Singin' in the Rain:
metaphor

The terms here, while being literally played out as seduction and romance, are all apposite to the simultaneous argument the film makes about cinematic futures and the 'singing' cinema. While this can be thought of as metaphoric, to insist upon such an interpretive move is to rely overly much on a literally textual tradition. It is important to this film, and probably to cinema in general, that it is a romance and an argument about what the cinema might be, as well as a sophisticated demonstration of its own legitimacy as art. In other words the concrete logic (for example what Lévi-Strauss has ascribed to myth, and Biró has detailed in cinema) that the film displays is fundamental to cinema's mode of thought and allows the film to develop series of arguments or ideas that form constellations around particular themes, though sharing common elements. On the other hand, being popular cinema, it is also just a song.

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