Beyond the Looking Glass: the Narcissistic Woman Reflected and Embodied in Classic Hollywood Film
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Beyond the Looking Glass: The Narcissistic Woman Reflected and Embodied in Classic Hollywood Film Ana Salzberg PhD, Film Studies University of Edinburgh 2010 Declaration I declare that the following work is my own, and that I have clearly cited all external sources. This work has not been submitted for any other degree or qualification. Abstract Linking the images of stars as contrasting as Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, and Gloria Swanson, and uniting genres like romantic comedy, film noir, and melodrama, the figure of the narcissistic woman stands as a versatile, ever-present extra- and intra- diegetic force in the dream factory of classical Hollywood. She is, in fact, the lead in what sociologist Edgar Morin conceptualizes in The Stars (1957) as a golden-age “myth of love”: Calling upon the psychic and sensory investment of her fans with her otherworldly aura and material impact, the female star emerges as both the active subject of romantic narratives and the admired on-screen partner in a love affair with the spectator. Like Ovid‟s original Narcissus before her, the narcissistic woman of Hollywood exists, as Morin describes it, to “focus…love‟s magic on [herself].” Contemporary film theory, however, has interpreted the star not as a subjective force in this dialogical “magic” between actress and spectator but rather as the product of a patriarchal system of filmmaking, one that objectifies women both on the screen and in the audience. In an effort to further analyze the questions of identity and representation evoked by the female star and her audience, this thesis will seek an alternative to the binaries that tend to characterize the traditional understanding of women in classic Hollywood (that is, spectator/star, narcissistic subject/idealized object; male/female, active/passive). Rather than read narcissism as a one-dimensional, monologic preoccupation with one‟s image, this research posits that classic cinematic representations of the woman‟s relationship to the self invite an examination of the existential complexity of a figure negotiating the registers of corporeal reality and ethereal ideality, star persona and diegetic character. In the hopes of highlighting the active engagements – between star and role; spectator, actress, and filmic form itself – inspired by these cinematic entities and their “myths of love,” this work will connect psychoanalytic concerns with Edgar Morin‟s cultural history of Hollywood, Laura U. Marks‟s theory of haptic visuality, and the phenomenological understanding of film outlined by Vivian Sobchack in an exploration of the embodied subjectivities borne by the on-screen Narcissus and her off- screen audience. Table of contents I. The Narcissistic Woman: Reflections and Projections…1 II. Redefining the Ideal: Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1941) and Woman of the Year (1942)…43 III. “What are you running away from? Is it me?”: Vanishing Differences in Mildred Pierce (1945) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945)…98 IV. Transcending Narcissism: Materiality and Essence in Four Rita Hayworth Films…165 V. “Wherever There’s Magic”: Performance Time in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and All About Eve (1950)…236 VI. Marilyn Monroe: “The Last Glimmering of the Sacred”…306 VII. Beyond the Looking Glass…384 Works Cited and Filmography…397 Acknowledgements With much gratitude and appreciation to: my supervisors, Martine Beugnet and Katharine Swarbrick, for their insights and encouragement; John Orr, for his guidance; and Dorota Ostrowska, for introducing me to Edgar Morin. With especial thanks to Laura Mulvey for her thoughtful commentary, and Kriss Ravetto for her feedback and support in the final stages of revision. And many thanks to Kate Marshall for her technical expertise. I would also like to thank Brighid Heenan, Molly Hermes, Kim Richmond, and Silvia Villa for their brilliant friendship. And, as ever, with love to my beautiful parents: my father, Richard, who gave me the movies; and my mother, Janice, who makes me believe in the five of hearts. 1 Chapter I The Narcissistic Woman: Reflections and Projections In his Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote of the original love affair with the self in the myth of Narcissus, a young man who adores his own reflection. Though loved by Echo, a nymph who may never speak for herself but can only repeat the last words of others‟ phrases, the exquisitely handsome Narcissus arrogantly rejects her as he has done with the numerous women and men who admire him. Devastated, Echo retreats to a cave where she pines for Narcissus until her body wastes away and only her voice remains. Later, another spurned admirer curses Narcissus to know the impossible love he inspires in others; and accordingly, Narcissus catches a glimpse of his reflection in a river and falls madly in love with it. Realizing that he has become infatuated with himself, a tormented Narcissus finally dies on the riverbank and spends his days in the underworld gazing at his image in the river Styx. Echo, witness to her loved one‟s deterioration, is left to repeat the laments of the mourning nymphs; and when the time comes to collect Narcissus‟s body, only a flower remains where he had lain (109 – 116). Thousands of years later, in the closing image of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‟ 1950 film All About Eve, a young woman would stand before a mirror and embody a transformed Narcissus: the narcissistic female star and filmic heroine in classic Hollywood film. After tracing the usurpation of theatre star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) 2 by her ruthlessly ambitious protégée, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), the film concludes with a threat to Eve herself in the form of a devoted young fan named Phoebe (Barbara Bates). In these last moments, Phoebe stands before a three-way mirror in Eve‟s bedroom, wearing her idol‟s elegant evening cloak and clutching her award for achievement in the theatre. But Phoebe is not alone in her reverie. Indeed, she bows to the multitude of reflections surrounding her as she graciously accepts the inevitability of her own success; the imminence of the merging of her real self with the ideal selves mirrored before her. This vision of narcissistic transcendence articulates metonymically the ability of classic Hollywood to echo Ovid‟s original myth while at the same time craft its revival and revision, as the tale of one man‟s passion for his reflection evolves into an exploration of feminine identity and awareness of self. In that final shot, Phoebe is not simply a young woman enthralled by her likeness, but rather a subject engaging with possible selves: She is a fan worshipping at the altar of stardom, wearing the borrowed robes of her idol; yet she is also an actress, seeking to replace Eve as she ascends that same altar. Unlike Narcissus, doomed to never attain the union of real self and ideal image, Hollywood poises Phoebe – as both fan and actress – on the threshold of a journey through the looking glass. 3 Linking the images of stars as contrasting as Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, and Gloria Swanson, and uniting genres like romantic comedy, film noir, and melodrama, the figure of the narcissistic woman stands as a versatile, ever-present extra- and intra- diegetic force in the dream factory of classical Hollywood. She is, in fact, the lead in what sociologist Edgar Morin conceptualizes in The Stars (1957) as a golden-age “myth of love” (30): Calling upon the psychic and sensory investment of her fans with her otherworldly aura and material impact, the female star emerges as both the active subject of romantic narratives and the admired on-screen partner in a love affair with the spectator. Like Ovid‟s original Narcissus before her, the narcissistic woman of Hollywood exists, as Morin describes it, to “focus…love‟s magic on [herself]” (ibid). As the expansive cultural mythology crafted by Morin ceded to a more expressly academic critique of classic American cinema, however, the female star and her engagement with on-screen lovers and off-screen spectators were viewed with a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective. With the 1975 publication of Laura Mulvey‟s canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the subsequent wave of feminist criticism in the 1980s interpreted the female Narcissus of classic film not as the recipient of love‟s “magic” but rather as the product of a system of filmmaking objectifying to women both on the screen and in the audience. Through a psychoanalytic framework, feminist theorists interpreted the leading 4 ladies of Hollywood‟s golden age as symbols of male fantasy; as Mary Ann Doane wrote in “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” classic films are a “writing in images of the woman but not for her” (18). In engaging with these images of idealized womanhood, according to Doane, the female spectator consequently takes part in a narcissistic process through which she bears a subjective investment in that cinematic projection of femininity as the object of her desire (22). Where Morin‟s myth of love conceptualizes the female star/heroine as a subject of desire as well as an object thereof, the feminist perspective has viewed such women as passive figures subject to patriarchal visual pleasures; “cut,” as Mulvey wrote, “to the measure” (26) of a fetishistic gaze that reduces the woman to an illusion of ideality. In so approaching the female star and her diegetic counterparts with a kind of wariness – acknowledging her aesthetic appeal while attributing it to a reductive male gaze; interpreting ideality as a trick of purely surface allure – the 1970s/80s wave of feminist film criticism tended to assign the on-screen woman to the plane of the fragmented illusory. Though disclosing the patriarchal bias that underlay certain golden-age American works, such theoretical arguments avoided a direct engagement with the capacious subjectivity (rather than the passive object-ivity) of the female star.