“I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”: passing from one world to another in Hollywood musicals

Classical Hollywood musicals are probably the film genre in which the motif of transworld travel (either actual or metaphoric) is the most frequently used. Analyzing scenes from films such as The Wizard of Oz a nd Brigadoon, I argue that this recurrent motif is not just a topos of a genre which favours escape from reality, but a central semantic/syntactic element which calls into question the received notion of the musical as an ideologically conservative genre. Although musicals do not seem to allow any transgression other than momentary and derisory, the motif of transworld travel complicates the norms of the genre. Musicals produce a mature and sympathetic viewer who, while he or she willingly participates in the construction of the fictional world, remains distant and able to assess his or her involvement in this world with detached irony.