Xanadon’t: The limits of kitsch

Normally I wouldn’t devote an entire column to one movie, but I recently re-watched Xanadu and it got me to thinking. So now if nothing else I can lay claim to – most likely – being the first person to ever use the words “Xanadu” and “thinking” in the same sentence, at least without it being a reference to Coleridge.

For those of you so blessed by fortune that you’ve never seen this particular masterpiece, here are the basics: Michael “that guy from The Warriors” Beck plays a starving artist who has just given up on his dreams and gone back to work for the record industry. Within the space of a single morning he encounters a Muse (Olivia Newton-John) and a wealthy old guy (Gene Kelly – yes, that Gene Kelly) longing for his glory days as a clarinetist for Glenn Miller. Kara (short for Terpsichore, which is sort of like Dick being short for Richard) inspires the two guys to go into business and turn a wrecked-out dance hall into the ultimate roller disco.

You can tell just from the cold, hard, black-and-white description of the set-up that this movie was created for the specific purpose of being stupid. On one level it’s a good-natured send-up of the hey-everybody-let’s-put-on-a-show days of Hollywood musicals.

Unfortunately, the most difficult words to write in that last sentence were “send-up.” That comes closer than terms such as “parody” or “tribute,” but it doesn’t really hit the nail on the head either. What’s really going on here is something more crassly commercial.

Back in the 30s, stage door musicals were a desperately-needed antidote to the Depression. We’d gone through one world war, and another was looming on the horizon. The economy had gone into the crapper, and everyone lost their jobs. This created a big box-office demand for escapist movies. On the silver screen life was hard, but it was also innocent fun. Even Broadway’s gold-digging floozies were good girls at heart, ingénues who donned sparkly costumes, sang bouncy tunes with witless lyrics, and bubbled through to the end of the picture where they always ended up with Daddy Warbucks or his moral equivalent.

Xanadu uses this old, dusty recipe to bake a batch of brain candy for the newly-dawned 1980s. It should have worked. Certainly the nation was ready for simple-minded escapism, something to assure us that despite political turmoil and rampant inflation, everything was going to be okay. Why else would we have volunteered for eight years of Ronald Reagan?

But no, this doesn’t work. To start, it’s too stupid to function as anything other than kitsch. That criticism shouldn’t upset the folks who made this, as it’s clearly intended to be a kitsch production. The real problem, then, is that kitsch can’t be manufactured. It has to just happen. While some of the stupid stage-door musicals from the 30s are quaint and charming all these years later, this roller-disco reheat comes across as a marketing job.

Perhaps the passage of a few more decades will cleanse this production of its ultra-commercial roots. But then again, maybe it will always be a boring, brain-dead glitter fest. Only time will tell.