ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Grease, fan goliath and the biggest blockbuster film musical of all time, has within it a subversive critique of 1950s American culture, but particularly the repressive regimes of gender and sexuality so closely associated with that era. Grease certainly plays to feelings of nostalgia; in fact, its own marketing and promotion campaigns at the time made this appeal plain, as an insert in the double-album soundtrack implored purchasers to ‘share in the nostalgia!’. Accordingly, the ‘camp effect’ is not just a redefining of a style or mode, but a pointed critique of dominant values, particularly related to gender norms, and of the production system, even culture industry, served by constructing passive female objects of spectacle and supposedly duped female fans. When critics direct the conclusions about Grease’s nostalgia specifically to issues of gender and sexuality, its comfortable ‘pap’ transforms into Timothy Shary’s ‘masculine mythologies’ about sexual relations both then and twenty years later.
