Xanadu: I’m Alive!
Written by: Jennifer Brousseau, special to CC2k
Going back to the mysterious syllable “Ter” – my extensive childhood research quickly found that the only Muse with a “Ter” sound at the start of her name was Terpsichore, the muse of dance. (Why the muse of dance was assigned to help a visual artist is anybody’s guess, but disciples of the Xanadu mythos do not ask questions!)
Learning!
So, while Xanadu taught me about the Muses and the name of their father, Zeus, the music of ELO and Olivia Newton-John transported me to a world where the nine sister goddesses, the Muses, inspired people all around us. I mean, come on! If they’re goofing around Santa Monica, surely they had time to drop by my place in Tennessee, right? Believe me, they were. Xanadu taught me that inspiration is all around us, because if you watch the movie, the muses are everywhere! Look, there’s a Muse selling popcorn or driving a cab or roller-skating down the street! That led to more childhood research into who the Muses were and what they did, and I discovered that their only purpose was to inspire humans to be more creative and expressive in their craft. That’s it. All they did was go around and get artists jazzed about their work.
What a wonderful idea – and we have the Greeks to thank for it. They gave us these characters, and they gave us the expression “looking for your muse” to mean you’re looking for a source of inspiration. Yeah, it might not roller-skate headlong into you and kiss you out of nowhere (as Kira does to Sonny) … but it’s out there.
This brings us to the actual conflict in the movie: Sonny actually, literally finds his muse, and she’s a beautiful goddess who flirts and teases him into a perpetual state of confusion and arousal. She only wants to help him find artistic fulfillment and he only wants her love – but neither can give what the other wants. She can never give a mortal her love and he has rejected the life he chose as painter.
(Good grief – is Xanadu a thematic remake of the classic Christmas flick The Bishop’s Wife?)
Enter Gene Kelly’s character, also named Sonny, whom Kira inspired 40 years earlier – and here we hit upon yet another reason why this movie rocks.
Gene Kelly. Pick up a copy of Singin’ in the Rain to see what I’m talking about. Not many actors today are a triple-threat the way he was. By all the gods of Olympus, how did they score this talent from Hollywood’s Golden Age? Who knows? Maybe Xanadu looked like a throwback to the movies from his heyday. I like to think Kelly picked Xanadu simply because it was familiar to him. It had singing, dancing and a love story – all the ingredients of a classic Gene Kelly vehicle. Seriously, Kelly adds immesurable amounts of class, and it’s more than worth it just to see him dance again. Olivia Newton-John prepared for her dance scenes with Gene Kelly with – no bullshit – six months of tap and jazz lessons, and the old man still out-dances her in every scene.
In closing, let me concede that a lot of critics think Xanadu sucks pretty hard. What the hell do they know? It’s a cult favorite for many Gen-Xers — me included — and rightly so. It not only turned me into an expert on Greek myths, but it also taught me that Greek gods know how to roller-skate, and it taught me that modern-day Olympus looks like the ceiling at a discoteque. It taught me that we're the only ones who can kill our dreams, and it taught me that Muses are everywhere.
I’m Alive!