Characterology
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Singin' in the Rain:
Characterology

It is a truism in narratology that characters are effects of the demands of the narrative: it isn't so much that stories are about character's doing things as a series of events that require agents to get them accomplished.

This is the case in all narrative, whether implicitly popular (or populist) or unfailingly formalist, and Singin' in the Rain is no exception.

The specific attributes of Cosmo, Don, Kathy, R.F. Simpson, and Lina produces an immanent set of relations that allows the more abstract work of the film to be performed. These narrative 'agents' provide the concrete terms of the argument that the film mounts, an argument that is at once a defence of itself and a proof of its own artistic legitimacy.

Character imagemap

The movement between Cosmo, at one pole, and Lina at the other, provides a simple Freudian topography of Id, Ego, and Superego is reasonably obvious. Clearly, the film argues in favour of the creative power of Cosmo, or what in these terms would be characterised as the Id, and while not dismissive of the Superego (represented by the cold sterile order of R.F. and Lina) certainly doesn't recognise any possibility of cinematic revitalisation or recovery in such figures. Specifically this becomes an argument about the muse, and in endorsing the muse also recognises the 'danger' of the clown.

Created in 1998 by Adrian Miles, details, republished 2006.