Colling, SC., 2018.

Pleasure and obscenity in Hairspray (1988; 2007)

Comparing the original (Waters, 1988) and remake (Shankman, 2007) versions of Hairspray this paper explores the ways in which teen films are designed to invite particular tactile and kinaesthetic pleasures. Beyond structural conventions, the spectacles of performance in these films share in common an intended affective impact that draws on the embodied pleasures of music and dance, and on the spaces of possibility created by musical address. Musical moments in girl teen film invite the audio-viewer to enjoy a sense of boundless freedom through an enchanted mode of engagement that is responsive to the pleasures of music and dance. Musical moments can feel like freedom and expansion, but the experiences that they create are also restricted by gender norms. Where the original Hairspray draws on musical obscenity and the grotesque the conventional remake is representative of the sanitized aesthetic mode of millennial girl teen films. Both films draw attention to surfaces, as teen films generally do, but where the surface of the Waters' film is sticky and carnal the 2007 film feels like a smooth, simulated fabrication. Taking a material-semiotic approach, the paper unpicks the ways that musical moments in these two films are designed to generate specific pleasures. Girl teen films embody feelings that lend affective force to specific, gendered ideas of fun. The paper proposes that the millennial version of the film invites us to enjoy a limited version of girlhood, one that feels like potential and promise but is restricted within prescribed parameters. By focusing on how notions of fun (that sit in accord with postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies) feel pleasurable we can understand why we might be drawn to this version of girlhood nonetheless.