Dreamgirls' Dark Underbelly

It's good by me that Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson won Golden Globes for their roles in Dreamgirls. As a music fan and scholar, I'm less thrilled that the critics have gone gaga for the film itself, giving it the Globe for best musical-or-comedy and calling it silly things like "exhilarating entertainment that brings back some of the delicious excitement of the great movie musicals." I could fill this page with links to like hyperbole.

The plot of Dreamgirls is as disturbing as the slice of American music history it came from: While two talented African American musicians on their way up (Murphy and Hudson) get put down in the name of "crossover," the blandest, whitest pop music that could be crafted from the roots of R&B is elevated to exalted #1 status and an excruciating pitch in one "exhilarating" number after another. This includes the title song "Dreamgirls," a misogynist's fondest dream and all too emblematic of how women, especially black women, have been pressed into service by the music industry. After stopping to dabble in the conflicts and personal drama that crossing over engenders, the film ends in a farewell concert featuring an unsettling reprise of "Dreamgirls" that reminds any viewer with ears on that while the commercially successful can walk away, many more wanna-be dreamgirls and black musicians will submit to the machine.

Are the critics missing the message about the troubling twin commodification and erasure of racial identity that this movie represents, or do you have to be a mad ethnomusicologist to see it? Dreamgirls shows rhythm and blues as the dark underbelly of Motown, and its transformation to colorless crossover confection as "delicious excitement." Though R&B goes down fighting in the form of Hudson's and Murphy's characters, down it goes indeed.

It may be telling that Dreamgirls, which paints a thick beauty-school gloss over certain ugly realities of American culture, took the Globe over Little Miss Sunshine, which peels the gloss painfully, hilariously away. Sunshine makes a great antidote to Dreamgirls, as does an hour or so with Big Mama Thornton -- Hound Dog and all.