Film musicals are enjoying a revival of late, with notable remakes and adaptations that update generic conventions from Broadway's and Hollywood's golden ages. Glitzy productions heighten the sex appeal in the recent film adaptations of Broadway hits Dreamgirls (2006) and Chicago (2002). Modern dress and rock music catapult the familiar story of starving Bohemian artists into contemporary times in Rent (2005). The Producers (2005) re-creates the backstage musical for audiences steeped in camp. But perhaps the film musical that best captures the technical wizardry and frenetic energy of today's entertainment climate is Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001). With Moulin Rouge!, the third and final instalment of his Red Curtain Trilogy, Luhrmann has fashioned a cinematic tour de force that gives exuberant expression to his aesthetics of postmodern eclecticism. Deploying the signature postmodern characteristics of intertextuality and irony, merging of élite and pop culture, and celebration of simulacra, woven together in a brilliant kaleidoscope of saturated colours and glossy surfaces, the Australian director proffers with this film his reinterpretation of the musical for the twenty-first century.

Even more than its extravagant servings of glitziness, irony and pop references, Moulin Rouge! distinguishes itself from other recent film musicals by its degree of intermingling with conventions and formulas from other genres, extending from Romantic operas to rock videos. Multiple and sometimes opposing discourses collide into one another, and pre-existing genres mix to conflate past and present ways of ordering experience. Film theorist Rick Altman writes on genres and the production of meaning: ‘By prejudicing us toward one set of intertexts rather than another (and thus toward a particular set of patterns), [genres] provide and enforce a pre-reading of the text at hand’.Footnote ¹ In other words, generic conventions provide certain frameworks and presuppositions that prod a viewer towards a given interpretation of text, so that mixing genres results in the displacement of one readily recognisable set of possible meanings for a more complex dialogue of divergent meanings. Through the interpellation of salient features from other related yet distinct art forms, Moulin Rouge!, in particular, simultaneously recuperates and destabilises the film musical's ideological constructs that cluster around notions of entertainment, community and romantic love.Footnote ²

Many critics have noted how the film's stylistic promiscuity calls into question the generic boundaries and conventional readings of film musicals.Footnote ³ Shifting the emphasis, I will interrogate instead the ways the backstage musical format allows a critical engagement with the dominant ideologies of the operatic stage. In the early days of American popular theatre, opera exerted a strong influence on the budding genre of the musical, offering both a more aesthetically sophisticated model of music-dramatic spectacle and a source of familiar arias and singers.Footnote ⁴ Reversing the Hollywood musical's tendency to tout the virtues of popular entertainment at the expense of élite culture, Moulin Rouge! makes explicit the connections between the two genres and pays enthusiastic tribute to its high-class predecessor. But, intentionally or not, by grafting the self-reflexive, parodic tone of the backstage musical onto a narrative blending of two of the most beloved Romantic operas – La bohème and La traviata – this postmodern musico-cinematic fare is compelled to attend to many of the same political concerns that have occupied the most recent generation of opera scholars.

Despite its energy and interdisciplinarity, opera scholarship has remained somewhat conservative, often limited to the analysis of canonical works by Verdi and Wagner and to replaying age-old debates about the relationship of music and text.Footnote ⁵ Jeremy Tambling suggests that opera itself may be the most conservative and static art form on our contemporary cultural landscape, with repertory companies recycling the same handful of ‘masterpieces’ for audiences comprised mainly of the socioeconomic élite and radical reworkings of the canon by maverick directors meeting impassioned opposition from the Old Guard.Footnote ⁶ Still, under the influence of feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, opera critics have begun to explore opera's darker side, interrogating issues of race, gender and sexuality.Footnote ⁷ Playfully and provocatively, Moulin Rouge! grapples with many of the same questions, at once affirming, answering back and even looking beyond the purview of current opera scholarship in its filmic reformulations of the operatic topoi of sex, class, exoticism, authorship and performance.

It is a truism that opera requires a leap of faith on the part of the modern audience. Overweight divas, aged heroes, singing villages and convoluted stories of mistaken identities and misbehaving deities tax the imagination of audiences accustomed to the level of verisimilitude more typical of film. In Moulin Rouge! Luhrmann exaggerates the artificiality that permeates opera and (to a slightly lesser extent) the backstage musical, laying bare from the start the various constructive elements that buttress the story. The curtain opens on Moulin Rouge! with a conductor ‘conducting’ the overture, reclaiming some of the ‘aura’ of live performance that was lost in the transition to canned soundtracks. The overture consists of the musical logo for 20th Century Fox and, as in the Hollywood films of yore, an orchestral medley made up of thematic music from the soundtrack, beginning with ‘The Hills Are Alive’ from The Sound of Music and ending with Offenbach's ‘Can-Can’. The overture and title card situate the setting of the film in Paris, 1900, replete with simulacra of objects and landmarks signifying the romantic and bohemian lifestyle of the city's artistic community at the turn of the century. Dressed as a court jester, Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), who later plays an important role as the comic/tragic bearer of truths, introduces the main character with Nat King Cole's 1948 hit song ‘Nature Boy’. We see a dishevelled young man struggling to get himself up off the floor to make his way to the typewriter. Taking over the lyrics of ‘Nature Boy’ from Toulouse, Christian (Ewan McGregor) starts the voice-over narration, reading aloud the first lines of his story: ‘The greatest thing you'll ever learn / is just to love and be loved in return’. This opening sequence thus sets up several frames through which to regard the story – as a performed spectacle, actuated by the anonymous conductor in the orchestra pit, and as a recollection of earlier events conjured up with songs and narration. Later, a show staged within the show will function as a mirror to the ‘real’ story. The conductor, the singer and the writer all act as surrogates for Luhrmann, who fabricates a story about a pair of star-crossed lovers in fin-de-siècle Paris by rearranging and interpreting the archive of songs, plots and imageries contained in our collective memory.

As the conductor of the title sequence reminds us, movie soundtracks have always helped to convey a film's emotional tone, while also providing musical hooks that encourage viewers to connect events and character dispositions across the drama. In opera, music is the raison d'être; in film musicals it plays a more ambiguous role, mediating between the diegetic and meta-diegetic realms, and between the realism of the narrative and the utopianism of the ‘frozen’ musical numbers that interrupt the storyline. The best film musicals from Hollywood's classical era tended to blur the distinction between the real and the utopian by collapsing the distance between the diegetic and musical tracks. Calling constant attention to the music and having music spill over into the diegesis, Moulin Rouge! tips the scale even further in the direction of an imagined utopia, towards the operatic realm of the fantastic. In the process, the film self-consciously highlights the various functions of music in opera and in the film musical – illuminating music's ability to express heightened emotions, to engage in dialogue with other texts, to perform identity and to contribute centrally to the pleasure-generating machinery of show biz.

In the film's first scenes, as the profiles of the main characters are developed, music works overtime to set the story in motion. Christian begins his tale with his arrival in the colourful Montmartre neighbourhood. In a serendipitous meeting with the bohemians working upstairs, Christian launches into a spontaneous performance of the ‘The Hills Are Alive (With the Sound of Music)’ and is engaged on the spot to write the book for a new show, to be performed at Moulin Rouge. The bohemians, now including Christian, make their way to the club, hoping to convince the star performer – and consumptive courtesan – Satine (Nicole Kidman) to sign on to their project. Through Christian's eyes, we become acquainted with ‘the beautiful creatures of the underworld’ – the Diamond Dogs, the girls and freaks who work for the club's impresario Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent). The scene is a riot of dancing bodies, as women of all sizes, shapes and colours literally kick up their heels and put their crotches on prominent display as they perform a frenzied can-can to ‘Lady Marmalade’, Patti Labelle's hit single about a New Orleans prostitute. Moneyed men in tuxedos watch with glee and repeat the lines from Nirvana's ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’: ‘Here we are now / Entertain us!’ The first number elaborates the song's original meaning, while the second poaches a single line from a teenage anthem and casts it in a new context. Throughout the film, the conventional meanings of the pre-existing music are both reinforced and negated, depending on the filmic context of the moment. Such ambiguation of meaning in film soundtracks is relatively commonplace; what is new in Luhrmann's oeuvre is the degree to which he delights in pointing out the difference between the original and the simulation.

Following the Diamond Dogs' rambunctious performance, the lights go out, the music stops and all eyes behold the mesmerising sight of Satine descending from the darkness above. Even while overflowing with good cheer and comedic flourishes, Satine's first scene establishes the story's doomed love triangle and gives a foretaste of the impending tragedy. Satine is the club's main attraction, a courtesan who sells her body and affections for money, a characterisation made explicit by her song repertory, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend’ and ‘Material Girl’. She is a commodity to be consumed (a ‘sparkling diamond’, according to Toulouse), her exchange value equal to the high-class baubles she demands from her male clientele. And in fact this particular performance is motivated by her hopes of getting funding for a new show, a star vehicle that will jump-start her acting career. She is not only exhibiting her body for the male audience in general; she is whetting the sexual appetite of one specific spectator, the Duke (Richard Roxburgh) – the potential investor – whose lack of proper name denotes his status as the prototype of a patron of a certain class and gender. (In fact, with his customary attire of a tuxedo and generally nondescript features, the Duke epitomises in his person the male patrons that crowd the club.)

At first glance this scene reinforces Laura Mulvey's contention that women in film function solely as passive erotic objects, to be pleasurably looked at by the male audiences on either side of the screen.Footnote ⁸ Yet we get the sense that Satine is more than mere eye candy. Flaunting her physical assets and playing the vixen in a parodic fashion, she divulges to Zidler her dream of becoming a real actress. In her first scene, Nicole Kidman playing Satine exhibits the range of her acting, and with her high-voltage charisma threatens to overwhelm and overshadow her male co-stars. As Carolyn Abbate has argued, women performing and singing can wrest the authorial voice away from their male creators to assume – if only momentarily – the active male subject position. But according to Abbate, there is often a hefty price to be paid for the theft of the male composer's voice: the heroine's life.Footnote ⁹ To an opera aficionado, this scene feels all too familiar – lively merry-making with music, dance and a beautiful but consumptive courtesan – a synopsis with more than a passing resemblance to the first act of La traviata and the second act of La bohème. Perhaps Christian is Alfredo to Satine's Violetta, come to avow his love for her and take her away from this dizzying and demeaning lifestyle. Or he could be the poet Rodolfo warming the hands and heart of a girl called Mimì with his lyrical verses. (Christian is actually both the privileged scion of middle-class background and a poor poet.) One thing is clear: as a composite of Violetta and Mimì, the tubercular Satine is destined to die young, fated to become victim to what Susan McClary calls opera's ‘desire-dread-purge mechanism’.Footnote ¹⁰ Even as we marvel at the beautifully made-up face of the courtesan for the first time, a quick intercut of her death scene at the end of the film flashes across the screen, and this later fall is anticipated in her calamitous drop from a swing at the end of this supposedly frivolous number. Abbate maintains that in Romantic opera, a genre notorious for the ‘undoing of women’, the favoured plots are those that murder women ‘as a form of revenge, to assuage the anxiety born of the Jacobin uprising of performance’.Footnote ¹¹

It is precisely through her performance that Satine rises above her predestined role as a passive object and suggests the means of transcending or subverting her fate as sexual commodity. Satine's visual presence invokes illustrious female forebears such as Marlene Dietrich (Der blaue Engel, 1930) and Greta Garbo (Camille, 1936), while her choice of musical repertory in this scene links her to Marilyn Monroe and Madonna – two platinum blonde superstars of different eras who existed in radically contrasting relations to their public personas. Richard Dyer suggests that Monroe colluded in the construction of her image as the original playboy playmate throughout her abbreviated career.Footnote ¹² The film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), source for the song and dance number ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend’ – was a typical Monroe vehicle: her character Lorelei uses her seductive charms to marry for money, while her friend Dorothy (Jane Russell) finds fulfilment in romantic love.Footnote ¹³ Although the actress asked for better roles in the later years of her career, she never got the chance to play fully actualised or complex women. According to popular accounts of her biography, Monroe may have been driven to her tragically early death by her failure to find true love and to escape her sexpot image.

Madonna stands in stark contrast to Monroe, even as she pays homage to the star in her videos and performances. Madonna's 1985 ‘Material Girl’ video resurrects the mise-en-scène of Monroe's ‘Diamonds’ number to critique a social order that refuses to acknowledge women's subjectivity. Against the backdrop of her Monroe parody is the backstage story of the ‘real’ Madonna, pursued by a powerful producer who tries to win her over with lavish gifts. Madonna rejects these advances in favour of simpler and more sincere gestures of love. By counterposing the backstage Madonna against the staged Madonna, the singer calls attention to the sexual politics that reverberate throughout the male-dominated entertainment industry, in which women are compelled to offer themselves up as objects of consumption. Themes of gender performativity and anti-essentialist sex reversal permeate Madonna's oeuvre. And Madonna, unlike Monroe, is living well into her middle age, continuing to thrive in a profession formerly reserved for the young and/or male.Footnote ¹⁴

Through these allusions Satine claims a legacy that both pays homage to her glamorous sisters and knowingly winks at their clever artifice, their performative fiction. By making her way through a chain of iconic women – from the opera heroines Violetta and Mimì to the Hollywood divas Dietrich, Garbo and Monroe, and finally to the gender-bending pop star Madonna – Satine's performance suggests possibilities for women's agency within the restrictions of patriarchal capitalism, for ways of finding happiness even while pandering to male fantasies. Like Madonna, Satine plays her assigned role to a point, in order to get what she wants, all the while maintaining her strong subject position. Although she is known to be a courtesan, we never actually see her having physical relations for purely mercenary reasons. By offering her body as a prize without ever delivering on the promise, Satine fully exploits the one avenue open to her to achieve her ultimate dream: to become a fully fledged creative artist. Furthermore, as Dyer notes, a star's image is always intertextual, so that as we watch Satine, we cannot help but to see Kidman beneath the makeup, and the extra-filmic discourses around the star work as yet another ‘text’ that helps to complete the development of her character.Footnote ¹⁵ Around the time of the film's release, the tabloids were filled with stories of Kidman's and Tom Cruise's divorce, widely circulating rumours of infidelity, miscarriages and punitive financial settlements. In real life too, then, Kidman seemed vulnerable to the machinations of powerful men. Yet we know in retrospect that Kidman would move on from this personal crisis to win an Academy Award for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in 2003 and eventually become the highest-paid actress in Hollywood (whereas her ex was unceremoniously dumped from his fourteen-year contract with Paramount). Kidman's success belies the operatic conceit that the beautiful heroine must die and stay dead. In effect Kidman fulfils Satine's dream, as well as that of Monroe and Madonna, of becoming a serious creative artist, picking herself up after each filmic and personal ‘death’ to make yet another movie, to take even greater artistic risks.

If the male control of the heroine is rendered tenuous by Kidman/Satine's performance in this scene, the next scene further erodes and challenges the privileged position of male authorship. Dressed in a sexy negligee, Satine awaits the arrival of the Duke in her boudoir. Mistaking Christian for the Duke, she repeatedly attempts to seduce him, misinterpreting his eagerness to read her his poetry as a desire for sex. Satine again makes transparent the performative nature of a courtesan's work, loudly feigning arousal. The scene reinforces the conventional association of the phallus with creativity, with Satine asking ‘inspiring enough for you?’ while grabbing Christian's penis and the voyeuristic Toulouse exclaiming ‘he's got a huge talent!’ as the courtesan unzips his pants. Music transforms the comedy into romance, infusing Christian's poetry with real heartfelt emotions.Footnote ¹⁶ When he begins to sing the line ‘my gift is my song’ from Elton John's ‘Your Song’, Satine halts her fake orgasm to listen in wonderment. The two protagonists dance together, à la Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, bathed in the warmth of Placido Domingo's moon glow and voice, and as in the classic RKO musicals, their love is sealed by the time they take their final well-synchronised step. It is only at this point that Satine finds out, to her dismay, Christian's real identity. She is subsequently forced to juggle the writer and the Duke in her quest to attain both personal and professional fulfilment.

Following the self-reflexive tendency of earlier backstage musicals, Moulin Rouge! foregrounds the business aspects of putting on a show and ends up deconstructing and demystifying the creative process. If film theory has shown how the Hollywood musical is rooted in a tight collusion between patriarchal capitalism and cultural product (with the female star the creation of male genius, paid for and consumed by male patronage), the next scene of Moulin Rouge! simultaneously reinforces and contradicts this premise.Footnote ¹⁷ It peeks at the backstage dealings of the entertainment industry, in which a show must be sold to potential investors with an exciting story, exotic settings and other promises of enticing amusement. In the pitch for their show – to be titled Spectacular Spectacular – Satine, Zidler and the bohemians seem to patch together the story on the spot. Although the writer comes up with the main idea – the far-from-original theme of ‘Love!’ – the creative process is collaborative, involving not just the writer and the producer, but also the actors and the Duke, who stands for both investor and audience.Footnote ¹⁸

The notion of a single authorial genius is further eroded by Spectacular Spectacular's reliance on pre-existing music and formulaic storylines. Just as Christian's earlier musical utterances were actually composed by Richard Rodgers and Elton John, the music and plot of Spectacular Spectacular is a pastiche of Rodgers, Hammerstein, Offenbach and Delibes, and is clearly understood by all but the Duke to be a fictionalised version of the romantic relationship that is blossoming between Christian and Satine. The collaborative conception of Spectacular Spectacular highlights the very inspirations, constraints and justifications that define the genres of opera and musical, and that shape their reception. The format of the musical suggests the song ‘The Hills Are Alive’, which in turn suggests a setting in the Swiss Alps (mistaken for Sound of Music's Austrian Alps), immediately discarded in favour of the more exotic India. The plot takes shape in similarly contingent ways, as when the Duke rhetorically asks ‘How about the ending? Someone dies, yes?’ According to Moulin Rouge!, love, as grand as it is, is an endlessly recycled emotion, which most of us can express only with the aid of other people's songs, poems and stories.

Christian and Satine fall more deeply in love as they work together on the show. The day before the opening night of Spectacular Spectacular, the Duke discovers the true nature of their relationship. In a jealous rage, he enjoins Zidler to change the ending to establish the triumph of the maharajah (obviously modelled on himself) over the penniless sitar player (modelled on the writer) in their contest for the courtesan's hand. Because Satine knows she has the power to influence the Duke, she plays along, hoping to keep the original ending and therefore to end up with the man she loves off stage as well. Yet that fateful night, she steps out of character just for a moment, allowing the Duke to see where her affection really lies. The Duke threatens to kill Christian, and Satine repulses her lover in order to save his life.

The overwrought emotions generated by the love triangle find their expressive outlet in the film's culminating scenes. In a montage whose intensity equals that of famous ensemble climaxes such as the Rigoletto quartet and the ‘Tonight’ quintet from West Side Story, two scenes – Satine's and Duke's long-postponed dinner date and Christian's song of jealousy – are intercut with a spectacular tango sequence danced simultaneously on stage at the Moulin Rouge. In the tango, set to The Police's song ‘Roxanne’, the Narcoleptic Argentinean (Jacek Koman) and the gypsy prostitute Nini Legs-in-the-Air (Caroline O'Connor) enact the stages of an archetypal love triangle in which the woman must bear the brunt of the violence that erupts when two men vie to possess her. At the same time, the Duke presents Satine with a resplendent diamond necklace; but in the grip of true love she is no longer able to act out her performative role convincingly. Realising at last that his diamonds and riches cannot buy the courtesan's heart, the Duke resorts to violence and sexually assaults her, an act that parallels the climax of the tango. The leading men of the film's dual love triangles, the Narcoleptic Argentinean and Christian, sing the interwoven songs while the visual frame shows different men molesting and tossing around the bodies of the mute leading women. Like her tango-dancing rival Nini and their operatic sister Carmen, Satine's singing voice is silenced and her body made the target of male violence precisely because she threatens to escape male control.

The story reaches its crashing conclusion during the première performance of Spectacular Spectacular, another exoticised re-enactment of the Satine–Christian–Duke relationship. For this climactic scene, the stage is festooned in the opulent colours of an imagined India, and the song ‘Hindi Sad Diamonds’ accompanies an elaborate Busby Berkeleyesque dance sequence. In keeping with the long tradition of orientalism in both opera and musical theatre, Spectacular Spectacular is set in a faraway land and offers sensuous delights associated with the locale, real or not, such as the ‘tantric can-can’.Footnote ¹⁹ However, the representation of the exotic in Luhrmann's show-within-a-show departs in significant ways from its operatic antecedents, most notably in the racial identities assigned to the main characters. Whereas the orientalist operas of the late nineteenth century often cast heroines who were ethnically and racially ‘other’ against a white male hero, thus justifying the heroine's colonisation and ultimate extermination, in Spectacular Spectacular the white Satine plays the courtesan, the Jewish Zidler the evil maharajah, and the Narcoleptic Argentinean the penniless sitar player (who also serves as Christian's counterpart in the ‘Hills Are Alive’ and tango scenes).

But this is only one way in which Luhrmann's film plays with ethnic and racial signifiers that confound conventional cultural boundaries and instead dissolve traditional binaries around the self/other axis. The Diamond Dogs, a chorus of girls who span the racial gamut and include dwarves and obese women, dance to music that cuts a swathe across different geographical regions and time periods, remixed both to accentuate and to neuter ethnic associations: the British rock hit ‘Roxanne’ appropriated as tango, Gloria Estefan's ‘Rhythm of the Night’ stripped of its Cuban tinge, the invocation of a ‘Creole Lady Marmalade’ followed by the appearance of the fair Satine, and so on … In the Busby-Berkeley-style dance sequences, unlike in actual Berkeley numbers, the individuality of the dancers is emphasised, further maximising rather than erasing difference. And throughout the number, the heterogeneous music keeps the different cultural strains audibly distinct instead of assimilating them into a seamless whole, so that the varying musical layers together emblematise polycultural accretion rather than monocultural colonisation.

The medley ‘Hindi Sad Diamonds’, for example, commingles songs as disparate as ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend’ and ‘Chhama Chhama’, recorded by the popular Bollywood singer Alka Yagnik. The juxtaposition points to new conceptions of cultural flows, in which cultural goods circulate multi-directionally rather than solely from the West to the rest.Footnote ²⁰ Bollywood has been a particularly fertile site of analysis for scholars interested in transnational cultures both for its immense reach and its considerable influence as an alternative to Western modernity in budding film industries within and without Indo-diasporic communities.Footnote ²¹ As an Australian, Luhrmann came of age as an artist at the interstices of various cultural flows, receptive to influences from both the dominant Anglo-American bloc and neighbouring Asian countries, including India. His evocation of Bollywood is only one of several such attempts in today's West. Recent years have seen several Indian/Anglo-American musical hybrids that transcend old models of Western cultural cooption or theft, such as the films Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) and the stage musical Bombay Dreams (London 2002, New York 2004). With the ever-increasing global traffic of people and cultural artefacts, categories such as Hollywood and Bollywood, Broadway and Bombay, begin to look less like discrete styles or locations and more like treasure troves to plunder for the creation of new polycultural works.

The two songs that comprise ‘Hindi Sad Diamonds’ hail from two distant, yet overlapping traditions; musically and lyrically, they maintain their singularity even while sharing common themes. The Hindi song ‘Chhama Chhama’ comes from the 1997 Indian epic film China Gate, loosely based on Akira Kurosawa's Japanese classic The Seven Samurai (1954), which also inspired the Hollywood film The Magnificent Seven (1960). Both songs originated as music for song and dance numbers in films and have to do with the complicated rituals of romantic courtship; the varying melodic and timbral inflections are held together by a strong techno-beat. ‘Chhama Chhama’ refers to the jingling of the bells on the ankles of the female singer (possibly chosen as a reference to the famous ‘Bell Song’ from another musical spectacle set in India, Delibes's Lakmé?). She drives her male addressee crazy with her bells and flirtatious ways, he entices her with promises of material rewards, and they fall in love. The version of ‘Diamonds’ here lacks the gaiety of either its earlier incarnation or the Hindi song. The lyrics are distilled to their sheer essence – ‘Kiss hand, Diamonds best friend / Kiss grand, Diamonds best friend / Men Cold, Girls Old, / And we all lose our charms in the end’ – sung in a sombre tone by Satine bedecked in the Duke's diamonds. As the song ends, Zidler and the Duke both stake their claims on Satine, and the courtesan capitulates to the indomitable forces of patriarchal capitalism. Earlier Satine had rendered the same song as an ironic romp; ultimately forced to fulfil her role as a courtesan, she no longer believes in the comfort of material luxury yet cannot loosen the golden shackles closing in on her.

In the middle of Satine's performance, Christian, insensate to her pain, barges onto the stage and throws money at his former lover ‘to pay for my whore’. Although his actions deviate from the script of Spectacular Spectacular, the scene is familiar, its lines lifted almost verbatim from Alfredo's outburst in La traviata – once again belying Christian's authority as the author of the show-within-a-show. Unaware of the heroines' sacrifice, both Christian and Alfredo publicly humiliate the women by reminding them of their debased social position. In Moulin Rouge! the one thing that can redeem the love between Christian and Satine is music. Satine sings their secret love song, ‘Come What May’, the only original song on the soundtrack (written for but not used in Luhrmann's earlier film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet), suggesting that perhaps the diva does have the power to abandon the script and choose her own ending. Christian joins Satine's singing, at first hesitantly (and in the minor), then in full voice. Then Toulouse, playing the magical sitar, which ‘can only tell the truth’, reveals that the Duke had made arrangements to have Christian killed and that Satine was only trying to protect him. As in the earlier love scene, music – both sung and embodied as a metaphor through the sitar – gets to the authentic heart of the matter. Through music, the authorial function is dispersed among the performers, and the Duke, who does not sing, is in the end prevented from rewriting the story to suit him.

At this moment of artistic triumph and blissful reunion with her beloved, Satine collapses. While the audience on the other side of the curtain thunderously applauds the musical's brilliant star, her diseased lungs finally give out.Footnote ²² The stage story ends happily in the tradition of film musicals, but the backstage story veers in the direction of grand opera to close with the heroine's tragic demise. Even with all the hand-wringing over how Spectacular Spectacular will end, everyone has known from the beginning how this larger story would conclude: the prima donna's death is overdetermined. With her last breath, Satine urges Christian to write their story, ensuring that their love will live on. The closing scene makes a circular return to the opening scene, with Christian typing the final words of their love story, Toulouse singing ‘Nature Boy’ and the conductor signalling the curtain's descent. Even while they remind us of the constructed and mediated nature of the film, these framing devices somehow do not diminish the emotional impact of these concluding events. Even though Satine's death is inevitable and the story emphatically derivative, the ending is deeply moving, suggesting that this formulaic plot of love and loss works because it taps into some universal human drama.

Continuing to explore the intersection of the spectacular and musical, Luhrmann produced Puccini's La bohème for Broadway in 2002, dusting off and tweaking his 1993 production from the Sydney Opera House. The Broadway run provoked a lively debate on the state of contemporary opera as fans and detractors energetically chimed in to enumerate the merits and misses of the film-maker's vision for the art. Everyone seemed to agree that Luhrmann brought a cinematic sensibility to stage direction, but opinion was divided over whether this was to the benefit or detriment of opera. The most often cited criticism was that the visual was often emphasised at the expense of the musical. The New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini found the musical performances so wanting that he went so far as to bemoan ‘the future of opera’.Footnote ²³

The spectacular aspects of opera are just as important as the music in creating meaning and shaping audience reception of the work. As the immense popularity of Zeffirelli productions attests, opulent mise-en-scènes and physically attractive stars have their appeal for the opera audience as well as for the cinematic one. In fact, recent marketing ploys playing up the physical attributes of Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli or the controversy surrounding Deborah Voigt's dramatic weight loss merely echo Maria Callas's Cinderella story of suddenly acquired beauty from half a century ago. Unlike opera criticism, which has tended to ignore the visual elements of staging, writing about film music has long been concerned with the music–image dichotomy, with critics grumbling long and loud about the privileging of the visual over the aural.Footnote ²⁴ Film musicals are generally considered to be exceptional in this regard in that the music often takes precedence over and even dictates the image track. As indicated by the title of the show-within-a-show, Spectacular Spectacular, Luhrmann has a more than passing interest in the dynamic interplay between music and spectacle, but even with his love of over-the-top visual effects, his productions are extraordinarily attuned to the subtleties of music. Throughout Moulin Rouge!, musical excerpts or lyrics making specific musical allusions guide and even determine the narrative course of action, without being compromised by the attention paid to visual detail. In the best tradition of musicals, Luhrmann serves up abundant helpings of both music and spectacle, creating contexts in which the aural and visual are not an either/or proposition, but rather interact to create a sum that is greater than its parts.

Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! and La bohème are exemplary postmodern texts, in the sense outlined by Jim Collins, in that they serve as critiques of both avant-garde élitism and stuffy traditionalism.Footnote ²⁵ With the film, in particular, the auteur, free to pilfer from other works with his characteristic voracity, orchestrated an important musical work of greater originality and force than most opera productions on the stage today. To be sure, a score made up wholly of the hackneyed pop songs of yesteryear challenges the very basis of opera orthodoxy. Guardians of élite culture tend to distrust anything resembling pop culture, exalting what is ‘authentic’ – usually meaning non-commercial – in opera, conveniently forgetting that opera was a more populist form of entertainment in the nineteenth century, before the advent of mass media technologies, and porous enough to absorb elements from popular music and to provide melodic fodder for the budding popular music industry. Indeed the traditionalists' authenticity, in the purity of form and intent they claim for their culture, cannot possibly exist in today's hyper-commercial and fragmented society and, in all likelihood, has never existed except as a nostalgic fantasy.

And perhaps non-traditional incursions, such as the technology of cinema, can even ultimately revive the moribund genre, which remains ‘pure’ and isolated at its peril. The fixity of celluloid takes away the vibrant spontaneity of a live performance, but theatres around the world can exhibit the work to a wider array of audiences, and ‘liveness’ can now be captured or simulated in a variety of ways with ever-advancing technology. Experimental ventures such as the Tristan Project, a collaboration between the Los Angeles Philharmonic, video artist Bill Viola and director Peter Sellars, or the simultaneous broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's première of Tan Dun's The First Emperor in movie theatres around the United States, hint at the potential riches still to be mined in the overlap and integration of the movie screen and opera stage. Just around the time I was writing this essay, the Los Angeles Times published yet another story about the new strategies of major American opera houses, namely the Metropolitan and Los Angeles Opera, in their efforts to become more relevant to their surrounding communities, citing the inclusion of more musicals and operettas in their programmes and the marked increase in the employment of Hollywood creative talent.Footnote ²⁶ A partnership with cinema not only opens up many avenues of potentially fruitful exploration, but will also require a paradigm shift in the production and reception values of opera, in ways intimated by Luhrmann's film musical.

To the majority of fans of Moulin Rouge!, many of whom are teenagers and young adults, the operatic allusions surely made little impression. Members of the audience, coming from different backgrounds and knowledge bases, possess widely varying capacity to recognise the film's wealth of quotations and references from popular and élite, Western and non-Western, and archaic and contemporary cultures. Viewers are thus made to tease out some kind of individual meaning through a process of bricolage, combining what they knew before the viewing and their introduction to new contexts for previous codings. In this act of assemblage, the viewer is as empowered as the auteur/author, assuming the role of a ‘curator of his or her musée imaginaire’.Footnote ²⁷ Just as the director, writer, conductor, producer, performers and patron reinscribe meaning on pre-existing texts in Satine's first scene, the Spectacular Spectacular pitch and première, and indeed the entire film, the viewer must step in where the performers leave off to complete the signifying process. As W. B. Worthen reminds us in an essay on Luhrmann's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, ‘performing reconstitutes the text; it does not echo, give voice to, or translate the text’.Footnote ²⁸ Likewise, the viewer of Moulin Rouge! reconstitutes the text, bringing his or her knowledge and imagination to bear on a reading of the film that is inevitably and vitally individual. If the strongly polarised reaction of movie critics is any indication of the general reception of this film, multiple interpretations (as well as of any other text, including its operatic precedents) – from camp to feminist to plagiarist – are possible.Footnote ²⁹ The fervent expressions of both admiration and revulsion incited by Luhrmann's productions for the stage and screen seem to reflect audiences' varying attitudes towards questions of originality, sanctity of texts, and interpretative mandates. Perhaps a new generation of Luhrmann fans will come to appreciate opera not for its inviolable secrets, hidden under layers of analysis and historical detritus, but for the ways in which a work engages with other cultural phenomena familiar to them, with experiences in their own lives. Luhrmann undoes – or perhaps ‘re-does’ – opera not to obliterate its considerable power, but to have it speak to us in our own contemporary vernacular, in the increasingly noisy Babel of twenty-first-century culture.