Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

directed by Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly

Katharine Coldiron

My teeth keep chipping.

I think it’s the porcelain. I think the porcelain is stronger, harder, than what grew out of my jaw when I was a child. The real teeth bang against the porcelain and fail the test.

Eight porcelain teeth form my smile now. I don’t feel very good about this. The bright white American smile is just another Marxist/Gramscian/Foucauldian structure, a method to measure wealth and homogeny. I like the variety in British teeth, the smiles that are all interesting because they’re all different. I like watching my friend Jess’s crooked tooth flash as she speaks; I grieved when Adam finally had the three teeth in a second row behind the first, like a shark’s, removed. But the plastic sheathing my own teeth had started to fail. It’d been there a lot longer than its recommended lifespan. I’d known for years that I had no choice but to go with porcelain at some point. So, last summer, I did.

Let me explain.

*

I distinctly remember, the first time I watched Singin’ in the Rain, in high school, the sentence that materialized in my mind when Donald O’Connor commanded Debbie Reynolds to sing, and then stood in front of her and lip-synced as she did. And thus, the birth of dubbing. What I didn’t connect until years later was that, in the film, sound pictures had been in existence mere months before Donald O’Connor’s brainwave. In technological terms, the two ideas were twins, one coming only a few minutes after the other.

The word never spoken about Debbie Reynolds’s performance behind Donald O’Connor, in a secretive sound booth, in back of the curtain, is fraudulence. 

It’s just for the one picture, the actors say to each other. 

In the story, the fraud lasts not even that long. Debbie Reynolds is unmasked as the beautiful voice behind the screeching Jean Hagen and the picture wraps up with truth, love, and song prevailing.

But this is Hollywood, my dears. This is Hollywood. The moonlight comes from a gel, and falls on a girl who couldn’t dance a step before production began. Her tears could be silicone. Her face dissolves under cold cream, her hair lies on a blank plaster head at night, her little blue shoes are filled with blood. 

Here we are, she sings out, Sunset and Camden.

*

When I read The Lifespan of a Fact about four years ago, it caught me breathless, like a fish gasping on a wooden deck. It thrilled me, overwhelmed me. I had no idea such debates about truth and nonfiction could take place, because I had no idea that “essayists” had such a touchy relationship with facts. In the book, John D’Agata has written an essay about the suicide of a young man in Las Vegas, and Jim Fingal fact-checks the essay, which has more problems than a fourth-grader’s paper on cold fusion. The two men begin a correspondence that culminates in a debate about the moral responsibility of writing. The book pointed me in a philosophical direction from which I haven’t swerved, and toward which my work moves ever closer.

This philosophy depends on a pile of Jenga blocks, though, all of which D’Agata would happily yank out to tumble me all over the carpet. In D’Agata’s view, facts are not the point of the essay form, and readers know not to take what is presented to them as firm, verifiable fact. In my mind, fact is fact; facts are closer to truth than fiction; hewing to fact means I hew closer to truth. (That’s the point of my whole endeavor, to hew as close to truth as possible.) And if something is labeled nonfiction, no matter what adjective may precede that word, I will assume the writer is telling me the truth: the best adherence possible to the facts.

But fact is not all there is to truth. Not even the greater part of it. No philosopher would let me begin without defining terms, and even though I can’t define either word especially well, I know fact is not interchangeable with—perhaps not even precursor to—truth.

D’Agata argues that, for instance, the actual number of strip clubs in Las Vegas makes no difference to the thrust of his endeavor. He argues that in a sentence that includes the color of a van, “purple” (inaccurate) sounds better than “pink” (accurate), because of the rhythm of the two syllables in “purple.” Never mind that this is unmetered prose. He argues that fudging verifiable, scientific facts about geography and speed is not a problem, because he writes “essays,” in the etymological, Rousseauian sense, the sense in which an essay is an attempt, not a source of fact.

In this sense, D’Agata’s license is absolute. But his purpose—ah, that’s fuzzier.

*

It’s not that I bought the love story between Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly, particularly; Cyd Charisse has more chemistry with Kelly during her three-minute wiggle/dance with him than Reynolds has in the rest of the film. But I believed in Kelly’s passion, in his perfection, when he sings and dances in the titular rain. I believed his song and dance came from somewhere true. Therein, the power of Hollywood. He’s on a backlot, with a bad cold, in wet wool, lip-syncing, dancing a routine that’s been arranged down to the millimeter, overhead sprinklers dousing him, and I call that true.

Perhaps what I react to is Kelly’s talent spilling like wildflowers across all the prearranged studio trickery. The faker the scene, the truer he seems. Like genuine moments standing out in fiction: Quentin’s naked foolishness in The Sound and the Fury, or Dorothea sailing headlong into error in Middlemarch. Something sublime rises from the painted canvas backdrop and we are shown ourselves, intimately.

Plus, the audience’s perception of cinema has nothing to do with fact. It presents itself as falsehood. However I believe this movie came to be, whether or not I believe Gene Kelly is actually happy in that wet street, I know that he is not Don Lockwood, dancing because he is in love with Cathy Selden. He is Gene Kelly, dancing for the cameras in a role he plays. These shadows on the wall fool very few in the age of mechanical reproduction.

I can extend this argument to cover the eye of any camera. Even photojournalists are storymakers. Documentaries on true-life incidents are shaped carefully, just as a wooden sculpture is carved from a real tree. But cinema, movies, stories on film, offer themselves humbly (or not) as charming fictions, not charming facts.

Singin’ is peak classical Hollywood, a big bounteous musical jammed with talent and money, enough money to pretend anything. Pretend Reynolds can dance as well as Kelly. Pretend the rain is real. Pretend a girl behind a curtain can ever come out and be applauded for her real voice.

*

Problem 1: Patient is allergic to antibiotics.

Problem 2: Patient has chronic strep throat.

Problem 3: It’s the mid-1980s.

Solution 1: Tetracycline or doxycycline.

Problem 4: Giving tetracycline and doxycycline to children under age eight will likely discolor their still-developing teeth.

Problem 4a: This discoloration isn’t consistent, all over the tooth, nor is it necessarily gray like damage or yellow like tobacco staining. It’s wavy, and sometimes whitening, so bleaching the teeth isn’t a fix. It just makes them look weirder.

Problem 5: Patient is American.

Solution 2: Composite veneers (bonding) (plastic teeth).

Problem 6: Patient is middle-school-aged, too young to give her nitrous while the enamel of eight of her teeth is methodically sanded off over the course of several hours. 

Solution 3: Just do without it. She’ll be awake. Novocaine for the pain, nothing for the sound, or the need to lie there patiently while her tooth enamel is removed.

Problem 7: Composite veneers only last 5 years or so.

Solution 4: Patient will be in her late teens or early twenties by then. She can cope with (pay for) the problem herself.

*

What a thrill to study The Lifespan of a Fact in a classroom. The book had changed my life. I couldn’t wait to hear what other minds made of it. The result astounded me: my fellow students, the ones in their early twenties, didn’t care about the facts. They sided with art. What difference did it make if D’Agata got every little thing right? He was telling a story.

But it’s not the truth, I argued, nearly apoplectic. The truth is sacred. It’s necessary. It’s water in the desert of the real.

Eh, they answered.

I wondered darkly if the internet had caused this malaise. The Hydra internet, for which truth plays acrobat, stretching and leaping and contorting to entertain. The Pandoran internet, brimming with the howls of the damned, splintered and splintering. Everything could be true, so nothing is, so truth sits politely beside the point.

A lifetime in this mythological circus might lead one not to care how many strip clubs there really are in Las Vegas. But it troubled me, anyway, this mass shrug in response to a beautiful quarrel about the heart of my intellectual life. D’Agata and Fingal had impeccably portrayed the problems and the promise of the writer who thinks, deeply, about what he writes, and chooses nevertheless to be dishonest. Because it’s his calling to prod his audience, and in his poetics, prodding resembles misleading them.

I can’t go along, no matter how well he argues, no matter how dubious I feel about a moral responsibility binding the very profession of writing, creative or otherwise. I can’t agree with D’Agata. Not every person likely to handle his work will understand the rich ontological context he draws upon to bend the truth, and that will do harm, to someone, sooner or later. It’s harder to write the truth, harder to shape beauty from real facts, but, I mean, that’s how the essay is prodding you, Mr. D’Agata.

Throughout the entire conversation, in class, a student next to me kept whispering, under her breath, “But there is no truth.”

*

Debbie Reynolds sits beneath a piano on the soundstage-within-a-soundstage of Monumental Pictures on a Friday night, the lights dim, all quiet except for the vermin rustling in faraway corners. Reynolds cries, volubly, like the girl she is. Fred Astaire, walking by for no logical reason, sees her and stops to offer his handkerchief. This tiny kindness loosens her tongue and she tells him all: Mr. Kelly is so cruel, I don’t know how to dance, I feel so alone, I wish I hadn’t signed on for this thing, oh, what’ll I do, Mr. Astaire, what’ll I do. Sob, sniff, hitch.

He looks up. Above the lights, above the three-quarter walls of the sets, the gloom stretches beyond his vision. No stars up there, he thinks, they’ve all fallen down here. This poor girl. I should leave her to Gene, he thinks, toughen her skin. It’s not the last time this life will chew her up.

But she’s only 19. She reminds him of Adele in the early days, lithe and strong, fresh as a new pair of white gloves. Come along, he says to her, nudging a little at her elbow, show me what he’s got you doing.

My feet hurt, she says, sniffling. Like knives.

They both look at her shoes. I know what that’s like, he says. Tell you what. I’ll take you to my house and get your feet in an ice bath, and after that maybe we’ll dance a little. How’s that sound?

If she’d been even three years older, something might have shifted in her eyes, and she might have gone along for a different reason. But instead her face lights up. Me dance—with you?

Maybe, he says.

Oh, my, she says, oh, no. I couldn’t.

Anyway, let’s get you out of here. Your feet will get worse if we don’t ice them. He grabs a dolly from the edge of the set, plunks her on it despite her protests (she weighs as much as a wren), and wheels her off to his Bentley.

*

I had ten dental appointments in three months. For three weeks I wore what amounted to a glued-in mouthguard, which chipped and smelled bad and made me lisp and offered scant protection from hot and cold foods. I laid still in a dental chair for many, many hours. For all this I paid $11,000.

When the veneers came back from the lab, where they’d been hand-sculpted, I dropped one in my palm and poked at it. This falsehood, lying here. I had chosen it. In the absence of another option, because the enamel on my real teeth was gone forever, I had chosen it.

They gave me nitrous before they drilled off the plastic teeth. My old veneers had been on for so long they were wearing away, like shale under a breakwater. I asked the dental assistant to take a picture of what was under there. My real teeth are stubby, ground-down, hideous. You can still see the antibiotic staining. You can also see the pink mask over my nose for the nitrous.

After many hours in the chair, after unmeasured time in a pink echoing cloud of NPR jazz that reaffirmed my decision to stay away from drugs, lest I lose my life to them, after talks and jokes aplenty with my dentist, and the unseemly enthusiasm of his receptionist, and the barely shod contempt of his assistant—after all that, I bore new, beautiful, perfectly colored and placed porcelain teeth. No more strange gaps or mismatched length or worrying stains on the edges.

They look like real teeth. But they aren’t. Porcelain does not collect plaque, and it feels a half-degree colder against my tongue. They are hard to floss and they sound like glass when tapped with a fingernail and eating almonds feels like eating chalk.

I smile like an American.

*

Debbie Reynolds doesn’t sing “Would You?” in Singin’ in the Rain. A woman named Betty Noyes does. Anyone not dazzled by the film would know this with their ears. Reynolds’s voice is high, sunny, tinny. “Would You?” is sung by someone with a natural timbre, a richness, that Reynolds couldn’t attain with a hundred years of voice lessons. So even though the movie’s plot hinges on dubbing to save a star from humiliation, Betty Noyes hides behind a curtain of her own, singing for Reynolds, unnoticed, uncredited.

There’s more. In one scene, Reynolds and Kelly stand in a recording booth, finishing up the dub of The Dancing Cavalier. In view upstage is a movie screen. A quick clip of the film plays on it.

LINA
Nothing can keep us apart. Our love will last until the stars turn cold.

Moments later, the clip plays again as Reynolds dubs the line.

CATHY
Nothing can keep us apart. Our love will last until the stars turn cold.

But that second speaker isn’t Debbie Reynolds either. It’s Jean Hagen, in her natural voice, not Lina’s paint-peeling yowl. The scene depicts Hagen dubbing Reynolds dubbing Hagen.

Deception, layered like tiramisu. Singin’ is an entertaining hybrid of backstage musical and Hollywood story, and it plays on the real history of Hollywood: poor Clara Bow and her Brooklyn yammer, poor Vilma Banky and her thick un-American tongue, poor John Gilbert and his unmanly yip. These stars lost their light immediately, in a matter of months, and ended badly, in obscurity or early death. Singin’, backstage and frontstage, replicates the problem, and its embarrassing zenith, and its solution (new, young stars with good voices). That is, Cathy is a pawn to the Big Hollywood represented by R.F. Simpson and Monumental Pictures, and Betty is the pawn to the Big Hollywood represented by Arthur Freed and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Someone would have to make a backstage musical about Singin’ in order to give due justice to Jean Hagen and Betty Noyes.

But no one ever will.

*

A Wikipedia collage:

Dental bonding is a dental procedure in which a dentist applies a tooth-colored resin material (a durable plastic material) and cures it with visible, blue light. This ultimately "bonds" the material to the tooth and improves the overall appearance of teeth. Tooth bonding techniques have various clinical applications, including operative dentistry and preventive dentistry as well as cosmetic and pediatric dentistry, prosthodontics, and orthodontics.

It has been found that after 10 years, 50% of veneers are either displaced, need re-treatment, or are no longer in satisfactory condition.

In a controversial opinion, Dr. Michael Zuk, DDS, comments on the overuse of porcelain veneers by certain cosmetic dentists in “Confessions of a Former Cosmetic Dentist.” He suggests that the use of veneers for “instant orthodontics” or simulated straightening of the teeth can be harmful, especially for younger people with healthy teeth.

However, Dr. James W. Dunnavant, DDS, believes the benefits outweigh the small risks when the procedure is performed by a competent dentist. Leading dentists caution that minor superficial damage or normal wear to the teeth is not justification for porcelain or ceramic veneers. This is because the preparation needed to apply a veneer may in some cases destroy 3-30% of the tooth's surface if performed by an inexperienced dentist.

Veneers were invented by California dentist Charles Pincus in 1928 to be used for a film shoot for temporarily changing the appearance of actors' teeth.

*

Even worse, I found out on the internet that The Lifespan of a Fact was only based on correspondence between D’Agata and Fingal. The conversation about moral responsibility and not spoon-feeding your audience hadn’t grown organically out of Fingal’s fact-checking duties and D’Agata’s artistic propensity toward resisting them. It’d been designed. It’d been shaped. The whole reading experience had been engineered for effect.

Like Hollywood. Engineered. And like Singin’, with its tiramisu layers: deception hidden within its depiction of deception. Except that Hollywood’s misleading is cheerful, collaborative; awareness exists in all directions that they’ve made us a happy lie, even if beneath the happiness is the toil and underrecognition of real people, real voices. D’Agata’s misleading, it strikes me, is about a position of superiority. In writing The Lifespan of a Fact, just as in writing his essay about the death of Levi Presley, D’Agata relied on a sophistication he can’t be certain his audience possesses, and he chose to mislead.

I don’t know if a writer has a moral responsibility to her audience, but I don’t think decent people deliberately mislead others. Twice.

Late in the essay, D’Agata admits that he has bent and deformed the facts in order to draw profound, artistic patterns. Admits it in the essay, but does not admit it to his fact-checker. His fact-checker, like his audience, has to discover this admission on his own. But by then it’s too late, and the relationship has destabilized such that the whole thing feels wrong.

Yet my philosophy remains stacked, for now, in its configuration of block upon block. I believe in telling the truth on the page because I have seen D’Agata refuse to believe in it. Only by communicating directly to the reader, by looking you in the face and saying here, this is me, in language, telling you what I am, word by word, without ever misleading you on purpose about what I know, can I write the truth.

Unless I am telling you a fiction, a story about Debbie Reynolds and Fred Astaire that never actually happened. It’s based on a probably-true story, but the whole thing about her going to his house? I made that up.

Does such layered fraudulence mean you can’t find it true?

*

After the ice bath for her feet, she falls asleep on the sofa, and he hasn’t the heart to wake her. (Phyllis is in San Francisco.) He makes coffee and busies himself with next Monday’s sides, and then wakes her slightly after midnight.

Oh, she exclaims at once, I’m so sorry.

Do your feet feel better? he asks.

Yes, much, she says. She touches her instep and winces.

Will you show me what’s giving you such trouble? he says. I have a dance room with mirrors and a barre if you’d like.

Shouldn’t I go home? she says. It’s awfully late.

It’s never too late to dance, he says.

She smiles.

And so, she dances. She isn’t bad, just new. He shows her some shortcuts to solve the problems she’s having. He dances with her and she remarks on how light his touch is compared to Mr. Kelly’s. He curls his middle two fingers and says nothing. By two she laughs a little when he jokes and her muscles have loosened enough to show the brightness in her movements.

Don’t try to hit every step, he tells her. The Foley men will put those in. Just stay with the beat. Don’t lose the beat.

I won’t, she says. She is sprawled on the floor of his studio, barefoot, kneading her left heel. Thank you, Mr. Astaire.

You’re quite welcome, Miss Reynolds, he says, and stoops to give her a little pat on the shoulder. Her skin is warm. Should I call you a cab?

She looks up at him, hesitates for a tiny moment. He meets her gaze steadily, hoping she won’t, that she isn’t, that she doesn’t think. Phyllis being away has nothing to do with her coming here.

That would be very kind, she says.

*

She was right, of course. There is no truth. There is fact, falsehood, and the best we can do. That’s all. I can’t go back to my real teeth. You couldn’t make a movie without fraudulence, even if you wanted to; the very stuff of cinema is lies. Beautiful beyond compare, those lies, but inarguable.

We already know that fact and truth bear a wonky, unscientific relationship to each other. We know that we live in a weird era, when opinion can win an argument over fact. We know, from Stephen King, that fiction is the truth inside the lie.

We know that The Lifespan of a Fact was presented as a genuine artifact of a specific encounter between two men. 

We know that we as readers, unless we are incurably postmodern, rely on what we are presented.

None of these statements are facts.

The biggest problem with Singin’ is that it’s wonderful. It’s probably the primary example of its genre (MGM musicals from the classical Hollywood era), and that genre is known for nothing if not its fakery. It’s all phony, all cardboard and glitter, ridiculously over the top and unreal. And yet, I’d save Singin’ from a fire, even if I had to choose between it and my baby book. It is a pure expression of human joy. It’s intrinsically fake, unquestionable in its many layers of fraudulence, and yet somewhere between the screen and the eye, a transformation occurs, and the film becomes fine, even true.

But then, this is Hollywood, my dears. This is Hollywood.

Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials, an SPD Bestseller. Her work as a book critic has appeared in the Washington Post, NPR, the Believer, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other places. Find her at kcoldiron.com or on Twitter @ferrifrigida.