Northside_Dan wrote:
+1 RPB. Blues Brothers is incredibly overrated.
I like it as a musical comedy, but I love it as a tribute to a Chicago that no longer exists. It is a kind of comedic re-imagining of Studs Terkel's
Division Street: America that creates a sweeping, unified narrative out of various disparate working class institutions and experiences. Though it positions itself as a celebration of a vibrant working class culture, it is perhaps more appropriate to see the movie as a kind of eulogy or tombstone that marks the end of a historical era. At the time the film was made, the city's economy was being radically reorganized, rapidly evolving from an industrial center to a white collar megalopolis. And so despite the film's vibrant texture, it functions as a loveletter to a disappearing way of life. Jake and Elwood could only forestall the closing of the orphanage for so long; post-World War II industrial working class culture was similarly fleeting.
Incidentally, the class tensions accompanying this economic transition are represented in succeeding films like
Ferris Bueller, which may be seen as a kind of sequel to the
Blues Brothers. Although the film is again a comedy, it nevertheless addresses a prominent problem in the white suburban mind during the 1980s: how to understand and confront the city. Here Chicago's famous landmarks and institutions are deployed to depict an exotic landscape that must be productively engaged to satisfy Ferris' thirst for adventure. Crucially, he does so not by permanently or temporarily aligning himself with the sympathies or interests of working class city dwellers, but by intensifying the exoticism of the city so that its objectification is pronounced, and the urban landscape becomes rendered as a commodity to be consumed.
Though Ferris Bueller is often understood as a fable of teen rebellion, it is really a parable of the power of the consumer ethos. It is only by refusing status as a "productive" member of society and giving in to his need for leisure, a "day off" as it were, that Ferris can become truly productive, escape from the catatonic haze that seems to define his classmates, and resolve the symbolic and geographical chasm separating city from suburb, black from white, working class from leisure class. Thus, when Ferris takes the stage in the Von Steuben Day parade at film's end, he is not doing so as an unofficial member of the immigrant working class, but as a figure deeply entrenched in the logic of consumption. At this point, Ferris has forfeited his status as an individual in order to play a "role" as a cultural spectacle to be consumed by other members of the metropolitan area's leisure class. Consequently, if no real solution existed to the 1980s city-suburb divide, the film foretold such a "resolution" through the triumph of consumerism. This "resolution" was later played out across the city through the forces of gentrification, a dynamic that figuratively and literally transformed the city's vibrancy from a form of dangerous exoticism to a kind of theme park that rendered danger, excitement, and new sensations as saleable goods.
_________________
Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
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