In his 1977 essay "Entertainment and Utopia," film studies academic Richard Dyer wrote of the musical as the most potent utopian cinema expression. He described the genre as a form that "offers the image of 'something better' to set against the realities of day-to-day existence," and described the effect as envisioning not how utopia might function or how it might look in reality, but rather how it would feel.
He probably didn't know it at the time, but he was writing a eulogy. The live-action movie musical would never again hold the cultural prominence it did during the 1950s and 60s, when films like Singing in the Rain, The Sound and Music, and West Side Story raked in fortunes at the box office. Musicals would remain popular on the stage — by then a niche market far behind the movies in cultural relevance — and the spirit would live on in Disney animated movies. But the page was turned on a period of American film culture, and with it a period of American cultural history more broadly.
The past century has been an arc into and out of utopianism. Rapid technological advancement at the dawn of the 20th Century spurred a civilizational optimism that the future would be glistening sky cities and moon bases and flying cars — limitless material abundance. This came on the heels of the Romantic Era and reached toward a blend of realistic political arrangements and a sensitivity toward idealism. In Europe this hopefulness was shredded in the First World War, and for a moment Realism reasserted itself on the continent before it gave way to new delusions of utopian social order — communism, socialism, and Anglo liberalism. These mechanistic political arrangements were built on the back of centuries of cultural machinery, yet they were doomed to fail. They plunged the West into the inferno of the Second World War, and after it a long dark night of pessimism as the Soviet bear loomed, and as the Anglo-liberal cancer ate away at cultural confidence.
But America — spared the ravages and blessed with the riches of its victory in the cataclysm of the world wars — got to remain high off the fumes a while longer, which was reflected in its cinema.
The movies are Old America's true artform, the apotheosis of its starry-eyed expansionism and its brilliant implementation of industry and technology. You can see this in the musicals and westerns of the middle decades of the 20th century. The musicals especially simmered with overwhelming technicolor energy, the kind that could swamp the darkness by sheer force of expression.
But America was only spared the West's greater spiritual decline by a generation or so, and the nastiness of the movies of the late 60s and the 70s coincided with a certain old American spirit going dark, to be brought back only in mimicry and shadow. Stephen Sondheim, at once the musical genre's greatest voice and its most ferocious critic, bridged the gap between these eras in a way. But even his success dwindled after the early 70s, as the magic leaked out.
The box office success of the dark movies of the early 70s - The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, etc — closed the door on a utopian era that was hobbled by the Kennedy assassination and which crested with the moon landing, before America began its descent. The cinema musical was dead as a primary cultural form, because it could not by its very nature meet the moment.
The fantasy epics and comic book adaptations that have ruled the box office since the 80s are not a return to the utopianism of the musicals. They are escapism, in the way those older films were not. They seek to transport the viewer to other worlds, rather than reflect a candy-colored vision of this one. A stray outlier will occasionally emerge — Moulin Rouge in the wake of 9/11 comes to mind. But it's telling that the Ur-musical of the Obama era, Hamilton, never saw a serious effort to bring it to the screen. The white liberals who lapped it up on Broadway might have shown up, but no one else would have. And many producers in Hollywood still know an obvious loser when they see one.
But then again, big-screen cinema is itself going the way of the Vaudeville show. A dying spirit sees its reflection, and winces.
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