Abstract
In an iconic moment from 1992’s Wayne’s World, the eponymous slacker protagonist meets his love interest for the first time. Wayne gazes, slack-jawed, the diegetic soundtrack fades, and twinkling stars surround Cassandra while Gary Wright’s pop ballad ‘Dream Weaver’ replaces her hard rock belting. ‘She’s a babe … SCHWING!’ Wayne cries out, flashing an obscene gesture. The scene parodies the classical Hollywood trope of using musical scoring to essentialize a romanticized femininity and masquerade male subjectivity as female interiority. The film reinforces this archaic construction several times, notably with Wayne’s buddy Garth’s Tchaikovsky-scored vision of his ‘Dreamwoman.’ But Wayne’s World is only one of many films from the past few decades to parody this musical-dramatic trope. This essay defines the ‘schwing’ trope and investigates how gender stereotypes are implicated in a seemingly lighthearted display of gendered musical comedy—in short, in the ideological and aesthetic construct that enlists us into identification with Wayne and Garth and invites us to find their idealizations of Cassandra and the Dreamwoman so funny.
Wholehearted thanks to Oren Vinogradov and Kelly Stathis for their encouragement early on in this project, and to Jessica Kuskey for her frequent help and insight. Thanks also to Sarah Kessler Wolven, Dan Blim, Renée Camus, Alon Schab, and C.E. Aaron for their excellent suggestions of schwing examples. I am especially indebted to Robynn Stilwell for helping me to come to terms with some of the bigger ideas with which this essay attempts to grapple.
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to Caitlan Truelove for helping me realize the importance of this point with her suggestion of the ‘Slow Motion’ song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2019, dir. Stuart McDonald, season 4, episode 15), in which the ‘four badass chicks’ sing about how powerful they feel walking into a casino ‘in slow motion.’ This scene, however, includes no looking onscreen audience and is not an example of a schwing.
- 2.
This section contains material from my dissertation, ‘Heroes, Dames, and Damsels in Distress: Constructing Gender Types in Classical Hollywood Film Music,’ PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2012.
- 3.
FRC characters were also always white, at least until 1957 with the character of Katsumi (Miyoshi Umeki) from Sayonara (1957, dir. Joshua Logan, music by Franz Waxman).
- 4.
Schwings also appear increasingly on television, but these examples lie beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 5.
Not only is the song ‘Garbage Truck’ performed later in the film by Scott’s band Sex Bob-Omb, but Scott is also the band’s bass player, giving this schwing an extra level of connection to his subjectivity.
- 6.
An unusual counterexample is the schwing from A Night at the Roxbury, in which the nightclub’s diegetic music, ‘Be My Lover’ by La Bouche, seamlessly transitions into the schwing music.
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Fülöp, R. (2023). ‘She’s a Babe … SCHWING!’: Feminine Spectacle and Parody in Comedy Film Scoring. In: Audissino, E., Wennekes, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33422-1_7
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