Nicest Kids in Town

by Delmont, Matthew F.

  Hairspray (2007) also downplays the provocative gender casting decisions in Waters’s film. Whereas Hairspray (1988) cast Divine, best known for playing drag queens in Waters’s earlier films, as both Tracy’s mother and the racist (and male) television station owner, Hairspray (2007) toned down these challenging gender representations by casting John Travolta to play Tracy’s mother. Director Adam Shankman noted that Hairspray’s (2007) producers cast Travolta with an eye on the film’s commercial prospects:

  In the tradition of “Hairspray,” which started with John [Waters], obviously, casting Divine, it’s one of my favorite things that Edna’s played by a man because it’s anarchistic. And when [the producers] told me that they were talking to John [Travolta], I strangely immediately understood, because knowing that they were wanting to make a big, commercial hit movie out of this, and it’s a musical, what man are you going to go to that’s the biggest musical star that we have? And because of “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever,” it is John Travolta.72

  Here again, Hairspray (2007) smoothed away the transgressive edges of Waters’s film to appeal to the largest possible mainstream audience. As a result, the new film foregrounds the segregation story line more so than the original. By using a civil rights story as a commercial attraction, Hairspray is the latest in what filmmaker and media studies scholar Allison Graham and media studies scholar Jennifer Fuller have identified as the long line of civil rights-themed films and television shows since the late 1980s.73

  While “I Know Where I’ve Been” is Hairspray’s most serious portrayal of civil rights, the film’s concluding song resolves the issue of segregation on the Corny Collins Show with an upbeat and humorous dance number. Tracy kicks off “You Can’t Stop the Beat” with her performance in the Corny Collins Show’s “Miss Teen Hairspray” competition. Tracy’s performance fulfills her dream of being the lead dancer on the Corny Collins Show and sets the program’s integration in motion. Tracy’s dance partner, Link Larkin (Zac Efron), invites Maybelle’s daughter, Little Inez (Taylor Parks), out to dance. As Little Inez holds center stage, becoming the first black teenager on the Corny Collins Show, the film cuts between her dancing and a table of telephone operators who tally votes on the dance contest from the show’s viewers. After Inez’s performance, the film’s interracial couple, Seaweed and Penny, pick up the song.

  After the two teens finish singing, they kiss, and the scene shifts from the Corny Collins Show’s studio to the show’s image on a television in Penny’s mother’s living room. Penny’s mother tries to wipe the black-and-white image of the interracial kiss off television screen with a handkerchief while Corny intones to the camera, “Live television, there’s nothing like it.”74 Penny’s mother’s resistance to her daughter’s interracial relationship and televised kiss is portrayed as a comically retrograde viewpoint. Her viewpoint, moreover, is not shared by the viewers of the Corny Collins Show. Unlike the real Buddy Deane Show, which received hate mail and bomb threats after its sudden integration, Inez receives a “tidal wave of calls” of support from the film’s Baltimoreans.75 After Inez is named the winner of the “Miss Teen Hairspray” dance contest and the lead dancer on the show, Corny declares: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Corny Collins Show is now and forever officially integrated!”76 The film depicts public support for this integration with a shot of an interracial audience watching the show on television at a clothing store, and a second shot of a television reporter breaking the news outside of the studio. In front of a mostly white group of teenagers celebrating on the sidewalk, the reporter announces: “Interracial dancing has broken out at the WYZT stage. Just look at the crowd reaction.”77 By cutting among these scenes, the film uses three televisual representations to reimagine the historical struggle over the Buddy Deane Show’s segregation. The film shows the integration inside of the Corny Collins Show’s studio, how different viewers reacted to the televised image of the show’s integration, and how the show’s integration itself became a television news event.

  The finale of “You Can’t Stop the Beat” closes on a similarly triumphant note. In contrast to the stark division of black and white dancing styles in “New Girl in Town,” the teenage backup dancers perform steps that producer Neil Meron suggests are meant to reference the show’s integration:

  What’s great about [Adam Shankman’s] choreography [in “You Can’t Stop the Beat”] is that, subtly, the black dancers and the white dancers have the same choreography. When all the choreography in the movie prior to this was segregated by race, and now it’s all together, which is a very, very subtle reference to the theme of this movie.78

  In the musical film’s diegetic world, this integrated choreography is as important as the successful visual integration of the television program. The film’s teenage characters not only overturn segregation on the Corny Collins Show; they immediately erase the film’s earlier distinctions between “square” white teens and “hip” black teens. The film reinforces this subtle reference moments later when Corny Collins invites Maybelle out to sing the final verse of the song. Corny declares “this is the future” and tells Maybelle that “this is your time.”79 Maybelle sings: “You can’t stop today as it comes speeding down the track / Child, yesterday is hist’ry and it’s never coming back / ‘Cause tomorrow is a brand new day and it don’t know white from black.”80 In the film’s narrative, this utopian vision of a color-blind future solves the problem of segregation and racial injustice. Unlike the narrative ambiguity at the end of American Dreams’ first season, Hairspray’s narrative is fully revolved and unequivocally happy. Hairspray also uses the Corny Collins Show’s television camera to expose Velma Von Tussle’s attempt to switch the tallies so that her daughter, and not Inez, would win. As the camera captures Velma’s confession, the film cuts to an interracial group watching the program on a set of televisions in a store’s display window. The film’s protagonists, therefore, not only succeed in integrating the television show; they use the medium to prove the dishonesty of the show’s racist producer.

  This happy ending, of course, runs counter to historical events. The television station that broadcast The Buddy Deane Show canceled it shortly after civil rights activists successfully integrated a single episode. Hairspray’s ending resembles the utopian sensibility that film scholar Richard Dyer has identified as fundamental to musical films.81 Hairspray presents a utopian version of early 1960s Baltimore that is more racially integrated and fair than the real era’s history. John Waters created this particular vision, but more commercially minded producers and their audiences have shared in this ideal. Like Waters’s film and the stage show, Hairspray’s (2007) historical representations and utopian conclusion have the potential to mislead viewers about the level of racism in the early 1960s, the rate of success for civil rights activists, and the integration of televised teenage dance programs like American Bandstand. Viewed in this way, Hairspray endorses a view of the civil rights era in which an innocent white teen (Tracy) joins forces with a progressive medium (television) to vanquish racism, located, in the end, in the attitudes of a single character (Velma).

  Without minimizing the dangers of this film to promote a simplistic view of history, it is important to differentiate Hairspray from films like Mississippi Burning (1988), which erases the grassroots local activism of black Mississippians, and Forrest Gump (1994), which intervenes in major historical events of the 1960s and 1970s in order to emphasize the innocence of the United States.82 Hairspray, in contrast, does not ask its audience to view it as historically accurate (like Mississippi Burning), nor does it trivialize the historical era it celebrates and satirizes (like Forrest Gump). In other words, Hairspray encourages viewers to take the struggles over segregation on teenage television shows seriously, without claiming to be a historically true civil rights story. While Hairspray also foreground narratives of interracial unity and innocence, this utopian vision of the American Bandstand era is ultimately more successful than the narrative ambiguity of
American Dreams. Unlike the narrative ambiguity of American Dreams, which encourages viewers to embrace what they already think, Hairspray’s utopian vision of the American Bandstand era is less likely to encourage viewers to see the film as a completely accurate representation. Along these lines, producer Craig Zadan suggests that

  the wonderful thing about the movie … is the fact that while we are dealing with some very serious subject matter, we’re doing it in such a highly comic and entertaining way. So you never feel like we’re on a soap box, or we’re preaching to you, or we’re saying this is the lesson you need to learn. You’re laughing and you’re smiling and you’re enjoying all of it, and yet, hopefully, you come away from it with something serious to talk about afterwards.83

  There is no guarantee that viewers of Hairspray will discuss the film’s serious subject matter as Zadan suggests. The film, however, makes it difficult to overlook racism with regard to historical television dance shows, and, at the very least, provides a starting point for viewers to learn more about the American Bandstand era.

  A 2008 production by the World Performance Project at Yale University offers a final example of the relevance of American Bandstand in the 2000s, one that engages more critically with the American Bandstand era than either American Dreams or Hairspray. Developed through a seminarstudio course taught by dramaturges and professional dancers, Don’t Look Back! A Rock ’n’ Roll Orpheus used televised teen dance shows and popular music and dance from the 1950s and 1960s to create and perform a multimedia version of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As the basis for this production, students conducted research on American Bandstand, Baltimore’s Buddy Deane Show, Washington, D.C.’s The Milt Grant Show and Teenarama, and Hairspray, as well as rock and roll and civil rights. What is interesting about Don’t Look Back! is that it used historical media and representations from the American Bandstand era without suggesting that the problem of race was solved in the 1960s. One way Don’t Look Back! did this was by directly engaging with the idea of the 2000s as a post-racial era. “As rehearsals and scriptwriting began,” the producers note,

  it became clear that creating a frame through which the modern post-racial identification of students could enter the past would be as necessary as keeping our audience mindful of the present. The success of the piece depended on our ability to transport the audience and the student-performers back to the 1950s … without fully obscuring the time/space reality of the [present].84

  The play tried to accomplish this by having the teen performers portray both American Bandstand dancers and modern actors using camcorders to send live feeds to projection screens above the stage. The resulting production mixed period media from the 1950s and 1960s (including footage from American Bandstand), live portrayals of American Bandstand era dancing, and live present-day commentary on both of the former. This approach encouraged the teen performers and audiences to move back and forth between the American Bandstand era and the present, using each as a lens to examine the other. This helped Don’t Look Back! avoid the easy nostalgia for national innocence of American Dreams and tempered the utopian interracial unity of Hairspray. Finally, recognizing the complexities and dangers of representing historical race relations in an era when many of the teen performers and audience members viewed themselves as post-racial, Don’t Look Back! used a mix of historical and contemporary media to directly address and challenge these viewpoints. Perhaps because it was not a major commercial production like American Dreams and Hairspray, Don’t Look Back! encouraged its teen performers and audiences to do more than remember the innocence of the American Bandstand era.

  My focus in this chapter has been on how American Dreams and Hairspray engage with the history of the American Bandstand era. Despite their limitations, both American Dreams and Hairspray present the history of the American Bandstand era with more nuance than did previous popular histories of the show published by Dick Clark. For my undergraduate students, Hairspray and, to a lesser extent, American Dreams are primary points of reference for this era. I view this as an opportunity rather than a handicap. Similar to my project, both American Dreams and Hairspray encourage viewers to examine the histories of television, music, youth culture, and civil rights concurrently and in relation to specific urban spaces. I hope, however, that my students will be suspicious of the narratives of innocence and interracial unity at play in both productions. These narratives can too easily be taken as endorsements of a color-blind racial ideology in which racism is strictly a problem of individual prejudice and in which this prejudice has disappeared since the 1960s. Still, suspicion of these narratives can also provide the basis for critical analysis of the American Bandstand era and a more nuanced understanding of race and racism in a supposedly post-racial era.

  Conclusion

  Everybody Knows about American Bandstand

  While Nina Simone never performed on American Bandstand, her song “Mississippi Goddam” offers a lens through which to examine the issues at the heart of this book. In her autobiography, Simone recalled that she wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to two tragic events that shocked the nation:

  I was sitting there in my den … when news came over the radio that somebody had thrown dynamite into the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama while black children were attending a Bible study class. … It was more than I could take, and I sat struck dumb in my den like St. Paul on the road to Damascus: all the truths that I had denied to myself for so long rose up and slapped my face. The bombing of the little girls in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to be black in America in 1963.1

  The lyrics of “Mississippi Goddam” express Simone’s indignation at the repeated acts of racial terror in the United States: “Alabama’s got me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.” With “everybody knows,” Simone captures the fact that, with national media coverage of the assassination of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing, it would have been difficult for anyone not to be aware of these events. Still, Simone makes it clear that this awareness does not equal a commitment or sense of urgency to fight for racial equality: “Why don’t you see it? / Why don’t you feel it?/I don’t know / I don’t know.”2 Simone described “Mississippi Goddam” as “my first civil rights song,” and this work remains useful for thinking about the history of the civil rights movement more broadly.3

  Knowing about the nationally visible tragedies of 1963 was not the same as understanding these murders as part of a larger system of state-sanctioned violence that maintained the political disenfranchisement of blacks in the South and blocked the passage of meaningful civil rights legislation at the federal level. This gap between an awareness of bad things happening to individual black people and the systemic allocation of resources away from black communities is important because, as historian Thomas Sugrue argues, “the ways that we recount the history of racial inequality and civil rights—the narratives that we construct about our past—guide our public policy priorities and our lawmaking and, even more fundamentally, shape our national identity.”4 Absent an understanding of the civil rights movement’s ambitious economic, political, legal, and social goals, the legacy of the movement can be defined narrowly as a call to embrace racial color-blindness. This ideology of racial color-blindness focuses on overcoming individual racial prejudice and takes the decline in overt racism since the civil rights era as evidence of the end of racism. This view of civil rights ignores the histories of systematic discrimination, such as the public policies that maintained school and residential segregation, as well as how the long-term legacies of these policies disadvantaged black communities. To paraphrase Simone, everybody knows about the civil rights movement, but not everyone understands the movement as a decades-long fight to uproot structures of white supremacy.

  Philadelphia was not Mississippi
, and the history of American Bandstand is not equivalent to the racial violence that motivated “Mississippi Goddam.” Still, Simone’s song suggests an approach to history that has motivated this book. Everybody knows about American Bandstand, but like narrow views of civil rights, this awareness can obscure more than it reveals. The dominant memory of American Bandstand’s effect on society is that it took a bold and progressive stance on racial integration. Rather than making clear how race influenced nearly every facet of life in the postwar era—where people lived and worked, where young people went to school, and what images viewers saw on television—this dominant memory suggests that the country, led by commercial media industries in the liberal North, was well on its way to overcoming racism by the late 1950s. This rhetoric of progress and innocence is not unique to American Bandstand, but as the show was one of the most popular television programs of all time, this memory offers a barometer of how far the nation has come with regard to race.

  To complicate this memory, this book has shown how American Bandstand became a site of struggle over racial segregation and how the show influenced and was influenced by racial discrimination and civil rights activism in the city’s neighborhoods and schools. For those who watched American Bandstand during its heyday in the 1950s and early 1960s, this book has provided stories that were not part of the show’s afternoon broadcasts. Understanding how the local Bandstand developed into a national phenomenon, how American Bandstand constructed a vision of national youth culture, and how American Bandstand drew from black popular culture while excluding black teenagers adds depth and nuance to popular memories of American Bandstand. For those who know the early years of the program only through vintage black-and-white clips, this book has provided local and national context to make it clear that American Bandstand was more than the background images seen in 1950s-themed montages. Understanding how white homeowners organized to maintain segregation in the neighborhoods around American Bandstand’s studio, how American Bandstand’s producers and school board officials opposed meaningful integration while claiming to hold color-blind policies, and how black teenagers and civil rights activists protested racially discriminatory policies on American Bandstand and in Philadelphia’s schools and neighborhoods shows that far from being a relic from a more innocent age of popular culture, American Bandstand was at the center of local and national struggles over segregation and representations of race.