Page 10 of Director's Cut

I flip over to my PowerPoint. Yeah, okay, it’d be easy enough to insert examples from West Side Story into the vocab.

The first student rolls in right as I click into my presentation. I can’t help but check my phone; twenty minutes early, here even before Maeve and Ty.

Nice to know students are eager, but I don’t need to be cramming with an audience. While I panic over the PowerPoint, I find myself trying to avoid staring at her. She’s got an Aang sticker from Avatar: The Last Airbender on her laptop over the Apple logo. It’s a cool fuck corporations vibe. Groups of other students filter into the classroom soon after, grabbing seats and chatting with one another. One particular clump of blond, tan young men actually talk about taking a class with me as I stand at the front of the classroom. Others throw their gazes toward me and let them cook. Something I’m pretty used to at press events, premieres, those sorts of things. But I remember teaching back at King’s College, how students would hardly lay an eye on me. Where my words meant more to them than the body I said those words in. I shiver, searching for Maeve and her very particular academic scrutiny. Even that feels better than being exposed under the students’ gaze. It’s intense enough that I can’t cram anymore.

I don’t know what game Maeve is playing, but she slides in a few minutes before class starts, leaves Ty among the students, and approaches me. No laptop, just her irritatingly good looks and presumably years of film theory studies. Kids smile and call out to her as she passes. They share snippets about their projects, ask her opinions on films, which she responds to with a clipped Didn’t see or Worth a watch. Still, the students lap up her sparse thoughts like gospel. I find myself taking my own seat as she reaches the front of the room. I know how to work a photo shoot, interview, or red carpet, but there’s something magical about how Maeve approaches a classroom.

“Congrats to everyone for surviving the Hunger Games of registering for this class,” Maeve says during her welcome speech. “Now, if you’re not going to put in the work, feel free to walk out now in front of Professor Sullivan here.”

The class chuckles a bit. I just squirm; I know I know the answer to this somewhere in the back of my mind, but I can’t remember if most professors are called professor even if they’re doctors, or whether she should’ve called me Dr. Sullivan.

And suddenly Maeve’s lecture stops. Maeve’s lecture stops, and her gaze falls on me. I spring out of my seat and move to the front of the room. My hands are shaking. Fuck, it’s like the Oscars but I think I have like thirty times more minutes to fill. Is this why I never did theater?

“I have to guess at least some of you fought for entry into this class because you fucking love musicals, so for you, I’m—”

I glance at Maeve. She looks unhappy. Was I not supposed to swear?

“Professor Sullivan. I got my history BA from Oxford University and went on to almost get my PhD from King’s College before manic-depressively falling into an acting career.”

The students laugh. Mental health jokes work. Good. I get Gen Z.

“I now juggle my time between acting, producing, directing, and being my sister’s unpaid nanny.”

I get another few chuckles, despite how not funny that was. I switch slides. Please tell me we’re just going into it. If they want more useless snippets of my bio, they can ask me after class. I guess. Should I have put in precautionary measures in case of stalkers?

“So yeah, sorry, we’re gonna start diving into material now,” I say. I glance at my computer screen. I’ve never wanted a laser pointer so badly in my life. “Movie musicals have pretty much been married to the film genre since film incorporated sound, with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Like all Hollywood trends, there were attempts to mimic the success of that film, all mediocre and forgotten by historians except for suckers like Professor Arko.” The class laughs. Really laughs, there.

I glance at Maeve. Her arms are crossed now. My face burns, but hopefully I’m wearing enough foundation to hide my blush.

“By the second half of the twentieth century, what had become a Hollywood cookie-cutter genre had to adapt to a rapidly changing audience and society. Influences from audience taste to the whims of Hollywood businessmen created starkly different products, to the point where we could see an adaptation of the same show from the eighties and today and the experiences will inevitably be miles apart. The process of adapting a musical is often more complex and difficult than making a normal movie. In this class we’re going to focus on major movie musicals of the past sixty years, both successes and failures, and discuss what techniques were used.”

I flip to the vocabulary slide. My body clenches, but I resist the urge to look to Maeve for approval. This isn’t some ego-driven Hollywood shit. I can do this all on my own. I’m not being funny enough, but the lecture is completely passable.

“And the biggest question we’ll wrestle with for every film we discuss revolves around diegesis.”

A cacophony of keyboard clicks sounds through the room. The noise brings back a familiar feeling somewhere deep in my bones. It takes me back to when I was a wholly different person, freezing my ass off in England, losing sleep over disappointing my parents by getting a humanities PhD, returning home to a fiancée who sometimes wouldn’t kiss me if I was too tired to go to the archives with her.

“In a musical, songs are either diegetic or non-diegetic.” Said that in the wrong order. “But the effect of diegesis can be seen in any movie, really. Take a montage where some hack director decides to play ‘We Are the Champions’ over his generic sports drama. That song is non-diegetic. The fabled basketball team isn’t actually hearing hours upon hours of the same Queen song.”

The class chuckles again.

“It’s there on a meta level to form the movie itself. But then take the ‘Can’t Hurry Love’ scene in Bad Times at the El Royale. Cynthia Erivo plays an actual singer who sings actual songs that the other characters in the movie can hear. Music in that film is diegetic.”

I flip to my diegesis-music slide. “When it comes to musicals, it’s mostly established that songs are non-diegetic. They serve as something more symbolic. Audiences are forced to suspend their disbelief. Exceptions being, of course, actual music performances in shows. The operas in Phantom of the Opera or cabaret numbers in Cabaret. In a theater setting, where drama is larger than life anyway, it’s had a history of success. But with movies, which, over the past several decades, have trended toward realism, it becomes harder and harder to just buy that people are singing about their feelings. Thus, every movie musical filmmaker has to decide how they’re going to address music diegesis. Will songs really be sung in their movie universe; will they not exist for the characters, only for the audience; or will it be a mixture of the two? Which brings us to our first case study…”

I click my tongue. Switch the slide.

Aaaand it still says The Sound of Music. My hand migrates to my neck.

I finally glance over at Maeve. She’s got a heavy frown on her face. Like I did this to personally humiliate her.

“That’s a clip we’ll look at if we have time,” I say, flipping back to the diegesis slide. A quick scan around the room establishes that no one noticed. I pull my hand from my neck. “We’re actually focusing on the 1961 classic West Side Story to start.”

It’s fine, we’ll just not have a slide for that. I wonder why Maeve and Trish’s assistant established the syllabus but didn’t change my slide, but go figure. I do the rest of the lecture as planned. By the time I get to the end, about half an hour later, my blood’s buzzing. I’m still on edge, but something about this almost feels good. Familiar. The good parts of England, the parts that filled my well when Emily stole from it.

Maeve returns to the front of the classroom when I finish speaking.

“Does anyone have any final questions before the screening?” Maeve asks.

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