The Failure of Grease 2
Grease 2 is often regarded as one of the worst sequels in movie history; it’s pointless, a complete copy of the original (minus all the good parts), and the songs are forgettable for the most part. The story is also lazy, with subplots being introduced and dropped before you can say “chang chang changitty chang shibop”, nor do any of the motivations make sense — since when were Pink Ladies only allowed to date T-Birds and vice-versa? All of these reasons are regularly brought up in discussions of why Grease 2 is so bad, but I think this movie has one overarching failure that is consistently overlooked. Watching Grease 2 it becomes very clear that the people behind it did not understand musicals, which is odd, considering it was directed by choreographer Patricia Birch. Like every mode of storytelling, there are implicit rules. You can experiment with those rules, you can bend them, you can even break them, but you have to do it skilfully and you have to have a reason. There are two reasons this movie failed specifically as a movie musical, and both can ultimately be boiled down to indiscriminate departure from the structure and rules of a musical.
It has already been said that the songs are largely forgettable, and even where they’re actually catchy, the lyrics are god-awful (it’s been three years since I first heard it and Michelle Pfeiffer singing “I want a rider that’s cool” still haunts me), but a musical is not just a collection of songs; rather, it is a collection of songs which interact with each other and with non-musical elements to tell a story, and Grease 2 does not use its songs to tell a story. Only Cool Rider and Who’s That Guy move the main plot forward in any way. In the former, Michael learns about Stephanie’s romantic criteria and this motivates him to create his biker persona, and in the latter Stephanie and her peers are introduced to Michael’s alter-ego, setting up both his romance with Stephanie and the T-Bird’s dislike of him.
It is, however, true that not every song in a musical has to move the plot forward. Songs can also be used to establish characters’ feelings and reflect their internal monologues, or more generally to provide set-up for the plot. Most of the other songs fall into this category. Charades and Love Will Turn Back the Hand of Time are the clearest examples. The first of these tell us how Michael feels about having to assume a false identity, while the second reveals Stephanie’s grief over Michael’s supposed death. We’ll Be Together also serves this purpose, showing how all the characters have supposedly grown and are now ready to take the next step in life, secure in their relationships with each other. Back to School Again and Score Tonight are the ‘set-up’ songs. — they introduce the characters and the main issues that they will face over the course of the movie: school and sex. This leaves us with five songs that serve absolutely no purpose. That’s a third of the songs in the musical.
Grease 2 is a ‘backstage musical’, meaning that much of the plot revolves around the characters putting on a show, in this case a talent show. Two of the songs are part of this talent show, and to some extent that explains their existence, but why is Grease 2 a backstage musical? Why is there a talent show? The best backstage musicals, in my opinion, use the ‘show within a show’ songs to say something about the characters or the plot, but this is not the case in Grease 2. The T-Birds’ talent show entry, Prowlin’, for example, begins just after the T-Birds have argued with the Pink Ladies over Stephanie’s relationship with Michael. The first half of the song takes place as the T-Birds are walking away from the site of the argument, and only halfway through does the scene shift to a talent show rehearsal. The split setting of this song implies that Prowlin’ is relevant to the story, and we might assume from the lyrics about finding “a chick who’ll give you more” that the T-Birds are on the prowl for other women, except… they aren’t; their interest never shifts away from the Pink Ladies as this song implies. Even if that song only exists to tell us that the T-Birds are misogynistic and only want sex from women, this is not new information and has in fact been shoved in our faces both musically and non-musically for the entire course of the film up to this point.
The other pointless songs in Grease 2 similarly exist to tell us information that we already know, Reproduction being a prime example of this. It is one of four songs about sex in Grease 2, but this one barely even involves the main cast — most of the solo lines in the song are sung by extras, and it tells us nothing that Score Tonight hasn’t already told us. Worst of all is Rock-A-Hula-Luau, most of the lyrics of which are simply yelling “Luau!” while the cast unconvincingly pretend to be having a good time. Conversely, every song in the first Grease film serves a real purpose. It is easy to make a comparison between Rock-A-Hula-Luau and You’re the One that I Want, since both of these come at the same point in their respective films and both mark the end of the school year. Although Grease and Grease 2 have their main couple reunite and resolve their issues at this point, only Grease chooses to do this through song. Admittedly, not every plot point in a musical has to play out through song, but the problem comes where Grease 2 chose to put a song there anyway. Michael and Stephanie reunite through normal speech after the musical number, meaning the only information conveyed in Rock-A-Hula-Luau is the fact that a party is indeed happening and everybody is having (dubious) fun.
The first rule that Grease 2 broke, then, was the rule that songs have to serve a purpose. This rule has not necessarily always existed in musicals, especially in their early years, but I would argue it was firmly fixed by the time this film was released in 1982. The second rule, however, is far more important and universal, and that rule involves diegesis. This term can mean a lot of different things, and even within the field of movie musical studies its meaning is subject to a lot of debate, so much so that some scholars have suggested throwing it out altogether.[1] Generally, music is diegetic when it occurs within the story and nondiegetic when it occurs outside the story. This concept is still thorny outside of musicals, but it is at least somewhat clearer. A good example comes from The Return of the King, in which Pippin sings a thoroughly diegetic song to Denethor — that is to say, within the story, Denethor asks Pippin to sing a song and Pippin does, but the instrumental accompaniment is nondiegetic; the characters are not hearing that music, only the audience is. Even in this example where I use a non-musical, things still quite aren’t as clear cut as I’ve made them out to be. I would call Pippin’s song diegetic, but it also plays over footage of the soldiers of Gondor riding into Osgiliath. Presumably, these soldiers are not hearing Pippin sing at that moment, so the song in a sense becomes less diegetic. Even though it’s still not perfect, it’s a lot easier to mark a clear boundary between diegetic and nondiegetic in non-musical movies.
The distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic becomes even murkier when movie musicals come into it. Again, using the first Grease as an example, the song We Go Together is one that would typically be said to be nondiegetic. There is no realistic reason to be singing this song and there is no plausible source for the instrumental accompaniment. But I would argue that it becomes even less diegetic as the song continues. In the outro, a deep male voice is introduced into the background that doesn’t seem to be coming from any of the kids at the carnival, and by the time Sandy and Danny fly off in their car, fewer and fewer of the kids can actually be seen singing. The song has become less connected with the characters, with what we’re seeing onscreen, and therefore less diegetic. This is why a lot of scholars and critics prefer to talk about diegesis as a spectrum rather than as two completely separate categorisations, and as I mentioned earlier, some prefer a different spectrum altogether.
It seems difficult to get the boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic wrong if it exists on a spectrum, but there are still conventions, and where Grease 2 failed was in flouting these conventions without reason. By the time the main cast of Grease stop singing in We Go Together and by the time the disembodied male voice is introduced, the chorus has already become so large that these unrealistic, nondiegetic elements do not shock the audience or come across as wrong; we are eased into this unreality. Even at the beginning of this song, we are more able to accept the large chorus of people by first hearing one key character burst into song, then his friends join in, and finally the rest of the student body. Grease 2 is far less concerned with following these rules, and as a result, many of their musical numbers are extremely jarring because the diegetic status is changed very suddenly, breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
By far the worst offender is Cool Rider, which despite some of the worst lyrics in the movie and the most confusing diegetic mix-up, somehow manages to be the universally agreed upon (even by me) best and most memorable song from Grease 2. Cool Rider is a broadly nondiegetic song, which becomes less diegetic as it progresses. Stephanie starts out singing directly to Michael and then dances away from him, retreating into her own fantasy, although we can gather from Michael’s later behaviour that he is still hearing her. Of course, this is entirely unrealistic, but the audience has been successfully eased into it. The problem comes in the outro, where Stephanie, having been singing and dancing all by herself, emerges from the school building into a setting where students are milling around, chatting in small groups. In other words, she moves immediately from a fantastical setting to an entirely realistic, naturalistic setting. The contrast between a singing and dancing Stephanie and a large number of entirely normal students completely shatters the heightened reality in which Cool Rider seemed to be taking place and switches the musical number from nondiegetic to diegetic fast enough to give audience members whiplash. This is cemented by the fact that the music seems to be following Stephanie as she gets further away, both the vocals and the accompaniment. Stephanie is unquestionably singing and dancing within the world of the story, raising a bunch of questions — where are these instrumentals coming from, since they appear to clearly exist within the story? Even more pertinently, why is she behaving in such an odd way compared to her classmates? Watching her dancing through the grounds of her school while everybody tries their best to ignore her is frankly embarrassing, and it does the worst thing a musical could possibly do — it makes you wonder why they’re singing.
This is definitely the most glaring diegetic problem in the film, but it happens in quite a few of the songs. The very first song, Back to School Again, makes the bizarre choice of having the students dance to a song on the soundtrack, sung in voiceover, by a man who is clearly not actually present in the scene. The students themselves do not start singing until about halfway through the song. This song is at least somewhat diegetic because the characters can hear it and are reacting to it, but the fact that it does not become a musical number in the traditional sense until halfway through raises questions. Where is the voice coming from? Where are the instrumentals coming from? Who is the man singing? These are questions that the audience should not be asking, and which could have been so easily avoided if one of the students had just started singing from the get-go.
Likewise, in Who’s That Guy, the first lines of the song are sung during a shot where we can see almost the entire cast and none of them even have their mouths open. Only later on do we actually see the cast singing the lines. Once again it raises uncomfortable questions. The cast clearly is not singing, but they do start singing later on, so they must be able to hear the beginning of the song — where is it coming from? Who is singing it? One of Michael’s solo lines is unambiguously sung inside his own mind, and a generous reading might assume that the first lines of the song are sung inside the respective minds of the entire cast, but that brings with it its own questions. Why make that distinction? Why are the cast singing their thoughts aloud for some of the song but singing inside their heads for other parts? This reads to me like a fear of committing to the musical medium, and one which ultimately makes it a far more conspicuous, confusing work than it would have been otherwise.
Love Will Turn Back the Hand of Time presents a slightly different diegetic issue. Instead of switching indiscriminately between diegetic and nondiegetic, it is diegetic where it absolutely should not be. In any other musical, this would clearly be a nondiegetic musical number because most of it is a fantasy sequence occurring in Stephanie’s head, but in Grease 2 Stephanie starts singing her fantastical lament for Michael in the middle of the Pink Ladies’ talent show performance, a firmly diegetic musical number. What’s more, the other characters even react to this. By the end of the performance, she is sitting down, not taking part in her friends’ choreography, and people in the audience and on the stage are asking aloud, “what’s wrong with Stephanie?” She has, within the world of Grease 2, just started singing an entirely different song halfway through her friends’ performance. As with all the convention-flouting in this film, the only effect this has is confusion.
The worst thing a movie musical can possibly do is make you ask why they’re singing, and Grease 2 does this at almost every turn, both in its confusing diegetic status and the utter pointlessness of many of its songs. Not only are the musical numbers entirely superfluous, but they also actively make the film worse by unceremoniously yanking the audience out of the agreed-upon fantasy that must exist in a movie musical. It is not the only movie musical to make these mistakes, and in fact the first Grease is actually guilty of a few of them to a much lesser extent, but Grease 2 is by far the worst offender I have ever encountered, and that is, in my opinion, why it ultimately fails.
[1] Penner, N. (2017) ‘Rethinking the Diegetic/Nondiegetic Distinction in the Film Musical’ Music and the Moving Image 10(3).
Further Reading:
Knapp, R. (2006) The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wood, G. (2017) ‘Why Do They Start to Sing and Dance All of a Sudden? Examining the Film Musical’, in Everett, W. A. and Laird, P. R. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to the Musical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 381–382.
