The Sex Goddess in American Film, 1930-1965: Jean Harlow, Mae West, Lana Turner, and Jayne Mansfield
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Biography & Autobiography; Entertainment & Performing Arts; Film; General; Performing Arts; Social Science; Women's Studies
Description: Recommended by "Lavishly illustrated ... Jordan's lively discussion of the commodification of the female body in the service of the classic Hollywood star system will offer ...readers genuine insights into the way the system worked and how these women manipulated it to their advantage." From The Journal of Popular Culture, (Vol. 45.2): "Jessica Hope Jordan's The Sex Goddess in American Film, 1930-1965 makes unique contributions to popular film studies. Pluses for scholars are a very complete bibliography and an extensive listing of biographies and filmographies directly on the subject of sexy
Publisher: Cambria Press

JEAN HARLOW, MAE WEST,

LANA TURNER, AND JAYNE MANSFIELD

Jessica Hope Jordan

AMHERST, NEW YORK

Copyright 2009 Jessica Hope Jordan All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Amherst, NY 14228

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jordan, Jessica Hope.

The sex goddess in American fi lm, 1930-1965 : Jean Harlow, Mae West, Lana Turner, and Jayne Mansfi eld / Jessica Hope Jordan.

p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60497-663-2 (alk. paper)

1. Femmes fatales in motion pictures. 2. Sex in motion pictures. 3. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States. 4. Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

PN1995.9.F44J67

2010

791.43’6522—dc22

2009046265

For Steve

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Plates
ix

Acknowledgments xix

Introduction: Sex and the Goddess

1

Chapter 1: Sex as Cinematic Capital:

Jean Harlow and the Economy
of the Gold Digger

19

Chapter 2: Sex as a Cinematic “Queening”: Mae West Decamps

67

Chapter 3: Sex as Cinematic Code:

Lana Turner’s Star Text
and the Duplicity of the Femme Fatale

103

Chapter 4: Sex as Cinematic Eroticism: Jayne Mansfi eld’s Breasts

145

Conclusion: The American Sex Goddess
is Legally Blonde 189

Notes 195

Biographies and Filmographies

213

Select Bibliography

225
viii

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Illustration Credits

249

Index 253

LIST OF PLATES

Plate 1. Kitty in her bed ( Dinner at Eight, MGM, 1933).

20

Plate 2. Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933).

21

Plate 3. Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933).

22

Plate 4. Theda Bara (1917).

24

Plate 5. Louise Brooks (1926).

25

Plate 6. Joan Blondell as Carol and Aline McMahon as Trixie take Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert’s characters for everything they have got

( Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

26

Plate 7. The prostitute and the forgotten man ( Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

27

Plate 8. Carol (Joan Blondell) as a prostitute ( Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

28

Plate 9. Ginger Rogers as the Money

( Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

28

Plate 10. The Busby Berkeley V-shot

( Dames, Warner Bros., 1934).

29

Plate 11. Dames in bed ( Dames, Warner Bros., 1934).

29
x

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Plate 12. Jean Harlow (1933).

31

Plate 13. Another fi lm, another bed

(Jean Harlow, Libeled Lady, MGM, 1936).

42

Plate 14. Spencer Tracy and William Powell struggle to keep their eyes where they
belong while Harlow struggles to
keep a straight face ( Libeled Lady, MGM, 1936).

43

Plate 15. The scene starts to fall apart as the focal point grabs everyone’s attention

( Libeled Lady, MGM, 1936).

43

Plate 16. Capra fi lms the lovers in a pose of implicit power relationships

( Platinum Blonde, Columbia Pictures, 1931).

44

Plate 17. Harlow as an icon of ideal beauty ( Platinum Blonde, Columbia Pictures, 1931).

45

Plate 18. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow

( Red Dust, MGM, 1932).

48

Plate 19. The stooping Helen (Jean Harlow, Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

49

Plate 20. Helen dressed as a classical goddess

(Jean Harlow, Hell’s Angels,

United Artists, 1930).

51

List of Plates
xi

Plate 21. Jean Harlow (1933).

52

Plate 22. Jean Harlow (1933).

53

Plate 23. Helen gives Monte the direct gaze

( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

55

Plate 24. Helen shows Monte the goods

( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

56

Plate 25. Hughes catches Harlow going commando

( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

57

Plate 26. “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?”

( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

58

Plate 27. Helen puts on something more comfortable

( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

59

Plate 28. a, b, c. Roy and Monte’s view of Helen and Captain Redfi eld ( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

61

Plate 29. “I never loved you!” ( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

62

Plate 30. Monte’s guilty regret ( Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

65

Plate 31. The fairy princess arrives in Hollywood ( Night After Night, Paramount Pictures, 1932).

68
xii

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Plate 32. Juxtapositions of masculine and hyper-feminine women’s bodies with suggested lesbianism

(Alison Skipworth as Miss Mabel Jellyman
and Mae West as Maudie, Night After Night, Paramount Pictures, 1932).

71

Plate 33. Hyper-feminine bodily plentitude ( Belle of the Nineties, Paramount Pictures, 1934).

73

Plate 34. The hyper-feminine sexualized body and the aging body (Mae West and Alison Skipworth, Night After Night, Paramount Pictures, 1932).

75

Plate 35. “It’s a gift dearie; it’s a gift.” (Mae West, Gertrude Michael, I’m No Angel,

Paramount Pictures, 1933).

77

Plate 36. The much younger Lord Carrington escorts the new Lady Carrington from the bedroom

( Goin’ To Town, Paramount Pictures, 1935).

79

Plate 37. “Suckers” ( I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

81

Plate 38. “Am I making myself clear, boys?”

( I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

81

Plate 39. The audience as “suckers” ( I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1934).

82

Plate 40. Mae West as the quintessential American sex goddess ( Belle of the Nineties, Paramount Pictures, 1934). 83

List of Plates
xiii

Plate 41. The shimmy dance ( I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

90

Plate 42. Tira puts her head in the lion’s mouth

( I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

94

Plate 43. Tira gets the man of her dreams

( I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

100

Plate 44. LORA. If Steve is going to come between us, I’ll give him up. I’ll never see him again.

SUSIE. Oh Mother, please stop acting!

( Imitation of Life, Universal Pictures, 1959).

104

Plate 45. a, b. Lana Turner; Lana Turner and James Garfi eld ( The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946). 109

Plate 46. “Help! Help!” Cora acts the unwitting victim of male deceit (Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

117

Plate 47. Lee Philips and Lana Turner ( Peyton Place, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957).

119

Plate 48. Barry Oldfi eld and Lana Turner, c.1937

(Internet Movie Database).

126

Plate 49. Nick “pimps” Cora to his handyman Frank, linking the incestuous relation of the impotent father fi gure with the virility of the son and his desire for the mother fi gure (John Garfi eld, Lana Turner, Cecil Kellaway, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

129
xiv

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Plate 50. Successful restaurant owner and infamous murderess, Cora Smith, signs an autograph for one of her customers, a rendition evocative of the life of Lana Turner, actress (Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

132

Plate 51. Frank goes over the edge (John Garfi eld, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

135

Plate 52. The pivotal moment when Cora fi rst realizes Frank’s potential (Lana Turner, Cecil Kellaway, James Garfi eld, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

137

Plate 53. The “innocent” femme fatale gets her hands (and dress) dirty (Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

137

Plate 54. The sad alibi ( The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

139

Plate 55. a. Above frame: Cora Smith, loyal wife to loving husband Nick. b. Lower frame: Cora Smith, convicted murderess, and her
lover accomplice Frank (Lana Turner,

Cecil Kellaway, Frank Garfi eld, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

140

Plate 56. “Double-crossed, ha!…Oh, you listen Mr. Frank Chambers, when I get through with you, you’ll fi nd out there’s such a thing as being too smart.”

(John Garfi eld, Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

141

List of Plates
xv

Plate 57. Stripper Midnight Franklin sits on a spectator’s lap (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

146

Plate 58. Controlling her male spectator (Jayne Mansfi eld and Male Dancer, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

149

Plate 59. a, b, c. The oral fi xation of the male spectators ( Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960). 150

Plate 60. The famous Mansfi eld “Bust Thrust and Lean Over,” a move designed to best show off
the girls (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

151

Plate 61. The girl is too hot to handle (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960). 152

Plate 62. The pin-up girl and her appreciative admirers (Jayne Mansfi eld, Male Dancers, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

152

Plate 63. The feminine spectator and her appreciative escort ( Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

154

Plate 64. a, b, c, d, e. The sexy walk (Jayne Mansfi eld, The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956). 159
xvi

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Plate 65. a, b. The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956.

161

Plate 66. “Oh, I’ve been in men’s bedrooms before.”

(Jayne Mansfi eld, Tom Ewell, The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956).

162

Plate 67. “Everyone considers me for a sexpot instead of a mother; no one thinks I’m equipped to follow through.” (Jayne Mansfi eld, Tom Ewell, The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956). 163

Plate 68. a, b, c. “If the San Francisco hills could only talk.” (Jayne Mansfi eld, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956).

165

Plate 69. “I’m all excited because you’re loving me up!”

(Jayne Mansfi eld, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? , Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957).

168

Plate 70. “Making Up and Making Do.” (Fernand Aubry and Jayne Mansfi eld, The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne Mansfi eld, Blue Ribbon Pictures, 1968). 170

Plate 71. a, b, c, d. Gay Paris ( The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne Mansfi eld, Blue Ribbon Pictures, 1968).

173

Plate 72. The American censor painted-over dress (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

182

List of Plates
xvii

Plate 73. a, b. “Do you need anything honey?”

(Jayne Mansfi eld, Promises! Promises! , NTD, 1963).

184

Plate 74. Jayne Mansfi eld ( Promises! Promises! , NTD, 1963).

185

Plate 75. a, b. Elle and Bruiser Woods (both Gemini vegetarians) ( Legally Blonde, MGM, 2001).

192

Acknowledgments

Inspiration for this book came from many sources, including my personal experience as a scholar attempting to negotiate feminist culture and fi lm theory from a post-feminist perspective. For his constant support, direction, friendship, and an ever-willingness to give insightful comments, I owe tremendous gratitude to Scott Simmon. For their helpfulness and patience in reading and commenting on several drafts, suggesting corrections and additional areas of study, I am indebted to my colleagues at University of California, Davis: David Van Leer, Marijane Osborn, and Kari Lokke. This book is for Stephen K. Greenholz, whose love and friendship made it so.

INTRODUCTION

SEX AND THE GODDESS

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties…

The ladies would gang up in a corner and discuss my dangerous character.

—Marilyn Monroe

With the remaining mystery surrounding her untimely death, as well as the continued popularity of her fi lms such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Some Like it Hot (1959), Marilyn Monroe endures in the popular imagination. Through mass (re)production of her image, as in Andy Warhol’s famous painting, and frequent celebrity imitation, Monroe’s sex-goddess image continues to infl uence popular culture. That Monroe may be in fact considered the quintessential American sex goddess is relevant to this discussion. The womanly fi gure of the sex goddess in American fi lm and popular culture continues to exert a powerful infl uence on both men and women, and, perhaps just as importantly for the particular focus of this book, on feminist fi lm theory itself. The sex

2

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
goddess’ seemingly endless power to infl uence and fascinate, to achieve in a sense her own self-reproduction through many decades of “re-makeovers”

reveals her positioning in American culture as not only a lasting image but also as a potentially powerful and subversive force.

The excessively or hyper-feminine woman (terms which I will use here interchangeably with sex goddess), as she has been referred to by feminists, is often thought by feminist fi lm theorists to be little more than a projection of the male imaginary. This discussion, however, will make a necessary correction to this trend by demonstrating how the actresses performing the role of sex goddess in fact use the feminine imaginary to create their own agency. Through their performance of hyper-femininity, and with their seductive power, they exert control not only over their fi lmic narrative targets of seduction, but over their viewers as well. The ability to hold their objects of seduction in such thrall suggests that the image of the sex goddess possesses a power far more subversive than that which has been previously explored; in fact, to date, there has not been a critical study of the sex goddess in fi lm. As an actress, the sex goddess is fi rst a fl esh-and-blood woman; as cinematic goddess, she is surrounded by an aura and possesses a great power. Her star image is a mystique that circulates within and infl uences the culture. As the sex goddess deploys her powers of seduction, depending on her viewer, she is perceived in different ways: for some, she can be perceived as threatening, for others, she is often seen as an ideal object of desire, and for still others as an image worthy of worship and imitation. The multiple meanings of her image thus tend to move along a continuum between such extreme perceptions that she is either dangerous, empowering, or sometimes, both.

By defi nition, her image is always heavily invested with and interpreted as an embodiment of some abstract idea of sex. A more explicit defi nition of a cinematic sex goddess is needed here before progressing further. For the purpose of this study, and in the most obvious sense, the cinematic construct of a sex goddess exists as a point of convergence of cinematic techniques conjoined with an actress’ own bodily presence and performance. A cinematic sex goddess is, of course, sexy, but how

Sex and the Goddess

3
does she appear that way? An analysis of formal cinematic elements can reveal the cinematic image of the sex goddess. The actress’ body is most often shaped like the traditional Alberto Vargas pin-up girl: curvy, voluptuous, possessing the classical dimensions of a large bosom, small waist, wide hips, and long, shapely legs, with an overall slight fi gural plumpness. Her face reveals symmetrical features, with large, widely set eyes, a small slim nose, high cheekbones, and a delicate heart-shaped face with full lips. Her complexion, with the aid of Max Factor, is fl awless, and her hair is long, soft, and smoothly swept back from her face.

She often fi rst appears on screen scantily or suggestively dressed in tight fi tting or revealing costumes, usually composed of long, white, fl owing satin or diaphanous silk gowns, punctuated with sparkling diamond pins or earrings that are also refl ected in the light of her luminous eyes. Backlighting, a cinematic technique, is used to create a halo-like glow which bathes her bared skin in radiance. Full-body shots reveal the soft curves of her ample fi gure while soft-focus close-ups on her face serve to blur the boundary for the viewer’s gaze between reality and romantic fantasy.

Hers is a hyper-femininity seemingly taken to its extreme, embodied in every aspect of her movement and appearance.

In her discussion of Marilyn Monroe’s character Lorelei in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Maureen Turim mentions another signifi cant aspect of the American sex goddess—with a few notable exceptions, she is usually blonde. In her discussion, Turim (re)asserts the often held yet rarely openly articulated feminist view that, “Blondness is a cultural fetish, the sexual idea of a racist society” (108). Here, Turim rather too casually applies a backformation of the racial overtones of German WWII Aryan supremacy to the 1950s cinematic appearance of blondeness, as well as to Anita Loos’ 1920s text. While recognizing that certainly not all cinematic sex goddesses are “blonde” or even of Caucasian appearance, a large percentage of American fi lm sex goddesses fall into this category and continue to infl uence popular culture, especially as the image of sex goddess is copied and cultivated by young, female celebrities, often across racial boundaries, from Madonna to Jessica Simpson to Beyoncé Knowles. In her landmark book On Blondes,

4

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
a history of blonde hair in Western culture, Joanna Pitman, a photogra-phy critic for the London Times, comments that: Very little has been written about blonde hair, in spite of its cultural interest and its sociological, psychological, and biological signifi cance. Academics, perhaps concerned about racial sen-sitivities, tend to ban it from intelligent debate. Several women academics whom I approached refused to discuss it at all, and were indeed deeply affronted that I had thought that they might.

Perhaps they were unable to shake off the associations with the dumb blonde. (263)

Within American cinema, the cultural repetition alone is enough to make the blonde sex goddess an object worthy of study in a sense similar to the argument fi lm theorist Richard Dyer makes when he studies whiteness. In his book White, Dyer states that representations of white people in visual culture have been left relatively unexamined as a category in terms of how such images function in the “cultural construction of white people” (xiii). Similarly, this book will explore the previously unexamined issue of how the blonde sex goddess, as she appears in American fi lm, circulates in American culture, contributing to the cultural construction of “hyper” femininity; thus, this critical discussion will narrow its focus to such a typology.

Beyond the convergence and compilation of formal, cinematic, and bodily elements, the cultural coding surrounding such issues as sex and gender, political and institutional structures of the meaning(s) of sex, as well as cultural stereotypes, all come to bear on her image as a signifi er of these ideas. Therefore, through her representation as an embodiment of the abstract, transhistorical, sliding signifi er of sex, the category of sex goddess becomes additionally relevant from both fi lmic and cultural theoretical perspectives. Through her image, the problematic idea of sex thus becomes a category which fi nds a dominant mode of its expression in cinema, not only in its representations, but theoretically through psychological relationships of both imitative performance and spectatorship as well. Cinema thus becomes a place where the sex goddess’ designation as sex itself can further suggest her bodily signifi cation as a whole

Sex and the Goddess

5
discourse on sex outside of her cinematic representation, thus loading her body to be read almost entirely in terms of sex and its corresponding contemporary social thought. In particular for this historical period of study (1930–1965), the cinematic discourse on sex, as expressed through the image of the sex goddess, is especially important to consider in relation to the pre- and post-enforcement of the Hays Production Code (1930–1968). The construct of the sex goddess during the period of classical Hollywood cinema warrants special attention because of what can be revealed in broad terms about cultural ideas of feminine sexuality, American cinema and visual culture.

Why, then, is the image of the sex goddess such a controversial fi gure in American visual culture, yet one that continues to be so endlessly reproduced? In contemporary popular culture, her image is often revered and admired, and more often copiously imitated, especially by young, female celebrities. From the perspective of feminists, and in particular, feminist fi lm theorists, however, the image of the sex goddess, similar to that of the femme fatale, is more often dismissed as merely a “fi gment of the male unconscious, the male imaginary, offering women little to identify with” (Kaplan, Women in Film Noir 6–7). This tendency within American culture to perceive the sex goddess in such polarized ways indicates her problematic positioning within American visual culture in general, as well as in feminist culture, as a fi gure that simultaneously inhabits binary oppositions of the ideal and the abject.

CRITICAL BACKGROUND AND DISCUSSION

In spite of a lingering feminist tendency to dismiss her image, the fi gure of the sex goddess has often been the image around which the feminist look has circled. The hyper or excessively feminine woman’s connotative

“to-be-looked-at-ness,” Laura Mulvey’s coined term from her famous 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” has attracted the

“feminist gaze” as often as Mulvey’s ubiquitous “male gaze.” In the feminist fi lm theorists’ concentrated look on the image of woman, especially as she is presented in classical Hollywood cinema, many early

6

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
theorists, such as Maureen Turim and Mary Ann Doane, have often reiterated much of Mulvey’s view that the excessively feminine woman is but a “fetishized” or “hyper-polished object”; she exists only as “a reassuring object of fl awless beauty” for the male viewer (Turim 103).

Since to date there exists no tradition within feminist fi lm theory, or fi lm studies in general, of a critical academic study of the sex goddess in fi lm or, for that matter, the blonde sex goddess in fi lm, it is not possible to give a precise critical overview of the treatment of this topic.

Therefore, it is necessary to select from critical articles and texts which discuss images of excessively or hyper-feminine women that fi t within the typology this work will cover. Within feminist fi lm theory in general however, one can trace a theoretical trend that refl ects feminist attitudes toward such hyper-feminine women, or sex goddesses; attitudes that this discussion will attempt to overturn.

One can trace a more general historical development of feminist fi lm theorists’ critical perspectives of the sex goddess through several critical articles on Howard Hawks’ 1953 fi lm Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which features perhaps the most famous sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe. In particular, in her article “Gentlemen Consume Blondes,” Maureen Turim takes up Mulvey’s view of images of excessive femininity when she fi rst discusses Howard Hawks’ 1953 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell appear as best friend showgirls. Extending Mulvey’s view of the excessively feminine woman as

“hyper-polished object,” Turim demonstrates how the image of sex goddess represents an “increasing reifi cation of consumerist values” where the actresses, through their performance as self-conscious spectacle, are consciously exposing and exploiting a “precious commodity, the sexually cultivated self-aware female body” (103). As Patricia Erens later notes in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, and quite usefully for my purpose here, this “commodifi cation” of the feminine both “determines and is determined by pre-existing notions of femininity in the culture” (xxiii).

While Turim stresses the negative connotations of this “commodifi cation” of the feminine, Erens instead implies a way of reading through the image of the hyper-feminine body to show how it corresponds with,

Sex and the Goddess

7
and perhaps even more intriguingly, manipulates contemporary cultural ideas about the hyper-feminine and its ambivalent relationship to commodity fetishism.

Through her reference to classical Hollywood fi lms’ capitalistic production, Turim makes another direct connection between the spectacle of the body of the sex goddess and its aesthetic medium, fi lm: “the female body is not only a sex object, but also an object of exchange; its value can be sold (prostitution) or it can be incorporated into another commodity which then can be sold (the fi lm)” (106). While clearly taking the position that, in her view, classical Hollywood fi lm is itself both a medium and a commodity reproducing the sexual oppression and exploitation of women, what Turim further suggests is the notion of the womanly or excessively feminine woman as coded for sex itself. This view takes a decidedly negative stance on this coding and thereby identifi es the sex goddess as abject, effectively disallowing the excessively feminine or even sexually suggestive woman any agency or positive value. This negative value assigned to the image of the hyper-feminine woman, or any woman who in fact boldly displays her sexuality, is representative of feminist thought in general in the 1970s. Paradoxically, the sexualized image of woman was being attacked at the same time that sexual liberation for women was being touted. Turim, like several earlier feminist theorists, thus effectively reads the image of the sex goddess through Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze, where a woman in visual representation becomes sexually objectifi ed through a projection of male desires, and the male desire gets represented in capitalistic terms.

Early feminist readings of the sex goddess, therefore, place her rather squarely in an abject position, demonstrating how as victim she is manipulated by culture as well as by her mode of production, fi lm, as she all the while embodies some of its worst aspects of sexual, economic, and at times even racist oppression, especially in the problematic Aryan connotations of her blondeness. By demonstrating how not only the actresses performing the sex goddess, but the characters they play, as well as their screen images, manipulate culture more than they are manipulated by it, and in fact, often drive capitalist modes of consumption rather than

8

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
being consumed by them, this work will complicate previous notions of the sex goddess in fi lm, while also recouping her image as one that, more often than not, can be read as empowering.

A few later feminists have, in fact, taken up a more empowering perspective on the sex goddess. For instance, in their article “Pre-Text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca seek to reclaim a sense of pleasure for feminist viewers in the images of the sex goddess, to read through the dominant male culture in an effort to understand and recoup such images and fi lms for the feminist viewer.

Arbuthnot and Seneca believe that, in Gentlemen, Monroe and Russell demonstrate a “resistance to objectifi cation by men” and a “connection with each other,” and it is this resistance that accounts, in part, for what the authors fi nd empowering in the actresses’ images for feminist viewers (112–113). Arbuthnot’s and Seneca’s (re)reading of a classical Hollywood fi lm against the grain of a more traditional feminist perspective of female objectifi cation adds an invaluable contribution to feminist perspectives because of their attempt to recoup the image of the sex goddess as an empowering one.

It seems less believable, however, that, in their roles as showgirls, Monroe and Russell entirely “resist male [or for that matter, female]

objectifi cation.” In Gentlemen, Monroe and Russell in fact exploit the idea of “male objectifi cation” for their own purposes by using the hyper or, as it is often referred to in feminist fi lm theorist terms, excessively feminine, display of their bodies and costuming for their own empowerment. They do so in very conscious ways as a method of gaining power (both romantic and economic) over men, and thus they are, in a sense, “objectifying” the men both onscreen and off, as they also control their male spectators. Therefore, part of the pleasure Arbuthnot and Seneca seek to understand in the fi lm, through the onscreen friendship of Monroe and Russell, is inherently tied to, and heavily invested with, the same kind of attraction and desire for such a display or spectacle of an excessive femininity—one which is meant to exploit the idea of male objectifi cation—and it occurs for the very

Sex and the Goddess

9
reason that these critics read the sex goddess from a perspective of lesbian spectatorship.

Following Arbuthnot’s and Seneca’s attempt to reclaim the sex goddess as feminist, Susan Hegeman, in “Taking Blondes Seriously,”

describes how, in a biographical statement, Anita Loos, the author of the original novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “invariably described a situation in which she, a cute, clever brunette, discovered that the mere presence of a platinum-haired rival magically deprived her of masculine attention” (529). Here, Hegeman interestingly uses the term “archetypal blonde” to refer to the fi gure of the sex goddess, Lorelei, indicating a transhistorical aspect to the sex goddess (529). This archetypal aspect of the female protagonist is signaled in Loos’ text through her choice of the name Lorelei, which refers to a mythic Germanic seductress. While Hegeman furthers Turim’s impression that the sex goddess represents an

“anxiety over commodifi cation of culture” (531), she also, a bit admiringly, describes her as the embodiment of “work that is not quite work,”

rather insightfully suggesting that the sex goddess manages to transcend capitalistic modes of work (534).

Thus, instead of taking the more traditional feminist view of the sex goddess as abject, Hegeman recognizes that the sex goddess’ womanly or excessively feminine fi gure is a more complex, even ambivalent fi gure: “Is she sexual predator, or is she an innocent party; does she coax men into recklessness, or is she the passive object of their dangerous passions?” (534).

Through Hegeman’s recognition of the sex goddess’ ambivalence, her seductive, simultaneous ability to be both angelic and demonic, she conjures up a view of how the sex goddess accomplishes her “work that is not work.” By displaying sex as lure, while also playing the innocent, the sex goddess continually denies the viewer and her narrative objects any actual production of, or engagement in, sex. Thus, by objectifying both her narrative subjects and her viewers, who are usually presumed to be men, the sex goddess creates an enduring allure that functions in much the same way as does fi lm: By endlessly sustaining desire, neither

10

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
is “obtainable” in any real sense. While Hegeman poses the question of “whether Lorelei works at seduction or somehow simply, passively, embodies sexual attractiveness,” the answer appears to be that she simultaneously does both (534).

The sex goddess always alludes to but almost never actually produces sex (unless it is suggested off screen). The abstract idea of sex itself appears both as coded in her image and the narrative only euphemistically, and this substitution often appears as an infantilization that occurs in her mannerisms and speech, just as Hegeman states that, for Lorelei, her own “childishness helped complicate the details of her own sexual and economic exchanges” (538). Hegeman believes that these dually related exchanges always involve men because, for the sex goddess, “the source of her attractiveness [is] those who see it and value it” (544). In this instance, Hegeman also repeats some earlier feminist views that the sex goddess creates desire only for men.

While Arbuthnot and Seneca specifi cally refer to lesbian desire, none of the aforementioned critics account for the desire by some heterosexual feminine-identifi ed women, as well as some gay men, who also see and value the attractiveness of the sex goddess image. Thus, this book will further explore the relationship of camp performance as it is expressed through gay culture and female impersonators in its relationship to the image of the sex goddess, as well the oft-overlooked, culturally signifi cant, desire of heterosexual feminine-identifi ed women to identify with the image of the sex goddess. Finding a sense of agency in the image of the sex goddess, these feminine-identifi ed women often so strongly identify with the sex goddess as to deem her image worthy of imitation, as demonstrated through the extensive repetition of her image in celebrity and popular culture, e.g., Madonna. In other words, how can one continue to argue that the sex goddess image is entirely a male construct whose value is only determined by men when her image is, in fact, one that is, for the most part, constructed and performed by women and gay men, as well as admired by so many people of different genders?

Sex and the Goddess

11

TEXTUAL APPLICATION

While the critical background on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Marilyn Monroe is useful for exploring a historical trend in feminist fi lm theory which treats the sex goddess variably as abject fi gure, commodity fetish, or a projection of racial superiority, at times empowered, and always ambivalent, I will now illustrate one example of a direction this critical discussion will take through another blonde sex goddess: Mae West.

Pamela Robertson, in her article, “ ‘The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me’: Mae West’s Identifi cation with the Feminist Camp,” invokes Joan Riviere’s and Mary Anne Doane’s idea of the “female masquerade” as she explores Mae West’s performance of gay camp as a “female form of aestheticism” (57). This idea of a female aestheticism works well with the cinematic production of the construct of the sex goddess. Although, like earlier feminists, Robertson also weighs the term “excessive femininity” with a negative value, her discussion of Mae West’s “masquerade” and its connection to “gay men and women, lesbian and straight”

adds a valuable contribution to feminist fi lm theory (“Kinda Comedy”

57). While refusing to recognize that what she calls “stereotypes,” as she refers to images of hyper-feminine women, actually fall outside any sense of societal norms, Robertson uses her idea of stereotypes, in addition to Joan Riviere’s theory of “womanliness as masquerade” and Mary Ann Doane’s extension of Riviere which describes excessive femininity as a

“performative” device used to “deprive stereotypes of their currency” to develop her argument about West’s “ironic female masquerade” (“Kinda Comedy” 65).

Like many earlier feminists, Robertson believes that West uses the masquerade to produce an act of the “hyperbolization of the feminine”

(“Kinda Comedy” 63). She states that, while female impersonators absorb and displace a female aesthetic: West recuperates this aesthetic as female aesthetic. She parodically reappropriates the image of the women from female impersonators so that the object of her joke is not the woman, but the

12

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
idea that an essential feminine identity exists prior to the image: she reveals that feminine identity is always a masquerade or impersonation. (“Kinda Comedy” 63)

Thus, in developing her theory of Mae West’s use of gay male camp, Robertson reiterates the view of many social constructionist gender theorists. Robertson fails to note, however, that many heterosexually identifi ed women, as well as gay men, already fi nd an aesthetic pleasure in performing the female aesthetic of hyper-femininity without having to appropriate it from elsewhere, as Robertson does when she appropriates camp from gay male culture for feminist use. In other words, Mae West’s close association with gay male culture doesn’t necessarily have to make her into a drag queen performing a parody of herself.

When attempting to capture West’s own “double mimesis” and give West agency, Robertson writes that “West was simultaneously sexy and a parody of sex; she was both a sex object and a sexual subject”

(“Kinda Comedy” 63). In opposition, I will assert that West, and the other sex goddesses that this book will address (Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, and Jayne Mansfi eld), are women who resist objectifi cation at almost every turn: they in fact turn ideas in both the popular and even feminist imagination about their “objectifi cation” into those of their own empowerment, and they do so by seductively turning back onto their viewers, or so-called “subjects,” the very objectifi cation they are thought to embody, thereby effectively objectifying the viewers themselves. This idea of objectifying the viewer will be developed through a reapplication of Lacanian gaze dynamics to fi lm, one which overturns Mulvey’s theory of the gaze, where the gaze is conceived of as only a one-way fl ow from spectator (subject) to screen image (object).

Film theorist Todd McGowan has readdressed Mulvey’s theory as a

“Foucauldization” of Lacan, and in an article elsewhere1, I have further developed McGowan’s correction of Mulvey and applied it to screen images of women to show how they are active agents in the construction and control of their own spectatorship. Additionally, this work will seek to develop and apply elements of affect theory in order to show

Sex and the Goddess

13
how the screen images of the sex goddess are not only controlling but are also affecting their spectators.

West’s “masquerade” is her self-ironic ability as an actress to reveal to her audience, through verbal and dramatic irony, her own immense agency and empowerment that she enjoyed in her persona as a sex goddess, as she simultaneously conceals her ironic performance to her to onscreen “suckers.” She turns back onto her audience their own expectations, and their cultural notions of a sex goddess as a “bad” or “fallen”

woman, or, as in the traditional feminist valuation, as “abject,” as she occupies instead a position of empowerment. In this conscious turning back of her audiences’ expectations, and through her powers of seduction, West effectively defl ects her own objectifi cation and objectifi es her audience instead. Through her performance of the sex goddess persona, West reveals gaps in entrenched cultural notions about what “good” or

“bad” feminine sexuality should be, while simultaneously undermining such notions.

Unlike the cinematic construct of the femme fatale, who it has been argued represents a true projection of male castration anxiety and, therefore, must die at the end of the fi lm for the anxiety she embodies, the sex goddess almost always triumphs in the end in getting what she wants, whether it be a husband ( Blonde Crazy), diamonds ( Gentlemen), or just persuading all the men around her to see things from her particular feminine perspective ( The Misfi ts). While Robertson believes West both recognized and exploited an awareness of “her complicity in her own sexual objectifi cation,” her comment here can be extended to other familiar feminist views of the sex goddess as “abject” (59). In opposition to this idea, this work will argue that, while the image of the sex goddess may be perceived in the popular imagination as a woman who is sexually objectifi ed by Hollywood and American culture, instead of accepting some sense of objectifi cation, the actress performing the role of the sex goddess very consciously uses her awareness of her own sexual attractiveness (which is not the same as sexual objectifi cation) as a great source of pleasure, for both herself and her audience, as well as a source of power. Instead of objectifi cation, I will argue for the position

14

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
of the actress who performs the sex goddess as a “sexually aware, powerful female” (“Kinda Comedy” 60), one who both enjoys and exults in her own healthy view of sexuality, often at odds with societal views of what a woman’s sexuality, or her own view of it, should be.

While exceptions can certainly be noted, in tracing West’s career trajectory from “star” to her later “pop culture celebrity,” Robertson further touches on an important aspect of appropriating the role of sex goddess for many young, female celebrities: adopting the role can virtually guarantee a lasting and veritably renewable position in the cultural memory—a built-in propensity for self-repetition and imitation of one’s own image—a career move which has been readily employed and exploited by many contemporary female celebrities like Madonna, Sharon Stone, and Reese Witherspoon. The economic impetus for imitating the sex goddess may explain in part why so many female celebrities appropriate the look and the act.

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Today the sex goddess exists primarily as a cinematic/media construct in spite of much cultural imitation. Historically speaking, the role of the sex goddess did not generally extend to everyday women. Although Robertson insists that West was parodying “women’s roles in the 1930s,”

certainly these women’s roles did not usually include the role of sex goddess (“Kinda Comedy” 58). Nor did this occur in the 1950s, at the height of Marilyn’s celebrity, when most women’s roles were nothing like Marilyn’s. In fact, women’s roles at the time were quite restricted for the most part, either to the domestic situation (being married with children) or to positions as low-wage workers: secretaries, maids, shop girls, and factory workers. This book will also explore the relationship of the cinematic sex goddess to her historical moment, contemporary women and their roles, as well as her curious ability to transcend her historical moment. Thus, when Robertson refers to the images of Mae West as recapitulating “contemporary stereotypes,” this discussion will assert more accurately that, instead of reifying some kind of popular

Sex and the Goddess

15
stereotype which did not actually exist, the sex goddesses Harlow, West, and Mansfi eld, as well as others are far from contemporary stereotypes; they instead resist contemporary stereotypes (“Kinda Comedy” 58). Far more interesting than this resistance is its opposite yet related effect; that of creating the desire within some feminine-identifi ed women and gay men for the cultural imitation of the sex goddess’ image, a further effect which this book seeks to explore.

AUDIENCE RECEPTION AND IDENTIFICATION

In consideration of the cultural imitation and repetition of the image of the sex goddess, in “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identifi cations in Star-Audience Relations,” Jackie Stacey argues for “identifi catory fantasies related to the cinematic context that involve fantasies about the relationship between the identity of the star and the identity of the spectator”

(141). Through the application of reception as well as affect theory, I will show how audience participation in these identifi catory practices works toward the popular cultural imitation and reproduction of the image of the sex goddess. While useful for formal cinematic analysis, as Robertson mentions, these “identifi catory practices” rely upon “an aesthetics of femininity related to fashion, consumption, spectacle, and performance”

(“Kinda Comedy” 67). Whereas Robertson identifi es performance as indicative of gender performance in a social constructionist sense, or masquerade, specifi cally in relation to heterosexually-identifi ed women, I would instead posit this performance as a heightening of an already realized sense of hyper or excessive femininity, one which expresses a desire for the pleasurable performance of a feminine aesthetic. Thus, while Robertson labels this “aesthetics of femininity” as an appropriation by female performers of gay camp, and additionally believes that this appropriation is what “enabled” West’s “female fans…to distance themselves from sex and gender stereotypes, and to view women’s everyday roles as female impersonation”(“Kinda Comedy” 69), I will endeavor to overturn the idea that the role of the sex goddess is inauthentic, an impersonation, or a stereotype and instead will argue for the recognition

16

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
of the sex goddess’ image as one that can be read as another authentic, alternative identifi cation of femininity for fans, one that can also be read as both empowering and feminist. As Jackie Stacey has proven through her use of reception theory and empirical research in her book Star Gazing, there are many kinds of femininities that interact with screen images of women in many different ways which are not necessarily homoerotic, but are inclusive of homoerotic identifi cation. This book will argue more specifi cally for the identifi cation of heterosexual women and gay men with the image of the sex goddess.

As mentioned previously, the sex goddess’ ambivalent position becomes even further complicated by her categorization as that of an embodiment of an abstract idea of sex, one that is almost always historically contingent upon corresponding contemporary views of women’s sexuality. This categorization is additionally relevant from a fi lm theory perspective. More specifi cally, a study of the sex goddess, or what has previously been referred to in feminist fi lm theory as the excessive or hyper-feminine, can reveal modes of femininity that perhaps do not necessarily fi t with many post-modern feminist and early feminist fi lm theorists’ defi nitions of what appropriate femininity should be. In other words, in recouping the sex goddess as an empowering construct for hyper-feminine-identifi ed women and gay men, can she then too begin to count as feminist?

APPLICATION TO CINEMA

In consideration of feminist fi lm theory, the Lacanian idea of desire endlessly suspended is particularly applicable to the cinematic experience, as well as to the construct of the sex goddess. The sex goddess makes desire an action endlessly suspended; she is unobtainable in any real sense, and so is the desire aroused by cinema. Applied to the construct of the sex goddess, she thus becomes the ultimate cinematic aesthetic object because she functions as cinema does itself; as a never-fulfi lled desire for wish fulfi llment.

Sex and the Goddess

17

While Marilyn Monroe’s place in the popular discourse is the basis on which this project’s treatment of its subject actresses is formed, this project will not include a chapter on Monroe in order to fulfi ll the desire to trace the less obvious background on the historical development of the American sex goddess. In the fi rst chapter, I will argue that the actress Jean Harlow, in her acting and bodily presence, uses her sexualized body to affect and seduce viewers away from any primary identifi cation with those characters and their plotlines that are supposed to lead the fi lm, and to instead identify with the kind of sexual empowerment and self-possession her characters consistently display. This sexual empowerment allows Harlow’s characters to manipulate the male characters to their own devices, thereby undermining previous feminist ideas about representations of women and audience identifi cation in fi lm only being constructed for the male viewer. Linking the idea of sexual empowerment to the fi lmic and public celebration of hyper-feminine sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual, in the second chapter, I explore previous feminist discussions of Mae West’s performances as feminist camp, as well as interpretations of her characters as being only prostitutes, turning to Kathy Peiss’ valuable historical research on the role of “charity girls”

in the early twentieth century. I argue that West sought to both celebrate and embody for women viewers what she viewed as cultural ideals of femininity and women’s sexuality. In doing so, West empowered herself, her feminine (hetero-and homosexual) viewers, while simultaneously disempowering a masculinist sexist culture by making its notions of superiority appear ridiculous. In the third chapter, which is on Lana Turner and the cinematic code, I consider the many problems inherent in both the fi lmic and public celebration of hyper-feminine sexuality in relation to censorship. Thus, chapter three considers the effects of the Hays Code on hyper-feminine sexuality as depicted in fi lm noir, and the necessity of masking or veiling representations of feminine sexuality, not only in fi lm, but in 1940s culture-at-large, and most particularly in Turner’s own star culture. Finally, in chapter four I initiate a discussion on Jayne Mansfi eld, an actress previously ignored by feminist fi lm critics,

18

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
and make the suggestion that her 1950s open acceptance, celebration, and public promotion of her feminine sexuality, both onscreen and off, makes her not only a precursor of the more sexually liberated 1960s, but also, like the other actresses discussed here, a kind of prescient performance artist, even theorist, of feminine sexuality in particular, and cultural ideas about sexuality more generally.

The image of the sex goddess, among other things, is an image of taunting desire. Hyper-femininity possesses a power in itself: it is an active look. The sex goddess is both empowering and subversive. This book responds to a historical trend in feminist fi lm theory that attempts to write hyper-feminine women as active agents out of the discourse.

Beyond recouping her image as feminist, I will show how the kind of desire aroused by the sex goddess, a desire which remains endlessly suspended, works as a supreme example of the aesthetic apparatus of cinema itself.

CHAPTER 1

SEX AS CINEMATIC CAPITAL

JEAN HARLOW AND

THE ECONOMY OF THE GOLD DIGGER

KITTY (Jean Harlow). I was reading a book the other day.

CARLOTTA (Marie Dressler). Reading a book?

KITTY . Yes. It’s all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of book. Do you know the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?

CARLOTTA . Oh, my dear, that’s something you need never worry about.

— Dinner at Eight (1933)

“Kitty” Packard (Jean Harlow), a former-bar-girl-turned-rich-man’s-wife, fi rst appears in George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight in bed, lolling around in the middle of the day eating chocolates. She’s wearing a see-through white satin nightgown and fi lmy dressing gown trimmed with ridiculously oversized chiffon net sleeves that emphasize her hyper- femininity each time she waves her arms, which she often does for dramatic effect.

20

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 1. Kitty in her bed (Dinner at Eight, MGM, 1933).

The positioning of Kitty in her luxurious bed is the fi lm’s most dominant motif.

Kitty, with the aid of her extraordinary blondness, has used her gold-digging ways to land her husband Dan (Wallace Beery). A miner-turned-businessman moving into politics, Dan has become fabulously wealthy using his mining riches to swoop in and buy up stock in foundering companies at the beginning of the Great Depression. To refl ect Kitty’s and Dan’s lower-class origins, the fi lm’s dialogue is spoken coarsely with poor grammar and diction, but performed by Harlow and Beery with deliberate comic wit:

DAN. Remember what I told ya last week?

KITTY. I don’t remember what ya told me a minute ago.

Sex as Cinematic Capital

21

PLATE 2. Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933).

As in many fi lms of the period, such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames, the central characters represent the archetypal American nouveau riche that were rapidly replacing the more traditional, semi-aristocratic and monopolistic American captains of industry, who, through the severe fi nancial strains of the Great Depression, had fallen into steep decline.

Thus, the fi lm explores the economic pressures of the times through the lives and, more interestingly, the sexuality, of its characters.

Central to the fi lm is the positioning of the hyper-feminine woman, Kitty, whose only place in life appears to be in a bed (which she also surreptitiously shares with a lover, her family doctor). Suggestively dressing her for the viewer’s pleasure, the fi lm foregrounds the young beautiful blonde, Harlow, almost entirely in reference to her sexuality.

22

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

The character’s simple dialogue, combined with Harlow’s own tough Chicago accent, suggests not only the character’s lower-class origins, but also an assumed lack of sophistication or intelligence outside of a kind of sexual intelligence from which she makes her living. She often speaks to her husband in cutesy baby talk, referring to herself in the third person. Upon receiving a social invitation to a rich man’s house, she poutingly says to Dan, “Kitty wants to see all the lords and ladies in the big beautiful house” ( Dinner at Eight). She then jumps out of bed only to reveal that she is not wearing a bra or panties under her gown, giving viewers the strangely disconcerting image of hyper-feminine sexuality feigning an infantilized affect in the body of a sexually mature young woman.

PLATE 3. Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933).

Sex as Cinematic Capital

23

At the time, during the pre–Joseph Breen enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, this emphasis on a woman’s sexuality represented the early and relatively more relaxed attitudes toward regulating onscreen depictions of women’s sexuality.2 While much has been written about censorship and the Code’s effects on depicting bad women’s sexuality on screen, little has been written about what these images of hyper-feminine sexuality actually may mean. The over-determined positioning of Kitty, the blonde sex goddess/gold digger, in a luxurious satin-clothed bed directly yokes hyper-feminine women’s sexuality to capitalistic fantasies about, and desirings for, an easy gain of extreme wealth and luxury that precludes all necessity of usual capitalistic ideas of labor. The idea of sex, then, as it is embodied in the image of gold digger, becomes a site of both fi lmic and economic desire, wherein the image of the gold digger cinematically seduces the viewer into fantasies of leisure and wealth.3 Additionally, these sexual and economic hyper-feminine images are further gendered and racialized by the more traditional cultural ideas of American “superior” racial characteristics: the hyper-feminine bodies of white, Anglo-Saxon, blonde women of Northern European descent.4

While I will return to Dinner at Eight later in this discussion, at this point it is interesting to mention that, as the gold-digger fi lms progress throughout the decade of the 1930s, with the deepening of the Depression, as well as the enforcement of the Code, the fi lm industry shifts the connotations of the gold digger’s iconicity, more often exchanging its good moral connotation to bad, from glittering symbol of economic hope to that of subversive, manipulative prostitute. While certainly earlier silent-era fi lms, such as A Woman There Was, starring Theda Bara, and Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks, as well as others, depicted prostitution and bad women, they were a different kind of bad: a vamp, or predatory female, who seemed to care less about realizing capitalist wealth than they did, siren-like, seducing witless men to their doom.5

24

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 4. Theda Bara (1917).

In contrast, the early 1930s gold diggers had presumably better intentions, as well as a better plan. Their game was not only surviving or getting by while eventually realizing great wealth at the expense of man, but also often keeping that man. Love and money were not their main objectives; they also wanted to gain access to all of the culture that wealthy men could buy, including the respect that came with a newly elevated class status. In other words, not all gold diggers were prostitutes, nor vice versa, although it is true that sometimes they were both. Frequently, however, a marked difference exists in these 1930s fi lms between gold diggers and prostitutes, one that is probably best demonstrated in the fi lm Gold Diggers of 1933.

Sex as Cinematic Capital

25

PLATE 5. Louise Brooks (1926).

In the beginning of the fi lm, the dance hall girls (Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, and Ruby Keeler), appear dressed as gold coins, singing “We’re in the Money,” although it is clear in the fi lm’s plot that their bodies are a kind of capital themselves; for all effective purposes they are the money. They are also valorized (in the narrative logic) for their intelligent, even heroic, attempts at gold digging which, in this instance, is seen as an admirable quality of good old-fashioned survival, thereby underscoring their status as good American girls who possess true grit.

However, the fi lm’s ending has Joan Blondell posed as a prostitute who attempts to pick up the forgotten man, (an unemployed Depression

26

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 6. Joan Blondell as Carol and Aline McMahon as Trixie take Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert’s characters for everything they have got (Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

worker). While she is frankly portrayed as a lowly prostitute, she is also treated sympathetically, in the main because she sentimentally sings of the forgotten man’s plight being more desperate (and therefore, more important) than her own. In the year before the enforcement of the Code, the image of a gold digger or prostitute in fi lm was often considered an admirable representation of a sexually self-possessed, hyper-feminine woman.

As the enforcement of the Code took effect, in the later fi lms in the Busby Berkeley’ Gold 1930s Diggers series such as in Dames (1934), Busby Berkeley’s dance hall gold diggers are no longer costumed symbols of America’s economic hopes and dreams, as writ large on

Sex as Cinematic Capital

27

PLATE 7. The prostitute and the forgotten man (Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

cardboard gold coins, but instead are now fi lmed more suggestively as bodily sex and domestic objects. The choreographic director Busby Berkeley’s cameras move in and out between the legs of young female dancers, ostensibly displaying the interpretive artistry of synchronous dance, while nevertheless yielding to the gynecological positioning of fi lming between the young women’s spread-eagled legs. These examples speak to the development of the image of the early sex goddess in fi lm and how her bodily image and hyper-feminine sexuality become inextricably bound up with both economic and domestic ideas, national and fi lmic.

Much less sexually explicit, in Dinner at Eight, Kitty’s sexualized positioning in the bedroom still manages to link hyper-femininity to the

28

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 8. Carol (Joan Blondell) as a prostitute (Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

PLATE 9. Ginger Rogers as the Money (Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Bros., 1933).

Sex as Cinematic Capital

29

PLATE 10. The Busby Berkeley V-shot (Dames, Warner Bros., 1934).

PLATE 11. Dames in bed (Dames, Warner Bros., 1934).

30

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
more prurient interests of the fi lm industry in its portrayal of women’s sexuality. While the idea that sex sells in the media and advertising is not a new revelation, sex is also produced by the very medium that seeks to make a profi t from it. In the American capitalist fi lm industry, sex thus becomes a cultural-industrial idea produced by the medium itself and infl uenced by the audiences for which it is intended.6 Through formal aesthetic techniques, Hollywood constructs sexuality by deciding which bodies (and what parts) are shown, how bodies are costumed and lit, and how they move across a stage. Dialogue is constructed to allude to more than what can be said in front of children, as well as to appeal to the knowing viewer. Often, sex as an idea is constructed by Hollywood to fi t with particular audiences’ ideas of what can reasonably be shown or said in public in order to market fi lms to specifi c audiences. Sometimes, as well, sex as an idea is constructed by Hollywood in ways that push the boundaries of what sex is or may be, thereby creating new ways of thinking about sex. Particularly in mainstream Hollywood cinema, this is done less as a way of informing or improving a cultural consciousness about sex and more as a marketing strategy. Thus, ideas of cinematic sex become intertwined with the economic practices of the American fi lm industry.

A good example of this economic self-referentiality of the fi lm industry is Harlow’s 1933 fi lm Bombshell, a “fanzine” in motion, as it tells the story of fi lm actress Lola Burns, who is a stand-in for Harlow’s real life and career in fi lm, thereby giving the audience what they want to know about the actress’ personal and professional life. The fi lm even includes a mock re-shooting of the famous rain barrel scene from Red Dust, complete with a reference to the actual actor in the fi rst fi lm, Clark Gable. As will be discussed further, another way of revealing this economic self-refl exive relationship of sex and cinema7 is to consider how, in opposition to previous readings of hyper-feminine sexuality as abject and as manipulated by the media instead of doing the manipulating, these images can now be read against the grain of such traditional notions in order to show how, if not fully feminist, these earlier fi lms represent a proto-feminist agency. 8

Sex as Cinematic Capital

31

PLATE 12. Jean Harlow (1933).

Returning to our fi rst example, Dinner at Eight, central to the fi lm’s plot is Kitty’s conscious deployment of her sexuality through various manipulations of men in order to get all the wealth, sex, and social respect she can muster. Further, this is accomplished through the gratu-itous display of her body in costuming coded explicitly for sex. A twist on earlier Victorian morality tales, where only the virtuous women prevail at the end of the novel and save the morality of the men they love in the process, in Dinner at Eight, Kitty and her hyper-feminine bad girl sexuality not only prevail in the end, but she also succeeds in correct-ing her husband’s own moral failing of rapacious greed, realized at the expense of ruining honest businessmen.

32

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

The character of Kitty, then, and the bodies of similar gold diggers, become euphemisms for the libidinous hopes of an economic rebound of both the American economy and the Hollywood movie industry itself.9

The gendered, and by defi nition, sexualized, and further, racialized, body of the gold digger thus becomes a metonymic signifi er for something quintessential about the American capitalist character. Further, it is a kind of character that both covers and reveals its economic relations and operations. That these economic and nationalistic ideas are displaced onto the bodies of hyper-feminine women raises some interesting questions about the American capitalistic character itself. Moreover, the gold digger additionally receives (before the enforcement of the Code) a kind of moral sanctifi cation to her acts that allows her to transgress the entrenched social and religious codes policing everyday women’s sexuality.10 The fi gure of the gold digger/sex goddess is a good example, especially after enforcement of the Code, of Michel Foucault’s argument in The History of Sexuality that socio-religious attempts at repressing sexuality in fact produce more forms of sexuality. Thereby, instead of repressing issues of sex, Dinner at Eight makes sex a socially ubiquitous subject.11 In fact, the whole fi lm, one could argue, is a meditation on how American capitalism enters into, and even controls, marriages, romantic relationships, and women’s sexuality. In Dinner at Eight, both the national, and fi lmic economies determine the tenor of personal and sexual relationships.

The fi lm, then, not surprisingly, expresses the characters’ relationships in very capitalistic (and Protestant) terms, in that all of the interpersonal relationships in the fi lm, and their inherent successes or failures, are based on the determinate material relations of capitalistic production. That the central fi gure of the fi lm is that of a hyper-feminine, gold-digging woman who has class-climbed her way up from the wrong side of the tracks through using her sexuality to get whatever she wants, offers up a contradiction. She is rewarded not only with a rich husband, but also with everything his money can buy—gorgeous satin gowns, glittering diamond bracelets, white fur coats, and even a high-class doctor, whom she takes for her lover. At the center of the fi lm’s capitalist logic, then, there

Sex as Cinematic Capital

33
exists the contradiction of a hyper-feminine woman who both opportunistically utilizes commodity logic for her own personal profi t and in doing so, escapes the deadening bonds of conventional wage labor.

Moreover, the commodity she uses in exchange value is her own body, her sexuality, which she also uses in pursuit of her own pleasure. Thus her profi t is pleasure.

SEX AND CAPITAL

In any discussion of the sex goddess in American fi lm, the image of gold digger necessarily arises, along with the loaded problem of her relationship to sex and money (usually men’s). As Lea Jacobs puts it in The Wages of Sin, “a stereotypical ‘kept woman’ or ‘gold digger,’ uses men to become rich” (x). For this reason, the gold digger is seen by some feminists as little better than prostitute12; she deliberately lures men with her sexuality for the purpose of gaining from them an economic enfranchisement and “social mobility” otherwise denied her, whether it be actual money, items such as gifts of fi ne clothing, mere living expenses, or the pursuit of just plain fun. In praise of their self-agency, Jacobs notes that, “gold diggers are active, controlling characters; they explicitly propose to exploit their sexuality for jewels and real estate” (66).13

Other critics, such as Molly Haskell, recognize that in 1930s American pre-Code cinema
women were entitled to initiate sexual encounter, to pursue men, […] without being stigmatized as being “unfeminine”

or “predatory.” Nor was sexuality thought of as cunning and destructive, in the manner of certain forties’ heroines; rather it was unabashedly front and center, and if a man allowed himself to be victimized by a woman’s sex, it was probably thought some long-standing misapprehension of his own nature. (91) Feminists who view the representation of a hyper-feminine woman’s sexuality as threatening to any true feminist sensibility have argued that the image of gold digger is a display designed for the sole pleasure of

34

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
the heterosexual male spectator.14 The display of a gold digger’s merely
suggested sexuality, however, functions less as a code for sex than for an economic relation, or anticipated exchange, between heterosexual men and women, because her actual sexuality, or, the site of her labor, is subordinated, or kept hidden, within this exchange. The commodifi cation of the gold digger’s suggested sexuality (and the actresses who play them) places these images of women in American fi lm at the intersection between producing profi t for the capitalist institution that is appropriating it, Hollywood, and that of their own theoretical capitalization.

For this reason, the gold digger resists being a laboring body in the usual sense because her only labor is to suggest the idea of sex. Therefore, the subversive use of her suggested sexuality makes her fascination as a spectacle lie within the cinematic wish fulfi llment for an easy accumulation of wealth, one that falls outside of more usual capitalistic labor processes of laboring bodies—it is this fascination with easy wealth that thereby seduces her viewers in ways similar to sexual desire itself.15

Through the cultural multiplication of her iconic sexualized image, or its mass production, the fi lm industry realizes their profi t. Following Marx’s theory of capital as a social relation and applying this to the dominance of the visual image in modern society, Guy Debord writes in Society of the Spectacle that, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images…The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”

(12, 24).16

As spectacle, the suggested sexuality of the gold digger’s image in American cinema is constructed through the ideologically invested aesthetic practices of Hollywood’s formal cinematic conventions of portraying sexuality, all of which seek to exploit socio-historically contingent ideas of women’s sexuality while simultaneously reinvesting their images with the same historical ideas in order to preserve profi t. The formalistic, and often, but not necessarily so, fragmented images of hyper-femininity thus conglomerate to represent cinematic capital as spectacle of woman, both inside the cinematic frame and out. For our purposes, capital is being defi ned here in its popular defi nition as assets available for use

Sex as Cinematic Capital

35
in the production of further assets, a defi nition that speaks well to the capitalistic and cinematic production of the gold digger’s suggested sexuality, as well as Hollywood’s exploitation of, and profi t from, it.

The distancing from actual feminine bodies that occurs in this process represents Marx’s alienation of laboring bodies from the profi t of their own work. That it is a type of capital, the value of which is funded only through a suggestion of feminine sexuality, further reveals the idea of sex in the cinema as an also mediated capitalistic relation and, as Michel Foucault has also discussed, an institutional relation,17 one that is as well historically contingent, and perhaps more interestingly, one that often shares a metonymic relationship with the institution of Hollywood itself.

According to this logic, hyper-feminine characters in cinema that trade on their sexuality, or even suggested sexuality, perform a function not unlike cinema itself, in that they trade on desire, or commodity fetishism, for their own and the institution’s capitalistic profi t.18 Part of my purpose here will be to reveal how, upon close scrutiny, traditional perceptions about heterosexual negotiations between genders break down within their own representations; in other words, I will argue that images of hyper-feminine women (i.e., gold-diggers and sex goddesses) consistently resist such oversimplifi ed ideas about their purpose and function, revealing instead a more complicated view of sexualized women that, while still containing them within the fi lm industry’s profi t system, also allows them to manipulate the industry to fulfi ll their own desires, rather than merely fulfi lling traditional, and more recently, feminist, views that they are only being manipulated by a patriarchal Hollywood system.

In writing about media stars, Debord describes how stars function as emblematic of the capitalistic process:

Celebrities fi gure…views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner. Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labor, they mimic by-products of that labor, and project above labor so that they appear as its goal. The by-products in question are power and leisure—the

36

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and omega of a process that is never questioned. (38–39) The idea of a woman who is in possession of her own sexuality, who effectively bargains it for economic purposes, for luxury and leisure as does the gold digger, tends to draw round disapproval from both patriarchal guardians of social codes placed on the sexuality of women and from certain factions of feminists who see themselves as enforcers of these codes19 as a way of protecting women from the (often real) dangers of male desire. As Linda LeMoncheck points out in her book Loose Women, Lecherous Men, “one way to undermine such repressive politics is to subvert precisely those sexual practices that reinforce male-identifi ed sexual norms”(4). Interpretations of the gold digger in American fi lm can be read with an eye to the view that instead of performing for the interest of heterosexual men and their sexual desire, the gold digger in fact harnesses the power of her suggested sexuality for her own profi t, a kind of agency that also speaks well to those who fi nd themselves similarly placed in American society as sexualized bodies, or bodies that are already read and defi ned by their sexuality.

This harnessing of their own desire and sexuality thereby reveals cinema as a site of exploration and expression for hyper-feminine sex -
uality, and one I will claim that often transcends and breaks down barriers of actual societal practices and ideas about feminine sexuality, thereby also inciting desire in feminine viewers to possess similar powers. Within this logic of capitalistic desire, if indeed one is already read within the culture as a sexualized body, complete with the experience of the kinds of patriarchal economic disenfranchisement that has historically accompanied the condition of peoples whose bodies are read in terms of their sexuality and/or gender orientation, then why should they not take control of and deploy their sexuality for economic gain?

Many feminists state that overcoming societal views of women as beings reduced only to sexualized bodies has been the main effort of

Sex as Cinematic Capital

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the feminist movement, a stance which far too often recapitulates a patriarchal fear of women’s sexuality and the need to control it.20 Many feminist critics also applaud the relative demise of the gold digger and other cinematic characterizations of such sexualized women, in part because, since the enforcement of the Hays Code, as Haskell writes, “the proscriptions of the Production Code that were catastrophic to sexually defi ned, negligee-wearing glamour goddesses were liberating for active or professional women, for girls with more brains than cleavage” ( From Reverence to Rape 93). While Haskell admits that these attributes are not always necessarily mutually exclusive (“not that a woman couldn’t have both”), she goes on to say, that when it comes to sexualized women on screen having brains, “somehow, on the screen, she never did” (93–94).

In this sense, Haskell, like many other feminist fi lm critics after her, recapitulated the sexist thought of her own time and overlooked the possibility that a sexualized, or sexual, woman could possibly possess great cleavage and brains too.21

This thought process is what I like to call the “dumb blonde theory,”22
a theory that in fact pervasively circulates within contemporary culture (often self-consciously appropriated and furthered by blondes themselves). Surprisingly, it still circulates in both feminist and academic culture, as well as in the idea that there is something fundamentally self-contradictory about beautiful sexy blondes who are also intellectuals,23
who additionally possess brains enough to capitalize on their looks and sexuality, thereby avoiding the drudgery of, while simultaneously subverting, more usual labor practices. While many feminists may believe that such constructs of hyper-femininity are exactly that, constructs, or artifi ce, the closer truth is that, while all of these bodily attributes, such as blonde hair, large breasts, and wide hips, can be and certainly are at times embellished, they also occur naturally as well, a condition which can lead such women to be read as sexualized bodies by the culture whether or not they so desire. Many hyper-feminine women who fi nd themselves bearing this “affl iction,” fi nding it inescapable in most respects, in fact fi nd few choices other than to subvert their unasked for, already-sexualized body by either consciously de-sexualizing it or

38

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
conversely, as does the gold digger, throwing it back at the culture with the intention of using it to their own benefi t in order to manipulate the culture for all it is worth. As Lorelei states in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,

“a girl being pretty is like a man being rich.”

In view of the kinds of assumptions being deployed here, it is important to mention that much contemporary feminist criticism on women’s sexuality, gender, and femininity has insisted upon a sharp divide between essentialists and social constructionists. While social constructionism, whose best-known proponent is Judith Butler, effectively dissolves the body, relocating a spectral trace of its essence in ever-shifting and diffuse points of mediated identifi cations, essentialism seeks to ground experience of sex and gender within the corporeal body. In Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss argues that, “essentialism and constructionism are deeply co-implicated with each other,” and that, “there is no essence to essentialism…that we can speak of only essentialism.

Correlatively,…constructionism really operates as a more sophisticated form of essentialism” (xii; author’s emphasis). In its way, the existing argument between constructionism and essentialism represents older versions of philosophical treatises of the mind/body divide, that the mind and body are in fact separate entities in which one (mind) is animated by the other (body), yet not necessarily constrained by it. The body, then, is seen as a mere shell of habitation for the superior object—the “seat” of subjectivity—the mind.

In thinking about the cinematic gold digger as an embodied representation or mediated effect of the relations between American capitalism and sexuality, and in seeking an alternative to these splits between mind and body, as well as the body and its cultural discourse in fi lm theory and elsewhere, it is necessary to locate a theory of embodiment that is commensurate with and/or that works concomitantly with theories of sexuality, as well as with American capitalist fi lm aesthetics and practices. For these purposes, the work of fi lm scholar Anne Rutherford, in her article “Cinema and the Embodied Affect,” posits an “aesthetics of embodiment” in which the “affective experience” is located within the

Sex as Cinematic Capital

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“living physical body” (2–3). Applying this aesthetics of embodiment to fi lm spectatorship, Rutherford states:

if we focus on the spectator, and what the spectator brings to the cinematic moment, this is not a spectator who leaves behind the embodied ground of their experience (or perception)—embodiment is one of the important culturally or historically-inscribed dispositions that the spectator brings to the cinema. (11) For fi lm theory, then, Rutherford asserts that the cinematic experience for the spectator must move beyond its usually understood pattern where the spectator develops a narrative identifi cation or desire along a strict axis or organized relationship between spectator, character, and camera positioning, or apparatus theory.24 In the embodied affect, there occurs instead a displacement of self that is
not conceived of as a physical movement across a physical space…This is a movement interior to both the gritty materiality of the body’s location in space, and simultaneously to the carnality of an idea or experience. It is a movement of the entire embodied being towards a corporeal appropriation of or immersion in space, and experience, a moment. It is a movement away from self, yes, but away from the self as conceived as subject, in so far as this concept is a cognitive or disembodied one—a movement out of the constraints of the defi nable, knowable—a groping towards a connection, a link-up with the carnality of the idea, the affect of the body, the sensible resonances of experience…It is an erotics of the image. (Rutherford 15)

While Rutherford stops short in her theory of embodiment before explain-ing how it can be applied to problems of sex and gender in relation to spectatorship, one can perhaps intuitively understand the implications of its use. The application of the aesthetics of embodiment to sex and gender in spectatorship suggests that constructionism and essentialism merge in interesting ways. For if the spectator is fundamentally both a sensate being, a body, complete with bodily experiences of sex and one whose

40

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
sex and gender is also socially, historically, and culturally constructed as well as contingent, then I suggest that this allows us to throw off previous restrictions of feminist fi lm theory limited to such strict f/m binaries.25 Additionally, we no longer have to embrace fully post-modernist phenomenological gender de-corporealizations to describe gendered cinematic spectatorship;26 we are no longer restricted to whose feminist theories can decide which preferences of gender and femininity win, but rather, in merging theories of capitalism with that of an embodied “erotics of the image,” how does the spectacle of the hyper-feminine woman circulate in cinema and wider avenues of visual culture as a corporate body in terms of how such sexualized bodies both embody and deploy capitalist desire? How is hyper-feminine sexuality linked to capitalist desire? Further, how do feminine spectators engage in an embodied way with an erotics of the image, as desiring bodies themselves who both identify with while also desiring the kind of mystifi cation that occurs with the image of woman under capitalist practice? Finally, how does the image of the hyper-feminine woman subvert capitalism and challenge feminist views about her effects on women, and her place in American society? The suggestion I am making here is that the suturing or merging of Marxist feminist materialism and affect theory will open up a space for hyper-feminine women to locate themselves as feminists too, as well as recoup the image of hyper-feminine women for feminism, therefore locating via fi lm a sense of empowerment that has been previously denied them, an authenticity of participating within both the realm of spectatorship and a legitimate feminist point of view. The distinction of a hyper-feminine spectator as opposed to merely the feminine spectator needs to be made here in order to establish the legitimacy and identities of hyper-feminine women and men who both identify with images of hyper-femininity, as well as fi nd these images useful in constructing their own self identities. 27

Additionally, this method allows for an exploration of how the cinematic experience inhabits its viewer intellectually, corporeally, and in a combined sense of an affective, sensate way, thereby demonstrating a

Sex as Cinematic Capital

41
lived experience of cinema, complete with all its evocations of both felt and remembered experience. These insights will further reveal the participation of the fi lm industry and its audience in the production of ideas about the hyper-feminine woman’s sexuality.

The capitalistic spectacle of the image of woman, then, viewed as a corporate body and read through its erotic embodiment, seems an especially effective approach to a discussion of the hyper-feminine woman/
gold digger, fi gures that are precisely defi ned by their bodily and erotic presence and their ability to both exploit and subvert patriarchal capitalist practice, thereby revealing some of the fi rst feminist capitalists in fi lm.

CINDERELLA MAN

Another counter fi lmic example may be useful here. Platinum Blonde turns traditional notions of the gold digger topsy-turvy and shifts emphasis between genders. In the fi lm’s plot, instead of a gold digger, Jean Harlow plays Anne Schuyler, a wealthy socialite who falls in love with a poor news journalist, Stew Smith (Robert Williams). Once they marry, the fi lm begins to explore the complications of the inequity in their economic positions. Stew’s newspaper pals begin to refer to him as “ Cinderella Man” and make fun of the gold garters which Anne has made him wear. The gold garters become a symbol of his economic captivity within the marriage. Anne, however, while set up in the fi lm as a high-class woman of wealth, still appears as an eroticized, sexualized, hyper-feminine body, as here she is also dressed in tight-fi tting, see-through satin gowns and nightgowns with no undergarments, a costume effect for which Harlow, the actress, was well known. One of the most blatant examples of her penchant for doing so perhaps appears in a later fi lm, Libeled Lady, when, even after the enforcement of the Code, Harlow appears in a scene with Spencer Tracy and her real-life love interest, William Powell, without wearing a bra or chemise under her otherwise unusually conservative dress. The director, Jack Conway,

42

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
makes the most of the shot as he holds the camera steadily for some length of time in a medium close-up on the actors, with its focal point being Harlow’s bobbing breasts. The fi lm’s attempt at surreptitiously subverting the Code seems blatant, even to the male actors within the scene, who, if one observes them carefully, appear to gawk and almost to break out of character and chortle at the obviousness of the effect. Harlow herself appears to be aware of the joke, as she plays up the whole situation to great effect. As James Caryn, a fi lm reviewer for the New York Times mentions, “Harlow had the rare ability to mock her status as a sex symbol without negating it.”

However, in Platinum Blonde, Harlow is at her pre-Code-enforcement best in that she affects great elegance in manner, speech, and dress.

PLATE 13. Another fi lm, another bed (Jean Harlow, Libeled Lady, MGM, 1936).

Sex as Cinematic Capital

43

PLATE 14. Spencer Tracy and William Powell struggle to keep their eyes where they belong while Harlow struggles to keep a straight face (Libeled Lady, MGM, 1936).

PLATE 15. The scene starts to fall apart as the focal point grabs everyone’s attention (Libeled Lady, MGM, 1936).

44

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

The director, Frank Capra, stages her beauty in ways which give her an otherworldly, ephemeral quality. In an early sequence, when Anne and Stew are still courting, Capra fi lms the two enjoying their fi rst kiss while silhouetted behind a glass fountain in a garden. With the use of key and backlighting, Capra makes their kiss appear as a kind of art frieze that glows from within.

Later, Capra emphasizes the differences in class between the characters by using both high and low angle shots: the fi rst, with Anne standing on a balcony at night with the full moon behind her, looking down at her husband, Stew, who is now in the garden with Anne’s romantic PLATE 16. Capra fi lms the lovers in a pose of implicit power relationships (Platinum Blonde, Columbia Pictures, 1931).

Sex as Cinematic Capital

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PLATE 17. Harlow as an icon of ideal beauty (Platinum Blonde, Columbia Pictures, 1931).

rival, Stew’s offi ce gal pal Gallagher (Loretta Young); and the second, as they simultaneously look up at Anne, standing above them on the balcony, who Gallagher then melancholically refers to as “that beautiful woman.”

The fi lm winds up with having Stew become so incensed over his lack of economic power within the relationship that he ditches Anne and her mansion for Gallagher and a one-room apartment. Anne, fed up with Stew’s refusal to accept the economic disparity between them, is happy to see him go. Thus, the patriarchal codes of power between genders in relationships are reasserted and the “right” woman—the passive, drab, pancake-making, Gallagher—gets her man in the end. Anne, however,

46

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
remains a wealthy socialite who is now free to fi nd a more suitable mate. What reeks of insincerity in the fi lm’s resolution, with its marriage between Gallagher and Stew, however, is that the viewer has already been assured of Anne’s and Stew’s true love for each other. What breaks up this relationship is simply Stew’s lack of economic power over his wife. The fi lm tries to elide this fact by showing the sympathetic intellectual interests of Stew and Gallagher as partners in writing a play (which, in a more traditional codifi cation of women’s labor, Gallagher mostly writes). The viewer who reads against the grain, however, remains unconvinced.

Thus, in many ways, although the fi lm inverts the more usual tropes of the woman as gold digger and transposes this onto an all the while protesting man, there remain similarities in its treatment of the hyper-feminine woman that move beyond just the fi lm’s effects of eroticizing her body with techniques of wardrobing and keylighting. Anne Schuyler, for all her high class, is still in the main treated as a sexualized hyper-feminine body; however, she’s one that, through her immense wealth, further bears the signifi cation of American capitalistic values through the fi lm’s especial emphasis on her relation to luxury and wealth that is explicitly tied to her relations of love and sex. Interestingly, in this instance of economic gender reversal, the fi lm’s logic does not allow Anne to triumph in getting her man.

HELL’S ANGELS

To move even further in our exploration of the economic relations that circulate through and around the eroticized bodies of such hyper-feminine women, I will explore fully another fi lmic example. In Jean Harlow’s fi rst appearance in fi lm, with its oxymoronic title of Hell’s Angels, she plays Helen, an apparently independent young woman at the start of WWI who dallies with men’s affections. A minor socialite, Helen fl its among several social gatherings, fl irting with different men. While the character of Helen refl ects a certain class that suggests a moneyed background, at the beginning of the fi lm Helen does not appear to have a

Sex as Cinematic Capital

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job, though she maintains her own apartment. Thus, in tandem with her many fl irtations, the narrative suggestion is that she makes a living as a gold digger, most likely using her liaisons with men to garner her living expenses.

The character of Helen exhibits all of the usual traits of the gold digger as a woman who manipulates men to get what she wants. What she wants, however, is an exchange of something other than money for sex, or even the suggestion of sex for money. Instead of openly exchanging sex for money (this does not appear in the fi lm diegetically), what Helen appears to want is sex for sex’s sake, and more importantly, for her own sake. Whereas Marx argues that in a capitalist society, money takes on a “mystical” value, money is not the thing being valued for exchange here.28 In this sense, Helen subverts the usual expectations about women who exploit their own sexuality for money.

Haskell writes of the actress Harlow and the roles she played in most of her fi lms, she was sluttish and smart, cracking gum and one-liners simultaneously: chewing up the scenery as the vulgar star of Bombshell (whose temporary bout with motherhood, under the pressure of a fan-magazine idolatry, makes a joke of both institutions); or, in Red Dust, sidling up to Clark Gable when Mary Astor, as the frigid nice girl, wasn’t looking. For Harlow, like most sex kittens, queens, and goddesses was no friend to her own sex. Having nothing to lose, she is a threat to other women, and any woman who prizes her security, her position, or her husband (and what else does the “normal” woman have?), is justifi ed in being afraid of her. ( From Reverence to Rape 113–114) While Haskell does well in capturing Harlow’s on-screen persona, she also asserts the more usual feminist perspective about the kinds of sexualized women roles that Harlow played. Haskell further reveals the crux of the problem about hyper-feminine sexuality in American culture: Harlow (both the actress, as well as the characters she played), and women like her, are cast out of the community of women because they embody an idea of sex. The threat she poses to these normal women is that of possibly usurping their own sexual unions, upon which all their

48

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
security lies. She will accomplish this with her beauty. More precisely, she will do so with her open attitude about her own sexuality. This kind of thinking reveals that the real threat to the normal woman is not hyper-feminine or sexualized women, but sexuality itself and what this sexuality can buy in a capitalistic system. This further refl ects a deep-seated fear of feminine sexuality, accompanied with a repression that can be traced to its patriarchal roots in the kinds of social structures dependent upon it; socio-religious institutions that fund their foundations through, and prop themselves up on, women’s sexuality.

Haskell further reinforces this thinking when she refers to Harlow’s romantic rival, Mary Astor’s character in Red Dust, as that “nice frigid girl,” when in the fi lm she was anything but; as a cheating wife involved in a sleazy love affair with her husband’s employer, Astor’s character makes Harlow’s Vantine seem semi-angelic.

PLATE 18. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow (Red Dust, MGM, 1932).

Sex as Cinematic Capital

49

The fi lm Hell’s Angels begins with the story of two brothers, Roy (James Hall) and Monty (Ben Lyon) Rutledge, both of whom attend college at Oxford in England. At the beginning of the fi lm, the older brother, Roy, has fallen in love with Helen and carries her picture with him, a snapshot he made when she was not looking. A close-up of the photograph shows Helen stooped on the ground with her back to the camera while slightly looking over her shoulder, as if she is aware of the camera’s gaze that, presumably, she is not supposed to notice, thereby revealing Helen as a self-aware character. The impress of her tight white dress reveals her curvaceous fi gure. The positioning of her body with her back toward the camera further works within the narrative logic, as later the viewer comes to understand that Helen does not return Roy’s PLATE 19. The stooping Helen (Jean Harlow, Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

50

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
affections; she only toys with him (and other men) when he happens to be in her presence, turning her back on him at a crucial moment before he leaves for war. Moreover, her stooping posture suggests her willingness to stoop to a level undeserving of Roy’s devoted love, in which he elevates her to the level of a goddess.

The photograph also works as an image of woman, wherein woman is seen in the male character’s view as a paragon of the domestic life, its very foundation, and one that can be readily transported as a fetish object that signifi es to the men the heroic and domestic purpose that they are fi ghting for. Through our reading, the rest of the fi lm’s narrative will, against its intended patriarchal purpose, work to deconstruct these ideas.29

Far from a goddess in the mythic sense, the character of Helen is set in contrast to the other women in the fi lm who appear as either high-society women, dressed in elegant gowns, or German and French prostitutes, with the exception of one female canteen worker who appears almost asexual, or even masculine in appearance. Within these constructs of the feminine, Helen appears only slightly above middle class in that she dresses beautifully and lavishly, yet displays manners that mark her as a lower-class woman. She speaks frankly of sex while fl irting openly and outrageously with many men. She is, in fact, a woman in possession of her own sexuality, who deploys it at will in pursuit of her own pleasure.

When Helen fi rst appears on screen, aside from her image in the photograph, she is dressed in a long, white, fl owing, diaphanous gown fi tted with sparkling rhinestone straps, reminiscent of the draped apparel of classical statues. Moreover, her gown is visibly transparent and so close-fi tting as to reveal her bodily curves and even the impression of her breasts, hips, and buttocks. With the added technique of cinematic backlighting on her white hair and skin, Helen becomes the embodiment of the erotic image. While it is true that this is an eroticism mainly intended for the masculine gaze, the feminine, or in view of our study, the hyper-feminine viewer30 can equally derive pleasure from the image in a variety of ways that are, as Jackie Stacey has discussed, not necessarily homoerotic, but inclusive of homoeroticism.31 It is important to

Sex as Cinematic Capital

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note here that: 1) not all viewers are male; 2) not all female viewers are stereotypical viewers; and 3) while some lesbian viewers may identify themselves as hyper-feminine, others may not, and some just enjoy the erotics of hyper-femininity. In addition to deriving a pleasure from the image of the hyper-feminine, these viewers can also experience the image as an embodied effect.

For instance, the fl awless beauty of Helen’s image attracts a feminine viewer in ways similar to, but not the same as, a heterosexual man.

Beauty in fi lm, however, as any fi lm critic is aware, is constructed through conscious cinematic techniques—make-up, costuming, lighting, acting, and so forth. But a hyper-feminine viewer can identify with this particular construction of femininity, its elegance of the feminine form, PLATE 20. Helen dressed as a classical goddess (Jean Harlow, Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

52

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 21. Jean Harlow (1933).

revealing the female body through an emphasis upon its sexual nature that, while managing to reveal a great deal of detail, stops far short of any pornographic representation, merely suggesting sexuality. The hyper-feminine viewer can experience a physical pleasure in the recognition of the feminine form because of their identifi cation with it. While a pleasure in her eroticism encompasses a delight in the feminine form, its beauty and suggestion of sexuality, it does not necessarily create a homoerotic desire for her image.32

Aside from the pleasure the hyper-feminine viewer experiences in the recognition and identifi cation with Helen’s eroticism and sexuality,

Sex as Cinematic Capital

53

PLATE 22. Jean Harlow (1933).

further aesthetic pleasure arises in the presentation of Helen’s clothes and hair, and her speech and movements. In her costuming, the tactile pleasure of diaphanous silk and its ability to project a soft sensuality give pleasure to her viewer. For many feminine-identifi ed viewers, her body represents a kind of pleasure in that they are not turned off by looking at a beautiful woman. Instead, they experience a pleasure of self-recognition, as well as an admiration and desire for her beauty. Her hair, too, suggests a kind of tactile as well as aesthetic pleasure in its softly styled, perfectly even waves. The cut of her dress creates within her viewers a desire to possess similar garb, a relation of feminine consumption to fi lm previously discussed by critics such as Joanne Hollows, Jackie Stacey,

54

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
and Stella Bruzzi.33 The higher-pitched sound of her voice creates an aural pleasure that signals for a hyper-feminine viewer recognition of the distinctly feminine voice in contrast to those of the men in the fi lm.

Her bodily movements across the screen, such as when her hips sway as a shot/reverse shot is used, create for the viewer a kinetic sense of a specifi cally feminine kind of movement. All of the experience of viewing Helen’s image draws not just upon the visual dynamic of an identifi cation with the erotics of image and with the aesthetics of the feminine, but with an actual embodied or sensate effect as well. Her viewer can “feel”

the tactile fabric of her dress, hear the sexy breathlessness of her voice, and kinetically experience her swaying walk, as they do their own. In other words, the hyper-feminine viewer locates desire within the image as much as they desire to be and are like the image. Interestingly, her body is most often shown in at least a three-quarters body shot, instead of fragmented into eroticized body parts. Thus, the appeal and pleasure of her body is not its breasts but the whole package.

The embodied erotics of Helen’s image resonate with the hyper-feminine viewer not only because of the viewer’s identifi cation with it, but also because her image is formally constructed by the industry for exactly this purpose. Although it is important to note here that, aside from the cinematic aesthetic techniques used to create these effects, it is in actuality the actress Harlow’s own body that is both eroticized and erotic.

Therefore, when analyzing character in fi lm, in some ways it becomes nearly impossible to separate the actress from her character. This identifi cation with the feminine is important from a historical fi lmic perspective, since, as Richard Maltby, Miriam Hansen, and other critics have written, in the 1930s–1940s, the primary movie theatre audience was composed in the main of women, who had the leisure time to attend the cinema, a historical condition that led to the invention of the woman’s fi lm.34 As well as playing to the demographics of their audience, Hollywood also realized the value of exploring society’s ideas about feminine sexuality in fi lm. As Tanya Krzywinska writes in Sex in the Cinema,

“Sex and sexuality have proved a primary means to sell fi lms to potential audiences throughout cinema history.”35

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What further draws the viewer to identify with the hyper-feminine image of Helen lies more closely in the fi lm’s narrative logic, although it is a logic that the fi lm’s patriarchal positioning probably never intended.

As aforementioned, Helen is a woman in possession of her own sexuality. As an unmarried woman, Helen is free to choose where, when, and with whom she will have sex, or whether she will at all. Part of the fi lm’s plot, and ultimately, its tragic resolution, lies in the romantic triangle that forms between Helen and the two brothers, Roy and Monte. While at a society party, Roy, the brother who is in love with Helen, must attend to his duties as a committee man for the party’s hostess, Lady Randolph; thus Helen and Monte end up spending most of the party together.

At this point, it has already been established that Monte is a playboy who relentlessly fl irts with and pursues many women without discretion.

PLATE 23. Helen gives Monte the direct gaze (Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 24. Helen shows Monte the goods (Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

Upon fi rst being introduced to Monte, Helen boldly engages him in a prolonged, direct gaze to signal her romantic interest in him. That Helen dares engage Monte in such a direct gaze, instead of coyly looking aside, indicates Helen’s bold possession and awareness of her own sexuality. Monte is at fi rst drawn in, but then stops himself, remembering his brother’s deep affection for Helen. Helen will not let Monte get away, however, and sends Roy off to get her a glass of punch, a ruse to give her time alone with Monte. Later, as Helen and Monte have moved from the garden, where they had been surrounded by other party-goers, to the more intimate indoor setting in front of a large fi replace with its fl ames darting in the background, Roy returns, only to be drawn quickly away again by Lady Randolph.

Helen, tired of waiting for Roy to shower her with attention, feigns fatigue and asks that Monte drive her home. The scene dissolves to the

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PLATE 25. Hughes catches Harlow going commando (Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

two of them sitting in Monte’s car in front of Helen’s apartment, where Helen’s head is sleepily and seductively lying upon Monte’s chest. Helen boldly asks Monte, “Wanta come up for a cigarette and drink? I’ve just had my own place for a week. What a toy!” There’s another quick dissolve and Monte and Helen are in her new apartment, a room that is dominated by a large, overstuffed couch, draped in layers of sensuous blankets. Helen pours Monte a very large drink from the bar, and in the following shot she says to Monte, “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” while behind her in the background her bedroom door is half ajar. Monte replies, “I’ll try to survive,” as he wipes his forehead nervously and checks his watch. Helen slips into the bedroom.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 26. “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?”

(Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

After a slow dissolve to indicate some passing of time, the bedroom door opens and Helen emerges in a dressing gown, a robe which is mainly black (with the exception of some thin white trim along its edges) a color used to symbolically invert the usual moral codes. She lets the neckline fall loosely open. Monte takes a deep drink. He says to Helen, “He idolizes you.” She looks at him again with her direct gaze and says, “He wouldn’t if he knew what I am really like. When I’m with Roy, I’m the way he wants me to be.” Monte asks, “Do you love Roy?”

Helen hedonistically replies, “I want to be free! I want to be gay and have fun! I want to live while I’m alive!” Monte tries to leave. Helen draws him back with a kiss instead. There is a quick dissolve to Roy alone in bed in the military barracks waiting for his brother’s return,

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PLATE 27. Helen puts on something more comfortable (Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

and then a long fadeout to black (uncharacteristic of the fi lm’s editing techniques thus far).

As the next shot opens, Helen and Roy are again sitting next to each other on the couch. Helen pulls together the loosened edges of her robe.

Monte sits with his head in hands and an expression of guilt on his face.

Helen chirpily says, “Why so gloomy?” Barely restraining his anger Monte says, “You’re rotten.” Helen quickly retorts, “You’re rotten too.” Helen is insulted by Monte’s response to their lovemaking and tells him to get out. Monte returns to the barracks where his brother has been waiting.

Without revealing his lovers’ tryst, Monte suggests to Roy that Helen is unworthy of his affections. Roy is incensed and will hear none of it. As the scene closes, Monte emphatically states, “Women are all the same.”

This plot summary, with its sequence of feminine seduction, can be used to demonstrate the way that a feminist, and even a hyper-feminine,

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interpretation of the fi lm, in view of its intended patriarchal logic, can be construed to have very different meanings for a hyper-feminine viewer.

For example, aside from being in possession of her own sexuality, Helen seductively deploys it in pursuit of her own pleasure and in clear viola-tion of patriarchal codes of what feminine sexuality should be, codes that are expressed similarly through not only Monte’s disgust at Helen’s easy morality, but also by Roy’s irrational belief in Helen’s untarnished fi delity and sexual purity.

While the seduction scene takes place in the privacy of Helen’s bedroom, the fi lm is intended to play for a theatre audience. As Krzywinska notes:

Cinema is intended mainly for a mass audience and it therefore operates in the full view of the public sphere. Sexual acts are meant conventionally to be closeted in the private domain so their public presence has tended to solicit intense debate hinging on what constitutes public morality. (2)

While within the fi lm’s patriarchal logic Roy projects a view of woman as “Madonna,” Monte sees her as a whore. Between these two views, however, lies a more realistic view of the hyper-feminine and feminine sexuality. Helen acts independently of social codes designed to govern women’s sexuality and acts to satisfy her own desires. In this sense, it is the male characters in the fi lm that are manipulated and toyed with by a woman instead of the other, more usual, way around.

At the scene of her rejection of Roy, Monte and his brother stumble upon Helen couched in a backroom of a speakeasy with a British R.A.F offi -
cer, Captain Redfi eld, with whom she had been carrying on an extended dalliance all the while that she had been leading on Roy. Helen and the offi cer are drunk, smoking cigarettes, laughing and engaged in physical bodily contact. Helen is draped across his reclining fi gure. The offi -
cer asks her what she would do if she had a lot of money (indicating she does not), and she saucily replies, “I’d buy a diamond dog collar.”

“For me?” asks the offi cer. While it becomes clear that Helen intends the collar for herself and something even more wicked for her paramour,

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PLATE 28. a, b, c. Roy and Monte’s view of Helen and Captain Redfi eld (Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

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their sadomasochistic repartee is abruptly broken in upon with Roy’s and Monte’s horrifi ed discovery of her indiscretion. Roy tries to take the drunken Helen home. Helen throws off his grip and says, “Who wants to go home? I’m having a marvelous time.” While Roy is heartbroken, Helen is unfazed and then angry as she tells Roy that he has just been deluded in loving her; she tells him to “go away.” “I never loved you!” she screams.

While ostensibly the intention of the fi lm’s patriarchal logic is that the character of Helen is initially the ideal romantic love interest for the fi lm’s hero, Roy, by the end of the fi lm Helen appears truly unworthy of his misguided, naïve love. Thus, instead of a woman suffering romantic disappointment, a more usually presented complication, it is now the men who suffer instead, as they are made to come to a more realistic view of woman as her own sexual and desiring agent.

PLATE 29. “I never loved you!” (Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

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This romantic disappointment gets expressed again in Monte’s oft-repeated refrain that “women are all the same,” a statement that takes on a new meaning in that, if before “women” were capable of both taking control of and satisfying their own sexual desire, they are now capable as well of independently casting off a man just as easily as a man could a woman. Oddly enough, the brothers then turn their disillusionment with women into a renewed dedication to the war effort, in spite of there not seeming to be anything left worth fi ghting for.

To the hyper-feminine viewer, it is made clear that the war and the brothers’ efforts just provide a back story to that of Helen’s own story of independent agency and sexual empowerment, an agency in which men become merely tools for her realizing her sexual independence. While her actions perhaps may seem callous and cold on the surface, the character of Helen does not come across as such, but rather as a beautiful young woman who is much aware of her effect on men and who uses it to her every advantage.

For the hyper-feminine viewer, Helen’s hedonism registers as a sense of joyous pleasure in that Helen appears to get away with precisely what most women have been socialized in a patriarchal society against (and often punished mercilessly for) doing. This pleasure of felt experience supersedes even the complicating emotions of the brothers’ tragic end. The character of Helen steals the fi lm and, aside from the tech-nically astounding feats of the mid-air dogfi ght that appears halfway through the fi lm, the romantic escapades of Helen are what make for a memorable experience. In a world constrained by patriarchal logic concerning the correct conduct for women’s sexuality, which at times gets recapitulated in feminism, in this instance a hyper-feminine viewer wishes to be as beautiful, bold, and daringly sexually independent as Helen. Perhaps more importantly, Helen thwarts the usual capitalistic system of exchange in that she performs no labor other than to spend her time socializing and having fun with men and she actively pursues sex with men without any apparent monetary or value exchange, other than the satisfaction of her own sexual desire. This point is underlined in the scene with the French prostitutes and the brothers after Helen has

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dumped Roy. The prostitutes are clearly making an exchange of sex for money. The character of Helen, however, turns the whole notion of gold diggers and sexualized women on its head as she resists both reducing her body to a commodity for exchange while also resisting the condition of a woman who is victimized because of her sexuality.

If any war is won in this fi lm, it is that of the usual sex war between genders.

While feminist fi lm theory has often refused agency to a hyper-feminine character who boldly asserts her femininity and sexuality in terms of heterosexual femininity and one who further exploits both for her own gain,36 some critics, such as Tania Modleski, have recognized how in fi lms directed by male directors, such as Hitchcock, “the strong fascination and identifi cation with femininity revealed in them subverts the claim to mastery and authority not only of the male characters but of the director himself.” Modleski asserts that, as feminists, “we do need to destroy ‘man-centered vision’ by beginning to see with our own eyes—
because for so long we have been fi xed not only in its sights, but also forced to view the world through its lens” ( The Women Who Knew Too Much 3). Thus, feminists need to stop viewing the gold digger and the sex goddess through the male perspective as constructs that function in service to masculine desire, when, in fact, they work for feminine desire, and more specifi cally, as an expression of feminine sexual desire that demands to be fulfi lled on its own terms.

When Helen breaks social (and implicitly patriarchal) codes by invit-ing Monte up to her apartment for the purpose of seducing him to satisfy her own sexual desire, Monte allows himself to be seduced while vaguely protesting. After they have sex Monte protests, feeling a touch of remorse and moral indignation at his participation in their sexual liaison. Monte effectively fi nds himself placed within the traditional feminine position of morning-after (or in this case, late night) regret, after the fact of illicit sex. This positioning, undoubtedly intended by the fi lm’s patriarchal logic, is designed to make the viewer participate in Helen’s socially deemed immorality, which is meant to mirror Monte’s shame and disgust at Helen claiming her own sexual agency.

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PLATE 30. Monte’s guilty regret (Hell’s Angels, United Artists, 1930).

This patriarchal attempt to regulate and control women’s sexuality gets reinscribed not only through the fi lm’s intended moral positioning, but also through the kinds of writings of feminists and feminist fi lm critics that tend to reinforce patriarchal thought.37 As Brian McNair, author of Striptease Culture, has written, “it is clear that our media system can no longer be characterized as an oppressive ideological apparatus relentlessly supportive of patriarchal and hetero-sexist values; that it is, on the contrary, responsive to changes in capitalist social and sexual relations”

(205). This error in feminist thinking of recapitulating masculinist views occurs because of cultural ideas that privilege masculine ideals above the feminine. Many feminists then recapitulate these masculinist views in their own theories, and use them to support learned beliefs about the seeming incompatibility of the hyper-feminine woman, the gold digger/
sex goddess, with the possession of not only her own sexuality, but also

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her own agency and brains—all of which she clearly uses for her own profi t and pleasure. In the following chapters, I will further argue that the error in this critical move stems from an underlying belief that there is something fundamentally wrong about a hyper-feminine sexualized woman or the feminine sexualized body, a narrow perspective which fails to consider the more affi rming view that the hyper-feminine sexualized woman both possesses and celebrates her sexuality.

CHAPTER 2

SEX AS A CINEMATIC “QUEENING”

MAE WEST DECAMPS

MARGY. Say, you’ve got a nerve putting yourself on a pedestal above me. The things I’ve done, I had to do for a living. I know it was wrong. I’m not trying to alibi myself. But you’ve done those same things for other reasons. ( Sex, Mae West, 1926) I’ve seen Mae West without a stitch and she’s all woman. No hermaphrodite could have bosoms…well, like two large melons.

(Hollywood wardrobe designer Edith Head)38

In her Hollywood debut as Maudie in Night After Night, the sensation known as Mae West fi rst appears surrounded by admiring young men as she waits to get into a swanky nightclub. She playfully tells the

“boys” to “go home to their wives.” They move out of the frame, thus revealing in all her glory—glittering with diamonds, smooth in satin—
the platinum blonde beauty of a relatively young Mae West.39 When the doorman asks, “Who is it?” she quips, “The fairy princess, ya mug!”

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 31. The fairy princess arrives in Hollywood (Night After Night, Paramount Pictures, 1932).

Prior to her arrival in Hollywood, West had authored and performed in her off-Broadway play, The Drag, a play about gay male sexuality and drag queens. Thus, when West, in character as Maudie, refers to herself as “the fairy princess,” it marks for the more knowing members of her audience the kind of self-conscious, self-referential dialogue that West was famous for. As an actress who also wrote her own dialogue for fi lm, West deliberately selects the word “fairy” as a way to play with language and her audience’s expectations by signifying with another one of her iconic hallmarks—the double entendre.40 More subtly, however, by using the word “fairy,” West manages to evoke a very particular meaning. West draws on its connotation as cultural referent, depending on who is deploying the term and in what context, that can be used as a laudatory or derogatory term for an effeminate, homosexual male, one

Sex as a Cinematic “Queening”

69
who may or may not identify as gay. It may also be used for men who perform as transvestites or drag queens.41 Through referring to herself as “the fairy princess,” West taps into the pre-fi lm cultural consciousness of herself as “queen of the gay theatre.”42 Already a celebrity as a well-known playwright and theatrical actress, West uses the opportunity as screenwriter to transfer her theatrical aura to her work in fi lm. In also naming herself “the princess,” she additionally conjures up the idea of the artifi cial, supernatural, theatrical beauty and fantasy of the theatre, and now cinema, as well as a mythical, magical being that bestows upon others fulfi llment of their wishes (much like the wish fulfi llment of theatre and the dream screen of cinema). “Princess” can also read as being further invested with connotations of class privilege, as the term also suggests royalty.

What is especially important to sort out here between the two terms is that Maudie/West designates herself as the fairy princess and not the fairy. While in her play The Drag, Mae West treats homosexual men with great sympathy, West in fact did not view herself as gay or homosexual in any sense. Instead, she viewed herself as a heterosexual ally of homosexual men, one who admired them and their culture, but who fundamentally saw them in a very narrow sense, in particular viewing effeminate homosexual men as imitative of, or even the same “inside”

as, women, or as she famously put it to a police offi cer, that gay men are

“women in men’s bodies” (Bak 5).43

Her limitations on viewing the range of possibilities of homosexual men’s identities and performance of sexuality, however, did not stop West from appropriating aspects of some gay culture and gender performance theatricality, a political practice referred to by David Van Leer as

“Queening,” which he defi nes as a process through which gay culture enters into mainstream culture.44 West learned this type of theatricality from being brought up from a small girl to a young woman while performing on stage in many east coast vaudeville and burlesque venues.

West deployed her subversive use of her sexuality to deliberately take on what she viewed to be some of the most pressing issues of the day, issues such as the oppression of women’s sexuality and their sexual freedom,

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
homosexuality, and of race and multiculturalism, all of which she manages to treat sympathetically and at times, politically, in a relatively small body of creative works—fi ve published plays and eight fi lms.

In contemporary feminist culture there exists the argument, fi rst made by Pamela Robertson, that Mae West as an actress performs a mode of what she terms “feminist camp,”45 in which Robertson means that, instead of any sense of authentic femininity, West was performing a con -
scious performance of herself as a masquerade of femininity, or any es -
sential femininity, one that was later imitated by drag queens. Robertson’s article stands out in the critical conversation surrounding Mae West and her celebration of her sexuality because, as in the aforementioned quote, Robertson views West as many feminists have viewed many other hyper-feminine sexualized women and actresses; by referring to Mae West’s performance as “parody,” she effectively erases West’s sexuality from her body and her bodily performance, thereby creating a kind of disembodied distanciation toward feminine sexuality that many other feminist critics have also performed. I argue that the error in this critical move stems from an underlying belief that there is something fundamentally wrong about a hyper-feminine sexualized woman, or the feminine sexualized body, most notably that they are merely puppets performing for the sole benefi t of the masculine gaze. This error further stems from the continuing practice of many feminists of viewing feminine sexuality through a kind of male-centered vision in which a now oxymoronic mas-culinized feminist gaze becomes one that performs a regulatory function itself. The masculine feminist gaze, then, becomes a kind of policing agent, where it performs acts of sexual surveillance that seeks to strip hyper-feminine sexualized bodies of their right to express and to signify their sexuality, as well as to be sexually desiring bodies themselves.

In a society of female and feminine oppression, West sought to make legitimate hyper-feminine sexualized bodies, gendered female or male, and to help overcome their tendency to be read in a negative sense in culture. Instead, she celebrated these bodies as signifi ers of sex and feminine sexual desire, and she sought to naturalize their presence in culture as an expression of the human capacity to embrace the feminine and

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PLATE 32. Juxtapositions of masculine and hyper-feminine women’s bodies with suggested lesbianism (Alison Skipworth as Miss Mabel Jellyman and Mae West as Maudie, Night After Night, Paramount Pictures, 1932).

feminine sexual desire as a normative mode for both women and feminine-identifi ed gay men alike.

Since the early 1980s, there has been a great deal of critical interest in Mae West and her work, with numerous articles and books published on the subject. In Lillian Schissel’s introduction to Three Plays by Mae West, she explains this surge of recent critical interest: “The current interest in Mae West…attests to the fact that we are catching up with ideas that interested her…that sexual identity ranges over human experience from heterosexuality, to bisexuality, to homosexuality” (3). West, whom Colette once characterized as “the great exponent of Sex capitalized”

( Three Plays by Mae West 450), thus represents for contemporary viewers of her work an artist who possessed the vision of women’s and gay male sexuality that “feminine” sexuality is something to be celebrated;

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it should be draped and displayed in resplendent fashions, and deployed on the culture as a way of cultivating desire, not only for the feminine body, but also for realization of her own pleasure.

With the unabashed celebration of her own sexuality, her early biographers George and Stanley Eells respectfully wrote of West that it was through her characterizations of sexualized women that, “the impact of her freewheeling ladies changed America’s view of women as sexual beings and remained a part of our social-sexual history” (16). More recently, Ramona Curry, in her book Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon, recognizes how “Mae West has consistently signifi ed transgressive sexuality, in combination with other attributes: power, ambiguous gender positioning, and comedy, the mode in which she couched her sexual performance” (xvii). In Pamela Robertson’s article on feminist camp, “ ‘The Kinda Camp Where They Imitate Me,’ ” she writes of how “other sex symbols were both sexy and funny, but the way in which West blended sex and humor parodied the very notion of sex symbols” (64).

As aforementioned, Robertson’s critical move of reading West’s image as a parody creates a kind of distanciation from hyper-feminine sexualized bodies, implicit with a denunciation of particular kinds of feminine sexuality. Her move arises from a number of critical perspectives that hearken back to Freudian discourses on women’s sexuality in which feminine sexuality was viewed fundamentally as lack, a view that has continued amongst many second- to third-wave feminists critics, and one that culminates in an apparent endpoint in which theories of social construction leave the body itself in limbo; effectively erased, sexuality becomes a performance instead of a mode that possesses a corporeal habitus.46

Many post-feminists have recently begun to reexamine the idea of feminine sexuality as lack, seeking instead to reinstate the hyper-feminine body as a fundamental site of sexual pleasure. For these purposes, Mae West comes into play as a body that demonstrates the idea of hyper-feminine sexuality that is being deployed for its own pleasure; further, it is a pleasure that is predicated not on lack, but rather on an over-determined hyper-feminine plentitude.

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PLATE 33. Hyper-feminine bodily plentitude (Belle of the Nineties, Paramount Pictures, 1934).

Aside from Freud, part of the idea of viewing feminine sexuality as lack stems from a continuance of the kind of male-centered vision and discourse that followed from Freud’s fundamentally misogynistic perspectives on women, homosexuals, and their sexuality. With his theories of sex and sexuality so pervasively ingrained in Western culture, and as a starting-off point for feminist discourses on sexuality, within feminist criticism similar kinds of misogynistic theories often get deployed, wittingly or unwittingly, through the particular kind of language that is chosen when speaking about feminine sexuality, and the masculine-centered discourse this language tends to connote. For instance, Schissel writes that with her play “Sex Mae West broke with Broadway moralities and made sin a domestic product” (7). In this statement, through

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
close alignment of the words “moralities,” “sin,” and “domestic,” Schissel has encoded both West’s public use of the word sex as well as her hyper-feminine sexualized image as a “sin,” a word with a very religious connotation to be sure, while also moving this “sin” from the theatrical, or public, sphere, relocating it in the feminine-centered sphere of the domestic space. Schissel is thereby closely associating women’s sexuality in general with sin or a transgressive act in any sphere (while one wonders exactly what “Broadway moralities” could possibly be). One can argue that with the term “domestic product” instead of the private sphere (thereby making its own double entendre), Schissel refers more broadly to the nation. Here, the same kind of association about women’s sexuality as inherently and necessarily tied to discourses of morality and religion continues to locate women’s sexuality within masculinist discourse, except now it is on a grander scale.

While seeking to assert the important and revolutionary aspects of West’s work, Schissel continues in the same vein of masculinist discourse by referring to the “vulgarity” [of the language in] “Mae West’s plays,” which she writes “was meant to disrupt standards of propriety.”

She continues:

[Her] speech was intended to sow the seeds of revolution. No vic-tory is so triumphant as a dirty word spoken in public; no guerilla warfare so subversive as the moment when an audience, in spite of its best intentions, laughs at a really low joke. West’s assault on the standards of decency would be played out in the arena of sexual license, but her enduring signifi cance is her comedy where words are weapons and wit is the arsenal of attack. (Schissel 2–3) In spite of Schissel’s great assertions about the revolutionary aspects of West’s work, the underlying connotative assumptions about West and women’s sexuality in general that are continually being deployed are that there is something essentially “bad,” even really bad, about feminine sexuality, instead of the more affi rming construction made by West herself, that “when I’m bad, I’m better.” While Schissel, as well as other well-intentioned critics, are perhaps themselves merely refracting a

Sex as a Cinematic “Queening”

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PLATE 34. The hyper-feminine sexualized body and the aging body (Mae West and Alison Skipworth, Night After Night, Paramount Pictures, 1932).

pervasive masculine cultural discourse concerning women’s sexuality for lack of a better point of entry into discussion, the problem persists: how do critics, when writing about such hyper-feminine sexualized bodies, get out from under apparent cultural, and even feminist culture, dictums that assume there is something fundamentally wrong with hyper-feminine sexualized bodies?

As the conversation develops, the problem of effectively demonizing feminine sexuality only seems to get worse. For example, In Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, Robertson appears to pathologize not only West’s sexualized image as performer, but also calls into account another site of contentious ground in feminist discourses by deploying the more familiar masculinist trope about the transgressiveness

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
of hyper-feminine sexuality, one that in fact takes the next step; to criminalize it. Robertson writes that West’s “role as performer functions as a code for, and is seen as a piece with prostitution” ( Guilty Pleasures 45).

To label West’s performances “as a piece with prostitution” opens up a range of debate; for instance, while it would be both reckless and heart-less to deny that throughout history women all over the world have suffered terrible crimes under cultural institutions of prostitution, whether by coercion or personal choice, there are many cultures, as well as prosex feminists, who hold the view that prostitution should be legally sanctioned and protected, and that women should be able to exercise the right to use their sexuality as they see fi t, even if it means selling it for personal profi t.47

What these pro-prostitution debates tell us, however, is of course that women’s sexuality and its use have been always been historically and culturally regulated, policed, even criminalized. In other words, even in the case of personal choice, where a woman chooses to sell her body for profi t, and perhaps even for her own pleasure, the same or similar kinds of surveillance and control enter into her own private decisions about her own body.48 In fact, in any instance where it can possibly be inferred that West’s character is indeed performing an act of prostitution, West, as screenwriter, designs the dialogue to set the viewer straight (even in her pre-Code fi lms). For instance, in her fi lm I’m No Angel, her character Tira, a burlesque carnival performer and lion tamer, shows her young friend, Alicia (Gertrude Michael), her trunk of “trophies” that she has collected from her various suitors. The case is full of genuine semi-precious jewelry, amber, jade, and pearls. Pasted to the lid of trunk are numerous pictures of her former paramours (interestingly, one is of a black man).

Alicia exclaims, “Gosh, Tira, you always have such swell things. How do you do it on your salary?” Tira replies, “It’s a gift dearie; it’s a gift.”

Tira then tells how a different beau gave her each piece of jewelry, pointing out their individual pictures from a hyper-masculine-appearing group of sailors, musclemen, and athletes. Tira next gives Alicia a jade necklace that she has been admiring and counsels the young woman with the sage advice that, when it comes to men, “Take all ya can get, dearie,

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PLATE 35. “It’s a gift dearie; it’s a gift.” (Mae West, Gertrude Michael, I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

and give as little as possible.” While this scene is loaded with some of West’s best witticisms, it more directly speaks to charges of whether or not West’s fi lmic characters are engaging in prostitution. By directing Alicia with the witty sexual euphemism to “give as little as possible,”

Tira is making clear that she receives these gifts from men without “putting out,” as it were. She instead spends time with these men because she honestly enjoys their company and admiration (and possibly sex), and well, if they happen to give her nice presents, then that is all the nicer too.49 Engaging in sex for profi t seems the least of her concerns in her pursuit of her own pleasure.

Similar scenes of West’s characters disavowing actual acts, or even suggested off-screen acts of prostitution, occur regularly throughout her

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fi lms; in fact, wherever possible the issue could be raised, West addresses it directly.50 The perception of West’s characters as prostitutes arises from the character of Margy in her fi rst play, Sex. Margy is a character whose plight West treated sympathetically as a woman coerced into her profession by economic need. However, Margy is also a character who argues convincingly that, in spite of her condition, she should not be looked on by society as someone deserving of any less respect than any

“high-class dame” would receive. She makes this argument while berating a society woman for her feelings of sexual and womanly superiority. Margy points out to her that marriage is in fact a form of legalized prostitution, so how could the society girl be any better than her?51 It is a question well worth asking ourselves. If in fact West’s characters were prostitutes, why and how does that change our view of these characters or West herself? More importantly, we should ask ourselves, from where do these kinds of views originate?

Ramona Curry, while herself often referring to West’s characters as prostitutes, gets probably closer than any critic to untying the knot of why West has her protagonists barely skirt the label of “prostitute” while disavowing it, when she writes that, “central among the qualities that

‘Mae West’ represented in 1933 were an active, even predatory, sexuality and a bold, mocking manner, particularly toward men, who she appeared to desire sexually but otherwise not to need” (2). Robertson, too, on occasion admits the potential pro-sex feminist value of West’s work: “Functioning as an autonomous agent in the public entertainment sphere, West’s character suggests the possibility of breaking free from prescribed roles for women in all spheres, and especially in relation to sex and marriage” (“Kinda Comedy” 66).

While occasionally acknowledging West’s pro-sex feminist potential, Robertson, like Schissel, makes a number of misleading, and often frankly inaccurate statements about the body of West’s work; for instance, Robertson writes that West “does not get married at the end of the fi lm, does not die, does not take the road to exile” (“Kinda Comedy” 66). While it is true West’s characters do not die, they do, however,

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get married, and do so often. More importantly, they marry the man of their choice, a man they truly love and one who is both admiring and accepting of their open candor about owning and expressing their sexuality. In fact, when her characters, such as Rose Carlton in Klondike Annie and Cleo Borden in Goin’ To Town get married, they seem to turn many ideas of traditional marriage upside-down by marrying much younger men, who are often far outside of their social class. Or they become the dominant partner in the marriage, the one who calls all the shots.

Robertson further mentions how West’s “awarish and transgressive sexuality was taken at once as a pose or joke and as a real source of PLATE 36. The much younger Lord Carrington escorts the new Lady Carrington from the bedroom (Goin’ To Town, Paramount Pictures, 1935).

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power—and fans, especially female fans, could identify with both sides”

(“Kinda Comedy” 66). By “awarish,” presumably Robertson refers to West’s self-referentiality in her roles, or perhaps that West was “aware”

of performing her feminine sexuality. While not all viewers would consider West’s transgressive sexuality to be a “pose or joke,” many would certainly view it “as a real source of power.” In the idea of “joke,” Robertson is perhaps indirectly asserting a pervasive idea in some feminist culture that hyper-feminine sexuality is just so outrageous that it must be funny, fake, or both. This stance presumes that there is fundamentally one kind of femininity and that hyper-femininity is artifi cial. Stripped of that artifi ciality, it is fundamentally (and more properly, one might add) masculine, a view which leads us, via a few generations of feminist critics, directly back to Freud.

To be fair, Robertson’s overall critique of West is mostly ambivalent, with more weight given to undermining the legitimacy of West’s hyper-feminine sexuality and that of her characters. While she lauds West by commenting that, “the sexual autonomy her star text represented could not be contained” (“Feminist Camp” 47), Robertson also doubles back on her own apparent admiration for West by critiquing what she designates as West’s “complicity in her own sexual objectifi cation” (“Kinda Comedy” 59). When discussing West, this idea of objectifi cation becomes a fraught issue, for who is really being objectifi ed, sexually or otherwise, by Mae West’s star text? Is it sexual objectifi cation if one chooses to express and display their sexuality, as West did? Is West the “sucker”

here, or is it her targeted audience, one that often appears in her fi lms, groups of everyday, middle class, usually married men? These are the

“suckers” the sex goddess Tira sneeringly refers to in I’m No Angel as she exits the stage.

By designating West and her characters as prostitutes, Curry goes further than Robertson in actually naming them so, rather than just suggesting prostitution: “West’s self-characterization equated female prostitution to a woman’s pursuit of pleasurable sex with a succession of partners” (5). Again, it is diffi cult to fi nd a single instance of actual prostitution in West’s fi lms. Even in her fi rst pre-Code fi lm appearance,

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PLATE 37. “Suckers” (I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

PLATE 38. “Am I making myself clear, boys?” (I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

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PLATE 39. The audience as “suckers” (I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1934).

Night After Night, when mistaken for being a prostitute in the fi lm, her character Maudie retorts, “Say, what kinda’ business do ya think I’m in anyway? I own a chain of beauty parlors!” However, Curry gets closer to identifying West’s fi lmic legacy and its relevance for issues of women’s sexuality, which is, interestingly, often intertwined in her fi lms with issues of race and class: “West’s historical impact in entertainment and American culture arguably arose from her comedic depiction of a taboo sexuality marked by race and class as well as gender deviance” (3). In fact, it is very often the marked intersection of these aspects of American life that makes the icon Mae West, with her sexualized body, represent something quintessentially American, and hyper-feminine.

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PLATE 40. Mae West as the quintessential American sex goddess (Belle of the Nineties, Paramount Pictures, 1934).

CHARITY GIRLS

In thinking about Mae West as perhaps the quintessential American sex goddess and her place in the sexual economy, it is important to examine the thoughts of some pro-sex feminists, such as Ann Snitow, who, writing in the early 1980s in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, expressed the problem of being a sexually desiring women in oppressive American society, a problem that one can still argue continues to exist today in a post-modern, post-feminist world: In spite of its publicity, sex remains oddly taboo, particularly for women. The widespread exposure to sexual imagery and talk seems not to have made a dent in the embarrassment… Perhaps taboo and

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shame are among the necessary products of capitalism; certainly shame, guilt, and trauma can short circuit the radical traditions that have named sex as creative and life-affi rming, so that even the most progressive works on sex are often stilted, cautious, or imbued with the melancholy of sex…But however much either the morally righteous or the politically earnest call sex trivial, a self-indulgent luxury, or one more consumer item in the capitalist marketplace, the commercialization of sex has failed to reduce it to a mere product. (9)

Suggesting the underlying economic impetus for the continuance of containing women’s sexuality to realm of “taboo,” Snitow underscores the linguistic problems that arise in the discourse surrounding women’s sexuality in both mainstream and feminist culture. She sees these problems arising from patriarchal views of women’s bodies that have been embedded in Western texts from the beginning: Traditionally women have been ‘the sex’; we have represented the body and its mixed pleasures and pains for everyone. When feminists try to celebrate female sexuality, we fi nd that men have been there fi rst, rhapsodic and mythic about virgins, mothers, and whores. It is hard to throw of their obfuscating enthusiasm. As a result, while feminism has cast its own new, if variable, illumina-tion on the subject of sex, the apprehension of sex as subject is still impeded by the density of former traditions. (10) After Freud, Michel Foucault enters in with his treatment of the medicalized discourse of women’s bodies. As Snitow and others have pointed out, however, “his analysis rests, as it must, on the obsessive male discourse that runs through the centuries” (10). In fact, in Foucault’s History of Sexuality one questions the remarkable silence of his medicalized female bodies. When reading retrospectively, it is almost as if the pen-dulum has swung back from the extreme disembodiment of social construction, to an idea of a female that exists entirely as a body (and an anatomized body at that) that bears little resemblance to and spurs little recognition for most women. In other words, Foucault speaks from a

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masculinist perspective about feminine bodies in a way that elides their possibility of speaking for themselves.

Many of these problems of masculinist thought exist in Marx’s work as well, a theorist that other pro-sex feminists have turned to in their attempts to connect theories of sexualized bodies with those of history and capitalism. Nancy Hartsock, in Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, writes that: Thus Marx’s critique of private property fails to recognize that this property is in fact in male control. The Marxian reluctance to face questions of gender, sexuality, and sexual domination means that Marxist theory provides inadequate accounts of the genderedness of power relations feminists work to understand, most particularly those connected with sexuality…(146) This was of course because Marx himself was working within the bourgeois structure of relations of gendered property.52 Pointing to how these relations arise and impact women, Snitow writes that, “It was Fourier, for instance, who fi rst perceived the connection, popular with subsequent sex radicals, between sexual monogamy and the acquisitive mentality fostered by private property” (14). At its base, capitalism functions as a way of containing women’s sexuality as property to be owned, controlled, and used for both propping up and furthering other modes of production and consumerism. Snitow goes on to reveal how this state-sanctioned monogamy is a social construct: Engels in later life edged toward a more searching position. His Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) presented monogamy as a historical construction, and evolution from an earlier system of sexual promiscuity but one which represented a world-historic setback for women, associated with the emergence of a double standard, private property, and class relations…He criticized legally sanctioned monogamy as part and parcel of system of private property. (15)

As Hartsock makes clear, “Monogamous marriage is an essential condition for the development of industrial capitalism” (149). She goes on point

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out that the crux of the problem of fi nding a language appropriate for writing about sexualized women for feminists, pro-sex or otherwise, is that her

“reading of these and other analyses leads [her] to argue that sexuality in our society is defi ned almost exclusively in masculine terms, and moreover that hostility and domination are central to the construction of masculine sexuality” (Hartsock 7). If sexuality in American society is written exclusively in masculine terms, then women’s bodies become palimpsestic bodies, in which their bodies are written over with and described in terms that fundamentally arise from masculine bodies, not the feminine. This is an important crux of the problem of what we speak about when we discuss the hyper-feminine sexualized body. Further, this language is inscribed over these bodies: “because issues of power are at the same time issues about the nature of legitimate community, power seems irreducibly to involve questions of eros or sexuality” (Hartsock 6; author’s emphasis).

Snitow also writes of the ways that late twentieth and twenty-fi rst century contemporary feminist discussions of sex have dealt, by and large, with incorporating some form of sexuality into women’s lives; however, these discussions have been quite limited: While feminists were acutely aware of the legal and social inequalities of marriage, they also recognized that in a society that denied them the means to support themselves, most women only had two choices: marriage or prostitution—or, later, celibacy and career. (21) Interestingly, however, when we look retrospectively at the late 1920s–

1930s, the most prominent era of Mae West’s cultural circulation, we fi nd the gender construct of the “new woman”: the postwar fl apper, younger sister of the revolutionary women of the earlier milieu [who] was sexually active but seemingly apolitical; a new style of family life, the ‘New Deal’ [which], theoretically incorporated her needs for emotional and sexual expression while a new mode of consumer capitalism declared its fashions, cosmetics, and household goods to be adequate expressions of her erotic identity. (Snitow 19)

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Relating ideas of the “new woman” with aesthetic modes of femininity contemporary with West, Curry writes that the “luxurious materials arrayed on West’s photographed body signal wealth as well as sexual allure. Carefully lit and posed, the rich textures evoke a highly tactile sensuality and so metonymically encode West’s elaborately costumed image as sexual.” Thus, “West’s highly decorative and evidently impractical costumes also mark her as a creature of leisure, fi tted for display rather than physical labor” (6). Curry points directly to how ideas of sexuality can often implicitly arise from an aesthetic sense of bodily or tactile pleasure. In this instance, it is a kind of pleasure that is both tactile and visual.

Moreover, this particular kind of bodily pleasure and presentation is often read in culture as sex or, in the presence of clothing, at least as signifying the sexual body. In the 1920s–1930s, these kinds of aesthetic and scopto-philic bodily pleasures associated with the feminine arose from European ideas of luxury and the vestiges of America’s own Gilded Age.

To illustrate the relation of the image of the “new woman” to West’s seductive costuming and empowered performance of hyper-feminine sexuality, it is useful to turn to Kathy Peiss’ work, “ ‘Charity Girls’ and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality 1880–1920.”

Peiss’ work indirectly gives relevant background to the infl uence on West’s performance of hyper-feminine sexuality and how it appears to get bound up with ideas about prostitution. Peiss writes that in the 1930s, America experienced another wave among many reformist efforts where: Reformers, social workers, and journalists viewed working-class women’s sexuality through middle-class lenses, invoking sexual standards that set ‘respectability’ against ‘promiscuity.’ When applied to unmarried women, these categories were constructed foremost around the biological fact of premarital virginity, and secondarily by such cultural indicators as manner, language, dress, and public interaction. Chastity was the measure of young women’s respectability, and those who engaged in premarital intercourse, or, more importantly, dressed and acted as though they had, were classed as promiscuous women or prostitutes. ( Charity Girls 75)

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Most useful for my purpose here is how Peiss “describes an urban subculture of young women who orchestrated their premarital social lives in the street, dance hall, theater, and at work” ( Charity Girls 74). This is in fact the cultural milieu in which West was working, in which she was raised, and one that came to infl uence her views on feminine sexuality.

Therefore, West was truly both working within as well as against the very culture from which she came. Instead of a kind of “masculine female performing an imitation of femininity,” or a “female in drag,” as Robertson and others have written about West, the actress was instead performing versions of what she most identifi ed herself as—a woman who came from a middle class, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn neighbor-hood. In the evenings, West’s contemporaries, working girls, or women employed in small income jobs, such as shop girls and waitresses, would venture out into the avenues in the evenings after work, looking to meet up with men who could show them a good time in return for a bit of fl irting, petting, or the occasional sexual encounter under cover of the dark: These women were known in underworld slang as ‘charity girls,’

a term that differentiated them from prostitutes because they did not accept money in their sexual encounters with men…they

‘offer themselves to strangers, not for money, but for presents, attention, and pleasure, and most important, a yielding to sex desire. ( Charity Girls 81)

Importantly, Peiss also mentions how, for many daughters of new waves of immigrants, the urban identity the “charity girls” strived to form was a part of the kind of assimilation into American society that they sought to accomplish:

Born or educated in the United States, many adopted a cultural style meant to distance themselves from their immigrant roots and familial traditions. Such women dressed in the latest fi nery, negotiated city life with ease, and sought intrigue and adventure with male companions. For this group of women, sexuality became a central dimension of their emergent culture. ( Charity Girls 76)

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As Schissel points out, “West’s language came out of the speakeasies”

(8). In addition to the speakeasies, West’s bodily performances as an actress came out of the vaudeville theatres in which she worked because she virtually grew up on the stage. West’s self-concept as sex goddess was nurtured in this way. Coming from a working-class background, like her adolescent and teen peers, West “incorporated a free and easy sexuality into [her] attractions” (Schissel 77). “Music halls and cheap vaudeville regularly worked sexual themes and suggestive humor into comedy routines and songs,” and in fact “one reformer found that ‘the songs are suggestive of everything but what is proper, the choruses are full of double meanings, and the jokes have broad and unmistakable hints of things indecent” (Peiss 77). For these reasons, a brief summary of Peiss’ work on “charity girls” in New York is useful here for furthering our discussion of West’s performance and understanding of feminine sexuality: The heterosexual orientation of these amusements made popularity a goal to be pursued through dancing ability, willingness to drink, and eye-catching fi nery…Many women used clothes as means of drawing attention to themselves, wearing high-heeled shoes, fancy dresses, costume jewelry, elaborate pompadours, and cosmetics (8)…While waltzes and two-steps were common, working women’s repertoire included ‘pivoting’ and ‘tough dances.’ While pivoting was a wild spinning dance that promoted a charged atmo-sphere of physical excitement, tough dances ranged from a slow shimmy, or shaking of the hips and shoulders, to boisterous animal imitations (76)…Treating was not a one-way proposition, however, but entailed an exchange relationship. Financially unable to reciprocate in kind, women offered sexual favors of varying degrees, ranging from fl irtatious companionship to sexual intercourse, in exchange for men’s treats (78)…Through the use of slang and ‘vulgar’ language, heterosexual romance was expressed in a sexually explicit context (79)…Respectability was not predicated solely on chastity. ( Charity Girls 83) Thus the historical background Peiss provides us with in her excellent work on “charity girls” gives great insight into where many aspects of

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West’s trademark performance arose—the elaborate costumes, her use of the double entendre, the “shimmy” dance, and “getting all you can, while giving as little as possible.” What Peiss’ work shows us is that West was a creature of her own culture, and while today, with post-modern critics reading West retrospectively, her elaborate performance of hyper-feminine sexuality appears outrageous, artifi cial, and even camp to many critics, her performance was actually much closer to her own culture. Not only did West represent the culture of which she was a part, she gave back to that culture exactly what it wanted to see. Like cinema itself, West as playwright, screenwriter, and actress, had a self-refl exive relationship with her audience and she represented an American idea of hyper-feminine sexuality that America wanted to see, while also helping women in places outside of New York and L.A. through a PLATE 41. The shimmy dance (I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

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process of imitation construct their own versions of an empowered feminine sexuality.53

FEMINIST CAMP

With the historical background Peiss provides, it is now much easier to return to Robertson’s critical rendition of West and her work to sort out some of its more vexing issues. Robertson writes the problematic formulation that West “parodically reappropriated the live entertainment traditions of burlesque and female impersonation to create ironic distance from gender stereotypes supported by these traditions, thus putting into question contemporary stereotypes” (“Kinda Comedy” 58). While West certainly incorporated elements of burlesque into her work, she did not see herself as a female impersonator or as impersonating femininity in any sense. Rather than seeing herself as representing a stereotype, she instead embraced a specifi c type of hyper-feminine sexuality, which she more generally viewed as a normative and empowered mode of expression for hyper-femininity. It is only later in post-modern feminist and social constructionist theories that her performance has come to be thought of as an impersonation of femininity, giving uncertain weight to the notion that West was herself a social constructionist concerned with gender theory. Robertson writes further that, “West was simultaneously sexy and a parody of sex; she was both a sex object and a sexual subject” (“Kinda Comedy” 63). This is a paradoxical formulation about West that informs the ambivalence about the actress throughout much of Robertson’s essay. What thus becomes apparent is how much of a backformation of post-modern feminist social constructionist views gets applied to the actress. About parody, one must ask why West would go to such trouble to distance herself from what was for her an already-felt sense of a sexual bodily identity that she lived in the theatre and out. We must also ask ourselves exactly who is the target of West’s characters’

seductions.

Many of Robertson’s social constructionist assertions about West arise because she builds her critique on such ideas as Mary Anne Doane’s

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thesis about feminine masquerade, where “the link between sexuality and performance in West’s fi lm offers, then, an instance of self-conscious female masquerade” (“Feminist Camp” 44). Robertson seems harsher in her critique when she asserts that:

West seems like a female impersonator because she appears to be a grotesque, a man in drag, a joke on women, and not a woman.

Some feminist critics, however, have taken on the comparison to claim West’s style as an instance of deliberate and ironic female masquerade. (“Kinda Comedy” 60)

At this point, one has to ask the question: What may specifi cally seem

“grotesque” about West’s body? Is it because it represents a specifi c type of hyper-feminine sexuality that infuriates particular factions of anti-sex, anti-pornography, anti-feminine feminists? In her argument Robertson attempts to locate a sense of gender uncanniness about West in order to claim overall that West’s sexuality and gender identity are essentially masculine. Thus, the idea of West as feminine masquerade follows on the very same Freudian constitution of feminine lack and masculine feminism, which reads the feminine through the oxymoronic masculine feminist gaze. Further, it is a gaze that ultimately serves to interpret West’s hyper-feminine body within masculinist terms, thereby effectively reinscribing it into masculine culture.54

Robertson’s critique does not end with her assertion that West is merely performing without any authentic sense of sexuality and/or feminine identity. Her discussion leads next to a critical erasure of yet other bodies, when her argument further appropriates camp from gay men to use instead as a feminist aesthetic. Making a similar claim about female impersonators, as she has done about West, Robertson writes that

“Female impersonators absorb and displace a female aesthetic. West recuperates this aesthetic as a female aesthetic” (“Kinda Comedy” 63).

This kind of reasoning seems too circumlocutive to satisfy the imagination not only about how West may have chosen to perform, but also how female impersonators may operate. There seem to be far too many

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levels of displacement here to negotiate reasonably. One suspects it is much more diffi cult to sort out where ideas of femininity and hyper-femininity begin and are usually located in the fi rst place. Robertson mentions how:

Curry, too, describes West’s female masquerade as a modifi ed form of gender reversal or drag. While arguing for a feminist reading of West as a “female female impersonator,” Curry claims that West represents an instance of deliberate female masquerade through her embodiment of masculine characteristics, as a “phallic woman”

and as a “female displaying a male displaying a female.” (“Feminist Camp” 33)

At this juncture, as a critic one begins to experience a sense of exaspera-tion at how many levels West seems to be bodily removed from herself.

Curry writes further that West “represented both an excessively yet earnestly feminine woman and an implicitly gay male female impersonator” (Curry xvii). One wonders who is supposed to be imitating whom.

Much of this critical confusion about West’s suggested gender dys-phoria most likely arises from one of her early biographies which states that, because of West’s bold and frank attitudes about her own sexuality it had been speculated that “this world-famous sex goddess was not a woman but the greatest female impersonator of all time.” This notion apparently lingered despite costumer Edith Head’s testimony: “ ‘I’ve seen Mae West without a stitch and she’s all woman. No hermaphrodite could have bosoms…well, like two large melons’ ” (Eells 12). Of course, the speculation arose because unlike most everyday oppressed women, West spoke about sexuality in the same terms as did men, yet gave these terms an ironic twist as a way to empower the hyper-feminine. If anything can be designated as “masculine” about Mae West, it was her insightful ability to recognize that the cultural language surrounding feminine sexuality was indeed masculine. Her masculine move was to deploy this language in a way that shifted its terms and meaning into a language that better described and empowered the feminine.

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PLATE 42. Tira puts her head in the lion’s mouth (I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

QUEENING

Taking up again the problem of West and feminine masquerade in relation to gay men within post-modern discussions of camp, queer theory critics such as Cynthia Morrill have attempted to deal with its problematic lingering formulation of social construction: “Feminist masquerade and mimicry theory share with ‘orthodox’ psychoanalytic inquiry the reduction of same-sex eroticism to an order delimited by structures pertaining to homosexual desire” (111). This critical move in fact disallows the existence of hyper-feminine heterosexuality and desire. Curry points out how rather than West appropriating camp from gay men, it was in fact gay men who recognized West’s attempt to attack the sexual double standard held for women: “while camp’s theatrical and ironic exaggerations are most frequently associated with female masquerade,

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it is gay men, rather than women of any sexual orientation, who have primarily generated and appreciated camp traditions” (124; author’s emphasis).

Stripped of the ideas of female masquerade/impersonation/feminist camp, today West offers her women viewers a model of a sexually empowered woman. As Kate Davy asserts, “Female impersonation, while it certainly says something about women, is primarily about men, addressed to men, and for men,” and more importantly for our discussion, she also writes that, “Both female and male impersonation foreground the male voice and, either way, women are erased” (133). However, Robertson’s thesis on Mae West as feminist camp states, This essay argues for the role of women as producers and consumers of camp, using Mae West’s star text as an example. I aim to de-essentialize the link between gay man and camp and its alliance with gay subculture. But I suggest that camp as a structural activity has an affi nity with feminist discussions of gender construction, performance, and enactment; and that, as such, we can examine a form of camp as a feminist practice. In taking on camp for women, I reclaim a female form of aestheticism, related to female masquerade, that articulates and subverts the image-and culture-making processes to which women have traditionally been given access. (“Kinda Comedy” 57; author’s emphasis) In response to the argument that feminists should appropriate camp from gay culture, Cynthia Morrill responds that: Some recent post-modernist cultural theories have claimed subcultural lesbian and gay Camp as a model for a particular type of gender performance analyzed through the tropics of masquerade theory. Critics link the material performative practices of lesbian and gay “role playing”…with the feminist description of psychoanalytic theories about female masquerade and its twisted sister, female mimicry. (110)

Thus Robertson’s move to use the image of Mae West to “reclaim camp as a political tool and rearticulate it within the theoretical framework of

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feminism” is one fraught with much controversy (“Feminist Camp” 6).

Robertson claims that
despite camp’s seemingly exclusive affi liation with gay men and misogynist tendencies, camp offers feminists a model for critiques of gender and sex roles. Camp has an affi nity with feminist discussion of gender construction, performance, and enactment; we can thereby examine forms of camp as feminist practice. (“Feminist Camp” 6)

She further asserts “[t]hat gay men appropriate a feminine aesthetic and certain female stars but that women, lesbian or heterosexual, do not similarly appropriate aspects of gay male culture” (Robertson, “Feminist Camp” 5). Thus, there is an almost defensively postured tit-for-tat argument at work here; if what female impersonators are doing can be considered misogynistic, then one should not feel bad about appropriating their aesthetic as they do women’s. But this argument overlooks the possibility of a form of femininity that already circulates amongst female impersonators: drag queens. Moreover, it ignores the particular kinds of political aspects that are historically associated with camp aesthetics. To make the argument “for the crucial role of heterosexual women as producers and consumers of camp” (Robertson, “Feminist Camp” 9), seems disingenuous on many levels.

Robertson is able to make this move, however, because, just as she does with Freud, Doane, masquerade, and feminine lack, she begins with Sontag’s early formation of camp as an aesthetic act: “Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifi ce” (“Notes on Camp” 106). As Moe Meyer writes in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, “Sontag’s 1964 essay, ‘Notes on Camp,’ complicated the interpretations by detaching signifying codes from their queer signifi ed” (5). This is the same move that Robertson performs when removing camp from the queer camp to the feminist (which is not to say these do not at times politically overlap). As Meyer

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also points out, however, reading camp as a form of “aestheticization,”

as does Robertson, when she reads West’s performance as a camp female aesthetic, evacuates camp’s political purpose: “This objectivist bias that reduces people to thing-like status is used to label Camp as extreme aestheticization and therefore apolitical” (12); “Camp is not simply a ‘style’

or ‘sensibility’ as is conventionally accepted. Rather, what emerges is a suppressed and denied oppositional critique embodied in the signifying practices that processually constitute queer identities” (12); and “Camp is both political and critical” (1). Meyer names Sontag’s attempt to reduce a political act to aesthetics as:

the birth of the camp trace, or residual camp, a strategy of un-queer appropriation of queer praxis, whose purpose, as I will demonstrate, is the enfusement of the un-queer with the queer aura, acting to stabilize the ontological challenge of Camp through a dominant gesture of reincorporation. Thus, there are not different kinds of Camp. There is only one. And it is queer. It can be engaged directly by the queer to produce social visibility in the praxis of everyday life, or it can be manifested as the camp trace by the un-queer in order, as I will argue, to provide queer access to the apparatus of representation. (5)

Robertson believes, however, that “Because gay men have been marginalized, camp commits itself to and identifi es with images of the marginal and that women simply represent the primary type of the marginal in society” (“Feminist Camp” 5). But this seems problematic positioning.

While both women and gay men may share experiences of oppression, they are not the same. Also, how does one sort out which group truly represents “the primary type of the marginal”? Meyer argues how “gay writers seeking to reclaim the discourse of Camp through a restoration of its homosexual connotations fail to address issues of non-gay and Pop culture appropriation” (8). Speaking directly to the kinds of problems Robertson’s formulation on feminist camp present, Meyer writes of how

“The bourgeois subject of camp celebrates the invisibility of the queer, rejoices in the act of appropriation, and, in effect, derives pleasure from

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the erasure of the queer” (15; author’s emphasis). Importantly, Meyer also argues that

[b]ecause un-queer appropriations interpret Camp within the context of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality, they no longer qualify as Camp as it is defi ned here. In other words, the un-queer do not have access to the discourse of Camp, only to derivatives constructed through the act of appropriation (1)…The queer is erased in representation at the very moment that Camp is subjected to a dominant interpretation. Pop camp emerges, then, as the product of a visually biased dominant reading of queer praxis interpreted through the object residue that remains after a queer agent has been rendered invisible. (13)

Yet Robertson insists that “Feminine camp, then, views the world ‘queerly’: that is, from a non-or anti-straight, albeit frequently non-gay position”

(“Feminist Camp” 10). Through this statement, Robertson both completes her act of appropriation, while apparently evacuating gay men and the queer-identifi ed from their political use of camp. Robertson performs a similar kind of move for the hyper-feminine body of Mae West when she effectively erases her hyper-feminine sexuality, reducing it to a masquerade and re-inscribing it overall as masculine.

Queer critic John Bak more accurately states that, instead of appropriating camp for her own performance as an act of imitating female impersonators, that if “West sought to attract audiences with the gay spectacle, then, her serious intention was to treat homosexuality openly and justly, tempering campy comedy with the penetrating psychodrama that underlies what she saw as the tragic destiny of all ‘queens’ ” (6).

Bak refers to a fairy/queer binary that West failed to recognize in which, while she lauded feminine gay males, she apparently seemed to detest masculine gay men (8). He asserts that “West…equated homosexuality with effeminacy” (Bak 5). Bak also writes of West’s sympathetic treatment of gay men in her plays.

In The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society, David Van Leer interestingly argues that camp originates in the homosexual community, gets “imported” into mainstream culture, and then “re-

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appropriated” into homosexual culture as a way of making fun of the culture of heternormativity:

a linguistic tradition like camp may reside as much in its movement between subcultures as in its relation to the cultures that claim it as their own…“Queening” then calls attention to the extent that much camp humor is not appropriation but re- appropriation—a recapturing of something that was already a part of gay cultural heritage.

“Queening,” then, suggests the way in which gay men and to some extent women shape dominant cultural forms by silently importing into heterosexual plots rhetoric and motifs more common to their own homosexual community. At its simplest it overturns notions of camp as merely a humorous exaggeration of straight culture. (67)

The fl uidity with which camp moves between cultures but still maintains its origins as homosexual critique of mainstream culture seems a more plausible approach to consider when thinking about Mae West and camp. For example, one can argue that instead of being camp, or even feminist camp, similarly to how she constructed her ideas of femininity from the cultural milieu of “charity girls,” West also picked up on the rhetorics of camp from the gay male theatrical performers and drag queens with whom she worked. West indirectly signifi ed gay cultural forms into the dominant culture, but in the main these forms remain queer, not feminist. Certainly West was consciously aware of performing this kind of ventriloquism, and despite its comic effect, she performed this effect in all seriousness. Later, homosexual culture, recognizing her attempts at critiquing inequities in power with regard to sex and gender, re-appropriated their own camp rhetoric from West in order to make fun of straight culture, as did West, but not necessarily, as Robertson would assume, to make fun of West herself. In camp performances of West, as well as other female camp fi gures, one can argue that in addition to the comic effect there exists a kind of reverence in imitation as well.

In addition to West’s association with gay male performers, as well as her creation and performance of the prostitute Margie in Sex, another often overlooked reason for West being considered a parody of herself

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can be located in Curry’s astute observation that “strong social taboos against the visibly aging sexual female body have also contributed to widespread perceptions of West as self-parody” (xxi). In spite of her youthful appearance, West was in her early forties when she fi rst began appearing in fi lm. The social stigma attached to hyper-feminine sexualized bodies in West’s case was additionally overwritten by ageist stigmas about women “of a certain age” in fact even possessing sexuality.

There is a seeming social incongruence for an older woman who still likes and talks about sex while also publicly displaying herself as a sexualized body. The culture still lacks a language for this display other than to pathologize, medicalize, distance, or estrange its affect. Thus, in addition to sex, race, and gender, we can add issues of aging to West’s all-American repertoire.

PLATE 43. Tira gets the man of her dreams (I’m No Angel, Paramount Pictures, 1933).

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Instead of a camp aesthetic, Chuck Kleinhans writes that what gay men and West shared is how “the fairy’s sexual aggressiveness in his solicitation with men was certainly inconsistent with the sexual passivity expected of a respectable woman, but it was entirely keeping with the sexual character ascribed to tough girl and prostitutes” (10). What gay men shared with Mae West was “the popularity of ‘strong’ or ‘tough’

women”; “they were regarded as women who disdained convention, were determinedly and overtly sexual in character, and did what they needed to get what they wanted” (Kleinhans 10).

CHAPTER 3

SEX AS CINEMATIC CODE

LANA TURNER’S STAR TEXT

AND THE DUPLICITY OF THE FEMME FATALE

“Lana Turner lived a lurid life” (Fischer, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” 95)

“She is not a fl ower of Jehovah” Witness in The Prodigal (1955)

“But few remembered Lana” (Updike 68) LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

Oh Lana Turner we love you get up (“Poem” O’Hara) In Imitation of Life, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, a woman who has single-mindedly climbed her way to the top of the acting profession at the expense of her relationship with her only child. While arguing with her sixteen-year-old daughter Susie (Sandra Dee, an actress who, in the fi lm, bears an eerie likeness to Turner’s own real-life daughter, Cheryl Crane), the daughter responds to her mother’s clumsy maternal attempt to soothe her, imploring, “Oh Mother, please stop acting!” This line of

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dialogue would have had a resounding reference for Turner’s contemporary audience. The fi lm followed closely after Turner’s and her daughter Cheryl’s real-life scandal with what became known as the Johnny Stompanato affair, in which Cheryl stabbed her mother’s lover to death with a kitchen knife, fearing he was threatening her mother’s life. While testifying in court about the killing, Turner was said by the press to have displayed “her best case of acting yet.”55

With this scene’s simultaneous dialogic reference to both Turner’s real-life drama in the courtroom and her on-screen character, Turner manages to reveal the duplicitous nature of acting itself. Interestingly, this kind of duplicity functions in many ways as does the fi lmic construct of the femme fatale in that these fi gures often appear to be something else ( innocent) than what they really are ( manipulative).

It is also true, however, as Elizabeth Cowie writes in “Film Noir and Women,” that “the pleasure and fascination of the duplicitous woman PLATE 44. LORA. If Steve is going to come between us, I’ll give him up. I’ll never see him again. SUSIE. Oh Mother, please stop acting! (Imitation of Life, Universal Pictures, 1959).

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in fi lm noir are, no doubt, as varied—or limited—as the different forms the fantasy takes” (124). Of course, most femme fatales are duplicitous by nature because what they usually need to hide is some kind of secret related to their sexuality, a secret that is not considered socially acceptable for a woman to reveal, including the existence and pursuit of their own sexual desire. While the femme fatale certainly uses her sexuality to manipulate men, she always attempts to appear innocent of its impact, because if she were more open about her sexuality, her manipulations would fail. Men would then think that she was not worthy of their attention and admiration. Cowie also interestingly suggests “another motive for the fantasy of the duplicitous woman, namely that it is her very ‘promiscuity’ (however veiled to accommo-date the Production Code) that secures her as a sexual subject” (“Film Noir and Women” 124).

In “The Dark World of Film Noir,” Timothy Perry amusingly, yet with a touch of seriousness, writes of femme fatales that these babes are man-killers. The classic noir femme fatale arche-type oozes raw, hot sexuality. She’s so beautiful most men would fi nd their hearts failing them if she jumped into their arms. But she’s extremely cold-blooded, and uses men to get what she wants. When they’re not conning the men into robbing for them, they’re convincing them to kill their husbands and/or boyfriends. ‘Come on. Do this for me. Then we can be together,’ is the classic femme fatale line…

Most always, by the time the man realizes he has [a conscience], that’s when the Fist of noir Fate comes smashing down on him.

Most times, it is when the femme fatale realizes he’s no longer any use to her scheme, and has him killed. (103) Of course, sometimes the femme fatale really is innocent of her sexual impact on men; sometimes she is just beautiful and sexy in her own right and attracts the attention of men, whether she wants to or not, and thus her beauty leads to her getting tangled up with the wrong men.

What may be especially interesting about the construct of the femme fatale is that when viewed from a perspective of fi lmic aesthetics, her image actually functions as a highly condensed instance of the techniques

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of the Production Code, such as editing and dialogic techniques which were designed for the most part to veil issues of women’s sexuality onscreen. Cowie notes that “in the 1940s the elements later identifi ed as fi lm noir allowed Hollywood to reintroduce themes of sexuality within the terms of the Production Code” ( Film Noir and Women 132). In More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, James Naremore mentions that

“Psychoanalytic feminism tells us something about [sexual violence in fi lm noir] (much feminist theory grows out of the study of American fi lm noirs), although the discussion needs to be historicized and linked to changing patterns of censorship” (12–13). He writes of the continuing fascination with fi lm noir and its post-modern reemergence as neo-noir: Numerous books and essays have been written on the topic, usually analyzing thrillers or crime pictures of the 1940s and 1950s in terms of their cynical treatment of the American Dream, their complicated play with gender and sexuality, and their foreground-ing of cinematic style. (Naremore 2)

With its “complicated play with gender and sexuality,” and its “foregrounding of cinematic style,” the cinematic image of the femme fatale comes in many ways to represent an ultimate product of fi lm, one that is especially and intriguingly bound up with issues of women’s sexuality. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it can in fact also be argued that the artistic process known as fi lm noir emerges as an expression of fi lmic techniques of the Production Code taken to their ultimate limits, at a time when the enforcement of the Code was beginning to wane. In “Women in Film Noir,” Janey Place mentions that a fuller explanation for the current surge of interest in fi lm noir must acknowledge its uniquely sensual visual style which often overwhelms (or at least acts upon) the narrative so compellingly that it stands as the only period in American fi lm in which women are deadly but sexy, exciting and strong. (63) In further consideration of the duplicity of the femme fatale, unlike the usually more reserved manner of her acting, in the previous shot

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Turner appears to be struggling to maintain an expression of sincerity, while she is in fact anything but sincere. This fi lmic moment of both diegetic and extra-diegetic reference further marks a particular convergence of what fi lm scholar Richard Dyer calls “the relationship between a star and her/his social context, namely the reconciliation of contradic-tions” (“Four Films of Lana Turner” 80). The contradiction in this scene from Imitation of Life, however, is less that of Dyer’s “collapsing” of a perceived social context with Turner’s star image, and is more a real point of convergence and condensation of Turner’s real-life image with that of her star image. Both the dialogue and failure of the maternal role refl ect Turner’s actual life circumstances.56 As Jeanine Basinger writes in her 1976 biography of Turner:

her screen roles began to refl ect personal scandals…She began to act out her own life on screen…She began to be cast only in roles that were symbolic of what the public knew—or thought they knew—about her as a person. (17–18)

Lucy Fischer also notes that “Lana Turner was one: an actress/mother—
like the persona she inhabits. Furthermore, her string of unstable marriages left her a single parent. Thus, Turner’s life reveals numerous parallels to the movie that are both accidental and intended (10). Screen actors simulate the dramas of their personal lives, replaying them in fi ctional worlds (5). The specter of Turner’s legend stalks the narrative”

(13). Fischer continues, commenting that: As Lora Meredith, Turner embodies a heroine whose story looks outward toward the public, reproducing certain strains within the cultural landscape (the problem of motherhood, the question of women and work). Turner’s character, however, also gazes inward toward the private, restaging scenes of her own intimate biography. (“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” 5) The “collapse” in Imitation of Life between Turner’s real-life and screen-life was of course consciously constructed by the Hollywood star machine,57 as were numerous others instances of interpersonal

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screen references throughout Turner’s long career (fi fty-four fi lms), as the Hollywood studio system sought to capitalize on Turner’s turgid life and numerous marriages and love affairs.58 As Basinger writes, “Lana Turner is the epitome of Hollywood machine-made stardom” ( Star Machine 181).

In spite of her long career and her cultural impact on women viewers, as well as the ideas she projected about women’s sexuality, there has been very little scholarly study of Lana Turner or her work, perhaps because many critics, including John Updike, feel that as an actress the quality of her work just didn’t warrant the attention: “she was a faded period piece, an old-fashioned glamour queen whose fi fty-four fi lms, over four decades, don’t amount, retrospectively, to much” (68). Of course, it is quite arguable as to whether or not Turner’s fi lms are memorable and worthy of critical attention. For example, one only has to think of her quite memorable and famous white-clad image as the femme fatale Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice to make an argument in favor of the value of her work for posterity.

Janey Place mentions that in fi lm noir: the source and the operation of the sexual women’s power and its danger to the male character is expressed visually both in the iconography of the image and in the visual style. The iconography is explicitly sexual and often explicitly violent as well. (54)

She mentions the “ ‘unnatural’ phallic power” of these highly-sexualized women:

the femme fatale is characterized by her long, lovely legs: our fi rst view…of Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice is a signifi cant, appreciative shot of their bare legs, a directed glance (so directed in the latter fi lm that the shot begins on her calves, cuts to a shot of her whole body, cuts back to the face of the man looking, then fi nally back to Lana Turner’s turban-wrapped angelic face) from the viewpoint of the male character to be seduced.

(Place 54)

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PLATE 45. a, b. Lana Turner; Lana Turner and James Garfi eld (The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

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What is also apparent in this famous shot are not only some of the more conventional aesthetic techniques of fi lm noir (many of which were derived from the presence of German fi lmmakers in Hollywood and their use of German expressionism), such as its expressive use of light and shadows, or chiaroscuro, but also, for example, the use of architectural lines and shadows to enclose the fi gure of femme fatale. In this instance there appear such a variety of geometrics that the effect is that, not only is she a danger that needs to be contained, but she is also perhaps, even more dangerously, crazy and deadly. The central focus, however, is on her sexuality because she is costumed to show it off to its best effect in attire that barely skirts the limits of the Code. Her blouse is extremely low cut, her abdomen is partly bared, and her shorts are extremely short.

What makes this outfi t more sexually tantalizing is that, instead of a showgirl’s outfi t, for which its appearance would be more acceptable, it is meant instead to be the attire of an ordinary housewife. Of course, Cora is anything but ordinary. The expression on her face appears very nonchalant and innocent of the effect her sexuality might have on her viewer, especially her male viewer in the fi lm, Frank. With her face framed by her turban and lit to highlight her high forehead and cheekbones, she appears youthful, angelic, and even reminiscent of Renais-sance portraitures of Madonna fi gures. This effect of highlighting her sexuality while making it appear innocent of its effect has a dual purpose. In her sexualized/angelic appearance, with her body mostly uncovered and dressed in white, while her head is covered, the fi gure of Cora both passes standards of the Code for portraying women’s sexuality and simultaneously uses those techniques to reveal and conceal it. What is especially interesting is how Cora’s hands are posed in a stance that can be described as one of thoughtful calculation or manipulation. Thus, the effect of duality, or duplicity, of both the application of the Code and the fi lmic construct femme fatale come into play here. Additionally, these techniques culminate to produce the effect of fi lm noir. They reveal how Lana Turner, actress, constructs her sexuality onscreen in a manner very much the same as she did off screen: by assuming a pose of innocent sexuality.

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While the technique of referencing a star’s real life and even real sex life in their fi lms, as well as in the marketing of these fi lms, is certainly not confi ned to Turner alone, she is unique to the extent that this was done almost always throughout her career. When reviewing her career, one often fi nds very close parallels between the screen roles she played and her personal circumstances, as well as the society in which she lived.

If, as Dyer has also written, “the star phenomenon depends on collapsing the distinction between the star-as-person and the star-as-performer…they reveal or express the personality or type-of-person of the star” (“Stars” 79), one can further add that in the case of Lana Turner, this “collapsing” becomes almost more of a truly inward implosion or intense condensation, because Lana the actress often seems to become Lana the person at times. It is diffi cult to tell where one ends and the other begins. In a sense, when reviewing Turner’s fi lms, biographies, and autobiographies, it becomes almost impossible to tease out the difference.

Further, the implosion among Turner’s real life, image(s), on-screen roles and personae becomes enacted less through any formulae to create a “star phenomenon” than it does through Turner’s own efforts to control both the studio’s and the public’s views about the multiplicity of her apparent centrifugal image, an image that relies on a “real” person at the center. In other words, it seems very likely that Lana Turner consciously constructed and controlled her own image in not only her professional but her personal life as well (and there is much evidence to support that she did).59 She did so not only to maintain her success as movie star, but, perhaps more importantly, to live her life on her own terms. Hers was a life that was often scandalous, in her rapacious sexual enjoyment of numerous husbands and lovers in an age when issues of sex, and particularly women’s sexuality, were meant to be kept both repressed and suppressed.

The construction and maintenance of this double image is also essential to Turner’s method of having her cake and eating it too: Lana Turner, real-life person, very much in the manner of a femme fatale, deliberately

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veiled her rapacious sexual desires by thoroughly play-acting the innocent, or the far-too-often unwitting “victim” of male deceit.60 She sought to persuade the public that the multiple scandals surrounding her life and marital failures hinged not upon her own search to fulfi ll her romantic and sexual desires, but rather on her always falling in love with the wrong men who would eventually deceive her.61 As John Updike quips,

“there is something ridiculous about a woman who takes seven husbands, as if she had rummaged through the drawers of masculinity and come up with seven dwarfs” (68). Here, Updike hints at the underlying disbelief that a critic must feel when confronted with the idea that Turner could have unwittingly fallen into and out of seven marriages.

Even more unbelievable, however, is that in her autobiography she still defends herself as woman who “disliked sex,” who only put up with it

“for love.”62

In fact, Turner’s entire autobiography, Lana, the Lady, the Legend, the Truth, strikes the careful reader as entirely constructed around her own responsibility for her life and its often tragic circumstances. Even its title hints at the carefully constructed yet troubled alliance between her multiple images and the appearance of truth. In her personal life, Lana was always perfectly in control of her own real-life decisions and image. Barring those complications she could not control, she sought to live out her life on her own terms, terms which were beyond even many present-day standards for women of what could still be considered sexually risqué.

In order to effect these desires, in the manner of a real-life femme fatale, Turner purposely lived a masked or veiled double life, constructed from the combined double persona of Lana Turner, real life unwitting victim of male deceit; and Lana Turner, actress, whose onscreen presence evoked for her viewers the very same act or persona of the innocent victim who evokes empathy from her audience for her assumed victimhood. All the while, under the cover of this mask she lives out her (sex) life on her own terms. Her double persona was necessary of course, because of the kinds of strict sexual standards placed on women in general at the time, and also because of the fi lm censorship efforts of

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the Production Code. For the most part, she quite often got away with this act, because, as Updike mentions, “a more suggestible and repressed public consumed the products of the Hollywood that made Lana Turner”

(75). Fischer also notes that this process of doubling is part of the mech-anization of the star machine: “the star phenomenon in American culture articulates a complex system of replication and doubling” (“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” 5).

In a sense then, Turner’s image itself becomes the ultimate sexual double entendre, if you will, one that is evocative of the very similar aesthetic practices of the Code itself, wherein masking and veiling techniques serve the purpose of concealing while yet simultaneously revealing (to the knowing viewer) issues of sex and sexuality. The enforcement of the Code effects this doubling not only through the mise-en-scene, or formal composition, and techniques of editing, but, of course, in the sly construction of dialogue as well. Thus, in spite of her off-screen actions, Turner’s real life and onscreen images come to represent a kind of oxymoronic innocent sexuality.63 The similarity here between the aesthetic techniques of the Code and Lana’s image is that Lana just as slyly constructed her own image as a form of visual double entendre. Her act, in this regard, as Susie points out in Imitation of Life, is not wholly non-transparent. As Dyer intriguingly remarks: with most stars, the point is to disguise the manufacturing so that they simply appear to be what their image proclaims them to be; with Turner, part of the fascination is the manufacture itself—with her, it is actually beguiling to see the strings being pulled. (“The Four Films of Lana Turner” 80)

Like the femme fatale of fi lm noir, part of what makes her image so riveting is the viewer’s recognition that there is something perhaps more sinister, or at the very least, suspicious, behind the actor’s façade; that there is something else really going on behind the mask of apparent innocence. Interestingly, from the perspective of fi lm history, these aesthetic fi lmic techniques of masking and double entendre also appear to reach their apotheosis as fi lm noir at a time when efforts of enforcing the Code

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are beginning to break down64 “Paradoxically, fi lm noir both complied with, yet undermined, Production Code censorship” (Biesen 41). In part, then, fi lm noir emerges as a culminating effect of the high stylization of the aesthetic principles and practice of the Code.

Most interesting is how these methods of suppressing sexuality or keeping sexuality seething beneath a deceptive appearance of innocence (for the purpose of meeting societal standards of sexual propriety) appear as well to become condensed as image of femme fatale itself.

Importantly, the sexuality that was being suppressed at the time was feminine sexuality, as masculine sexuality was seen as appropriate in its own seeking and expression (and usually rewarded), in comparison to that of the feminine. With regard to Lana and the implosion of her real-life image with star image, while deliberately also veiling one with the other, Lana Turner, actress and real-life person, comes in many ways to represent the ultimate femme fatale. And nowhere does this intense condensation of deceptive image and doubling become more apparent than in her fi lm, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Before discussing the fi lm, however, it is important to consider the fi lmic aesthetic methods used to represent women in fi lm noir. Place writes that:

Visually, fi lm noir is fl uid, sensual, extraordinarily expressive, making the sexually expressive woman, which is its dominant image of woman, extremely powerful. It is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous and, above all, exciting sexuality. In fi lm noir we observe both the social action of myth which damns the sexual woman and all who become enmeshed with her, and a particularly potent stylistic presentation of the sexual strength of woman which man fears. This operation of myth is so highly stylized and conventionalized that the fi nal “lesson” of the myth often fades into the background and we retain the image of the erotic, strong, unrepressed (if destructive) woman. (48)

Issues of sexuality also come to inform the image of the femme fatale in ways that reveal more at hand here in Turner’s cultural impact than

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is fi rst apparent. For instance, consider Dyer’s comment on Lana’s purported sexual rapacity:

She dated countless men, most of them famous, and hence was widely rumored to be a nymphomaniac (or, as an MGM executive quoted by Morella and Epstein revealingly put it, “Lana had the morals and the attitudes of a man…If she saw a muscular stage hand with tight pants and she liked him, she’d invite him into her dressing-room.” (“The Four Films of Lana Turner” 101) Interestingly, Dyer characterizes Turner’s lust for men as a pathologi-cal condition, that of “nymphomania,” when in the same sentence he quotes male Hollywood studio heads comparing her sexuality to that

“of a man.” The sexual double standard for differences in socio-cultural views of female versus male sexuality is very apparent here. If Lana is promiscuous and picks up men “with tight pants,” then she is exhibiting a kind of “masculine” sexuality that is seen as inappropriate, even patho-logical, for a woman. Turner denied this rumor in her biography, making light of its assumptions, by stating that this sort of sexual interlude would be impossible on a movie set because of all of the people present.65

John Updike criticizes Turner’s sexualized image even more harshly as

“woozy slut and glamour queen” (71).66 However, Jeanine Basinger takes a different view of Lana and her role as sexual aggressor: Early in life she became accustomed to being the boss at home, as she was the person who paid the bills. She knew it was her looks and her talent that brought home the dollars. She began to take the role of aggressor in relationships, without feeling the slightest bit self-conscious. After all, she was Lana Turner. Why hang back and wait for the man to decide? She picked her own men …and she could have her pick. Although totally feminine, Lana Turner was one of the fi rst fi lm stars to take the male prerogative openly for herself. In this regard, she was liberated. She was less a slave to sex than she was its master. ( Lana Turner 14) This self-possessed sexual liberation prior to women’s lib and the sexual revolution of the 1960s is perhaps what today makes Turner an object of

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admiration for more liberal thinking, pro-sex feminists. First, as breadwinner and main provider for her family and numerous husbands, Turner understood the underlying capitalistic economic relation between money and women’s sexuality. Realizing that with her earnings she did not need to trade sex for money, in marriage or otherwise, Turner pursued her objects of desire freely. In reference to the myth of men attempting to control the sexuality of the femme fatale of fi lm noir, Place writes that in fi lm noir, it is clear that the men need to control the women’s sexuality in order not to be destroyed by it. The dark woman of fi lm noir had something her innocent sister lacked: access to her own sexuality (and thus to men’s) and the power that this access unlocked. (49)

To tease out the difference between Turner’s presence as sexual object or sexual subject, John Updike writes:

Custodians of today’s correctnesses might prefer to forget a once-celebrated screen presence whose appeal was so purely sexist, so exclusively female, built on bosom and backside, pouting lips and penciled eyebrows, breathless embraces and limp surrender. But, aside from the undercurrent of feminist protest in many of the roles she played, Turner’s well-publicized life showed her idol-izers that even a beauty cannot depend on a man: a woman is on her own. (76)

In spite of her independence (a notable characteristic of the femme fatale as well), Turner also recognized that her romantic and sexual appetites could be dangerous for her career if the public thought that she was indeed the one in control. Therefore, she created the perfect movie idea of herself as a hopeless romantic who continually fell in love with the wrong men, men who lied to her, cheated on her, and who even stole her money.67 With the occasional exception, these were men who were most often extremely handsome and very muscular. In contrast to Mae West, who spoke candidly about her love of “muscular men and sex,” Turner cast herself as feminine victim, which made it both okay for her to continue the pursuit of fulfi lling her desires, while also gaining an empathy

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PLATE 46. “Help! Help!” Cora acts the unwitting victim of male deceit (Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

from her female audience, a kind of pathos for the pains she had suffered at the hands of men.

Updike thinks that Turner’s attempt to preserve her image in the public eye by manipulating the truth was mistaken. However, he also recognizes its effect on what was at the time a predominately female moviegoing audience:

had Turner been harder-headed, she might not have projected the vulnerability that her female fans could identify with. The house-wives and working girls who trooped to the movies between 1930
and 1950 saw their furtive affective lives enlarged and glamor-ized on the screen. (Updike 74)

She not only managed to invoke the public’s sympathy, but she scrupulously, and even quite narrowly at times, managed to avoid its censure as well for her bad behavior.68 Updike believes this is because “a more suggestible and repressed public consumed the products of the Hollywood

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that made Lana Turner” (75). This escape from losing her career to scandal also occurred because as Updike notes, “personal irregularities, however, do not so dim the reputations of Hollywood stars, who are licensed to live out our fantasies, in a realm above conventional restraints” (68).

Since we love our stars, we therefore allow them a little more leeway than the common person.

In consideration of her characters’ bad, femme fatale behavior, Dyer raises the intriguing question: “What she touches turns bad, but is that because she is bad or because she is irresistibly attracted to the bad?”

(“The Four Films of Lana Turner” 88). The answer appears to be both, of course, but what is considered to be bad is more aptly a fairly healthy expression of feminine sexuality—she obviously likes and is attracted to sex with men, and good-looking men at that. However, society (and the Production Code) deemed women’s sexuality to be bad, especially if it is expressed outside the confi nes of marriage. For example, in Peyton Place her character Constance MacKenzie’s terrible secret is that her daughter Allison (Diane Varsi) is illegitimate because her mother had previously lived with a married man. Seeking to hide her shame, Constance creates the lie of being a widow who returns to her hometown to raise her daughter while herself swearing off sex for good: “All men are alike. The approach is different; the result is always the same.” Constance, however, conspicuously and seductively dresses in a form-fi tting scarlet satin gown that outlines her ample bosoms in detail, as she is escorted to be a chaperone at the senior prom by the high-school principal (Lee Philips).69 Without the fi lm’s dialogue having to make explicit reference to Constance’s seething (yet still repressed) sexual desire for the smart, handsome principal, the fi lm’s aesthetic technique of costuming and keylighting Turner in a blazingly hot red dress, while also framing her in black, easily makes the point. In this view, the man, Lee Philips, is almost completely in shadow, while it is in fact Turner’s sexualized image that controls the screen. In the fi lm’s narrative Constance struggles to keep her sexuality in check, repressed in line with societal standards. Her always highly sexualized appearance in sensual silk dresses and blouses and form-fi tting pencil skirts, in contrast to the other women

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her age in the fi lm who appear in drab cotton housedresses, reveals how the hyper-feminine woman’s sexuality needed to be kept under wraps in fi lm, while also still managing to function in a seductive manner. Interestingly, the issue of women’s sexuality and both the pleasures and dangers it presents for women, as well a society’s perverse need to suppress it, are all issues that are foregrounded in Peyton Place. It can even be said that this fi lm, and the novel from which it was adapted, especially with their frank discussions of such sexually-charged issues as rape, incest, and abortion, were highly infl uential in changing 1950s–1960s social mores concerning women’s sexuality.

Dyer concludes his essay on Lana with the beginning of a great insight into the purpose and cultural effect of Turner’s sexuality; however, he stops short of exploring it further: “In a more political sense, it seems to me that her combination of sexuality and ordinariness was in itself ideologically explosive…comparable to that later embodied by Marilyn Monroe” (“The Four Films of Lana Turner” 110). And so it was.

Like the image of femme fatale itself, both in crime novels and fi lm noir of the time, Lana Turner’s star text represented the sexually aware and PLATE 47. Lee Philips and Lana Turner (Peyton Place, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957).

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knowing woman who, in spite of society’s strict codes against it, realized her sexuality on her own terms, while also using her sexuality to work in her favor by protectively veiling her actions with the very same codes.

FEMMES FATALES

In her book Femmes Fatales, Mary Ann Doane connects the appearance of the femme fatale in literature and fi lm with psychoanalysis and masculine
fears and anxieties prompted by shifts in the understanding of sexual difference in the late nineteenth century…Sexuality becomes the site of questions about what can and cannot be known. This imbrication of knowledge and sexuality, of epistemophilia and scopophilia, has crucial implications for the representation of sexual difference. (i)

Doane’s points here about the ontology of “sexual difference,” its relation to what can and cannot be seen, what can and cannot be known, as well as its being a difference that becomes an object of cultural fetishization, are quite useful for the discussion about Lana and the cultural impact of her sexualized image, because Doane identifi es the locus of the problem for Lana’s image as a wholly and openly sexual presence. In order to express her sexuality openly, Lana loses some of her sexual mystique as well as her perception as being feminine in a masculine culture. In order to maintain this sense of feminine sexuality, Lana’s desiring sexuality must be masked or veiled:

For the veil functions to visualize (and hence stabilize) the instability, the precariousness of sexuality. At some level of the cultural ordering of the psychical, the horror or threat of that precariousness (of both sexuality and the visible) is attenuated by attributing it to the woman, over and against the purported stability and identity of the male. The veil is a mark of that precariousness. (Doane, Femmes Fatales 46)

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Of course, for the most part, Doane is writing about the use of a real veil, or the multiple and curious appearances of actual veiled women in fi lm.

For my purpose, the veil is metaphoric, in which there is a covering of one’s image in order to conceal or maintain some sense of mystery; in this sense it is a type of veil constructed through the creation and wearing of a mask of a certain persona. In process, then, the act of veiling is not unlike the actor’s craft itself. This process of veiling, however, often takes on a sinister or suspicious quality because it seems to hide some kind of truth; but worse, it seeks to distort the image below it in an effort to deceive its viewer or to screen the viewer from discovering the unknowable truth of the image behind the veil. Further, because of this effort to conceal and deceive, “the power accorded to the femme fatale is situated as evil” (Doane, Femmes Fatales 2).

While in her psychoanalytic reading, Doane believes that femme fatale is “not the subject of feminism but a symptom of male fears about feminism,” or, more specifi cally, “male castration anxiety,” she also importantly recognizes that, “the representation—like any representation—is not totally under the control of its producers and, once disseminated, comes to take on a life of its own…In a sense, she has power despite herself” ( Femmes Fatales 2–3). This view of the femme fatale, however, seems to relieve her image of any responsibility as well as to steal the very power that she is purported to have. This is a critical move not unlike Turner’s own act of disowning responsibility for her actions as well as not publicly embracing her own power as agent of her own sexuality. In a move toward a more empowering view, Elisabeth Bronfen writes in “Femme Fatale—Negotiations of Tragic Desire,” that on the one hand, one can speak of [the femme fatale] as a fi gure of male fantasy, articulating both a fascination for the sexually aggressive woman, as well as anxieties about feminine domination…On the other hand, the femme fatale is more than simply a symptom of the hero’s erotic ambivalence. (106–107) Certainly, there is a power in just her fi lmic representation. As Dyer writes, “much of the pleasure of fi lm noir resides in the true knowledge

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of the woman, as good or evil” (“Four Films of Lana Turner” 89). It is possible, however, to read the image of femme fatale through Lana Turner, as well as Lana Turner herself as femme fatale. Her image can be read as that of a woman who smartly controls not only her own sexuality and sexual desire, but who manipulates her specifi c (male) target as well. While this view seems little different from conventional views of the representation of the femme fatale, the difference in this approach is that what appears to make femme fatales bad is their very possession of feminine, and quite more often, hyper-feminine, sexuality. But let us ask in this context, what exactly is it that we perceive as “bad” about feminine sexuality? While the traditional feminist view of the femme fatale is that she lures men to their doom through her seduction of them with her destructive beauty and its creation of sexual desire, whose view is this really? By considering the image of femme fatale as a projection of

“male castration anxiety,” once again one privileges the masculine as the both the creator and interpreter of the cultural codes. In her book Women in Film Noir, E. Ann Kaplan repeats the traditional feminist fi lm theory belief that “fi lm noir is a response to a troubled sense of masculinity in the 40s” (4). In The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir, James Maxfi eld “believe[s] that the femme fatale is typically conceived of as an extremely attractive woman who deliberately tries to lead men to their destruction; she is composed of equal parts of seductive beauty and malice” (i). Instead of a fi gure that is wholly evil, Bronfen points out that
the problem with reading the femme fatale as a stereotype of feminine evil, as a symptom of male anxiety, or as a catchphrase for the danger of sexual difference is that it treats this tragic feminine heroine as an encoded fi gure who exists only as the phantasmic emanation of others, who is acted upon, and, when necessary, extinguished, rather than treating her as a separate subject who has agency and is responsible for her decisions. (114) While Bronfen reveals an important problem with continuing to read the femme fatale from a masculinist perspective, my reading seeks to

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recoup these fi gures as women who are more empowered by their sexuality than done in by it. When they are done in, it is because the enforcement of the Code says that it must be so. In order to restore a sense of righteous morality to the scene, the sexualized woman must be killed for her transgression of society’s codes regulating her sexuality. In the fi lmic instance of killing off the femme fatale, however, not only is the enforcement of the Code put into effect, but the sexual double standard is also revealed. Additionally, the power and force of her sexuality becomes foregrounded in a way that reveals a moment when the veil is lifted.70 Through this act of violence, sexual violence, it can be said that the femme fatale reaches the apotheosis of her power as, instead of cheering her demise, the audience is made to identify with and abhor the appallingly unjust treatment of the sexually empowered independent woman. Instead of a “source of male anxiety,” Bronfen importantly mentions how
within feminist fi lm criticism, the femme fatale has thus emerged as a fundamentally unstable fi gure. Not only will she not allow herself to be dominated by the men who fall for her charms, but also the meaning she assumes in any given text refuses to be fi xed…

Her ability to seduce the noir hero into undertaking actions that undermine his self-interests renders visible a radical fallibility of the masculine subject. (113)

How, then, to read Turner and the femme fatale on their own terms?

First, one must rid oneself of ideas about feminine sexuality as being bad or potentially destructive. As Bronfen mentions, one can just as easily argue that in most cases of the hero or, more appropriately in fi lm noir, the anti-hero, being dragged down into destruction by an evil woman, the responsibility for his downfall can be traced to a major fl aw in his character. The femme fatale just happens to be quite astute at recognizing and acting on the opportunity to realize her own power at the expense of a man of weaker intellect, who, if the more usual scenario would be played out, would not hesitate to exert his power and control upon her.

This assertion of her power as her own agency, and particularly, sexual

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agency, marks the difference between how the femme fatale, or in our case, Lana Turner, is perhaps perceived between female and male audiences; as Dyer writes, “Turner serves to open up the tension between what women are for men and what that means for women as women”

(“Four Films of Lana Turner” 91).

This difference in views also represents the time gap between 1970–1980s feminist fi lm theoretical perspectives about women’s sexuality and those of today, where many post-modern pro-sex feminists have, for the most part, stopped viewing issues of feminine sexuality through a patriarchal lens.

Instead, there exists today a tendency to celebrate a sense of empowered sexual independence for women. In Women in Film Noir, Kaplan notes this shift in critical feminist views toward the image of the femme fatale:

[Ruby Rich] notes that contemporary audiences…seem to love the new femme fatales’ rapacious acts, their disregard for human life, their greed and lust and lack of restraint…Elizabeth Cowie challenges the assumption that fi lm noir is always a masculine fi lm form. She points out that these fi lms “afforded women roles which are active, adventurous and driven by sexual desire”…

Cowie asserts that the fantasy of a woman’s dangerous sexuality is as much a feminine as a masculine one: further, that it is the fantasy itself “that demands the punishment, for in the punishment the reality of the forbidden wish is acknowledged.” (5–6) Kaplan herself resists taking sides and attributes the different reception of the femme fatale to differences in audience: I assume that the text is producing places for more than one gender fantasy, depending on the needs of the spectator as noted above. The exciting, powerful, sexual woman of 40s noirs can, alternately, be a fantasy that satisfi es males unconscious needs (and may be seen by some female spectators as a male fantasy because she is not of interest to them as a model). And the same fi gure can be a fantasy that precisely interests and excites other female spectators, who do not read the fi gure as a male desire, but as their own fantasy. It all depends on what turns on any specifi c female spectator. (10)

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While Kaplan makes an important point about how differences in spectators make for different reception, it is important to consider how and why the femme fatale can be considered a model for women, and not just a fantasy.

Part of the problem emerges from early feminist fi lm theorists’ beliefs that both fi lm and “fi lm noir [are] male fantas[ies], as is most of our art”

( Women in Film Noir 47). Thus in fi lm noir “woman here as elsewhere is defi ned by her sexuality: the dark lady has access to it and the virgin does not” (47). As Place writes, the fact that “men are not so determin-istically delineated in their cultural and artistic portrayal is indicative of the phallocentric cultural viewpoint.” In her view, as well as that of other feminist fi lm theorists, “women are defi ned in relation to men.”

She believes that
fi lm noir is hardly ‘progressive’ in these terms—it does not present us with role models who defy their fate and triumph over it.

But it does give us one of the few periods in fi lm in which women are active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality. (Place 47)

It is clear, however, that the problems being defi ned here are still being read through a masculinist perspective that privileges the masculine as the maker of cultural meaning and that also views feminine sexuality as a still potent, yet destructive, force, instead of a force to be viewed on its own terms and its meaning for feminine-identifi ed women.

STAR TEXT, DOUBLING AND

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

Lana Turner fi rst appears onscreen in They Won’t Forget, a fi lm about the rape and murder of a young woman in a southern town. Turner, who plays the victim, Mary Clay, was memorable in her fi rst on-screen role because of her highly sexual appearance and her sexy walk down the street in a form-fi tting sweater that outlined her large, bouncing, breasts.

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“As she walked down the street, her ample bosom moved to the rhythm of ‘Dixie’ being played by a band in the Memorial Day parade. The young girl’s breasts were subtle enough to pass Hollywood censors in 1937, but tantalizing enough to arouse every male in the audience” (Basinger, Lana Turner 1). In the fi lm, Mary is raped and killed because her sexualized behavior and transgressive speech skirts the limits of what is considered proper behavior for women. In a sense, then, the fi lm puts forth the cruel “blame the victim” message that she deserved to be killed for her transgression of the codes regulating and controlling women’s sexuality.

Comparatively, in fi lm noir, Place writes that “the ideological operation of the myth (the absolute necessity of controlling the strong, sexual woman) is thus achieved by fi rst demonstrating her dangerous power and its frightening results then destroying it” (Place 56). This appearance PLATE 48. Barry Oldfi eld and Lana Turner, c.1937 (Internet Movie Database).

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marked the beginning of a fi lm persona for Lana Turner, in which she comes to represent a kind of innocent sexuality, too young at the time to be considered a woman (she was seventeen), yet her sexually mature bodily appearance said otherwise. For her male audience, Dyer writes,

“The girl-next-door was that never-never bombshell, plain-knit and voy-eur’s delight were one” (“The Four Films of Lana Turner” 81).

In her next appearance in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), she plays a kind of pre- femme fatale version of the dangerous woman, a vamp, or in this case, a “baby vamp,” Cynthia Potter, “that red-headed vampire,”

who “teases” Andy Hardy with her fl irting and kisses (Basinger, Lana Turner 31). From the outset of her career, Turner was cast and developed as both hyper-feminine sexualized woman as well as femme fatale.

“Even as a teen-ager, Lana Turner represented the girl who’d rather sit on the diving board to show off her fi gure than get wet in the water…the girl who’d rather kiss than kibbitz” (31).

By the time she starred in The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1946, after several marriages, divorces, and numerous other sexual liaisons, Turner’s image had been developed into the full-fl edged and sleek representation of femme fatale. Importantly for this discussion, Postman,

“gave her the part which best mixed her sex appeal with the violence it seemed inexplicably linked to, and let her penchant for tragedy express itself fully” (Basinger, Lana Turner 67). The Postman Always Rings Twice is the perfect example for ideas about the sexuality of the femme fatale because, as Basinger also notes, “the fi lm is loaded with hot, repressed sex” (67–68). Further, the fi lm perfectly exemplifi es both the doubling effect of Turner’s image with that of the femme fatale, and how Turner deployed this doubling to manipulate her viewers into feeling a sense of sympathetic identifi cation with both herself and the character she plays, Cora Smith.

In fact, this sympathetic identifi cation with Cora is part of what makes the fi lm so fascinating, because without it her character would be utterly unredeemable. That Cora gets away with the murder of her husband, Nick, is made to seem right in the fi lmic logic because, early in the fi lm, her character is developed to be a victim of circumstances, a victim of the

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beauty and sexuality she cannot hide. When her soon-to-be lover Frank (John Garfi eld) asks her why she married her husband, a man much older than herself, she says that since she had “never been homely,” she had had to “fi ght off all the guys”: “I never met a man since I was fourteen that didn’t want to give me an argument about it,” she tells Frank. She marries Nick to escape the unwanted and relentless sexual pursuit of her body by men. While this ploy initially worked for Cora, it apparently worked too well, as the fi lm’s underlying premise is that Nick is too old and boring to be interested at all in sex, or at least as much as is the now more mature Cora, thereby leaving her open to the affair with Frank. As Cowie writes, “what is centered by this fantasy is almost always a masculine scenario, that is, the fi lm noir hero is a man struggling with other men, who suffers alienation and despair, and is lured by fatal and deceptive women” (“Film Noir and Women” 122). In this instance, however, it is the woman, Cora, who is struggling with the fact of her apparently sexless, or at least sexually unfulfi lling, marriage to Nick coupled with the presence of a sexually virile and desirable younger man who actively pursues her.

Oddly enough, Nick even seems to encourage and sanction their sexual liaison by making such suggestions that Frank and Cora dance together on a hot night, as well as go swimming in the ocean at night alone together. A viewer is made to wonder if Nick is unconsciously or even purposely “pimping” Cora to Frank, in order to keep both his wife happy and his indispensable handyman around.

From his masculinist perspective, Timothy Perry both amusingly and revealingly mentions that

Frank begins handymanning Smith’s pretty wife Cora who plays perhaps the biggest slut who ever showed her half-naked body on celluloid…The dumb fool falls for her trap and helps her to kill him. Eventually, of course, the Fist of noir Fate crushes them too.

(105)

The designation of Cora as “slut,” of course seems too harsh when, in attempting to stay loyal to her husband, Cora in fact attempts to resist

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PLATE 49. Nick “pimps” Cora to his handyman Frank, linking the incestuous relation of the impotent father fi gure with the virility of the son and his desire for the mother fi gure (John Garfi eld, Lana Turner, Cecil Kellaway, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

Nick’s demands that she dance with Frank. However, Nick insists that she dance and pushes her toward Frank.

Of course, as the plot develops, Cora and Frank begin having an affair, one which soon leads to Nick’s murder. As Basinger points out, in retrospect, after the Johnny Stompanato affair, “The link between sex and violence which is now associated with Turner’s private life makes Postman an even more disturbing fi lm today” ( Lana Turner 68). But even

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though Postman pre-dates this tragic event, the fi lm still manages to make the connection between sex and violence seem both plausible as well as reasonable, and fi nally, necessary. Dyer views Cora to be a more ambivalent character because, in keeping with traditional views of the femme fatale, the fi lm’s narrative insists on creating and sustaining a mysterious tension for character:

Partly, what is happening here is that the fi lm wants to give Cora motivations, including some that make her a sympathetic fi gure, but, as her (generic) function in the narrative is to be changeable and unknowable, the fi lm has to keep giving her different, inconsistent motivations. (“Four Films of Lana Turner” 90) What Dyer perceives as her character’s ambivalence is more accurately her abilities of manipulation at work. As already mentioned, Cora’s motivations are quite clear. As a beautiful and highly sexualized woman, Cora is already marginalized in the culture and thus really has little choice in the decisions she makes. Dyer relents slightly, though, writing that:

consequently, the pattern of impulse and entrapment in Postman can be read—I would argue, was read by Turner’s fans—as a source of identifi cation and sympathy. The attraction to bad (often meaning little more than sexual desire) can be seen as an uncontrollable, destroying impulse that anyone can identify with (especially in a sex-negative culture). (“Four Films of Lana Turner” 91)

In this sense, for the sympathetic women in the audience who identify with Cora, the fi lm’s logic goes: Why should the young Cora have been made to suffer the unwanted sexual attentions of men just because she is beautiful? Why should she then have to be stuck in a sexless marriage to a man she does not desire just to get by in life? Why should she not realize her own sexual desire with a man she truly loves on her own terms? Lastly, why should she have to live out a dreary life as waitress and cook in her husband’s business instead of realizing success on

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her own? Certainly, many of her viewers have experienced the same or similar situations. Thus, in spite of the awfulness of the deed and the protracted manner of Nick’s murder, the fi lm evokes little sympathy for his character. He just seems to be a pitiable man who is standing in the way of Cora and Frank completely realizing their love for each other, as well as for Cora to realize her dreams of business success. In this manner, the viewer is made not only to sympathize with the lovers, but to be complicit in seeing the problem from their view as well.

Cora also sees Frank as a vehicle to her success, just as she previously had Nick. Like many women of her time, lacking any other skills than those of waitress and cook, and with a good head for business, Cora cannot seem to realize any success on her own, but only through a man. As Ruby Rich notes in “Dumb Lugs and Femmes Fatales”: the femmes fatales of original noir had some kind of relationship to the brassy dames that fl ourished when the men were off to war, only to face banishment back to the kitchen and bedroom when their johnnies came marching home. It doesn’t take much feminist analysis to trace the short line from postwar gender regulation to fi lm noir’s embodiments of male fear and female treachery. (8) In the fi lm’s logic, Cora married Nick also because he had a business she thought they could build up together; however, Nick is a simple man with simple dreams, and he barely manages to keep the joint running.

Thus Cora deploys her sexuality at will to gain what she desires most—
the fi nancial success that enables her to resist the economic control of men in order have control over her own life, sexual and otherwise. More perversely, for some viewers perhaps, is that Cora, after what appears a case of deus ex machina, is let off for the murder of her husband and turns what is now her business, the Twin Oaks restaurant, into a thriving success.

Film noir’s “special signifi cance lies in the combination of sensuality with activity and ambition which characterizes the femme fatale” (Place 63).

While her actions may seem deplorable from a contemporary feminist standpoint, it is also important to realize the limited choices that were open to women at the time. Moreover, the audience is made to

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PLATE 50. Successful restaurant owner and infamous murderess, Cora Smith, signs an autograph for one of her customers, a rendition evocative of the life of Lana Turner, actress (Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

sympathize with Cora’s plight because of her inability to realize success on her own through the more honorable routes of education and hard work at a well-paying job; in a pre-women’s lib world, this path does not exist for Cora, or for many of her women viewers either.

In a reported attempt to tone down her sexuality, the fi lm’s producers made the decision to dress Turner all in white (with the exception of a black robe and dress in a few scenes after the murder of Nick). As director Tay Garnett explained:

There was a problem getting a story with that much sex past the censors. We fi gured that dressing Lana in white somehow made

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everything that she did less sensuous. It was also as attractive as hell…They didn’t have “hot pants” then, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at hers. ( L, L, L, & the Truth 85) While fi lm noir was generally “a dark stylistic practice…which developed in relation to industry censorship during the 1940s”(Biesen 41), the decision to dress Turner all in white had multiple effects: It added connotations of goodness to her character, therefore making her impossible to hate; it associated her with other screen sex goddesses, such as Jean Harlow in Platinum Blonde, Ingrid Bergman as she appeared in Rick’s Café in Casablanca, and Mae West in a number of fi lms; it helped to create an idea of the intense heat and passion the characters were experienc-ing; and fi nally, it made Turner look overtly sexy, playing on her already established appearance of innocent sexuality. In prose worth repeating, Basinger writes of Turner’s fi rst scene in Postman: The searching camera follows her dropped lipstick as it rolls across the fl oor, over to her white, open-toed high heels and up her perfectly proportioned fi gure to her insolent face framed in a white turban. This image of the tanned and beautiful Lana Turner, dressed in white shorts and halter top, is one of the most famous in American pin-up history. When she applies her lipstick, preen-ing her self in front of John Garfi eld merely to show him plenty of what it is he can’t have, an entire generation remembered the image. ( Lana Turner 67)

As Place notes, “the independence which fi lm noir women seeks is often visually presented as self-absorbed narcissism,” a valuable asset to be sure for a woman who does not want to depend on men to get by.

Instead of caring about the men’s need, the femme fatale remains self-interested to the end of the fi lm. Because of her ambition in this regard, however, she is made to suffer in the end, because such repressive views of women’s sexual and personal independence cannot be allowed their full expression:

Often the original transgression of the dangerous lady of fi lm noir (unlike the vamp seductress of the 20s) is ambition expressed

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metaphorically in her freedom of movement and visual dominance. This ambition is inappropriate to her status as a woman, and must be confi ned…She wants freedom from an oppressive relationship, and initiates events that lead to murder. (Place 57) In a more traditional view, Dyer reads Cora’s character as one that exists to support the main character, the handyman and Cora’s manipulated lover, Frank. As femme fatale, the traditional thinking goes that Cora
is only there to be the means by which Frank enters the path that leads to his doom, to be the terrible object of his sexuality, terrible because his attraction to her is what leads him to the death cell.

(“The Four Films of Lana Turner” 89)

Place importantly makes the distinction that “independence is her goal, but her nature is fundamentally and irredeemably sexual in fi lm noir.

The insistence on combining the two (aggressiveness and sensuality) in a consequently dangerous woman is the central obsession of fi lm noir (Place 57).

Frank hardly appears to be the main character in the fi lm, but rather its next intended victim after Nick. He states that he “felt like a cheap nobody, making a play for a doll who had no use for [him].” For example, in attempting to murder Nick by pushing his car off a cliff, Frank gets trapped in the vehicle as it plunges into a deep ravine.

Frank is severely injured and ultimately charged with Nick’s murder, while Cora escapes both punishments, until the D.A. tricks them both into ratting each other out. After they both literally get away with murder and are released, Cora continues to treat Frank as her servant, a lowly handyman, while she becomes a wealthy and successful business woman.

If anyone is the stooge in the fi lm, it is Frank, and if any character is the lead, it is Cora. In consideration of the character Frank as the central protagonist of the fi lm, Biesen mentions how the “fl ashback narration foregrounded the noir antihero’s psychology, guilt, and impending doom as a consequence of his crimes and uncontrollable obsessions—
thus reinforcing a ‘voice of morality’ throughout the fi lm” (44). Like the

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PLATE 51. Frank goes over the edge (John Garfi eld, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

fi lm’s inversion of the usual codes of black and white found in fi lm noir, which becomes apparent in Cora’s clothing, the attempt to have the audience believe that Frank is the main character through this framing technique is a misleading one. At the fi lm’s end, when the focus returns to Frank in prison, the assertion that the fi lm was about Frank instead of Cora seems out of sync, because throughout the fi lm it is Cora who has riveted the viewer in her dominance of most of the fi lm’s scenes. Frank merely seems to be an accessory or accomplice to her image.

In the beginning of the fi lm, it is Frank who sexually pursues Cora, even as she insists that he stop, while she attempts to stay loyal to Nick.

Frank is nearly driven crazy with his lust for Cora as she appears in

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scene after scene in sensuous white clothing, such as a bathing suit and heels:

From the moment the hero catches sight of the femme fatale, both fi nd themselves caught in a sequence of events which can go only one way. Both are tragically framed within a narrative of fate and can only come to accept the law of causation. Yet if the contingent turn from free choice to inevitability is aligned with a masculine gaze appropriating a seductive feminine body, one must not overlook the fact that as bearer of the hero’s look, it is the femme fatale who manipulates the outcome of their fatal meeting…Indeed the classic femme fatale has enjoyed such popularity because she is not only sexually uninhibited, but also unabashedly independent and ruthlessly ambituous, using her seductive charms and her intelligence to liberate herself from the imprison-ment of an unfulfi lling marriage. Furthermore, though she gains power over the noir hero by nourishing his sexual fantasies, her own interest is only superfi cially erotic…Duplicity thus emerges as her most seminal value. (Bronfen 106)

It is not until Frank suggests to Nick that putting up a neon sign outside his diner might attract more business that Cora realizes Frank is smart at manipulating Nick to please her. Cora realizes that, unlike Nick, Frank has real potential. She then opens up to Frank about her dreams and desires, and the deadly die is cast: Cora says to Frank, “I want to make something of this place, I want to make it into an honest-to-goodness...,” but Frank sarcastically interrupts her, saying, “Well, aren’t we ambitious?”

Cora decides to run away with Frank, because she decides she loves him. Cora packs, leaves Nick a goodbye note in the cash register, and she and Frank try to hitchhike to L.A. The day is hot, however, and Cora, as usual, is perfectly dressed in white. When a close call with a passing car sends Cora sprawling in the dirt, she quickly realizes that Frank has little to offer her, and she insists that they return to the diner.

Instead of Cora suggesting they murder Nick, Frank is the one who fi rst mentions it. When they witness a drunk Nick, returning home from

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PLATE 52. The pivotal moment when Cora fi rst realizes Frank’s potential (Lana Turner, Cecil Kellaway, James Garfi eld, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

PLATE 53. The “innocent” femme fatale gets her hands (and dress) dirty (Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

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the market who narrowly escapes plowing his car head-on into a big rig truck, Frank blurts out, “I’d like to see him get plastered like that some night and drive off a cliff.” Cora is shocked, believing that Frank is not serious, and he allays her fears. After Nick reports (without consulting Cora) that he has decided to sell the diner and move to Canada to have Cora care for his paralyzed sister, a despairing Cora decides to go along with Frank’s plan to kill Nick so that they can keep the diner. The traditional view of the femme fatale is that she is the one who initiates the murder. As Perry writes of fi lm noir’s anti-hero, “He runs into a brutal act of violence and/or collides with an ultra-sexy, drop-dead gorgeous femme fatale who grabs him by the crotch and doesn’t let go” (103).

Viewing her as the real culprit because of the effect of her sexuality on the male anti-hero, Perry identifi es the femme fatale’s machinations: This chick specializes in using men. Especially poor, dumb, innocent Everyman saps stupid enough to fall for her sexual play-acting. Usually, it is to make them a fall guy for a crime she’s already committed, or is currently contemplating. She’s expert at chewing them up and spitting them out. Her goal is to pull off a jewel heist or get a pile of dough through murder. Guess who she gets to pull the trigger? (103)

While there are certainly instances of truly evil femmes fatales in fi lm, such as Barbara Stanwyck’s character Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, in Postman, Cora is initially sincere in her loyalty to her husband until she herself is seduced by the constant presence of Frank’s lust for her.

Their fi rst attempt to electrocute Nick in his bath is almost successful, but foiled by a stray cat that gets tangled in the wires. After Cora and Frank come under suspicion by the D. A. for attempted murder, it is ironically the dead cat that clears them. The cat’s then stiffened carcass at the bottom of the ladder leading to the bathroom serves as alibi.

With their fi rst attempt deemed an accident, the two killers are now more determined than ever to fi nish Nick off by driving his car over a cliff and making it look like a case of accidental death by drunk driving.

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PLATE 54. The sad alibi ( The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

While they succeed in killing Nick, Frank is injured in the accident. In one of the numerous twists of fate in the fi lm, the D. A. happens to be driving by just as the accident occurs. Both Cora and Frank are arrested for his murder.

At this point, the fi lm’s narrative seems to break in two, as if another story were being told. Of course, this division in the story seems to fi t with the fi lm’s “obsessive doubling of details and events” (Dyer, “The Four Films of Lana Turner 80). Instead of lovers, Frank and Cora are now set against each other for survival. Instead of the innocence Cora had projected in the fi rst part of the fi lm, she now comes across as a cold, calculating fi gure who desperately seeks a way out, a way to get them, or at least herself, off for the crime. Cora reveals herself as only concerned about her own interests, as she no longer appears to care for Frank, not caring if the guilt is wholly placed on him or if he fries in hell.

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PLATE 55. a. Above frame: Cora Smith, loyal wife to loving husband Nick.

b. Lower frame: Cora Smith, convicted murderess, and her lover accomplice Frank (Lana Turner, Cecil Kellaway, Frank Garfi eld, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

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Cora’s rapid shift from innocence to guilt reveals the very act of doubling, or veiling and masking, that takes place not only in the fi lm’s narrative, but through Turner’s acting as well. In the beginning of the fi lm, her act of innocence and caring for her husband Nick was thoroughly convincing. One is led to believe that the girl really cannot help it. She is sexy in an innocent way. In the fi lm’s second half, however, the viewer is made to see more clearly how Turner/Cora has manipulated not only the other characters’ views and expectations, but those of her viewers as well. In the moments outside the courtroom when the two killers have been tricked into implicating each other, when Cora realizes she must manipulate the outcome to save herself, the mask (and ubiquitous PLATE 56. “Double-crossed, ha!…Oh, you listen Mr. Frank Chambers, when I get through with you, you’ll fi nd out there’s such a thing as being too smart.”

(John Garfi eld, Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM, 1946).

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turban) fully comes off; as the façade wears off, the image of innocence and sexuality collide in a way that reveal the strings being pulled.

In the scene illustrated in plate 56, Cora fi rst reveals not only to Frank but the audience as well that she has been purposely been manipulating Frank to her desires all along; however, she has expertly managed to conceal her manipulations behind a mask of innocence. While this seems little different than the usual claims about the actions of the femme fatale, what is different is that, instead of being a refl ection of the male psyche, with its emphasis on male castration anxiety or being read through a masculinist lens, in Cowie’s view, for example, Cora reveals herself as the fi lm’s main agent:

what I am attempting to challenge…is the tendency to characterize fi lm noir as always a masculine form. Even though this masculine bias is considered critically, the tendency is still to see women characters as occupying a subordinate position in the fi lms. This obscures the extent to which these fi lms afforded women roles which are active, adventurous and driven by sexual desire. (“Film Noir and Women” 135)

Most interestingly, at this juncture in the fi lm, the active sexualized images of the character Cora and of Lana Turner, actress, also collide and ultimately collapse upon each other as her character’s appearance and manner of speech change radically from that of the character Cora.

In this scene, it is the actress Turner herself who appears to emerge.

While in the fi lm’s fi rst half, Turner convincingly disappears through her acting into the character of Cora; in its second half, it is now the actress Lana Turner who controls the screen as Cora disappears beneath Turner’s image, just as her character Lora appears to do in Imitation of Life, when the Sandra Dee character implores her to stop acting. In this scene in Postman, Turner’s act as Cora is now revealed. Moreover, the motivations for Cora/Lana’s duplicitous actions have been as actress/
character both to conceal/reveal her sexuality and its accompanying desires while also realizing through this act of duplicity a particular kind of sexual independence. Through her performance as Cora in Postman,

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Lana Turner, almost uncannily, both performs and reveals what is more closely her own real-life persona as a woman who continually publicly revealed and concealed her desiring sexuality as a way, in the face of public censorship, to realize and enjoy her own sexual desires. Further, in Postman, this duplicity gets played out not only in the narrative structuring and numerous instances of doubling that appear in the fi lm, but also through fi lmic aesthetic techniques that originate in the application of Hollywood’s censorship codes, techniques that further culminate in the highly artistic aesthetic practices and expressive effects of fi lm noir.

In this moment, Turner and her work thus take on a kind of dual transparency where the audience is now made aware not only of the very essence of acting as act but of the transparency of fi lm as well to accurately reveal real cultural conditions and historical instances concerning women’s sexuality. Thus, Bronfen believes that the femme fatale can be understood as a particularly resilient contemporary example of tragic sensibility…She functions both as the screen for fantasies of omnipotence and as the agent who, by ultimately facing the consequence of her noir actions, comes to reveal the fragility not only of any sense of omnipotence that transgression of the law affords, but, indeed, of what it means to be human. (105)

Like her later troubled negotiation with her real life in Imitation of Life after the Stompanato killing, where Turner as actress continually references her real life, in Postman, Turner continually references her life as an actress as an act in her brilliant ability to manipulate her audience as well as the public’s view of her image. In that moment, Lana Turner, real-life person, and Lana Turner, actress, merge. That, in the fi lm and her real life, this ability to manipulate her image takes on the guise of femme fatale is no mistake. The Postman Always Rings Twice is Turner’s most signifi cant fi lm because, more than the character Cora, what is really being represented is Lana Turner herself, and her brilliant ability as an actress to manipulate her image, her audience, and her men.

CHAPTER 4

SEX AS CINEMATIC EROTICISM

JAYNE MANSFIELD’S BREASTS

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.

(Audre Lourde, “Uses of the Erotic” 281)

A forty-one inch bust and a lot of perseverance will get you more than a cup of coffee—a lot more. But most girls don’t know what to do with what they’ve got. 71

“I looked like a sexpot but I could read Shakespeare.” 72 (Jayne Mansfi eld)

In Sex Lives of the Hollywood Goddesses, biographer Nigel Cawthorne relates what may possibly be a rather hyperbolized anecdote73 about Jayne Mansfi eld in the late stage of her career: Nudity was to be her new thing. She incorporated a “satire on strip” into her stage act and went on tour. She would also wander

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among the audience in a dress that seemed to have been sprayed on. One night she sat on the lap of an older gentleman. As his eyes zeroed in on her magnifi cent bosom, his face went red and Jayne fi shed out her left breast and thrust it into the man’s mouth.

Another old man, possibly with a weak heart, asked her to get off.

“But I’m just a sex symbol,” she cooed. (40) While Mansfi eld has often been referred to as an “ur-sex object” (Saxton xi), this anecdote reveals her instead as a performance artist who, possessed of her own sexual agency, was unashamed of her own nudity and sexuality and used it both to entertain and control men. As her biographer Martha Saxton writes, “in Jayne’s case the purpose of objectifi cation was sexual attraction, which made her experience common to most women” (87). To date there have been no critical studies of Mansfi eld PLATE 57. Stripper Midnight Franklin sits on a spectator’s lap (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 147
and her work. This chapter seeks to open up a discussion on the importance of recuperating Mansfi eld and her image for pro-sex feminists as an important fi gure in the construction and sexual liberation of the hyper-feminine sexualized body in American culture. Instead of seeing Mansfi eld from a more traditional feminist fi lm theory view, that of solely a sex object, we should more accurately seek to understand, as Tanya Krzywinska writes in Sex and the Cinema, that “seeing cinematic sex solely in terms of objectifi cation does not accurately represent the multi-faceted experiences that watching cinematic sex brings” (230). There is much more to cinematic images of feminine sexuality than being objectifi ed. Therefore, the aforementioned anecdote reveals Mansfi eld’s self-awareness of the inherent power contained within her image of herself as a cultural and cinematic sex symbol. Interestingly as well, this anecdote also reveals a kind of maternal quality to her nature that is inherently tied to her feminine sexuality, one that she deliberately uses both to please and control men. By placing her breast in the old man’s mouth (if indeed this really occurred), Mansfi eld reveals not only her sense of herself as maternal woman (she gave birth to fi ve children) but an acknowledgement of heterosexual men’s desires to view her as such.

Complicating this view, and perhaps what offends the second old man the most, is that in the American patriarchal consciousness, the feminine maternal and the feminine sexual are not supposed to mix—these are always to be viewed as mutually exclusive categories. as Krzywinska points out, however:

Utopian visions of sexual plenitude…can highlight, in an inverse way, the problems with realities and confl icts of interests at a personal or social level…sex and desire lie at the very heart of the way that identity, society, family and civilization are experienced, classifi ed and defi ned, sex is mythologised, narrativised, elevated, debased, but it never loses its power to fascinate. (231) Her performance of the maternal fi gure breastfeeding a man demonstrates how Mansfi eld’s image challenges and undermines the very foundations of patriarchal identity as a stable, dominant force.

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Mansfi eld’s blurring of these strict patriarchal boundaries creates for both men a sense of discomfort for fear they are being dispossessed of their power. Mansfi eld crosses over from one patriarchal view to the next, from sexual object (whore) to sexual subject (Madonna), blurring the boundaries.

To defuse their discomfort and potential for patriarchal wrath, Mansfi eld next, “cooing” with girlish innocence, comically resorts to a naïve and infantile persona, using her baby voice to demure that she is “only a sex symbol” [my emphasis]. This is a proclamation that, as a form of situational irony, resonates not only with multiple instances of cultural references surrounding the symbology and coding of sex in America, but also the instantiation of her own power over the men as sexual agent. By adopting the persona of a little girl, a girl that “can’t help it,” Mansfi eld effectively erases for herself any responsibility for how the men may view her. “Jayne learned very early that little girls are a mixed metaphor for a childlike female” (Saxton 6).

The focus on the maternal breast can be illustrated by an example from one of her later fi lms, Too Hot to Handle, in which Mansfi eld plays the stripper Midnight Franklin. During her striptease act, Midnight also sits on a male spectator’s lap and thrusts her breasts into his face. As she dances around the stage and tables, the fi lm makes several intercuts to the audience of male spectators, all of whom, while intently engaged in viewing Midnight’s performance, are also shown intensely sucking on the cigarettes they are smoking. The obvious Freudian symbolism of these shots reveals the heterosexual male desire to suck the maternal breasts that Midnight keeps thrusting at them. A later frame show that while dancing on the stage, Midnight keeps a male dancer’s eyes on the prize as she also controls his physical access to her body by holding his head fi rmly at breast level and pushing him to keep him at a distance, indicating her awareness of the control her sexuality has over the men.

Importantly, this anecdote shows that Mansfi eld possesses a sexual agency with a power over men that gets realized through not only the

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PLATE 58. Controlling her male spectator (Jayne Mansfi eld and Male Dancer, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

spectatorial performance of maternal/sexual bodily acts, but that is also performed in a way that is particularly invested with cultural views of the hyper-feminine.

As an actress and nightclub performer, Mansfi eld sought to capitalize on her voluptuously hyper-feminine fi gure. “The Cleavage Queen”

(Vogel 357), or as she was named in Sweden, “America’s Sex and Bosom Queen,” and “America’s Queen of Sex” (Cawthorne 29–30, 34), as these monikers intimate, Mansfi eld’s breasts regularly made appearances everywhere.74 Mansfi eld frequently (and purposely) experienced bra strap and neckline failures in public for publicity. Kenneth Anger’s book, Hollywood Babylon, has as its cover the famous photo of

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PLATE 59. a, b, c. The oral fi xation of the male spectators (Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

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Mansfi eld letting the neckline fall below her nipple in attempt to steal press attention from the actress Sophia Loren. As shocking and risqué this was considered to be at the time, Mansfi eld was unashamed, and one could say even proud, of her breasts and body. She saw nothing wrong with it; she
had a lot of trouble keeping her clothes on, but she…thought it wasn’t dirty. Her attitude about her nudity was quite matter of fact.

She knew men would be shocked and momentarily undone. That was the effect she wanted. She wasn’t sultry or vampish. That level of sexuality required a sophistication she didn’t intend and one which confl icted with her image of the dumb blonde. (Saxton 52) PLATE 60. The famous Mansfield “Bust Thrust and Lean Over,” a move designed to best show off the girls (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

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PLATE 61. The girl is too hot to handle (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

PLATE 62. The pin-up girl and her appreciative admirers (Jayne Mansfi eld, Male Dancers, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 153

For some more conservative feminists Mansfi eld’s performances, with a focus on her sexuality and her body, with its seductive use of hyper-feminine eroticism for mainly male audiences, falls just short of prostitution.

Complicating this discussion from a feminist fi lm theorist position is the dearth of any scholarly work that has yet been done on Mansfi eld.

Thus it has been necessary, in lieu of an opportunity to discuss previous feminist fi lm criticism of the actress, to turn instead to the work of both anti- and pro-sex feminists to open a discussion about the potential value of Mansfi eld’s work for feminism and feminist fi lm theory.

As Nina Martin writes in Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller,

“the art of erotic dancing represents a means to seduction and a path toward a woman’s gaining sexual knowledge and empowerment” (i).

At the time, women had differing relationships with Mansfi eld and her image. What other female movie stars saw as a body to compete with, everyday women often saw as one to aspire to. Still others found her an image of disrepute, a sleazy representation of a subject better completely avoided—sex. Today, a number of these attitudes toward Mansfi eld’s image survive, and some feminist perspectives, such as the anti-feminine arguments of Susan Bordo, take on a particular vehemence in their rage against hyper-feminine women such as Mansfi eld: Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity—a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashion—female bodies become docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, “improvement.” Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress—central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women—we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modifi cation. Through these disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, of insuf-fi ciency, of never being good enough. At the farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead us to utter demoralization, debilitation, and death. (91)

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In contrast, in her persuasive pro-sex feminist arguments about sex workers in Loose Women, Lecherous Men, Linda LeMoncheck points out that

From a sex radical perspective, feminists who are unable or unwilling to confront their own sexuality and who see little if anything that is not degrading about sex work under patriarchy are the natural allies of a sexual conservatism that condemns the anony-mous, recreational, pleasure-seeking sex in sex work. Moreover, many feminists from a variety of theoretical perspectives believe that such an alliance results in the association of feminism with an antisex moralism that makes feminism unappealing to women who consider themselves both politically liberated and sexually adventurous. (114)

PLATE 63. The feminine spectator and her appreciative escort (Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 155

SEX AND THE MATERNAL BODY

Mansfi eld was a woman who loved sex and loved using sex to make a living. In her performances, she fought against the “antisex moralism” that sought to reduce her image to only a sex object, as well as to degrade hyper-feminine sexuality and deny it its own pleasure. As LeMoncheck notes, “this ascription of degradation risks investing an unde-sirable sexual Puritanism and moral condescension” (117). By a fairly brilliant move of constantly associating the image of the maternal with her hyper-feminine sexualized body, Mansfi eld attempted and to some degree succeeded in naturalizing and normalizing her sexpot image.

Ironically, the way she chose to do so was by accepting and highlighting her already hyperbolized image as sexpot, and through the use of massive publicity, working it as a point of entry into the culture, where instead of being manipulated as an image, she could herself manipulate the public’s view. Just as Mae West sought to naturalize and legitimize the sexually desiring woman in a culture still rife with Puritan views towards women’s sexuality, Mansfi eld sought to gain real acceptance of women’s sexuality on its own terms. Charles Champlin writes that: Her voluptuousness, freely revealed, was central to her fame, of course, yet she possessed an oddly endearing mixture of innocence and calculation. She seemed alternately to be pushing sex and to be making fun of it, as Mae West did. (194) In this manner, her image becomes a precursor to the sexual revolution of the late 1960s.75

The difference between the two actresses is that, while West mainly used her comedic wit, Mansfi eld mostly used her body, and of course, in the main, her breasts:

The “own” Jayne came into was her body. She had enormous breasts, made to seem even more enormous because they rested on a wide ribcage…The size of those breasts, important as they seemed to every man she met, became crucial to her…She was trapped in an overblown, phantasmagoric piece of fl esh, and what

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could she do but take it seriously…Jayne, hungry as she was for approval, surveyed her assets and found the most valuable one to be her forty-inch bust…So she dressed in tight clothes, created a commotion, and developed in the direction in which she was having the most success. (Saxton 30)

Paul Rutherford writes in A World Made Sexy: In the [1940s] the look of the bra was hyped by the popularity of full-fi gured movie stars such as Jane Russell, her bosom made famous by the movie The Outlaw (1943), and Lana Turner, the

“Sweater Girl.” Big breasts symbolized sexual potency in postwar America. The bras that suited this obsession were formidable affairs: the breasts were contained, separated, raised, and exaggerated by two cone-shaped cups that produced a “pointy” effect, supposedly realizing the aim of an enhanced femininity. (92) One can easily surmise that, while she has been left out of the credits here, Mansfi eld had a lot to do with this fashion trend.

Hers was a complicated and risky move (and some would say eventually fatal to her career). While seeking to manipulate the culture for all she could get, she had to fi rst gain access to it by the sole image that the culture already had of her. As her biographer Martha Saxton writes,

“One can make the case that she was exploited by a sexist culture. One can also make the not so mutually exclusive case that she exploited the culture for all she and it were worth” (xiii).

When discussing Mansfi eld the obvious comparison to the actress Marilyn Monroe must usually be addressed: “If there hadn’t been a Marilyn Monroe there might never have been a Jayne Mansfi eld,” says one critic (Haspiel 329). Even the comedian Bob Hope saw that Mansfi eld and Monroe had much in common:

She shared a personality trait with Marilyn Monroe—another star whose death was equally untimely. Both of them had sympathetic personalities and I feel that this was the main reason for their popularity. The public sensed a certain softness and vulnerability about them. (Bob Hope, book frontispiece, Mann)

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 157

After her death, however, her image was often perceived with much less generosity: “Jayne Mansfi eld was considered to be a budget imitation of Monroe, with bigger breasts, but much less talent” (Ferrucio 1). She was

“a thinly-disguised burlesque of—who else?—Marilyn Monroe” (Haspiel 326), or “the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe” (Vogel 361). One critic asserts that “In Mansfi eld Fox suddenly saw the possibility of creating a SUPER-MONROE” (Haspiel 328), and fi nally, “Jayne has become Marilyn Monroe, king size” (Haspiel 329). However, it is this critic’s view that Mansfi eld and Monroe were fundamentally different. While both actresses represented a kind of hyper-feminine blonde sexuality couched in a sweet innocence, when it came to bodily proportions Mansfi eld clearly had the take on Monroe. In Marilyn one also often senses a true helplessness and desperation, while in Mansfi eld real power and determination. Mansfi eld was said to have had the “strongest career drive of anyone in show business” (Saxton 7). “In the years since her death Jayne has become a cultural icon and her legion of devoted fans see her as much more than a Marilyn wannabe. Nothing would have made her happier” (Vogel 370).

In fact the self-aware nature of Mansfi eld’s acting led one critic to proclaim that “Jayne was the satire of all dumb blondes” (Cawthorne 24). While Mansfi eld certainly knowingly performed a satire of the dumb blonde image, for her the signifi cance of this image was more than skin deep. Mansfi eld really viewed herself a smart blonde caught in a dumb blonde image as refracted upon her by the culture. “She was a very smart woman, a said IQ of 163, and she was named correctly by the press as ‘America’s Smartest Dumb Blonde’ ” (Saxton 15). As a child, Mansfi eld was precocious and talented in music. She was educated and

“could speak fi ve languages and enjoyed reading Shakespeare” (Vogel 363). Defensively, perhaps, Mansfi eld said that “I went to three colleges and three drama schools and learned to act before I even bleached my hair” (Vogel 357). She studied acting with Philip Lumet, brother of the director Sidney Lumet. As a highly intelligent woman, as Saxton writes, Mansfi eld “bore the burden of proving herself. It was important that she become rather than just be” (4). Unfortunately, Mansfi eld’s forty-inch

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bust line and eighteen-inch waist did not allow her to be taken seriously in any other way than as a symbol of sex: “At the University of Texas it was discovered I had an I.Q. of 163. Everyone laughed when I’d mention it. I cooled it. In Hollywood, I realized it would ruin my feminine, sexy ‘image.’ Who wants a brainy blonde?” (Luijters 85). She decided instead to use it to her advantage. “I had a body, yes, but I also had brains and an inborn stubbornness. I was determined to work things out and make it—my way” (Mansfi eld, qtd. in Mann 32). “I didn’t come to Hollywood to be the girl next door. I came to be a movie star” (Luijters 138).

As Saxton importantly points out, “She cannot, however, be blamed for the character she constructed. She took the materials at hand and turned them into an idea” (181).

Thus Mansfi eld “is linked to feminism by a paradox” (Saxton xv).

“Jayne was a woman and a public fi gure and she had an important place in women’s time” (180). Her image, however, is complicated much more perhaps than the previously discussed actresses, Harlow, West, and Turner, because more than any of these actresses, who each deployed their bodies and sexuality in a variety of ways to manipulate a patriarchal culture, Mansfi eld’s image came across as one that was purely and thoroughly about sex. In her most successful fi lm, The Girl Can’t Help It, in spite of occasional costuming attempts to hide her remarkable bodily proportions, it is still diffi cult for the viewer to see Mansfi eld or her character Jerri/Georgiana in any way other than as a sexpot.

Mansfi eld plays Georgiana/Jerri, aspiring housewife and mother, who is being forced into a career as a nightclub singer by her boyfriend, her gangster father’s best friend, Marty “Fatso” Murdoch (Edmond O’Brien).

In directing her career, Marty gives Georgiana the stage name of Jerri Jordan. The fi lm is obsessive in its focus on Georgiana’s body, especially her breasts. For example, in one long tracking shot, the camera captures her sexy walk as she goes to her agent’s apartment.

Unlike other scenes in which she is dressed in beautiful sequined gowns, in this one she is wearing a fairly conservative suit, with the exception that the suit is so formfi tting as to appear sprayed on. Further,

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PLATE 64. a, b, c, d, e. The sexy walk (Jayne Mansfi eld, The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956).

(continued on next page)

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PLATE 64. (continued)

its neckline is just low and wide enough to reveal a fair portion of Mansfi eld’s cleavage. At the center of her bosom there is a large, pale-pink rose, which serves to anchor her breasts as the focal point. The tightness of her dress serves to highlight Mansfi eld’s extraordinary hyper-feminine bodily proportions. Her pushed up, pointy breasts jut out so far in advance of the rest of her body that they appear large enough to make her topple over, when set in contrast to her tiny waist and otherwise slim profi le. The camera also tracks her walk from a reverse view, showcasing Mansfi eld’s large hips, again made to seem larger in contrast to her tiny waist. In addition to tracking her sexy walk, the camera

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PLATE 65. a, b. The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956.

often fi lms her from a high-angle view made to capture and focus on her breasts and cleavage as they bounce down the street. The scene is comically set with a number of cartoonish visual jokes, such as having blocks of ice melt steamily as she walks by, and a male viewer’s glasses shatter as he catches a glimpse of her (director Frank Tashlin began his career as a cartoonist and carries that into his fi lming of Mansfi eld here). Even though her expression conveys that she is thoroughly aware of and enjoying the attention of the men, as evidently does Mansfi eld the actress, Georgiana/Jerri asserts that she just wants to be seen as a domestic, maternal fi gure; she defensively tells her agent Mr. Miller

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(Tom Ewell) that, “I just want to be a wife and have kids, but everyone just fi gures me for a sexpot.” This statement, when refl ected back upon Mansfi eld’s own life, resounds with irony.76

The fi lm next makes the visual joke of Georgiana holding two bottles of fresh milk in an upward-pointing direction in front of her breasts. The joke is of course that Georgiana’s breasts are containers and suppliers of maternal milk. The effect, however, is one that renders her image as less a joke than an image of sympathy and power because the milk/breast association brings forth a maternal connotation for her character, mixing her sexualized appearance with ideas of motherhood. Additionally, her association with maternal milk allows her a power over the male in the frame, her agent, Mr. Miller, as he is held in sway by her connotative maternal sexuality. This view of Georgiana, then, reveals a fundamental site of power that hyper-feminine sexualized women have over heterosexual men—the ability to evoke the both the image of the maternal body and the sexualized body as sites of feminine power as well as masculine desire.

When thinking of Mansfi eld, then, especially in her late career work as an erotic performer and striptease artist, or sex worker, it is perhaps useful to employ LeMoncheck’s view of “understanding sex work as a dialectical relation between commodifi ed object and active subject”

PLATE 66. “Oh, I’ve been in men’s bedrooms before.” (Jayne Mansfi eld, Tom Ewell, The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956).

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PLATE 67. “Everyone considers me for a sexpot instead of a mother; no one thinks I’m equipped to follow through.” (Jayne Mansfi eld, Tom Ewell, The Girl Can’t Help It, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956).

(117). When it comes to sex in cinema, as Krzywinska has so usefully argued, the “rhetorics of transgression” is the method most commonly employed to construct sexuality on the screen: Of all the infl uences that prevail on cinematic mediations of sex and desire, it is transgression that proves to be a signifi cant guiding factor; it is extremely common for fi lms to couch sex and desire in rhetorics of transgression. While these might prove important in attracting the attention of a target audience, the particular way that transgression is coded has an in-built moral and value-laden perspective. (229)

Interestingly, while her later fi lms were clearly transgressive in their use of open nudity, in Mansfi eld’s early fi lms, other than her forty-one inch bust, the “rhetoric of transgression” appears to be kept under wraps, as Mansfi eld’s characters are whitewashed to appear sexually innocent and virtuous in spite of their highly-sexualized appearances. This is perhaps because, as Saxton writes, “Hollywood women in 1954 were sexy and stupid or funny and stupid. They were encouraged not to try to be both since sex or the woman would suffer” (38). Thus, the transgression, it

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can be argued, only occurs in the viewer’s mind. The Production Code was still in effect at the time, however, but its enforcement was beginning to wane, leading to a loosening of standards (and dress) that allowed for more implicit images of feminine sexuality.

For instance, in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Mansfi eld plays Kate, a local saloon owner who sings in elaborate costumes and performs onstage with her dance-hall girls. In keeping with the genre of the Western, Kate seeks to protect both her own virtue and that of her girls from being molested by the men, except of course, as a sign in her establishment says, “only if they want you to.” In the fi lm’s plot Kate falls in love with an Englishman, a visiting gun salesman (Kenneth More).

Thus she is vigilant about protecting and proving herself to be worthy of a proper marriage. However, in one of the fi lm’s most outrageously transgressive scenes, Kate appears onstage in a costume to sing “If the San Francisco Hills Could Only Talk,” where, instead of the usual site of her breasts, the focal point is designed to land squarely on her pelvic region. What is especially comic is that the pelvic triangle of her costume appears to be constructed out of black feathers in such a way that it appears to be pubic hair. The editing next crosscuts from a full body shot of Kate to a three-quarters frame view that leaves her lower body out of the frame, thus highlighting her large breasts on each cue for the line about “San Francisco hills.” The erotic peek-a-boo effect occurs as the focal point moves from a view of her pelvis, with its suggested nudity, to her breasts, which she arcs high into the air in a pin-up pose.

Thus, the audience is confronted with the paradox of feeling respect for Kate’s virtue while being manipulated by her fairly blatant sexuality.

Here again Mansfi eld is happily giving the male audience what it wants, with the complete knowledge of the comic and erotic effects her performance is engendering. In spite of the fi lm’s genre of Western comedy, the effect of Mansfi eld’s erotic use of her body is similar to that in The Girl Can’t Help It. Just beneath the visual joke lies the real seriousness of Mansfi eld’s control and enjoyment of her sexuality. The further visual joke is on the viewers, both diegetic and non-diegetic, because through the tantalizing use of her eroticism, Mansfi eld and the camera play with

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism

165

PLATE 68. a, b, c. “If the San Francisco hills could only talk.” (Jayne Mansfi eld, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956).

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the viewer’s desire to see what is not supposed to be seen. This marks a moment of the rhetorics of transgression in cinema. Instead of becoming sexually objectifi ed, Mansfi eld makes sex (and herself) her subject in a way that puts her in control of how her sexuality gets deployed. The insightful viewer is made to think that she is making fun of the men’s desires because she knows the effect her performance will have.

COMMODITY FETISHISM, EROTICISM,

AND CONSTRUCTING JAYNE MANSFIELD

In “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display,” Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes:

Within cultural forms of… “commodity aesthetics,” it is the image of desirable femininity that is central, having become in the course of more than a century a supplementary emblem of the commodity itself. In becoming not only the commodity’s emblem but its lure, the feminine image operates as a conduit and mirror of desire, reciprocally intensifying and refl ecting the commodity’s allure…apparent inevitability of this coupling of eros and commodity, and indeed its global ubiquity, should not however blind us to its historicity, its roots in social as well as sexual relations. (113)

With her intelligence Mansfi eld recognized the power of the erotic allure of the image of the feminine in its reifi cation as a commodity.

She worked tirelessly throughout her short life to create, build, and secure her career through making her image ubiquitous in the culture:

“she posed at the drop of a shutter, appearing at the openings of fried chicken franchises and charity events; she was Miss Freeway, Miss Electric Switch, Miss Fourth of July” (Champlin 194). In reference to her sexuality as a selling point, Cawthorne notes, “it was said she did not have to get out of bed to get publicity” (34). She made daily press appearances: “She made a career out of keeping her face in the paper”

(Calendo 16). She twice appeared on the cover of Life magazine, the fi rst with the heading “Broadway’s Smartest Dumb Blonde” (Mann 58).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 167

While Monroe was undoubtedly the better actress, Mansfi eld was the better business woman, and in some ways more than Monroe, is single-mindedly responsible for purveying the image of the “dumb blonde”

(who we always secretly know is smart) into a lasting cultural signifi er of an ideal of American femininity. In fact, as her best friend and biographer May Mann has written,

In the three years since Jayne had made her debut on Broadway, she had become the most spectacular and controversial star in a decade. In 1960, she topped all press polls for more words in print about her than anyone else in the world. Her publicity exceeded Elizabeth Taylor’s. She created instant news, daily—everything from dresses falling off, clothes that burst at the seams strategi-cally in the presence of cameras, to well-planned, fi ctional plots that would make headlines. (104)

Surely there is a touch of genius and even feminist potential in the ability of a girl from Texas to have accomplished all of this. Her accomplishments are made all the more impressive because she did most of this on her own while working with her longtime press agent. It is even more impressive because when Mansfi eld appeared on the scene the Hollywood studio system was on its last legs. In the wake of television as a new media that competed for audiences, the star machine had broken down. “Under new fi nancial arrangements, studios were no longer prepared to do massive publicity and stars began to fi nd it chic to hide”

(Saxton 41). Mansfi eld realized the power of media to construct images, however, and therefore, she worked the press to her advantage: Newspaper people are very important and I have always believed in the power of the press and publicity. I learned quickly how to use that power and to cooperate with the press fully at all times.

It became a love affair. I have never let the press down, even at times when I have been criticized for my publicity. (Mansfi eld, qtd. in Mann 40)

Unfortunately, later in her career, her endless quest for publicity turned against her. Always seeking to be in control of her image, Mansfi eld

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fought the lingering control of the studio executives, asserting her own desires as self-agent. This led to tension with her studio bosses, and eventually, one can argue, it was her relentless self- and over-exposure that, so to speak, did her in as a viable actress: The studio had not yet resigned itself to the fact that Jayne would be unmanageable. During a studio publicity conference, Jayne agreed on all points the studio had in mind. And, as usual, she went right on doing what she thought best for her career on her own. (Mann 66)

Aside from “out-breasting” Jane Russell in a swimming pool publicity shoot for a Howard Hughes fi lm,77 one of her most ingenious publicity ideas came after she began her highly successful run on Broadway in the play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? , which was later adapted to fi lm. In the fi lm version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? , just as she did on stage, Mansfi eld initially appears in nothing but a pink (her signa-ture color) towel as she receives a massage.

During the play’s run, realizing the cultural connection between capitalism and sexuality, she dreamed up the idea of blanketing department stores throughout New York City with copies of her image: PLATE 69. “I’m all excited because you’re loving me up!” (Jayne Mansfi eld, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 169

Almost every store window in New York City had my picture in front, and those that didn’t—I would go in personally and hand them one. Then I got the idea of blow-ups, fi ve feet by three. I’d autograph them to a respective shop or store and walk in with one and give it to the owner. I had so many different poses, so each would have an exclusive. No one refused me. And there I was, block after block, smiling out at the public. (Mansfi eld, qtd. in Mann 52)

And smiling all the way to the bank too, one suspects. “It has been said with authority that she achieved more notoriety in her year on Broadway than most actresses do in a lifetime” (Haspiel 328).

With her intelligence, Mansfi eld instinctively recognized that “capitalism is as much a semiotic as an economic system” (Solomon-Godeau 114). She further recognized the complex relations, about which Solomon-Godeau writes, between image, eros, human psychology, and Marx’s theories of commodity fetishism:

The chimerical illusion of erotic plentitude, in conjunction with the semiotic excess of both image and commodity, additionally suggests the need to grant an enlarged purview for fetishism, one that would incorporate these libidinal mechanisms into the Marxist model while integrating the role of the economic and social relations into the Freudian one. (133)

With her instinctive knowledge of the interrelationships between the erotic and commodity fetishism, Mansfi eld eroticized her own body, specifi cally her breasts, turning them into a commodity for her own profi t.

In doing so, she wore specially made bras and clothing that pushed up and exaggerated the size of her breasts in contrast to her much smaller eighteen-inch waist. In tandem with her bleached blonde hair and heavy make-up, the effect was that of an erotic hyperbolic hyper-femininity that sought to seduce, manipulate, and arouse by shifting the focus onto the most feminine parts of the female body.

All of this publicity, in conjunction with her long-running Broadway play, and the release of her wildly successful fi lm in 1956, The Girl Can’t

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Help It, led to Mansfi eld winning the Golden Globe award for “Most Promising Female Newcomer” (Vogel 362). Tellingly though, for this discussion, is her biographer May Mann’s comment that “All the prominent people in town came to pay her homage; the men—not the women.

Women were either envious or not willing to bask in Jayne’s light, so they ignored the invitations” (60).

In her day, Mansfi eld was in many ways emblematic of her times, in her lifestyle and the embellishment of her hyper-feminine sexuality.

The culture then was already fully commodity-driven, and “conspicuous consumption was a characteristic of Jayne and the era. Later Jayne was willing to buy, if she couldn’t promote, clothes, jewels, furs, houses, and cars, things which could be seen and envied” (Saxton 11). With her self-earned money Mansfi eld bought herself houses, pets, and even a pink Jaguar to drive around in. She bought all the best clothes and furs, although her early jewelry was fake. When constructing Jayne Mansfi eld, she “made-up and made do” with lots of red lipstick, bleached hair, black eyeliner, and heavy brows penciled in.

PLATE 70. “Making Up and Making Do.” (Fernand Aubry and Jayne Mansfi eld, The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne Mansfi eld, Blue Ribbon Pictures, 1968).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 171

As Kathy Peiss writes:

Makeup contributed to the constitution of women’s identity, no longer its falsifi cation…making up became one of the tangible ways women in their everyday lives confi rmed their identities as women: they became women in the application of blusher, mas-cara, and lipstick. (“Making Up and Making Do” 330–331) While some women had a troubled relationship with Mansfi eld’s image, others admired it, and in the manner of Jackie Stacey’s work on women’s cultural imitation of women’s images,78 young girls saw in Mansfi eld an image worth emulating because looking like her held the promise of their own sexual empowerment both with themselves and with men, and by extension, empowerment to be recognized in the culture as a desirable body:

Males had a primary relation with Jayne. She played to them and to their sexual desires. But her true fans were her students, the girls who saw her effect on men. Unlike the males who wanted Jayne the way a groupie wants a rock singer, the girls fl attered her by imitation. Adolescent females read her opinions, considered her clothes and surveyed her body. Even sophisticated girls bleached their hair and tried to walk and talk…with personality.

They experimented with hip wiggling and whispery voices. Jayne was a lesson that achievement depended on a forty-inch bust.

(Saxton 115)

According to both Stacey and Peiss, this act of imitating and constructing identities through a star’s image has culturally positive effects for women. While Peiss writes about the period 1900–1930, the same holds true for the 1950s of Mansfi eld:

If one effect of the cosmetics industry was to represent “woman”

as a kind of merchandise or objectifi ed spectacle, another was to destabilize nineteenth-century cultural hierarchies among women, open economic opportunities, and represent, however inadequately, new claims for cultural legitimacy. These commodities offered women a language through which they could articulate

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new demands, concerns, and desires:…In this context, external appearances could be manipulated to represent and mediate new notions of identity. (“Making Up and Making Do” 331) When it comes to constructing one’s image as that of a “dumb blonde sex symbol,” however, many feminists take decidedly opposite views.

As Joanne Hollows notes,

Fashion and beauty practices have been a major target for feminist critique. Many feminists have seen these practices as oppressive and exploitative and emphasized the damage they do to women.

While many second-wave feminists saw fashion as form of ‘bondage’—for example, the girdle and stiletto heel are frequently cited examples—the fashion and beauty industries continue to receive a great deal of criticism. (139)

While some feminist might view a bra as a form of “bondage,” for Mansfi eld it was a valuable key to her success. Further, with her push-up bra exaggerating her already-large breasts, Mansfi eld created erotic pleasure not only for her viewers but for herself as well. Mansfi eld was extremely proud of her large breasts and sought to show them off as much as possible.79 She had her bra and dress straps specially engineered to suddenly break, thereby exposing her breasts at crucial opportunities for publicity.80 In this, Mansfi eld seemed to revel in the public exposure of her breasts, not only as way of advancing her career but also as a way of fl aunting her body in the face of social mores designed for surveillance, policing, and containing the feminine body. Mansfi eld thought her breasts and body were beautiful and saw nothing wrong with public nudity. Further, she recognized the erotic effect her public exposure had not only on her heterosexual male viewers, but also homosexuals, transsexuals, and drag queen viewers who both admired and often imitated her appearance. Notably, in a semi-documentary fi lm released after her death, The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne Mansfi eld, Mansfi eld is shown exploring Parisian nightlife. At night in the Montemarte district of Paris, she is fi lmed in her wanderings through several gay and lesbian nightclubs, and even as a judge at a transsexual beauty contest. In the fi lm,

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism

173

PLATE 71. a, b, c, d. Gay Paris (The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne Mansfi eld, Blue Ribbon Pictures, 1968).

(continued on next page)

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PLATE 71. (continued)

seeking less to sensationalize her subjects, and treating them with great respect and admiration, Mansfi eld makes a powerful statement about cultural differences between American and European attitudes toward nudity, the body (male and female), sex, homosexuality and alternative lifestyles.

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 175

Just as Mansfi eld was ahead of her time in openly recognizing alternative sexualities and ways of being, her homosexual viewers also recognized, as did many heterosexual women, the empowering effect of a woman who was fully aware and in possession of her own sexuality as a site of explorations and pleasure for herself and others. From a post-feminist perspective it is this sense of sexual empowerment that makes Mansfi eld a sexual subject worth exploring today. As Hollows comments further, “recent feminists have not only highlighted the ways in which fashion and beauty practices can be used as a form of resistance by women, but also the modes of feminine pleasure produced by these practices” (157).

When we talk about Mansfi eld, feminine pleasure, especially hyper-feminine erotic pleasure, seems to be what it is all about, at least from the perspective of more than a fair share her female or feminine-identifi ed viewers. In her sexually charged appearance and performances, the other half, heterosexual men, it can be argued, do experience her as a realization of male desires. For sex is what Mansfi eld is really about, as even her most favorable critics point out that, “Her acting was, at its best, enthusiastic. She was, however, shrewd, colossally stacked and insatiable for attention” (Saxton xii–xiii).

Saxton further notes that “by making herself sexually outrageous, Jayne made it hard for sober, serious-minded feminists to incorporate her in the greater sisterhood” (179–180). However, Saxton also makes some excellent points about Mansfi eld’s feminist potential: her story must resonate with every woman who has ever felt used for her sexuality, who has ever been confused by the confl icting pressures of career and family, who has ever been tempted to use her sexuality for love, acceptance or gain, who has ever wanted more than she could have. Jayne’s dilemma hounds all women.

(xv)

While raising fi ve children and purveying her sexualized maternal image, Mansfi eld also created her own career. “She would have understood instinctively women’s desires to achieve beyond the confi nes of

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a family, women challenging their traditional roles” (Saxton xv). She instinctively understood, perhaps because she, more than most, in her already hyper-feminine, over-determined bodily presence, was forced to live out daily the inherent power of feminine sexuality. While sex was supposed to be kept private, for Mansfi eld sex was a constant public presence, one presence that accompanied the burden (and pleasure) of having a forty-one (and after fi ve children, forty-six) inch bust.

Jayne suffered from the sexual stereotype forced on a woman with a forty-inch bust. There was nothing else she could be but sexy, and there was no way anyone could respond to her but sexually…Jayne suffered from being an unusually strong and courageous woman in a society which prefers its women cowardly and undecided. (Saxton 180)

In thinking about Mansfi eld’s public and fi lmic use of her sexuality, it is useful to consider how in Sex and the Cinema Tanya Krzywinska explores the ways that fi lm constructs sex through its formal aesthetics.

She comes to the conclusion that

Cinema’s very form…calls on transgression in that sex is made the object of the gaze; sex becomes a public entertainment which infringes on the commonly held value that sex should be a private affair, hence scrutiny from regulatory, reformist or other bodies, and the presence of conditions that govern the legitimate or illegitimate status of a fi lm. Many representations of sex on screen work to draw viewers’ interest by making of sex an invitation and mystery; working with people’s curiosity about sex has proved to be a lucrative strategy throughout cinema’s history. (Krzywinska 229) These insights applied to Mansfi eld indicate that she had a very canny understanding about the relationships between sex, fi lm, and the public, making it so that her career as a Hollywood star seemed inevitable. Her bodily form constantly conjured up the private act of sex as a public affair. She was transgressive in her own right because her appearance invited sex, whether she wanted it to or not. Instead of being beaten down by the fact, she was smart enough to realize that she had a real

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 177
asset that would be lucrative to her. As LeMoncheck writes, “sex work is attractive to many women who are sex workers precisely because sex is a powerful tool for women’s economic independence. As one prostitute has said, ‘The erotic image is our bread and butter’ ” (121). Resoundingly, Mansfi eld once said that she “did it to buy her baby milk” (Saxton).81 Paradoxically, however, “The fact that a woman’s sexuality can be a source of freedom from dependence on any one man may be one reason for the stigma of sex work” (Saxton 121). In other words, American and feminist culture often unwittingly work to keep old patriarchal structures of containing women’s sexuality in place.

In her defense of her feminist biography of Mansfi eld, Saxton insightfully writes,

Women’s history, unlike men’s, is also the history of sex. If a woman transcends her sexual identity, it is with diffi culty and cause for endless comment. If she does not, no one is surprised.

A woman who capitalizes on it, on the other hand, is used or ridiculed. Feminists who have written about women naturally tend to gravitate toward heroines like Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf…who have fought to overcome the handicaps of their sex…To understand what it means to be an exclusively sexual being, to understand why a woman chooses that part and what it does to her, will be a step toward understanding sex and its capacity to imprison or free. (xi) As Saxton mentions, as a hyper-feminine sexualized body, Mansfi eld

“wasn’t encouraged at home or at school to take her mind seriously, whereas people all over the place were taking her body seriously” (27).

Many women have perhaps shared her plight. Additionally, Mansfi eld was a woman who loved sex and who embraced her sexuality. In the sexual climate of the 1950s, this could be a diffi cult position to take, as young women then were divided into the binary categories of “good”

and “bad” girls, the bad girls being the ones who got a reputation for getting too close with boys. While there is no evidence that as a young woman Mansfi eld was promiscuous, she did like boys and this eventually literally got her into trouble: “Girls like Jayne found it hard to hide

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their interest and were avoided or exploited for it” (Saxton 21). When Mansfi eld was sixteen, she was given several alcoholic drinks until she passed out and was reportedly raped:

One of the boys put me in his car and drove to a parking place so the fresh air blowing into the car would make me come to. I can’t remember the details, but I was raped…When my period didn’t arrive on schedule, my worst fear was confi rmed. I was pregnant!

(Luijters 131)

The result was her daughter, Jayne-Marie, and a hasty, young marriage to her fi rst husband, Paul Mansfi eld.

Mansfi eld still chose to develop her talents as a symbol of sex. In this attempt she succeeded so well it can be argued that she at times even eclipsed Monroe. “In the fi fties, Jayne was a demonstration of what to do and how to do it when female sexuality was a come-on, a taste, a broken promise” (Saxton xii). Mansfi eld developed her talents as an image of the erotic that attempted to hide beneath a thin veil of innocence.82 The veil was necessary of course, because as Audre Lourde writes in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” “On the one hand, the superfi cially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence” (277). As Saxton writes, She availed herself of the 1950s stereotypes about women, gathered them up and packaged them into the helpless, breathless, pouty tease which described sexy American women. She became an object lesson in the sex life of the fi fties. If anyone characterized the schizoid attitude toward sex in this country, it was Jayne. (xii)

In many ways, she was a “performance artist” of sex: Later, on stage, Mansfi eld brilliantly manipulated America’s peculiar love-hate relationship with sex. She became an artist at stimu-lating sexual interest without demanding anything…She always kept in mind what men wanted women to be and the fearsome

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 179
side of sex. She came to symbolize the cheerful, easy lay, whom one didn’t have to lay at all. (Saxton 29) Mansfi eld also spoke openly to the press about sex in a time when women were not expected to even know much about it: I believed that sex is the most important human factor between two people (Mansfi eld, qtd. in Mann 115). I love sex…Since it is one of God’s gifts to everyone, there should be no shame in saying so. It gives me a glow of happiness all day…When it is honest, it enchants, it captivates, amuses, it fascinates. It arouses within you the desire to protect and shelter (Cawthorne 42). Meanwhile, I enjoy being a sex symbol and making people happy (Luijters 13).

I believe that in physical relationships, everything goes. The wild-est form of love is beautiful…It should be animalistic. It should be beautiful. It should be tender. It should be brutal, sadistic. It should, at times, even be masochistic. (Mansfi eld, qtd. in Mann 115) Mansfi eld’s attitudes and knowledge about sex, coupled with her public acknowledgement of herself as a sexual and sexualized body, make her in many ways ahead of her time in furthering public attitudes and ideas about feminine sexuality. Of course, Mansfi eld was speaking about heterosexual sex. She loved men, had numerous lovers, and married three times. Although she was usually the breadwinner in her relationships, she believed in always being feminine for her man. She turned her Hollywood home, the “Pink Palace,” into a dream of feminine décor. Her love of the feminine color pink extended to her dress as well: “A woman should be pink and cuddly for a man” (Mann 77). Mansfi eld enjoyed pleasing her man: “Once he’s happy in the bedroom, the kitchen and the living room are a cinch. Today, any intelligent girl knows that” (Luijters 17).

As time went on, she became even more blatantly open about her love for men and sex. When speaking about her then-fi ancé, second husband Mickey Hargitay, she said: “Career-wise, I know I shouldn’t marry. But he has the biggest—and I’m not going to let go of it” (Mansfi eld, qtd.

in Mann 77). Perhaps it is not surprising that “Jayne’s most devoted and loyal fans were gay” (Saxton 136).

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Of course, Mansfi eld’s open attitudes toward sex left her open to much criticism from conservative factions as well. Mansfi eld constantly had to defend her reputation:

I have been called an immoral girl, a broad of easy virtue. I am accustomed to such criticism, and the many things that are not true. I am always proud though when people know the real me.

I could never have an affair of the moment, nor for money. Not even for my career. I couldn’t take the casting couch routine.

A human being must have dignity and self-respect to survive in this business. Or you smother out with sleeping pills. (Mansfi eld, qtd. in Mann 172)

Earlier on, Mansfi eld sought to keep a wholesome image in her relationship with sex in the public eye, in spite of general knowledge that she had many lovers. Saxton writes that Mansfi eld saw sex as an expression of love: “She slept around less for the sensual fun of it than for ‘love’ ” (20).

Interestingly, Mansfi eld was also very selective about the men she slept with, only choosing men, like her third husband, Matt Cimber, whom she (wrongly) thought could help her in her career. “Jayne never really had a love affair without fi rst consulting her career. It wasn’t all that deliberate, but she was so single-minded that all the important men in her life were involved intimately with her profession” (Saxton 45). Her second husband, Mickey Hargitay, managed both her home and career.

Cimber managed her career as well, and, as a soft-core pornographer, is arguably in many ways responsible for its decline.83 It is only when Mansfi eld gave up much of her control over her career, due to alcoholism, to various husbands and lovers that her career rapidly began to suffer. Reportedly, both Cimber, and her last boyfriend before she died, Sam Brody, seeking to have complete control over both Mansfi eld’s body and her career, also regularly beat her into submission, a condition that was regularly recorded in the press as she often appeared with blackened eyes and bruises all over her body. The fact that these men were able to get control over a woman who had previously been so strong-minded was aided by her taking numerous drugs to control her weight, and later, an addiction to alcohol.

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 181

Thus Mansfi eld’s career really seems divided into two parts; her early and meteoric rise to fame, and her rapid descent into a life as striptease and burlesque performer in Vegas and the nightclub circuit. Many have blamed this decline on Mansfi eld’s blatant use of her sexuality; however, it was clearly more likely caused by her addictions and fatal involvements with unscrupulous men who convinced her they could help her career.

Weakened by her chemical dependencies, Mansfi eld gave up control: From one feminist point of view, Jayne was a classic woman victim…On the other hand, there are many ways, within the dictates of a sex-obsessed culture, in which Jayne was liberated. If liberation includes making one’s career as important as one’s life, mobi-lizing one’s energies toward the same goal distinct from being a wife and mother, then Jayne was at least partly free. (Saxton xiii) Once her career was in decline, Mansfi eld’s use of her sexuality in her act became even more blatant. While the little girl innocence still often came into play, more of the clothing came off than ever before. More than ever was “Jayne’s body her career” (Saxton 45). The thirtyish Mansfi eld begins to demonstrate a kind of maturation where, like a striptease scarf, the veil of innocence drops. Mansfi eld realized the ridiculousness of attempting to maintain a façade of innocent sexuality tempered by the maternal when she was performing in soft-core fi lms and strip clubs. She fi nally gave in to the truly sexualized image of herself that she had only previously teased her audiences with. In spite of the downward spiral of her career at this point, Mansfi eld had decided to throw of the shackles of sexual oppression completely. When writing about patriarchal sexual oppression of women, Lourde states that:

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women truly be strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the contexts of male models of power. (278) During her later fi lm appearances and nightclub acts, with their emphasis on her stark nudity, it appears that Mansfi eld came to the full realization

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that, “ the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough” (Lourde 278).

Later in her career, Mansfi eld left off merely attempting to shock men and appeared to be enjoying the sensual and erotic effect of her body, not just for the men’s pleasure, but hers too. Her later fi lms have many instances of near or complete nudity: In Too Hot to Handle, Mansfi eld appears in a dress that is made of nothing but silver netting and sequins.

The effect is that she appears almost completely naked. While the original was shot and distributed in England, in America “the censors objected to her revealing gowns and an animator had to be hired to paint sequins over Jayne’s naked nipples” (Mann 35). “A male homosexual friend of PLATE 72. The American censor painted-over dress (Jayne Mansfi eld, Too Hot to Handle, Topaz Film Corporation, 1960).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 183

Jayne’s observed that she had the style and taste of a drag queen” (Cawthorne 137).

Striptease became a very important part of her act. Just as the rhetorics of transgression come into play in cinema, striptease itself becomes perhaps the supreme, highly artistic rhetoric of transgression.

In striptease
transgression is important…Forbidden practices are being engaged in…The obsessive transformation of virgin into whore simply crosses over and over again the boundary between them. Without the boundary, there could be no transformation. And without the boundary to violate, the thrill of transgression would be gone. The sexual excitement striptease produces…only “works”

to produce sexual excitement because the exposed body is considered shameful and forbidden. The viewer is seeing something he is not entitled to see, something forbidden, and moreover, something potentially dangerous because it might have the power to change or transform him…One fi nds the same view of the (fe -
male) body as loathsome, humiliating, and even dangerous in a stripper’s comment that one of several styles of producing excitement in striptease is “hard,” that is, emphasizing the dark, hard lines of constraint provided by women’s clothing, constraint of an aggressive female sexuality: “It is as if the notion of sexual woman were so overwhelming that she had to be visibly bound.”

(Hartsock 173)

Toward the end of the enforcement of the Production Code (1930–1968) in a 1963 fi lm, Mansfi eld fi nally threw off all the clothing binding her.

With the exception of the occasional well-placed sheet or towel, in Promises! Promise! Mansfi eld appears almost completely nude. Inevitably, perhaps, her fi rst onscreen nude scene is one that highlights her famous breasts. As she appears in a bathroom doorway, she seductively towels herself off and then does a half-pivot with her arms raised above her head to both highlight and extend her breasts in the air, an attempt to make them appear as large as they do in a bra.

It is apparent, however, that Mansfi eld’s breasts are actually much smaller than they have appeared when clothed, not too much larger than

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 73. a, b. “Do you need anything honey?” (Jayne Mansfi eld, Promises!

Promises!, NTD, 1963).

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism

185

PLATE 74. Jayne Mansfi eld (Promises! Promises!, NTD, 1963).

those of the average woman. Even more interestingly they are also covered with obvious stretch marks from her numerous pregnancies.

A later shot shows Mansfi eld rolling around nude in bed (ostensibly after an attempt at baby-making sex) and she’s shot from a high-angle in a frontal nude pose. In this shot, since her breasts are obviously natural, they of course appear quite fl attened against her chest (artifi cial breasts stay upright in reclined position), again making them look smaller. Also, despite her obvious attempt to hold it taut, the fl esh of Mansfi eld’s abdomen is loosened and hanging, while also covered with numerous stretch marks. Strangely, Mansfi eld plays a wife whose husband has failed at getting her pregnant, while the actress’ body says otherwise. Here again, the maternal body appears as sexually desirable. Nevertheless, what is apparent in these shots is Mansfi eld’s obvious erotic pleasure at her open and cinematic display of her body. She appears to exult in the cinematic display and gaze at her nudity in a way that seems less like acting than a true sense of enjoyment.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

The fi lm, however, was not well received: “When Promises! Promises! was released in 1963 it got scathing reviews and fl opped at the box offi ce” (Vogel 365). Prior to the fi lm’s release these nude scenes from the fi lm were published in Playboy, a venue in which Mansfi eld regularly appeared (“I like being a pin-up girl. There’s nothing wrong with it”

[362]). “No other mainstream actress had ever appeared nude in a movie before and Mansfi eld hoped the controversy would help ticket sales. The pictures were so revealing that the magazine’s editor Hugh Hefner was arrested on obscenity charges” (365). Of her appearances in the nude, Mansfi eld once said “If you’re going to do something wrong, do it big because the punishment is just the same either way” (Luijters 126). That same year at a “show in Burlington, Vermont, she was arrested for indecent exposure” (Vogel 364).

Because Mansfi eld saw herself as fully sexually empowered, a woman who exulted in her own erotic power, she was forced to suffer the scorn of her society, still rife with Puritanical views. Lourde writes that “Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from the most vital areas of our lives other than sex” (279). Still today, instead of seeing sexual empowerment, “many radical feminists contend that dancing in strip bars, working as prostitutes, or posing for pornography reduces women to marketable sexual commodities in a patriarchal environment that legitimizes men’s unconditional sexual access to women” (LeMoncheck 110). When writing about the self-empowerment of sex workers, women much like Mansfi eld, LeMoncheck makes the point that

As women who advocate fi nancial independence, sexual self-determination, and protection against sexual abuse for all women, they consider themselves feminist as well as sex workers who acknowledge the intimidation and abuse of sex workers worldwide but who reject feminists’ and moral conservatives’ identifi cation of all sex workers as victims…From this perspective, if prostitution gives a woman fi nancial independence to choose what to do with her life, feminists who value women’s sexual agency and self-defi nition must not condemn women for pursuing sex work. (113)

Sex as Cinematic Eroticism 187

The height of the classical American sex goddess’ reign begins its decline toward the end of Mansfi eld’s career. Saxton blames the advent of the sexual revolution and the pill on her decline in popularity: If Jayne was a product of the fi fties, then she was a casualty of the sixties. In the fi fties, Jayne and American men had conspired to keep sex a secret. By the sixties the secret was out. The pill and the sexual revolution on the campuses had begun eating away at the double standard…This way of sexual honesty deprived Jayne of a persona. She couldn’t sell her illicit appeal when the country had taken the sin out of sex. (xiii)

It is also fair to say, however, that Mansfi eld had much to do with ushering in the newer and more open attitudes about sex. While Mansfi eld may have staked the success of her image on rhetorics of transgression, it is clear that Mansfi eld never saw herself as doing anything in the least bit transgressive, but only what she felt was natural and normal for a girl to do. Thus, Mansfi eld and her breasts become iconic in American and feminist culture because of what they truly represent—a sexually self-empowered woman. As Krzywinska writes:

Cinematic sex acts to some degree as a gauge for measuring historically specifi c pressures that shape the meanings and practices of sex, desire and sexuality in real life…Films can often open up new sexual vistas for viewers and contribute to ensuring that sex and desire are regarded in multiple ways…Through the cross-current of exchanges between representation and culture, sex in the cinema has an important role in the formation of dominant attitudes to sexuality, as well as promoting particular sexual identities either by positive or negative example. (228) It has oft been reported that the real reason for the decline of Mansfi eld’s career can be attributed to the death of Marilyn Monroe: “It was very strange how Marilyn’s death affected the industry, and the need for blonde sex symbols. It was like all parts and work for blondes disappeared to honor her. After Mansfi eld’s own early and tragic death, Saxton believes that “Jayne really exterminated the dumb blonde by taking

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
its image to its funny, insane and unpalatable conclusion” (138).84 However, like Harlow, West, and Turner before her, Mansfi eld’s true legacy demonstrates that, when it comes to ideas about hyper-feminine sexuality (and even sexuality in general), and its relation to American capitalism and culture, these blonde sex goddesses really were smart. When it comes to blonde sex goddesses in fi lm, Vogel writes, “it seems that both in the real world and the ‘reel’ world, blondes leave a lasting impression and garner the most attention. Anita Loos was right: Gentlemen prefer blondes, and, history tells us that Hollywood does too” (392). And in American culture and fi lm, the image of the blonde American sex goddess is still thriving.

CONCLUSION

THE AMERICAN SEX GODDESS

IS LEGALLY BLONDE

Being a blonde is more powerful than you think.

––Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, 2001

In the fi lm Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon plays Elle Woods, a blonde alpha Barbie. Like Jayne Mansfi eld, Elle’s favorite color is pink.

Early in the fi lm, Elle gets dumped by her handsome Ivy League boyfriend, Warner Huntington III (Matthew Davis). He breaks up with her because if he is “to become a senator,” he needs a “Jackie, not a Marilyn.” Heartbroken, and in a desperate effort to get Warner back, Elle uses her brains to get accepted to the same law school as does Warner—

Harvard Law. Eventually, Elle comes to realize that Warner does not really love or deserve her. She then decides to apply herself seriously to her studies, and through her shrewd intelligence she eventually becomes the top law student in her class.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Along the path to her legal success, and because she is so beautiful, smart, and blonde, Elle gets sexually harassed by one of her law professors. Disillusioned with law school by this incident, as well as the continuing and appalling unfriendliness of her fellow students who fail to take her seriously, Elle decides to quit. When saying goodbye to her best friend, the beautician Paulette (Jennifer Coolidge), a discouraged Elle says, “When people look at me all they see is blonde hair and big boobs.

No one is ever going to take me seriously.”

Through our exploration of blonde sex goddesses and hyper-femininity in American fi lm, it has become clear that, while blondes often do get represented in fi lm as “dumb,” looked at more deeply, it is often a canny kind of dumb that is seriously smart. Most often blondes become powerful images on the screen as women who control the fi lm, “leading” their ostensibly leading men. Off screen, these actresses control their own sexuality, and often their careers. Thus, in American fi lm, blondes consistently subvert the usually assumed roles of “passive” or

“dumb” and emerge triumphant (when not being killed off by the Code) by using both their beauty and brains to get what they want. While it is true that getting what they want is often combined with an accumula-tion of wealth and a willful class-climbing, it is also apparent that such wealth acquisition and class mobility are very much a part of American character, a condition that, in part, makes the phenomenon of the blonde sex goddess quintessentially American.

Most interestingly, because of their beauty and feminine sexuality, and perhaps because they are already read as sexualized bodies in the culture, blondes in fi lm often use these stereotypical cultural ideas about blondes and their sexuality not only to empower themselves, but to empower their viewers as well. In other words, recognizing the cultural gaze on their already sexualized bodies, blondes in fi lm often use their bodies and ideas about their sexuality, not only to create a desire and admiration for the feminine and/or hyper-femininity, but also to open up and further frank discussions on feminine sexuality and sexuality in general.

We have seen how the actress Jean Harlow smartly used her sexualized body, beauty, and brains to control the screen in her fi lms, in which

The American Sex Goddess is Legally Blonde 191
she most often played women who not only used their sexuality to get what they wanted, but also used it to get the sex they wanted. Similarly, we have seen how Mae West took getting what she wanted much further when she skillfully deconstructed, undermined, and rewrote the patriarchal language surrounding women’s sexuality. She thereby developed a new language about feminine sexuality and hyper-femininity and their relationship to a masculinist culture in a way that empowered herself and her viewers. With the duplicity of Lana Turner, we have seen how American attitudes about women’s sexuality can shift over time, and how negative cultural views can sometimes necessitate a veiling of hyper-feminine desire in order to manipulate patriarchal controls on women’s sexuality so that women can continue to realize their own desires. Finally, through opening a discussion on Jayne Mansfi eld’s public foreground-ing of her hyper-feminine sexualized (and occasionally nude) body, we most clearly see that the body of the blonde sex goddess in fi lm, far from being passive, can be celebratory, initiating cultural conversations and boundary-pushing ideas about femininity, sex, and sexuality.

While it appears that after Monroe’s and Mansfi eld’s deaths, for a time, the American sex goddess became an anachronism in American fi lm and culture, this occurrence seems to have been infl uenced by both the advent of the sexual revolution and a Kennedy administration era preference for brunette “Jackies.” However, the American sex goddess’

image did not disappear for long, reappearing in the 1970s in soft-porn chic and other fi lms where women took up and further explored their sexual liberation. Among other places, in the 1970s, she reappears as Cybil Shepherd’s character, Betsy, in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and as one of television’s Charlie’s Angels, Farrah Fawcett. Perhaps more interestingly, beginning in the 1980s, the image of the sex goddess moves fi rmly into popular culture through performers such as Madonna, continuing to this day with pop music icons such as Gwen Stefani, Beyoncé Knowles, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton (who reportedly earns $20 million a year on her blonde sex goddess image alone). Today, the popular culture rendition of the American sex goddess both functions as a form of nostalgia and a tapping into of an iconic image that offers

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

PLATE 75. a, b. Elle and Bruiser Woods (both Gemini vegetarians) (Legally Blonde, MGM, 2001).

The American Sex Goddess is Legally Blonde 193
the ability for endless reproduction and reinvention of the image. But most of all, the endless repetition and performance of the image of American sex goddess evokes for its subject the self-empowerment of self-possessed, hyper-feminine sexuality as well as pointing toward methods of successfully negotiating and subverting the American capitalist labor economy.

Just when Elle is about to give up, feeling beaten down from always having to fi ght the stereotypical views of being read in intellectual and feminist culture, as well as the culture-at-large, as a dumb blonde, one of her female feminist law professors happens to overhear her remark about not being taken seriously. In reference to the sexual harassment, her professor says, “If you are going to let one stupid prick ruin your life, then you’re not the girl I thought you were.” Thereby encouraged, Elle returns to law school, and with the loyal mentoring support of a male law professor, Emmett, who is secretly in love with her and in the sequel Red, White, and Legally Blonde will become her husband, she graduates as valedictorian of her law class. Elle then moves on to the nation’s capitol to fi ght for the rights of animals—another group once oppressed, soon empowered.

NOTES

1. See Jordan, Jessica Hope. “Women Refusing the Gaze: Theorizing Thryth’s

‘Unqueenly Custom’ in Beowulf and The Bride’s Revenge in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volume 1.” The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 9 (2006).

2. In the fi rst chapter of his book, Pre-Code Hollywood, Thomas Doherty writes that, in “the so-called pre-Code era, when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it,…pre-Code Hollywood did not adhere to the strict regulations on matters of sex, vice, violence, and moral meaning forced upon the balance of Hollywood cinema” (2). Of post-Code enforcement (after 1934) Hollywood, Doherty writes, (while using an oddly-formed metaphor), “frac-tures of American life, still less the open embrace of sex, did not close up when the Code clamped down. No matter how rigid the body cast, Hollywood cinema is too supple and expressive an art form to constrain what Walt Whit-man referred to as ‘nature without check with original energy.’ ” (3). Chapter fi ve of Doherty’s book, “Vice Rewarded,” discusses the pre-Code “sex fi lms”

with their “promiscuous embrace of sex,” where his many examples use fi lms that focus explicitly upon women’s sexuality. While Doherty makes much of the distinction between Hollywood’s pre-and post-Code’s depiction of sex in the cinema, however, his overall tendency is to perform a kind of heterosexual naturalization of sex, thereby failing to emphasize how sexuality in these earlier fi lms (as well as later ones) has almost always focused upon the exclusive depiction of women’s or feminine, sexuality, not masculine, and even less so, homosexual sexuality. In effect, Doherty uses his examples of fi lmic sexuality to solidify a heterosexual, masculinist perspective wherein women’s sexuality functions only in service to masculine desire.

3. In Wages of Sin: A Study of Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, Lea Jacobs refers to the 1930s fi lm heroine as one of a series of self-consciously “modern” American types: fl appers, gold diggers, chorines, wisecracking shopgirls. While the heroine could be a kept woman, a trickster, or simply out to marry a millionaire, the stories revolved around the problem of obtaining furs, automobiles, diamonds, and clothes from men…The downward trajectory of the fall was replaced by a rise in class. (11)

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Jacobs’ linguistic and moral characterization of the class and wealth ambi-tions of these fi lmic women as “the fall” is a telling example of how feminist critics often recapitulate masculinist thought and patriarchal misogynist views within their own work.

4. In White, Richard Dyer discusses “The Light of the World” (82–144) or how American cinema has traditionally aligned its technology in order to depict and privilege whiteness. Specifi cally, he discusses the development of “arc lighting,” “colour fi lm that more readily photographs Caucasians,”

and the use of “Max Factor” specially-blended make-up to develop his argument how Hollywood cinema as well as American advertising created the “ideal” American feminine icon of Anglo-Saxon, white, blonde-haired femininity ( Dyer, “White” 92–93).

5. Janet Staiger’s Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema discusses “The Vamp,” where Staiger describes this cinematic construct from a censor’s point of view, as “a woman gone astray, a parasite woman who could feed off the solid stock of America, destroying the vital future it should have” (147). Her own more tempered perspective asserts that “the character of the vamp seems almost to be merely a foil for an extensive examination of the power of sex, women’s rights in this new age

[Modernism and ‘The New Woman’], and the crumbling belief in the assertion that some nineteenth-century notions of the family’s behavior were still pertinent for twentieth-century America” (Staiger 147–148). Thus, Staiger’s interpretation of the 1920s vamp sets the stage for the deep critique of the following 1930s gold digger, her relation to sex, and traditional American family values.

6. In Tanya Krzywinska’s seminal study, Sex and the Cinema, where she closely examines how cinema formalistically constructs sexuality, she writes that:

it is clear from the ubiquitous presence of sex in cinema that it has a strong seductive power and it may well provide images and ideas that affect our own fantasies about sex, sexuality and desire. Representations of sex and sexuality in cinema have therefore been regarded as having the potential to destabilize dominant mores about sex and desire. (2) 7. Cinema both constructs not only itself but its audience as well. Additionally, as Richard Maltby explores in Hollywood Cinema, audiences also play an important role in constructing cinematic ideas. In a self-refl exive impulse, cinema constantly refers to its own self-constructedness, calling

Notes

197
attention to this fact by multiple intertextual allusions, as well as the self-parody of fi lms that contain storylines about Hollywood and its own stars.

8. The history of feminist fi lm theory reveals early feminist fi lm theorists’

interpretations of women in fi lm in fact refl ected the dominant cultural male Caucasian perspective present at the time. In attempts to get out from under patriarchal control, the second-wave feminist fi lm theorists of the 1970s and early 1980, in fact fi rst read fi lm through the “male gaze,” thereby positing cinema as an apparatus that supported the dominant white, masculine culture (see Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”). Recognizing this fact was a signifi cant advance. Building on this, feminist fi lm theorists sought both to overturn and enter into the dominant masculine culture through this male gaze, as did feminists themselves who entered the masculine corporate culture, thereby gaining access to economic power; they in fact accomplished these advances, however, by quite often mimicking the power strategies and persona of masculine culture itself. The early feminist fi lm theories were predicated on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of the feminine as “lack,” as well as the still-useful Marxist and Althusserian theories of capitalism and ideology. While an important and necessary step in the development of feminist fi lm theory, as well as for feminism itself, for the most part, these early perspectives elided the possibility of the representation of woman in fi lm as being read as one of self-agency in its own right (see early feminist fi lm theories, embodied in the works of Laura Mulvey, Mary Anne Doane, E. Ann Kaplan and others). As feminist fi lm theory has progressed, later theorists such as Tanya Modleski, Janet Staiger, Jackie Stacey, et al., have pointed out the theoretical and political necessity for feminist fi lm theorists to stop reading representations of women in fi lm and culture through the male gaze. Extending Janet Staiger’s suggestion of reading fi lm as a

“perverse spectator,” the argument for the feminist agency of the cinematic construct of the gold digger becomes more convincing, in that, if reading through a feminine gaze, then these representations of women can be seen as exercising the fullest agency allowed them, in spite of still being undeni-ably limited by a male-dominated culture.

9. In “Breadlines and Box Offi ce Lines,” Thomas Doherty lays out the effects of the Great Depression upon the Hollywood fi lm industry: In the long night that was the Great Depression, the period between 1930 and 1931 measured out the blackest hours…By 1931 box offi ce returns had dropped 10 percent to 35 percent in most localities. Tens of

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
millions of once loyal moviegoers, up against it and forced to cut back, foreswore the luxury of motion picture entertainment. (27) Doherty points out, however, that “in the long run, the Great Depression was good for the motion picture industry, requiring it to streamline operations, facilitating its realignment along modern lines of business manage-ment, and helping it to crush independent producers” (31). The cinematic construct of the gold digger, then, stands in for both America’s and the fi lm industry’s economic hopes of continuing to realize great wealth in even the most diffi cult of circumstances. That the body of the gold digger, being feminine, is additionally coded for sex renders an even more complex relationship of the representation of the gold digger to the fi lm industry, capitalism and the American economy at large.

10. In most of the earlier pre-Code fi lms of the period depicting the gold digger, she is portrayed in a favorable light and allowed to get away with what good girls cannot. She is often even made wholesome in the end by getting her man. Post-Code, the gold digger is usually made to pay in the end, thereby ending her status as emblematic of unsanctioned economic striving.

11. In “The Repressive Hypothesis,” Foucault argues that “what is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadowy existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infi nitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (35).

12. Real divisions in feminist culture exist in opinions as to how issues of women’s sexuality should be portrayed in various forms of representation. Older school feminists (i.e., second wave and some third wave), as well as many lesbian feminists often assert that in general: 1) representations of women as sexual objects cause instances of sexual violence against women, and 2) representations of women’s sexuality is an inherently male-focused practice that both denigrates and disempowers women. More recently a movement has been afoot in some feminist circles to recognize the power of women in both owning and enjoying their sexuality without having to feel as if they are no longer feminist and are breaking explicit tenets of feminism. For both sides of this argument see Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Oxford University Press, 2000, and Linda LeMoncheck’s Loose Women, Lecherous Men, A Feminist Philosophy of Sex, Oxford University Press, 1997. See also Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter’s Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, Routledge, 1995.

13. While some feminists would argue against the gold diggers’ “self-agency”

in manipulating men for economic gain, seeing them instead as victims

Notes

199
of a male-dominated economy, my reading, while recognizing their economic limitations, (i.e., not being able to gain economic access through a respectable job) applauds the gold digger for subverting the usual capitalistic expectations of wage labor and realizing economic wealth in pursuit of her own pleasure, as well as escaping the more typical patriarchal marriage and domestic plot by manipulating men to her own advantage.

14. See notes 7 and 11.

15. See note 13.

16. Debord further argues that:

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world—not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society’s real unreality. In all its specifi c manifesta-tions—news or propaganda, advertising of the actual consumption of entertainment—the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing mode of social life. (13; author’s emphasis)

In essence, Debord argues that this social relation of the spectacle is a function of capitalism, and further, it is one that works to both create and support a false consciousness or ideology.

17. Foucault writes that:

by placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremonious history of the modes of production…A principle of explanation emerges after the fact: if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. At a time when labor capacity was being systemati-cally exploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable pursuits, except in those—reduced to a minimum—that enabled it to reproduce itself? (5–6)

Thus, sex in cinema performs a function not unlike Hollywood itself; sex in cinema transforms labor, through its mode of production, the fi lm industry, into pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure. The use of women’s sexuality in cinema becomes synonymous with a capitalist institutional relation of labor transformed into pleasure.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

18. In “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx defi nes a commodity as:

in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labor…From that moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character.

On the one hand, it must as a defi nitive useful kind of labour, satisfy a defi nite social want…On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself…The mystical value of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use-value…The products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses…The produc-tions of human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into a relation both with one another and the human race.

So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.

This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. (319–322) Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is useful here to describe the gold digger’s use of her sexuality for economic gain, as well as the fi lm industry’s representation of women’s sexuality for its own profi t.

19. See note 11.

20. In the introduction to her book Loose Women, Lecherous Men, Linda LeMoncheck makes a convincing argument that, for the most part, feminist culture works to limit women’s expression of their sexuality and, for those who choose it, femininity. Her thesis is: that a philosophical and feminist dialogue on women’s sexual liberation is possible if women’s sexuality—the erotic passions, pleasures, and preferences that circumscribe women as sexually desirable beings—is examined from two equally compelling perspectives: 1) the perspective of women’s sexual oppression under conditions of individual and institutionalized male dominance; and 2) the perspective of women’s sexual liberation, identifi ed both in terms of women’s personal pursuit of sexual agency and self-defi nition and it terms of the sexual liberation of women as a class. This approach to women’s sexuality posits that individual women’s sexual lives are variously oppressive or liberating,

Notes

201
and sometimes both at once; they are seldom static over time or identi-cal to one another, and they are often complex and contradictory. Indeed there may be as many different kinds of women’s sexuality as there are women. As a feminist philosopher, I believe that a caring as well as critical understanding of this variety is essential to a feminism committed to pluralism and social equity. The aim of this book is to develop a philosophical framework, which I call the ‘view from somewhere different,’

to recognize and celebrate the different ways that women fi nd meaning and value in their sexual lives. (LeMoncheck 5–6) In agreement with LeMoncheck’s manifesto toward a feminist celebration of the multiplicity of women’s sexuality and experience, this article on the gold digger similarly seeks both recognition and acceptance of these women’s use of their sexuality in accordance with their own pursuit of profi t and pleasure.

21. Haskell in fact interprets sexualized women through the male gaze.

22. See note 23.

23. There exist real cultural, feminist, and academic ideas that blondes are dumb. A recent television commercial underscores this idea by depicting a beautiful young sexy blonde approaching a drab (and overweight) brunette librarian. The joke is that the blonde thinks the library is a fast food restaurant, and she orders a cheeseburger and fries. The librarian is incensed by the blonde’s stupidity and contemptuously hisses, “This is a library.” The blonde then lowers her voice, and, now whispering, repeats her order. One has to wonder what the message is about the frumpy librarian. This very example was actually recently posted by an academic librarian at University of California, Davis on a fi lm blog, with her accompanying comment to other librarians that “we all have experienced this;” “this,” of course, being encounters with academically hopeless beautiful sexy blondes. This example well demonstrates an apparent fundamental feminist and academic incongruity about the incompatibility of blondes with any intellectual or academic value. The same attitude gets furthered in feminist and academic culture through very specifi c codes as to what feminine/feminist appearances are socially acceptable and what are not. Many academic feminists in fact frown upon women who adopt overly feminine appearances, who wear overtly sexual clothing, dye their hair, or even wear make-up. One blonde academic I know has referred to this condition within feminist culture as

“blonde discrimination.” The novelist A. S. Byatt, in her novel Possession, has even created a character who is a blonde academic that suffers these same kinds of disapproval from the feminist scholars around her.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

24. See early fi lm theorists Christian Metz’s and Laura Mulvey’s discussions of the camera as apparatus for the male gaze.

25. See Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18.

26. See Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter.

27. For more on how women identify with fi lmic constructs of femininity, see Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship.

28. In Capital, Marx explains that, money, like commodities and capital, is also a social relation.

29. While it is diffi cult to say exactly what the producer and credited director Howard Hughes’ intentions for Harlow’s character may have actually been, there is much evidence to support what Hughes thought about women in general, as well as Harlow in particular. Various biographies of both Hughes and Harlow have described his misogynistic views of women, as well as his own unusual sexual proclivities. My assertion is that Hughes intended Harlow’s character of Helen to be read as contemptible in her blatant expression of her own sexuality. Additionally, Hughes desired that Helen be blamed by the audience for the brother’s tragic ending. Even her name, Helen, is a telling one, as it refers to traditional issues of a cultural scapegoating for women’s perceived responsibility in issues of war.

In spite of the identifi cation of hyper-feminine viewers with Helen’s own self-empowerment, this view too would have been complicated in the context of its time with that of prevailing contemporary patriarchal views of women’s sexuality.

30. Here this distinction of the hyper-feminine viewer is made as a viewer who inhabits the same subject position and therefore identifi es with images of hyper-femininity.”

31. In Star Gazing, Jackie Stacey argues for the historical specifi city of the cinematic spectator, and one of [her]

aims is to develop the spectator as a “historical subject” in such a way that the cultural location of the text-audience encounter are understood.

Thus the “active” role of the female reader or viewer, it has been argued, has been an important corrective to those early models of audiences as passive dupes. However, pleasure and activity should not simply be celebrated in the name of a naïve kind of populism. “Activity” in and of itself is not a form of resistance: women may be active viewers in the sense of actively investing in oppressive ideologies. I would argue for the need to understand popularity and pleasure as historically located in

Notes

203
order to theorise the full complexity of female spectators’ relationships to popular culture. (47; author’s emphasis) In following Stacey’s argument for the agency of the active female spectator, and the cultural location of these spectators, my argument is making way for the similar agency and recognition of a particular spectator—the hyper-feminine woman.

32. In the main, these critics have made variously informed arguments for a homoerotic component to female spectatorship. Their theories have often been based on Freudian psychology, where woman is read as lack, or Lacanian psychology, based on structuralist theories, that posit women in a similar, if not the same, positioning. In a capitulation to, and a partial refutation and further extension of this, my argument more closely aligns with that of Jackie Stacey’s, where a homoerotic desire is also possible, but not necessary, to the female (or feminine) spectator’s pleasure.

33. See Jackie Stacey’s text mentioned previously; Stella Bruzzi’s Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies; Victoria de Grazia’s The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective; and Joanne Hollows’ Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture.

34. See Richard Maltby, “Hollywood and Its Audiences” in Hollywood Cinema, 19–28. Maltby writes that in the late 1920s, the industry estimated between three-quarters and four-fi fths of its audience were women. Although the reliability of this estimate is open to question, for most of the 1930s and 1940s there was a widespread assumption among production and distribution personnel that the large majority of its movie audiences in the US and Europe were female. (19) 35. Krzywinska’s Sex and the Cinema is, for my purposes here, the best recent study of how sex and issues of sexuality in fi lm are historically and formally constructed. She additionally extensively explores psychoanalytic perspectives, as well as the fi lm industry’s economic impetus and reward for constructing sex in fi lm.

36. See notes 7 and 11.

37. See notes 7 and 11.

38. As quoted in Eells, 12.

39. Various biographical sources give different dates for West’s birth; August 17, 1887, 1888, 1892, or 1893, therefore complicating attempts at determining her exact age when she fi rst arrived in Hollywood. According to her biographer George Eells, the youngest West could have possibly been when she began her screen career is thirty-nine. See Eells, 19.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

40. Eells reports that upon receiving the script for Night After Night, West was
appalled…that she didn’t appear until halfway through the fourth reel.

Worse, still, as written, Maudie was a colorless minor character; one which, in Mae’s opinion could be played by any utility actress…She stormed into the offi ce of Al Kaufman, one of studio head Adolph Zuck-or’s chief aides. She told him she hadn’t worked long and hard to turn herself into a character woman. She offered to refund her salary and go back to New York. Kaufman informed Le Baron of Mae’s revolt, and Le Baron, recalling Mae’s fl air for creating dialogue, urged her to rewrite the character to show off her talents to full advantage… Mae…set out to endow the role with a maximum of Westian witticisms and double entendres. (105–106)

West’s famous line “Goodness had nothing to do with it,” fi rst occurs in this fi lm.

41. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives the defi nition of fairy, in part, as:

2. A mythical small being with human form, popularly believed to have magical powers and to interfere in human affairs (with either good or evil intent); now esp. such a being with the form of a delicate beautiful female, usu. with wings…3b. A small graceful woman or child. c.

A male homosexual. slang, derog. (908) In reference to her play The Pleasure Man, West once said that “In this show, I got seventeen real live fairies on stage!” (Eells 80). Marybeth Hamilton writes that
drag queens and effete though conventionally attired homosexual men exemplifi ed what George Chancey has called “the culture of effeminacy,” the style and mannerisms that had come to dominate gay public interaction since the late nineteenth century. Chauncey’s investigation of New York’s early gay community suggests that gay men found in affected, “womanish” banter, feminine nicknames, and female pronouns the clearest meaning of participating in the gay social world: More gay men in the 1920s than today did adopt effeminate mannerisms: they provided one of the few sure means of announcing one’s sexuality. But acting like a “fairy” was more than just a code; it was the dominant role model available to men forming a gay identity and one against which every gay man had to measure himself. (64)

Notes

205

42. In Three Plays by Mae West: Sex, The Drag, The Pleasure Man, Lillian Schissel mentions how
the gay subculture fascinated New York society in the 1920s and ‘30s…

Word got out she [Mae West] was casting a play about homosexuals…

The Drag had no star; it was meant to be a spectacle…Gay characters

“dish the dirt” and fl irt. (12–13)

The play was billed as “A Homosexual Comedy” (13). While West had already been performing with gay men throughout her career in Vaudeville and burlesque theatre, it wasn’t until she wrote and performed this, at the time, controversial play, The Drag, that she became known as “the queen of gay theatre.”

43. This refers to the famous instance of Mae West trying to stop police offi -
cers from beating up gay men they met on the streets or under their arrest.

“ ‘Remember,’ she told the police, ‘when you’re hitting one of the gay boys you’re hitting a lady’ ” (Leider 157).

44. In his book The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society, David Van Leer helpfully suggests that “the ways in which gay men and to some extent women shape dominant cultural forms” through a process he names

“Queening,” is “by silently importing into heterosexual plots rhetorics and motifs more common to their own homosexual subcommunity” (66–67).

45. In Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, Pamela Robertson seeks to “reclaim camp as a political tool and rearticulate it within the framework of feminism” (6). As this essay will discuss, Robertson’s thesis on “feminist camp” appears fraught with problematic critical and theoretical moves in relation to the hyper-feminine West as well as feminine-identifi ed male homosexuals.

46. See in particular Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

47. For a useful pro-sex feminist philosophy and discussion on sex workers, as well as pro-sex views on prostitution, see the chapter, “I Only Do It For the Money,” in Linda LeMoncheck’s Loose Women, Lecherous Men: A Feminist Philosophy of Sex (110–154).

48. See note 12.

49. As later discussed in this chapter, in Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, historian Kathy Peiss writes that young women then known as “charity girls” often traded their company and selected sexual favors for the attentions and gifts they would receive from male suitors.

206

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

50. Although West’s early fi lms were made before the stricter enforcement of the Hays Code, by denying actual acts of prostitution in her dialogue, West most likely sought to make clear to her audiences that there was a real difference between women who were actual prostitutes and those who were better known as “tough girls” and/or “charity girls.”

51. In Act III, Scene I of West’s play Sex, the character Margy retorts to the high society dame Clara’s remark that, “I’ll not permit a woman of the streets to talk to me like that”:

Margy. Say, you’ve got a nerve putting yourself on a pedestal about me.

The things I’ve done, I had to do for a living. I know it was wrong. I’m not trying to alibi myself. But you’ve done those same things for other reasons. (Schissel 74)

52. In Profi t and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, Rosemary Hennessey, in attempting to construct a theoretical link between Marxism and sexuality for feminism, reveals the underlying bourgeois patriarchal structure of Marx’s theories, thereby making it problematic as an application for feminist theories on sex. See her chapters, “Setting the Terms”

(1–36) and “The Material of Sex” (37–73).

53. See West’s 1936 fi lm, Go West Young Man, where everyday Depression-era women become enamored with and imitative of her character’s hyper-feminine image (a transparently thin rendition of West’s own star image).

54. In Guilty Pleasures, in addition to camp, Robertson also appropriates Mary Anne Doane’s work on masquerade where, “the masquerade offers an opportunity for a form of ‘double mimesis’ in which a woman fl aunts and exaggerates her femininity to reveal the performative activity of gender and sexual identities and to deprive stereotypes of their currency” (“ ‘The Kinda Comedy’ ” 62).

55. Jeanine Basinger writes in the 1976 biography, Lana Turner, that Turner’s pathetic breakdown in court, when she brokenly attempted to testify on her daughter’s behalf, was treated almost like a joke. At the very best, it was regarded as just another performance. Life magazine ran pictures of Turner’s trial scenes in fi lms ( Postman, Cass Timberlane, and her current release, Peyton Place). Her testimony was called

“a dramatic personal triumph far beyond anything she has achieved as an actress.” Her words were referred to as a “Hollywood scenario,” her sobbing as a “performance.” Time magazine referred to her as a “wan-ton,” describing her sex life as a men’s room conversation “everywhere from Sunset Boulevard to Fleet Street.” (108)

Notes

207

56. In her autobiography Detour (1988), Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, chronicles her turbulent and tragic childhood with her mother.

Crane writes that Turner “tried to shape [her] as an appendage of her image,” and that her “appalling childhood had bent the tree in strange ways”: “if I needed her help, I also resented her for giving it. The main problem was that help did not come soon or often enough” (5). Here, Crane obliquely refers to her own helplessness, sexual victimization and molestation at the hands of her mother’s fourth husband, actor Lex Barker.

Left primarily to the care of hired nannies and her grandmother, Cheryl suffered a lonely childhood mostly bereft of Turner (who was always away working or vacationing with husbands and lovers) and her love and attention.

57. In The Star Machine, Jeanine Basinger writes of how Hollywood studios constructed stars’ images through a rigorous process of makeovers, acting, singing and dance lessons, publicity with newspaper and advertising placement and fanzine promotions, etcetera. Of the construction of Lana Turner’s star image she writes:

Turner stayed the course but let herself be used. It was what she had been taught to do by the studio system. She accepted limited roles and became a true sex symbol—an actress who played roles in which the meaning of the character came from a source other than the script, her own private life. She was cast only in roles that were symbolic of what the public knew—or thought they knew—of her life from the headlines she made as a person, not as a movie character. Thus, Lana Turner reversed the usual pattern of star development. She began to act out her own life on the screen, making a myth and ritual out of herself.

This ritualization isolated her from her natural talent. Her person became her persona. (Basinger, Star Machine 182) 58. By all accounts, including her autobiography, Turner married and divorced seven times. In between marriages, she enjoyed numerous lovers.

59. Both Turner’s autobiography, Lana, the Lady, The Legend, The Truth, and her daughter Cheryl Crane’s autobiography, Detour, cite accounts of Turner’s obsessive attention to the construction and control of her star image.

Turner writes that she couldn’t leave the house for an evening out until her appearance (hair, make-up, clothing) were absolutely perfect. She would sometimes spend six hours getting ready for an evening out. If, after all the preparation, she deemed her appearance less than perfect, she would stay home instead.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

60. In her autobiography, just as in her fi lms, Turner denied her accountabil-ity for her numerous marriages and their failures. She writes, “if you can believe it, I thought at the time that each marriage would last forever. You see…when I fell in love, I married” (4). “I am a romantic, and I was highly optimistic about my relationships with men” (8). “Something in me made me choose takers, over and over again.” “With me the honeymoon never lasted” (249).

61. By Turner’s account her fi rst husband, bandleader Artie Shaw, was mentally cruel and abusive toward her. By her daughter Cheryl Crane’s account, Turner’s fourth husband, actor Lex Barker, best known for his performance in the Tarzan fi lms, sexually abused Cheryl from the ages of ten to thirteen.

Turner’s last husband, “Dr.” Ronald Dante reportedly defrauded her of $34,000 and after their separation allegedly burglarized her home, stealing nearly $100,000 in jewelry.

62. In the face of her numerous marriages and lovers, Turner makes the suspect claim in her autobiography that she did not in fact really like sex: Sex was never, with any man, the fi rst thing on my mind, and if I didn’t make love for weeks I was content. No, I wasn’t frigid. But I hated the public notion that I was constantly picking up men. Sex was so much what I symbolized, so much of my image, that I closed myself off to the pleasures of the act. (93)

What appears disingenuous in her denial is that the bulk of her autobiography is given over to detailing her love and sex lives with numerous men.

Instead, her denial appears to be an attempt to dupe the public and reinstate the idea of herself as a woman in possession of an innocent sexuality who continually falls prey to instances of male deceit.

63. In his “Four Films of Lana Turner,” Richard Dyer refers to Turner’s

“sexy-ordinary image” (80). My point is that Turner both constructed and purveyed this image by affecting to be innocent of the impact of her highly-sexual appearance, when in fact, she was of course acutely aware of it and cultivated it to achieve the maximum effects.

64. In “Raising Cain with the Censors Again: The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Sheri Biesen makes the connection between “the industrial environment [of Hollywood] during World War II,” and how it “actually advanced fi lm noir style” (41). She additionally connects a need for “morally uplifting patriotic propaganda” with “increasingly sanctioned depictions of violence”

(Biesen 42). Biesen argues that “as controversial adaptations proliferated and became ‘acceptable’ to the PCA, a dark new trend of Hollywood fi lms

Notes

209
noir would become increasingly pervasive—and censorially possible—
during the postwar period” (44). My chapter is an attempt to defi ne a re -
lationship of cause and effect between the aesthetic practices of the Code, fi lm noir, and the fi lmic production of feminine sexuality.

65. In her autobiography, Turner makes numerous denials of earlier press reports and Hollywood rumors surrounding her sexual liaisons. See Lana, The Lady, The Legend, The Truth.

66. Updike wrote his article “Legendary Lana” for The New Yorker as a memorial to the actress and her work shortly after her death from throat cancer in 1996.

67. See Lana, the Legend, the Lady, the Truth.

68. See note 65.

69. This scene, as well as Constance’s occupation as dress-shop owner, alludes to Turner’s own endless fascination with haute couture costuming and apparel.

70. At the end of Postman, Cora is killed in a car accident when Frank is driving. Cora has just revealed to Frank that she is pregnant with his child.

Because of the illicit nature of their affair, enforcement of the Production Code would not allow the character of Cora to get away with a sexual transgression, although she gets away with the murder of her husband. Thus an unwitting victim of her own sexual desires, Cora again emerges as a sympathetic character. The fact of her pregnancy makes her tragic death even more poignant.

71. Jayne Mansfi eld as quoted in May Mann’s biography. Jayne Mansfi eld: The Passionate, Haunted Life of Hollywood’s Most Voluptuous Sex Symbol.

New York: Pocket, 1974.

72. Jayne Mansfi eld as quoted in Luijters, 79.

73. While other earlier biographers tell of a similar instance, none make the account that Mansfi eld actually “thrust her breast into a man’s mouth,”

but rather that she only covered the man’s head with her large bosoms.

While one senses perhaps over-sensationalism here on Cawthorne’s part, the anecdote as presented is useful for this discussion.

74. At the promotion for the Howard Hughes fi lm, Underwater, a “fi lm that was to be shown to a submerged audience in bathing suits and aqualungs,” and which would star Jane Russell, Mansfi eld stole the publicity from Russell when she showed up early in a bikini. When her bikini top “accidentally”

came off in the water, the press went wild snapping her picture. By the time Russell appeared, the press was reportedly out of fi lm for the event. This publicity stunt began what would become one of Mansfi eld’s regular ploys

210

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
to gain publicity, as her bra and dress straps would break in front of the cameras, revealing her breasts.

75. See Martha Saxton’s biography of Mansfi eld: “I see her as a link between the 50s and 60s” (xvi).

76. As a result of a date rape after she was given several alcoholic drinks when a teenager, Mansfi eld became pregnant and had her fi rst child at sixteen.

She married a boyfriend, Paul Mansfi eld, to cover the incident. She eventually had four more children by two subsequent husbands, Mickey Hargitay and Matt Cimber. See Saxton, 25 and Mann, 26.

77. See note 74.

78. See Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1994.

79. See note 74.

80. See note 74.

81. By her biographers’ accounts, both Saxton and May report that after arriv-ing in Hollywood, Mansfi eld and her daughter suffered extreme poverty when, fed up with Hollywood and Mansfi eld’s single-minded pursuit of her career, her fi rst husband, Paul Mansfi eld, left Mansfi eld and her daughter to return to Dallas. Jayne mentions often having only crackers to eat at times because she gave her food to her daughter. Mansfi eld also mentions that this is how she came to lose and keep her weight down. See Saxton and Mann.

82. For a discussion on the “veil” see Chapter Three, as well as Mary Ann Doane’s Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991.

83. Numerous press accounts exist with pictures of Jayne Mansfi eld covered with bruises during her late career, at a time when she reportedly became increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs. After her breakup with second husband Mickey Hargitay, fi rst Cimber, her third husband, and then her lawyer Sam Brody, managed both Jayne’s career and life. By all accounts, even though she made several attempts to escape both men, Mansfi eld appears to have been held a prisoner of sorts by the domestic abuse she reportedly suffered at their hands, which worsened when she attempted to leave. See Saxton and Mann.

84. On June 28, 1967, Jayne Mansfi eld, along with her lawyer and boyfriend Sam Brody and their driver, were killed in a car accident when the driver plowed into a slow-moving mosquito-spraying truck in Mississippi, where Jayne had been performing at a nightclub. Mansfi eld’s three younger children were also in the car but survived. At the time, it was widely reported

Notes

211
that Mansfi eld had been “decapitated” in the accident. These reports arose from the fact that Mansfi eld’s wig had come off and was photographed on the side of the road. More accurately, Mansfi eld suffered a “partial cranial avulsion” as her head hit the windshield of the car. See the account written by the undertaker who prepared her body for the funeral: Tom Roster,

“Jayne Mansfi eld’s Head.” New York Times Magazine (4 May 1997): 17.

BIOGRAPHIES AND FILMOGRAPHIES

JEAN HARLOW

The striking platinum blonde who became known as Jean Harlow was born Harlean Carpenter, March 3, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Mont Clair Carpenter, a dentist, and his wife, Jean Poe Carpenter (née Harlow). Harlow’s mother, “Mother Jean,” as she was called, was an aspiring actress who divorced her husband and moved to Hollywood with her daughter. Mother Jean later remarried and moved the family to Chicago. Harlean enjoyed an upper-middle-class upbringing and attended private schools. At age sixteen, Harlean married the wealthy twenty-three-year-old Charles McGrew, and they moved to Beverly Hills. In Hollywood, Harlean fi rst worked as an extra in fi lms. Harlean divorced McGrew after two years. She continued to play bit parts in fi lms until 1930, when Howard Hughes cast her in Hell’s Angels. In the fi lm, Jean Harlowe, as she then spelled her last name, was both sexy and comedic, but most striking was her appearance with platinum blonde hair, fresh from a peroxide bottle. She became an instant sensation. The fi rst leading actress to dye her hair platinum blonde, Harlow quickly became America’s new sex symbol. Thus, after Angels she starred in the aptly titled fi lm, Platinum Blonde (1931). Most frequently paired with lead actor Clark Gable, she appeared with him in six fi lms, including Red Dust (1932), The Secret Six (1931), and Wife vs. Secretary (1936) .

In 1933 Harlow married cinematographer Harold Rosson; they divorced after eight months of marriage. During the fi lming of Red Dust, her third husband, producer Paul Bern, committed suicide, leaving a note to suggest he had been physically unable to consummate their two-month marriage. Harlow, by then known as the original “blonde bombshell,”

appeared in another well-titled fi lm, Bombshell (1933), a transparently autobiographical fi lm based on her diffi cult life with her stage mother and alcoholic stepfather. In 1935 she legally changed her name to Jean

214

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Harlow, her mother’s maiden name. After three failed marriages, Harlow fi nally found true love with actor William Powell, with whom she would spend the last two years of her tragically short life. Harlow had suffered occasional bouts of poor health as a child, and while fi lming Saratoga (1937), she was suddenly stricken with kidney failure. Harlow died of uremic poisoning, June 7, 1937, at the age of twenty-six. She appeared in forty-two fi lms in the ten short years of her career. She was the fi rst actress to appear on the cover of Life magazine, and is credited with being the fi rst blonde Hollywood sex goddess.

Filmography

Saratoga. Dir. Jack Conway. MGM, 1937.

Personal Property. Dir. W.S. Van Dyke. MGM, 1937.

Libeled Lady. Dir. Jack Conway. MGM, 1936.

Suzy. Dir. George Fitzmaurice. MGM, 1936.

Wife vs. Secretary. Dir. Clarence Brown. MGM, 1936.

Riffraff. Dir. J. Walter Ruben. MGM, 1936.

China Seas. Dir. Tay Garnett. MGM, 1935.

Reckless. Dir. Victor Fleming. MGM, 1935.

The Girl from Missouri. Dir. Jack Conway. MGM, 1934.

Bombshell. Dir. Victor Fleming (uncredited). MGM, 1933.

Dinner at Eight. Dir. George Cukor. MGM, 1933.

Hold Your Man. Dir. Sam Wood (uncredited). MGM, 1933.

Red Dust. Dir. Victor Fleming (uncredited). MGM, 1932.

Red-Headed Woman. Dir. Jack Conway. MGM, 1932.

The Beast of the City. Dir. Charles Brabin. MGM, 1932.

Three Wise Girls. Dir. William Beaudine. Columbia Pictures, 1932.

Beau Hunks. Dir. James W. Home. MGM, 1931.

Biographies and Filmographies 215

Platinum Blonde. Dir. Frank Capra. Columbia Pictures, 1931.

Goldie. Dir. Benjamin Stoloff. Fox Film Corporation, 1931.

Iron Man. Dir. Tod Browning. Universal Pictures, 1931.

The Public Enemy. Dir. William A. Wellman. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1931.

The Secret Six. Dir. George W. Hill. MGM, 1931.

City Lights. Dir. Charles Chaplin. United Artists, 1931.

Hell’s Angels. Dir. Howard Hughes. United Artists, 1930.

New York Nights. Dir. Lewis Milestone. United Artists, 1929.

Weak But Willing. Dir. William Watson. Paramount Pictures, 1929.

This Thing Called Love. Dir. Paul L. Stein. Pathé Exchange, 1929.

The Love Parade. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Paramount Pictures, 1929.

The Saturday Night Kid. Dir. A. Edward Sutherland. Paramount Pictures, 1929.

Bacon Grabbers. Dir. Lewis R. Foster. MGM, 1929.

Masquerade. Dir. Russell Birdwell. Fox Film Corporation, 1929.

Thundering Toupees. Dir. Robert F. McGowan. MGM, 1929.

Double Whoopee. Dir. Lewis R. Foster. MGM, 1929.

The Unkissed Man. Dir. Leo McCarey. MGM, 1929.

Close Harmony. Dir. John Cromwell and A. Edward Sutherland. Paramount Pictures, 1929.

Why Is a Plumber? Dir. Leo McCarey. MGM, 1929.

Why Be Good? Dir. William A. Seiter. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1929.

Fugitives. Dir. William Beaudine. Fox Film Corporation, 1929.

Liberty. Dir. Leo McCarey. MGM, 1929.

Chasing Husbands. Dir. James Parrott. MGM, 1928.

216

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Moran of the Marines. Dir. Frank R. Strayer. Paramount Pictures, 1928.

Honor Bound. Dir. Alfred E. Green. Fox Film Corporation, 1928.

MAE WEST

The stage and screen sensation known as Mae West was born Mary Jane West on August 17, 1893, in Brooklyn, New York, although the exact date of her birth and age has often been a subject of controversy (fueled by the actress herself). Her parents were professional fi ghter “Battling Jack” West and Tillie, a German immigrant and former model. As a young girl, West worked in vaudeville and quickly became a comedic star. Self-admittedly sexually adventurous, she claimed to have happily lost her virginity to her piano teacher at the age of thirteen. Reportedly, West only married once, to a fellow actor, Frank Wallace, but she kept the marriage a secret and for a time denied it, until later in her fi lm career when she fi nally sought a divorce. Toward the end of her vaudeville career she began writing plays. In 1926 a public outrage over her play Sex led to her brief arrest on morals charges. In 1932, at the age of forty, West went to Hollywood and made her fi rst appearance in her friend George Raft’s fi lm, Night After Night. West insisted on rewriting her dialogue for the fi lm, helping to make her an overnight sensation with such lines as, “Goodness had nothing to do with it,” alongside her diamond-laden, nightgown-wearing seductive appearance. Later, West’s sexual self-possession and dialogue loaded with double-entendres continued to upset the religious right, making it so that West once claimed that the Hays Code had been created solely because of her open and outspoken attitudes toward sexuality. With the enforcement of the Code, West was increasingly forced to wear heavy Victorian style dresses to cover her curvy fi gure and to rewrite her dialogue to eliminate references to sex. Feeling her creativity stifl ed, West left fi lm for many years, fi nally returning at the age of seventy-seven to appear in a hilarious role as a sex-crazed septuagenarian in Myra Breckinridge. West made her last fi lm appearance in 1978 in Sextette when she was eighty-fi ve years

Biographies and Filmographies 217
old. She died on November 22, 1980, and was buried in Brooklyn. West is most remembered for her unabashed public expression of feminine and gay sexuality.

Filmography

Sextette. Dir. Ken Hughes. Crown International Pictures, 1978.

Myra Breckinridge. Dir. Michael Sarne. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1970.

The Heat’s On. Dir. Gregory Ratoff. Columbia Pictures, 1943.

My Little Chickadee. Dir. Edward F. Cline. Universal Pictures, 1940.

Every Day’s a Holiday. Dir. A. Edward Sutherland. Paramount Pictures, 1937.

Go West Young Man. Dir. Henry Hathaway. Paramount Pictures, 1936.

Klondike Annie. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Paramount Pictures, 1936.

Goin’ to Town. Dir. Alexander Hall. Paramount Pictures, 1935.

Belle of the Nineties. Dir. Leo McCarey. Paramount Pictures, 1934.

I’m No Angel. Dir.Wesley Ruggles. Paramount Pictures, 1933.

She Done Him Wrong. Dir. Lowell Sherman. Paramount Picutres, 1933.

Night After Night. Dir. Archie Mayo. Paramount Pictures, 1932.

LANA TURNER

The sultry Lana Turner was born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner on February 8, 1921, to John and Mildred Turner in Wallace, Idaho. The family struggled fi nancially. Tragically, after returning from a card game, her father was robbed and murdered for his winnings. In search of employment, Turner and her mother moved to northern California, where, for a time, Turner was boarded out to live with acquaintances while her mother worked. Under these circumstances, Turner was treated harshly, and upon revealing details of her mistreatment, was returned to

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
live with her mother. They moved to southern California, where Lana attended Hollywood High and was reportedly discovered at Schwab’s drugstore while skipping school to get a Coke. Cast as a schoolgirl who gets murdered for her sexy appearance in the fi lm They Won’t Forget (1937), Turner wore a tight blue sweater which revealed the outline of her ample breasts that bounced as she walked down the street. For this role, Turner became known as the “Sweater Girl.” Her popularity quickly led to additional fi lm roles, and she rapidly became fi nancially successful, as each new role lead to an increase in her weekly salary. In 1946 she was cast as the archetypal femme fatale Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. In 1957 Turner received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Peyton Place. Turner was married eight times, twice to fi rst husband Stephen Crane, father of her daughter, Cheryl. Throughout her life, Turner maintained a lively social life with the Hollywood crowd and reportedly had many lovers, eventually giving into the persistent romantic attentions of a mysterious John Steele. Tragically, Turner found herself in an abusive relationship with a man who was really the mob-ster Johnny Stompanato. As Turner tried to extricate herself from the relationship, Stompanato became increasingly abusive and possessive, until one night, fearing that Stompanato would kill her mother, daughter Cheryl Crane came to her rescue with a kitchen knife, fatally wounding him. After an investigation and trial, both Turner and her daughter were exonerated. Stompanato’s death was ruled justifi able homicide. In Imitation of Life (1959), Turner’s character Lora Meredith mirrors a transparent and similarly troubled relationship with screen daughter, Sandra Dee, with that of Turner’s own daughter Cheryl Crane. As Turner began to age, her popularity waned and lead fi lm roles started to dry up. She began to work in television and theater. Lana Turner died of throat cancer on June 29, 1995. Aside from her creative accomplishments, Turner’s legacy may lie in her ability to realize her own sexual desires in the face of glaring publicity and unrelenting public scrutiny based on society’s repressive sexual mores, while still managing to maintain her successful fi lm career. Turner demonstrates a legacy of strength and sexual self-possession uncharacteristic of feminine roles at the time.

Biographies and Filmographies 219

Filmography

Thwarted. Dir. Jeremy Hummer. Levkas+Independent Entertainment, 1991.

Witches’ Brew. Dir. Richard Schorr. United Artists, 1980.

Bittersweet Love. Dir. David Miller. AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1976.

Persecution. Dir. Don Chaffey. Fanfare Films, 1974.

The Big Cube. Dir. Tito Davison. Warner Bros./Seven Arts, 1969.

Madame X. Dir. David Lowell Rich. Universal Pictures, 1966.

Love Has Many Faces. Dir. Alexander Singer. Columbia Pictures, 1965.

Who’s Got the Action? Dir. Daniel Mann. Paramount Pictures, 1962.

Bachelor in Paradise. Dir. Jack Arnold. MGM, 1961.

By Love Possessed. Dir. John Sturges. United Artists, 1961.

Portrait in Black. Dir. Michael Gordon. Universal Pictures, 1960.

Imitation of Life. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Universal Pictures, 1959.

Another Time, Another Place. Dir. Lewis Allen. Paramount Pictures, 1958.

The Lady Takes a Flyer. Dir. Jack Arnold. Universal Pictures, 1958.

Peyton Place. Dir. Mark Robson. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957.

Diane. Dir. David Miller. MGM, 1956.

The Rains of Ranchipur. Dir. Jean Negulesco. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1955.

The Sea Chase. Dir. John Farrow. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1955.

The Prodigal. Dir. Richard Thorpe. MGM, 1955.

Betrayed. Dir. Gottfried Reinhardt. MGM, 1954.

Flame and the Flesh. Dir. Richard Brooks. MGM, 1954.

220

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Latin Lovers. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. MGM, 1953.

The Bad and the Beautiful. Dir. Vincente Minelli. MGM, 1952.

The Merry Widow. Dir. Curtis Bernhardt. MGM, 1952.

Mr. Imperium. Dir. Don Hartman. MGM, 1951.

A Life of Her Own. Dir. George Cukor. MGM, 1950.

The Three Musketeers. Dir. George Sidney. MGM, 1948.

Homecoming. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. MGM, 1948.

Cass Timberlane. Dir. George Sidney. MGM, 1947.

Green Dolphin Street. Dir. Victor Saville. MGM, 1947.

The Postman Always Rings Twice. Dir. Tay Garnett. MGM, 1946.

Week-End at the Waldorf. Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. MGM, 1945.

Keep Your Powder Dry. Dir. Edward Buzzell. MGM, 1945.

Marriage Is a Private Affair. Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. MGM, 1944.

Du Barry Was a Lady. Dir. Roy Del Ruth. MGM, 1943.

Slightly Dangerous. Dir. Wesley Ruggles. MGM, 1943.

Somewhere I’ll Find You. Dir. Wesley Ruggles. MGM, 1942.

Johnny Eager. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. MGM, 1942.

Honky Tonk. Dir. Jack Conway. MGM, 1941.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dir. Victor Fleming. MGM, 1941.

Ziegfeld Girl. Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. MGM, 1941.

We Who Are Young. Dir. Harold. S. Bucquet. MGM, 1940.

Two Girls on Broadway. Dir. S. Sylvan Simon. MGM, 1940.

Dancing Co-Ed. Dir. S. Sylvan Simon. MGM, 1939.

These Glamour Girls. Dir. S. Sylvan Simon. MGM, 1939.

Calling Dr. Kildare. Dir. Harold S. Bucquet. MGM, 1939.

Biographies and Filmographies 221

Dramatic School. Dir. Robert B. Sinclair. MGM, 1938.

Rich Man, Poor Girl. Dir. Reinhold Schünzel. MGM, 1938.

Four’s a Crowd. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938.

The Chaser. Dir. Edwin L. Marin. MGM, 1938.

Love Finds Andy Hardy. Dir. George B. Seitz. MGM, 1938.

The Adventures of Marco Polo. Dir. Archie Mayo. United Artists, 1938.

The Great Garrick. Dir. James Whale. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1937.

Topper. Dir. Norman Z. McLeod. MGM, 1937.

They Won’t Forget. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy (uncredited). Warner Bros. Pictures, 1937.

A Star Is Born. Dir. William A. Wellman. United Artists, 1937.

JAYNE MANSFIELD

The voluptuous platinum blonde Jayne Mansfi eld was born a brunette on April 19, 1933, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and named Vera Jayne by her parents Herbert William and Vera (née Jeffrey) Palmer. Her father was a lawyer who died of a heart attack while driving a car with his wife and daughter in it. Mansfi eld’s mother remarried and the family moved to Dallas, Texas. In 1950, after a reported date rape by another man, by which she found herself pregnant, she married a boyfriend, Paul Mansfi eld. During their marriage, she attended Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas, where she studied drama. In Texas, she entered and won several beauty contests, and in 1954, she, her husband Paul, and their daughter Janie (born when Mansfi eld was seventeen) moved to Los Angeles so that Mansfi eld could pursue her desire to become an actress. While in L.A., she also attended UCLA. Mansfi eld was an accomplished musician and considered to be highly intelligent, claiming to have an I.Q. of 163. While her husband Paul agreed to allow Mansfi eld one year’s time to realize her hopes of becoming a fi lm actress in Los Angeles, he quickly became disillusioned and the relationship fell

222

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
apart; he left early and returned to Dallas, leaving Jayne and her daughter behind. Mansfi eld at fi rst barely made ends meet with odd jobs and bit parts. In the demise of Hollywood’s star system, Mansfi eld worked tirelessly on her own publicity, appearing at store openings, beauty contests, car shows, and random photo shoots, wherever she could get a write-up by the local press or a photo opportunity. To foster the press’ attention, Mansfi eld would often bare her size 40D breasts, seemingly by accident.

Although she was eventually given larger fi lm roles, most of her early success was based less on her ability as a serious actress and more on her sexy appearance. In 1955, however, she realized critical success in the Broadway production of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? The play was made into fi lm, and following on her heady popularity, Mansfi eld starred in The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), today considered a classic. In 1957 she took on a serious role in The Wayward Bus and won a Golden Globe for

“New Star of the Year.” After 1959, her roles in Hollywood began to dry up and she moved on to making fi lms abroad. Throughout her career, Mansfi eld was frequently compared to Marilyn Monroe, sometimes known as “the poor man’s Monroe”; she and Marilyn occasionally competed for the same fi lm roles. Mansfi eld was married three times. She met her second husband, Miklos (Mickey) Hargitay, a bodybuilder, Mr.

Universe of 1957, at one of Mae West’s shows, much to West’s chagrin.

With Hargitay, Mansfi eld gave birth to three more children. Together the family lived in their Beverly Hills home, the famous “Pink Palace,” with its heart-shaped pool built by Hargitay . Eventually, Mansfi eld and Hargitay divorced, and she married the Italian director Matt Cimber, with whom she had one son. Slipping into alcoholism, Mansfi eld began doing burlesque shows around the country. After her marriage to Cimber fell apart, she lived with her lawyer, Sam Brody, who was reported to be abusive to her and her daughter, Janie. On June 29, 1967, after a show in Biloxi, Mississipi, on the way to New Orleans, the car Brody, Jayne, and three of her children were traveling in crashed into the rear of a mosquito-spraying truck. Mansfi eld, her driver, and Sam Brody were killed.

Her children, who had been sleeping in the back of the automobile, survived. The details of the accident led to the gruesome rumor that

Biographies and Filmographies 223

Mansfi eld had been decapitated, although photos taken of the scene appear to be of Mansfi eld’s wig. While Mansfi eld consciously used her voluptuous bodily assets to further her career, she did so consciously as a way to both realize celebrity and fame as well as to open up frank discussion on social acceptance of self-possessed feminine sexuality.

Filmography

Single Room Furnished. Dir. Matt Cimber. Crown International Pictures, 1968.

A Guide for the Married Man. Dir. Gene Kelly. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1967.

The Fat Spy. Dir. Joseph Cates. Magna Pictures Distribution Corporation, 1966.

The Las Vegas Hillbillys. Dir. Arthur C. Pierce. Woolner Brothers Pictures Inc., 1966.

Dog Eat Dog. Dir. Richard E. Cunha. Ajay Film Company, 1964.

Panic Button. Dir. George Sherman and Giuliano Carnimeo. Gorton Associates, 1964.

Primitive Love. Dir. Luigi Scattini. AFDC, 1964.

Promises! Promises! Dir. King Donovan. NTD, 1963.

Homesick for St. Pauli. Dir. Werner Jacobs. Constantin Film, 1963.

It Happened in Athens. Dir. Andrew Marton. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1962.

The George Raft Story. Dir. Joseph M. Newman. Allied Artists Pictures, 1961.

The Loves of Hercules. Dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia. Ciné Vog Films, 1960.

The Challenge. Dir. John Gilling. Valiant Films, 1960.

Too Hot to Handle. Dir. Terence Young. Topaz Film Corporation, 1960.

224

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1958.

Kiss Them for Me. Dir. Stanley Donen. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1957.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Dir. Frank Tashlin. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957.

The Burglar. Dir. Paul Wendkos. Columbia Pictures, 1957.

The Wayward Bus. Dir. Victor Vicas. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957.

The Girl Can’t Help It. Dir. Frank Tashlin. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956.

Hell on Frisco Bay. Dir. Frank Tuttle. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1955.

Illegal. Dir. Lewis Allen. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1955.

Pete Kelly’s Blues. Dir. Jack Webb. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1955.

Female Jungle. Dir. Bruno VeSota. ARC, 1955.

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FILMS CITED

Belle of the Nineties. Dir. Leo McCarey. Mae West. Paramount Pictures, 1934.

Blonde Crazy. Dir. Roy Del Ruth. Jean Harlow. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1931.

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THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Dames. Dir. Busby Berkeley. Joan Blondell. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1934.

Dinner at Eight. Dir. George Cukor. Jean Harlow. MGM, 1933.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Dir. Howard Hawks. Marilyn Monroe. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1953.

The Girl Can’t Help It. Dir. Frank Tashlin. Jayne Mansfi eld. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956.

Goin’ to Town. Dir. Alexander Hall. Mae West. Paramount Pictures, 1935.

Gold Diggers of 1933. Dir. Busby Berkeley. Joan Blondell. Warner Bros.

Pictures, 1933.

A Guide for the Married Man. Dir. Gene Kelly. Jayne Mansfi eld. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1967.

Hell’s Angels. Dir. Howard Hughes. Jean Harlow. United Artists,1930.

Imitation of Life. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Lana Turner. Universal Pictures, 1959.

I’m No Angel. Dir. Wesley Ruggles. Mae West. Paramount Pictures, 1933.

Legally Blonde. Dir. Robert Luketic. Reese Witherspoon. MGM, 2001.

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. Dir. Charles Herman-Wurm-feld. MGM, 2003.

Libeled Lady. Dir. Jack Conway. Jean Harlow. MGM, 1936.

Love Finds Andy Hardy. Dir. George B. Seitz. Lana Turner. MGM, 1938.

Night After Night. Dir. Archie Mayo. Mae West. Paramount Pictures, 1932.

Pandora’s Box. Dir. Laurence Trimble. Vitagraph, 1912.

Select Bibliography

247

Peyton Place. Dir. Mark Robson. Lana Turner. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957.

Platinum Blonde. Dir. Frank Capra. Jean Harlow. Columbia Pictures, 1931.

The Postman Always Rings Twice. Dir. Tay Garnett. Lana Turner. MGM, 1946.

The Prodigal. Dir. Richard Thorpe. Lana Turner. MGM, 1955.

Promises! Promises! Dir. King Donovan. Jayne Mansfi eld. NTD, 1963.

Red Dust. Dir. Victor Fleming (uncredited). Jean Harlow. MGM, 1932.

She Done Him Wrong. Dir. Lowell Sherman. Mae West. Paramount Pictures, 1933.

The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Jayne Mansfi eld. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1958.

Too Hot to Handle. Dir. Terence Young. Jayne Mansfi eld. Topaz Film Corporation, 1960.

They Won’t Forget. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Lana Turner. First National Pictures, 1932.

The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne Mansfi eld. Dir. Arthur Knight. Jayne Mansfi eld. Blue Ribbon Pictures, 1968.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Dir. Frank Tashlin. Jayne Mansfi eld.

Twentieth Century-Fox, 1957.

A Woman There Was. Dir. J. Gordon Edwards. Fox Film Corporation, 1919.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

The fi lm illustrations are a mix of production publicity stills (labeled

“stills” below), publicity photographs (labeled “photos”), and frame en -
largements (reproducing the onscreen image, and labeled “frames”).

1. Dinner at Eight (1933), frame

2. Dinner at Eight (1933), frame 3. Dinner at Eight (1933), frame 4. Theda Bara (1917), photo

5. Louise Brooks (1926), photo (Nikolas Muray) 6. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), frame 7. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), frame 8. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), frame 9. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), frame 10. Dames (1933), frame

11. Dames (1933), frame

12. Jean Harlow (1933), still

13. Libeled Lady (1936), frame 14. Libeled Lady (1936), frame 15. Libeled Lady (1936), frame 16. Platinum Blonde (1931), frame 17. Platinum Blonde (1931), frame 18. Red Dust (1932), still 19. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 20. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame

250

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

21. Jean Harlow (1933), photo (George Hurell) 22. Jean Harlow (1933), photo (George Hurell) 23. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 24. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 25. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 26. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 27. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 28. a, b, c. Hell’s Angels (1930), frames 29. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 30. Hell’s Angels (1930), frame 31. Night After Night (1932), frame 32. Night After Night (1932), frame 33. Belle of the Nineties (1934), frame 34. Night After Night (1932), frame 35. I’m No Angel (1933), frame 36. Goin’ to Town (1935), frame 37. I’m No Angel (1933), frame 38. I’m No Angel (1933), frame 39. I’m No Angel (1933), frame 40. Belle of the Nineties (1934), frame 41. I’m No Angel (1933), frame 42. I’m No Angel (1933), frame 43. I’m No Angel (1933), frame 44. Imitation of Life (1959), frame 45. a,
b. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frames

Illustration Credits

251

46. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 47. Peyton Place (1957), frame 48. Barry Oldfi eld and Lana Turner (c. 1937), photo (IMDb) 49. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 50. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 51. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 52. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 53. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 54. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 55. a,
b.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frames 56. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), frame 57. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frame 58. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frame 59. a, b, c. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frames 60. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frame 61. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frame 62. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frame 63. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frame 64. a, b, c, d, e. The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), frames 65. a,
b.

The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), frames 66. The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), frame 67. The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), frame 68. a, b, c. Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1956), frames 69. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), frame 70. The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne Mansfi eld (1968), frame

252

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

71. a, b, c, d. The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfi eld (1968), frames 72. Too Hot to Handle (1960), frame 73. a,
b.

Promises! Promises! (1963), frames 74. Promises! Promises! (1963), frame 75. a,
b.

Legally Blonde (2001), frames

INDEX
aesthetics of embodiment, 39, 41, 50
body ( continued)

affect, affect theory, 12–13, 15, 17,

185, 190–191, 195n2, 198n9,

22, 38–40, 42, 46, 50, 56, 59, 100,

211n84, 227, 229, 233, 236–237,

117, 187, 196n6, 204n41, 208n63,

239, 241

242

Bombshell, 30

Anger, Kenneth, 149

Bordo, Susan, 153, 227

Arbuthnot, Lucie and Gail Seneca,

Breen, Joseph, 23

8–10, 225

Bronfen, Elisabeth, 121–123, 136,

Astor, Mary, 47–48

143, 227

Aubry, Fernand, 170

Brooks, Louise, 23, 25
brunette, 9, 191, 201n23, 221
backlighting, 3

Bruzzi, Stella, 54, 203n33

Bak, John, 69, 98, 225

Butler, Judith, 38, 202n26, 205n46,

Bara, Theda, 23–24

228

Basinger, Jeanine, 107–108, 115,

126–127, 129, 133, 206n55,

Calendo, John, 166, 228

207n57, 226
camp, 10, 12, 90, 92, 94–99, 101,

Beery, Wallace, 20

205n45, 206n54, 226, 230, 235,

Berkeley, Busby, 26–27, 29

238–239, 243

Bergman, Ingrid, 133
capital, capitalist, 7, 9, 19, 23, 30,
blonde, 3–9, 11, 13, 21, 23, 37,

32–38, 40–41, 46–48, 63, 65, 71,

41–42, 44–45, 67, 133, 151,

84–86, 108, 116, 149, 168–169,

157–158, 166–167, 169, 172,

177, 188, 193, 197n8, 198n9,

187–193, 196n4, 201n23,

199n13, 199n17, 202n28, 206n52,

213–215, 221, 225–226, 228–229,

234, 237

234, 236, 240, 244–246

Capra, Frank, 44

Blonde Crazy, 13, 245

Caryn, James, 42

Blondell, Joan, 25–26, 28

Casablanca, 133
body, 3, 5–7, 17, 22, 31–34, 36–41,

Cawthorne, Nigel, 145, 149, 157,

46–47, 49, 52–54, 64, 66, 70, 72,

166, 179, 183, 209n73, 228

75–76, 78, 82, 84, 86–87, 92, 98,
charity girls, 17, 83, 87–89, 99,

100, 108, 110, 128, 136, 147–148,

205n49, 206n50, 240

151, 153, 155, 158, 160, 162, 164,

Charlie’s Angels, 191

169, 171–172, 174, 177, 179–183,

Champlin, Charles, 155

254

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965
chiaroscuro, 110
drag, drag queens, 12, 65, 68–70, 88,

Cimber, Matt, 180, 210n76, 210n83,

92–93, 96, 99, 172, 183, 204n41,

222–223

205n42, 225, 242

Colette, 71

Dressler, Marie, 19

Conway, Jack, 41
dumb blonde, 4, 37, 151, 166–167,
commodity, commodity fetishism,

172, 187, 193

6–7, 11, 33, 35, 64, 166, 169–170,

Dyer, Richard, 4, 107, 111, 113, 115,

200n18

118–119, 121, 124, 127, 130, 134,

Coolidge, Jennifer, 189

139, 196n4, 208n63, 231

Cowie, Elizabeth, 104–106, 124

Classical Hollywood Cinema, 5, 236

Eells, George and Stanley, 72, 93,

Crane, Cheryl, 103, 207n56, 207n59,

203nn38–39, 204nn40–41, 231

208n61, 218

Engels, Friedrich, 85, 237

Cukor, George, 19

Erens, Patricia, 6, 225, 231, 244

Curry, Ramona, 72, 78, 80, 82, 87,
essentialism, 38–39

93–94, 100, 229

Ewell, Tom, 162–163

Dames, 21, 26, 29, 232

Factor, Max, 3

Davis, Matthew, 189
fairy, 67–69, 98, 205n42, 242

Davy, Kate, 95, 230

Fawcett, Farrah, 191

Debord, Guy, 34–35, 199n16, 230

Ferrucio, Frank, 157, 231

Dee, Sandra, 102, 116, 142, 218
female impersonators, 10–11, 92, 96,
desire, 2, 7–10, 15–18, 23, 34–37,

98, 239

39–40, 52–54, 60, 63–64, 70–72,
feminist camp, 11, 17, 70, 72, 75, 80,

78, 83, 88, 94, 105, 112, 116,

91–93, 95–99, 205n45, 241

118, 121–122, 124, 129–131,
feminist fi lm theory, 1, 243–244

136, 142–143, 147–148,
femme fatale, 5, 13, 103–106, 108, 162–163, 166, 168, 171–172,

110–114, 116, 118–125, 127,

175, 179, 187, 190–191, 195n2,

130–131, 133–134, 136–138

196n6, 202n29, 203n32, 209n70,
feminist gaze, 5, 70, 92

218, 221, 227, 230–232, 238,
fi lm noir, 5, 104–106, 122, 124–125, 240, 243

128, 131, 142, 229, 235, 238–242

Dinner at Eight, 19–23, 27, 31–32

Fischer, Lucy, 103, 107, 113, 232

Double Indemnity, 138

Foucault, Michel, 32, 35, 84,
doubling, 113–114, 125, 127, 139,

198n11, 199n17, 232

141, 143

Freud, Sigmund, 72–73, 80, 84, 92,

Doane, Mary Ann, 6, 11, 91, 96,

96, 148, 169, 197n8, 203n32,

120–121, 197n8, 206n54, 210n83,

232–233, 236, 238

226, 230

Fuss, Diana, 38, 233

Index

255

Gable, Clark, 30, 47–48, 213

Hays Production Code ( continued)

Garfi eld, John, 128, 133

198n10, 206n50, 209n64, 209n70,

Garnet, Tay, 132

216, 231, 236
gay, 10–12, 15–16, 58, 68–69, 71,

Head, Edith, 67, 93

92–99, 101, 172–173, 179, 204n41,

Hefner, Hugh, 186

217, 225–226, 231, 233, 239, 245

Hegeman, Susan, 9–10, 234
gay camp, 11, 15, 95

Hell’s Angels, 46, 49, 51, 56–59, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1, 3, 6, 61–62, 65, 213, 229, 244

8–9, 11, 38, 118, 225–226, 228,

Herbert, Hugh, 26

236, 246
heterosexual, 10, 12, 15–17, 34–36,

German expressionism, 110

51, 64, 71, 89, 94, 96, 98–99,

The Girl Can’t Help It, 158–159,

147–148, 162, 172, 175, 179,

161–164, 222, 224, 246

195n2, 205n44

Goin’ to Town, 79

Hilton, Paris, 191
gold diggers, 24, 26–28, 32–33, 35,

Hitchcock, Alfred, 64

64, 195n3, 198n13, 238, 241

Hollows, Joanne, 53, 172, 175,

Gold Diggers of 1933, 21, 24, 203n33, 205n33, 234

26–28, 238, 241
homoerotic, 16, 50, 52, 203n32

Great Depression, 20–21, 23–24,
homosexual, 10, 17, 68–71, 73, 94,

197n9, 206n53

98–99, 172, 174–175, 182, 195n2,

204n41, 205n42, 205nn44–45, 226

Hall, James, 49

Hope, Bob, 156

Hansen, Miriam, 54

Hughes, Howard, 57, 168, 202n29,

Harlow, Jean, 12, 15, 17, 19–22,

209n74, 213, 215, 227, 234, 237,

30–31, 41–43, 45–49, 51–54,

240, 246

57, 133, 158, 188, 190, 202n29,
hyper-feminine, 2–3, 6–7, 11–12,

213–214, 228–229, 233–234, 237,

16–19, 21–23, 26–27, 30–37,

244–247

40–41, 47, 50–52, 54–55, 59–60,

Hargitay, Mickey, 179–180, 210n76,

63–66, 70–76, 80, 82, 86–87,

210n83, 222

90–94, 98, 100, 119, 122, 127,

Hartsock, Nancy, 183

149, 153, 155, 157, 160, 162,

Haskell, Molly, 33, 37, 47–48,

169–170, 176–177, 188,

201n21, 234

190–191, 193, 202nn29–30,

Haspiel, James Robert, 169

203n31, 205n45

Hawks, Howard, 3, 6, 246

Hays Production Code, 5, 17, 23,
imitation, 1–2, 10, 14–15, 88–89, 91,

26, 32–33, 37, 41, 76, 80, 103,

99, 103–104, 157, 171, 228

105–106, 110, 113–114, 118,

Imitation of Life, 103–104, 107, 113, 123, 143, 164, 183, 190, 195n2,

142–143, 218, 230, 232–234, 246

256

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

I’m No Angel, 76–77, 80–82, 90,

Madonna, 3, 10, 14, 60, 75, 110,

94, 100

148, 191, 205n45, 225, 241, 243
male gaze, 5, 7, 197n8, 201n21,

Jacobs, Lea, 33, 195n3

202n24
male imaginary, 2, 5

Kaplan, E. Ann, 5, 122, 124–125,

Maltby, Richard, 54, 196n7, 203n34,

197n8, 235, 240

237

Keeler, Ruby, 25

Mann, May, 156, 158, 166–171,

Kellaway, Cecil, 129, 137, 140

179–180, 182, 209n71, 210n76,

Kibbee, Guy, 26

210n81, 237

Kleinhans, Chuck, 101, 235

Mansfi eld, Jayne, 12, 17, 145–146,

Klondike Annie, 79

148–149, 151–152, 155–159,

Knowles, Beyonce, 3

162–163, 166–168, 170–173,

Krzywinska, Tanya, 54, 60, 147, 163,

175–185, 187, 189, 191, 210n81,

176, 187, 196n6, 203n35, 236

210nn83–84, 221–224

Mansfi eld, Jayne-Marie, 178
labor, 23, 33–35, 37, 46, 63, 87, 193,

Mansfi eld, Paul, 178, 210n76

199n13, 199n17, 200n18

Martin, Nina, 153, 237

Lacan, Jacques, 12, 16, 197, 203,

Marx, Karl, 34–35, 40, 47, 85, 169,

236, 238

197n8, 200n18, 202n28, 206n52,

Legally Blonde, 189, 192–193, 246

230, 233, 237

Lemoncheck, Linda, 36, 154–155,
masquerade, 11–13, 15, 70, 92–96,

162, 177, 186, 198n12, 200n20,

98, 206n54, 215, 230–231,

205n47, 236

241
lesbian, 9–11, 51, 71, 95–96, 72,
maternal, 103, 107, 147–149, 155,

198n12, 225, 233

162, 166, 175, 181, 185

Libeled Lady, 41–43

Maxfi eld, James, 122

Lokke, Kari, 18

McGowan, Todd, 12, 238

Loos, Anita, 9, 188, 226, 236

McMahon, Aline, 26

Lorelei, 3, 9–10, 38, 237

McNair, Brian, 65

Loren, Sophia, 151

Meyer, Moe, 96–98, 230, 235,

Lourde, Audre, 145, 178, 181–182,

238

186, 237

Michael, Gertrude, 76–77

Love Finds Andy Hardy, 127

The Misfi ts, 13

Luijters, Guus, 158, 178–179, 186,

Modleski, Tanya, 64, 197n8, 238

209n72, 237

Monroe, Marilyn, 1, 3, 6, 11, 17,

Lumet, Philip, 157

119, 156–157, 187, 222, 229, 237,

Lumet, Sidney, 157

242, 246

Lyon, Ben, 49

More, Kenneth, 164

Index

257

Morrill, Cynthia, 94–95, 239

Red Dust, 30, 47–48, 213

Mulvey, Laura, 5–7, 12, 197n8,
rhetorics of transgression, 163, 166,

202n24, 239

183, 187

Rick’s Café, 133

Naremore, James, 106, 239

Riviere, Joan, 11, 241
neo-noir, 106

Robertson, Pamela, 11–15, 70, 72,
new woman, 86–87

75–76, 78–80, 88, 91–93, 95–99,

205n45, 206n54, 241

O’Brien, Edmund, 158

Rogers, Ginger, 25, 28

O’Hara, Frank, 63, 239

Russell, Jane, 6, 8, 156, 168, 209n74

Oldfi eld, Barry, 126

Rutherford, Anne, 38–39, 242

Osborne, Marijane, 18

Rutherford, Paul, 156

The Outlaw, 156
parody, 12, 14, 70, 72, 91, 99–100,

Saxton, Martha, 146, 148, 151,

197n7, 235

156–158, 163, 167, 170–171,

Pandora’s Box, 23

175–181, 187, 210n75, 242

Peiss, Kathy, 17, 87–91, 171,

Shepherd, Cybil, 191

205n49, 240

Simmon, Scott, 18

Perry, Timothy, 105, 128, 138, 240

Simpson, Jessica, 3

Peyton Place, 118–119, 206, 218
seduction, 2, 10, 13, 59–60, 91, 122,

Philips, Lee, 118–119

153

Pitman, Joanna, 4, 240
sex, 1–19, 23, 27, 30–40, 42,

Place, Janey, 106, 108, 114, 116,

46–47, 50, 54–55, 63–65, 67,

118, 125–126, 131, 133–134,

70–74, 77–78, 80, 83–89, 91, 96,

240

99–100, 103, 111–113, 115–116,

Platinum Blonde, 41–42, 44–45, 133

118, 127–130, 132, 145–149,

The Postman Always Rings Twice,

153–155, 158, 162–163, 166,

108–109, 114, 117, 125, 127, 129,

172, 174–181, 185–187, 191,

132, 135, 137, 139–141, 143,

195n2, 196nn5–6, 197n7,

205n64, 218, 227

198n11, 199n17, 200n18, 203n35,

Powell, William, 41, 43, 214

205n46, 206n52, 206n55,

The Prodigal, 103

207n57, 208n62, 213–214, 216,

Promises! Promises! , 184–186, 223, 225, 227–228, 230–241, 243–245

247
sex goddess/es, 1–18, 23, 27, 32–33,
prostitution, 7, 23, 76–78, 80, 86–87,

35, 64–65, 80, 83, 89, 93, 133,

153, 186, 205n47, 206n50

187–191, 193, 214, 231, 235,

243, 245
queening, 67, 69, 98–99, 205n44, 245
sex symbol, 42, 72, 146–148, 172, 179,
queer, 94, 96–97, 99, 200, 225, 239

187, 207n57, 209n71, 213, 237

258

THE SEX GODDESS IN AMERICAN FILM, 1930–1965

Schissel, Lillian, 71, 73–74, 78, 89,

Turner, Lana ( continued)

205n42, 206n51, 242

206n55, 207nn56–59, 208nn60–63,

The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw,

209n65, 209n69, 217–218, 226,

164–165, 224, 247

231–232, 239, 243–247

Scorsese, Martin, 191

Twin Oaks, 131

Skipworth, Alison, 71

Snitow, Ann, 83–86, 183, 234

Updike, John, 103, 108, 112–113,
social constructionism, 38

115–118, 209n66, 244

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 166

Some Like it Hot, 1
vamp, 23, 127, 133, 151, 196n5

Sontag, Susan, 96–97, 243

Van Leer, David, 18, 69, 98, 205,

Spears, Britney, 191

225, 245
star image, 2, 107, 114, 206n53,

Vargus, Albert, 3

207n59, 228

Varsi, Diane, 118

Stanwyck, Barbara, 138

Vogel, Michelle, 149, 157, 170, 186,

Stacey, Jackie, 15–16, 50, 53, 171,

188, 245

197n87, 202n27, 202nn31–32,

203n33, 210n78, 243

Warhol, Andy, 1

Stefani, Gwen, 191

West, Mae, 11–15, 17, 67–80,
stereotype, 4, 11, 14–15, 91, 122,

82–83, 86–95, 97–101, 116, 133,

176, 178, 206

155, 158, 188, 191, 203n39,

Stompanato, Johnny, 104, 129, 142,

204nn40–41, 205nn42–43,

218

205n45, 206nn50–51, 206n53,

Stone, Sharon, 14

216–217, 222, 225, 229, 231, 234,

236, 241–242, 245–247

Tashlin, Frank, 161, 224, 246–247

The Wild, Wild, World of Jayne

Too Hot to Handle, 146, 150–152,

Mansfi eld, 172–173, 247

154, 182, 223, 247

Williams, Robert, 41, 235

Tracy, Spencer, 41, 43

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? , transsexual, 172

168, 222, 224, 247

Turim, Maureen, 3, 6, 244

Witherspoon, Reese, 14, 189, 246

Turner, Lana, 12, 17, 103–104,

A Woman There Was, 23

107–127, 129–130, 132–134,

137, 139–143, 156, 158, 188, 191,

Young, Loretta, 45

Document Outline

- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Sex and the Goddess

- Chapter 1: Sex as Cinematic Capital: Jean Harlow and the Economy of the Gold Digger

- Chapter 2: Sex as a Cinematic “Queening”: Mae West Decamps

- Chapter 3: Sex as Cinematic Code: Lana Turner’s Star Text and the Duplicity of the Femme Fatale

- Chapter 4: Sex as Cinematic Eroticism: Jayne Mansfield’s Breasts

- Conclusion: The American Sex Goddess is Legally Blonde

- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Sex and the Goddess

- Chapter 1: Sex as Cinematic Capital: Jean Harlow and the Economy of the Gold Digger

- Chapter 2: Sex as a Cinematic “Queening”: Mae West Decamps

- Chapter 3: Sex as Cinematic Code: Lana Turner’s Star Text and the Duplicity of the Femme Fatale

- Chapter 4: Sex as Cinematic Eroticism: Jayne Mansfield’s Breasts

- Conclusion: The American Sex Goddess is Legally Blonde

- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index