In my first week as a SpoutBlogger, I linked to Kevin Lee’s video essay on Dario Argento’s Inferno. Twelve weeks later (putting us at last weekend), I met Kevin for the first time in Real Life, and he told me that the next installment of his project has going to investigate one of my favorite musicals, the Busby Berkeley-choreographed Dames. It’s now up at his site.

The actual video essay breaks down the film’s title number, one of the most batshit insanely kaloidoscopic musical sequences of Berkeley’s career, into symbols and meanings; the page it lives on is tricked out with quotes from the film’s original reviews, unadulterated clips of other musical numbers, and Lee’s own analysis.

My favorite part of the whole thing comes at about the 3:55 mark of the video, when Lee stops in the middle of his analysis to ponder the one scene that appears to have gotten away from Berkeley.

There’s a bit where a line full of chorines break from geometric formation and break into a tap dance. They don’t look *that* bad, but with this scene wedged in the middle of Berkeley’s plotted-to-the-death tableau, the dancers’ weaknesses are magnified. “I think a control freak like Busby Berkeley is scared to death of dancing,” Lee says. “This must’ve made Busby Berkeley sick.” Lee says the line as though he can almost relate to Berkeley’s revulsion, although his text about Berkeley’s use of dancers as objects would suggest otherwise.

I haven’t seen Dames in a long time, so I can’t speak to that film’s narrative in specifics, but I think it’s interesting that the “anarchic” nature of that tap dance reads within the musical number as a whole as a flaw, or at least, something Berkeley would have preferred to have done differently. In most of the musicals Berkeley worked on, the plots, thin though they surely were, were full of that kind of female-led anarchy. In a film like Gold Diggers of 1933 or 42nd Street, the women are generally unpredictable, unfaithful, and prone to instigating the collapse of powerful men and institutions for their own amusement. Berkeley’s musical numbers generally come at the end of the film, and often play as though the filmmakers thought it imperative to make the viewer forget about the story of the movie before they leave the theater. In that sense, the idea that they’re very literally about women contained in boxes may not be politically correct by our standards, but it sort of makes sense–it’s all about quelling that anarchic threat.