Christine Gledhill

Collection of essays on film stardom and particular stars. I liked Miriam Hansen’s observation that Dorothy Parker’s quip about men not making passes at girls who wear glasses was very much about controlling the female gaze.

Charles Eckert also gets off a nice bit about mid-1930s film merchandising: “Almost as significant for films as the scope of this merchandising revolution was the conception of the consumer that underpinned it. As one reads the captions beneath the style photos, the columns of beauty advice and the articles on co-ordination of wardrobes and furnishings, one senses that those who bought these things were not varied as to age, marital status, ethnicity or any other characteristics. Out there, working as a clerk in a store and living in an apartment with a friend, was one girl--single, nineteen years old, Anglo-Saxon, somewhat favouring Janet Gaynor. The thousands of Hollywood-associated designers, publicity men, sales heads, beauty consultants and merchandisers had internalised her so long ago that her psychic life had become their psychic life. They emphasized with her shyness, her social awkwardness, her fear of offending. They understood her slight weight problem and her chagrin at being a trifle too tall. They could tell you what sort of man she hoped to marry and how she spent her leisure time.” The language of identification here reminds me of Carol Clover’s Final Girl, though to a very different purpose, and more generally reminds me that we don’t ask enough about when men identify with the women they’ve constructed (e.g., we ask about the overlapping identifications of women reading slash—do I want to do him or do I want to be him, do I identify with the situation/the gaze rather than any participant, but we don’t ask what the guy who watches lesbian porn is thinking, perhaps because we assume he isn’t).

Eckert also makes clear that complaints about free riding by new media are old news—newspapers and theater owners protested product placement and other promotional alliances between brands and movie stars, arguing that their presence on radio to tout the products shown in the films undercut theater profits and newspaper advertising revenues. The preference for “tie-ins,” which led to advertising support and subsidies for the making of the film in the first instance, supported the production of women’s films (since women were the target consumers) and modern films (since it was harder to place products in historicals, and we hadn’t yet arrived at the current solution of branding ordinary consumer products with characters from the film). I haven’t yet read a history of how major media decided that, since women would watch anything men would, they would target men instead, but I’d like to.

John O. Thompson’s piece, Screen Acting and the Commutation Test, made me think a lot about fan fiction and vids, since he discussed the way that film, unlike performance, seems fixed and inevitable—vidding can free that up again, remaking the meaning of a filmed scene or character. Commutation is the idea of imagining a different version of a performance, or even a different actor in a role, and seeing how that changes the meaning of the film. (In his words: “Commutation is a device which is designed to allow us consciously to grasp units which were previously invisible, submerged in the smooth operation of the sign system in question.”) And hey, we do that six times before breakfast in fandom! Commutation, Thompson suggests, de-naturalizes, making our assumptions about plausibility, realism, and so on manifest. (I’m also reminded of, among other things, certain debates over A Game of Thrones: Dragons = totally okay; a world in which sexual violence against women is not the default = defiance of all rules of realism and plausibility.)

Thompson points out that our sense of whether an actor is right for a role depends on “canons of suitability, … which turn out to be suffused with ideology and to shift with history.” Extras generally don’t matter—but “we would notice of everyone on the streets happened to be female, or to be bald and so forth.” This is particularly interesting to me in light of the research showing that, in fact, there’s a huge gender disparity onscreen even among the extras—as with contributions to a conversation, the presence of a few women turns out to look/sound like “equality.” So we don’t notice a divergence from reality there.… (más)