Singin' in the Rain (Singin' in the Rain)

What Gene Kelly does in this sequence — and the song and the film are inseparable — is perform joy as a kind of athletic event, turning a simple melody about happiness in bad weather into one of cinema's defining images of what it looks like when a person is overcome by feeling too large for their body to contain. The melody itself is almost defiantly simple: a major-key tune with a bouncing rhythm that mirrors the physical act of dancing in a downpour. The original recording from the early 1950s has a cheerful brass-and-strings arrangement that would feel nostalgic in any decade, a sound that belongs specifically to the optimism of American popular music before the complications of rock and roll. Kelly's voice was not a technically extraordinary instrument, but it had personality in surplus — he sang the way he moved, with physical commitment and evident pleasure. The lyric is pure emotional transparency: I am happy, and here is exactly what my happiness looks and feels like, and I am doing it in the rain which makes it even better. There is something almost stubbornly life-affirming about this song, the refusal to be dampened, the insistence on the physical experience of joy even in adverse conditions. You reach for this — or you are simply put in the condition this song describes — on the morning after something wonderful has happened, when the world looks clean and the impossibility of being this happy feels like a very good problem to have.