I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of the Astaire / Rogers musical comedy film Top Hat.
But … despite some evident absurdity, I find the film enormously enjoyable, and in fact it’s by far the most successful of the Astaire / Rogers movies. Musical films are clearly not bound by constraints of rationality or fidelity to fact — indeed, the narrative objects of culture are in general unconstrained by such considerations: consider the plots of most operas and American Western movies, both set in times and places that never existed and often don’t make sense: consider, specifically, Manon Lescaut and The Magic Flute; or Red River and Stagecoach. Masterpieces of their genres, truly wonderful, but preposterous and inaccurate in many ways. We don’t care. All this stuff happens in fictive worlds that are imaginative creations with their own conventions (not unlike the fictive worlds of science fantasy).
Now: background about idiot plots. And then an appreciation of Top Hat.
