Fraught Encounters on the Focus Plane

A fraughtness in the human communicative situation—the impossibility of assuring collegial equality in our presentations to each other, given that we are striving to control each other’s attention—is compellingly figured in the treatment of the focus plane of show entertainment in film musicals. In Busby Berkeley’s seminal work in 42nd Street (1933), the portrait of the Great Showman in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and Brian De Palma’s satirical Phantom of the Paradise (1974) it may be seen that the show musical genre has a distinctive preoccupation with the focus plane of performance and constructs this place of encounter as fraught—in the sense not only that characters are shown in possibly untenable positions but that viewers are made to recognize that they might be in an untenable relationship with the performers and makers of the shows they are looking at.