[This post is by new DG contributor Cosmo Wenman.--vp]
Virginia recently tweeted and posted on Facebook asking, "What photos should absolutely be in a book on glamour?"
While putting together this collection of recommendations from pop-culture, I sought out the two photos below, of Sean Young in Blade Runner and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. But it wasn't until I saw them side by side that I realized how similar they are. Not only do both women know how to hold the hell out of a cigarette, but the images' contexts are nearly identical.
Both are from interrogation scenes in which the women are suspected of concealing their true natures. Both characters are extremely poised and confident, and both become romantically involved with their interrogators. There are several other parallels as well. I put together a comparison:
These twin scenes are following the same formula and mix of glamorous elements: smoking (even the question of permission to smoke), composure and confidence, deception, emotional distance, and danger. Is there an older film noir scene both these movies are paying homage to?
BTW, Virginia told me she thinks the Sean Young photo "is a little too calculatedly retro for my purposes. It lacks sprezzatura. It's more like an imitation of glamorous photos from the '40s." I think it evokes glamour, but I know what Virginia means - Sean Young's character does look almost artificial...
I've been enjoying Christian Esquevin's Silver Screen Modiste blog, which he started in December 2010, for the past six months or so and, thanks to a Google search, knew that he lives in Southern California (he's director of library services for the city of Coranado). So when I went to the Debbie Reynolds auction, I made a point of looking for him in line. Sure enough, Christian arrived not long after I did. In our conversation there and in his subsequent blogposts on the auction, he provided valuable insight for my Bloomberg View column. I also learned that he has a large collection of costume design sketches, which are a beautiful art in themselves. Christian kindly agreed to share a few sketches (don't even think of reusing them without permission), as well as some thoughts on the art and history of movie costumes.
DG: How did you get interested in Hollywood costumes?
Christian Esquevin: My interest came relatively late. My great-aunt had been the head cutter-fitter at the RKO studio during the 1930s. Although I had heard some of her stories growing up, it was not until she bequeathed me many of her photos and costume sketches that I became interested. This interest grew into a passion as I researched many of the unknowns about these beautiful items.
DG: You've written a book about Adrian, who with Edith Head is probably the most famous Hollywood costume designer. What makes his work particularly significant?
CE: There were, and are still, many great costume designers for films. Adrian, I believe, was a genius. He combined his artistic and fashion abilities with the needs of the movie character and the actor playing the part to make indelible images. I truly believe that along with costume designer Travis Banton he created the modern look of glamour.
You can actually look at a photo of some of their creations and say that there was no precedent for such a look – that’s where modern glamour started. Take any of several photos of Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, or Carole Lombard for example. The look of knock-your-eyes-out glamour is there, and it’s still the look today. And with Adrian, you can look at fashion at the time (late 1920s and 1930s) and draw the connection between his costume designs for the stars on film and what women wanted to wear around the world. His looks have been knocked-off for so long that people nowadays can no longer make that connection. Yves St. Laurent was heavily influenced by Adrian in the 1960s, but it’s YSL that gets the mentions.
Los Angeles is always being compared unfavorably with other cities in fashion creation and influence. But in the 1930s and early 1940s, Los Angeles and Hollywood were where fashion trends were started, and that was due to the influence of costume designers like Adrian.
DG: You're now writing a book on Irene, Walter Plunkett, and Helen Rose. What should people know about them?
CE: These three costume and fashion designers were as influential and accomplished in their day as Dior or Schiaparelli. They all led fascinating creative lives designing the looks of movie-star icons, yet who hears of them today?
If your resume stated that you created the costume designs for Gone with the Wind, Singing in the Rain, and King Kong among many others, as it would for Walter Plunkett, people would be impressed. Or that you designed Grace Kelly’s wedding gown, much of Elizabeth Taylor’s early wardrobe, and for such stars as Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Cyd Charisse, Doris Day, Esther Williams, Debbie Reynolds, and many others, people would take notice.
As for Irene Lentz Gibbons, known simply as Irene, it was said at the time that she dressed everyone in Hollywood. [The sketch to the left is one of Irene's designs for Easter Parade.--vp] Since she worked both as a costume designer and a fashion designer with her own boutique and then her own fashion business, she really did work with many leading ladies. Her customers and stars included Marlene Dietrich, Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Dolores Del Rio, Ava Gardner, Greta Garbo, and many others. When you look at her gowns and suits you’ll quickly see why she was so admired. They are impeccable and drop-dead gorgeous. While each of these designers is fascinating in their own right, they all worked at MGM at the same time for a period. What a combination – a unique time and place in history that will never be repeated. I just couldn’t leave that story alone.
DG: You collect costume design sketches. How do the clothes change from sketch to actual garment to what we see on film? What's the difference from medium to medium?
CE: I’ll talk about the process during the classic, “studio system,” which is what I’m most familiar with. At that time the studios employed virtually all the talent they needed on a long-term basis. In the wardrobe department this was a vertical integration, so that a designer had one or more “cutter-fitters” they worked with, and seamstresses working under them. These skilled cutter-fitters made muslin patterns based on the costume sketch a designer created. And consider that the costumes fabricated could be Elizabethan, classic Roman, or satin glamour gowns.
The costume sketch itself could be rendered by a sketch artist that had the artistic ability to paint figures and costumes. In these cases the sketch artist had to develop a close working relationship with the designer. Some designers wanted to do the sketch themselves. Adrian, for example, did not want anyone else “interpreting” his designs.
After the cutter-fitter used the sketch to devise patterns, the seamstresses would sew the final fabric based on the individual pattern pieces and then sew them for the fitting. Beaders and embroiderers would also base their work on the sketch.
Still, changes came about in the movie-making process. So some costumes were later modified from the original sketch for the movie. Edith Head liked to change her costume designs as she went along. Adrian wanted his costumes to look just like his sketch.
What is particularly fascinating about having an original production-made costume sketch is that this is an artifact that was handled by the stars, the director, often the producer, and the artisans that made the costume itself, as well as the designer. These pieces often have approval initials from these individuals, as well as budget information on the back. They are unique pieces of Hollywood film history.
DG: Can you share a few of your favorite sketches with our readers and tell us a bit about them?
CE: I have many sketches, and each is special in its own way. Although they have traditionally been called “costume sketches,” they are really water-color paintings, with more attention taken than would a pencil sketch. They were nonetheless working tools, and equally important, they represented the costume designer’s original design. I emphasize this because there are also pieces floating around that were often done many years after a film had been made. These were often done by the designers themselves as commemorative illustrations, or because they did not possess the original sketches, and were made for some of their fashion shows. Since these were done as show pieces, they are typically exact reproductions of how the costume looked on film. But even as working tools, the sketches are usually beautiful – they had to “sell” the director and star on that look.
I have picked a few that I like and I think will be of interest to the viewers, or that illustrate a point I want to make about costume designing and sketches. One of the icons of the movies is Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson. The costumes were designed by Edith Head. This is the costume sketch for Gloria Swanson’s opening scene in the film. It’s interesting because it’s not a regular dress but rather what was then called a hostess gown or hostess dress which was worn over pants. You only notice that when she descends the stairs in the movie. As with many of Edith’s designs, the final costume was changed in that the interior lining was no longer a plaid but rather a leopard print.
Here is another Edith Head costume sketch, done for Betty Hutton in Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek in 1942 (left). Edith Head sketches are pretty rare from the early 40s. Over her long career her sketches look quite different. That’s because she used different sketch artists over time and each had their own artistic style. Also, many costume sketches are never signed. When it was a real production sketch, everyone knew who the designer was, so it was not necessary to sign the piece. Sometimes that makes identifying a particular sketch difficult. The next sketch is also by Edith Head from this period, but there is nothing to identify who it was for or for what film.
The next two are costume sketches designed by and rendered by Oscar winning costume designer Mary Wills. The first was done for Joan Collins in The Virgin Queen in 1955. Joan played Beth Throgmorton in the film. A fabric swatch is attached. This costume was one sold at the Debbie Reynolds auction. The next one was also from Mary Wills and was done for “extras” in the outdoor market scene in Hans Christian Andersen starring Danny Kaye. This is one of many sketches Mary Wills did for a variety of outdoor vendors that made the scene really come to life. The sketch looks more like it was painted on an easel at the actual Copenhagen market than a costume sketch in a studio.
This sketch by Donfeld (Don Feld) was done for Angelica Huston in Prizzi’s Honor. Donfeld’s sketching style was very distinctive, with exaggerated long limbs. This sketch was probably done later than the actual film production sketch.
Here is a costume sketch designed by Helen Rose for Edie Adams in Made in Paris in 1966. The sketch was actually rendered by Donna Peterson, Rose’s long-time sketch artist. Some sketches actually showed two views of the costume, or with and without a jacket or coat.
This sketch was done by William (Billy) Travilla for Sharon Tate in Valley of the Dolls in 1967. Travilla is famous for his costume designs for Marilyn Monroe, a couple of which sold for several millions at the Debbie auction.
DG: Are there any contemporary films whose costumes you particularly admire?
I really liked the costumes designed by Coleen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland last year. This was a challenge because of the fantastical nature of the story and the well established look of most of the characters, but she did a great job. Another “fantasy” type movie was The Tempest, with costumes designed by Sandy Powell for Helen Mirren, Felicity Jones, and the other cast members. Powell really created the fantastical look of these characters based on the Shakespeare play.
For more contemporary costume I liked A Single Man, with costumes by Arianne Phillips and directed by Tom Ford. You’d expect the best costumes to come with a Tom Ford movie, and these did not disappoint both for the men’s and women’s wardrobe. And for those period costumes that are close to the “Mad Men” rage, there’s Revolutionary Road, designed by veteran costume designer Albert Wolsky for Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. The one dress that has made the biggest splash over the last several years is Keira Knightly’s green satin, backless gown from Atonement, designed by Jacqueline Durran. The movie was set in the 30s and 1940s, and this gown is really right out of the classic movies of that era.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour?
The original meaning of glamour was “to enchant” and that’s what it’s still all about. The person or the dress of glamour is one that captures attention and holds it in a mesmerizing and basically pleasurable way. It is strictly visual, so you know it when you see it without being able to describe it. That’s one reason why new looks in fashion or glamour occur.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon?
There are several, including classic icons such as Jean Harlow, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, and Catherine Deneuve, and more contemporary ones like Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, and Marion Cotillard.
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity?
It is a luxury, but also a necessity in that it’s a human need that many people pursue.
4) Favorite glamorous movie?
There are many, but I’ll mention Dinner at Eight, The Women, Shanghai Express, To Catch a Thief, and The Thomas Crowne Affair (with McQueen & Dunaway).
[Questions 5, 6, and 7 omitted.]
8) Most glamorous job?
I think that even creating art, music, beauty, or fashion involves toil. Creating glamour is work, and displaying glamour oneself becomes a role. The most fun is being the person watching glamour.
9) Something or someone that other people find glamorous and you don't
Parties. I would make an exception for the “masked ball” parties that were held in France by such bon-vivants as Carlos de Beistegui during the first half of the last century, for which I was regrettably not around.
10) Something or someone that you find glamorous whose glamour is unrecognized
Formal dining outdoors for lunch.
11) Can glamour survive?
It will, but it’s always in short supply.
12) Is glamour something you're born with?
No. But It helps if you’re born in the right milieu. Mostly you acquire glamour through cultivation. Some people acquire it through the expertise of others. Garbo was glamorous on the screen, but it was Adrian that created that glamour for her.
[Sketches are owned by Christian Esquevin and used with permission. Do not even think of republishing them without permission. Tumblr counts as publishing.]
I first read about leaning boards in Ronald L. Davis’s The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System. Davis writes, “For the screen, clothes, above all, must be photogenic. Comfort and practicality were of little concern. Many of [Adrian’s] gowns were too tight for actresses to sit in, requiring them to recline on ‘leaning boards’ between takes.”
Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight (left) and Katharine Hepburn with costume designer Walter Plunkett in Sea of Grass
This bit of film history struck me as the perfect example of how the grace you see on the screen is created by hiding the -- in this case, literal -- support behind the scenes. But I'd never seen a photo of a leaning board, and imagined that perhaps there weren't any, until Christian Esquevin included one in this Silver Screen Modiste post about MGM's costume operations.
Were there more? I asked Christian. There were, indeed, and he kindly scanned some to share with DG readers. In the two above, the leaning board is doing what Davis suggested in his book, allowing actresses in very tight dresses to rest without sitting. (Closely examined, the Hurrell photos from Dinner at Eight reveal that Harlow was sewn into her Dinner at Eight dress, sans underwear.)
In the third photo, of Rosamond Pinchot as Queen Anne in The Three Musketeers, the costume is not so much tight as heavy. The same is true of the photo Christian featured in his blog post. There, Jane Halsey is wearing a 102-pound beaded costume for The Great Ziegfeld.
That got me to thinking. Nowadays, Lycra makes tight gowns a lot easier to move in (though wrinkles are always a potential issue). But what did Natalie Portman (and the rest of the cast) do between takes while wearing those elaborate costumes in the (execrable) Star Wars prequel? Are leaning boards still around?
Tomorrow we'll have a Q&A with Christian Esquevin, including some wonderful examples from his collection of costume design sketches. Tune in.
[Photos from the collection of Christian Esquevin.]
“He who seeks beauty shall find it” is the personal motto of 82-year old fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. He’s been riding around on his bicycle, photographing fashion on the streets of New York City for roughly half a century. And although his name and reputation are well established in the fashion world, his personal “fashion philosophy” is by no means conventional.
In the movie Bill Cunningham New York, Bill comes off as a mysteriously simple character, a happy man who loves what he does and does what he loves. But there’s more; in fact, there are many complex and profound ideas wrapped up in the way Bill views fashion and culture, all of which inform the pictures he takes.
When photographing runway shows in Paris, he says, “If it isn’t something a woman could wear, I’m not interested.” His down-to-earth, fun-loving attitude makes fashion approachable to all. He praises daring and originality in clothing choices above all. He’s not afraid to call an outfit boring, no matter who’s wearing it. He may ignore a celebrity on the street wearing a multi-thousand dollar gown in favor of a bag-lady digging in the garbage, whose overlapping patterned shawls and head-scarves he thinks are “marvelous.”
Bill Cunningham’s straightforwardness stems from his ethical commitment to honesty and to celebrating individual creativity. He takes a firm stance against fashion magazines’ “In & Out” lists for attempting to dictate from the top-down what’s “in fashion” and what isn’t. Part of his opposition is moral and the other part is practical. He understands that no matter what magazines and designers decree, real fashion—what is actually “in”—can only be determined from the bottom up, by what everyday people actually wear.
To me, it seems that Cunningham’s incredible ability to capture weekly street-style trends is made possible by his understanding of how culture works. Bill’s photographs show us that in the city, fashion is a silent dialogue between people on the streets. Some respond to the latest designs from Paris; others adopt and revise the looks of those around them, incorporating good ideas from anywhere they can be found. People’s clothing choices are also often responding to the conditions of the local climate and Bill traces these complex and spontaneous orders with skill and grace (see “Boiling Point,” documenting the woven, eyelet fabrics of the hot New York week of August 14, 2009).
In de-emphasizing the role of “top-down” dictates from the fashion elite, Bill Cunningham helps us see how we, as everyday people, have the opportunity to participate in the fashion world. “I’m not interested in celebrities with their free dresses,” he says, “I’m interested in clothes!” He calls our attention to the role each of us has as a potential contributor to the silent dialogue of fashion with the choices we make in front of our mirrors each morning.
Click here for a list of when and where the film is showing.
The photos all present idealized versions of the stars--but what a range of ideals they represent, from the refined elegance of Grace Kelly to the sultry seductiveness of Rita Hayworth's Gilda, from Vivian Leigh in hyperfeminine white ruffles to Marlene Dietrich tough and dominant in a crisp blouse and slacks. And those are just (a few of) the women. Click the slideshow link for a selection.
Reviewing the London exhibit in The Independent, Matthew Bell praised it for giving visitors a hint of the effort behind the effortlessness:
The most interesting image isn't on the wall. It's tucked in a cabinet and is of Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, marked up for retouching. A backroom worker has criss-crossed the areas that need work – stubble and hairy hands for him, crow's feet and a flabby jawline for her. If you have been duped into believing in the fantasy of Hollywood, this snap brings you down to earth.
Like Debbie Reynolds's late-lamented costume collection, the John Kobal Collection originated with MGM's previously mentioned mother of all garage sales. In the '60s and '70s, when Golden Age glamour was out of fashion and studios were dumping their archives, Kobal bought and preserved prints and negatives, befriended aging stars and photographers, and documented their stories. Most of the classic images you see reproduced today come from his archives, now licensed by Getty Images.
The George Hurrell photos occasionally featured on DG are exceptions. They're courtesy of our friends at the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive, which has just put together a beautiful new site, including a blog, at GeorgeHurrell.com. If you like classic Hollywood glamour photography, be sure to check it out.
This rare photo of Greta Garbo smiling belongs to the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive, maintained by DG friend Louis D'Elia. It was taken by the great Hollywood portrait photographer George Hurrell in his one and only session with Garbo--a shoot to promote her 1930 film Romance.
Garbo did not like the antics Hurrell used to get his subjects to relax and look natural, and refused to work with him again. (Clarence Sinclair Bull became her photographer of choice.) But she did crack a smile when Hurrell tripped over some equipment, and he managed to capture the moment.
I examined the photos from this shoot when I wrote a catalog essay for a 2006 exhibit of Hurrell photos from the Pancho Barnes collection. (A version of that essay later appeared in The Atlantic.) While working on the essay, I noticed that the earrings in the Garbo photos reappeared in one of my favorite Hurrell portraits, this one of the woman Hurrell himself considered his "most mysterious" subject: Myrna Loy.
Remembered today mostly as the comedienne star of the Thin Man movies, for many years Loy was cast as an "exotic," thanks to her almond eyes. (For an amazing collection of Myrna Loy photos, from many phases of her career, check out this blog.) Like Garbo, she was an MGM star when Hurrell was the studio's chief portrait photographer.
As I've mentioned in my posts and article about the Debbie Reynolds collection auction, while MGM created lavish costumes, it also recycled them. The same was true, of course, of accessories, and here's the photographic evidence. As always, click the photo to see a larger version.
Over at Silver Screen Modiste, Christian Esquevin has a second excellent post on the Debbie Reynolds costume auction, which includes a sad note on why the collection was so heavy on period costumes. Debbie Reynolds bought the foundations of her collection as when MGM had the mother of all garage sales in 1970, dumping its inventories of props, costumes, photographs--anything that could be sold for quick cash. (Twentieth Century Fox did the same a year later.) Christian writes:
Most of the studio's wardrobe at that time consisted of period costumes, which is by and large reflected in the strength of Debbie's collection. That MGM had many years earlier dumped many costumes in its wardrobe collection is little known. Due to the small value that was ascribed to contemporary fashion, and the lack of its re-usability in later films, many crown jewels of costume were destroyed. By the time of the 1970 MGM auction, many of those late 1920s and 1930s costumes were already gone. These had been the costumes that created the very image of glamorous Hollywood movie-stars, and that started fashion trends around the world. The Adrian-designed gowns worn by Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford that defined the look of glamour were mostly discarded. It is informative to consider the sale of Debbie's collection as reflecting the earlier MGM auction and the even earlier destruction of those movie costumes.
Yet even as scholars and fans mourn the collection’s breakup, dreaming of the museum that might have been, they admit the importance of private collectors. These enthusiasts may not all preserve artifacts in museum-quality condition, keeping costumes unaltered and mostly in the dark. But without the sometimes-eccentric people who buy at auctions out of their own passion to own a piece of movie history, no one would have saved these objects in the first place.
“Thank God for them,” says Deborah Landis. “Thank God for Debbie. We would have nothing. It would have been rags. That was the old way. We used everything until it fell off the hanger. That was the tradition in Hollywood.”
In my Bloomberg View column on the Debbie Reynolds collection auction, I cite some of the waist measurements Lisa Urban took from the costumes. But column prose didn't allow for the full inventory, which should be kept for historical interest. Here, in alphabetical order with links to the photos (much better than my snapshots) and auction results for each costume, is the full list. The numbers are the auction lot numbers. In a decision I now regret, I did not request a measurement of Audrey Hepburn's My Fair Lady Ascot dress, because everyone knows she was thin, the same reason I didn't ask Lisa to take any Katharine Hepburn measurements.
The biggest surprise to me was that Deborah Kerr's waist was as large as 24 inches. Her costumes, particularly the black gown from An Affair to Remember, are strikingly svelte and, like Marilyn's white dress, couldn't be fully fastened in the back, as you can see by my photo of her Catherine Parr gown. I was also surprised that the Ginger Rogers dress had a 24-inch waist. It looks even smaller in person.
We should never again hear anyone declare that Marilyn Monroe was a size 12, a size 14 or any other stand-in for full-figured, zaftig or plump. Fifteen thousand people have now seen dramatic evidence to the contrary. Monroe was, in fact, teeny-tiny.
The 15,000 were the visitors who turned out over eight days to oooh and aaah at the preview exhibit for the June 18 auction of Debbie Reynolds’s extraordinary collection of Hollywood costumes, props and other memorabilia.
The two comments heard most often in the crowded galleries were (to paraphrase), “Wow, they were thin” and “It’s such a shame. These things should be in a museum.”
The two remarks are in fact related. The former demonstrates the truth of the latter.
When the auctioneer’s final hammer came down at 1:20 in the morning, the world lost a treasure. The collection Reynolds assembled over 40 years will now be fragmented and dispersed. “It was a melancholy day for Los Angeles and the rest of the country,” wrote Christian Esquevin on his Silver Screen Modiste blog, expressing a common sentiment. “We will never see the likes of this collection again.”
The movie business has never particularly valued its historical artifacts. Hollywood, notes director John Landis, treats costumes and props as “industrial waste,” to be recycled or discarded but not displayed or preserved. It also keeps an embarrassed distance from the enthusiasts who treasure such relics. Unlike, say, science fiction, the mainstream movie industry doesn’t embrace cult followings. And Los Angeles is notorious for its paucity of institution-building philanthropists.
I spent Saturday at the giant auction of costumes, props, and other Hollywood memorabilia that Debbie Reynolds had collected over decades in hopes of establishing a museum. (The financial collapse of her most recent attempt led to the auction.)
The headline story was that Marilyn Monroe’s famous “subway dress” from The Seven Year Itchsold for $5.658 million—a hammer price of $4.6 million plus a 23% buyer's premium of $1.058 million, not to mention an additional $551,655 in sales tax.
That dress, however, was only one of 587 lots that included not only other iconic costumes—most notably Audrey Hepburn’s Ascot dress and hat from My Fair Lady, which is more important in the history of design than Marilyn’s dress and went for $4.551 million—but also props, cameras, concept drawings, posters, and an archive of W.C. Fields contracts, letters, and notes for jokes. At the auction’s end, an auction house employee reported that the total sales topped $18 million. (The final total was in fact $22.8 million.)
I'll publish something more analytical later, but I thought I’d share a few notes here. (For more detail, here’s a good report on the procedings. Silver Screen Modiste blogger Christian Esquevin, with whom I spoke as we waited for the doors to open, provides smart context and good costume photos.)
Joe Maddalena introduces Debbie Reynolds
On Friday, Joe Maddalena, the owner of auction house Profiles in History, was confidently predicting that the auction, which started at noon, should be over by 7:00 p.m.. Instead, it lasted until 1:20 a.m. One reason was the complexity of the setup: two websites for Internet bidding, a large phone bank taking phone bids, and a downstairs gallery for the overflow crowd that couldn’t be accommodated in the main Paley Center auditorium; gallery bids came in by phone to a representative in the auditorium.
But the main reason for the late hour was that the bidding went so high, meaning each sale took longer than usual. Even with an opening bid of $60,000 for Charlie Chaplin's bowler hat, compared to the catalog estimate of $20,000-$30,000, it took a lot of $2,500 increments to reach the final $110,000. (The delays were particularly excruciating for the 13 W.C. Fields lots early on, which sold for relatively modest amounts sometimes arrived at in $50 increments.) The auctioneer did not speed-talk, making sure instead that everyone who might bid did so. He therefore allowed not only for technical delays but for lulls while people contemplated additional bids.
She's a princess!
When the bidding lulled, Debbie Reynolds generally piped up with a wisecrack to get things going. Her standard was, “I paid more than that.” Sometimes she pitched the lots’ qualities, QVC-style: “That's a leather seat. It’s really beautiful.” “That’s real mink.”
She also deployed sexual innuendo: “You know what you could do on that couch,” “You don't know what Ty Power did in there,” and the audience favorite: “Mae West didn’t even have a chest like that.”
At one sad moment, however, Reynolds reversed her usual plea. After the first few bids for lot 280, the pastel rainbow-hued ballgown worn by Susan Hayward in With a Song in My Heart, she said, “It’s from me—don’t bid!” (Someone else was bidding on her behalf.) No luck. Paddle-holder #247, a Korean (not, as widely reported, Japanese) man who was the dominant bidder actually present in the room, persevered and eventually bought the dress for a hammer price of $3,000. It was one of his cheaper purchases of the day.
[Photos by Virginia Postrel. Permission to use freely granted with credit and link back to DeepGlamour.net]
The Academy Awards show is ridiculous. Guests arrive in broad daylight wearing the most formal of evening gowns. Presenters, including some of the world's most accomplished performers, read their lines with the studied cadence of high-school commencement speakers.
In contrast to the Super Bowl, a beauty pageant or "American Idol," nothing happens on stage that affects the outcome of the competition. The production numbers are just padding. And, of course, the speeches are boring, the show is too long, and comedies never have a chance.
Yet the Oscar ceremony somehow manages to be compelling. In a good year like 2010, its U.S. audience tops 40 million, according to Nielsen Co. In a bad year like 2008, it tops 30 million. By contrast, the recent Grammy ceremony, which offers far better musical numbers, won its week with only 26.7 million viewers.
The Oscar show's appeal can't just be the fun of water-cooler criticism. You can get all the information you need for that from Twitter or the next day's newspaper. You don't need to sit through the awards ceremony.
In fact, as the marketing efforts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences suggest, the glamour of the Oscars lies not in the movies the show ostensibly celebrates, but in the "Oscar moment." Watching the Oscars gives viewers the chance to imagine being singled out before the whole world as special, beloved and really good at their jobs.
To promote the show, the Academy is giving fans in New York City two different chances to pose holding Oscars, either virtual statues or, at Grand Central Terminal, real ones. There, "the big payoff is that you get to go on stage and have your Oscar moment," says Janet Weiss, the Academy's director of marketing. Some people, she says, even show up in gowns and tuxes.
Read the rest here. That's my photo to the right, taken on Friday in Grand Central.
Sunday night's emerald gowns offered a vivid, tasteful contrast to the usual red carpet wardrobe of what the LAT's Vincent Boucher calls the "boring tone of 'blushnudeplatinumivory.'"
This Kelly bag in Hermès orange is for sale at Decades Inc., the high-end vintage boutique beloved of Hollywood stars and the stylists who dress them. According to the Decades blog, this particular model retails for $9,000 but is available for an undisclosed "below retail" sum. (If you have to ask, you can't afford it.)
The bag got its name when Life ran a photo of Princess Grace, then pregnant with her daughter Caroline, using it to disguise her pregnancy from paparazzi. With its dated combination of large size and short straps, the bag is a holdover from the days of perfectly polished ladies in white gloves who'd never think of flaunting their “bumps.” Yet it’s still considered a timeless classic. Why?
The Kelly bag reminds me of Lisa Fremont, Grace Kelly’s character in Rear Window. It’s rare and expensive. It flaunts its owner’s wealth in a subtle and unapologetic way. But it’s also tough and more adaptable than it initially appears. If Lisa does wind up tramping through the jungle with her true love, the Kelly bag is the sort of purse she might take with her.
The practical effect of this combination of rarity, expense, and toughness is that people can justify spending outrageous amounts on a purse, knowing that it will last indefinitely. It won’t go out of style, because it wasn’t really in style to begin with, and Hermès will refurbish it on request. The per-use cost thus drops substantially, plus there’s a secondary market in case you need the cash.
Note that it’s called the Kelly bag, even though Grace was married when the name was coined. It’s not associated with royalty but with Kelly’s on-screen persona.
Digital special effects are now used so frequently in films and television that we tend to take them for granted. Photoshop is so widely used to manipulate digital photographs that we seldom notice the changes, sometimes even when “realistic” advertising photos have missing, wrongly sized, or misaligned parts. (The website Photoshop Disasters adds funny comments to miscalculated images.)
The theater has always dealt in illusions, and we are perfectly capable of imagining that a bare stage or an abstract set (such as the one shown in the photograph) represents a fictional world. Shakespeare’s plays were first performed on bare stages: thus the characters often speak of the time of day and place.
With experience we also sometimes take theatrical conventions for granted. A proscenium stage is described as having an invisible fourth wall through which the audience views the sets and action onstage. A movie or television screen serves much the same purpose. We forget that we are looking at a flat picture plane once we begin looking “through it” to see images that seem to have dimensional qualities. The addition of 3D further heightens our feeling that we are seeing a dimensional reality, rather than the illusion of one projected onto a screen.
Stage and screen illusions depend partially on an awareness that what the audience will be able to perceive is limited. The fourth wall, for example, does not reveal what is going on above, behind, below, or to the sides of the stage. Cameras reveal only what is in front of the lens, concealing even the person operating the camera.
When actors and dancers perform onstage, they know where the fourth wall is, and they sometimes “cheat” by turning their bodies enough to insure that their speeches and actions are audible and visible to the audience. Dance studios have large mirrors so that dancers can develop some sense of how their bodies, costumes, and movements will look to the audience. In film and photographic work, actors and models learn to maintain an awareness of where the camera is, as well as the light.
In most dramatic productions, the prevailing convention is that the actors act as if the audience is not there, even though actors need to retain some awareness of them. In most film situations, such as the dining room set shown in the photograph, it is impossible to ignore the presence of the equipment. The ability to perform effectively while aware of the presence of an audience, or a camera and a set full of equipment, is a difficult skill, but one that actors must master if we are going enjoy the fictional illusion that they exist in a “real” world.
[The abstract set was built for a production of Sara McKinnon, an opera by Mark Medoff and Randall Shinn. Photograph by Carol Shinn. The photograph “Film set in the dining room” is by Flickr user ricardodiaz11. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
Hair is having a major cultural moment. Disney’s Tangled, a retelling of “Rapunzel” that features what one blogger calls “ninja hair,” is a monster hit, while nine-year-old Willow Smith (daughter of Will and Jada) has become an instant star with her exuberant video “Whip My Hair.”
Meanwhile, in Paris, where they take both fashion and cinema far too seriously to produce celebrations of ninja-hair-whipping, the Cinématèque Française has mounted an exposition devoted to the portrayal of women’s hair in the movies. Titled “Brune-Blonde” (“Brunette-Blonde”), it runs through January 16, with an online version here. The poster features the naturally brunette Penelope Cruz as a platinum blonde, and the exhibit’s intellectual theme is Hollywood’s role in fostering a now-fading “blonde imperialism.”
There is something fascinating, seductive, and slightly unnerving about human hair. It’s a constant reminder of how little control we really exercise over the bodies that define us to other people. Lacking nerves and muscles, hair is simultaneously part of its owner and yet somehow not. A defining part of a person’s appearance, it takes conscious artifice to control. Contrary to the title, Rapunzel's long tresses in Tangled are never in knots. When they start to get in the way, an adorable trio of little girls fashions them into a flower-filled braid worthy of Botticelli.
In the era of the faux-disorderly “messy bun,” the phrase “not a hair out of place” now connotes too much control, Betty Draper-style. But, taken literally, getting your hair under control is still a glamorous ideal. All that’s changed is the definition of “in place.” As a friend once remarked, nobody in a movie love scene ever says, “Owww, you’re on my hair.”
Gucci has designed a highly effective ad campaign for its Flora perfume that revolves around fields of flowers, diaphanous floral print dresses, and the sultry beauty of model Abbey Lee Kershaw. In the print ads Kershaw is photographed in dresses that seem to magically transform into butterfly wings. The Chris Cunningham video shown below was shot in Latvia in a seemingly endless sea of flowers. Kershaw is depicted like the Roman goddess Flora, who with waves of her arms causes the flowers to bow to her (an effect that appears to use a mobile wind machine). At the end the images are manipulated so that Kershaw and her dress seem about to take flight.
If you have seen Botticelli’s Primavera, the Gucci ads may remind you of his image of Flora, who holds spring flowers in the folds of her sheer floral dress. These images all promise that winter’s reign will end, that spring will transform the world, and that once again we will enjoy the scent of blossoming flowers.
The butterfly-like shape of the billowing dress in the Gucci ads reminds us of another transformation, that of caterpillar to butterfly. Most butterflies are colorful, beautiful creatures. How tempting it becomes to try a perfume that suggests it can transform you into a creature as beautiful as spring, flowers, butterflies, or a youthful goddess.
Most people do not find butterflies attractive in their caterpillar stage. The same is true of bugs. While we might be delighted to have a butterfly land on us, we may shudder if we notice a caterpillar or a bug crawling on us.
That’s one reason this photo by John Bonath, titled “Contemplation on a Cicada,” is so arresting. The beautiful blond model appears to be naked, photographed in a studio, and deep in thought as cicadas crawl on her hair, face, and body. This image is used on a card advertising an upcoming show of Bonath’s work at The Camera Obscura Gallery in Denver. He specializes in surreal digital images, so it is difficult to know what is “real” in this image. Cicadas don’t bite or sting humans, but I can’t image them arranging themselves in such orderly fashion.
When they molt cicadas leave behind ghosts of themselves in the form of hard shells whose claws cling to trees, bushes, and posts. (Here is a time-lapse image of a cicada molting.) We tend to associate bugs with disease and decay, and in nature various bugs and their larvae help decompose dead animals. That is a transformation that few of us enjoy contemplating, yet nature’s transformations are not always pretty. Once while leading an art class on an excursion to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, my wife came upon a group of Monarch butterflies feasting on smelly poo in a tossed-away baby diaper.
Part of the cleverness of the Gucci perfume ads is how well they combine positive images of transformation. In contrast, a brilliant aspect of the opening of David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvetwas its fluid movement from images of an idyllic small town to an man dying while watering his lawn, and then to bugs in the soil beneath the lawn. This sequence prepares us to see the film reveal part of the decadent underworld of the town. In both cases images are used to help us focus on transformations, either toward renewal or toward decay and decadence.
This image originally appeared on the site PostSecret.com, a crowdsourced art project that invites people to "Take a post card or two. Tell your secret anonymously. Stamp and mail the postcard." A half million postcards have been sent in since the project began in 2004.
The humor of this particular card comes from the unshocking nature of its confession. "I'd be lying if I haven't made a version of this speech before I was 8 years old and staring into the bathroom mirror," said Kate Winslet when she won Best Actress last year. "And this would have been a shampoo bottle." In response, someone started a Facebook group called Thanks a lot Kate Winslet for stealing my oscar speech. In 2008, Dove even made a commercial about practicing your Oscar speech in the shower. "Everyone Has an Oscar Acceptance Speech," observes John Scalzi in a funny piece about temporarily having a real Oscar in his house. As the postcard says, you don't have to be in show business to have this fantasy.
The Oscar speech is a touchstone glamorous moment: You're being recognized as special in front of the whole world. (If you're a woman, you're also wearing a great dress, but that's a minor fantasy compared to the acclaim.) But, with a few exceptions, real-life Oscar speeches are disappointing. In fact, audiences tend to hate them. In a great 1999 rant Sharon Waxman called the typical speech "a waste of the rapt attention of much of the Western world."
Please! Is it too much to ask? A little humor? A little pathos? Histrionics are fine, even hubris is welcome – as long as it's different. Rod Steiger thanked the Maharishi. Fine. Vanessa Redgrave scored the "Zionist hoodlums." Whatever. Anything, anything, ANYTHING but thanking your agent.
Who can forget director James Cameron declaring, "I am the king of the world!" last year, right after requesting a moment of silence for the victims of "Titanic." Sure, we thought he was a jerk, but at least it was more interesting than listening to his co-producer Jon Landau reel off an endless list of names we'd never heard.
The problem that the glamour of winning an Oscar is all about individual triumph--the recognition of one particular person--but social convention dictates that winners act humble and dependent. That (faux) humility destroys the glamour of the moment. Thanking your supportive family can still be glamorous, but a long list of backstage players breaks the fantasy of the autonomous star. It forces the audience to contemplate the mundane, even bureaucratic, processes behind the achievement.
One way to preserve social convention while preserving some magic is to replace glamour--the idealized moment--with romance, a narrative of struggle and triumph. That may be just the story of getting the movie made or it may be a greater historical narrative, like the story of African Americans in Hollywood. Or, like Mo'Nique, you can go for both.
Last month, American Cinematheque sponsored a special double-feature of Pulp Fiction andInglourious Basterds, followed by a Q&A with Quentin Tarantino. I attended and recorded the conversation, which was moderated by Variety’s Todd McCarthy. (Read McCarthy’s review of Basterdshere.) Thanks to the diligent work of DG intern Crystal Hubbard, we now have a transcript, which Tarantino fans can download here, with the caveat that we make no guarantees of 100 percent accuracy.
In one portion of the interview, Tarantino talked about why he plans a short career:
As far as an artist is concerned in this business, it’s about the filmography. That’s what it’s about. It’s about every one being of a piece. And that’s why I want to get out, at a certain part in the game. I want to live or die by that filmography. And you know—we all know—if anyone knows it in this room, it’s you as well—is, the most cutting-edge artist, the coolest guys, the hippest dudes, they’re the ones that stay at the party too long. They’re the ones that make those last two or three movies that are completely out of touch and do not realize the world has turned on them. And they have no idea how corny they are. And I’m really talking about the hippest film makers who ever existed in Hollywood. But you know, you can’t expect these guys to know that life has changed and they’re out of tune or that they’re corny. And I just don’t want to be corny.
I just remember how I found Howard Hawks. I went to a Film-X 32-hour marathon—comedy marathon—and I saw His Girl Friday, which was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had with an audience this big, in my life. I mean—it was just—I had never laughed that hard, it was like an orgasm. It was just so great....And so I then wanted to see everything that Howard Hawks did. And the next thing on television that I watched was Barbary Coast. Well that was wonderful! That had great dialog, wonderful characters, and that fed in to what I liked about His Girl Friday....
So, I just have this scenario of 30 years from now, some girl or boy is 16 years old and they see one of my movies. And they dig it. They don’t know who the fuck I am, they’ve never heard my name, but they think, “I dig this guy. Who is he? Tarantino? Well, let me find another Tarantino movie.” Now they don’t know about my filmography, they don’t know which one to watch. They don’t know if this one came here or that one came there, they just randomly—like I do with Barbary Coast, thank God, if could have been Rio Lobo—they grab the next one they get their hands on. And I want them to come from the same place. I want all my movies to have some connection to Reservoir Dogs. And I just don’t want to make Buddy Buddy. And Fedora and—what was the Marthe Keller [movie], Fedora, yeah. Sounds like a hat. But I don’t want to make Cheyenne Autumn, I don’t want to make Rio Lobo.
Amelia Earhart was daring, adventurous, modern, and beautiful, among the 20th century’s most enduring icons. Sixty years after her disappearance, high-profile advertising campaigns for Apple and the Gap were still employing her image as a symbol of independence and glamour. A movie about her must have seemed like a sure thing. Yet Amelia is a critical and commercial disaster. What went wrong?
It would be easy to blame the project’s specifics. Director Mira Nair did, after all, manage to turn Thackeray’s lively satire into the ponderous, unwatchable Vanity Fair. A less earnest director or more creative script might have produced a more interesting Amelia, one less reliant on half-hearted soap opera and more focused on the challenges of early aviation. But the real problem may be Amelia Earhart herself.
In the 1920s and ’30s, “the aviatrix was the ultimate glamorous and daring modern woman,” notes Kristen Lubben in Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, the catalog for a 2007 exhibition of Earhart images at the International Center of Photography. Earhart, of course, was the ultimate glamorous aviatrix. She achieved that status not because she was the best female pilot—many were better—but because she was media-savvy and able to embody the public’s multiple aspirations. She was feminist yet feminine, casual yet elegant, modern yet wholesome. “Hers is the healthy curiosity of the clean mind and the strong body and a challenging rebuke to those of us who have damned the youth of the land,” declared a 1928 essayist who saw her as an antidote to Jazz Age decadence. He concluded, “What a girl!” Such a glamorous figure makes an effective advertising icon but an emotionally flattened protagonist. She loses her individuality.
During her life, Earhart was transformed from a person into a persona—idealized, distant, and glamorous, her mythic allure heightened by the mystery of her disappearance. The more time passes, the more her individuality recedes. “She has become an increasingly abstract symbol—of the thrill and danger of adventure, of the possibilities for women, and of the courage to break with … conventional expectations,” writes Lubben. Eternally young, Earhart remains unblemished from the kind of eccentricity or controversy—or ordinary individual complexity—that could make her a compelling subject for a modern biopic. To preserve her glamour, Amelia must keep her at a distance, without flaws, doubts, or character development. We learn nothing of the struggles of her youth, her political commitments, or her limits as a pilot. She ends the film essentially the same as she began it—as an icon.
Here, another recent film about a pioneering aviatrix presents a sharp contrast. Currently making the film-festival rounds and expected to air on public television in the spring, The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club is a straightforward documentary made on a tenth of Amelia’s production budget. Yet for all its still photos and talking heads, it is far more entertaining. While Amelia struggles against the glamour of its heroine, The Legend of Pancho Barnes is imbued with its protagonist’s charisma. The contrast between the two pilots, and the memories they left behind, illuminates the distinctions between these two often-conflated qualities.
Old Hollywood glamour is Jean Harlow lounging suggestively in a white satin gown or Fred Astaire sweeping Ginger Rogers across a ballroom floor; Rita Hayworth peeling off long black gloves or Greta Garbo staring mysteriously off to sea. It is decidedly not a gingham-clad, jolie laide farm girl and her scrappy little dog. Dorothy, Toto, and their companions may be beloved—familiar family friends introduced by each generation to the next. In our fond memories, however, they do not qualify as glamorous.
But now that The Wizard of Oz has survived its 70th anniversary and is about to get high-definition release in theaters and on DVD, it is time to reassess. The Wizard of Oz is actually one of the studio era’s most emotionally sophisticated explorations of glamour. It does not offer us a luxuriously attired starlet or languid, sexy scenes. Instead, the movie shows us how glamour works. Glamour offers a lucid glimpse of desire fulfilled—if only life could be like that, if only we could be there, if only we could be like them, if I only had a …
In The Wizard of Oz, the principal characters aren’t the objects of glamour. They’re its audience: the dreamers who imagine their lives transformed and who learn, over the course of the film, that even illusions can reveal inner truths.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex, now playing in U.S. theaters, tells the story of the West German domestic terrorists who called themselves the Red Army Faction. Over about a decade, beginning in the late 1960s, they committed increasingly brutal acts, from bank robberies to kidnappings and murder, in the name of global revolution.
Christopher Hitchens, writing in Vanity Fair, called the movie “the year’s best-made and most counter-romantic action thriller.” Others have been less approving. The LAT’s Kenneth Turan deemed it “an exploitation film on a socially conscious subject, the equivalent of Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ having a love child with ‘The Fast and the Furious.’” When it was released in Germany last fall, some felt it was “a little too sexy for comfort” and trafficked in “terrorist-chic.”
“The film portrays one murder after another without any sense of meaning, any explanation,” Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter Bettina Röhl, who was abandoned to a Palestinian orphanage by her terrorist mother, complained in an interview with the Associated Press. She said that “in nonverbal but very suggestive ways, the film insinuates that their motivations for terrorism are understandable.”
These contradictory reactions reflect an uncomfortable fact about terrorism and political extremism: To the right audience, they can be very glamorous. They promise purity and meaning, attention and fame and a sense of belonging. Evil does not always appear ugly and unappealing. It can even be sexy.
“Terror is glamour,” said Salman Rushdie in a 2006 interview with an incredulous Der Spiegel reporter. It was an astute observation. “The suicide bomber’s imagination,” he noted, “leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people’s lives.” What The Baader-Meinhof Complex reminds us is that the glamour of terrorism extends not only to those who actively engage in such violent acts but to the broader public that admires or justifies those actions.
Intentionally or not, this movie about violent leftists illuminates the mass psychology of fascism. (Or maybe seeing crowds of Germans chanting and raising their fists just makes me think of Hitler.) Hitchens writes:
Consumerism is equated with Fascism so that the firebombing of department stores can be justified. Ecstatic violence and “action” become ends in themselves. One can perhaps picture Ulrike Meinhof as a “Red” resister of Nazism in the 1930s, but if the analogy to that decade is allowed, then it is very much easier to envisage her brutally handsome pal Andreas Baader as an enthusiastic member of the Brownshirts.
In its descent from glamour to ever-greater brutality and degradation, however, The Baader-Meinhof Complex most resembles a movie with no political agenda: Casino. It is no more a defense of terrorism than Casino is an ad for the Mafia.
But, of course, glamour depends on the audience and so, then, does its deconstruction. German journalist Claudia Fromme, writing in the Times of London, recounted one disconcerting reaction:
As the credits rolled and the lights went up at a screening I attended in Munich, one member of the audience raised his fist in a gesture of sympathy.
He was barely 20 years old, munching popcorn and wearing a hooded jumper. The assiduously factual debunking of the “Baader-Meinhof myth” obviously did not work for everyone in the audience.
From Marlene Dietrich and Buster Keaton to Aretha Franklin and Bianca Jagger, George Hurrell captured some of the 20th century's great faces, in hats that added an extra dimension to the characters they portrayed, in film or in life. Click here to see the show.
Anyone who has heard a small child say, “Read it again, read it again,” knows that children love repetition. They love audible patterns of all kinds, as Dr. Seuss realized. The number of sound patterns in the following two lines is fascinating:
“And NOW comes an act of Enormous Enormance! No former performers performed this performance!”
Such lines were never intended to be read silently, they were intended to be performed by someone reading to a child. If a word like “Enormance” was needed for sound, then Dr. Seuss made it up. Children respond because hearing such patterns performed out loud creates a kind of magic spell.
Children’s love of patterned language is not some temporary madness, it’s part of being human. We retain our ability to enjoy language created for oral presentation all our lives. Such language has its greatest impact when we hear it presented, rather than when we read it silently. And hearing such language performed by a great vocal interpreter remains a magical experience.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw the film version of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood. I felt almost drunk on words as I heard Richard Burton’s glorious voice read Thomas’s resonant lines. Burton, seen at right as a young star, was, of course, also a great actor. The play was first written for radio, and you can hear the beginning here. Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Peter O’Toole, along with many other fine actors, are in the film version. (You can get get a feel for the visual quality of the film here, but only by enduring a hideously over-hyped theatrical trailer.)
Another way to make words audible is to intone them, to sing them. This has long been a way to give special meaning to the words of religious ceremonies. It can also work with the lyrics of popular songs. With some songs, witty rhymes can be a major source of delight, as with these gems from Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” (I’ll quote the female version of the lines, which are used in the video below. Zevon’s original version was from a male perspective):
He really worked me over good, He was a credit to his gender. He put me through some changes, Lord, Sort of like a Waring blender
Well, I met a boy in the Vieux Carré Down in Yokahama. He picked me up, and he threw me down: He said, “Please don't hurt me, Mama.”
These lines are clever on the page, but make a stronger effect when performed by someone with a rich voice like Linda Ronstadt (just as was the case with Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas).
DG recently had a post on pop divas, and in We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock Gerri Hirshey called Ronstadt the first “arena-class rock diva.” Reaching that status was an arduous journey for her. Early in her career, as reported in her Rolling Stone bio, when she went onstage “she was often devastatingly timid.” Even as she became a popular concert attraction, she was “still hampered by stage fright.”
But there was nothing timid about her voice: it was a force of nature. Like Richard Burton, her ability to use that voice to magical effect would bring fame, fortune, and glamorous relationships. Burton’s second wife was Elizabeth Taylor, and Ronstadt’s personal life has included relationships with men such as Star Wars creator George Lucas and Jerry Brown when he was governor of California. While singing, Ronstadt could dramatically change the character of her voice (as Burton could do as an actor). She begins “Long Long Time” by singing two phrases in a young-girl’s voice, then suddenly her voice becomes that of a mature, aggrieved woman. Her performance becomes a drama, and her ability to transform her voice allows us to hear different emotional qualities embodied in the sound of her voice itself.
Her appearance could seem just as changeable. She could variously seem vulnerable, sexy, innocent, buoyant, or world-weary. She could seem to be the girl next door dumping her boyfriend (“You’re No Good”), or the personification of loneliness (“Someone to Lay Down Beside Me”). Rolling Stone dubbed her “Rock’s Venus,” and her poster decorated countless dorm room walls. Writer Phillip K. Dick was obsessed with her, and she appears as a persona, “Linda Fox,” in his novel Valis. He wrote elsewhere, “My fantasy number that I run in my head is, I discover Linda Ronstadt, and am remembered as the scout for Capitol who signed her. I would have wanted that on my gravestone.”
While researching this post, I was surprised to learn from a NY Times article that Ronstadt felt her singing had been most influenced by opera star Maria Callas.
Emmylou [Harris] and I are both Maria Callas fans.
We listen to that all the time.
She's the greatest chick singer ever.
I learn more about bluegrass singing,
more about singing Mexican songs,
more about singing rock-and-roll from listening
to Maria Callas records than I ever would
from listening to pop music for a month of Sundays.
In 2006 Opera News wrote that “Nearly thirty years after her death, [Callas is] still the definition of the
diva as artist.” Callas had the same power we have been discussing: an ability to color her voice, to make words audible in an extraordinarily vibrant, emotion-laden way—an ability which allowed listeners to have almost magical experiences. Few people thought Callas was gifted with the most purely “beautiful” operatic voice of the time, but the way she would sometimes shape her voice and performance for dramatic effect could leave audiences stunned. Callas was also a great actress on stage. Here’s a video of her bringing the house to its feet at the Paris Opera in 1958. Even during a thunderous standing ovation that temporarily stops the performance, she continues to act—she never breaks character.
[Reading before bedtime photograph by Flickr user jeff, the rhino under the Creative Commons license. His photostream is here. The Linda Ronstadt photo is from the Wikimedia Commons.]
Julia Child is an unlikely glamour girl. Over six feet tall, with long arms and legs and a warbling voice famously parodied by Dan Aykroyd, she possessed none of the sultry airs of Marilyn Monroe or the cool confidence of Jackie Kennedy. But glamorous she was thanks to her larger-than-life personality and her role in helping Americans see food itself as something glamorous.
Put her in the kitchen, surrounded by knives, a raw chicken, and a vat of cream, and Julia transformed into something wonderful. Completely in charge of her surroundings, perfectly at home, and most of all, thrilled to be there. A woman happy to be behind a stove and in front of a camera is not a surprising image today, what with our Nigella Lawsons and Barefoot Contessas and even our Rachael Rays. But in 1963, when Julia Child made her debut on a local channel in Boston, the world – both in terms of food and of women – was a very different place.
In the 1920’s and ’30s, women (and it was always women) spent an average of 30 to 42 hours per week cooking for their families – and that’s in addition to other at-home responsibilities. Back then, cooking wasn’t fun. It was a chore.
By the time Julia Child entered the public eye, women’s roles were starting to evolve. They were entering the workforce, allowing less time to slave over the stove back at home. Food manufacturers were quick to notice the trend and capitalize on it, developing easy-to-make semi-prepared foods. Those dishes might not have been as tasty or healthy as the fresh stuff, but they were a whole lot quicker and easier.
If prepared foods never complete displaced cooking from scratch, we have Julia to thank. She helped American women see the value – emotional as well as gustatory – in “real” cooking.
In a recent New York Times article, Michael Pollan points out that Child’s television debut occurred the same year as the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Pollan notes that while it might seem, on the surface, that Julia’s position in the kitchen was at odds with Friedan’s take on feminism, in reality, the two were working in concert. He says:
She tried to show the sort of women who read The Feminine Mystique that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s too.)
Fulfillment, intelligence, confidence – these are the qualities that emanated from Julia Child, the ones she passed on to her audience, and the ones that made her glamorous. Plus, the food she cooked was rich, French and (at times) complicated – the most glamorous sort. Pollan again:
Once upon a time, Julia…showed you how you, too, could cook like someone who could not only prepare but properly pronounce a béarnaise. So-called fancy food has always served as a form of cultural capital, and cooking programs help you acquire it....
On Friday, Julia Child’s glamour and charm will be broadcast once again, via Meryl Streep, with the opening of the movie Julie & Julia . It tells the story of Julia’s culinary awakening in post-war France intertwined with the (also true) story of a New York City blogger named Julie Powell cooking her way through Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking. If the trailer is any indication, it’ll be a fabulous movie.
Nearly 50 years after her first appearance on the small screen, Julia’s character still captivates us with her unflinching joie de vivre. As the movie proves, her spirit connects not only to those women she originally influenced, but to women (and men) of younger generations, as well. Like a true icon, and the glamorous woman that she was.
One of the stars of the Transformers films is Megan Fox, a sultry young actress noted for, among other things, having several conspicuous tattoos. Her recent appearance on the cover of Elle distressed Samatha Sault, who found the cover “trashy.” One of Sault’s coworkers thinks Fox is “one of the worst-dressed women in the country.” Leaving that issue for others to judge, I found myself reflecting on the notion of what being transformable might mean in relationship to actors and models.
Tattoos are clearly one way of transforming your appearance, but having used that means of transformation can become an issue in some situations. For example, in the 11th cycle of America’s Next Top Model, Elina, one of the final five contestants, was eliminated after her “go sees.” She visited various fashion designers, all of whom reported that they would not book her because she had some prominent tattoos. Why would having tattoos be an issue for fashion designers looking for models?
The purpose of fashion shows is to sell clothes. During runway shows fashion designers want the audience’s focus to be on their designs. The models are there to show the audience how their designs can look when worn by a “stylish” person. I put “stylish” in quotation marks because runway shows and ad campaigns are often designed around a particular theme that expresses (or perhaps extends) our impression of an individual designer’s overall style. There is a lot at stake. When a fashion designer looks at a potential model, he (or she) hopes to see someone whose appearance can be temporarily transformed by skilled hair stylists and makeup artists in a manner that can help present his stylistic ideals.
So if a fashion designer sees a model and feels her appearance can be transformed to serve the particular concept he has in mind, then he may be eager to work with her.
If, on the other hand, he sees a model who has conspicuous features that conflict with his current fashion ideals (perhaps she has prominent tattoos or breasts that are too spectacular), then his instinctive reaction may be, “I can’t use her. Her image doesn’t suit my designs.” (Incidentally, tattoos can be temporarily concealed, but the process is tedious, as shown in this video.)
If we think about actresses who have an exceptional ability to transform their appearance from role to role, one of the first that comes to mind is Cate Blanchett. In the photo at left, as she appeared in the film Heaven, her face seems an almost androgynous canvas. Looking at her strong facial features, you can imagine how a director might cast her to portray the young Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. On the other hand, she can transform into someone so strikingly glamorous (as seen in the photo below) that she could be visually believable in any role requiring glamour. (Speaking personally, I also find glamour in the strength of the stark image of her.)
The ability to transform in appearance is not necessarily the surest way to get consistent work as an actor. Many fine actors play essentially the same character in different guises throughout their careers. Grant McCracken has used Cate Blanchett as an example of someone taking a “transformational and fluid” approach to branding her image as an actress. In contrast, Megan Fox, by branding herself as an edgy sex symbol, may be hired many times to play variations of that role.
In the fashion world, a designer, when imagining a runway show, is most likely to be inspired by models who can be transformed to match his design ideals. The aura of high glamour that we sense in this photograph of Blanchett depends partly on the way her porcelain skin complements the gown, as do her hairstyle and makeup. In her Elle photograph Fox’s appearance and her attire also complement each other, even if some find the result “trashy.”
But if we imagine Fox displaying her shoulder tattoo while wearing the gown shown in the Blanchett photograph, the glamorous aura of the gown would be compromised. Her tattoo would draw attention away from this particular gown in a detrimental way, thereby failing to present the gown as ideally as the designer might hope for.
In a designer’s mind, some imagined ideal presentation will likely be what prospective models are measured against. The question then becomes, “could we transform this model’s appearance into a look that would present my design effectively?” Anything about the model’s appearance which hinders imagining an effective presentation becomes a hindrance to using her. Conversely, if something about the model’s appearance helps the designer imagine a deeply satisfying presentation, he will likely want to hire her.
Does a model give up her individual identity by being transformable? No. The ability to be comfortable in highly varied guises becomes an integral aspect of her identity.
[Both images of Cate Blanchett are in the extraordinary collection of images of her by Flickr user Louise Lampton, and are used under the Creative Commons license.]
Nollywood Babylon, showing July 3-7 at the Museum of Modern Art, depicts the stars and directors behind Nigeria's film industry, the world's third-largest and fastest growing. Made cheaply and distributed as DVDs, Nollywood films have an enthusiastic audience, many of whom rely on pirated copies. Judging from the trailer and press notes, the documentary focuses particularly on the role evangelical Christianity plays in Nollywood films. The trailers at Nollywood.com suggest more-universal elements: sex, money, violence, and family conflicts.
The distanced gaze of models as they walk the runway is fascinating. Their elevated position appears to give them status (just as elevated thrones, raised platforms, and having subjects bow gave rulers status). Models on the runaway generally gaze above their audience, thus seeming too uninterested in anyone below their position to bother to look down at them.
Russian model Sasha Pivovarova, seen here in an Armani ad, has self-described her gaze as influenced by the images in silent films and as being “ice cold and unreachable, like the stare of a sniper.”
To fully appreciate the significance of that remark it helps know that in World War II Russia trained 2,000 women snipers, only 500 of which survived the fighting. One of them, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, has been listed as one of the top ten snipers of all time. During the war she had 309 confirmed kills, including 36 enemy snipers. Russia issued two postage stamps in her honor, and in the best known photograph of her with her rifle (shown below), she appears both strikingly attractive and as relentless in purpose as one would have to be to achieve that many kills.
Other famous Russian women snipers include Roza Shanina (a sweet-looking kindergarten teacher turned sniper), Tanya Baramzina (who was brutally tortured and executed when captured), and Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya (who commanded a company of women snipers). Russian and Soviet women have been awarded medals in some of the most hazardous combat assignments, including scouts, snipers, and fighter pilots.
Thus when Sasha Pivovarova mentions the stare of a sniper, she may well be referencing images such as this one of Lyudmila Pavlichenko (most likely one of the publicity photos taken of her). Here was a woman who was extremely successful in the glamorous wartime role of sniper. The role is glamorous partly because snipers tend to work alone, or in teams of two (shooter and spotter). And partly because there is something fascinating about a sniper’s patience, stealthiness, self-control, and cold-blooded ability to kill from great distances. Snipers have been the subject of numerous novels and films. Her first day in combat Pablichenko could not bring herself to shoot until the young soldier next to her was shot and killed. After that she said, “Nothing could stop me.” Pavlichencko’s fame as a sniper eventually became so great that she was pulled out of combat so that she could be sent to Canada and the United States for publicity. She was the first Soviet citizen to be received by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Any special “looks” that models repeatedly use can make them candidates for both emulation and parody. The facial poses of male models was parodied by Ben Stiller in Zoolander. (See Ben Stiller being Derek Zoolander in a commercial.) His “patented” look was named “Blue Steel” (and was identical to his other looks). To practice your Blue Steel has become an insider joke among models, and one web site tells how to do it, while at the same time complaining about seeing it commonly used by celebrities.
An irony in the name “Blue Steel” is that it references the bluing process that is used to provide rust protection to steel gun barrels, as well as to reduce the glare from the barrel. Perhaps the name emphasizes the sense of cold hardness that we sometimes feel when looking at photographs of models and actors. There is also the suggestion of danger. Sasha Pivovarova describes herself a smiling person in real life, but when she uses her sniper stare there is a feeling that if she did condescend to look your way, she could, if she chose to, kill you without hesitation.
Although I can think of silent film actresses who could project this quality (Louise Brooks, for example), the platinum blond quality of the Armani ad brings to mind actress Jean Harlow. Although she often sparred with her male costars using wit and laughter, she could look deadly when she wanted to.
Little children will often spontaneously start dancing to energetic music. They don’t worry about how they look, they just enjoy moving to the music. Then boys and girls divide into separate tribes, and by adolescence everyone is self-conscious about their body. Worrying about how you look to others can inhibit dancing.
Social dancing was important to my parents, as it had been to my father’s parents. I learned to dance fairly young and took a couple of classes in college. Years later I signed my wife and myself up for dance lessons, and we loved it so much we continued to take lessons in a variety of dances for a decade.
After a few years of lessons we occasionally substituted for our teacher, or served as a demonstration couple. Once, after demonstrating, we watched as some beginning students waltzed around the floor. My wife whispered to me to look at a particular couple. Nothing stood out about them to me, so I said, “What?” She said, “Look at her face. She feels like Ginger Rogers.”
Seeing films of Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers can seem to define grace—his immaculate tuxedo, her impossibly beautiful gown, both of them seeming almost weightless.
By the time these movies were made Astaire had been dancing almost all his life. He grew up dancing in vaudeville with his older sister Adele. Their partnership ended only when Adele married an English Lord.
In films his partnership with Ginger Rogers was the longest and most successful. She was a great dancer, although some argue she was not as technically skilled as Astaire’s later partners like Eleanor Powell and Rita Hayworth. But Rogers remained an charming actress even while dancing, just as Adele Astaire had been. Critic John Mueller felt that “the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable.”
The reality was probably different. Astaire was a perfectionist. Never satisfied, always doubting himself, he wanted to practice routines weeks past their scheduled shooting dates. He would practice long hours until he and his partner were exhausted, with Astaire still never totally satisfied. Fortunately for us, none of that grueling work and endless self-doubt shows in the final illusions, those images of effortless grace.
Illusions can be important. Dancing is easier physically when you’re young. But the feeling of joy you can experience while dancing does not disappear with age. My father, widowed, danced into his 80s. Each Saturday night, he would dress up, and, looking dapper, he would drive somewhere to dance. At 83 he died at home peacefully in his sleep, and three women attended his memorial that had danced with him the previous Saturday.
No doubt they would miss my father as a friend. But the loss of their dance partner was probably just as devastating. They knew that my father wasn’t Fred Astaire, and that none of them were Ginger Rogers. But the pleasure of moving in time with the music, of being squired around the dance floor by a well-dressed man who enjoyed their company: such things allowed to them feel that life was joyous, and that they were graceful and desirable. I suspect they felt something like the way they imagined Ginger felt when dancing with Fred.
How important are such feelings? With my father no longer available as a dance partner, one woman moved away to a retirement center. Nothing had changed about her health, but her image of herself had. She no longer saw herself as a woman who, come Saturday night, would be dressing up and going out to dance.
Lionsgate recently announced a new special-edition DVD release of Abel Ferrara's masterwork, Bad Lieutenant. Starring Harvey Keitel as a New York cop with more than just the usual bad habits, the film is a fascinating crawl through the gutter of despair. The script was written by Ferrara and Zoë Lund, who'd previously starred in Ferrara's Ms .45.
Before her 1999 death, Zoë Lund, (nee Tamerlis) was beautiful, talented, willful, addicted, and brilliant. Her ex-husband, Robert Lund, maintains a website as tribute to her, and it's worth clicking around to read various interviews with her, and Ferrara's interviews about her. She also did a little journalism, notably a tour of Julian Schnabel's loft forHouse and Garden.
Lund's the thinking man's cult figure. She died in Paris, tragically young, but she left a legacy of social activism, a novel, film scripts, her films, and some great photos. Her husband, director Edouard De Laurot, took this one in Paris in the 80s.
Not all classical music has ‘glamour’, but some does. In her bookDance with the MusicElizabeth Sawyer has a chapter on choosing music suitable to choreograph for ballet. She writes:
One matter on which most writers seem to agree is that music for the theater must have the quality of glamour. This being defined as ‘magic, enchantment; delusive or alluring beauty or charm’, that view seems reasonable.
Sawyer also talks about an indefinable something called “atmosphere.” Although she can’t define theatrical atmosphere in music, she names pairs of composers whose music in general has or does not have theatrical atmosphere. Among others, she says that Monteverdi’s music generally has it, Palestrina’s does not. Similarly, Weber but not Beethoven; Tchaikovsky but not Brahms.
Her perceptions are valid, and since the second composer in each pairing is undeniably great, it shows, as she writes, that “the presence or absence of glamour does not, in itself, determine the worth of a piece of music.”
Sawyer is not saying that some music is glamorous because of its association with glamorous venues or performers, but rather that some pieces of music have qualities that make them intrinsically glamorous. (I would add the caveat that this can only be true of the music is performed well.) And if a piece of music can have the qualities of “glamour” and “atmosphere,” then these qualities can be borrowed by other media, such as dance, film, and even advertising.
If we think of glamour in the older sense in which it was synonymous with a magic “spell,” then some classical music has the ability to immediately cast a spell, whereas other music builds its effect more slowly as it unfolds. In film, as in the theater, immediacy is important, so film makers typically choose music that has atmosphere, especially for emotional moments. In many films where there are sequences of images with no dialogue, borrowing the magic, the glamour, of particular passages of classical music has been crucial to the final effect .
One work that has been used many times in films is “O Fortuna”,
the opening movement of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Like most composers whose music Sawyer feels has the quality of “atmosphere,” Orff wrote numerous works for the theater, and though written for the concert hall, Carmina Burana is undeniably theatrical.
You can see a video of “O Fortuna” performed in the concert hall here, with the incredibly dark text given in subtitles. The video below shows how a portion of the music was used in the 1981 film Excalibur. It’s a short excerpt, so I suggest watching it first with the sound off and then again with it on. Notice how remarkably different the emotional effect is when the music is added.
There is some glamour in the knights’ shining armor and their horses. But the music adds tremendous emotion and atmosphere, as well as a sense of universality. The knights seem to represent all warriors who have ridden or marched into battle, and the elemental force of the music suggests that although the orchard they ride past will blossom again next spring, most of these knights will not live to see it.
I plan to talk about a few other examples of films using classical music in the next few weeks, and while doing so I will try to hint at why some music can cast such a powerful spell.
Guest blogger Peter LiCalsi is a screenwriter in Los Angeles who has done work in production design and art direction. You can contact him at peterlicalsi-at-gmail.com.
One of my guilty pleasures is the "reality" show, The Hills, in which a cadre of vapid beautiful people (the millennial Bright Young Things, though not all that bright) are given the skeleton of scenes which loosely resemble events actually unfolding in their own lives, and improvise accordingly. We are meant to believe that the scenes played out are the actual lives of those stars, or personalities. What unfolds can be a banal and trite soap opera, but more often than not the scenes themselves are surreal and voyeuristic. The fourth wall is never broken, yet what remains--or rather, what is allowed to remain--are the awkward pauses, the stuttering, the bizarre locutions and facial gestures, the run-ons, and the fragments that are rife within, yes ... reality.
In film, the vérité technique has been used to great effect to illustrate that a subject needn't be editorialized to be compelling. Much of the most famous vérité work has sought to depict the mundane. The Hills, by contrast, uses a vérité lens to examine traditionally "glamorous" subjects. The young, beautiful, and affluent are seen in all their glory--attending nightclubs, buying expensive clothes, staying at resorts, and jet setting to Vegas one weekend, Cabo the next. Yet they are robbed of an essential element of glamour: grace.
This combination of glamorous subject matter and graceless presentation is derivative of many of the films from Andy Warhol's Factory. Indeed, much of reality television seems to be Warhol's legacy: Warhol's famous “15 minutes of fame” idea is predicated on the notion that fame per se is a cultural commodity, with value independent of any deeper association. The rise of the reality show, the faux-reality show, YouTube, etc.--these owe a great deal to Warhol's insistence that simply focusing the eye toward a subject can imbue it with artistic and commercial value.
Among these, The Hills is quite special. It dispenses with the grace, eloquence, and comportment that are typically granted to attractive, affluent characters in western pop culture. In doing so it confirms, intentionally or not, Warhol's point that beauty validates itself indefinitely. And fame validates beauty eternally. Perhaps we miss the point when we agonize that Lauren, Audrina, Brody, and The Whole Sick Crew probably couldn't master long division, and are thus not worthy of mass adulation. They are works of art to be observed, nothing more--the descendants of the Campbell’s Soup Can.
More pointedly, it’s difficult to watch Warhol's Poor Little Rich Girl, the hour-long film of heiress Edie Sedgwick preparing for a party, musing on about her reckless spending habits, rock and roll, and fur coats, and not recognize some happenstance lineage to The Hills. Warhol expanded upon Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” making beauty an acceptable tenet of art after the deconstructionism of the previous half-century. The Hills is one of the many chapters in the battleground of glamour and reason, one that says we can have our cake and look at it too.
Both men and women seem to recognize that a valuable fashion accessory can be the company of an attractive, well-attired member of the opposite sex. And if one item of arm candy helps proclaim one’s attractiveness, what about the effect of a bevy of them?
Musical theater has long understood and exploited this notion. In the 1957 film Les Girls Gene Kelly works with a troupe of 3 beautiful dancers. In the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy James Cagney sings for a bevy of 16 belles wearing matching costumes. (See image number 22.) And in the same film Fay Templeton is admired by 8 nattily attired men. (See image number 37.)
Costuming one's bevy of admirers in matching outfits helps mark them as your entourage. In a 2005 Salzburg production of Verdi’s La Traviata, Anna Netrebko, in a red dress, is surrounded by a large chorus, all of whom wear black suits. If you look closely you can see that many of those wearing suits are women, which only adds to the implication that she is attractive to all.
This image from Broadway Melody of 1938 suggests even greater sexual ambiguity. Thirty-two men in black top hat and tails kneel in admiration of Eleanor Powell, who is dressed in masculine, gray-blue top hat and tails. She stands in a feet-planted, legs-apart stance that body language experts call a crotch display. It is common stance for tough guys, but is seldom used by women (except superheroes). Of the 32 women whose eyes admire her, half already seem to have swooned, their dresses forming a lovely pattern. (See a superb large scan of this image here.)
Such over-the-top images almost parody themselves. By the time music videos came around, the entourage effect was ripe for post-modern reworking. In Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video his band consists of five women who seem made up to resemble the stylized prints of Patrick Nagel. Clad in provocative versions of the simple black dress, these women wear neutral expressions. This leaves the tie-clad Palmer as the only person free to show facial emotion, his sexual attractiveness firmly established by his glamorous band.
Shania Twain parodied these images with herMan! I Feel Like a Woman! video. Her male band is strangely clad. Wearing what appears to be latex from the waist down, their upper bodies are showcased in thin stretch fabric. Better matched facially even than the women in Palmer’s video, they all wear swim goggles atop their forehead, perhaps a reference to a particular image of Nagel’s. The men seem to be stoic soldiers of glamour who know and accept their role as accessories. For brief periods they even disappear from the video. (And be sure to note Twain's stance.)
Twain begins the video wearing a top hat and long black dress that suggests a tuxedo. By the video’s end she has stripped down to long black gloves, thigh-high boots, and a black corset. This costume has enough dominatrix overtones to reinforce her commanding role in this group, and, like Palmer, she is the only one allowed to show facial emotion.
As a stage device the entourage effect can seem part of an entertaining fantasy. But perpetuated over time in real life (à la Hugh Hefner surrounded by living Barbie Dolls), it can devolve into a caricature that becomes unflattering to everyone involved.
Paramount recently released the poster for the new Star Trek movie, opening May 8. The black and white composition and almost abstract suggestion of speed make an interesting contrast to the clear forms and primary colors of the original show.
Long-time DG readers may remember this quotation, comparing James Bond and Mr. Spock, from Jeff Greenwald's 1999 book Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth. Like Ayn Rand's novels, Star Trek traffics in glamour that appeals to people who generally think they're immune to such frivolous nonsense (and, conversely, whose obsessions seem decidedly unglamorous to most of the fashion crowd). Greenwald's book has a number of good passages that deal with Star Trek's glamour, without using the word. Here's one of the best, which follows his girlfriend's insight that the book "is about longing," the subject of all glamour:
When I began this book, I naively imagined that everyone I spoke to would echo my own intuition: that Star Trek has become successful because it awakens a collective human yearning to get out into space and explore the “final frontier” in earnest. A number of people on my list did indeed feel this way—but they were in the minority. Star Trek, I learned, inspires longings of many kinds. It’s a mirror that people tune like a radio, focusing on the aspects that attract them most.
Star Trek invokes an almost primal wanderlust—a hardwired compulsion to break away from the familiar, and plumb the depths of outer and inner space. It inspires a desire to build a society where technology is partnered with conscience. It evokes a yearning for family and friendship, which is played out in a thousand different fan clubs and Web sites around the world. And it fulfills a deep and eternal need for something to believe in: something vast and powerful, yet rational and contemporary. Something that makes sense.
One of the trailers for the new Star Trek movie features someone’s voice telling young Jim Kirk, “You’ve always had a hard time finding a place in this world, haven’t you? Never knowing your true worth. You can settle for something less, an ordinary life. Or do you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special.” In the trailer, that enticing suggestion accompanies this evocative shot, which beautifully captures both the centrality of the individual and the longing to belong to something larger than oneself:
The promise of becoming someone special is at the heart of much glamour, from the allure of beautiful dresses to the appeal of the U.S. Marine Corps. Particularly for people who feel out of place in their surrounding community, the idea of belonging to an ideal fellowship (Camelot's Round Table, Ayn Rand's Galt's Gulch, the Enterprise crew) is particularly powerful—and, as Greenwald documents, able to sustain real-world fellowship among devotees who share the same enthusiasm.
As I've suggested in The Atlantic, Watchmen
is the Sunset Boulevard
of superhero comics: a mythic debunking that, for all its revisionism, depends on the audience's appreciation for the original glamour of its subject.
Dave Gibbons, the graphic novel's illustrator, was at Borders in Century City yesterday. After the long line of fans had cleared, I asked him a few questions about the glamour of superheroes. He talked enthusiastically about the transformation represented by superheroes' costumes and gear and about the glamour of heroism himself. But, most emphatically, he disagreed with my use of the word debunk to describe Watchmen's relation to superhero glamour.
"Alan Moore and I loved superheroes," he said.
The original Watchmen, like most comic books (or Dickens novels), came out in installments. Whenever an issue ended on a particularly bleak or revisionist note, Gibbons said, they'd start the next one with a glimpse of the wonder of being a superhero.
In an interview with Adam Rogers of Wired, Gibbons praised the Watchmen movie for capturing the geek glamour of superheroes:
"I think because Dan Dreiberg, Nite Owl, is kind of the geek superhero. He's the one that—well, he's the one that I would be, perhaps the one that you would be as well. I just love all of those gadgets and the car, and the whole feeling of that underground lair I thought they captured beautifully in the movie. And the whole, you know, glamour of being a superhero. As much as Watchmen is set in a real, kind of gritty world, there is that wonder of being a superhero, that joy you must feel when you sail off into the night in your wonderful machine and your cool costume. I think that's been captured wonderfully."
Not to mention Silk Spectre's perfect hair, which is as impractical as the capes Edna Mode banned in The Incredibles, but somehow never gets in the way.
Win Watchmen tickets: I have two tickets to the 12:15 a.m. show on Friday (just after midnight Thursday) at the Arclight in Hollywood for the first DG reader to send an email telling me which superhero you think is most glamorous and why. The tickets are in the regular theater, not the dome, in the middle of the 2nd row, seats B-16 and B-17. To enter, send your email to Virginia-at-DeepGlamour.net. Entries may be published in a future DG post.
Observing this year's Oscar entrances, the WaPost's Amy Argetsinger writes that the red-carpet arrivals have become more central to stars' identities than the performances those arrivals supposedly honor:
"So the ritual of arriving somewhere -- of lighting up a place with their sheer presence, all that tragically underused charisma -- that's the performance these days."
Advertising imagery confirms her observation. Here are two ads that invite us to picture ourselves as stars. They show us pretty people in fine clothes but, above all, they suggest that we imagine ourselves as arriving some place special and being photographed as we do. The glamour of contemporary celebrity appeals less to the longing for beauty or riches--this isn't the Depression, no matter what the papers say--than to the desire for admiration, adulation, and love: the yearning to be recognized as important. Wouldn’t it be great to be like that?
With the Oscars this Sunday, I thought Dallas photographer Mark Oristano's work might get you in the mood for the old glamour of yesteryear, when studios matched stars up on the red carpet and picked out their Oscar gowns. Believe it or not, there was a time before the professional freelance stylist.
"Stylists are a relatively new phenomenon in fashion. Orginally, stylists worked as fashon editors, dressing-- or "styling"-- models for fashon shoots for magazines or catalogs. But as the number of formal affairs exploded in the 1990s, from the Oscars and a few premieres to an avalanche of paparazzi-line red-carpet events, stylists saw the birth of a new niche: dressing celebrities. Stylists went freelance and starting signing up movie, television and music stars."
But Thomas goes further, explaining the timeline of the once and future stylist.
In the 1950s, following the advent of television and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as the Hollywood Anti-Trust Case that forced studios to sell off their theatre chains, the industry suffered a financial slump and changed the way business was done. Actors and technical staff--including costumers--were gradually released from their studio contracts; many costume departments were shut down. To make matters worse, films began to take on a more realistic tone, with actors in more everyday, normal clothes--no ermine-trimmed peignoirs or sequin siren gowns required. By the mid-1960s, movie costume designers were nearly an extinct breed...
With no more Edith Head or Helen Rose or Jean Louis to provide glamorous wardrobes gratis, stars were forced to shop themselves for premieres and award shows, including the Oscars.
So at Oscar time, as Thomas writes, stars criss-crossed Rodeo Drive looking for their gowns. "The problem was most stars didn't have cultivated taste and they didn't have the studio costumers to guide them anymore."
Then, disastrously, the stars decided that they could design their own outfits. See: Demi Moore in bike shorts and a gold capey-skirty thing in 1989 and Kim Basinger in 1990 in her futuristic a-bomb gown (also see 1989, when Jodie Foster wears a baby-blue prom dress with a giant butt-bow, plucked from a Milan shop window).
Enter Armani, who decides he wants stars wearing his clothes. After seeing poor Jodie Foster in her taffeta, Armani's director of entertainment industry communications, Wanda McDaniel, contacted Foster and offered to dress her in Armani for the 1990 ceremony when she'd be presenting. McDaniel also dressed Michelle Pfeiffer that year and, writes Thomas:
The next morning Women's Wear Daily ran the headline: "The Agony and the Ecstasy." Under it were two pictures: Kim Basinger in a freakish self-designed one-sleeved white number, and luminous Pfeiffer in her understated, utterly tasteful Armani... Women's Wear Daily dubbed it the Armani Awards...more important, it gave Americans a glamour they could actually imagine wearing.
Ah, but back to Oristano. His clients want the studio-conceived glamour, the kind that Edith Head could whip up and immortalize in a Hitchcock film, so he's got his own stylist on call to give his clients make-up treatment and costume consultations.
Says the photographer, "I've always been a huge fan of the photos of George Hurrell, the photographer who set the pace in the 30's and 40's in Hollywood.
I've also studied with Michael Grecco, who is one of the top portrait photographers working today. He got me interested in using the same kind of 'hot' lights that Hurrell used. I just kept fooling around until I got it right."
This lovely lady is thought to be Simonetta Vespucci, the most beautiful woman in Renaissance Florence. Like many of his contemporaries, Botticelli had a major crush on la bella Simonetta--and he immortalized her, or versions of her, in many of his paintings.
This painting, officially known as Young Woman in Mythological Guise, is not meant as a realistic portrait. In his introduction to a 2001 exhibition at the National Gallery, David Alan Brown wrote that the image recalls a verse from Petrarch:
Breeze that surrounds those blond and curling locks, that makes them move...and scatters the sweet gold, then gathers it in lovely knots recurling....
The abundant, gravity-defying, partially braided, partially down hair was highly suggestive in its day. The pearls--remember, this is long before the cultured variety--would be worth a fortune. (Check out the pearls threaded through the braids outlining her bust.) The pearls woven through her hair create a net called a vespaio, or wasp nest, and are usually taken to refer to the Vespucci name. But, for all the clues, she remains a mystery. Maybe she's Simonetta; maybe she's an imaginary creature. Maybe she's a mixture of the two.
All in all, she's the picture of quattrocento glamour.
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there.... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
--Ezra Pound, "Patria Mia," New Age, September 18, 1912
Taken in 1932, Berenice Abbott's "Nightview" is one of 60 iconic New York photos in this exhibition at the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe. (Check out the link to see more.)
The exhibit's most glamorous shots are from the 1930s and '40s, when New York was the symbol of American modernity, and many of them are night views, with windows bright with promise. These aren't realistic photos of city streets but abstracted, suggestive portraits that spark the imagination.
In his brilliant book Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies James Sanders points out that the New York of classic movies--the city of penthouses and jazz clubs--was a glamorous composite created by homesick New York writers exiled in Hollywood:
The city they were creating was not just the one they were remembering, however romantically. The writers were, after all, professional imaginers, and it was an imaginary city they were bringing into being. It would be animated not only by the memory of what once had happened there, but by all the things that could have happened, or should have happened. To memory was added imagination, and it would be these two potent faculties that would animate the dream city and give it special force and flavor.... If the real New York had many tall buildings, it had plenty of low ones as well, especially in its outer boroughs and residential districts. But the dream city would seem to be all vertical, every scene playing in a penthouse, on a terrace, in a rooftop nightclub, every window looking onto a view of rising towers.
Every scene. The mythic city, the dream city, the city of imagination is less a place of stories than a series of scenes--static shots into which the audience members can project their own longings. The glamour of the setting lingers in memory after the particulars of plots and characters fade, encouraging the audience to imagine their own stories in that glamorous version of Metropolis.
The most powerful cinematic image of the mythic city, Sanders suggests, is thus not a glamorized version of the real New York but a fully imaginary shot: the Emerald City of Oz.
Dorothy and her friends indeed stand transfixed—but not by aesthetic pleasure. In that gleaming skyline, they see the fulfillment of their dreams. In that place, perhaps only in that place, will each find the special thing he or she is looking for. These towers will somehow change their lives. This is what makes the view so powerful, so moving. From a distance, the skyline is everything they could have imagined, and more. Soaring, glistening, grand but comprehensible, its upward leap precisely mirrors the feeling in their hearts. Its very improbability—all those slender, dizzying towers, bundled tightly together, cresting ad the center—simply adds to its impact. For how could their lives be truly transformed, after all, in a place of ordinary appearance? Magical events call for magical settings. Through a kind of urban grace, the skyline of New York—in one sense simply the overscaled product of technology and real estate—became the locus of one of the most potent collective emotional experiences in the life of America. Into Manhattan’s towers were focused the hopes and dreams of millions, until the very girders and facades were permeated and charged with a sense of human possibility, as the skyline’s own skyward aspirations became fused with the personal yearnings of millions. The dream city, even in this most unworldly of guises, lets us share that transactive spark.
The Oscars are in a world of hurt if the producers' big idea is coming attractions. Michael Cieply reports:
Producers of the show — to be hosted by Hugh Jackman
and broadcast Feb. 22 on ABC — are even trying to liven up the
proceedings by asking studios and others to provide scenes from future
films, according to a request sent to various companies last month.
The
idea, if the clips prove watchable, is for Mr. Jackman to sign off the
broadcast with fresh 10-second snippets of two dozen new movies, to run
on a split screen with the end credits.
At last a reason to watch til the end! Or at least to Tivo and skip ahead. Somehow gimmicks for the end of the show seem wrong-headed. What about the other 80-odd minutes?
Actually, I think the Academy needs to dream up some new categories and dump some old ones. A Best Trailer award makes more sense than Documentary Short Subject, doesn't it? Everyone watches trailers and doc. shorts are seen by half-dozens. And why not Best Ad Campaign? Best Appearance by a Commercial Product? Outstanding Achievement in Viral Marketing?
Groundhog Day is one of those films that I'm always willing to watch--even if it's already started. I'm especially fond of Bill Murray's scene with character actor Steven Tobolowsky, playing Needle-nose Ned Ryerson, insurance salesman.
Stanley Fish named it one of the 10 Best American Movies, which strikes me as a sign of Prof. Fish needing to get out more, and readers agreed. I don't care about the sweetness in the movie--sweetness, schmeetness, I'm here for the laughs. Bing!
The Financial Times My Favorite Home features the dwelling places of the great, the good, and the interesting. I'm not sure which category Fran Rubel Kuzui falls into. Kuzui and her husband Kaz Kuzui discovered Joss Whedon and his script for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. She directed the feature film and through good luck and/or astute management has been receiving executive producer credits for the TV franchise and compensation, no doubt, ever since. The audience at Whedonesque isn't exactly enchanted by the interview, but hey, that's show biz. Some people think she's neat.
Her interview is a tich precious for my taste. As DG is a snark-free zone, I'll refrain from commenting on her latest plans:
I’ve decided to direct one more film and have just finished the screenplay.
This may seem like an unfortunate moment to release a film called Confessions of a Shopaholic, opening February 13.
But speaking to fans at the Westwood Borders, Sophie Kinsella, author of the best-selling books on which the movie is based, declared the international economic crisis the perfect context for the movie--and not just because we could use some escapism. Her credit-crazed protagonist Becky Bloomwood, said Kinsella, "is not only Everygirl, she's every country, every institution." Becky's struggle to overcome her shopping compulsion and the unpaid bills it brings, Kinsella said, is a "parable for our time."
It's also Jerry Bruckheimer's first venture into chick flickery--more shopping, less shooting. (That's him looking admiringly at Kinsella in the photo.) He claims the movie is "empowering for women." Maybe.
At the very least, it provides some work for actresses, including Krysten Ritter, who plays Becky's best friend Suze. Ritter, who joined Kinsella, Bruckheimer, and fellow cast member Hugh Dancy (Becky's love interest) at the Borders event, had the best line of the night. Describing her favorite scene, she said it made her "want to go home and drink tequila and open bills." Fun times.
After their panel discussion, the four signed books and special shopping bags--including a set for DG.
Share your favorite shopping experiences--good, bad, or dangerous--in the comments below. We'll send the autographed copy of Confessions of a Shopaholic to the person whose story we like best and the signed shopping bag to the runner up. (Not interested in these prizes? We'll send you a signed copy of The Substance of Style
instead.)
In Sunday's NYT, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott offered up a seemingly comprehensive dissection of the ways in which Hollywood has, since the days of Sidney Poitier, given us archetypes of the black male hero: the Black Everyman, the Black Outlaw, the Black Provocateur, the Black Father, the Black Yoda, and the Black Messiah.
But they forgot one important recurring role: the Black Techie or, if you prefer, the Black Geek. These guys are everywhere in TV shows and movies, programming computers and setting explosives. (I'm not even counting the many doctors.)
With all due respect to Geordi, the greatest black techie was, in my estimation, Dr. Miles Hawkins, the Reed Richards-meets-Tom Sowell protagonist of the short-lived superhero series M.A.N.T.I. S., who played by Carl Lumbly. (Now that the surprisingly glamorous white ubernerd Gil Grissom has left CSI, maybe Laurence Fishburne has a shot at at creating a new prototype of the black supergeek. Given his character's medical training, however, it will be hard to beat Omar Epps on House. And I did say I wasn't counting the doctors.)
Now black nerds are hardly a cultural stereotype. What gives?
One explanation is simply imitation. The Ur-black techie was, of course, the original Mission Impossible's immortal Barney Collier, played by Greg Morris, who reprised the role in three episodes of the remade 1988 series (which featured his son Phil Morris, who, like Lumbly has also played Martian Manhunter J'onn J'onzz). Maybe Barney was so memorable that he imprinted Hollywood with a new casting stereotype, à la Louis Gossett Jr.'s Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman.
But where did Barney come from? Why, in 1966, would a TV series feature a black man as its team's technical expert?
I suspect Barney came from the same impulse that in 1977 led my high school's senior class play to cast a black student as the boss in Meet Me in St. Louis. That selection wasn't an attempt at verisimilitude--not many white professionals had black bosses in 1903 St. Louis--nor was my South Carolina drama department devoted to color-blind casting (though the student in question did a fine job). No, the reason was that the boss had no visible family: no wife, no kids, no romantic entanglements. He was non-threatening because sexually neutral.
And who could be more non-threatening and sexually neutral than a techie?
That makes Joe Morton's Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson a breakthrough role. Not only does he create (and destroy) Skynet. He actually has a wife and son.
Now if only they made that horrible Terminator 3.
(In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the TV spinoff of the Terminator movies, Miles Dyson appears only in a photo, where he is portrayed by Phil Morris. So he, too, is a son of Barney.)
Margaret Ferrand Thorp's 1939 book America at the Movies includes one of earliest (perhaps the earliest) examinations of Hollywood glamour. What did predominately female Depression-era audience find at the movies? Why did they keep coming back? Movie glamour wasn't just about luxury and sex appeal, suggests Thorp. There was another attraction as well.
What the typical adult American female chiefly asks of the movies is the opportunity to escape by reverie from an existence which she finds insufficiently interesting. Better ways of enriching her life, society has not yet taught her. She sees the quickest release from a drab, monotonous, unsatisfying environment in dreaming of an existence which is rich, romantic, glamorous. But dreaming, though a pleasant occupation, is not altogether easy. The making of a really good reverie demands considerable effort both of energy and of imagination. How can the American woman who buys her bread sliced and her peas shelled be expected to concoct her own reveries? At the movies she gets them ready-made, put up in neat two-hour cans.
One of the things she wants most is to be appreciated, not just by implication but right out loud. There is social and psychological significance in the fact that 70 per cent of Gary Cooper’s fan mail comes from women who write that their husbands do not appreciate them. Their ideal is still the ideal husband of the Victorian era who told his wife at breakfast every morning how much she meant to him, but that husband is not a type which the postwar American man has any interest in emulating. He prefers to conceal his deeper emotions at breakfast, and during the rest of the day as well. His wife, consequently, has to spend her afternoons at the movies.
In the movies a wife finds it quite worth while to get into a new evening frock for a tête-à-tête dinner at home because her husband is sure, by dessert time at least, to take her hand across the intimately small and inconvenient table and say, “Darling, you get lovelier every day.”
This account is interesting for two reasons. The scene Thorp describes is, first of all, a composite. It doesn't advance a plot point about specific characters in a specific film. Rather, it's an emotion-laden but generic snapshot, a scene whose meaning lingers in the memory to be enhanced by each new version of the scene. We experience glamour not as a narrative but as a moment.
Second, Thorp is describing something that today's moviegoers would find unremarkable. This scene doesn't depict penthouse living or satin and furs. It seems like a stylized version of pretty ordinary life. The language is old-fashioned, of course, but the idea of a vocally affectionate husband is hardly exotic. It's been the norm since "the postwar American man" of the 1920s and 1930s was superseded by the "postwar American man" of the 1950s.
But, I have to wonder, Where are the movies that include these portrayals of expressive, married love?
Maybe I have too many Garbo DVDs, but married love doesn't seem that central to pre-1939 movies. Yet I can't imagine that Thorp simply made up this resonant scene. Was it a trope of forgettable films that kept housewives happy but never made it to Turner Classic Movies, let alone DVDs? Film students, please help me out. What movies is Thorp talking about? Or is she wrong?
[Still courtesy of Getty Images, which cannot identify the movie from which it was taken. The actor is Neil Hamilton, who decades later played Commissioner Gordon on Batman.]
The Motion Picture Home is closing, according to the LA Times, which is sad news not only for the residents and their families, but also for devotees of Hollywood history. Started in 1940 by Jean Hersholt (of the Humanitarian Award given out at the Oscars, which usually leaves home viewers wondering "who he?"), the Woodland Hills hospital and nursing home has been a refuge for older members of the entertainment industry.
Movie historians have turned the place into one-stop shopping for interviews with actors, directors and crew members from the Golden Age. If only the Home got residuals! While the motto "we take care of our own", sounds great, in real (not reel) life, the show biz community isn't breaking their backs to fund the place. Instead of writing huge checks, they throw a party:
But even modern-day Hollywood's biggest names couldn't script a happy
ending for the hospital and home. DreamWorks Animation SKG chief
Jeffrey Katzenberg, filmmaker Steven Spielberg and stars such as
Jennifer Aniston, Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt
and Reese Witherspoon each year host an annual pre-Oscar fundraiser
bash at the Beverly Hills Hotel for the home.
The tickets are around $25,000 for four, which is powder-room change. Corporate underwriters, like Target, boost the take, which means " Target takes care of old performers".
Rather than run individual rinky-dink foundations, why aren't these fat cats writing fat checks to keep this place going? Or maybe the A-list could donate their residual checks to the place in perp? Marc Wanamaker, film historian, agrees.
Nikki Finke is scathing on the closure, as are her readers, one of whom has an all-too-plausible take:
As soon as they shut down the hospital they will probably sell the
acreage for a wonderful price, so these “philanthropists” no longer
have to help out the “fund".
Kill the baby, strike the blond, and send donations here.
Consider for a moment the picture of the silent, capable man: the 007, or the mysterious cowboy who meanders into town and takes care of business, even the official portrait of JFK with his head down, deep in thought. Their glamour is rooted in our very DNA.
Anthropologically speaking, when times are tough, silence is the best way to live to see the next day. “Each man must do his own surviving,” writes Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. “Privacy is important for strength in that lonely work.”
But we live in a culture that’s tell-all, all-the-time. In 1994, Molly Mayfield in the Rocky Mountain News coined a new word. “the Oprahization of our culture—the astonishing propensity to tell all, even the most sacred, private things to an audience of strangers…”
When Oprah first went on the air her more scandalous guests would appear behind a screen or, who else remembers this??, dressed in disguise, big glasses, wigs, etc. That was 1985. By 2007, middle-class women were lifting up their shirts on national TV,for her Bra Revolution show. (Not to be outdone, Tyra added her own classy spin to the topic.) Perhaps we’ll look back at the apex of this era of T.M.I. as Tom Cruise’s jumping on Oprah's yellow couch and continuously dropping to the floor to do the E.R. arm pump all while professing his love for Katie Holmes. As my mother used to say “What would the neighbors think?”
Directly after that stunt Cruise went on a public relations whirlwind (“You’re glib, Matt. Glib.”) Note to those in the PR field: “Thrashing does not save a drowning person… Those who can float quietly have a better chance,” writes Gonzales.
Part of surviving, as Gonzales sees it, is constantly being able to reorient your mental map. A survivor must take in his surroundings, admit to himself he's over his head (humility), discard all hope of rescue (he's got to do it himself), and just get on with the business of making the right choices. "Survivors aren't fearless. They use fear: they turn it into anger and focus," he writes. (See Russell Crowe's Maximus in Gladiator.)
Strangely though, even though it is programmed into our DNA to be silent in survival, lately the quiet one turns out to be the sinister character to avoid: Daniel Day-Lewis' character in There Will Be Blood, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.
Economically, environmentally, individually, these are tough times. So where’s the good guy who puts up and shuts up, on the big screen or even in everyday life? From Gonzales' book, "Epictetus said, 'and let silence be the general rule, or let only what is necessary be said and in few words. And rarely and when the occasion calls shall we say something.'"
Somewhere, maybe because we've had it pretty easy for so long, we've forgotten the best way to survive is to go inside ourselves and stay quiet. You feel it, I feel it, even Lily Allen feels it. She sings about it in her new song, “The Fear.”
"I want to be rich and I want lots of money I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny ... I'll take my clothes off and it will be shameless 'Cuz everyone knows that's how you get famous ... I don't know what's right and what's real anymore I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore When do you think it will all become clear? ‘Cause I’m being taken over by The Fear"
No, I mean real glamour: the enchantment that stirs an audience to project themselves into an ideal life, that heightens our longing for escape and transformation by presenting an object that embodies our desires.
In this 2002 Atlantic article, Mary Gordon recalled "The helpless love of a certain kind of girl for a certain kind of nun. We loved them the way we loved movie stars and the way we loved God." (This discussion of nun dolls recalls a similar fascination.) Gordon uses the word glamour to describe her childhood view of nuns. They represented a more desirable life—mysterious and seemingly perfected. A few excerpts:
I know that my father wanted me to be a nun. He was a Jewish convert; perhaps this accounted for his romanticism. He died when I was seven, but I remember his saying, with real pride, "My daughter will be either a nun or a lady of the night." He was a man of extremes. I didn't know what a lady of the night was. It sounded glamorous, but no more glamorous than the image of a nun. He and I had a party piece about nuns. He would say, "Honey, what do you want to be when you grow up?" And I would say, without skipping a beat, "A contemplative."
I knew exactly what I meant. I knew, even at four and five, what contemplation was: Silence and prayer. Union with God. I had knelt beside my parents in the dim light of early-morning masses. I knew as many prayers and hymns as nursery rhymes. More. I dreamed of First Communion, believing those who said it would be the happiest day of my life. And I had had a glimpse of a real contemplative, a glimpse that would press itself into the hot wax of my imagination—an indelible image marking a life devoted to the creation of images....
A Jewish friend with whom I was watching [The Nun's Story] found it all appalling. I wondered why I did not; why I found it enchanting—the silences, the gliding walk, above all the belief in perfection, which I have spent many thousands of analytic dollars trying to give up. I imagined that if, like Audrey Hepburn, I could confess my faults to Edith Evans (the wise mother superior, the superior mother, blessed with the gift of discernment, her hard-won wisdom shining in her sorrowful eyes), if Edith Evans would bestow on me the secret smile of favor that she bestows on Sister Luke, if Edith Evans would make a cross on my forehead every morning, I might have the stamina to try for perfection. The stamina not to give it up as impossible. The stamina to believe that perfection is not a delusion, a trap. As Jesus said, "You, therefore, must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." Of course, we were meant to believe that we never could be perfect but that the attempt was infinitely worthwhile.
Gordon now sees her childhood view of nuns as an illusion, as, of course, all glamour is.
Doubt does not partake of this glamorous view of nuns. It shows us their life from the inside, not the outside. (That the Sisters of Charity wear prim 19th-century style bonnets rather than flowing veils also reduces the glamour.) The movie (and play) is about a power struggle between a scary, old-fashioned sister who suspects a priest of molesting a student and the priest, who is friendly, modern, and, because we decide the nun is right, seriously creepy. Sister Aloysius can see evil because she is a savvy woman who has lost any youthful illusions. This bit of dialogue, which proceeds their confrontation over Father Flynn's relationship with the boy, illustrates an essential element in the lost glamour of nuns: distance.
Father Flynn: I think the message from the Second Ecumenical Council was that the Church needs to take on a more familiar face. Reflect the local community. We should sing a song from the radio every now and then. Take the kids out for ice cream. Sister Aloysius: Ice cream. Father Flynn: Maybe take the boys on a camping trip. We should be friendlier. The children and their families should see us as members of their families rather than emissaries from Rome. I think the pageant should be charming, like a community theatre doing a show. Sister Aloysius:But we are not members of their families. We're different. Father Flynn: Because of our vows? Sister Aloysius: Precisely.
Among the half dozen or so people who write seriously about glamour, my view that religious glamour is one of the phenomenon's important manifestations (reflected not only in ideas of vocation but also in much--though by no means all--religious art) is considered eccentric. But at least Mary Gordon is on my side. What do you think?
Artist Matt Haley and writer Thomas Gerhardt have a rather strong reaction to the news that Frank Miller would be directing the Buck Rogers movie. Haley told us:
It's not that I dislike Frank Miller comics or movies, I just wish he'd try something different once in a while.
The Spirit, direct by Miller, opens Christmas Day. And yes, it's noir. Like Sin City. Buck Rogers will also get that same treatment.
DeepGlamour explores the magic of glamour in its many manifestations, from movies, fashion, advertising, and cars to real estate, politics, sports, and travel.
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, who with Edith Head is probably the most famous Hollywood costume designer. What makes his work particularly significant?
. Davis writes, “For the screen, clothes, above all, must be photogenic. Comfort and practicality were of little concern. Many of [Adrian’s] gowns were too tight for actresses to sit in, requiring them to recline on ‘leaning boards’ between takes.”
. It’s rare and expensive. It flaunts its owner’s wealth in a subtle and unapologetic way. But it’s also tough and more adaptable than it initially appears. If Lisa does wind up tramping through the jungle with her true love, the Kelly bag is the sort of purse she might take with her.
. A less earnest director or more creative script might have produced a more interesting Amelia, one less reliant on half-hearted soap opera and more focused on the challenges of early aviation. But the real problem may be Amelia Earhart herself.
, the catalog for a 
has survived its 70th anniversary and is about to get 
. It is no more a defense of terrorism than Casino is an ad for the Mafia.
Gerri Hirshey called Ronstadt the first “arena-class rock diva.” Reaching that status was an arduous journey for her. Early in her career, as reported in her 
. He 
. Pollan notes that while it might seem, on the surface, that Julia’s position in the kitchen was at odds with Friedan’s take on feminism, in reality, the two were working in concert. He says:
. If 
, her face seems an almost androgynous canvas. Looking at her strong facial features, you can imagine how a director might cast her to portray the young Bob Dylan in 
---
of Abel Ferrara's masterwork, Bad Lieutenant. Starring Harvey Keitel as a New York cop with more than just the usual bad habits, the film is a fascinating crawl through the gutter of despair. The script was 
,
the opening movement of Carl Orff’s 
. Like Ayn Rand's novels, 
,
instead.)
, who played by 
.
. “Privacy is important for strength in that lonely work.” 
, Javier Bardem in 
.
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