Beyond the Looking Glass: Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood 9781782384007

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BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

Beyond the Looking Glass Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood

Ana Salzberg

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2014 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2014 Ana Salzberg All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Salzberg, Ana. Beyond the looking glass : narcissism and female stardom in studio-era Hollywood / Ana Salzberg. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 978-1-78238-399-4 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-400-7 (ebook) 1. Women in the motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—California—Los Angeles. 3. Motion picture studios—United States—History—20th century. 4. Motion picture audiences—United States. 5. Women in motion pictures. I. Title. PN1995.9.W6S35 2014 791.4302’80820973--dc23 2014000900 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78238-399-4 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-400-7 ebook

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction. The Narcissistic Woman: Reflections and Projections

vi viii 1

Chapter 1. Garbo Talks: Expectation and Realization

16

Chapter 2. Katharine Hepburn and a Hollywood Story

35

Chapter 3. Vanishing Differences in Mildred Pierce (1945) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

55

Chapter 4. One Touch of Venus: Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, and the Production Code

79

Chapter 5. “Wherever There’s Magic”: Performance Time in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and All About Eve (1950)

103

Chapter 6. Marilyn Monroe: “The Last Glimmering of the Sacred”

126

Chapter 7. Neo-Screen Tests, Part One: Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor

151

Chapter 8. Neo-Screen Tests, Part Two: The Search for Scarlett Continues

172

Filmography

179

Bibliography

183

Index

193

Figures 0.1. Phoebe (Bates) in All About Eve (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

2

1.1. Before the mirror: Elena (Garbo) in The Temptress (MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1926).

24

1.2. The Temptress (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1926).

25

1.3. Anna (Garbo) and her double (Dressler) in Anna Christie (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1931).

27

2.1. Tracy (Hepburn) and the True Love in The Philadelphia Story (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1940).

39

2.2. Tracy (Hepburn) and Dexter (Grant) in The Philadelphia Story (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1940).

47

3.1. Laura (Tierney) with Mark (Andrews) in Laura (Twentieth Century Fox, 1944).

61

3.2. Mildred (Crawford) in Mildred Pierce (Warner Bros., 1945).

64

3.3. Veda (Blyth) and Mildred (Crawford) in Mildred Pierce (Warner Bros., 1945).

67

4.1. Lilly (Christine), the Swede (Lancaster), and Kitty (Gardner) in The Killers (Universal Pictures, 1946).

91

4.2. Acoustic intimacy: Hayworth in Gilda (Columbia Pictures, 1946).

93

4.3. John (Lancaster) and Ann (Hayworth) in Separate Tables (United Artists, 1958).

98

5.1. Norma (Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard (Paramount Pictures, 1950). 5.2. The final close-up: Norma (Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard (Paramount Pictures, 1950).

109

113

FIGURES vii

5.3. Eve (Baxter) meets Phoebe (Bates) in All About Eve (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

121

6.1. Hollywood dynasties: Eve (Baxter), Miss Caswell (Monroe), and Margo (Davis) in All About Eve (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

127

6.2. “You just shine in my eyes”: Roslyn (Monroe) in The Misfits (United Artists, 1961).

128

6.3. Nell (Monroe) and the mirror in Don’t Bother to Knock (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

133

6.4. The pin-ups: Guido (Wallach) and Roslyn (Monroe) in The Misfits (United Artists, 1961).

145

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Martine Beugnet for her invaluable guidance since the beginning of this project, Elizabeth Ezra for her support and encouragement, Homay King for her inspiring teaching at Bryn Mawr College, and Laura Mulvey for offering thoughtful commentary on this work in its early stages. Excerpts of previously published articles appear in this work, and I gratefully acknowledge the original publishers: “Myth and Materiality: The Duality of Grace Kelly,” in ConFiguring America: Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity, Intellect 2013; “ ‘The Spirit Never Really Ages’: Materiality and Transcendence in Three Rita Hayworth Films,” in Aging, Performance and Stardom, Lit Verlag 2012; and “The (Im)mortality of the Lived-Body: Marilyn Monroe’s Screen Presence in The Misfits,” in E-Pisteme (2.1) 2009. My love and appreciation go to my father, Richard, for giving me the movies; to my mother, Janice, for giving me the five of hearts; and to my husband, Alex Thomson, for his rare insight and heart. This book could not have been written without John Orr and his abiding wisdom. With admiration and gratitude, always, for all that he shared, I dedicate Beyond the Looking Glass to him.

INTRODUCTION

The Narcissistic Woman Reflections and Projections In October 1999, celebrities and fans alike gathered at Christie’s auction house in Manhattan to take part in a sensational cultural event: the auction of Marilyn Monroe’s personal possessions. As viewers watched coverage of the auction broadcast live on American Movie Classics (AMC), bidders around the world spent a total of $5,030,000 on items ranging from the legendary—the dress in which Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy and her wedding ring from Joe DiMaggio—to the quotidian, including her furniture, shoes, and make-up. Curator Nancy Valentino described the offerings as “a capsule of an American life” (in Barron 1999); but more than this, the auction itself encapsulated the modern-day desires associated with Monroe in particular and—as subsequent auctions of the personal effects of Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor suggest—with classical stardom itself. For both participants and spectators, such auctions represent a chance to possess a physical trace, with all its auratic resonance, of contemporary mythology; furthermore, these events offer an intimate proximity to the offscreen reality of an on-screen ideal. Underlying these appropriative gestures is, indeed, a narcissistic impulse: a longing to identify oneself with paragons of talent and glamour, if only through the purchase of a near-holy relic. One bidder inadvertently spoke to these questions of materiality and narcissistic identification: After his Monroe-impersonator wife bought a pair of the icon’s high heels, he clarified that she would not be wearing the shoes in her performances as the star. “They were [Monroe’s] shoes, not Esther’s,” he explained (in Barron 1999). Yet decades before and a cinematic world away from this auction, the closing image of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 film All About Eve anticipated this intersection between narcissism, embodied proximity, and stardom. After tracing the usurpation of theater star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) by her ruthless protégée, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), the movie ends with a threat to Eve herself in the form of a devoted fan named Phoebe (Barbara Bates). In these last moments, Phoebe stands before a three-way mirror in Eve’s bed-

2 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

room, wearing her idol’s elegant evening cloak—the borrowed robes of an icon—and clutching her award for achievement in the theater (see figure 0.1). Bowing to the multitude of reflections surrounding her, Phoebe graciously accepts the inevitability of her own success; the imminence of her real self merging with the ideal selves mirrored before her. In this shot, Phoebe is not simply an egotist enthralled by her surface reflection, but rather a multi-dimensional subject composed of material reality and projections of possibility. She is a fan worshipping at the altar of stardom, appropriating almost ritualistically the objects of her idol, and she is also an actress, seeking to replace Eve as she ascends that same altar. Unlike the original, mythic Narcissus, doomed to never attain the union of real self and ideal image, Phoebe is poised—as both fan and actress—on the threshold of a journey beyond the looking glass. Both All About Eve and the Monroe auction belong, then, to a broader narrative of classical-era female stardom and spectatorship, as the fan—whether in 1950 or 1999, in a diegetic world or off-screen reality—seeks a visceral connection to the on-screen performer that complicates the notion of narcissism as a monologic preoccupation with an ephemeral reflection. Contemporary

Figure 0.1. Phoebe (Bates) in All About Eve (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

INTRODUCTION 3

auctions, of course, demonstrate the extreme objectification (and quantification) of this material identification; yet the spectator’s pursuit of embodied immediacy generates from the golden-age figure’s own evocation of a dialogue between the (corpo)real and ideal—one that, moreover, invites a further interrogation of the relationship between the star’s studio-designed image and actual cinematic presence. More precisely, what can be said about the embodied experience of the star herself, and, by extension, her own relationship to notions of feminine ideality? A living subject rather than a static icon, the studio-era actress actively negotiated an existential balance between idealized persona (love goddess, blonde bombshell), diegetic role, and corporeal presence; how, then, do the complexities of her cine-subjectivity and objective affect call on the embodied engagement of the spectator? Tracing extra- and intra-diegetic representations of narcissistic femininity in studio-era Hollywood, this book proposes that the star’s own relationship to the ideal generates an engagement with the cinema screen not as a looking glass of ephemeral reflections, but as a medium of shared experience. The following studies of personas and narrative characterizations will argue that as the figure of the narcissistic woman shifts from one star, role, and genre to another, the audience itself is included in this interplay between facticity and projections of possibility. Commentary from the studio era, in fact, reveals that this very interplay helped to define the existential situation of Hollywood itself—with the narcissistic preoccupations of its inhabitants ranging from a starlet’s myopic ambition to the complacency of established performers. In 1930, for example, Motion Picture columnist Ruth Biery reflected on the near-paranoiac striving of the hopefuls: “[T]hese young folk are running to the corner drug store to buy the magazines . . . which may have words about the movies in them. They thumb the pages anxiously. Are their names mentioned? Have their pictures reached the front pages? Has anything unkind been said about them?” (1930: 90). In their pursuit of fame, Biery continues, these young actors are driven by “fear. Fear that the public may not hear anything or that it may hear one sentence which is not to their glory” (90). As the title of the article declares, “Glory Comes High”—and the price, Biery suggests, is a self-perception alternately validated and undermined by the vagaries of public opinion. Decades on, still other commentators would focus on the stars who finally made it, highlighting their delusional self-satisfaction. In 1951, anthropologist

4 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

Hortense Powdermaker published a scholarly account of Hollywood in which she described the “narcissistic characteristic” (1951: 207) of its inhabitants, observing that some stars “seem actually to believe the publicity circulated about them and to accept the built-up synthetic personality as their real one” (1951: 266). Powdermaker refers to these personalities as the “Look at me” type, for whom the constant press attention (covering “[t]heir life at home, their parties . . . and even the details of their sleeping habits”) substantiates intrinsic exhibitionist tendencies (207). Indeed, she declares that the industry of “Hollywood has created a mammoth machine to exploit the exhibitionist quality of its actors” (265). Only a few years later, critic Thomas Wiseman would describe egomania as one of the “deadly sins of Hollywood” (1957: 220). Writing of actors’ “obsessive desire to be loved . . . in the form of fan mail, flattering paragraphs in columns and the adoration of the public” (93), Wiseman remarked, “it is assumed that anybody who betrays undue modesty must have plenty to be modest about” (220–221). A world in which, as Wiseman quipped, “[e]very 75-dollar-a-week contract artist thinks she has the makings of a Garbo” (220), Hollywood emerges as a concrete, spatialized variation on the mirror in which Phoebe regarded her possible selves: offering glimpses of ideality to the hopeful, while industrializing (as Powdermaker’s “mammoth machine”) the intersection between (corpo)reality and “synthetic” persona so that it may continue to profit from established stars. Indeed, through a constellation of close readings and film history, Beyond the Looking Glass will cast Hollywood itself as a kind of costar in this work— with the intertwining of extra-diegetic context and cinematic representation exceeding the experience of individual stars to include the film colony they inhabited. Taking a chronological approach that begins with the transition from silent to sound pictures, the following chapters will further propose that representations of the narcissistic woman follow an arc that parallels the rise and fall of the studio era itself: arguing, that is, that Hollywood called on those stars and characters associated with a narcissistic subjectivity to evolve simultaneously with the shifting of technological capacities, censorship restrictions, and industry politics between the late 1920s and early 1960s. A system driven to unite myth and reality, the dream factory of studio-era Hollywood produced—but, as this book suggests, could not entirely control—the cinematic existence of the ideal feminine.

INTRODUCTION 5

Narcissism: A Theoretical Context Scholars of classical cinema have long considered issues of feminine ideality and narcissistic identification. Psychoanalytic theorist Christian Metz utilized a Lacanian framework to conceptualize film as “a new kind of mirror” (1982 [1977]: 45) for the audience; and scholars Mary Ann Doane (“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” [1982]) and Laura Mulvey (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” [1975]) famously explored the feminist stakes of the spectator’s (over-)identification with the onscreen ideal. In Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (1991), Amy Lawrence transposed the mythological narrative to the gendered aural and visual aspects of golden-age films; and Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing (1994) presented an empirical analysis of female audiences’ identification with classic stars. In related works, Mulvey’s Death 24X a Second (2006) theorizes a possessive spectatorship through which the viewer uses new media technologies (fastforwarding, rewinding, pausing at will) to satisfy a fetishistic desire to control the image. Yet questions of embodied proximity and/in relation to studio-era narcissistic femininity itself—as both a genre-spanning trope and a defining element in various star personas—has yet to be analyzed extensively. Informed by the psychoanalytic perspectives pioneered by feminist scholars, while focusing on current theories of embodiment set forth by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, the theoretical framework of Beyond the Looking Glass will also draw on works on visuality and cultural studies by René Girard and Edgar Morin. Through, respectively, theories of mimetic rivalry and the osmosis between star and role, these critics have explored the interplay between self and other in a way that enhances this book’s concentration on intersubjective experience. In order to historically ground narcissistic sensibilities in the construction of star personas, the following chapters will also consider publicity build-ups of stars in magazines like Picture Play, Motion Picture, and Life. The concluding chapters will explore the role of new media in the changing relationship between golden-age star and contemporary audiences. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have described classic films as currently “caught in the logic of hypermediacy” (2000: 82) so prevalent in today’s visual culture; and they even go on to posit an element of narcissism in such hypermediated works, noting their “self-awareness and . . . sense of satisfaction in the power of mediation” (148). What, then, is the remediated resonance of classical Hol-

6 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

lywood in present-day moving image culture? And how do channels of new media transform not only the contemporary viewer, but also the classical star into what Bolter and Grusin term a “networked self” (232)? In related terms, Barbara Klinger has recently analyzed the cable networking of classical Hollywood, describing AMC and Turner Classic Movies (TCM) as cine-museums that preserve and, at the same time, remediate the era. As she remarks, “[c]lassic films are not born; they are made by various media, educational, and other agencies interested in revitalizing old properties” in response to the market for nostalgia (2006: 94; emphasis added). As the closing chapters will discuss, AMC and TCM are representative of the greater channels of new media that continue to capitalize on the fascination with goldenage stars and films: television advertisements feature digitally reanimated icons selling perfume and cars; entire films are (re)edited and posted on internet sites like YouTube, along with innumerable stills and clips; and DVDs emphasize special features like screen tests, previously unreleased footage, and documentaries. Emerging from this commercialized, truly mass-media attention to the classical era as such are works that examine the unique legacies of its performers. Richard Dyer, whose scholarship is so seminal to star studies, has remarked that stars “articulate both the promise and the difficulty that the notion of individuality presents” (1986: 8); and indeed, books on the cultural resonance of individual stars are continually published and range from the popular to the scholarly. Consider, for example, the broad appeal of Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations (Peter Evans and Ava Gardner, 2013); Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart (Stefan Kanfer, 2011); and the numerous biographies and appreciations of stars like Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe—as well as academic works, including Adrienne L. McLean’s Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (2004), Lawrence’s The Passion of Montgomery Clift (2010), and Sarah Thomas’s Peter Lorre: Face-Maker (2012). Analyzing stars from a variety of perspectives and within a number of critical contexts, these studies speak to the dynamic after-life of the golden age. As a chronicler contemporary to that golden age itself, Wiseman (1957) noted that “[n]ext to sex,” psychoanalysis was “the favourite topic of smalltalk” (102) for Hollywood residents in the 1950s. It seems fitting, then, to turn to the psychoanalytic paradigm from which this work will take its definition of

INTRODUCTION 7

the narcissistic personality: Freud’s 1914 essay “On Narcissism.” Here, he sets forth the notion of an ego-libido, or an investment of energy channeled toward the subject himself or herself rather than cathected on external objects. Perceiving the foundation of this ego-libido in a primary narcissism experienced by each subject in early life (Freud 2001 [1914], vol. 14:88), Freud goes on to note that certain individuals may also engage in a secondary narcissism— focusing on themselves the very energy that, in what he terms the “anaclitic” personality, would be directed toward external objects and/or beings. He outlines the various objects of desire appealing to narcissists: a) what he himself is (i.e. himself), b) what he himself was, c) what he himself would like to be, d) someone who was once part of himself [i.e., a child]. (90) In their commentary on Freud’s work, J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis “stress . . . that what serves as a model for the [first three] choice[s] is an image or ideal,” whereas the final choice refers to the love of a parent for a child (1988 [1973]: 259). Though Freud proposes that narcissistic and anaclitic object-choices are “open to each individual” (2001 [1914], vol. 14: 88), he nonetheless identifies women as quintessential narcissists. Responding to the limited choice of love-objects set forth by society, these women—usually beautiful—“develop a certain self-contentment” that allows them to love “only themselves . . . with an intensity comparable to that of the man’s love for them” (88–89). Though troubling and elusive to those who love her, the narcissistic woman’s appeal lies in her very evocation of that “unassailable libidinal position which [the admirer himself or herself has] since abandoned” (89). The woman may, however, go on to redeem her self-involved nature through devotion to a child (89). A part of herself now made external, this child inspires object-love while—as Laplanche and Pontalis make clear—representing “the thing that allows the subject to rediscover and restore his [or her] lost unity” (1988 [1973]: 259). Indeed, Freud describes the love of a parent for a child in fairly blunt terms: “Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again” (2001 [1914], vol. 14: 91). Caroline Rupprecht has remarked that, following Freud’s schema, the narcissistic woman occupies a vexed position in which she is “self-enclosed . . . and at the same time . . . subject to mirroring, to treating her own self as an

8 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

object,” leading to a state of “confusion” between the interiority of self-image and external, outward appearance (2006: 51) Yet even in considering this imbalance, one may suggest that the abiding element in the narcissistic woman’s identity is the materiality of her body itself—the corporeal presence whose aesthetic impact both grants her the privilege of self-containment and inspires the admiration of others, even as it has the potential to enable her transition to complete object-love through motherhood. Certainly the subsequent studies of, for instance, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) underscore the more comedic implications of the nexus between body and (self-)image; equally affecting are the narcissistic crises explored in films like Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), and Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950). Here, the vulnerability of once-exalted bodies are revealed by a changing film industry, the threat of the double and/or professional rival, and the process of aging—attesting to the fragility, rather than certainty, of ideality itself. Indeed, the myriad characters, projected personas, and on-screen presences of the actresses studied in this book speak to a fundamental interplay between the ethereal and the corporeal—an interweaving explored by Girard in his conceptualization of the narcissistic woman. Offering an alternative to Freud’s theory, Girard relates the question of self-love to an overarching concern with mimetic rivalry, or the rapport between the model/ideal and a covetous disciple/rival. He rejects the traditional psychoanalytic paradigm (which, as he remarks, “takes the phantom [of the narcissistic woman] for true being”) and instead outlines a strategy of coquetry through which the woman deliberately adopts of a guise of self-sufficiency to conceal a need for the desire of the other (2003 [1978]: 374, 370).1 Knowing that “desire attracts desire,” the coquette acts as if she takes her very self as both model and object, and in this way she inspires the amorous energy of a disciple ever-searching for a desire to imitate and an ideal to covet (370–371). Yet even as Girard examines the spectacle of the coquette’s “dazzling illusion of a self-sufficiency,” he warns against treating narcissism as a mere strategy, admittingthat the word “implies . . . an untenable, clear-cut division between the mask and the real face behind it” (371). In an effort to not “limit the substance” (371) of the phenomenon of narcissism, then, the theorist allows for an interplay between the ideal model, or mask, and the actual, real face that coexist within an individual’s psyche.

INTRODUCTION 9

Psychoanalytic film theory, however, has perceived a tension, rather than interplay, between corporeal reality and its external reflections—drawing especially from Lacan’s conceptualization of the mirror stage. In The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Metz transposes the Lacanian paradigm of je as corporeal subject and moi as ideal, reflected object to spectatorship itself, proposing that the viewer relates to the film on the screen as though it were a “shade . . . phantom . . . double” (1982 [1977]: 45) of reality. Though Metz concedes that the spectator is never literally reflected on the screen, he attributes the individual’s identification with the film’s characters to his or her ability to recognize his or her like projected in the diegetic world. That is, just as the infant acknowledges his or her status as an object in the mirror, the film spectator acknowledges the filmic figure as a removed but nonetheless kindred object that stands before the gaze of the subject (45–46). Within the 1970s and 1980s wave of canonical feminist film criticism, the Lacanian model also provided a context within which to consider, as Teresa de Lauretis wrote, “What happens . . . when woman serves as the looking-glass held up to women?” (1984: 6–7) What happens, that is, when an off-screen feminine subjectivity encounters a female ideal reflected within the frame of the cinema screen? In her groundbreaking “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Mulvey utilized the narcissistic paradigm in order to analyze the relationship between the star and spectator of classic Hollywood works. Citing Lacan’s conceptualization of the mirror-stage as the model for what she terms the “love affair/despair” (2009: 18) between the real spectator and the onscreen star of classic Hollywood film, Mulvey comments on the way in which the projected image of perfection contrasts the relatively mundane existence of the spectator-subject: “the glamorous impersonates the ordinary” (18). In the dichotomy posed by Mulvey between a reductive masculine gaze and the passive spectacle of the woman’s “to-be-looked-at-ness” (26), it is ultimately the male spectator who bears a more intensive narcissistic identification with the on-screen figure: Aligning his subjectivity with that of the male lead, the viewer finds an ego-ideal reminiscent of that one perceived in the original mirror stage (21).2 Mary Ann Doane further explored the question of sexual difference, relating it to the binary opposing distance from the image and a psychic proximity to it. In “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Doane proposes that the male spectator enjoys a masterful distance from the

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woman pictured in the film, whereas the female viewer experiences the image as an oppressive “overpresence” because “she is the image” (1991: 22; emphasis in original). In Doane’s structure of visuality, the female subjectivity finds itself relegated to either a masochistic overidentification with the objectified woman or a narcissistic engagement that calls for the woman to take her own image as the object of her desire (31–32). In still another work, The Desire to Desire, Doane describes the on-screen image as “both shop window and mirror” (1987: 33) in its presentation of the female star as a commodified spectacle that can belong to the viewer, if only as a reflection of a longed-for reality. As current scholarship moves toward an embodied relationship to cinema, however, there is the potential to consider still other elements of classic Hollywood femininity and identification. With this in mind, the following chapters will explore the dynamism of each performer’s cine-subjectivity, taking a chronological approach that begins with an analysis of Garbo’s significance in the early days of the talkies. Chapter 1 argues that Garbo gave voice to what will be termed the “anxieties of transition” haunting her silent-era star contemporaries, capturing the tensions of an incipient sound cinema in films like Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1927), The Temptress (Fred Niblo, 1926), Anna Christie (Clarence Brown, 1930) and Grand Hotel (1932). Chapter 2 introduces a post–“box-office poison” Katharine Hepburn, returning to the screen in The Philadelphia Story (the year before Garbo would star in her final picture) with a versatile—sometimes volatile—presence that invites an intensive examination of visual pleasure and the making of the female star herself. Chapter 3 focuses on the threat of the double as encountered by Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce and Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945). Through the prism of Girard’s theory of the mimetic crisis, the discussion explores the significance of the double in terms of both the narratives themselves and a broader, extra-diegetic imbalance between star and costar. The analysis suggests, furthermore, that Crawford and Tierney themselves brought to the screen an internal alterity that reveals the fragility, rather than certainty, of the star presence. Chapter 4 will turn to a study of Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner’s intertwined cinematic life-spans as love goddesses in a Production Code–era Hollywood, arguing that their (perceived) narcissistic sensibilities and sensual relationships to the filmic form subverted the demands of the moral code; just as, indeed, their post–Production Code Administration (PCA) performances in films like Separate Tables (Delbert Mann,

INTRODUCTION 11

1958) and Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964) conveyed the struggle between the revelation and concealment of their aging bodies. Turning from the height of the studio era to its demise, Chapter 5 will explore a Hollywood-in-transition through the concept of the chronotope. Following Bakhtin’s (1982) literary theory of the material connection between space and time in narrative worlds, the chapter posits a performance time inhabited by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard as well as Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve. Defined by the narcissism of the (fictional) actresses, as well as their varying situations of stardom—Norma Desmond in decline, Margo Channing at her peak, and Eve Harrington beginning her ascent—performance time materializes their suspension between a dissatisfying reality and an ideal, on-screen/on-stage image of themselves. In addition to exploring the spatiotemporal dimensionality of these worlds of performance, the chapter suggests that this 1950s chronotope anticipated today’s uncanny awakening of classical stars through digital animation. Chapter 6 will link Girard’s interpretation of the narcissistic woman with Barthes’s concept of the punctum (or point of striking awareness that attracts the eye) in a reading of Monroe’s evolution as a performer in Don’t Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1950), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956), and The Misfits (John Huston, 1961). Arguing that Monroe both inherited and surpassed a cinematic legacy of the ideal feminine, the chapter will explore her significance as—to apply Girard’s description of the narcissistic woman—“the last glimmering of the sacred” (2003 [1978]: 375) studio era. Finally, chapters 7 and 8 theorize a “neo-screen test” for stars of the golden age through contemporary processes of remediation and digital media, taking Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, and iconic heroine Scarlett O’Hara as representative studies. Addressing the studio-era’s own fluency in the language of hypermediation, the chapters argue that old Hollywood anticipated the capacities and concerns of new media. This book engages, ultimately, with the narcissistic woman as a continually evolving presence, as expressions of her self-investment shift between the registers of extra- and intra-diegetic, iconic persona and material facticity, and even historical context and present-day revitalization. Indeed, the incarnations of femininity so represented reveal Hollywood’s Narcissus to be an entity of near-infinite variety, crossing not only decades, but also genres as diverse as romantic comedy and film noir, musicals and melodramas. Though a

12 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

number of the diegetic characters discussed here find their bases in roles typical to their respective generic conventions—the eccentric heiress of romantic screwball comedies and the femme fatale of noir, the showgirl of musical tradition and the self-sacrificing mother of melodrama—the performances of the stars themselves and their élan vital complicate (and often subvert) narrative expectations.

Embodied Identities: Film, Star, and Spectator The understanding of the lived-body that will inform these chapters derives primarily from theorists like Sobchack and Marks. Drawing on the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty in her assertion of a fundamental cinematic subjectivity, Sobchack writes, “Perceptive, [film] has the capacity for experience; and expressive, it has the ability to signify” (1992: 11). Yet she also reconciles the autonomy of the filmic force with the agency of the spectator who “shares cinematic space with the film” and, in this way, “negotiate[s] . . . , contribute[s] to and perform[s] the constitution of its experiential significance” (10). Marks’s own related exploration of hapticity in cinema strengthens this appreciation of the relationship between self and the cinematic world.3 In contrast to a hierarchical optical visuality (dividing the subject and object of the gaze), hapticity incorporates the sensory capacities (touch, smell, kinesthesia), or “embodied intelligence,” of the spectator into his or her visual comprehension of the image (Marks 2002: 18). Recently, Jennifer M. Barker has expanded on Marks’s and Sobchack’s concepts of visuality to explore what she terms the “tactile eye” of the viewer as she or he responds to the skin, musculature, and viscera of the filmic body (2009: 2–4). With these embodied dialogues in mind, David Michael Levin’s phenomenological discussion of narcissism offers a means of further reconciling the ostensibly opposed self and other—whether on, off, or even of the screen. Levin contends that the process of reflection and self-definition depends not on the Lacanian mirror but on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “the mirror of the flesh” (1991: 61–62). Alternately recognizing oneself in and distinguishing oneself from the existence of another, and aware of the gaze returned by that other, the individual asserts the subjective force of his or her own body while perceiving its objective role within this interchange. Narcissism, then,

INTRODUCTION 13

is not simply an isolating juxtaposition between actual self and ideal other, but also a corporeal interaction—what Levin calls a “communion . . . of the flesh” (62)—wherein the body of one negotiates its subjective and objective identity in relation to the presence of another. Self and other are both reflections-incarnate, and each explores the parameters of an embodied identity that preserves his or her own singularity while allowing for a sympathetic rapport with others. Certainly the experience and accompanying interactions of the lived-body are not universal. As Sobchack points out, issues like race, disability and gender may relegate the viewing subject to a particular mode of experience within his or her historical and cultural context (1992: 147). Indeed, as the previous section outlined, the question of sexual difference has been especially problematic in terms of the visual pleasure inspired by the female star. Mulvey, for example, offered “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ ” (first published in 1982), in which she proposed that a cinema created by and for a male gaze may allow a female spectator to identify with a masculine perspective and, in so doing, briefly abandon the constraints imposed on her by a patriarchal society (2009: 39). In related terms, Doane argues that in order for the female viewer to dissociate herself from the “overpresence” of cinematic Woman, she must relate to femininity itself as “a mask which can be worn or removed” (1991: 22, 25, 32). In taking the experience of a given performer as unique in its sensory resonance, however, and acknowledging the variability of the spectator’s own responses, this book will consider the female star as, to use Sobchack’s description of the lived-body, “in excess of the historical and analytic systems available to codify [and] contain” it (1992: 147; emphasis in original). This work will also propose that narcissism itself is a similarly dynamic phenomenon, with the variety of its manifestations (as a source of strength, sensuality, or anxiety) further undermining restrictive systems, whether these are conveyed in the patriarchal bias of certain narratives, Production Code–imposed morality, or in the “mammoth machine” (to recall Powdermaker’s terms) of Hollywood itself. Ultimately, the spectator’s own response to various performers’ investments in the self (in extra- and intra-diegetic terms) is as multifaceted as the mirror of the flesh itself. In his 1950s writings, Edgar Morin presaged such contemporary concerns with stardom, embodiment, and the individual experience. He described cin-

14 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

ema itself as “a system that tends to integrate the spectator into the flow of the film. A system that tends to integrate the flow of the film into the psychic flow of the spectator” (2005a [1956]: 102; emphasis in original). His notion of the “osmosis” (2005b [1957]: 28) between star and role is emblematic of this overarching concern with the nexus between psychic investment and sensory resonance. Recalling Girard’s focus on the reciprocity between the mask and real self, Morin argues that the star contributes to her fictional role the singular affect of her physicality and persona: “Actor and role mutually determine each other. The star is more than an actor incarnating characters, he incarnates himself in them, and they become incarnate in him” (28; emphasis in original). Instead of a complete sublimation of persona to the demands of a diegetic character, or vice versa, the star generates a reflexive exchange between the two. Indeed, as Dyer would later contend, the myriad diegetic identities an actress may assume throughout her career do not fundamentally alter her material presence (1986: 10). Furthermore, Sobchack has commented on the ways in which stars introduce a “charge of the real” into a fictional work (2004: 278). Evoking associations with their extra-diegetic reality (whether in terms of biography or Hollywood lore), performers provide a medium through which the documentary and fictional consciousness of a film may shift. That is, the extrafilmic awareness of the spectator enables him or her to determine the elements of “memory, fiction, or document” (1999: 253) in a given movie. Consider, for example, the public attention surrounding Joan Crawford’s motherhood as an off-screen counterpart to Mildred Pierce—and the subsequent scandal of her daughter Christina’s 1978 memoir, Mommie Dearest, that tempers contemporary viewings (outlined in chapter 3) and Grace Kelly’s royal wedding and its influence over the marketing and reception of High Society (Charles Walters, 1956), as analyzed in chapter 7. Ultimately, these assertions of embodied engagement recall still another scene from All About Eve—this time, featuring the titular antiheroine herself. During the famously “bumpy night” of Margo’s party, Eve quietly but emphatically contradicts the remark that performers “give so much for almost always so little”: “Why, if there’s nothing else, there’s applause. . . . It’s like . . . waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine, to know every night that different hundreds of people love you. . . . They want you; you belong. Just that alone is worth anything.” In this ariaesque musing,

INTRODUCTION 15

Eve articulates the narcissistic need for admiration and affirmation that drives her, but she also speaks to the more sensual engagement between star and viewer that concerns this book. Responding to the star’s on-screen affect, the spectator “wraps” the performer up in a visceral embrace that is unique in its sensation—not abstract, but utterly intimate. As the following will suggest, of course, questions of wanting and belonging in relation to stardom are not as absolute as Eve believes. Instead, they evolve according to the identity of each performer and fan alike. What both give, in fact, is the singularity of their experience.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

In her article “The Narcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard,” Sarah Kofman offers a critique of both scholars’ readings of feminine narcissism. In her 1992 work In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic, Gaylyn Studlar offers a theoretical counterpoint to Mulvey’s model of visual pleasure. Examining the Von Sternberg-Dietrich cycle of films, Studlar focuses on the cinematic figure of the dominating woman and the spectator’s submission to her gaze—an active look that “asserts presence and power” (1992: 48) rather than passive objectification. See The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002). It should be noted here that Marks does not analyze traditional Hollywood filmmaking, but rather alternative and experimental cinema.

CHAPTER 1

Garbo Talks Expectation and Realization In 1933, at the height of her career, Greta Garbo starred in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina. Near the end of the film, just before the troubled queen abdicates her throne for love, Christina/Garbo declares, “All my life, I have been a symbol. A symbol is eternal, changeless, an abstraction. A human being is mortal and changeable, with desires and impulses, hopes and despairs. I’m tired of being a symbol. . . . I long to be a human being.” Beyond their diegetic significance, these words capture a conflict between the earthly and ethereal that has shaped the legend of Garbo herself—from the beginning of her career to the modern day.1 Largely perceived as an “eternal, changeless” icon of (as her oft-cited appellation suggests) divine appeal, Garbo ended her film career at the age of thirty-six with George Cukor’s Two-Faced Woman (1941); and with her process of aging captured only in rare still photographs (often taken by paparazzi), the actress lingers in the cultural imagination as an utterly perennial beauty. Roland Barthes exalted her as a “Platonic Idea of the human creature” (2000a [1957]: 56), merging feminine and masculine features in an elegant androgyny, while Edgar Morin pondered her “divine mystery” (2005b [1957]: 7); and Susan Sontag remarked, “the model woman’s face is Garbo’s,” with its features “immutable, unmarked” by the passage of time (1997: 23). Among the most famous tributes was Kenneth Tynan’s description of her as “[t]ranced by the ecstasy of existing . . . giv[ing] to each onlooker what he needs” (in Vieira 2005: 6). Far from the “mortal and changeable” figure her Queen Christina longed to be, Garbo endures as an otherworldly source—a symbol—of aesthetic experience. Yet in 1929, years before her enigmatic withdrawal from public life, even the divine Garbo found herself hesitant on the verge of a new life in the talkies. For a time, she had resisted the sound-film vogue launched by Warner Bros. with The Jazz Singer in 1927, finding great success under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in silents like Flesh and the Devil (1927) and A Woman of Affairs (Clarence Brown, 1928). But as the public fascination with talkies endured, Garbo eventually confronted—like so many of her fellow silent-cinema per-

GARBO TALKS 17

formers—the recording technology that would determine the future of her career. Actresses such as Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer had made a successful transition to talkies, but still other stars, including Garbo intimate and costar John Gilbert, had suffered through a negative reception of their voices. Before shooting her first scene in Clarence Brown’s talkie Anna Christie, the actress confided her worries to a friend: “I feel like an unborn child just now” (in Vieira 2005: 107). As well as capturing the apprehension of that cinematic era in all of its “hopes and despairs,” to return to Christina’s monologue, Garbo’s statement counters that image of her as an icon fully formed and absolute in her perfection. Indeed, underlying the myth of Garbo are other such contrasts, point/ counterpoints that exceed even those of her androgynous appeal and her triumph as both a silent- and sound-era star. In her performances, for example, a minimalist acting technique that appeared innocuous to costars and crew during filming translated to the screen with remarkable intensity: Basil Rathbone, who appeared with her in Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1934), described Garbo’s “tiny movements, minute changes of expression which I didn’t notice at the time, but when I saw the scene on the screen I was amazed” (in Vieira 2005: 213). In personal terms, biographical accounts reveal that the woman famed for the credo “I want to be alone” (actually taken from her dialogue in 1932’s Grand Hotel) in fact scrupulously monitored the public’s perception of her: She would, for example, attend showings of her films at random movie theaters with unsuspecting fans; and after a daily perusal of newspapers and magazines, she would return and seek a refund for those that did not name her (Brett 2012: 156–158). Finally, though critics and fans alternately mourned and rhapsodized Garbo’s early retirement—as Morin declared, she was “[t]oo big for a cinema that had grown too small” (2005b [1957]: 9)—she remained open to a possible return to filmmaking years after leaving Hollywood.2 Uniting minimalism of expression with maximalist impact in both silent and sound pictures, isolated from yet intrigued by her public in a conditional solitude, withdrawn from the screen but still attracted by potential roles, Garbo and her often-paradoxical approach to performance and persona speak less to a “divine mystery” (Morin 2005b [1957]: 7) of absolute stardom than the complexities of her lived experience—from the anxieties of an “unborn child” (in Vieira 2005: 107) in 1929 to the musings of an aging actress who would remark, “Time leaves its traces on our small faces and bodies. It’s not the same any-

18 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

more, being able to pull it off ” (in Vieira 2005: 270). In so regarding Garbo as an evolving cine-subject rather than an iconic fait accompli, then, it is possible to return to her on that threshold of early sound cinema and, in the fraught narcissistic sensibilities that underlie several of her characterizations, perceive narrative parallels to her own identity-in-transition. As femmes fatales Elena in The Temptress (1926) and Felicitas in Flesh and the Devil (1927), as well as troubled heroines like the eponymous Anna Christie and Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel, Garbo portrays women whose respective pursuits of the ideal are shadowed by a fear of its impossibility, or undermined by their past corruption. And with cinema itself negotiating the shift from silents to talkies, the extraand intra-diegetic entities of star, film, and character share an existential momentum generated by uncertainty. If, as Melinda Szaloky sets forth, Garbo’s acting style is characterized by a “mercurial” shifting between emotions that bears a “phenomenological affinity” with the momentum of the moving image itself (2006: 197), then this mutual mutability extends to her broader relationship with a cinema in flux. Amongst filmic bodies not wholly unborn, perhaps, but still incipient in their possibilities, Garbo here gives voice—sometimes literally—to anxieties of transition.

Voices on the Verge Though Garbo’s face belongs, as Barthes highlighted, to modern mythology, her voice has also attracted critical attention. Philippe Soupault, for example, described her “silent voice”: “When she spoke on the screen, we heard nothing; but her virtual voice seemed, somehow, to be a promise” (in Durgnat and Kobal 1965: 95). Pursuing this notion of inherent expressivity rather than explicit articulation, Szaloky writes of the actress’ “ability to intimate what lies between, or beyond, conventions or discrete forms of” communication (2006: 204). Similarly, Charles Affron remarks that Garbo’s voice in talking pictures only “reveals the inadequacy of normal discourse. . . . Her being is meaning” (1977: 168; emphasis added). Yet for all its metaphysical affect, the phenomenon of Garbo’s voice may also be considered as a corporeal element in dialogue with the phenomenon of sound cinema itself. In writing of the film’s lived-body, Sobchack has drawn parallels between the growth of the cinematic and human form: each evolving from infancy, as

GARBO TALKS 19

it were, in progressively refined processes of movement, vision, and—as in the late 1920s—articulation (1992: 251). Making audible the sounds of both the filmed environment and its human inhabitants, and merging with the camera’s perceptions in what Sobchack calls a “technological synaesthesia,” the invention of talking pictures allowed the cinematic body to communicate, as Sobchack notes, “the world’s emotional significance” (254). More than a question of the popular versus the passé, then, the fate of silent-era performers lay in their embodied affinity with the changing cinematic form; the relationship of their once-unheard voices to the expressive capacities of film itself. In a nexus between technological innovation and corporeal development, the silent-to-sound (r)evolution introduced—and demanded—a new generation of cinematic bodies. In a 1946 biography of Garbo (published only five years after Two-Faced Woman, and still enthusing about her future return to films), E.E. Laing discussed the shift to talkies as still-recent history, using vivid language that reflected its perilous implications for the bodies of star and film. Describing “the celluloid corpse[s]” of failed transition vehicles for silent stars, he cites one critic’s use of the phrase “The Death Sentence”: “Several actors . . . spoke theirs as soon as they opened their mouths” (1946: 132). Offering still another commentary on Hollywood’s crisis, Laing quotes from a rhyme of the times: Twinkle, twinkle, little star! How I wonder what you are? French or German, friend or foe— Talkie, talkie—then we’ll know! (135) Evocative even in their flippancy, these notions of celluloid corpses, death sentences, and the revelation of stars’ hidden origins expressed the preoccupations of an industry attempting to regulate new, vocal bodies—or what historian Donald Crafton terms “the out-of-control voices” emanating from star and screen (1999: 455). Tracing the changing standards of desired tones, he notes that early talking pictures called for a “quality” voice belonging to traditions of stage-acting, before studios began seeking out a more “natural” and “intimate” register. Finally, by 1931 a “hybrid” of these emerged, uniting clarity of diction with “the everyday spontaneity . . . and colloquialism of American (not British) English” (447). An accented voice, like those belonging to Mau-

20 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

rice Chevalier, Ronald Colman, and Garbo herself, was not in itself an impediment as long as it complemented the star’s continental persona (463). In the case of performers like Vilma Banky and Pola Negri, however, heavy accents often prevented the ease of articulation demanded by the studios and desired by audiences. As the talkies uncovered the once-hidden, or muted, element of a star’s physicality, they evoked the concept of phonogeny—which, as Michel Chion explains, “emerged . . . as an analogy of” photogénie (1994: 102). Early sound engineers, testing the voices of silent stars, popularized this notion to describe what Chion calls the “mysterious propensity of certain voices to sound good when recorded and played over loudspeakers” (101). As affective and elusive to exact definition as its photographic counterpart, phonogeny describes the felicitous merging of human voice and recording technology3; and certainly, after Garbo’s phenomenal box-office success in Flesh and the Devil and subsequent roles in A Woman of Affairs (Clarence Brown, 1928) and Wild Orchids (Sidney Franklin, 1929), the public eagerly awaited the revelation of her own phonogeny. As one fan wrote in a letter from the July 1929 issue of Picture Play magazine, “Garbo gives us [drama] so grandly in the silent film . . . which I sincerely hope she’ll be able to give us in the talkies” (“What the Fans Think”: 10). Indeed, following Garbo’s Hollywood debut in The Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926), her voice(lessness) emerged as a point of attraction—whether in her casting as an opera singer in that first film (which, as Maureen Turim notes, itself “anticipate[d]” talking pictures with its diegetic focus on sound [2009: 177]) or in the development of her remote persona. Although retrospective accounts reveal that the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) publicity department in fact promoted the idea of Garbo’s uncommunicativeness in order prevent her from speaking too candidly in interviews (Swenson 1997: 197), audiences regarded her silence with reverence. In a 1930 Photoplay article on these “Garbo-Maniacs,” Leonard Hall wrote, “[A]loof and majestic on a lonely mountain top . . . Greta gets away with personal idiosyncrasies that would send other stars’ fans shrieking away in droves” (1930: 60).4 Underlying, perhaps, this acceptance of Garbo’s detached quality was the public’s implicit recognition of what theorist Béla Balázs would term the “ ‘polyphonic’ play of features” expressed within the silent-era visage; the sense, that is, that Garbo’s face—with its “synthesis [of myriad] feelings, passions and thoughts” (1970 [1945]: 64)—spoke for itself. In the finale of Flesh and the Devil, however,

GARBO TALKS 21

Garbo’s performance style shifted from a subtle to overtly kinetic expressivity, suggesting that though she may have borne what Soupault called a “silent voice” (in Durgnat and Kobal1965: 95), it was one on the verge of audibility. Famed as the film that launched Garbo and John Gilbert’s tempestuous off-screen affair, Flesh and the Devil explores the love triangle between two devoted friends, Ulrich (Lars Hanson) and Leo (Gilbert), and Felicitas (Garbo), the woman whose amoral striving for wealth and sexual satisfaction nearly destroys both men. Recalling The Torrent’s focus on sound and Garbo’s diegetic voice, several key points in the narrative of Flesh and the Devil pivot on Felicitas’s offered—and withheld—articulations. One of her lies ultimately leads to a duel between the men, which Felicitas could stop if she would only confess to Ulrich, her husband, the truth of her past with Leo. As Ulrich’s sister, Hertha (Barbara Kent), prays for her to do so, Felicitas undergoes a process of redemption that transforms her bodily from temptress to atoning woman. As the scene opens, Felicitas/Garbo sits in bed with trance-like calm while Hertha beseeches her to stop the duel. A figure of seduction paralyzed not only by shock, but also by the imminent end to her material and sexual gratification, Felicitas/Garbo only comes alive when Hertha begins to pray. Throwing back the covers, Felicitas/Garbo rushes to the young woman and begins a frantic, near-spastic pacing: she shakes her fists, throws her arms in the air, stamps her feet, and covers her ears—all the while voicelessly railing against the prayers and, near the end of her breakdown, seeming to offer her own words to an otherworldly being. Commentators have dismissed it as “an ultracamp climax and the silliest sequence in any Garbo film” (Brett 2012: 95), showing the star with merely “an embarrassing case of the shakes” (Affron 1977: 116); but in treating the scene as failed melodrama, the critics overlook the diegetic impetus of the hysteria: Felicitas’s exorcism. If, as a pastor remarks to Leo earlier in the film, “the devil . . . creates a woman beautiful enough to reach us through the flesh,” then Hertha’s prayers battle with Felicitas’s own possession—and it is through the voice that she is purged. Yet just as the verve of Garbo’s motility—the contortion of her face as she mouths her rants, the flailing of her body as she projects them—suggests a voice on the verge of audibility, Felicitas’s salvation remains conditional. Indeed, the film ends with Felicitas closer to redemption but remaining a femme fatale, if only to herself. Racing to the frozen island where her lovers are dueling, crying out her confession, Felicitas falls through a crack in the ice and

22 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

drowns unheard. Though not directly engaging with the sound film vogue, Flesh and the Devil nonetheless crafts a tension between the silent and the spoken that parallels the preoccupations of an industry encountering its own questions of concealment and revelation—and, more specifically, Garbo’s future as a femme fatale.5

Garbo Talks Toward the end of 1926, following the filming of Flesh and the Devil (and amidst the fervor surrounding Garbo and Gilbert’s romance), the actress entered into contract negotiations with MGM. Writing of Garbo’s agency in these negotiations, historian Sumiko Higashi describes the star as “narcissistic and determined enough to deal with studio magnates” (2009: 208)—even though she had only made three Hollywood pictures up to that point, after arriving from Sweden in 1925 with mentor-director Mauritz Stiller. Aware of her own potential, Garbo resisted being typecast as a vamp. Indeed, Christian Viviani has argued that the star’s “aura of goodness” had already rendered her characterizations more “sanctified sinners” than wholly fatale women (2006: 96). Through the tense process of renewing her contract (during which she went on strike), legendary chief of production Irving Thalberg promised to offer her roles that were more complex—even, as historian Mark Vieira points out, conceiving of a Garbo “formula” that accommodated her demands while cultivating her seductive qualities. In films like Love (Edmund Goulding, 1927; based on Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 novel Anna Karenina), Wild Orchids (Sidney Franklin, 1929), and The Kiss (Jacques Feyder, 1929), Garbo would play a “woman of mystery” caught in a love triangle between the older man to whom she was committed and the younger man who pursued her (Vieira 2005: 42–44, 77). Thalberg also perceived, and sought scripts that played on, a certain magnetic passivity in the star’s allure: “She is a fascinating artist, but she is limited. She must never create situations. She must be thrust into them. The drama comes in how she rides them out” (in Vieira 2005: 223). Not the agent of action so much as its inspiration, the post–Flesh and the Devil Garbo emerges as a muse of romantic conflict rather than a fatal vamp. The nuances of Garbo’s image, of course, raised the stakes of her transition to sound. In January 1930, Walter Ramsey of Picture Play magazine observed

GARBO TALKS 23

that Garbo “suggests mystery, a mystery that has its being in silence. What then, will the spoken, tangible thought have to do with this peculiar appeal?” (1930: 52) Following the advertising campaign launched by MGM, the question could have also been phrased more directly: “Garbo Talks!”—but what would she say? And how would she sound? In response to this public curiosity, Thalberg chose an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie as Garbo’s talkie debut. Casting the star as a despairing former prostitute of Swedish descent who finally finds the love she had believed to be denied her, this was, as Vieira points out, “an odd vehicle” (2005: 104) for her first sound picture. The story was grim and utterly unglamorous, taking place in wharf bars and barges far from the continental milieux associated with the actress. Furthermore, O’Neill’s dialogue was demanding for a star who had not yet spoken on the screen. As one critic commented, “The part is almost a monologue, a test for an actress experienced in speech, a brave feat for one who is not” (in Vieira 2005: 104).6 Yet a consideration of Garbo’s career up to that point reveals the role of Anna to be an evolution of, rather than a diverging from, her broader cinematic identity. More precisely, Anna stands as a descendent of Elena in The Temptress, a silent film that concludes with the once fatal woman walking the streets of Paris in alcoholic misery.7 With a sense of generational interplay between Elena’s end and Anna’s beginning, as well as the women’s shared preoccupation with reflections of their darkest selves, both The Temptress and Anna Christie engage with questions of corruption, redemption, and the uncertainty of the future—with the latter movie allowing Garbo, as one contemporary advertisement declared, to “sound the very depths of human emotion” (emphasis added).8 The Temptress opens with a night of passion between Elena and Robledo (Antonio Moreno), an Argentinian engineer who instantly falls in love in with the beautiful woman. Soon after this tryst, Robledo learns that Elena is both married and carrying on an affair with a wealthy banker who soon kills himself. A disillusioned Robledo returns to Argentina to continue his work in a remote village; Elena—still in love—later travels to join him. Following a series of deaths and misadventures provoked by her fatal appeal, Elena fears that she will destroy Robledo with her love and leaves him. Six years later, after great success and a betrothal to a local woman, Robledo visits Paris and glimpses Elena in the admiring crowds. Given over to alcoholism and prostitution, Elena

24 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

pretends she does not recognize Robledo when, at the end of the film, he seeks her out. Though her doomed lovers condemn her as a villain, Elena of The Temptress in fact anticipates the conflicted muse of Garbo’s later characterizations. The audience learns, for example, that Elena’s husband had encouraged, and profited from, her affair with the suicidal banker. When Robledo rages, “Men have died for you—forsaken work and honor—for you!,” Elena replies, “Not for me—but for my body! Not for my happiness, but for theirs!” Indeed, where Felicitas’s fatal allure merely serves her pursuit of self-gratification, Elena has a fatalistic awareness of her own magnetism and attributes it to “my legacy from God—or the devil.” Preoccupied with questions of the divine and the damned, Elena describes her love for Robledo as the “one thing about me that is a part of God”—its purity existing apart from the beauty that she recognizes as an objective force equally corruptive to her and her admirers. As she writes to Robledo in her farewell letter, Elena believes that she is ultimately “lost to [her]self.” A brief scene following Elena’s arrival in Argentina explores this bitter intertwining between her present self and what she could, and eventually does, become. Standing before her dressing table in a rundown room, Elena catches a glimpse of herself in a warped mirror (figure 1.1). Her perfect features reflected back as deformed, even monstrous, Elena clutches her face in fear as

Figure 1.1. Before the mirror: Elena (Garbo) in The Temptress (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1926).

GARBO TALKS 25

she rushes to a hand mirror that shows her beauty to be intact; the scene fades out with a medium-shot of Elena’s smiling contemplation of her image.9 As evident as the sense of Elena’s relief, however, is the satisfaction with which she regards her reflection—as though she herself were as enraptured with her beauty as the very men she tempts (figure 1.2). This moment suggests, then, that Elena’s narcissism has rendered her lost in her physical form as well as to her better self, but it also reveals Elena’s anxieties over the very nature of her identity: externalized in the horrifying reflection is the “legacy from the devil” that she fears lies within her, a vision of the damnation predestined—and concealed—by her remarkable corporeal form. The final sequence, however, resolves this tension between the internal and external, sin and salvation. After Robledo follows Elena—her eyes shadowed, with stooped shoulders and tattered clothes—to a sidewalk café, she insists that she has forgotten him and asks only that he buy her a drink. He finally leaves her, after slipping money in her purse; and in a drunken daze, Elena spies a solitary man who she believes to be Christ. In a point-of-view shot sharing Elena’s hallucinogenic perspective, an aureole of light surrounds the figure and beatifies his coarse features. Elena approaches the man with an elliptical supplication, offering him a ruby ring that Robledo had given her years before: “In all my useless life—one thing. . . . You will understand—You died for love.” Reversing the juxtaposition between physical splendor and reflected horror presented in the earlier scene, here Elena incarnates the dreadfulness

Figure 1.2. The Temptress (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1926).

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of the warped mirror while beauty itself remains an ephemeral projection— representing a more forgiving “legacy from God” than that one Elena believed herself to bear. Yet in sacrificing the ring, her last material connection to the past, Elena nonetheless achieves a kind of release. The film ends with a longshot of Elena walking away, her face hidden and her body an anonymous, dark form moving along the cobblestone street—this spectral quality itself suggesting a conditional redemption for the temptress. Even if only a shadow, she is no longer wholly of her body. A predecessor to Felicitas’s overtly fatal woman, as well as the more conflicted romantic heroines of Garbo’s later roles, Elena also introduces the preoccupation with corruption and redemption—and the fear of an unknown future—that underlies Anna’s character. Seeking a rest from her life on the streets, Anna reunites with her neglectful father and sails with him on his barge. While on this journey, she meets and falls in love with sailor Matt (Charles Bickford). When he proposes, though, Anna is forced to reveal her former way of life. At the end of the film, Matt forgives Anna her past, and the couple is engaged. Yet in her encounters with Marthy, an aged prostitute played by Marie Dressler, Anna must contend with the embodiment of her feared, potential self. With its use of sound demonstrating the newfound powers of the cinematic body itself, Anna Christie explores the capacities and limitations of an individual longing to escape the past—and her possible future. Anna/Garbo’s first appearance in the film establishes its reflexive sensibility. Dressed in a tattered black cardigan, with a hat framing her grim face, Anna stands in the doorway of a bleak saloon as a twin to Elena in the final sequences of The Temptress; extending this effect to triptych dimensions is the figure of Marthy herself. Dozing at a table with her head resting on her hand, wearing a frumpy sweater and rakishly tilted hat, Marthy in her stupor suggests the static resolution of Anna’s slow, slouching gait—incarnating, as it were, the wretched destination toward which Anna moves. A long-shot frames the two women as they regard each other, seated on opposite sides of the deserted bar with a similarly oblique set to their shoulders; a subsequent medium-shot/ reverse-shot sequence heightens this sense of parallelism (figure 1.3). As if transposing Elena and her warped reflection to an expressly corporeal context, the scene between Anna and Marthy introduces a dialogue between two individuals of commensurate experience. “You look all in. Have you been on a bat?,” Marthy asks Anna knowingly; while the latter ruefully declares her nar-

GARBO TALKS 27

Figure 1.3. Anna (Garbo) and her double (Dressler) in Anna Christie (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1930).

cissistic, if dystopic, identification with the older woman. “I got your [number] without no trouble. You’re me, forty years from now.” Later in the film, a more overtly uncanny sensibility shades this doubling of experience. As Anna and Matt sit at a café in Coney Island, with a merry-goround and crowds rushing behind them, he declares his love for her. While she listens to him in medium close-up, she turns her profile away from the camera to look into the background of the shot. Moments later, Marthy emerges from the out-of-focus chaos to join Anna at her table. When Matt tries to dismiss Marthy, Anna demurs: “I know her and she knows me. I recognized her the minute she stepped across the room.” Recalling the near-spectral quality of key scenes in Flesh and the Devil and The Temptress—Felicitas’s mute battle against salvation and Elena’s projections of interior anxieties—this sequence frames Anna and Marthy’s rapport in terms of the carnivalesque. A near-vibrational pull seems to draw Anna’s attention to Marthy even before she appears; when she does, it is as a magic-mirror reflection brought to life, a projection of Anna’s possible future made all the more dreadful for her very reality. The extra-diegetic attention surrounding Garbo’s performance in Anna Christie, in fact, introduced a parallel doubling effect between the mystique of her silent-cinema past and the embodied reality of her as-yet-unheard voice. Before the release of the film, the press build-up relegated the star to a limbo

28 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

in which she existed as both established idol and “unborn child” (in Vieira 2005: 107), to return to her own statement. As Ramsey (1930) would go on to write in Picture Play, “An out-of-character voice will ruin Garbo. She must speak as she looks—soft, alluring, and yet with a huskiness which her sophistication suggests. . . . Otherwise she strikes at a preconceived impression of herself, an impression which is too well established to be easily uprooted, even though she burst forth upon the public with a childlike range” (52; emphasis added). Recalling the phonogenic impact of which Chion wrote, Ramsey here highlights the necessity of a merging between voice and image—the importance, that is, of the star’s voice affirming the audience’s “preconceived impression” (52) of her. Somewhat ominous in tone, these remarks allude to the grim stakes should the star not meet the spectator’s expectation: Garbo’s silent appeal was “too well established” (52) to be challenged successfully; a “childlike range” (52) or variability was allowed only in the incipience of her fame. Indeed, where The Temptress and Anna Christie explore the heroines’ vexed pursuit of the ideal—Elena longs for a redemptive “legacy from God” while Anna confronts the double who intrudes on her hopes for the future—the speculation around Garbo’s performance in Anna Christie highlights a need to preserve the audience’s ideal in the transition between silent and talking pictures. Ultimately, it was Garbo herself—with a voice that may have been, to return to Ramsey, “out-of-character” (52) or utterly phonogenic—who could have thwarted her own success. As Laing comments in his 1946 biography of the star, even the divine Garbo was expendable at that critical moment: Should audiences have rejected Anna Christie, “the company could have buried the celluloid corpse and thought no more about it. Stars were falling from the heavens all over Hollywood: they were being forgotten as quickly as they had been made” (135). Yet the response to Garbo’s performance was effusive, with critics proclaiming, “The Great Garbo talks—and remains great!” (“Brief Reviews of Current Pictures”: 6); and, “Now we know that Greta Garbo is truly gifted. . . . [Her] voice is deep, and has a huskiness suitable to the character of the unhappy Anna” (Schallert and Schallert 1930: 44). Though heavy accents had hindered the success of stars like Banky and Negri, accounts began to circulate that Garbo’s voice was in fact fairly Americanized. As Rilla Page Palmborg recalled in 1932, “We were told that several of the scenes had to be retaken when it was discovered that Garbo didn’t have enough accent to make

GARBO TALKS 29

the Swedish girl whom she was portraying, realistic” (199–200). Critic Norbert Lusk did comment, however, on the near-iconoclastic quality of Garbo’s voice: “[T]here isn’t another like it. Disturbing, incongruous, its individuality is so pronounced that it would belong to no one less strongly individual than Garbo herself” (in Conway 1991: 89). Unique, yet still satisfying the public’s demand for relative familiarity; demonstrating versatility in Anna Christie’s realist milieu without diverging from audience expectation, Garbo matched the “technological synaesthesia,” following Sobchack’s terms (1992: 254), of talking pictures with her own harmony between voice and image. Fittingly, it is a monologue near the conclusion of Anna Christie that attests to both Anna’s redemptive self-awareness and Garbo’s “strongly individual” (in Conway 1991: 89) appeal. Speaking to Matt and her father, Anna insists that they “will listen” to the reality of her past—no matter how troubling or disillusioning. “Nobody owns me, see, excepting myself. I’ll do what I please. And no man . . . can tell me what to do. . . . I am my own boss.” With a wracking passion that recalls Felicitas’s exorcism, and an assertion of will that rejects Elena’s fatalistic victimhood, Anna affirms her autonomy—independent of her father, her lover, and, implicitly, her wretched double. Throughout the scene, Garbo’s voice declares itself as polyphonic, to recall Balázs’s phrase, as her very visage. Rolling her r’s in moments of particular intensity, she all but growls in indignation, only to nearly keen as she appeals to Matt: “Will you believe it if I tell you that loving you has made me clean?” Affron has noted that part of Garbo’s art lies in her ability to offer the “formal rendering [of emotional states] in a physical context” (1977: 147), and certainly her voice here provides the bodily channel for her character’s internal drama. Anna’s soliloquy, then, is Garbo’s aria; both women affirm their existential singularity by speaking for themselves.

“I Finished; I Waited; I Listened” Inherent in the transition to sound, of course, was a certain process of demystification. Commenting on the more ethereal qualities of Garbo’s talkie characterizations, Szaloky perceives a desire to “safeguard” the enigmatic quality of the star’s persona (2006: 204). Certainly, films like Romance (Clarence Brown, 1930) and As You Desire Me (George Fitzmaurice, 1932)—and even a somewhat later work like Camille (George Cukor, 1936)—sought to preserve

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the star’s transcendent sensibilities in the revelatory era of sound. Going farther, Szaloky notes that the actress’ talkie films even had a “tendency . . . to grow self-reflective, to offer quotations of ‘the silent-screen goddess’ that Garbo uniquely typified” (205). Indeed, a fan-magazine columnist of the day anticipated this more theoretical analysis in her exploration of Garbo’s transformation. “She was in those first years of her heyday a warm, wholly-tender, wholly-human-being,” wrote Photoplay’s Amelia Cummings, contrasting the silent-era Garbo to the “dominating, unattainable woman” and “cool, remote goddess-like celebrity of . . . more recent achievements” (1933: 98). Though here Cummings does not explicitly propose a silent versus talkie dichotomy (and in spite of her arguably revisionist discussion of Garbo’s “wholly-humanbeing” [emphasis added]), the columnist does trace the effect of strategies that preserved the star’s mystique within the realism of the sound era. Exemplifying this protective approach was Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel, a 1932 movie that exalted both the high style of Thalberg’s prestige productions and the high drama of Garbo herself. As Grusinskaya, a ballet dancer on the verge of losing her talent and renown, Garbo shifts between moments of manic joy and paralyzing despair. Famously, it is in one of the latter moments that she utters the defining expression, “I want to be alone. . . . I just want to be alone.” Spoken quietly rather than proclaimed, more a plea than a demand, Grusinskaya’s credo was adopted into popular culture as Garbo’s own. Yet the star herself would go on to protest this merging of the diegetic and personal, as biographer Karen Swenson notes: “She never said she wanted to be alone, only that she wanted to be left alone” (1997: 280; emphasis in original). With the public already attuned to Garbo as “aloof and majestic on a lonely mountain top,” to recall Leonard Hall’s phrasing in Photoplay (1930: 60), such distinctions went unheeded. The star’s clarification seems, in retrospect, as poignant as the statement to which it responded: For where Anna Christie stands as a triumph of self-expression—in both narrative and film-historical terms—Grusinskaya’s pathos surpassed the diegetic to shade Garbo’s legend itself. This echo of misunderstanding suggests, then, that in the broader dialogue between fan and early sound film, the expectations of the former— whether focused on phonogeny or persona—tempered the interpretation of the latter. Episodes of misinterpretation and thwarted communication feature in the narrative of Grand Hotel itself, an ensemble film starring MGM luminaries

GARBO TALKS 31

John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Wallace Beery. Following the intertwining lives of guests at a hotel in Berlin, several storylines hinge on messages received, ignored, or misunderstood: Beery’s volatile industrialist learns that a crucial business deal has collapsed, and lies to his investors; and Lionel Barrymore’s obsequious clerk checks into the hotel on the news that he has a terminal illness. The film opens, in fact, with an overhead tracking shot showing operators at the hotel switchboard before cutting to medium-shots of the various guests speaking on telephones in booths off the lobby. It is in one of these early establishing vignettes that the audience meets Grusinskaya—but only as a phantom figure invoked by her fretful maid: “Poor Madame! Her mind is tortured. I’m afraid she will—.” A cut leaves the threat of suicide unspoken, just as Garbo’s appearance itself remains a deferred, anticipated phenomenon until almost twenty minutes into the movie. When she does speak, hers is an elliptical monologue that conjures disjointed images of imperial Russia, only to conclude that they are “all gone.” Though Grusinskaya’s malaise vanishes after she falls in love with John Barrymore’s impoverished Baron, his death at the end of the film signals the dancer’s imminent collapse, a demise that is, again, deferred by her entourage’s refusal to tell her the tragic news. Yet it is another love affair of missed and mixed messages that inspires Grusinskaya’s initial devastation: the romance between the dancer and her audience. Moving beyond Anna and Elena’s more monologic narcissism, one focused on an alternately dreaded and hoped-for reflection of the self, here Grusinskaya seeks the affirming admiration of the masses in order to sustain her identity. In her first sequence, she recalls the previous night’s performance: “That theatre, half-empty, dancing for those few—I was frantic! I finished; I waited; I listened—but the applause did not come. Nothing!” Her producer assures her that “the house is jammed to the roof” with crowds awaiting her next performance, but a subsequent exchange reveals this to be a lie meant to appease the troubled dancer. Just as the “I want to be alone” declaration exceeded its narrative significance to influence the development of Garbo’s legend itself, so too did Grusinskaya’s fears over her diminishing fame speak (however allegorically) for those Hollywood performers made vulnerable by the introduction of talking pictures. Though much of the popular and critical material on the transition to talkies focused (and still focuses) on the “waiting” and “listening” of fans eager to hear their idols speak, this first sequence plays on the appre-

32 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

hension of the performer himself or herself—the uncertainty of awaiting an admiring or derisive reception to a newfound expressivity. Amidst the diegetic episodes of (mis)communication shaping Grand Hotel, Grusinskaya/Garbo opens a dialogue with its extra-diegetic context—and not simply, as the attention to her famed statement suggests, in relation to her individual persona. Indeed, in articulating these anxieties of transition even in a fictional context, Garbo is not “alone” here but rather in the phantom company of an entire lost generation of stars to which she could have easily belonged. Through the very reflexive gestures meant to preserve Garbo’s silent-era glory, Grand Hotel only highlights the relative instability of her, and her contemporaries’, ideality. With a line of dialogue translating into an iconic statement, and a heroine’s musings on passing fame echoing the bewilderment of the film colony itself, this sequence in Grand Hotel indicates that even as sound cinema allowed Garbo and her characters to speak for themselves, it could not anticipate or control the off-screen resonance of their articulations. For beyond making audible the “emotional significance” of the diegetic world, to recall Sobchack’s terms (1992: 254), the talkies intensified the emotionally significant relationship between star and fan—allowing for both the enthusiasm of gratified expectations (“The Great Garbo talks—and remains great!”) and the disappointment surrounding fallen idols. Presaging the quasi-eulogistic tributes written after Garbo’s withdrawal from the screen, Cummings proposed that a major element in the star’s allure was her ability to satisfy the longings of her fans and “always [be] . . . as you desired her” (1933: 98; emphasis in original). That is, “[i]n a curious and inexplicable way, Greta Garbo has given her audiences what they demanded. Whatever she acts in a picture she becomes . . . ‘all things to all men’—and to all women also” (36).10 As the decade passed, however, the notion of what audiences demanded was changing—as was Garbo’s face. For the remainder of the 1930s, Garbo appeared in about one film a year, and closed the decade with Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939). Nearly a decade after the release of Anna Christie, the studio would revise the “Garbo Talks!” campaign to declare, “Garbo Laughs!” in the popular comedy. Two years later, though, the making of the star’s next film was less lighthearted. During the production of Two-Faced Woman (1941), director George Cukor encountered the star as she sat in her dressing room and studied her face in a magnify-

GARBO TALKS 33

ing mirror. Pointing out lines around her mouth, Garbo declared, “Those lines will get deeper. . . . I must quit” (in Vieira 2005: 262). Producer David Lewis also commented on Garbo’s reliance on the magnifying mirror, though he perceived a more pragmatic self-absorption: “She constantly examined her face. . . . I don’t think it was vanity. She simply knew what her values were” (in Vieira 2005: 270). Two-Faced Woman would in fact be Garbo’s final film, a comedy that featured her playing a dual role as sensible wife and frivolous femme fatale. A popular and critical disappointment, the movie and its weakly screwball antics framed Garbo as a near-anachronism, her continental gravitas sharply contrasting the modish costuming and dance number (in which Garbo danced the chica choca). In 1943, studio chief Louis B. Mayer bought out her contract with MGM (though Garbo in fact refused the final pay-out), and ingénue Lana Turner moved into her dressing room (Vieira 2005: 269).11 Though, as mentioned earlier, Garbo entered into negotiations for film roles in her postHollywood years, she never returned to the screen—which Vieira attributes to the star’s “combination of sloth, dread, and narcissism” (2005: 271) when confronted with the reality of her changed appearance. No longer an unborn child on the verge of the talkies, Garbo left Hollywood to begin what would be her retirement; in so doing, she became a figure of memory, an icon remembered rather than a woman aging. Yet the very cine-existence that preceded the legend of Garbo reveals not her absolute ideality, but rather her underlying, all-too-human elements of instability and apprehension. For paralleling Garbo’s film-historical trajectory from silent to talkie star are the fictional concerns of her heroines: the desire for self-expression that shades Felicitas’s and Anna’s (admittedly diverging) articulations; the focus on an alternately longed-for and dreaded future, as faced by Anna and Elena; and, finally, the fear that so tormented Grusinskaya of losing an audience. As an actress finding her voice in Hollywood’s sound (r)evolution, Garbo gave voice—literally and symbolically—to the preoccupations of other women in transition, figures hoping to protect or realize their respective conceptions of ideality. Through these “desires and impulses, hopes and despairs,” to return to the words of Queen Christina, the divine Garbo explored utterly human experiences, however rapturous in their enactment— and their articulation.

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Notes 1.

In their monograph on Queen Christina, Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo maintain that as well as presenting a moment in which “Christina becomes Garbo,” this monologue “links the star to her audience since this dilemma is . . . intrinsic to cultural conflicts concerning identity problems” (1995: 45). 2. In 1949, Garbo made a screen test for La Duchesse de Langeais, which was to be produced by Walter Wanger and directed by Max Ophuls. In 1971, she and Luchino Visconti discussed a cameo role in a possible production of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Brett 2012: 337–341, 352). 3. Presaging, indeed, Barthes’ description of the “grain,” or “body of the voice as it sings . . . [inspiring the listener’s] relation with the body of the man or woman singing” (1982: 188). 4. Sumiko Higashi considers Garbo’s appeal in capitalist terms, noting that the star’s very “elusiveness inflated her stature as an icon . . . [and so] she remained an unusual star in a modern celebrity culture designed to promote endless consumption” (2009: 210). 5. Screenwriter John Howard Lawson would recount later, however, that he had written a “talking” dream-sequence for the film; though never used, it nonetheless impressed producer Irving Thalberg (Walker 1986: 85). 6. Szaloky has suggested that in immersing Garbo in the bleakness of Anna Christie, MGM was testing the star’s ability to adapt to the “psychological realism” introduced by talking pictures (2006: 204). 7. The Temptress (1926) was Garbo’s second film in Hollywood, a project originally intended to be a collaboration between her and Stiller. Conflicts on the set led Thalberg to fire Stiller, however, and production continued with director Fred Niblo (see Vieira 2005: 23–26). 8. Advertisement in Photoplay, April 1930: 80. 9. Biographer David Brett notes that several of Garbo’s early films featured “obligatory mirror scenes” (2012: 160), showing the star gazing at her own reflection. 10. To continue in the terms suggested by this last phrase, Garbo’s androgyny has indeed inspired commentary on the lesbian undertones of her appeal. See, for example, Andrea Weiss’s article “ ‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You’: Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s” (in Gledhill 1991: 283–299). 11. In his biography of Thalberg, Vieira marks the producer’s death in 1936 as a turning point for Garbo and fellow MGM leading ladies like Crawford and Shearer. By the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s, Mayer treated this generation of stars as expendable and instead focused his attention on younger actresses like Turner, Judy Garland, and Hedy Lamarr. As Vieira succinctly states, “The MGM goddesses of the 1930s should not have been put out to pasture. . . . If Thalberg had lived, they would not have been” (2010: 397).

CHAPTER 2

Katharine Hepburn and a Hollywood Story In 1932, the same year that Garbo starred in Grand Hotel, RKO Radio Pictures released A Bill of Divorcement. Directed by George Cukor, and also featuring Garbo costar John Barrymore, the drama introduced audiences to Katharine Hepburn—a young actress who attracted immediate critical and popular acclaim. In 1933 she would go on to win an Academy Award (the first of a recordsetting four) for her performance in Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman), only her third film. In March of that year, Motion Picture magazine put Hepburn on its cover to herald “A New Kind of Star!” In a brief summing up of her appeal, an anonymous editorial remarked, “Not having met any actress like this before, her studio didn’t suspect it had a sensation on its hands. . . . She looks a bit like Garbo, but she is too individual to be compared to anyone” (“A New Kind of Star!”: 5). Indeed, though famed today as an icon of intellectual elegance, in the early 1930s Hepburn stood as an unconventional beauty amidst the more traditional charm of stars like Claudette Colbert and Norma Shearer, and the overt sexuality of a Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford. Throughout the decade, Hepburn portrayed heroines who—whether in their outright eccentricity or reluctance to conform—challenged patriarchal expectations of womanhood: a tomboy (Little Women, George Cukor, 1933) and an aviatrix (Christopher Strong, Dorothy Arzner, 1933); a young woman posing as a man to help her thieving father (Sylvia Scarlett, George Cukor, 1935) and an ambitious turn-of-the-century journalist (A Woman Rebels, Mark Sandrich, 1936). In the idiosyncratic, if not infinite, variety of her roles, Hepburn was certainly a new kind of star for Hollywood; yet she invites (and invited) more comparisons with Garbo than Motion Picture initially allowed. Aside from sharing with the latter a symmetry of features and intensity of gaze, for example, Hepburn also presented an androgynous appeal that—as highlighted in Sylvia Scarlett—unsettled conventions of feminine beauty.1 Moreover, in a kind of generational merging, Garbo and Hepburn would find themselves in career difficulties at roughly the same period—the enfant terrible, that is, suddenly becoming an equally faltering contemporary of her established predecessor. In 1938, following the unpop-

36 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

ularity of Hepburn’s roles in movies like John Ford’s Mary of Scotland (1936) and Howard Hawks’s now-classic Bringing up Baby (1938)—released around the same time as Garbo’s relatively unsuccessful Camille (1936) and Conquest (Clarence Brown, 1937)—theater owners published in The Hollywood Reporter a list of performers they damned as box-office poison (in Swenson 1997: 385). Among those stars were Garbo, Hepburn, Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich. In an effort to revive her career after these difficulties in Hollywood, Hepburn returned to the New York stage to originate the role of Tracy Lord in the Phillip Barry play The Philadelphia Story (directed by Robert B. Sinclair; running from 1939–1940). It was a highly successful comeback vehicle; and after selling the screen rights to MGM, Hepburn went back to Hollywood to star in the film version. A box-office hit, the Cukor-directed movie would definitively reestablish Hepburn’s stardom. Her next film, Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), would inaugurate her legendary partnership with Spencer Tracy. Indeed, beyond sharing the turning point of 1938, Garbo and Hepburn also crossed paths, as it were, in 1940—the year before Two-Faced Woman was released to a bleak reception, and that Hepburn starred in the film version of The Philadelphia Story. Here Garbo and Hepburn may yet again be compared, meeting at a film-historical juncture at which one star would withdraw from the screen and another reclaim the fame that would last for decades to come. As Hepburn related in an interview toward the end of her life, “I gave [Tracy Lord] life, she gave me back my career” (Katharine Hepburn: All About Me 1993). Understood this way, Hepburn’s relationship to Tracy Lord is one of an existential transaction rather than the anxious transition(s) captured in Garbo’s characterizations. Where the latter’s heroines emerged as fraught narcissistic figures, enduring crises of redefinition that paralleled Hollywood’s own, Tracy’s self-absorption appears—at first—more straightforward, even lighthearted, in its implications. Main Line Philadelphia heiress Tracy stands at the center of the various romantic entanglements played out through the narrative’s comedy of errors: On the eve of her wedding to her pompous fiancé, George (John Howard), Tracy learns that her first husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), has returned to her family’s estate with two magazine reporters in tow. Mike (James Stewart) and Liz (Ruth Hussey) plan to cover the wedding for Spy magazine, the editor of which threatens to reveal Tracy’s father’s scandalous philandering if she does not comply. By the day of her wedding, after a champagne-infused evening with Mike, Tracy must choose between George,

KATHARINE HEPBURN AND A HOLLYWOOD STORY 37

Mike, and Dexter—ultimately deciding to relinquish her role as a (nearly) unimpeachable golden girl and to give her heart and hand to her first husband. Early in the film, after Mike first meets the overwhelmingly vivacious Tracy, he turns to Liz in exasperation and demands, “Can she be human?” Delivered as an aside, the question nonetheless resonates throughout a broader consideration of the film and its treatment of Tracy. A woman extraordinary in both her nature and circumstances, Tracy’s fascination with her own image matches the admiration of those around her; and though she sincerely protests that she does not “want to be worshipped . . . [but] loved,” she seeks a measure of ideality that belies her very humanity. Through the machinations of the male protagonists, however, The Philadelphia Story ultimately reveals the flesh-and-blood reality underlying Tracy’s otherworldly appeal, insisting that she abandon her project of self-divinization—that she must be human. Yet in her enactment of Tracy’s humanization, Hepburn invites an examination of another, extra-diegetic figure: the classic Hollywood star. In a key example of Edgar Morin’s theory of the osmotic engagement between role and star, Hepburn herself provokes the same questions that underlie the narrative: What is the nature of feminine ideality, and how should it be defined? Can the woman (as-star) “be human,” and, if so, what are the stakes of her humanity? Where Barthes maintained that Garbo’s face “was not to have any reality except that of its perfection” (2000a [1957]: 57), Hepburn here inspires an exploration of the reality of such on-screen perfection. Not simply—to borrow from Dexter’s description of Tracy—a “goddess [who] must and shall remain intact,” Hepburn returns to the screen as, indeed, “a new kind of star.”

Close-up (on) Vision In 1940, a year before the release of The Philadelphia Story, Life magazine mused on Hepburn’s recent career troubles, noting that fans had become disenchanted with her strident persona: “[P]eople grew a little tired of Katharine facing the world, clear-eyed, forthright, arrogant and unafraid—in situations which merely called for relaxation” (Jenson 1940: 48). Yet on the great success of the film, critics and fans alike pondered her remarkable return: As John Reese of Motion Picture pointed out, “[H]er re-entry is not the humble, thanksfor-the-chance comeback trail, but the parade of a victor into the fallen cita-

38 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

del of a vanquished foe” (1940: 31). In a letter published in the same magazine the following year, one fan declared, The movie-makers have a name for her—Temperamental, Hard-toGet-Along-With Hepburn—but I call her . . . Katharine-the-Great. . . . Maybe the part she played [Tracy Lord], a pampered darling, is also her true-life role. Maybe she is difficult. . . . [But] she has that all-too-rare elusive quality called personality coupled with the creative ability to project it across the screen and into the hearts and heads of her audience. Go meet the girl in The Philadelphia Story. . . . She’s vividly alive and real. (“Katharine the Great”: 16) Written only three years after film audiences rejected Hepburn’s unsettling persona, these commentaries acknowledge her past difficulties even as they welcome—and openly marvel at—the return of the star. What most impresses the fan, in fact, is Hepburn’s ability to convey her vitality to the audience—as if she has expressly directed the energies of her spirited personality into a dialogue with the off-screen world. Indeed, even as the film presents a metacommentary on the fallibility of the screen goddess, it also invites the audience to consider the material dynamism generating her enduring on-screen impact. Simultaneously (re-)ascending the Hollywood pedestal and reflecting on its very foundation, Hepburn-as-Tracy expressly calls on what the fan letter described as “the hearts and heads” of the viewers—and, as one scene toward the middle of the film makes clear, on their sensory sympathy. In a film characterized by its breezy pace and rapid, witty dialogue, one of its most affecting moments takes place in silence. Holding Tracy/Hepburn in long-shot as she walks down the steps of her pool-house, the camera remains static as she approaches the pool and looks at the water contemplatively (see figure 2.1). She appears to gaze on a toy yacht floating in the pool, a model of the True Love that Dexter built and on which the couple sailed on their honeymoon. As the shot continues, however, Tracy/Hepburn’s look seems to rest on her own reflection, which mirrors her pose exactly as she stands at the edge of the pool, dressed in a white robe against the marble purity of the pool-house. Indeed, the precision of pose borne by the “real” Tracy/Hepburn and her sedately shimmering, reflected counterpart fill the frame to form a tableau in which she looks not so much like a woman, but rather like a goddess

KATHARINE HEPBURN AND A HOLLYWOOD STORY 39

Figure 2.1. Tracy (Hepburn) and the True Love in The Philadelphia Story (MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1940).

in her temple.2 Statuesque in her elegance, Hepburn here draws the gaze of the viewer into an enchanted space, an almost metaphysical suspension of the boundaries between actuality and reflection, earth and water, and—in her occupation of both sections of the bisected shot—even gravity itself. Though moments earlier Tracy had insisted that she does not “want to be worshipped . . . [but] loved,” in this shot the true love on which Tracy gazes appears, in fact, to be her own reflection. Yet rather than frame Tracy/Hepburn as a goddess wholly, as Dexter remarks, “intact”—a subject whose reality matches her reflected ideality—the shot conveys a deliberate, almost self-conscious aura of sublime femininity that complicates such notions of completion. Certainly the mythic connotations of the image invoke the star-pantheon of early Hollywood, and in this long-shot, framing Hepburn as she muses in a dreamscape, she plays the role of star as much as that of Tracy Lord. As it lingers, however, Hepburn’s very look into the pool introduces a more dynamic undercurrent to the scene. Rather than a myth beyond the “reach” of an embodied gaze, Hepburn is here a corporeal being simpatico to the spectator: contemplative, even curi-

40 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

ous, she appears to regard the vision of herself as a kind of screen-withinthe-screen—becoming, in this way, a flesh-and-blood spectator as intrigued by the shimmering figure as is the off-screen audience. In one of those “moments of convergence and rapture” (Sobchack 1992: 286) that may characterize the dialogue between film and viewer, here the on- and off-screen worlds reveal their fluid interplay. In a recent study that parallels such concerns with convergence—and, as Sobchack also points out, corresponding “moments of divergence and rupture” (1992: 286)—Martine Beugnet has theorized a “close-up vision” of the human form. Rather than regard the close-up as a means of fragmenting the figure for a fetishistic or possessive gaze, Beugnet perceives its possibilities for a “re-mapping of the cinematic territory,” creating a “body-landscape” (2006: 36–37), that is, in which the sensory dimensionality of the image supersedes distinctions between subject and object, masculine and feminine, even interior and exterior (36–37). Beugnet outlines this approach to visuality in relation to the close-up technique itself, specifically as it appears in works by contemporary French women filmmakers; yet in considering the sensory resonance of the pool scene from The Philadelphia Story, one could arguably build on the notion of close-up vision to consider the intimacy between viewer and star. More precisely, one could suggest that Hepburn invites a close-up on vision itself—a heightened awareness of the visual pleasure inspired by the actress’ on-screen form as it alternately merges with and diverges from (pre)conceptions wrought by persona and conventions of the feminine ideal. Reviewers at the time implicitly recognized this dialogue opening up between star, role, and what the aforementioned fan letter called the “hearts and heads” of the audience. In its take on the film, Life magazine would go on to laud the symbiosis between star and production:“Its shiny surface reflects perfectly from her gaunt, bony face. Its languid action becomes her lean, rangy body. Its brittle smart-talk suits her metallic voice. And when Katharine Hepburn sets out to play Katharine Hepburn, she is a sight to behold. Nobody is then her equal” (“Movie of the Week”: 31; emphasis added). Once chronicling a period in which Hepburn lacked an audience as well as an “equal,” Life here marvels at the osmosis between star and role that was so compelling to Morin. As he writes, this process allows for the “exceptional qualities” of the character to “reflect . . . back on and illuminate the star” (2005b [1957]: 28). Furthermore, it enables “the two mythic supports, the imaginary heroine and the beauty

KATHARINE HEPBURN AND A HOLLYWOOD STORY 41

of the actress [to] interpenetrate and unite” (31). Yet with its commentary on Hepburn’s organic relationship to The Philadelphia Story, the Life review transposes this osmosis to more-existential, less-mythic terms. For though Tracy’s “exceptional qualities” (to borrow from Morin) inspire her demand for inhuman ideality, they ultimately cede to her flesh-and-blood imperfection; and the character herself finds embodiment, appropriately, in an actress alternately praised for her unique look and described as “not beautiful” (Rankin 1934: 34)—a figure vacillating between box-office poison and cultural iconicity in the making. Rather than a union of those “mythic supports” described by Morin, then, Hepburn-as-Tracy stands as a felicitous merging of morematerial elements. Certainly the use of still photographs within the film heightens this sense of what the Life review called “Katharine Hepburn playing Katharine Hepburn,” suggesting as it does an engagement with an altogether different kind of material: publicity. Using imagery from magazines as both prologue and conclusion to the narrative, The Philadelphia Story introduces the varnished glamour of the tabloid aesthetic as a counterpoint to the effervescent figures animating the screen. Imitating the style of the very magazines that would profile the film and its stars (Life included), these photographs introduce a further element of reflexivity that comments on both publicity build-ups and the stakes of celebrity in the studio era. In the film’s broader process of inspiring a close-up vision of Hepburn’s star presence, the inclusion of this imagery directly recognizes her relationship to the fan magazines that, as Morin states, “pour out on the faithful all the vivifying elements of their faith” (2005b [1957]: 57). Hepburn’s still image first appears after the introductory scene depicting Dexter and Tracy’s last encounter as husband and wife. As he leaves the house, she provokes him into pushing her in the face and knocking her down. Following an inter-title signaling “Two Years Later,” however, a photograph of Tracy from the society pages appears, proclaiming her upcoming marriage to George and offering proof of her recovery from the ignoble exit. (Ironically, and as will be discussed later, it is this same imagery that captures the couple’s reconciliation.) There is a painted quality to the shot, rendering it more a touched-up portrait than a straightforward photograph; and its illustrative sensibility highlights the loveliness of a woman famed for her less-traditional appeal. Indeed, as Andrew Britton remarks in his illuminating study of the star, a binary opposition dominates descriptions of Hepburn: She is considered either “beautiful”

42 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

or “plain” (1995: 37), and the extreme contours of her face seem to willfully call on the spectator’s acceptance or rejection. Britton goes further, arguing that where close-ups of Garbo, for example, capture the unquestionable beauty of her face and thus redeem the “non-femininity” of the star, close-ups of Hepburn serve only to further isolate those elements that comprise her sometimes-unsettling visage (30). Decades earlier, actual fan magazines also attempted to make sense of this curious appeal. As one 1934 Photoplay article listing “13 Irresistible Women” explained, where Garbo is “the most beautiful woman, so much so that she stands alone [Hepburn represented] the other extreme” (Rankin 1934: 34; emphasis in original): quoting photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huené, “‘With her flaring nostrils and harsh mouth, she could never be called beautiful, but her face has a dynamic quality which is more important to an actress than beauty. She could make people believe anything; she is almost hypnotic’” (in Rankin 1934: 98). The Philadelphia Story itself explores Hepburn’s ability to “make people believe anything”—though in a more self-reflexive performance of a performance. In a plot twist, the Spy reporters initially believe that they are undercover and do not realize that Tracy knows their intentions—and that she herself intends, as she scornfully declares, to “give them a picture of home-life that will stand their hair on end.” Indeed, on meeting them, Tracy deliberately acts the part of high-society star throughout the sequence: wearing a frothy dress, chattering in French, and blithely insulting the reporters with an air of noblesse oblige.3 The body of the film is itself complicit in this performance, framing Hepburn in close-ups that—in contrast to the standard two-shots that feature Liz and Mike in shot/reverse-shot—exalt her form, dressed in white as she beams on her audience. The fact that this is Tracy/Hepburn’s first extended shot/reverse-shot sequence in close-up underscores her highly affected, stylized presentation of radiant elegance: diffused lighting creates a halo around her hair and calls attention to high cheekbones and a broad smile; and as her distinctive enunciation and sharply resonant tones prattle on, she commands both the gaze and the aural space of the soundtrack. If a Main Line mansion is Tracy’s domain, then this radiantly lit expanse of glittering eyes and striking contours forms Hepburn’s own body-landscape, one that deliberately invites the spectator’s immersion. Further expanding the terrain of that landscape is the sense that Liz and Mike, in their nonplussed

KATHARINE HEPBURN AND A HOLLYWOOD STORY 43

captivation, also see her in close-up. In a mise en abyme of spectatorship, then, the extra-diegetic audience watches Hepburn just as Liz and Mike watch Tracy—both audiences observing a construction of stardom that deliberately inspires a close-up on their visual engagement with the performer. In these moments that court a contemplative, rather than possessive, gaze—from the pool sequence to the magazine imagery, and finally to this performance of a performance—Hepburn-as-Tracy invites an exploration of the territory that lies beyond preconception in the realm of perception.

An Alternative Romance: Grant and Hepburn Early in The Philadelphia Story, on meeting Mike and Liz, Dexter describes his history with Tracy by stating, “You might say Miss Lord and I grew up together.” In narrative terms, this remark alludes to the couple’s ill-fated first marriage; in relation to the extra-diegetic construct of the film, this comment references Grant’s history with Hepburn as a costar. Though Hollywood legend has virtually canonized the personal and professional relationship between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, with whom she shared a similarly organic on-screen affinity, Grant stands as Hepburn’s first screen partner. In three films preceding The Philadelphia Story—Sylvia Scarlett, Bringing Up Baby, and Holiday—Hepburn and Grant radiate a charged chemistry in which the effortless charisma of the latter balances the more spirited, often offbeat charm of the former.4 Their final collaboration in The Philadelphia Story offers the ultimate rendering of this shared energy; and though Dexter likens himself to “a kind of high priest to a virgin goddess” in his marriage to Tracy, Grant and Hepburn themselves share a kindred sensuality that belies such narrative appraisals of the characters’ physicality. Relating to each other not through hierarchical binaries (male/ female, priest/goddess) but in embodied mutuality, Grant and Hepburn call on the spectator’s own investment in an alternative romance borne of the nexus between on- and off-screen subjectivities.5 It should be noted, however, that Tracy Lord’s love story follows a far more traditional trajectory, in which humanity betokens the assumption of the role of wife and helpmate, and only the romantic relationship between man and woman can redeem the heroine from the perils of self-love. Such a model belongs to a greater narrative framework: the dominant fiction of Western

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culture, or what Kaja Silverman describes as the prevailing ideas and ideals that constitute “what passes for reality in a given society” (1996: 178). According to Silverman, the schema of the dominant fiction equates the penis with the phallus, crafts a binary opposition between masculinity and femininity, and utilizes the notion of the family as its “most central signifier” (178). With popular culture perpetuating these ideological tenets, the dominant fiction provides a system of meaning from which individuals derive their understanding of the parameters of desire and gendered behavior, as well as notions of race and class (178). In related terms, Silverman also explores Lacan’s concept of the screen, that opaque construction akin to the seminal reflection of the mirror stage in its function as a mediating force influencing how and what the subject perceives of the world (18, 134–135). Describing it as a “culturally generated image or repertoire of images,” Silverman treats the screen as “the site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society” (135). Though not specifically referencing The Philadelphia Story, Janet Thumim has commented on the often-troubling gender politics of the dominant fictions shaping a number of Hepburn’s films. Pointing to Hepburn’s ultra-independent extra-diegetic identity, Thumim notes that the star’s “persona emphasizes the unreality of the happy ending” (1986: 96; emphasis in original). Taking this reading further still, it could be argued that just as Hepburn herself defies traditional conceptions of stardom, the close-up (on) vision she evokes allows for a kind of release from the ideological tenets that both extend to and shape the narrative. In so moving away from the screen of cultural impositions, one comes closer to appreciating the depth, as it were, of the cinema screen itself—which, as Sobchack has described it, “articulates the film’s ‘fleshly’ boundaries” (1992: 210). As this embodied interaction with the movie extends to include the corporeal subjectivity of its stars, Tracy/Hepburn and Dexter/Grant evolve from signifiers of a dominant fiction to elements of— body-landscapes within—the sensuous flesh of the film itself. As cocreators of and costars in this alternative romance, Grant and Hepburn shared a collegial rapport. In a Motion Picture interview published in 1941, Grant expressed his admiration for his costar: “She’s a greatly misunderstood person. . . . The important thing is, she’s a brilliant performer. . . . That’s what really matters. That, and the fact that she had the whole Press against her and still came through . . . unaffected” (in Carroll 1941: 67). Acknowledging the “box-office poison” difficulties that stalled Hepburn’s film career, as well as

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her “misunderstood,” challenging persona, Grant’s camaraderie with the actress contrasts the often-vexed interplay between their on-screen characters. Toward the middle of The Philadelphia Story, for instance, Dexter approaches Tracy with a desire to “have [his] say” about her. Accusing her of perceiving herself as a goddess above the weak mortals surrounding her, Dexter declares, “You’ll never be a first-class human being or a first-class woman until you’ve learned to have some regard for human frailty. It’s a pity your own foot can’t slip a little sometime—but your sense of inner divinity wouldn’t allow that. ‘This goddess must and shall remain intact!’ ” Holding a mirror up to the nature of Tracy’s high-society ideality, Dexter reveals it to be a deliberate construct preventing her from becoming “a firstclass human being”; yet he also perceives an intrinsic self-divinization that rejects the notion of “human frailty” and even, as a further comment about “married maidens” suggests, the desires of the flesh.6 Indeed, where George and Mike offer a more romanticized variation on the male look theorized by Mulvey, each regarding Tracy as the feminine ideal, Dexter refuses to suspend his disbelief in her perfection. As the only realist in a world dominated by the illusion of Tracy’s infallibility, Dexter infuses The Philadelphia Story with a sense of objectivity—which Stanley Cavell highlights in his description of Dexter as a figure of authority, “a surrogate for the . . . director” (1981: 139) in his ability to guide the events of the narrative. Certainly the opening sequence of the film, depicting the last encounter between the couple as husband and wife, establishes this dynamic: As she aggressively asserts the force of her will and he subsequently pushes her off her pedestal, each has met his or her match in the other. Even more than this, the exchange introduces the complexities of Dexter’s relationship to Tracy. Not simply a casualty of her self-involvement, Dexter has proven his ability to conquer the goddess: he knows that she can, in fact, be human. And in possessing such knowledge, Dexter represents a threat to Tracy’s very identity—a power made evident in their first meeting since the divorce, a near-reprise of the choreography of their opening battle. After she walks up to him angrily, he steps forward as if to embrace her. Warily avoiding his advances, Tracy steps backward, and the two continue this dance of reflection and deflection in medium-shot until Dexter ceases his pursuit and each retreats to opposite sides of the frame. On the diegetic level, Tracy’s blatant rejection of Dexter’s proximity conveys not merely a resistance to his untimely reappearance or the possibility

46 BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS

of physical aggression, but also the fear of another revelation of weakness on her part. As Dexter later remarks to Mike, “strength is her religion.” Indeed, Dexter’s presence shakes Tracy’s narcissistic faith in her own perfection. Yet despite Tracy’s obvious resistance to Dexter, there nonetheless exists in the space between them an intense energy: Two bodies moving in tandem with harmonized precision, Grant and Hepburn’s graceful athleticism and steady eye contact bespeak an attuned physicality that counters the discord of the narrative situation. Calling on Hepburn’s corporeal expressivity, Grant’s presence in the scene—and indeed the film itself—highlights the intrinsic dynamism of her on-screen impact. A brief exchange on the night before Tracy’s wedding heightens the sensory sympathy between the on- and off-screen dimensions. For most of the film, Cukor employs a high-key lighting that complements the energetic wit of the narrative; here, however, he places Hepburn and Grant in an intimate, shared close-up that shades the stars’ faces in a chiaroscuro effect. As Tracy sits to the left of the frame, drowsy from the champagne she has just drunk, Dexter enters the shot cautiously and watches her while she sleeps (figure 2.2). Just as Hepburn and Grant engaged in a wary choreography in their first meeting after the divorce, each mirroring the other’s motions, here another process of reflection takes place as the two stars sit side by side in profile. In contrast to their earlier encounters, the mood between Tracy and Dexter is subdued and tender: He tells her that she looks beautiful and invites her in for a drink; she demurs quietly. With the merging of the lush shadows concealing the lower part of their faces and a bright light creating a kind of aureole around their heads, the image evokes an oneiric mood of suspended reality as the two lovers find each other again, for a moment. What the spectator finds in the scene, moreover, is a material sensuality expressive of the diegetic mood. Indeed, as the shot dissolves the tensions surrounding Tracy’s narcissism and Dexter’s insistence on her reformation, it allows the audience to contemplate its own role in this romantic visuality. In language that counters the subject/object dichotomy in optical visuality, as well as the notion of male/female roles within the dominant fiction, Laura U. Marks has described the fleshly rapport between viewer and film as an “erotic” relationship: It “is an elastic, dynamic movement,” calling for a “respect for otherness, and concomitant loss of self in the presence of the other” (2002: 20). Illustrating Tracy and Dexter’s own “giving-over to the other” (20), to

KATHARINE HEPBURN AND A HOLLYWOOD STORY 47

Figure 2.2. Tracy (Hepburn) and Dexter (Grant) in The Philadelphia Story (MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1940).

adopt Marks’s phrase, the image seduces the audience itself into a giving over of sensory sympathy. Where, as Britton has noted, the “strategy of recuperating Hepburn for the patriarchal couple” (1995: 184) ultimately directs the narrative, this image exalts her place in the greater, sensually resonant union of viewer and film. The final sequence of The Philadelphia Story, with its “double marriage,” as it were, between Tracy and Dexter, Hepburn and Grant, addresses both the extra- and intra-diegetic romances. Tracy—dressed in white as in the pool scene, though this time as a bride and not a goddess—tells her father that she has “never . . . been so full of love before,” and that she finally feels “like a human being.”7 Now that Tracy has forsaken her love for herself in order to love another, the narrative may end happily with an image of marital bliss—in this way replacing the myth of Narcissus with the myth of completion between man and woman. The resolution of the film, then, declares that Tracy’s humanity can truly be achieved only through ceding her hubris to Dexter’s superiority; the closing still photo of the couple’s kiss offers proof of this transition. As Tracy and Dexter meet at the altar, the editor of Spy magazine appears

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suddenly and takes a picture of the stunned wedding party. While the film’s theme plays merrily in the background, the last two images are of photographs in the tabloid itself—the first of Mike, Dexter, and Tracy’s shocked faces, followed by the turning of the page to a photo of Dexter and Tracy kissing as husband and wife. Cavell, however, finds that this shift from motion picture to still photography signals the more “ambiguous status” (1981: 160) of the finale, rendering it neither a definitive happy ending nor a harbinger of (another) marital disaster. He also notes that with the closing kiss contained within a picture instead of the moving film, the spectator becomes aware of “something at a remove from what has gone before . . . betokening uncertainty” (160) in the love match between Tracy and Dexter. Taking this reading further still, one could argue that the change in media signals an emergence from the dominant fiction depicted in The Philadelphia Story to an awareness of that fiction as such. If, as Metz has stated, orgasm represents an “amorous myth . . . of fusion” (1982 [1977]: 60), this embrace offers a subdued visual articulation of that union—but isolated from the motion of the film so that its realization may be contemplated and, moreover, questioned. The stylistic contrast resonates beyond such narrative ambiguities, however: Cavell remarks that the closing placement of the diegetic figures on the pages of a magazine suggests that rather than accept Tracy’s humanization, the audience must contend with the notion that it has “traded the goddess for a movie star” (1981: 160). Yet more than simply “betoken uncertainty” (Cavell 1981: 160) in happy endings or Tracy/Hepburn’s identity, the shift in media highlights the fundamental dualities always already in place within the film. That is, the slippage between still and motion pictures underscores the broader slippages between registers of humanity and ideality, spectator and star, and character and performer—thus transposing this dynamism to the material dimensionality of the film. Furthermore, it recalls Mulvey’s contention that the star’s ability to pose underlies the motility of classical film itself, in this way crafting a “fusion of energy with a stillness of display” (2006: 162) with each unreeling. Just as the flux between motion and stillness speaks to the shifting experiences within the film, then, that flux also parallels the versatility of Hepburn and Grant’s respective presences. Sobchack has defined still photos as material objects to “be . . . possessed, circulated, and saved” (2004: 142). In related terms, Tracy’s horror at being

KATHARINE HEPBURN AND A HOLLYWOOD STORY 49

included in the tabloid illuminates the possession and circulation of the Hollywood star image within the culture of fan magazines. In this movement between the pages of popular publications and the motion of the film itself, however, Hepburn and Grant appear less as figures to be “possessed” and “circulated” than as subjects who fluidly inhabit both visual dimensions. Tracy and Dexter may feature in Spy under duress, but their interpreters’ occupation of still and animate space speaks to a certain physical fluency that allows them to adapt between media. Suspending the unreeling of the film to frame the performers themselves, the photo of Grant and Hepburn’s last embrace highlights the spectrum of their physical affect—compelling to the viewer even in this shift from motile intimacy to iconic stillness.8 The material of the photograph itself may be possessed, but it does not constrain the materiality of the stars themselves. The interplay between the extrafilmic and filmic dimensions enabled by embodied visuality, then, offers not a “myth of fusion” (Metz 1982 [1977]: 60), but rather a realization of the possibilities of cinematic fusion. Here, the flesh of the screen and the corporeal awareness of the spectator unite in an intimacy that surpasses the division between self and other. Through Hepburn’s union with Grant, a romance born of simpatico sensuality, the constraints of the dominant fiction and its abstract screen dissolve in the dialogical interplay between on- and off-screen subjectivities.

The Philadelphia Story Continues: Woman of the Year A consideration of The Philadelphia Story as a meta-commentary on stardom almost demands an accompanying exploration of Hepburn’s next film, Woman of the Year. Part revision of The Philadelphia Story, part inauguration of a new era for the star—that is, her partnership with Spencer Tracy—the movie and Hepburn’s performance as international celebrity Tess Harding allow for a continuation of the close-up vision on feminine ideality and the image of the star. Indeed, Britton describes The Philadelphia Story as “the first Hepburn/Tracy film” (1995: 183), noting that in both works the respective male leads assume the responsibility of humanizing or (as in Woman of the Year) domesticating the headstrong Hepburn heroines. Yet where The Philadelphia Story offers a more lighthearted account of this project, Woman of the Year presents a case

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of extremes: Tess is an adamantly independent, essentially arrogant journalist, and Sam Craig (Tracy) is the grounded sports writer who falls in love with her—only to find that Tess’s narcissistic involvement with her public image makes any chance of personal happiness through marriage virtually impossible. By the end of the movie, however, the couple agrees to seek a balanced union in which Tess Harding adopts the identity of Tess Harding-Craig—just as the actress herself, in fact, would take on the mantle of the Spencer TracyKatharine Hepburn pairing. From the beginning of Woman of the Year, Tess’s persona appears perhaps even more challenging than Tracy Lord’s, or even “Hard-to-Get-Along-With” Hepburn’s. In an opening montage of headlines, the spectator learns of Tess’s international importance as she advises heads of state on the verge of American involvement in World War II; and in a radio interview, Tess demonstrates an impressive knowledge of history but alienates listeners with her contempt for baseball (“a frightful waste of energy”). In a later, telling exchange with Sam, Tess reveals her modus operandi: “I feel very good about [being me]. Always have. I like knowing more about what goes on than most people . . . and telling them.” Maintaining a distance from the less-refined elements of society, Tess is as aloof from “most people” as the portrait of herself that hangs in her home—an association that recalls The Philadelphia Story’s own engagement with the figure of the unapproachable goddess and her flesh-and-blood reality. The portrait is introduced early in Sam and Tess’s romance. As the couple walks into her apartment, the larger-than-life image hangs on the wall, brightly illuminated while Sam and Tess remain in the shadows. After a cut from a close-up of the lovers kissing in dusky silhouette, there follows a long-shot that frames Sam as he gazes up at the portrait looming above him. Tess disappears around a corner, only to return immediately in a medium-shot—one that captures her knowing smile as she looks at Sam, up at the portrait, and then at Sam again. Once back to the long-shot, Tess asks Sam, “Like it?,” to which he replies, “Beautiful. . . . A little too high to reach.” Following a final cut to a medium-shot in silhouette, Tess remarks, “I’m not,” and embraces Sam. Even as Tess declares her approachability, the design of the sequence itself plays on the otherworldliness of her painted reflection, recalling the suspension of the pool sequence in The Philadelphia Story. Pacing itself in a kind of embrace-and-release pattern in the “elastic, dynamic” (2002: 20) rhythm

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described by Marks, the scene creates a dreamlike scenario of romance. Like Sam, the spectator finds himself or herself alternately seduced by the intimacy of close shots in silhouette and impressed by the expanse of the long-shots that highlight the magnificence of Tess’s framed image. Reminiscent of the car scene between Tracy/Hepburn and Dexter/Grant, this scene inspires a closeness between on-screen couple and off-screen spectator, crafting a milieu of lush shadows interspersed with a subdued, almost pearly illumination. Holding each other in silhouette, Tess/Hepburn and Sam/Tracy—with fragments of light fleetingly caressing their faces—appear not in opposition (male or female, ideal or real) but intertwined, dissolving the distinction between self and other in a union thereof. It is a body-landscape effect repeated in the film, as the planes of the stars’ faces—Tracy’s gently curving forehead and nose and Hepburn’s sharply defined nose and mouth—meet in a continuum of facial features that coheres their respective extremes. With such attention to the stars’ organic affinity, then, the shot of Tess watching Sam gaze at her portrait seems abrupt and intrusive, suggesting that she not only revels in herself as a construction (“Like it?”), but also seeks to control his relationship to that image. Indeed, Tess positions herself between the space of Sam’s arms and the portrait on the wall, moving from painted reflection to flesh-and-blood reality as she woos her lover into perceiving her as a model of femininity. Yet just as Tracy Lord’s contemplation of the reflecting pool, and even the use of still tabloid photos, evoked the spectator’s closer consideration of their own visual pleasure in relation to the star, Tess’s pride in and awareness of herself as object continues this dialogue between the onand off-screen worlds. Certainly Tess’s narcissism is more overt and less fanciful than Tracy’s: as the film goes on, the former adopts a child to publicly prove her commitment to the war effort, only to neglect him; at times, she speaks to Sam with outright contempt—and eventually the audience must struggle to find a sympathetic quality in the character.9 But the sheer obviousness of Tess’s narcissism allows Hepburn to craft still another kind of performance within a performance in her interpretation of the role. It could be argued, in fact, that Hepburn plays on the notion of her own difficult persona, the greater context of her perceived willfulness and headstrong independence. From this perspective, the actress here directs diegetic self-absorption outward, into a meta-commentary on the fragility of the star image: Hepburn enacts, that is, the instability of the goddess who, to paraphrase Dexter, cannot stay intact—

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and redeems the character from antiheroine status through her ability, as the fan letter remarked, to engage with the “hearts and heads” of her viewers. Like The Philadelphia Story, Woman of the Year ends with happiness “at a remove,” to borrow Cavell’s terms (1981: 160). Desperate to win Sam back after he leaves her, Tess cooks breakfast for him in a disastrous attempt to prove her domesticity. The audience watches as Tess, frantically making her way around the kitchen, devolves from a supremely confident woman of the world into a figure as addled and malfunctioning as the culinary machinery that foils her. Though clearly intended to amuse the audience both with Tess’s newfound weakness and Hepburn’s physical comedy, the long duration of the sequence exhausts the spectator so that the final embrace seems a mere conciliatory afterthought. Admittedly, Sam declares that he does not expect Tess to go from the spotlight to complete obscurity in a domestic dungeon—but only after she has been effectively subjugated through Hepburn’s tour de force performance of female failure. Ultimately, then, the lingering embrace, the marriage that resists the vexed questions of the dominant fiction is—as in The Philadelphia Story—the sensory romance between stars and spectator. More than a decade after both The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year, Hepburn would once again explore the sensual sympathy between star and viewer—as well as her own ability to “make people believe anything” (to recall Hoyningen-Huené’s words) with her dynamic face—in her role in The Rainmaker (Joseph Anthony, 1956). Starring with Burt Lancaster in a drama about a lonely spinster who finds hope in the love of a charismatic drifter, Hepburn—playing neither the spirited WASP of screwball comedy nor the assured partner to Spencer Tracy—explores the despair of an aging woman who fears that she is plain. In a climactic scene, Hepburn breaks down before Lancaster, who insists that she is pretty, if only she herself will believe it. Held in a medium over-the-shoulder shot, Hepburn puts her head down and haltingly declares, “I’m pretty,” until, gradually increasing in confidence, she lifts a glowing face to Lancaster and the camera. The facial features of a more mature Hepburn remain the same from instant to instant in the shot, yet her animating energy effects their transformation from resignation to radiance. More than a moment of high drama within the narrative, the shot exalts the versatility of Hepburn’s own features—and her ability to direct the impact of her own appeal. Indeed, Hepburn’s enduring, unsettling vitality proves true Tracy Lord’s declaration that “the time to make up your mind about people is never.” Certainly

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the line attests to the evolution of Tracy’s character, moving from a “virgin goddess” wholly invested in her own perfection to a “first-class woman” accepting of human foibles. In the running dialogue between spectator, film, and star, however, the line may also refer to Tracy and Tess’s interpreter and her own capacity for change. Moving forward in film rather than retreating like Garbo, starring in films long after the studio era (though without the camp sensibility that would shade fellow journeymen including Crawford and Bette Davis), and enduring as an haute Hollywood icon without the element of poignancy surrounding Hayworth or Monroe, Hepburn defied the audience’s ability to “make up its mind” about the nature of the female star. Even more than alternately resisting and complicating expectations, she encourages the viewer to explore the possibilities of the on-screen form: investing in shifting body-landscapes whose complexities reveal alternatives to conventions of the woman-as-star and as romantic partner, and engaging with meta-commentaries that contemplate visual pleasure and classic Hollywood stardom itself.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

It is worthwhile to recall Andrew Britton’s clarification on the point of gender ambiguity in stars like Dietrich, Garbo, and Hepburn: “This is not to say . . . that the star-as-person was gay or bisexual, but that certain dominant traits of the persona are strikingly out of true with dominant social norms of ‘femininity’ ” (1995: 85; emphasis in original). Though Stanley Cavell does not specifically refer to this image in his study of The Philadelphia Story, he notes that other scenes by the pool (with Tracy/Hepburn diving into the water, for example) allow the spectator to “study . . . Katharine Hepburn’s body” (1981: 140) as the physical expression of Tracy’s diegetic identities as both goddess and flesh-and-blood woman. Throughout her career, the question of class underlay Hepburn’s persona and performances: Britton has noted, for example, that Hepburn “embod[ies] at once ‘aristocracy’ and a vivid . . . female assertiveness and intransigence” (1995: 70). In his study Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire, Britton even remarks on the shared element of bisexuality in the stars’ respective personas (1983: 11–12)—a nuance of their rapport not as evident in the straightforward heterosexual romance of Cukor’s film, however. This mutual engagement recalls John Orr’s description of the “instinctive fluency” of physicality between Grace Kelly and Grant in Hitchcock’s 1955 To Catch a Thief, their exchanges bespeaking the “effortless intimacy of equals” (2005: 125–126).

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6.

7.

8. 9.

For an analysis of the “humanization” of Katharine Hepburn’s persona in her career from 1945 to 1960, see Janet Thumim, “ ‘Miss Hepburn Is Humanized’: The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn.” In this essay, Thumim examines the publicity material that surrounded Hepburn at the middle-stage of her professional life (1986). Naomi Scheman has compared Tracy’s character with that of her mother, Margaret Lord (Mary Nash), a woman whose “unconditional love . . . of her philandering husband . . . can be taken . . . as a model of how Tracy is supposed to learn to feel” (1988: 73). It was quite literally their last embrace: The Philadelphia Story was the stars’ final collaboration. Molly Haskell has described the ways in which Hepburn “transcend[s]” Tess’s unsympathetic nature, citing the former’s “strength of character and integrity [as well as] the soft and sensual radiance with which . . . George Stevens illuminated her” (1987: 6). Undoubtedly Stevens, like Cukor before him, brings out Hepburn’s prettiness with diffused lighting that softens her angular features, but this serves more to enhance the romance of Hepburn’s relationship to the body of the film itself than to reveal her moral core.

CHAPTER 3

Vanishing Differences in Mildred Pierce (1945) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945) In his biography of Hepburn, William J. Mann remarks that her independent, spirited persona matched perfectly the patriotic vitality of World War II–era Hollywood. With Woman of the Year released just after the United States entered the war, Tess/Hepburn stood for what Mann calls the “can-do nature” of the women left behind on the home front. Indeed, as Mann relates, Hepburn even narrated the short 1941 documentary Women in Defense, produced by the Office of Emergency Management to encourage women’s participation in the war effort (2006: 304). To take the point further, it could be argued that Tess’s narrative spoke to a new, wartime ideal of femininity: the liberated woman who proves she can stand alone, but only before she returns to the security of her husband and home. In the postwar years so intrinsically linked to film noir, however, movies such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944), Love Letters (William Dieterle, 1945), and The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946) may have led audiences to question anew the dominant fiction into which Tracy and Tess were reinstated. Diverging from the (conditional) happy endings of The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year, but evoking an anxiety similar to that one haunting Anna Christie, the postwar noir cycle and its (anti)-hero(ines) redirected the fervor of patriotism into a pervasive dissatisfaction with the everyday, characterized by struggles with domestic deterioration (or what Sylvia Harvey has termed “the absent family” [1998: 35]), moral apathy, and sexual obsession. As if revealing a dystopic, secret life within the American experience—the corruption underlying a united homefront, the discontent faced by both men and women as they attempted to return to their former, conventional roles—film noir itself subverted the tenets of a more classical style. As Borde and Chaumeton wrote in their seminal study, these films resisted “a logic to the action, a clear distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters [and] clear motives” (2002 [1955]: 12). The unreeling of film noir, then, doubled for a broader existential unraveling.

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In 1945, an emblematic film of the era was released: Mildred Pierce, featuring Joan Crawford in the title role. In its opening sequence, an unknown figure—later identified as Mildred herself, but finally revealed to be her daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth)—shoots and kills Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). At the conclusion of the scene, the camera focuses on a mirror hanging on the wall of the room where the murder took place, its surface marred by two bullet holes. Presaging the questions of skewed identities and (mis)conceptions of ideality that will come to define the film, the image works as a thematic establishing shot. Viewed in this way, the fact of the two bullet holes becomes all the more ominous. The fracturing of the reflection is caused not by a singular damaging entity, but by two such forces working in tandem. It is destruction wrought by doubles. Caught between the genres of maternal melodrama and film noir—as well as that overarching category of “women’s pictures”—the film itself bears a kind of fragmented, dual identity.1 Based on the 1941 novel by James M. Cain, the film tells the story of Mildred, a divorced mother who, in order to give her two daughters, Veda and Kay, the best in life, becomes a successful businesswoman who owns a chain of restaurants. After Kay’s death, Mildred is driven by a consuming desire to win the love of her selfish elder daughter, and marries wealthy Monte—only to have the marriage end in betrayal when Mildred discovers that he and Veda have been having an affair. Finally rejected by Monte, Veda kills him in a moment of jealous rage. The film opens with the murder (referenced above) and the events that led to this end are reconstructed through Mildred’s flashbacks in her statement to the police. When her attempts to protect Veda fail, Mildred ultimately returns to her role as wife as she walks off into the sunrise with her first husband. For all its fluctuation between the worlds of melodrama and noir, Mildred Pierce does not stand alone in this generic limbo. Released in the same year, John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (based on Ben Ames Williams’s 1944 novel) also negotiates a place for itself between domestic melodrama and the more sinister noir milieu. Ellen Berent Harland, played by Gene Tierney, devastates the lives of those around her with a jealous love that turns into madness: She kills her brother-in-law in order to “protect” her marriage, and later deliberately induces a miscarriage so that she will not have to share the

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devotion of her husband, Richard (Cornel Wilde). At the end of the film, believing her husband to be in love with her cousin, Ruth (Jeanne Crain), Ellen kills herself and frames Ruth so that she will be blamed for the death. In the last scene, however, Ellen’s fears are realized as Ruth and Richard embrace and reclaim their lives together. Leave Her to Heaven is, admittedly, an unlikely double for Mildred Pierce: the former is a Technicolor rendering of one woman’s obsession with her husband with more obscure actress Gene Tierney in the lead; the latter a chiaroscuro-laden depiction of a mother’s all-consuming love starring the iconic Joan Crawford. Transcending such contrasts, however, is the essential narcissism driving the (anti)heroines to impose their respective conceptions of the ideal onto the real: Ellen seeks to fulfill her pathological need to receive all of her husband’s love, and Mildred is determined to give her ruthless daughter the life that she herself never had. Moreover, they share relationships with doubles in an interplay as fatal as the two bullet holes in the shattered mirror. Indeed, both films link the downfall of the lead characters to their engagement with a counterpart who, whether as an amoral daughter or a winningly wholesome young woman, inspires the mimetic rivalry theorized by René Girard—a dynamic of desire predicated on a model and disciple’s struggle for a coveted object. Even as it speaks to the broader issue of a double life in postwar noir culture, this diegetic blurring of the distinctions between self and other, familiar and uncanny, further translates into a material shift within the balance of star presences. Certainly Garbo encountered the threatening double in The Temptress and Anna Christie; even the blithe Tracy and Tess reflected (on) elements of Hepburn’s own persona. Yet in Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven, the question of the double refracts further to take an utterly exteriorized, corporeal form: that is, the costar. As the distinction between star (model) and costar (disciple) collapses through the stylistic depiction of the interaction between Crawford and Blyth, Tierney and Crain, the issue of usurpation that haunts the narrative finds embodiment in the conflicting forms of the actresses themselves. With performances that explore not only the deterioration of the American dream, but also the vicissitudes of Hollywood’s dream factory itself, Crawford and Tierney’s experience of stardom here captures the volatility of their unsettled era.

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The Mirror Crack’d: Classic Hollywood and the Double In film theory itself, the double has long played a role—from the ideality of the Lacanian moi in the mirror stage and Metz’s invocation of the double/moi figure in a description of the audience’s relationship to the movie star (1982 [1977]: 67), to Morin’s linking of an age-old fascination with the double to an aesthetic appreciation of the image itself. As he writes, “[O]ne of the moving qualities of the photo is connected to a latent quality of the double” (2005a [1956]: 32). Moving from psychoanalytic discourse, Marks’s conceptualization of haptic visuality includes a mimetic dynamic between film and spectator (2000: 138), as the latter “presses up to the object and takes its shape. Mimesis is a form of representation based on getting close enough to the other thing to become it” (2002: xiii). In related terms, Beugnet has commented on the “ambiguity at the heart of corporeal cinema, between the pleasures of sensuous communion and the terror of self-integrity decomposing” (2007: 68). Indeed, in considering both Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven, the questions of overidentification and appropriation that haunt their extra- and intra-diegetic registers also highlight the more sinister aspects of a permeable cinematic subjectivity—even as they recall Girard’s conceptualization of “vanishing differences” between double-rivals (2003 [1978]: 299). Girard sets forth the paradigm of a model-disciple relationship in which a subject, or disciple, longs for an object purely because it is already desired or possessed by another, model figure (2003 [1978]: 413). Yet in the striving for this coveted object, the distinction between the two collapses: “If the model himself becomes more interested in the object that he designates to his imitator as a result of the latter’s imitations, then he himself falls victim to his contagion. In fact, he imitates his own desire, through the intermediary of the disciple. The disciple thus becomes model to his own model, and the model, reciprocally, becomes the disciple of his own disciple. In the last resort, there are no genuine differences left between the two . . . or . . . their desires” (299). With a focus on the threatening aspects of the mimetic process, Girard here recalls the ambivalence of the rapport between the Lacanian je and moi; yet his examination of dissolving parameters of identity bears a closer affinity with the expressly uncanny elements of the double as described by Freud. Extending Freud’s conception of a psychic realm in which the ego and its double con-

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front each other as separate entities, Girard presents a world in which the two are inextricably linked in nightmarish chaos. Noir itself explored double identities, as both Lucy Fischer (1983) and Janey Place (1998) have noted: the former discussing the theme of a split female subjectivity in films like Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1946) and A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946), and the latter commenting on the distinction between the “nurturing woman” and the femme fatale, seen notably in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) and Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) (Place 1998: 60–63). And in terms of Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven, of course, the matter of “vanishing differences” (2003 [1978]: 299) represents a danger to the narcissistic investments Mildred and Ellen maintain in their respective idealities. Though contrasting in their approach to the doubles with whom they engage—Mildred driven to make Veda a perfect version of herself, Ellen obsessed with Ruth as a rival for her husband’s love—both women experience a deterioration of the self as their preoccupations with the mimetic counterparts intensify. Even beyond the diegetic and/or theoretical, however, the double played a role in the construction of the star system itself, as fan publications—and Crawford and Tierney’s own careers—attest. In the November 1939 issue of Photoplay, Barbara Hayes chronicled several famous Hollywood rivalries of the day, including those between Joan Bennett and Hedy Lamarr, Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, and Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer. Though at the beginning of the article Hayes offers a conciliatory remark about the lack of “good old knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out fights such as Gloria Swanson and Pola Negri used to indulge in” (18), she closes on a more reflective note: “For the Hollywood girls know how to fight for their place in the camera. . . . And, considering all they have at stake, they’d be stupid if they acted otherwise. Survival of the fittest is the first law of Hollywood human nature. . . . Almost anyone can go along sedately . . . but it takes girls with dash and fire and wilyness [sic] to meet competition at fifty paces—and knock it dead” (91). In other words, these actresses understand that a rivalry with an equally ambitious counterpart is implicit in the struggle for the object of stardom—and that, for career survival, the natural law of Hollywood demands that the double be conquered absolutely. Indeed, as Hayes’s article suggests, the concept of the double provides a particularly appropriate framework for discussing Crawford herself. In a

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1941 interview with Motion Picture magazine, for example, Crawford waxed bitter about “The Women I Hate” in a columns-long soliloquy on how she “mistrust[s] a woman who doesn’t like women. A woman who doesn’t like women is a dishonest woman. She doesn’t like her own sex because she cheats her own sex. . . . I like only honest women. I hate dishonest women” (in Hall 1941: 76; emphasis in original). In writing of the star’s early career, columnist Adela Rogers St. John cites flapper Clara Bow as Crawford’s “then greatest rival” (1937: 69; emphasis added). By the late 1920s, though, Crawford struggled over dramatic roles with fellow MGM leading lady Shearer, a top star and the wife of production chief Thalberg. (Ironically, one of Crawford’s first appearances on screen was, in fact, as Shearer’s double in Monta Bell’s 1925 film Lady of the Night [Chandler 2008: 38.]) The feud between the stars would reach its height in the making of Cukor’s 1939 film The Women, during which “they skirmished about clothes, lines, positions and everything else” (Hayes 1939: 91). Among the most famous of golden-age rivalries, however, was Crawford’s feud with Bette Davis, their mutual resentment enduring for decades as they attacked each other’s talent, looks, and lifestyle. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), with its recounting of a grotesque jealousy between two sisters and former stars, captured on screen the enmity between the women. Fans would even remark on Crawford’s single-minded approach to her career. Following the box-office poison upset of 1938, for example, one fan wrote in Photoplay, “The reason for Joan’s flop at the box-office can be traced directly to her ambition to be the one and only film star in pictures” (“Boos and Bouquets”: 75). Certainly Crawford’s legendary ambition—or what Richard Dyer describes as the “total slogging away at all aspects of her image” (1986: 7)—led her to explore myriad personas, keeping up with the changing mores of Hollywood: First gaining fame in the 1920s as a pleasure-seeking flapper in films like Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928), the 1930s found Crawford modeling herself as a glamorous working girl in movies like Grand Hotel, Mannequin (Frank Borzage, 1937) and The Women. But by 1945 the actress had hit a career low-point. After being released from her MGM contract, Crawford fell into obscurity for several years and had to campaign mightily for the role of Mildred, even offering to appear in a screen test to prove her ability (Chandler 2008: 167). According to historian Thomas Schatz, Warner Bros. leading actresses Davis, Rosalind Russell, and Barbara Stanwyck—and even

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comparatively minor stars like Ida Lupino—were all favored for the part over Crawford (1988: 417). Yet following the success of Mildred Pierce (for which she received an Academy Award, winning over Tierney, who was nominated for Leave Her to Heaven), Crawford cultivated the image of a severe leading lady in films like Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947), and Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952). The last years of Crawford’s career (with the exception of Baby Jane) were marred by low-budget horror films that lent a camp sensibility to her persona. Contrasting Crawford’s ubiquity in popular culture, Tierney stands as a near-enigma of classical cinema. In a kind of poetic variation on the osmosis between role and star, Tierney herself now stands as a figure as removed from both the popular and critical material on golden-age Hollywood as the haunting portrait of Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) with which she is so identified (see figure 3.1). Tierney herself acknowledged the dominance of her framed double in the title of her 1979 autobiography, Self-Portrait, in which she reveals that the evocative image was, in fact, a photograph that had been enlarged and brushed with paint (132, 134). Truly, the ambiguity of Tierney’s portrait—neither wholly

Figure 3.1. Laura Hunt (Tierney) with Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) in Laura (Twentieth Century Fox, 1944).

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a photograph nor a painting—parallels the complexity of her greater cinematic appeal. A unique beauty with feline angles to her eyes and cheekbones, and a slight overbite offsetting the symmetry of her features, Tierney bears an exotic quality that tempers her patrician elegance. As Richard remarks to Ellen in Leave Her to Heaven, “I can’t say you look like anyone I’ve ever met before.” This sentiment was presaged by the publicity build-up surrounding Tierney’s arrival in Hollywood. In a Motion Picture profile from 1940, Tierney’s society background is alternately played up and undermined in an acknowledgement of her uniqueness: “Frankly, Gene’s a bit of an anomaly—a debutante in overalls, so to speak” (in French 1940: 28); and, “[S]he just won’t fit into a rut. Everything she does seems to have an original twist to it” (62). The following year, Life would address the issue more directly: “When Gene signed up with 20th-Century Fox . . . nobody quite knew what to do with” her (“Gene E. Tierney”: 63). Accordingly, and throughout her career, Tierney was cast in a variety of roles—from what the Life profile unfortunately terms “half-breed” (63) women in Sundown (Henry Hathaway, 1941) and The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941) to socialites in Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943) and The Razor’s Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946); and finally romantic heroines in Laura, Dragonwyck (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946), and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). There is, then, a certain irony to the fact that a frame surrounds the enduring image of Tierney, a star whose polymorphic cinematic presence spoke to the very dissolution of boundaries. For even more than exceeding generic categorizations or, like Hepburn, conventions of the ideal feminine, Tierney’s unsettling beauty—simultaneously classic and exotic—introduced a destabilization between the natural and supernatural realms. Indeed, the thrall of the fantastic underlies a number of Tierney’s films: from the Gothic sensibilities of Dragonwyck to the supernatural romance of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the resurrection of Laura, and Whirlpool’s (Preminger, 1949) concern with hypnosis and mind control. Where Crawford’s engagement with the double centered on a preoccupation with rival stars, even in the abstract—as she once remarked, “People expect to see Joan Crawford, not the girl next door. If they want to see the girl next door, let them go next door” (in Chandler 2008: xii)— Tierney’s affinity with the uncanny lay within her very corporeality. Underlying the dialogue of embodied visuality between on- and off-screen worlds, then, is Tierney’s own doubling effect between the natural and fantastic.

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Considering their own conflicted experiences of stardom, defined in large part by a double/rival, both Crawford and Tierney were uniquely poised to occupy the noir worlds of Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven. If, as Borde and Chaumeton wrote, film noir is itself characterized by “moral ambivalence . . . [and the] contradictory complexity of the [diegetic] situations and motives”—leading, in this way, to “the disappearance of [the spectator’s] psychological bearings” (2002 [1955]: 13; emphasis in original)—then the casting of these stars resonates further to form an uneasy alliance between extra- and intra-diegetic questions of doubling and the dissolution of boundaries. As each gives form to a woman obsessed with an other, both Crawford and Tierney engage in a volatile cinematic dialogue with their costars—demonstrating that the double is not merely a theoretical construct, but also a material threat.

“You’re Very Much Like Your Mother” After the opening sequence depicting Monte’s murder, Mildred Pierce dissolves to present the heroine herself as she walks on a pier in the misty night, dressed in the accoutrements of 1940s elegance—fur coat with broad shoulder pads, hat, and high heels. Yet Mildred’s glamour cannot conceal the devastated expression on her face, which the camera captures in close-up as she looks over the railing of the pier into the churning ocean (see figure 3.2). With Max Steiner’s score reaching a crescendo on the soundtrack, Mildred considers suicide in a moment of anguish that allows the audience, in turn, to consider Crawford herself. As diegetic heroine, Mildred here looks self-sacrificing and almost beatific; as star, Crawford appears as the most refined version of herself, her severe visage purged of its harsh angles through an aureole of studio backlighting. The duration of the close-up, moreover, allows Crawford to display what would become a signature technique in later films like Humoresque and The Damned Don’t Cry (Vincent Sherman, 1950)—that is, the shifting from unutterable melancholy to grim determination in literally the blink of an eye. Far from a flapper or tough working girl, the Joan Crawford incarnated in Mildred Pierce is an affectedly noble woman of the world. Joyce Nelson describes these first shots of Mildred as a function of the “false suture” effect of the film itself, appearing as they do immediately after

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Figure 3.2. Mildred (Crawford) in Mildred Pierce (Warner Bros., 1945).

the opening images of Monte’s death and in this way implicating her as the murderer (1985: 451).2 Yet even as they effectively confuse the narrative sequence of events, the shots of Mildred/Crawford also offer a false promise of Crawford’s depiction in the remainder of the film. Placing the actress in a realm of glorious solitude and focusing on her as a figure of singular dramatic and visual impact, the close-up seems to introduce a monological showcase for Crawford-as-star in the remainder of the movie. What ensues, however, is a film that offsets this apex of Crawford’s star presence through the deliberate construction of starlet Ann Blyth—who had, to that point, only appeared in B-musicals like Babes on Swing Street (Edward C. Lilley, 1944) and Bowery to Broadway (Charles Lamont, 1944)—as an equally affecting double for the actress. From the beginning of the film, Mildred’s perception of her daughter as a revered model-figure is clear: Veda is the child who would succeed where Mildred failed, and through whom she too could gain access to a more privileged, cultured existence. In so worshipping her daughter, Mildred epitomizes the account of parental narcissism offered by Freud: “The child shall fulfill those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out” (Freud 2001 [1914], vol. 14: 91). In so projecting their dreams of infallibility onto the child, the parents may suspend the recognition that they themselves are vulnerable

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to “the laws of nature and of society” (91). An early exchange between Mildred and her husband makes this process evident: Bert: Veda has to have a piano and lessons and fancy dresses . . . and Kay . . . she’s going to become a ballet dancer so you can feel proud of yourself. Mildred: All right, what of it? What if I do want them to amount to something? I’d do anything for those kids, do you understand? Anything. This dual dynamic of selflessness and selfishness reveals itself early in the film when Mildred enters Veda’s bedroom and assures her that she will do all that she can to provide for the family now that Bert has left. Framing an intimate mother-daughter tableau, the camera pans closer as Mildred holds her daughter close and promises to “get you . . . anything you want.” As Pamela Robertson points out, however, the ominous implications of this exchange become apparent at the close of the sequence when Veda, framed in a close-up, looks after her mother as she leaves the room and smiles knowingly (1990: 46). (Significantly, Veda’s first appearance in the film also highlights her lingering gaze, as the camera holds on her looking after Mildred as she is led away by the police for questioning after the discovery of Monte’s murder.) Robertson describes such moments as indicative of the tenuous nature of Mildred’s authorial presence through voice-over (1990: 46), and goes on to liken Veda to the femme fatale archetype, comparing Mildred’s own feelings to those of a blindly devoted lover in true noir fashion (49). Indeed, Veda’s commanding, unsettling gaze places her in that tradition of noir femininity, revealing a particular affinity with Double Indemnity’s Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and her lingering look after fall-guy Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) has convinced her husband to sign the insurance papers that will lead to his murder. Undoing the sense of intimacy seen in the immediately preceding two-shots, the women’s respective moments of solitary contemplation foreshadow the eventual destruction of their unknowing companions. Yet through the subtle unraveling of this diegetic closeness, a kind of complicity between spectator and character develops. Made aware of Veda’s true nature, the audience does not share Mildred’s ignorance and, instead, finds itself aligned with a far more sinister point of identification: Veda herself. No longer relat-

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ing to Crawford as the striking, autonomous figure seen in her first close-up, the spectator instead literally senses the precariousness of her star presence in the closing shot of this sequence: While Blyth’s face fills the foreground, Crawford exits the shot and reappears only briefly in the background—as a mere shadow flitting across the wall. Where this encounter between the women favors extended two-shots in order to capture their ostensible intimacy, their subsequent exchange—a bitter dialogue about Mildred’s waitressing job, which Veda believes “degrades” the family—utilizes a rapid shot/reverse-shot pattern highlighting the increasing tension in their relationship. Much in the same way that the close-up of Tracy/ Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story contributed to a deliberate construction of stardom, Crawford’s initial close-up in this series belies her character’s decidedly unglamorous plight: the lighting is diffused, softening the harsh, almost masculine set of Crawford’s features. Yet where the design of the earlier film meditated on Tracy/Hepburn as a star presence, the appearance of Veda/Blyth in the subsequent shot undercuts the solitary glory of Mildred/Crawford’s close-up—a shift that emphasizes Blyth’s strong resemblance to Crawford. Rather than signal unqualified stardom, then, the close-up in this shot/reverseshot exchange serves as a means of framing Blyth in her bourgeoning strength as a star presence rivaling Crawford’s own. Making literal Girard’s assertion, “[i]n rivalry, everyone occupies all the positions, one after another and then simultaneously” (2003 [1978]: 299), this sequence reveals the space of the close-up itself to be an uncertain dimension open to appropriation. Indeed, later in the film, after the revelation that Veda has faked a pregnancy in order to gain a financial settlement from her wealthy suitor, the two women stand face to face in a medium shot that all but insists on the spectator’s acknowledgement of their resemblance—the sameness that, like the bullet holes in the mirror, becomes a harbinger of danger and instability (see figure 3.3).3 Pam Cook has noted that the resemblance between Mildred/Crawford and Veda/Blyth makes evident Veda’s position as a narcissistic object choice for Mildred (1998: 80n12). Here, however, the women (both dressed in severe black suits, with their dark hair pulled back from their faces) appear not as refined reflections but as opposing doubles in a warped mirror, confronting each other as threatening counterparts to their respective selves. In this brief shot/reverse-shot pattern—one that manifests Naomi Scheman’s contention that the women cannot “take their eyes off each other”

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Figure 3.3. Veda (Blyth) and Mildred (Crawford) in Mildred Pierce (Warner Bros., 1945).

(1988: 87)—Mildred and Veda are both trapped within a relay of contemptuous and disappointed gazes; the back of each of their heads alternately appearing as an eerie trace of darkness within their respective close-ups. Expanding on her notion of false suture, Nelson remarks that such reflection-imagery substantiates the act of “metonymical substitution of Mildred for Veda” that began with the shot of Mildred that followed Monte’s murder (1985: 455). This scene, however, also calls attention to the process of substitution of Blyth for Crawford—or, more precisely, the steady usurpation of the model-star as the disciple-costar is crafted in Crawford’s image. Even as Crawford’s star presence within the body of the film becomes all the more malleable and unstable, the figure of Blyth compensates for that diminishing in an uncanny balancing act. Rather than construct a formidable, otherworldly star presence, the shot plan of this scene offers the spectator an immersion into the corruption of ideality. The penultimate sequence of the film, in which Mildred discovers that Veda has murdered Monte (in an action that, as Albert J. LaValley comments, allows Veda to “act . . . out her mother’s revenge and assume . . . her guilt” (1980:

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12), emphasizes this sense of interchange. Facing her mother in a final shot/ reverse-shot series, Veda/Blyth seems an almost self-conscious construction of feminine desirability: With a flower in her hair, in an evening dress, and with firelight eerily illuminating the frame of her close-up, here Veda—like Blyth herself—is a young woman brilliantly playing the part of a femme fatale. Now a fully realized double for Mildred/Crawford, Blyth radiantly projects much of the star presence that one would have associated with Crawford—whose own close-up is cloaked in shadows. In a last, desperate effort to preserve the sanctity of the narcissistic reflection that she has long nurtured and desired, Mildred once again cedes to the power of the double and attempts to take the blame for her daughter’s actions. In the moments before the police finally imprison Veda, however, Mildred shares a last two-shot with her daughter. Staring at her grieving mother impassively, Veda declares, “Don’t worry about me, mother. I’ll get by.” In the pause between these two sentences, there is a cut from the two-shot to a medium shot of Veda turning from Mildred and walking away. In an instance of disquieting continuity, Veda’s utterance of the phrase “I’ll get by” clearly emits not from the image track (Blyth’s mouth does not move) but from the overdubbing of the soundtrack. With its disembodied suspension and ominous promise, Veda’s articulation presents the aural counterpart to her lingering look in that first key scene between her and Mildred. In this final affirmation of Veda/ Blyth’s role as an uncanny point of identification, she becomes the enunciator, leaving no question as to the dominance of her will in this appropriation of the voice-over—Mildred/Crawford’s last semblance of singularity.

Intertwining Identities in Leave Her to Heaven Like Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven rejects traditional generic boundaries and finds a place within both melodrama and film noir; equally significant, however, is its expressionist Technicolor palette. In his discussion of the film, Marshall Deutelbaum describes the use of color as “entirely naturalistic, avoiding any unusual tonalities which might call attention to themselves” (2006: 164). Though certainly avoiding any blatantly fantastic visuals, the film’s intensity of color nevertheless calls into question the appropriateness of the term “naturalistic.” Where dusky grays and inky shadows give visual resonance to

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the corrupt melodrama of Mildred Pierce, cloaking the flesh of Mildred/Crawford and Veda/Blyth in the somber chiaroscuro skin traditionally associated with noir, Leave Her to Heaven saturates the screen with a palette of reds, greens, and blues, whether in the expanse of naturally lit exterior shots or the intimacy of studio interiors.4 The Motion Picture profile cited earlier observed that Tierney’s “beauty and coloring are right up the Technicolor alley” (29); and indeed, the chromatic vibrancy of Tierney herself—with the tones of her chestnut hair, bright blue eyes, and red lips—contributes to the film’s sensorial dimensionality. To borrow from Beugnet’s description of the intimacy between film and viewer, however, there is “something both appealing and potentially threatening” (2007: 68) in Tierney’s presence, as she forms a body-landscape stunning in its natural beauty and sinister in its diegetic significance. Where Tierney’s photogénie provides a nexus point between unsettling beauty and excessive desires, the conventional prettiness of costar Jeanne Crain presents a screen presence as unassuming as the character of Ruth herself. In leading roles in films like State Fair (Walter Lang, 1945) and A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949), and dramatic turns in Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), Crain consistently cultivated this wholesome appeal; yet with the passage of time, Crain and her pleasant but innocuous persona have become somewhat incidental in the scheme of classic Hollywood cinema. These women, then, share a relationship as opposing forces on the continuum between not only master and disciple, but also heimlich and unheimlich, with Crain representing the familiar, unthreatening counterpart to Tierney’s uncanny magnetism. Certainly the film’s stylistic treatment of the actresses— isolating villainess Ellen/Tierney in restrictive close-ups, while placing the innocent Ruth/Crain in medium- and long-shots—highlights this sense of the disparate, and seems to make manifest the traditional understanding of the melodramatic world as one founded on what Peter Brooks describes as “an irreducible manichaeism” (1995 [1976]: 36). Yet underlying the melodramatic elements of Leave Her to Heaven is an interest in uncovering the fluidity between the poles of good and evil. As Freud remarks in his essay on the uncanny, “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (Freud 2001 [1919], vol. 17: 226). As the distinction between the two women’s identities as femme fatale and ingénue, star and costar, steadily disintegrates, the

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film follows that direction of ambivalence not toward the triumph of good over evil, but toward the intertwining thereof. Leave Her to Heaven begins by highlighting the contrasts between the two women, framing Ellen in her disquieting intensity and Ruth in her mild loveliness. Seated on a train, Ellen initially encounters her future husband— and makes her first appearance on screen—in a scene that establishes the sense of disequilibrium that will come to characterize her presence. She appears in a series of medium close-ups, a technique that introduces not only her striking beauty, but also her unsettling effect on Richard. In a shot/ reverse-shot pattern that returns five times to the same medium close-up of a motionless Ellen, she gazes steadily and silently at Richard. Compared to his own light-hearted demeanor and the cheerful extra-diegetic music, the strength of Ellen’s unwavering gaze seems alien and out of place. Indeed, subverting the traditional Mulveyan paradigm of visual pleasure that aligns active/male and passive/female, Ellen here radiates an aggressive sensuality that defines her as a woman unaware of anything other than her own desires. As Mary Ann Doane notes, the “excessive desire and overpossessiveness” (1991: 27) that will come to define Ellen’s relationship with Richard reveals itself here.5 Where Ellen’s first scene resonates with the promise of troubles to come, Ruth appears on screen in an unobtrusive fashion. Joining Ellen and her mother in long-shot as they step off of the train, at first glance Ruth attracts notice only because of her proximity to Ellen. Truly, Ruth might have faded from the tableau entirely were it not for the ringing tones of her voice as she speaks incidental dialogue and, more significantly, a medium close-up that insists on the spectator’s attention. Following a shot of Ellen and Richard meeting again on the station platform, there is a cut to Ruth’s face as she watches the encounter. Raising an eyebrow and looking thoughtfully, almost warily, at the couple, Ruth suddenly transforms from an innocuous supporting player to a perceptive subject. This shift takes place, however, in the very space that the previous sequence had aligned with Ellen: the close-up. Once again highlighting the female gaze, this shot also calls for a moment of identification with a female subject—this time, with the woman that Ellen will come to fear as a rival. With her muted comeliness, Ruth/Crain lacks the commanding impact of Ellen/Tierney’s features; it is, nonetheless, the very unlikely quality of the former’s occupation of the close-up that enhances the

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threat of usurpation. In so allowing supporting player Ruth/Crain to inhabit, however briefly, the space associated with star Ellen/Tierney, the film hints at the melding of identities that inevitably occurs in mimetic rivalry. In this way, it also subtly overturns any notion of a strict Manichaean depiction of Ellen and Ruth. If, as Girard maintains, “there are no . . . distinct positions” (2003 [1978]: 299) or roles within the relationship of doubles, there are by extension no distinct positions of morality for the women to occupy. Further enhancing this sense of ambiguity is the vagueness of the actual relationship between Ellen and Ruth. Though raised as sisters, they are in fact cousins: Ruth remarks that Mrs. Berent adopted her out of loneliness and alienation from the closeness of Ellen’s bond with her father. Ruth, then, has assumed the role of daughter that originally belonged to Ellen. Yet as the sequences at Back-of-the-Moon, Richard’s country home, make clear, Ellen seeks this exile from her family of origin in order to possess Richard more completely.6 After a disastrous visit from Ruth and her mother, Ellen rails against the crowded atmosphere of the cabin and jealously accuses Richard of being in love with Ruth. At the height of her rage, Ellen appears in a closeup that jarringly contrasts both the preceding two-shots of the scene and the medium-long-shots that characterized the previous sequence, disrupting the established shot pattern much as she herself disrupts the domestic harmony. Attracting the camera—the close-up appears three times in the scene—and the audience even as it seems to exceed the parameters of the frame, Tierney’s face becomes a body-landscape both appealing and threatening in its affect, to paraphrase Beugnet. The scene following this tirade, however, presents the loveliness of Ruth/ Crain as the appeasing complement to Ellen/Tierney’s disruption. Just as Ellen’s tight close-up exiles her from the world of Back-of-the-Moon, Ruth’s inclusion (near-immersion) in the sweeping exterior shots indicates that she belongs to this realm of conventional domesticity. These divergent experiences distinctly recall Brooks’s commentary on the trope of the enclosed garden in melodrama, an Edenic “space of innocence” kept by the virtuous and threatened by the “violation and spoliation” wrought by villainy (1995 [1976]: 29–30). Unlike Ellen, who brings only destruction to the pristine landscape, Ruth happily complies with the traditional values of the land she tends. Pictured in long-shot, Ruth works in the garden outside the cabin, the earth tones of her clothes and hair presenting her as an extension of the landscape itself.

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Yet a subsequent sequence places Ellen within the same natural setting—and this time, the frame includes Danny, Richard’s crippled brother (played by Darryl Hickman). In this, the climax of the film, Ellen allows her brother-in-law to drown, watching him die in the lake where she has been teaching him to swim. Earlier in the movie, Ellen had admitted to Richard, “I love you so that I can’t bear to share you with anybody.” In this sequence, Ellen meets the sinister potential of that statement. The scene opens innocently enough, with both Ellen and Danny framed in medium-shot as they sit in a boat on the lake. Lacking extra-diegetic music, the shot pattern itself establishes a rhythm: Long-shots of Danny and Ellen making their way across the lake are intercut with mediumshots of Ellen, watching Danny through her dark glasses while she rows behind his swimming figure. Like Ruth before her, Ellen is now part of the vista of Back-of-the-Moon—but only as the bearer of Brooks’s “violation and spoliation” (1995 [1976]: 29–30). When Danny realizes that he has a cramp and calls for Ellen’s help, she sits still in her medium-shot, staring as he goes under the water. After a shot of Danny sinking, there is a cut to a tight medium close-up of Ellen as she watches him die, her face an implacable mask that gives no sign that she hears the sounds of Danny’s splashing or frantic appeals for help that fill the soundtrack. Once Danny has completely sunk in the water, there is a cut to a long-shot of Ellen in the boat, staring impassively at the lake. In a chilling variation on the shots that highlighted the serenity of Back-of-the-Moon, silence suffuses the scene as the green water rocks Ellen’s boat gently against a backdrop of pine trees. As the subsequent shot demonstrates, however, Ellen belongs not to that idyllic vista, but to the alienated and alienating dimensions of her closeup. Doane has noted, “the face is the most readable space of the body” (1991: 47; emphasis in original); the fact that Ellen’s face offers only a blank page to the expectant viewer, then, enhances the unsettling quality of the image. With Tierney’s striking features remaining expressionless and her eyes concealed by dark glasses, her visage is, like the lake that claimed Danny, a vacuum of a landscape. After Danny’s death, Ellen decides to have a baby to help her husband through his grief. Soon, however, she becomes jealous even of their unborn child and the affection that Richard will have for him.7 Where the scene of Danny’s death deliberately juxtaposes the natural vista of Back-of-the-Moon

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with close-ups of Ellen, the sequence in which she murders her unborn child remains bound to the claustrophobic sphere of her subjectivity. In a shot/ reverse-shot sequence that alternates close-ups of Ellen with her point of view of a flight of stairs, she throws herself down the staircase to induce a miscarriage. After Richard confronts Ellen about the loss of the lives of Danny and the child, she admits to the murders in a fantastically misguided effort to prove her love: “I couldn’t stand having anyone between us.” Richard, horrified, declares his intention to leave his wife. Yet even as Ellen loses control over Richard, she also realizes that Ruth is a stronger foe than she had feared. Immediately before Richard leaves her, Ellen confronts her cousin, accusing her of jealousy and plotting against the marriage. Ruth, now demonstrating her own formidability, only comments on the Pyrrhic victory of Ellen’s machinations: “You’re the most pitiful creature I’ve ever known.” Throughout the exchange, the extremes of the isolating close-up and longshot disappear, and what remains instead is a series of medium two-shots that emphasize the similarities between the women. With an over-the-shoulder perspective that places either Ellen or Ruth’s back in the shots that favor the other, the compositions (reminiscent of those in Mildred Pierce) create the impression that each woman is engaging with her reflection. With neither Tierney nor Crain highlighted as star or supporting player—the striking visage of the former shown only as a complement to the comeliness of the latter— the intra- and extra-diegetic roles of the two women prove interconnected rather than distinct. Ellen/Tierney and Ruth/Crain are, in fact, fully realized as doubles. With this in mind, Ellen’s subsequent actions relate as much to her desire to destroy her double-rival as her will to dominate (or, as Doane describes it, “have, appropriate, possess” [1987: 121]) Richard’s life. As Jean-Michel Oughourlian states in a dialogue with Girard, “By the stage of psychosis, the object is no longer there at all; all that remains is . . . the obsessive concern with the model-obstacle” (in Girard 2003 [1978]: 311). After writing a letter that frames Ruth for the death, Ellen kills herself. Certainly, on one level, Ellen’s act of suicide seems to belie a reading of her character as narcissistic. In destroying her corporeal self, though, Ellen ensures the devastating force of her memory—as powerful in death, perhaps, as she was in life. Ruth stands trial for murder (occupying the very place, ironically, where Ellen should be) and while testifying, she admits her love for Richard. He, in turn, discloses his knowledge

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of Ellen’s crimes. Though this revelation vindicates Ruth, Richard himself goes to prison for acting as a reluctant accessory to Ellen’s deeds. On his release, Richard returns to Back-of-the-Moon and Ruth. As the couple embrace in the half-light of a final long-shot by the lake, they seem to have survived Ellen’s attempts at destruction. More precisely, Ruth herself has lived out Ellen’s worst fears by taking her place by Richard’s side. Several moments before this finale, however, there is a long-shot of the house and of a woman in white walking along the grounds, a figure whose languid gait and elegant bearing call to mind not Crain-as-Ruth, but Tierney-as-Ellen. Though the following medium-shot of Ruth/Crain identifies her as the enigmatic woman, the lingering trace of Ellen/Tierney’s presence once again violates the natural vista—this time with the shadow of the supernatural. Unsettling any sense of the women’s discrete identities, Ellen/Tierney and Ruth/Crain are, in these last moments, twinned entities. In so erasing the distinction between femme fatale and ingénue, star and costar, the conclusion presents not the restoration of boundaries but the exceeding thereof. It declares, ultimately, that the differences between the women have vanished. Only the spectre of the double remains.

The After-Life of the Double Even as Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven each stand as a double to the other, these aesthetically and thematically intertwined films would encounter yet another mimetic entity in the form of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life, starring Lana Turner and Sandra Dee. A remake of Stahl’s 1934 original, Sirk unites the vibrant Technicolor palette of Leave Her to Heaven with an examination of mother-daughter conflict reminiscent of Mildred Pierce. Commenting on the parallels between Imitation of Life and Mildred Pierce, Jean-Loup Bourget describes the search “for . . . lost daughters” (1991: 436) that characterizes both films, as the mothers seek the love of children who come to resent them as obstacles to a desired existence. As in Mildred Pierce, the use of two-shots between Turner and Dee emphasizes the actresses’ resemblance to each other in an exchange of screen impact; and in close-up shots of Turner, like Tierney before her, the dimensions and shadings of her face and hair work as a Technicolor landscape as striking as any panoramic

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long-shot. It is, however, in its treatment of Turner as star that Imitation of Life diverges from its predecessors. Where Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven uncover the fragility of the star-identity without seeking to rehabilitate it, Sirk’s film frames Turner in a self-reflexive filmic world that preserves her stardom. Acting out her own mythology as a star, Turner plays a narcissistic actress sacrificing domestic happiness for fame. And rather than allowing her beauty to become a site of excess and disruption, as was Tierney’s fate in Leave Her to Heaven, Sirk uses a mirror motif that literally contains and reflects her image within a restrained framework. Certainly one reading of this recuperative process could propose that, as in the relationship of doubles, this disciple of Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven has managed to usurp its model-predecessors: taking a figure and thematic discourse made vulnerable in the earlier films and reclaiming them as, to paraphrase Christian Metz, a collective “beautiful closed object” of Hollywood cinema (1982 [1977]: 94). Yet just as the instability of the noir era gave rise to these two earlier films, a similarly vexed time produced Imitation of Life: the end of the studio system. As chapter 5 will discuss in detail, the collapse of the studios introduced freelancing stars and the threat of television, as well as technological novelties like CinemaScope and 3-D in order to win back audiences. Altogether, as Mulvey has noted in her discussion of Sirk’s film, Hollywood’s golden-age “was beginning to show cracks of unsustainability” (2006: 159). To offer a more exact contextualization—only a year after the release Imitation of Life, Marilyn Monroe would reject the sheen of more traditional, mainstream productions in favor of John Huston’s realist drama The Misfits. Hollywood and its stars were evolving, and attempts to contain that momentum translated into a self-conscious hesitation on the threshold of a new epoch—recalling, indeed, the uncanny worlds of Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven and their doubling of fractured postwar sensibilities. For both Crawford and Tierney, the presence of the double would continue to shadow their public life, long after 1945. Today, Crawford’s name remains synonymous with Mommie Dearest, the title of a 1978 memoir written by her daughter Christina. Recounting childhood abuse and her mother’s fanatical obsession with her career, Crawford’s book, later made into a film starring Faye Dunaway (Frank Perry, 1981), presents the actress as a monstrous perversion of the maternal figure envisioned in Mildred Pierce and, indeed, in Joan Crawford’s own self-constructed mythology. In an article released after the mak-

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ing of Mildred Pierce, Crawford declared, “I was eager to accept this chance to portray a mother who has to fight against the temptation to spoil her child. As I have two adopted children, I felt I could understand Mildred” (in LaValley 1980: 48). Years later, however, on learning that Christina was in the process of writing Mommie Dearest (published after the star’s death), Crawford would speak of her daughter in different terms: “I’ve come to think that what she has wanted is to be me. Or at least to have what I have” (in Chandler 2008: 276; emphasis in original). Distinctly recalling both the conflict between Mildred and Veda and Girard’s paradigm of the model-obstacle, Crawford’s words describe an off-screen, real-life mimetic rivalry that has arguably surpassed the fame of Mildred Pierce itself. It seems appropriate, then, that just as the specter of the double haunted Crawford’s career and personal life, a misalignment of star and costar renders her best-known performance an examination of mimetic rivalry between screen presences. As time passed, Tierney also found herself still engaging with the specter of her on-screen character. Addressing audiences’ responses to Ellen, Tierney relates in her autobiography that after the release of the film, she visited friends who asked in some embarrassment if I would speak to the cook. “She has seen your new film,” the wife said, “and when she heard you were coming she threatened to leave.” I went to the kitchen and said hello. We chatted and, after a few minutes, the cook smiled and said, “Oh, ma’am. You sure were mean in that picture. Now that I’ve seen you, you are real nice.” (140) Indeed, both Ellen and the eponymous Laura would endure as Tierney’s signature roles; for though she began the 1950s with strong dramatic parts in Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950), she virtually vanished from the screen following severe mental health problems in the middle of the decade. The crisis that precipitated Tierney’s breakdown, however, received international attention with the 1962 publication of Agatha Christie’s mystery novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, a work that introduced a murderous twist into an already incredible event: After an appearance at the wartime Hollywood Canteen, a pregnant Tierney contracted German measles. Her daughter was later born severely handicapped

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and eventually was institutionalized. A year later, a fan approached Tierney and told her how she had broken quarantine while ill with the measles to meet the star at the Canteen (Tierney 1979: 119). Through the dramatization of Tierney’s tragedy, popular culture absorbed only a reflection of her experience—a double, that is, of her off-screen existence. Only moments before Ellen sets her suicide and framing-plot in motion, she demands of Ruth, “What are you running away from? Is it me?” But as Leave Her to Heaven and Mildred Pierce—and the experience of their stars—make clear, model and disciple can only run so far. For the duality that haunts Ellen/ Tierney and Ruth/Crain, Mildred/Crawford and Veda/Blyth exists inherently in the material dimensions of the films themselves, thus revealing an unsettling alternative to notions of autonomous ideality. In this undermining of a monologic, self-contained stardom, the embattled presences of Joan Crawford and Gene Tierney demonstrate the fragility of not only the on-screen figure, but also the lived-body itself—vulnerable to fear and destruction, over-identification and appropriation. The star, then, is not removed from but intrinsically akin to the viewer; not an other, but another.

Notes 1.

In The Desire to Desire, Mary Ann Doane succinctly defines the woman’s film as one that “attempts to engage female subjectivity” (1987: 34). 2. In his discussion of Mildred Pierce, David Bordwell further notes that the opening moments of the film offer two narrative “paths”: one for “the trusting spectator, who assumes that Mildred is the killer,” and the other for “the skeptical viewer, who will not take her guilt for granted” (2008: 140). What Bordwell implicitly describes, then, is a double for the direction of the diegesis itself. 3. Veda’s false pregnancy also brings to mind the fact that earlier in the film, Kay dies while Mildred begins her love affair with Monte—a turn of events that creates a direct cause-and-effect between Mildred’s decidedly unmaternal pursuit of romantic/sexual fulfillment and the child’s passing. See, for example, June Sochen (1978: 8) and Pamela Robertson’s (1990: 50) respective articles. 4. In contextualizing the color scheme of Leave Her to Heaven, Deutelbaum points out that its Technicolor presentation was a rarity in the early 1940s, when most contemporary dramas were filmed on black-and-white stock. At that time, Technicolor was primarily used in fantasy, historical, or musical films because of its

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divergence from cinematic conventions of “plausibility and natural appearance” (2006: 161). 5. Doane has cited Leave Her to Heaven as a film in which the agency of the female protagonist and her relationship to the gaze inspires the patriarchal narrative framework to engage in “extreme efforts of containment” (1991: 28). Yet while Doane illuminates the fact that Ellen’s danger lies, in part, in her assumption of visual power, she does not acknowledge that Ellen negotiates between the roles of spectator and spectacle. In two key scenes—one in which she scatters her father’s ashes in a performance of mourning, the second in which she feigns concern as she looks for the body of Richard’s brother, whom she has just murdered—Ellen manipulates her status as object of the gaze with an ease that renders her an even greater threat. 6. In his article “Leave Her to Heaven: The Double-Bind of the Post-War Woman,” Michael Renov (1991) condemns the Berents’s “crippling family dynamic” (235) in an apologist reading of Ellen’s character. Treating Ellen as a straightforward case study of the double-bind victim, Renov makes assertions about her (possible) childhood traumas to explain her actions. 7. Lucy Fischer remarks that pregnancy also represents the “growth of a second self in the primary being,” in this way bringing the woman “closer to a lived sense of the double” (1983: 39).

CHAPTER 4

One Touch of Venus Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, and the Production Code For all of the on-screen intrigue of Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven, still another Hollywood drama was taking place behind the scenes, and indeed throughout the 1940s: the conflict between censorship and sensuality. This drama had, of course, been playing out for years. In 1930, in response to public dismay over the lack of morality in films, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America—headed by Will Hays—adopted the official Production Code, a document composed by a Jesuit priest and Catholic publisher (Doherty 1999: 2). Though the Code insisted that the “sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin” (741) and that “scenes of passion” must not contain “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces [or] suggestive postures and gestures” (742),1 historian Thomas Doherty points out that the industry largely ignored these decrees until the formation of the Production Code Administration in 1934. Up to that juncture, he suggests, a variety of factors impelled the continued production of risqué, socially relevant films: the national trauma of the Depression, which unsettled cultural mores and inspired the provocative narratives that, in turn, drew disillusioned audiences; the rise of talkies themselves, featuring characters now able to articulate sensational dialogue; and Hollywood’s attention to the “rumblings in the theaters” (1999: 18), or the audience’s positive or negative reactions to particular diegetic themes (1999: 16–19). It was, then, the enforcing agency of the PCA, under the leadership of Joseph I. Breen, that imposed the moral edicts of the Production Code itself. Grappling with censorship decisions from the high-profile (the “Frankly, my dear” declaration in Gone with the Wind [Victor Fleming, 1939] and Jane Russell’s décolletage in The Outlaw [Howard Hughes, 1943]) to the quotidian (the translation of all foreign words uttered on screen and the changing of film titles), the Breen Office encountered particularly complex issues in the film noirs of the 1940s. Though the PCA was rigorous, critics have pointed out that the volume of noir material—based on pulp fiction and magazine serials—overwhelmed the censors, making it impossible for them to monitor

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every decadent nuance and, in this way, leading to the release of a number of provocative noirs.2 For instance, Wilder’s adaptation of Cain’s Double Indemnity had sensationalized viewers only a year before the release of Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven. In 1946, MGM would cast Lana Turner and John Garfield in yet another Cain adaptation, The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett). The sinister sexuality of Fritz Lang’s 1945 Scarlet Street also scandalized censors, who banned the film at the regional level, though Breen himself had passed the film for national exhibition (Doherty 2007: 249). To borrow from a Life article profiling Postman, these noir works were not “for the fainthearted, [but rather for] those who prefer[red] romance-with-a-snarl to romance-with-a-sigh” (“Movie of the Week”: 129). A figure central to the noir romance-with-a-snarl was, undoubtedly, the femme fatale. With an allure that incited a criminal passion in the male protagonist, this seductress defied a Code that demanded respect for “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home” (741). Often, however, the threat of the femme fatale lay not only in her overt sensuality, but also in her intrinsic narcissism. Consider Phyllis Dietrichson’s calculation in Double Indemnity as she lures men to “come along and take care of” any obstacle in her way; Postman’s Cora, whose self-absorption is signaled throughout the film by her gaze in a compact mirror and the meticulous application of her lipstick; and both Mildred’s maternal narcissism and Ellen’s vampirism as they struggle with a double in the respective melo-noir worlds of Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven. Going back even farther, the narcissistic woman had also presented a challenge to pre–Code Hollywood—though with less of a snarl and more of a shrug. Jean Harlow nonchalantly broke up marriages and caused scandals in Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932), Barbara Stanwyck’s Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933) used her sex appeal to gain social status, and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) abandons her family in order to cure an intrinsic ennui: “Somehow, the things that make other people happy leave me cold.” Indeed, as the earlier discussions of Garbo and Hepburn suggest, the narcissistic woman as threat was not simply a noir phenomenon, but one destabilizing “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home” (741) in drama and comedy, pre– and post–Code Hollywood alike. Though Garbo’s late 1920s and early 1930s heroines avoided the outright censure of the PCA, it could be argued that Tracy and Tess’s so-called rehabilitation in marriage, or Mildred and Ellen’s (somewhat ambiguous) defeat, derive in part from an

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institutional pressure to censor narcissism as another form of “indecent passion” (742). Two stars who spoke to the treatment of narcissism as a crossgeneric threat to PCA-imposed morality were Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner. In 1957, Thomas Wiseman observed, “the result” of the Production Code was “that sex in American films is embodied in a person rather than explicit in a scene” (148); and certainly Hayworth and Gardner brought to life and to the screen the lush sensuality condemned by the PCA. Famed as love goddesses in the 1940s, the actresses appeared in both musicals and films noirs, and portrayed characters from the mythical (Hayworth as Terpsichore in Down to Earth [Alexander Hall, 1947] and Gardner as Venus in One Touch of Venus [William A. Seiter, 1948]) to the misunderstood (Hayworth in Gilda [Charles Vidor, 1946] and Gardner in Mogambo [John Ford, 1953]). Indeed, among the stars’ most celebrated roles were the narcissistic heroines of Cover Girl (Charles Vidor, 1944), starring Hayworth as Rusty Parker, and The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), featuring Gardner as Kitty Collins. Taken together, the Technicolor, musical exuberance of the former and the noir brutality of the latter attest to the cross-generic fluidity of narcissistic femininity—even within, that is, the constraints of a PCA-era Hollywood. Here, Hayworth and Gardner’s respective performances suggest that though the narratives may contain the dangers of the narcissistic woman, they cannot control the embodied affect of her interpreters.

“Scenes of Passion”: Hayworth and Cover Girl In a clause explaining the need for the regulation of morality in motion pictures, the Production Code states, “The enthusiasm for . . . film actors and actresses, developed beyond anything of the sort in history, makes the audience largely sympathetic toward the characters they portray and the stories in which they figure. Hence the audience is more ready to confuse actor and actress and the characters they portray, and it is most receptive of the emotions and ideals presented by their favorite stars” (745; emphasis in original). Outlining a process of quasi-narcissistic identification that anticipates not only more psychoanalytic approaches, but also Morin’s notion of the osmotic engagement between star and role, the Code here rationalizes its imposition according to

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the intense rapport between star and fan. As Wiseman noted, however, “the Hollywood Code [was] instrumental in conveying some strangely unreal ideas to the public: that no criminal ever gets away . . . [;] that no woman ever enjoys ‘illicit sex’ without regretting it afterwards; . . . [and] that passion is something only vicious people indulge in” (1957: 147). In terms of sex appeal, moreover, the Code also presented an unreal, curious double bind for filmmakers: In order to ensure the continued success of the industry, the stars themselves had to be exceedingly alluring, but in order to protect the moral integrity of the audience, the characters they portrayed must be punished for any allure in excess. The treatment of the sweater girl archetype demonstrates this vexed approach to sensuality, with stars like Ann Sheridan and Lana Turner famed for the very figures that—as the Breen office mandated—must not be shown in “sweaters that are too revealing, or outlining a woman’s breasts” (in Doherty 2007: 136). Indeed, the PCA’s intervention in the appeal of stars recalls Winthrop Sargeant’s assertion, “the ambition of all Hollywood is either to be worth looking at or to manipulate the careers of those who are” (1947: 85). In this same article, published in Life, Sargeant would also suggest that the fan-star dynamic was not, as the Code set forth, “developed beyond anything of the sort in history” (745)—but instead, the reprise of an ancient dynamic between worshipper and love goddess. As he writes, “The age-old sex goddess has emerged from the status of a minor-folk deity . . . into that of an overwhelming, industrialized . . . idol to which millions of otherwise sane Americans pay daily tribute” (1947: 81). Sargeant proposes that Hayworth herself stands as a deity representative of this union between the sacred and sexual, a neo-Aphrodite like Turner and Betty Grable in the tradition of stars like Clara Bow and Jean Harlow. Yet Sargeant also acknowledges the difficulties posed by these goddesses. Referencing the machinations of the Johnston Office (Breen’s short-lived successor), he comments on the PCA’s task of “censoring the letter of her true sexual nature while letting her spirit triumph without limit” (81). As the article continues, however, and Sargeant explores Hayworth’s appeal in depth, the question of the love goddess’ erotic spirit cedes to a lauding of her “power of passivity”: “Like the ideal, theoretical woman, Rita exerts enormous power by merely existing. She causes or inspires action, but she does not act herself except in response to the desires of others” (89). In an especially alarming turn of phrase, Sargeant writes, “Rita, like

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Helen [of Troy], is totally lacking in ambition and is mentally incapable of initiating anything on her own” (89). In subsequent interviews, Hayworth herself would go on to reject Sargeant’s assertions, noting that she had just formed her own production unit (Beckworth Company), and, moreover, “[What] I’ve accomplished, I’ve accomplished by myself” (in McLean 2004: 60). Indeed, as Adrienne L. McLean writes in her illuminating study of Hayworth, Sargeant’s article represents a “malign discourse that converts [Hayworth’s famously] cooperative labor into” a point of objectification (2004: 57). Yet even beyond its unpleasant and unfounded reading of Hayworth’s character, Sargeant’s theorization of the love goddess archetype disregards the agency of those “deities” who preceded her: the Harlows and Stanwycks whose very air of self-sufficiency, however narcissistic and/or diegetic, had led in part to the imposition of the Code itself. Ultimately, the article speaks to still another element in that broader, underlying double bind generated by a PCA-culture: condoning the titillation and erotic objectification that brings “millions of otherwise sane Americans” (Sargeant 1947: 81) to movie theaters, while seeking—however unsuccessfully—to censor the star’s subjectivity as a performer. As one of the most successful stars of the 1940s, Hayworth indeed expresses her “kinesthetic subjectivity” as a dancer (McLean 2004: 25) in Fred Astaire musicals You’ll Never Get Rich (Sidney Lanfield, 1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (William A. Seiter, 1942), as well as movies like Tonight and Every Night (Victor Saville, 1945) and Cover Girl. Hayworth’s dramatic performance in Gilda also inspired one of Hollywood’s most legendary mergers between star and role, evoking her rueful statement, “Men fell in love with ‘Gilda,’ but they woke up with me” (in McLean 2004: 1). Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, Hayworth was discovered as a teenager while performing in a nightclub with her father, a Spanish dancer. First billed as Latina starlet Rita Cansino, Hayworth’s hair was dyed black and her fair skin covered with darker makeup. By the beginning of the 1940s, however, “Rita Hayworth” was born as a redhead with a hairline raised through two years of electrolysis treatments (McLean 2004: 33, 48). McLean has analyzed the ideological implications of the “Americanization” of Hayworth’s persona, pointing out that the very process that formed “Rita Hayworth” out of “Rita Cansino” (and, of course, Margarita Carmen Cansino) granted the actress a certain dimensionality in her appeal (2004: 51). That is, in drawing on Rita Cansino as a “shadow image”

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(2004: 48) of exotic sensuality, Hayworth’s image as all-American movie star always hinted at a kind of mystery, or back-story, as it were, lacking in fellow stars like Grable or Turner. Contemporary audiences found this ambiguity alternately intriguing and unsettling. In a 1955 study on audience responses to contemporary movie stars, sociologist Frederick Elkin cited a participant who spoke of Hayworth as “very romantic and musically inclined. . . . She’s after gaiety; she’s more concerned with the now than with the future” (1955: 104). Still another respondent cited by Elkin defined the star in other, more suspicious terms: “I think she’s selfish in a way. I think she thinks about herself more than about other people. . . . She’d like a man that can give her anything she wants, the kind you find sitting in a night club, the kind just waiting for her to come in. She just wants to show off Rita Hayworth” (106). In describing the narcissistic sensibilities of Hayworth’s persona in such an extreme fashion, the respondent decries not only the actress’ satisfaction in her own appeal (which clearly disrupts the norms of romance between men and women), but also the sense of decadence that underlies her presence on screen.3 Where Hepburn’s selfinvolvement is presented as an eccentricity allowed by so-called WASP breeding, and Crawford and Tierney work through their narcissistic desires within a familiarly melodramatic framework, Hayworth as the love goddess represents a slippage between romantic appeal and excessive sensuality. Even within the era of Production Code restrictions, she has made the carnal ideal.4 Cover Girl, however, offers a more ebullient representation of this complex appeal, even while addressing the narcissistic undercurrents of Hayworth’s persona. It follows the story of Rusty Parker, a singer-dancer in boyfriend Danny McGuire’s (Gene Kelly) nightclub until she poses for the cover of Vanity magazine and becomes a star overnight. After choosing fame on Broadway over Danny, Rusty finds her success meaningless and returns to him at the end of the film. Throughout the narrative, there is a defining juxtaposition between what Danny calls Rusty’s “easy get” shortcut to fame and the more worthy, legitimate approach associated with his nightclub—a contrast that exceeds questions of work ethic. Indeed, this debate bespeaks a concern with the narcissism inherent in Rusty’s desire for instant success—a concern, that is, that she will sacrifice a harmonious relationship with Danny for the chance to be a star. As Cover Girl’s body takes form in its kaleidoscopic Technicolor and energetic musical numbers, moreover, the diegetic questions of narcissism merge

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with the materiality of the film to create a hierarchical division between movement and stasis. When dancing exuberantly, Rusty channels the verve of a genuine performer and loving partner to Danny; yet the image of a posed Rusty on a one-dimensional magazine cover (with an overdetermined title) signifies her willingness to sacrifice that motility to fulfill self-involved desires. Indeed, where the Production Code stipulated, “dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passion are forbidden” (742), in Cover Girl it is Hayworth’s dancing that signals her rehabilitation from an “indecent passion” for fame and fortune. Yet even as the narrative recuperates the love goddess for the traditional couple, it cannot control the sensuality of still another romance: that one between Hayworth and the filmic body. The climactic “Cover Girl” musical number highlights the film’s sensory dialogue between stillness and animation, as well as Hayworth’s own provocative role in these motion pictures. The sequence begins with a panoramic shot of a stage dominated by a giant camera descending to the ground, around which various women pose as a male chorus sings and pretends to take photographs. There is then a cut to a medium-shot of the first model, who stands outside of the “lens” of the giant camera before looking to the left of the shot—after which we see her finally framed within the lens. In a slow tracking-forward, the movie camera progressively absorbs the stage-camera lens in a subtle slippage of apparatus. With the two mechanical eyes now merged, a tripling effect takes place for the parade of cover girls. Each enters the frame and stands to the left in a long-shot that captures her full figure; in the next moment, a close-up of the woman’s face fills the right of the frame. The close-up is then replaced by her image on an actual magazine cover, toward which the “live” model gestures from the left of the shot before exiting. Making full use of the Technicolor palette, the shot presents a rainbow effect composed of the backdrop, the brightly colored costumes, and the women’s faces themselves—all white teeth, shining hair, and radiant skin. Jeanine Basinger describes these cover girls as “more or less passive. . . . They stand straight, wear good clothes, smile, and wait to be admired” (1993: 147). Although this parade of women undoubtedly pose as figures of beauty, there nonetheless exists a deliberate acknowledgement of the power of cinema to bring these once-static women to life—to render them, in other words, motion pictures. As the eye of the filmic camera shares the gaze of the faux stage camera, the lived-body of the film itself grants verve and vitality to its

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subjects; in so doing, there appears a free exchange between static style and motile substance. With this process of animation already in motion, as it were, Rusty/Hayworth’s appearance in the number represents the epitome of the filmic metamorphosis: the transformation from an icon of femininity, driven by a narcissistic desire to be admired, into an expressive lived-entity—that, moreover, cannot be controlled by narrative dictates. After the “shutter” closes on the final magazine cover, the screen goes black for a moment—only to be illuminated as the shutter opens again slowly to reveal Rusty/Hayworth, standing still on the top of a high, winding ramp. Playing the role of a cover girl, she strikes several poses luxuriously before making her stately way down, finally picking up speed and all but racing to the bottom of the ramp where a chorus of male admirers wait to dance with her. As Basinger notes, Rusty/Hayworth “is a living, breathing talent . . . free and unleashed” (1993: 147). Her appearance itself enhances the kinetic energy of the sequence: Rusty/Hayworth’s dress is a shimmering gold, and her hair an even brighter red than in the rest of the movie; indeed, in this scene she seems an incarnation of the red and gold tones that have so dominated the Technicolor skin of the film. This engagement with the film’s body extends to the choreography of the dance routine: Racing down the ramp, Rusty/Hayworth progressively unwinds from the reserved stasis of her pose—that is, she unreels her body until she is as fluid as a strip of film itself, moving rapidly toward a space of expression and projection as the theater stage becomes her screen. At times coming close to the camera, Rusty/Hayworth dives and swoops in movements that directly address the filmic audience, almost insisting that they share her sheer delight in motility—in her merging, that is, with the filmic form. In its more conventional engagement with the female body, however, Cover Girl presents a commentary on the making of the star herself. Where The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year utilized Hepburn’s challenging persona as a means to reveal the construction of stardom, here Cover Girl celebrates that construction in a montage depicting Rusty’s makeover from chorus girl to glamour model. As her patron and magazine publisher looks on, Rusty is powdered and primped by various make-up artists. Finally, once the transformation is complete (there is, in fact, no striking before-and-after effect), Rusty sits for her portrait and a single shot signals her imminent fame. Certainly, this sequence is a reflexive one meant to reference the beautification processes undergone by any star—including Hayworth herself, as any remotely informed

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spectator of the era would have known. Yet Basinger comments on the vexed message conveyed in this scene: The audience is meant to revel in Rusty’s fairy-tale treatment, but must also accept that, as the narrative dictates, such moments of happiness are destabilizing to traditional romance. As Basinger states, “Cover Girl is a perfect example of how women were glamorized and made powerful as images . . . and then were asked to see this as a total mistake in regard to their personal lives” (1993: 149). The dream of stardom represented in this sequence proves destructive, a narcissistic exploitation of one’s beauty that threatens the more legitimate dream of a happy marriage. Fraught with double binds, then, this makeover montage does not represent the film’s most authentic scene of Rusty’s metamorphosis into a star. Instead, that moment can be found in a subtler interlude depicting her first dance on a Broadway stage. The sequence opens with a panoramic shot of an empty theater, with the rectangular dimensions of the stage recalling the contours of a film screen. When Rusty admits that she has never before danced on such an expansive stage, the producer attempting to woo her insists that she try it: “It’s more like flying than dancing.” While music gradually swells on the soundtrack, the promise of uninhibited motion offered by the stage seduces Rusty/Hayworth, whose steps become more assured and joyous until there is almost the illusion that she is indeed flying across the stage and the screen—exceeding even McLean’s assertion that the star consistently “add[s] an extra dimension to the flat surface of the screen” (2004: 161) in her performances. In a silver dress that floats around her, Rusty/Hayworth herself appears as shimmering as a silver screen, here assuming what Sobchack has called the “fleshly boundaries” of the film’s vitality as the actress claims the space of the frame and twirls ever closer to the camera (1992: 210). Where the “Cover Girl” number that follows minutes later represents a self-aware zenith of stardom, this intimate solo presages the spectacle that is to come—that is, it shows the birth of an animated, living screen within which Rusty/Hayworth’s fully realized star presence will take form. Ultimately, the narcissistic overtones of Rusty’s “shortcut” to fame find resolution not simply in her reunion with Danny at the conclusion of the film, but in her relationship to the filmic form itself. Merging with its Technicolor skin, matching its rapid unreeling, Hayworth is a cinematic element as essential as the screen or the camera—sharing a continuous scene of passion, a prolonged embrace, with the body of the film. Though Rusty’s reconciliation with Danny

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offers a conventional happy ending to the narrative, it is Hayworth’s alliance with the filmic body that ensures her freedom from both the frozen f(r)ame of narcissism and the demands of the PCA-imposed dominant fiction. This alliance is, in fact, the true love affair of Cover Girl.

Siren Song: Gardner and The Killers Reflecting on her experience as a movie star, Gardner likened herself to Hayworth in that audiences “preferred the myths and didn’t want to hear about the real me at all” (in Felleman 2006: 65). Certainly Gardner’s performance in The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954) spoke to these sometimes vexed exchanges between the public and personal, character and interpreter—even going beyond these to include an exchange between star and star. Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz would later remark that Hayworth served as the inspiration for the character of Maria Vargas, a Spanish dancer who rises from obscurity to become a movie star, only to die tragically (Server 2006: 279). If, to recall McLean’s statement, Rita Hayworth’s persona suggests the “shadow images” (McLean 2004: 48) of her earlier, pre-star selves, then she herself stands as a shadow image to Gardner in the film; the predecessor in a kind of dynastic succession between love goddesses.5 Yet where Hayworth brought to Cover Girl, for instance, the legend of her own metamorphosis from Latina starlet to Americanized love goddess, Gardner’s image depended on a divergent, but equally evocative, legend: her natural beauty. As cinematographer Elwood Bredell recalled, during the making of The Killers “[A]ll we did was rub a little Vaseline into her skin for a sheen effect”—other than that, Gardner wore no make-up in the breakthrough role that introduced her to audiences (in Server 2007: 123). Born in the small town of Smithfield, North Carolina, Gardner was discovered as a teenager after an employee of Loew’s (the parent company of MGM) happened to see her picture hanging in the window of her brother-in-law’s photography studio in New York City. As the inadvertent talent scout described the portrait, “It was the face of the kind of girl you want to marry. It was vibrant. I mean vibrant” (“Cinema: The Farmer’s Daughter”: 5). (Interestingly, Gardner first attracted public attention through her marriages to Mickey Rooney and then bandleader Artie Shaw.) Indeed, her Hollywood success in the mid-1940s, following the innoc-

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uousness of her small-town background, lent her image a sui generis quality—as if Gardner appeared on the screen, as in the life-changing photograph, fully realized in her classical beauty. Later, in an interview with Wiseman, Gardner herself would explain that she was “a simple girl. A farmer’s daughter. I can’t think where I got the bad blood . . . that got me into this business. . . . [I]t was just a fluke that got me into pictures. I’m no actress. I don’t enjoy making films. I just enjoy making money” (1957: 69–70). Downplaying her status as love goddess, but still referring to the nearsupernatural forces (“bad blood” and “flukes” of fate) that led to her success, Gardner (however inadvertently) substantiates this sense of aesthetic predestination. Indeed, the narrative juxtaposition of statue and living woman that recurs through several of her films (One Touch of Venus, The Barefoot Contessa, and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman [Albert Lewin, 1951]) parallels this notion of Gardner as having been “brought to life” through cinema. Tracing the statue motif in these three films, Susan Felleman finds that the diegetic use of sculpture synthesizes not only Gardner’s trajectory from contract player to film goddess, but also questions of corporeality and desire in classic Hollywood (2006: 58, 71). With the statue functioning as alternately “magical idol, fetish object, memorial portrait, status symbol, bearer of cultural patrimony, classical canon” (72), its presence references the complexities of both the cinematic medium— through which still figures are almost magically given life—and Hollywood’s at once confining and worshipful approach to the female form (66, 71–72). Felleman extends this reading of the statue to include its relationship to the “paradoxical realities” of spectatorship. Like the sculpted form and the otherworldly figures they represent, “stars are physically inaccessible. They are . . . phantasms” elusive to the viewer, just as, for example, Production Code dictates placed Gardner’s diegetic selves beyond the reach of male desire (2006: 69). Yet Felleman’s assertion of the star’s inaccessibility in a PCA-era Hollywood belies the dynamism of her embodied affect, as well as certain of her characterizations. In One Touch of Venus, for example, the goddess’ lust for life (to use a cliché) matches, if not exceeds, her more traditional romance with the young man played by Robert Walker. Released from her pedestal, Venus sings, dances, smokes cigarettes, drinks champagne, and pursues carnal pleasures—suggesting that, just as Rusty/Hayworth’s relationship to the filmic body represented the abiding love affair of Cover Girl, Venus/Gardner’s devotion to a flesh-and-blood existence evokes the rapture of One Touch of Venus.

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As the breakthrough film in which Gardner was first “brought to life” for audiences, The Killers introduced this dialogue between the ethereal and carnal. If, as Claude Gauteur has written, Gardner as a star is “aware . . . of the quasi-divine character she is and assumes” (in Felleman 2006: 56), then it is in the often-brutal world of The Killers that Gardner’s self-aware, supernatural carnality first takes form—or, more precisely, is given voice. Where Garbo articulated anxieties of transition in the historical moment between silents and talkies, Gardner’s experience with sound more than a decade later attests to the continued complexities of phonogeny. On her arrival in Hollywood as a contract player at MGM, Gardner took mandatory voice lessons in order to moderate the tones of her Southern accent (Server 2007: 54). In 1951, during the making of musical drama Showboat (George Sidney), Gardner worked furiously to sing the famous score—only to have her voice dubbed in the final film. It was only because of contractual technicalities, requiring that Gardner appear on the soundtrack album, that her vocal performance would be heard at all (218). (Hayworth herself would have her singing voice dubbed by six different women throughout her career [McLean 2004: 234n83].) In The Killers, however, Gardner’s own voice would be used in her musical performance as Kitty Collins, in this way inviting a further consideration of the sensual intersection between aural and visual dimensionality, the lived-body and its recorded utterances. In the classic noir tradition, The Killers itself uses voice-overs to motivate the narrative. Generating from a number of characters, these voice-overs retrace the events leading up to the unsolved murder of the Swede (Burt Lancaster), a man who knew that he would be killed and accepted his fate—because he “did something wrong, once.” As various acquaintances share their recollections in a series of vignettes, the “coolly . . . narcissistic” (to adopt Frank Krutnik’s terms [1991: 121]) Kitty Collins’s role in this unhappy destiny reveals itself. As even her gangster husband remarks, “You might say Kitty Collins signed [the Swede’s] death warrant.” First seducing the Swede with a torch song, Kitty/ Gardner’s voice comes to exceed even the enunciative power of the voiceover in its capacity to entice, threaten, and finally plead. Though throughout her career Gardner would portray both amoral glamour girls (as in Mervyn Leroy’s East Side, West Side [1949]) and romantic heroines, as in Hemingway dramas like the Henry King-directed The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and The Sun Also Rises (1957), Kitty is striking in her synthesis of these dual elements of

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characterization: She asserts that she can “take care of herself” in a world of thieves and murderers, yet later declares that she hated the life in which she thrived; and she maintains a sexual power over the Swede that is ultimately secondary to the romantic thrall she inspires. In a diegetic world of boardinghouses, boxing rings, and prison cells, Kitty/ Gardner’s first scene frames her within a more luxurious milieu. Seated by the piano at a cocktail party, she appears, as Krutnik has noted, as a stunning form kindred to Hayworth’s famous Gilda (1991: 117), dressed in a black satin gown with her hair falling over her shoulders and framing her face. In contrast to Lilly (Virginia Christine), the Swede’s comely former girlfriend whose voice-over frames the vignette, Kitty/Gardner exerts a potent physicality that complements the Swede’s/Lancaster’s own—their simpatico sensuality heightened as she lures him to her with a performance of “The More I Know of Love” (see figure 4.1). Shifting from relatively deep, more-assertive tones to a wistful higher register, the phonogeny of Gardner’s voice matches the duality inherent in both Kitty’s nature and the star’s earthy/ethereal presence. Indeed, just as the photogenic qualities of Gardner-as-Kitty consistently draw the eye to

Figure 4.1. Lilly (Christine), the Swede (Lancaster), and Kitty (Gardner) in The Killers (Universal Pictures, 1946).

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her form even as she remains still by the piano, the phonogenic qualities of her voice appropriate the aural register that the Swede’s girlfriend had ostensibly controlled with her voice-over. In a particularly striking moment, Lilly sits and tries to make small talk while Kitty/Gardner’s voice drifts over from the offscreen space, overpowering the former’s visual presence as well as usurping her enunciative power. Here, the aural dimensionality of the woman’s voice foreshadows a future with the Swede that is vague—“the more I know of love, the less I know it”—but inescapable. Certainly the more the Swede and the audience hear Kitty/Gardner’s voice, the less they know her. Krutnik has interpreted her character as “occup[ying] a highly constrained place within the text . . . bracketed within the context of a male-directed investigation” (1991: 116)—a notion of textual entrapment that belies the actual fluidity of her vocal presence. On the couple’s first meeting, Kitty practically purrs as she tells him that she “hate[s] brutality”; yet later in the film, after she has abandoned the Swede while he was in prison for a crime she committed, Kitty/Gardner coarsely confronts an abusive lover with threats of retaliation. Later, she sets the Swede up yet again with a virtuosic, vocal seduction, goading him to disaster as she stridently relates how much his fellow thieves hate him, then breathily accepting his embraces. Yet even as it enhances her physical affect, Kitty/Gardner’s voice manages to exceed her body to haunt the Swede’s past and, moreover, the soundtrack itself. Though the opening sequences establish the Swede’s mortality, and Lancaster’s own physical gravitas heightens the poignancy of his character’s incarceration and subjection to Kitty’s will, Kitty/Gardner herself remains elusive: avoiding punishment by the police, vanishing from the Swede, and conjured by voice-overs as a ghostly figure who can—as her own narration indicates—nonetheless speak for herself. Yet where the murder of the Swede denies him any chance, as one character points out, “to tell his story,” the penultimate scene finds Kitty/Gardner herself finally caught—unable to escape from either the present tense of the narrative or the consequences of her actions. As her gangster husband lies dying, Kitty pleads with him to speak the words that will exonerate her from prosecution: “You can save me! Say, ‘Kitty is innocent’!” Crouched over his body as she sobs, dependent on another’s voice for the redemptive utterance, Kitty and the phonogeny so seductive to her lovers and the audience cedes to violent, almost inarticulate despair. But even as Kitty herself is punished for

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her transgressions, following Code dictates, the tight close-up that frames this moment offers a final exaltation of her relationship to the film’s body. Reminiscent of the body-landscape effect seen with Hepburn and Tierney, this image focuses on the planes of Gardner’s face and hair—and, with the aural proximity to her voice matching the visual proximity to her visage, the shot includes vocal texture as an element within that landscape. The devolution of Kitty’s voice, then, presents a visceral signaling of her own demise, but its very depiction presents a last embrace between cinematic and human form. Anticipating Gardner’s more provocative expressivity in The Killers, Hayworth’s own voice appeared on screen in Gilda, in a subdued rendition of the famous “Put the Blame on Mame” musical number. Revealing the heartbreak underlying Gilda’s bravado performance of fatale narcissism, it is, as Richard Dyer remarks, a “moment of truth” within the film, a “privileging” of Gilda’s subjectivity (1998a: 119). The scene also privileges Hayworth’s phonogenic affect, a not-yet-heard but anticipated phenomenon for the musical star at the height of her career. With her soprano tones and rueful vibrato, Hayworthas-Gilda here introduces an acoustic intimacy that echoes the kinetic immediacy of her dancing (figure 4.2). Later, in the subsequent (and most famous)

Figure 4.2. Acoustic intimacy: Hayworth in Gilda (Columbia Pictures, 1946).

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rendition of the song in the film, the brassy tones of the singing voice used to dub Hayworth’s serve to emphasize the very constructedness of the moment. That is, the voice of a stranger now gives expression to what had been a meditation on the fate of Woman—in this way creating a vocal masquerade that merges with Gilda’s masquerade of fatal femininity itself. Where Kitty/ Gardner’s voice highlights her supernatural carnality, Hayworth’s own version of “Mame” endures as a moment of revelation—both for the star offering the muted elements of her celebrated physicality, and the noir heroine contemplating the futility of ever winning back her lover. For both performers, the use of their original voices—however diverging in diegetic significance—introduces an intimacy of expression that not only complicates the mystique of the femme fatale, but also undermines the dictates of the Production Code itself. Gardner would go on to lip-synch in films like The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947) and The Bribe (Robert Z. Leonard, 1949); yet the very fleetingness of her acoustic immediacy in The Killers emphasizes, even parallels, her broader provocative interplay between the elusive and the intimate.

Down to Earth: Separate Tables and The Night of the Iguana Following their performances in Gilda and The Killers, both Hayworth and Gardner would explore still more extreme narcissistic characterizations: the former in Orson Welles’s expressionist The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the latter in Albert Lewin’s surrealist fairy tale Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). As Elsa Bannister, Hayworth portrays a villainess of overdetermined self-absorption, a woman who admits that she has never “heard . . . of something better to follow” than her own nature. Captured in stark black and white, with her signature red hair cut short and dyed platinum, Hayworth appears as what Peter Conrad calls “a photographic negative of herself” (2003: 232)—a visual effect complementing the vacuum of Elsa’s irredeemable nature, as many critics have already discussed.6 In a chromatic inversion of Lady’s chilling luminosity, Pandora/Gardner—filmed by cinematographer Jack Cardiff—appears in lush reds, blues, and golds that, in a similar effect to Leave Her to Heaven, transform the body of the star into a supernatural presence. The character of Pandora shares with Elsa an amorality that, though channeled into pleasure seeking

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rather than murder, renders her a fatal force, demanding tributes to her beauty from her admirers. She finally falls in love with the mythical Dutchman (James Mason), however, and makes her own ultimate sacrifice for her lover. Dealing more overtly, and cheerfully, with these questions of mortality and otherworldly femininity was the 1947 musical Down to Earth, in which muse Terpsichore—played by Hayworth—travels from Mount Parnassus and falls in love with a Broadway composer who has written a show about her myth. At the end of the film, when Terpsichore learns that she must return to Mount Parnassus, she pleads with Mr. Jordan (Ronald Culver), the angel who has orchestrated her journey to Earth, to allow her to cry and assuage her grief. Mr. Jordan gently refuses, declaring, “Tears are only for mortals. It’s an advantage they have over us.” In a film that plays on the binaries of mortal/immortal and natural/supernatural, this statement offers a poignant caveat to the presumed triumph of the metaphysical over the physical. The ultimate emotive act of crying belongs solely to mortal entities; that catharsis is reserved for the bearers of a lived-body, not for a goddess who defies the demands of reality. In extra-diegetic terms, the film also presents a meditation on Rita Hayworth herself as the ultimate love goddess. Drawing on visual and narrative tropes from Hayworth’s most popular motion pictures—especially Cover Girl and Gilda—Down to Earth deliberately constructs itself as the definitive Rita Hayworth movie. As such, Down to Earth signals a turning point in Hayworth’s career. Released immediately after the making of The Lady from Shanghai, it represents the studio’s attempt to affirm her status as love goddess in the mind of the public and, significantly, preemptively rehabilitate her image in advance of the radical force of Welles’s film. In so framing this defining moment in Hayworth’s professional life, Down to Earth serves as both prologue and epilogue by simultaneously reconstructing the filmic bodies that bore her such success and foreshadowing an altogether different phase in the star’s photogénie—that is, her aging. Yet for all of Down to Earth’s reflexive and rehabilitative strategies, as well as Welles’s and Lewin’s radical re-visioning of the feminine ideal, by the end of the 1940s audiences were discontented with the more mainstream productions of the dream factory—and its Code restraints. In 1949, Life magazine convened a round-table panel to figure out “What’s with the Movies?” Pausing to assess the industry as it faced the bourgeoning threat of television, as well as continued challenges by groups like the Legion of Decency, the article

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chronicled the observations of critics, scholars, exhibitors, and consumers alike. The panel gave particular attention to the question of censorship, concluding, “Hollywood is trying to comply with thousands of prohibitions, and its aim is thus becoming the barren and self-defeating aim of not displeasing anybody” (Hodgins 1949: 106). Or, as Alistair Cooke put forth more succinctly, “The moviemakers . . . should not be cowed by the people who want to make the movies a guide to conduct” (in Hodgins: 100). Indeed, the PCA, Hollywood’s own guide to conduct, diminished in strength in the 1950s, along with the studio system it had so influenced. In 1953 Preminger’s bedroom comedy The Moon Is Blue was released without approval from either the Breen Office or the Legion of Decency. One year later, the Supreme Court decided that motion pictures were to be protected under the free speech provision of the First Amendment. In 1956 the Code itself was revised to allow for the cinematic treatment of issues like abortion, drug addiction, white slavery, and kidnapping. Finally, Hitchcock’s Psycho was released in 1960 as what Doherty calls the “curtain-closer on Hollywood’s moral universe” (2007: quote on p. 329; 308–329). For actresses like Hayworth and Gardner, the passage of time and cultural/industrial mores introduced a shift in their own on-screen affect—that golden-age, sensual synthesis between star and film. In 1958 Hayworth starred as a former model in Separate Tables (Delbert Mann), and in 1961 Gardner played a world-weary voluptuary in John Huston’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play Night of the Iguana. Produced after the relaxation of Code strictures, both movies dealt frankly with topics that earlier films had only hinted at—namely, sexual passion and frustration. Yet with the topical transparency of these later pictures came an altogether different question of exposure: that is, the revelation of the aging love goddess. Curiously enough, The Lady from Shanghai had anticipated the questions of revelation and concealment that would temper these later films. At the conclusion of the hall-of-mirrors shoot-out, in which the platinum veneer of Elsa/ Hayworth cedes to her literally shattered reality, she staggers from the wreckage to fight imminent death. As she drags herself along the floor in the foreground of a tracking shot, Elsa/Hayworth’s face moves in and out of the shadows, revealing its dimensionality in the final moments of the film: the contours of her cheekbones begin to materialize, as do the lines on her forehead and the swelling under her eyes. Holding herself up on her forearms, rising into the frame with a rush of dynamism, Hayworth-as-Elsa appears in her reality, nei-

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ther glamorized nor stylized. Separate Tables, however, would revisit the notion of a narcissistic woman coming down to earth in less abstract terms. Based on a Terence Rattigan play, Separate Tables is an ensemble film recounting the tragedies and triumphs of the residents at a small hotel in England. Hayworth plays Ann Shankland, who, overcome by the fear of losing her beauty, seeks out the validating affections of her ex-husband, John (Lancaster). Exploring the anxiety of an aging beauty, the role calls for Hayworth to move between the modes of calculated seduction and sheer desperation in a relatively limited screen time. The character also presented extra-diegetic difficulties for Hayworth. Not only was the star unsure of her dramatic skills in a cast of distinguished actors, but the part itself placed her in a vulnerable position on the screen (Leaming 1989: 328). With much of the narrative focused on the changes in Ann’s appearance, Hayworth’s own altered visage would be highlighted as an object of scrutiny for an audience already able to discern the before-and-after of her aging process. Giving body and voice to the overwhelming concerns of a famous beauty growing older, Hayworth would have to play herself, in a manner of speaking—that is, the Rita Hayworth of the public imagination.7 Director Delbert Mann described the production of Hayworth’s scenes as a kind of meta-exploration of the threat of aging that Ann faces: “Rita was quite conscious of her looks. . . . We lit very carefully. . . . I think we tried very hard to compromise, to give the sense of . . . age lines showing, without being brutal about it” (in Leaming 1989: 328; emphasis in original). Indeed, with the predominance of their long- and medium-shots, as well as the gentler opalescence of the black-and-white cinematography, Hayworth’s scenes emphasize what Dyer has called the “positive charge” (1998a: 119) of her charisma rather than the aging of her body, in striking contrast to Ann’s own anxious attention to the corporeal self. Afraid of losing the beauty and accompanying admiration that has defined her identity, Ann returns to John and courts his affirming desire: “You really think I haven’t changed much? To look at, I mean.” Though Ann coyly credits “clever make-up” with her attractiveness, John disagrees and declares, “I still think you’re the most beautiful, the most desirable woman I’ve ever known.” Yet when John learns that Ann has returned to him not so much out of love but to appease her troubled vanity, he violently rejects her attempts to seduce him. Mocking the fact that she has turned out all of the lights in the

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bedroom to conceal her changed appearance, John grabs her face and holds it up to a harsh overhead light and tells her, “Yes, I can see the make-up now all right, the lines that weren’t there before. The beginning. Soon there’ll be more and more, and one day this face will begin to decay and there’ll be nothing left to make a man grovel” (figure 4.3). With her greatest admirer articulating her greatest fears, Ann faces a nightmarish variation on her position as the object of the gaze. She is now looked at not with an appreciation of her beauty, but with the intention of uncovering its failings. The film itself, however, does not pursue an all-revealing look at Hayworth. Rather than present the sequence in a close-up exploiting the star’s transformation, the cinematic body holds Hayworth’s own body at a distance. The scene is framed in a medium-shot at a high angle that matches Lancaster’s height as he towers over Hayworth, the darkness of his figure in the foreground contrasting her illuminated face in the background. In shooting the scene, Mann commented that he and the camera operator “wanted to protect [Hayworth] and make her look as good as we possibly could” (in Leaming 1989: 328). The design of the shot, however, accomplishes more than simply sparing Hayworth the trauma that her diegetic counterpart endures. In sustaining this focus on Hayworth’s “positive charge” (Dyer 1998a: 119) rather than her physicality, it allows the star to project the essence of the character herself. With her dark eyes the most prominent aspect of her appearance in the shot, Ann/Hayworth regards John/Lancaster with a gaze that, for all its despair, re-

Figure 4.3. John (Lancaster) and Ann (Hayworth) in Separate Tables (United Artists, 1958).

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mains unbroken throughout his tirade. Managing to maintain her dignity even in terror, Ann/Hayworth proves that she does, as she cried only moments earlier, “have some pride left.” The drama of the image, then, is predicated on Hayworth’s abilities as an actress rather than on an all-revealing glimpse of her maturity. Huston would encounter similar issues as he filmed Gardner’s portrayal of Maxine, a sensual older woman who loves the troubled Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (played by Richard Burton), who has retreated to her tropical inn after a nervous breakdown. Oscillating between a sometimes stark, sometimes uncannily opalescent black-and-white palette, Night of the Iguana frames Maxine/Gardner herself as a natural element akin to the Mexican landscape—as sensuous and volatile as the sea in which, as shown in a defining sequence, she cavorts with her young lovers. Where years before, as a tribute to her youthful beauty, the director of The Killers insisted that Gardner not wear make-up, here the realist immediacy of the cinematography reveals a more mature figure—incarnating Shannon’s description of Maxine as a demystified survivor: “The only impression Maxine gives is of herself.” This aura of experience would also factor into Gardner’s extra-diegetic image at the time. In a 1951 article written at the height of her romance with Frank Sinatra, Time noted that Gardner “makes no secret of the fact that she likes men” (“Cinema: The Farmer’s Daughter”: 5); twelve years later, profiling the making of Night, it would remark less coyly, “Wherever Ava goes . . . sparklers burn in many hands” (“Hollywood: The Cast Menagerie”: 1). The same article would go on to quote Huston’s appraisal of the actress: “Ava can belt it out as well as belt it down” (2). The early public image of Gardner as a romantic adventuress, had, by the making of Night of the Iguana, ultimately come to include an element of world-weary pleasure-seeking. Throughout the making of the film, the proximity between camera and star—contrasting the rich chiaroscuro of The Killers or the Technicolor of Pandora, for example—awoke a certain anxiety in Gardner. Biographer Lee Server notes that she felt “skittish and uncertain of herself” as an actress, and a documentary filmmaker chronicling the making of the movie related that Gardner “was at that point in her life where she was very concerned about her appearance. And one afternoon I was filming her, and I guess I got on the wrong side and . . . she blew up and went off the set” (in Server 2007: 423, 426). Like Hayworth before her, Gardner found herself cast as an aging beauty both on and

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off the screen. In the poignancy of the beach scene, however, these extra- and intra-diegetic concerns would intersect: the character of Maxine realizing the emptiness of her carnal pursuits while she is in love with another man, and Gardner confronting her insecurities as a cinematic presence in transition. Throughout the film, Maxine stands as a voluptuary with an essential integrity. Dismissing her affairs with young “beach boys,” she remarks, “Even I know the difference between loving somebody and just going to bed with them.” She is in love with Shannon, but understands the responsibilities of that love; indeed, when they are united at the end of the film, she promises to always “get [him] back up” the proverbial “hill.” Just before the beach scene, however, Shannon cruelly dismisses her attentions and sends her to the arms of her beach boys in a nighttime swim. Maxine tries to respond to their embraces, only to push them away and stalk out of the sea in frustration. In preparation for the performance, Gardner expressed her worries to Huston: She did not want to be filmed in an unforgiving natural daylight, nor did she want to appear in a bikini, as originally scripted. Huston resolved these concerns by shooting the scene at night, with Maxine running into the sea fully clothed. The scene was filmed in a single take (Server 2007: 424). As Gardner stands in the water in medium-long-shot, her face is hidden by her wet hair and the two lovers caressing her body. In this way, the shot calls on what could be termed her “body language”: the arch of her neck as she leans back to kiss one of the boys, the rise of her arm as she moves to clutch the other in an almost aggressive pursuit of sexual fulfillment. Yet this attraction eventually turns to repulsion, as she pushes them away in near disgust at their impersonal advances. The more satisfying embrace, perhaps, is that one between Gardner and the skin of the film itself. Here, the inky shadows of the ocean and the moonlight reflected on the water complement the black-andwhite palette of Gardner’s very being: her dark eyes and hair contrasting the paleness of her skin, and the flux between desire and revulsion felt by her flesh seeming to extend from the motion of the sea. As Maxine strides away from the boys toward the shadows, there is a regal quality to her movements—head held high, pushing forward through the water, only to pause and then run for the shore. In this spectrum of motion, the narrative question of Maxine’s earthiness shifts to a focus on her connection to the earth itself; and Gardner’s extra-diegetic image of decadence fades in relation to this cinematic portrait of the very natural beauty—in all its transitioning—that first made her famous.

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In a body-landscape that extends from the narrative to its extra-diegetic context, Maxine and Gardner exist not as sexual objects, but as sensual subjects. In the 1949 Life article discussing the fate of filmmaking, one respondent remarked that she “would like to see adult movies more adult and children’s movies more childish” (in Hodgins 1949: 105). Certainly both Separate Tables and Night of the Iguana brought to the screen candid explorations of adult desire while, off the screen, their stars negotiated equally stark dramas of revelation, concealment, and aging beauty. Years before these so-called adult movies, of course, the Production Code played out its own drama between the forbidden and permitted, not only in terms of sweater girls and questionable language, but also in relation to the narcissistic agency of its more willful heroines. Even while treating the latter as a threat, a source of strength, unsettling to the dominant fiction of the time, however, the PCA could not control the romance between Hayworth, Gardner, and cinematic form. As figures who shared an intimate relationship with the films in which they starred, there is ultimately a certain aptness to the fact that Hayworth and Gardner’s onscreen affect would evolve simultaneously with the golden age they helped to define and the PCA-era they subverted. With a corporeal capaciousness that includes the idealized form of the eternal feminine and the realities of a lived, aging body, the actresses demonstrate that, to paraphrase Marks (2002: xi), materiality is not only mortality, but also proof of life—in all its passions and challenges.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

Following Thomas Doherty (2007), I cite from the version of the Production Code published in the 1956 edition of Motion Picture Almanac (pages 740–748)—published by Martin J. Quigley, a coauthor of the Code. As Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons note, “The sheer number of ‘sordid’ pictures proposed had made Production Code enforcement more selective” (1990: 131). It should be noted that in 1955 the respondents would have been aware of the scandalous undertones of Hayworth’s “fairy-tale” marriage to the immensely wealthy Aly Khan in 1949 and their divorce in 1953; see McLean (2001). Critics including Marjorie Rosen and Richard Dyer have remarked on Hayworth’s awareness of and pleasure in the aestheticism of her motility, seen especially in Gilda. Rosen describes Gilda’s attitude: “This is my body. It’s lovely and gives me

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5.

6.

7.

pleasure” (in McLean 2004: 159; emphasis in original); while Dyer notes that one can “read her dancing in terms of eroticism for herself as well as the spectator” (1998a: 121). In related terms, Susan Felleman comments on the “unacknowledged racial nuance” that underlay Gardner’s image, likening her to Hayworth in her ability to “slip from sensuality to outright exoticism” (67). The Lady from Shanghai and its amoral femme fatale have inspired much critical discussion. Comparing her to otherworldly beings like the sphinx and Narcissus, Lucy Fischer writes, “there is almost no female character in the history of cinema” as narcissistic as Elsa (1989: 48). In her psychoanalytic reading of Lady, E. Ann Kaplan remarks that the climactic mirror-maze shoot-out represents the annihilation of Elsa as “an empty signifier, a pure ego-ideal” and, moreover, the “shattering of the world of the imaginary . . . [and] the world of the film” (1983: 69, 70). Scholars have further commented on the undermining of Hayworth’s corporeal integrity: Maurice Bessy described the cutting and bleaching of the star’s hair as “the execution of Rita Hayworth” (in McLean 2004: 149); and Andrew Britton remarks that the “radical reconception” of the actress’ beauty serves to “conceal the essential nature of the woman” who bears it (1992: 220). McLean writes that Welles’s desire to prove the “spurious basis” of the star-phenomenon led to a film that “subvert[s], taint[s], . . . demolish[es] Hayworth’s kinesthetic subjectivity” (2004: 154, 26). As director Delbert Mann would later reflect, there “were things in the character that Rita could latch onto and relate to, very much so. She could comprehend the character and invest some of herself in it” (in Leaming 1989: 329).

CHAPTER 5

“Wherever There’s Magic” Performance Time in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and All About Eve (1950) In 1951, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker set forth the unique coordinates of the film colony: “Hollywood itself is not an exact geographical area, although there is such a postal district. It has commonly been described as a state of mind, and it exists wherever people connected with the movies live and work. The studios are scattered over wide distances in Los Angeles. . . . They combine a bungalow and factory in their appearance, and many give the feeling of being temporary” (1951: 18). The Hollywood of Powdermaker’s description, then, resists conventions of space and time—or, perhaps, establishes its own. Its boundaries are porous, shifting in sympathy with its inhabitants. It functions in a vague temporality in which the permanent and definitive cede to the temporary and contingent—waiting, that is, for the next hit or box-office flop. Here, Powdermaker does not present a map so much as an existential situation. Still other, less-academic sources questioned the suspended nature of the dream factory at the beginning of a new decade. As well as pondering the problems of the Production Code, Eric Hodgins’s article in Life asking “What’s with the Movies?” pointed to Hollywood’s greater dilemma: “[T]oday the movies are in a crisis. . . . The crisis is less a financial crisis than a crisis of motives, direction, reasons-for-being. The air is full of threats to the movies— they reverberate from Hollywood itself. Everybody loves the movies, but what is everybody going to do about them?” (1949: 97). At the time of publication, the “threats” Hodgins referenced were still in their incipience—only to gain in strength as the decade continued. Indeed, the late 1940s and early 1950s present a grim timeline for Hollywood: In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee began its pervasive and destructive investigation into Communist activity within the film industry (Schatz 1988: 434). The next year, a Supreme Court decision known as the Paramount decree determined that the major studios held a monopoly over the theatrical distribution and exhibition of their films. With this antitrust decree came a series of mandates that undermined

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the dominance of the studio system. Companies were ordered to divest their interests in theater chains, and further forbidden to engage in any “privileged arrangements” with theater owners in the showing of their films (Schatz 1988: 435). In this way, focus on individual films replaced the massive output and exhibition that had been guaranteed by the studio system. Destabilized by this forced revolution in the industry, studios faced not only the autonomy of freelance stars and directors once held to the constraints of a contract, but also the wandering interest of the public itself. As Tino Balio notes, radio programming and, most significantly, the bourgeoning medium of television claimed the attention of postwar, suburban audiences (1990: 3). Sobering statistics reveal the gravity of Hollywood’s situation: Between 1949 and 1953 weekly attendance at movie theaters fell from 87.5 million to 46 million, and by the close of the 1950s the figure had decreased to only 40 million (in Belton 1992: 212). Desperate to reclaim its public and revitalize film viewing, studios developed techniques like CinemaScope, Cinerama, and 3-D—all of which sought to offer an impressive, immersive experience not accessible in the domestic milieu of television. Yet Hollywood’s reevaluation of its role in American culture provoked more than such commercial, technological novelties. Seeking stability within a decade that disclosed the fallibility of its once-inviolate domain, Hollywood released a series of “movies about movies” and their stars. Indeed, where World War II and its aftermath presented a dark inspiration for noir works, the demise of the studio system introduced a parallel era of disruption and fragmentation within Hollywood itself; and through the 1950s reflexive cinema presented a greater protective framework for the city and its industry. As Powdermaker herself remarked, the Hollywood of this troubled epoch sought to reincorporate the past in order to anchor its present—even as it drifted to a vague future: “Like all modern societies, Hollywood is in flux, and represents a changing situation. It has deep roots in the past, which dominate the present; but there are also new tendencies, not yet very strong, some of which may be merely aberrations—and others, signposts to the future” (1951: 38; emphasis added). Cine-incarnating this intertwining of romanticized past, foundering present, and unknown future were a number of motion pictures that explored the workings of Hollywood: ranging from melodramatic accounts (The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincent Minnelli, 1952; The Star, Stuart Heisler, 1952; The Barefoot Contessa) to musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Stanley Donen

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and Gene Kelly, 1952; The Band Wagon, Minnelli, 1953; and A Star is Born, Cukor, 1954).1 Furthermore, biopics of great stars in Hollywood history became as popular as such “insider stories.” Seeking to generate not only commercial success but also a cultural mythology, the dream factory crafted itself as such with these illustrious profiles—even, ironically, as “the sure potency of the star formula” itself was “being questioned” (Powdermaker: 251). Representative films included Valentino (Lewis Allen, 1951); Man of a Thousand Faces (the story of Lon Chaney, starring James Cagney; Joseph Pevney, 1957); and Jeanne Eagels (starring Kim Novak; George Sidney, 1957), among many others. As W.J.T. Mitchell describes it, such “backlot films” convey an “institutional memory” of Hollywood itself (1994: 100). Early in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), one of the most famous of these reflexive works, faded silent-era star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) tells her lover and ghostwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) that the transition to talking pictures drove the studios to take “the [silent] idols and smash them.” By extension, it could be said that the 1950s series of movies about movies sought to reconstruct both the fallen idols and their Hollywood sanctuary. Rather than cultivate a wholly institutional memory, however, Sunset Boulevard itself explores more-sinister questions of identity and mortality within the context of 1950s Hollywood: moving between the past and the present, and capturing both Norma’s mansion on Sunset Boulevard and the movie studios only streets away, but a lifetime beyond her. In this time-space, Sunset Boulevard aligns the cinematic bodies (the stars, films) of Hollywood’s past and present in a process of uncanny reanimation—as if in dialogue with Norma’s demand at the beginning of the film: “Why have you kept me waiting so long?” Still another film released that same year, Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, would craft a dimension in which memory and present-moment intertwined and so redefined spatial coordinates—this time, those of Broadway and its environs.2 As Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) recalls in the opening voice-over narration that retraces Eve Harrington’s journey to stardom, “When was it? How long? It seems a lifetime ago. Lloyd [her playwright husband] always said that in the theater, a lifetime was a season, and a season a lifetime.” That is, existence in the theater defines itself not by the more traditional demarcations of temporality—past, present, future; beginning, middle, end—but instead through the passage between a series of moments defined only in their relationship

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to spectacle: rehearsing for a play and then performing in it, engaging with the reality of life off the stage and bringing to life a constructed narrative on the stage. Uniting Sunset and Eve, then, are their respective remappings of familiar worlds of performance; their creation, more precisely, of a chronotope that this chapter will term “performance time.” In 1937, literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin developed the concept of the chronotope in relation to literary genres, tracing the various narrative environments within which “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole” (1982: 84). Resisting an abstract understanding of time and place, Bakhtin describes a world in which grounded, material coordinates and temporal progression intertwine to “make . . . narrative events concrete, make . . . them take on flesh, cause . . . blood to flow in their veins” (250). Transposing these existential concerns from literature to cinema, Sobchack has extended the notion of the chronotope to explore “lounge time” in film noir (1998).3 With its concrete rendering of the transient nature of postwar culture, characterized by anonymous milieux such as bars, motel rooms, and diners, Sobchack’s lounge time offers a negative alternative to what Bakhtin terms the chronotope of the idyll: that charmed “unity of place” that forms a “little . . . world . . . sufficient unto itself” (225). In contrast, lounge time presents, as Sobchack writes, “the perverse ‘idyll of the idle’ ” (1998: 167) within a disenfranchised societal consciousness. Highlighting the function of the cinematic chronotope as “the spatiotemporal currency between” experienced historicity and artistic expression (150), Sobchack’s lounge time serves as a model for what this chapter will call the idyll of the idol. In this idyll of reflection and revision, moreover, the women of Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve encounter a number of figures from golden-age narcissistic femininity. Norma is a victim of Hollywood’s transition to sound, a fictional member of the lost generation contemporary to Garbo; and Margo, like Hepburn’s Tess before her, contends with the tension between professional success and romantic happiness. The Broadway star also encounters her double in Eve, a disciple seeking to appropriate the creative artistry, professional status, and personal relationships of her model-object. Finally, both Norma and Margo grapple with the fear of aging, the frustration of their onceexalted bodies brought down to earth—presaging, in this way, the concerns of Separate Tables and Night of the Iguana. More than “movies about movies,” then, these films explore the legacy of studio-era characterization itself: the

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narcissistic heroines whose relationships to ideality are, through the reanimating capacities of performance time itself, played out in reprise. Generating from the essential unrest of 1950s Hollywood, the coordinates of Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve’s performance time extend to include film sets and theater stages, back lots and dressing rooms, mansions and apartments—all sites that find their meaning in relation to, and as extensions of, the star and the screen/stage itself. Granting further dimensionality to this space is the temporal structure of performance time, a chronology most often associated with the flashback.4 Through this device, the present functions as a threshold across which the characters may engage with both the past—a register always already set in motion by an even more distant anteriority (Norma’s zenith in the silent era, Margo’s established successes, Eve’s vague background)—and the amorphous future, defined by hopes of eventual glory. As experienced by the narcissistic woman, as well as her off-screen audience, performance time is a realm of rehearsal and expectation, nostalgia and regret.

“Why Have You Kept Me Waiting So Long?” After Joe happens on Norma in her mansion-retreat, he learns of her obsession with her comeback—or, as she insists, her “return” to the screen. Certainly Swanson’s performance in Sunset Boulevard signaled her own return to the screen, as well as her escape from the forlorn fate of her character. A look at Swanson in the late 1920s suggests, indeed, that such a revival was not guaranteed—not because of a failed transition to talkies, but because of her association with (future Sunset costar) Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1929). After success in Mack Sennett films in the late ‘teens and a famed collaboration with Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount Pictures in the early ‘20s—featuring films like Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), Why Change Your Wife? (1920), and The Affairs of Anatol (1921, also starring Wallace Reid)—Swanson embarked on the ill-fated, quasi-vanity project. Producing the film with lover Joseph P. Kennedy, Swanson starred as a convent-student-turned-prostitute in an epic conceived by Stroheim, who had already established himself as the perfectionist filmmaker of opulent productions like Greed (1924) and The Merry Widow (1925). By the middle of filming Queen Kelly, however, Stroheim

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had completely alienated Swanson with his fanatical attention to detail and preoccupation with crafting a work of grotesque eroticism. Asserting her authority over her on-screen image, Swanson fired him (Staggs 2002: 257; Swanson 1981: 372)—a decision with unfortunate repercussions: Stroheim’s career as a director ended, Swanson lost almost a million dollars, and Queen Kelly was never completed. The press, of course, chronicled these travails. In July 1929 Katherine Albert of Photoplay pondered, “What Next for Gloria?,” noting that she “has had everything and lost it and had it again” (1929: 64), only to further remark that she is “now awaiting the effect of her new film, Queen Kelly, on the genuspublic to see if she is still popular. That is, if Queen Kelly is ever released” (124). Following the positive reception of Swanson’s phonogeny in The Trespasser (Edmund Goulding, 1929), Dorothy Manners from Motion Picture protested (perhaps too much), “The Queen Is Not Dead—Long Live the Queen.” Yet for all of Swanson’s initial success in talkies, the experience of making Queen Kelly indeed offset the momentum of her career. Until her renaissance in Sunset Boulevard, Swanson lingered in memory as simply, to apply Albert’s terms, “one of the Amazing Stories of an Amazing Town” (124; emphasis added). As a nearly fallen idol herself, Swanson would arguably have had intimate knowledge of Norma’s own triumphs and disappointments. In words that could have come from Wilder’s script itself, Manners described haute Swanson as “the luxurious mistress of an indulgent public. There was only a fine hair’s difference between the extravagances of her screen roles and her personal ideas” (1930: 102). Indeed, early in the film the audience learns that, like Swanson herself, Norma held her fans enthralled with her exploits and excesses: Max (played by von Stroheim), Norma’s butler and former director-husband, tells Joe that at her peak she “in one week received 17,000 fan letters. Men bribed her hairdresser to get a lock of her hair.” In performance time, however, Norma’s former fame and the present tense of contemporary Hollywood are literally placed in opposition. Virginia Wright Wexman, for example, has commented on the division between the scenes taking place in Norma’s “phantasmagoric retreat” and those depicting the “down-to-earth realism” of the world beyond the mansion (1993: 150), a duality established in the transition between the title and opening sequences. Beginning with a shot of asphalt bearing the street name Sunset Boulevard in white paint, the camera continues to track swiftly along the street, with credits appearing in

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the same lettering as the street name. Finally, Joe’s voice-over begins, guiding the spectator to Norma’s home where his dead body floats in the swimming pool—even as his voice recounts how he came to be there. The scene in which Norma returns to Paramount is emblematic of this supernatural spatiality. Moving from the realism of naturally lit exterior shots that capture the studio lots and gates, as well as the “behind-the-scenes” glimpses of a modern-day movie set, the sequence gradually submits to Norma’s uncanny affect. Seated in a director’s chair at the periphery of her one-time (extra- and intra-diegetic) collaborator DeMille’s set, Norma remains unnoticed until a lighting technician turns a spotlight to “get a good look at” her. Gradually, a crowd of extras and studio workers almost envelop Norma as they pay homage to her, a tableau of homecoming caught by a bird’s-eye shot (figure 5.1). As the shot continues, however, the nearly beatific radiance that highlights Norma’s face seems to bleach it beyond recognition; like an overexposed piece of film, her image is on the verge of fading into nothingness. Offering only the suggestion of a figure, this shot presages the final fadeout that signals Norma’s ultimate union with the filmic body she so fanatically desires.

Figure 5.1. Norma (Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard (Paramount Pictures, 1950).

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The image also suggests a brief disjunction between Norma and Swanson herself, as the former’s ghostly persona seems to supersede the anchoring corporeality of her interpreter. Wilder himself remarked that Norma was “a real character, who had lived, who could be living on Sunset Boulevard” (in Crowe 1999: 304), and Swanson herself grappled with this darker osmosis between her and Norma’s persona. The shot is, in fact, an uncanny manifestation of Swanson’s future contention that Norma was “a huge specter in the spotlight” with her (Swanson 1981: 259) after the success of Sunset Boulevard. Transposed to even broader historical terms, the popularity of star biopics in the 1950s reflects just such an uneasy intersection between past and present incarnations. Indeed, for those stars still alive (including Al Jolson, Buster Keaton, and George Raft), the prestige of seeing their stories depicted on screen was rivaled by the poignancy, and irony, that though their lives were box-office draws, they themselves were not. Similarly, the glorious reception initially granted to Swanson’s performance in Sunset Boulevard eventually gave way to the ignominy of typecasting. As she remarked in her memoirs, “It was Hollywood’s old trick. . . . I could . . . go on playing [the part] . . . until at last I became some sort of creepy parody of myself, or rather, of Norma Desmond—a shadow of a shadow” (260). Beyond its reflexive exploration of what might-have-been for both Norma and Swanson—the former returning to screen, the latter fading into obscurity—Sunset Boulevard also conceives of a reflective domestic space filled with relics of Norma’s past glory. (Wilder’s camerawork even mirrors the supernatural aura of the mansion, with scenes fading into each other in such a way that the conclusion of one sequence casts its shadow over the beginning of the next—as though reluctant to relinquish its presence.) Though intrinsic to performance time, the notion of such an overdetermined living space itself existed decades before the film. Simon Dixon has noted that, at the height of her success, Swanson herself lived in a lavish home that “in a sense still belonged to the studio and was always at its disposal as a site for publicity” (2003: 86). And in her 1930 article musing on the price of fame (“Glory Comes High”), Ruth Biery of Motion Picture remarked, “There is not a house in Hollywood which has not the best in mirrors. The furniture may, if pocket-book demand it, remain old stuff but the mirrors must be the latest. One wrinkle, one shadow beneath the eye—and fear brings both to even those who have not reached twenty” (90).

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Commenting on the pervasive narcissism of even younger stars than a Norma Desmond or Gloria Swanson, Biery here describes a site that only serves to house, reflect back, the anxieties of its inhabitants. For Norma, however, the mirrors are contained within those objects that reflect the past and preserve what had been. Like those described by Bakhtin in terms of “castle time,” Norma’s is a domain in which décor and “legends . . . animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events” (1982: 246). Indeed, these animate(ing) legends include what Joe calls “the waxworks . . . dim figures you may still remember from the silent days.” Glimpsed in cameos by silent-era stars Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner, these former idols are barely motile or articulate, and instead seem to belong to the house as organically as the screen and projector hidden within the walls. Most notable among these reflective elements, however, are the myriad photographs of Norma as a young woman, introduced by an elegant trio of tracking shots linked by two dissolves. While the camera follows the array of framed images that crowd a table in her living room, Joe wonders in his voice-over, “How could she breathe in that house so crowded with Norma Desmonds, more Norma Desmonds, and still more Norma Desmonds?” For a narcissist whose existence depends on both the memory of her former ideality and the dream of its revival, however, the question is how she could have breathed in that house without those sustaining reflections. As Lucy Fischer remarks, Norma’s mansion is “more than a home . . . [it is] an extension of the woman herself” (1997: 167). In contrast to what he calls this “grim Sunset castle,” Joe himself occupies a hyperdefined spatial context—a veritable street map of 1950s Hollywood in which the young screenwriter drives from the Alto-Nido Apartments near Rudy’s Shoe-Shine Parlor to Paramount Pictures and Schwab’s Drugstore, moving swiftly through the landscape of modernity in anticipation of his future. Once finding himself trapped in Norma’s past, Joe appraises his surroundings: “The whole place seemed . . . out of beat with the rest of the world, coming apart in slow-motion. . . . And of course she had a pool. . . . Mabel Normand and John Gilbert must have swum in it 10,000 midnights ago.” Point-of-view long-shots of a tennis court and the empty pool awash in a cold moonlight illustrate Joe’s words, yet through this vocal and visual meditation the viewer perceives both the reality of the house’s present state and a parallel vision of

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its past glory—a ghost image, as it were, behind the actuality and evoked by Joe’s words. Not so much a question of contrast as of intertwining, the milieu that has “come apart” comes back together again: the spectator’s sensory intelligence assimilating the evidence of devastation while responding to the reverberations of those who inhabited the space “10,000 midnights ago.” Appropriately enough, one of the most defining moments of resurrection in Sunset Boulevard also provides a coda to the Queen Kelly saga that began decades earlier. With Stroheim cast as Max, Wilder’s film reunited star and director, as well as offering a glimpse of the unfinished movie itself. When Joe and Norma spend an evening watching one of her films—through the uncovering of the screen and projector hidden within the walls in a quintessential intersection between Norma’s domestic and performative spheres—it is a youthful Swanson who appears and emotes as the eponymous Queen Kelly. As intertitles appear on the screen-within-the-frame and only the clicking of the projector breaks the silence, the scene here deliberately evokes the experience of a silent film. Yet this return to past spectatorship is offset by Joe’s voice-over, which expands the parameters of the film to awaken the spectator’s sensory sympathies: “She’d sit very close to me, and she’d smell of tuberoses, which is not my favorite perfume. . . . Sometimes as we watched, she’d clutch my arm or my hand.” In the accompanying medium-shot, Norma grips Joe in a grounding, oppressive gesture that contrasts the drifting of cigarette smoke as it wafts through the light of the projector. No longer a ghost lost to the memory of silent films, but now an active presence, Norma occupies a time-space that impacts the sensual construct of the body itself—both of and off the screen.5 Even as this scene heightens the audience’s investment in Sunset Boulevard, it also highlights the myopic nature of Norma’s own spectatorship. Fischer has observed that Norma “seems almost to ‘feed’ on her youthful persona” (1997: 168) in a vampiric variation on the traditional spectator-star rapport, and Amy Lawrence likens Norma to Doane’s concept of the “overinvested” female spectator (1991: 157–158). Norma’s immersion in the film also bespeaks a visceral craving for the vivifying capacities of the filmic body. At the conclusion of the sequence, Norma breaks away from her seat in the “audience” and cries, “I’ll be up there again, so help me!” She stands before the screen in the solitary beam of light from the projector, lusting for, to paraphrase Marks, the experience of performance time through her aging body (2000: 163). As Law-

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rence notes, “She is searching for a way back in” (158)—which she finds at the end of the film. Infuriated with Joe’s resistance to her will, Norma murders him and fulfills the prophecy she made only moments before: “No one ever leaves a star.” Yet Norma finds herself equally trapped within the time-space of her own making. While newspaper reporters and policemen crowd in her bedroom following the murder, a delusional Norma keeps her eyes fixed on her reflection in a mirror, now seeking immersion in that original sanctuary. In the final words of his voice-over, Joe declares, “[T]he dream [Norma] had clung to so desperately had enfolded her”; and as Norma descends the staircase of her home, believing herself to be on the set of a DeMille movie, her dream ultimately enfolds the off-screen audience, as well (figure 5.2). In a definitive integration of the film’s various spatiotemporal elements—the mansion and studio, the past and the present—the chronotope of the film finds its fullest, and most sinister, realization. After speaking directly to a news camera about how happy she is to be back at work, Norma makes her famous proclamation, “All right, Mr.

Figure 5.2. Norma’s close-up: Norma (Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard (Paramount Pictures, 1950).

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DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” and moves closer to the lens until the image becomes indistinct and, finally, dissolves. Meeting Norma’s visceral desire, and need, for the life force of the filmic body, the shot exceeds even the promise of hyperproximity made in the Queen Kelly scene. Neither goddess nor mortal throughout the movie, Norma is nonetheless wholly at peace in these last moments, as her physical self becomes one with her longed-for cinematic reflection. In a final twist of the pathos that shadows Norma, however, her triumphant union with the body of the film is one that only unsettles the audience, those “wonderful people out there in the dark,” as she says, who are now oppressed by the diffusion of Norma’s image across the screen. Of course, this last, orgiastic merging further exalts the coexistence of materiality and ephemerality that so defined the film itself—a movie about movies revisiting the vexed transition from silents to talkies through a filmic body that invites the viewer into an equally anxietyridden, amorphous realm. For even as the audience already knows that Joe will end his life in Norma’s swimming pool, the charged performance time of Sunset Boulevard seduces the spectator into not only suspending that awareness, but also engaging with the hope—not unlike Joe and Norma themselves, perhaps—that the ending might be different.

Re-Visioning Time in All About Eve Early in All About Eve, Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), the temperamental director with whom Margo is in love, decries the elitism of Broadway culture: “What book of rules says ‘the theater’ exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? . . . Wherever there’s magic, and makebelieve, and an audience, there’s theater.” As the film progresses, Bill’s words prove true. In a narrative composed of intrigues and masquerades, the offstage reality inhabited by Margo and Eve rivals the drama of any on-stage production. Whether through Margo’s self-involved, commanding persona, or Eve’s Machiavellian charade, the film’s various locales—theaters, apartments, and dressing rooms—lose their conventional significance and transform instead into dimensions structured by performance time, sites within which Margo and Eve act out their roles as both actresses and women. Structured by flashbacks from the tripartite voice-over perspective of theater critic

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Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), friend Karen Richards, and briefly Margo herself, the relationship of time and space in All About Eve demonstrates that the world of performance not only extends beyond Broadway, but also may be inescapable. Bill’s world of “magic” recalls not only the charged spatiality of Sunset Boulevard itself, but also the Hollywood described by Powdermaker (1951): a state of mind with shifting parameters, existing wherever people invest, or believe, in its magic. Complementing these fictional and scholarly perspectives is, moreover, an “insider’s” view—Bette Davis’s, no less. In a 1940 interview in which she discusses not only Hollywood, but also the omnipresence of mimetic desire in the industry, Davis responded to the question, “Can Women Be Friends in Hollywood?” She admits, “Hollywood women” are “all actual or potential rivals,” attributing it to “professional jealousy . . . a very good and healthy thing” (in Surmelion 1940: 88). Yet Davis also muses on the subjective interplay between stars and the city itself. After experiencing Hollywood as “the most selfish, cruel and indifferent place in the world” (89) as a young starlet, a more mature Davis remarked, “Just as I’m not the same girl I was then, neither is Hollywood the same town. Both of us have grown up. Hollywood is such a perplexing place to know in the beginning! You have to go through a certain evolution to really discover this town and set things right for yourself” (89). Here, Davis invokes Hollywood as an actual place, a near-villain in her narrative of stardom, and even an adjective (Hollywood women)—a literally multidimensional entity with a multifaceted identity. In the dialogue between Hollywood and its inhabitants, however, Davis suggests that learning how to contend with the threat of the double is part of the very evolution of the star. Women costars “copy each other unconsciously,” says Davis, “[A]nd imitation, after all, is the sincerest flattery” (in Surmelion 1940: 88). Putting aside the dubious sincerity of the remarks themselves, their concerns would be uncannily reprised in not only Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven, but also All About Eve—a film that deals with spatiotemporal fluidity and the parallel intertwining of personal identities. Indeed, the interplay between the leading actresses themselves—Davis, an established star who would become a legend, and Anne Baxter, an ingénue appearing in what would be her defining role—imbues the narrative mergings and tensions with an extra-diegetic resonance. At the beginning of the film, for example, the au-

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dience learns that Margo has been starring as a Southern belle in an antebellum drama, and shadowing this fictional role for a fictional actress is the fact of Davis’s own performance as a Southern heroine in William Wyler’s Jezebel (1938). This reflexive allusion to Davis’s early career acknowledges both the fantasies she enacted on screen and the extra-diegetic reality of her professional life as, like Margo, a working actor in films including Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934), Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939), and The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941). With her intensity of expression and quick, vivid movements, Davis triumphed as what Martin Shingler calls “an actress in motion,” conveying the emotions of her character through “a systematic orchestration” of her eyes, shoulders, and torso (1999: 47). As Davis herself remarked, “[O]ne acts with the complete body” (in Shingler: 50).6 Counterbalancing Davis’s driven intentionality is Baxter’s relatively innocuous, unaffected presence. In the mid-1940s, she had earned critical acclaim—and an Academy Award—for her portrayal of an alcoholic socialite in The Razor’s Edge (Goulding, 1946), a striking performance in which she shifts from naiveté to desolation. The role of Eve, however, called for the more calculating, quiet strength so well conveyed by Baxter. Even in movies as disparate as Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Western Yellow Sky (Wellman, 1948), and Hitchcock drama I Confess (1953), she consistently presents a restrained acting style that favors the development of character over the formation of a signature star persona. Indeed, an article attributed to Baxter in a 1950 issue of Film Show Annual presents her as a more thoughtful, introspective actress in contrast to the stereotypical studio-era contract player. In “All About Anne,” she notes, “The school of acting is . . . a matter of studying people. . . . My favourite way of studying for a film role has always been not to study the dialogue or the scenes so much as the kind of person I’m going to portray. I figure that if I know the character, the words and actions will come naturally” (26–27; emphasis in original). In the costarring of Davis and Baxter, then, the film (like Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven before it) reflects on an extra-diegetic level the narrative conjunction of icon and ingénue. The immediate implications of this alignment were revealed when the time came to submit the actresses’ names for Academy Awards. Davis obviously entered the Best Actress category; and, although studio-head Darryl Zanuck advised Baxter to compete for Best Supporting Actress, she insisted on being nominated as a lead. Reporting on

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the issue, Time magazine remarked that “Baxter might almost have still been rehearsing” her role as “ambitious, ruthless” Eve (“Cinema: Stardust”). That same year, Swanson was nominated for Sunset Boulevard, but all three lost to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday (Cukor, 1950). In Hollywood lore, it is believed that if Baxter had agreed to remain in the supporting category, both she and Davis would have won their respective awards rather than splitting the vote between them (Staggs 2001: 207). For a film that deals, in part, with the question of what could have been, it seems fitting that the specter of speculation should haunt its extra-diegetic history. Indeed, All About Eve itself rejects a sense of the predetermined, that “aura of inevitability” that, as Turim notes (1989: 170), characterizes many flashback films.7 Instead, the awards ceremony in Eve’s honor that frames the narrative presents her stardom less as a predestined fait accompli than an evolving situation borne of the momentum of what came before. As Mankiewicz himself noted, flashbacks allow the viewer to perceive “not only the effect of the past upon the present, but also the degree to which the past exists in the present” (in Kozloff 1988: 71; emphasis in original). In his analysis of Mankiewicz’s technique, Deleuze has remarked that the recollectionimage (the image that makes memory visually manifest) “represents the former present that the past was” (2003 [1985]: 54). By extension, then, Eve’s success in the present appears as a happening already in the process of becoming memory, a former present that leads only to the next state of being for this performing woman. On her first meeting with Margo, introduced as her most ardent fan, Eve masks her ruthlessness with the appearance of unconditional appreciation. Insinuating herself into her idol’s life, Eve—like the Hollywood women of Davis’s own acquaintance—copies Margo’s actions with an appropriative intent that, for a time, goes unnoticed. Bill, ascribing to Eve a kind of ingenuous narcissism, describes her as a “dreamy-eyed kid” who is simply “trying in every way to be as much like her ideal as possible.” But Birdie (Thelma Ritter), Margo’s more perceptive assistant, observes the almost mechanical processes at work: “She’s studying you like . . . a set of blueprints,” Birdie explains, “How you walk, talk, eat, think, sleep.” An interlude following one of Margo’s performances illustrates this vampirism: After Eve leaves the dressing room to store Margo’s costume, the latter follows her backstage seconds later. Standing in the foreground of a long-shot with her back to the camera, a surprised Margo sees Eve

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standing in the background before a mirror, holding the dress up and bowing deeply to her reflection. There is a ghostly quality to the image, taking place in silence within an all-but-deserted backstage, with a glimpse of the empty theater seats visible in the background. Eve herself seems nearly weightless in her reverie, absorbed within her reflection and unaware of Margo’s more stolid form. The spell is broken only when Margo calls to Eve and startles her from her surreptitious self-admiration. Deleuze has described Mankiewicz’s use of the flashback as allowing the spectator to “witness the birth of memory” (2003 [1985]: 52), to experience the inception and duration of an event that will, in part, shape the present. Certainly this scene offers just such a revelation, with Margo gazing on the birth of not only a memory, but also the star that Eve herself will become—in this way rendering the latter’s reflection not a wished-for imagining but a vision of the imminent. Several sequences later, after Eve has been made understudy to an unknowing Margo, Addison informs her that “in time, [Eve] will be what you are.” After witnessing the birth of Eve, as it were, in her own performance time, both Margo and the audience already know the truth in Addison’s prophecy. Where Eve hovers wraith-like in her noiseless attendance to and anticipation of Margo’s needs, the latter herself conveys a more dynamic expressivity—born of her conflict between professional success and the longing for domestic happiness with Bill. Indeed, complicating Eve’s attempts at usurpation is Margo’s own discontent with her identity as “something spelled out in light bulbs . . . [or] something called a ‘temperament.’ ” In the middle of the film, Margo discloses the depth of her unrest, abandoning theatrical bravado and speaking candidly about this limbo: “The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster; you forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman.” But Margo cannot completely escape the coordinates of performance time; at the end of the monologue, she counters her emotional tone with a wry, “Slow curtain. The end.” Sardonic humor aside, the monologue does in fact conclude an introspective interlude that begins for Margo several scenes earlier, in the party sequence. Accurately predicting a “bumpy night,” a drunken Margo finds herself caught in a clash between performativity and self-revelation from which the mournful quality of the later monologue finally emerges. Suspicious of Eve and jealous of Bill’s affection for her, Margo confronts her friends as they sit

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on the stairs leading from the foyer to her bedroom. Clambering past them as the camera pans to follow her path in medium-shot, Margo reaches the top of the stairs and summons her dignity for a final insult to Eve before exiting. As ever, the dialogue between Margo and her guests is drolly insightful, but the affect of the sequence generates from Margo/Davis’s physicality itself. The rustling and wrinkling of Margo’s black satin dress as she shoves past her friends, her hair falling in her face, the sound of her footsteps and “Stormy Weather” played on a tinkling piano in the background—all cohere, recalling the Queen Kelly sequence of Sunset Boulevard, to appeal to the more visceral intelligence of the spectator. It is a sensory sympathy, then, that guides the spectator’s awareness of the pathos radiating from Margo’s dejected figure, trapped as she is between her stage persona and her emotional reality. Stranded on the staircase, Margo’s corporeal displacement both anticipates and makes manifest her subsequent recognition of “the things you drop on your way up the ladder. . . . You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman.” Charles Affron maintains that here, Margo/Davis “will never be more herself . . . [an] actress-woman on an appropriated stage” (1977: 310). Rather than signal a triumph, however, this coda instead typifies the fraught performance time that Margo inhabits, in which she must be on stage in her own home, playing a selfobsessed diva instead of revealing her insecurities to the man she loves. In an angry observation at the party, Karen remarks, “[I]t’s about time Margo realized that what’s attractive onstage need not necessarily be attractive off ”— but she does not know how to distinguish between the two. Beyond the divide of age and career-status, then, Margo and Eve diverge in their relationship to time and space itself: the former’s physical immediacy grounding her in the present, as her longed-for future seems to recede, the latter a more elusive figure, continually beckoning the spectator to follow her drifting between the could-have-been and the could-be. (Addison himself describes Eve’s on-stage presence as “something made of music and fire.”) The sequence depicting Eve’s first meeting with Margo establishes the ingénue as just such a channel for the ineffable. Transforming Margo’s dressing room (what Affron describes as “a nether land between stage and life” [1977: 298]) into her personal theater, Eve weaves a tale of childhood dreams, love, and loss within a close-up that further emphasizes her role as the star of this subdued spectacle. As she speaks, the theater professionals she claims

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to revere have now become her audience—a fact emphasized through the depth-of-field of a preceding shot that shows the back of their heads in the foreground as they sit listening to Eve, centered in the background. Highlighting this glorious isolation is her musical theme, a wistful melody that, like Eve herself, is uneasily seductive in its very sweetness. Both interrupting and redirecting the flow of the present with her own flashback, Eve crafts a past that is eventually proven to be a lie—a twist that adds what Turim calls a “level of self-reference” (1989: 135) to the flashback structure of All About Eve itself. More than contributing “a tinge of irony” (135) to the film, as Turim writes, the fact that Eve’s narrative is a fictional one serves to enhance the movie’s overarching interweaving of possibility and actuality. As Deleuze remarks, “Mankiewicz’s characters never develop in a linear evolution” (2003 [1985]: 49); so it is fitting that Eve’s life story, as it were, does not follow a conventional chronology, but instead captures an alternate past reality. Eve’s former present never existed; she is shaping both her own future and that of her listeners with a mistruth. Yet Eve’s deceit lacks the banality of an ordinary lie. She is, rather, actively constructing a parallel existential situation—a performance time—that could have been true. As she herself explains, “It got so that I couldn’t tell the real from the unreal, except that the unreal seemed more real to me.” When Addison uncovers the tawdriness of Eve’s actual past in what he calls a “killer to killer” dialogue, her demeanor and physique gradually become unrecognizable. Her voice shifts from its carefully modulated tones to a coarse belligerence, and the composure with which she held herself throughout the film degenerates into a spastic agitation. Finally, Eve cedes to the gravity she has eluded throughout the film; by the end of the scene, her body appears less like that of a woman than a wounded feral creature. Following this scene, the film returns to the present-day awards ceremony—and signals the conclusion of Eve’s performance time and the beginning of another’s. Returning home, Eve finds a young woman in her living room, a devoted fan named Phoebe (Barbara Bates) whose worshipful language recalls that used by the actress herself. Appropriately, Phoebe’s first appearance on the screen calls to mind the once-supernatural quality of Eve’s physicality: Eve looks into a mirror and, shocked, sees the image of Phoebe’s sleeping form, suspended in the looking glass (figure 5.3). Though Phoebe proceeds to explain herself, her indeterminate identity (“I call myself Phoebe,” she later retorts to a quizzical Addison)

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Figure 5.3. Eve (Baxter) meets Phoebe (Bates) in All About Eve (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

requires no clarification. She is, as her first appearance asserts, Eve’s reflection—one that allows the present Eve to meet her former self. At the conclusion of the scene, Phoebe takes Eve’s award to the bedroom and stands before a three-way mirror holding the prize. The film ends with the image of Phoebe bowing to and graciously acknowledging her infinitely reflected selves—a shot that Cheryl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer interpret as not only externalizing Phoebe’s narcissistic drive, but also “metaphoriz[ing] . . . the . . . connected desires of performer and spectator” (2001: 134).8 Yet the image also presents the ultimate merging of these two entities. Abandoning any sense of distinction between the natural and supernatural, Phoebe and her reflections represent an almost mythical moment of ascension as the real unites with the ideal—the next Narcissus becoming one with her reflection. Highlighting this otherworldly affect is the stunning look of the image, crystalline in the clarity of its lighting, with sharp points of illumination radiating from the silvery sequined cloak that Phoebe has borrowed—appropriated— from Eve. There is little material traction for the gaze: even Phoebe’s body in the foreground lacks the flesh-and-blood gravitas of a wholly human figure, and it seems she is only the original reflection from which the others generate. As a triumphant fanfare plays on the score, the film concludes with the birth of another memory, the inception of what-will-be for both Phoebe and Eve. At the same time, it also bears witness to what-has-been. What anchors this

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shot, then, is the weight, the burden, of the audience’s knowledge—an audience that knows all about Eves.

Performance Time Unending? In addition to commenting on the anxious narcissism of the film colony, Biery discusses its inhabitants’ vexed relationship to time: “You struggle—you save, you sacrifice, you even cheat—for fame. It comes at a little before twenty, it goes at a little before thirty. What is there left in life for you? You can never summon back youth. Time is the one thing that you lose forever. You may have gained wealth and even glory after thirty—but the joy of spontaneous youth is gone forever” (1930: 95). In the inherently unsettled time-space of Hollywood, Biery reveals the star’s own crisis of “motives, direction, reasonsfor-being”—to borrow the terms of Hodgin’s Life piece written almost twenty years later (1949: 97). Certainly Norma, Margo, and Eve—and probably Phoebe herself—could attest to Biery’s titular observation that “Glory Comes High,” suggesting that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Indeed, in a scene between Eve and Karen, the latter remarks, “Nothing is forever in the theatre. Whatever it is, it’s here, flares up, burns hot, and then it’s gone.” It is, however, the very intertwining of striving, “spontaneous youth” and the idol’s lusting after what has been lost that shape the “here” of performance time—and Hollywood—itself. In their concern with the reanimation and revisioning of the past, Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve also uncannily presage the questions of digital (re)animation that shape today’s new media—suggesting, in this way, that the coordinates of performance time (“wherever there’s magic”) are still expanding to include the modern moment itself. Consider Sunset’s reanimation of both silent-era stars and Queen Kelly, as well as the closing scene’s newsreel immediacy that presages contemporary viral, omnipresent media channels, and Eve’s own musing on the generations of media dominating popular culture. In this dynastic model, Margo’s theatrical tradition (and, as embodied by Davis, golden-age film) cedes to the lure of Hollywood that finally seduces Eve—while competing against the new, bourgeois medium of television to which Addison exiles starlet Miss Caswell, in the form of a young Marilyn Monroe. (“That’s all television is,” he tells her, “Nothing but auditions.”)

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Decades later, Forbes financial magazine would publish the cover story “A Star Is Reborn: How Virtual Actors Are Changing the Business of Hollywood Forever” (Pomerantz 2010: 60–64). The article states that studios struggling to ensure box-office revenue are exploring “the latest formula: more technology, cheaper actors” (62). Rather than bank on a particular star guaranteeing a hit film, that is, studios are highlighting the special-effects elements of productions—especially following the phenomenal success of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) (60–62). Also intriguing to the movie industry is the possibility of reanimating dead stars: In June 2012 The Hollywood Reporter detailed plans to create a hologram of Monroe—allowing her to virtually go back to work as “a performer, spokesperson, cultural pundit and computer avatar,” according to the cofounder of Digicon Media (in Gardner 2012). In related terms, a recent Dior perfume ad “starred” animated versions of Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, and Monroe—making evident Forbes’s contention that “[t]he marketplace is ready” (Pomerantz: 64) for such a return. Noting that these technological developments lead to “changing conceptions” of screen acting, Lisa Bode has suggested, “rather than splitting ‘acting’ from digital animation . . . we might instead imagine a screen performance continuum encompassing all the modes of technological mediation and augmentation of performance” (2010: 69–70). Within the context of performance time, this notion of a “performance continuum” provides an intriguing perspective from which to consider the spatiotemporal place of the classical star in an age of reanimation. As Bode notes, digital imaging can place the star “not just within new scenes but within new mise-en-scène,” citing, for example, Fred Astaire and James Cagney’s appearances in recent advertisements (51). If the television era introduced what Thomas Schatz terms a “recolonization” (1988: 476) for Hollywood in the 1950s, then contemporary technology—in response to a marketplace demand—enables a literal re-placement of the star himself or herself. Just as Norma, Eve, and Phoebe bear an uncanny quality in their very forms, however, digitally reanimated stars may awaken a sense of the grotesque. Technicians, for example, strive to avoid the Uncanny Valley, a term used to describe the uneasy effect that occurs as robotic or animated figures “look . . . almost human but not quite right” (Pomerantz 2010: 63; emphasis added). Indeed, though Fischer remarks that even Norma is “technically alive” throughout Sunset Boulevard (1997: 168; emphasis added), reanimated stars

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are simply technologically extant. To return to the recent Dior ad featuring Kelly and Monroe: the former appears with the oddly pristine, “seamless . . . plastic look” that Barbara Creed attributes to digital effects (2000: 84), while the latter’s face looks strangely blurry and even malformed. Such representations are, in fact, as impressionistic as Norma’s final close-up and Phoebe’s mirrored realm. In this way, the closing images of both films assume a contemporary significance: both figures exceeding their films’ bodies to literally move—Norma encroaching on the space of the frame until she dissolves across the screen, Phoebe turning and bowing to reflected selves that span infinitely—into an amorphous realm beyond the vision of both film and spectator. Recalling Powdermaker’s notion of Hollywood’s “new tendencies . . . which may be . . . signposts to the future” (1951: 38), it is as if these women anticipate the renaissance to come—not ceasing to exist as the movies conclude, but suspended until another, as-yet-undetermined magic reawakens them.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

In their study Hollywood’s Hollywood: The Movies about the Movies (1975), Rudy Behlmer and Tony Thomas (1975) note that Hollywood was producing self-reflexive works from its very inception. (Consider, for example, Cukor’s 1932 film What Price Hollywood? and William Wellman’s original A Star is Born from 1937.) The historical context of a 1950s American cinema in transition, however, lends unique significance to this moment in Hollywood’s self-definition and awareness. Though All About Eve examines the world of performance within the context of the Broadway theater, its revelatory analysis of female stars and their relationships to fame, aging, and identities in transition (not to mention the presences of Bette Davis and starlet Marilyn Monroe) places the film in the canon of Hollywood’s self-reflexive works. Technically, Michael V. Montgomery’s 1993 study, Carnivals and Commonplaces: Bakhtin’s Chronotope, Cultural Studies, and Film precedes Sobchack’s essay. Considering that his book offers a fairly straightforward application of Bakhtin’s chronotopes to various Hollywood works, this chapter will take Sobchack’s phenomenological approach as a point of departure. In her analysis of the significance of the flashback technique in such “movies about movies,” Maureen Turim describes the films as “psycho-histories of Hollywood” (1989: 133): that is, movies that focus on the past and present experiences of various individuals in the industry in order to examine the greater context of

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5.

6. 7. 8.

Hollywood itself. Turim interprets these films as avoiding overt censure of Hollywood by transferring “tales of ambition and neuroses” to its residents, in this way “converting the moment of self-criticism into another melodramatic entertainment to be exploited commercially” (133). The design of these productions, however, bespeaks not only a desire to protect the industry from condemnation, but also a need to reclaim Hollywood from the limbo of the post-studio-system era. Wilder had already briefly explored the sensory parameters of film in Double Indemnity, in which the doomed Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) ruefully remarks in voice-over, “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” Consider even Davis’s brilliant static pose in The Little Foxes, when her character refuses to save the life of her dying husband. In the passage from which this quote is taken, Turim’s discussion relates specifically to film noir. Indeed, Jackie Stacey has described Eve’s evolution as one that “narrativise[s] a traditional pleasure of female spectatorship,” with its diegetic recounting of a fan who becomes a star (2000: 459).

CHAPTER 6

Marilyn Monroe “The Last Glimmering of the Sacred” For all its luster, the closing image of Phoebe in All About Eve is not the first in the film to convey such luminosity. Indeed, its antecedent appears not through a particular trick of lighting, but in the figure of then-starlet Marilyn Monroe. Cast as Miss Caswell, a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art, Monroe plays the anti-Eve: a glamour girl of style without substance. Monroe appears in only two scenes, the most notable of which is the party sequence. Drifting through Margo’s soirée in a silver gown (presaging Phoebe’s own borrowed robes), Miss Caswell/Monroe is blonde and pale, a practically iridescent entity—as would be emphasized in the moment in which Eve/Baxter and Margo/Davis face each other. Seated in the background, behind and between them, Miss Caswell/Monroe observes the unfolding scene. Though she is only glimpsed in the shot, what photographer Eve Arnold called her “flesh impact” (2005: 26) reveals itself as an expanse of shadowless white countering the relative darkness of the other women’s skin and costuming (figure 6.1). Here, the parameters of the three actresses’ bodies generate an inadvertent performance time, as yet another birth of a memory takes place through the retrospective gaze of the contemporary viewer: in a dynastic triad, the image captures Hollywood’s history in the legendary Davis, its present in ingénue Baxter, and its future in the form of a young Monroe. Over a decade later, in a scene from John Huston’s 1961 film The Misfits, Monroe’s incandescent promise is fully realized. As Gay, the aging cowboy played by Clark Gable, gazes at divorcée Roslyn/Monroe, he remarks, “You’re a real beautiful woman,” after which Roslyn/Monroe responds in close-up by smiling, tilting her head back, and lifting her hand to her face as though to brush the hair out of her eyes. In a single fluid gesture, she traces the frame of her visage with a wordless eloquence that bespeaks both gratitude to Gay and a gracious acknowledgement of the truth of his statement. He continues, “It’s almost kind of an honor sitting next to you. You just shine in my eyes.” Certainly this close-up of Monroe shines in its black-and-white cinematography with a diffused light that accentuates the intrinsic luminosity of her skin and

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Figure 6.1. Hollywood dynasties in All About Eve: Eve (Baxter), Miss Caswell (Monroe), and Margo (Davis) (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

hair, evoking the almost iridescent quality of her material form (figure 6.2). In a realist filmic body that otherwise resists the idealization of its characters and landscape, this is a moment of nearly supernatural suspension—a meditation on the aesthetic capaciousness of cinema itself and of Monroe especially. As she basks in the admiration of both her diegetic lover and extra-diegetic audience, Monroe epitomizes the awareness of one’s own loveliness that has characterized narcissism since the original myth. In this image from The Misfits, her final completed film, Monroe confirms that the captivating appeal of the cinematic Narcissus is, to borrow from Girard’s analysis of the narcissistic woman, “not an earthly thing; it is the last glimmering of the sacred” (2003 [1978]: 375). More than a valedictory moment for Monroe herself, in fact, the shot captures an entire era at its close: Not only had classical Hollywood contended with a changing popular culture (shown in its evocation of performance-time and technological novelties like CinemaScope and 3D), but fellow love goddesses Hayworth and Gardner would reveal their mortality in Separate Tables and Night of the Iguana within years of The Misfits; and the elegiac Imitation of Life (1959) had cast golden-age leading lady Lana Turner in

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Figure 6.2. “You just shine in my eyes”: Roslyn (Monroe) in The Misfits (United Artists, 1961).

its mimetic homage to an earlier era. A consideration of Marilyn Monroe as “the last glimmering of the sacred,” then, both contextualizes her place in the pantheon of Hollywood femininity and evokes an exploration of her uniquely incandescent photographic presence. As glimpsed in All About Eve, Monroe indeed occupies an intriguing place in the classical-era dynasty: carrying on, and yet moving beyond, the legacy of her predecessors in a way that parallels the broader flux of 1950s Hollywood itself. The comments both of colleagues and of popular press indicate an awareness of Monroe’s evolutionary affect—Huston, for example, compared Monroe to Garbo in her ability to convey “the real meaning of the character” through just a “flickering” of the eyes (in Grobel 2000: 603). And in 1958 Life magazine published a pictorial featuring Monroe (photographed by Richard Avedon) in the guise of stars like Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, and Jean Harlow—the “heiress today of this fabled” group channeling the élan vital of her cine-sensual ancestors (“Fabled Enchantresses”: 138). Indeed, returning specifically to the terms of this book, the lushness of Monroe’s photogénie recalls that of Hayworth, but where Hayworth’s dynamic motility matches the

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film’s unreeling as a complementary life force, Monroe exists on the screen as a more ethereal subjectivity. To apply Barthes’s description of the punctum, Monroe is the “floating flash” (2000b [1980]: 53)—the flickering—of impact and attraction moving through the cinematic form, an embodied yet elusive point of magnetism that compels the gaze even as it transcends its proprietary constraints. Offering a dystopic variation on this fluid cinematic presence is, of course, the massive commercial reproduction of Monroe’s image since her death in 1962. As S. Paige Baty has pointed out, Monroe is “never fully situated in any one time or place, but rather . . . reproduced and disseminated ad infinitum” (1995: 21). She is seen and sold on posters, postcards, and wine bottles, among countless other objects. Furthermore, biographies, novels, and other media have analyzed ad infinitum the many facets of her identity; returning to Baty, Monroe has been “ ‘re-membered’ into collective life” (18) since her untimely passing at the age of thirty-six. Yet where popular culture tends to present Monroe as a figure composed of fragmented, iconic images and conspiracy theories, her cinematic materiality itself calls for a more intimate awareness. The actress herself proposed perhaps the most essential approach of appreciation: “To really say what’s in my heart, I’d rather show than to say. Even though I want people to understand, I’d much rather they understand on the screen” (in Goode 1986 [1963]: 199; emphasis added). In adopting Monroe’s anticipation of Barthes’s contention that the photograph “cannot say what it lets us see” (2000b [1980]: 100; emphasis in original) one must explore what is in fact understood in her on-screen presence. Both extra- and intra-diegetically, her roles in Don’t Bother to Knock, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bus Stop, and The Misfits—four films that represent the arcing of her cinematic lifetime—speak to a continuing process of self-definition. In her portrayals of women who are, respectively, conflicted, ambitious, hopeful, and displaced, Monroe explores the complex relationship between performativity and self-discovery negotiated by both character and movie star. Recalling Hepburn’s engagement with the construct of stardom as such, as well as Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven’s exploration of fragile ideality, Monroe exceeds even these reflective precedents in her encompassing of the material and ineffable. The cinematic realm occupied by Monroe, then, transforms into a site of shared experience between the on-screen entity and off-screen spectator—an understanding on the screen between punctum and perceiver.

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Apprentice Goddess As discussed in the Introduction, Girard’s concept of the narcissistic woman emphasizes the rapport between the actual and the mythical. In his study, Girard relates the question of self-love to his overarching concern with the rapport between the model/ideal and disciple/rival. Knowing that “desire attracts desire” (2003 [1978]: 370), the coquette acts as if she takes her very self as both model and object, in this way inspiring the amorous energy of a disciple ever searching for a desire to imitate and an ideal to covet (370–371). Yet even as Girard examines the spectacle of the coquette’s “dazzling illusion of a selfsufficiency” (371), he warns against treating narcissism as a mere “strategy”— admitting, in fact, that the word “implies . . . an untenable, clear-cut division between the mask and the real face behind it” (371). In an effort not to “limit the substance” (371) of the phenomenon of narcissism, then, Girard allows for an osmosis (to use Morin’s terms) between the ideal model, or mask, and the actual, real face.1 Girard’s concern with the intertwining between mask and real face finds a specifically photographic counterpart in Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2000b [1980]). In this work, Barthes uses the word “air” to describe the ethereality that may surround the photographed form: It is “the luminous shadow which accompanies the body; and if the photograph fails to show this air . . . there remains no more than a sterile body” (110). The air of an individual is not so much a mask as an aura—yet its distinctly otherworldly, immaterial presence recalls the glimmering of Girard’s idealized mask. Of course, Barthes distinguishes between the impact of photography and cinema, noting that they diverge in their respective relationships to movement. Where the stillness of the pose defines the photographic image, cinema requires the constant motion of its subjects—thus creating an aesthetic contrast between the stasis and selfcontainment of the photograph and the dynamic ephemerality of the filmic “passing” before the eye of the camera (78). Yet for Barthes, the punctum, or point of striking awareness that attracts the eye, grants the photographed subject a similar freedom. He defines the punctum as “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (2000b [1980]: 26). Through this process of perception, the photographed entity suddenly attains “a whole life external to [his/] her portrait” (57), an entire existential situation exceeding the parameters of

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the composition. In the viewer’s own life “external to the portrait” (57), the punctum bears an indefinable force: “The effect is certain but unlocatable. . . . Odd contradiction: a floating flash” (51, 53). In a dialogue between the subjectivity of the work and that of the viewer, then, the punctum represents “what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55; emphasis in original). This exchange of subjectivities, each bringing to the other both discrete and shared experiences, presages Sobchack’s theory of the reciprocity between spectator and film. Indeed, what finally links Girard’s masquerade, Barthes’s punctum, and embodied visuality is an overarching concern with the intersection rather than division of registers of experience: the mythic mask, or air, of self-sufficiency that overlays the actual self; the point of affect in an image created by the merging of viewed and viewing consciousness; and the fluidity between the subjectivities of a film and its spectator. Though Monroe’s performances arguably endure because of her capacity to evoke such moments of “convergence and rapture” (Sobchack 1992: 286), to apply Sobchack’s terms, her gifts as a star did not emerge sui generis.2 Indeed, a 1951 Life article would identify Monroe as one of a generation of “Apprentice Goddesses” (emphasis added), an up-and-coming starlet rather than a full-fledged love goddess. Granting her the dubious distinction of being a “Busty Bernhardt” (in reference to legendary stage actress Sarah), the brief commentary declares that Monroe “seems to have her future assured” with her combination of beauty and talent (“Apprentice Goddesses”: 37). Pages later in the same issue of Life, however, an anonymous editorial despaired of the state of Hollywood in the age of television, observing, “the life seems to have gone out of the new generations” of performers. Undermining the very publicity build-ups that segued into it, the rueful piece ponders whether “a Marilyn Monroe [will] really achieve . . . the universal sex appeal of Jean Harlow,” and characterizes Hollywood itself as in the throes of a “game” attempt to sustain its famed star system (“Many Call. . .”: 41). One year later, in Don’t Bother to Knock (1950)—her first leading role under contract at Twentieth Century Fox—Monroe would begin to refine the mask of her persona in a transition from “apprentice” to star.3 As Nell, a mentally ill young woman working as a babysitter in a hotel, Monroe portrays a victim and femme fatale by turns. She becomes obsessed with Jed (Richard Widmark), a guest at the hotel who describes her as “silk on one side and sandpaper on the other”—to which she replies, “I’ll be any way you want me to be.” Wear-

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ing several diegetic masks throughout the film, Monroe the starlet herself encounters parallel challenges of self-definition: familiar to the audience only as a supporting player, lacking a sure persona, and now portraying a character in flux. Yet the punctum of Monroe’s performance lies within that very uncertainty, the inclusion of the spectator, that is, in the apprentice’s transition into movie-star ideality—seen especially in Nell’s own transformation from innocuous young woman to glamour girl. In her first moments in Don’t Bother to Knock, Nell/Monroe appears as a figure lacking substance or distinction. Wearing a drab hat and wrinkled dress, and with her hair darkened to a light brown, Monroe looks like a comely young woman, fairly unremarkable—were it not for the fairness of her skin, striking even in the low-contrast lighting. Even her physicality bespeaks a kind of reserve: on meeting the family whose child she will watch, Nell holds herself at a remove, guarded and distant from the flurry of pleasantries. Altogether, these opening images work to establish Nell/Monroe as a blank corporeal canvas, one on which her—and, later, Jed’s—fantasies of glamour and sexual attractiveness may be projected. These fantasies become real for Nell while her charge sleeps. Approaching the vanity table on which the little girl’s mother has placed her belongings, Nell stands in profile in a medium-shot, first applying a drop of perfume, then opening a jewelry box to take out earrings and a bracelet. After she sits down eagerly at the table to put on the jewelry, there is a cut to a closer, full-face medium-shot—with the camera in this way assuming the place of the mirror (figure 6.3). From this perspective, the shot captures Nell’s hesitant pleasure as it turns to sheer narcissistic delight at her reflection. In what Carl Rollyson describes as “the wondering manner of a child,” her physical unease evolves into a more “forthright” and confident bearing (1993: 49)—a commentary that recalls the language of the Lacanian mirror stage. Indeed, the (camera as) mirror stands as a channel of possibility—allowing Nell to play at being “some movie star” (Rollyson 1993: 49) and Monroe herself to realize her promise as a star presence. Still emerging as an actress and a persona, Monroe is here at the beginning of her cinematic lifetime, on the verge of stardom and courting the gaze of the camera just as Nell seeks the moi of her reflection. As a cinematic counterpart to the Barthesian “vague zone” (2000b [1980]: 53) of the spectator’s consciousness, then, the punctum of this image lies in Monroe-as-Nell’s very uncertainty within the dimension

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Figure 6.3. Nell (Monroe) and the mirror in Don’t Bother to Knock (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950).

between ideality and reality—the affect of her cinematic adolescence, as it were. Here, the audience observes the process of constructing what would, for a time, stand as the star’s signature mask of glamorous sensuality. Heightening the impact of the shot is the fact that the on-screen figure so clearly calls on the audience’s investment in her evolving image. In so directly addressing the camera, Monroe implicitly addresses the spectator. After serving as an apprentice goddess of a faltering faith, Monroe soon assumed her place within its very pantheon. Several of her defining early roles highlighted the narcissistic elements of her appeal: For example, Monroe played an amoral coquette in film noir The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), and in a leading role in Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953), she portrayed a cheating wife who plots to murder her husband. In so regarding her as the descendent of a sacred, haute Hollywood, contemporary press mused on the exceptional qualities of Monroe’s beauty—and, moreover, her alleged idiosyncrasies. Of particular interest was her notorious lateness, a characteristic implicitly aligned with a narcissistic withdrawal from the surrounding world. Time reported in 1956, “She once missed a plane because she stopped at the boarding gate to smear a little more lipstick on” (“Cinema: To Aristophanes. . .”: 6). A Life article chronicling Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) remarked, “She often reports late for work. Sometimes she does not report at all. When she does report she is likely to go off into a corner to commune with her soul”

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(“Walk Like This. . .”: 101). Thomas Wiseman would also take note of the star’s “ecstatic appreciation of herself. . . . [During their interview, she], ran her hand down her neck and bare shoulders. . . . I noticed that she was as full of admiration for her legs . . . as the rest of the world” (1957: 211–212). As he related, “Talking to Miss Monroe, her celebrated body is like an open secret between you. You may not actually talk about it, but you both know it is there” (211). Decades later, film scholars would comment on the narcissistic overtones of Monroe’s image. Richard Dyer attributes this sensibility to the heavily psychoanalyzed construct of feminine sexuality in 1950s America (1986: 49), and Sarah Churchwell surveys biographical literature to trace claims of the star’s personal self-absorption. In an assessment that implicitly addresses the questions of mask and real self, Churchwell points out, “[w]hat others see as” Monroe’s alleged narcissism the star “saw as work: it was part of her attempt to control how she was seen” (2004: 200) in an industry notorious for its manipulation of performers. Monroe herself candidly acknowledged narcissism as a necessity in the life of an actress and celebrity: “Marilyn Monroe has to look a certain way—be beautiful—and act a certain way, be talented. . . . [W]e actors and actresses are such worriers, such . . . Narcissus types” (in Weatherby 1976: 147; emphasis in original). Aware of the practicalities that underlie a rapturous on-screen presence, Monroe here defines ideality not as a longed-for register of experience but as an actual demand placed on her corporeal self.

The Value of Visuality: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Exchange of the Look Within two years of Don’t Bother to Knock, Monroe starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—the film that would, in many ways, come to define her early 1950s persona. Though her performance as Lorelei Lee, a gold-digging showgirl both vague and canny, is now considered utterly iconic, Monroe later reflected on the lack of respect with which she was treated by Twentieth Century Fox during the filming: “[T]hey always kept saying, ‘Remember, you’re not a star.’ I said, ‘Well, whatever I am, I am the blonde!’ ” (in Meryman 1962: 34; emphasis in original). Even as it speaks both to the objectifying tendencies of the star system and the struggles of Monroe as apprentice, the very straightforwardness of her remark belies its significance. In a cinematic body alternately cel-

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ebrating and examining the spectacular construct of glamour and feminine sensuality, Monroe is essential not only because she is the eponymous blonde, but also because her presence on the screen determines the film’s overall approach to visuality.4 As Lorelei, Monroe draws the gaze of the spectator as effortlessly as she attracts the attention of her diegetic admirers—only to exercise the powers of her own perception as, to adopt Sobchack’s definition of the lived-body, “both an objective subject and a subjective object” (2004: 2; emphasis in original) in search of wealthy men. Where Sobchack has written of a “unity of the look” that offers a transcendent “equivalence between human flesh and the flesh of things” (301), Lorelei employs what this discussion will term “an exchange of the look”—that is, a visuality in which the roles of subject and object of the gaze are not diametrically opposed but ever traded in a fusion of corporeal subjectivity and material interest. This exchange value, in turn, translates into the spectator’s embodied appreciation of the film as an opulent, Technicolor continuum composed of animate and inanimate forms. The notion of Lorelei’s objectification, however comedic, has raised feminist concerns, especially in considering the film’s emphasis on the commensurate worth of sexual appeal and material wealth. As Mulvey remarks, Lorelei “understands her erotic value simply as exchange value” (1996: 49) in a world where, as she famously muses in song, “A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” Wearing a mask of self-sufficiency even as she requires the romantic and financial investments of millionaires, Lorelei’s literally spectacular self-absorption calls to mind Guy Lefort’s comment to Girard about the appeal of a narcissist: “[M]oney is only lent to the wealthy, and desire always pursues desire, just as money pursues money” (in Girard 2003 [1978]: 376). Yet Gentlemen Prefer Blondes does not seek to reduce the woman to merely an embodied form of sexual currency. Instead, it establishes an economy of gazes in which the female and male characters’ continually traded subjectivity and objectivity—their exchange rate, as it were—determine the value of the look in a filmic body that courts the spectator with its own wealth of sensorial luxuries. Emblematic of this fluidity between material object and human subject is a moment early in the film, a turning point in the narrative in which Lorelei meets Sir Francis Beekman, or Piggy (played by Charles Coburn). As Lorelei and her best friend, Dorothy (Jane Russell), cruise to France in expectation of

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Lorelei’s marriage to a millionaire, the meeting with diamond magnate Piggy sets in motion a series of misunderstandings all predicated on Lorelei’s desire for a tiara belonging to Piggy’s wife. In the initial encounter between Lorelei and the soon-besotted old man, a point-of-view shot from the former’s perspective epitomizes her visual understanding of the world. As she enters the scene at the end of Dorothy’s conversation with Piggy, Lorelei asks, “Did you say diamonds?” Following her look at him, there is a cut to a medium close-up of Piggy with a large animated diamond gradually superimposed over his face. There follows a reverse medium-shot of Lorelei, who says with satisfaction, “You did say diamonds! I can tell.” In this equation of Piggy with her material desires, Lorelei bears a look that is all-encompassing in its very calculation; perceiving the implicit objectivity of his human form, she “can tell” his worth with the same instinct that she uses to appraise her own appeal. (As she later says to her fiancé’s skeptical father, “A man being rich is like a girl being pretty. You might not marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?”) In the parallel visual system of the film’s body, moreover, the reverse-shot of Lorelei/Monroe allows the viewer to contemplate her own duality as subject and object. Framed within the closeup, Lorelei/Monroe herself appears as the human counterpart to the diamond she sees in Piggy’s form: light glinting off her platinum hair and gold earrings, eyes shining and white teeth gleaming brightly, and even the embroidery on her violet dress angled to suggest a diamond, Lorelei/Monroe stands out in Technicolor animation against the drabness of the background. The spectator, then, regards the star as luxury incarnate even as this sparkling entity asserts the autonomy of her own gaze. In the look so exchanged, the visual trade signals an increase in, rather than a depletion of, Lorelei’s subjective resources. As Dorothy points out, “You’re the only girl in the world who can stand on stage with a spotlight in her eye and still see a diamond in a man’s pocket.” Later in the film, Lorelei further explores the cohesive corporeality of an objective-subject—though in a more innocuous setting. After finding herself locked in a cabin on the ship, Lorelei tries to exit through the porthole. Stuck halfway through the window, Lorelei sees child millionaire Henry Spoffard III (George Winslow) approaching on the deck and asks for his help—only to find Piggy also making his way toward her. Henry hands Lorelei a blanket to hold up to her chin, and then hides underneath it in order to make it appear that she is sitting up above the deck chairs. In this absurd ménage, the hybrid

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body of Lorelei and Henry engages in a dialogue with a roguish Piggy, who even goes so far as to try to kiss “Lorelei’s” hand. Lorelei/Monroe’s ostensible quandary, then, transforms into an expression of her corporeal versatility. Certainly a shot of Monroe’s hips stuck in the porthole speaks to the thwarted physicality of woman as mere object for visual consumption5; yet the framing of the porthole itself also provides a concrete context that determines Lorelei/Monroe’s subsequent embrace of her surroundings. Grasping the fabric of the blanket to her face, “adopting” the child as an extension of her body, Lorelei/Monroe merges with the material forms that surround, rather than bind, her lived-body. Her conjunction with a child here also recalls critical readings of the intrinsic instability of Lorelei’s character: Mulvey mentions how “Lorelei’s attitude to life zigzags” (1996: 49), and Dyer describes Lorelei/Monroe as being “simultaneously polar opposites” (1998b: 130). That is, Lorelei is both cunning and naïve in an intertwining so convoluted as to resist the differentiation between Girard’s mask and real face. (Morin himself described Monroe as a quintessential “good-bad girl” throughout her films in the 1950s [2005b (1957): 22; emphasis added]). With the hybridity of the child-woman so depicted in this sequence, however, the abstract notion of Lorelei/Monroe’s duality takes shape as an actual construction—a synthesized, continuous unity between the objective and subjective registers representative not of instability, but of versatility. Expanding on the motivations behind the strategy of coquetry, Girard writes in terms that imply an almost commercial interest in desire: “[E]veryone has to try to convert to his own benefit mimetism that is still seeking a point to fix on which it will always find by reference to other desires” (2003 [1978]: 371; emphasis added). With an implicit understanding of the mimetic crisis that impels the longing of the other, the woman casts herself as a coquette in order to control—or “convert to [her] own benefit”—the amorous interest of the disciple-subject continually searching for a model-object. Acknowledging the vagaries of attraction, the coquette ensures a measure of stability in her own identity as a pursued entity, a “point to fix on” in the equation of desire. Indeed, the famed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” sequence spectacularly expresses this delicate balance between the variable and absolute. Featuring a song that articulates the need for a material trace of ephemeral desire—“There may come a time / When some hard-boiled employer / Thinks you’re awful nice. / But get that ice or else no dice”—the musical number de-

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fines Lorelei’s attempt to “convert to her own benefit” the shifting economy between men and women. Cultivating her coquettish appeal whilst attesting to its motivating strategy, Lorelei performs a musical valentine to the objective criteria of the gold-digger, while Monroe herself reaches the Technicolor zenith of her role as the floating flash of the film. Lorelei/Monroe travels through the number with an air alternating between flirtatiousness and directness: utterly coy with the encircling men who offer jewelry, while in straightforward conference with the women dancers. She is, to borrow Girard’s term, the point to fix on in the scene, the punctum that pierces the gaze amidst the splendor of the vignette. Certainly this overtly theatrical rendering of the questions of subjectivity and objectivity (with women in the background literally objectified as chandeliers and candelabras and the men functioning as extensions of the jewelry they proffer), presents the ultimate spectacle of the exchange of the look.6 Yet the form of Lorelei/ Monroe herself, as she both revels in and expounds on her coquetry, is an even more unifying entity within the scope of the sequence. Wearing a rose-colored dress with a hint of black and, of course, diamond jewelry, Lorelei/Monroe assumes the landscape of the scene on her person—even as the contrasting tones of her blonde hair and fair skin assert the autonomy of her bodily identity. The scene is, then, the climactic realization of the continuous exchange between her subjective and objective selves. Celebrating both the strategy of Lorelei-as-gold-digger and the authenticity of Monroe’s photogenic impact, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” captures the star as she shifts between the registers of experience through an exchange of the look that ensures their equivalence. The dimensionality of the sequence becomes all the more apparent several scenes later, when Dorothy/Russell impersonates Lorelei/Monroe. Performing both Lorelei’s character and her song with all of the objective mannerisms but none of the subjective depth inherent in Monroe’s presence, Dorothy/Russell takes part in a masquerade that only emphasizes the complexity of the original figure. In this way, Monroe’s indispensability to Gentlemen supersedes her wry self-appraisal. More than “the blonde” referred to in the title, she is here one of the most fully realized Hollywood stars, glimmering as a punctum that, to borrow from Girard, represents the material and immaterial “point to fix on” (2003 [1978]: 371) in the fluctuating visual economy of the movie.

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Bus Stop: Impassioned Illumination Examining the significance of Monroe’s relationship to CinemaScope filmmaking in the 1950s, Lisa Cohen draws a parallel between the latter’s evocation of an expansive “postwar prosperity and anxiety” and the actress’ own “relation to . . . questions of excess, containment, and visibility” (1998: 273). Cohen goes on to analyze Monroe’s appearance in CinemaScope production How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953), a comedy glamorizing the intersection between capitalism and domesticity in a celebration of Monroe’s spectacular appeal. In the CinemaScope of Bus Stop (1956), though, the panoramic framing depicts realist vistas not of glorified femininity, but of identities in transition. As the characters dream of Hollywood & Vine, and angelic women beyond the immediate cinema-scope of the diegetic world, Bus Stop’s saloons, rodeos, bus interiors, and diners represent conditional realms that offer both the chance for interpersonal connection and the possibility of miscommunication. Barthes, however, has described the ways in which luminosity itself provides a means of communication between viewer and photographed subject: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me” (2000b [1980]: 80). Regarding light as a connection between photographed entity and viewer, Barthes defines it as “[a] sort of umbilical cord . . . a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed” (81; emphasis added). Though any of Monroe’s films capture the incandescence of her “flesh impact” (Arnold 2005: 26), Bus Stop signals a refinement of this embodied luminosity—a moment of transformation in which Monroe-as-Cherie channels her inherent radiance toward the creation of a nexus, an “umbilical cord,” between star, filmic body, and spectator. The romantic relationship between Cherie and Beau (Don Murray) parallels these questions of (missed) connection and (mis)communication. When the naive cowboy sees Cherie, a singer in a rundown bar who dreams of stardom in Hollywood, he pursues her with as much determination as he approaches his rodeo riding. Literally roping Cherie into joining him on his ranch, Beau overwhelms the young woman, until he realizes that he must, as she says, “treat . . . [her] with a little respect.” For Cherie, a character so concerned

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with what she calls her “direction” in life that she carries a map marking her path to Hollywood, the direction of love must lead toward a mutual understanding between two individuals. As she relates, “I’ve got to feel that whoever I marry has some real regard for me, aside from all that loving stuff.” Cherie seeks, then, a passion born of what Sobchack has called “an active devotion” to another, and a desire to “embrace [his or her] alterity as our own” (2004: 288–289; emphasis in original). Here, with Monroe’s luminosity further calling for the spectator, to paraphrase Barthes, to “share the skin” of her on-screen self, the luster of flesh impact replaces the mask of narcissism, and passion in Bus Stop evolves into a love affair of material mutuality. In her first scene in the film, Cherie/Monroe outlines the course of her life. After a small-town upbringing, she has been making her way across the country with the dream of fame and fortune in Hollywood. Transforming herself from what she calls a “hillbilly” to a “chanteuse,” Cherie plots the trajectory of her identity as clearly as she marks her path to Hollywood. As she explains to her friend, “I’ve been trying to be somebody.” With this exchange taking place after drunken cowboys burst into Cherie’s dressing room and grope her roughly, the words bespeak not simply a desire for stardom, but also a longing for inviolability, made possible in a fantasy world called Hollywood in which, as Cherie enthuses, “You get discovered, you get tested, with options and everything! And you get treated with a little respect, too.” A process of poignant juxtaposition constructs these introductory moments: the contrast between the young woman’s vulnerability and her dream of respect; the dingy dressing-room in which Cherie envisions the wonder of Hollywood & Vine; and, moreover, the musings on that locale given voice by a star who would have surely recognized the naiveté of Cherie’s perspective. As if underscoring this sense of disparate forces, the first few minutes of the dialogue take place with Cherie/Monroe sitting at a vanity table, her back to the camera and her face reflected in the mirror in a pose that highlights the distinction between actuality and projection. Yet in this placement of Monroe’s body between the gaze of the viewer and the mirroring of her image, the shot implicitly declares the actress’ proximity to the spectator and the filmic body itself. Establishing an immediate rapport with the physical form from which, to recall Barthes’s remark, “proceed radiations which ultimately touch” (2000b [1980]: 80) the spectator, this moment asserts the privileging of the actual self over the mask of illusion.

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In this way, Cherie’s subsequent rendition of “That Old Black Magic” represents not so much a performance as an exploration of her ideal self—a rehearsal, that is, for the day when she will be discovered. As Dyer notes, “[W]e see how she is producing her image” (1986: 60) in this musical number. Stepping onto a small stage, the lighting of which she controls by kicking at switches along its perimeter, Cherie sings in an earnest, off-key voice while adding a flourish to the lyrics with choreographed movements. In her first scene, Cherie spoke of her regard for movie stars and the way they “put over their songs and their gestures,” and this number confirms Cherie’s eager modeling of herself after those cinematic idols. Matching what Sobchack describes as the filmic body’s “visible representation . . . of activity coming into being and being” (2004: 146), the evident deliberation with which Cherie constructs herself as a chanteuse grants the spectator a kind of intimacy to this work, or rather identity, in progress. Cherie’s performance takes place in a wholly grounded environment, with drunken cowboys carousing in the smoky bar. But in a sequence comprised of the disparate elements of Cherie, the noisy crowd, and an infatuated Beau, the cohering point of focus remains the luminosity of Monroe’s form. Bathed in the spotlight that shines from her small stage, Cherie/Monroe consistently attracts the eye as, in Beau’s words, a “gleaming” entity, “pale and white” standing above the shadows of the saloon. Though her emerald and black costume seems to blend into the greenish-gray mist of the bar, Cherie/Monroe nonetheless stands in contrast to her surroundings through the luster of her flesh impact. Even when Cherie briefly changes the lighting to a vibrant red, the scarlet tones that suffuse her body serve to complement the whiteness of the skin that has absorbed this chromatic shift. If light in photography represents a “carnal medium” (Barthes 2000b [1980]: 81) uniting the body of the referent with the body of the viewer, then the radiance of Monroe in this sequence— linking as it does the disjointed facets of the diegetic situation—further connects her to the body of the film itself. Responding to her incandescence, Beau projects onto Cherie an idealized vision of femininity. She is his “angel,” a symbol of purity beyond the mire of carnal desires. After he has pursued Cherie and forced her to join him on the bus journey back to his home in Montana, a snowstorm forces the couple and their fellow passengers to spend the night at a diner. It is here that Cherie tries to dispel the young man’s illusions: “I ain’t the kind of girl you thought

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I was. . . . I’d had other boyfriends ’fore you. . . . Quite a few.” The exchange takes place in a medium-shot, with a panoramic CinemaScope framing that captures Beau and Cherie as they sit to the left and right, respectively, of the expansive space. For the duration of this single take, the shot is bisected between Beau, laconic in his disappointment, and Cherie, as she falteringly but bravely tells him about her “wicked life.” Adding to this sense of isolation is the division of illumination: where Beau appears shadowed, earth-bound by his heavy clothing and set expression, Cherie seems an extension of the light that shines through the window behind them. Against the backdrop of a white lace curtain, Cherie/Monroe grants fleshly parameters to the sunshine radiating from the exterior, her hair a reddish-gold and the skin of her face and upper chest a pale white.7 There is a weightless quality to Cherie/Monroe in this image, a delicate physicality heightened by the timbre of the actress’ voice as the soft (not to say breathy) soprano of Cherie/Monroe’s speaking voice creates an aural lightness that further enhances this ethereal suspension.8 Sobchack has set forth that “the passion of suffering”—whether as a personal or witnessed experience—evokes “an increased awareness of what it is to be a material object” (2004: 288; emphasis in original) vulnerable to the actions of others. In this scene, then, the passion of Cherie’s suffering takes shape in a gesture of fragile tactility. As she tries to assure Beau that he will be “better off ” without her, her hand flutters above him briefly and then comes to rest softly on his shoulder. In contrast to the roughness with which men, including the well-meaning Beau, have treated her, Cherie asserts herself with a gentleness—a lightness, in fact—that seeks Beau’s understanding even while accepting the possibility of his withholding it. Indeed, with this sense of vexed potential—either met or lost within the vast cinema-scope—Cherie and Beau’s eventual coming together provides not only a happy ending, but also a triumph of reconciliation. In a shared medium close-up, with Cherie’s upper body lying along the bottom of the frame and Beau leaning above her, the two merge in a body-landscape, a panorama of passionate recognition. As Beau tells Cherie, “I like you the way you are, so what do I care how you got that way?” Further exploring the passionate possibilities of the CinemaScope perspective is a subsequent close-up of Cherie/Monroe, one so extreme that it excludes the top of her head within the wide horizontal frame. Where the

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two-shot of Beau and Cherie makes manifest their romantic integration, this close-up of Cherie/Monroe appeals to the sensory investment of the spectator—the ultimate realization of that “shared skin” that unites the on- and off-screen dimensions. As director Joshua Logan described it, the shot reveals “every vein, every tiny bit of facial fuzz, the watery depths of her eyes, the detail of her skin” (in Rollyson 1993: 107) in its proximity to the landscape of the star’s face. Once again, Monroe’s luminosity serves as a sheen that fuses these discrete elements, even as it throws each into relief—and encourages a visuality as delicately caressing as Cherie/Monroe’s touch on Beau’s shoulder.

The Misfits: The (Im)mortality of the Lived-body In both diegetic and extra-diegetic terms, Huston’s The Misfits (1961) captures the sense of the elusive that Barthes attributed to the cinematic image. The screenplay, written by Arthur Miller, traces the quest of four individuals as they search for a place of belonging in the shifting world around them. Incarnating three of these wanderers are stars who would soon pass not only in front of the lens, but also in life itself: Gable suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after the film completed shooting, Monroe died in 1962, and Montgomery Clift died in 1966. The Misfits would be Monroe’s final completed film. As Graham McCann writes, “[E]ach viewing . . . is implicitly . . . a contact with what has ceased to be” (1988: 167). Watching the film with this knowledge, the viewer confronts the aura of death that haunts Barthes’s conception of the punctum. The camera depicts both “this will be and this has been . . . [the spectator] observe[s] . . . an anterior future of which death is the stake” (2000b [1980]: 96; emphasis in original). In photographic imagery, argues Barthes, “a simple click” (92) of the camera provides the boundary between life, present at the moment of the shot, and death, shadowing the final, developed composition. As Mulvey has elucidated, the preservation of the past in the present tense of an unreeling film itself inspires “questions that still seem imponderable: the nature of time, the fragility of human life and the boundary between life and death” (2006: 53). Indeed, Huston’s work presents life and death not as oppositions in a dichotomy, but as complementary forces that share a tangential relationship rendered visible within the cinematic form itself.

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Embodying this flux between life and death is Monroe herself, a figure whose live presence coexists with the fact of her untimely passing—which, due to a myriad of conspiracy theories, matches her life as a source of pop-culture fascination. Beyond such questions of lore, however, Monroe’s performance as divorcée Roslyn attests to her capacities of reconciliation—superseding the boundaries between not only corporeality and ethereality, mask and real self, but also life and death. In the black and white of Huston’s cinematography, Monroe’s flesh impact has never been more evident, nor has the Barthesian air, or “luminous shadow” (1993 [1980]: 110) of spirit that radiates from her person. In this elegiac evocation of Monroe as a cinematic floating flash, The Misfits represents the site within which the this will be and this has been of Monroe’s screen presence reaches its apex. Monroe’s first scene establishes this defining interplay between ideality and reality. Framed in medium-shot, Roslyn/Monroe sits before a mirror, applying make-up with shaking hands. The reflection of Monroe’s face to the left of the frame is the focus of the shot, while she herself is seated to the right with her back to the camera. Captured in the luminosity of the looking glass, her visage appears in all its famous beauty: simply, she wears the mask of Marilyn Monroe, movie star. As she turns away from the mirror to face the lens directly, however, the camera’s pan to the right reveals a somewhat different figure in medium close-up: a woman with swelling under her eyes and lines around them, the strain on her face so diffused in the reflection now altogether apparent. Rejecting the traditional star-imagery of the mirrored Monroe, this close-up explores the texture of her form, taking in her strands of platinum hair, fake eyelashes, and even the freckles on her arms. Where Monroe’s first moments on screen allow the audience to glimpse her lived-body in contrast to the veneer of conventional star-imagery, a later scene engages with the problematic coexistence between Marilyn the sex symbol and Monroe the actress. It opens with a medium-shot of six pin-ups of Monroe from her various glamour girl incarnations, hanging in Roslyn’s bedroom closet. As she shows another character, Guido (Eli Wallach), the bedroom, he stops before the door to stare at the photographs (figure 6.4). Embarrassed, she closes the closet door saying: “Don’t look at those, they’re nothing . . . a joke.” She finally pushes the fascinated man out of the room, and passes close to the camera as she herself walks out of the frame with a frustrated expression.

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Figure 6.4. The pin-ups: Guido (Wallach) and Roslyn (Monroe) in The Misfits (United Artists, 1961).

In this sequence, the spectator observes a kind of meta-dialogue between Monroe and yet another reflection: that of her past selves. Featured in her most clichéd poses of female stardom, the pinned-up Monroe recalls the Mulveyan object “cut to the measure” of the male gaze (2009: 26)—a one-dimensional figure existing on screen to satisfy a desirous perspective. Indeed, the scene recalls Barthes’s contention that photographed figures “do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down” (2000b [1980]: 57; emphasis in original) in contrast to animated cinematic subjects who pass through and beyond the frame. Admittedly, the film itself is not wholly innocent of momentary alliances with a reductive male gaze. There are, in fact, several male point-of-view shots that, like Guido in this scene, “fasten down” aspects of Monroe’s famous body in a fetishistic manner. Yet such shots hardly define the Marilyn Monroe of this scene, who, with her hair in braids and dressed in jeans with little make-up, is nearly unrecognizable as the woman in the pinups. As if paralleling Roslyn’s hope for a different future, Monroe the actress evades the Barthesian aura of death that haunts the fixed glamour shots; and though she would face her own mortality only a year after this passing before

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the lens, it is that same movie camera that ensures her very immortality as a star. McCann has described the character of Roslyn as having “the abstraction, and the intimacy, of a figure and an object in a dream” (1988: 155). Undoubtedly, the film acknowledges on both aesthetic and diegetic levels the oneiric qualities of Roslyn/Monroe. Throughout the work, though, she drifts back and forth between abstraction and the material plane. Indeed, the vision of the movie as a whole seems to convey an understanding of Monroe and her character as the ultimate misfit, an individual unable to find her place in either the ideal or the real. As Clift’s character remarks, “I can’t figure you floating around here like this,” to which Roslyn replies, “I don’t know where I belong.” A sequence early in the film captures Roslyn/Monroe’s search to belong, to connect her spirit with the physical world. After an impromptu party with the cowboys, Roslyn stumbles outside in the moonlight. Withdrawing from Guido’s drunken attempt to kiss her, Roslyn begins to dance in a graceful drifting movement toward a tree that stands in the middle of the yard. At first the camera pans to the left to follow this desultory ballet, but it soon remains motionless as Roslyn moves farther away and finally embraces the tree, collapsing her body against it. There is an eerie quality to this sequence, highlighted by the minor tones and discordance that shape the extra-diegetic music to which Roslyn/Monroe appears to be dancing; and the camera’s stasis bespeaks a reluctance to follow the woman any deeper into what quickly becomes an utterly private and nonperformative moment. Yet the natural elements with which Roslyn seeks to bond prevent the scene’s complete immersion in surreality. As she sways closer to the tree, Monroe seems to merge with the very landscape—her hair, her skin, and even the black of her dress becoming additional layers of texture to the dynamic palette of a frame already filled with moonlight and moving leaves. With this in mind, Sobchack’s theory of the unity of the look is especially appropriate: With the eye of the camera offering equal attention to phenomena beyond simply the human figure, Sobchack argues, film may reveal a “unity of transcendent being . . . in the flesh of the world” (2004: 301)—a transcendent unity for which Roslyn/Monroe longs. In clinging to the tree, she has claimed nature itself as the space within which her body, as part of the flesh of the world, finds continuous unity.

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At the conclusion of the film, Roslyn/Monroe again merges with her landscape—this time, in a moment of liberation from the men around her. After witnessing the almost grotesque spectacle of the cowboys roping and tying up mustangs that will be sold and killed for dog food, Roslyn/Monroe runs deeper into the Nevada desert. She appears in long-shot, a solitary figure against the panorama of desert sand, distant mountains, and blank sky. Screaming into her surroundings, she calls the men “killers . . . murderers . . . liars. You’re only happy when you can see something die.” As they listen to these words, the men are positioned in a medium-shot that appears claustrophobic in comparison to Roslyn/Monroe’s long-shot—what Rollyson describes as a “deliberately awkward” (1993: 181) technique that highlights the distance between the guilty triumvirate and Roslyn’s outrage. Within this vista, Roslyn/Monroe finds yet another moment of unity with her environment, now heightened by the Barthesian grain of her voice as it resounds through the landscape. Though early in the film, she laments her unrest—“The trouble is, I always end up back where I started”—this sequence marks a new beginning: the horses are freed, and Roslyn/Monroe and Gay/Gable leave the desert to begin a shared life. The final image is of a star in the night sky that the lovers follow, the same star that, earlier, Guido pointed to and remarked, “That star is so far away, that by the time the light from it reaches us here on earth, it might not even be up there anymore.” How well that statement defines the presence of any great cinematic star—but of Monroe especially. Contemporary spectators watch Monroe in any of her films with the understanding that, as Barthes puts forth, death will be and life has been. In The Misfits, however, the audience engages with the woman casting that luminous shadow, the lived-body from which such ethereality emanates. Suspending that “simple click” (Barthes 2000b [1980]: 92) between this will be and this has been, Marilyn Monroe is.

“The Last Glimmering of the Sacred” During the filming of The Misfits, Monroe and Huston spent an evening at a casino. When she asked Huston how to throw the dice, he replied, “Don’t think, honey, just throw. That’s the story of your life. Don’t think, do it” (in Guiles 1984 [1969]: 292). Years later, Barthes would describe the punctum as “a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but

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also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (2000b [1980]: 27). In applying Huston’s words to the punctum of Monroe’s presence on the screen, the director does not so much disparage the famously precise crafting of her performances as he calls on the effortlessness of her intimacy with the filmic body and diegetic character. Here, Huston refers not to accidents of winning or losing, but to the sheer exultation of simply throwing the dice in an on-screen existence— an act of faith that may be met, as Barthes notes, with poignancy, but just as probably with joy. Following its 1951 profiling of Hollywood’s “apprentice goddesses,” Life suggested, “if one of the dozen girls in this group lives up to her studio’s hope . . . it will feel that the old system is still strong enough to survive” (“Many Call. . .”: 41). Though Monroe did in fact, as the article wondered, “achieve”—even surpass, arguably—the “universal sex appeal” of predecessor Harlow (41), her phenomenal success reflected not the strength of the star system, but of her own on-screen impact. Indeed, throughout her career Monroe steadily evolved from an inhabitant of early 1950s performance time—the recuperative era of an unsettled Hollywood—into a relatively autonomous figure: traveling to New York City in the mid-1950s to study the method at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasburg, and forming Marilyn Monroe Production to independently pursue prestige projects like The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) with Laurence Olivier. Monroe’s appearance in All About Eve, then, was a “signpost to the future” of a changing industry (recalling Powdermaker’s phrase [1951: 38]) rather than an enhancement of an old system. In her final interview, in fact, Monroe further asserted her independence from the strictures of the studio system: “I want to say that the people—if I am a star—the people made me a star—no studio, no person, but the people did” (in Meryman 1962: 34). Recalling her earlier statement (“Even though I want people to understand, I’d much rather they understand on the screen” [in Goode 1986 [1963]: 199]), Monroe here suggests that it was indeed the people—her audience—who best understood her on the screen. The difficult filming of Monroe’s last, unfinished film, 1962’s Something’s Got to Give, highlighted the closing of a cinematic era whose traditions she had both inherited and exceeded.9 Financially shaken by the turmoil of TaylorBurton epic Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), Twentieth Century Fox made expendable the star who had greatly defined its success: With the understanding that, as one executive admitted, “No studio can afford her and

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Cleopatra” (in Maddox 1977: 172), Fox fired Monroe. In this last rush to recapture golden-age opulence, that is, no studio could afford two goddesses. Monroe would reference these continuing struggles with Twentieth Century Fox in a telegram sent only two months before she passed away, stating, “I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars.” Monroe ended the message succinctly, with words that spoke for every actress who had shared her own glimmering of the sacred, from the old system and beyond: “After all, all we demanded was our right to twinkle” (in Spoto 1993: 591–592).

Notes 1.

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

Certainly such questions of masks and femininity bring to mind Mary Ann Doane’s 1982 essay “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Doane here explores “[w]omanliness” as “a mask which can be worn or removed” (1991 [1982]: 25). Where Doane focuses on the expressly psychoanalytic implications of the relationship between woman, the masquerade, and the image, however, this chapter will seek to explore the phenomenological stakes of the interplay between the mask and the lived-bodies of the cinematic form, star, and spectator. Eve Sonnett, for instance, contests the notion that the actress’ “final state of stardom stands as a self-confirming truth” (2010: 58), pointing out that “historical conditions of real uncertainty are converted by the teleological trajectory into a retrospective narrative that admits nothing of the instability of the process of star construction” (66). Technically, the first starring role of Monroe’s career came in Ladies of the Chorus (Phil Karlson, 1948), a B-picture made at Columbia Pictures. In her discussion of the film, Maureen Turim describes the film as negotiating a “perniciously thin [boundary between] celebration [and] satire” (1990: 101). In their article on the film, Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca (1990) comment on the ways in which the mise en scène of the film resists crafting an overtly fetishistic image of either Lorelei/Monroe or Dorothy/Russell. Arbuthnot and Seneca view this instance of female objectification as an element of “sadistic fantasy” within the film, a moment deferential to “patriarchal relations of power between the sexes” (1990: 118). In considering the economy of the gaze circulating between both men and women throughout the movie, however, the image appears less sadistic than farcical. For this film, Monroe wore a very pale face powder to create the impression of what director Logan described as “a little nightclub singer who always went to bed

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8.

9.

at five or six in the morning after drinks . . . a girl who never really saw the sun” (in Rollyson 1993: 104). Sarah Churchwell points out that the notoriously breathy quality of Monroe’s voice is one of “the clichés about the Marilyn persona [that has] overtaken the reality of her performances. . . . Monroe used ‘breathiness’ when playing a certain kind of role, when creating a seductive moment” (2004: 57). Biographer Donald Spoto records figures detailing the studio’s predicament: “In June 1961, Fox had 29 producers, 41 writers and 2154 employees on its weekly payroll, working on 31 films; there were now [in 1962] 15 producers, 9 writers and 606 staff for only 9 films” (1993: 561).

CHAPTER 7

Neo-Screen Tests, Part One Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor In an interview taking place during the making of The Misfits, Clift commented on the responsibility of the performer to expand the parameters of cinema, moving from the mere reflection of experience to an exploration of its possibilities: “The only line I know of that’s wrong in Shakespeare is ‘Holding a mirror up to nature.’ You hold the magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror we would have no art” (in Goode 1986 [1963]: 95). Here, Clift proposes an exchange between off-screen perception and on-screen expression, an identification founded in the spectator’s and actor’s respective immersions in the nuances of experience. Claiming the capacity of film and its stars to transcend the frame of the screen-as-looking glass, Clift asserts the multidimensionality of a cine-existence. To transpose Clift’s words to the stars and films discussed in the preceding chapters, it could be argued that these lived-bodies of cinema do not merely hold a mirror up to a reductive understanding of a narcissistic nature—that is, a monologic obsession with one’s own reflection. Instead, in the dialogue between the demands of the real and the desire for the ideal that helps to define narcissism, each actress and heroine contributes her singular experience. These figures are incarnate expressions of classical-era Hollywood’s engagement with the mythic, giving form to a fascination with the ideal feminine that continues to resonate through the embodied awareness of the spectator. As the discussion of digital reanimation in chapter 5 suggested, however, contemporary media itself has recently sought to revise this connection between spectator and classic star through a broader process of what theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) have termed “remediation.” Through this process, an original work is reincarnated, as it were, in various other media formats—including DVD, cable channel showings, and online clips edited by fans. Bolter and Grusin have analyzed the “double logic” at play in the process of remediation, noting the paradoxical but compelling demands for hypermediacy and immediacy in a visual culture that “wants to erase its

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media in the very act of multiplying them” (5). Such inherent duality gives rise to “the hybrid character of film” itself (67), as each trip to a movie theater entails an engagement with associated media like trailers and posters, while at home audiences interact with the DVD menus and special features that accompany a single film. Simply put, classic films are, as Bolter and Grusin note, “caught in the logic” of the hypermediacy (82) that itself bears a narcissistic “self-awareness and . . . sense of satisfaction in [its pervasive] power” (148). In a historical arc punctuated by crises of transition—between silents and talkies, the revealed and the censored, and the dissolution of the studio system—classical Hollywood today encounters still another process of redefinition, introduced by the “proliferating screens” (following Will Straw’s [2000: 115] terms) of new media. Indeed, the era and its actresses are undergoing what could be termed a “neo-screen test.” Recalling the historical screen test that determined their futures as stars, these figures and their images—digitally compressed and transmitted—currently negotiate a remediated identity in computer, television, and mobile phone screens. If, as Bolter and Grusin (2000) have posited, the modern-day subject experiences a “succession of relationships with various applications [and] media (236), then both the contemporary viewer and classic star now share elements of a networked subjectivity that transposes cinematic engagement to a multimedia interface. Yet as Powdermaker proposed over fifty years ago, old Hollywood itself continually, somewhat uncannily, conveyed “signposts to the future” (1951: 38) that hinted at the preoccupations of modern-day visual culture. Consider not only the question of reanimation in performance time, but also the crisis of mimetic desire: in contemporary terms, the doubling of stars, narratives, and aesthetic approaches that characterized films like Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven, and Imitation of Life has broadened to include the doubling of media itself. From their original theatrical releases to television showings, VHS to DVD home-viewing formats, and now to online streaming, the celluloid forms of the movies and their stars are reprocessed through mimetic media. Classical films are, in fact, far more accessible to audiences in the guise of their media disciples. To paraphrase Girard’s description of a mimetic paradigm in which “the disciple . . . becomes model to his own model” (2003 [1978]: 299), the remediated incarnations of these movies assume a privileged position by virtue of their very immediacy in an age where the original model is confined to retrospective screenings and archives.

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Framed in terms of mimetic desire, then, remediation strives for “vanishing differences” (Girard 2003 [1978]: 299) between primary and secondary media works as well as the proliferation of the doubles themselves in a hypermediated society. With this contemporary context in mind, Mildred Pierce’s and Leave Her to Heaven’s troubled explorations of the double bear a particular resonance. As both films convey, the exchange between model and disciple demands sacrifice; the creation of the digital double of an analogue original is no exception. Lev Manovich explains that implicit in the lossy compression that enables the transfer between media are “loss of data, degradation, and noise” (2001: 55), qualifying the experience of that work to varying degrees. The material threat of the double haunting Mildred/Crawford and Ellen/ Tierney, then, has evolved into the threat of a compromised materiality. Furthermore, a movie like Cover Girl, or even One Touch of Venus and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, cultivates an intersection between the narrative itself and the cine-bodies of film and star in order to generate a brought-tolife effect that is today transposed to digital media. Recent theoretical works have analyzed the technological innovations that enable the spectator himself or herself to bring the star to life. Mulvey, for example, has explored the spectatorship enabled by contemporary digital capacities, in which the on-screen figure and his or her environment are “subordinated to manipulation and possession” (2006: 171) through the control panel of a DVD player or computer that animates and stills the star at will. Moreover, these questions of possession and elusiveness, stillness and motion, seem to coalesce in the phenomenon of editing and streaming clips online. As what Henry Jenkins calls “a media archive [for] amateur curators” (2008: 275) of culture, YouTube enables fans to construct and disseminate—or, to paraphrase Jenkins, produce, select, and distribute (2008: 275)—micro versions of films and television shows, interviews with celebrities, and even original tributes to stars. Whether editing epic cinematic interludes into minutes-long clips, or highlighting obscure images of a personal or cinephilic significance, the YouTube participant evolves from a possessive spectator into a possessive producer. Indeed, Jenkins has remarked that fair-use laws governing the use of copyrighted material are awkwardly suspended in the online culture of fandom. “Judges know what to do with people who have professional interests in the production and distribution of culture,” Jenkins writes, but “they don’t know what to do with amateurs” (2008: 198). It is these amateurs, however, who

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make myriad cinematic images instantly available to the public. Recalling the star-system process of cosmetically altering the female form—as discussed here in relation to stars including Hayworth and Gardner—the creation of these clips transposes such attentions to the cinematic body itself. That is, the modern-day fan may explore what had been the exclusive province of the studios and redefine a filmic form, whether in terms of a star or movie. Through such an intersection between contemporary visual culture and golden-age productions, the cinematic lifespan of these stars extends further, so that they are continually brought back to life in their roles as the eternal feminine, even as their aging bodies are continually brought back down to earth. Countering the vastness of the material is the continual miniaturization of its display. As Norma Desmond declared decades ago, the pictures and their screens have indeed gotten small: entire films may now be viewed on computer screens, mobile phones, and tablets. Where the preceding chapters have considered the scale of the star in terms of her subjective capaciousness, contemporary media demands an examination of her relationship to the shifting dimensions of the screen—which, however, is itself only part of a vaster mediascape which has, as the following suggests, always already been in flux. With this in mind, these final two chapters will return to the issues of reflection, magnification, and identification raised by Clift, as well as the questions of intimacy and scale these introduce. In closing the preceding chapter with Monroe’s performance in The Misfits, the study paused on the threshold of a post–studio era. Subsequent analyses here will take up the threads of that discussion in order to contextualize the classic star’s neo-screen test in contemporary visual culture—exploring, more precisely, how the dream factory itself anticipated this process of remediation. As the above suggests, classical Hollywood’s own productions and projections attest to a fluency in the language of hypermediacy.1 The following, then, will consider the “new media” of an old system: from the recuperative processes of the mid-1950s—as seen in Grace Kelly’s role as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story remake High Society (1956)—to the early days of a post–studio era, in Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton vehicle The VIPs (Anthony Asquith, 1963). Refracting golden-age sensibilities in a hypermediated context, these works present still another facet of narcissistic characterization: that of the star playing herself.

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Grace Kelly’s Fairy Tale In 1956 High Society would revisit—remediate—Tracy Lord’s frustrated pursuit of ideality, though with a number of variations. The film was a Technicolor musical, featuring Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. The Main Line Philadelphia setting had been transposed to Newport, Rhode Island. Perhaps most strikingly, Tracy herself had found a new interpreter in the form of Grace Kelly. Sobchack has written of the cinematic form’s propensity, like that of its human counterpart, for maturation, as production techniques gradually become obsolete and make way for subsequent technological generations (1992: 252), and certainly this musical reincarnation of Tracy’s story speaks to an evolutionary process taking place in Hollywood at the time. Transposing the ebullient wit of The Philadelphia Story to the lyrical charm of Cole Porter songs, the movie gestured toward MGM’s famed command of the musical genre, while also utilizing Technicolor and, moreover, the VistaVision process. In this reframing of the 1941 classic within the widescreen vogue, High Society presented a prestige production that drew audiences away from television screens and into theaters—making it the studio’s most successful film of the year (Spoto 2010: 184). A further draw for audiences was clearly Grace Kelly herself. With her “Hitchcock Blonde” style diverging from Hepburn’s more idiosyncratic appeal, Kelly ostensibly stood in sharp contrast to her predecessor. Still, in her own enactment of Tracy’s humanization, Kelly also invited an examination of the star-figure—though this time, in a process of hypermediated valediction rather than reascension. After announcing her engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco, Kelly returned to MGM to begin work on what would be her last picture for the studio. Among the numerous commentaries on the star and her nuptials was a Life profile that remarked on Kelly’s affinity with the High Society material: “By a fascinating coincidence [the film] amount[s] to [a] full-blown charade . . . on the life . . . of Miss Grace Kelly . . . who herself grew up in the conservative society of Philadelphia” (“Her Movie Prelude. . .”: 47). The casting of Kelly as Tracy represents, perhaps, less a coincidence than a virtual inevitability. A curious interjection in a 1955 Time article, for example, described the teenage Kelly as “even then remote and self-absorbed,” (“The Girl in White Gloves”: 3), and in her senior year at the American Academy of

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Dramatic Arts, she played the role of Tracy in a student production (Spada 1987: 215). Indeed, where Kelly’s classical beauty evokes none of the interrogation of conventional femininity that predecessor Hepburn demands, the two actresses share—along with Tracy herself—an aura of WASP-ish elegance. In 1957 sociologist Thomas Harris wrote of Kelly’s “carefully disseminated ‘lady’ image” within press materials, characterizing her as a “product of wealth, genteel breeding and close family ties” (1991 [1957]: 42). This “lady” image, however, is only one of the elements that contribute to Kelly’s cultural complexity. In 1963 sociologist Violette Morin studied Kelly’s persona in an article entitled “Les Olympiennes,” placing her among those iconic figures whose gifts of talent and beauty enable them to surpass the constraints of mortality. Morin remarks that Kelly—in her superlative existence as both movie star and princess—bears an idealized identity that nearly “defies reality” (1963: 112).2 As numerous documentaries and biographies have explored, Kelly lingers in the popular consciousness as both the refined princess in a modern fairy tale and the subject of sensational Hollywood lore; she is remembered alternately as a determined actress who triumphed in her profession and Her Serene Highness of Monaco who, following her royal marriage, never made another film. The enigmatic quality of Kelly’s appeal exceeds the juxtaposition of her public roles to include other dualities. Commenting on the star’s roles as a “Hitchcock Blonde,” critic Stella Bruzzi notes that Kelly’s “perfection” as such lies in her “ability to sustain [the] duality” between “pure and sexy” (2000: 206)—thus reflecting the director’s own description of her as a “snow-covered volcano” (in Lacey 1994: 11). In films like Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955), Hitchcock highlights Kelly’s versatility. Statuesque in her classical beauty and refinement, yet intense in her physical desires, she negotiates a balance between the carnal and the ideal—as made manifest in the classic close-up kiss in Rear Window. She moves toward the camera until her face suffuses the screen, then appears in profile as she kisses James Stewart in slow motion—the purposeful sensuality of the act heightened by the camera’s own deliberate meditation on her face. Taking place in an oneiric rather than realist temporality, the shot frames both Kelly’s earthly passion and the otherworldly rapture of its enactment. In related terms, a number of Hollywood colleagues described a merging between Kelly’s on-screen image and her off-screen identity. Making state-

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ments that, as Bruzzi notes, speak to Kelly’s “fluid transition from woman to icon,” they insisted that her image represented “an effortless extension of her real self” (2000: 206). As if to substantiate the sheer authenticity of Kelly’s appeal, famed costume designer Edith Head maintained, “[S]he dressed like Grace Kelly, and she was Grace Kelly” (Head and Ardmore 1959: 149). Costar Cary Grant remarked that Kelly made acting “look so easy. Some people said Grace was just being herself. Well, that’s the toughest thing to do if you’re an actor, because if you’re yourself, the audience feels as though that person is living and breathing, just being natural” (in Spada 1987: 152). Aligning her personal appearance with the fashion iconography of her star persona (“dressed like Grace Kelly”), perfecting the technique of “just being natural,” the nuances of the Kelly effect suggest that the actress’ savoir faire pur, to borrow a phrase from Violette Morin (1963: 110), lay in her ability to elide the distinction between nature and design. These assertions of authenticity aside, the notion of High Society as a charade does, in fact, resonate in a consideration of Kelly’s performance. Throughout the film, there is the sense that she plays Hepburn playing Tracy—an effect highlighted by the interior sets that seem at times clumsily theatrical as they attempt to fill the VistaVision frame. Indeed, one of Kelly’s finest moments in the movie occurs when Tracy overwhelms Mike and Liz with her high society “act.” In this scene, the homage to Hepburn cedes to a broader performance of a performance, and Kelly deftly meets the challenge of high comedy. This reflexive quality pervades various elements of High Society, however, rendering The Philadelphia Story’s own slippages between ideality and reality, star and role, all the more overt. For example, Armstrong plays himself, and in a duet with Sinatra, crooner Crosby refers to him in an aside as “one of the newer fellas.” Furthermore, in a gesture subtly acknowledging her upcoming wedding, Kelly wore her own engagement ring in the movie. Even the change in setting—from Philadelphia to the shores of Newport— evokes a sense of old Hollywood, with the mansions along the coast seen in an early aerial shot recalling California’s oceanfront grandeur. The thematic focus on these houses, in fact, presents a (far-more) lighthearted variation on the spatial preoccupations of Sunset Boulevard. Just as Norma Desmond shares an organic affinity with her crumbling home, Tracy likens herself to the “graveyard” along the Newport coast, those mansions abandoned through sudden misfortune or sold for taxes. “Why don’t you compare me to one of

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these homes?,” she demands of Mike. “Boarded-up, a thing of the past, a relic.” Here, Tracy/Kelly’s words resound beyond the narrative to articulate the vulnerability of Hollywood itself, proving fallible in the age of television. Spoken by one of MGM’s last contract stars on the threshold of an exodus from Hollywood, an actress paying homage to a classical-era icon in a remake of one of her most famous films, the statement captures the poignancy of a shifting extra- and intra-diegetic landscape. Yet Mike’s reply tempers this melancholy and proclaims instead the transformative power of the present: “Tear the boards down, open the doors, throw open the windows and let the wind blow through.” He then segues into the song “You’re Sensational,” a ballad that pays tribute to Tracy’s latent passion (“I’ve no proof when people say / You’re more or less aloof / But you’re sensational”). Converse to Dexter’s condemnation of Tracy’s otherworldly perfection, Mike’s song exalts the joys of a flesh-and-blood existence. Just as the privileging of Hepburn’s material form in The Philadelphia Story defies a depiction of the female star as a goddess aloof from the audience, Mike’s call to “tear down” the façade of obsolete expectations asserts Tracy/Kelly’s sensational impact, with each unreeling of the film declaring her a being of the moment rather than “a thing of the past.” Audiences, however, were equally concerned with Kelly’s own off-screen present and future. In her memoir, Edith Head noted that on the announcement of Kelly’s engagement, the press “besieged” her, demanding anecdotes about the star, to which Head replied, “Grace doesn’t allow anecdotes to happen to her” (Head and Ardmore 1959: 152). Related in a pithy, even offhand tone, Head’s remark nonetheless relates, once again, to those greater dualities of Kelly’s persona. It asserts the actress’ distance from trite episodes that court press coverage, even as it is ultimately (and ironically) an anecdote about her. It describes Kelly as in control and inaccessible, yet it speaks to the frenzied media attention that claimed her for the public. Indeed, in 1955 a cover story in Time quoted Kelly’s credo as a public figure: “A person has to keep something to herself, or your life is just a layout in a magazine” (“The Girl. . .”: 2). Uncannily presaging Tracy’s diegetic conflict with a sensationalist press, Kelly’s attitude heightened all the more the intertextual dimensionality of High Society. Thomas Harris noted that Kelly rarely spoke for herself in studio publicity, “as if it would be beneath her dignity” (1991 [1957]: 42) to engage in self-promotion, yet her very appearance in High Society allowed her to engage

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performatively with the pressures of celebrity so affecting her own life. For Kelly, the media machinations in High Society—the intrusion of journalists and photographers, the commercialization of personal experience—exceeded the narrative to parallel the attention surrounding her own wedding. Biographer Donald Spoto points out that from the announcement of her engagement on 6 January to her wedding on 19 April 1956, the press covered virtually every aspect of the star and her nuptials in daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines (2010: 181). As Kelly would later confide to him, she “didn’t even read a press clipping for over a year, because it was just a nightmare, really, the whole thing” (in Spoto: 191). This attention reached its apex in MGM’s filming of the nuptials and the subsequent release of a short documentary, The Wedding in Monaco (1956). From this perspective, Kelly’s performance as Tracy—a society princess about to marry and finding her wedding besieged by the press—reverberates with biographical elements. At the beginning of the film, Tracy/Kelly decries the idea of having “intimate pictures of my wedding in that barber-shop magazine,” and she goes on to protest angrily that she will not “be examined, undressed, and generally humiliated at 15 cents a copy.” Later, she demands of reporter Mike, “Do you consider what you do worthwhile? Making a living off of other people’s lives and misfortunes?” Aware of Kelly as a public figure who declared in print her desire to “keep something to herself,” the audience would perhaps regard Tracy’s moments of indignation as assertions of Kelly’s own (“The Girl. . .”: 2). Contemporary viewers, with the information produced retrospectively in documentaries and biographies, might also consider the reality of a Tracy in love. As Kelly herself described to Spoto, the filming of High Society “was one my most enjoyable experiences. . . . I was in love, I was engaged, I was singing a song called ‘True Love.’ . . . We had such fun making that picture” (in Spoto 2010: 186). Beyond crafting a meta-commentary on the nature of stardom, then, High Society also considers a more specific phenomenon: Kelly’s heralded transition to Princess Grace. With its intertwining of extra-diegetic events and narrative structure, High Society recalls Sobchack’s assertion that the extrafilmic awareness of the spectator enables him or her to determine “what constitutes as memory, fiction, or document” (1999: 253) in a given movie. That is, the existential knowledge of the viewer guides him or her in an understanding of the moving image, even as its bodies vary in their perspective (fictional, documen-

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tary, home movie) on the world. As these points of view may share cinematic space with each other in a single film, the spectator must call on his or her own perspectival versatility—a process exemplified by the viewing of High Society.3 In watching this movie, the spectator may appreciate it as a meta-commentary on Kelly-as-star and the frenzy surrounding her wedding, a record of a personal and cultural turning point, and/or, finally, a romantic-comedy fiction. As today’s viewing conditions further reframe the film within the formats of DVD, cable movie channels, and online streaming, the work attests not only to the complexities of identification, but also to the eras of hypermediation in which it was produced and is currently engaged. Exceeding, to paraphrase her own statement, layouts in magazine profiles, Grace Kelly as Princess Grace suffuses the channels of visual culture—past and present. Sobchack also mentions, however, that commercial interests often underlie “how the irreal can be charged by the real” (2004: 276). That is, film studios may publicize a given movie with an emphasis on its relationship to extrafilmic events. Certainly MGM took part in such strategizing during and after the making of High Society, crafting a deliberate nexus between its star and her future identity—or what Hitchcock called “the best role of her life” (in Spoto 2010: 190). The 9 April 1956 issue of Life, for example, reported that MGM would premiere Kelly’s penultimate film, The Swan (Charles Vidor), in her hometown of Philadelphia five days before the wedding, a marketing decision made all the more effective by the fact that Kelly played a princess in the movie (“Her Movie Prelude. . .”: 45).4 And in the trailer for High Society, released in July 1956, Bing Crosby (playing himself in dialogue with television personality Ed Sullivan) refers to Kelly as “la princesse.” In addition to featuring a picture of Kelly watching High Society in a screening room with producer Sol C. Siegal, the Life article also notes, the actress “got a big head start on her trousseau when her doting studio in a parting burst of generosity gave her the 12 costumes she wore in High Society ” (“Her Movie Prelude. . .”: 50). (Belying the exuberance of the commentary, however, is Kelly’s exhausted expression in the accompanying photo, showing her in black sunglasses on her last day on the studio lot as she and an assistant carry the dresses.) MGM also insisted on paying for the wedding dress and hired Helen Rose, who had designed the costumes for High Society, as its designer (in Spoto 2010: 175). Though MGM had consistently loaned Kelly out to rival studios throughout her contract, and indeed suspended her for refusing un-

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satisfactory roles (150), they nonetheless sought prestige by association with her. While High Society itself characterized Tracy as “like a statue to be worshipped,” MGM’s contribution to Kelly’s new role as princess—and the press coverage it engendered—claimed the actress herself as the studio’s own idol. Yet a certain anxiety arguably underlay this eager appropriation of Princess Grace, for MGM was negotiating the sea change of television, introducing its own series, MGM Parade, in 1955. In August 1956 the series would premiere the first feature-length film to be shown on television in its entirety. Shortly thereafter, studio chief Dore Schary resigned, signaling the close of one of the majors of golden-age production (Schatz 1988: 460–462). The passing of time has somewhat diminished the role of MGM in both High Society and the making of Princess Grace, with references to it surfacing now only in film histories and biographies. Such a shift recalls Sobchack’s remark that historical provisionality tempers the “charge of the real” with which a spectator regards a fictional work (2004: 278). Certainly MGM’s significance for Kelly fades in her contemporary canonization as Hitchcock muse and Princess Grace.5 The phenomenon with which the studio so sought to align itself, however, remains undiminished by the passing of time and historical circumstances. Indeed, High Society’s commentary on the frustrations of celebrity resonates further in considering Kelly’s place in today’s hypermediated visual culture. In a mise en abyme of documentary-esque elements, Tracy’s indignation gives voice to Kelly’s own, even as the dialogue anticipates the contemporary media attention and manipulation that would surpass the barrage of publicity in the 1950s. Rather than sold at “15 cents a copy,” as Tracy decried, Tracy/Kelly can be streamed “for free!” in online versions of High Society. And while Kelly once described her wish to have been married “in a secluded chapel somewhere” (in Spoto 2010: 176), the MGM docu-short The Wedding in Monaco has its own online fan base.6 The filming of this legendary wedding, in fact, provides a context within which to consider the remediation of Kelly’s image. Just as the anticipation of the event gave rise to the documentary implications of High Society and the movie’s subsequent popularity, The Wedding in Monaco itself now stands as a medium through which fans may gain proximity to Kelly’s modern-day fairy tale. Yet this filmic body remains elusive to home-viewing audiences not necessarily fluent in the online streaming of media. For example, the cable channel TCM owns the rights to the film and occasionally broadcasts it, but

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has not released it on DVD. Accordingly, fan sites like www.gracekellyonline .com encourage fans to contact TCM and vote for its release. (In similar terms, the site also has a survey page that allows visitors to vote on their favorite Kelly film and costar.) Following Clay Shirky’s conceptualization of the “feedback loop” (2010: 88) among participants in online media, the digital dialogue concerning Kelly speaks to fans’ self-perpetuating “indulgence in feelings of membership and sharing” (88). Interjecting their own sensibilities into the discourse surrounding Kelly, sharing opinions and information, virtual strangers in fact contribute to—and help generate—the fairy tale they laud. To paraphrase Sobchack, these viewers impose the charge of their subjective experience on Kelly’s image and cultural legacy. Evocative of Mulvey’s notion of possessive spectatorship, this literal network of appropriative gestures signals a desire to move beyond the moving image and engage directly with the Grace Kelly and/as Princess Grace—even if that ostensible directness is actually mediated by channels of visual culture. Indeed, for all of the historical and contemporary preoccupation with the transition from Grace Kelly to Princess Grace, the woman herself continually maintained her famed reserve. Offering her own charge of the real to the legend, Kelly would remark, “The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale” (in Spoto 2010: xviv).

The Value of The VIPs In an early sequence from The VIPs, millionaire Paul Andros (Burton) holds up a magazine and comments to Frances (Taylor), his socialite wife, “There’s another [photograph] of you, full-page . . . I can’t open one of these without finding you. It’s a phenomenon. . . . This doesn’t do you justice, but none of them do.” Commenting not only on her beauty, but also on the reproduction of that beauty in various media channels, Paul/Burton makes a diegetic statement that resonates on an extra-diegetic level—referring, that is, to the phenomenon of Elizabeth Taylor herself. Where Kelly’s role in High Society speaks to the felicitous intertwining of media spin and narrative concerns, the treatment of Taylor and Burton in The VIPs highlights the commercial interdependence between the charge of the real and narrative characterization. In a variation on the value of visuality so intrinsic to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Taylor and Burton here introduce the value of personality. As Burton himself ruefully com-

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mented, “They say we generate more business activity than one of the smaller African nations” (in Kashner and Schoenberger 2010: 194). The Taylor-Burton pairing of The VIPs is, of course, only the sequel to a story that began several years earlier, with the making of Cleopatra. During Taylor’s affair with costar Burton—which he referred to as le scandale—the sensational press attention set the stage for a paparazzi age that today exploits the indiscretions of the rich and famous in print, television, and online outlets. If Monroe’s conflicts with Twentieth Century Fox during the making of Something’s Got to Give spoke to the dissolving powers of the studio and its star system, then the scandale of Cleopatra could be seen as an incendiary conclusion—rather than an illustrious valediction—to its golden age. Yet Taylor herself belonged to the legacy of that haute Hollywood era. Cinematically “born” as a child star at MGM, she matured into a leading actress in grand works like George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951) and Giant (1956), Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), and Richard Brooks’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1958). During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Taylor thrived as a figure of on- and off-screen romantic drama, a stable presence even as Hollywood itself shifted from the era of studio dominance to freelancing actors and directors. Moreover, in the context of the actresses discussed here, Taylor emerges as a kindred constant. She became a winning child actor in 1944’s National Velvet (directed by Clarence Brown, who made a number of Garbo’s films) only a year before Mildred Pierce and Leave Her to Heaven were released, and assumed young adult roles in the later part of the decade so identified with Hayworth. Cementing her star presence in the 1950s, virtually unaffected by the disenfranchising collapse of the studio system, Taylor starred with Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) and presented a foil to Monroe’s platinum appeal. Finally, Taylor was present throughout the filming of Night of the Iguana, accompanying Burton as he costarred with Gardner. It was with the combination of her already-remarkable career and the allure of her off-screen persona that Taylor agreed to make Cleopatra for Twentieth Century Fox—for the price of one million dollars (Maddox 1977: 157). At the height of her beauty, Taylor portrayed the ancient queen in a spectacular rendering of the interplay between star and role theorized by Morin. As director Mankiewicz stated, “For [Taylor], living life was a kind of acting” (in Spoto 1995: 196). After Taylor fell in love with Burton, cast as Mark Antony, the couple embarked on an adulterous affair that captured the attention of

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the world—and, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett points out, transposed “the sacred energy of Dionysian excess” linked with the historical Antony and Cleopatra to contemporary culture (1990: 356). Transforming the engagement between star and role into an excessive suffusion of on- and off-screen sensuality, Taylor and Burton appeared to the public as, in Mankiewicz’ words, “two actors who did not know when the show was over” (in Spoto 1995: 198).7 It should be clarified, however, that this discussion is not an attempt to define Taylor’s persona as narcissistic in itself. Indeed, her legendary marriages and devotion to Burton would undermine such a characterization—and suggest, moreover, that Taylor speaks more to the romantic myth of completion between man and woman rather than to the myth of Narcissus. In the present tense of le scandale, however, certain press material regarded her as an utterly self-obsessed figure. An acerbic Life article from 1962, entitled “Poor, Dear Little Cleopatra,” chronicled Taylor’s romantic history by depicting her as “a princess who lived happily ever after, after, after and after” with her various husbands (34). The article also cast aspersions on Taylor’s abilities as a mother, noting that in her “headlong rush from one love to the next, the existence of children in her own home or any other has produced no noticeable sobering effect” (38). Depicting her relationship with Burton as symptomatic of a chronic pursuit of self-gratification, this article condemns Taylor as surely (if snidely) as the Vatican itself would. In 1964, however, Taylor herself would reflect on le scandale in more measured terms, clarifying her approach to life as a celebrity: “I have almost zero contact with the public, and I try not to read much of what’s written about me” (in Meryman 1964: 74). She went on, “I don’t know—there’s a point past which I cannot go just for the public’s benefit. There’s always this terrible danger, when one talks about oneself, of sounding like you’re trying to capitalize on your emotions, your relationships. . . . My life has lacked dignity. Let’s face it. But I shouldn’t add to it by going into something that doesn’t belong to the public” (82). Taylor’s personal reservations did not, however, prevent the film industry itself from capitalizing on—and, as in The VIPs, glamorizing—her and Burton’s tumultuous relationship. Indeed, the suffusion of attention inaugurated by Cleopatra rendered the couple themselves an original, pop-culture object of remediation, as if each magazine article, paparazzi photo, and subsequent performance in films like The Sandpiper (Vincente Minnelli, 1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966), and The Taming of the

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Shrew (Franco Zeffirelli, 1967) transformed the lovers into new, alluring media incarnations. The trailer for The VIPs typified this tendency. As various voices with continental accents declaim the stars’ names, a montage of their images in newspapers and magazine covers is overlain with titles heralding, “The most talked-about, the most read-about, the most famous couple in the entire world . . . Elizabeth Taylor [and] Richard Burton, TOGETHER, for the first time, in a MODERN LOVE STORY” (emphasis in original). Not only anticipating Paul’s dialogue about his wife’s media ubiquity, the trailer also signals the remediating impetus of the movie itself—its transposing, that is, of the Taylor-Burton archetype first seen in Cleopatra into a contemporary setting. As biographers Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger point out, screenwriter Terrence Rattigan (who also wrote Separate Tables) revised the characters of Paul and Frances Andros in order to “take advantage of [the stars’] notoriety,” introducing into the mise-en-scène accoutrements of celebrity like a helicopter, Rolls Royce, and the jewelry that Taylor so famously loved (2010: 44). One character, played by Rod Taylor, even offers the requisite musing on the “emotional cost” of being such a VIP: “I suppose people envy us—the big expense-account cars; being escorted into V.I.P. lounges. I wonder if they realize the cost of it all.” Adding further drama to the filming was the fact that Burton had not yet divorced his wife, though his romance with Taylor continued unabated (49–52). Paralleling this triangle was the diegetic one between Paul, Frances, and Marc (Louis Jourdan), the gigolo for whom she is planning to leave her husband. In a particularly sensational exchange in which Paul tries to convince Frances to stay with him, he demands to know what allure Marc—whom he calls a “male whore”—holds for her: “If it isn’t sex, what is it, then?” In the relaxed post-PCA era, it was possible for such charged dialogue to appear on screen; yet even more than make explicit the adult content of the film, the lines would have satisfied the audience’s more prurient expectations of Taylor and Burton. As Taylor herself remarked later, “Our love is married love now. But there is still a suggestion, I suppose, of rampant sex on the wild” (in Meryman 1964: 74). Expounding on that sensual suggestion, and capitalizing on their alreadylegendary off-screen emotions, The VIPs cultivated a “charge of the real” (Sobchack 2004: 278) between Taylor and Burton that promised intimacy with the

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world’s most famous couple, but instead added only another level of remediation to their personas. Even in its most maudlin moments, however, the film frames Taylor and Burton’s embodied affinity, which the former would describe (in reference to The Sandpiper) as “something funny . . . happen[ing] on the screen. We’re supposed to play two people in love and . . . when we look at each other, it’s like our eyes have fingers and they grab ahold” (in Meryman 1964: 76). As if highlighting the sheer physicality of the stars’ on-screen union, the overdetermined dialogue in the scene referenced above suddenly turns to violence as Paul grabs Frances’s arm and slams her into a mirrored door. A medium-shot frames the couple’s intertwined arms, pressed against the shattered glass that radiates from their bodies as, in stunned silence, the action pauses. However inadvertently, and allegorically, this shot captures the charge of the real that shadowed(s) Taylor and Burton’s public lives and screen performances: framing the tension between their immediate corporeality and its disseminated reflections, and depicting the aggressive marking of their joined bodies as the source from which the refractions generate. In a conjunction between the mirror and magnifying glass spoken of by Clift, the image reflects the couple’s celebrity while magnifying its explosive implications.

Re-remediation: Lohan and Kidman With a note of particular poignancy, the shot from The VIPs also presaged the eventual implosion of the stars’ personal union—though their pop-culture legacy endures in today’s demand for the hypermediation and overexposure of celebrities. Examining recent cases brought to court by stars attempting to protect the rights to their images and/or privacy, Philip Drake has noted that celebrity in the contemporary moment bespeaks “a nexus of discourses: cultural, legal and economic” (2007: 228); a refracted series of meanings, that is, deriving from a single performing body. Certainly the online manipulation of the star image by fans and detractors alike heightens the complexities of what Drake terms “the ownership of symbolic and economic capital” (227) represented by the celebrity, as the possessive spectatorship theorized by Mulvey extends to include acts of possessive production. Yet there are further productions that negotiate the delicate balance between benefiting from and paying homage to the golden-age personality. Consider, once again, the

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September 2011 advertisement for J’adore perfume, featuring a digitally animated Kelly milling around a fashion show with other legends like Dietrich and Monroe, where only a few months earlier the dress Kate Middleton wore at her royal wedding to Prince William inspired numerous comparisons to Kelly’s wedding in Monaco decades before.8 And in 2010 London’s Victoria and Albert Museum held the exhibition “Grace Kelly: Style Icon,” showing costumes from Kelly’s films as well as ensembles from her life as Princess Grace. Where materials related to Kelly are often characterized as tributes to a paragon of femininity—as with the Hermès Kelly bag, for instance—Taylor herself took control over the value of her personality. Creating a range of perfumes (White Diamonds, Passion) that actively played on her glamorous public identity, Taylor’s enterprise earned her millions of dollars. In 2002 she published My Love Affair with Jewelry, a chronicle of her extraordinary personal collection. Most remarkable, however, was Taylor’s use of her celebrity to support AIDS research and education in the mid-1980s, then a fledgling movement. Testifying in front of Congress, raising funds, and developing the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Taylor capitalized on her hypermediated, ubiquitous image in order to support her humanitarian efforts: “If people wanted to come to an AIDS event to see whether I was fat or thin, pretty or not, or really had violet eyes, then great, just come. My fame finally made sense to me” (in Lord 2012: 162). Years after their final film performances, and even their deaths, these stars are ever (re)evaluated—remediated—according to the influx of materials (in terms of both biography and actual objects) that infuse the cultural scene. Indeed, as new media continues to reincarnate the original bodies of star and film, carrying on in the tradition of hypermediation established by classical Hollywood itself, it could be argued that—to once again use the cliché—the more things change, the more they stay the same. Heightening this effect of re-remediation is the recent cycle of star biopics, a trend in the industry that reprises the overt myth-making of 1950s performance time. In 2011 Michelle Williams played Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis); and in The Aviator (2004), Martin Scorsese recreated the world of Howard Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), complete with Cate Blanchett portraying Katharine Hepburn and featuring Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner. Adding still another dimension to the engagement between performer and role, as well as the mimetic immersion between model and disciple, the biopic phenomenon

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includes the interplay between star as star—and, moreover, the notion of historical actress as diegetic character. In this way, the saga of media attention associated with Taylor and Kelly, and typified by films like The VIPs and High Society, continues today with recent cinematic works: the 2012 TV-movie Liz & Dick (Lloyd Kramer), starring former child-star Lindsay Lohan as Taylor in a chronicle of her marriage to Burton; and the forthcoming Grace of Monaco (Olivier Dahan, 2014), in which Nicole Kidman plays the titular princess. In her New York Times review of Liz & Dick, Alessandra Stanley finds that “there is something a little embarrassing about an industry that keeps trying to replicate stars who are inimitable,” though she indirectly acknowledges the value of personality in her assertion that “[s]tudios feel safer financing projects that offer something audiences already recognize” (2012). Certainly the decision to cast Lohan as Taylor expanded this notion of the pop-culture familiar to include the overexposed—capitalizing, that is, on Lohan’s recent infamy in order to craft a veritable mise en abyme of sensationalism. At the center of various scandals (including substance-abuse problems and time in jail), Lohan and her relatively unsavory public image introduced an element of the carnivalesque to the biopic. The movie’s marketing campaign played up this sensibility. In a style derivative of the reality-charged trailer for The VIPs, a poster for the production— featuring an image of Lohan as Taylor—was emblazoned with key words like Controversial Love Affairs, Child Star, Scandal, Paparazzi. All of these words, in fact, could have described either Taylor or the troubled actress who appeared in her guise. Articles in celebrity magazines, furthermore, reported that Lohan was “obsessing [about] getting into the Hollywood legend’s head” (Buckland 2012). They also quoted the movie’s costume designer as saying, “You’d swear it was Elizabeth. . . . She just walked into the clothes and became Elizabeth Taylor” (in McNeil 2012). Comments from Lohan herself highlighted the doubling-effect of casting: “Everything I’ve gone through made me ready to play Liz” (in “Lindsey Lohan on. . .” 2012). Yet even in comparing their life experiences, Lohan attempted to differentiate herself from her predecessor. Distinguishing between Taylor’s struggles with drinking and her own substance abuse, Lohan declared, “Elizabeth was drunk on sets. I’ve never been drunk on set, ever” (in “Lindsey Lohan on. . .”). In an evolution of the mimetic crisis—from narrative conflicts, off-screen rivalry between star and costar, and now to tensions between stars of alto-

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gether different generations and status—Lohan’s relationship to model-figure Taylor represents a twinning of (over-)identification and a desire for independent recognition. For years, though, the starlet herself has cultivated this sense of vanishing differences, to recall Girard’s terms (2003 [1978]: 299), as if investing the value of her personality in that of golden-age stars. In 2008 she appeared on the cover of New York magazine as Monroe, photographed by Bert Stern in a recreation of the famous “last sitting” from 1962; and in 2011, she was featured on the cover of Playboy in homage to photos of Monroe that had appeared in a 1953 pictorial. Furthermore, Lohan recently developed a clothing company with the name 6126—Monroe’s birthday. Aligning herself with—arguably capitalizing on—the memory of golden-age performers in an almost compulsive fashion, Lohan speaks to a crisis of celebrity in this new era of hypermediation.9 A volatile figure seeking a stable public identity by assuming those of her predecessors, Lohan remediates herself—even as her own original image remains amorphous and associated with past potential. If Lohan’s performance as Taylor casts an unsettled/unsettling charge of the real over the latter’s contemporary remediation, then Kidman’s Kelly continues the dialogue between fact and fairy tale that began with High Society. In contrast to the fraught associations evoked by Lohan and Liz & Dick, Kidman’s casting as Kelly has been received with equanimity. There is, of course, a dimension of prestige to Grace of Monaco that was lacking in Liz & Dick—with Kelly’s life played out in a feature-film rather than a television drama, and portrayed by an Oscar-winning actress rather than a scandal-ridden starlet. Indeed, the discourse of overidentification that surrounded Lohan’s performance cedes here to one that simultaneously acknowledges and underplays comparisons. In a recent interview, Kidman related, “There was a period in my life that was very similar. Although it wasn’t royalty, there was a rarefied air, living in a big place in Hollywood. So I had some kind of perspective on that. . . . Not so much now though. I live a much quieter life” (in Potter 2013: 64; emphasis in original). In still another statement, Kidman emphasized her “respectful performance,” describing the process as “exciting but at first it was daunting. At the same time I had studied her and felt a kind of tenderness towards her” (in Low 2013). Yet for all of Kidman’s finesse, Grace of Monaco has itself evoked negative press—from Kelly’s royal family, no less. In January 2013 Kelly’s children released a statement condemning the film as “pure fiction”: “[T]his film does not constitute a biographical work but portrays only a part of

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her life and has been pointlessly glamorised and contains important historical inaccuracies as well as scenes of pure fiction” (in Child 2013). The interweaving of fiction and documentary that characterized High Society and The VIPs, then, endures in the modern-day retellings of its stars’ lives, in this way highlighting and perpetuating the merging of myth and biography so defining to the phenomenon of Grace Kelly/Princess Grace since the 1950s, and the Taylor-Burton pairing of the 1960s. In contemporary culture, the wave of hypermediacy does not so much reduce the stars to layouts in a magazine (“There’s another one of you, full-page”) but multiplies their images in biopics and photo shoots, as well as on fan sites, in home-viewing formats, and through innumerable windows both still and streaming. Through such sources, the longing for intimate access to these figures continues unabated—and is experienced not only by press and public, but also now by the next generation of stars who (re)interpret their lives.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

In related terms, Mulvey has commented on the suffusion of extra-diegetic materials like film stills, posters, and pin-ups that created a “bridge between” the movie itself and the off-screen reality of the spectator (2006: 161). Translation mine; the original French text reads “défier la réalité.” As Sobchack elucidates, “[O]ur identification is . . . as fluid, dynamic, and idiosyncratic as it is fixed and conventional. One viewer’s fiction may be another’s filmsouvenir; one viewer’s documentary, another’s fiction” (1999: 253). Considering The Swan’s well-publicized alignment of Kelly’s narrative and extrafilmic roles, a similar reading of the film as meta-commentary on the star could take place; yet the fact that Kelly was not yet engaged to Rainier during the making of the film complicates a docufiction interpretation. Time’s 1982 obituary of Princess Grace, for example, discusses To Catch a Thief (produced by Paramount Pictures) at length, but does not mention MGM. “The Princess from Hollywood,” Time 27 September (1982). Accessed in online archives. Viewers can access High Society, for example, at http://www.alluc.org/movies/ watch-High-Society-1956-online/215163.html and http://www.solarmovie.eu/ watch-high-society-1956.html, as well as on YouTube. The wedding film even has its own Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wedding-inMonaco/107234246032439?sk=info.

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7.

8.

9.

Heightening the Taylor-Burton drama were tales of the escalating costs of the production itself, which nearly drove Mankiewicz to a nervous breakdown and almost bankrupt the studio (see Hughes-Hallett 1990: 355–364). See, for instance, Time’s “From One Princess to Another: Kate Middleton’s Grace Kelly Inspired Dress” (29 April, 2011). Retrieved from http://newsfeed.time .com/2011/04/29/from-one-princess-to-another-kate-middletons-grace-kellyinspired-dress/. In related terms, the proliferation of reality television and online social networks has inspired celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky to examine The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America (2009). Featuring case studies of narcissistic celebrities, the work also includes a Narcissistic Personality Inventory test for readers who want to know if they themselves are narcissists. (The irony, of course, is that Dr. Pinsky is himself a reality television star.)

CHAPTER 8

Neo-Screen Tests, Part Two The Search for Scarlett Continues

Where Lohan’s compulsive pursuit of associations with classical stars speaks to the instability of her own public identity, Kidman’s performance as Kelly may be regarded as part of a broader trajectory toward iconicity—one that has, however, attracted less-than-enthusiastic commentary. In 2004, after costarring with Kidman in the drama Birth (Jonathan Glazer), Lauren Bacall protested when an interviewer described the former as a legend: “She’s not a legend. She’s a beginner. What is this ‘legend’? She can’t be a legend at whatever age she is.” Kidman hastened to insist that she was “thrilled that [Bacall] dismissed the legend stuff. To put me in a category I don’t belong burdens me. . . . [I] thanked her.”1 Beyond recalling the tension between “Hollywood women” spoken of by Bette Davis decades before (in Surmelion 1940: 88), and even the careful language of celebrity that (as shown throughout this study) has characterized fan magazines since the early days of the star system, the Bacall-Kidman exchange also invites a simpler, more basic question in the post–golden age: What, in fact, makes a Hollywood legend? As the stars and roles profiled in this book suggest, the concept of the feminine ideal is a fluid one. Where audiences once sought the “divinity” of a Garbo, they eventually responded to the lushness of the 1940s love goddesses. Even as spectators were drawn to Monroe’s dual evocation of Hollywood’s “sacred” past and as-yet-unknown future, they also invested in late-classical figures like Kelly and Taylor, whose on-screen presences invited an association with their off-screen lives. Furthermore, figures like Katharine Hepburn, Gene Tierney, and Gloria Swanson demanded that their viewers recognize such variances in visual pleasure. Yet these shifts speak to more than mere changes in the film industry and cultural mores. Instead, they attest to the existential versatility of star and spectator— and that of their shared relationship, in all its moments of rapture and rupture, to paraphrase Sobchack (1992: 286).

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In the current age of digital technology, however, questions of star-making have become literal rather than abstract. In 2002 Andrew Niccol’s film S1mOne parodied this disjuncture between humanity and technology, old Hollywood and the new. Addressing the industry’s reliance on the digital, S1mOne relates the travails of a director (played by Al Pacino) who discovers a software program that allows him to create a simulated “ideal” actress. Composed of computer files that have isolated the essential elements of iconic female stars, Simone (named after the computer program Simulation One) is constructed through an Emotions Index, Body Catalog, and, most interestingly, a Legends Library archiving the manner and voice of hundreds of golden-age stars. Accordingly, Simone has what one character calls “the voice of a young Jane Fonda, the body of Sophia Loren, the grace of Grace Kelly, and the face of Audrey Hepburn combined with an angel.” An unknowing, adoring public makes Simone an international star, bestowing on a digital image an utterly (and ironically) visceral passion. The film arguably captures the incipience of a new kind of nostalgia—not for the glamour of bygone Hollywood, but for the human body itself in an age where stars may be, as Simone’s director/creator proclaims, “digitized” rather than born. Yet the notion of the neo-screen test highlights the classical star’s own digital rebirth, especially in relation to the online-release of historical screen tests. Indeed, the streamed screen test exemplifies the double bind of remediation discussed by Bolter and Grusin (2000). As moments recording the incipience of (sometimes legendary) careers, screen tests offer a heightened intimacy between viewer and star, a sense of transparent immediacy that is, however, made possible only through the hypermediation of material long relegated to archives. Considering the significance of screen tests in terms of both the footage itself and its contemporary implications, the following will examine the YouTube-streamed tests of stars Paulette Goddard and Lana Turner for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. This is not, it should be noted, to introduce an altogether new topic at the conclusion of the book, but rather to reflect on how the many dialogues explored in these chapters (between corporeality and ideality, fan and star, role and star, past and present) continue to play out and do not themselves conclude. As Hortense Powdermaker asserted decades ago, “Hollywood is in flux, and represents a changing situation” (1951: 38). A return to the origins of a legendary character-

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ization, while highlighting its dynamic after-life, signals not only a culmination of the abiding concerns of this study, but also an affirmation of Hollywood’s past as present. In the new mediascape, each film, each performance, “represents a changing situation” indeed—one that resists resolution. Certainly Gone with the Wind provides a context appropriate to this book’s concerns: the character Scarlett O’Hara herself—remediated from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel into cinema—bearing a narcissistic drive that both ensures her survival through a war and renders her blind to the reality of others; the film-historical significance of the casting process and the numerous actresses who auditioned; and the sheer, iconic ubiquity of Scarlett/Vivien Leigh in popular culture. Will Straw has remarked that even as the “proliferating screens” of new media diffuse, miniaturize, and compromise the quality of cinematic works, the channels “through which these texts travel and accumulate the markers of distinct brands and identities” (2000: 116) heighten the spectator’s ability to recognize those works. In a related sense, the many representations of Scarlett O’Hara/Leigh have created a cultural brand immediately identifiable as such. Documentaries, books, and parodies; calendars, dolls, and Christmas ornaments—all craft a commercial and cultural discourse that simultaneously depends on and exceeds the affect of Leigh’s performance itself. As Molly Haskell notes in her study of the Gone with the Wind phenomenon, producer David O. Selznick wanted to cast an unknown as Scarlett because a major star would “be likely to change and shape or even dilute the part” (2009: 61); yet today, audiences approach Leigh and Scarlett as virtually a dual entity.2 The very cultish fascination surrounding Gone with the Wind, however, ensures that Scarlett and Leigh share historical space with the series of actresses who also pursued the role. In a variation on the “what could have been” temporality of performance time, various making-of accounts in print and film chronicle the testing of Goddard and Turner, as well as stars like Jean Arthur and Joan Bennett. Neither wholly fictional nor entirely documentary, the extant screen tests call for a process of identification that shifts between an awareness of a given star’s greater cinematic context and knowledge of the narrative itself. Indeed, the screen tests recall Sobchack’s analysis of the nonfiction film experience: Like the film souvenir or home movie, they offer “incantatory and procurative moments” that “evoke presence . . . the whole ensemble of a well-known person’s gestures and comportment” (1999: 247; emphasis in original). Awakening recollections of and associations with the

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stars themselves, as well as comparisons to Leigh-as-Scarlett, the Gone with the Wind screen tests offer microcosms of cinematic experience. Footage exists, for instance, of an eighteen-year-old Turner playing the scene in which Scarlett tries to convince Ashley to run away with her after the war. Instantly recognizable from Turner’s performances in films like Ziegfeld Girl (Robert Z. Leonard, 1941) and The Postman Always Rings Twice are her dramatic gestures—the shifting of her shoulders and arms, a furrowed brow—while other features of the Turner presence are not yet fully formed or even evident. Her voice, so carefully modulated in films like Imitation of Life and Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957), is high-pitched and nearly cracks with emotion. Her famously symmetrical face is seen only in profile—a positioning due perhaps to an inexperience before the camera as much as the direction of the test itself. Watching Turner test for Scarlett, then, holds a magnifying glass to both her youthful inexperience and the polish of her eventual screen style. And even as it allows the audience to glimpse Turner’s presence-in-progress, the test also offers an alternative vision of Scarlett in the defining scene: Turner plays her as an impatient juvenile, verging on petulant. Leigh, however, would appear both grave and beseeching. The Goddard test of the same scene introduces yet another element to the hypothetical cinematic Scarlett. Where Turner would become a legend of the studio era, Goddard is today perhaps best remembered for her roles as a sardonic divorcée in ensemble film The Women (George Cukor, 1939) and the gamine in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936)—as well as for being the leading candidate for Scarlett before Selznick encountered Leigh. Yet at the time of the Gone with the Wind casting, Goddard was Chaplin’s paramour in an out-of-wedlock romance that represented, as Haskell notes, “a scandal risk” for the production (2009: 68). Considering the relative paucity of enduring Goddard films, it is arguably this biographical information that dominates a contemporary understanding of the actress—rendering her extensive tests for the part more facets of her Hollywood lore than reflections of a greater oeuvre. There is, indeed, a certain grounded sensibility to her fragments of a performance, contrasting both Leigh’s ethereal elegance and the evocative quality of Turner’s interlude as Scarlett. In the scene with Ashley, Goddard is fierce as she proclaims her desire to escape, desperate to convince him to come with her, and carnal as she finally embraces him. In color footage from an earlier scene, director George Cukor is heard off-screen coaxing Goddard to not look

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“so hard.” With the awareness that Goddard would not win the part, there is arguably a particular poignancy to these images of Goddard trying to match the director’s conception of Scarlett—attempting, that is, to unite her bodily form with an abstract ideal of the character. The public’s conception of Scarlett represented an equally formidable ideal. Haskell notes that throughout testing over a thousand young women for over two years, Selznick engaged directly with the public, “whose opinions and temperature he gauged through polls, letters, newspaper stories, and fan magazines” (2009: 50, 69). It could be argued, in fact, that this interaction between mass audience and filmmaker/producer presaged the networking of the viewer and cinematic subjectivity so prevalent in today’s visual culture. Where, for example, these moments featuring Goddard and Turner were once screened expressly for Selznick and his associates, they are now available not only through documentaries, but also in collections of clips posted on YouTube. The post “Gone with the Wind Tests” is a case in point, excerpting archival material from television documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind (David Hinton, 1988), and allowing viewers to offer their opinion on the casting over fifty years later.3 “Of all the ones that didn’t get the part, Paulette Goddard seemed closest,” writes one viewer, but “Vivien was the perfect movie Scarlett.” Another comment dismisses Turner as “a ‘broad.’ . . . [S]he played herself in everything.” Still another clip collates the existing Leigh screen tests, inspiring one viewer to comment, “She poured so much of her heart and soul into [the] tests,” while by contrast, another claims, “Goddard was far more suitable for the part.”4 Recalling the “feedback loop” theorized by Shirky, contemporary fans continue to contribute their viewpoints on a decades-old question of casting that is, nonetheless, continually (re)circulated through the media network. Bolter and Grusin (2000) have noted that the hypermediated subject “oscillates between media—moves from window to window, from application to application—and her identity is constituted by those oscillations” (236). Equally oscillating in her networked affiliations is the classic star herself, shifting from window to window and application to application along with the contemporary spectator who moves the mouse or taps a touch screen. If the screen tests provide a microcosm of broader interchanges between star, role, and film itself, as well as the interplay between star and her overall image, then the networking of these tests provides a media parallel to this dynamic of re-

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duction and expansion. Like the “incantatory and procurative moments” of the screen tests (borrowing Sobchack’s terms [1999: 247]) that metonymically capture the past even as they gesture to the actress’ future, the online dimensions of the star continually shift between the miniature—whether in thumbnail images, compressed data, or edited clips—and the full screen. To recall Norma Desmond’s credo, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small”; and beyond its narrative significance, her statement asserts the vastness of the star’s affect—her ability to perform, exist—even within the unstable frame of contemporary visuality. The narcissistic subjectivities examined in this book, then, endure in a continual process of evolution, as each woman engages in her unique dialogue between the demands of reality and the possibility of ideality, the past and the present, film history and fiction. To phrase the issue in terms borrowed from Garbo’s monologue in Queen Christina, the narcissistic woman does not belong to myth as merely “a symbol . . . eternal, changeless, an abstraction.” She is, rather, “mortal and changeable, with desires and impulses, hopes and despairs” that impel her to strive beyond reality for her realization of the ideal—whether it take shape in the notion of a perfect self or a child, a lover or the glory of the past. Just as each star and role defies the strict delineation of the real and ideal, so too does the ever-evolving experience of the spectator himself or herself resist a relationship to film founded in the dichotomies of subject/object, active/passive. Eve Harrington once dreamed of “waves of love coming over the footlights”; yet through an embodied cinematic spectatorship, the actress and her audience share an even more material engagement. As both on- and off-screen figure approach ideality and falter from grace in the tradition of Narcissus himself, such a visceral approach imbues that emotional investment with a sensory sensitivity. In this way, the narcissistic woman of classical Hollywood exists beyond the looking glass—within reach.

Notes 1.

“Kidman Is OK with Bacall’s Critique,” UPI.com, 28 September 2004. Retrieved from http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2004/09/28/Kidman-is-OK-withBacalls-critique/UPI-16491096393807/.

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2.

3. 4.

Leigh, of course, shares a similar engagement with the character of Blanche DuBois from her 1951 performance in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xmfLHXiAhA. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17nqHTMWD_0&feature=related.

Filmography All About Eve. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Perf. Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. Twentieth Century Fox, 1950. Anna Christie. Dir. Clarence Brown. Perf. Greta Garbo, Marie Dressler, Charles Bickford. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1931. The Asphalt Jungle. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Sterling Hayden and Louis Calhern. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1950. Baby Face. Dir. Alfred E. Green. Perf. Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent. Warner Bros., 1933. Barefoot Contessa. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Perf. Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart. United Artists, 1954. Birth. Dir. Jonathan Glazer. Perf. Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall. New Line Cinema, 2004. Bus Stop. Dir. Joshua Logan. Perf. Marilyn Monroe and Don Murray. Twentieth Century Fox, 1956. Cleopatra. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Perf. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Twentieth Century Fox, 1963. Cover Girl. Dir. Charles Vidor. Perf. Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. Columbia Pictures, 1944. Don’t Bother to Knock. Dir. Roy Ward Baker. Perf. Marilyn Monroe and Richard Widmark. Twentieth Century Fox, 1950. Double Indemnity. Dir. Billy Wilder. Perf. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. Paramount Pictures, 1944. Down to Earth. Dir. Alexander Hall. Perf. Rita Hayworth and Larry Parks. Columbia Pictures, 1947. Flesh and the Devil. Dir. Clarence Brown. Perf. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1927. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Dir. Howard Hawks. Perf. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Twentieth Century Fox, 1953. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Perf. Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. Twentieth Century Fox, 1947. Gilda. Dir. Charles Vidor. Perf. Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Columbia Pictures, 1946. Gone with the Wind. Dir. Victor Fleming. Perf. Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Selznick International Pictures, 1939. Grace of Monaco. Dir. Olivier Dahan. Perf. Nicole Kidman and Tim Roth. Stone Angels, 2014. Grand Hotel. Dir. Edmund Goulding. Perf. Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932.

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High Society. Dir. Charles Walters. Perf. Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956. How to Marry a Millionaire. Dir. Jean Negulesco. Perf. Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe. Twentieth Century Fox, 1953. Imitation of Life. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Perf. Lana Turner and Sandra Dee. Universal Pictures, 1959. Katharine Hepburn: All About Me. Dir. David Heeley. Perf. Katharine Hepburn. Turner Pictures, 1993. The Killers. Dir. Robert Siodmak. Perf. Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Universal Pictures, 1946. Ladies of the Chorus. Dir. Phil Karlson. Perf, Marilyn Monroe and Zachary Scott. Columbia Pictures, 1948. The Lady from Shanghai. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. Columbia Pictures, 1948. Laura. Dir. Otto Preminger. Perf. Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. Twentieth Century Fox, 1944. Leave Her to Heaven. Dir. John M. Stahl. Perf. Gene Tierney, Jeanne Crain, Cornel Wilde. Twentieth Century Fox, 1945. The Little Foxes. Dir. William Wyler. Perf. Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall. The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1941. Liz & Dick. Dir. Lloyd Kramer. Perf. Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler. Silver Screen Pictures, 2012. The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind. Dir. David Hinton. Turner Entertainment, 1988. Mildred Pierce. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Perf. Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Zachary Scott. Warner Bros., 1945. The Misfits. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. United Artists, 1961. Mommie Dearest. Dir. Frank Perry. Perf. Faye Dunaway and Diana Scarwid. Paramount Pictures, 1981. Niagara. Dir. Henry Hathaway. Perf. Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotton, and Jean Peters. Twentieth Century Fox, 1953. Night of the Iguana. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1964. Ninotchka. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Perf. Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1939. One Touch of Venus. Dir. William A. Seiter. Perf. Ava Gardner and Robert Walker. Universal Pictures, 1948. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Dir. Albert Lewin. Perf. Ava Gardner and James Mason. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1951. Peyton Place. Dir. Mark Robson. Perf. Lana Turner and Lee Philips. Twentieth Century Fox, 1957.

FILMOGRAPHY 181

The Philadelphia Story. Dir. George Cukor. Perf. Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1940. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Dir. Tay Garnett. Perf. John Garfield and Lana Turner. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1946. The Prince and the Showgirl. Dir. Laurence Olivier. Perf. Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier. Warner Bros., 1957. Queen Christina. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. Perf. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1933. Queen Kelly. Dir. Erich von Stroheim. Perf. Gloria Swanson and Walter Byron. Gloria Swanson Pictures, 1929. The Rainmaker. Dir. Joseph Anthony. Perf. Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. Paramount Pictures, 1956. The Razor’s Edge. Dir. Edmund Goulding. Perf. Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, Anne Baxter. Twentieth Century Fox, 1946. Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. James Stewart and Grace Kelly. Paramount Pictures, 1954. Red-Headed Woman. Dir. Jack Conway. Perf. Jean Harlow and Chester Morris. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1932. The Sandpiper. Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Perf. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1965. Scarlet Street. Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett. Universal Studios, 1945. Separate Tables. Dir. Delbert Mann. Perf. Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster, David Niven. United Artists, 1958. S1mOne. Dir. Andrew Niccol. Perf. Al Pacino. New Line Cinema, 2002. A Streetcar Named Desire. Dir. Elia Kazan. Perf. Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Warner Bros., 1951. Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. Perf. William Holden and Gloria Swanson. Paramount Pictures, 1950. The Swan. Dir. Charles Vidor. Perf. Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness. Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1956. Sylvia Scarlett. Dir. George Cukor. Perf. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. RKO Radio Pictures, 1935. The Temptress. Dir. Fred Niblo. Perf. Greta Garbo and Antonio Moreno. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1926. Three on a Match. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Perf. Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, Bette Davis. Warner Bros., 1932. To Catch a Thief. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. Paramount Pictures, 1955. Two-Faced Woman. Dir. George Cukor. Perf. Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1941.

182 FILMOGRAPHY

The VIPs. Dir. Anthony Asquith. Perf. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rod Taylor. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1963. The Wedding in Monaco. Dir. Jean Masson. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Dir. Robert Aldrich. Perf. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Warner Bros., 1962. Whirlpool. Dir. Otto Preminger. Perf. Gene Tierney and Richard Conte. Twentieth Century Fox, 1949. Woman of the Year. Dir. George Stevens. Perf. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1942. The Women. Dir. George Cukor. Perf. Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard, Norma Shearer. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939. Women in Defense. Perf. Katharine Hepburn. Office of Emergency Management, 1941. Ziegfeld Girl. Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Perf. Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1941.

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Index A aging, 8, 11, 52, 106, 154 in All About Eve, 119, 124n4 of Ava Gardner, 96, 99–101 (see also Night of the Iguana) of Greta Garbo, 16, 17, 32–33 of Rita Hayworth, 95, 96, 97–99, 101 (see also Separate Tables) in Sunset Boulevard, 112 All About Eve, 1, 2, 11, 14, 124n2, 126, 128, 148 and performance time, 105–107, 114–122, 124 See also Anne Baxter; Bette Davis; Joseph L. Maniewicz; Marilyn Monroe Anna Christie, 10, 17, 18, 23, 26–29, 30, 32, 33n6, 55, 57. See also Greta Garbo B Baby Face, 80 Bacall, Lauren, 172 Bakhtin, M.M., 11, 106, 111, 124n3. See also chronotope The Barefoot Contessa, 88, 89, 104 Barthes, Roland, 11, 16, 18, 34, 37 and the punctum 129–131, 132, 139–141, 143–145, 147, 148 Bates, Barbara, 1, 120 Baxter, Anne, 1, 11, 115–117, 126 Beugnet, Martine, 40, 58, 69, 71 Biery, Ruth, 3, 110–111, 122 biopics, 105, 110, 167–170. See also Liz & Dick; Grace of Monaco Blyth, Ann, 56, 57, 64, 66–68, 69, 77 Bolter, Jay David, 5–6, 151–152, 173, 176

Bow, Clara, 60, 82, 128 Burton, Richard, 99, 148, 154, 162–166, 168, 170, 171n7 Bus Stop, 11, 129, 139–143. See also Marilyn Monroe C chronotope, 11, 124n3 lounge time, 106, 124n3 performance time, 103–125. See also All About Eve; Sunset Boulevard CinemaScope, 75, 104, 127, 139, 142 Cleopatra, 148–149, 163–164, 165. See also Richard Burton; Joseph L. Mankiewicz; Elizabeth Taylor Clift, Montgomery, 6, 143, 146, 151, 154, 166 Cover Girl, 81, 84–88, 89, 95, 153. See also Rita Hayworth Crain, Jeanne, 57, 69–71, 73–74, 77 Crawford, Joan, 10, 14, 17, 31, 34n11, 35, 36, 53, 56–57, 69, 84, 153 and the double, 59–61, 62, 63–64, 66–68, 75–76, 77 See also Mildred Pierce Crawford, Christina, 14, 75–76. See also Mommie Dearest Cukor, George, 32, 36, 46, 53n4, 54n9, 175 D Davis, Bette, 1, 11, 53, 59, 60, 115–117, 125n6, 172 and performance time, 117, 119, 122, 124n2, 126 See also All About Eve Deleuze, Gilles, 117, 118, 120

194 INDEX

DeMille, Cecil B., 107, 109, 113, 114 Dietrich, Marlene, 15n2, 36, 53n1, 123, 128, 167 digital animation, 6, 11, 122–124, 151, 167 as related to questions of reanimation, 122–124, 152 Doane, Mary Ann, 5, 9–10, 13, 70, 72, 73, 77n1, 78n5, 112, 149n1. See also feminist film theory dominant fiction, 43–44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 55, 88, 101 Don’t Bother to Knock, 11, 129, 131–133, 134. See also Marilyn Monroe double, the, 8, 9, 10, 26–29, 55–78, 80, 106, 115, 120–121, 153. See also Anna Christie; Leave Her to Heaven; Mildred Pierce; mimetic rivalry Double Indemnity, 55, 65, 80, 125n5 Down to Earth, 81, 95. See also Rita Hayworth Dressler, Marie, 26. See also Anna Christie Dyer, Richard, 6, 14, 60, 93, 97, 101n4, 134, 137, 141. See also star studies E embodied visuality, 2–3, 5, 10, 12–15, 39, 43–49, 62, 131, 135, 151, 177. See also Laura U. Marks; Vivian Sobchack F feedback loop, 162, 176 feminist film theory, 5, 9–10, 13, 15n2, 135, 149n1. See also Mary Ann Doane; Laura Mulvey film noir, 11–12, 55–56, 57, 59, 63, 65, 68–69, 75, 79–80, 81, 90, 94, 104, 106, 125n7, 133 Fischer, Lucy, 59, 78n7, 102n6, 111, 112, 123 Flesh and the Devil, 10, 16, 18, 20–22, 27. See also Greta Garbo Freud, Sigmund, 7–8, 15n1, 58–59, 64, 69

G Gable, Clark, 126, 143, 147. See also The Misfits Garbo, Greta, 1, 4, 10, 16–18, 34nn1–2, 34n4, 34nn9–10, 35–36, 37, 42, 53, 53n1, 57, 80, 128, 163, 172, 177 in Anna Christie, 23, 26–29, 34n6 end of career of, 32–33 in Flesh and the Devil, 20–22 in Grand Hotel, 29–32 in The Temptress, 23–26, 34n7 and Thalberg, 22–23, 34n11 (see also Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) and transition to talkies, 18–20, 23, 27–29, 31–32, 90, 106 Gardner, Ava, 6, 10, 102n5, 127, 154, 163, 167 aging of in Night of the Iguana, 96, 99–101 as natural beauty, 88–89, 100 in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, 94–95 and the Production Code, 81 voice of in The Killers, 88, 90–94 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 8, 11, 129, 134– 138, 162. See also Marilyn Monroe Gilda, 81, 83, 91, 93–94, 95, 101n4. See also Rita Hayworth Girard, René, 5, 10, 11, 14, 15n1 and mimetic rivalry, 57, 58–59, 66, 71, 73, 76, 152–153, 169 and narcissism, 8, 127, 130, 131, 135, 137, 138 Goddard, Paulette, 173, 174, 175–176. See also Gone with the Wind; neo-screen tests Gone with the Wind, 173, 174–176 Grable, Betty, 82, 84 Grace of Monaco, 168, 169–170. See also biopics; Grace Kelly; Nicole Kidman Grand Hotel, 8, 10, 17, 18, 30–32, 35, 60. See also Greta Garbo

index 195

Grant, Cary, 36, 43–49, 53nn4–5. See also Katharine Hepburn; The Philadelphia Story Grusin, Richard, 5–6, 151–152, 173, 176 H Harlow, Jean, 35, 80, 82, 83, 128, 131, 148 Haskell, Molly, 54n9, 174, 175, 176. See also Gone with the Wind Hayworth, Rita, 6, 10, 53, 88, 90, 101n3, 102n5, 128, 163 aging of in Separate Tables, 96–99, 101, 127 in Down to Earth, 95 in Gilda, 91, 93–94, 101n4 in The Lady from Shanghai, 94, 95, 96, 102n6 as love goddess, 82–83. See also Winthrop Sargeant metamorphosis of, 83–84, 86, 154 and Production Code, 81 relationship to filmic body in Cover Girl, 84–88, 89 Head, Edith, 157, 158 Hepburn, Katharine, 1, 8, 10, 35–37, 53nn1–3, 55, 57, 62, 80, 84, 86, 93, 129, 163, 167, 172 career of, 37–38, 52–53, 54n6 with Cary Grant, 43–49, 53nn4–5, 54n8 in The Philadelphia Story, 38–49, 66, 155, 156, 157, 158 in Woman of the Year, 49–52, 54n9, 106 High Society, 14, 154, 155–162, 168, 169, 170, 170n6 Hitchcock, Alfred, 53n5, 96, 116, 155, 156, 160, 161 hypermediation, 5, 11, 151–153, 154, 155, 160, 166–167, 169, 170, 173, 176. See also new media; remediation Huston, John, 75, 96, 99, 100, 126, 128, 143, 144, 147–148

I Imitation of Life, 74–75, 127, 152, 175 K Kelly, Grace, 6, 11, 53n5, 123, 124, 154, 167, 168, 170n4, 171n8, 173 duality of, 156–157 and Grace of Monaco, 169–170, 172 in High Society, 14, 155–162 and MGM, 160–161, 170n5 and The Wedding in Monaco, 161–162 See also neo-screen tests Kidman, Nicole, 168, 169, 172 The Killers, 81, 88, 90–94, 99. See also Ava Gardner L Lacan, Jacques, 5, 9, 44, 58, 132 The Lady from Shanghai, 94, 95, 96, 102n6. See also Rita Hayworth; Orson Welles Lancaster, Burt, 52, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98 Laura, 61, 62, 76. See also Gene Tierney The Little Foxes, 116, 125n6. See also Bette Davis Liz & Dick, 168–169 Lawrence, Amy, 5, 6, 112–113 Leigh, Vivian, 174–175, 176, 178n2 Levin, David Michael, 12–13 Logan, Joshua, 143, 149n7 Lohan, Lindsay, 168–169, 172 M The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind, 176 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 1, 88, 117, 118, 120, 163, 164, 171n7. See also All About Eve; Cleopatra Mann, Delbert, 97, 98, 102n7 Marks, Laura U., 5, 12, 15n3, 46, 47, 51, 58, 101, 112. See also embodied visuality Mayer, Louis B., 33, 34n11

196 INDEX

McLean, Adrienne L., 6, 83, 87, 88, 101n3, 102n6 melodrama, 11–12, 21, 56, 68, 69, 71, 74, 84, 104, 124–125n4 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 16, 36, 60, 80, 88, 90 and Garbo, 20, 22, 23, 30, 33, 34n6, 34n11 and Grace Kelly, 155, 158, 159, 160–161, 163, 170n5 Metz, Christian, 5, 9, 48, 49, 58, 75 mimetic rivalry, 5, 8, 10, 55–78, 115, 137, 152–153, 167–169. See also the double; René Girard; Leave Her to Heaven; Liz & Dick; Mildred Pierce The Misfits, 11, 75, 126–127, 129, 143–147, 151, 154. See also Marilyn Monroe Mommie Dearest, 14, 75–76 Monroe, Marilyn, 1, 2, 6, 8, 11, 53, 75, 122, 124n2, 126–128, 129–131, 147–149, 149n3, 150n8, 163, 167, 169, 172 in Bus Stop, 139–143, 149n7 and digital animation, 123, 124, 167 in Don’t Bother to Knock, 131–133 in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 134–139, 149n5 in The Misfits, 143–147, 154 Morin, Edgar, 5, 16, 17, 58, 137 and engagement between star and role, 13–14, 37, 40–41, 81, 130, 163 Mulvey, Laura, 5, 9, 13, 15n2, 45, 49, 70, 75, 135, 137, 143, 145, 153, 162, 167, 170n1. See also feminist film theory N narcissism in Hollywood, 3–4, 110–111, 122 theoretical context, 2–3, 5–13, 64, 130 See also individual films, stars, theorists neo-screen tests, 11, 151–153, 173. new media, 5–6, 11, 122–124, 152, 154, 167, 174. See also digital animation; remediation

Night of the Iguana, 11, 96, 99–101, 106, 127, 163. See also Ava Gardner O One Touch of Venus, 81, 89, 153 P Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, 89, 94, 99, 153 The Philadelphia Story, 8, 10, 36–37, 40–49, 52, 53n2, 54n8, 55, 66, 86, 154, 155, 158. See also Cary Grant; Katharine Hepburn; High Society phonogeny, 20, 30, 90–92, 108 The Postman Always Rings Twice, 80, 175 Powdermaker, Hortense, 4, 13, 103, 104, 105, 115, 124, 148, 152, 173 Production Code, 13, 79, 81, 84, 85, 89, 94, 101, 101nn1–2, 103 Production Code Administration (PCA), 10, 79–81, 82, 83, 88, 89, 96, 101, 165 psychoanalysis, 6–8, 81, 102n6, 134 and film theory, 5, 9–10, 58, 149n1 Q Queen Christina, 16, 33, 34n1, 177 Queen Kelly, 107–108, 112, 114, 119, 122 R The Rainmaker, 52 Rattigan, Terence, 97, 165 Rear Window, 156 Red-Headed Woman, 80 remediation, 11, 151–54, 161, 164, 166–170, 173. See also digital animation; new media Russell, Jane, 79, 135, 138, 149n5 S The Sandpiper, 164, 166 Sargeant, Winthrop, 82–83

INDEX 197

Selznick, David O., 174, 175, 176. See also Gone with the Wind Separate Tables, 10, 96, 97–99, 101, 106, 127, 165. See also Rita Hayworth Shearer, Norma, 17, 34n11, 35, 59, 60 Showboat, 90 silent era, 4, 10, 16–17, 18–21, 22–23, 27–32, 33, 90, 105, 107, 111–112, 114, 122, 152. See also Greta Garbo; Sunset Boulevard; talkies S1mone, 173 Sinatra, Frank, 99, 155, 157 Sirk, Douglas, 74–75 Sobchack, Vivian, 5, 48, 135, 140, 142, 146, 174, 177 and “charge of the real,” 14, 161, 162 and the embodied relationship between film and spectator, 12, 13, 40, 131, 159–160, 170n3, 172 filmic body, 18–19, 29, 32, 44, 87, 141, 155 and lounge time, 106, 124n3 See also embodied visuality Stanwyck, Barbara, 61, 65, 80, 83 Stroheim, Erich von, 107–108, 112 Swanson, Gloria, 11, 59, 107–108, 117, 172 in Sunset Boulevard, 105, 110, 111, 112 T talkies, 10, 16–17, 18–21, 22–23, 28, 29–32, 33, 34n5, 79, 90, 105, 107–108, 114, 152. See also Greta Garbo; silent era; Sunset Boulevard Taylor, Elizabeth, 1, 11, 148, 167, 170, 171n7, 172 and Lindsay Lohan, 168–169

and The VIPs, 154, 162–166 (see also Richard Burton) Technicolor, 57, 68, 69, 74, 77n4, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 99, 135, 136, 138, 155 The Temptress, 10, 18, 23–26, 27, 28, 34n7, 57. See also Greta Garbo Thalberg, Irving, 22–23, 30, 34n5, 34n7, 34n11, 60 Three on a Match, 80 Tierney, Gene, 10, 84, 93, 172 and the double, 59, 61–63, 153 in Leave Her to Heaven, 56–57, 68–74, 75, 76–77 Tracy, Spencer, 36, 43, 49–52. See also Katharine Hepburn; Woman of the Year Turner, Lana, 33, 34n11, 74–75, 80, 82, 84, 127, 173, 174, 175, 176 Twentieth Century Fox, 62, 131, 134, 148–149, 150n9, 163 Two-Faced Woman, 16, 19, 32–33, 36 V The VIPs, 154, 162–66, 168, 170 W The Wedding in Monaco, 159, 161–162, 170n6 Welles, Orson, 94, 95, 102n6 Wilder, Billy, 59, 80, 105, 108, 110, 112, 125n5 Wiseman, Thomas, 4, 6, 81, 89, 134 Woman of the Year, 36, 49–52, 55, 86 The Women, 60, 175