical, the cast sings right at the end: who says we have to let it go? It's the best part we've ever known. The song that summarises the whole series, then, makes all-but-explicit the dependence of the cycle on the choice its audience/participants make to play at being in this imaginary high-school world. It's not the best high school the singers have ever known, it's high school musical, the parts they've played, the ridiculous unreal world that they've constructed and invited participation in.
High School Musical: The Ice Tour
Part 6 was High School Musical: The Ice Tour, which is based on HSM1 and HSM2. Where HSM: Sing It! was an interesting mis-step, HSM: The Ice Tour had it exactly right: it taught the audience a (pretty awful, but easy) dance, it told us firmly to clap along, and it sacrificed all the different plotlines in the service of its desperate attempt to squeeze 3 hours of movie into 100 minutes of ice show, without missing any of the good bits. "Well, you all know what happened next," said Piano Girl (like all of them, lip-synching her dialogue as well as her songs), shuffling us as swiftly as possible between songs; and yes, we did all know what happened next. And at quarter to five they ice-danced the baseball song, swinging styrofoam bats around their heads in unison.
The two messages of High School Musical
Of course the world that HSM portrays is nothing like any real high school. And perhaps no real high school students would want it to be. But, you know, fuck them, and all the miserable bored misery of real adolescence: this is the way to redeem it, through songs and sparkly hats and four-year-olds who jump up and down waving paper Wildcats banners, through observation of and performative participation in a world in which there are only two messages.
The first message, declared with almost shocking consistency throughout all three movies is: don't try to control other people's lives. Everyone who does this is wrong: parents, teachers, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, the woman sitting in the row in front of us during the first half of HSM-the-stage-show who kept turning around sour-faced whenever we cheered. This is a generic enough message, pulled from the list of acceptable Disney messages: "everyone's special", "it's amazing what can happen if you try", "let's all work together", "there's a bit of good in everyone", "female sexuality sure is scary". Certainly, as a message, it's not on a par for originality with "unionisation is an unambiguous good and 18-year-old Christian Bale is embarrassingly attractive in rumpled nineteenth century newsboy outfits" (the unifying theme of Newsies, an earlier Disney film by the director and choreographer of HSMs 1 through 3). But it's a pretty nice message, and ingrained into the plot at every level.
The second message is: singing and dancing and exuberance are pretty great, even if you're not actually very good at them. And they are.
I know, I know - when isn't it time to talk about High School Musical? But it's time for me to talk about High School Musical, because it's been one of the defining themes of my year, and when else am I going to have even the slightest excuse for posting 2200 words arguing that HSM is basically an enormous live-action role-playing game/collaborative theatre piece, and that in experiencing it you are asked not just to watch a movie and give Disney your money, but to become an imaginary member of an imaginary high school and thereby help to create, very temporarily, the world that the movies envisage?
The most and least important things about High School Musical
So. High School Musical. The most important thing about High School Musical is that it's about high school students, but it's not for high school students. Its enthusiasts are overwhelmingly younger children, some of their parents, and childless women in their twenties.
The very least important thing about HSM is the storyline. All of the movies - and the theatre shows, and the Ice Tour - have the same basic plot: romantic leads Troy and Gabriella compete against self-centred manipulative Sharpay for the roles in a musical production created by put-upon Hat Guy (Sharpay's brother) and Piano Girl; eventually, Troy and Gabriella's blander, slower versions of the songs win out against Sharpay's peppier arrangements, and Sharpay learns the error of her ways, at least until the next movie. The tension is non-existent, and the storyline advances not at all from one film to the next. Instead it's the budget that changes, as the exuberant choreography outstrips by an increasing margin the technical capacity of the leads: "hey," each subesquent movie says, "we've got money, where did that come from? Quick, put the camera on a crane! Now spin it around! We still haven't spent it all - send in a chorus line of fifty dancers in sparkly pink hats, they can do high kicks!". The message of the production choices made is the same as the message of the movies themselves: "having fun is good - let's do that! AS MUCH AS WE CAN!"
Towards a critical framework for High School Musical
High School Musical, then, is aimed at non-adolescents, and it portrays an idealised adolescence that has never existed. This is of course not an unusual thing for a movie to do. Where HSM differs is that it doesn't just portray this ideal: it invites its enthusiasts to enact it, movie cycle as pop-culture LARP. "Hey," it says, "wear red and black. Wave pom-poms. Scream out GO WILDCATS. Not you, real teenagers, in your strange awful world where everything matters so much, where your stress-filled suddenly-ugly friend-fraught days are filled with all those superficial or genuine problems you can't escape yet; go and get on with your homework, or writing bad songs, or whatever it is you do. We can't help. But for the rest of us, wouldn't it be fun to pretend?" When ten-year-olds queue around the block for a day to scream at the actors at the premiere of HSM3, when their parents have a go with the pom-poms at the ice show, this is not about watching a ridiculous high-school-as-it-never-was-nor-will-be; it's about creating it.
This means that High School Musical cannot be approached critically by a mere observer; reviewing it after watching it would be like reviewing a video game because you happened to be in the room while somebody else was playing. The HSM experience is an active process, not a passive one. To talk about High Schol Musical, therefore, is to talk about my experience of the cycle.
High School Musical
Early this year I watched the first High School Musical on a weekend afternoon, sitting on a sofa with roz_mcclure, both of us unprepared for just how great it would be - how enthusiastic, how wholehearted, how relatively free of pop culture's usual background sexism, racism, fat hatred and other lazy biases; how a couple of the songs would be surprisingly catchy, how the choreography would mean everything so hard.
High School Musical 2
So as soon as possible, maybe a week later, we watched High School Musical 2. This time we were ready with cake and fizzy wine and anticipation. The budget was obviously bigger than before; it was, in some ways, not quite as great, with a couple of moments of idle sexism, and the male lead proving either pretty dumb or pretty willing to sell out his friends for his own advancement (it's never quite clear which; I go for "choosing to be dumb so as not to confront what he's doing", but it's ambiguous, and that's unusual and not entirely welcome for the HSM cycle). But there's also more incredibly exuberantly choreographed numbers, starting off with "Summertime" and reaching the high point of the whole series with "I Don't Dance", a gleeful song with a gorgeously choreographed accompaniment that is (1) a coherent baseball game, (2) an intrinsically cheering well-executed dance, and (3) a phenomenal dance fight about whether baseball or dancing is better that's playing loudly inside your head right now, if you're me, and several times a week into the bargain.
High School Musical: Sing It
Part 3 comes with High School Musical: Sing It!, a Singstar-a-like with the songs from HSM1 and HSM2. The game deviates from the classic Singstar mould by the inclusion of a "story mode" following the storyline of the first movie. There's also a limitation on the available songs: you have to unlock many of them by getting a certain number of points on the earlier songs, playing in story mode. This deviation is interesting, because it's a rare mis-step for the HSM franchise; it was widely deplored, and they've backed off from it in the Singstar release for HSM3 [apparently, I haven't played it]. It's an understandable mistake, because as I've argued above, HSM is about enacting the world of the movies; but the mis-judgement fails to realise that nobody cares about the story, we just want everything to be bright and cheerful and full of song and dance and unself-conscious delight.
High School Musical on stage
Part 4 comes with the High School Musical stage show, a theatrical adaptation of the original HSM1. We bought the cheapest possible tickets and sat in the very back row, with a pair of pom-poms which we split between us. "No light-sabres allowed in the auditorium", a sign said, and this was wonderful: first that they thought it necessary, and second that it was so massively unenforceable and unenforced. HSM-themed light sabres flashed, pom-poms whirled, the glee of the audience buoyed the whole production up through the dubious decision to add a narratorial student-radio character. Two dozen basketballs dropped from the ceiling. "REVISIONISTS!", we shouted critically at the end from the back of the auditorium as Unnecessary Narratorial Student-Radio Character took his bow; unheard above the massed cheering, of course, but still, a shockingly thoughtless thing to do that again was only possible because HSM had shifted us into an imaginary teenager world where if you say what you think, and mean things a lot, and have fun, then everything is okay. We shook the pom-poms some more as the actors roused us to our feet for "one last High School Musical party".
High School Musical 3
Part 5 is HSM3. We went to a 9pm showing in Wandsworth on opening night, with no idea whether to expect massive crowds (opening night!) or the whole auditorium to ourselves (movie whose primary audience is under 12 years old, at 9pm in Wandsworth!). To be on the safe side we booked tickets in advance and arrived half an hour early, dressed in East High black-and-red. To fill the spare time we bought a bottle of fizzy wine and some cheap glasses from the Sainsbury across the road.
Twenty minutes later it was time to go in, and we'd only managed half a glass each, too distracted by anticipation to drink quickly. An American and an Australian, we had no idea whether the bottle would be confiscated at the cinema doors.
"I know," roz_mcclure said. "Your bag's pretty big. I'm good at carrying open bottles in bags and not spilling them."
"Um. I suppose?" I said. "I'm a bit nervous about this," I added as she leant the bottle in among my phone, purse, books, notebook and miscellaneous papers; and then inspiration struck. I took the wine out and rummaged in my bag. "I've got a balloon in here somewhere. We could put it over the top of the bottle to stop it spilling."
I found the balloon - yes, really a balloon, this is not a bowdlerised version; it was pink, and a friend had given it to me a few weeks earlier. We stretched it over the top of the bottle, Roz nestled the bottle in the bag with only the very top poking over, and we went into the cinema.
I mentioned earlier that this bottle contained fizzy wine, and some of you will, as we did not, already have spotted the problem.
"Um," Roz said. "The balloon's... expanding."
"Er," I said, as the bubbles continued to fill it.
We'd brought the pom-poms; Roz rested them over the bright pink balloon that was sticking out of the top of the bag, slowly increasing in size. The pom-poms were silver and shiny red, it might be worth noting: the manner in which they were supposed to draw less attention to the balloon is unclear.
It all turned out fine, of course, like everything always does in High School Musical land: the balloon didn't burst, the wine got in unconfiscated and apparently unnoticed, the auditorium was almost empty (eleven people including us, all adults). And the movie was astonishing: negotiating that awkward first-song-in-a-musical moment by opening with a song-and-dance basketball game to decide the championship, the plot culminating in the characters making a High School musical about their own year, even about the process of making the musical; sometimes playing themselves, sometimes each other.
HSM3 all but openly discusses the dependence of the cycle on an enactment of fantasy lives by its viewers/participants. The best song-and-dance of the movie, The Boys Are Back, takes Troy and Big Hair Guy into the junkyard that was home to their childhood adventures. Once there, they sing about the joy of imagining possible lives for a couple of hours at a time: "to solve a mystery, fight the battle, save the girl! No one can stop us now, we're the ones who make the rules". They disappear behind a window and take on different guises in silhouette; at one point they roll under a derelict car and come out the other side as five-year-old versions of themselves. For the one moment in the whole series that actually portrays peers of HSM's primary audience, they are explicitly play-acting fantasy lives, and being celebrated for it.
And if this wasn't a clear enough indication that HSM's appeal is one of imagination and enactment, there's the very last song. High School Musical, the cast sings right at the end: who says we have to let it go? It's the best part we've ever known. The song that summarises the whole series, then, makes all-but-explicit the dependence of the cycle on the choice its audience/participants make to play at being in this imaginary high-school world. It's not the best high school the singers have ever known, it's high school musical, the parts they've played, the ridiculous unreal world that they've constructed and invited participation in.
High School Musical: The Ice Tour
Part 6 was High School Musical: The Ice Tour, which is based on HSM1 and HSM2. Where HSM: Sing It! was an interesting mis-step, HSM: The Ice Tour had it exactly right: it taught the audience a (pretty awful, but easy) dance, it told us firmly to clap along, and it sacrificed all the different plotlines in the service of its desperate attempt to squeeze 3 hours of movie into 100 minutes of ice show, without missing any of the good bits. "Well, you all know what happened next," said Piano Girl (like all of them, lip-synching her dialogue as well as her songs), shuffling us as swiftly as possible between songs; and yes, we did all know what happened next. And at quarter to five they ice-danced the baseball song, swinging styrofoam bats around their heads in unison.
The two messages of High School Musical
Of course the world that HSM portrays is nothing like any real high school. And perhaps no real high school students would want it to be. But, you know, fuck them, and all the miserable bored misery of real adolescence: this is the way to redeem it, through songs and sparkly hats and four-year-olds who jump up and down waving paper Wildcats banners, through observation of and performative participation in a world in which there are only two messages.
The first message, declared with almost shocking consistency throughout all three movies is: don't try to control other people's lives. Everyone who does this is wrong: parents, teachers, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, the woman sitting in the row in front of us during the first half of HSM-the-stage-show who kept turning around sour-faced whenever we cheered. This is a generic enough message, pulled from the list of acceptable Disney messages: "everyone's special", "it's amazing what can happen if you try", "let's all work together", "there's a bit of good in everyone", "female sexuality sure is scary". Certainly, as a message, it's not on a par for originality with "unionisation is an unambiguous good and 18-year-old Christian Bale is embarrassingly attractive in rumpled nineteenth century newsboy outfits" (the unifying theme of Newsies, an earlier Disney film by the director and choreographer of HSMs 1 through 3). But it's a pretty nice message, and ingrained into the plot at every level.
The second message is: singing and dancing and exuberance are pretty great, even if you're not actually very good at them. And they are.