A Film Canon

Swing Time clarifies Fred Astaire as a personification of insatiability; that is, as a figure for whom pleasure consists of fluctuating within a given distance from a set 'goal', rather than achieving it. As gambler 'Lucky' Garnett, Astaire's 'goal' is to win enough money to wed a fiancee he doesn't love; as a lover, his 'goal' is to achieve the physical and emotional proximity to dance instructor Penny Carroll (Ginger Rogers) that will necessitate informing her of this fiancee's existence. In this bind, tap dancing becomes the most appropriate mode of expression, providing an potentially infinite, self-generating play whose lack of any ultimate object is registered in the unprecedented fragmentation of the dance sequences, which robs them of any tangible conclusion. Hence Astaire's disruption of any conclusive separation between dancing and not dancing, both by filtering the former through a theatrical clumsiness ("Pick Yourself Up") and a calculated refusal to dance ("Never Gonna Dance"), as well as through the unpredictability of the sequences which, more than ever, gives the impression that he and Rogers are gambling on each other's bodies. More specifically, Astaire makes very little distinction between podalic and verbal conversation - or, alternatively, envisages a parallel relation between the two, rather than the perpendicular relation of Top Hat - in such a way as to clarify the latter as another strategy of postponement, creating a perfect fusion of screwball comedy and musical; a genuine 'screwball musical'. This all extends the realism of the earlier film, as well as its characterisation of tap dancing as an embodiment of the insatiable modernist metropolis, encapsulated in the three major dance arenas, which are all set against panoramic vistas of New York City, and, in one case, features a floor detailing an expansive bird's-eye view.