The dance musical West Side Story, conceived and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, is a classic of American musical theater. Its 1961 film version holds an even more prominent place in our historical consciousness than the original Broadway production of 1957. The film was received with critical acclaim and garnered eleven Academy Award nominations, winning ten of them, including Best Picture.
The movie presents a twentieth-century variation on the story of Romeo and Juliet, in which the Puerto Rican Sharks and the white ethnic Jets engage in a turf war that dooms the secret lovers, Tony and Maria. Among scholarly critics who have analyzed the film's social implications, a focus on this ethnic rivalry has predominated, with good reason. As Frances Negrón-Muntaner has written, “There is no single American cultural product that haunts Puerto Rican identity … more intensely than the 1961 film, West Side Story.”Footnote 1 Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez has described its portrayal of Puerto Ricans as an “iconic ideological construction” that implicitly replicates a political position that it appears to reject, namely the naturalness of white racial dominance over “social spaces, public territories, and institutions.”Footnote 2
The dances of West Side Story reinforce its already problematic portrayal of Puerto Ricans, marking their ethnicity through Spanish-inflected body stylings coupled with Cuban-inspired mambo moves.Footnote 3 Rachel Duerden and Bonnie Rowell have analyzed the choreography in one of its central dance numbers, “Dance at the Gym,” to describe how the dancers' embodiment becomes an apparatus of racial differentiation.Footnote 4 Similarly, Anna B. Scott points out how the Sharks' dancing with “emphasis on the hips,” as opposed to the Jets' emphasis on height and acrobatics, is used as a marker of cultural difference between the two groups.Footnote 5 These readings underscore the ways in which an imaginary of ethnic difference is woven into the very physical warp of the musical's dances, in addition to driving the plot.
However, a closer attention to other aspects of Jerome Robbins's choreography suggests that, in his imagination, the musical's foundational tension was not that between the Jets and the Sharks, but rather the struggle of both gangs against the strictures of adult society. In his book West Side Story as Cinema, Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz compares the movie in this respect to the subgenre of the folk musical. Folk stories are typically coming-of-age tales in which the homosocial and homoerotic bonds of youth must give way to the heterosexual coupling associated with maturity – the only difference being that in West Side Story they don't.Footnote 6
Significantly, the film begins and ends on a playground. After a series of aerial shots establishing its Manhattan location, the camera zooms in on a single neighborhood and then fades to the playground. From the considerable height of an adjoining building, we see children swinging on swings, riding bikes, playing basketball and catch, and scrambling across monkey bars. As the shot lingers, however, we become increasingly aware of a motionless group settled against one of the chain-link fences on the playground's outer edge. Their stationary huddle visually contrasts with the activity around them. In the next shot, the camera zooms in on them where they sit with their backs against the fence, coolly snapping their fingers: Riff, Ice, and Action, A-Rab and Baby John – these are the Jets. When an errant baseball invades their space and a boy their own age comes to retrieve it, the sharp contrast between their brooding presence and the structured play of the playground's other users is emphasized.
As a setting for dramatic action, this playground reappears throughout the movie. The Jets are playing basketball there when five Sharks come to play and are told to “beat it”; Baby John runs there yelling for help when he is attacked by the Sharks, starting the melee that brings about the first confrontation with police detective Schrank; Tony loiters there after the dance at the gym to sing about Maria. And we are returned to the site for the movie's final scene: when Tony is told that Maria is dead, he runs distraught from the basement of Doc's candy store into the streets. He staggers onto the playground, calling for Chino to come and get him, as he wanders past the monkey bars, the swing set, and the hopscotch course. The camera zooms in for a close-up of his face as he sags against the chain-link fence and begs for Chino to find him. When, against all hope, Maria herself appears, they run to embrace in the middle of the playground, just as Chino arrives at the fence and shoots Tony dead.
The sound of this gunshot convokes a ritual assembly of all of the Sharks and the Jets. The figures of social authority, in the persons of Officer Krupke and Lieutenant Schrank, arrive on the playground again as well. Schrank retrieves Chino's gun, but Maria warns him away from Tony's body. Instead, the Jets and Sharks together claim Tony, and they cooperate in lifting and carrying him away. Several Jets and Sharks file out together through the playground gate after Tony's pallbearers, forming a funeral procession. Schrank falls back to stand beside Chino, effectively claiming him as an arrested criminal. As the camera retreats toward its original high vantage point, the remaining Sharks and Jets melt away into the night, leaving Schrank and Krupke in possession of the dramatic space. The fenced-in playground, transformed by the night and the flashing police light, assumes a prison-like quality.
The centrality of the playground in the movie's opening and closing scenes is a clue to the fundamental conflict in the minds of the makers of West Side Story. The musical is a carefully constructed cultural defense of youth and play, expressing its creators' ambivalence towards Cold War ideals of emotional maturity and social responsibility. Using the ethnicized masculinity of Jets and Sharks as a vehicle, Robbins's choreography constructs a complex portrait of youthful play that challenged the dominant popular and social-scientific discourses of the era.
In the Cold War American context, popular media images and the received wisdom of the social sciences enforced sentimentality, social conformity, and heteronormativity as the mainstays of a family-centered social structure. As a corollary, they fetishized childhood innocence and adult responsibility. After the social dislocations associated with the Depression era and the Second World War, Americans were eager for a return to normalcy, and their ideal of it tended to take an exaggeratedly sentimental form.Footnote 7 Dad was to be the breadwinner, Mom the homemaker, and children were to engage in innocent play. Deviations from this sentimental norm were investigated by sociologists and psychologists as pathological.
At the same time, the growth of big businesses during and after World War II made for changes in the nature of middle-class jobs. Men increasingly worked in large, bureaucratically managed corporations, leading to a perceived crisis of masculinity in what came to be known as the plight of the “organization man.” David Riesman's 1951 study The Lonely Crowd contrasted the independent, self-made man of yesteryear with the white-collar employee eager to conform in order to succeed. These concerns were echoed in popular-culture venues such as the 1956 film The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (based on the best-selling novel of 1955), in which Gregory Peck plays the eponymous everyman Tom Rath. A former war hero turned public-relations executive, Rath struggles with the conflicting demands of office politics and in the process loses his wife's respect; his children are spoiled and undisciplined.
Against this background of high expectations and changing circumstances, the spectacle of juvenile delinquency became a major cultural preoccupation.Footnote 8 Postwar child psychologists emphasized the importance of quality emotional relationships between parents and their children. But such liberal voices coexisted and conflicted with older, more conservative ideas that emphasized enforcing rules and punishing transgressions. The debates around juvenile delinquency encapsulated social fears of defiant youths wreaking social havoc. Youth gangs in public high schools were a particular focus, both in sociological studies and in movies like Rebel without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle (both 1955). These representations often harbored a class or ethnic inflection, as middle-class whites worried about how lower-class whites, blacks, and Hispanics (who were attending high school in record numbers) were reshaping the social landscape.
West Side Story's celebration of immigrant and underclass masculinities thus subsumes its evocations of class and ethnicity within a broader objective of contesting the juvenile-delinquency discourse with an image of the transgressive male youth. The play's librettist, Arthur Laurents, worked with Robbins to ensure that the gang members evoked the audience's empathy: “I am not for keeping or making them hoodlums,” he wrote to the choreographer; “I found the gang in ‘Jungle’ [Blackboard Jungle] distasteful and overdrawn.”Footnote 9 The screenplay by Ernest Lehman reinforces this sympathetic viewpoint through cinematographic techniques. In the film's opening scene, for example, as the Jets leave the playground, we see their feet in medium close-up as they walk carefully around a little girl and her chalk drawing. Although we have been primed by their cool demeanor to anticipate some antisocial act, this shot makes us rethink our assumptions about them.
In contrast, while the symbols of adult authority in the film – Lieutenant Schrank and Officer Krupke – pretend that their social power is rooted in a moral superiority conferred by civic responsibility, it is shown instead to be based on their privileged use of force. Schrank threatens the youths with bodily harm or physical restriction in order to silence them, impede their play, or compel them to speak. After breaking up the melee in the playground, he tells the Jets, “If I catch any of ya doin’ any more brawling in my territory – I'm gonna personally beat the livin’ crud outa each and every one of ya and see that ya go to jail and rot there!”Footnote 10 Such threats of excessive force are consistently shown to underpin adult authority. Officer Krupke asks repeatedly, “You wanna get ya skull broke?” and the feeble attempts of Glad Hand (the high-school social worker) at quelling the gang rivalry are only carried across by the threat of Krupke's nightstick.
Robbins and Lehman portray adulthood as a surrender of individual vitality to the demands of socialization. It is a devil's bargain in which the adults have traded physical energy and meaningful action for social acceptance and power. By accepting the constraints of adulthood, these men have diminished themselves, as their names indicate. “Krupke” suggests a Yiddishism translating as “the little stunted one” (verkruppelt), while Schrank's name is an obvious homonym. Their inner lack of vitality is embodied outwardly in the affectless demeanors of Glad Hand and Doc (the candy store owner who employs Tony), both of whom are also “successful” adults.
The self-congratulatory self-image of adults as serious and mature requires the concomitant sentimentalization of childhood as innocent and carefree. The adults in West Side Story therefore work persistently to force the Jets and Sharks into one of two binary subject positions: that of serious and mature adults, or of innocent and victimized children. But the youths themselves make common cause in resisting and exceeding these categories, through forms of play that sprawl from the playground into the streets, and beyond children's games to the brawling and balling that adult discourses labeled “juvenile delinquency.” The movie's attention to displaying this continuum of play is apparent in the way that the mise en scène insistently mixes aspects of child's play with moments of adolescent transgression – including the staging of a fistfight on the playground. The social theorist Paul Goodman, a contemporary of Robbins who was similarly sympathetic to youthful “deviance,” observed in his classic work Growing up Absurd of 1960,
Our social scientists have become so accustomed to the highly organized and by-and-large smoothly running society that they have begun to think that “social animal” means “harmoniously belonging.” They do not like to think that fighting or dissenting are proper social functions.Footnote 11
But West Side Story imagines a broader range of social behaviors, which it celebrates the youth for exercising in the diverse forms of their play. The very discourse of juvenile delinquency is ironized in the film as a strategy that adults deploy to delegitimate this authentic play, which the Jets and Sharks engage in with the desperation of a survival instinct. Robbins's dances resonate with an idea expressed by Goodman in 1951:
“Maturity” … is conceived in the interest of an unnecessarily tight adjustment to a dubiously valuable workaday society, regimented to pay its debts and duties … With regard to the adjustment of the mature person to reality, must we not ask … [whether] other cultures, gaudier in dress, greedier in physical pleasures, dirtier in manners, more disorderly in governance, more brawling and adventurous in behavior, were or are thereby less mature?Footnote 12
Robbins's youthful protagonists embody Goodman's vision of a gaudier, greedier, dirtier, and more disorderly, brawling, and adventurous way of life. The Jets and Sharks dance and play through the streets and alleys of the West Side, claiming them in the name of youth. Just as Officer Krupke and Detective Shrank patrol the streets enforcing adult authority, so the Jets and Sharks claim the streets in resistance to the stultification of normative adulthood. They occupy playgrounds, apartment rooftops, candy stores, and front stoops in their effort to retake New York's West Side in the name of an oppositional youth identity. This is West Side Story's real turf war.
The youth gangs' strongest animosity is directed not at one another, but at the adult world's restricted options and monopoly of social spaces, through which it enforces its hegemonic limitations. It is Schrank's sneer following the early fistfight on the playground, “You hoodlums don't own these streets!” that provokes the Jets to defy him by planning their rumble with the Sharks. They bitterly rehearse a litany of phrases by which the adults assert their control of living spaces – the street, the home, the park, the block – the “here” of wherever the youth happen to be. “Keep offa da woild!” Action fumes, then fervently proclaims, “A gang dat don’ own a street is nothin’!” which prompts Riff to declare, “WE DO OWN IT!”Footnote 13 When Bernardo shows up at the dance in the gym, the opportunity is presented to stage a rumble that will take back the streets – from Schrank.
These insights arise from a close reading of West Side Story's disposition of moving bodies in space – both in its set dance pieces and in the staging of other scenes. Dance scholar Sally Banes has described break-dancing's hyperphysical, competitive style as a bodily rhetoric reproducing territorial rivalries between African American and Puerto Rican youths: “a kind of serious game … that had urgent social significance for the dancers,” although its stylized aggression usually passed unnoticed by adults.Footnote 14 This framing of dance as “serious play” can be extrapolated to the dances of West Side Story, which similarly express an occupying and claiming of territory that is for the most part illegible to the adult authorities that it eludes and defies.
Particularly at this moment in the history of American studies, dance studies presents itself as an important methodological addition, because of its unique ability to contribute to what is emerging as an interpretive “revolution from below” – that is, a radical reassessment of the politics of cultural forms based on a recovery of the embodied subject as the center of meaning-making. In 1986, Susan Foster proposed in Reading Dancing an epistemological conception of the dancing body as a site of cultural power.Footnote 15 Ten years later, American studies scholar Jane Desmond argued in her essay “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” for a more expansive understanding of “text” to include the research potentials of dance: “By enlarging our studies of bodily ‘texts’ to include dance in all its forms … we can further our understandings of how social identities are signaled, formed, and negotiated through bodily movement.”Footnote 16 More recently it has become evident that, as an insistently embodied art form, dance is an especially valuable textual resource for recovering the centrality of affect to the processes of meaning-making. Affect is the physiological “feeling” response of the human organism to social experience. In his analysis of the micro-biopower of urban spaces, Nigel Thrift has called for a better understanding of the affective procedures by which subjectivity is constructed – because the subject constantly engages in decision-making processes that have little to do with thinking.Footnote 17 Dance studies can be methodologically useful in developing such an understanding, because affect is expressed by the dancing, attitudinal body in complexities that are not readily available to other forms of communicative media. Theorist and critic Julia Kristeva has borrowed Husserl's idea of the “thetic threshold” to describe the pervious boundary between the spoken and the unspeakable that affect traverses.Footnote 18 Dance movements poised on the thetic threshold can articulate complex and even conflicted affective states.Footnote 19
Communicating affect was a priority for Jerome Robbins as a choreographer. Even after he had stopped working on the film version of West Side Story, for example, he wrote a letter to its director, Robert Wise, expressing his disappointment with the scene in which Tony meets Maria. The camera work, he complained, rendered their duet “prosaic, untouching and insensitive,” although onstage it had been a “fantastically magical moment.” Robbins went on to insist that the details of the choreography should be subordinated to the communication of affect: “I don't care about the choreography or the steps themselves. But I feel forcibly insistent that the story and the emotion be saved. I don't care what you do with the steps, even if you lose them.”Footnote 20 As a result, the film was reedited.
When the embodied affect that is rendered through its choreography is accorded primacy in interpreting West Side Story, the musical is revealed as a polemic about youth. Contemporary reviewers reacted to the movie in ways that indicate that they were at least unconsciously aware of its real stakes. In the Saturday Review, for example, Arthur Knight praised the film for its “refus[al] to compromise, to make it easier for some nice old ladies in Dubuque to understand.”Footnote 21 His review transfers the characters' struggle against the demands of adult society onto the film itself, which he sees as “refusing to compromise” in order to please “nice old ladies.” Taking the opposite view, a reviewer for Newsweek complained that the film was too energized, presenting its story in “full throttle” and “overdrive” when what it needed was “restraint.”Footnote 22 Here, too, the reviewer's vocabulary, although ostensibly directed at the aesthetics of the film, suggests that he was reacting to its underlying thematic content.Footnote 23
From the opening shot, we see a playground that is occupied by compliant children engaged in an ordered rendition of play. The static brooding of the Jets doesn't fit into this environment. Their finger-snapping motion offers an ironic commentary on the playing going on around them. Over time, this finger-snapping will develop into a recurring motif in their dancing, one that signifies an affective disposition of “coolness” that is opposed to both “childishness” and “seriousness.” In leaving the playground – a space constructed by adults for children – they symbolically reject the construction of youth that is defined by the range of games encouraged there. As we watch them from the other side of the playground's chain-link fence, the Jets begin to walk in a cluster toward the street, still snapping their fingers. Before exiting the playground, they demonstrate their control of it by playing basketball; but they quickly lose interest in this adult-sanctioned game. With a last scornful look at the playground and its users, they emerge onto the street.
It is only out on the street that the Jets become fully activated, breaking out singly and then collectively into dance. These streets are their real “playground,” one that is coextensive with the entirety of their living space. In this space they establish a second trademark move, which replaces the finger-snapping that marked their previous “cool” demeanor: rising up on the ball of one foot, they swing the other leg in front and circle it to the side as, with palms and hands facing downward, they spread their arms horizontally in a proprietary gesture. Tellingly, this number, now known as the “Jet Song,” was originally titled “This Turf Is Ours!”.Footnote 24 Although “Jets” is spray-painted on the asphalt, it is the way they cover the ground that truly stakes their claim to the streets. They dominate the streetscape through their physical virtuosity, leaping, running, jumping, turning, kicking – and abruptly encounter Bernardo, the first of the Sharks. Before the end of the opening scene, the Sharks have joined them in an even more expansive form of play.
Authentic play, as the movie presents it, is marked by energy and flexibility: Robbins's choreography showcases the dancers' bodies as flexible, strong, and fast. And it takes multiple forms, including everything that the Sharks and Jets do: dancing and sexing, taunting and teasing, sprawling and brawling. While the adults in the film are preoccupied with the disruptive effects of gang rumbles, the movie itself validates the rumble as a form of youthful play. Upon closer inspection, all of the movie's scenes of the Jets and Sharks fighting (in the opening scenes and in the rumble under the highway) are staged to emphasize the nature of their fighting as playful competition. They bait each other and dare each other in a manner very like the way the Sharks and their girls taunt and tease each other in the dance number “America.” Even the hand gesture that is used – beckoning with the fingers – is the same in both cases.
Like their fighting, the “Dance at the Gym,” although superficially emphasizing the rivalry between the two gangs, ultimately places this rivalry in the service of a performance of youth. The mambo dance-off allows the Jets and Sharks to be moving and daring one another. It is a rumble by other means, contained within a game-like structure of call-and-response, with first the Sharks and then the Jets displaying their dancing abilities. Significantly, both gangs are willing to play along with Glad Hand's circle dance so long as it provides them with an opportunity to move through space and challenge each other. Immediately as that possibility expires, however, the circle dance is ended and the mambo dance-off is commenced, reestablishing the competitive dynamic on terms of greater physicality and sexuality. Akin to the conventional games of the playground, the circle dance, with its absurdly simple music, is presented as an artificial mock-up of the authentic play that the mambo here represents.
Robbins's construction of authentic play is also implicitly masculine in quality. As Frances Negrón-Muntaner observes, women – with the possible exception of Anybodys – are “accessories” in West Side Story's central struggle, which focusses on the meaning of manhood.Footnote 25 While the Jets' and Sharks' girls match the physical prowess of their male counterparts in the danced sections of the film, Robbins's choreography in both substance and quantity highlights the gang members themselves. This masculinist bias was characteristic of the postwar counterculture more generally, which imagined freedom from social constraint as resulting in a lifestyle of increased mobility and virility.
BODY AND PLAY AS SUBVERSION
The idea that grew into West Side Story came to Jerome Robbins almost twenty years before the movie was made. In the spring of 1941, inspired by a magazine article titled “War Babies,” Robbins (who was then aged twenty-two) sketched a scenario for a set of dances with the same name. The war that it referred to was the First World War; and Robbins, who was born in October 1918 (a month before the Armistice), saw himself as one of these “war babies.” In his dance scenario, the lights come up on a streetscape described as “coarse, brutal, [and] oppressing,” with tenements towering over the bodies of the dancers. There follows a narrated prologue:
Here they live … the stepchildren of a nation. Angels, brats, dolls, mutts, good eggs … pluggers, shirkers, sluggers, mixers, tin horns … flirts, cheats, mopes, crybabies … trouble shooters, jitterbugs, hellcats. Kicked around, tripped up, clipped under the chin but full of give and take, trial and error, able to take it and ready to show 'em.
What are they saying on tomcat April midnights as they hold on to each other in hallways on back stairs, under smokestacks, between hugs in the dark, above horns on the river, between kisses?Footnote 26
Robbins's “War Babies” is set in April, just like the earliest versions of West Side Story would later be, and it includes prototypes of Tony and the Jets in the characters of “Red and his gang of high steppers … potential big shots but now just over-grown small fry [with a] taut tense of slyness under all movements.” Robbins's treatment makes it clear that these youths are not the losers they appear to be: “They are like a bunch of people just starting to become aware of themselves … They are the ones who count today. This cockeyed city is THEIRS.” As early as 1941, then, Robbins was already imagining a set of dances intended as a symbolic claiming of urban space for the psychological existence of a socially subversive youth.
Such youth was a theme that preoccupied Robbins for decades. In the musicals and ballets that he choreographed, he returned almost obsessively to representing the playfulness of youth. His ballet Interplay, from the fall of 1945, has been described by biographer Deborah Jowitt as “a lighthearted view of American teenagers, or rather of American dancers as teenagers; the games they play.”Footnote 27 Interplay includes movements titled “Free Play,” “Horse Play,” “By Play” and “Team Play”; it is set in a park with playground equipment,Footnote 28 and uses dancers that are imagined as “perpetual adolescents.”Footnote 29 Similarly, in the program note for the duet “Summer Day,” of 1947, Robbins offered this gloss: “Children while playing together make a comment on adults' behavior.”Footnote 30 In 1954, he choreographed and directed the dance musical Peter Pan for Mary Martin; Martin later explained, “He was the one and only one to choreograph AND direct Peter. You see, Jerry IS Peter Pan.”Footnote 31 In Robbins's version, Peter, the perpetual adolescent, crows, “I am Youth, I am Joy, I am Freedom!”
In Leonard Bernstein, Robbins found a musical collaborator who shared his faith in youth's disruptive potentiality. The two began working together in 1943. In the spring of 1948, a poem by Bernstein titled “Life is Juicy” was published in the little magazine Neurotica.Footnote 32 This poem associates life with marginality, and death with the “spermless” desiccation of aging:
The journal Neurotica was published from 1948 through 1951, and its contributors included many poets, artists, and intellectuals whose work would figure prominently in articulating the outlook of a youth counterculture. Among these were Kenneth Patchen; William Krasner; the “beat” writers Allen Ginsberg, Carl Solomon, and John Clellon Holmes; the existentialist William Barrett; the painter Larry Rivers; Marshall McLuhan (whose article “The Psychopathology of Time and Life” first appeared in Neurotica's autumn 1949 issue); Judith Malina (later of the Living Theater); Chandler Brossard; Anatole Broyard; and Alvin Lustig. Neurotica's editor was Gershon Legman, who aligned the journal's editorial policy with a viewpoint that is best described as a discourse of “social neurosis.” Its basic premise was that social norms were pathological, and that therefore the outsider whom mainstream society pathologized was actually part of a sane and healthy minority. Legman wrote,
We define neurosis as the defensive activities of normal individuals against abnormal environments … It is our purpose to implement the realization on the part of people that they live in a neurotic culture and that it is making neurotics out of them.Footnote 33
Paul Goodman wrote similarly in 1951, “If we speak, as we must, of a social and epidemic neurosis, it is not the symptomatic social eccentricities … that are pathologically important, but the normal knowledge and technique, the average way of life.”Footnote 34 Inverting the mainstream discourse on juvenile delinquency, these writers diagnosed the social order as pathological and celebrated transgressive behavior as psychologically healthy.
The idea of “social neurosis” gained broader circulation when the noted social psychologist Erich Fromm used it in his book The Sane Society (1955) to critique the “political realism” that justified the atomic arms race. Fromm wrote that a “schizophrenic indifference” to the possibility of nuclear annihilation had been widely adopted by the mainstream culture in the name of adjusting to reality, resulting in a “pathology of normalcy.”Footnote 35 In his poem “America,” of 1956, Allen Ginsberg associated this social neurosis with the Cold War buzzwords “serious” and “responsible”:
A common thread running through these various articulations of the “social-neurosis” discourse of the 1950s was the influence of Reichian psychology. In his psychoanalytical arguments for a sexual revolution, published in the United States in 1949,Footnote 37 Wilhelm Reich wrote that the social neurosis had an embodied dimension, which he called “muscular armor.” In lieu of authentic contact with the physical environment, the pathologically socialized individual was physically and sexually walled off from others. This was because society had grown so repressive that healthy levels of animal aggression and sexuality were no longer tolerated. The result was that the average man lacked energy and connectedness – connectedness between the mind and the body, and between self and other. In the poem “Howl,” published in 1957, Allen Ginsberg relied on this Reichian formula when he compared American society to the Canaanite god Moloch, to whom worshippers sacrificed their children: he denounced it as “Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!”Footnote 38 Paul Goodman's social psychology was also rooted in the Reichian perspective; he concluded that apathy and sadism were the twin symptoms of normative socialization.Footnote 39
As opposed to the disconnectedness associated with “muscular armor,” healthy body–mind connectedness was imagined as both necessary to individual integrity and corrective of the social order. By the logic of this discourse, “seriousness” was an affective disposition enforcing the social neurosis and its resultant sadism and apathy. Therefore its opposite, playfulness, constituted a perspective and a practice that was both psychologically healthy and socially subversive. This is the discursive context out of which West Side Story creates its defense of youthful play as a form of social struggle. Its construction of the transgressive youthful subject is therefore, like Reichian psychology, inherently masculinized. Anita tells Maria that the boys fight (and, it is implied, fuck) like they dance: as if they “have to get rid of something quick … too much feeling.”Footnote 40
The markers of ethnicity – whether white working-class or Latino – that the musical invokes are, moreover, intended to magnify the freedom, energy, and virility that Robbins associated with youth. As Negrón-Muntaner has commented, in West Side Story the Sharks' latinized masculinity connotes “everything opposed to rigidity and repression: a boundless energy and irrepressible sexuality.”Footnote 41 In the fall of 1941, soon after he first devised the “War Babies” scenario, Robbins (then Jerry Rabinowitz) wrote from Mexico to his parents that he loved the appellation joven that he had encountered there: “It doesn't mean young man, or youngster, or adolescent, it means youth. And nothing is nicer.”Footnote 42 The ethnic rivalry of the youths in West Side Story is a condition enabling the intensity of their play – like dividing into teams to play sports. Thus at the “war council” in which the terms of their rumble are agreed upon, its elaborate rules supersede whatever ethnic animosity is present.
While the Jets and Sharks are mutually intent on staging a rumble, it is Schrank who is revealed in the scene as the only one with bona fide racial animosity. His repeated threats against the Sharks and Jets show the sadistic side of adult authority that Goodman warned against. Like the “pathology of normalcy” that Fromm identified with atomic weapons, the violence that he threatens them with is worse than the fighting that he pretends to be protecting them from. When he saunters into Doc's candy store to interrupt the council, he indulges in racial slurs that offend the Jets as well as the Sharks. Bernardo lunges at Schrank, but is restrained by two Jets, Riff and Ice. Schrank then aims more taunts at Bernardo, which earn him only resentful glares from Riff. Finally Schrank kicks the chair that Bernardo is sitting on out from under him. “Clear out, you! I said clear out!” he snarls, his voice rising. He flaunts his privileged use of excessive force: “Oh, yeah, sure, I know: ‘it's a free country, an’ I ain't got the right.’ But I got the badge. Whadda you got?”Footnote 43 The Sharks leave the candy store, but as they go, Bernardo and Riff exchange a meaningful glance of mutual understanding.
As this scene illustrates, the two youth gangs present a united front against adult authority on multiple occasions.Footnote 44 Unwilling to risk open warfare against Schrank and Krupke, their defiance mainly takes the form of verbal sparring with the adults, in which the two gangs show mutual appreciation for one another's wordplay. When Schrank and Krupke break up the fistfight on the playground, for example, Riff and the Jets greet Schrank with ironically exaggerated politeness, and Bernardo and the Sharks give Krupke the same treatment. The physical arrangement of bodies is in the process transformed: from that of a face-off between the two gangs to that of two adults surrounded by a gauntlet of youths. When Schrank drags Baby John towards the Sharks and asks him which of them was responsible for piercing his ear, Riff intervenes to draw Schrank's attention away, offering, “We suspicion the job was done by a cop.” When Officer Krupke responds, “Impossible!” it is Bernardo's turn, in this improvised play of call-and-response, to riposte, “In America, nothing is impossible.” Bernardo wins even more admiring looks from the Jets when he asks Schrank to translate his ensuing tirade into Spanish.
When the sequence of dances in the musical as a whole is surveyed, the logic of its structure is likewise revealed as predicated on the youth-versus-adult (not the Sharks-versus-Jets) binary. The youthful excess of the mambo dance-off is nested within two confrontations with Schrank over ownership of the streets (“Overture” and “Rumble”) that more violently exceed adult authority. In turn, the rumble, which provides the musical's narrative climax, is bookended by the two dances that most overtly articulate the confrontation between youth and adulthood: “Gee, Officer Krupke” and “Cool.” The symmetry of these two dances in the overall structure of the musical is reflected by the fact that, from the play version to the film version, their places in the story were switched.
Both are dances that feature the Jets in gang mode. In both they are working to formulate responses to actions by the Sharks; yet in both cases the youth–adult conflict subsumes the Jets–Sharks conflict. Although there are dances that feature only the Sharks (“America”) and dances that feature the two gangs in competition (“Dance at the Gym” and “Rumble”), in those dances the youth–adult conflict is always addressed indirectly, through the youths' engagement in forms of illicit play during which adult authority hangs over their heads like an invisible sword of Damocles. In these two dances, however, the youth–adult conflict is addressed directly. In “Gee, Officer Krupke” the Jets exhibit their mastery and mockery of the juvenile-delinquency discourse. In “Cool” they remind each other that their survival depends on camouflaging their anger at the adult world.
“GEE, OFFICER KRUPKE”
“Gee, Officer Krupke” is staged when, following the dance at the gym, the Jets wait in front of Doc's candy store for the Sharks' arrival for the war council. But Officer Krupke arrives on the scene first, and they respond to his threats and inquiries with a parody of the juvenile-delinquency discourse. The Jets playfully convolute this discourse by claiming that home is “such a bad environment” that the streets are preferable: “We don't get no love dere … If you don’ leave us stay out on da streets all night, we liable toin into a buncha joovenile delinquents.”Footnote 45 This sets the tone for the song-and-dance number that begins upon Krupke's departure, in which the Jets further lampoon adult institutions. The dance number is structured as a game of merry-go-round, in which Riff is passed from one social institution to another, and ends up back at the beginning: from Officer Krupke, to a judge in the juvenile courts, to a psychoanalyst, to a social worker, and finally back to Krupke. Near the end of the dance, Riff is physically passed from hand to hand among various gang members mimicking adults, each of whom hits him on the head while pronouncing what “the trouble is” with him.
This hitting is one of two recurring motifs in the choreography. In the moments leading up to the dance, A-Rab calls Krupke a “headbuster,” and Tiger, who is holding a rolled-up newspaper, responds by beating A-Rab over the head with it as if it were a nightstick. In the role of “Officer Krupke,” Tiger continues playfully to “bust the head” of every Jet who speaks (next Snowboy, then Baby John), until Riff engages him in the dialogue that begins the dance. Similar beatings are administered to Riff, as a representative of youth, after each verse – by the “police officer,” the “judge,” and the “psychiatrist” – whenever he begins to speak. The “social worker” joins in too, tweaking his nose, slapping his face, and giving him multiple slaps on the wrist. The pace of the beatings accelerates near the end of the number, culminating in Riff's being passed from hand to hand. But the dance ends with Riff's taking the “nightstick” and knocking “Officer Krupke” unconscious, as all the Jets sing in unison, “Krup you!”
The complement of this adult violence, as represented in the dance, is adult sentimentality. These are the two attitudinal poles between which the adult personae careen erratically. Tiger as “Officer Krupke” veers irrationally from tearful empathy to angry beatings in a passing moment. “That's a touchin’ good story!” he weeps, wiping his eyes; “Just tell it to the judge!” he snaps, hitting Riff with the newspaper.
For their part, the Jets portray themselves as playing knowingly on this sentimentality. Backing Riff up in the first verse, Big Deal, Mouthpiece, and Snowboy join him in forming a suitably sentimental “barbershop quartet” while claiming that they are good boys who are deprived of love and understanding. Their hand motions reinforce their claims in parodic pantomime. Riff lays his open hands against his chest while Big Deal flashes the “okay” sign with his right hand and Snowboy sniffles pathetically behind them.
The most exaggerated embodiment of their play on sentimentality is the posture of kneeling supplication that the Jets assume at both the beginning and the end of the dance. At the outset, Riff kneels with clasped hands, begging “Officer Krupke” to understand him as he laments his poor upbringing. At the song's end, this attitude is reiterated by all the other Jets, who kneel in front of “Officer Krupke” imploring his guidance, while Riff leaps into his arms to be held like a child.
In the choreography, such violations of personal space as Riff's leap into “Krupke's” arms suggest the physical means by which the youths imagine themselves fighting back against the adults' impositions on their bodies. As he is paraded from institution to institution, Riff is not only beaten, but petted on the head by the “judge” and sat on and stood on by the “psychiatrist.” In return he mashes the “social worker's” cheeks together, grabs her shoulders, sprays her with his saliva, and rubs his hands over her hair and face. As a version of the central struggle for control over social (that is, interpersonal) spaces, the dance includes such physical contacts within the range of play to which youth lays claim – an idea that links the number thematically to the rumble under the highway for which the Jets are preparing.
Riff's navigation through the series of adult institutions in “Gee, Officer Krupke” choreographically represents two opposed topographies. On one hand are the “serious” spaces of adult society. The Jets telescope the streetscape they inhabit into compacted “institutional” environments, transforming Doc's storefront into an imagined courtroom, the bench next door into a psychoanalyst's lounge, the stoop into a social worker's office, and wrought-iron gates into a jail. But on the other hand, in the interstices of the song, during which Riff transitions between these various institutions, the Jets engage in playful acts of spatial and choreographic breakaway that assert their own agency against these institutional circuits, reclaiming the streetscape with an unbridled energetic and physical virtuosity that amplifies their youthfulness. After the first verse, they engage in a parodic rendition of ring-around-the-rosie, dance a minuet, and twirl in circles. After the second verse, in which the “judge” pronounces Riff to be “psychologically disturbed,” the Jets revel in the physical possibilities of this diagnosis. With their bodies and limbs stiffened, they jerk their shoulders to their ears, transforming their hands into claws and thrusting stiff legs into a zombie-like walk. Action runs in place to the tune and rhythm of Riff's bursts of maniacal screaming.
Riff's encounter with Action-as-“headshrinker” in the third verse offers an unambiguous physical representation of the conflict between the Jets' celebration of their youth and the institutional forces that threaten it. Riff is supine, lying on the bench, while the psychoanalyst hovers over him. Riff rises into a sitting position and then rolls backwards, flipping over his shoulders into a headstand — a polysemous gesture that, while literalizing the “upside-down” quality of his life from the perspective of the adult authorities, simultaneously enlists a playful athleticism in resistance to their discourse. A physical struggle is thus commenced. Grabbing Riff by the back of his coat collar, the psychoanalyst forces him out of his headstand and lands him flat on his belly. He then sits on his immobile, temporarily controlled patient and pronounces Riff “sociologically sick.” But this pronouncement only triggers another moment of transition, in which the Jets gleefully sing and dance in a playful embodiment of their purported social pathology. As they joyfully repeat the diagnosis while screeching, kicking, and flopping their bodies on the sidewalk, Riff himself leaps into a handstand, and the other Jets collectively cheer. Thus resuming and amplifying his “upside-down”-ness, he locomotes along the sidewalk on his hands. The affect expressed is twofold: these moments of play are simultaneously a direct expression of youthful exuberance and a satire of adult discourse.
“COOL”
While “Gee, Officer Krupke” offers an overt display of youthful vitality, “Cool” is its antithesis: the focus of this dance is on developing effective control over the public display of emotion. In the play version of the musical, the Jets dance “Cool” in preparation for their rumble with the Sharks; in the movie, though, it becomes about hiding emotions from the adult authorities after the deaths of Riff and Bernardo. There is a thematic logic to Robbins's preference for the order of the dances in the film version.Footnote 46 “Cool” expands on the vocabulary of subversive strategies introduced in “Officer Krupke,” adding to that dance's evasions of adult expectations the possibility of an embodied evasion via the strategy of “getting cool.”
At this point in the plot, the movie reminds its viewers that, despite the killings, it is Schrank who remains the major threat. The scene begins with the Jets emoting uncontrollably and fighting among themselves about whether there is a need to take further revenge against the Sharks. But their argument is interrupted by the intervention of an adult: a man who leans out of a window above them to throw a bottle that shatters at their feet. “Shut up down there you dirty lousy good for nothin's! Why don't you go home where you belong?” he yells. This blatantly hypocritical sentimentalization of home life, coupled with a reassertion of adult control over the public space of the street, refocusses the Jets' anger onto adult authority. Action threatens, “The next creep who sounds on me, I swear, the next guy who gets up my craw, I'll kill,” but Ice finishes his sentence for him: “YOU'LL LAUGH!” Ice then admonishes the group as a whole:
No matter who or what is eatin’ at you, you show it, buddy boys, and you are dead! You are cuttin’ a hole in yourselves for them to stick in a red-hot umbrella and open it wide! Man, you wanna get past the cops when they start asking about tonight? You play it cool. You wanna live in this lousy world? Play it cool!Footnote 47
Ice herds the over-emotional Jets into a parking garage to help them regroup before they betray themselves.Footnote 48
As an affective strategy, cool emphasizes self-containment – not the repression of emotion associated in Reichian discourse with the listlessness of “muscular armor,” but a calibrated self-control that is energized by emotions roiling just below the surface. When uncontrolled emotional expression (getting “hot”) may be unsafe, cool maintains a tension created by preserving emotions even while containing them. “Go, man, go, but not like a yo yo schoolboy,” Ice instructs the Jets. In her book Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild defines cool as “an attitude (in the sense that African Americans use that word) that combines composure with vitality”: the “mask-like” detachment of one “whose body and energy may be working fast, hard, and hot, but whose face remains cool.”Footnote 49 Ted Gioia in his book The Birth (and Death) of the Cool also traces cool as a “cultural style” to the historical needs of an African American community “navigating through the especially tricky and dangerous conflict between inner and outer imperatives.”Footnote 50 He elaborates, “How could you express deep inner emotions with honesty while apparently holding them in check? … How could you exist outside the scope of oppressive social rules and imperatives while also following them to the letter?”Footnote 51 He attributes the spread of the cool aesthetic in mainstream American culture to the “Method” actors starring in popular movies of the early and mid-1950s, particularly Marlon Brando and James Dean: “Cool … would reveal while keeping things hidden. It would be emotionally involved while maintaining its distance.”Footnote 52 Cool, like other aspects of the emerging youth counterculture, was primarily masculine in its formulation. As the progenitors of cool, Gioia credits, in addition to Brando and Dean, the jazz musicians Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, and Miles Davis.
Significantly, at the end of the “Cool” dance, Action “goes gunning” for the man who threw the bottle. Backed by the entire Jets gang, he points his finger coolly at the camera (which offers us a point-of-view shot from the man's window) and mimes shooting. In contrast to how the gang danced without inhibition in the film's overture, taking over the streets with their buoyant, physically virtuosic moves, their retreat into the parking garage followed by their reemergence suggests the terms of a compromise: some of their energy will be redirected into an exertion of self-control, so that they can keep on fighting.
Action's “pow!” in the dance's final moment is the last in a series of such exclamations that recur throughout the dance and signify the emotional energy beneath the facade that the Jets are constructing. Early in the dance, as they work to “get cool,” A-Rab unexpectedly relapses into his former “hot” demeanor, punching his arm out to the side as he makes his fingers into the shape of a gun and screams, “Pow!” then laughs hysterically. Over the course of the dance, this gesture is not eliminated, but is disciplined and integrated into the emotional fabric of coolness, so that Action, at the dance's end, can control it and use it.
Because cool is embodied affect, the Jets cannot simply decide to exhibit it; they must bodily dance their way into it. In the song lyrics, Ice issues instructions for adopting cool as an embodied affect: “Boy, boy, crazy boy – Stay loose, boy! Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it – Turn off the juice, boy!”Footnote 53 But more importantly, his metronomic finger-snapping gives the Jets a shared physical rhythm and a physical point of return.Footnote 54
Throughout the film, finger-snapping denotes the affective struggle of youth against adult society, signifying their blend of resistance and accommodation. As a bodily event, finger-snapping is grounded in a muscular tension building beneath the surface, a tension that is revealed only when it is released as sound. Now, in an effort to establish the physical and emotional tenor of cool, Ice leads the Jets and their girls into a session of finger-snapping. He walks through the group making eye contact with the heated Jets, getting them to participate psychologically and engage physically in his cool practice. The consistent rhythm of this snapping reestablishes a group dynamic and also begins to relax the tempo of the Jets' overheated emoting. When Action temporarily loses it, walking away from the group and slamming his hand onto the hood of a nearby car, Ice draws him back into the fold of cool through his finger-snapping. At the end of the dance, everyone has gotten cool, as evidenced by their ability to dance in unison; and only then does Ice lead them out of the parking garage and back onto the street.
Robbins's choreographic structure dramatizes the slow progress of the group effort to achieve cool. After Action's outburst, two other Jets, Baby John and Snowboy, are likewise stricken with violent energy, translating their internal wildness into a series of frenzied turns that land them on the garage floor. Such outbreaks are seen to be contagious, as this duet triggers four other Jets to punch their right arms forcefully upward. But they are censured by the Jet girls, who respond with a “Shhhhhhhh,” attempting to quiet the boys' outburst of energy. The four Jets lower their outstretched arms with effort, using the weight of a forced and clenched fist to expel their uncontrollable energy. Only A-Rab remains out of control, and his inability to commit to either hot or cool is embodied by his effort to “punch out” his own energy with his fist. A verbal admonishment from Ice serves to bolster the claims of coolness, and A-Rab's tight, curled-up fingers are transformed into loose, flexible, mobile ones. He begins to “cool down” and the heated affect dissipates through his body as he glides from side to side, dancing out light, intricate footwork.
The Jet girls are more important in this dance than in any other. They help to inculcate the embodiment of cool. Breaking away from the rest of the group, the three of them reach out to reenact the extreme movements performed by Action and A-Rab, and in the process to reinscribe them. The girls reproduce the boys' movements in a manner that is energetic yet grounded. While maintaining the supremely important finger-snapping rhythm, they stoop to the floor, bending their knees. They reformulate A-Rab's gesture of punching the air, into a thrusting outward of their arms. Then they perform traveling footwork referencing A-Rab's uncool locomotion, but the energy of their movement is now refined. Even when engaging in full-body lunges, they maintain their composure. They bend forward to clap and then kick their right legs behind them as their upper bodies arch into a full-body inversion. Thus they take the Jets' heated gestures and stylize them, incorporating them into a vocabulary of movement more socialized than Action's initial flailings. If Action, in his grief and anger, is on the far side of the thetic threshold – as Julia Kristeva names the psychological border zone where subjectivity is compromised and language verges on the impossible – then the girls bring his movements back into the fold of social being, turning his outburst into a sign and mapping out the path of his return.Footnote 55
Soon the girls' dancing begins to have an effect on the others. Three Jets group in the background and begin to approach Graziella and her companions with snapping fingers, bent knees, hunched shoulders, and light feet. They are donning the mantle of cool, locating themselves within its affective boundaries. These incoming Jets echo the girls' clapping and their full-body inversion. Then the three girls and these three boys unite in couples, performing a frenetic partner dance on the balls of their feet that recalls Anita's earlier assessment that “they dance like they have to get rid of something, quick.” Their ability to dance a duet marks their attainment of a further level of cool: they are social beings again – but just barely.
Meanwhile, in the background, the rest of the Jets, including the energetically recalcitrant Action and A-Rab, have gathered in a group formation and begin to reproduce, in the form of a canon, the moves of clapping and bodily inversion that were first executed by the Jet girls. The sway of cool is gathering momentum as they take center stage. Led by Action, these dancers in formation snap their fingers and, with slightly hunched bodies and bent knees, locomote forward. Ice works as their affective coach, encouraging this group from the sidelines by clapping in time with their movements and carving space with his hands in a signal of moderation. The dancers expand their bodies laterally, and then spinning back in on themselves drop to the ground in a crouch. Ice darts through the mass of lowered bodies, taking a giant leap as he utters the word “Cool!” This prompts all the Jets, including the ones dancing in duets, to take upward, leaping jumps in unison. For the first time, the whole gang has cohered again.
Now their movements and utterances are no longer the desperate, wayward calls of A-Rab's earlier outbursts, but have become an exploration of the question, how hot can you be and still be cool? As Dixon Gottschild has explained, hot is always present in cool: “a laugh, a grimace, a verbal expression that seems to come out of nowhere to break, intercept, or punctuate the established mood by momentarily displaying its opposite and, thus, mediating a balance.”Footnote 56 Their “pows” become more randomly distributed as individual Jets make reaches towards the garage ceiling, hurling themselves into the air, transferring their energy overhead as they fling their arms and legs high; but each break from unison is now short-lived, and they come together in a unison rendition of “pow,” followed by a jumping turn which slides them onto the garage floor on their sides.
When they get back on their feet at this point, the Jets pause at Kristeva's thetic threshold, with a body position that itself is not fully one shape or the other. We see them standing but crouched, with elbows and knees bent, shoulders hunched, arms and hands splayed open. Their bodies are rigid as they vibrate in this shape, slowly raising their arms upwards and straightening their knees. For the moments in which the Jets occupy this shape, they embody divided and inarticulate intentions: perhaps a physical effort to maintain their cool in the face of a heat that threatens to escape; perhaps an indecision about their commitment to either hot or cool. This posture, in which they hover in an affective complex that defies resolution into a definite emotional state, physically signals the Jets' passage across the thetic threshold.Footnote 57 Next, having regained possession of themselves, they stand in a lunge (left leg in front and bent, back leg straight) with their heads lolling forward, arms and hands outstretched and flopping. They are literally “hanging loose,” self-consciously riding the line between cool and hot. But Action and Baby John must release another burst of energy and cycle again through the crouching position before they establish self-possession and the group again achieves unison.
The last phase of the dance demonstrates the Jets' accomplishment of the balanced state of cool. It returns again to the call-and-response form before resolving into an extended period of dancing in unison, followed by singing in unison, which completes their return to the social world. Appropriately, this phase of the dance begins with the girls again taking center stage. Thrusting their arms overhead, the girls shout “Cool!” while one group of Jets responds with “Go!” and the other group calls back “Crazy!” With each exclamation, the boys alternately throw their arms out or retract them, signifying the poles of emotional expression and self-containment that the words imply.
Gioia observes that cool as an ethos is historically associated with groups of social outsiders. This is because it embodies a coping strategy for the living conditions imposed by outsider status.Footnote 58 In West Side Story, multiple aspects of outsider status – poverty, ethnicity, and arguably queerness – are conflated in a countercultural representation of “youth.” Cool characterizes this oppositional youth culture, constituting their compromise position toward the dominant “social neurosis”: acknowledging the reality of society's power to destroy them, without agreeing to become its victim.
CONCLUSION
Even before it ends with a third death, on the playground, West Side Story has become a meditation on the potential costs of authentic play. On his way to meet Chino on the playground, Tony yells at Anybodys, “It's not playing any more! Can't any of you get that?” But the film says otherwise. After Tony's death, the Jets and Sharks claim his body and reoccupy the streets. Despite their casualties, Robbins insists, these youth will play and fight on.
Play in West Side Story is the bodily assertion of vitality in the face of adult regulation. If the costs are high, so are the stakes. According to cultural psychologist Lev Vygotsky, “It is incorrect to conceive of play as activity without purpose; play is purposeful activity … [and] the ultimate goal determines the child's affective attitude to play.”Footnote 59 The adult-sanctioned play of the playground does not affectively engage the Sharks and the Jets, because it connotes socialization into a society that they don't want to inhabit. Instead, they take to the streets in a range of play that includes dancing, fighting, and other proscribed behaviors.
In performing their subversive style of play, Robbins's and Bernstein's youths are not refusing to be socialized. Rather, they are engaged in a process of socialization into a society that they want to belong to but that does not exist. In a dance number from the Broadway musical that was cut from the film – a “dream ballet” to accompany Tony and Maria's song, “Somewhere” – Robbins invoked a “would-be world” that encapsulates his notion of this nonexistent society. According to Arthur Laurents, Robbins concentrated in rehearsals “almost exclusively” on perfecting this ballet.Footnote 60 As a complement to Tony's funeral procession, it emphasizes West Side Story's vision of extending youthful play beyond the fences of the playground. The stage directions describe it this way:
The two lovers begin to run, battering against the walls of the city, beginning to break through as chaotic figures of the gangs, of violence, flail around them. But they do break through, and suddenly – they are in a world of space and air and sun … [A]s boys and girls from both sides come on … They begin to dance, to play: no sides, no hostility now; just joy and pleasure and warmth. More and more join, making a world that Tony and Maria want to be in, belong to, share their love with … Jets to Sharks; Sharks to Jets. And they form what is almost a procession winding its triumphant way through this would-be world.Footnote 61
