The Star as Film and Cultural History: A Historiography of Miriam Hansen and Gaylyn Studlar’s Scholarship on Rudolph Valentino

The phenomenon of female fandom, usually characterized by screaming, hysteria, mobs, excessive emotional investment, and other such pejorative descriptions, seems to have inspired rather charged responses, puzzlement and anxiety, since the beginning of cinema.  It is within this context of excessive female fandom that early cinema star Rudolph Valentino, one of the first and therefore news-worthy figures to inspire such fervor in female fans, was and still is often discussed and remembered.  When Valentino died in 1926, every major newspaper ran first-page coverage of the Latin Lover’s funeral, all headlining the mostly-female “throngs” of more than 30,000 who stopped traffic and caused riots, hurting more than 100 people and smashing two large windows in their frenzy to catch a last, short glimpse of the body of “Film’s Greatest Lover” (“Endless Throng”; “Thousands Riot”; “Valentino Passes”).  These larger-than-life responses are just one anecdotal example of the many that make up the mythic legend that still persists as Rudolph’s Valentino’s star persona, the public image of the man who immigrated from Italy at eighteen and worked as a dancer before becoming one of early Hollywood’s biggest stars for masses of desiring female fans, idolized (by women) for the exotic sexuality that characterized his star vehicles and seemed also to exist in his “real life.”

Perhaps film historians felt the same discomfort over issues of feminine desire and fan excess which was evident in the sensationalized and somewhat condemnatory newspaper headlines of Valentino’s funeral and which was voiced by countless American men during the period of Valentino’s stardom, for the critical examination of stars and fans remained largely marginalized until the 1970s.  Scholars like Richard Dyer, who produced some of the first scholarly work on stars, have been incredibly influential in the world of film studies and beyond, revealing the ways in which fans, stars, and the star system serve as sources of complex concepts and theories; they provide productive points of intervention for the investigation of Hollywood’s industrial and economic practices, its various constructions of desire, and the cultivation of consumerist spectators, especially in this historical moment of on-rushing modernity and a flourishing star system, as well as the complex processes of spectatorial engagement and identification, with both stars and film texts.  Many feminist scholars of the 1970s and afterwards were deeply interested in female spectatorship and in reclaiming cinema and its histories for female practitioners and participants, and so, like Richard Dyer, have also taken up the study of fandom and stardom.  Involved in both of these trends of scholarship are Miriam Hansen and Gaylyn Studlar, cultural film historians who each published responsive and overlapping yet differently-oriented work on Rudolph Valentino in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating his star image as part of their cultural reexamination of and intervention into (film) history.

One of the clearest sources of influence on both Hansen and Studlar, evident across their careers and particularly visible in their scholarship on Valentino, was the development of feminist film studies in the 1970s.  According to film scholar and historian Patricia Erens, the development of feminist film studies was a product of Second-wave feminism, begun in the early 1960s, as well as of the inclusion of women’s studies in academia (xvi).  Initially sociologically-focused, feminist film studies began by investigating the representations of female characters in filmic narratives and genres and the repercussions such popular representations had for social stereotypes of women.  The movement then turned towards the semiotic, Marxist, and psychoanalytic (Freudian and then Lacanian and Althusserian) movements which were coming to dominate critical theories of the later 1970s.  These feminist scholars thus became more centrally concerned with and examined film texts’ production of meaning, their positioning of the viewer, and the ways in which cinema’s very mechanisms affected the representation of women (xvii).

Considering such thematic and theoretical trends, the historical patterns evident in the bibliography of Valentino scholarship are themselves very interesting and point to the various ways in which the Valentino figure has been cast or been seen as useful or interesting in different cultural and critical moments.  The 1970s witnessed not only the rise of feminism but also the publication of a plethora of biographies which focused on Valentino’s cult image and the sexualized, enigmatic legacy which persisted long after his untimely death in 1926 at the age of 31; examples include Norman Mackenzie’s The Magic of Valentino (1974) and Noel Botham and Peter Donnelley’s Valentino: The Love God (1976).  Miriam Hansen and Gaylyn Studlar provide the only significant scholarship on Rudolph Valentino between these biographies of the 1970s and the 2000s, when a new wave of publications emerged.  Returning after thirty years’ influence of feminist and gender studies, an increased interest in fandom, stardom, and spectatorship (additionally fueled by the recent explosion of internet- and reality TV-dominated celebrity culture), the upsurge in masculine studies since the 1990s, and the new vogue that silent cinema has been experiencing in the academy since the 1970s, these new biographies of the 2000s focused catalogue-like on “the first” male and female stars, looking to locate the film star and the phenomenon of fandom in early cinema history.  Some of these more recent works, which also seem more interested in the dark side of Hollywood than in Valentino’s sexual allure, include Noel Botham’s Valentino: The First Superstar (2002), David Menefee’s collection of the First Male Stars (2007), Allen Ellenberger’s The Valentino Mystique: Death and Afterlife of the Silent Film Idol (2005) and Emily Leider’s Dark Lover (2003).

Responding to the influence of feminist, gender, and star studies and seeking to answer large-scale cultural and historical questions, Hansen and Studlar, unlike many of these (largely gossip-mongering) biographies and rather cursory star anthologies, forgo attempts to document the life and personality of Valentino himself; rather, these cultural film historians use the star figure of Rudolph Valentino to investigate the broader, contextualizing culture and history in which he became a star, which made him a star, which offered his star image to desiring spectators.  They examine his constructed star image, the viewing strategies embedded in his films and their alignment of spectators and spectatorial identification, as well as the public reception (both male and female) of his star image during the 1920s.  But beyond their shared cultural scope and their overlapping feminist and psychoanalytic interests and backgrounds, these two scholars have different questions and different goals in relation to cinema history, which directly shape their use of and research into Rudolph Valentino.

Miriam Hansen published her essay “Ambivalence, Pleasure, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship” in 1986, initiating the new trend of critical Rudolph Valentino scholarship after the 1970s’ proliferation of biographies.  Five years after this first essay, and after a published response from both Richard DeCordova and Gaylyn Studlar, Hansen published her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991); it expands upon the ideas begun in “Ambivalence” and represents a fuller rendering of her career-long investigation into (female) spectatorship and early cinema, especially as it pertains to the entirety of the cinematic experience and its relation to modernity, mass culture, and the public sphere.

As is clear from these broader research interests and her extensive resume of publications, Hansen is not only engaged with feminist studies but is also deeply influenced by the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, who, drawing on Marxist theories, produced works discussing the frenetic, newly-arriving modernity of the 20^th century and investigating entrenched dominant ideologies.  The mass media of film was an important part of such study, seen as significant for the role it played in both the modern and ideological impacts on and interactions with the human sensorium at this time (and since then).  In much of her professional bibliography, Hansen engages with these three Frankfurt theorists and both utilizes and advances their ideas of modernity and mass culture to investigate the entirety of the cinematic experience, particularly at the time of its introduction into and solidification within society in early 1900s.  Hansen seeks to locate a/the historical space between American silent cinema and the so-called classical Hollywood cinema which dominated narrative filmmaking between the 1930s and the 1950s and whose legacy stretches through to today, registering the spectatorial and textual transitions that occurred in that shift towards the cementing of classical cinema and “the creation of this classical spectator,” especially in relation to this era’s transformation of the public sphere (Babel 16).  Thus, as is so clearly evident in her psychoanalytic textual work on Valentino, Hansen is interested in the creation of spectatorship as we know it, in tracing, as Gaylyn Studlar so succinctly explains, “Hollywood’s creation of film-viewer relations during an era that solidified the cinema’s place in public life,” examining both textual and spectatorial transformations (“Response” 39).

In considering both Hansen’s and Studlar’s scholarship, it becomes important to acknowledge Laura Mulvey’s seminal, deeply-influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), which was produced within the scope of influence of 1970s feminism as well as psychoanalytic- and Lacanian-influenced theories of film and feminism and considers the relation between gender and spectatorship; Hansen’s “Ambivalence” is a direct response to this essay.  In “Visual Pleasure,” Mulvey investigates the textual strategies and the pleasures involved in classical cinema’s spectatorial engagement, laying out a societally and cinematically systemic dichotomy of sexual difference and concluding that in such classical cinema women have traditionally been represented as scopic objects of (male) pleasure, as passive bearers of male characters’ and spectators’ active desiring gaze.  In Mulvey’s elucidation of what she calls the ‘masculinized’ spectatorship which emerges from such patriarchal structures, “masculinity as a ‘point of view’ is inscribed onto all spectatorial identification and pleasure in classical cinema (“Afterthoughts” 69).  Like the many feminist scholars who attempted to rescue the female spectator from this oblivion and secure a more active, productive place for women both on and in front of the screen, Hansen in “Ambivalence” seeks to locate a space of “potential resistance to be reappropriated” for women within mainstream narrative cinema, an “alternative conception of visual pleasure” for the female spectator of mainstream Hollywood cinema (261).  Additionally, Hansen also uses both Mulvey’s gendered structuring and the star figure of Rudolph Valentino to trace the emergence of that gendered, i.e. “structurally masculinized,” spectatorship in classical cinema, which she argues became institutionally and conventionally codified in the transition out of the silent era (Babel 5).

Because of this research focus, the main methodology of Hansen’s Valentino scholarship centers primarily on close textual analysis of his films’ viewing strategies and organizational systems and their impact on (female) spectators.  She is thus able to examine pre-classical placements of the (female) spectator as well as the types of visual pleasure such engagements were capable of providing beyond the theories of masculinized spectatorship outlined by Mulvey and others, expanding and adding to accepted notions of the female spectator and to film history in general.  And though Hansen does move beyond “the primacy of the film object” towards broader cultural considerations of “the cinema as an economic and social institution” in her follow-up, widely-researched book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship and American Silent Film (1991), her main reading of the significance of the Valentino figure lies in the ambivalent spectatorial engagement his films offered women in the 1920s, a profitable ambivalence which she claims was also productively mirrored in his extratextual star image (Babel 5).  In his “ambivalent” films, Hansen locates both the “alternative conception of visual pleasure” and the point of potential female resistance she sought: here, the Valentino characters oscillate between and embody both of the two viewing positions polarized in the dichotomy with which Mulvey characterized classical cinema,  the active male controller of the gaze (and narrative) and exhibitor of the desirous look versus the passive female scopic object, the recipient of male voyeuristic and fetishistic looking (715-6).

This oscillation blurs Mulvey’s structure of sexual difference and opens up a space for female subjectivity in (patriarchically-dominated) mainstream cinema, specifically in this historical moment of early cinema, blooming modernity, and an emerging public sphere.  Hansen writes that Valentino’s films productively offered female spectators a positive engagement beyond mere narcissistic identification with the passive female on screen or masochistic identification with the active male, as would later become the case with the solidification of classical cinema.  By combining the “masculine control of the look with the feminine quality of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness,’” Valentino’s characters thereby created a space for the desiring female viewer and hence, importantly, female subjectivity in mainstream cinema (“Ambivalence” 263).  Additionally, his ambiguous positioning, both within the diegesis of his films and extratextually in his star image, inherently argues for an ambivalence in spectatorial identification and textual structuring, and “urges us to insist upon the ambivalent constitution of scopic pleasure” in cinema (264).

Though Valentino’s films might initially resemble classic examples of Mulveyan textual strategies of sexual difference, with their narratives ultimately condemning the “vamp” women who gaze desiringly at Valentino and rewarding with heterosexual coupling the “good” girls who receive but don’t reciprocate Valentino’s look, Hansen argues that these films actually subvert such a reinforcement of patriarchal power by contradictingly positioning him, along with the women, in the “feminine” position of erotic object.  Hansen writes that Valentino’s is “a gaze that fascinates precisely because it transcends the socially imposed subject/object hierarchy of sexual difference,” and because Valentino is not only the masculine looker but also, like the traditional “good” girl, looked at, is a scopic object of pleasure for the (female) spectator’s gaze; for women, she writes, the “erotic appeal of the Valentinian gaze… is one of reciprocity and ambivalence, rather than mastery and objectification” (“Ambivalence” 265).  This ambivalent filmic position opens up an avenue within classically masculine structures of cinema and spectatorship for an alternative system of male-female relationships and power as well as for a reciprocal female desire which is usually denied (266).

After using textual analysis and psychoanalytic frameworks of textual viewing strategies to prove this subversive, positively ambivalent structuring of Valentino’s films, Hansen then uses similar means to reclaims two additional “alternative” aspects of visual pleasure for his female spectators: the pleasure of sadomasochistic rituals and the pleasure of recognition (264).  This latter aspect of Valentino spectatorship rewards the (desiring) female spectator’s gaze both for recognizing the star onscreen and for successfully recognizing the Valentino figure, who often remained diegetically masked and disguised from the female characters in his many films which centered around narratives of costume, disguise, and deception.  All of Hansen’s detailed, well-argued psychoanalytic explanations and analyses offer interesting and potentially useful readings of Valentino’s films and paint a very intriguing picture for the existence of alternative pleasures of female spectatorship before the masculinized structure of classic cinema had been fully cemented.

However, such primarily psychoanalytic scholarship ultimately seems rather limited and disappointingly a-historical after the hindsight of thirty years.  Hansen attempts to remedy this in her wider-ranging book Babel and Babylon, where she explains that because “female identification within the dominant masculine structures is difficult, efforts to conceptualize a female viewer have gone beyond the psychoanalytic-semiotic framework to include culturally specific and historically variable aspects of reception” (5).  Hansen makes an effort to adopt this broader type of strategy in Babel, where her scope has expanded to include the entire “public dimension of cinematic spectatorship,” yet with Valentino, her final case study in the book, she returns to these psychoanalytic conclusions and textual break-downs (7).  Babel’s last chapter is an almost direct transcription of her 1986 “Ambivalence,” which effectively leaves such psychoanalytic explanations as her final word on Valentino, with lingering emphasis thus also given to her whole book on early spectatorship; this ultimately somewhat undercuts and diminishes the effectiveness of the extratextual, cultural work that she lays out as the project of the book and astutely explores elsewhere in it.

Regardless of such shortcomings, as well as an unfortunate overlooking of “the historical context of male film stardom,” Babel gave Hansen the extended space to more fully examine (female) spectatorship in relation to the public sphere, a topic which has marked most of the work of her career; she examines the ways in which “spectatorship is profoundly intertwined with the transformation of the public sphere, the gendered itineraries of everyday life” (Studlar “Babel” 40; Hansen Babel 2).  Thus, Hansen traces the historical emergence and construction of film spectators not merely as textually-imagined, passive entities but as real participants in a heterogeneous social audience; by addressing the cinema as a social and commercial institution, she is able to identify the spectator as a consumer as well as an assumed figure of textual address.  By extension, Hansen now also discerns female spectators as being constructed by desire, in relation to both film and star texts, both personal engagement and industrial production, which importantly nuances traditional conceptions of their fandom and filmic engagements and incorporates a larger awareness of the social and industrial structures at work around spectatorship.  Within this broader, extra-textual scope, in Babel’s first chapter on Valentino, Hansen productively investigates the star not only within the textual structures of his films, but also in relation to the Hollywood star system of which he was a part, as Richard DeCordova had originally suggested in his 1986 “response” to “Ambivalence.”  Thus Hansen complements her textual analysis with contextualizing cultural and historical research, locating Valentino as a visible “emblem of the simultaneous liberalization and commodification of sexuality that crucially defined the development of American consumer culture” at this time (2).

With such extratextual research, Hansen can also more fully explore the positive “ambivalences” of Valentino not only in relation to his films’ spectators but also to his fans, to the women of the “public sphere” of the culture in which he was a star; Hansen reads Valentino as “a figure and function of female spectatorship,” one who existed (or at least was seen to exist) to be looked at and desired by  women and who existed because women looked at and desired him, both as an actor/character within his films’ diegesis and as a “real” man/star.  This created an avenue for the expression of female desire not only in the relative privacy of the movie theater, which Hansen conceived of as a modern public space, but also in the public sphere at large.  Hansen also extends the ambivalences of female desire itself to this public sphere, explaining that Valentino’s stardom exposed female spectatorship’s “precarious status as both cult of consumption and manifestation of an alternative public sphere,” as both potential victim of manipulation by Hollywood’s commercial construction of desire and empowering means of expressing female desire and subjectivity where women had been traditionally unable to do so (253).  Thus, she writes, Rudolph Valentino “beckon[ed] with the promise of sexual – and ethnic-racial – mobility… appealed to those who most keenly felt the need, yet also the anxiety, of such mobility, who themselves were caught between the hopes fanned by the phantasmagoria of consumption and an awareness of the impossibility of realizing them within existing social and sexual structures” (268).

But despite these well-illustrated, detailed arguments about the creation of alternative pleasures and public spaces for women in this modern period of transition, and the usefulness of Valentino’s ambiguity in relation to their expression of desire and the possibilities of female spectatorship at this time, Hansen’s research and arguments have a few blind spots, which Studlar’s own critical focus allows her to address; male spectatorial response to Valentino and his ethnically-other background simply do not optimally fit into Hansen’s psychoanalytic models and her cultural research focus, and thus are less satisfactorily addressed in this scholarship.  Hansen’s historical project lies primarily with female spectatorship (Valentino as “a figure and function of female spectatorship”), in contrast to Gaylyn Studlar’s focus on male spectatorship and discourses of masculinity in this period, and thus she concludes that “racial and ethnic stereotypes are inseparable from inscriptions of gender and sexuality, especially female sexuality” (255).

Female subjectivity, the main focus of Hansen’s scholarship and historical inquiry, ultimately ends up making her arguments, especially as it concerns Valentino in particular, appear largely one-sided, for she traces much of this modern period’s cultural and historical discourses back to women and to sexuality, to Freud and Lacan.  For example, Hansen offers psychoanalytic analysis to explain Valentino’s ethnically-other yet clearly-desired identity in the sole terms of what she sees to be the fear and threat of female sexuality, which she links to the public emergence of the New Woman and a tradition of American fear and fascination with miscegenation.  The complicated historical and cultural currents and discourses of this 20^th century society of “blatant xenophobia” become reduced to a mere “displacement, a defense against the threat of female sexuality,” subordinated to the workings of the unconscious (255; Masquerade 4).  As Studlar writes in her review of the book, it appears at times that “Hansen’s exploration of extratextual materials attached to Valentino’s stardom never seeks in a significant way to embrace a broader analysis of the cultural-historical moment” (40).  Though Hansen compellingly locates the female spectator within the experience of cinema as it moved into modernity’s new public sphere, a Freudian coping mechanism, interesting and initially enlightening and more intriguing when applied to Valentino’s films themselves, unfortunately seems insufficient to wholly explain the huge cultural phenomenon that was the ambivalent figure of Rudolph Valentino, nor to explain factors like the racially-charged elements of culture as revealed in and exacerbated by Valentino’s stardom.

Gaylyn Studlar began her own Valentino scholarship with an initial response to Hansen’s “Ambivalence,” and in the process of development from this preliminary “response” (1987) to her final book This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (1993), she published her initial investigations into Valentino in “Discourses of Gender and Sexuality” (1989).  In addition, Studlar also published a 1993 book review of Hansen’s Babel which, like her “Response” to the first essay, reveals her own specific research interests and the direction she would take with Valentino, outlining the differences of approach and inquiry between herself and Hansen in their joint exploration of the star figure Rudolph Valentino.

The title of her interim essay, “Discourses of Gender and Ethnicity,” like Hansen’s titles, reveals Studlar’s particular research focus and historic inquiry, which is culturally historic like Hansen’s but which centers around Jazz Age social discourses of gender (specifically masculinity) and ethnicity and the role of Hollywood stars rather than the specific positioning of 1920s (female) spectators and their emergence into a new public sphere.  Though Studlar’s professional bibliography reveals overlapping interests in both male and female stars, spectatorial engagement, and filmic representations, her approach to Valentino eschews much of the textual structural analysis that defines Hansen’s discussion of Valentino’s films.  Instead, she uses some textual narrative analysis to support her exploration of what are mostly the extra-textual elements of Valentino’s stardom and his star image, including publicity photos, newspaper and magazine interviews and articles, write-ins to the press from American men and women, and the gossipy facts and rumors which circulated about his ethnic identity, his background in dance, and his many and somewhat scandalous relationships with women.  In her book’s introduction, Studlar explains that in contrast to some of her previous theoretically-oriented scholarship, this work on male stars is premised primarily upon her interest in American culture and “grounded in the specific cultural history of the period,” rather than exact theoretical definitions of terms like masquerade, for example.  By looking towards these types of sources, in this moment when the star system was becoming a fully-fledged cultural phenomenon, Studlar is able to interrogate the various images of Valentino as they were constructed and perpetuated by the studios, by the press, by his films, by his “real life” biographical information, and even by himself on certain occasions, all for various commercial and professional motives and in complex interactions with the era’s social, cultural, and political discourses.  Her “analysis focuses on the circulation of meaning created around a selected group of male stars” as well as on “how culture literally and figuratively ‘set the stage’ for that star” (Masquerade 3, 6).  She also investigates male and female receptions of and reactions to that circulating star image, both textually and extra-textually, in order to more fully identify and engage with the dominant discourses of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality which were circulating in American society at this time of new modernity, of transition, of movement and change, and which became visible when voiced around the locus of Rudolph Valentino.

Studlar was clearly inspired by Hansen’s work on Valentino and appreciative of most of it; but where Hansen seems to be trying to explain culture through the figure of Valentino and his films (and psychoanalytic theory), Studlar appears more interested in the culture itself and the way it shapes and produces and becomes manifested in various forms, such as in Hollywood star figures.  Studlar attempts to read Jazz Age American culture and its prevailing discourses of masculinity, ethnicity, and sexuality through the construction and reception of Valentino’s star image, using him as a gauge of popular cultural discourses and national preoccupations.  Studlar finds a common link for her book’s four male star case studies in a unifying “paradigm of transformative masculinity” which was a product of the “the period’s extremely self-conscious negotiation of tradition and modernity, femininity and masculinity” and of its literary and cultural representations of gender as a performance, a process, a “mad masquerade” (4-5).  \            Within this larger framework of then-circulating preoccupations with transformation and change, Studlar investigates Valentino specifically in relation to the cultural concept of “dance madness” which was sweeping the nation at the time, focalizing Valentino through that era’s view of dance as a case study for identifying the dominant cultural trends of the time.  Noting the star’s dual positioning in relation to both the commercial film system and the realm of desiring/ identifying fans that Hansen too explored, Studlar explains that for Valentino, who had a background in dance and whose film career was characterized by his high degree of agile athleticism and a focus on his (dancer’s) body, dance was “the most important cultural influence on the meaning of the star profitably shaped by the industry discourse and pleasurably experienced by film spectators,” the most effective way of identifying the cultural currents which were already in circulation in the American society that made Valentino a star (7).

By extension, she also uses Jazz Age cultural discourses of masculinity, as embodied in Valentino’s star and filmic images and in the gendered public responses to him, to see “how American masculinity negotiated various social and sexual dilemmas of the time,” such as women’s increased sexual and economic freedom and the large influx of ethnically-other immigrants (5).  Thus, she not only uses star figures to identify cultural concerns and then-dominant definitions of masculinity but also to ascertain the various responses that were employed by society at the time in response to its perceived threats and anxieties.  So, in contrast to Hansen’s more theoretical, psychoanalytic formulations of such male and female responses to Valentino and the cultural and historic changes of the time, Studlar grounds her similar investigations in the figure of Valentino himself, in the definitions of masculinity he embodied, and the cultural discourses mobilized around him, as well as in the specific culture itself.

Studlar’s well-organized, deeply-researched, highly-engaging scholarship has the interesting benefit of registering the perceived concerns and responses of the time in a reception history that reveals a portrait of the time beyond mere historical “facts;” to a large extent, perceived reality is reality for the people living it, and by using the figure of Valentino to register prevailing social perceptions, Studlar is able to record the social realties which overlay concrete historical and cultural fact.  Thus Studlar shows the complex ways in which Valentino figured prominently and importantly within the “perceived crisis in American sexual and gender relations” of the time, how he, “like dance, had become symbolic of tumultuous changes believed to be taking place in the system governing American sexual relations” (196-7).  Furthermore, Valentino and his star text, and the sexually ambiguous, “dance mad” masculinity he represented, seemed to confirm the “increasing effeminacy of men and the masculinity of women” which was perceived by the culture (mostly its men) of this time (186).

In exploring the relationship between stars, the star phenomenon in general, and culture, Studlar is able to examine “the circulation of meaning around masculinity as a cultural concept” by way of these four male stars (4).  For instance, as both Hansen and Studlar address, Valentino’s past career as a dancer tied into his feminized persona of being “a creation of, for and by women,” as Hansen wrote, a popular conception created by his immense dependence on the desire and adoration of female fans to remain a Hollywood actor and star, his being “discovered” by June Mathis, screenwriter of his star-making film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as well as his well-publicized relationships with dominating, sexually-vampish and –ambiguous women like dancer Natacha Rambova, whose platinum “slave bracelet” he wore (“Ambivalence” 262, 261).

However, whereas Hansen saw such popular characterizations and perceptions of Valentino as linked to negative ideas of his being dependent upon women and to the new liberalized female sexuality and identified them as a largely male defense against the threat he posed in terms of female sexuality, Studlar uses these same circulating star images and perceptions to identify larger cultural anxieties and discourses beyond female sexuality.  Studlar explains and explores Valentino’s pre-film career as what was derogatively called a “lounge lizard” or “tango pirate,” men paid by women to be their dance partners and to teach them the latest steps, and the public male-voiced outcry against it.  She reads this negative male response in relation to the threatening new expressions of liberalized female sexuality and the (male) perception of women’s “actively searching for pleasures” which such “lounge lizards” made all too visible and which they easily facilitated in the newly expanding public sphere (159).  But such responses also relate to (and help Studlar identify) not only perceived threats, but also the traditional, dominant American masculinity they appeared to be displacing.  Epitomized by the Rooseveltian cult of virility, these more traditional codes of masculinity were perceived to be under particular threat as Valentino’s and the lounge lizards’ more ambiguous, feminized, “dance mad,” and often racially-other type of masculinity were embraced by women, both by film fans and by the many women going to dance halls and jazz clubs in the 1920s.  By examining all of these elements in relation to each other, Studlar moves beyond the limiting realm of female sexuality to get at the ambiguous and complex web of discourses, social transformations, and cultural threats which were circulating in American culture at this historical moment.

Additionally, Studlar’s research satisfyingly engages with the highly problematic ethnic aspect of Valentino’s stardom, linking such negative outcry against what was characterized as his effeminate, non-American image to the xenophobia which was prevalent at this time; she connects these rampant expressions of xenophobia to the newly Eastern and Southern European, versus the previously Western European, demographic of immigration, the nativist movement which had been building since the 1890s, and ensuing ideas of racial purity and eugenics.  Additionally, such racial discourses further compounded the threat and anxiety caused by Valentino’s characterization as a “tango pirate” type of man, both in his past career and in his films which frequently played on this own biography and on his lean, athletic body by incorporating dance into the narrative, for Studlar writes that the “darkly foreign” immigrant was the most dangerous incarnation of the already-existent stereotype of “sexualized and greedy masculinity” epitomized by “lounge lizards,” or “boy flappers” (151).  Thus Studlar acknowledges multiple cultural perceptions and discourses which were broadly circulating during the American Jazz Age, which become succinctly visible as responses to the so-called feminized masculinity and the dancer and racially-other characteristics of Valentino’s star texts.

In returning to her unifying theme of this modernity’s “transformative masculinity,” Studlar further explains that Valentino became especially troubling to Jazz Age America(-n men) (and full of positive potential for its women) because he (and his films) revealed a transformation of masculinity, or rather subverted then-dominant patterns of transformation, as opposed to the “oscillation between sadistic and masochistic” positions outlined in Hansen’s “ambivalence”-stressing scholarship.  Such structures and narratives of transformation well matched organizations of the popular-among-women romance novel as analyzed by scholar Janice Radway, potentially explaining his films’ appeal among women, as well as this modern era’s “obsession with the transformative potential of masculinity” (171).  These narratives of transformation, which defined popular Harlequin romances, for example, characterized some of Valentino’s early star-making vehicles, such as Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wherein he narratively progressed from “male butterfly to sacrificing war hero” (175).

However, such transformations do not characterize most of his films.  Rather, as Studlar writes in her cultural history, Valentino’s racially-other, sexually ambiguous, feminized masculinity ultimately “could not be transformed into traditional American masculinity,” either through such conventional and popular narrative patterns or in his own star image (176).  Whereas most ethnic stars like Tony Moreno had been assimilated into normative ethnic and masculine codes, Valentino’s films, with their emphasis on dance, physical disguise and transformation, and the (male) dancer’s body, suggested an ambiguous “nuanced range of erotically charged moods” in contrast to the dominant patriarchal notion of controlling masculinity and also productively “visually redefined the cinematic images of the male body” at this time (191).  Therefore, as Studlar concludes, Valentino ultimately presented the intensely troubling (to men) and massively desired (by women) figure that he did to Jazz Age America because, narratively and extratextually, his “vehicle for masculine transformation” did not assimilate him to dominant discourses of gender and ethnicity but instead left him “culturally poised between a traditional order of masculinity and a utopian feminine ideal” (197).  The star figure of Valentino converged “female fantasy with the dangerous, transformative possibilities of dance and with the highly restrictive norm for constructing ethnic masculinity in a frankly xenophobic nation,” creating both a site of tension and potential resistance, leaving him to embody “anxieties for some…promise to others” (197).

Forgoing any grand, all-encompassing, theoretical conclusions, choosing instead to embrace the ambiguities and contradictions and overlaps of her cultural research through the star figure of Rudolph Valentino, Studlar concludes by explaining that Valentino presented not a unique case, but “a higher order of problematic” for a culture already struggling with the issues brought up and exacerbated by his stardom and his star texts (197).  Thus does she avoid the “dehistoricizing theoretical orthodoxy” that threatened Hansen’s scholarship, offering a new type of historical inquiry which merges disciplines of study and eschews Grand Theories to paint a picture of society as it was seen by those living within and making it (Studlar “Babel” 40).

Bibliography

deCordova, Richard. “Richard deCordova Responds to Miriam Hansen’s ‘Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification : Valentino and Female Spectatorship’ (“Cinema Journal,” Summer 1986).” Cinema journal 26.3 (1987): 55-7.

Erens, Patricia.  Issues in Feminist Film Criticism.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Hansen, Miriam.  Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

—. “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship.” In Stardom: Industry of Desire.  Ed. Christine Gledhill.  London: Routledge, 1991.  Originally published in Cinema Journal 25.4 (1986): 6-32.

“Many Hurt in Mad Fight to Pass Valentino Bier.” Boston Daily Globe.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Aug 25 1926.

Mulvey, Laura.  “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by Duel in the Sun.”  In Feminism and Film Theory.  Ed. Constance Penley.  New York: Routledge, 1988.  69-79.  Originally published in Framework 15/16/17 (1981): 12-15.

—.  “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”  In Film Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen.  7^th ed.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 711-22.

 Studlar, Gaylyn.  “Discourses of Gender and Ethnicity.” Film Criticism XIII.2 (1989): 18-35.

–.  “Gaylyn Studlar Responds to Miriam Hansen’s “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship” (“Cinema Journal,” Summer 1986).” Cinema Journal 26.2 (1987): 51-3.

–.  Rev. of Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, by Miriam Hansen.  Film Quarterly 47.1 (1993): 39-40.

–.  This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 150-98.

“Thousands in Riot at Valentino Bier; More than 100 Hurt.” New York Times.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Aug 25, 1926.

 “Valentino Passes with No Kin at Side; Throngs in Street.”   New York Times.  ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  Aug 24, 192.

Rick Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre”

In 1984 Rick Altman set out to “scratch” an itch that he claimed no one working in the field of film genre criticism seemed to even feel (6).  In his essay “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” he claims that the field is befuddled with uncertainty, confusion and contradiction because it lacks an adequate theory, an adequate means of reconciling the differing opinions which were then stalemating advancements in genre study.  Fortunately, Altman himself offers a solution, a unifying theory which he claims will, unlike the semiotic and structuralist approaches he critiques, diachronically consider historical context while reconciling the field’s contrasting opinions.  In his essay, Altman strategically shows his proposed semantic/syntactic theory, an inclusive, dualistic approach, to neatly solve the three sets of problematic contradictions that he explains are hindering genre studies, believing that such an approach will supplement “weaknesses of current notions of genre” while also productively raising “numerous questions for which other theories have created no space” (6, 17).

Altman’s essay is exceptionally well organized, straightforward and clear; he firmly establishes a lack in (what was then) current genre studies and then plainly shows the ways in which his proffered theory corrects that lack, all in a pleasantly conversational tone and with plenty of illustrative examples.  Altman initially outlines the three main “contradictions” which he claims plague genre criticism because of the way that their seemingly oppositional points of view have allowed no common ground or universally accepted definitions of genre; and since no rapprochement between the two sides has been yet established, the field has been left irreconcilably divided and bereft of a cohesive guiding theory (6).  Firstly, Altman explains that there is no single agreed-upon way of determining a genre’s corpus, which can be defined by either an inclusive or an exclusive means of selection, depending on your position.  The inclusive list, such as would be found in an encyclopedia, defines genre in a broad, tautological sense, while the exclusive canon is determined by more abstract qualifications.  In this latter category, a definition is given based on “attempts to arrive at the overall meaning or structure of a genre” and tends to encapsulate films that critics feel somehow “represent the genre more fully” (7).  These two types of definition ultimately correspond to Altman’s own dual semantic and syntactic approaches, respectively, and his proposed theory thus unites the two canons and two types of definition which he here shows to be contradictingly and competingly disparate.

Altman’s second contradiction pertains to genre history and theory and the apparent, or at least accepted, incompatability of the two schools.  Clearly favoring a diachronic, historical and developmental view of genre, Altman briefly explains the synchronic, ahistorical semiotic approach that has dominated genre studies from the 1960’s until the 1980’s when he is writing.  He posits that such thinking tends to conceive of genres in terms of timeless Platonic ideals and completely ignores their historical development as well as the very fact that they do develop and evolve.  This section of Altman’s argument becomes a little muddled in his eagerness to discount such a synchronic view while also trying not to bog down his relatively direct and concise essay with burdensome theory and history.  Still, the fact that genres do develop over time, as do genre theories themselves, as Altman illustrates, seems a simple enough truth upon which to accept his assertion that the theory of genre should consider history rather than exist in diametric separation from it, as he claims is currently the case with this second contradiction.

Thirdly, Altman compares the so-called ritual approach to genre with the ideological approach, explaining how they, like the inclusive and exclusive definitions and like genre theory and history, have been viewed as opposite, incompatible positions which then leaves the field of genre criticism with no clear course of study.  He writes that the ritual approach, stemming from Levi-Strauss’ examination of the role of myth in genre, essentially attributes ultimate agency to audiences, who pick the movies they want to see and thus compel Hollywood to accommodate their desires.  On the other hand, the ideological approach denies all audience agency and describes genre as merely a vehicle for the rhetoric of Hollywood, as their means of “luring” audiences in and then manipulating them for their own commercial motives (9).

After thus clearly establishing three sets of contradictions, three sets of theoretical binaries, Altman calls for a theory that will not only consider historical context, but will also, without denying any of these past positions, offer a “critical methodology which encompasses and indeed thrives on their inherent contradictions” (10).   His proposed semantic/syntactic theory here offers a “dual approach” whose “slash” component promises to resolve the seemingly insurmountable fissures he just established by combining their contradictory view points (12).  In categorizations that parallel those of the inclusive and exclusive canons of genre, Altman differentiates between genres defined by their semantic elements and those by their syntactic organization.  Semantic definitions, he explains, use “a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets,” i.e. the genre’s “building blocks themselves.”  Syntactic definitions, on the other hand, stress the “constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders,” or the “structures into which [the building blocks] are arranged” (10).

Altman’s entire semantic/syntactic argument is predicated upon his belief in a diachronic approach to the study of genre, or of any text.  Most clearly introduced in the context of his second stated contradiction, Altman directly asserts the need for such an approach throughout his essay while also indirectly confirming its validity and necessity through the inclusion of examples which reveal the historical developments of genre.  For instance, he outlines the development of the musical in which the original use of music to melodramatically convey sorrow later developed into associations with the joy and pleasure of “coupling, the community and entertainment” (13).  Also, in establishing the contradiction between genre theory and history, Altman indirectly describes the development of genre theories themselves, explaining the way in which previous citations of the industry’s own generic terms were suspiciously replaced by a “self-conscious critical vocabulary” after the work of semiotics rose to popularity (7).  Furthermore, aware of the change and evolution of not only genres but ideas of theory as well, Altman consciously avoids the trap of synchronicity by historically situating his own semantic/syntactic theory as a response to the dominating influence of semiotics over the twenty years before he is writing, as one more step in the history of genre theory.  By thus conveying that historical development does occur, in genres as well as in theories, Altman cleverly shows all of these single-theory approaches, each half of his three “contradictions,” to be inherently incapable of explaining a genre’s big picture.  The logical extension of this idea, which supports the rest of Altman’s argument, is that since theory alone cannot tell the whole truth of a genre without the insight gained from considering history, so too do his two other contradictions also fail to fully convey a genre when they do so from only one side.

To unequivocally prove not only that his two new categorizations of semantic and syntactic can successfully define a genre but also that the two elements need to be combined in order to optimally characterize genres, Altman uses the example of The Western.  He explains both the semantic and the syntactic elements of this familiar genre, thus concretely clarifying his two categories while also proving that they can sufficiently define a genre.  However, he then cites the problematic subcategory of the “Pennsylvania western” which has clear “affinities” with the western genre but lacks some of the established semantic requirements.  In a succinct affirmation of his dual theory, Altman neatly removes the “problem” of this exception by removing the mono-ideological approach; combining semantic and syntactic definitions means sacrificing neither wide applicability nor the identification of meaning and the “Pennsylvania” films can be thus unproblematically grouped within the Western genre where they belong (11).

From this rather convincing example, Altman clearly and systemically returns to his original three stated contradictions to show in each how the application of his semantic/syntactic theory adroitly solves the problems posed by a faithful adherence to just one ideology.  Thus, by neatly aligning his dual approach with the two means of defining a genre’s corpus and by making it clear that the use of only one such definition ignores the complexity, individuality and varying “levels of genericity” of each film text, Altman proves that his dual approach offers a “more accurate description” of genre.  Secondly, he forgoes the synchronic division between genre theory and history that he so clearly disapproves of and offers his own “working hypothesis” of the two paths of generic historical development, in relation to his chosen semantic and syntactic categories: “either a relatively stable set of semantic givens is developed through syntactic experimentation into a coherent and durable syntax, or an already existing syntax adopts a new set of semantic elements” (12).  This not only reaffirms the fact that genres change and proves the previous synchronic approach to be inadequate, but also confirms that his own chosen means of definition are capable of bridging the gap between theory and history and of accounting for a genre’s historical development.  Finally, Altman compares his “dual approach” to the space wrought between ritual and ideological approaches.  His justification here comes from his claim that genres need a “special bilingualism” to exist and thrive; they are comprised neither wholly of audience agency nor Hollywood rhetoric, but instead exist in the “common ground” between audience desire and Hollywood motivation that is arrived at through a genre’s “process of accommodation,” that is, its historical development (14).

Altman concludes his very convincing essay by returning to the beginning, so to speak.  Having proven the existence of a lack in genre studies and that his dual approach offers a successful means of ameliorating that lack and of reconciling those contradictions, he returns to the “general theory of textual signification” that provided the basis for his new genre theory in order to offer further corroborating support and explanation (15).  He cites the literary theory which differentiates between the “primary, linguistic parts of a text’s component parts,” his semantics, and the “secondary, textual meaning which those parts acquire through a structuring process internal to the text or to the genre,” his syntactic category (15).  Examples of the western, again, and the horror genre show that this original literary delineation is just as effective as his own semantic/syntactic approach and Altman confidently concludes that his selection of these two classifications is ideal “because the semantic/syntactic distinction is fundamental to a theory of how meaning of one kind contributes to and eventually establishes meaning of another” (16).

The essay, which was so clear, well organized and well proven, starts to get a little convoluted here at the end as Altman returns once more to trying to convey the historical development of genres, explains the ways in which genres become established.  After having stressed the importance of both semantic and syntactic categorizations and outlined two parallel ways in which genres develop, Altman here, in returning to this literary model, has to overtly privilege the syntactic as the primary way in which meaning is produced.  Because this literary theory stresses the idea that meaning is created through “internal” structuring, it ignores external factors like the commercial and ideological motivations of Hollywood and the agency and expectation of audiences themselves.  Altman tries to address this latter element, tries to recognize the “interpretive community” which he claims semiotic genre theorists ignored, by cursorily crediting these audiences with a level of determining agency not present in his original literary theory.  However, he cannot address this aspect at length, and so wraps up his essay by placing the majority of a genre’s meaning-creating power in the texts which preceded it, in the repeated application of a syntactical system to a set of semantics, which thus establishes the genre.

And though Altman’s essay is well structured and set up to succeed, though he uses convincing rhetoric and organization to prove his theory, there are a few issues which are missing from his compact argument.  First, though he does an amazing job of applying his semantic/syntactic theory to genres like the western, the musical and horror films, he does not adequately address the less clear-cut, more slippery genres of melodrama and film noir.  Much harder to define and to assign to a single set of identifying factors, these genres might simply have been harder to use as evidence in this short essay, but it stands to wonder whether Altman’s dualistic approach would have been able to accommodate these more amebic genres as well.  Secondly, though his proposed theory does a nice job of uniting the apparent chasms of genre study, they are slightly vague in and of themselves and would not necessarily generate useful definitions of specific genres.  As Altman shows, it neatly combines previously asserted definitions, both semantic and syntactic, such as Jean Mitry’s with Jim Kitses’ or Marc Vernet’s with John Cawelti’s for the western, but it doesn’t seem to define a genre on its own (10-11).

And finally, it must be reasserted that the theory which Altman has based his entire approach on is literary in nature, and thus, though obviously applicable to and useful in relation to cinema, still creates a slight issue of variable mediums.  And if Altman found such troubling insufficiencies with the application of semiotics to the study of genre from twenty years before he was writing, then his own use of a literary theory might also ultimately prove unsatisfactory, especially given his own stress on the importance of historical development.  Still, even if there are a few issues left unanswered, Altman has proved his proposed theory to be a productive addition to genre studies, if not solving every problem then at least “raising questions for which other theories have created no space” and making it potentially possible to answer those questions in the future (17).

 

 

Works Cited

Altman, Rick.  “A Semantic/Syntactic Theory of Genre.”  Film Theory and Criticism:

Introductory Readings.  7^th ed.  Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“This is Sparta!”: The Spectacle of the Active, Muscled Male Body in 300

Introduction

The intense box-office success of 300 proves that overt male spectacle sells.[i]  Both men and women came to see not only the comic book adaptation’s display of masculine fighting skill and stoic resolve, but also the spectacle of the male actors’ hard, sharply-defined ab and chest muscles which the film explicitly offered them via the heightened impact of CGI-enhanced definition and ancient Greece-justifying loincloths.  Because of its blatant positioning of the male body as spectacle and source of visual pleasure, 300 aligns with the work of Richard Dyer, Steve Neale, and Steven Cohan, [ii] who have all shown that it is not only women who are structured as passive objects of spectacle connoting “to-be-looked-at-ness,” as Laura Mulvey laid out in her deeply-influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” but that men occupy this position as well.  In claiming that men too inhabit this “female” position in Mulvey’s conception of gendered cinematic structures and the masculine spectator, all three scholars also imply that the male inhabitation of this passively-coded position creates instabilities and anxieties (11).  Thus, they claim, in consciously or unconsciously presenting the male as to-be-looked-at spectacle, the film texts must attempt to disavow or minimize the contradictions and threats such erotic contemplation of the male image poses to patriarchically hegemonic definitions of masculinity as active.

Zach Snyder’s 2007 film 300 is adapted from Frank Miller’s 1998 graphic novel about the historic Spartan battle of Thermopylae against Xerxes and his armies during the Greco-Persian Wars of 480 B.C.; it offers an interesting confirmation and subversion of Mulvey’s theory of active/passive gendered cinematic structures and of these three scholars’ claims for the need to disavow the presumably troubling display of male spectacle.  Clearly corroborating Dyer, Neale, and Cohan’s assertion of the existence of cinematic male spectacle, 300 overtly and consciously offers the male body as object of erotic contemplation and obvious spectacle in its (re)presentation of these hard-muscled, nearly nude Spartan warriors and their elaborate fight sequences, all stylized with extensive digital effects.  300 incorporates many of the devices which these scholars claim have been traditionally employed to disavow the anxiety such male spectacle presumably causes, and yet they seem rather to enhance the spectacle; for 300 remains wholly invested in the unexcused display of the spectacle of these men/these men as spectacle, which is further enhanced by its highlighting of the unnaturalness of these masculine constructions.  In addition to this implied lack of tension concerning the gaze at male spectacle, by both male and female audiences, 300 also importantly conflates the Mulveyan dichotomy between masculine action and the gazed-at objectification attributed to the feminine, showing that it is both which construct the male ego ideal.  Yet 300 ultimately seeks to validate its spectacular presentation of this idealized active masculinity, defining it in terms of national values, of which these spectacular bodies and the actions they perform serve as an extension.  Moreover, such masculine ideals are further privileged in relation to what the film constructs as “bad” masculinities, which are Othered, demonized, and contrastingly represented through physical deformity, moral and sexual corruption, and passivity.

Men as Visual Spectacle: 300’s Simultaneously “Active” and “Passive” Male Ego Ideal

300’s Spartan male characters are excessively positioned as ideal egos, to borrow Mulvey’s term; led by King Leonidas, these men perfectly embody Mulvey’s characterization of classically “active” male protagonists, who she says offer “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal egos” with which the male spectator narcissistically identifies (12).  As such an active male ideal, Leonidas controls the film’s epic war plot and its desiring gaze and thus exemplifies classic “narcissistic fantasies of power, omnipotence, mastery and control” (Neale 5).  Furthermore, the idealized Spartan masculinity which Leonidas (literally) embodies is seamlessly replicated in his identically well-muscled, identically costumed men, offering not just one but a camaraderie of 300 ideal egos for male spectators to identify with.  This extra level of “narcissistic fantasy” reinforces this Spartan masculine ideal and also recalls the exaggerated identification-with-the-ideal often associated with the presumably male readers of comic books and super hero narratives (Neale 5).

Additionally, Leonidas and his Spartan men also exhibit the same verbal and “emotional reticence” which marks masculine heroes like Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s Westerns; indeed, their status as classic active ideal egos is compounded by the fact that their actions take the place of agency-exhibiting, communicative speech (Neale 7).  Neale claims that such silence further engages narcissistic male identification for it implies the pure state which existed before the loss and lack associated with language.  Because 300 seems determined to mark not only its central male protagonist as the ego ideal of narcissistic identification and fantasy, but the whole Spartan masculinity he represents and leads, this verbal and emotional reserve becomes intricately tied to Spartan national values and characterizes all of its idealized citizens; regardless of gender, they display the restraint and austerity which have come to define “spartan” in everyday language.  These hard-bodied Spartan men say little, emote even less, and wear only a loincloth, shield, and cloak.  This Spartan reticence, along with the men’s impressive fighting skill, also additionally encourages the film’s focus on the spectacle of their male bodies, which come to stand as crucial nonverbal sites for the communication of active masculinity, both to each other and to audiences.

In addition to such idealized Spartan reticence and active characterization, this athletic, loin-cloth-wearing “virility [also] has its undeniable basis in the spectacle of muscular bodies,” just as Cohan describes was the case for the often-shirtless William Holden in Joshua Logan’s 1955 Picnic (210).  But though Leonidas and his 300 Spartans clearly exemplify the active position and idealized narcissistic identification that Mulvey outlines for men (characters and spectators) in mainstream cinema, they also sharply deflate her assertion that “a male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of erotic contemplation,” consciously offering muscled male bodies as blatant visual spectacle (Mulvey 12).  On display for both the scopic pleasure of their muscled bodies as well as the spectacular actions they can do with those bodies, these masculine ego ideals are thus “encoded with the value of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’” which Mulvey first attributed to passively-structured women in classical cinema (Cohan 210).

But as Dyer, Neale, and Cohan prove, and as 300 thus clearly shows, the male figure can embody both of Mulvey’s gendered filmic positions, can oscillate between the (masculine) active narcissistic ego ideal and the (feminine) scopic object of erotic contemplation, thus complicating such gendered divisions.  Beyond this though, 300 also shows that these two positions can be united, that they need not remain separate and distinct poles between which characters and spectatorial identification oscillate.  Rather, the active characterizations which make these Spartan protagonists narcissistic ego ideals are often also the basis for their erotic contemplation, and vice versa.  For despite the assertions begun in Mulvey and picked up by these three scholars, being (erotically) contemplated is actually a large part of what comprises many onscreen male ideals, and both the active and the static body facilitate this pleasurable contemplation.  Additionally, the passivity traditionally associated with being the object of the gaze needs to be complicated: as is especially clear in a film as blatant and self-aware as 300, there is also a very evident and enviable power to be had in being looked at, in being contemplated, and in setting oneself up as an ego ideal to be admired and emulated.  300 consciously offers these hard-bodied warriors to male and female audiences as well as to diegetic characters as objects of scopic pleasure to be gazed at for both the spectacle of display and the spectacle of action (which are intimately related).  Also, the men themselves continually offer up the image and the action of their bodies to the gaze of their countrymen, hoping to prove their own embodiment of the Spartan ideal and to inspire it others.

Muscles have always been a very important part of both male action and male spectacle, but they have also, according to Dyer, Neale, and Cohan, inspired anxieties and presumably troubling ambiguities between the discrepancy of the masculine action connoted by muscularity and the supposed passivity inherent in displaying the body.  Though muscles have often been displayed for their ability to connote phallic power and offer proof of the active constructions of these cinematic male heroes and hegemonic masculinity, Dyer, Neale, and Cohan all explain that such efforts inherently incriminate the masculine representations with the connotations of passivity they attribute to being gazed at and contemplated.  However, though three key moments of slow motion in 300 epitomize such a potentially unsettlingly ambiguating process, they also show the way in which it is both static, “passive” bodily display as well as the display of (bodily) action which create these Spartan male narcissistic ego ideals.  By now a cliché of so-called male action genres, these scenes involve a line of Spartans simply walking or running towards the camera, cropped above the head and below the knee for optimal muscle viewing and dramatically slowed down.  Importantly, in these moments of spectacle, it is still very much muscles and bodies in motion, enhanced rather than diminished by the slower speed, which provides increased visibility of the male spectacle and gives (male and female) audiences more time to gaze at and enjoy it.

Interestingly, slow motion actually aligns the men of 300 most conventionally with Mulvey’s characterization of the filmic positioning of the female, which she explains offers moments of pure spectacle which retard the development of the narrative and “freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (11).  Steve Neale shows that such narrative freezing often characterizes much of the fetishistic spectacle of men in “male genres,” which I will discuss further later, but here the erotic gaze at the male body not only pauses the narrative, it almost literally freezes the fighting action through the use of slow motion effects; these moments offer the most drastic combination of “passive” scopic objectification and powerful action into a unified male ego ideal.  Already slowed down to ensure optimal appreciation of and pleasure in these male bodies as well as their physical skill, the action of 300’s elaborately choreographed fight sequences very nearly halt mid-leap, mid-lunge, mid-thrust, recalling video game structures of pleasure in and power over the physical spectacle.  This intriguingly ambiguates the presumably passive frozen-in-time spectacle of women as originally laid out by Mulvey, aligning it with the similar effects used in games and movies aimed at male audiences, and importantly implicates physical action in the pleasure of (erotic) (male) spectacle.

For example, the most battle-hungry Spartan, Stelios, pulls his sword from the scabbard at his waist, a close-up frame highlighting his flexed abs and making explicit the connection between his muscles, his sword, and his phallic Spartan power; he growls fiercely and leaps into the air to attack the Persian emissary, mounted on a platform at least twenty feet high.  Slow motion renders his agile, athletic, impossible leap a glorious spectacle, highlighting his beautiful form; clothed in nothing but a loincloth, he flies horizontally towards his target, seemingly frozen in air.  The camera breaks up his body as he leaps, shooting his legs, stomach, and chest in different close-up segments, clearly aligning with Mulvey’s explanation of the objectifying fragmentation of the female body in cinema.  And yet, here too it becomes clear that though the narrative action literally stops to gaze at specific male body parts, objectifiedly decontextualized, the point remains that it is an action being frozen and gazed at: it is the physical actions of these men, along with their hard muscles, which comprises and adds to the erotic spectacle of their body as well as their positioning as an active ego ideal.  Even when frozen, theirs remain spectacular bodies in spectacular motion.

As such highly self-aware scenes make clear, 300 seems to find male spectacle justifiable in its own right and consciously presents the spectacularized male body as to-be-looked-at by male and female audiences without it detracting from the “active” characterizations of traditional narcissistic ego ideals.  Indeed, the bodily display enhances the active spectacle and idealization.  It is therefore important to also point out 300’s visual presentation of this male spectacle: the film overtly and consciously creates and codes its entire mise-en-scene to further highlight and enhance the contemplation of the spectacle that is these men’s muscular bodies, to heighten their beauty and perfection as well as their actions.  The shots’ framing reveals a preference for dramatic shafts of sunlight which pierce down through the clouds to illuminate the marble-like chests and abs of the 300 Spartans, making them visually stand out in golden illumination against the slate-colored ground and walls behind them and against the stormy sky overhead, while supplying additional connotations of the divinely blessed.  Moreover, their long red cloaks regally highlight the planes of their long muscled bodies and provide a dramatic backdrop to the presentation of their physiques, a bold yet graceful and mobile accent to their sword thrusts and twirls.  This further links them to connotations of powerful superheroes, themselves often defined by both idealized bodies and actions while also offering unabashed bodily spectacle to both men and women.

Disavowal of the Male Spectacle

As discussed by Dyer, Neale, and Cohan, the ambiguity created by such blending of Mulveyan notions of “feminine” passivity and “masculine” action has traditionally been described as troubling; they mention tensions which arise around the erotic contemplation of the spectacle-laden, objectified male body, tensions which the film texts have to work to disavow in order to be “kept in line with dominant ideas of masculinity-as-activity” (Dyer 66).  Similarly, the films must also, they write, work to disavow the apparently inherent “passivity” which exists not only being gazed at by viewers, but also in the conscious posing of an image constructed to provide visual pleasure.  Richard Dyer, in discussing male pin-ups, claims that the people constructing and posing such images attempt to downplay or conceal the passivity of the male model’s being gazed at by the camera and by both male and female viewers, for in hegemonic classical cinema, as Mulvey points out, men are bearers of the gaze and women objects of it; by doing so, they can reassert an “active” notion of masculinity.  Such active-enforcing impressions are achieved, he claims, in three main ways, with particular relevance for 300: posing the man to look directly at the spectator/ return the spectator’s gaze; photographing and staging the male object “doing something” or as poised for action; and by imposing the impression of naturalness on these representations of the masculine image (66).

Steve Neale, too, writes that the representation of action is used to conceal the contradictions of male spectacle on screen: since the main anxiety involves the male spectator viewing the male image with potentially erotic contemplation, this homosexual current, he claims, becomes “minimized” through the sado-masochistic fantasies and scenes which often characterize male genres like the Western or the gangster film (14).  Similarly, Cohan writes that Picnic, which foregrounds the diegetic and spectatorial female gaze at Hal’s semi-nude body, unlike the male genres Neale discusses, had to move outside of the text altogether to mobilize Holden’s star image in its attempt to “minimize” the “disturbing male spectacle” he and his bare chest presented (205).  However, though 300 incorporates many of the techniques of disavowal laid out by these three scholars, as might well be expected of this male-dominated Hollywood blockbuster aimed at primarily male audiences, ultimately its self-conscious and highly constructed presentation of excessive male spectacle, defined as both active and gazed-at in its idealization, extends beyond mere contradiction to imply that such a staging of male spectacle need not be disavowed at all.

Citing Mulvey’s description of the sadism associated with voyeuristic looking, Neale identifies similar narratives which “depend on making something happen,” on “a battle of will and strength, victory and defeat” in traditionally male genres, which often involve the “depiction of relations between men” or “the struggle between a hero and male villain,” as is the case in the almost-all-male 300 with the battle between Leonidas’ Spartans and the Persian army led by Xerxes (Mulvey 14, Neale 12).  In such films, Neale claims, conventions and rituals of combat and violence both “embody and allay” the anxieties involved in contemplating the male image (12).  Paul Willemen, he writes, sees director Anthony Mann as using such “narrative content marked by sado-masochistic fantasies and scenes” to repress any “explicit eroticism in the act of looking at the male” (12).  Neale further explains, however, that such scenes of “male struggle [can easily] become pure spectacle,” freezing the narrative in the way 300’s slow motion fight scenes do.  However, unlike 300, Neale claims that this potentially troubling fetishization and devolution into spectacle has traditionally been structured to, as in Mann’s and Leone’s films, “recognize the pleasures of display” while also “displacing [that pleasure] from the male body as such and [locating] it more generally in the overall components of a highly ritualized scene” (12).

Though 300 shares many similarities with these Westerns and other male genres, its highly ritualized combat scenes operate solely as “embodiment” within  Neale’s dual “embody and allay” description, and its presentation of male spectacle is so self-aware, excessive, and reflexive about its own constructedness that it ultimately sides with the exhibition of male spectacle over any need for disavowal.  300’s depiction of the Spartan fight against wave after wave of Persian foes is ritualistic, nearly fetishistic, like Neale’s Westerns, and draws heavily from the graphic novel and superhero tradition of epic, frame-by-frame depictions of physically competent fighting men.  However, it reflexively retains the emphasis on the male body which Neale saw as having to be completely displaced by such rituals of combat.  In one slow motion sequence of Leonidas’ choreographed fighting, the camera advances with him as he approaches each new enemy, aggressively thrusts his sword forward and hurls his spear; but it also halts his intense progress, slows him down so that audiences can focus on his body, his tautened muscles as he prepares for action, the grace of his body as he stands or pauses or readies for the next seamless attack.  Here, the spectacle of the male body in action usurps the fetishization of combat alone and forcibly reasserts its presence, implying that the spectacular, gazed-at, and supposedly passive depiction of cinematic men is not something that contradicts active definitions of masculinity, but in fact contributes to the construction of narcissistic ego ideals.  The context of the fight narrative and the ritual of combat here more fully enhance, not merely justify and excuse, male spectacle.

Neale goes on to say that traditionally, such explicit focus on the male body as is seen in 300 could not be contained outside of the biblical epic, which forced other male genres to focus on the spectacle of the fight rather than of the male bodies fighting.  As such, Rock Hudson’s functioning as a clear object of (female) desire in Sirk’s melodramas resulted in the male star having to be punishingly “feminized” in the narrative,  revealing, as Neale claims, the “strength of those conventions which dictate that only women can function as the objects of an explicitly erotic gaze” (14).  Cohan similarly describes the female “sex bomb” status attributed to the melodrama Picnic’s femininely-desired Hal/Holden, despite the “rippling muscles” which were so phallically coded to represent active masculinity (210).  Neale, Cohan, and Dyer all imply that the epic’s conventions of male exhibitionism and representations of the male body function, more so than the melodrama or even other “male genres,” to very strongly assimilate overt focus on the male body into dominant notions of masculinity, and it is within this presumably safer tradition that 300 confidently flaunts its use of the male body as spectacle.  However, the stylized CGI effects and conscious investment in male spectacle ultimately seem to indicate that the safe-making “sword and sandal” genre here serves as an additional self-aware excuse for male spectacle, an excuse as skimpy as the Spartans’ loincloths, another convention of male display (of both body and action) which further enhances the spectacle of these men rather than working to disavow it.

Male muscularity also functions as an important part of this generically epic tradition of blatant male spectacle, using its connotations of biological naturalness to counteract the supposed feminization of spectacle.  In discussing the male pin-up, Richard Dyer writes that every image of male spectacle promotes muscularity because “muscularity is the key term in appraising men’s bodies, …[and is viewed as] the sign of power – natural, achieved, phallic” (71).  Men’s muscles are seen as the natural indication of their physical superiority over women, the proof of their ability to dominate and control (women and weaker men).  By extension, well-defined muscles are “hard” and phallic in the symbolic sense of the phallus’ representation of “abstract paternal power” (Dyer 71).  Similarly, the hard muscles which eye-catchingly refract light and draw the spectator’s admiring gaze in almost every one of 300’s CGI-enhanced scenes prove these men’s innate phallic power and present “a more perfect” ego ideal to male viewers, while also offering very clear scopic pleasure, as was epitomized in the slow motion muscle-highlighting scenes discussed earlier.

But it is not only the display of the phallic-connoting muscles themselves, but also the posing of /their promise of action which has conventionally been used to excuse male display and reinforce traditional active definitions of masculinity as natural rather than constructed.  For example, as Dyer points out, the male model “tightens and tautens his body so that the muscles are emphasized, hence drawing attention to the body’s potential for action” and often “stands taut, ready for action” (67).  300 abounds with such posings of its nearly-nude men, most often immediately preceding or following a battle, to a level of excess which becomes self-referential.  The greatest example of such conscious posings involves a scene which opens on the completion of a defensive wall comprised entirely of Persian bodies.  Stelios, positioned in the immediate foreground of the frame, instantly commands the audience’s attention as he pauses, resting hand on hip in a model’s perfect display of his muscular body, his abs and chest facing the camera and his leg propped up alluringly on the pile of bodies he helped kill and assemble.  This scene begins with the action already completed, and the blatantly posed and displayed male body (-ies) benefits from this pretense of action and is enhanced by its connotations.  Flinging the last body up, the men, breathing heavily and muscles flexing, all gather in front of their human wall, a perfectly posed display of muscled male bodies, barely excused by this grotesque suggestion of physical action.  Yet this posing also highlights these bodies’ capacity for action in such a surreal, exaggerated way that it does not so much excuse the very potentially erotic spectacle as it consciously enhances it.

Both Neale and Dyer discuss the artificiality and constructedness which underlie the filmic displays of male muscularity meant to convey innate phallic strength and action but which, in the Hollywood system of representation, ultimately expose the unnaturalness of these posed bodies and thus more firmly align the men with the feminine position of spectacle.  Dyer writes that the muscles on screen are not natural, as they attempt to appear, but are actually just as “achieved” as the makeup and other markers of female spectacle and masquerade which are thought of as being “done to” the women on screen; these muscles are demanded by Hollywood and achieved through hours of narcissistic body-building, a point which Neale also addresses (71).  Cohan writes that muscles and the filmic attention paid to them reveal the Hollywood star system’s deepest threat to “symbolic phallic support of male power: the extent to which an actor’s appearance, no less than his female counterpart’s, has to be artificially fashioned into an image of physical virility for the eyes of the camera” (221).  This is a presumably dangerous truth which, these scholars assert, must continually be denied if hegemonically active definitions of masculinity are to be upheld.

300 however, absolutely refuses to imply any notion of naturalness in relation to its men’s muscles and their masculinity as a whole, thus devoting itself to the explicit revelation of the constructedness of its male ego ideals.  Not only does it point to the “achieved” quality of these muscles through physical action, but it also reveals these male muscles as very clearly “done to” these male actors, digitally added and enhanced in post-production.  Of the three scholars, 300 comes closest to Cohan’s analysis of the masculine spectacle in Picnic which, in so explicitly exposing Hollywood’s investment in the spectacle of the male body for desiring gazes, reveals masculinity to be a performance and construction.  Hal masquerades his masculinity, constructing his phallic identity out of fakery and spectacle, and the fictional portrayal of him by a Hollywood actor compounds this destruction of any idea of “a natural man” or of a stable masculinity (221).  Similarly, 300, in its action-centered narrative, focuses on the masquerade-like performance of this masculine Spartan identity and portrays these men in such exaggerated ways, both narratively and visually, that their actions cannot seem natural, only pure affect.

This is further compounded by 300’s digital effects, which create not only the whole physical world but also the men themselves, making the Hollywood construction of and investment in the (muscled, male) image and its idealization explicit.  Such overt stylization renders these men visually unreal, and, by extension, their phallic muscles, their actions, and the active masculinity they represent.  This conscious artifice also calls attention to the actor beneath the visual styling, the man who cannot embody the Spartan ideal depicted unachievably onscreen; this exposes the absurd degree to which even the hard muscles and good looks of Hollywood stars are incapable of attaining such ego ideals and points to the doubly unreal male image (created by both actor and effects).  And though this ancient battle’s historicity provides the sheerest basis of truth to these warriors, theirs is a masculinity which remains almost wholly outside the realms of reality and naturalness, displayed spectacularly for audiences’ visual pleasure in a way that exposes and revels in that very constructedness.  Neale points out that narcissistic identification with ego ideals is often troubling for male viewers because these idealized “models” involve representations and abilities which are often impossible to achieve (7).  But perhaps what is so appealing about these muscled Spartans, to both male and female audiences, is that very unreality, the unachievable ideal traditionally offered by Hollywood, especially when presented in such a self-aware package.

Masculinity-Based Definitions of Sexual Difference: Active Masculinity and Othered Men

Beyond this overt acknowledgement and foregrounding of the construction of this male spectacle, 300 also diverges from Dyer, Neale, and Cohan by redefining sexual difference around masculinity.  The film does not offer techniques of disavowal as such, for it is fully devoted to both the traditionally categorized “passive” and “active” elements of its Spartan ideals, but in a similar function the film works to privilege and validate its idealized masculinity in relation to Othered, demonized ones.  These three scholars all imply that classical cinema works at constructing, maintaining, and reinforcing hegemonically active definitions of masculinity so as to enforce patriarchy’s gendered hierarchy of sexual difference between men and women, thus ultimately protecting the dominant structures of male power.  For example, Cohan explains that William Holden’s muscles, the “natural indication of [men’s] physical superiority over women,” as Dyer wrote, were used to counteract any effeminization incurred in presenting Hal as gazed-at spectacle and to define and reinforce sexual difference diegetically and in relation to female spectators.

300 maintains a similar structure of sexual difference defined in relation to the phallus, to male muscles specifically, yet it counteracts the dominant tradition of validating men by subjugating women; rather, sexual difference is here recentered exclusively around men.  For instance, Queen Gorgo is equal to her husband, no less powerful because of her female gender, and just as idealized.  Though there is a strictly sexual division of labor in Sparta, where bodies are such an important indication of identity, Gorgo’s traditionally-marginalized role in female reproduction is an intense source of pride for her, for all Spartan women, and for Sparta as a (masculine) nation.  However, that is also because it, like Gorgo herself, is still defined in terms of the (Spartan) masculine: “only Spartan women give birth to real men” she smugly tells a Persian ambassador.  Gorgo is idealized along with the strong phallic men because she is equally Spartan, characterized by the same definitions of Spartan masculinity: physical strength, emotional reserve, verbal reticence, and most importantly a perfectly-formed, hard, well-defined, albeit female, body.  Whereas Cohan explains that Picnic signified Hal as a phallic marker of sexual difference in order to combat the threatening agency of the films’ desiring female gazes, 300, in making all Spartans equally and ideally ‘masculine,’ sees no threat in the direct and desiring gaze of Spartan women like Gorgo.  Instead, it codes all Spartan masculinity, associated with national values and the idealized bodies of its men, as the “phallic marker of sexual difference” in relation to Othered men, both “bad” and non-Spartans, ultimately privileging traditional definitions of masculinity as active.

300’s idealized Spartan masculinity is most clearly embodied (literally) in Leonidas’ active, erotically-contemplated, hard-muscled body, and by extension his phalanx of uniformly bodied men.  Since the film seems less interested in upholding such traditional methods of disavowal as noted by Dyer, Neale, and Cohan, it uses different thematic techniques to reinforce and validate its constructions and definitions of ideal active masculinity.  The idealized Spartans are linked to national values and patriotism (of both ancient Greece and present-day America), their (muscled) bodies literally reflecting their good citizenship.  Though this serves to narratively characterize all who oppose the 300, in effect it privileges them over all other masculinities and men, with the Others demonized through the comparative depiction of un-ideal, deformed bodies.  300 begins by introducing a Spartan law which immediately establishes this equation of an idealized body with “good” masculinity and the very definition of Spartan national identity: the “inspection” to which all babies are subjected and the valley of skulls which awaits every child “discarded” for being born “small or puny or sickly or misshapen” in Sparta.

Ephialtes, who joins Leonidas’ fighting 300, is a hunchback whose mother fled Sparta to save him from the nation’s brutal discarding of such ill-bodied men.  He returns now, with his father’s Spartan shield, spear, and red cape, with a decent fighting technique and noble ambitions.  Despite this, his physical deformity, including wrinkled skin, broken overlarge teeth, one eye bulging larger than the other, and a crippled, stooped posture, renders him unable to lift his shield.  As such, he cannot join the Spartan phalanx, the “single impenetrable unit” which is the “source of their strength” and which relies on absolute uniformity of its men (bodies, actions, and masculine values).  Ephialtes’ physical imperfection, here cruelly visually contrasted to Leonidas’ perfect muscles and tall, upright stature, renders him incapable of achieving this Spartan masculinity, prevents him even from masquerading along beside his countrymen.  Denied access to this Spartan masculinity, Ephialtes betrays Leonidas by revealing to Xerxes the hidden path that will enable him to defeat the Spartans.  He is thus conclusively and condemnably aligned with weakness, betrayal, and corruption as extensions of his deformed body and his failure as a Spartan, giving in to Xerxes’ seductive promises in a way that Leonidas, in his ideal Spartan masculinity, never does.

A similar example of this differentiated masculinity, characterized in contrast to the ego ideal of the Spartan’s muscles and fighting abilities, are the Spartan ephors, enforcers of “the old religion.”  The film’s narrator Delios privileges the Spartan values of reason and logic over irrational belief and misplaced faith, and by extension action and fighting over inaction and talking, describing the ephors as “worthless remnants of a time before Sparta’s ascent from darkness.”  Their failed masculinity, as Delios sees it, is thus linked to a lack of alignment with Sparta’s current glorious and masculine national values, and they too are physically corrupted: stooped and diseased, with sores on their faces and, unlike the body-baring Spartan warriors, characterized by attempts to conceal their physical deformities under sickly grey robes.  Delios disgustedly describes them as “inbred swine; more creature than man …worthless, diseased, rotten, corrupt.”  These “bad” Spartans’ physical rot reflects their inactive masculinity and their failed patriotism as well as their moral corruption, which not only dramatically contrasts the Spartan ideal but directly threatens it: the ephors accept Leonidas’ payment, yet prevent him from taking the army to defend Sparta against the enslaving Persians, having also been bribed with Xerxes’ gold.

The final example of this failed Spartan masculinity, strikingly visually contrasted to the spectacle of Leonidas and his 300, is Congressman Theron who, unlike Ephialtes and the ephors, has the same well-muscled body as Leonidas.  However, he does not blatantly expose his like the idealized Spartans, but obscures it beneath a white robe, a sad comparison to the 300’s crimson capes, one which recalls those of the malignant ephors.  He is not a man of action, like the Spartan warriors, like Sparta’s definition of men, but instead is a schemer, a plotter, corrupt and slippery; he spies, lies, and whispers, he attacks nothing directly and compromises his own integrity and the good of his nation for personal gain.  It was he who facilitated the bribery between the ephors and Xerxes and he brutalized Gorgo before betraying and verbally impugning her in front of the council.  More of a Spartan man than Theron, Gorgo fights the politician’s lies with silent, direct (and violent) action: she phallically stabs him, proving his corruption by thus exposing his bag of Xerxes’ gold which further links him with the ephors’ venality and with non-Spartan immorality.

In addition to these failed Spartan masculinities, the 300 are also contrasted to Xerxes, and by extension, all the creatures of his army.  Here, with Xerxes already Othered by nationality and marked with the exotic Orientalism traditional of Western (Hollywood) representations of the East, he is also feminized and marked as sexually perverse in relation to active Spartan masculinity.  Though Xerxes’ body is similarly well-muscled and depicted as beautiful spectacle in the way of the 300, his body is not allowed to stand as representative of an ideal masculinity.  Xerxes’ costume of long cape, loincloth, and greaves is almost identical to Leonidas’, yet is marked not as national uniform of masculinity but as deliberate spectacle, personally chosen for its aesthetic impact and to make him stand out among his slave hordes.  Thus is he linked more securely to feminized notions of scopic objects than Leonidas ever is, this explicit affect of costume aligning him with the concept of women narcissistically constructing their appearance.  So though his clothing is no more body-baring than the 300’s and acts as a similar form of spectacle, the film seems to define the difference in Xerxes’ willing adoption of this spectacle, his desire to be noticeable within a group and to present himself as special rather than as a representative member of a nation, the opposite of spectacle-justifying Spartan national values.[iii]  Additionally, this visual difference between national military uniform and decorative costume also implies a difference in action: Spartans fight while Xerxes watches from afar on a throne carried on the backs of slaves.

Furthermore, all of Xerxes’ clothing is gold and vaguely iridescent, his greaves are not functional armor but made of delicate jewelry chains, and his long cape is attached to his shoulders by an oversized necklace, not muscle-accentuating leather straps.  This preference for appearance over action, for pure spectacle rather than action (as opposed to the Spartans’ combining of spectacle with action), is condemningly taken to the degree of overt effeminization and associations with marginalized queer masculinities: instead of a Spartan helmet Xerxes has gold face chains and gold hoops pierced through his lips and cheek bone; instead of angry smears of grease around his eyes, Xerxes has shimmery gold eye shadow and precisely-lined lids, framed by delicately plucked eyebrows.  Furthermore, this God-King, as he calls himself, has painted his entire body gold, rendering it unreal (and unmasculine) in a way quite different from the CGI effects on the Spartan’s bodies; he has aimed for the divine, the inhuman, achieving the otherworldly rather than the merely unreal, while the Spartans’ bodies are linked to the largely human (though equally unattainable) notions of narcissistic ego ideals.

Though it is conventional to render the enemy of a film’s protagonists as Other, this representation of Xerxes extends beyond the narrative justification of a visually- or even racially-Other enemy, coding him effeminately and perversely.  If Leonidas’ well-formed, well-muscled phalanx is an extension of his idealized masculinity, then Xerxes’ army too embodies his ‘failed’ masculinity: his is made up of ill-bodied “monsters,” mutant giants, even large creatures with blades surgically mounted to their arms, which all function as a clear definition of Xerxes’ Other, sexually demonized masculinity.  Xerxes’ harem too, like his mutated and monstrous armies, represents his sexual perversion in comparison to Leonidas and Gorgo’s strictly heterosexual relationship, which is further validated by the legitimating context of royal, i.e. national, marriage.  Xerxes’ harem, colored the same iridescent gold, includes an armless midget, two Indian women kissing, one of whom has a burned face, and an exotic topless African woman with an afro dancing seductively.  Such a conscious menagerie of racially-Other women comprises pure spectacle of the female image as Mulvey traditionally defined it, though it is here condemningly linked to Xerxes, his enslaving use of these women, and his own inferiorly passive masculinity.  Like the ephors who have “the most beautiful Spartan girls” brought to them, Xerxes is negatively associated with turning women into spectacle, into purely passive objects of erotic contemplation: his harem freezes the narrative for Ephialtes’ and the camera’s gaze at these explicitly exoticized female bodies and sexual oddities, fragmenting them into scopic close-ups of breasts, navels, and hips.  Additionally, in stark contrast to the admiring and pleasure-taking slow motion which gazed at and allowed audiences to gaze at the Spartan warriors, the slow motion spectacle inside Xerxes gold tent recalls the perverted or non-normative ogling at the freaks and oddities of a side show, put on display not for their idealized bodies but for their physical imperfection, and to someone else’s benefit.  In contrast to 300’s extensive spectacle of the exposed male body, which is linked to masculine agency as well as idealized masculinity, this dehumanizing Mulveyan use of cinematic spectacle against women here further condemns these ‘bad’ men.  Thus does 300 ultimately use a hierarchy of sexual difference defined by active notions of the phallus and linked to nationalized values to condemn these more traditionally “passive,” ill-bodied, and ill-moraled masculinities.

Conclusion

300 presents audiences, both male and female, with unabashed spectacle of the male body, seemingly conscious of the contradictions which this erotic presentation has traditionally had for masculinity in terms of Mulveyan notions of active male gazers versus passive, inactive female visual objects, an awareness enhanced by the extensive use of digital effects.  This at least opens up the possibility for less binary definitions and representations of masculinity in cinema.  Also, such an open acknowledgement of the erotic contemplation of the male image, along with the insistence on presenting male action as part of that erotic spectacle rather than safely distinct from it, seems particularly subversive considering the male audience which such a graphic novel franchise would have been expected to have.  Then, unlike Neale’s description of male genres, 300 seems to be largely unafraid of any potentially homosexual identification encouraged in these male audiences’ contemplation of the erotic spectacle of these male bodies.  And yet, the film ultimately fails in such direct acknowledgement of amorphous, ambiguous identifications with masculinity, backpedalling to privilege and naturalize this Spartan masculinity in comparison to Othered masculinities.  300 uses the codings of non-White races, non-Western cultures, and non-heterosexualities to demonize these other men in relation to the Spartan warriors, ultimately re-idealizing traditionally “active” definitions of masculine ideals, though from the vantage of self-aware male spectacle; problematic hierarchies of sexual difference are transferred to the world of men, at the expense, not of women, but of various non-dominant cultures, races, and sexualities.

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i  300 made its entire $65 million budget back, plus more, with its opening weekend intake of $70,885,000.  It grossed a total of $210,615,000 and $244,500,00 internationally, and comprised the year’s largest box office hit for an R-rated movie, making it the eighth largest grossing R-rated film of all time (“300”).

ii  These three essays, which form the foundational set of theoretical investigations for this essay, are: Richard Dyer’s “Don’t Look Now;” Steve Neale’s “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema;” and Steven Cohan’s “Masquerading as the American Male in the Fifties: Picnic, William Holden, and the Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywood Film”.

iii  There appears to be a strong connection between such nationalized idealizations of these values of group homogeny and patriotic solidarity, united in proactive military action, as well the call to ideals of freedom, liberty, and the fight for justice, and post-9/11 America.  This issue would need to explored much further, but the idealization of the Spartan men so as to uphold the values of Western civilization in the face of a Middle Eastern oppressor, coupled by the rather vicarious, cathartic vigilante-style fight-for-what’s-right of the 300 seems to align very clearly with U.S. national sentiments in the years following the attack on 9/11.

 

Bibliography:

“300.”  Box Office Mojo.  Boxofficemojo.com.  Web.  Accessed May 1, 2012.

Cohan, Steve.  “Masquerading as the American Male in the Fifties: Picnic, William Holden and the

Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywood Film.”  In Male Trouble, Eds. Penley, Constance and Sharon Willis.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.  203-34.

Dyer, Richard.  “Don’t Look Now.”  Screen 23.3/4 (1982): 61-73.

Mulvey, Laura.  “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”  Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

Neale, Steve.  “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on men and Mainstream Cinema.”  Screen 24.6 (1983): 2-16.

Modernization in Pride and Prejudice Adaptations: Joe Wright’s Realism and Romance in Pride and Prejudice & Gurinder Chadha’s Filmic and Cultural Hybridity in Bride and Prejudice

 

After a drought which lasted nearly sixty years, a Jane Austen resurgence has brought the 18-19^th century author back to life.  For Pride and Prejudice, after the 1940 elaborately-costumed Lawrence Olivier version from MGM, audiences had to wait until 1995 for the release of the British miniseries iconically associated with Colin Firth emerging shirtless from a lake.  It wasn’t until 2003 that Pride and Prejudice finally returned to the big screen in the form of a “Latter-Day” adaptation, which presumably made much of the novel’s chastity for its Mormon audiences.  Becoming Jane (2007) fused the Pride and Prejudice narrative with the figure of Jane Austen, blending fiction, history and authorship, while 2013 will see Elizabeth Bennet fighting not only her pride and prejudices but also zombie foes (“Pride and Prejudice”).  But before adaptation gets stretched quite so far, let us consider Joe Wright’s 2005 realistic, modernized-heritage rendition of Pride and Prejudice and Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 Bollywood/ Hollywood hybrid Bride and Prejudice, which relocates the story to modern day India.

While Wright’s film is a rather “traditional,” faithful form of adaptation, its subtle modifications reveal an effort to modernize Elizabeth and the so-called heritage-style adaptation of classic British novels for modern audiences.  On the other hand, Chadha dramatically transposes the novel’s basic style, culture, and location to a post-colonial global Indian setting inspired by her own perspective as a Non-Resident Indian living in Britain (Dawtrey B2).  Because of this, Chadha actually does make a few recourses to the heritage tradition as a way of aligning her bold adaptation with its British filmic predecessors and textual ancestor.  Like Wright, she privileges the romantic relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy as a means of modernization, to the expense of some of Austen’s social critiques and literary language.  But Chadha’s centering of the romance plot was also done in accordance with the generic traditions of Bollywood cinema, Bride’s stylistic manifestation of her geographical and cultural relocation to India and of her narrative and stylistic marriage of cultures.  Thus, the obstacles to romantic union for Bride’s Elizabeth, here renamed Lalita, and Darcy become based on cultural differences while Wright maintains the divisive differences in social class from Austen’s novel.  With Bride and Prejudice, Chadha offers a self-conscious adaptation, a “hybrid” of classic and contemporary, of literature and film, of Hollywood and Bollywood, of the East and the West, to appeal to the diverse audiences making up today’s hybridized global population (Wilson 323).

Christine Geraghty, scholar of classic adaptation, writes that the “Austen revival of the 1990’s has often been explained as a combination of the classic adaptation’s traditional emphasis on costume, landscape, and a familiar plot with new exploration of a more modern sensibility- that of the independent young woman facing choices in her personal life” with an accompanying “shift not only to a central heroine but also to an address to a female audience” (33).  Such shifts tend to align the films with the conventions of the romance genre, most notably its “narrative structure organized around the learning process that has to take place before the central couple can find harmony and love” (Geraghty 33-4).  Because of this alignment, many “modern” adaptations have increasingly privileged the romantic relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy and taken recourse to the romance genre, often for commercial reasons and to the intense chagrin of literary critics and purists.  This privileging of the romance plot and the modernization of a central heroine mark both Wright and Chadha’s adaptation and can be initially seen in each of their films’ taglines: Wright’s trailer declares that his Pride and Prejudice is from “beloved author Jane Austen” but is the “story of a modern woman” while Bride and Prejudice explains that “Hollywood meets Bollywood—And it’s a perfect match,” describing its cultural and stylistic blending in terms of the story’s well-known romance (Wilson 323; Hopkins 148).

As a central part of this modernization, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach give their adaptation of Pride and Prejudice unequivocally to the character of Elizabeth.  Moggach writes that “this film, I decided, would be Elizabeth’s story.  She is in every scene; we see it all from her point of view” and this is evident from the film’s opening scene onward (19).  Here, Elizabeth walks alone through a field at daybreak, reading a book which only a carefully timed Pause reveals to be Pride and Prejudice itself.  Having conveyed her intent concentration on the novel’s last pages, the camera repositions itself, and audiences, at her right shoulder, so as to read the book with her, move through the field with her, enter her perspective and her consciousness for the rest of the story.  Deborah Cartmell cites David Roche’s reading of this “meta-adaptive moment,” visible too in Bride where Lalita reads a copy of Pride and Prejudice by the pool, “as an announcement to the film’s infidelity to Austen, that the adaptation will leave the book behind to create something different” (112).  This is an extremely productive way of viewing this film, which “pulled a comb through Austen’s dialogue,” as Moggach explains, and took a “muddy hem” and “rustic chaos” approach to the pristine, glamorous heritage tradition and its focus on landscape and costume (19).  Here, for example, the film’s opening shot of a dawn-lit English meadow would seem to establish this adaptation as just another British heritage piece, but Wright immediately upsets such a connection; instead, this opening scene initiates his association of landscape with the character of Elizabeth, her independence, and her personal and romantic growth.

Wright’s use of costume, too, works to distance his adaptation from previous heritage films and further establishes the connection between Elizabeth and nature.  Here, costume satisfies the needs of characterization and contrast as opposed to its more spectacular, self-serving function in films like MGM’s Olivier version.  For Keira Knightly, the film’s modern heroine, “the difference between costume and modern dress is consistently played down” and she wears no bonnets, ribbons or gloves like the other ladies.  Additionally, she is dressed in muted greens and browns, or neutral whites and creams, eschewing the pastels which Geraghty explains often cover the young women of costume dramas (38).  Such colors also tie Elizabeth to nature, an association which Wright uses to visually convey the development of the romance between her and Darcy and to visually mark her independence, her separateness from society.

This Elizabeth continually moves confidently through physical landscapes, flees confining houses and entrapping society to stand alone outside, and is dramatically and emotionally situated in sympathetic nature.  For instance, one stunning patiently-held shot shows Elizabeth’s solitary silhouette walking the full length of the horizon, visually and physically commanding and traversing space.  Additionally, Elizabeth rushes outside to process her feelings and thoughts alone, away from society, after her emotion-stirring dance and conversation with Darcy at the second ball.  And in Pride’s most dramatic use of landscape, a striking pathetic fallacy marks Darcy’s first disastrous marriage proposal: having learned that Darcy separated her sister Jane and Mr. Bingley, Elizabeth furiously flees the crowded church and rushes outside, into the dramatic storm that reflects her rage.  She moves swiftly over a horizon-spanning bridge and takes refuge against an old colonnade; Darcy appears suddenly, similarly rain-soaked and emotionally-riled, to ask for her hand.  Now, the heavy rain and rugged forest backdrop mirror the choleric passion that fills each of them as their pride and prejudices are given full voice.

Geraghty argues that such use of landscape is also strongly associated with “romantic conventions” and thus Wright utilizes it not only to contrast his heroine with her mannered, restricting society, but also to show the learning and development that take place between her and Darcy.  This association with dramatic landscapes also heightens the romance by epically implicating fate and by positioning it in nature, outside society, like Elizabeth herself (Geraghty 40).  When Elizabeth and Darcy meet in the crowded chaos of a country dance, social manners create bad first impressions on both sides and the stifling dinners and teas which follow further constrain the couple’s movement towards each other.  It is only in nature, in the “outside spaces where time and social order can be ignored” that their pride and prejudices can be finally overcome, their romantic union finally accomplished (40).  This nature-encouraged movement towards each other after the first failed proposal is consummated in a second successful marriage proposal which takes place at dawn, in a field much like the one Elizabeth was first seen in, revealing the suitability of the union to both their natures.

This final encounter solidifies Darcy and Elizabeth’s personal and romantic development, their perfect companionship after spending much of the narrative largely isolated from others, on the fringe of social groups.  Plus, throughout the movie, Darcy would repeatedly appear very suddenly, emerging into the room (and the screen) as if out of nowhere, physically startling Elizabeth and taking her by surprise, such as he did in the first proposal.  But here at the end, having developed and overcome her pride and prejudices, Elizabeth now truly sees Darcy and his perfect suitability for her and is thus finally able, along with audiences, to see him approach: the camera holds on him as he walks the field’s entire length toward her, heightening the impression of the emotional and chronological distance that it has taken for each of them to reach this point.  As these two outdoor proposal scenes make very clear, these “romantic moments are visually heavily marked” and contrast with the film’s other emphases on reality, which were inspired by Wright’s background in realistic T.V. drama and his attempts to modernize the British heritage tradition with which such adaptations are usually associated; these emphases include the costumes, the house and farm’s functional and detailed mise-en-scène, and Keira Knightley’s modern, light handling of Austen’s language (Geraghty 40; McFarlane 11).

While the majority of the modifications Wright made to Austen’s novel fall under these categories of using realism to distance himself from the heritage tradition, modernizing the heroine, and privileging the development of the romance between the couple, Chadha’s adaptation, though encompassing the same modernized heroine and centralized romance, has bigger cultural goals that end up inflecting most of her transitions to modern day India, to Bollywood cinema traditions, and to a conscious hybridization.  Firstly, unlike Wright, Chadha utilizes landscape to represent national identity, similar to the use of the English countryside in British heritage films, but the nations she presents are India, the United Kingdom (London), and the U.S. (Los Angeles); much of these ‘landscapes’ are urban and suburban and thus represent the predominantly modern spaces of today’s global world.  A few stunning shots of agrarian landscapes, though, represent the “old India” in striking visual contrast to the chaotic streets of Deli, the tourist resort at Goa which Lalita insists does not represent the “real India,” and the iconic, globally-commercial images of Los Angeles and London’s tourist sites (Geraghty 42).  This “old India,” characterized by the film’s opening shots of Amritsar’s Golden Temple and of Lalita riding a donkey-pulled cart through corn fields, is becoming increasingly hard to hold on to in an age of global expansion and commercialization, just as traditional Indian values are being lost in the Westernization and capitalization of the global culture and economy. 

Also, in terms of costume, Chadha rejects Wright’s realism for the spectacle associations of heritage costume dramas, eschewing his muted, natural approach and filling the entirety of the screen with a rainbow of vibrantly colored saris.  Geraghty explains that “Lalita’s switching between Indian and Western dress,” between vivid saris for the Bollywood dance sequences and Indian wedding rituals and jeans and T-shirts for her everyday life, “demonstrates her position as a modern Indian woman” (Geraghty 42).  Besides highlighting the modernity of Chadha’s Indian heroine, Bride’s costumes are also undeniable spectacle, pulled from Bollywood convention, just like the opening reference to a religious icon for good luck (Cartmell 102).  Scholar of Bollywood, or Hindi, cinema Nasreen Munni Kabir contextualizes such extravagance, explaining that typical Bollywood formula films rely on the “total spectacle” (14).  These films, whose prominence was especially solidified with the introduction of color, emphasize family dramas and love stories in which the spectacle takes center stage and the “settings and the costumes become more important than the themes,” an approach similar to many Western costume dramas and reflected in Chadha’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and as its Bollywood stylizing (16).

While Chadha’s privileging of the romance plot between Lalita and Darcy is a commercial modernization like Wright’s, it is also motivated, like her spectacular use of costume, by Bollywood filmic tradition which demands and revels in “love stories” and “happy endings” (Kabir 19).  This Bollywood-inspired emphasis on romance clearly directed many of the plot changes and narrative modifications that Chadha made to Austen’s novel, the clearest of which is perhaps her enlargement of the jealousy and competition between Darcy and Johnny Wickham (here a cad of backpacker) over Lalita.  Furthermore, Kabir explains that within Bollywood cinema, which is defined by convention, formula, and repetition, the “most recurrent theme” beloved and demanded by audiences is that of the love triangle (10).  Thus, Chadha makes the drama of Lakhi’s (Lydia’s) running away with Wickham a suspenseful action sequence raced through the tourist spots of London rather than Austen’s static waiting to find out if one young woman has lost her reputation and ruined her family.  As opposed to acting secretly and alone to find the couple and redeem Lydia through the legitimization of marriage, Chadha’s Darcy takes Lalita with him to literally chase Wickham past the London Eye and into a Bollywood movie theater.  Darcy emerges triumphant from his cinematic fistfight with Wickham (no such physical confrontation would ever have occurred in Austen), the “action hero” beloved of Bollywood narratives, having bloodied Wickham’s nose, won over Lalita and, unlike in Pride and Prejudice, returned Lakhi to her family (Kabir 19).

This application of Pride and Prejudice’s romance plot to the stylizing and conventions of Bollywood cinema reveals a natural affinity between Austen’s comedy of errors and the popular Indian film tradition.  There are many other points of compatability as well, including: the parallel between marrying for money and Indian arranged marriages; the shared sexual modesty and emphasis on the family; and the use of dances to depict socialization, romantic courtship, and the choreographed patterns of men and women.  This plethora of parallels shows the way that Austen’s novel might be productively mapped onto the contours of Indian culture and Bombay cinema, which is exactly what Chadha does.  However, her hybridizing interests extend beyond the mere kinship between the two texts and her cultural relocation has greater repercussions than simply changing out Austen’s balls for Bollywood dances, which she does do.  This narrative and structural blend of cultures ends up creating a stylistic and commercial middle ground for global audiences, one which allows Chadha to comment on the pride and prejudices which affect the East and West in today’s post-colonial, global world.

The characteristic presence of dance and musical numbers is perhaps the best known aspect of Bollywood cinema outside of India, and so Chadha uses it as the easiest point of access and integration for Western audiences.  Pride and Prejudice and Bollywood cinema share the ritualized, choreographed dances which function as a sanctioned means of socialization between the sexes as well as a literal and thematic way of expressing the ritualized choreography of manners in society and courtship.  The dances also additionally offer a way of narratively tracing the development of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship, of materializing their back-and-forths, which Wright visually expresses in his elaborately choreographed ball sequences.  His camera’s intricate choreography mirrors this social “dancing” and utilizes minutes-long continuous tracking shots in its seamless following of the various people and their diverse interactions.  Bride’s Bollywood dances, the narrative and stylistic equivalent of Austen’s balls, trace this same development between Darcy and Lalita, revealing Darcy’s increased interest in Lalita by showing his efforts to win her over by attempting to join her in the dances, though he remains awkward and unskilled at the ritualized steps.

The wedding song is a traditional Bollywood characteristic and Bride and Prejudice’s three main dance sequences relate to marriage, a theme salient to Jane Austen’s novels, though Bride’s sequences often pertain to arranged marriages between Indian women and “westernized” Indian men living abroad in the U.S. or the UK.  Balraj’s (Bingly) very Westernized (and Whitened) sister translates for both American Darcy and Western audiences the formulaic lyrics and corresponding steps of the opening dance sequence, the film’s introduction to both its Bollywood stylization and this Austenian/Indian narrative world of ritualized courtship and marriage for advancement: here the drama and ritual in “the boys meet the girls and the girls meet the boys” is acted out through colorful, traditional song and dance, just as it was wordlessly conveyed in Wright’s films and Austen’s novels.  And as Cheryl A. Wilson points out in her wonderful essay on Bride and Prejudice, “the back-and-forth dialogue of the song echoes the back-and-forth of the dialogue of Elizabeth and Darcy in Austen’s novel” and “reinforces how social dance stands as a model of heterosexual partnership” (326-7).

Furthermore, Vijay Mishra points out that in Bollywood, “songs are significant emotional correlatives, they extend dialogue or filmic image” and, as Wilson adds, “can even replace dialogue” (148; 328).  This is the case, for example, in the dance and music montage which represents the courtship between Lalita and Darcy as they overcome their cultural prejudices, which shows them coming closer together without any dialogue passing between them.  Instead, the song, a reprise of “Take Me to Love,” and the luscious images of L.A. and the Grand Canyon convey the budding romance between the couple.  Here, Bollywood song and dance act as cinematic stand-ins and equivalents for Austen’s literary language, as well as a visual literalization of the marriage of East and West which is here embodied in Lalita and Darcy’s coupling and in the meeting of Hindi’s stylistic conventions with Hollywood’s landscapes.

By moving her Austenian adaptation to India, Chadha inherently changes the main obstacles between Elizabeth/Lalita and Darcy from differences in class to differences in culture.  This switch occurs naturally but it also facilitates much of Chadha’s critical commentary on the pride and prejudices that exist between global cultures today, voiced through the Austenian characters and situation.  Chadha explicitly discusses this, explaining that “whereas Austen explored 18^th century class divisions, I wanted to look at the first impressions we make of each other culturally in today’s increasingly small world” (“Press Packet” 2).

As in Austen’s novel, Chadha’s Darcy does not make a good first impression; he is socially awkward and uncomfortable and comes off as prideful and arrogant, here because of his Western businessman identity.  Because of her narrative shift to cross-cultural impressions and interactions, Darcy appears uncomfortable and distant primarily because of the cultural distance between him and his surroundings, not because of the privileged class standing which alienated Wright and Austen’s hero.  Darcy accompanies his British friend Balraj to his Indian “homeland” for the traditional Indian wedding of Balraj’s friend to an Indian girl, an arranged marriage.  As is conventional for Bollywood films, the wedding here is communicated through a ritualized song and dance number, which Darcy is literally unable to join because he does not know the steps.  Cultural difference heightens this Darcy’s discomfort beyond that of Darcy in the opening dance scene of Austen’s novel and Wright’s film, for in Chadha’s Bollywood film the awkwardness of foreign cultures has replaced the invisible barriers of class and manners.

However, in this new cultural environment, Chadha offers Darcy an excuse that the other Darcys are never afforded.  Dressed in a traditional Indian sherwani, which only highlight’s his Otherness in this Indian (and Bollywood) context, Darcy struggles to keep his pants’ drawstring tied.  When he rudely and abruptly dismisses Lalita’s offer to dance, the audience sees it is because his pants would certainly have fallen down if he had tried, a truth which, hidden from Lalita, cements her prejudices of the Westerner and causes her to continually see them in Darcy.

As this wedding scene, this first confrontation of cultures (and cinematic styles) makes clear, Lalita’s personal and romantic development will involve learning to see beyond her cultural prejudices and defenses, learning not to project them onto all wealthy Western men.  Whereas Wright’s Elizabeth had to overcome pride and prejudices founded in Darcy’s different social class and manifested in his unappealing personality, Lalita must learn to bypass the cultural prejudices which her life in a rural Indian town, in a global post-colonial economy, have taught her to defensively raise at the first sight of wealthy Westerners.  While Wright’s Elizabeth initially dislikes Darcy because she finds him “rude, unpleasant,” Chadha’s Lalita harshly condemns Darcy for his “pride, arrogance, [and] vanity,” denouncing her idea of Western imperialist men in general more so than Darcy himself.

As this makes clear, Lalita’s prejudices have been in place since long before Darcy’s arrival and were merely brought out and engaged by his seemingly rude refusal to join in the Bollywood-style dance (and as she sees it, her entire culture by extension).  After this first bad impression, she continually critiques Darcy for the faults she believes Western culture as a whole embodies in relation to India, and also projects these onto him when he doesn’t actually deserve it.  “Rich American” she defensively labels Darcy after he quickly leaves the wedding dance to attend to his pants, “what does he think, we’re not good enough for him?,” referring to both herself and her sister as potential mates but also to Indian culture as a whole.  After this initial incident, Lalita frequently puts words in Darcy’s mouth, projecting her own cultural prejudices onto him as the embodiment of the West.  “I think you should find someone simple and traditional to teach you to dance like the natives” she tells him coldly, becoming defensively aggressive about her culture in response to his critique of the system of arranged marriages which she herself also dislikes.  Also, it is she who supplies the colonially-implicated “natives,” revealing the large impact colonialism had and still has on India and its people, especially its women, who are now dealing with the repercussions in a global world (Hopkins 127-8).

Beyond this inherent narrative shift to cultural differences, seen in these last examples, Chadha also utilizes her new setting to position Lalita as a sort of mouthpiece for India, a “spokesperson for her country” (Geraghty 42, 40).  And though Lalita’s prejudices sometimes cause her to become overly defensive and attack Darcy when it isn’t warranted, the film is still generally sympathetic to many of her arguments of Western globalization and her defenses of India, ultimately agreeing with her.  Furthermore, the focus on cultural differences and the positioning of Lalita as national and cultural spokesperson means that the witty conversational dialogue which characterizes Austen’s novel here becomes political and economic in content, argumentative and soap-box-y in style.  Lalita seems to voice world view positions rather than personal opinions, sounding more like a text book or academic lecture than a real person.

Chadha consciously uses Lalita, Darcy, and Pride and Prejudice itself as vehicles for these cultural and global debates.  Their first conversation involves Darcy describing his (Western) “standards” of business and hotels, to which Lalita counters that what his hotels charge for one night’s stay is “more than most people here make in a year.”  She further stresses to him that standards are fine “as long as you don’t impose them on others,” clearly voicing a model for Western-Indian relations beyond the two individual characters.  Lalita tells Darcy that she doesn’t want him (and by extension, all “American Imperialists”) “turning India into a theme park” for rich tourists looking to sample a “touch” of exotic culture with guaranteed “five star comfort,” directly recalling India’s historic relation to colonial powers and its exploited existence as “exotic” jewel in Britain’s colonial crown.

Furthermore, Lalita also defends India against Kohli, Bride and Prejudice’s translation of Austen’s Mr. Collins figure, who is perhaps the film’s clearest condemnation of Indians’ excessive Westernization and the replacing of traditional values with global capitalist ideas of success as measured in money and modernization.  Kohli “is a green card holder now,” living in the U.S., and he voices the stereotypical dismissals of India usually espoused by Western nations, no longer seeing himself as Indian though still hypocritically looking for a “traditional” Indian wife.  “U.K.’s finished, India’s too corrupt,” Kohli says offhandedly, sounding exactly like an ignorantly overconfident American, to which Lalita hotly responds, voicing her own as well as the film’s deflating defense of India against such Western notions of superiority: “And what do you think the U.S. was like sixty years after independence?  All killing each other over slavery and blindly searching for gold.”  Thus, through Lalita and the Pride and Prejudice narrative, Chadha is able to question dominant Western values of progress and superiority and to argue for a hybrid and open rather than an imperialist culture.

Chadha, who co-wrote the film with her Japanese-American husband Paul Mayeda Berges, explains that “Bride and Prejudice is a multinational, multi-cultural crowd-pleaser that touches on American Imperialism, the way the West looks at India and what people regard as backward or progressive” (Macnab 37).  In offering a cultural and commercial “middle ground” to global audiences, with something both familiar and different to everyone, Chadha wants her films to be seen, to appeal to and impact as wide an audience as possible, which again aligns her with the Bollywood tradition (Chadha and Burges Commentary).  Chadha not only utilizes Bollywood conventions to tell Austen’s story, but her very hybridization process of adaptation is itself reflective of the Bollywood movies she is invoking.  For instance, Kabir explains that the Bollywood formula film must “speak to the grandmother and the grandson at the same time,” to a “pan-Indian audience” in the same way that Chadha wants her film to speak to wide audiences of both Easterners and Westerners, both native Indians and Indians of the Diaspora (2; Geraghty 40).  Also, Bollywood films themselves are hybrids of genre, much like Chadha’s “middle ground” film which was meant to be neither entirely Bollywood nor entirely Hollywood.  “The Bollywood film,” Kabir explains, “juggles several genres and themes at the same time” and, like Bride, offers audiences a “melodramatic and emotional rollercoaster” (“Press Packet” 7).

Chadha’s film is not only a hybrid in terms of style (Hollywood and Bollywood filmmaking) and cultural forms (British literature, Bollywood cinema), it is also a highly conscious and reflexive work of adaptation and hybridization which highlights the very processes it is utilizing in order to comment on the global culture in which we all live and on the way pride and prejudices now globally interact between the West and post-Colonial East.  This approach is evident in every aspect of the film, all the way down to its multi-nation, multi-tradition casting.  Chadha explains that the particular casting of Darcy and Lalita “would enable us to really look at America and India and the kind of first impressions we make of each other culturally,” here using the original title for Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to explain her modern, global, cross-cultural, adaptation (Chadha and Burges Commentary).  Furthermore, Bride’s production history too reflects Chadha’s attempt to make a formally and thematically hybrid film in which “East Meets West” and “Hollywood Meets Bollywood.”  The actors were blended from three different continents and three different acting styles and the film received both British and American funding (“Press Packet” 9; Geraghty “Jane” 163).  Furthermore, the crew itself was an international compilation, necessitated, as Chadha explains, by her hybridizing decision to “work in three different languages and three different cultural spaces” (“Press Packet” 9).

The dance sequence “No Life without Wife” provides a case study of this stylistic and cultural hybridization, the offering of something familiar and something different to each audience so as to engage them with what they know, what they don’t know, and what they think they know (Wilson 324).  As Chadha explained of her middle-ground hybridization, “the music and songs are Bollywood based but arranged and produced to suit what a Western ear will like” (“Press Packet” 11).  This particular Bollywood sequence expresses Lalita’s disappointment with the Indian men who have abandoned their culture for the globally-esteemed and -dominant values of Western capitalism and who then return to India for an arranged marriage to a “traditional” woman who has to leave home to follow them to the U.S. or U.K.  But even here, choreography of the four pajama-clad sisters recalls the sleep-over sequence of Grease, while additional dance sequences reference West Side Story and the other Western musicals that Chadha watched as a child (Geraghty 41).  As this one Bollywood sequence makes clear, Bride and Prejudice is not only an adaptation of Jane Austen to both India and Bollywood, but is also an adaptation of Bollywood for Western audiences, and represents the film’s whole process of adaptation, its formal and thematic marriage of cultures (Geraghty “Jane” 164).

In closing, I would like to return to the films themselves, to their endings’ depiction of the romantic union between Elizabeth/Lalita and Darcy in order to see how it relates to each adaptation’s stylistic and thematic goals.  Austen confirms Elizabeth and Darcy’s successful union in her novel with their joint inhabitation at his grand Pemberley estate, solving their class differences by physically placing Elizabeth in the house, that society’s clearest indication of wealth and status.  Though Elizabeth’s new name “Mrs. Darcy,” repeated over and over by her new husband, makes her elevated social status clear, Wright keeps the physically couple outside of the house and ends the film with them sitting together by the lake.  Wright includes no shot of the impressive mansion itself, for in this modern retelling, it must be very clear that Elizabeth married not for money but for love, married because she, like Darcy, realized that they were each the perfect match for the other (Moggach 19).  So though the class divide has been successfully overcome, the couple remains in the outdoor, de-socialized space which has characterized their relationship and their respective natures.  Plus, Elizabeth is here shown to have finally overcome the isolation which distinguished her throughout the film; she has found someone to stand outside with her, has completed her romantic and personal growth and found her ideal partner.  The film’s last shot slowly tightens around the couple, excluding all else, sealing their “happy ending” with their first chaste kiss.

The overcoming of cultural prejudices and differences in Chadha’s Bride, on the other hand, for all its fanfare is less clearly positive.  The movie finishes with the happy ending required of Bollywood films and the wedding which marks most classic comedies: Balraj and Lalita’s sister marry in a joint ceremony with Lalita and Darcy, and the two couples ride elephants through the streets of Amritsar, which is celebrating the local wedding (and the revenue it brought in).  This book-ends and reverses the arranged wedding sequence which opened Bride, for in this closing ceremony, which is equally traditional if not also larger in scale, both parties have married for love.  Cultural difference seems to have been overcome: Darcy, in stark contrast to his first appearance at an Indian wedding and his repeatedly failed attempts at joining in the Bollywood dances, appears in a band of Indian drummers, now culturally and personally in sync (literally) with Lalita and India.  The two couples ride off towards their “happily ever afters” with the whole town cheering, confetti falling, and the Bollywood music swelling joyously, a cultural rather than a private celebration.

However, there are practical questions which Wilson points out are left unanswered by this romantic marriage and the cultural marriage it implies, practicalities that don’t trouble Wright’s couple (330).  Where will they live?  Will Lalita leave her home to go West like so many of the Indian girls? How will their families interact?  (The last time we saw Lalita’s mother she was still looking for a “nice Indian boy” for Lalita and Darcy’s mother saw no need to actually visit India because of the availability of things like Yoga in the United States).  Lisa Hopkins pessimistically sees this ending as “wish fulfillment rather than realism,” particularly in terms of its lack of acknowledgement of Lalita’s and Darcy’s interracial relationship, which she claims would pose a serious problem in Indian culture (122).  She sees Chadha as “shying away” from the issue and offering a love marriage that filmically ends in India but which has potentially negative extra-narrative consequences for our heroine, who might have to live in a country she never wanted to or inherit a horrible mother-in-law (122).  And though the movie literally ends in India, with Darcy rejecting Western imperialism and marrying in an Indian ceremony, their life does not necessarily neatly end in India as Elizabeth and Darcy’s does at Pemberley.

However, perhaps Chadha is again taking recourse to the Bollywood tradition, offering a happy ending of what should be rather than what necessarily would be.  Kabir writes that Bollywood presents a “stylized form that operates outside the restrictions of reality,” full of “romantic dreams and a code of right and wrong” (3, 22).  He explains that Indian audiences know these films don’t represent real life, but instead love them for offering an “allegory of a perfect world.”  “It’s more than just happy endings,” he writes, “the stories are full of hope, showing that good eventually triumphs” (23).  Perhaps Bride and Prejudice is Chadha’s hope for a global union of cultures like that embodied in Lalita and Darcy’s entwined seating on the elephant, her portrait of the “perfect world” in which marriages are founded on love and cultural differences and global prejudices can be overcome and productively hybridized.

The final shots of the couple in each adaptation: cultural union in Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, above, and personal and romantic development and partnership in Wright’s Pride and Prejudice below.

Bibliography:

“Bride and Prejudice Press Pack.”  docstoc.com. pp. 1-11.     http://www.docstoc.com/docs/15092916/Bride-and-Prejudice-Press-Pack.

Cartmell, Deborah. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: The Relationship between Text and Film.  London: Methuen Drama, 2010.

Chadha, Gurinder, dir., and Paul Mayeda Berges, co-writer.  Bride and Prejudice.  Audio Commentary. Alliance Films, 2005.  DVD.

Dawtrey, Adam.  “Free-Wheeling Chadha Leads New London Helmers.”  Variety 396.6 (2004): B2.

Geraghty, Christine. “Jane Austen Meets Gurinder Chadha.” South Asian Popular Culture 4.2 (2006): 163-8.

—. “Narrative and Characterization in Classic Adaptations: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Pride and Prejudice.”  In Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008.  15-46.

Hopkins, Lisa.  Relocating Shakespeare and Austen on Screen. Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Kabir, Nasreen Munni.  Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story.  London: Channel 4 Books, 2001.

Macnab, Geoffrey.  “Austen Power.” Sight and Sound 14.10 (Oct 2004): 36-7.

McFarlane, Brian. “Something Old, Something New: ‘Pride and Prejudice’ on Screen.” Screen Education.40 (2005): 7.

Moggach, Deborah.  “How I Changed Pride and Prejudice as the Scriptwriter for the Film of Jane Austen’s Best-Loved Novel, Deborah       Moggach Rearranged some Scenes, Conflated Others and Pulled a Comb through the Original Dialogue. but She Knows that You Mess about with this Particular Story at Your Peril…” The Daily Telegraph: Sep 10, 2005.  19.

Mishra, Vijay.  Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire.  New York: Routledge, 2002.

“Pride and Prejudice Search Results.”  imdb.com.  http://www.imdb.com/find?q=pride+and+prejudice&s=all.

Wilson, Cheryl A. “Bride and Prejudice: A Bollywood Comedy of Manners.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34.4 (2006): 323-31.

Filmography:

Bride and Prejudice.  Dir. Gurinder Chadha.  Perf.  Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson.  Alliance Films, 2005.

 Pride and Prejudice.  Dir. Joe Wright.  Perf. Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfayden.  Focus Features, 2005.

 

For the first post, one of my favorite film images of all time: little Bruno looking up at his father in Bicycle Thieves

Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 Italian Neo-Realist classic, Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette), follows a man, Antonio Ricci, and his son Bruno as they search through the lonely war-torn city of Rome for the stolen bicycle that is Ricci’s last hope of holding a job, and thus of providing for his family. In an odyssey that becomes increasingly hopeless as Ricci descends ever closer to the thief who stole his bike at the start of the film, Bruno tags along beside and behind his distraught, self-absorbed father, loyal as a puppy. The pathos that De Sico creates between father and son through his on-location, black-and-white mise-en-scene and the perfect staging of his two male characters, the younger and the older, is incredibly affecting, especially as it operates on a largely silent, purely visual level, thus making the story of loss, love and survival optimally universal and heart-wrenching. Little Bruno, a visual miniature of the distracted Ricci, earnestly follows in his father’s footsteps and struggles to keep up with his larger strides as they move across the various landscapes, crowded or empty or broken, of the city; and always, through it all, he looks up at his father, into his father’s face as Ricci searches aimlessly for the bicycle he will never find. Of course, this look is both literal, for Ricci is presumably the one leading his son, whom he often seems to forget is there, on this hopeless journey, and yet it is also figurative, for Bruno wants nothing more than to be like his father. Unfortunately, his idealization crumbles; the disintegration of Ricci’s already-cracking masculinity and human dignity when he himself is caught trying to steal a bicycle, and Bruno’s terrifying realization of the truth of his father, are some of the most heartbreaking moments in all of cinema.

Rebel Without A Cause

One of the most striking things about the notions of masculinity invoked in Rebel Without A Cause is the extent to which it is established in contrast and antagonism to femininity/females.  Jim desperately wishes for his father, his male role model, or at least the male role model prescribed to him by American society, to embody traditionally glorified active definitions of masculinity.  He repeatedly tells his father, begs him to “stand up,” a figurative cry given literal embodiment in Ray’s blocking and staging; often, Jim, on the verge of tears, pulls his stooping or kneeling father up from his knees or his static sitting position, as if to simultaneously pull him up into the more active, dominant form of masculinity espoused by American society.

However, what makes the wish for such idealized notions of masculinity interesting is the way it is here constructed almost wholly in relation to the female, specifically in the figures of Jim’s paternal grandmother and his mother.  I am reminded of the notoriously troubling figure of The Mother in many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films: grown men, like the Claude Raines character in Notorious or the worst-case-of-all Norman Bates in Psycho, are shown to be compromised in their masculinity and their adult maturity by the continuing presence (which is often overbearing and excessive) of their mother.  These men fail to live up to notions of what it is to be a “man” by living in houses and families still ruled by the matriarch rather than the masculine patriarch.  Here, too, Jim’s father Frank is completely dominated not only by his nagging wife, who “eats away at him” as Jim says, but also by his mother.  When the female-dominated trio go to collect Jim from the police station, it is not only Jim’s mother but also his grandmother who forcibly make themselves heard, who drown out his father (and Jim) and perpetuate the boundless, cyclical chatter which so sickens Jim and which emasculates his father.  Furthermore, Frank’s mother joins the family at the breakfast table on Jim’s first day of school, inserting her (female) presence into a family already strained with tension and overburdened with the weight of the male-suppressing and -dominating female.

What really bothers Jim is not merely that his mother is a (vocally, among other things) strong female presence or that his dad is a rather “weak” masculine one, but that one is seen to be a cause of the other; in Rebel Without A Cause, the weak man who cannot literally or figuratively stand up for himself or his teenage son, who cannot stand or speak against the woman, is cast in a directly causal relation with the mother (female).  Jim’s father fails to meet his and the film’s definition of a “man,” donning the apron that reveals his feminized role in the household, (to Jim) his lack of masculine pride and self-respect, and the “whipped” nature of his inactive, bent-over masculinity in relation to the more masculinely dominant female character of Carol Stark.  It is not surprising that Frank has no answer to Jim’s question of “what can you do when you have to be a man?,” or proposes the ineffectual pro-con list which amounts to about the same thing for Jim, for Frank has never asserted himself as “a man” to either his wife or his son.  It is this which Jim finds so difficult to forgive, and which causes him to fight and participate in deadly “chickie runs,” in town after town, in an over-earnest, desperate attempt to prove himself the active, upstanding “man” his father has never been.

However, such personal complaints and textual discourses against this supposed feminization in relation to the proverbial-pants-wearing wife (the man wears his wife’s frilly yellow apron and Jim actually “thought [he] was mom”!) are interestingly complicated when compared to Jim himself, played to charismatic delight by the moody and shy Method-acting James Dean.  The line between character and actor blur slightly and Jim, while acting the traditional active man by defending his honor (violently) against accusations of “chicken” and by racing Buzz towards the end of a cliff, also embodies an emotionality which the film admiringly supports but which is also traditionally associated with the female.  Jim is revered by both Plato and Judy for his “sincerity” and it is his ability to actually talk with the unpopular and otherwise-unseen Plato, to cry and to rage, to connect with Judy on a level beyond physicality which define his masculinity.  In the end, he is able to do what his father never could, to “stand up” for Plato and to assert his voice, literally; he is the one who peaceably convinces Plato to give up his gun and to come out of the observatory, through his words, his paternal strength and his proactivity, before it all ends violently, while still advocating the general emotiveness which Judy “so easily” fell in love with.  Just as Frank’s passive masculinity is linked with Carol, so too is Jim’s particular embodiment of masculinity set up in contrast to the destructive group violence of the gang of teenagers and to the parents’ inability to provide a supportive home.  Of course, though, Rebel ultimately covers it all over in the vanilla-sweet ending which kills off the renegade figure of Plato and re-asserts the successful heterosexual couple and the “correct” formulation of the American family, as well as the traditional active and female-dominating definitions of masculinity despite much of the tension and contradiction which came before.

Party Girl

Well, I must say that I really enjoyed this delightful, quirky little film.  Though Ray had very little personal control on the project, having not written the script and been denied any influence in post-production, Party Girl immediately struck me as “a Nicholas Ray movie.”  It addresses many of the themes and preoccupations which recur throughout his films and it involves his characteristic play with, or hybridization of genre.  Most centrally, in terms of Nicholas Ray, this movie is about two people looking for a “home,” for both a physical world or place as well as an ideally-suited person, which will make them feel as though they belong, that they won’t have to fight or hustle men or defend sleazy criminals for, but which can just be their’s and can let them be their best selves.  Our titular character, Vicki Gaye, begins the film as a cynical “dancer” who has been forced into “show-dancing” at the Golden Rooster, slinking around in skimpy costumes and decorating gangsters’ arms at expensive dinner parties in order to make a living.  Like some of Ray’s earlier young characters, such as Nick Romano and even Bowie and Keechie, Vicki becomes a mouthpiece for the niceties of morals and principles and standards, which all fall apart when you can’t afford to eat, as she matter-of-factly tells Tommy during their initial cocoa-sipping conversation.  She is characterized by her independence, her aloofness, and her own past which has made her jaded in the ways of love and men and which has compelled her to let no one “get too close” or to “back her into a corner.”  Of course, the “crooked” Tommy will change all of this, will offer her the husband, in action if not in legal name, that she has needed to tame her independence, to cure her past wrongs, and to bring her salvation through love, or rather, through her intense devotion to the Hollywood couple and her man.  Vicki maintains her independence (her own apartment and her job at the club, which Tommy got for her) only in name, effectively living as Tommy’s dutiful wife, a change solidified when he collars her with an expensive diamond choker necklace.  After this, her dialogue is restricted things like her telling him she’ll wait for him while he leaves their anniversary dinner to attend to mobster business and that even if he’s in danger, her place is with him.

Tommy too finds redemption and salvation in love, in the formation of the couple with Vicki, a theme which permeates much of Ray’s work.  After first judging Vicki for her lifestyle, pretending towards understanding when he tells her that “a girl’s entitled to what she can get” before condemning her for “selling her pride” not only in taking Louie’s gambling money but also in his insinuations that her “dancer” past has been more sordid than her elegant red gown would imply, that she has sold more than her company or her “dances” to the many men willing to pay.  However, after she watches his infamous “watch routine” in court, she realizes his own hypocrisy and confronts him in the male-dominated, gangster-inhabited speak-easy where he goes to celebrate his victory.  Here, this “chick,” turns his own moral judgment back on him, revealing to him that his pride simply sells for a higher price than hers (men vs. women and the money-making possibilities and social positions open to each of them).  This immediately kicks him off of his high horse (sort of) and reveals Vicki to be his equal, in contrast to the scum he has to defend in the courtroom and the mob boss Rico who is emotional, irrational, and sentimental, and who “needs” Tommy to tell him the hard truth about himself (such as when he stops Rico beating a man to death and when he scolds him for being sloppily drunk and foolish after shooting a portrait of Jean Harlowe because the movie actress married someone else).  Oddly, after he comes to see her dance three times in a single week, Vicki only decides to accept Tommy, to go to him, after he starts drinking, which perhaps hints to her that he has loosened his own moral pretensions, but is still a rather odd choice.  He explains his own troubled past to her, his current hang-ups, which come from being a man who is physically, and ultimately morally (or at least reputationally), “crooked.”  Like the rodeo-riders in The Lusty Men, Tommy got his injury through a performance of machismo bravura and daring, hanging onto the Chicago bridge as it rose into the air, trying to impress and best the other kids but ultimately getting his bones crushed in the “meat grinder” of the gears.  In classic definitions of masculinity, American masculinity at that, Tommy explains that he didn’t mind his limp, for it gave him character and attested to his boyhood glory, at least until the other boys started going out with girls; it was only then that he started to notice his difference, his inferiority (as based on performability in relation to ‘the fairer sex’).  This was then compounded by the fact that his show-girl wife made him leave her because she couldn’t stand the sight of his physical “crookedness,” adding insult to injury by continuing to live off of his money, his jewels and the apartment he paid for, but denying him, a physically imperfect man, the pleasures of the marriage bed.

Tommy not only escapes his physical limitations while in love with Vicki (he gets his hip fixed at an exotic clinic in Sweden, where Vicki later joins him to celebrate his new life by riding in freedom-connoting convertibles and picnicking by the seaside) but he also begins to seek a way out of his gangster life, a way to find respectability.  Presumably, in Hollywood when we have two “good” people in love, and they want to get married, they must both become respectable: Vicki moves into the more prestigious, higher-paying, yet connotationally more savory job of Headlining Dancer as opposed to Show Girl, and Tommy attempts to move away from the fear- and respect-inspiring position as “crooked” lawyer to the mob, though it was the “quickest way” for him to get the kind of authoritarian, powerful masculinity he desperately sought.  Like the magical hide-away that Jim, Judy, and Plato escape to in Rebel, where they can forget the realities and disappointments and dangers of their lives to live momentarily in a dreamy utopia, and like Bowie and Keechie’s ramshackle shed-turned honeymoon Home, Tommy and Vicki dream of “the coast” as the magical land that will save them from their lives, that will let them live together in all the unbridled happiness of love.   Though I assumed they had meant the East Coast because of geographic proximity, Vicki’s attempted train ride reveals their dreamed-of destination to be the West Coast, Los Angeles, the city of angels and lovers, land of sunshine and happiness; there the couple could experience a life-long version of their Swedish vacation, on the beach, in the land where Hollywood romances and movie magic would reflect and encourage the escapist, blissful nature of their relationship.

I also want to discuss the film’s interesting use of genre and its relationship to masculinity.  This is indeed an odd little film in terms of genre, for it starts out as the story of the “party girl” of the title, initially focusing on the spectacle-giving showgirls (of this gangster town’s night club AND of Hollywood cinema itself) before following them into the female-dominated world of backstage, to listen to the romantic drama of Vicki (or lack thereof) and her poor roommate, whose affair with a married man is not going very well.  But after that roommate kills herself in tragic (and pregnant) desperation, the movie becomes a man’s movie, focused almost entirely around the character of Tommy and his development, for Vicki is wooed over to the romantic relationship very quickly and after that loses all of her personality, her experienced independence and charisma, and becomes a typical wife figure to Tommy.  This shift in protagonists (and a “taming of the shrew” motif) is accompanied by a shift in genre, for the film here settles into its gangster/crime generic convention, though it still retains its romance plot, which indeed is a blending that is almost ubiquitous with Nicholas Ray (see On Dangerous Ground, They Live By Night, Knock On Any Door, etc.).

But despite this shift to a masculine genre, the film is interrupted by two of Vicki’s musical dance numbers, which stand out blaringly from the style of the rest of the film, and indeed from anything Nicholas Ray has ever done (it is very clear that with such camera work, Ray could not have been personally responsible for them).  They are quintessential Hollywood musical numbers, with a dream-world type of closed set space that contains and intensely abstracts the dance from any type of real world space, with stylized colors and lights, elaborate costumes, the dancer’s direct look at the camera/spectator, and sweeping camera movements to catch and to enhance the woman’s movements.  These are moments of pure spectacle, which stand out blaringly from the narrative, and do extraordinarily little to advance either plot or characterization.  They become the only “active” thing Vicki can do after she becomes involved with Tommy and passively clings to his side despite the danger, after the film shifts its focus to the male worlds of gangsters and lawyers.

These sequences seem to perfectly epitomize Laura Mulvey’s conjecture about women in Classical cinema, who are positioned as bearers of the male (spectators’ and diegetic characters’) look and who exist as visual spectacle, shown off in moments of pure spectacle which halt or freeze the narrative.  Party Girl’s musical numbers do just that, in outlandishly obvious fashion (perhaps another play with Hollywood genre and convention in this luridly-colored, highly stylized film), highlighting the woman’s body and the (male/camera) gaze at it.  Furthermore, the opening credits sequence perfectly epitomizes the objectification of the woman that Mulvey discusses, for the camera breaks up the female body into abstracted, impersonal parts: legs, midriffs, arms, heads and headdresses.  This scene, besides closely adhering to the model of gender difference in classical cinema laid out by Mulvey fifteen years after Party Girl’s release, also reflexively comments on this very spectacle-creating and spectacle-needing element of Hollywood cinema and of cinematic spectatorship.  It is not only in the night clubs of Chicago, for rich men and gangsters, that women show off their bodies, sell their image for personal gain, and it is not only the clubs or the mobs that benefit from such sales. Hollywood too, indeed our culture as a whole, profits from the sale of spectacularized, eroticized women and it is Hollywood itself which offers this same type of spectacle to men and audiences, a fact made outlandishly plain in this opening number of Ray’s last studio film.  But then, the film turns its reflexive and playful glance at other genres, directs it gaze away from women towards men to explore notions of performance, violent machismo, and the importance of appearance and reputation for men who  are similarly spectacularized (though in less objectified, body-focused ways) through the explosively-violent, Tommy gun-blaring genre of the gangster film.

 

They Live By Night

The dichotomy, or at least the dual characterizations, of both an active, “lusty” masculinity and a more sensitive, emotional masculinity is starkly illustrated in Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night, his first film (though released after he completed his fourth).  Much of the writing on Nicholas Ray and Professor Polan’s lectures point to the simultaneous presence of these two separate notions of masculinity in both Nicholas Ray’s own life and in his films, both the active Man’s Man type of masculinity as well as the counterpoint gentle poet-type of masculinity.

These two manifestations of masculinity, seemingly characteristic of Nicholas Ray and his films, are clearly articulated in They Live By Night through the rather overtly foiled characters of young Bowie on the one hand, and aged, rugged TW and one-eyed Chickamaw on the other.  The two types of men share a common denominator of crime and jail time, and yet, though Bowie is initiated into the two older men’s jail-breaking and bank-robbing plans, from the very beginning he is markedly different from them.  The opening scene shows the two experienced criminals angrily threatening and beating a man to steal his car, while in the back seat Bowie shies away from the violence.  This distinction is carried through the whole film, with Bowie proclaiming to have joined up with these two hardened criminals in order to secure enough money to get a lawyer to clear his record, and is ultimately manifested in his love (and his ability to love) Keechie.

Whereas TW and Chickamaw remain isolated in a criminal fraternity, first within prison and then outside of it, Bowie moves away from them towards Keechie, the rational, good-natured, more femininely emotional and caring niece of Chickamaw, who better fits his embodiment of masculinity.  However, their pairing quickly turns They Live By Night into a story of the young lovers against the external world, much like Romeo and Juliet and Tony and Maria after them, pursued by both the legal forces of law and order as well as Bowie’s abandoned partners-in-crime.

The film’s opening sequence frames the two young lovers and seems to formally shelter them from the outside world, their faces overlapped in intimate close-up.  However, disquieting subtitles are then projected over their loving faces, foreshadowing their dark fate: “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.”  Their idyllic moment of romantic abandon is then interrupted not only by these alarming words but by an unheard sound off screen, and both kids look up suddenly startled and afraid.  This opening foreshadows the way in which the external world and Bowie’s criminal past will continually chase them and break into the private spaces they have created for themselves.  This mirrors the way the film’s two notions of masculinity are counterposed and forced to interact with each other, as Bowie’s more innocent, naive, dreamy and gentle masculinity is constantly challenged by the more active, violent and controlling masculinities of not only TW and Chickamaw but also the stalwart policemen.

What is important is that Bowie, embodiment of the sensitive aspect of Ray-ean masculinity, is shown to be capable of love at all, linked with the two female characters Keechie and Mattie in contrast to the other men: TW’s mentioned-but-never-shown relationship disintegrates before the his violent death during a bank robbery and Chickamaw, who performs the most machismo of anyone and who takes definitions of active masculinity to their chaotically violent extremes, is not only incapable of getting a girl but also loses and destroys every relationship he has, male or female, romantic or not.  Mattie hates him as does Keechie, and Bowie too tries to leave him, eager to live a life “like real people” with his new wife.  Drunk and alone, an impossible form of active masculinity, Chickamaw rebels against those running away from him, yelling out into the night that “I’m better off alone, I always was,” before being killed trying to break into a liquor store.

What is so tragic, though, is that there is “no place for her and me” as Bowie sadly comes to realize, even though they have never embodied the violent, active machismo espoused by TW and Chickamaw and though they have done their best to outrun Bowie’s past and start anew, with a family built upon their combined sentimental and emotional integrity and love.  But here, both of Ray’s manifestations of masculinity come to the same violent end: like his older criminal pals, Bowie goes out in a reign of fiery violence, shot down in front of his pregnant wife by the uncompromising arm of the law.

This movie has made Nicholas Ray’s interest in both the active and the sentimental forms of masculinity more clear to me, and such understanding offers some possible elucidation on Jim Stark’s more emotional masculinity in Rebel Without A Cause.  Last week I wrote that it was somewhat confusing or at least complicating that though Jim fights for an active, erect, stand-up type of masculinity, he himself is capable of crying, of emoting, of loving, and is in fact praised for this.  But now I can see this in the larger scope of Ray’s other films and his own life, in which he the creative, intense, emotional artist was also influenced by the drinking, whoring, reticent, authoritative German masculinity of his father, among others.  Like the men in his movies, Ray himself defies any single notion of masculinity, oscillating instead between active machismo and emotional sentimentality.

The Lusty Men

I must first admit that I very much enjoyed this movie; it is definitely one of my favorite Nicholas Ray films so far.  It has many traditional Ray elements such as two men confronting each other, sizing each other up and taking stock of the other.  Also, it is a male-male relationship which, though it ultimately descends into masculinity-testing contests and challenges and stand-offs, begins as Ray’s much loved mentor-mentee relationship between and older and younger man.  Here, however, the particular valence becomes one of a seasoned, experienced professional, renowned and famous with a reputation that precedes him (people know/assume his name by sight, before being introduced to him) versus the young ingénue, a rookie with promise who we will see “get his feet wet” in the rodeo circuit, mentored by the older, more broken Jeff.

The film’s male relationships themselves are rather less interesting than the dynamic which exists between them and women, something which hasn’t really been  true for most of the Ray films we have watched so far (except In A Lonely Place).  Here, it is immediately very clear and expertly depicted in Ray’s literal framing and fragmenting of space that the male bonding and the formation of a buddy male couple is a direct threat to the wife Louise and her American notion of “home” (which is often merely a literal house) and thus “marriage.” From the first moment we see Louise and her husband, united in the front seat of their car and in their desperate eagerness to acquire the Jenkins/previously-McCloud farm, Jeff’s presence disrupts their unity and their established relationship.  The two men are instantly coupled together, reflected off in the distance through the windshield, as Louise is left alone in the car, instantly suspicious and worried.  Her husband darts off to talk to the famous Jeff McCloud, and this childlike eagerness towards his masculine idol and star of the dangerous rodeos should prepare us for his very quick seduction into rodeo-ing, his decision to leave “home” for the glory and prize money of the arena.  This first shot of the burgeoning triangular relationship also shows the way in which Louise is always being left “at home,” in some type of domestic/domesticated space, confined indoors while her men go off into the world and perform daring actions (and drink and party, too).  For instance, she is left in the kitchen doing dishes while the two men go outside to have their first after-dinner chat; she interrupts their conversation (about youthful macho ambition) to call them back into the confines of the house and the figurative confines of a full-time job, telling them to go to bed because they are both “working men” now (including the lone wanderer Jeff).

This also brings up the issue of Mommying which seems to run through the film and which was a cultural concern in relation to masculinity in post-war America.  There is a clear comparison drawn between the role of wife as embodied by Louise and the role of mother, to the inhibition and detriment of “the man:” even as Louise proclaims not to want to mother her husband and even as the film and its characters, ironically or not, assert the fact the Wes is a “big boy,” a “grown man” who makes money and (therefore) can make his own decisions and be in charge of his own life.  This latter statement specifically links money-making and the role of breadwinner to active, dominant notions of masculinity, and further associates it with having achieved maturity (Steven Cohan discusses the issues of momism, maturity and the hegemonic role of breadwinner in the 1950’s at greater length in his Masked Men).  And yet, as Louise ultimately declares in her intense frustration at Wes’ regression to immature playboy, though he should be able to take charge of his life, “he isn’t.”  His final acceptance of the maturity prescribed for men of 1950’s America, the taking on of the role of breadwinner, loyal husband who comes home to his wife, and importantly also home/ property owner, comes only with the death of Jeff, his idolized hero, the embodiment of all his (boyish) dreams of fame, glory, and riches; ultimately it is the man who brings Wes back to traditional domesticity, not his home-championing wife.  Though this ending might fall into the more ironic category like that of Rebel Without A Cause, too rapid and with too-great reversals to be wholly believable or to sustain any notion of longevity, this man’s maturation process, his embracing (literally) of his wife and the conventional “home” she represents and asks for, and his Exiting the rodeo world for the American Dream idea of ownership of his own farm, working the land rather than playing at being a cowboy for a cheering crowd, remains the film’s final message.

As a sort of side note, I want to mention the many references made which equate women with horses, with particular implications for the way they are then treated and related to the men of this rodeo world.  Women, like horses, are to be appraised and picked up, bought for their (breeding and performance) potential and their beauty.  Just as Wes and Jeff peruse the pens of horses and cattle for sale, so too did Wes find his bride in a tamale shop, taking her home for her good cooking and her looks, making a sort of investment as you would with a horse.  The old rodeo-er’s daughter Rusty (which could also be a perfect name for a chestnut horse) and Louise, as she sleeps in the car, are both referred to as fillies, and the men ogling Louise describe her physical appearance in the appreciative yet demeaning terms of horses, finally saying that they would love to “jockey” for her.  Rusty’s father even tells Wes flat-out that “judging a horse is like judging a woman” and in the world of rodeo-ing, “there’s no ladies’ room, no ladies,” only the horse-like property of men (or independent trick riders like Rosemary, who ultimately succumbs to the confines of marriage too).  Indeed, the sparkly-dressed trollop who tries to seduce Wes is first seen being lassoed by drunk rodeo-ers at a party; the film seems here to be condemning her loose morals by portraying her as liking the game, but more importantly it is visualizing an all-pervasive theme and prevailing notion of women in this world, applicable whether they enjoy playing the role or not.  The innuendoes about “riding” continue in the verbal sparring between Louise and this woman (Louise tells her to “beat it, he’s got a horse”), and extend to “branding,” as they are appropriated by these two women and used to reference men, the men they “own” or seek to own.  For ultimately, this metaphoric rhetoric reinforces a relation of ownership and possession between men and women and men and their horses; both women and horses here serve to support these men in their rodeo performances, whether cheering in the bleachers and preparing dinner afterwards or racing after a calf and slamming to a halt while the cowboy ropes him.  And of course, this correlation between ownership and romantic relationships is further compounded by the excessive degree to which marriage in this film is equated with “owning” property, or some other financial compensation: Louise “got married for a home;” Wes sees himself as justified in dominating their relationship because he makes the money and she “didn’t have four quarters” when he “found” her; Jeff thinks he could have been more “productive” with his money if he’d had a woman/wife like Louise.

In A Lonely Place

         What initially struck me about In A Lonely Place, which I saw for the first time in our last class, in relation to the other Ray films we have seen so far, is the fact that we now have an older man as our primary source of identification and inquiry.  In Rebel Without a Cause, They Live by Night and Knock on Any Door, we had a young man as our central protagonist, and he was often set up in relation or contrast to an older man, a father or mentor figure who performed his job to varying degrees of success.

The interesting part of this dynamic which focuses on the younger man is that it tends to create a sort of microcosm for the relationship of the young man to the world as a whole; the older man comes to stand for dominant, authoritative society as a whole, along with its decrees and expectations.  For example, Jim reels against his impotent, emasculated father as one particular example of an entire type of masculinity he wishes to reform, or at the very least, to not witness in his own home.  Jim rejects the idea that men as a whole can or should act like his father, who is hen-pecked and talked-over and beaten down by his overbearing wife.  Or even TW and Chickamaw in Night, jail-fled criminals who admittedly don’t stand for dominant society per say, yet who represent a major element of the adult male world of crime and violence, a fast life spent on the run and an accompanying masculinity, which Bowie is trying to extricate himself from.

But In A Lonely Place focuses instead on the older man, the one who might still be struggling, like these boys, between the type of masculinity and human values he himself wants to embody and the ones society is telling him to, but who is not doing so during his formative years.  Thus his struggle is quieter than the younger boys’, and yet also more intense, for it has lived under pressures and trials and efforts and disappointments for much longer.  It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Dix Steele is the most violent main male character we have seen in Ray so far, though he is not involved in a “life of crime” like Bowie or Nick were.  Dix leads a respectable life as a Hollywood screenwriter and his history of violence and fighting seems to be somehow more accepted by society, seen as a more excusable manifestation of masculinity, than Nick’s life, for example.  Is violence acceptable in a man if it is limited to the bravado of street fighting in response to the slightest insult or macho confrontation??  Or if it involves breaking your girlfriend’s nose when she upsets you??  Somehow these acts of violence, which are seemingly always excused in Dix (and Humphrey Bogart?), appear rather more acceptable because they are linked the masculine traits of pride, power, and control.

Fortunately, ultimately Laurel protests against such violence and refuses to stay with Dix.  However, many people encouraged her to tough it out or to passively wait until a solution presented itself, and it was almost too late: Dix nearly strangles her to death, just like poor Mildred, another female victim of male possession and aggression.  And it is seemingly only chance that saves Laurel’s life, for the ringing telephone (ironically calling to deliver Dix’s innocent verdict) is what snaps him out of whatever has taken possession of him as he squeezes her neck.  In A Lonely Place makes a point to show its star’s efforts at contrition, silent and tongue-in-cheek though they may be: Dix pays a (black) man to deliver flowers to the murdered Mildred and sends enough money to pay for a new paint job on the UCLA jock’s car, singed “Squirrel.”  And yet, all of these are mere gestures, achieved through meaningless money and requiring very little apology and even less self-change on Dix’ part.  Flowers can’t save Mildred and money can’t fix that boy’s injuries.

What I did really like about the adaptation from Hughes’ novel to Ray’s film, which was pointed out in Dana Polan’s BFI book, is the fact that Bogart’s Dix is not a serial killer.  At first, this change made me upset, for I liked the close link between the reader and the distorted mind of a psychopath in Hughes’ novel.  And yet, the implications of this change are much more far-reaching: instead of presenting a lone killer, who may or may not signal a larger condition within society or within men and masculinity at this time, Ray explicitly shows male violence and the capacity to kill (especially women) to be a component of masculinity as a whole.  It is not only Dix who gets into stupid skirmishes over petty insults, but also the men who instigate the fights.  For instance, the husband driving the car at the start of the movie, who insults Dix and threatens to fight him just because his wife talked to him!  Or even Junior, who in a way has it coming, in his disrespectful “new generation” approach to human relations.  Even if Dix is shown to respond in a more extreme, and more actually violent way, his inclinations are clearly shared by many of the men around him.  The only non-violent men we see are definitely older: the always-drunk Shakespeare-quoting thespian and the almost-dried-up agent, both past their active, impassioned male primes.  So we can wonder, were they once violent too?  Will Dix grow out of his violence??  Of course, that is all too simple; I would refute such generalizations and the claim that all young men are violent.  Indeed, if Ray has taught us anything about masculinity, it is that it is always ambiguous, multiple and contradictory, often combing active and sensitive notions within a single person.  And yet, there is still the jealous boyfriend who murdered Mildred, a man who remains anonymous and thus stands for all (possible) men, for the all-too-ready-impulse to hurt and kill which lurks in Dix and other men.