Musical theater exists on two levels: the hetero plot and the not-so-hetero, often camp, subtext. I think everybody who’s thought about this topic for more than five seconds knows this, but I was reminded of it when introducing my daughters (well, the one who is old enough to have awakeness windows of more than a half hour) to “Bye Bye Birdie,” the movie version with Ann-Margret. Is it a musical about a teenager in chaste love, and secondarily (p.s. why is the subplot involving grown-ups always boring even when you’re a grown-up), a couple of 30ish adults in similarly unconsummated somethingorother? The movie’s most dated moment would have to be when Janet Leigh’s character, a grown woman engaged for 6 years to the same man, refers to herself as, much like 16-year-old Ann-Margret, a “good girl,” unsubtle code for having not put out.
Is it (apparently, per Google) about Kim’s father, suburban patriarch, being played by an actor apparently known for being flamboyantly gay? (And how young must I have been when I watched this originally to have missed this?)
The truth falls somewhere between plot and subtext: it’s a movie about female heterosexual desire. And not in a marriage-plot sense. Quite the contrary. As gorgeous and at times scantily-clad as Ann-Margret and Janet Leigh are in the film, its sole lust object is Conrad Birdie, Elvis stand-in, played by Jesse Pearson.
Birdie causes all the teenage girls in town (and across America and, apparently, Canada) to swoon. The girls, but also the mayor’s late-middle-aged wife (this is played for laughs), whose legs involuntarily open during the “Honestly Sincere” dance number. And Dick Van Dyke’s mother, Maureen Stapleton (sorry I know these people as the actors, not the characters) even honest-to-goodness asks him on a date. (Something about going for a drive in the country.) He’s rude about it when he rejects her, but her even asking demonstrates, it is fair to say, balls.
And somehow, miraculously, as a sex symbol, he holds up. All the boys in town look puny and insecure in their masculinity beside him. They’re all in their conformist suburban clean-cut get-ups and he shows up in skintight gold leather? lycra? who knows. If you image-search “Conrad Birdie” you get Conrads from various school productions, and it’s all wrong.
The movie’s ending is very “The Devil Wears Prada,” in that the boring boyfriend wins in the end. We’re supposed to be happy that Ann-Margret opts to stay “pinned” (pre-engaged, I remember once learning) to Hugo, and that Janet Leigh prefers known-quantity Robert Petrie sorry Dick Van Dyke over a British schoolteacher with a passion for sociology. (Why?) But there’s also Maureen Stapleton, singing her complaint about “working, slaving, scrimping, saving pennies (and living with your father),” presenting something of an alternative to married bliss. (In the rewatch I was reminded that she—and she alone of the main cast, not Ann-Margret, not even Dick Van Dyke—gets married in the course of the film, ambivalent widow no more.)
It’s a movie that takes female desire—and men as objects of desire—seriously. It can do this because it’s about teenage girls. They’re allowed to lust, because it’s implicit that the culture at large wants them slash wants to be them. It’s never pathetic when a cute teenage girl has an unrequited crush on a rock star, because she’s the implied crush object of basically everyone else. They’re not choosing crushes over their careers because they are children, so as long as it’s not (say) second term junior year or PSATs time, there’s nothing problematically unfeminist going on to get anyone in a handwringing tizzy.
For grown women it’s a bit trickier. Postmenopausal sorts—Mrs. Mayor, and Maureen “Mom” Stapleton—are comedic lusters, the trope that has old ladies hooting and hollering at a Chippendales show. But Janet Leigh, what does she (that is, her character; side note, I’m assuming the essay’s already been written about Rosie, Ricky Ricardo, and the quasi-non-issue of Latino whiteness in some very pre-‘woke’ moments of US entertainment history) want? Stability. A provider. A man to take her out of her secretarial role (which she of course exceeds, Leaning In avant la lettre, but for her man) and make sure she doesn’t turn into (per a lyric) “a mean old thing.”