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that the utopian resolution the films reach sees the abolition of class distinction and the marriage of commerce and aesthetics creating a utopia for all people, mainly for the mass audience these films appeal to. Indeed, Dyer seems to suggest entertainment caters for individual audience needs, rather than as members of social groups or classes. The escape created suggests a revised, utopian version of the audience's own world. It is a utopian world because it has more energy and abundance than the "real" world, and has clearer, more intense conflicts, issues and problems than in our day-to-day lives. Richard Maltby (1995) sees Dyer's relationship between Utopian sensibility and the inadequacies in society as presenting "an instance of the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness." This would make sense in terms of post-war musicals where most, if not all, of the audience members would be feeling great unhappiness and wishing for something better, living with memories but having hopes and dreams for the future.

Dyer looks at entertainment's ability to evoke what utopia would feel like, creating alternatives, hopes, wishes, "the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized." He goes on to say that the utopian worlds presented are not presented in a classical way but rather in the feelings of the films, therefore "what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organised" and the way this is produced is thorough two categories of signs that are intermingled within the musical: representational and non-representational signs.

The representational signs include plot, characters, costumes, and so forth. Things that represent something and function on a level of comprehension. He suggests this is shown through thoughts that "the stars are nicer than us, characters more straightforward than people we know, situations more soluble than those we encounter". Non-representational signs include colour, texture, camera angles, editing, movement and the musical score. These things do not represent anything concrete. They determine the attribution of meaning to a large extent. The non-representational signs actually create more fully the utopian effect as they involve the emotions.

Dyer takes a look at Susanne K Langers concept of signs in relation to music which moves us but is the least obvious reference to reality' thus, music embodies feeling. However he argues against Langer in a

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