ABSTRACT
Exploratory and immersive musical playfulness is a recurring feature throughout film history, especially in movies that value youthfulness over the adult orders of routine, decorum, and work. Using criteria theorized by Johan Huizinga, the first part of the chapter demonstrates how music is an efficient means of defining a playground in film, as illustrated by scenes from A Day at the Races (1937), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), and The Sound of Music (1965). The next section of the chapter focuses on musical equivalents in more recent film for Roger Caillois's types of play: agon (i.e., competition as illustrated by School of Rock (2003)) and alea (i.e., chance/destiny as illustrated by Amadeus (1984)); mimicry (i.e., make-believe) and ilinx (i.e., vertigo) are explored through the teen film genre in which musical play is a means of resisting the prospects of an unsatisfying adulthood. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) illustrates how musical make-believe as lip-synching offers teen film characters a vehicle for escaping into and trying on preexisting sonic and expressive identities. The chapter concludes by interpreting teenage music-making in Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club (1985) as a force for appropriating space and time for play.
