| John Costello |
Xanadu plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 31st, through Sunday, February 2nd. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
There’s something wonderful about watching a chaotic roller disco fantasia with multiple, costume-intense musical numbers in the middle of winter. As a kid watching Xanadu (1980) with my oldest sister, I loved the upbeat music and the flurry of joyous visual images accompanying each song. The neon-outlined muses. The sparkly animation. The climactic disco scene with blink-and-you-will-miss-it costume changes. I ate a lot of sugar back then.
As an adult, I cringe at the stilted dialogue and the story’s focus on a mostly unremarkable man. When the film was released in the summer of 1980, it was a box office flop, only later considered worth watching. Now, it’s clearer how the film revolves around Kira, played by Olivia Newton-John, instead of the two main men.
Set in 1980 Los Angeles near Hollywood—”Where the magic happens,” someone once said—the story initially seems to follow Sonny Malone, a frustrated painter.1 No Basquiat, Sonny tears up his self-portrait and declares, “Guys like me shouldn’t dream anyway.” This action summons the Greek muses. From a neon-infused mural. At the end of an alley.
Xanadu isn’t about this tortured artist. Sonny is a sex object. His co-workers comment on his love life, the popcorn vendor sporting a pixie bob ogles him, and two women let him borrow a scooter only if he returns it in person. “We like the looks of you,” their expressions seem to say.
(To modern audiences, Sonny may not look like a sex object, but in 1980, many of the film’s viewers would have owned copies of Tiger Beat magazine as teens, especially the issues featuring Shaun Cassidy’s feathered hair on the cover. Sonny fits into this category of teen dreamboat.)
Sonny rarely takes meaningful action, instead reacting to a series of coincidences. Put another way, Sonny doesn’t have Main Character energy. As the song “Suddenly” states, “She walks in and suddenly, I’m a hero.”2 The “I” in this lyric is Sonny. The woman mentioned is Kira, who often is outlined in neon and skating on rollerblades. Sometimes, she’s covered in glitz and changing costumes. The visuals often seem friendly for an audience tripping on hallucinogens, LSD, or psilocybin, a reflection of 1970s psychedelia.3
Kira is really Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dance and light verse, a good description for the film’s content. The lighthearted lyrics move the plot forward at least as much as the dialogue, and the film rewards close attention as much as sugar-fueled enjoyment.
Yet, Xanadu doesn’t want you to take it seriously. The music critic Greil Marcus once called the pop scene “all flux and novelty.”4 Although Marcus meant the phrase as an insult, it’s an accurate description of how the movie achieves joy. Even though he isn’t the main character, Sonny shares in this joy.
After the muses spring to life from a street mural and send neon streaks across the city and into the sky, Kira chooses Sonny. She rollerblades up to him and kisses him before skating away, then keeps appearing in unexpected places to work her inspiration on him. That’s her job.
While searching for Kira, Sonny discovers Danny Maguire, another tortured artist who is playing a mournful clarinet solo on the beach. Danny once abandoned his Kira-inspired dreams of running a music venue. Instead, he started a construction business. He misses Kira, too.
Kira inserts her image on an album cover Sonny has been assigned to convert to a promotional poster. Later, Kira taunts Sonny into racing off a pier into the water. Kira’s mischief steers Sonny into becoming friends with Danny, and she arrives unannounced at Sonny’s workplace to convince him that Danny’s dream is big enough for both men.
By pushing Sonny and Danny together, Kira revives Danny’s decades-old dream to open a music club. Sonny’s dream still is to paint, or so he claims. Sonny gets out of his partnership with Danny the advice not to lose the girl of his dreams.
Let me give you an idea of a typical scene from the film. When the two men swap their ideas for the music club, a chaotic fantasia spring to life. Danny’s vision of a 1940s big band accompanied by dancers and singers in a mishmash of styles—harmony trio, Zoot suit swing, tango, blues, jazz, dancing WWII soldiers—melds with Sonny’s vision of a rock band accompanied by writhing leotard-clad dancers. The two groups swap partners and merge. There’s a lot of hip grinding and a little kinky behavior involving a peculiar soundboard.
The film doesn’t explain how the big band combines with the rock group to result in a roller disco. What matters is the destination, the realization of a shared dream, the club Kira names Xanadu.5
“Isn’t anyone interested in my feelings?” Kira asks late in the film while standing in what looks like a black void decorated with neon floor stripes and a starry sky. Behind the many coincidences moving the film forward, Kira is the one character who drives the action, and she demands people take her seriously. She is the tortured muse.
(Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is a downbeat album in the voice of the artist as muse and poet. Xanadu tries to be the upbeat story of a muse who struggles against the limits of the tortured artist’s gaze to escape her eternal torture. Listening to both albums back-to-back results in an enriching balance of upbeat and downbeat moods.)
The film’s arc fits the 1970s progression of second-wave feminism, when women sought to choose their own careers and rebelled against parental and social expectations. When Kira’s godly parents, really just disembodied voices, reject the idea of permitting her to do anything more than inspire, let alone love, she demands a chance to pursue her own dreams. She wants to escape the tortured muse department.
Yet, the film also would have you believe that Kira has been waiting for an artist to abandon his artistic dreams to devote himself to her dreams. Sonny takes Danny’s advice and refuses to let her go, even though his demands are powerless before the godly voices. His choice to pursue love seems to make a difference to Kira.
In the end, Xanadu is enjoyable for the way it favors romance over reality.6 The musical scenes are frequently bonkers, and the dialogue is tolerable. The final scene is more chaotic than the ones leading to it, a climax of expression. The lyrics are upbeat and optimistic, perfect for a winter of discontent. By the end of the film, it’s evident, if not obvious, how much Kira has been using Sonny for her own purposes.
You need this film to remind you of the joys of summer, rollerblading, and dreaming. In the song “Magic,” the tortured muse celebrates the opening of the club, Xanadu, and reminds us you have to start building your dreams.7 As a tortured poet once said, “In dreams begin responsibilities.”8
- There’s something indescribably dystopian about writing an essay on a joyous fantasia set in the same city where an old friend fled fires with her partner and pets. The humans and pets survived, but her house, originally her grandmother’s, was lost. However, Xanadu premiered during a deep economic recession in a year when interest rates zigzagged between 6% and 20%. The film is an escape, not a panacea. The only answer I have to give to you is the optimism presented in the last paragraph of this essay. ↩︎
- Newton-John, Olivia, and Cliff Richard. 1979. Suddenly. Munich, Germany: John Farrar. ↩︎
- In the documentary “Going Back to Xanadu,” included on the 2008 DVD re-release, several people reference surrealism and fantasy as inspirations, but not specifically drugs. Lawrence Gordon, one of the film’s producers, stated that the film was made to capture “the roller disco craze” sweeping the movie industry and the nation. The film’s director, Robert Greenwald, wryly notes, “It was not a film rooted in a kind of Paddy Chayefsky realism.” Greenwald states that the script was never fixed to his satisfaction. “My solution was to dream up the most interesting magical musical numbers,” Greenwald says, while the dancer Jeffrey Osser recalls, “Everything that you saw on the movie [musical sets] was happening in the clubs.” The film has inspired a vivid musical and even a new psychedelic roller rink in Bushwick. ↩︎
- Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music (Penguin, 2008), p. 45. ↩︎
- When Danny wonders aloud what to call the club, Kira quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-inspired poem, “Kubla Khan: Or, a vision in a dream.” ↩︎
- I’m thinking of Greil Marcus’s quotation from W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, where Cash describes the physical world of the U. S. South. Cash and Marcus are talking about a different vibe, but the notion of “a kind of cosmic conspiracy against reality in favor of romance” seems like an apt description of Xanadu. Marcus, p. 136. ↩︎
- Newton-John, Olivia. 1979. Magic. Munich, Germany: John Farrar. ↩︎
- The American poet, Delmore Schwartz. ↩︎
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon