Cover Girl is a movie of a woman caught between faces. She is linked to her grandmother's face (intergenerational doppelganger) and to the abstract commodified face of a cover girl. The plot, then, is relatively simple. She must choose her fate between one face (embrace the legacy of her grandmother) and another (enter into the ether of fame and money). But beyond this choice, what truly matters in Cover Girl is the oyster--indifferent, oceanic. Through the oyster, the film breaks open the theatrical limits that typically constrain the musical and extends into the everyday. In their quixotic Friday night ritual in Joe's oyster bar, Danny, Rusty, and Genius complete a circuit between the theatre district and the ocean, which in effect stands in for the circuit between drama and the limitless, imperceptible expanse of time (infinitely more than the "Long Ago and Far Away" of the movie's theme song).
Can we imagine the film with only this ritual, repeated without dramatic interruption of plot? Perhaps, but we cannot conceive of the time and indefatigable energies that process grit into pearl. Yet this pearl, in the most random of cosmic coincidences, finally sets the couple towards a patently perceivable and predictable happy ending. It is not for nothing that their ritual partakes of pseudo-voodoo gestures and happy-go-lucky mumbo-jumbo: they are asking for meaning from the meaningless, for the universe to conspire with an engineered reality fundamentally alien to that universe. In this way, the enchanted-oyster-object acts on the whole of the plot, following the characters from the oyster bar, to the theater and finally to the altar. The absurd little pearl and its magic emerges from the oyster as glamour does from the genetic matrix--only partially. That is, the meaning of the pearl comes from a place that is not germane to the oyster, in the same way the mechanisms of glamour are somewhat alien to the forces of life.