I very seldom do this but I find that I must speak out against a specific article.   The NYT recently published an article entitled “How Hollywood Films Are Killing Opera.”  The piece is ostensibly a review of a movie named Margaret, but in it the author makes some very grand and sweeping claims about movies and opera–chief of which is Hollywood’s misuse of opera in films is to blame for opera’s failing popularity.

I find it deeply problematic that when asked for the reasons behind opera’s current financial and artistic problems, “repertory stagnancy”, and difficulties in finding a broader new audience the author can answer with conviction and specificity that the blame lies with two 30 year old movies, Pretty Woman and Moonstruck.

Neither of these movies have particular relevance or resonance to the younger audience opera very much needs to capture.  In fact the majority of that audience was not even born when these movies were released or were at best watching cartoons, some of which contain the best uses of opera committed to film of any kind.  

The author bemoans the films’ use of the “most standard of standard repertory” in the films.  This grotesque phrase reeks of the very elitism that is at the core of the majority of people’s misconceptions and aversion to and feeling of alienation from opera in general.  That is the problem, not the standard repertory.

In fact, the operatic counterpoint of Boheme is exceedingly appropriate for Moonstruck in that it mirrors the operatic and heightened emotional landscape in which characters interact.  As amply demonstrated by Nicolas Cage’s character, Ronny.  “I lost my hand!!  I lost my Bride!!!  Johnny has his hand!!  Johnny has his Bride!!!” Somewhat similarly, Pretty Woman is a fairy tale in which the Opening Night at SF Opera stands in for the Grand Ball, the private flight there the magical pumpkin coach etc.  Traviata Opening Night at SF Opera is as good a backdrop for the metaphoric Grand Ball as any.  Perfect in fact.  The story of Traviata, topically at least, also obviously mirrors the story of Pretty Woman.  In each film the lead character has a transportative and transformative experience at the opera.  Both are moved to tears not in lieu of but in addition to “deep emotion and thought”.  Especially in Moonstruck.  Little “stale” or “static” about that.  Transportative and transformative experience is what art should be about, no?  But again these films are not only over 30 years old, but Moonstruck is almost unknown to younger viewers in my experience.

FAR more relevant and resonant for younger people today, although released only slightly later, are Philadelphia and The Shawshank Redemption.  These both speak directly to the core of what, at its best, the operatic experience can still be for the newcomer–a transportive, transformational journey.  The same experience we all hope for when attending the opera, no matter how jaded some of us may have become.  Deep down somewhere, hope for reliving that experience which ensnared our souls in the first place, still springs eternal.

In Shawshank, Tim Robbins’ Andy Dufresne risks solitary confinement by locking himself in the warden’s office and playing the Letter Duet from The Marriage of Figaro over the prison loudspeakers to the population in the yard.  This experience transported the men from the single point temporal perspective of their miserable daily existence if only for a moment.  Morgan Freeman’s Red narration says it far better than I ever could: “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about.  Truth is, I don’t want to know.  Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it.  I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream.  It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”

The famous sequence from Philadelphia, Callas singing La Momma Morta from Andrea Chenier, in which Hanks translates the aria line by line for Washington achieves the same goals and almost countless others.  It speaks to the transformative experience we all hope for our loved ones who are not “that familiar with opera” (as Washington’s character states).  Opera transforms from a symbol of difference, the seeming vast distance between the two characters to the penultimate emotional beat in Denzel Washington’s character arc.  He emerges a changed (transformed) man through the presence of Hanks and the opera.  Emotional revolution is the dearest, greatest hope at the heart of all artistic endeavors is it not? 

The only real misuse of opera in film is the still all too common practice of laying unrelated operatic pieces over otherwise light film scenes of emotional beats to give much needed weight to the otherwise thin and saccharine proceedings.   This kind of emotional cue-ism is destructive not just to opera but film in general.  But this speaks more of the filmmaker’s ignorance of both opera and his own chosen art form.  In Moonstruck the backdrop of opera blends and compliments perfectly with the heightened operatic emotional landscape in which the characters live and breathe.  It is NOT used in patchwork to bolster emotionality or profundity otherwise lacking in the emotional narrative/arc, or in the words of the Times article, to “super size the scale” of the moment.  The sin of the extreme cinematic overuse of Madam Butterfly’s Un Bel Di is not really its overuse so much but that more often than not it is overlaid on cinematic sequences so inappropriately to serve as an emotional “supersizer”.

I think also the author of the Times article has missed the point of the Met sequence in the fantabulous Hannah and Her Sisters.   The detached hyper cerebralism and analysis of the three characters drinking wine and eating cheese I believe is meant to convey their neurotic inability to be present.  Even in the midst of a great and furious art performance they are firmly and air tightly ensconced in their own individual agendas.  They are not there to experience the art going on before them but to impress, to seduce, to win, to outthink.  There is little to no transportative, let alone transformative, effect for them.     

The author’s criticism of Hollywood’s use of only “the most standard of standard repertory” is also highly misguided.  The standard repertory is necessary for a new audience to develop the operatic and theatrical vocabulary to be able to see the more esoteric pieces.  You want a newbie to hate opera forever take them to Guilio Ceasare without any context or background.  Just as, for many, Fellini, Bergman or Kurosawa, are inaccessible without some kind of previous assimilation of the language of visual and audial symbols of film involved.  But once deciphered, the endless depth and breadth of their vision can be experienced.  Similarly, the familiar harmonies of the “most standard of standard repertory” can serve as a signpost for newbies allowing them deeper entrance into the fuller narrative.  Much like my previous experience with Macbeth gave me reference point enough to gain entry into the mind bogglingly rich work of Kurosawa through Throne of Blood.

Perhaps had the author turned his gaze upon himself and the snobbery and elitism drenching his almost every comment he would have been onto the real plague alienating general audiences from opera.  

Like I said, I usually don’t do this but felt compelled to comment.

-Shawn E Milnes