The general subtext of Dreamgirls — which, let's face it, has forever existed as the predominant subtext of art and culture in general — is of the double-bind that exists perpetually/repeatedly/unendingly between art and commodity. To paraphrase Dan Graham: It's Show Business and not Show Family. This thematic, of course, is as classic as the songs the movie represents. Except here, the general omnipresence of the subject — of sixties black pop reconstituted as an eighties musical and now repackaged as a double-ohs movie vehicle — exemplifies the manifold ways in which culture industry will, once again, repurpose artistic material as new forms of capital. Then again, it is the persistence of the subject-as-capital and how its art-as-commodity moralizing is played out in the movie that proves most interesting. That is to say: how the geographic/economic shift from Motown-to-Broadway-to-Hollywood is creatively made simultaneous with the skepticism the movie expresses towards black cultural ownership, as opposed to white corporatism (whose covert, sophisticated impetus allows us to think about the whole enterprise in the first place).
