Gene Kelly in the 21st Century: SCMS 2012

A few minutes ago, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) released the schedule for its 2012 Conference, to be held in Boston, March 21-25. For those non-academic readers, here’s how this works:

• April-July, 2011: Wait for the conference submission form to become available.
• August 9, 2011: Head to Twitter and announce (alongside the rest of your academic feed) that the conference submission form is now online.
• August 10-11: Rack your brain trying to figure out what you’d like to present on.
• August 12-15: Rack your brain thinking of colleagues whose research would fit nicely alongside a presentation like yours. Contact said colleagues.
• August 16-30, 2011: Email colleagues back and forth about the proposed panel until it looks and sounds presentable.
• September 1, 2011: Submit proposal.
• September 2-November 30, 2011: Wait for your proposal to be accepted or (gasp!) rejected.
• December 1, 2011: Go back to Twitter and announce that the proposal notifications have been emailed. If yours was accepted, politely boast about it on Twitter.
• December 2, 2011: Sit and wait for the tentative schedule to be released, fervently praying your panel isn’t scheduled for 8:00 AM the first day or 5:00 PM on the last.

Our panel this year, Singing Across Places and Spaces: The Temporal and Contextual Fluidity of the Hollywood Musical, is (tentatively) scheduled at a great time: Friday, March 23 at 9:00 AM. Here’s the rundown:

• Blair Davis, “Singing Sci-Fi Cowboys and Genre Amalgamation in The Phantom Empire (1935)
• Kelli Marshall, “Gene Kelly in the Twenty-First Century”
• Laurel Westrup, “Scratching the Past: OutKast’s Idlewild“

Finally, here’s my individual proposal. Should be a great time!

Gene Kelly in the Twenty-First Century

Even though Gene Kelly has been dead 15 years and his most admired films are six decades old, his presence in the twenty-first century is alive and well. For example, in the past four years, the deceased Hollywood song-and-dance man has starred in Family Guy, a Funny or Die sketch, and at least four television commercials (two for Volkswagen alone). In addition, The Simpsons, Glee, Saturday Night Live, Britain’s Got Talent, Usher, Jaime Cullum, and Mint Royale have recently paid homage to Gene Kelly and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Furthermore, over the past decade, several Gene Kelly-related fansites, tumblelogs, memes, Twitter and Facebook accounts, video mash-ups, and message boards have appeared online, all of which continue to be extremely active. In my spare time, even I (along with several contributors) maintain Gene Kelly Fans and @genekellyfans on Twitter, fansites that publish not only news, videos, images, and brief commentary devoted to the dancer/choreographer/director/entertainer, but also original analyses on Gene Kelly, his star persona, family, place in pop culture, etc.

It is this renewed interest in the musical star and what he represents — the classical film musical, old Hollywood in general, a working star system, a complex representation of masculinity, an authentically nice guy — that my presentation will consider. Specifically, I’ll address reasons that Gene Kelly’s musical numbers, films, television appearances, etc. are currently flourishing in the popular sphere and why those by Kelly’s onscreen counterparts are perhaps not (e.g., the broken economy, Astaire’s elite image versus Kelly’s working-class one, Kelly’s sex appeal). Necessarily, my presentation will also consider some of the expressly twenty-first century technologies and social media trends that allow fans and the media to share Gene Kelly easily and en masse.

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