West Side Story: Beauty and social change

I recently rediscovered, in DVD format, one of my favourite films of all time — a musical, as it happens, which won no less than 10 Academy Awards way back in 1961, including that for Best Picture. The movie in question is West Side Story, a 20th century version of the immortal story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (who also choreographed it), with a beautiful, haunting musical soundtrack composed by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. It is based on the stage play — presented many times, most recently in Brisbane, Australia — produced by Robert Griffith and Harold Prince, with a beautifully written screenplay by Ernest Lehman.

What struck me forcefully when I saw it again, for the first time in many years, was the powerful manner in which it enacts the conviction on the part of 18th century poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller that humankind ought to be aesthetically educated in order to be prepared for ethical, political and social action. This belief on his part has its origin in Immanuel Kant’s insight, expressed in his third Critique (of Judgement), that beauty is the symbol of the morally good — something that may, in turn, be traced back to Plato’s notion of the “kalogathon” (if I recall the ancient Greek correctly), or unity of the beautiful and the good (although in Kant it receives its modern formulation, which relates it to a priori human cognitive and ethical capacities, instead of suprasensible Forms, as in Plato).

Like Kant, only more powerfully, Schiller believed that beauty is not restricted to aesthetic experience, but transcends it in the direction of moral experience — so much so that one might say for him the good and the beautiful was one. This might strike the people of today as being odd, if not downright incomprehensible, preoccupied as they are by matters financial and economic. And yet, anyone who may be persuaded to watch a production of West Side Story on stage or in its film format, would have to be pretty insensitive not to experience what Schiller believed through the narrative and the songs that bear this timeless story of forbidden, but irrepressible love between two people from different cultural groups. In the process, West Side Story is simultaneously one of the most uncompromising statements against any form of racism that may urge, in the words sung by an understandably grief-stricken Anita to Maria: “Stick to your own kind!”

Schiller’s assertion, in his work, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, that the moral character of a people may be lifted up by first bringing their souls or minds in touch with beauty, is extremely relevant for an understanding of West Side Story, and its potential effect on audiences. It is worth noting that Schiller wrote the letters out of a sense of disillusionment by the aftermath of the French Revolution, which, despite initial lofty ideals, degenerated into persecution and bloodshed — something he believed could be prevented through the aesthetic education of a people. (Needless to say, perhaps South Africans need some aesthetic education to remind them of the moral ideals underpinning the birth of a post-apartheid, democratic South Africa.)

But I digress. To return to West Side Story: in the film, Shakespeare’s “star struck lovers”, Romeo and Juliet, each from one of two opposed, warring families, the Montagues and the Capulets of Verona, have their counterparts in Maria, a Puerto Rican immigrant, and Tony, a native of Manhattan, New York. They belong to two different cultural groups in Manhattan, which find their strongest, most virile and virulent, expression, respectively, in the tense, uneasy relationship between two gangs, the (ex-Puerto Rican) Sharks, led by Bernardo (Maria’s brother) and the Jets, founded by Tony and his best friend, Riff. To cut a long story short, the Sharks and the Jets, attending a dance at the local gym with their girlfriends, but always spoiling for a fight, arrange for a “rumble” under the freeway to settle the turf conflict once and for all.

In the meantime, Tony, who has been lovesick for a while, anticipating something grand to happen, and arriving at the dance, exchanges longing looks with Maria, who is there with Chino, the rather inept “boyfriend” arranged for her. When their mutual interest is noticed, she is wrenched away from him, but — as in Romeo and Juliet — they meet afterwards at Maria’s home, when Tony climbs up to the balcony by means of the fire escape to declare his love for Maria. Before going there, he sings one of the most memorable songs of the show, Maria (“The most beautiful sound I ever heard … ”), and when the two enamoured lovers (tautology intended) embrace, they sing Tonight — my personal favourite of all its enchanting songs.

Ignorant of the erotic transformation that has occurred in his friend, Riff tries to persuade Tony to join them in the planned rumble that evening, but Tony demurs, having found something far more valuable than fighting for turf supremacy. When he meets Maria at the bridal shop where she works, she persuades him to put a stop to the imminent rumble, and he assures her that he will do so. Anita, Maria’s friend and her brother Bernardo’s girlfriend, witnesses the lie of the land as far as the two lovers go, but does not attempt to come between them.

Tony, trying his best to stop the rumble from happening, does not succeed in getting it cancelled, but at least seems to persuade the warring parties to settle for a “fair fight”, meaning a fist-fight between the two best fighters from either camp. As in all tragic stories, things go seriously wrong, however, and before long Riff and Bernardo face each other with switchblade stilettos. When Tony tries to come between them, he inadvertently creates the opening for Bernardo to stab Riff fatally (just like Romeo, trying to separate Tybalt and his friend, Mercutio, unintentionally paves the way for the latter’s death). When he realises what he has done, he is overcome with grief and anger, and engages Bernardo with Riff’s knife, killing him in turn.

When Chino informs Maria of Bernardo’s death at the hand of Tony, she is torn between grief for her brother and her new-found love for Tony, but love wins out when Tony approaches her openly to confess what he has done, but also explaining to her the circumstances. They plan to elope together, but when the grieving Anita finds him with her, she tries to convince Maria that it is a mistake, and that she should “stick to her own kind” instead. However, Maria persuades her, in turn, that she should “know better,” because she was in love with Bernardo, and sends her to Tony with a message for him.

This is where the inescapably human side of events that exacerbate something already tragic, plays itself out: instead of helping Anita find Tony, the remaining members of the Jets taunt, and eventually rape her as an act of revenge for Riff’s death, and predictably, instead of relaying Maria’s message for Tony to them, she spitefully tells them that Chino found out about Tony and Maria, and in a fit of rage shot the latter. When Tony hears the news he is beside himself, and roams the streets looking for Chino, who has a gun.

But it is Maria who appears instead, to his astonishment, and for a moment the lovers’ good fortune seems to be assured. But Chino finds them, and shoots Tony, who dies in Maria’s arms. As in Romeo and Juliet, the warring parties appear, at the end, to find in the utterly senseless deaths of three people a new sense of the need for peace between them, but not until Maria has berated them and threatened to kill herself as well. The film ends with members of the Jets as well as the Sharks lifting Tony’s body on their shoulders and carrying him off the stage.

You may wonder what this narrative, musically conveyed, has to do with the title of this piece, “Experiencing beauty and the prospect of social change”. It is well-known that members of an audience identify with protagonists in the course of viewing a tragic film or stage play, and — in Aristotle’s words — are “purged by/with pity and fear”. West Side Story is no exception, but here there is a salutary difference, as with Romeo and Juliet before it. The utopian — Schiller would say “eutopian” — moment instantiated by the reconciliation, through tragedy, of two formerly conflicting parties cannot be overlooked. It represents a profoundly morally and politically edifying moment, effected through the aesthetic beauty of the presentation, musically and lyrically.

The song where the penny drops, audibly, in this regard, is the “utopian” dream-sequence number, sung by the entire cast (including a resurrected Riff and Bernardo) after Tony and Maria’s reconciliation in the face of her brother’s and Riff’s deaths, There’s a place for us. This song projects an imagined “place” where all racial, cultural and class differences may be dissolved in the interest of a reconciliation between former foes, much as it is also articulated in the lyrics of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, where the vision of all people becoming “brothers” (and “sisters”, of course) is encountered. But predictably, the utopian expectations of the song have to yield before realism: the harmony falls apart, and recalcitrant tragedy reigns again.

The potential triumph of the human spirit over cultural, racial and ideological divisions is preserved in Maria and Tony’s (Juliet and Romeo’s) unassailable love, however, and this is where Schiller’s belief, that a (perpetually) morally and politically immature humankind needs the edifying work done by art, is most evident. If the dream of reconciliation between ideologically interpellated people has any hope of becoming more attainable, it is through great art such as this. Whether it is Romeo and Juliet, or West Side Story — or any of a host of other uplifting artworks (the films, As it is in Heaven, Jesus of Montreal, Dead Poets Society and Antonia’s Line readily come to mind) — while such art exists, and audiences still show an interest in experiencing them, there is hope for humankind.