This month, the Criterion Channel streamed 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats movie—thereby granting me intellectual permission for the first time to watch a film that I would not have been caught dead near at the time it ran in theaters (I being an 11-year-old boy at the time). It is now one of the most popular films streaming on the Criterion site, and it’s easy to see why: not only is the movie entertaining, it also has all the fascination and populist appeal that comes from being a film (much like 1999’s cult classic Drop Dead Gorgeous) that the critics completely misunderstood at the time it appeared, and which only began to receive its due thanks to DVD purchases and its die-hard contingent of fans finding each other on the internet.
When it ran in theaters the first time around, after all, the film was a box-office flop: its satirical message proving ill-tailored to the target audience of its marketing. It also suffered the fate of so many films that draw from beloved pop cultural material of the past. People, to the extent that they were aware of “Josie and the Pussycats” at all, knew them as stars of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, or as side characters from the Archie comics—two sources of entertainment we recall with affection from childhood, but which seem cringe-inducingly naïve and unselfconscious in retrospect, like most pop culture from that era. Critics therefore assumed the Josie movie would have the same tone.
What the critics forgot, in making that assumption (as they always forget), is that the people who make movies are just as smart as they are; they regard the pop culture of the past from the same distance and with the same jaded attitude as they do, and therefore, if called upon to make a reboot, will almost certainly find some way to put their tongue in their cheek. (Also accounting for the critics' dismissive attitude at the time, no doubt, was the usual unexamined sexism of the era, which, alas, immediately wrote off any film aimed at young women and teenage girls—or depicting their experience—as saccharine nonsense, regardless of its actual content. This probably explains the comparable fate of Drop Dead Gorgeous as well.)
Bizarrely, many of the critics seem to have viewed the Josie movie as a straight-faced pitch for a dumb pop band, or as an effort to sell CDs (and indeed, it must be said, the soundtrack is catchy, and reportedly sold better than the movie). Some drew a comparison to 1997’s Spice World (which may turn out to be good too; who knows? I’ve never seen it). One is reminded of those early viewers of This is Spinal Tap, who reportedly left the theater shaking their heads and saying “why would anyone bother to make a documentary about such a stupid rock band—I’d never even heard of them before this!”
It's almost like they didn’t even watch the movie, and just reacted based on the title and trailer (which maybe they did). Since what it immediately obvious upon viewing it is that, if this film is nothing else, it is a satirical send-up of its own subject matter, as well as of American consumerism and the music industry. It’s not like this is some sort of questionable revisionist take either—the film is obvious satire. It’s not even subtle. The film’s social commentary is not sub-text; it’s text.
I won’t say it’s always the sharpest or the best satire. The fact the film was misunderstood and unfairly maligned at the time it ran in theaters does not mean that, in actuality, it can do no wrong. It has its flaws: the energy of the outstanding first fifteen minutes does not last through the film, for instance; some of the humor, like so much of what was produced more than twenty years ago, has aged poorly.
But the movie certainly did not deserve the mockery it received from critics upon its release, or the incomprehension it met from theater-goers. Its jokes about the music industry still land (as someone who a few years ago accompanied his sister to a BTS concert where everyone was forced to buy unique blue tooth–paired glowsticks in order to participate fully in the experience, the scene where the record company markets one-of-a-kind “Josie” headsets as a prerequisite to hearing her music seemed astoundingly ahead-of-the-curve). I am therefore glad the film has had its Criterion Channel redemption tour, as part of the streaming service’s Parker Posey collection—as well as its social media rediscovery.
What I want to do here, however, is not to relitigate the question of the movie’s quality, but rather to offer a structural analysis. And the best thing about structural analysis is that it does not actually require any value judgment on the literary work in question. In his classic book, Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye at first provokes consternation in the reader when he tells us that the conventional role of critics in assessing the merits of literary works is misplaced. But as Frye models his alternative method of criticism, we find ourselves convinced. There is actually much for critics to do besides pronouncing on whether a work is “good” or not. Before critics offer their subjective judgment (which will be as infinitely various as the diversity of humans in general), Frye shows us, they should first try to analyze and explain what the work is, and what it is doing.
The Josie and the Pussycats movie, within the Frye framework, is above all a comedy, obeying the essential formula for this genre dating back to the ancient world. This is probably why we so readily accept its premises, as soon as we start viewing it. For one, there is the alazon —the braggart character, who pretends to be something they are not, and who is one of the oldest stock figures in Western comedy. Here, the alazon (or one of the alazons) is the Parker Posey character, Fiona, who seeks to brainwash the youth of America into consuming endless new products and trends. Her motive? She was unpopular in school, and therefore now longs to be the source of the very definition of “cool” in the public mind. In short, she is a poseur, like all alazons, who is trying to present herself as the very opposite of what she actually is.
There are also two young people who plainly like each other. But, as at the start of every comedy, there is someone who is preventing them from being together. There is always, as Frye puts it, a “blocking character” who forestalls the couple’s union. Sometimes, but not always, the blocking character is an alazon as well, and becomes a source of the comedy themselves. Josie takes this approach, making Fiona and her henchman Wyatt into blocking characters (they conspire to mislead the male in the central couple, Alan M, into thinking that Josie does not actually care about him, by tricking her into missing his first concert). The blocking character is usually motivated, in Frye’s telling, by some extraneous obsession that harms the people around them—here, this would be Fiona's need to be liked and popular.
Every comedy, in Frye’s framework, also needs its scapegoat—its pharmakos—on whom the audience can vent their opprobrium and disgust. The pharmakos is generally the “villain”—someone who operates entirely outside the moral universe and social norms of the viewers, and whom we therefore wish to see punished and defeated. With the brutal directness of the ancient world, the classic scapegoat might have some literal physical stigma—a limp or a hunchback, say. Hence, the classic villains of the stage are stooped, deformed, masked.
Josie too has its pharmakos—and it is the same person (this, again, being fairly typical of, or at least tolerated within, the classic forms of comedy) as the alazon and the “blocking figure”: namely, Fiona again. She even has the old-fashioned physical stigmata of the scapegoat: her quest to brainwash the youth of America is motivated by her own persistent lisp, for which she was mocked in high school.
The punishment and exile of the pharmakos, though, Frye tells us, must happen quickly and casually at the end of a comedy, if it is to happen at all. If we linger on it too long, after all, we may start to identify with or take pity on the scapegoat; and if that happens, the comedy is at risk of turning into a tragedy or an “irony.” (The risk of this happening is all the greater in a society with a stronger social conscience around disability and marginalization than the ancient world possessed.)
In Josie, the filmmakers deliberately engineer this effect. After Fiona and Wyatt are unmasked, we start to realize that we are closer to them than to the heroes—that we identify more with the teased and mocked, the outsiders, than we do with the self-assured and un-mocked, the insiders. The music changes, as Fiona tells the heroes: “go ahead and laugh; you don’t know what it’s like to live with a lithp!” This is her “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” moment. The movie directs us to exchange our derision for the posturing alazon for pity, as soon as she is unmasked and forced to confront the truth of who she really is.
But comedies, even in their classic form, don’t have to end with the punishment and permanent exile of the pharmakos. To the contrary, the impulse of every comedy, in Frye’s telling at least, is to end with a reconciliation. The final scene of a comedy is always a wedding, or some equivalent ceremony (here, it is of course a rock concert), the purpose of which is to show the reconciliation of all the major characters. The blocking character has realized the error of his ways; the alazon has admitted his mistakes and limitations; and the central characters have overcome the tricks and obstacles in their way to marry and love one another at last. And in some comedies, Frye tells us, this reconciliation is so universal that it embraces even the pharmakos. Instead of being expelled, the pharmakos is reformed and incorporated into the new society established at the end of the play.
This is what happens here. Fiona, after being unmasked, learns the error of her ways. She realizes that she ought to embrace who she really is, and be proud of it, rather than trying to force a certain false impression of her upon others by invading their thoughts. The pharmakos is thus reconciled to the heroes, and all are enabled to join in the final wedding feast: i.e. Josie’s first rock concert. Even the audience—as represented by the concert-goers—is invited to participate in the final universal reconciliation, by halting their need to conform to the trends of consumer society and simply becoming comfortable with who they really are.
But Josie works not only because it is an archetypical comedy; but also because it is a classic fairy tale. It has the element of the “fantastic” that makes it especially enjoyable. For an analysis of this aspect of the film, I draw on the structuralist theorist Tzvetan Todorov—who was himself deeply influenced by Frye (though he criticizes and rejects key aspects of his methodology). According to Todorov, “fantastic” literature lies close to the heart of all narrative, which is why the fairy tale—with its device of the intervention of the supernatural—is the earliest form of proto-narrative to make its appearance globally.
The reason why so many narratives benefit from the element of the “fantastic,” Todorov writes, is that the fundamental structure of the narrative invites it. In its simplest and most general abstract form, according to Todorov, a narrative is always made up of a journey between two different equilibria. The story begins with one equilibrium, which is somehow disrupted, and it is only resolved when the characters are able to overcome these destabilizing influences enough to establish a new (and generally—in a comedy with a “happy ending,” at least—better) equilibrium. And for introducing a sudden state of disequilibrium, says Todorov, few devices work as well as the intervention of the supernatural. Hence, narratives need not necessarily be “fantastic,” but they so often are, because it is the easiest way to move the narrative forward out of the first stasis with which it begins.
The Josie movie follows the Todorov framework admirably. The equilibrium at the start of the movie is showcased in the first musical montage involving Josie and her friends, as well as the first scene in which Josie flirts awkwardly with her love interest. It is a stasis characterized by eternal youth among a plucky and determined set of friends, as well as perpetual unresolved romantic tension between the two leads, Josie and Alan M—but it is a tension (rather like Archie’s unresolvable choice between Betty and Veronica, come to think of it) that causes us no real pain because everyone is young, they plainly all like each other, and we have no actual reason to fear things will not work out perfectly for them in the end. We therefore delight in this equilibrium, and resent the fact that it must be disrupted for the narrative to move forward.
But disrupted it inevitably is: and here, the disequilibrium is introduced, as in the classic fairy tale, by the intervention of the “fantastic” element. It may be true that Wyatt’s blandishments to Josie and her friends, by which he induces them to abandon Riverdale and seek fame and fortune, by signing a sort of Faustian pact with the record company, are not literally supernatural. But they are achieved through a form of made-up technology so outré and implausible (namely, a device that inserts subliminal messages into pop music that effectively control people’s thoughts) that it might as well be supernatural.
Plus, as Todorov tells us, the “fantastic” can appear in forms that do not literally defy the laws of nature, so long as they defy the laws of proportion and reason. The fantastic is characterized by “excess,” he writes (Richard Howard translation throughout), including excessive delight in evil. Here, Wyatt’s pattern of murdering pop bands in succession, after having drained them of their value, before they can catch on to his and Fiona's evil scheme for brainwashing American youth, is so over-the-top as to appear fantastical. So is the ludicrous speed and facility with which he is able to elevate Josie and her friends to instant superstar status, before they have even put out a record. Wyatt is clearly operating with quasi-demonic, Mephistophelean powers.
Wyatt and Fiona thereby introduce the element of instability that Josie and her friends will spend the rest of the movie trying to resolve. He forces the band members apart from one another and undermines their friendship by introducing false suspicions and jealousies, Iago-like, into their midst. He and Fiona prevent Josie (as we have seen), from going to Alan M’s concert, thereby driving a wedge between them as well. But ultimately, Josie and her friends are able to see through their tricks, as we have also seen, and achieve the universal reconciliation of the final rock concert. They thereby establish a new equilibrium on a higher level: the perpetual romantic tension of the original equilibrium is resolved into the perpetual reconciliation of the final one.
But what does it all mean? Todorov resists seeing “fantastic” narratives as straightforward allegories, unless the text explicitly invites such an interpretation, and he argues forcefully that literature should be interpreted according to literary elements, not by pulling from such non-literary sources as politics, psychology, and sociology. Yet, he does bend his rigorous strictures in this regard enough to admit that the “form” and “content” of literary works are never truly separable from one another, and that fantastic literature works with a set of stock “themes” that are never entirely free of non-literary origins in human psychology and society.
One of the major themes he identifies as typical of the fantastic genre is that of “desire.” Excessive desires—particularly for taboo forms of sexuality—are satisfied by supernatural means in these tales, and then ultimately punished. Mephistopheles induces Faust to sign his contract, and shows him the way to Gretchen’s house, for instance—but the ultimate result is tragedy and destruction.
Todorov maintains, after completing his survey of the “fantastic” genre, that it is no longer possible to write genuine fantastic tales in the twentieth century, because psychoanalysis has made it possible to talk explicitly about taboo sexual urges. They no longer need to be sublimated into tales of devils and succubi for us to have an honest conversation about them—so we don't need literature to deal with them, at least in Todorov’s telling.
Yet, this seems to us now like a very naïve claim—and one that is far too credulous about the power and efficacy of psychoanalysis as a field. For it is probably an eternal and universal problem in human life that we experience anti-social desires that cannot be fulfilled in reality—at least not without massively disrupting the functioning of society. The specific desires that are stigmatized and restrained may change their names over time, but the general principle will hold in any society: there are some impulses that people will simply have to repress and restrain, if they are going to live alongside one another in civilization (Freud, by the way—the father of psychoanalysis himself—would whole-heartedly agree with this).
One of these dangerous desires that must be restrained is one that is especially prominent in modern American society: the desire for fame and celebrity. And Josie is in large part a parable about the excessive satisfaction of the urge for fame, and how it leads to the destruction of friendship and sociality, as surely as Faust’s craving for youth and sexual satisfaction leads him to destroy the one he loves. Wyatt offers a “fantastic” amount of fame, delivered on a timeline so compressed as to amount to the supernatural. (“Does anyone else think it’s strange that all this has happened in just a couple days?” Josie asks at one point, leading Wyatt to worry that the band members may be catching on to his scheme. This sense of uncertainty and "hesitation"—of suspended judgment as to whether what is happening to them is real or merely an illusion is, by the way, another distinguishing feature of the "fantastic," according to Todorov. Literature in this genre is often marked, he writes, by comments from the characters such as "it seemed as though...")
We can all relate to the temptation that Josie and her friends face. And we can all see why the supernatural wish-fulfillment of this desire must end in tragedy (at least until Josie learns to act on her own merits, and take the long and hard road to success, in which case the conflict is resolved, and the story can end in reconciliation as a comedy, rather than a Faustian tragedy—for, as Frye tells us, both comedy and tragedy have a moment of "discovery," when the truth is revealed, but the key difference between them is that in comedy, the "discovery" comes when there is still time to mend their mistakes, whereas in tragedy, the characters always find out the truth when it is too late to act on it).
The excessive desire for fame, wealth, and celebrity by any means necessary is certainly one we can still detect in our society. And, pursued without regard to consequences or one’s intrinsic merits and deserts, it is indeed profoundly anti-social (as we see in American life every day—Trump, anyone? Musk?). Psychoanalysis can provide little help by restraining this desire, so long as it remains so powerful and omnipresent in our society. To name it is not necessarily to tame it. So we still need “fantastic” stories that provide us a way of sublimating these desires, and enacting our wish-fulfillment of these desires in narrative form—while still serving as a reminder that we should decline to act them out in reality. We should not sign Wyatt’s devil-pact, a much as we might be tempted to do so. We should say no to the flaming pen.
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