TheMusicMan

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Last year (this was written in 2004 -ed) a friend showed me the video of the American musical "The Music Man" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Music_Man).

And recently I've been downloading a couple of tracks and mixing them into compilations.

I've started becoming extremely freaked by this musical. Consider the story :

A dishonest but charismatic salesman arrives in an agrarian backwater town : River City. He manufactures a moral panic by claiming the local pool hall is corrupting the town's youth. He tells the inhabitants that the solution is to organize the youth into a uniformed, military band, to teach them discipline and pride in their community.

He lies repeatedly, wins influence with the town's leaders through flattery, invents a fake past for himself, and seduces the librarian (intelligentsia) into complacency.

His motivation is purely to sell instruments to the town. He has no musical ability whatsoever. When his bluff is called, he is saved by a miracle.

In short, this is the classic fantasy of fascism : Unite behind, and trust absolutely and irrationally, a strong, charismatic leader; and he will lead you to miraculous victory.

It's the most fascistic (in this proper sense) film I've seen since Terry Gilliam's "BaronMunchausen" (another fantasy of trusting in an irrational fabulist rather than reason ... this time to stop a war, which the fabulist himself has started.)

But The Music Man verges on self-knowing. How can you not watch Harold Hill stirring up moral panic? Or see that his underlying motive is to commercially exploit the town's people - without seeing a satire as explicit as "TheResistableRiseOfArturoUri"?

And yet - and this is what's really getting me - do people see it for what it is? No-one I watched it with perceived this. The film itself seems to fall for the fantasy as much as the people of the town. It's a heroic triumph when the miracle happens, the band plays, and Hill is vindicated.

Faith in the irrational is rewarded.