jane dark's sugarhigh!

stick it

The "Flashdance trope," though one would scarcely claim it originated with that film, involves a young artist/performer (almost always with an absent parent, generally dead) who specializes in an art form marked as whiter-than-white. After failing or bailing a juried audition, the hero has a chance encounter with a dark-skinned Other who practices a newer and more populist form of the art; the hero then incorporates some elements of this vitalist street style into their own routine and, racially hybridized, dynamic and democratic, wows the judges on the second pass.

Coyote Ugly rehearses this narrative with absolute schematic certainty: "Violet Sanford" (Piper Perabo), struggling singer-songwriter, bumming out on her rooftop, hears some hip-hop from the next dirty building over...followed immediately by the lthoughtful staring/lightbulb inspiration/late-night work montage around which the film turns. All of this makes the film's jubilant ending as baffling as any cultural text on offer: when we finally hear Violet's song, it turns out to be an utterly white-identified country number, sung onscreen by Leann Rimes and written by Diane Warren. This makes sense insofar as the film is less an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's article about the New York bar Coyote Ugly than it is a Diane Warren biopic relocated to the East Coast. But it makes no sense in relation to the narrative of cultural mixing that the film so diligently sets up; the ending takes place as if that rooftop encounter, and the following montage, simply never happened. It's as if Jules, Jim and Catherine, in their final scene, drove off to In'N'Out Burger.

Stick It is more invested in the dynamic between female performer and panel of judges than either of these films, or any other film one might recall — it renders that scene not a crucial means toward the hero's future success, but an end in itself. This perhaps explains why the Flashdance trope must at once appear and be shuttled to a side narrative, and displaced from the unbearably white star (Missy Peregrym) to an already-nonwhite side player. The trope contains a central fact about this particular confrontation and its cultural payload, and so remains necessary; at the same time, the film's idea about what "success" would be is actually one stop more appealing, and so there's no room in the lead story for finally softening the judges' hearts to aesthetic miscegenation. For once, the movie has someting better to do than recapitulate the virtues of exogamy, and lands closer to "Bartleby" than "Rape of the Sabine Women."

ps: Hey Missy Peregrym — Piper Perabo called. She wants her stage-name designing algorithm back.

Posted by jane at May 8, 2006 01:26 PM | TrackBack