University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School July 2020 Glamour in Contemporary American Cinema Shauna A. Maragh University of South Florida Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Scholar Commons Citation Maragh, Shauna A., "Glamour in Contemporary American Cinema" (2020). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/8467 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Glamour in Contemporary American Cinema by Shauna A. Maragh A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Hunt Hawkins, Ph.D. Victor Peppard, Ph.D. Quynh Nhu Le, Ph.D. Date of Approval: July 3, 2020 Keywords: Hollywood, gender, femininity, beauty, heroines, women of color Copyright Ó 2020, Shauna A. Maragh ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I offer my thanks to everyone who has supported me throughout this journey, especially as the world changed overnight due to COVID-19 in March 2020. It’s one thing to write a dissertation; it’s another to write a dissertation during the early stage of a world-wide pandemic. First, I would like to thank my Dissertation Committee for their guidance through these past few years. Thank you to Dr. Phillip Sipiora, my Dissertation Chair, who first introduced me to the concept of glamour as a project idea at the end of my second year. Dr. Sipiora spoke with me numerous times as I tried to develop my ideas, and I cannot begin to quantify how much I have grown as a writer, scholar, and teacher from him. Next, I am tremendously grateful to Dr. Quynh Nhu Le, who has helped me learn more deeply about critical conversions concerning the racialiZed identities of various American ethnic groups. In addition, I want to extend my appreciation to Dr. Hunt Hawkins, who was my Comprehensive Exam Chair; his course on African Postcolonial Literature has guided me through teaching my own 4000-level course in Postcolonial Literature. I also want to thank Dr. Victor Peppard for being on my committee and acting as the Dissertation Defense Chair: you facilitated such an enjoyable online defense. Thanks to my good friends who can share both jokes and existential crises. To my friends in the Literature program who are kind and supportive: Dr. Stephanie Lance, Megan Stowe, and Rachel Tanski. To my editor Atika Chaudhary, who has an amaZing talent in seeing the writing errors my brain refuses to notice. To my close friends who are family: Rachel Ekblad, Isha Vicaria, Cleo Collange, and Lisa Wrede. And most of all, I cannot thank my family enough for encouraging me to pursue an education. I dedicate this dissertation to my late grandfather, Ferdy, who always said I was a “modern woman,” and to my late father who passed before I applied to a doctoral program. To both of my grandmothers, especially Catherine, who is so ecstatically proud that she will now competitively lord my degree over the other grannies who collectively compare grandchildren’s achievements. And most importantly, I dedicate this dissertation to my mom, Sharon, who listened to all the times I was happy or stressed, and who sacrificed so much to help me get where I need to go in life. Thank you! TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables .................................................................................................................................. ii Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 What is Glamour? ................................................................................................................4 Glamorous Women in Hollywood Cinema ..........................................................................9 Chapter Summaries ............................................................................................................15 Chapter One: Ruminations on the Evolution of Cinematic Glamour ............................................19 The History and the Mystery .............................................................................................19 Contemporary Glamour: Enigmatic, Heroine, and Current ...............................................25 Chapter Two: Enigmatic Glamour in The Devil Wears Prada and Memoirs of a Geisha ............36 The Glamorous “Cinderella” Transformation ...................................................................36 Glamour, Orientalism, and Cultural Appropriation ...........................................................55 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................59 Chapter 3: Heroine Glamour in The Matrix and Charlie’s Angels ................................................63 The History of the Heroine ................................................................................................63 Glamorous Action Heroes ..................................................................................................70 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................93 Chapter 4: Current Glamour in Wonder Woman, Aladdin, and Black Panther .............................97 A New Stage in Glamour ...................................................................................................97 Wonder Woman Starts a New Heroine Era ......................................................................101 Disney’s Influence on Glamour: Aladdin and Black Panther .........................................106 Current Glamour ..............................................................................................................117 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................129 Conclusion: Implications of Glamour in Future Cinema .............................................................131 References ....................................................................................................................................138 i LIST OF TABLES Table 1: My Framework: (In)tangible Glamour ........................................................................16 Table 2: Glamour Spectrum of Sensuality/Sexuality .................................................................26 ii ABSTRACT American cinematic glamour shapes hegemonic notions of femininity, beauty, performativity, sensuality, and sexuality for both female actresses and viewers. In addition, glamour has an economic component in encouraging women to buy products, such as clothing and makeup, to help them emulate their idols from cinema. Glamour is more than beauty and notoriety: it is achieved through careful styliZation of tangible aspects—hair, clothes, makeup— and intangible, cinematic elements—performance, dialog, lighting, and camera techniques. In Classical Hollywood, traditionally white standards of beauty were often exalted as glamorous, and many leading roles were played by racialiZed white actresses; however, actresses of color were frequently cast into the stereotype of “Other” in the roles of servants, sexualiZed objects, and villains. As a result, female viewers of color experienced decades of cultural pressure to conform to the white standards of glamour and aesthetics that Hollywood disseminated, but cultural ideals of beauty are becoming more diverse within the twenty-first century as a result of actresses of color being cast in glamorous leading roles. Currently, a gap exists between glamour scholarship of the past decade and scholarship about actresses of color: glamour scholars usually concentrate on racialiZed white actresses from Classical Hollywood, but scholarship about contemporary actresses of color often centers on the representation of racialiZed identities without discussing these actresses’ glamorous depictions. The increased representation of actresses of color within twenty-first century film calls for a reassessment of American cinematic glamour. iii I address this gap with an evaluation of how the principles of aesthetics and femininity are changing within American culture, resulting from women of color in leading cinematic roles from 1999-2020. A dissertation of this nature is qualitative and illustrative since no single definition of glamour exists. I select movies that are representatives of different places in the spectrum of sensuality/sexuality in order to illuminate three categories: Enigmatic Glamour, Heroine Glamour, and Current Glamour. Then, I create a framework named (In)tangible Glamour to evaluate and record qualitative data about seven characteristics of glamour, such as performance and styliZation, for nine leading actresses: Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Ziyi Zhang in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix (1999), Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels (2000), Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman (2017),