Everyone has their favorite song from the original West Side Story (1961), but mine is “Gee Officer Krupke,” which consists of a few errant youths making fun of a policeman’s—and by extension, America’s—obsession with tracing their delinquent behavior to cliché childhood misfortunes:
“My daddy beats my mommy / My mommy clobbers me / My grandpa is a commie / My grandma pushes tea / My sister wears a mustache / My brother wears a dress / Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess!”
The point of the song isn’t to dispute the idea that people are influenced by their environments. Rather, it’s to mock the establishment’s fetish for speculating on the causes of behavioral problems while neglecting to give badly needed help to those caught in the cycle of degeneracy. To the boys singing the song, the question of how they got where they are is irrelevant. What matters that Krupke and others won’t lend a desperately needed hand. Since this point is implicitly made at several other moments, I’ve always viewed it as the film’s central social thesis.
Somehow, though, Steven Spielberg seems to have missed that message entirely, because the updates he’s made in his remake of West Side Story, now in theaters, are in direct contradiction to it. Like Officer Krupke, Spielberg in this version has a shallow, pointless explanation for everything. For instance, the two gangs are fighting because their neighborhood is being razed for a shiny new development. Ah, so that’s it! And Tony wants out of the Jets because he had some time in prison to reflect, and besides, he can’t break his parole. Makes sense! Also, it’s emphasized that the aimless Riff has no family, and it’s hinted a few times that his dad may have been killed, a fate that awaits him, as well. How logical! On and on.
Spielberg is trying to treat his characters with love, trying to help the audience see where they’re coming from. But this does nothing for the film and, perhaps more importantly, nothing for young people on the margins of society. Again, this is the point of “Gee Officer Krupke”: that without the intention to give concrete assistance, tracing social evils is merely an academic exercise. Spielberg has so ignored the song’s warning against cheap psychologizing that when “Gee Officer Krupke” is eventually performed, it’s genuinely confusing for a minute whether the boys are being ironic, as in the original, or whether they’re actually serious in tabulating scapegoats, since the latter would seem to be more congruent to the aims of the director.
I’ve been beaten to this point, unfortunately, by Richard Brody of The New Yorker, with whom I rarely agree but who has precisely zeroed in the misguidedness of the new West Side Story:
Brody: “Spielberg… delivers the very kinds of diagnoses that the song is meant to mock—he himself Krupkifies the film. He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes. Instead, he enumerates topics and solutions dutifully and earnestly, creating a hermetic coherence seemingly rooted not in the positive shaping of drama but in the quest for plausible deniability in the court of critical opinion.”
Indeed, the “court of critical opinion” is Spielberg’s true audience, and it will surely grant him his desired approval. That’s because many who evaluate movies today perceive themselves, essentially, as academics—not academics of film, but rather academics of social forces; and for these viewers, it may well be satisfying to discover Spielberg’s “hermetic coherence,” to find that he has scrupulously supplied, if only in passing, the unseen root of each evil portrayed in the film.
Thus, the self-gratifying pontification lambasted in “Gee Officer Krupke” is sadly a dominant mode of art criticism today. Its purveyors want everything put explicitly into context: they’re interested in what’s off the screen, such as the villainous property developers, rather than what’s on it. What a strange way to watch a film!
It’s a shame that Spielberg has been caught up in trying to please these folks, because he has made, otherwise, a very good film. Several musical numbers pop. New actors and actresses give excellent performances. The set design is mostly top notch. Nevertheless, when this movie is watched fifty years from now (perhaps upon being remade again), it’ll stick out oddly for its obsession, so traceable to our current moment, with emphasizing the larger forces impacting the characters, such that every misfortune and misdeed is made to seem logical rather than dramatic. Hamlet in 2021, I’m sure, would be about a Danish hunger crisis that spurred a few innocents to murder.
Somehow I don’t think that would do well at the box office, either.
–Jim Andersen
For more reviews, check out my review of The Power of the Dog.