“Do You Hear the Aliens Sing?”: Analysing America’s Alienation in Starkid’s Musicals The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals and Black Friday

Abstract

[Abstracts] This study will analyse how two of Starkid’s musicals, The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals and its sequel, Black Friday, engage in a critique of America through the figure of the alien. In order to describe how this is done, I examine the evolution of musical theatre, highlighting its social influence and commentary. This, combined with a study of how the alien has been used as a mirror of the troubles of humankind, will be the basis of my analysis of these plays, where I examine how the “other” can represent “us.” The analysis of these two comedy-horror musicals will revolve around the alien’s nature and role. At the same time, since both plays depict how America’s policies and politicians were corrupted before the alien invasion, I will argue that this corrupt capitalist system, where money becomes a religion, is the real origin of human apocalypse. Not only the public sphere, but also the private lives of the characters are shown to be monstruous, often deriving from dysfunctional families. The need of love or lust is one of the aspects that the alien takes advantage of, using the female body as a source and means of production. On this countdown to the end of the world, the heroes/heroines are tested, and they must realise who is the alien and whether they had been alienated all their lives. The critical approach chosen for this analysis is broad and eclectic, but it is indebted to ecocritical and posthumanist scholars (Åsberg and Braidotti, Nayar or Halberstam and Livingston, among others), complemented with Marxist criticism (when talking about the description of America’s capitalism) and feminist points of view (the industrialization and commodification of the female body). The main objective of this BA thesis is to demonstrate that the image of the alien, inserted in musical comedies, mirrors and magnifies the faults of humankind, serving as a commentary on our civilization. Finally, my conclusion is that The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals and Black Friday’s light-hearted comedies, mixed with the horror of the alien apocalypse, enact an inevitable disaster caused by earthlings’ mistakes. In this performative context, the audience is the “humankind,” observant of the “alien-performers” that provide a representation of the mistakes humanity makes.