What the Ear Sees: Performing Bodies, Hollywood Spectacle, and the Mass-Mediated Musical

Lane O'Brien, Emily

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3xq5-q437

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What the Ear Sees: Performing Bodies, Hollywood Spectacle, and the Mass-Mediated Musical

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Within scholarship on mid-century Hollywood musicals, celebrity, glamour, and spectacle are commonly included in the conversation about the films themselves. Yet, what happened when these films – which privilege visuality – were adapted into purely aural forms, has not been as deeply analyzed. In this project, I track the cross-media life of Hollywood musicals, researching the ways that these films did not exist stagnantly on screen, but were functional material that had many iterations throughout media forms during the height of their popularity, including on the radio. Without considering these broadcasts – and all the ways that listeners consumed film properties – scholarship on the Hollywood musical is incomplete. This forgotten genre – radio musicals – affords a new vantage point on audience and media interaction that has been obscured by scholarship in the past. I mine radio remediations for the ways that listeners are invited to engage with the musical, looking across media to radio, to imagine the ways that audiences may have heard the musical during the mid-century. For example, in radio broadcasts of Hollywood musicals, the sounds of song and dance encourage listeners to imagine the visual and physical aspects of a musical performance through aural cues. By examining this forgotten genre, I seek to illustrate the multifaceted lives of the film properties in the mid-century and introduce a new vantage point for scholarship today.

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