Deep Glamour: At the Intersection of Imagination & Desire

Transformations: Perfume, Flowers, Butterflies, and Bugs

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 Velvet was 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.

Why Do People Hate Oscar Acceptance Speeches So Much?

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.

[Image originally from PostSecret.com via Flickr user within(Reason).]

Quentin Tarantino on His Filmography: “I don't want to make Rio Lobo”

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 Basterds here.) 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.

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Glamour vs. Charisma: Aviators Amelia Earhart and Pancho Barnes

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.

Read the rest and see a Pancho Barnes slide show on DoubleX.

[Photo of Pancho Barnes (left), Amelia Earhart, and participants in 1929 Women's Air Derby © and courtesy of Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive.]

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Glamour in The Wizard of Oz

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.

Read the rest on DoubleX.

The Wizard of Oz will be shown in theaters on Wednesday evening. For information on locations and tickets, click here.

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Glamour & Terror in The Baader-Meinhof Complex

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.

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DG Slideshow: "Hats Tell Tales," Photographs by George Hurrell

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.

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Magical Words and Powerful Voices

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.]

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Julia Child: Glamorous Icon

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.

On Being Transformable

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.]

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Nollywood Babylon

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 Prom: It’s A Pleasure!

Thanks to the Prelinger Archives, the good advice of 1961 lives on. Dick—don’t wait too long!

That Deadly Look: Sniper Glamour

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.

Dance Week: Dancing and Self Image

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.

Zoë Lund and Bad Lieutenant

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 for House 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.

Music and Spells: Borrowing Glamour from Classical Music

Not all classical music has ‘glamour’, but some does. In her book Dance with the Music Elizabeth 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.

The Warhol Effect: From Edie Sedgwick to The Hills

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.

The Entourage Effect

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 her Man! 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.)

[Click to see YouTube video.]

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.

The Glamour of Star Trek

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.

ADDENDUM: "What most appeals to me about Barack Obama is his Spock-like quality."

Geek Glamour: The Sunset Boulevard of Superheroes

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.

The Glamour of Arrival

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?

Behind the Scenes of Hollywood Style

 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.

From Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster:

"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."

Oristano's prices range from $695 to $1295, depending on the complexity of the shot, makeup, wardrobe, etc., which is actually a steal if you think about it. Rachel Zoe, stylist to the stars and trademarker of such original and household phrases of "I die" and "Bananas!", costs thousands of dollars per day.

[Kim Basinger and Jodie Foster photos by Flickr user Alan Light under Creative Commons license.]

Quattrocento Glamour

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 yet when I saw her as I read through the catalog for the National Gallery exhibit (Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women), I kept doing double takes. She seemed so familiar, like one of today's famous faces. Look below the fold and tell me if you agree.

Metropolitan 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.

End of Oscars Promises to be Smasheroo! Credit Crawl Updates!

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? 

I'm just trying to help.

Bing! It's Groundhog Day All Over Again!

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!

Fran Rubel Kuzui: Life After Buffy, Plans to Direct Again

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.

Buffy the sequel?

Confessions of a Shopaholic: Parable for Our Time?

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.)

Need inspiration to get the memories flowing? Check out the DG Q&A with Debbie Millman.

 

[Permission is granted to reproduce photos with a link back to DeepGlamour. Permission is not granted to reproduce photos without such a link.]

It Began with Barney

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.)

Here's a small selection: Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, LaVar Burton in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Joe Morton in Terminator 2, Don Cheadle in the Ocean's movies, and Ving Rhames in the Mission Impossible movies. Even the German bad guys in Die Hard used a black guy (Clarence Gilyard Jr.) as their tech expert (though the character's reviews aren't good). And Sidney Poitier made it into Sneakers.

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.)

"Darling, You Get Lovelier Every Day"

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.]

ISO: Stingray Rider from On Any Sunday

Anyone know this kid, from Bruce Brown's 1971 classic, On Any Sunday?

Curtain Falls for Motion Picture Home (Unless Miracle Occurs)

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.

Silence Is Golden

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"

The Glamour of Nuns

Meryl Streep's decidedly unglamorous turn as Sister Aloysius in Doubt has me thinking about the largely lost glamour of nuns.

I'm not talking about the satirical stylings of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (who look not like nuns, even satirical ones, but clowns) or one Father Antonio Rungi's sincere and short-lived idea for a "Miss Sister Italy" pageant.

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?

(Photo of nuns at altar from a 1944 Life feature on Carmelite nuns taking their vows, via Google's Life archive. Barbie nun doll photo by Flickr member Flirty Kitty taken at Nun Doll Museum, via Creative Commons license.)

Frank Miller's Bucking No Trends: Matt Haley Disapproves

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.

National Tango Day

Established by Ben Molar in 1980 to honor Carlos Gardel, today is National Tango Day. The scene above is from  Gardel's  1935 picture, El Dia Que Me Quieras. Or at least part of the scene--here's another bit and another and a little more.

Angelina Jolie Outwits Journalists--Sign of End Times? Or Business as Usual?

Angelina Jolie continues to confound. In a NY Times piece by Brooks Barnes, we learn that she can make some magazine editors jump through hoops,  write big checks for exclusive photos of her and her family, and to not use Brangelina when referring to her and her husband, Brad Pitt. I hope you're all sitting down when you read the whole story. Breathless quotes abound:

“She’s scary smart,” said Bonnie Fuller, the former editor of Us Weekly and Star magazines.

Fuller knows scary like the back of her hand, but smart? Let's ponder the impossibility of that, shall we?

Ms. Jolie expertly walks a line between known entity and complete mystery, cultivates relationships with friendly reporters and even sets up her own photo shoots for the paparazzi.

And as both the paparazzi and their customers make money off those photos,  she's been very savvy about making sure she or her favorite charities get paid.

And with the kind of keen insight that gets you a job at the nation's most important paper, Barnes surmises:

The persona that Ms. Jolie projects on screen tends to be intimidating and physical. She is not the girl next door.

No shit, Sherlock, as the kids say. Or used to say.

Jolie either grew up or remade her image, after her divorce from Billy Bob Thornton, depending on your POV. Writing about her meeting with Kashmir earthquake victims,  Barnes tosses in a quote from ancient flack, Michael Levine, who was probably the only person around willing to give a mean-spirited statement:

“Presto, they come out looking like serious people who have transformed a silly press obsession into a sincere attempt to help the needy,”

Except for those needy publicists and PR firms--does she think about them? Does she?

With a Q score of 24 ( a likeability scale), Jolie is a popular movie star. Want proof? This piece is the most-emailed story in the Business section (but only 17th  in the whole paper.)  Readers vary in their opinions of Jolie, but most agree that this piece was feeble.

Slideshow from an earlier story here.

Behind the Red Carpet Glamour

On my way to dinner Monday night I ran into the L.A. premier of Twilight and, as you can tell from the video, it was loud, with a much larger turnout of (screaming) fans than the typical Westwood red carpet event. But, as always, the premier itself felt less like a real event than a theatrical presentation where what the audience sees--on TV and in publicity stills--is different from what you see when you're there. For one thing, it's much more brightly lit. The movie may be Twilight, but on TV it looks like daylight thanks to those high-powered lamps.

By the time we finished dinner, the lights were gone and they were striking the set.

 

Disney Bad Girls--The Meaner, the Better

Idle thought:

Why doesn't Disney assemble all their  great female villains into a Mean Girls All Stars ?

Here's one from YouTube:

Fun fact:

Eleanor Audley voiced both Lady Tremaine (Cinderella's step mother)  and Maleficent.

When Did Snow White Get So Dirty?

I don't know about where you live, but the teen pregnancy rate in Texas is appalling. Every 10 minutes a teen gives birth and a quarter of those births will be the teen mother's second child.

Now comes a study from the RAND research org that says, "Exposure to some forms of entertainment is a corrupting influence on children, leading teens who watch sexy programs into early pregnancies."

But, hey, I grew up on Dynasty and Dallas and my all-time fave ever Falcon Crest (those trumpets! The swelling score! Brilliance!) and I wasn't exactly gunning to have the high school quarterback's spawn. So what's changed?

Personally, I think what the study calls a "corrupting influence on children" is something that's pummeling little girls at a much earlier age than we really notice. Take Disney, for example. They have updated the look of their princesses and guess what? They ain't exactly spring blossoms anymore.

Look at the eyes (and mouths) of these modern princesses. In the 1937 classic Snow White, our protagonist's eyes were either innocently surprised or softly gazing. Today's Snow (and her cronies) now give a come-hither stare that I find more than a little disconcerting.

David Johnson writing for Inside Animation, notes that the 1930s Snow White had several different, subtle looks. Turns out the first artist to draw Snow White was a man named Ham Luske and his Snow had a very cartoony look to her.

"Her head was large for her body, as were her eyes, large almost round-shaped orbs... Other anatomical features were likewise over simplified...because Ham evidently saw her that way," Johnson writes.

But drawing a cartoony Snow White didn't allow for the full range of emotions Walt Disney wanted, so Grim Natwick was brought in (these names!), the same guy who had created Betty Boop in 1930. Johnson says it was Grim who made Snow so fashionable "with a kind of thirties model face, with its plucked and highly-curved eyebrows." (FYI: Johnson says you can watch the change from cartoon in the first dwarf scenes to fashion plate to another, more lifelike girl at the end drawn by guy named Campbell. You can kind of see that here with these stamps of the movie.)

In addition to making Snow White fashionable, Grim also "began to absorb more and more of the actual live model" into his drawings, writes Johnson, who happened to be a 14-year-old girl named Marge Belcher, who was 16 when they finished filming. Take a look at that face--it's not exactly the childlike countenance Disney princesses have these days, is it?

Look at Snow White on the Disney Princess official website, Sure she's been hipped up a bit to fit into modern times and, apparently, that included her waistline--it's smaller than Barbie's! (Go download Snow White's wallpaper and then ask yourself, are the dwarfs even feeding her?)

Look at the innocence of the 1937 Snow White. Compare that with the newest Disney movie out Tinkerbell (although, granted, Tink has always been sexy.) Disney used to use 14- to 16-year-old girls as their models. Now what are they using? I'm guessing 30-year-old strippers.

I give you exhibit A: something's definitely up with this bounce house. Look at the folds of Snow White's skirt. Is this for a child's party? And I wish I knew what diet she was on, because her breasts have certainly grown since the '30s.

So, look, maybe it's time to stop blaming Gossip Girl for all the world's woes and take a second look at those vixens that at one time seemed to be the harmless princesses next door.

Although that Chuck Bass, he is sure fun to hate.

[All images © Walt Disney, reproduced for direct commentary under fair use.]

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Jules Verne Film Festival

The Jules Verne Film Festival starts Friday, here in Los Angeles.

Great poster.

Can An Architect Carry A Movie?

Reader K. Zachary purports that architects have never been Hollywood heroes.  However, there's a juicy list of movies with leading men who just happen to work as architects. Still, Zachary's right--the job is really just an accessory, like a cool car and cute dog.  And Hollywood loves those models.  Just look at Richard Gere, in Intersection. And actors love to play architects--all those erections.

TCM had an architect's week, back in 2006. 

I live within walking distance of Sci-Arc, in industrial  LA, and have always thought that it's the perfect location for an urban mystery. All those late nights, professional jealousies and young men and women on the edge.  And they work with sharp objects.

(Photo from You Are Here.)

The Fountainhead: Now More Than Ever

Posting has been a little light here, as I'd been struck down with the 'flu that's raging around Los Angeles.  Feeling too fragile to  lift anything heavier than a glass of water and a remote, I've been busy watching TCM, where programming classic films is an art form.  While David Brooks rages against the banality of the office park and its denizens, Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper wage their own war on mediocrity in The Fountainhead.  Directed by the aptly-named King Vidor from a rampaging script adapted from the book of the same name by Ayn Rand, this is trash at the highest level--trash with a purpose and a lot of sex. 

Cooper plays iconoclast architect Howard Rourk, who has a noble vision, strong manly forewarms, and a nice taste in battered fedoras.  He's stalked, seduced, spurned and finally snagged by rich girl Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal) who's so hot she's cold, or vice versa. There's a lot of silly high blown talk about architecture, the spirit of man, selfishness, media manipulation and monuments to the aforementioned spirit, but there's a lot of sex, too.   

The Fountainhead must be the most phallic movie ever made.  Cooper's forever drilling into solid rock walls and  building soaring skyscrapers while Neal is always in the saddle, one way or another. 

Quotable: Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz

“Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” over “away,” that the “moral” of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler—“East, West, home’s best”—would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts up toward the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is the tension between these two dreams; but as the music swells and that big, clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment, this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life in the “place where there isn’t any trouble.” “Over the Rainbow” is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.”

—Salman Rushdie, “Out of Kansas,” in Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 

The Many Faces of Classic Hollywood Glamour

Through this Sunday, October 5, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is exhibiting studio portraits and movie stills from the John Kobal Collection of classic Hollywood photos. 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.)

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.

This slideshow represents a small sample of the exhibit's images. For more, see the John Kobal Foundation site.

Paul Newman: Grit and Grace

David Thompson, writing in the Guardian, argues that the late Paul Newman was best in those roles that expressed his own ambivalence about the movies. Playing  Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler, Newman got an Oscar nomination

The film was done with grit and no glamour, as well as a lot of hard-learned pool, and Felson was a knife to scrape away Newman's jammy smile.

But Thompson tries too hard to convince us that Newman was immune to glamour and its trappings, writing:

He was absurdly popular as a young man, and then waited or endured until that had worn off, and he could face all the abiding tests of honesty without glamour or celebrity to divert him.

Newman was never more honest than when driving Indy cars, and open wheel racing is about a glamorous as it gets.  He was 70 when he won at Daytona.  Lime Rock Park owner Skip Barber said of him:

He liked to win. He thought of himself as an uncoordinated guy, a stumbler a little bit, but in a car he was really graceful. 'Graceful' is not a word that a lot of people associate with car racing, but there sure are guys that are more fluid and smoother than others, and he was good.

(photo from Michael Manning)

D G Q&A: Karina Longworth

Film writer and critic Karina Longworth blogs at Spout, was a founder of Cinematical  and can also be found here.  She frequently writes about film, new media and popular culture.  Longworth's informed, thoughtful, skeptical and funny as hell.  Seen at left, she's doing her famed Linda Blair imitation.   

Naturally, DG was thrilled when she agreed to answer our questions.

DG: Do movies today even try to depict glamour? Do they succeed? 

KL:We're in a weird point in terms of Hollywood glamour. In general pop culture about 15 years ago there was a big backlash to the "overdoneness" of the 80s, and the result is that most of today's big female stars (Reese, Cameron, Drew, Kate Winslett, Kate Hudson) have a kind of tomboy practicality to their personas that goes against what the fantasy of old Hollywood glamor was all about. Its all about being endearingly frazzled and relatable. The sort of exception to this is Angie Jolie, but even though she always rocks an other-worldly attainability that is reminiscent of the great old world stars, she's most successful in dominatrix action hero mode, and films which try to cast her as a "regular" woman can seem laughable.

DG: You're a film critic--is it as glamorous as it sounds? Screenings, festivals, parties--it's not just a job, is it? C'mon, spill.

KL: Actually, my past life working in restaurants and gourmet stores was probably more glamorous on a day to day basis---now, I work from home, staring at screens trying to be clever all day, rarely leaving the house when I'm not traveling. But I DO get to travel quite a bit, and even in this age of cookiecutter hotels and air travel nightmares, there is a scrappy glamour to life out of a suitcase that j enjoy. I'm not particularly good at real life, so dividing my waking hours between airports, screening rooms and sponsored receptions really works for me.

The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour?
KL: Glamour isn't interesting unless it's done with a wink, and most women today are too self-consious to be able to have a sense of humor about it. My current conception of glamour involves a keen familiarity with the following: square-tipped red nails (which I can't pull off), the dominatrix boots Cher wears under her dowdy old maid skirt in Moonstruck (ditto), Palm Springs, baroquely garnished bloody marys, early-Playboy style tanlines, the "fuck you" behind the eyes of a Barbara Stanwyck or Nina Simone.

2) Who or what is your glamorous icon?
KL: It's cliché, but I still can't get over Louise Brooks. And Anna Karina. Also, Sara Diaz, the girlfriend of filmmaker Azazel Jacobs and the star of his movie "The GoodTimes Kid", has the most amazing sense of style.   

3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity?
KL:I would think of it more as a curse.

4) Favorite glamorous movie?
KL: An impossible question to answer considering my line of work, but I love anything like Baby Face, where a gal without breeding is suddenly encrusted with jewels, but her shifty morals and low birth class can't be obscured

Hot Girl on Girl Action: Missing in The Women

The Women, a remake of the 1939 classic George Cukor film has opened, finally, after 14 years of development. And the consensus seems to be, Why?

John Hartl, Seattle Times:

There's an irritating self-consciousness about this update, in which one character claims that relationships need more work in the 21st century while another exclaims, "What is this, some kind of 1930s movie?" By the time it's over, you may wish it were.

Kenneth Turan, LA Times:

Never particularly believable, the story quickly unravels into schematic contrivance and wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Colin Covert, Mpls Star-Tribune:

Still playing winsome girlishness as she edges toward 50, the cosmetically enhanced Ryan clucks over the decision by her mother (Candice Bergen) to have a face-lift. For Ryan to speak in support of natural beauty through her famously collagen-inflated lips gives the message an ironic twist.

You know things are bad when Peter Travers can't say anything nice:

Think Sex and the City without the sex.

The Baltimore Sun's Michael Sragow  repeats this line, but has a very thoughtful take on the film:

English wrongheadedly updates the film by replacing catty negative stereotypes with equally shallow and less-funny positive stereotypes.

But Mary Elizabeth Williams, in Salon, seems to miss the point of the whole thing:

The weirdest element of the film, though, isn't its fevered pitch. It's that these smart, successful, got-your-back best pals don't even notice they're living in a dystopian nightmare where men are invisible.

Where to begin? Clare Booth Luce's play was mounted with the novelty of an all-female cast, and the 1939 film, adapted by Anita Loos and punched up by an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald and David Ogden Stewart, featured every big name actress in town--Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and a couple dozen others.  No men. (Salon's readers point this out, but then the discussion dwindles.)

Diane English, with backing by Dove (making this production the biggest product placement vehicle ever) and Mick Jagger, who could have cast the whole thing from the ranks of his ex-es, stepped in to direct after James Brooks dropped out. Despite having a very successful television career, English had trouble getting distribution, and long story short, finally shot the film last summer in a little over a month.  With no rehearsal time, she got the principals together for a big sleepover bonding session at her house on Martha's Vineyard.  Since Sex and the City did so well,  execs figured the film might catch some of that chick-flick B.O .mojo and threw more money at promotion.

So why is today's film less successful? Have times changed so greatly? I think one reason is that  the '39 film's actresses  were such distinct types: Norma Shearer was the perfect wife, Joan Crawford was the  shameless, sexy gal on the make.

Today's stars just aren't as iconic, in either looks, public personas or film choices. A few years back, Annette Benning could have played the scheming hottie (Eva Mendes), but now she's most often seen as someone's addled mother, and will be playing Helen Thomas. That's a career trajectory that the old studio moguls would have stopped cold. (Crawford didn't start playing lonely loonie ladies until she was nearly 60.) Variety is necessary for an artist, but consistency  makes a movie star. 

When anyone can buy lingerie or a full mani/pedi/facial treatment at nearly any mall, the glamour of the situations in the film don't translate well into the present.  Instead of waiting out her divorce decree at a dude ranch, sipping cocktails , Mary and her pals go to an rustic spa and smoke dope.

To echo Sragow, The First Wives Club is a very funny slapstick update, and Friends with Money laid out female friendships in a more subtle, but killing way.  Hop on to Netflix and stay home.

Cate Blanchett's Glamour (and Why I Love This Photo)

Taken at the 2007 Academy Awards, this photo of Cate Blanchett  (which I dug up to illustrate the Fug Girls interview) deconstructs the usual red carpet glamour. It's almost a behind-the-scenes shot. Rather than spotlighting an autonomous star in a "Who Are You Wearing" pose, it includes a jumbled crowd of anonymous faces and partly seen suits. The red carpet itself is hidden and, as if to emphasize the makeshift nature of the de facto outdoor set, a bit of scaffolding is evident on the left. Blue sky peeks through the clouds, emphasizing the bizarre nature of the ritual--stars promenading in evening dress while it's still afternoon, a concession to East Coast schedules. This is the clutter you see on the scene, not the edited version on television or in magazines.

Instead of the usual cropped and constructed scene, the photo provides something more compelling: a glamorous vision of a poised and radiant star. With her smooth pale skin, Blanchett stands out from the dull background as if she were the only truly present and vital person there. She is at once self-contained and responsive to her unseen interviewer, who appears as a still life or synecdoche for "Hollywood reporter:" red nail polish, notebook, and digital recorder. The occasion may not appear glamorous, but Blanchett does. She is at once the center of attention and a mysterious universe of her own. She evokes aspiration. Wouldn't you want to be like that?

Blanchett is not glamorous because she is pretty or dresses well. Glamour is not something you can get from a stylist. It's not about what you wear. It is not taste. These are merely tools. Glamour is an imaginative quality, something you create in an audience's mind, and it requires a certain amount of distance. As reader Randall Shinn aptly notes in a comment on the Heather and Jessica interview, "Cate Blanchett's glamour may partly come from her desire for mystery." He quotes her: "I don’t want behind-the-scenes footage, I don’t want to know about the actor’s personal life. I want to experience their revelation of what it means to be human, to see somebody transporting me to another world."

Blanchett seems to have solved the essential dilemma of 21st-century glamour: how to preserve translucence in a transparent society. In this interesting post Grant McCracken discussed Blanchett's chameleon glamour, citing an assessment from Scott Rudin: "She's very shrewd about what capital she gives up and when.  When she gives you the tiniest bit of insight into why the character's behaving the way she is, you gobble it up.  I think it's a combination of alluring and elusive."

[Photo by Richard Harbaugh, courtesy of Image.net, ©A.M.P.A.S.]

Breaking: Paris Hilton Doc. Held to 1 Screen at Toronto Film Fest

Spout's Karina Longworth tumbles the news that Paris, Not France will have only one screening in Toronto.

DG wonders who on earth could sit through it twice?

Did Hilton's legal team cancel the film? Or were the advance sales so poor that her PR handlers moved in to spare her embarrassment? 

As if that were remotely possible.