Play it cool, boy: Role-playing and identity in Spielberg’s West Side Story

In West Side Story, Steven Spielberg takes the musical form and uses it to comment on lost innocence, identity and the desperation that emerges when people feel they’ve lost that sense of identity.

Steven Spielberg’s characters have always danced. Sure, they may not move like Ginger Rogers or Fred Astaire, but there’s a dynamism to his staging that’s informed by the expressive movement of the Golden Age musicals he loved as a child. Just look at the ferry scene in Jaws (1975), where Spielberg moves Brody and Mayor Vaughn around like chess pieces to show how the politician harries his Police Chief into submission. Or the power plays going on in The Post (2017), where Kay is repeatedly squeezed out of or cornered within frames by the men of the Washington Post’s board. Spielberg’s got the moves and knows how to use ’em.

Sometimes this movement finds musical expression, even when the sequence isn’t directly musical in nature, such as in E.T.‘s (1982) famous finale, which plays like a BMX ballet through the streets and skies of suburbia. Meanwhile, the concept of play and performance has been key in some of his most important films, from the extra-terrestrial concert of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to the overtly performative cons of Catch Me If You Can (2002). Spielberg’s longed to make an out-and-out musical pretty much his entire career, and little by little he’s been honing the skills and waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect project.

It’s little wonder that West Side Story is that perfect project. It’s a show he loved when he was growing up, and its tale of family dynamics, community and prejudice very much play into his thematic concerns. More than that though, Spielberg’s brief forays into full-on musical sequences suggest he sees the genre as something laced with violence as much as playfulness. A chorus line kicks like Indiana Jones, and both the ballroom brawl of 1941 (1979) and the Anything Goes opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) have revolved around fight scenes in movies that playful wink and nod at the audience, fully aware of their own artificiality.

West Side Story offers Spielberg the chance to explore this to its fullest. It’s an opportunity he seizes with both hands, juxtaposing reality and the artifice of the movie musical to comment on the roles his characters are forced to play, the identities they long to have and the violence that erupts when they’re taken from them.

When you’re a Jet…

In this respect, West Side Story starts as it means to go on. We open with a scene of urban decay. New York buildings are being torn down to make way for the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, a real-life location (and home to the movie’s East Coast premiere) that adds to the verisimilitude Spielberg strives for in all his movies. In a long, expressive opening shot, Spielberg’s camera climbs high over the rubble, slowly glides through the sky and snakes down a wrecking ball. He could be following one of E.T.’s flying bikes, but here he’s following nothing because nothing (or, rather, nothingness and the characters’ desperation to avoid it) is what this film is about.

The shot also acts as Spielberg’s take on the sepia-to-Technicolour transition in Wizard of Oz (1939): we’re being transported to another world in which the rules are slightly different. What we see is grim realism, but the way we see it is twisted as the real and the artificial clash for the first (but not the last) time. As the shot winds its way to a close, we seem to be landing on the rubble-strewn floor. Surely nothing of interest can be found here. Except it is: suddenly, a hatch opens and the Jets emerge, crawling from the dirt, the only place they feel like they belong. The film begins in earnest as the gang dance through the streets, playfully pirouetting from store to store as they steal the paints and brushes they need to deface a Puerto Rican flag painted on the wall of a nearby basketball court.

Naturally, the Sharks appear, a fight erupts and the police arrive to break it up. From the very start, Spielberg is unequivocal in his portrayal of the police: either incompetent (Officer Krupke, played by Brian d’Arcy James) or flat-out racist (Lieutenant Schrank, played by Corey Stoll). But there’s more happening here than just that. This is a Spielberg film, so ideas of family and community are everywhere. A Jet called Baby John (Patrick Higgins) has been injured in the fight, a nail hammered through his ear lobe. Schrank pulls him from the crowd, asking who inflicted the wound. There’s a parental air to his actions, rendering both gangs – but especially the Jets, who he lectures about heritage after the Sharks have departed – as children playacting their way through battle.

Following the fight, the Jets’ leader Riff (Mike Faist) tries to recruit fellow co-founder Tony (Ansel Elgort) for the planned rumble that will prove so destructive in the film’s third act, but here too Riff is more child than leader. After serving jail time for almost killing a member of another gang a year prior, Tony has moved on from the Jets and now works in a drug store run by the Puerto Rican Valentina (Rita Moreno). The pair have struck up a strong friendship – a mark of Tony’s maturity – and he now lives in her basement, where the conversation with Riff takes place. Riff’s anxious pleading comes across less like a discussion between two equal friends and more like a younger brother trying to get his elder sibling back onside, or perhaps more pertinently for Spielberg a son trying to reunite his estranged father with the family.

There’s a tragic yearning to Faist’s performance throughout, and it’s entirely arguable that the film is a love story between he and Tony as much as it is between Tony and Maria. Whether it’s platonic or something more, it’s a love that the film is clear will never be requited – and never should be. Riff and the rest of the Jets are violently aggressive racists and, from the opening battle to the rumble, instigators of all the film’s troubles. Yet Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner do as they did in previous collaborations Munich (2005) and Lincoln (2013) and find humanity across the divide. Riff’s a lost boy merely playing at being a gangleader because it’s the only role open to him in a changing New York. Why should a man with no family, no home and no hope even try to escape from it when all that’s left is the rubble-strewn nothingness that opened the film?

Spielberg’s interest in play as a shaper of identity is focused primarily on the Jets. Beyond Riff, two of the gang emerge as critical to the film’s thematic purpose: the aforementioned Baby John and Anybodys, a tomboy in the 1961 film who here is played by non-binary actor Iris Menas and portrayed as a transgender man. First I’ll look at Baby John, who takes centre stage in one of the film’s most remarkable and unsettling musical numbers: the rendition of ‘Gee Officer Krupke’. In the 1961 movie, the song provides a little respite and allows the lesser-spotted Jets to show off their comic chops. It worked back then and was in its own way revolutionary, with the Jets mocking the liberalism that finds excuses for their behaviour. But the light comic touch is problematic sixty years on, almost absolving them of their sins and providing a certain likability that the characters don’t deserve.

Spielberg and Kushner are aware of this and move the sequence from the streets to a police station and add an air of menace almost entirely absent in the original. Key to this is a prostitute (Nadia Quinn) who’s also been brought into the station and watches the number play out. ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ is, therefore, one of a handful of songs that Spielberg plays as a self-conscious performance, with the characters openly singing to an in-film audience (the others are ‘America’ and ‘I Feel Pretty’ which I’ll come to later). As the scene progresses from knockabout comedy to something wilder and more deranged, the prostitute locks herself in a cell and seems to become increasingly terrified, a hint of how Spielberg wants his audience to feel. The Jets revel in identity after identity, pleading to make-believe Krupke, judges and therapists, but as the song comes to its close it’s clear that this is a performance with a point. It’s an induction of sorts for Baby John, who starts as an audience himself, naively following along before deliriously stealing the final verse from the song’s leader Diesel (Kevin Csolak) and bringing it to a close.

If ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ marks John’s acceptance into the group, the granting of a new identity, it provides Anybodys with further proof of his apartness from it. He’s brought into the police station along with the rest of the gang, but is forced to sit on the female bench, along with the prostitute, as they awaited their punishment. For all their talk of togetherness and familial bonds, the Jets repeatedly distance Anybodys, refusing to accept him as male, let alone part of the gang. Spielberg and long-time cinematographer Janusz Kaminski are pointed in their portrayal of the character, repeatedly showing him in isolating one-shots in a film made in 2.39:1 and otherwise dominated by wide angles in which packs of characters vie for dominance. Anybodys scraps too, fighting with the rest of the gang when they laugh at him, but always remaining alone: the fight gets so out of hand that he flees the station before ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ starts.

Indeed, it’s only when Anybodys becomes explicitly useful to the Jets that they accept him. Having learned that an armed Chino is looking for Tony and ready to kill him, Anybodys warns the rest of the Jets, who mobilise and seek to protect their one-time leader. Praising Anybody’s ingenuity, one of the Jets calls him ‘buddy boy’, not only suggesting acceptance in the group but also as a man. Like Baby John’s acceptance, Spielberg plays the moment with a tinge of regret, a suggestion that Anybodys would be better off without the group. He’s the only Jet who sees himself clearly, the only one Spielberg doesn’t position as a dumb kid playing a role. He knows who he is; his tragedy is that the rest of the world doesn’t. A true victim of an actual social disease.

Meanwhile, the key playactor gets his moment in the sun shortly after when Riff comes to blows with Tony in ‘Cool’. In another of the film’s quiet but significant shifts, Spielberg and Kushner have moved the song’s location, bringing it forward to just before the rumble rather than just after it, as in 1961. Riff and a handful of Jets have got hold of a gun from the owner of an Irish bar. The owner makes a comment about Riff’s father and the boy’s inability to live up to his legacy and this seems to bring out the child in him. In the next scene, he and the Jets run through the deserted streets enacting a gun-fight, ‘pow pow powing’ the sound of gunfire. Tony is waiting for them and mocks Riff by calling him Batman. Riff returns the barb with a childish one of his own, but again exposes his frailties: ‘Well gee Superman, I ain’t got your special powers.’

What follows is a beautifully choreographed and performed song and dance sequence that works on multiple levels: a fight for a gun, a fight between two friends and a fight between two different interpretations of identity and play. One (Riff) is desperate to keep the cool toy he’s found, maintain the bond with his best friend and keep on playing the only role he’s ever known: that of the tough guy thug. The other (Tony) is equally keen to put the toy away, move on from an immature and corrosive friendship and create a new role for himself: that of the sensitive boyfriend. The rumble is where the narrative’s decisive violence takes place, but thematically and emotionally, this is the film’s most important battle.

Played out on a crumbling dock, it brings us back to the desolate urban landscapes we saw at the start of the film; a reminder of the nothingness Riff is desperate to escape from. Here though that desperation is escalated. The thin slither of somethingness he was clinging to in Valentina’s basement is now, finally, slipping from his grasp and the only way to maintain his desired identity is to beat Tony. Of course, he does, reclaiming the gun from his friend and regrouping with his fellow Jets, but he’s lost something more important – and knows it. The group depart the scene, each making a gun with their fingers, pointing at Tony and giving enthusiastic ‘Pows’. Except for Riff, who says the word too, but with defeat and resignation. He’s a child who’s just accepted a harsh adult truth. The game’s over.

¡La libertad!

While the Jets have to play-act their identities, the Sharks have no such problems. Spielberg and Kushner are clear that the Sharks are not equally culpable in the violence the film depicts (the attack on the Puerto Rican flag, for example, isn’t inspired by any act on their part) and when they sing their identity-defining song, it’s the real-life Puerto Rican anthem La Borinqueña (another Spielberg/Kushner addition for this version of the story). Riff and his gang use song and dance to divide, intimidate and create personas for themselves. The Sharks’ togetherness is based on something real and communal: a culture, a nationality, a yearning for freedom, for la libertad. Why pretend an identity when you’re already sure of who you are?

Later we see inside the apartment shared by Sharks leader Bernardo (David Alvarez), sister Maria (Rachel Zegler) and girlfriend Anita (Ariana DeBose). The group are on their way to a dance and Bernardo has invited a date for Maria: Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera). He’s a nice kid but, like the Jets and unlike most of the rest of the Sharks, he’s looking for acceptance by playing a role: he wants to be the kind of manly man who can live up to the faith Bernardo is placing in him by setting him up with Maria. It’ll eventually lead to his downfall, but for the here and now he sheds his initial inhibitions at the dance and joins in the celebrations, with Spielberg (as he later does in ‘America’) showing the act of dancing with others (rather than the dancing-as-violence we see in ‘Prologue’ and ‘Cool’) as a communal gesture that brings people together. Positive play rather than destructive play.

Following the dance and her stairwell serenade with Tony, Maria ruffles up her bed to make it look like she’s actually slept in it and then discusses Tony with Bernardo and Anita. Bernardo is predictably confrontational, but Maria holds her ground, insisting that she’s old enough to make her own choices. Anita plays a neutralising role, calming the escalating tensions and insisting that they speak English, rather than their native Spanish, so they can learn the language. This and the previous apartment scene are pure Spielberg, with characters vying with each other and the clutter of everyday life to express themselves. It could be the moment of mimicry between Brody and his son in Jaws or the brotherly sniping that opens E.T., and it’s significant that Spielberg gives it to the characters who are repeatedly ‘othered’ and abused. The closest the Jets have is the confrontational moment at the Irish bar.

It’s no accident either that this domestic scene segues into West Side Story‘s signature moment and a song so vividly realised that I can only imagine Spielberg has been imagining in his head for years: ‘America’. In the 1961 version, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise staged the song as a battle-of-the-sexes flirtatious showdown, a sensible choice for a take that foregrounds the love story. Spielberg and Kushner have grander themes in their sights and so their ‘America’ leaves the moonlit rooftops behind and gets out onto the sun-drenched street, where Anita leads not only Bernardo and his boys a merry dance but also the whole neighbourhood. By the song’s end, everyone – men, women, children – have joined in this tribute to the glories and flaws of the great American melting pot.

If any character represents Spielberg’s voice in the film, it’s Anita. Spielberg repeatedly returns to ideas of community and communication, so Anita’s insistence that Maria and Bernardo learn the language and her ability to immediately command the involvement of neighbours in the opening lines of ‘America’ put her in line with the likes of Bridge of Spies‘ James Donovan and even The Terminal‘s Viktor Navorski, who also cut through division to seek common ground. Her choice of dress doesn’t hurt either. If there’s truth and purity in a Spielberg film, it can often be found in the colour yellow, so Anita stomping through the streets in a bright yellow dress positions her as the film’s ideal, the hope that all characters could aspire to if they could only make the effort to climb out of the rubble. Riff, too satisfied to dwell in that rubble, could learn a lot…

Yet Anita is no bluff traditionalist. She represents community, but it’s a community that’s pushing against the restrictions of the past – and, most importantly, the role it forces her to play. Her love of America comes from the fact she has choice. She doesn’t have to settle down and have an army of children as Bernardo suggests during the scene in the apartment. Nor does she have to settle for being a stay-at-home wife; like Maria, she can get a job and earn her own way through life. Even religion doesn’t pen her in. During ‘Tonight (Quintet)’, we see her in church delivering decidedly unchurchlike lines about having sex with Bernardo, much to the chagrin of her more chaste friends. She has la libertad. She’ll work, live and love how she likes, not play the role expected of her.

When the film’s violence unfolds, it is the loss of this freedom, as much as the loss of Bernardo himself, that Spielberg and Kushner portray as the tragedy. In another significant change from the norm, ‘Somewhere’ is given to Valentina in the wake of the rumble. Another voice of the film’s conscience, she turns the song from a lovers’ lament to a (solo) Greek chorus as she comments on the tragedy unfolding while Spielberg montages through the key characters. If ‘America’ was about the hope of social cohesion, ‘Somewhere’ is about that cohesion falling to pieces. Spielberg’s historical rhyming (Rita Moreno, of course, played Anita in the 1961 film) only adds to the sense of melancholy.

With nothing left but anger, Anita’s duet with Maria (‘A Boy Like That/I Have A Love’) finds her spitting the lines at her friend like a snake spitting venom and resorting to the kind of racism the Jets used earlier (‘One of your own kind, stick to your own kind’). Eventually, Maria talks her around, but an attempted rape by the Jets at the drug store removes once and for all any lingering hope she may have held. As she leaves the store, she denounces Valentina for protecting Tony and associating with the Jets and declares herself a Puerto Rican, not an American. Here Spielberg reminds us of ‘America’ by framing Anita alongside a yellow light that burns in the distance. The colour that previously bonded Puerto Rico and the US is now dividing them, and the melting pot vision of America has never seemed more like a fantasy.

Miss America should just resign

I‘ve purposefully left an analysis of the Tony and Maria romance until the latter sections of this piece because the film itself does that to a degree. Of course, the characters intertwine throughout the movie, but I don’t think Spielberg and Kushner are as enamoured of the relationship as Robbins and Wise were back in the 60s. They retain the hazy, dreamlike quality of Tony and Maria’s first meeting that the ’61 film nailed (here their eyes lock as crowds of dancers flash across the gym and their first kiss is abruptly interrupted as if the pair have been awoken from a dream) but there’s a sense that these kids are playing as much as the Jets are.

This impression is partly formed because ‘Somewhere’ is given to Valentina, so they only get to express themselves through ‘Tonight’ and ‘Maria’. Both are wonderful songs but they’re placed very early in the relationship and infused with the rush of love at first sight. There are other reasons too: a scene on a subway train shows Maria as the more astute of the couple as she insists that there will be consequences – potentially terribly damaging – of their love. It’s easy to read the wiser heads of the director and writer in those words. Meanwhile, the cut-and-thrust of Anita and Bernardo’s relationship suggests something more grown-up; the dizzying speed of Tony and Maria seems trivial by comparison.

It’s a comparison that comes to a head during ‘A Boy Like That/I Have A Love’, which is partly sung in Anita and Bernardo’s bedroom. Watching the scene, I wondered if Spielberg and Kushner had considered removing it or at least had misgivings about the conclusion it draws. Perhaps its popularity and importance to the narrative made removal impossible, but having Maria sing about Tony to Anita in Anita and Bernardo’s bedroom hours after the latter’s death shows a callousness on the young girl’s part that surely won’t have escaped Spielberg and Kushner’s attention. She’s not being intentionally cold, of course, but it’s another little seed of doubt in my mind that suggests that Maria and Tony may not be quite as made for each other as they were sixty years ago.

If there is an undercurrent of callous naivety here, it’s not one Spielberg and Kushner judge Maria too harshly for. She may sometimes be foolish, but the film presents this as her version of the freedom Anita sings about in ‘America’. After all, shouldn’t she be free to make mistakes? Shouldn’t she be able to throw caution to the wind, fall wildly in love and mature as a result of the consequences of her actions? Isn’t that what pretty much everyone else in the world does? Only they don’t have to contend with the racism Maria is up against. Again, the tragedy here isn’t just the loss of a loved one, it’s the loss of freedom and the imposition of a role (that of the bereaved partner) that Maria, like Anita, has placed upon her.

Spielberg crystalises this when he gives Maria a moment as representative of her hopes and dreams as ‘America’ is to Anita. ‘I Feel Pretty’ is perhaps the most candy-coated of all the show’s songs. Light and fluffy, it’s reflective of a woman in love and not much else. In Spielberg’s hands, it’s a moment of foreshadowing, a Capitalist critique (no, really!) and a bitterly ironic meeting of the character’s dreams and reality. As in the show, the song takes place after Bernardo and Riff’s deaths in the rumble, but unlike the show Spielberg relocates it to the Gimbels department store where Maria works, turning the location (and the song) into a playground for her wildest dreams.

As she and her co-workers start their cleaning shift, Maria plays through the store, donning a silk scarf she knows she can’t afford and playing with the display dummies. It’s the dream of a life she believes America and Tony can deliver, but one we already know is impossible. The dummies become ghosts, Maria’s fantasies a nightmare of painted-on faces, permanent grins and ghoulish commercialism that seems entirely facile given what’s gone before it. The Jets doomed themselves to a life of childish, violent roleplaying and through their actions have condemned Maria too.

When the fallout is felt, all characters become locked in roles they didn’t choose for themselves against backdrops that are presented as intentionally artificial. Look, for example, at Anita’s apartment when Schrank comes asking about Tony. The vivid reality we saw earlier is gone, replaced by an artifice that positions the dinner table as an interrogation table as Anita and Maria lie to the officer (another form of roleplaying). Later, when Tony runs through the streets in pursuit of Chino – who he believes has killed Maria – Spielberg and Kaminski drench everything in black and midnight blue. It’s another signature Spielberg colour, a counterpoint to the yellow that represents tragedy and isolation. Here though, it also adds an artifice to the film. Suddenly the streets that seemed so real before now look like theatre sets, lacking depth and distance. Chino emerges and shoots Tony, leaving Maria (now dressed in a deep blue to reflect her environment and mental state) to mourn her lost love.

The Sharks and Jets pick up Tony’s body and return him to Valentina’s store as Spielberg’s camera, capturing the scene in an extreme wide shot, creeps slowly up a stairwell, the kind Tony and Maria used to profess their love, the kind we see in a state of disrepair amongst the rubble at the start of the film. Here the iron bars trap the characters and reinforce the artifice. They’re frames with the movie frame, a reoccurring Spielbergian device and reminder of the inherent filmic nature of the film. The characters have finally closed the loop, ceasing to be real people in a real world and instead turning into actors in a fiction.

Spielberg characters always dance, but here at the end of his first musical, such freedom and self-expression has never seemed so far away.