Playbook For Chicago

PLAYBOOK FOR CHICAGO

From Shootings to the Silver Screen—The History of Chicago

**The Truth—Stranger Than Fiction
**Art Imitates Life
**Life Imitates Art
**You Oughta Be in Pictures Again—But How?
**Imagination to the Rescue.
**Roxie’s Reveries

Ongoing Themes That Play Throughout Chicago

**Transitions Back and Forth Play a Major Role
**The Depth of Roxie’s Reveries
***Freud’s Formulations
***Jung’s Take
***Archetypal Excursion
***Hiatus in Hades With Hillman
***Romanyshyn’s Response Regarding Reverie
**Onyx Theater Excursion
***A Colorful Perspective
***Mineralogical and Esoteric Qualities
***Mythical Look
**It's All Show Business
**Mirror, Mirror on the Wall Who’s the Most Narcissistic One of All?

Chicago—Chapter and Verse

Reflections on Chicago

Chicago Gameplan

Created in a shadowy time, and reflecting on another shadowy time, the film Chicago (Marshall, 2002) is a wonderful vehicle to illuminate the darker aspects of play. I will begin by giving a short summary of the story so that we can get our cartographic bearings, to get a feel for how Grof's cartography "plays out" in the movie. Then we will explore the history of Chicago, from its real life beginnings to the making of the movie. After that I will allude to the darker themes and dimensions or facets that the movie reveals and then we can explore how these themes actually play out in the movie. Finally, we will reflect on the possible lessons that can be learned. Along the way, this essay may take an excursion or two into the Onyx Club, and visit psyche’s players.

A Short Summary of Chicago

Chicago (Marshall, 2002) is the story of Roxie Hart, an ambitious ex-chorus dancer who desperately wants to be a star. Set in 1929 Chicago, the movie Chicago takes place in the last days of the Jazz Age when Chicago was awash with bathtub gin, bootleggers, gangsters, and jazz; it was one last hurrah as the decade of decadence drew to a close. An enantiodromia (Jung’s term for the turning of something into its opposite) awaited, on the eve of the Great Depression.

We first see Roxie standing in the audience at the Onxy Club watching Velma Kelly’s act onstage. Roxie, fantasizing of stardom, projects herself onto the stage in Velma’s place. The fantasy represents a very brief glimpse into Roxie's Neptunian (idealistic, imaginative dimension of life, state of psychological fusion, tendencies toward illusion and delusion, escapism, projection, fantasy) dream world akin to Grof’s first perinatal matrix (BPM I)—“confusing daydream with reality,” and “situations in life where important needs are satisfied” (Grof, 1975, p. 102); the word “confusion” means "fusing with." As it turns out, earlier that evening, Velma had just killed her philandering husband and sister.

A month later, Roxie learns that her lover, Fred Casely has lied and used her. He is now ending their affair and gets physically abusive with Roxie. As he starts to walk out on her, Roxie becomes enraged and shoots him to death. After learning that Fred was married and had five children she feels further betrayed and furiously confesses to the killing, “yeah I killed him and I’d kill him again.” Roxie is handcuffed, locked up in the “pokey wagon” and taken to jail as the District Attorney announces that it’s a “hanging case.” Roxie is now in exile, jailed, and firmly in a Saturnian Hell of second basic perinatal matrix (BPM II). She is naïve, frightened, and alone, locked behind bars in her cell at the Cook County Jail where she awaits an uncertain and bleak future, from which there seems to be no exit or escape.

While in prison, Roxie meets other murderesses who have violently killed their husbands or lovers, and her rivalry with the now infamous Velma Kelly begins. Roxie realizes that with the help of Mama and Billy Flynn, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. Something good might actually come of all of this if Roxie can keep upstaging her rivals—so Roxie plots and schemes to keep her name in the papers. Roxie is ensconced in this Plutonic death-rebirth struggle of the third basic perinatal matrix (BPM III), for most of the movie. Roxie’s original naïveté vanishes and she becomes a narcissistically-inflated, opportunistic, thieving trickster, who almost succumbs to her own grandiosity. Luckily, with the help of master manipulator Billy Flynn, and her own ruthless cunning, Roxie is ultimately found not guilty.

After being released from jail, at first she struggles to find work on her own and finally achieves her dream of stardom by working with her former rival Velma. In the end, Roxie and Velma strut their stuff in unison at the Chicago Theater. Elegantly attired and all aglow in the limelight, the bright radiant lights of the big time have a fourth basic perinatal matrix (BPM IV) flavor, with its Uranian ambiance. Roxie and Velma capitalize on and spoof their own notoriety, being redeemed and reborn as “trickstars,” and admit they couldn’t have done it without us—the audience.

From Shootings to the Silver Screen—the History Of Chicago

The movie, Chicago is based on a musical, which was based on a play, which was based on real-life events. As Chicago (Kobel, 2003), the beautiful picture book about the movie, playfully reveals—it went from “real to reel” and “came right from the headlines” (p. 23). Two other movies were also based on the play. Sounds sort of complicated, so let me explain.

**From Shootings to the Silver Screen
***The Truth—Stranger Than Fiction
***Art Imitates Life
***Life Imitates Art
***You Oughta Be in Pictures Again—But How?
***Imagination to the Rescue.
***Roxie’s Reveries

The Truth—Stranger Than Fiction

The author of the original play, Maurine Dallas Watkins, born in 1896, was a cub reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1924. During the spring of that year, she covered two murder cases where women had shot their lovers. To attract interest, in reporting on these cases, Watkins gave them a sympathetic and humorous spin that ultimately led to the acquittal of both murderesses. The real-life murderesses, Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan, were fictionalized as the very fashionable Velma Kelly and the prettiest murderess, Roxie Hart. Astonishingly enough, many of the details in the play, musical, and movie, come directly out of real life: Belva’s (Velma’s) not remembering what happened as well as her stylishness—cloche hat and all, Beulah (Roxie) playing the victrola, her confession and the later change of story to they “both reached for the gun,” and even the declaration of pregnancy all occurred in real life. Many of Billy Flynn’s best lines were taken from the slick defense lawyer’s actual summation, and the Mary Sunshine character reflects Watkins’s role, as it was Watkins's reporting that helped free the two. Ebb remarks: “the Mary Sunshine element was a little bit her mea culpa for the injustices that were done for women who didn’t get hanged for various crimes” (Marshall, 2003a, DVD).

Art Imitates Life

Watkins took the material from her reporting and satirized it in a play, which debuted December 30, 1926 and ran successfully on Broadway. The original title was going to be “Play Ball” (Watkins, 1997, p. xxiii); the term “play ball” is slang for cooperate (AHD, 2000c, p. 1346). In 1927, Watkins’s play Chicago was published and a silent film named Chicago—a DeMille production—was released in 1928 (Watkins, p. xxix). In 1942, Ginger Rogers starred in the film Roxie Hart, a not so loyal portrayal, where Ginger as Roxie was really innocent and ended up having a bunch of children (Kobel, 2003, p. 25).

In the early 1950s Robert Fryer, one of the 1975 Broadway musical’s producers, sought the rights to make a musical that would star Gwen Verdon as Roxie, but he was unsuccessful. Verdon later got her then husband, Bob Fosse, interested, yet the rights to make Watkins’s Chicago into a musical would have to wait until Watkins’s death in 1969, since Watkins had become a reclusive born again Christian. Fosse, a Chicago native, born in 1927, did musicalize Chicago for Verdon with the help of John Kander and Fred Ebb of Cabaret fame. In 1975, they brought Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville (Fosse, 1975) to Broadway. The Broadway version takes place entirely on stage, as different vaudeville numbers, and the book, that is, the talking portions in between, are also based on vaudeville. Screenwriter Bill Condon explicates:

The characters did vaudeville turns, which commented on the action, each inspired by a famous act. What made this so brilliant was that the form the musical took also expressed its basic point—that our institutions, especially our legal system, are just as tawdry as the cheapest act on the bill. It was a dark vision and a great achievement.” (Condon, 2003, p. 16)

Fosse had a heart attack during initial rehearsals and staging, so the show was put on hold for months while he recovered; reportedly Chicago became much darker afterwards (Grubb, 1989). Fosse’s Broadway musical Chicago was a success, but it didn’t get the recognition it deserved. Chicago was overshadowed by A Chorus Line, which came out the same year, and swept the Tony Awards. Chicago was successfully revived on Broadway in 1996, and won acclaim at the 1997 Tony Awards.

Life Imitates Art

Watkins’s Chicago was uncannily visionary, when it debuted in 1926. Watkins’s own experience educated her about the way the press could exploit and alter the judicial process, which prophetically anticipated today’s high-profile trials (Watkins, 1997, p. xxiii). Expressing “the broad based aversion towards the aggressive commercialization of crime that was occurring” at the time, Brooks Atkinson, an original reviewer from the New York Times in 1926, wrote: “Chicago is . . . a satirical comedy on the administration of justice through the fetid channels of newspaper publicity—of photographers, ‘sob sisters,’ feature stunts, standardized prevarication and generalized vulgarity” (Watkins, 1997, p. xxx).

La plus ças change, plus la meme chose! (The more things change, the more they remain the same.) Rene Zellwegger, who portrays Roxie in the movie, remarks:

It is actually frighteningly accurate in what it has to say about the manipulation of the press, public opinion. It was truly prophetic at the time when written, a time when journalism and news and entertainment to the masses became very ambiguous” (Marshall, 2003a, DVD).

The original musical came out in the 1970s, during the Vietnam and Watergate era, and mirrored the corruption of American institutions at the time. When the musical Chicago (Fosse, 1975) was revived, in 1996, it had an “incredible relevance all over again: coming off the O. J. Simpson case, with the whole idea of the legal system as being a sort of corrupt world based more on theatrics than facts, we’d just seen it on television.” (Marshall, 2003a, DVD) We had seen how Johnnie Cochran’s expert showmanship had manipulated the system.

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