UNDRESSING CINEMA

From Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy to sharp-suited gangsters in Tarantino movies,

clothing is central to film. Clothes are not mere accessories, but are key elements
in the construction of cinematic identities. Undressing Cinema focuses on the
narrative significance of clothes in film, and proposes new and dynamic links
between cinema, fashion and costume history, gender, queer theory and psycho-
analysis.

Undressing Cinema explores the difference between the referential relationship

of film and fashion, and the notion that clothing, in such films as The Piano and
The Age if Innocence, can be a repressive or expressive statement of sexuality.
Discussing new film nair, the gangster movie and new black cinema, Bruzzi
analyses assumptions about femininity and masculinity and examines the relation-
ship between gender and dress in recent cinema: the emergence of the modern
femme fatale in Single White Female, Disclosure and The Last Seduction; generic male
chic in Gooc!Jellas, Reservoir Dogs and Leon; and pride, costume and masculinity in
'Blaxploitation' films, Boyz N the Hood and New Jack City. The concluding chapters
further problematise gender identities through a consideration of drag in films,
proposing a radical differentiation between the unerotic cross-dressing of Mrs
Doubtfire as opposed to the eroticised ambiguity of androgyny in Orlando.

Undressing Cinema challenges and reassesses received notions of costume and

fashion in film. It radically departs from conventional interpretations of how
masculinity and femininity are constructed through clothes and reconsiders the
role dressing up plays in the martufacturing of gender, identity, sexuality and
desire.

Stella Bruzzi is a lecturer in Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. She

has published widely in the areas of cinema and cultural studies and is a regular
contributor to Sight and Sound.
UNDRESSING CINEMA
Clothing and identity in the movies

Stella Bruzzi

London and New York

 First published 1997
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX144RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

© 1997 Stella Bruzzi

Typeset in Palatino by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloauina in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library tif Conaress Cataloaina-in-Publication Data
Bruzzi, Stella
Undressing cinema : clothing and identity in the movies I Stella
Bruzzi
p. em.
Filmography : p.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
(hbk : alk. paper)
I. Costume--Symbolic aspects. 2. Fashion in motion pictures.
I. Title.
PN1995.9.C56B78 1997
791.43'655-dc21 97-7260
ISBN 0-415-13956-2 (hbk)
0--415-13957-0 (pbk)

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements xi
Introduction xiii

Part I Dressing up

CINEMA AND HAUTE COUTURE Sabrina to Pretty Woman, Trop Belle

Pour Toi!, Pret-a-Porter 3

2 DESIRE AND THE COSTUME FILM Picnic at Hanging Rock, The

Age if Innocence, The Piano 35

Part II Gender

3 THE INSTABILITIES OF THE FRANCO-AMERICAN GANGSTER

Scaiface to Pulp Fiction, Casino, Leon 67
4 THE SCREEN'S FASHIONING OF BLACKNESS Shcift, New jack
City, Boyz N the Hood, Waiting to Exhale 95

5 CLOTHES, POWER AND THE MODERN FEMME FATALE

The Last Seduction, Disclosure, Single White Female 120

Part III Beyond gender

6 THE COMEDY OF CROSS-DRESSING Glen or Glenda, Mrs Doubifire,

The Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the Desert 147
7 THE EROTIC STRATEGIES OF ANDROGYNY The Ballad if Little
Jo, The Crying Game, Orlando 173

v
 Contents
Notes 200
Filmooraphy 204
Bibliooraphy 208
Index 217

vi
 PLATES

Alain Delon as Jef Costello in Le Samourai' xiv

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.1 Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden in Sabrina 6
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.2 Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon in The Cook, the Thiif, His Wife
&_Her Lover 9
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.3 Victoria Abril wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier in Kika 12
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive
1.4 Victoria Abril and man in Kika 13
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.5 Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman 16
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive and
Audrey Hepburn and William Holden in Sabrina
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.6 Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Rear Window 19
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.7 Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour 21
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.8 Carole Bouquet and Gerard Depardieu at their wedding in Trop
Belle Pour Toi! 22
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.9 Sean Connery in The Untouchables 27
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
1.10 Sam Shepard in Voyaser 29
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
2.1 Miranda (Anne Lambert) emerging from a rock in Picnic at
Hanging Rock 47
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

vii
 Plates
2.2 Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age tf Innocence 52
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
2.3 Daniel Day Lewis as Newland in The Age tf Innocence 54
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
2.4 Holly Hunter and Maori women in The Piano 59
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive
3.1 Paul Muni as Tony Camonte in Scaiface 73
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
3.2 Jean-Paul Belmondo as Silien in Le Doulos 78
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
3.3 Alain Delon as Jef Costello, shot through his trenchcoat in
Le Samourai" and Alain Delon nursing his wound in Le Samourai" 81
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
3.4 Ray Liotta as Henry Hill (with Joe Pesci) in Gooijellas 85
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
3.5 Harvey Keitel as Mr White in Reservoir Dogs 88
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
3.6 Jean Reno as Leon in Leon 92
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.1 Richard Rowntree as Shaft in Shcift 98
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.2 Tamara Dobson as Cleopatra Jones in Cleopatra jones 100
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.3 Ron O'Neal as Priest in Supeifly 101
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.4 New jack Ci9' 106
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.5 Ice Cube as Doughboy in Boyz N the Hood 112
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.6 Cuba Gooding Jr (Tre) and Harry Fishburne (Furious) in
Boyz N the Hood 113
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.7 Wesley Snipes as Nino Brown in New jack Ci9' 115
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
4.8 Waiting to Exhale 117
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive
5.1 Jane Greer as Kathie Moffatt (with Robert Mitchum) in Out tf the
Past 126
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
5.2 Linda Fiorentino as Bridget in The Last Seduction 131
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

viii
 Plates
5.3 Michael Douglas as Tom (with Donald Sutherland) in Disclosure 133
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive
5.4 Demi Moore as Meredith in Disclosure 135
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
5.5 Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson (with Fred MacMurray) in
Double Indemnity 137
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
5.6 Bridget Fonda (Allie) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Hedy) in Single White
Female 141
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
6.1 Cary Grant as Florence in I Was a Male War Bride 152
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
6.2 Ed Wood and Dolores Fuller in Glen or Glenda 155
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
6.3 Robin Williams as Mrs Doubtfire in Mrs Doubifire 160
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
6.4 Robin Williams as Mrs Doubtfire with his family in Mrs Doubifire 161
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
6.5 Terence Stamp as Bernadette and Hugo Weaving as Mitzi in
The Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the Desert 171
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
7.1 Marlene Dietrich as Amy Jolly in Morocco 174
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive
7.2 Suzy Amis as Little Jo in The Ballad if Little jo 182
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
7.3 Suzy Amis as Little Jo in The Ballad if Little jo 185
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
7.4 ]aye Davidson as Oil in The Crying Game 188
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs
7.5 Tilda Swinton as Orlando in Orlando 197
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive

Although every effort has been made to contact owners of copyright material
which is reproduced in this book, we have not always been successful. In the event
of a copyright query, please contact the publishers.

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many friends, colleagues and members of my family have helped in different ways
and at different stages with the writing of this book. I thank Rebecca Barden at
Routledge for her encouragement and guidance on this project, and acknowledge
the tremendous help and support I have received from others. I would particularly
like to mention Philip Dodd, for having allowed me the space and time to try out
in Sight and Sound many of the ideas that I have since developed and incorporated
here, Millie Simpson for her advice about picture research and Dan Rebellato for
his suggestions on various chapters. I would have found it impossible to complete
my research without the invaluable resources of the BFI reference library and the
assistance of their staff. I also thank the British Library and, for their swift response
to specific queries, the Chane! press office and Lisa Brody at Conde Nast.

This book is dedicated with love to Mick.

xi
 INTRODUCTION
Clothing and cinema

This book is the last stage of a long and varied journey that began with the first
UK screening of The Piano. Never having been an ardent fan of conventional
'bodice rippers' or nostalgic fossilisations of a past we never had, I was surprised
by my reaction to the costumes. Like most of the audience, I was left moved
by the film's sensuous intensity, its engagement with women's history, even its
brittleness, its lack of sentimental compassion for the heroine, Ada; but most of all
I was moved by the clothes. One sequence, showing Baines (Harvey Keitel)
crouched under the piano as Ada (Holly Hunter) is playing, stands out as a turning
point in my conversion. In close-up we see Baines's rough, grubby forefinger caress
a speck of white skin left exposed by an undarned wool stocking. This gesture is,
on one level, a very straightforward signal of Baines's desire for Ada, and Ada
registers this through the startled but not unpleased expression on her face in the
subsequent shot. Its eroticism, however, as a cinematic image rather than an
idea, is created by the multiple juxtapositions of colour and texture: the two skins
(one masculine and swarthy, the other feminine and 'white and hairless as an egg'),
the heavy blackness of the stocking, and the delicate, if a little perfunctory, edging
on Ada's white petticoat. The snatched quotation in parentheses above is from
Robert Herrick's two-line poem Her Lens (Fowler 1991: 271) which he wrote in
1638 to his muse 'Julia'. Why the words come to mind when thinking of The Piano
is not simply the pallor of Ada's skin, but the awareness that Herrick, a priest as
well as a poet, was a clothes fetishist who translated his unconsummated desires
into an attraction for the movement, detail and eroticism of clothes. The scene
from The Piano replicates the duality of the fetishist: it both gives the costumes
a narrative purpose and allows them to exist independently of that dominant
discourse. This book is about that independence.
The significant scholarship already available in the area of cinema and clothes
has predominantly dealt with the same intersection between women, sexuality
and costume found in The Piano. The emphasis of this work, from a largely
feminist perspective, has gravitated towards period films such as Gainsborough

xiii
 Introduction
melodramas (Harper 1987, Cook 1996) or to the meaning and production of
costume in the era of classical Hollywood (Gaines and Herzog 1990). These texts
do not, however, make extensive reference to the theoretical studies of clothes
fetishism and the concomitant effect of this sexualisation on the spectator. Even
within the discussions of costume and sexuality (for instance Harper 1987 and
1994) there lurks the assumption that clothes, though evocative and complex
signifiers, are a means of understanding the body or character who wears them
not an end unto themselves. This mandatory bridesmaid status afforded to
costume failed to coalesce with my response to cinema where, much of the time,
clothes seemed able to impose rather than absorb meaning.
Another key image as I conceived of this book was Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre
Melville's Le Samourai·. Although the main focus of UndressinB Cinema is more
recent film (1980s and 1990s), the ubiquitous cold, silent, cool gangster of
Melville's films retains a certain topicality through having been conspicuously
resurrected by Quentin Tarantino in both Reservoir Dons and Pulp Fiction. At the
end of Le Samourai' the hit man Jef (Delon) goes into a bar. In front of the barman
(who recognises him as the assassin hired to kill his boss earlier in the film)
Jef deliberately, impassively puts on the white gloves he wears for executing a
contract killing, stark and bright against the sobriety of his coat and the dinginess
of the locale. He then walks over to the pianist, gets out a revolver as if to shoot

i Alain Delon as Jef Costello in Le Samourai'

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

xiv
 Introduction

her, but is himself shot in the back first. As he falls to the ground still clasping the
gun (which we discover is unloaded), Jef folds his pristine hands across his chest
and dies. Throughout the scene (and despite what is going on in terms of action)
our gaze is directed towards Jef's inappropriately technical (as opposed to chic)
gloves, garments that suggest significance but remain opaque, even after Melville
has proffered the explanation, 'White gloves are a tradition with me: all my killers
wear them. They are editor's gloves' (Nogueira 1971: 139).
Jef's white gloves once again fail to conform to the idea of costumes as function-
aries of the narrative, rather they are spectacular interventions that interfere with
the scenes in which they appear and impose themselves onto the character they
adorn. Jef is constructed through his costume. The fetishisation or over-valuation
of appearance that pervades Le Samourai' also raises other fundamental issues con-
cerning clothes and cinema, most importantly the unconventional correlation
between masculinity and extreme narcissism exemplified by Delon's fixation on
his own reflection. What is of course most surprising about the Delon image is that
he is a man. Discussions of costume have tended to exclude men and masculine
identities, as if an attention to dress is an inherently feminine trait, despite the
recent debates around masculinity and the eroticised male image in the cinema
(see Neale 1983) or some recent psychoanalysis-based studies of men and
cultural/social identity (e.g. Middleton 1992, Frosh 1994, Leader 1996). Since
vanity has now also hit the Anglo-American male population, more recent histories
of fashion and its cultural impact (Craik 1994) have considered men as more than
disinterested observers.
These questions of gender bring me to the third and final image that helps
draw the parameters of this book: the drag queen Felicia/ Adam standing on top
of the bus crossing Australia in The Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the Desert. Felicia,
miming to arias like a camp diva, poses in silver make-up and dress on the moving
bus. The camera starts to close in on Felicia's bright face, then pulls out to reveal
the excessive, tapered train billowing in the wind and shimmering as its waves
catch the sun. There is no straightforward contextualisation for this and the
similar scene which occurs later; this is simply, more extravagantly than Jef's
oddity gloves, a sequence that functions as a radical narrative interjection. The
triumphant image of Felicia is about complicating not cementing the relationship
between sex, gender and clothes, and is thus relevant to the analysis of drag
and performativity outside cinema (Butler 1990 and 1993, Garber 1993). Felicia's
arias, set against the multiple costume changes throughout Priscilla, work as a
metaphor for the film as a whole, representing as they do the liberation and
performative potential of clothes and the fluidities of identity.
These three very different images already imply a broad and eclectic field,
but one that contains significant intersections. In order to reflect this intriguing
duality, I wanted to do two things: to approach the subject of clothes and cinema

XV
 Introduction

in an interdisciplinary way, and to focus the discussions within each chapter on

a discrete body of films that most productively exemplify these cross-overs.
Undressing Cinema does not, therefore, remain closeted within the narrower
confines of pure film studies, but suggests links with other fields. Although the
emphasis of this book is on representation of clothing and fashion in cinema and
the relevance of these to the understanding and interpretation of narrative and
images, it also reflects the need to yoke together a heterogeneous and dispersed
range of disciplines. Two main axes inform the discussions of specific films in
Undressing Cinema: the theory, history and art of fashion and costume design, and
the debates surrounding the construction of gender and sexuality, primarily in or
deriving from psychoanalysis. Within these parameters my intention has been to
reassess and challenge some of the assumptions and truisms that have dominated
the study of dress, gender and sexuality, and to recontextualise others by applying
them to cinema. Running through the discussions in the individual chapters there
are arguments posed against received notions of how gender has been constituted
in theory and a re-evaluation of the eroticisation and problematisation of the
cinematic image through its relationship to clothing.
My fundamental premise, that clothing exists as a discourse not wholly depen-
dent on the structures of narrative and character for signification, is introduced
via the two initial chapters. In Chapter 1 , the questions raised in relation to the
presence of couture designs in cinema pertain largely to issues of spectacle. The
foundation for my distinction between designs by costume designers whose role
is simply to dress characters and designs made for films by couturiers who have a
name and identity beyond cinema is straightforwardly to contrast between those
clothes that are intended as spectacle and those that are not. My stress is on work
by couturiers renowned for their association with modern cinema such as Jean-
Paul Gaultier, Coco Chane! (and the house of Chane! since her death) and Giorgio
Armani. Hijacking the tight and prescriptive world of fashion and inserting it into
a discussion of cinema threw up many interesting and complicating ideas. The first
of these relates to the notion of the spectacular. Whereas Gaultier's designs for
The Cook, the Thiif, His Wife &.. Her Lover or Kika can unproblematically be called
'spectacular' by virtue of calling attention to themselves, Armani's designs for
films such as The Untouchables and V'?}'ager or Chanel's for Trap Belle Pour Toil are
more ambiguous in this respect. The inherent contradiction of the latter designs
is that they function in a spectacular way whilst not being agents of display,
a duality that extends from their ability to prescribe characters' identities or
to function in relation to the spectator independently of characters despite
remaining visually unextravagant. This duality (both a disavowal and a reference
to the function of the spectacular) impinges most obviously on the representation
of masculinity (hence the focus on Armani who, for the cinema, dresses pre-
dominantly men), whilst it is less expected in relation to the feminine. What

xvi
 Introduction

evolved out of my examinations of a group of films that deal with this ambivalently
defined femininity (Rear Window, Belle de Jour and Trap Belle) were two ideas: first,
that clothes do not acquire significance only in relation to the body or character
(which is the overriding ethos of most costume design), and second, that fashion
is not inevitably produced to render the wearer attractive to the opposite sex. The
former contention is the starting point for the notion of clothes as discourse,
pursued in various forms throughout the book; the latter is a crucial observation,
revisited most extensively during the discussion of Sinnle White Female, which casts
serious doubt on the theorisation of the feminine image as passive in relation to
an active male gaze, as part of the intention behind the all-female dialogue that
takes place between female fashion magazines and readers or between fashionable
female images and spectators is necessarily to exclude men altogether.
Questions of definitions of gender are tackled from an alternative perspective in
Chapter 2 's discussion of period costumes and sexuality. Initially with recourse to
Freud's essays on sexuality and fetishism and J.C. Fliigel's The PrycholoB.Y of Clothes,
which is, at heart, a transposition of Freud's ideas on sexuality to the issue of
clothing, this discussion explains essentialist arguments for the belief in fixed
and segregated genders with reference to dress and fetishism. Fliigel's concept of
the Great Masculine Renunciation during the nineteenth century (when men
renounced the desire for exhibitionism in their own attire and so transferred the
effects of display and the sexualisation of the body through clothes onto the increas-
ingly decorative woman) has proved hugely influential. Fliigel, after Freud, thus
argues for the exhibitionist but passive woman being the embodiment of the man's
desire- in short, his fetish; a view that is further substantiated by fashion historians
such as James Laver, who consolidates Fliigel's notion of the shifting erogenous
zone. By subsequently incorporating both historical accounts of fetishism and the
debates surrounding cinema's deployment of voyeuristic and fetishistic techniques,
the chapter offers analyses of films that both uphold and contest the traditional
views. Whilst in an intensely patriarchal film such as Picnic at Hanoinn Rock the
representation of women readily conforms to the archetype that the decorative
woman is the source of the male's erotic pleasure, both The Ane of Innocence and The
Piano offer critiques of this binary, the former by alienating and making strange the
past and its objects of fetishism, the latter by indicating how clothes fetishism can
be positively appropriated by women. This reconfiguration of fetishism and gender
dynamics is another way in which clothing can he seen to construct an independent
discursive strategy (thus conforming to Foucault's notion of the entry of sex
into discourse) through which one can link, for instance, the secret tight-lacing
communications women had with each other across the letter pages of Victorian
magazines to modern reassessments of restrictive clothing and fetishism (Kunzle
1982, Gamman and Makinen 1994). Many of these debates are subsequently
picked up in the following chapters on gangsters andjemmesjatales.

xvii
 Introduction
The second section of UndressinB Cinema deals with three different modern
genres in which clothing makes a significant intervention in the representation and
interpretation of identity. The rationale behind grouping together discussions of
gangsters, black American cinema and modern femmes fatales is to open up the
debates around gender, sexuality and appearance begun in the previous two
chapters. All the discussions in some way are renegotiations with established
stereotypes. For example, what governs and hangs over the shared iconography
and mutual veneration expressed by the Franco-American gangster traditions is a
constant, ultimately futile striving for a stereotyped, idealised and unattainable
image of masculinity. Within this context the gangster's consciously repetitious
and self-reflective wardrobe suggests a perpetual need to define and redefine
himself against such an image, to create his identity by comparing himself to past
icons. These ideas of creating a mythic identity to hold up as an Ideal develop,
most significantly, Freud's views on narcissism and Lacan's arguments pertaining
to the centrality of the mirror phase and the permanently veiled phallus to the
construction of masculinity. Recent American black cinema is likewise informed
by a reaction to stereotypes, but is further problematised by the added issue
of racial identification. The complexities foregrounded in the analysis of black
cinema are of critical importance to this section on gender and genre, as film
costume has been regarded largely as a white preserve - despite some of the
quintessential clothes movies of all time being black. Certain critics have argued
that in the recently revived and reappraised Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s
there is a self-conscious acknowledgement and citation of the stereotyped images
of blackness centred on exoticism, virility and action (Tasker 1993), a reflexivity,
this chapter argues, that leads directly from these black action movies to a 1990s
'ghetto movie' such as New Jack City.
An intrinsic element of both these new contextualisations of gender and
race archetypes is narcissism. The analysis of gangster films overturns several
established assumptions perpetuated by film theory, psychoanalysis and fashion
history about men and appearance, notably that men invariably deflect the erotic
gaze (Mulvey 1975, Neale 1983) and that their functional clothes necessarily
render them unerotic (Laver 1945 and 1969). The conclusion of these debates is
that, despite the Great Masculine Renunciation, narcissism and the eroticisation
of the male body can exist as correlatives of heterosexual masculinity, even via
the ostensibly unspectacular men's suit. These discussions are developed and
complicated in Chapter 4 by the issue of race. From the 1940s zoot suiters to
1980s hip-hop fashions and beyond, racial pride has been intricately entwined
with excesses of appearance within black culture, so narcissism and exhibitionism,
therefore, has been of particular cultural significance to African-Americans. One
of the negotiations this chapter has to make is between the film costumes and the
creation of subcultural styles (Hebdige 1979, Cosgrove 1989, Tulloch 1993);

xviii
 Introduction
whereas the white gangster's style is an appropriation of high fashion, the black
gangster's style in 1980s and 1990s 'home-boy' films is anti-fashion that derives
from street styles. The notion of an identity governed by race and stereotypes is
then questioned by WaitinB to Exhale which reasserts the relevance of gender (in
this case femininity) over race and offers a concluding critique of the outdated
view that the more authentically black the hair and clothes styles are, the more
ideologically 'right-on' the individual (Mercer 1994).
A comparable preoccupation with the 'natural' as opposed to the 'artificial' has
dominated feminist arguments about femininity, a conflict which forms the basis
for the reconsideration of the contemporary femme fatale in Chapter 5. Here the
dilemma centres on the rejection by most feminist commentators, whether in
response to the representation of femininity on screen or within a social context,
of the image of an overtly sexual, powerful woman as an inevitable construct of
patriarchy. Recent feminist writings on women and fashion (e. g. Brownmiller 1984,
Coward 1993) have pursued the line adopted by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second
Sex ( 1949), namely that the eroticised female figure is necessarily the embodiment
of male sexual desires, thus extending many of the debates foregrounded in the
analyses of couture and period costume. The established feminist extension of this
argument is to perceive women who dress to flaunt rather than disguise sexual
difference (as the femme fatale does in her stilettos and short skirt) to be colluding
in their own oppression. This chapter seeks to counter such feminist notions
by expanding upon the idea, proposed during the discussion of fetishism and
the costume film, that women's restrictive clothing is not innately oppressive, a
contention that requires a re-examination of Riviere's definition of the masquerade
and the assumption that this, again, is a tactic for presenting men with the image
of women they desire. Once more, an issue here is the active, self-conscious use
made of a stereotype by a character such as Bridget in The Last Seduction, who uses
the potential offered by the masquerade (the presentation to the threatened man
of an ostensibly unthreatening femininity) to destroy the men around her. Much
of this discussion thus extends the examination of the feminine image evolved
in Chapter l in relation to the spectacular, and also continues the potentially
empowering dialogue between feminism and fetishism initiated in Chapter 2. In
the final analysis of Sinsle White Female there is also a detailed development of the
idea that women might not dress with men in mind at all, but rather that women's
fashion -and in a cinematic context emphatic femininity -is an exclusory dialogue
between a female image and a female spectatorship. The possibility envisaged is that
a stereotype can be aggressively reappropriated.
UndressinB Cinema is intentionally structured so that the issues raised by the
relationship between clothing and the body become increasingly problematised.
Whereas all three chapters in the second section of the book deal with a certain
correlation between gender and dress, the final section reassesses the validity

xix
 Introduction
of that assumption with reference to transvestism. Wearing the clothing of the
'wrong' sex is the most conventionalised method of undermining gender, but
on the whole past assessments of transvestism have, rather uncomfortably,
bracketed all such mixings and matchings together. The division I have proposed
between cross-dressing and androgyny is inspired by a belief that there are
essentially two ways in which transvestism has been approached in cinema.
Whereas comedies of cross-dressing (Mrs Doubifire proving an exemplary text in
this respect) seek to affirm the inflexibility of sexual difference and so leave gender
binaries unchallenged, the androgynous image strives to break such oppositions
down. Cross-dressing is largely about emphasising the existence of the sex that is
temporarily disguised, so we are never left in any doubt that Robin Williams is
male despite his feminine attire - indeed his masculinity is inferred even more
strongly through its absence. The relationship between body and clothes is treated
very differently when it comes to drag. In The Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the
Desert, for instance, a similar discrepancy between sex and constructed gender
is celebrated not hysterically dismissed. Although cross-dressing can be theorised
as a point of radical departure from which to question gender categories (Garber
199 3), this disruption of sexual difference only exists on an intellectual level,
a result of the troubling comic image having been effectively desexualised.
The blurring of difference that characterises the androgyne is, conversely, more
dangerous and destabilising because it incorporates eroticism. Thus, the allure
of Little Jo or Orlando is intensified at the moments in either film when the
boundaries between body, clothes and gender are least clear, when the image itself
conveys doubt and uncertainty, as when Jo hides her female face beneath a wide-
brimmed masculine hat. From Virginia Woolf onwards there has, though, been a
tendency to perceive androgyny as a perfected, utopian version of femininity,
which, with the inclusion of The CryinB Game, this analysis is keen to dismiss.
The significance to this discussion of the uncertain friendship between Oil, the
transvestite, and Fergus is that, whilst initially repelled by Oil's 'real' sexuality,
Fergus nevertheless spends the remainder of the film redefining his attraction to
the androgyne. Drawing together androgyny in fashion, the notion of passing
(particularly Butler 1993) and the complex process of disavowal which makes the
spectator both recognise and misrecognise the ambivalence of the androgynous
image, this final discussion examines the powerful attraction of ambiguity and
dismisses the notion that what is more alluring than anything else is the person who
passes so successfully that the spectator is 'fooled'. My response to the erotic
potential of androgyny is exclusively based on the cinematic effect of the image, on
the identity being intentionally blurred, and so functions as a discursive, film-based
conclusion to the many perspectives cited previously, and in particular to the
arguments surrounding the role clothing plays in defining gender, sexuality and
desire.

XX
 Introduction
A word of warning, though: in 192 3, Erich von Stroheim was reputedly
relieved of his duties as costume designer on Merry-Go-Round for squandering a
large portion of the budget on silk underpants embroidered with the Imperial
Guard monogram for the Guardsmen extras. Some producers just don't get it.

xxi
 Part I

DRESSING UP
 1

Cl N EMA AND HAUTE COUTURE

Sabrina to Pretty Woman, Trap Belle
Pour Toi !, Pret-a-Porter

All the films included in this chapter, featuring designs by a diverse range of
couturiers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Coco Chanel and Giorgio Armani, articulate
very different attitudes to the central premise, namely the use of clothes as
spectacle and mechanisms for display. A result of having arrived at the distinction
between costume and couture design is the belief that clothes can function
independently of the body, character and narrative, that through them alternative
discursive strategies can be evolved that, in turn, question existing assumptions
about the relationship between spectator and image, not necessarily problematised
through the use of conventional costumes. Couture's involvement with cinema
has an elaborate and fragmented history. From 1931 when Sam Goldwyn offered
Coco Chane! one million dollars to design for MGM, high fashion has been brought
in to a production to contribute a quality which eludes even the most prolific and
proficient costume designers: the glamour of a name. Chanel's reputed disagree-
ments with Gloria Swanson, whom she dressed in Toniaht or Never, led to her
premature departure from Hollywood after barely a year, as, despite proving an
imaginative and meticulous costume designer, she was inflexible when asked to
tailor her style to the needs of the film or to divest her costumes of the understated
chic which had become her couture trademark. 1 Chanel's attitude, exemplified by
her 1931 designs for Palmy Days for which she made at least four ostensibly identical
versions of each dress, slightly differently cut to show the design at its best for
a specific movement or action (Leese 1976: 14), was in a subtle way to prioritise
the clothes over the narrative, an attitude which runs counter to the traditional
ethos of costume design, namely to create looks that complement the narrative,
character and stars. 2 The creation of clothes as spectacle is the prerogative of the
couturier; the overriding ethos of the costume designer is conversely to fabricate
clothes which serve the purposes of the narrative. From the earliest fashion show
films of the 191 Os to the recent cinematic contributions of Vivienne Westwood
(Elizabeth Shue's corsets in LeavinB Las Veaas) or Jean-Paul Gaultier (The Cio/ if Lost

3
 Dressing up

Children) the issue of couture designs as screen costumes has remained significant.
Although discussions of the role fashion plays in film consistently collapse the
difference between couture and costume design, the intention of this chapter is to
emphasise the distinction and focus on cinema's specific use of couture, in such
recent examples as Kika, Pretty Woman, Trap Belle Pour Toil, Voyaaer and Pret-a-Porter.
The earliest films to feature fashion were cinematic fashion shows, the earliest
example to be documented by the costume historian Elizabeth Leese being Fifty
Years of Paris Fashions 18 59~ 1909. This and subsequent fashion show shorts proved
increasingly popular, Pathe, for instance, expanding its coverage in 1911 by
producing a series of films devoted exclusively to forthcoming collections. Soon,
with Jacob Wilk of World Film Productions' filming of a fashion tour of the USA
in 191 5 (organised by Mrs Armstrong Whitney), the primitive fashion show film
developed into a narrative based genre with definite (if simple) story-lines. As
Leese comments, on both sides of the Atlantic 'Fashion films had started out by
being simple displays of gowns, then progressed to a story-line built round the
display' (Leese 1976: 11). In her discussion of the ways in which the fashion show
has been incorporated into features, Charlotte Herzog further distinguishes
between films which position a show as essential to the action and those which
treat the display of fashion as incidental (Herzog 1990: 136), thereby highlighting
fundamentally different motivations for incorporating fashion into narrative film.
The narrativised fashion film has clearly survived, and is a form adopted by such
later examples as Funny Face or Pret-a-Porter, which are both structured around the
staged exhibition of fashion on the catwalk. From the late 1920s, Hollywood
openly declared its desire to supplant Paris as the leading fashion innovator, a
move precipitated by having been left behind after Jean Patou dropped his hem
lines in 1929, an innovation that made Hollywood films populated with 'Flapper'
dresses (shot up to two years before) look hopelessly demode. The couturier
Madame Vionnet introduced the longer bias cut dress also in 1929, a style which
was to dominate Hollywood's visions of glamorous femininity through the 1930s,
epitomised by Jean Harlow's silver-beaded negligee and 22-inch ostrich feathers
in Dinner at Eiaht. As cinema took the initiative in the 1930s and 1940s, the
distance between costume and couture fashion was minimised, and Hollywood
recruited to its increasingly important design departments several fledgling
couturiers such as Howard Greer and Gilbert Adrian, who was brought to
work for Cecil B. DeMille and later MGM after allegedly being discovered by
Rudolph Valentino and his wife. 3 As the Paris-based couturier Elsa Schiaparelli
commented, 'what Hollywood designs today, you will be wearing tomorrow'
(Haggard 1990: 6). There are numerous examples from the classical Hollywood
period of the effect film styles had on contemporary fashion trends; both Adrian's
white, puff-sleeved dress for Crawford in Letty Lynton and Edith Head's strapless,
violet-encrusted New Look gown for Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, for

4
 Cinema and haute couture

instance, spawned a rush of mass-produced imitations, 4 whilst the appearance of

Clark Gable bare chested in It Happened One Night in 1934 led to an immediate
drop in the American sales of men's undershirts of around 30 per cent (Chenoune
1993: 182). Anne Hollander, in her examination of art and clothes, posits that
'dressing is an act usually undertaken with reference to pictures- mental pictures,
which are personally edited versions of actual ones. The style in which the image
of the clothed figure is rendered . . . governs the way we create and perceive
our own clothed selves' (Hollander 1975: 349-50). Cinema, and particularly
Hollywood, had a similar relationship with its (largely female) audience in the
1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when spectators swiftly emulated and adopted the styles
worn by their favourite film stars in their latest films. 5
The supremacy of the costume designer as a dictator of fashion and the
domination of Head, Adrian, Orry-Kelly and Branton was lessened with the intro-
duction of another French couturier, Hubert de Givenchy, as the major designer
for Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, a collaboration which heralded a new relationship
between stars and clothes. By the 1950s Edith Head, who was the costume
designer for Sabrina, readily acknowledged that her role was far less influential in
fashion terms than that of the couturier, saying of the gown she designed for Taylor
in A Place in the Sun, 'People have said ... that I was a great fashion trend-setter
in 1951. That's very funny. My clothes were middle of the road in terms of the
current fashion trends' (Head 1983: 97). Head, like many other costume design-
ers, did not create looks that were so fashionable that they would quickly become
obsolete. She learnt her lesson

the hard way. Just after Dior brought out the New Look (in 1947), every
film that I had done in the past few months looked like something from the
bread lines. With each screening, I was reminded. I vowed that I would
never get caught by a fashion trend again.
(Head 1983: 69-70)

Head's relationship with Givenchy became symbolic of the divergence between

the respective roles of the costume designer and the couturier. Accounts of how
Givenchy came to be assigned the task of creating Hepburn's Parisian wardrobe
for Sabrina differ; Head herself attributes the decision to the director Billy Wilder,
commenting, '(he) broke my heart by suggesting that while the "chauffeur's
daughter" was in Paris she actually buy a Paris suit designed by a French designer'
(Head 1959: 119), whilst others have stated that Hepburn arrived at the initial
costume discussion armed with a series of Givenchy sketches to show Head
exactly what she wanted (Head 1983: 104). Symptomatic of the friction was the
controversy surrounding the 'authorship' of the most innovative design in the
film, the black bateau neckline evening dress which, to her death in 1981, Head
had claimed as hers. Givenchy and even Head's colleagues at Paramount have since

5
 Dressing up

I. I Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden in Sabrina

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

confided that the dress was too innovative for Head, and had instead been made
up from one of Givenchy's original sketches for the film. 6 The demise of the
costume designer and inverse rise of the couturier is thus contextualise d within
the narratives of both Sabrina and Funny Face . Both films centre on the transfor-
mation of Audrey Hepburn from gauche girl to sophisticated gamine, and in both
the roles filled by Head and Givenchy are clearly demarcated : whilst Head is given
the pre-transform ation clothes, it is Givenchy who designs all the show-stoppin g
Parisian fantasies. Since the success of Givenchy's relationship with Audrey
Hepburn (whom he dressed off-screen as well) the use of a couturier on a film has
become closely aligned with a desire to bequeath to the clothes the kind of star
status usually denied to costume . Givenchy and other couturiers since have used
films to showcase their designs. Givenchy's signature styles, his strapless, square-
necked sheaths in heavy silks and satins, his wraps and trains and his elaborate hats
infiltrated every film he worked on with Hepburn up to their final collaboration
on Bloodline . Film fashions no longer had to remain subservient to narrative
and character, and could become much more intrusive, a legacy which, taking
in several designers along the way, finds its surest modern expression in the
spectacular, innovative costumes of Jean-Paul Gaultier.

6
 Cinema and haute couture

From the late 1950s through to basically 1980, when Giorgio Armani designed
Richard Gere's wardrobe for American Gisolo and effectively redefined the role
of the film couturier, a fluid mutual relationship existed between fashion and
costume design. Over these years a film tended towards being a general reflector
of outside fashions and trends. There were obviously exceptions, such as Chanel's
designs for Delphine Seyrig in Last Year in Marienbad which were far more
flamboyant than the clothes she had created for Jeanne Moreau in Les Amants three
years earlier, and Paco Rabanne's space-age look for Jane Fonda in the final
sequence of Barbarella, both of which are examples of fashions being created
for films that, although they bore some relation to the trends of the day, were
nevertheless non-functional flights of fancy. Over this period costume design
started certain notable trends, usually pertaining to street rather than high
fashion, such as Marlon Branda's 'slob look' of flying jacket and white T-shirt in
The Wild One (which he reputedly provided himself, in an era when this was no
longer expected of male stars) and James Dean's tortured adolescent in similar T-
shirt and wind-cheater in Rebel Without A Cause. With the ascendancy of European
cinema in the early 1960s, there arrived a more harmonious relationship between
couture and street styles - the appropriation of haute couture glamour by a land-
mark film such as La Dolce Vita, or the throwaway use of a Dior day dress on Jean
Seberg in A bout de soriffle. Films of the mid-1960s such as DarlinB and Two For
the Road brought in the by now common practice of 'shopping' rather than design-
ing film costume, of buying in designer off-the-peg items. The latter (another
Hepburn/Givenchy collaboration) trawled the ready-to-wear collections of
designers such as Mary Quant, Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy himself. 7
Apparent through the 1960s, therefore, is a growing desire to treat haute couture
(and perhaps spectacular costume designs in general) with less reverence and
more irony, a tendency exemplified by the quintessentially 1960s Andre
Courreges-inspired costumes by Hardy Amies for 2001: A Space Odyssey. As Amies
was at the time the Queen's favourite designer, his costumes are particularly
unexpected. The very notion of couture styles being synonymous with art and
pure exhibitionism was questioned and mocked by Saint Laurent's exquisitely
mundane wardrobe for Belle de jour, a film whose attitude to unexceptional but
very expensive clothes still resonates in the designs of the markedly unflamboyant
cinema work of modern couturiers such as Cerruti, Armani and the house of
Chane!, who dressed Carole Bouquet in Trop Belle Pour Toil.
As a troublesome epitaph to the ability of film fashion to inspire particularly
bland contemporary trends, there is the work of Ralph Lauren on two highly
influential films of the 1970s, The Great Gatsby and Annie Hall, both of which testify
to the designer's obsessive nostalgia for a bourgeois past of leisure wear and
natural fabrics in pale shades. As one writer says of Lauren's wardrobe for Robert
Redford as Gatsby, the fact that the suits worn in the film (set in the 1920s) could

7
 Dressing up

have been worn in 1974 without causing comment, is a reflection on the

moribund state of male dress (McDowell 1992: 96). The costumes are also, for
all the suave ease they evoke, a sad reflection on the misuse of couturiers in cinema
as subsidiary costume designers who subsume their styles to the narratives
and characters. Since then, even the less extrovert designers (Armani being the
strongest example) have begun to restate their presence as dictators of fashion
outside cinema, a re-evaluation which has likewise reinstated the element of
display into couturier film designs. Nino Cerruti, another prolific men's couturier
who has worked on several films, has identified his intention to manufacture a look
that is 'common', to subtly infuse reality with invisible style (Irvine 1995: 157),
indicating that clothes can be items of display in cinema without being spec-
tacularly extrovert. Certain fashion writers have related the rise in prominence
of all technicians and stylists involved in cinema during the late 1970s and 1980s
(including fashion designers) with the demise of the classic era star (Butazzi and
Molfino 1986: 19-20), but it may be more appropriate to simplify matters by
equating the emergence of the design movie with the 1980s' idolisation of the
label. In an age when 'shopping' a film falls within the remit of the costume
designer, the involvement of the couturier in film is far from standardised.
The most interesting debates surrounding the involvement of fashion in film
still centre on the questions of exhibitionism and art; whether clothes should
perform a spectacular as opposed to a subservient visual role in film; and whether
those same costumes should remain functional intermediaries to narrative and
character, or stand out as art objects in themselves. Peter Wollen makes the
distinction between Hollywood's 'play safe' attitude to fashion, and the predomi-
nantly European art cinema tradition that made fashion into 'an integral part of
the overall look of the film which was genuinely treated as another art-form in its
own right; incorporated into the cinema but not reduced to an ornament or an
accessory' (Wollen, P. 1995: 13). Into the latter tradition, for which the starting
point is taken as Chane! 's work on Last Year in Marienbad, Wollen places the
costume designs of, for example, Jean-Paul Gaultier. In his analysis Wollen
expresses the rather contentious and elitist attitude that fashion as art is 'good',
and that only extravagant designs can be classified as 'art'. This emphasis on
artistry recalls the origins of couture designs; as Anne Hollander suggests, 'In the
middle of the nineteenth century the French invented, fostered, and spread the
idea of the dress designer as an original genius, like a painter - someone totally
responsible for his creations' (Hollander 1993: 351 ). The outmoded attitude,
expressed by Wollen, that only the spectacular can be art, and that 'good' fashion
designers necessarily create designs for display and effect will be contested later
with reference to Yves Saint Laurent and Armani.
As mentioned above, Jean-Paul Gaultier is one of the couturiers who also
design for film and who Wollen classifies as an 'artist'. When working for film

8
 Cinema and haute couture

Gaultier, a designer whose signature styles off the screen have been radical,
spectacular garments such as his early 1980s male skirt and the 1986 'Cone
Dress', often creates costumes anew, rather than lend or adapt existent lines.
He has seemingly approached his film work (which to date includes The Cook, the
Thiif, His Wife &_Her Lover, Kika, My Life Is Hell, The City if Lost Children and Pret-
a-Porter) as if it were art, saying, for instance, that cinema has afforded him the
opportunity of letting his imagination run wild and has, in turn, proved 'food for
my fashion' (Irvine 1995: 157). His involvement in cinema projects is also often
greater than that of many other couturiers, designing entirely original costumes
for all one hundred characters in The City if Lost Children and one-offs for the
protagonists in The Cook, the Thiif often for negligible financial rewards.
Gaultier's designs for Greenaway's The Cook, the Thiif, His Wife &._Her Lover
are wildly eclectic. Helen Min·en 's caged cobweb dress and the waitresses' corsets
bear the trademarks of past Gaultier collections, whilst elsewhere his reference
points are a heady blend of 1960s 'space age' fashions, Cavalier uniforms,
seventeenth-century Cardinals' robes and modern business suits. Although the
items for the leads (except Alan Howard 's clothes as 'the lover ' ) are specially
designed one-offs, many of the other costumes are from Gaultier's regular

1.2 Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife &_Her Lover
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

9
 Dressing up

ready-to-wear collection, the extras reputedly having been 'let loose amongst
his rails and told to deck themselves out in whatever they would wear to a swanky
restaurant' (Maiberger 1989: 159). Gaultier, belying Wollen's suggestion that
'artistic' costume designers seem to find their inspiration from outside rather than
inside mainstream cinema, includes several touches of traditional Hollywood
glamour in his The Cook, the Thiif costumes, particularly the long gloves, whipped
hair and yards of chiffon used for Helen Mirren as Georgina. The self-conscious
affiliation with an existent film tradition is further signalled by Mirren's cape with
its collar of dark, upright feathers that frame her face, a direct reference to the
much copied feather cloak designed by Chanel for Delphine Seyrig in Last Year
At Marienbad. 8 Gaultier's costumes for The Cook, the Thiif are tightly aligned with
the film's highly formalistic narrative structure. Greenaway's film (like many of
his others) is structured around the idea of a procession: the clear separation
of the interconnecting rooms (the restaurant, the kitchens, the rest room) along
a horizontal axis, the evenly paced tracking shots following the action, the
positioning of the characters (at table and elsewhere) in straight lines, and the
division of the narrative into seven consecutive days. The insistence of this pattern
is repeated on the level of costume, most notably in the co-ordination of costumes
with the dominant colours of the lighting and mise-en-scene, so that clothes change
colour (whilst maintaining the same design) as the characters move from room to
room. Greenaway identifies the essence of the decor and the costumes as being
vulgarity, commenting, 'The people in the film are part of a swaggering society
and wear clothes to identify themselves and set themselves apart' (Bergan 1989:
29). The costumes here are characterised by their looked-at-ness; changes are
motivated purely by the requirements of the overall design rather than the
narrative, and thus they fulfil a star-like role, processing through the film as
arbitrary signs which precede rather than follow character.
Gaultier's costumes are deliberately intrusive, and thus instrumental in
defining the spectator's responses to a film. Pedro Almod6var's Kika juxtaposes
several styles and couturiers with just such an intention in mind; of using costume
to impose rather than reflect meaning built up within the characters and narration.
Almod6var refers to his film having 'the structure of a collage or a very radical
puzzle' (Strauss 1996: 127), indicating again that display-orientated couture
functions best in a narrative environment where consistency, conformity and
invisibility are not paramount concerns. The designers credited during the title
sequence are Jean-Paul Gaultier, who designed (specially for the film) the
costumes for Victoria Abril as Andrea, the exploitative presenter of a gruesome
television 'reality show', who alternates between vamp and robot, and Gianni
Versace, who loaned the film items from his current collection, notably Kika's
gaudy, clashing, optimistic frocks. Two couturiers, therefore, are employed to
create the distinctive signature looks of the two protagonists. 9

10
 Cinema and haute couture

Andrea hosts a television show comprising video footage shot by herself of

murder, rape and other lurid events, and is, as Almodovar describes her, the
embodiment of the corrosive horrors of television's titillating predilection for
voyeuristic and exploitative entertainment. Her function is thus largely symbolic,
a connotation which informs Gaultier's costumes. As the television personality,
Andrea has two looks: the militaristic Martian for her roving filming trips and the
futuristic vamp for her studio pieces to camera. The former, in military green
decorated with chrome, is a rich amalgam of the functional and the expressionistic
(clearly referencing the robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis), overlaid with militaristic
and technological trimmings such as multiple zips, epaulettes studded with video
controls, flip up shades, heavy-duty boots and a moulded helmet onto which
her video camera is mounted. Andrea presents herself to the characters she videos
and stalks as just another persistent, story-hungry journalist. Her look, however,
particularly in any dialogue scene, acts as a disruptive, jarring force, and contra-
dicts, by its obtrusiveness, the presumption that snuff television is invariably
captured by an unobtrusive camera and 'stringer'. To this overall symbolism
are added anarchic details which alternately fetishise and alienate Andrea. The
militaristic costume's most overtly fetishistic features are the breastplate lamps
protected with industrial meshing, which function as a makeshift lighting system
(used by Andrea during her final interrogation of Nicholas (Peter Coyote]).
The alienating function of Gaultier's costumes for Andrea is made explicit
in the studio sequences through the wild discrepancy between her heightened
glamour and the horror of the 'real life' filmed extracts she introduces. During one
transmission Andrea introduces a report on a self-flagellating and mutilating
religious ceremony for her 'Bloody Ceremonies' slot. The dominant dynamic of
this scene is clearly the collision between Andrea's appearance and the potential
effect of the subject matter. Andrea, deploying all the coquettish poise of the
traditional television host, is dressed in parody evening wear: a tight, mutilated red
velvet dress over a loosely crocheted black vest, her hair scraped back Flamenco
style and her legs and arms (to the length of elegant evening gloves) swathed in
surgical bandages which offer a particularly gruesome and direct link with the
ritual being screened. The provocative Gaultier costumes for these scenes serve an
ambivalent function: on the one hand they are metaphors for (in Almodovar's
view) the exploitation of ghoulish television, and on the other they render Andrea
inappropriately glamorous. Andrea's costumes are not merely distancing devices
but exaggerated, conventionalised mechanisms for making the female form into an
objectified spectacle. During her first broadcast Andrea wears another distressed
black and red velvet dress, this time with two plastic breasts exploding through
the ripped fabric, stalking the stage and kicking her train out of the way like an
adept cat-walk model. Gaultier's costumes are both pure aesthetic displays and
perversely functional, a complex blend often found in his real couture designs.

11
1. 3 Victoria Abril wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier in Kika
Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive

12
 Cinema and haute couture

Andrea's costumes are thus an interesting development of the 'star costume' or

single item of spectacular couture, used to make one character stand out visually
from the others. A classic example of this sartorial convention is Howard Greer's
fancy-dress ball costume for Katherine Hepburn in Christopher Strong, which he
agreed to make despite having left Hollywood by 1933 to open his own couture
house. For most of Arzner's film Hepburn dons utilitarian and masculine clothes,
but for the ball (which we do not see) she wears a shimmering, luminous silver
dress, cape and skull cap with fine , virtually imperceptible antennae bouncing off
it. The same mechanism is adopted in many of the Givenchy I Audrey Hepburn
films, particularly Funny Face, which hardly disguises the fact that it is a prolonged
cat-walk show. The clothes in these instances intrude on, dominate the scenes they
are couched in .

1.4 Victoria Abril and Man in Kika

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

Not unlike the early fashion show shorts, Gaultier's costumes for Victoria Abril
in Kika are pure spectacle. Although contextualised within a more formal frame -
work, they are not wholly motivated by either character or narrative. An anomaly
suggested by the alienating way in which costumes function in Kika is that the more
sensational clothes become, the less they signify the beauty and desirability of,
in this instance, the female characters who wear them. This contravenes directly
the traditional interpretation of adornment as something which accentuates
and complements the feminine, but is somehow symptomatic of how couture as

13
 Dressing up

opposed to the generic fashion operates in cinema. A useful comparison to make,

which also serves to highlight the different agendas of couture and fashion, is
between Bertrand Slier's Trop Belle Pour Toil and Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman, two
recent films overtly preoccupied with the representation of femininity through
an elaborate and expensive wardrobe. Both films focus on a central female figure
who is persistently named as beautiful, but whereas Carole Bouquet's Chanel-
clad perfection in Trap Belle Pour Toil is established from the start and thus exists
independently of her or the ensuing action, Julia Roberts's comparable perfection
is created, Cinderella fashion, through the course of the film and so exists only as
a causal, dependent response to the narrative itself. There is a further distinction
to be made between the two protagonists' beauty which pertains directly to the
difference between the specific signification of couture and the general connota-
tions of fashion. Whereas couture acts as a barrier to identification and intimacy in
Trap Belle Pour Toil, fashion in Pretty Woman does the reverse.
Pretty Woman is an intentionally formulaic romance, constructed around the
improbable match between a hooker (Vivien) and a rich businessman (Edward)
which deliberately announces itself as a fairy-tale: Vivien is likened to Cinderella,
for example, and is rescued at the end by Edward on the 1990s version of a white
charger, a white limousine. As Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake have
observed, the film's reflexivity diverts 'the contradiction faced by the spectator
who is no longer able to believe in romance ... yet at the same time wishes to do
so' (Lapsley and Westlake 1992: 28). In Pretty Woman the dream is expressed
through clothes. A woman acquiring sexual confidence and a man through the
appropriation of a new wardrobe is a well-established cinematic convention.
Charlotte in Now Voyager, for example, conducts her courtship with Jerry dressed
entirely in the clothes of a woman we never see. In Pretty Woman there is a similar
transaction between clothes and female identity, and a similar awareness that the
woman is at her most alluring when wearing clothes that do not belong to or are
new to her. The basis for the successful fairy-tale driving Pretty Woman (Vivien after
all gets her man) is the ease with which Vivien adapts to her new wealth and
°
Rodeo Drive wardrobe. 1 Coco Chane! is reported as having said, 'If a woman
walks into a room and people say, "Oh, what a marvellous dress", then she is badly
dressed. If they say, "What a beautiful woman," then she is well dressed' (Craik
1994: 83). Chanel's stated aim is to construct a wardrobe that projects its beauty
onto the woman wearing it; a woman, therefore, must inhabit, be appropriate to,
be at one with her clothes if she is to be found attractive. All the admiring glances
shot at Vivien from men throughout Pretty Woman (in the street, in the hotel lobby)
abide by such a rule, as the film is at pains to prove that, far from being mutton
dressed up as lamb after her trips to Rodeo Drive, she is a natural who was waiting
to be discovered. The number of times Edward and Bernie, the hotel manager
who befriends her, attribute the term 'special' to Vivien is testament to this.

14
 Cinema and haute couture

The slippage between personality and clothes ensures that, on their own count,
the clothes are not particularly 'special', but rather function as a symbolic visual
shorthand for desirable femininity, volume (the number of options, changes, bags
and boxes) being of far greater significance than style. The wide but not extrava-
gant black hat, the slim-fitting pale dress buttoned down the front, the white
gloves to half-way up the forearm, the polka-dot dress with matching hat trim,
are deliberately unexceptional metonyms for tasteful elegance. The majority of
the negative critical responses to Pretty Woman concentrated on the film's fixation
with wealth, exchange and consumerism. 11 Within this one can discern the
further connotation that what really makes Vivien 'pretty' (and this is the film's
most potentially interesting comment on femininity) is her capacity to spend
copious amounts of money on clothes. It is significant, though, that the money she
spends is Edward's. The traditional economic exchange between men and women
when clothes are the currency is characterised by the man spending on behalf
of the woman in order to buy her. As Herzog concludes, 'If men are buying
women, then women are buying clothes to get bought, or just to get a man,
period' (Herzog 1990: 158). The supposed attraction of this commodification of
women through clothes is exemplified by the Rodeo Drive spending spree
sequence, swathed in the lush tones and insistent beat of the Roy Orbison track,
'Pretty Woman'. From the moment Edward dangles his gold credit card in front
of Vivien's nose, through the orgiastic trying on and purchasing montage, to her
contented, overladen return to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, this whole sequence
is cut like a pop promo celebrating the art of shopping.
One film Pretty Woman clearly resembles is Sabrina, which constructs a similar
fairy-tale around the parallel between a woman changing her clothes and increasing
her sexual (and economic) status. There are, however, important differences which
inform the relationship between identity and costume. Whereas clothes in Pretty
Woman are homogenised, making no significant distinction between couture and
non-couture items, the pieces of couture design in Sabrina perform a different
expositional and symbolic function to those which are not. The contrast between
couture and fashion can best be made by comparing the two pivotal outfits used
in each film to illustrate the woman's sartorial transition: the ballgown Hepburn
wears to the Larrabee ball in Sabrina, and the red gown Roberts wears to the
opera in Pretty Woman. Selected wardrobes for Pretty Woman are by Cerruti 1881
(principally Richard Gere's suits), but the red, off-the-shoulder gown is designed
by the costume designer, Marilyn Vance- Straker. Hepburn's ball gown is created by
Givenchy, not the film's costume designer Edith Head. Vance- Straker's dress of silk
chiffon with silk-back satin crepe overlays is showy but conservative and derivative,
recalling principally Yves Saint Laurent- his 1959-60 and 1981-2 rouched, torso-
hugging couture evening dresses or the red Rive Gauche off-the-shoulder cocktail
gown shown in Spring 1985 which has a similar 'V' neckline. There also appear to

15
 .,...

1.5 Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman

Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive and
Audrey Hepburn and William Holden in Sabrina
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

16
 Cinema and haute couture

be echoes of Bruce Oldfield's red velvet Tulip Dress of 1986 and Caroline Roehm's
1980s trapunto-stitched satin bustiers with dart necklinesY As Edith Head has
intimated, costume designers must remain 'middle of the road' (Head 1983: 97),
they are not, as Vance-Straker confirms, 'doing fashion - we're doing characters,
building energy, portraying a slice of real life' (Vance-Straker 1991: 15). Gaines
sums up the imperatives facing the costume designer when she says, 'costume
assimilates bodily signifiers into character, but body as a whole engulfs the dress'
(Gaines 1990: 193).
This process of assimilation and denial of identity is only one factor in Sabrina,
as Hepburn enters in her 'lovely dress with yards of skirt- way off the shoulders'
to the admiring stares of all the men - and women - at the ball. One point of
focus is Hepburn, but the other is the Parisian gown, innovative in its mixture of
lengths and shapes, juxtaposing a tight above-the-ankle dress, a long, trailing train
and a strapless bodice. Significantly, the other young women at the Larrabee ball
are wearing standardised, 'middle of the road' New Look gowns. Hepburn's
design is set apart by the detail, the floral embroidery on the white chiffon, the
dark tasselled trim and dark lining that round off the train, the weight of the fabric
apparent as Hepburn moves, and the fact that it creases. Whilst conventional
ideas about costume stipulate that they should serve the narrative and refrain
from being spectacular, Givenchy's gowns for Sabrina intentionally create a visual
diversion.
In The Fashion System, his exhaustive dissection of the semiology of fashion,
Roland Barthes suggests distinctions between the real, the written and the imaged
garment that is useful for cinema's oscillating dialogue with couture. Barthes
identifies 'three different structures, one technological, another iconic, the third
verbal' for each item of fashion. The reader of a fashion magazine (to keep to
Barthes' model) assumes that the common reference point of a photograph and
the accompanying words 'are united in the actual dress they both refer to', but in
reality there is only an equivalence between the different structures, not a
complete identification (Barthes 1963: 4-5). Similarly, both couture and non-
couture costumes for film are only equivalent, as they diverge in both their
relations to the spectacular and in their affiliations to the dominant narrative. The
majority of film costumes are 'real' in that they are given meaning only in terms
of how they pertain to and are informed by character and narrative, are depen-
dent on contextualisation for significance and do not impose meaning. Therefore
the red dress in Pretty Woman carries the meaning: 'Vivien is pretty'. Iconic clothes
serve a proclamatory function in film, they collide with the sequences in which
they are placed because they carry an alternative, independent meaning that is not
necessarily subservient to or even compatible with that of the dominant narrative.
'Iconic' and 'spectacular' are not interchangeable terms when applied to couture
costume, although they frequently intersect, as in Hepburn's grand entrance to

17
 Dressing up
the Larrabee ball in Sabrina, where all the connotations of Paris, Givenchy and
stylistic difference converge on the one dress. The Givenchy gown impacts on
Hepburn rather than vice versa: 'Hepburn is pretty because of her dress'. The
essence of iconic clothes is that they have an independent, prior meaning; they
function as interjections or disruptions of the normative reality of the text.
A pattern that emerges among certain films in which the iconic and the real are
segregated is that they construct or impose a distant, unreal feminine ideal that
could be termed 'too beautiful'. In such films as Rear Window, Belle de jour and
Trop Belle Pour Toil, the role of couture clothes or the haute couture industry are
fundamental components in the characterisation of Lisa, Severine and Florence. In
the first scene of Rear Window, Lisa (Grace Kelly), who works at the exclusive end
of the New York fashion trade, arrives in an evening dress 'right off the Paris plane'
at the apartment of her partner Jeff (James Stewart), an intrepid photojournalist.
Kelly's dress is intentionally spectacular, contrasting a tight black top half cut
to a plunging V both front and back and a full white tulle and chiffon three-
quarter length skirt embroidered with black sequins in sprig patterns coming down
from the waistline. 13 Lisa ostentatiously does a twirl to show the creation off, to a
defiantly disinterested Jeff who dedicates his time, while she glides around the
apartment fixing the dinner delivered from '21 ', to enumerating their incompati-
bilities. Hitchcock initially goes to great lengths to establish our identification
with Jeff's point of view, repeating twice the soft-focus, slow-motion shot of Lisa
stooping to kiss Jeff on the lips. The spectator's position, however, is soon declared
to be at odds with Jeff's, and the problem is the iconic status of the dress.
Paradoxically, despite the emphasis on Lisa's beauty, this opening scene is the
low point of their relationship. As the vulnerable, deflated Lisa serves the lobster
dinner, tentatively enquiring of Jeff what he thinks of it, he wearily replies, 'Lisa,
it's perfect- it's always perfect'. She is perfect to a fault, she is too beautiful.
Where the fashionable, too beautiful woman is concerned the issues of identity
and identification become problematised, as the focus has shifted away from the
woman herself to the art and spectacle of her clothes. Lisa is the embodiment
of feminine perfection and yet (until she enters the masculine murder mystery
narrative motivated by Jeff) she is the woman rejected by her lover. Lapsley and
Westlake argue that Hollywood's 'supposedly perfect beings are so many versions
of !a femme, the nonexistent figuration of the objet a, that by concealing castration
can within the male fantasy make good the lack' (Lapsley and Westlake 1992: 36).
The beauty of Lacan's idealised woman thereby functions as a barrier masquerading
the reality that underneath the surface there is nothing, that 'all these beautiful
women are simulacra' (36). Lapsley and Westlake's analysis then reverts to the
conventionalised view that the representation of and identification with the
idealised woman is dictated by male fantasy, so that 'those women deemed
beautiful function to mask the lack in the Other and support the illusion of sexual

18
 Cinema and haute couture

1.6 Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Rear Window

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

rapport, while those considered unattractive become the objects of the male
aggression resulting from disappointment at the lack in the Other' (36). Films
overtly preoccupied with fashion establish a very different relationship between the
idealised female image on the screen and the spectator. Not only is the audience
for fashion traditionally female, and so the assumption that the dictating fantasy is
male a tendentious one, but it is the clothes more than the woman that render her
perfect and become the point of identification. Because this feminine discourse
could be seen as one that excludes men (as illustrated by Jeff's feigned interest in
the detailed description Lisa offers of what her early evening cocktail partner was
wearing), the version of la femme offered in Rear Window or Belle de jour and Trap
Belle Pour Toil, although presenting women as simulacra, use clothes as distancing
devices whereby the presumed bond between beauty and sexuality or desirability
is displaced .
Grace Kelly's perfection in Rear Window is identified through an excess of
glamour- a peculiarly intrusive and noisy costum e detail being her multi -stringed
pearl bracelet with clanking gold lockets and hanging m edallions; conve rsely, the
equivalent beauty of Catherine Deneuve and Carole Bouquet in Belle de Jour and
Trap Belle Pour Toil is characterised by an absence of the spectacular. The defiantly
unsensuous couture in both films complicates the questions raised so far about

19
 Dressing up

fashion as art, and contradicts the common equation between women's fashion
and sexual display - and the concomitant correlation between spectacular clothes
and femininity. Richard Dyer has related certain types of sensual fabrics such
as chiffon, silk and satin to available, desirable female sexuality (Herzog 1990:
156); the sort of brothel iconography that in the cinema has, for example, been
associated with 'bombshells' like Jean Harlow. It is easy, therefore, to elaborate
upon this and to align the selling of the dress with the selling of the body it adorns,
to propose, as Herzog does, that the look directed at the clothes on display is
analogous to the look directed at the body, and to presume, again, that this
desiring look is male ( 157). And yet, the costumes of both Catherine Deneuve
in Belle de jour and Carole Bouquet in Trap Belle Pour Toil sever these traditional ties
between the woman's body and clothes and have very little to do with making a
sexual proposition except in the most ambiguous of ways. The couture element
of both wardrobes is instrumental in disengaging the characters Severine and
Florence from the discourse of femininity and beauty created around the male
subject. In both cases couture garments do not signify desire except in relation
to class and exclusivity and do not conform to the conventionalised notions of
sartorial femininity identified by Dyer. This is one result of including couturier
designs (by Yves Saint Laurent and Chane!) to define the female protagonists,
for (as discussed above in relation to Sabrina and Pretty Woman) such costumes
possess an independent identity which imposes itself on the characters. There is a
complex discussion to be had, therefore, about the role of understated couture in
the elusive portrayal of women who are 'too beautiful'.
Coco Chane! once commented, 'Le Scheherazade c'est facile. Une petite robe
noir c' est difficile' [The Scheherazade look is easy. A little black dress is difficult]
(Carter 1980: 56), so identifying the labour and artistry that goes into crafting
simplicity. Chane! invented the Gart;onne look, masculinising women's clothes by
using trousers, polo jumpers and cuffed shirts with cuff links, whilst still retaining
and emphasising femininity through the addition of accessories such as large gilt
chains, pussy-cat bows and delicate tipped sling-backs. Throughout her career, but
most prominently after her relaunch in 1954, Chane! has become associated with
an almost perverse attention to unobtrusive detail, an affectation exemplified
by the delicate silk linings with contrasting braid trimmings on her classic, soft
Linton tweed suits of the late 19 50s and 1960s. Such designs typified Chane! 's
opposition to the styles (which she loathed) typified by Dior; the overblown,
ultra-feminine New Look which, as illustrated by Rear Window and Sabrina, put the
decoration on the outside. Yves Saint Laurent, though less streamlined than
Chane!, similarly created certain collections that were fervently anti-spectacular.
Critics were quick to point out his debt to the ethos of Chane!, most conspicu-
ously shown in his 1960s daytime box suits and use of white collars on wool
dresses. 14 Deneuve as Severine is dressed exclusively by Yves Saint Laurent, and

20
 Cinema and haute couture

Bouquet as Florence by the house of Chanel. 15 Both women have long histories of
being 'too beautiful' . Bouquet succeeded Deneuve as Bufiuel's 'French woman'
when she performed the role of the similarly iconic, idealised woman in That
Obscure Object <if Desire (Bouquet 1990: 64); she then, in 1988, took over from
Deneuve as the face of Chane! No. S. In addition, Deneuve has been Saint
Laurent's muse and close friend for decades and has frequently modelled his
clothes, on one occasion against a projected still of herself in Belle de Jour. On
screen, both are used as icons whose sexuality is signalled through clothes and an
association with fashion .
In Belle de Jour, Deneuve in effect models a Saint Laurent 'capsule wardrobe'
of the time in her red tweed afternoon suit, black coat and hat, matching
wool-knit hat and polo neck, low-slung patent court shoes and plain dark dress
with white collar and cuffs. The film prioritises her clothes and plays on their
exclusivity, blending them into the surreal narrative about a bored bourgeois
housewife who is frigid with her husband but has an active, sado-masochistic
fantasy life and works in a brothel in the afternoons . Moments of personal crisis
(when, for instance, Severine fears her husband Pierre is about to find out about
her secret daytime job) are deflected onto close-ups of her shiny shoes pacing
to and fro, an overdetermination of her accessories which is representative of

1. 7 Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour

Co urtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

21
 Dressing up

the sado-masochistic denial suggested by Deneuve's entire wardrobe. Deneuve's

sexuality, unlike Jean Harlow's, is not conveyed through a wardrobe of sensuous
silks, furs and feathers; rather her attractiveness is marked by a severity, a lack
of sensuality, ornamentation or flamboyance in her wardrobe: all sharp lines,
fastened buttons and perfect co-ordination. This lack is only partly linked to
Severine's sexual repression when with her husband and the concomitant impulse
to destroy her immaculate appearance during her vivid fantasies. There is also the
way in which the clothes are signalled as beautiful, as when a client and the other
prostitutes at the brothel heap admiration on Severine's self-consciously, absurdly
unremarkable beige dress, fondling the jersey fabric, glancing at the label and
complimenting Severine on her style. The object of their praise is couture, the
exclusivity of the clothes which, in turn, define Severine's ambiguous sexuality.
The alienating effect of the perfect simplicity of couture is examined at length
in Trap Belle Pour Toil in which, again, the image of the central woman is char-
acterised by cool, elegant sartorial understatement. Blier's ironic polemic is
based on a straightforward inversion: a wealthy husband (Bernard / Depardieu)
is married to a staggeringly beautiful woman (Florence / Bouquet) but falls in love
with his plain secretary (Colette/ Balasko) and is finally left without either. Trap
Belle is an essay on the oppression and the oppressiveness of beauty. As Florence
is introduced (after a brief flash-forward showing Bernard's affair with Colette)

1.8 Carole Bouquet and Gerard Depardieu at their wedding in Trap Belle Pour Toil
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

22
 Cinema and haute couture

she has in her thrall the guests around a dinner party table, all captivated by her
delivery of a formless, pretentious monologue, the ostensible subject of which is
femininity. We hear Florence's voice as she begins, with the ponderous diction of
someone who does not have to fight for attention: 'Imagine a woman always trying
to be more feminine, easier on the eye, more desirable, forever seeking to go
beyond the bounds'. Accompanying this is a strange shot, through the glass table-
top, of her knees framed by the light folds of her yellow dress. At a measured,
emphatic pace that mimics the way she talks, the camera glides up past the gold-
buttoned front of the dress towards Florence's face, her eyes cast down as if
she herself is wrapped in the beauty of her words. A comparably steady tracking
shot then sidles past the faces of the individual guests, all mesmerised, not by the
dialogue, which gets progressively less intelligible, but by the perfect woman who
names and performs herself. Bernard, the husband, merely observes the parties
embroiled in this empty exchange with incredulity. Florence is femininity
distilled, identified only through and by her beauty. When later the film cuts to
a flashback of her wedding speech, Florence is shown apologising for being 'too
beautiful': 'beauty doesn't mean much, I'm a woman just like any other'. But in
her beaded Juliet cap and square-necked lace dress, with her perfect poise and
double-edged modesty she does not believe what she is saying and neither does
anyone else. Beauty, though, is the only language Florence knows, and when
she confronts the 'homely' Colette about the affair by telling her she is ugly
and lacking in class she asks with disbelief, 'Surely it wasn't love at first sight?'.
Upon finding out about Bernard's infidelity, she discovers the fragility of her
identification with a superficial and intangible ideal.
In her self-identification with this, abstract notion of femininity, Florence
assumes she is perfect. She is necessarily shallow and empty by virtue of being
consciously defined by her appearance, but this hysterical transferral of her
subjectivity onto her image is presumed to conform to what is ultimately required
of women under patriarchy. Fashion, which is at the centre of this representation,
is marketed and consumed in a gender-specific way; whilst women's fashion
magazines are aimed at and absorbed by women, men's fashion magazines are read
by men. Likewise, early fashion-show films assumed a female spectatorship, and
many early Hollywood producers (Sam Goldwyn, for example) recognised the
impact fashionable costumes had on the numbers of women going to the movies.
This relationship is replicated in a film such as Pret-a-Porter, in which the final
catwalk shows develop a running dialogue between the largely female models
and the three female fashion editors, a dynamic that strongly suggests that
the discourse of women's fashion excludes men, or that women interpret the
femininity constituted through the amalgamation of clothes and the female body
differently from men. The assumption, therefore, which pervades the use of
display mechanisms in films such as Pretty Woman - that women dress up for men -

23
 Dressing up

can be disputed. Herzog tentatively questions this presumption in her discussion of

the fashion show in film. She develops John Berger's observation that a woman is
taught to see herself from two points of view, 'the surveyed and the surveyor', and
argues that 'the spectator to whom women address themselves is not just a man but
also a woman' (Herzog 1990: 158), but then fails to develop the questions this
observation raises about the complexities oflooking, and disappointingly ends with
a classic misunderstanding:

The point here is that a woman looks at herself and at other women as a man
looks at her, but the male perspective is assimilated into what she thinks is
her own critical eye.
(my italics; 158-9)

This attitude is heterosexist and demeaning to the female spectator, and fails to
recognise arenas (such as fashion) where the active gaze is not ipso facto male. The
act of looking at a garment, whether in a magazine or on the screen, frequently has
nothing to do with sexual desire (for the wearer ofthe garment at least) and much
more to do with an attraction to clothes. Fetishism thus encroaches on this rapport
between fashion and spectator as a contradictory impulse that de-eroticises the
body. Fashion is thus an exclusory device, an interloper into the traditionally
male-orientated relationship between the viewer (male or female) and the female
image. The 'too beautiful' woman is not, as traditionally perceived, a symbol of
lack, but a symbolic rejection of the spectator whose desire for her is predicated
on the collapsing of the difference between body and clothes. It is possible, there-
fore, as is implied in Rear Window, that men, in turn, reject women who identify
themselves through fashion. As this pattern is repeated in Trap Belle Pour Ioi!, an
alternative is posited to the notion of la femme articulated above: that it is the
woman who is considered unattractive who masks the lack in the Other, not her
beautiful counterpart.
According to classical psychoanalytic theory the hysteric is a woman articul.!ting
and confronting femininity as it is designated by men on the surface of her body;
the hysteric who transfers these traumas on to her clothes could be viewed as
the logical, socialised extension of this. The hysterical element of Bouquet's
appearance is manifest in the tortuously polished and exclusive anonymity of
the clothes that have been selected to represent her; they are not spectacular,
sensuous metaphors for desirability but the most recognisable and thus oppressive
of twentieth-century fashion uniforms. The burden of Florence's fashionable
beauty is that it has been divested of any idiosyncrasy or meaningful personalising
mark. She moves effortlessly from one suffocatingly elegant Chane! outfit to
another; if it is not the little black dress then it is the red cardigan jacket with gilt
buttons or the pale cashmere jumper over the discreet black skirt, not a hair out of
place or an accessory uncoordinated. The hysterical symbolism of Florence's too

24
 Cinema and haute couture
beautiful clothes is most conclusively conveyed through the imposition of multiple
and arbitrary costume changes. A distinguishing feature of this film (and others by
Blier) is the illogical switching between different times and layers of narrative,
conditioning the spectator to view each scene as a symbolic unit, not a causal link
in a sequential structure. In one scene Florence alternates, without motivation,
between a black 'sweet heart' evening dress and her wedding outfit. It is the Chane!
house style, therefore, that imposes coherence and which functions as Florence's
only consistent defining feature. Trap Belle Pour Toil is a treatise on oppression, on
the unlikely torture of excess, whether this is Florence's studied Chane! wardrobe,
the stifling Schubert soundtrack (which an exasperated Bernard rails against
throughout) or the heavy intimacy of Bernard's physical relationship with Colette.
All are unrelenting impositions over which the characters have no control.
The minimalist aesthetic of the Chane! and Saint Laurent clothes in Trap Belle
and Belle de jour is grounded in a paradox: that deliberately unspectacular fashion
can still function in a spectacular way. Within this reorganisation of the expected
relationship between couture and display resides the further preoccupation with
femininity and dress. Contrary to what is usually implied in feminist writings about
fashion and costume, the motivation behind an excessive attention to women's
clothes is not necessarily to sexualise women or make them more desirable,
particularly when the attention is lavished on the least flamboyant of clothes.
Although this would have at first seemed unlikely, the argument could be extended
further to suggest that the clothes in Trap Belle, in all their understatedness,
function as devices for intervention to the extent that Gaultier's costumes do,
though they employ very different signs. This again raises the issue, first mooted
by Chane! when she extolled the complex virtues of the 'petite robe noir', of the
art of anti-display fashion.
The elitism of a commentator such as Wollen, who only acknowledges artistry
in the spectacular, most readily excludes men's film fashion and couture, which is
seldom showy. Wollen is inevitably dismissive of the work of Giorgio Armani,
whose basic motivation, he suggests, 'has been to design clothes in which the
wearer will feel secure against embarrassment, against sticking out like a sore
thumb.... Armani wants people to feel comfortably well-dressed in his clothes,
elegant, attractive, but never eccentric' (Wollen, P. 1995: 13-14). Wollen's
dismissive analysis disregards the double meaning of classic fashion, namely
that even the least extravagant item of clothing is spectacular because it can be
recognised as exclusive. This is not brazen but fetishistic fashion. An alternative
view of Armani to Wollen's is expressed by Craik, when she identifies him as
one of the recent menswear fashion designers (alongside the ostensibly wilder
Gaultier, Galliano, Kenzo, Kawakubo and Yamamoto) who have 'deliberately
pushed the limits of men's fashion by proposing new radical looks' (Craik 1994:
200). Armani's style stems, the designer himself believes, from an Italian as

25
 Dressing up
opposed to a French or British couture ethos, namely to create fashions which are
'logical, rational and wearable' (Armani 1986: 398), characteristics which mark
the specific innovation most readily associated with him, the informal, liberated
jacket design for both men and women. Having entered the fashion industry as
assistant to Nino Cerruti in 1961, Armani launched his solo career in 1970 by
designing menswear, and it is in the nebulous intersection between masculinity
and narcissism that Armani's muted radicalism is represented.
Armani has designed costumes for, among others, The Untouchables, Streets if
fire, Voyaaer and, most recently, StealinB Beauty. The moment which, for better or
worse, has become synonymous with Armani's involvement in film is the sequence
in American Giaolo when Julian (Richard Gere), the high-class gigolo of the title,
is getting ready to go out cruising. Dressed so far only in a pair of grey trousers,
Julian swaggers and shuffles to the beat of a bland pop music track, rifles through
a copious collection of Armani-labelled jackets, ties and shirts, assembles alterna-
tive combinations on the bed and finally, having decided on the right ensemble,
admires himself in the mirror. Most of the disproportionately serious scholarly
interest in American Giaolo pertains to its representation of male sexuality, 16
equating the care Julian takes over his clothes with his job, his narcissism, his latent
homosexuality, his femininity; in short, with everything except fashion. Men's
clothes have usually been interpreted as unproblematically functional (a belief that
is queried at greater length in the discussions of gangsters), and male costumes as
an irrelevance. For much of the classic Hollywood era, for instance, male actors
were expected to supply their own costumes, Clark Gable's 1935 contract with
MGM specifying that the studio would provide only period costumes. In the
dressing scene from American Giaolo, a man is presented communing with his
clothes, a rarity in itself, as the 'what shall I wear' scenario has traditionally been
a female preserve. Throughout the film Julian moves with the easy, hip-thrusting
swagger of a catwalk model, his gestural repertoire always that of the person who
is displaying clothes, as in the scene when Michelle (Lauren Hutton) comes to his
apartment and he self-consciously opens out his jacket by resting his hands on his
waistband in a rather classic mail-order menswear pose. For all the interest in
Julian's sexuality, American Giaolo is a clothes movie; the objects of fetishism are
not Julian but what he wears. As the camera pans back and forth along the line of
light jackets, silk shirts and knitted ties before Julian tries them on, the erotic
fascination is with the clothes, the gentle folds on the lining, the harmonious
juxtaposition of shade and fabric.
The British costume designer Lindy Hemming (responsible for Four Weddinas
and a Funeral) has commented that couturiers want to preserve their house look
whilst working on film character pieces (Goodridge 1994: 14). Designing for a
film is, for a couturier, an ambiguous process of maintaining a balance between
self-promotion and immersing the designs in the film. Why Armani is of greater

26
 Cinema and haute couture

1.9 Sean Connery in The Un touchables

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

interest to this debate than, fo r example, the m o re prolific Nino Cerruti (who
to date has contributed clothes to some thirty-nine films) 17 is that, despite his
costumes not being readily identified by their outrageousness as Gaultier 's are,
he takes m ore risks and retains a stronger identity even when working within
the confines of costume. Armani 's m ost infam ous collaboration to date was
with Marilyn Vance-St raker o n Br ian de Palma's The Untouchables , for which he

27
 Dressing up

produced the majority of the co~tumes for all the significant characters except
Robert de Niro as AI Capone. The tension between Armani and Vance-Straker was
over design control, Vance-Straker protesting that Armani really wanted overall
responsibility (Goodridge 1994: 13), a tension that is, to a certain extent, acted
out on the clothes themselves, particularly the loud, very un-Armani ties that were
demanded (Furnival1990: 14).
In The Untouchables, set in 1930s Chicago, Armani uses two, virtually contradic-
tory, tactics to deal with period reconstruction. The first, used for the secondary
characters such as Capone's gangsters, is to adopt a limited range of sartorial
bywords for the 1920s/ 1930s mob milieu, such as felt hats and loud accessories.
Capone's men conform very much to the image of the cliche cinema gangster,
but their tie pins and pocket handkerchiefs are the requisite period indicators
to reassure the audience that this is an 'authentic' reproduction of an era they
recognise. The second, applied to the 'Untouchables', is to elide the differences
between the styles of the 1930s and 1980s, and to dress them eclectically and
loosely in garments that shuffle easily between the two periods, such as Eliot Ness's
full-cut, single-breasted, unbelted raincoat. Ness (Kevin Costner) is dressed
predominantly in plain grey /blue usually pin-stripe three-piece suits which, whilst
nevertheless passing for credible reproductions, significantly lack the 1930s
embellishments retained for the gangsters. Particularly in the fashioning of Malone
(Sean Connery) and Stone (Andy Garcia) Armani then subliminally cites his
own design trademarks of soft fabrics and unstructured casual chic. Malone is
characterised by his grey chunky-knit cardigan, his relaxed tweed jacket and his
cap, none of which are presumably intended to seem exclusive to the 19 30s. Even
more ambiguous are Stone's light brown blouson jackets (one suede, the other
leather) and his matching leather waistcoat, which is backed with pale wool rather
than the more traditional silk; all of which display styling, fabric and colour links
with prevalent contemporary Italian fashions (particularly the coupling of leather
jackets and red scarf).
Armani's relaxed assimilation of his own designer identity into ostensibly
authentic period costumes emerges evocatively in the wardrobe he designed for
Walter Faber (Sam Shepard) in Volker Schli:indorff's Voyager. As far as Armani's
contribution is concerned, the film is an imaginative scavenging of the sartorial
archives. As he did with the 'Untouchables', Armani lends Faber an easy univer-
sality by down playing the inflexible over-emphasis of the late 1950s demonstrated
in the costume designs of the other characters who are uniformally clad in items,
such as bright Hawaiian shirts and bright, full, tight-waisted skirts. There are two
dominant design tactics employed for Faber: one is to impose coherence on his
wardrobe by creating a run of a few 'capsule' items which adopt the same style
but appear in various different colours (the most persistent being his range of
light-weight trousers, all with a large, right-side back pocket and his Trilbys); the

28
 Cinema and haute couture

1.10 Sam Shepard in Voyager

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

other is to develop items which take as their starting point an authentic 19 50s
style. Faber has, for instance, a collection of loose silk shirts with two large breast
pockets, a style that ostensibly echoes the 1950s fashion for baggy synthetic shirts.
This type of shirt, however, in early 1990s cinema became the ubiquitous sartorial
sign of middle-class, intellectual chic, whether in Hollywood or Europe, whether
on men or women, and so is never going to be simply an authentic 1950s item.
Armani freely cites and expands upon the fashions of the time, including, for
example, Faber's rive gauche-inspired black polo neck (cut a little more generously
than it would have been at the time), a garment which has had many transmuta-
tions and carries with it various associative meanings - of creativity, informality,
austerity - and is an unconventionally seductive item which frames and enhances
the features of the face . Having established Faber's eclectic universality, on a

29
 Dressing up

couple of occasions items are then inserted into the repertoire that retain only the
most tenuous engagement with 1957, such as the formal splayed-collar shirt
which was a hugely influential Italian design of the late 1980s/ early 1990s, and his
casual black jacket with beige under collar. Faber's eclectic wardrobe is thus
appropriate to his itinerant traveller's existence.
Even in Armani's period designs there is an inherent ambivalence whereby the
functionalism of the clothes is set off by their modern stylishness, a relaxation of
the differences between contemporaneity and period which also creates a point of
identification with the characters. The homogeneity of Giorgio Armani's style,
though unspectacular, is distinctive, and the 'Armani look' has an eponymous
identity which transcends the designer's own creations and has become a byword
for a certain type of man. 18 In this, he also permits his own identity to be stamped
onto the costumes he produces, and so, like Chane! or Yves Saint Laurent, creates
spectacular costumes (in that they are interjections into the narrative) utilising the
paradoxical means of anti-display couture. The contention that such clothes still
retain a spectacular function is particularly pertinent to men's fashion, which is
conventionally presumed to be anti-declamatory. Craik, for example, refers to
recent male fashions as having 'celebrated the body itself and played down the
decorative attributes of clothing and body decoration' (Craik 1994: 197), as if the
actual garments are devoid of significance except in their relationship to a new-
found male body narcissism, and she concludes, 'The revival of the peacock may
be some way off yet' (203). In the cinema work of Giorgio Armani it is possible
to detect a use of couture clothes based on an intrinsic, subtle fetishism of detail,
a desire to highlight the qualities of the clothes themselves, an emphasis which
does not prioritise the body or character wearing them.
This discussion began by making reference to the fashion show in film, the
presentation of clothes for display and the creation of narratives around them.
The function of bodies in such a context is to move in such a way as to enhance
and show off the clothes. The role of fashion-show models, from the earliest
demoiselles de magasin used by Gagelin, Charles Worth's employer, in the 1860s
(Craik 1994: 76), to the contemporary catwalk models has been to subordinate
themselves to what they are wearing. Catwalk or runway models were selected
for specific attributes, not necessarily those of the photographic model; they 'had
to be supple, move well, and have a sense of rhythm in order to bring the clothes
they were modelling to "life"' (Craik 1994: 79). Several couturiers have specified
the need to design for (and on) models rather than dummies. Chane! always
designed in 3-D rather than by drawing, and Yves Saint Laurent comments, 'I
cannot work without the movement of the human body. A dress is not static,
it has rhythm' (Duras 1988: 128). The interaction between body and clothes is
essential to fashion, but the balance between the two is not constant. Apparently
assuming that the dominant element is the body, Elizabeth Wilson starts Adorned

30
 Cinema and haute couture

in Dreams by asking why clothes which are not on bodies are 'eerie' (Wilson 1985:
1-2). In his discussion of Erte, Barthes, using more violent terms, similarly
contends, 'It is not possible to conceive a garment without the body ... the
empty garment, without head and without limbs (a schizophrenic fantasy), is
death, not the body's neutral absence, but the body decapitated, mutilated'
(Barthes 197 3: 107). Barthes' suggestion is that dress has no intrinsic value
without a body to adorn, and the prioritisation of the former over the latter has
traditionally been viewed as either inappropriately aesthetic or as indicative of the
superficiality and frivolity of fashion. Quentin Bell, for example, censoriously
declares, 'In obeying fashion we undergo discomforts and distress which are, from
a strictly economic point of view, needless and futile' (Bell, Q. 1947: 13). The
reverential, often flimsily uncritical films made about designers cement such
a view. With the exception of Wim Wenders' reflective essay on Yohji Yamamoto
Notebook on Cities and Clothes (which is as much a rumination on film-making as it
is on couture), designer biopics (such as Martin Scorsese's Made in Milan which
follows Giorgio Armani, or Douglas Keeve's Unzipped about Isaac Mizrahi) are
relentlessly self-congratulatory testaments to the opinion that haute couture has no
intrinsic moral or social value.
Seeming to take as its premise the view that an interest in fashion is morally
and intellectually indefensible (despite the director's reputed love of couture
[Jacobs 1994---5: 1]), Robert Altman's sprawling, enjoyable and sympathetically
inconsequential Pret-a-Porter functions as an extended critique of the Paris ready-
to-wear collections. Altman's target is the ridiculous in haute couture, the needlessly
spectacular; so Armani, it is said, was omitted for not being ridiculous enough
(although several of the costumes were incongruously designed by the even more
classic Nino Cerruti). 19 Pret-a-Porter emphasises the unwearability of high fashion,
its total lack of functionalism and its inappropriateness to daily use, juxtaposing
the collections of real designers (such as lssey Miyaki, Jean-Paul Gaultier and
Gianfranco Ferre for Dior) with the fictional shows, so as to maximise the triviali-
sation of the former through their proximity to the latter. Within this framework
the film develops a polemic around the tension and dichotomy between clothes and
the body, structured around the inevitability of nakedness and an intransigent
distrust of those who over-identify themselves with their dressed appearance.
There is a perpetual cycle of undressing and re-dressing that runs through Pret-
a-Porter, as many of the characters lose, strip off or swap their clothes for others.
Sergio (Marcello Mastroianni), for example, has to find a new set of clothes after
falling in the Seine, and in a hotel lobby absconds with the suitcase of the American
journalist, Joe Flynn (Tim Robbins), who happens to be several inches taller than
him. With his portable sewing machine Sergio then sets about altering the length
of Flynn's loud but classic sports journalist's separates, whilst Flynn is condemned
to the anonymity of casuals and a bathrobe, and spying his clothes on someone else

31
 Dressing up
on television. The romantic elevation of nakedness is, in this particular strand
of Prilt-a-Porter's web, manifested in the ensuing sexual relationship between Flynn
and another American journalist, Anne Eisenhower (Julia Roberts), who has like-
wise lost her baggage and is, to boot, booked into the same hotel room. Bereft of
clothes (and hence social status), the two are relieved of the burden of conformity
and spend much of the film in bed. A parallel story in which clothes and identity
are exchanged is that of Major Hamilton (Danny Aiello), whose partner (Teri
Garr) appears sporadically through the first half of the film on an extended
shopping binge for large designer clothes. These clothes, it turns out, are for
Hamilton to attend a transvestite convention in classic Chane!. Whilst Hamilton is
treated with tenderness, the characters the film appears particularly to despise
are those who express a fear of nakedness, such as the three mutually suspicious,
mutually dependent magazine editors (Regina, Sissy and Nina). The three women
are in competition to secure a contract with the fashion photographer Milo
(Stephen Rea), and in their eagerness stoop to flirtation and grovelling: Regina
(Linda Hunt) gets down in all fours, Sissy (Sally Kellerman) flashes Milo her breasts
and Nina (Tracy Ullman) undresses down to her underwear. They all subsequently
find themselves captured on Milo's spy camera. Letting down their facade is the
ultimate shameful compromise, and one with which the three women cannot cope.
Nina's panicked reaction is the most inappropriate as, having been photographed
by Milo in her underwear, she rushes from his bedroom and clutches first for
the most frivolous and useless garment of all: her ornate but insubstantial Philip
Treacy hat.
Altman, like Bell, Barthes and numerous others, cannot see the point of fashion
and is certainly not inclined to elevate it to the status of art. The intention behind
his topsy-turvy, multi-narrative film is thus to prove fashion's inadequacy by
highlighting its inversion of a functionalist system of value. The repetitive parade of
catwalk shows are served up as lavish, empty farces, a succession of ephemeral,
frothy gestures simply vying with each other to be the most spectacular and thus,
under the film's rules, the silliest. This invalidation of couture is expressed by the
actor Richard E. Grant who plays Cort Romney (CR), a fictionalised male version
of Vivienne Westwood (who also designs CR's collection for the film). As prepar-
ation for the shoot Grant attended Westwood's real Paris show and comments,
'The weirder clothes elicit the most positive response and whilst it is all obviously
original and flamboyant, I cannot fathom just where or when such gear could be
worn. This is clearly beside the point, but the point of it all is what?' (Grant, 1996:
288). Although in terms of visual styles the extravagance of the costumes exhibited
comes close to conforming to the categories of fashion as art discussed earlier in
this chapter, they are not rendered special but spectacularly trivial by being shown
to excess. The volume of clothes on display in Pret-a-Porter (and the implication of
waste and frippery) is used as a gauge of fashion's insubstantiality and ugliness.

32
 Cinema and haute couture

The clothes/nakedness thesis is concluded, as is the film, with Simone Lo's

show, in which her models walk naked rather than dressed along the catwalk;
the ultimate invalidation of fashion. As the same crowd which has attended all
the previous shows rise to their feet in admiration, the obvious allusion is to 'The
Emperor's New Clothes', and the film's target the complacency of people who
simply value something because someone else does. Jacobs misunderstands this
statement as being representative of Altman's desire to strip fashion of its mystique
and prove that, 'without their fancy clothes they're (the models) just like us'
(Jacobs, 1994-5: 4). Altman's gesture is altogether more complex than this, for
rather than confronting simply the industry's vacuousness, he is confronting the
fragility (as he perceives it) of our reliance on clothing for identity and safety. At
the end of Joe Orton's black farce What The Butler Saw, in which all the characters
who can least handle it end up without their clothes on, Rance says, 'Let us put
our clothes on and face the world'; Altman's expose is likewise of those who see
life as a protracted, nightmarish flight from nakedness. The action of Pret-a-Porter
has been punctuated with the inane observations of the television journalist Kitty
(Kim Basinger) who now, with Simone Lo's waving, naked models still lapping
up the applause behind her, is lost for words: the language of clothes can find no
way of theorising nakedness. As Kitty tenders her spontaneous resignation, her
assistant Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni) takes over the microphone and declares,
'Simone Lo has just shown us a celebration of fashion in the profoundest sense of
the word', echoing Vivienne Westwood's sentiment, 'fashion is eventually about
being naked' (Wilson 1985: 215). Both statements are inherently antagonistic
to the positive attributes of fashion, as both suggest that the underlying rationale
for clothing is the discovery of nakedness.
This last inversion of Altman's fictitious (but Cerruti 1881-designed) Paris
couture scene functions as an affirmation of the supremacy of the body over
clothes, the reinstatement of the 'natural' which has been lost under the endless
fabricated layers. Fliigel concludes The Psycholosy if Clothes with a similarly utopian
possibility that

dress is, after all, destined to be but an episode in the history of humanity,
and that man (and perhaps before him woman) will one day go about his
business secure in the control both of his body and of his wider physical
environment, disdaining the sartorial crutches on which he perilously
supported himself during the earlier, tottering stages of his march towards
a higher culture.
(Fliigel 1930: 238)

The arguments proposed in this chapter have attempted to counter those of

Barthes, Bell, Wilson and Altman who all, in their very different ways, argue for
clothes to be considered relevant only in relation to the body. Discussions of

33
 Dressing up

costume have similarly stressed this correlation. Gaines, for example, asserts that,
'in the discourse on costume, dress, like an expression of emotion, seemed to
grow out of the mysteries of the body (Gaines 1990: 187), continuing, later in the
same article: 'Costume assimilates bodily signifiers into character, but body as a
whole engulfs the dress .... Thus it is that costume is eclipsed by both character
and body at the expense of developing its own aesthetic discourse' ( 19 3). The
differentiation between costume and couture designs has been an essential means
of challenging these widespread beliefs that clothing in cinema does not possess
an aesthetic discourse or that it cannot function independently of narrative and
character. The argument has also been with those who believe that clothing can
only be disruptive within a narrative film if overly spectacular (Gaines 1990,
192-3). The independent alternative offered by fashion in particular necessitates
a reversal of the normative clothes/body relationship that understands the former
to be subservient to the latter, and allows for clothes to be the objects of the
spectatorial gaze and to be admired or acknowledged in spite of the general
trajectory of the film. This notion of clothing's distancing, disruptive potential is
to be returned to in several guises through the book, as fetishism in the following
chapter and as adjuncts of generic stereotypes in the discussions that make up
Part II.

34
 2

DESIRE AND THE COSTUME

Fl LM
Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Age of
Innocence, The Piano

Costume dramas, despite their continuing popularity, have rarely elicited anything
other than rather derogatory or cursory attention (although see Harper 1994,
Cook 1996). A variety of reasons has been proffered for this by those, largely
feminist, critics more favourably disposed to the genre, principally that the
costume film is aimed at a largely female spectatorship, and so, like the melo-
drama, has not merited serious consideration from male writers. A charge
frequently levelled at historical romances is that (unlike, presumably, comparable
pieces of men's cinema) they sideline history and foreground far more trivial
interests in desire, sex and clothes. Behind the genderisation of the costume film
lies the further implication, expanded upon by Sue Harper when she discusses
costume in the Gainsborough melodrama (Harper 1987), that the films possess
a covert, codified discourse that centres on the clothes themselves. It is this notion
of an alternative discourse that will be explored further in this chapter and
developed into a discussion of a group of modern films that focus specifically on
the fetishistic value of history and historical clothes.
Recent films as diverse and distinctive as Daughters if the Dust, Sommersby, The
Piano, Orlando, The Age if Innocence and Sister My Sister are symptomatic of a
resurgence in costume films, a renewed interest that extends the parameters
beyond the stifling daintiness of the Merchant-Ivory canon and the saccharine
reworkings of Jane Austen. The latter are what Alan Parker dubbed 'the Laura
Ashley school of film-making'. There are two principal charges levelled at costume
films: that they lack authenticity and that they are frivolous. Pervading much of the
existing critical writing given over to the costume film is a sceptical distrust of
the films' motives, their prioritisation of bourgeois ideals and their conservative,
nostalgic view of the past. Andrew Higson and Tana Wollen, for example, talk of
the British heritage films and television 'screen fictions' of the 1980s (Chariots if
Fire, A Room with a View, Brideshead Revisited) as vacuous, uncritical and superficial,
to be unfavourably compared with such interrogative contemporaneous screen

35
 Dressing up

ventures as Distant Voices, Still Lives and Boys From the Blackstuf[ (Wollen T. 1991,
Higson 1993 and 1996). The strength of such arguments are obfuscated by a
dogmatic lack of discernment, a refusal to acknowledge the differences as well as
the similarities between films that employ period costumes, as if the costumes
themselves, Delilah-like, possess a disempowering capacity to divest any film they
adorn of its critical, intellectual or ironic potential. The crucial issue, and one
which will be returned to in various guises throughout this book, is whether to
look at or through the clothes.
Films such as Howards End or Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibiliry look through
clothes, as the major design effort is to signal the accuracy of the costumes and to
submit them to the greater framework of historical and literary authenticity.
Costume films that, conversely, choose to look at clothes create an alternative
discourse, and one that usually counters or complicates the ostensible strategy
of the overriding narrative. When costumes are looked at rather than through, the
element conventionally prioritised is their eroticism. This might be another reason
for the costume film's relegation to the division of the frivolous, for it is their
emphasis on sex and sexuality (such as the British costume romances of the 1940s)
that appeals most to a female audience. In her discussion of the Enalishwoman's
Domestic Maaazine of the 1860s, Margaret Beetham introduces a distinction of
particular relevance to this examination of costume films. Beetham suggests that
the Enalishwoman 's Domestic Maaazine 'was caught up in several different economies
and discourses', that it supported both women's growing demands for political,
civil and economic rights over the decade, but nevertheless continued to publish
'sensation' fiction that focused purely on feminine desire and sexuality (Beetham
1996: 71-2). Whereas the economic discourse is no doubt perceived by most
to possess intrinsic worth, the sexual discourse is more frequently dismissed as
escapist fantasy. When, for example, Alison Light examines the popularity of
women's historical fiction she voices her concern that a preoccupation with fantasy
obscures a novel's moral, social or political message (Light 1989: 69). In a previous
discussion of recent costume films I suggested a distinction could be made between
the 'liberal' and the 'sexual' models adopted by women film-makers working
within the genre. The 'liberal' model (exemplified by such films as My Brilliant
Career, Rosa Luxembura and An Ansel at My Table) seeks to map out, via the lives
of emblematic or iconic historical personalities, a collective women's cultural
and political history. In these films clothes are merely signifiers to carry infor-
mation about country, class and period. The 'sexual' model, on the other hand,
(exemplified by The Piano and Sister, My Sister, for example) foregrounds the
emotional and repressed aspects of past women's lives and maps out an alternative
but equally genderised territory that centres on the erotic. In these films the
clothes themselves become significant components of a contrapuntal, sexualised
discourse (Bruzzi 1993: 232--42).

36
 Desire and the costume film

Throughout her discussions of British costume films Sue Harper rejoices in

their wilful disregard for historical accuracy in favour or a sexier escapism. In
Gainsborough melodramas such as The Wicked Lady or jassy Harper identifies a
closeted 'costume narrative' in which the inauthentic period clothes are loaded
with ambiguity and furtive desire, playing out 'contradictions between the verbal
level of plot and scripts, and the non-verbal discourses or decor and costume'
which the (largely female) audiences could 'decode' (Harper 1987: 167). At
times the costumes operate metonymically, as in the 'vulval symbolism' Harper
identifies in the use of fur, folds and velvet in some of the women's costumes
in The Wicked Lady (Harper 1994: 130). Too often period costumes are presumed
to signify sexual repression as opposed to the presence of an active sexual dis-
course. One of the intentions of this chapter is to develop previous discussions of
the sexualisation of costume and to propose that, through their use of historical
costumes, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Age if Innocence and The Piano create a
transgressive, erotic discourse which exists both despite and because of the
ostensible moral restrictiveness of the times in which they are set. At the heart
of this dynamic ambivalence is an interest in the fetishistic attraction of clothes
themselves, which is the basis for a covert dialogue between character and
character and character and spectator comparable to that discovered in the use
certain films have made of haute couture. From the moment The Age if Innocence,
for example, represents the exclusive milieu of late 1800s New York through
an exquisite, close-up montage of accessories and sartorial detail, it is apparent
that it is demanding a different level of engagement from its spectators than the
traditionally disengaged heritage film. 1
Fetishism has, primarily through the application of psychoanalysis, been consid-
ered by Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey and others an influential and significant
notion for understanding the eroticism of mainstream cinema. The intention of
this chapter is to position costume within the debates about how gender difference
and conventions of appearance inform the way in which we look by focusing
on clothes and their (often implied) relationship with the body, a particularly
pertinent issue when considering the supposed repressiveness of the last century.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Age if Innocence and The Piano offer divergent perspec-
tives on fetishism, and in many ways chart how approaches to sexual fetishism
in general have progressed since the 1880s when the term was first applied to
the 'perversion' of substituting an inanimate object for the sexual object. Picnic
at Hanging Rock, for instance, conforms closely to Freud's hugely influential inter-
pretation of fetishism as a male perversion through which the woman becomes a
symbol of masculine desire, whilst The Piano, in offering a representation of the
past from a clearly feminine perspective, posits the notion that fetishism is not
exclusively applicable to men. Campion's film suggests that superficially restrictive
clothes function as equivocal signifiers, acting both as barriers to sexual expression

37
 Dressing up

and as the very means of reaching sexual fulfilment. In both recent BBC Austen
adaptations there were indications that female characters (and spectators) do
fetishise the male body through the clothes that adorn it. In the opening episode
of Pride and Prejudice Eliza's desire for Darcy is conveyed through a horizontal
pan following the look from her eyes to Darcy's crotch, whilst in Persuasion the
final liberation of Anne's previously repressed desire for Wentworth is described
through a close-up of the Captain's stitched white gloves clasping her accepting
hand. The power of clothes fetishism is that it exists on the cusp between display
and denial, signalling as much a lack as a presence of sexual desire, through which
it is especially relevant to films that depict a past, less ostensibly liberated age. As
Louise]. Kaplan comments, '[a] fetish is designed to keep the lies hidden, to divert
attention from the whole story by focusing attention on the detail' (Kaplan, L.
1993: 34), an allusion to fetish as narrative tool that is pertinent to film, as, like-
wise, is Robert Stoller's definition of a fetish as 'a story masquerading as an object'
(Stoller 1985: 155). In all three films the fetish is, at some stage, the object or
detail masking the whole story, but whereas in Picnic at Han9in9 Rock the story is left
mysterious, by the time we get to The Piano it is unveiled.
Period clothes are not always transparent and are capable of being deeply
ambiguous. To the fashion historian James Laver the crinoline, despite its 'solid
and immovable' tea-cosy shape (Laver 1995: 184), is a complex and perplexing
agent of seduction:

The crinoline was in a constant state of agitation, swaying from side to side.
It was like a rather restless captive balloon, and not at all, except in shape,
like the igloo of the Eskimos. It swayed now to one side, now to the other,
tipped up a little, swung forward and backward. Any pressure on one side
of the steel hoops was communicated by their elasticity to the other side,
and resulted in a sudden upward shooting of the skirt. It was probably this
upward shooting which gave mid-Victorian men their complex about
ankles, and it certainly resulted in a new fashion in boots.
(Laver 1945: 52-3)

The more traditional view of the crinoline was as a metaphor and a metonym for
women's oppression, condemned by more moralistic commentators as a garment
which was 'as good a device for impeding movement as could well be devised'
(Bell, Q. 1947: 90-1), and by feminists as a fashion whose 'whole style trembled
with meek submissiveness' and reflected the dutiful wife's growing confinement
to the bourgeois home (Wilson 1985: 30). The fundamental difference between
these divergent opinions on the hooped contraption that dominated western
women's fashion for over twenty years from 1856 is fetishism. Laver, for example,
is not just an anti-functionalist commentator on fashion but one who, even
inadvertently as above, conveys through his meticulous and excitable writing the

38
 Desire and the costume film

erotic allure of garments, fabrics and accessories. He explains, in Taste and Fashion,
how Victorian mothers like his own had to momentarily release their children's
hands whilst crossing the road 'in order to gather their voluminous skirts from the
ground to prevent them trailing in the mud. As they did so there was the rustle
of innumerable silk petticoats underneath, and even a glimpse of lace frill' (Laver
1945: 199). The ostensible motive for the description (the mothers' sensible
actions) is rapidly forgotten, and Laver's focus transferred to the underlying point
of interest (the sensuality and movement of the women's clothes). A similar
division between functionalism and fetishism pervades what is loosely labelled 'the
costume film', where clothes usually exist as empty historical signifiers but can
more imaginatively become essential components of a film's erotic language.
Because the nineteenth century's fashions (for both sexes) appeared to embody
what Foucault terms modern puritanism's 'triple edict of taboo, non-existence,
and silence' (Foucault 1976: 5), they are fertile ground for fetishism; prohibition
possessing an allure that laxity does not.
It was Krafft- Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis (18 86) who first used the term
'fetishism' in a sexual and criminal sense, and the term was subsequently adopted
by Binet in 'Le fetichisme dans !'amour' (1888) and most notably by Freud.
Foucault's reading of fetishism in The History if Sexuality was as 'the model
perversion' which 'served as a guiding thread for analysing all other deviations'
(Foucault 1976: 154), and if one turns to Freud's early writings on the subject
in 'The sexual aberrations' the reason for such an assertion becomes apparent. In
his first of the Three Essays on Sexuality written in 1905 Freud sets up a polemic,
outlining what is 'aberrant' against an intentionally prescriptive and narrow
sense of what constitutes 'normality', namely heterosexual, penetrative sex. Why
fetishism is so important and why, therefore, 'no other variation of the sexual
instinct that borders on the pathological can lay so much claim to our interest as
this one' (Freud 1905: 66) is because, more clearly than the other aberrations,
it simultaneously obstructs and substitutes the 'normal' sexual act. At this point
Freud's emphasis is on the object choices of the fetishist, on the 'unsuitability' of
the inanimate objects or the 'inappropriateness' of the part of the body substituted
for the sex. Freud, like others since (for example, Gamman and Makinen 1994),
identifies stages of fetishism, the situation only becoming pathological, he argues,
when the fetish goes beyond being something the individual needs 'if the sexual
aim is to be attained' (such as a particular hair colour, a visible naked foot, a piece
of material) and actually allows the fetish to supplant that aim and become 'the
sole sexual object' (Freud 1905: 66-7). Although he is already writing in terms
of the fetish as symbolic (analogous to the anthropological fetish thought to
embody a deity), this idea is not fully developed. By his 1909 paper 'On the
genesis of fetishism' Freud has extended his argument, incorporating Krafft-
Ebing's association of the fetish object with the subject's first conscious sexual

39
 Dressing up

impulses to explain the peculiarity of certain object-choices. It is also in this essay

that Freud categorically argues for fetishism as a male perversion focused on the
selection of substitutive objects that serve to repress and deny the sight of his
mother's 'castration'. The essay then clearly suggests how, through an interest in
fashion, women become both passive fetishists and a complete, imaginary fetish
offered up for male contemplation:

half of humanity must be classed among the clothes fetishists. All women,
that is, are clothes fetishists .... It is a question again of the repression of
the same drive, this time however in the passive form of allowing oneself
to be seen, which is repressed by the clothes, and on account of which the
clothes are raised to a fetish.
(quoted in Ganman and Makinen 1994: 41)

As historians of the period have noted, fashions of the nineteenth century not only
accentuated but elaborated and constructed gender difference, and, as Elizabeth
Wilson puts it, 'woman and costumes together created femininity' (Wilson 1985:
29). If, therefore, this notion of femininity is pursued, then the clothed woman
mirrors the male ideal of femininity and becomes the fetish that masks and
embodies his fears of castration; a castration which, because of how the Freudian
fetish operates, is simultaneously denied and acknowledged.
This is given clarification by Freud in his 1927 essay 'Fetishism' in which he
comments that the (male) child, having 'perceived that a woman does not possess
a penis', did not simply, through fetish substitution, 'retain the belief that women
have a phallus' but rather retained that belief whilst having 'also given it up'
(Freud 1927: 352-3). It is the knowingness of this ambivalent state which is most
appropriate to how fetishism operates in costume films, for Freud does not equate
fetishism only with repression but introduces the more conscious, deliberate
notion of 'disavowal'; so 'yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite
of everything; but this penis is not the same as it was before' (Freud 1927: 353).
To explain the idiosyncrasy of many notably unphallic fetishes Freud suggests that
the choice of object is dependent not on the similarity to the penis but to the
original traumatic moment of perceiving the woman (mother) to be 'castrated'.
Hence shoes, feet, underwear and substitutes for female pubic hair such as fur or
velvet are fixated on because 'it is as though the last impression before the uncanny
and traumatic one is retained as a fetish' (354). Freud understands the act of
acquiring a fetish quite unmetaphorically . The shoe, for example, can be chosen
because it was the last thing the 'inquisitive boy (peering] at the woman's genitals
from below, from her legs up' (354) remembers before his traumatic realisation.
This is obviously greatly facilitated by a wider skirt, which is what gives Baines's
action in The Piano of snooping up Ada's hoops as she plays her piano such a
blatant eroticism. Both disavowal and affirmation of the female 'lack', Freud

40
 Desire and the costume film

concludes, went into the construction of the fetish, which 'signified that women
were castrated and that they were not castrated' (356). To return to Foucault's
comment that fetishism is the 'model perversion', it is now starkly apparent why:
Freud's reading categorically defines man as the sexual subject and the fetish-
choice as driven by the fear of his own castration. Like the perverse Chinese
custom which legitimised the mutilation of the female foot so that it could be
revered as a fetish, it seems, as Freud concludes, that 'the Chinese male wants to
thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated' (357).
This fashionable foot-binding custom is more painful, perhaps, but no more
contradictory than other prevalent nineteenth-century fashions such as tight-
lacing, also conventionally understood, in that most patriarchal of times, as
affirming the importance of clear gender delineations. A significant aspect
of fashion's evolution can be seen as a continuation of Darwin's theories of
difference, motivated by politics rather than necessity as J. C. Fliigel suggests in
his chapter on 'The Ethics of Dress' in The Psychology of Clothes:

There seems to be (especially in modern life) no essential factor in the

nature, habits or functions of the two sexes that would necessitate a striking
difference of costume - other than the desire to accentuate sex differences
themselves.
(Fliigel 1930: 201)

Going against Darwin, Fliigel believes that the 'logical' response to the post-
industrial Haunting of gender would be to abolish 'unnecessary sex distinctions in
costume' altogether (201). He is, however, resigned to the fact that the 'majority'
desire titillation and eroticism from clothes, and see distinctive dress as a means
of stimulating sexual instincts. A consistently forceful argument used to explicate
the divergence between men and women's fashions is that femininity has been
emphasised for the express purpose of making women erotically appealing
to men: 'for man in every age has created woman in the image of his own desire.
It is false Hattery of women to pretend that this is not so' (Laver 1945: 198). In
a later book, Modesty In Dress, Laver develops this notion by identifying two
polarised principles: the hierarchical and the seductive. The former is applicable
to men because 'a man's clothes are a function of his relation to society' whilst
the latter pertains to women because 'a woman's clothes are a function of her
relation to man' (Laver 1969: 173). As Simone de Beauvoir acerbically comments
in 1949, excessively feminine clothes have nothing to do with glorifying or
emancipating women, but are devices of enslavement that make them prey to
male desires (de Beauvoir 1949: 543).
The eroticism that dominated women's nineteenth-century fashions was
perhaps more subtle and ambiguous than this implies. Fliigel perceives there to
be a fundamental paradox in women's clothes, that whilst they ostensibly function

41
 Dressing up

to emphasise morality and modesty they in effect arouse desire. As examples of

this one could cite Laver's excitement at imagining the movements of the crino-
line, or his equally ardent support of the small waist, corset and the deep Bertha
decolletaae which 'emphasised the impression of something very precious emerging
from a complicated wrapping, as a flower emerges from the paper which encloses
its stalk' (Laver 1945: 146). Perhaps unsurprisingly James Laver is neither a fan
of more liberated or masculine clothes on women nor a supporter of overtly
erotic fashions, maintaining that the naked body is not as appealing as the clothed
one, and that a woman in suspenders is less alluring than a woman sporting a
crinoline. Fetishism (as opposed to eroticism) is founded on tension, distance and
imagination, and is dependent on symbolic rather than actual association between
the subject and the object of (his) desire. It is precisely because the crinoline says
'touch me not' that Laver finds it seductive (52).
In costume films interested in sexuality (above nostalgia and history telling) the
contrast between the obtainable concealed body and the means of enforcing that
concealment (namely the clothes) is seen to heighten expectation and arousal. The
shiny black boots in Diary if a Chambermaid, the Amish cap in Witness, 2 the lock of
hair in Golden Braid or the scrap of dirty lace in Picnic at Han9in9 Rock are personal
fetishes, inappropriate substitutes as Freud would deem them for the unobtainable
woman they represent. Important to all these instances of the fetishisation of
the woman and of the man's desire is the notion of difference, contrast and, most
significantly, distance. Just as Christian Metz posits that distance rather than
proximity is essential to the voyeuristic impulse, that 'all desire depends on the
infinite pursuit of its absent object' (Metz 1975: 60), so the erotic effect of
fetishised articles of clothing is essentially related to their metaphoric value. The
underlying implication for fashion is that an idealised (male conceived) image of
femininity acquires symbolic effect by having been constructed through costume,
and that the greater the divergence between the 'natural' body and the 'unnatural',
distortive clothes the greater the sexual stimulation.
This is a predominantly masculine view of the workings of clothes fetishism, and
there obviously exist arguments and cinematic examples which counter it. In Sister
My Sister, by comparison, the fetishisation of particularly articles of clothing,
household objects and food is expressive of an exclusively female repressed
sexuality. The codification of desire in this much later film uses a similar displace-
ment tactic to Freudian male fetishism (the substitute of an inanimate object for
a living object-choice) but only pertains to the sexualities of the various female
characters. The strenuous affirmation of hierarchical sexual difference and the
conceptualisation of elaborate detail and ornamentation as essential to fabricating
women's attractiveness to men remain, however, the sexual mechanisms operative
in a highly masculine fantasy film such as Picnic at Hanaina Rock, an adaptation that
embellishes the already insistent fetishism of Joan Lindsay's original 1968 novel.

42
 Desire and the costume film

Picnic at Hanaina Rock is the story of a fictional murder mystery that took place
on St Valentine's Day 1900. Most of the schoolgirls of Appleyard College go on a
picnic at Hanging Rock, a group of them want to explore the rock further and
three of them (including the pivotal character Miranda) are never found, whilst
Irma, who is found, cannot remember anything of what occurred. A particularly
Freudian reading of fetishism, which stresses the significance of sexual difference
and the importance of the 'normal' sex act, is deeply relevant to Weir's tumescent,
adolescent fantasy, to its heterosexism (with its sharp gender delineations) and to
its fundamental preoccupation with the transition from childhood to adulthood and
thus the point of sexual awakening.
As women's exhibitionism in fashion has been understood to be for the
enjoyment of men or at least as a means of ensuring their attention, so the same
controlling gaze has been attributed to the male spectator looking at the fetishised,
iconic female form on the screen. Whether this is through demystification or over-
valuation of the woman as Laura Mulvey suggests, the fetishisation relegates her
to the passive role of bearer of male desires, thus dissipating the threat her very
'castrated' presence evokes. The girls in Picnic at Hanaina Rock are subjected to both
'the investigative side of voyeurism' Mulvey identifies in Hitchcock's work and
become 'the ultimate fetish' produced by von Sternberg, as often in Weir's film
'the powerful look of the male protagonist. ... is broken in favour of the image
in direct rapport with the spectator' (Mulvey 1975: 311). Picnic at Hanaina Rock's
conception of fragmented, transcendent and superficial female beauty is only
partially provoked by narrative necessity. Much of the film's fetishism is contained
within hiatus sequences divested of any plot function in which the spectacle of
beatific schoolgirl sexuality is simply offered up for display. Just as Mulvey only
refers to a male spectator, so Weir only addresses a masculine erotic gaze.
Picnic opens with just such a hiatus sequence in which the pupils, preparing
for their St. Valentine's Day excursion, are presented to us as direct objects of
fetishism. The film's mystery is sustained by elliptical dialogue, narration and
images which, like Miranda's quivering opening piece of voice-over ('what we see
and what we seem are but a dream -- a dream within a dream') lend it a teasing,
ornate vacuity. Like the expressionistic montage sequences of the classic 1930s
Hollywood gangster films, the beginning of Picnic at Hanaina Rock offers a symbolic
condensation of the issues and iconography that arc more conventionally enacted
through the narrative, in this instance the idealisation of femininity through
clothes and feminine sexuality. The girls and their romanticised French teacher are
dressed exclusively in frail, pristine white (with the exception of the 'deviant' Sara
who has blue sleeves) 1 and are ritualistically preparing themselves not just for the
day hut for womanhood. Hence the dreamy reading aloud of Valentine's messages,
Irma and Miranda's sensuous face-washing in front of self-scrutinising mirrors
and, most fetishistically of all, lacing each other into corsets. It is the hyperbolic

43
 Dressing up

self-consciousness of this montage sequence that makes it so obviously symbolic,

with the abundance of flowers, soft focus and golden light; an excessive fusion of
the mechanics of fetishism and the fetishising potential of the cinematic apparatus.
As if we needed prompting into cleaning our own glasses to further enable us to
enjoy the ensuing spectacle, one girl is shown polishing hers immediately after
the line of giggling, whispering schoolgirls has performed its corset-lacing
routine. From the outset, the girls' sexuality is defined as being for an unspecified
but omnipresent phallus, metonymically represented by St Valentine, but also
contained within the film's masculinisation of the voyeuristic and fetishistic
impulses. In keeping with Lacan's notion of the phallus as something lost,
forever out of reach, but nevertheless pursued as if it were attainable, there is a
coalescence throughout Picnic at Han9in9 Rock between direct and indirect
fetishism, between the real and the veiled. For example, before setting off on
their final ascent up Hanging Rock, the girls reverentially, slowly remove their
stockings and shoes: for the rock, the spectator and the unspecified phallus. There
is a direct alignment at a point such as this between the active, consuming
spectatorial gaze, the phallic rock (which has already been identified as such
through a laboured series of low-angle shots) and the veiled phallus governing the
girls' actions from the start.
The direct fetishism scenes in Picnic at Han9in9 Rock are frequently 'rites of
passage' sequences in which we, the spectators, are voyeuristically engaged with
the girls' progress towards maturity. There are several such rituals that have
marked the transition from girlhood to womanhood through the use of clothes,
most of which, like the acquisition of deforming shoes, uplifting bras and sculpting
corsets or girdles, have involved extreme physical restriction. The significant
ritual of Picnic at Han9in9 Rock is that of the pupils lacing each other into their
corsets, an action that signals both confinement and liberation. This activity further
differentiates between those who are ready for sex and those, notably the plump
and uncorseted Edith, who are not. 4 Crucial to these fashions is the tension
between pain and pleasure; as David Kunzle comments, 'The state of being tightly
corseted is a form of erotic tension and constitutes ipso facto a demand for erotic
release, which may be deliberately controlled, prolonged and postponed' (Kunzle
1982: 31). Kunzle, who was the first to call for a radical reassessment of the
corset's relationship to female sexuality, noted that many of the advocates of tight-
lacing in the mid-1800s were sexually assertive women, and that the majority
of the corset's sternest critics were conservative men who felt threatened by this
clandestine expression of desire. Tight-lacing (or the excessive constriction of
the waist by means of a corset) was a deeply ambiguous phenomenon. Whilst
the corset, particularly by feminists, has been traditionally interpreted as a tyran-
nical garment of oppression, there are well-documented examples of tight-lacing
as a popular nineteenth-century erotic pursuit. Fetishistic correspondence in

44
 Desire and the costume film
innocuous sounding Victorian women's magazines such as The Q!Ieen and The
Enolishwoman's Domestic Maoazine was rife, as readers, often vying with each other
for the smallest waist, offered 'advice' on how to lace more tightly. In the corre-
spondence pages of domestic magazines there are ample examples of women using
tight-lacing for auto-erotic pleasure, describing, for instance, the light-headedness
which follows the deliberate interruption of their circulation. Although it is
presumed (even by Kunzle) that such tight-laced women are to be found desirable
by men (Kunzle 1982: 43), it is strikingly apparent that many correspondents
derive the greatest pleasure from the narcissistic contemplation of themselves in
restrictive undergarments. During the 1860s-1880s it was primarily men who
documented the reasons why tight-lacing was reprehensible, for instance the
doctors who alerted adults to the direct use of corsets for masturbatory satisfaction
among pubescent girls (170-1, 218-22). A more moderate view of the 'corset
controversy' than Kunzle's is offered by Valerie Steele who argues that 'most
accounts of very small waists represented fantasies' (Steele 1985: 163), and that the
vast majority of corsets in fashion museums suggest that the real average size of the
Victorian and Edwardian waist was several inches wider than the 'perfect' 11
inches aspired to by readers of Enolishwoman's Domestic Maaazine. According to
Steele, therefore, the idea of a tight-lacing epidemic rather than the reality of one
is what excited male and female readers alike.
A preoccupation with lacing and restriction is, however, a pervasive force
through Picnic at HanoinB Rock. As if signalling its own interest in fetishism, the
major departures the film makes from the original novel are the moments (such as
the opening montage) which dwell on the latent perversity of the pupils' sexuality
and not on the narrative. In the book there is a cursory mention of a 'padded
horizontal board fitted with leather straps, on which the child Sara, continually in
trouble for stooping, was to pass the gymnasium hour this afternoon' (Lindsay
1968: 131). Although bizarre, this is not presented as a sadistic instrument of
torture, which is roughly in keeping with the times, as such correctional contrap-
tions were, in 1900, considered old-fashioned but not perverse. In the film,
however, the treatment of Sara is overloaded with perversity, and the shame of the
teacher who has administered this punishment is likewise underlined, as she
guiltily cowers behind a chair when Mademoiselle and Irma interrupt the dancing
lesson. Identified from the start as the deviant pupil, she is systematically, though
subtly, punished throughout the film. Because, it is insinuated, Sara is in love with
Miranda, she is not allowed on the picnic, she is prevented from reading out one of
her love poems, and now she is strapped up.
Of persistent interest to historians has been the gender and identity of the
addressee of the nineteenth-century fetish correspondences. Was it, perhaps, men
who got a sexual kick out of hearing about and disapproving of women tight-lacing
or whipping their horses? A similar ambiguity resides in Picnic at HanainB Rock.

45
 Dressing up

Whereas Sara can be likened to the problematic, sexually active girls who
discovered devious means to practice auto-eroticism and thus implicitly deny
the importance to their sexual development of the male, Irma, it is made clear,
survives the tragedy of St Valentine's day to enter into an exclusively heterosexual
womanhood. Whilst it is titillatingly confirmed that she, the only girl to be found
alive, is sexually 'quite intact' and only superficially injured, Irma was discovered
on the rock clothed but minus her corset. Kunzle quotes an Australian poem of
1890 telling of an adolescent girl who equates the pain of love with the pain of
wearing a corset, and who, on the threshold of marriage, summons the 'iron-clad
corset, as befits the chaste woman' asking for her companion to 'pull and heave
on the laces, that the bridally enhanced body be truly ethereal'. 5 If the painful
corset is a sign of virtue and maturity, it is little wonder that the fully recovered
Irma (the problematic goings-on with her corset having represented her rite of
passage) should return once more to Appleyard College dressed in an intensely
adult scarlet cape and feathered hat, visually differentiated from the other school-
girls still clothed in virginal white by colour and an ostentatiously adult hour-glass
figure.
The most categorical example of the female functioning in Picnic at HaneinB
Rock to provoke both diegetic and extra-diegetic male desire is the aptly named
Miranda. As she disappears up the rock she waves back at the French mistress who
remarks, looking down at a reproduction in her art history book, 'now I know
that Miranda is a Botticelli angel'. Thus identified with an imaginary, idealised
vision of beauty, Miranda becomes the film's ultimate, mysterious fetish. The film
cements this through the repeated use of a slow motion image of Miranda waving
to Mademoiselle (and, by implication, the adoring enraptured spectator) before
turning away and disappearing forever. As Picnic at HaneinB Rock uses clothes as
one of the ways of differentiating between the girls who are on the brink of
womanhood and those who are not, so it clearly demarcates the masculine and the
feminine. It could be argued that, with so many women looking admiringly at
Miranda, this is a film that throws into question the assertion that the active erotic
gaze is necessarily male. Likewise, if one takes into account the possibility that
pain can be pleasurable, there is also the subversive suggestion that women can
derive fetishistic enjoyment from such oppression. It is primarily the character-
isation of the two adolescent males Michael and Bertie (likewise on the cusp of
adulthood) that counters such a positive feminist reading. As mentioned earlier,
in costume films interested in fetishism, distance and gap is significant to the
relationship between clothes and desire. A film such as Picnic at HaneinB Rock
creates a mysterious, sexual world based on several enforced but never coherently
explained oppositions: between clothes and bodies, spectator and narrative,
people and landscape, desire and sex, male and female. Sexual difference is even
represented through the use of two distinct types of music: a whimsical, feminine

46
2.1 Miranda (Anne Lambert) emerging from a rock in Picnic at Han9in9 Rock
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

47
 Dressing up

and indeterminate pan pipe tune for the girls, and a strident, soaring track which
builds to a definite crescendo for the boys. Distance is the basis for fetishistic
fantasy, perpetually denying and affirming the underlying desires through an
elaborate interplay between metaphor, metonym and sexual object. The fetishist's
ultimate fantasy (even if it may be Freud's) is not to dispense with the fetish and
unravel the mystery, but to retain (and perhaps embellish) the ambiguity. We do
not wish Miranda to be explained, she is a shared fetish, the figure onto which our
desires are projected. She, like the ever-veiled phallus, remains beautiful by virtue
of being unfound and unexplained.
In Picnic at f-langing Rock such fetishistic ambiguity is expressed via the
pleasure/pain dynamic as it pertains to the significant males in the film, the
spectator and the eroticised clothes. Michael, an English gentleman staying with
his uncle and aunt, never meets but falls deeply in love with Miranda after seeing
her only once. In one of the film's 'male-bonding' scenes Michael and Bertie, a
servant, watch the four girls heading for Hanging Rock cross a stream, their white
dresses gleaming in the sun. Whilst Bertie makes crude comments about their
legs and hour-glass figures, Michael becomes painfully smitten, haunted by the
frozen image of Miranda, an image that the spectator, once again, is given in soft-
ened, slow close-up. Michael's obsession with the film's unobtainable (and hence
perfect) object is for him tortuous, for us titillating, an ambivalence exemplified
by his return to the rock, in a last desperate attempt to find Miranda. Throughout
Picnic at f-langing Rock the language of desire has been the language of clothes,
and in Michael's actions the transferral of attention from actual femininity to
unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object is complete. In another show of male
camaraderie, Bertie discovers Michael, after his night-time search of Hanging
Rock for the lost girls, slumped in a catatonic trance. As the masculine music
soars Michael, now transferred to the back of a buggy, holds out his trembling
clenched fist towards Bertie who wrests from it a tiny scrap of lace (an exchange
again not in the book). We are subsequently shown, in close-up, the frail piece
of material nestling in Bertie's palm, its delicacy and whiteness symbolically
contrasted with his soiled, rough skin. Without having it explained why, this
improbable bit of insubstantiality is, ultimately, what propelled Michael into
his catatonia, what leads Bertie to find Irma and what must suffice as the film's
symbol for the impenetrable mystery of what occurred on the rock. In such a
hyperbolic and hysterical film the absent object remains tantalisingly opaque,
nearly sending Michael mad, but serving to preserve the spectator's fantasy
of enigmatic femininity 'perfectly intact'. What has been created here is an exclu-
sively male fantasy in which representation, symbolism and narrative converge to
evoke the (adolescent) male obsession with the female sexual object. The female
is both central and absent, 'the enigma the hieroglyphic, the picture, the image'
(Doane 1991: 18). The only viable position for the female spectator is as an

48
 Desire and the costume film

enigma-identifier; to desire to be the absented object with whom everyone is

infatuated: in short, to desire to be the fetish.
Rather than being primarily an example of fetishistic behaviour as Picnic to a
certain extent is, The Aae if Innocence, in its treatment of the image as well as the
narrative, is a total fetishistic experience. The absenting of particularly women's
sexuality and desire is the mainstay of melodramatic romanticism, making the
entire film-watching experience into a deeply fetishistic enterprise. Melodramas
of necessity manipulate detail, visual style and music to convey emotions the
characters are not permitted to express, thus films such as Ophuls' Letter From an
Unknown Woman, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and Scorsese's The Aae if Innocence
(which, the director readily acknowledges, is indebted to the sumptuous though
claustrophobic melodramatic tradition [Christie 1994: 10-15)) become fetish
objects in themselves. The Aae if Innocence is the clearest example to date of
Scorsese's fetishisation of cinema history. Technically the film has several past
reference points: there's some of the 'romance and tragedy' of Ophuls' camera,
some 'pure Eisenstein stuff' in the editing, and the Soviet technique of using shade
and light to focus on the important part of an image. There is also the conscious
involvement of some of the most experienced cinematic craftspeople, such as Saul
and Elaine Bass who had been designing title and credit sequences for over forty
years, and Elmer Bernstein who wrote 'the closest to a traditional Hollywood score
I have ever worked with' (Christie 1994: 14). Melodramas are narratives of allu-
sion, Ophuls' romantic tracks, cranes and pans, for example, bearing contradictory
functions: to create a point of identification with the characters' emotions whilst at
the same time substituting for them and signalling their repression. The intensity
of the desire is deflected onto the film image itself, and is eloquently understood
through distance not closeness. The Aae if Innocence is likewise about gaps and lack.
Newland Archer (the film's - although not the book's - undoubted subject) falls
in love with the married but estranged Countess Ellen Olenska whilst he is engaged
to her cousin May Weiland. Social convention bars Newland from marrying
Ellen, so he weds May. The essence of melodrama is that being in a perpetual
state of loss and longing is a more delicious experience than consummation, a
tantalisingly torn state preserved in The Aae if Innocence largely through Michael
BaUhaus' camera and lighting and Thelma Schoonmaker's editing; so just as
Newland at the end wants to hold onto his idealised image of Ellen rather than see
her again, we are fulfilled by the sensuality of the film, its roaming camera and slow
dissolves. Because the ultimate object remains obscured and so much is left under-
stated, fetishism also dictates that part of the enjoyment of reading or watching a
piece of period romanticism is filling in the blanks. Again Scorsese uses a lush filmic
style to do this, as in the instances when measured costume drama sequences
dissolve into violent red or yellow that engulf the whole screen; sudden eruptions
of passion and desire that, as they are flaunted, become just as rapidly repressed.

49
 Dressing up

This degree of image fetishism is carried over into the narrative and mise-
en-scene, as The Age if Innocence is built around detail. Most of Scorsese's films are
obsessed with ritual and social codes, with how his male characters particularly
perceive themselves to be defined (and confined) by their environments. It is
the gap between reality and expectation that, in films like Taxi Driver and Raging
Bull, prompts the extreme physical outbursts of Travis Bickle or Jake La Motta.
In The Age if Innocence a comparable pain is evoked by an accentuation rather than
diminution of the formalities and social niceties. The presentation and precision
of the rituals that dominate 1870s upper-class New York society become, in
Scorsese's adaptation, tempting cinematic renditions of Freud's notion of fetish-
istic disavowal, in particular the repeated ritual of dining. However tantalising and
excessive the food, no sooner does one ornate course appear on the table than it
dissolves elegantly, effortlessly into the next, seldom to be consumed and never
to be enjoyed. The one dinner that is seen to be consumed (at Archer's family
home) is, significantly, a badly cooked test of endurance. Whereas one's suspicions
about fetishism and eroticism in Picnic at Hanging Rock might be that it is really
a case of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' in which a fascination with costume
betrays a fascination with emptiness, The Age if Innocence is more grandiloquently
poignant in this respect, as the details are the brittle surface which both suppress
and convey emotion. As Edith Wharton puts it in the original novel, 'They all
lived in a hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even
thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs' (Wharton 1920: 55).
The pleasure in the text is being able to read those signs, to feel the intensity of
the suppressed instinct conveyed through the many closely observed, ritualistic
actions the adaptation focuses on such as letters being passed, cigars being clipped
or hands being slipped into gloves. The potency of the metaphoric language is that
the spectator is both aware that such actions and objects possess a significance
beyond themselves and their immediate function, but ultimately excluded from
their exact, codified meaning. This equivocal function of the imaginary sign
is prominent in The Age if Innocence's use of costume detail, most notably the
clothes of the ostensibly transparent, straightforward May. When identifying
with Newland's patronising gaze (as we are constrained to be at the Beaufort Ball
at which May announces their engagement), May is presented as an innocent
cocooned in lace, muslin and organza against a complex world. There are, how-
ever, moments when costume detail is employed to suggest May's disguised
strength, for example when she triumphantly manoeuvres her heavy train out of
the door, having told Newland she is pregnant and thus thwarting his desire to
elope with Ellen. Here, May's bustle-encased lower body, as Pam Cook implies,
could be seen to function as a 'powerful image of male terror in the face of the
maternal body' (Cook 1994: 46). A far less comprehensible - but more evocative
and sensual - use of May's clothes as signifiers occurs when the delicate fibres of

50
 Desire and the costume film

her lace-encrusted summer dress are punctured by the point of the pin she has
been gi~en for winning the archery competition. The penetration of the strands
of cloth function as an abstracted image of repressed violence.
The past is made strange in The Aae if Innocence through an obsessive attention
to minutiae and authenticity, as if the spectator has been invited to observe the
meticulous dissection of late nineteenth-century manners, cuisine, and clothes in
order to both revel in them and recognise their role as signifiers of that society's
extreme superficiality. The fetishised object thus simultaneously represses and
renders visible the implied desire. As Scorsese comments about Wharton's
technique, 'what seems to be description is in fact a clear picture of that culture
built up block by block- through every plate and glass and piece of silverware, all
the sofas and what's on them' (Christie 1994: 12). The notion of re-examining the
past through the present is important to all the films being discussed in this chapter
(an awareness, perhaps of differentiation is central to their fetishisation of that past),
and this is the case on several levels in The Aae if Innocence. Both Wharton and
Scorsese are outsiders looking in. Wharton had gone into exile in Europe and wrote
the novel in 1920 about the 1870s New York of her childhood, and Scorsese, from
a background far removed from that of the characters, had never before attempted
a straight costume drama. This juxtaposition between old and new informs the film,
and the primary site on which we see the tension being acted out is Gabriella
Pescucci's luxurious costumes. A scene such as the one in which Newland kneels
down to kiss Ellen's embroidered shoe exemplifies the film's preoccupation with
making the codes of the past strange. As it exists in the novel, Newland's gesture
of suddenly stooping to kiss the 'tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress'
is odd but engagingly impulsive (Wharton 1920: 156). There exists, however, a
chasm between imagination and realisation, and as a described passage in a book,
Newland's arcane kiss can be freely imbued with whatever abstract desire the reader
likes. The representation of the scene in the film is obviously less suggestive and
more concrete, and the spectator is constrained to acknowledge the strangeness of
the past, compelled to confront the outmoded awkwardness of the gesture rather
than fantasise it into romantic abstraction.
Newland kissing Ellen's shoe offers an analysis of fetishism (its reality, its
mechanics) rather than an immersion in its implied eroticism, and in its oddity
the scene is illustrative of the fundamental distance between Scorsese and his
subject matter. This is an audacious scene that does not comfort us with a bygone
universal romanticism (where the dress is different but the language of love
remains the same), but rather confronts us with a form of expression so outmoded
that it is almost embarrassing to observe. Although the most obvious thing to say
about The Aae if Innocence is that it is a love story (and in that respect universal),
Scorsese's adaptation focuses resolutely on the unsuitable object. The film's use of
melodramatic excess highlights the painful loss and absence of what could so easily

51
2. 2 Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer in Th e Aae if Innocence
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

52
 Desire and the costume film
have been. Whilst the fetishism in Picnic at Hanging Rock is titillating and somehow
a substitute for empty fantasy, in The Age if Innocence it is resonant with the sense
that, at another time, distance would not have been necessary. In the back of a
carriage from the station Newland and Ellen snatch two precious hours together;
he passionately unbuttons her glove and kisses her exposed wrist, an action that is
filmed with the same slow, sensuous dissolves as is much of the would-be love
story. The pity is unbearable: pulling all the stops out for this?
Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Piano both imply that restrictiveness can be
exciting. The Age if Innocence suggests that living by a strict nineteenth-century
code can only be stultifying. Newland Archer is immured by the conventions that
surround him, symbolised to an extent by the monotonous uniformity of his
clothes. This is very much Scorsese's take on Wharton who is more resolutely
critical of her protagonist, portraying him as complicit in his entrapment and not
purely a victim of circumstance. At first Newland appears oblivious to the weight
of convention, a lack of awareness delicately signalled during the second sequence
(the Beaufort Ball) by the table of neatly laid out and labelled white evening gloves
to which he blithely adds his own. Men are defined through their conformity and
Newland, before he falls in love with Ellen, is quite content to comply. As the film
progresses the distanciation between masculine conventionality and Archer's
desire increases, until he is smothered rather than complemented by the formality
of his heavy, layered clothes. One sequence evokes with particular poignancy
the repression of male individuality by conformity. After Newland and Ellen
have managed a brief meeting they part, the camera (carrying the inevitability
of distance) retreating cruelly from Ellen with every jump cut. 6 This snatched
moment is the prelude to a scene that at first appears to possess no direct narrative
function, and indeed is not in the book. In slow motion a sea of grey-suited men
walk towards the camera accompanied by Michael William Both's melancholy
song 'Marble Halls' ('But I also dreamt which charmed me most/That you loved
me still the same'), all clutching identical bowler hats threatened by the battering
wind. Although Newland then emerges from the crowd holding tightly onto
his bowler, so linking this scene with the narrative proper, the potency of this
image is that it can remain an abstract metaphor for fearful, unthinking male
conformity, 'the conformity of men who've learnt to keep it all under their hats'
(Taubin 1993: 8). Like the sudden, violent bursts of screen-drowning colour or
the involuntary moan Newland emits in the previous scene as Ellen touches his
hand, desire throughout The Age if Innocence is fleetingly permitted to surface in
order to be instantly bottled up under hats and under convention.
The representation of Newland Archer suggests that sartorial conformity
corresponds to emotional repression, that he can be 'read' through his clothes. In
one of the most influential accounts of how masculinity has been expressed through
clothes, Fliigel described what he termed 'The Great Masculine Renunciation',

53
 Dressing up

2. 3 Daniel Day Lewis as Newland in The Aae if Innocence

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

when 'Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful' (Fliigel 1930: 111).
The argument posited by Fliigel for men's clothes becoming utilitarian, austere and
uniform in the nineteenth century is increased democratisation since the French
Revolution, 'the fact that the ideal of work had now become respectable' (Fliigel
1930: 112) and thus that man was, as a result, defined more by his social than
his personal role. Fliigel then conflates sartorial and psychological changes in a
significant statement about how the masculine ideal is symbolised by physical
appearance, commenting:

54
 Desire and the costume film
It is, indeed, safe to say that, in sartorial matters, modern man has a far
sterner and more rigid conscience than has modern woman, and that man's
morality tends to find expression in his clothes .... modern man's clothing
abounds in features which symbolise his devotion to the principles of duty,
of renunciation and of self-control. The whole relatively 'fixed' system of
his clothing is, in fact, an outward and visible sign of the strictness of his
adherence to the social code.
(Fiiigel 1930: 113)

Newland Archer has bought into this code of denial and fraternity: he works as a
lawyer and wears his bowler hat. But just as the attention on obsessively
researched surface details in The Age if Innocence serves to deflect attention onto
what is not visible, so Newland's renunciatory stiffness serves to accentuate his
potential for passion.
The romantic necessity of unfulfilment is expressed verbally by Countess
Olenska in the shoe-kissing scene when she says 'I can't love you unless I give you
up', but it is evoked filmically through the subjectification of Archer who, right at
the end when he is offered the chance to see Ellen again, declines to meet her and
bridge the gap between imagination and reality. As with every act of fetishism,
distance preserves the mystery. So Newland would rather imagine the past Ellen
than meet the present one, and as he closes his eyes a rapid montage culminating
in the Ellen he remembers turning round and smiling at him flashes across the
screen. Archer is playing a game with himself which he's played before: if she
turns around he will go to meet her; if she does not, he will walk on by. As Amy
Taubin suggests, The Age if Innocence is about 'the suffocating anxiety of waiting
for the sign on which one believes one's life depends, wanting it to come and at
the same time fearing it' (Taubin 199 3: 9). Fetishism keeps the danger of change
at bay.
Both Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Age if Innocence make use of the fetishistic
transferral of desire for the woman onto her clothes as both the symbols and the
masking agents for this fear of change. In this they are both masculine films,
although The Age if Innocence is self-reflective in its representation of fetishism, as
if offering a commentary on its peculiarity. Primarily through their portrayal of
the male characters, both films emphasise the significance (if a safe convention-
alism is to be maintained) of distance, the clothes and narrative separations
functioning effectively as barriers. Newland Archer realises his loss, but Michael
in Picnic at Hanging Rock is an exemplary pathological, Freudian fetishist who
keeps a voyeuristic distance between himself and Miranda. 7 Freud comments in
'Touching and Looking' that '[t]he progressive concealment of the body which
goes along with civilisation keeps sexual curiosity awake', and that a 'normal'
endeavour would be to 'complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts'

55
 Dressing up

(Freud 1905: 69). Clearly Michael cannot go beyond scopophilia and so is

exclusively confined to fetishising his fantasised object-choice.
If the man cannot (or does not want to) go beyond the level of civilised
concealment, the woman inevitably becomes the passive representation of his
active sexuality. A playful example of this imbalance can be found in the verses
to Julia by the seventeenth-century poet and priest Robert Herrick. His poems
convincingly posit the notion that distance is more erotic than closeness, and
emphasise the attraction rather than the sadness of over-valuing the inappropriate
substitute for the sexual object. Even in a poem such as 'The Nightpiece, To Julia',
in which Herrick finally imagines a union with his ideal love, his focus are her what
Freud would term 'unsuitable' feet:

Then Julia let me woo thee,

Thus, thus to come unto me;
And when I shall meet
Thy silvery feet,
My soul I'll pour into thee.
(Fowler 1991: 275)

Herrick suggests that conventional consummation is not so devoutly to be wished

after all, as his verse resonates with a desire for an image of woman so objectified
that the mythic Julia's identity is lost beneath 'that liquefaction of her clothes'
(Fowler 1991: 276). Julia's clothes are not substitutes for her absent body
but signifiers of Herrick's desire. 'Delight in Disorder' conveys the intensity of
Herrick's imaginatively active though repressed sexual longings through the free-
dom and immorality granted the clothes not the completely absented muse, as it is
the dress that possesses a 'sweet disorder', the lace is 'erring', the cuff 'neglectful',
the petticoat 'tempestuous' and the shoestring 'careless' (Fowler 1991: 257-8).
Needless to say Herrick never gets his Julia, but the suspicion is that he is quite
satisfied with observing her mischievous clothes. As he writes in 'Art above nature:
To Julia' after praising again the tempting 'wild civility' of her appearance:

I must confess, mine eye and heart

Dote less on nature, than on art.
(Fowler 1991: 274)

There is a sense, therefore, that Herrick is not just making do with the glittering
and the vibration of Julia's clothes, but that his erotic gaze wants to be fixed on
them. It is mistaken to hold, as Steele does, that, despite everything, it is Julia
and not her clothes that are Herrick's true object-choice. Steele maintains, with
reference to Herrick's Julia poems, that 'the desire for the body can be partially
transferred onto clothes, which then provide an additional erotic charge of
their own. But ultimately it is the wearer who is 'sweet' and 'wanton' (Steele

56
 Desire and the costume film

1985: 42). Julia is a muse, an impossible, unattainable ideal, and so her clothes
and not her are the substitute phallus; they are what the poet desires -and what
he makes his reader desire.
Fliigel concludes his section on 'The Great Masculine Renunciation and its
Causes' with the observation that

in the case of the exhibitionistic desires connected with self-display, a

particularly easy form of conversion may be found in a change from (passive)
exhibitionism to (active) scoptophilia (erotic pleasure in the use of vision)-
the desire to be seen being transformed into the desire to see.
(Fliigel 1930: 118)

And so the man does not renounce his exhibitionism at all but experiences the
pleasures of 'vicarious display' (Fliigel 1930: 118) through the desired woman, an
active, if displaced, sexuality very apparent in Herrick's verse. In this belief,
Fliigel is in agreement with Darwin when he comments in The Descent if Man that,
'In civilised life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the
choice of his wife by external appearance' (Darwin 1871: 873). The sexual effect
of display has thus been transferred to the woman. What occurs in The Piano in
terms of fetishism (a clear indication that this film is in part a critique of both
Victorian sexuality and the manner in which it has been interpreted by Fliigel,
Freud and others) is less to do with elaborate distanciation manoeuvres, and more
to do with expressing direct desire and trying to have sex. This seems to be the
intention behind the many archetypes and stereotypes that are reconsidered
through the narrative in which Ada, a mute Scottish woman, has been packed off
to New Zealand with her daughter Flora to marry a local landowner Stewart, but
instead falls for his neighbour, George Baines. Whilst giving him piano lessons and
winning back her instrument, Ada enters into an elaborate striptease whereby she
exchanges and removes items of clothing in return for keys. In its re-examination
of voyeurism, fetishism, striptease and hysteria, The Piano adopts clothes and their
relationship to sexuality and the body as primary signifiers. There is a matter-
of-factness in the clothes-dialogues between Ada and Baines that indicates any
fetishism in this film is fetishism as a means to an end, namely intercourse.
Campion herself has commented on being able to explore the physical side of a
relationship in a way that Emily Bronte, for example, could not, and of being able,
in the 1990s, to be 'a lot more investigative of the power of eroticism' (Campion
1993: 6). The Piano's complex sensuality is informed by this eclecticism, being in
several ways a re-examination of and a counter-argument to the conventional
views of nineteenth-century sexuality. The film is deeply methodical in this
respect, taking traditional mechanisms of desire and modes of articulation in order
to question and subvert them, and, essentially, to give twentieth-century feminism
a voice in situations where in the past such an intervention has not occurred.

57
 Dressing up

The potential sexuality and sensuality of clothes is overtly explored in The

Piano, as both costume and the body appear linked in this film to a complex
feminist displacement of the conventionalised objectification of the woman's form
via scopophilia and fetishism. It is not only Ada who is caught up in this radical
exploration, although her fierce independence is essentially manifested by her
repeated refusal to conform to the designated role of the pacified and distanced
image of woman contained by the voyeuristic male gaze. This is where Stewart
would have her, but the film strips him of this traditional power by refusing to
align his look as the on-screen voyeur with ours. The Piano offers, in its repre-
sentation of Stewart, a feminist re-contextualisat ion of Fliigel. It is almost as if
Stewart deliberately conforms to the ideas (or ideals) of The Great Masculine
Renunciation. He is the archetypal nineteenth-centu ry colonial husband bound
by a burdensome sense of his position within patriarchal history, a character who
is socially defined, obsessively aware (but not in control) of his territory, his
whiteness and his role as head of the household. The problem is that Stewart
inhabits a feminised not a Darwinian world to which he cannot see how to adapt
because it is so manifestly correlated with Ada, his transgressive wife who creates
alternative discursive strategies to counter his intended subjugation of her.
Voyeurism, for example, as it is presented within the narrative, is not a pleasur-
ably active pursuit but one born out of desperation and isolation. Stewart is
forever (comically at times) portrayed as the outsider, isolated within a feminist
framework by his dependency on scopophilia. He is consistently identified with an
act of looking that is estranged rather than normative; squinting through a camera
lens, or spying on Ada and Baines having sex through cracks in the timber and the
floorboards. He is thus emasculated rather than empowered by his possession of
(only) the look, as the tropes of traditional masculinity are gradually ridiculed.
The misguidedness of Stewart's unthinking appropriation of convention is neatly
illustrated in his costumes, which Janet Patterson deliberately made too small
for Sam Neill 'to make him look uncomfortably uptight', adding that 'particularly
in the scene when he first goes to meet Ada, his clothes are not a good fit'
(Patterson 1993: 9). That the representation of Stewart is ironic is established in
the opening sequence in which he checks his reflection and clumsily flattens his
hair before meeting Ada for the first time. The would-be patriarch is the film's
outsider looking in, being mimicked by his Maori helpers strutting around in top
hats calling him 'dry balls'.
Stewart's masculine counterpart is Baines who, having discarded the ideology
and the clothes of the European colonialist, has 'gone native'. This, again, is an
example of The Piano intentionally bringing a 1990s consciousness to bear on a
nineteenth-centu ry narrative. Whereas Stewart is dressed in the monochrome
uniform of repression, Baines formed a strong relationship with the Maoris and
appropriated a look which closely resembles theirs. There is an easiness about

58
 Desire and the costume film

Baines, illustrated by the rich blue dyes, thick weave and authentic whale-bone
buttons of his costume , and the Maori-esque markings on his face . 8 Baines
symbolises the presence of the dangerous, erotic Other, the forc e that in the
context of traditional repression narratives conventionally remains implied but
concealed. A significant precursor to Baines is the man influenced by the wayward
gypsy figure in several 1940s melodramas such as Jassy, Blanche Fury or the quasi-
melodrama Duel in the Sun. The dangerous sexuality of Gregory Peck in Duel in
the Sun or Stewart Granger in Blanche Fury is signalled through their ostentatious
adoption of a gypsified look. Thus Granger's wearing of a red polka-dot necker-
chief he has bought from a gypsy woman becomes a m etonym for his rebellion
against social and sexual norms. These, of course, are the men both the female
characters and the audience are attracted to and identify with, in part because
sexual, erotic clothes are conventionally viewed as feminine. In the terms adopted
by Fliigel, Baines has reclaimed 'the principle of erotic exposure' (Fliigel 1930:
11 0~ 11 ), apparently (by the 1850s) the sole prerogative of women, and revived
male narcissism. Whereas the conventionalised interpretation of gender differ-
ence, as it has impinged on dress and physical appearance, is of the woman as
object of display onto whom subjective male sexuality has been displaced,
in The Piano the power relationship is inverted, as it is Baines who first presents
himself naked to Ada thus, peacock-like, putting himself on display. In his

2.4 Holly Hunter and Maori women in The Pian o

Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive

59
 Dressing up

appearance, Baines, with his Maori tattoos, hybrid clothes and unkempt hair,
repeatedly functions to confront Stewart not with his supremacy but his lack.
Stewart's lack is further accentuated by his exclusion from sex, the gender
conventions again being subverted to enforce this are grounded in the film's use
of clothes as ambiguous signifiers for femininity. Ada's oppressive and austere
Victorian costumes are made to function both for and against her, and are both
internal and external signifiers of her desire and her social position. The most
poetic example of this is the final, perplexing image of the drowned Ada tied
to her piano, encased in her billowing skirts. 9 Dressed largely in black with an
austerely authentic lampshade bonnet, Ada superficially embodies the archetypal
nineteenth-centu ry wife. James Laver, for example, declares the mid-nineteenth-
century bonnet to be 'a sign of submission to male authority' (Laver 1969: 123).
Unlike Baines, however, who does not keep his radicalism under his hat, Ada (via
her conventionality) embodies the potential of clothes as an oppositional discourse
not reliant for signification (even through a positive appropriation of difference)
on any pre-established patriarchal models. The complexity of this situation is
captured in the juxtapositional image of Ada posing for wedding photographs in
a dress she has simply flung over her day clothes, without even attempting to
fasten the back. The sartorial collisions here signal her clear rebellion against her
designated position.
A similar duality informs the representation of clothes elsewhere in The Piano,
for example Ada's cumbersome crinoline that both constricts her movements
(as when she is negotiating the New Zealand mud) and works in support of
her (as when it prevents Stewart from raping her). Clothes in The Piano function
as discursive strategies for talking about sex, gender and the existence of desire
underneath the veneer of conformity. In this the film's use of costume is
reminiscent of Michel Foucault's analysis of sex and the expression of sexuality in
The History cif Sexuality. Foucault offers a revolutionary thesis for understanding
the outcome of administered censorship of the articulation of desire from the
eighteenth century onwards. Far from imposing censorship as the authorities
had assumed, the measures that were brought in to prohibit sex and curtail the
public acknowledgeme nt of it brought into being 'an apparatus for producing an
even greater quantity of discourse about sex' (Foucault 1976: 4-5). Sex was thus
'driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence' (33), and
although western laws of prohibition were enforced, they had the contradictory
effect of drawing 'Western man ... to the task of telling everything concerning
his sex' (23). Silence, as Foucault maintains, is not 'the absolute limit of discourse'
as there is no 'binary division to be made between what one says and what
one does not say' (27). Instead, the discursive existence of sex led to the teasing
paradox that, in striving to consign sex 'to a shadow existence', modern societies
'dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad irifinitum, while exploiting it as the secret

60
 Desire and the costume film

(35). The dialectic between intention and this 'putting into discourse of sex' (12)
is given narrative representation in The Piano. Stewart, in an attempt to deny sex,
attempts to repress Flora's sexuality by making her scrub down the tree trunks
she (following the more expressive Maoris) has been rubbing herself against;
whilst Ada and Baines, in defiance of such social regulation, evolve a sexual
'clothes language' that transgresses the presumed boundary between silence and
discourse.
The eroticism of striptease, which plays on the proximity and difference
between clothes and the body, has seldom been disputed; as one writer on
fetishism puts it, 'the moment we invented clothing we also invented the possi-
bility of striptease' (Brand 1970: 19). In this nineteenth-century context, the
clandestine dialogue between Ada and Baines is a case of the putting into discourse
of sex. Rather than repressing or camouflaging sex, the oppressive Victorian
clothes become the very agents through which desire is made possible. Unlike
either Picnic at Hanging Rock or The Age if Innocence in which similarly prohibitive
costumes substitute the unobtainable sexual object and signal its absence, in The
Piano (and Freud would have approved) they and their fetishistic potential act as
preludes to the consummation that does occur. More so than the other films
(excepting the wrist-kissing scene in The Age if Innocence) the fetishistic emphasis
in the Ada/Baines exchanges is on the juxtaposition of clothes and body. The
forbidding Victorian woman's garments become elaborate mechanisms for getting
closer to her, as when Baines, crouching under the piano, raises Ada's hoops and
feels with his rough fingertip the spot of flesh exposed by a hole in her worsted
stocking. If such contact was simply initiated by the man this would indeed remain
a rather artful but traditional striptease, but the woman's active participation in
this clothes dialogue is what renders it unconventional. The striptease sequences
in The Piano conform to how several writers have viewed female fetishism as more
interested in forging links between the fetish and the desired sexual object. Brand,
for example, in reference to a case from the 1890s in which a widow became
fixated on her dead husband's gloves, comments that the direct association
between the fetish and the desired (in this instance) man 'is typical of the female
psyche which tends always to fix on one person and for whom sexual symbols are
relatively unimportant save in their ability to bring the lover closer' (Brand 1970:
67).10
The Piano, enforcing a simple inversion of the normative process, addresses
the question of what happens when the agent of the gaze is female and its object
is the male body. It is in the film's representation of Ada's desire that The Piano
adopts comparably fetishistic stylistic techniques to The Age if Innocence, notably
the use of luscious golden light and fluid camera movements for the sequences that
focus on the bodies of both Stewart and Baines. There are two such scenes in The
Piano which most notably demonstrate female desire of the male body (for the film

61
 Dressing up

is unquestioningly heterosexual) and the subsequent feminisation of that body as

the conventional scopophilic roles are reversed. One positions Ada as the subject
of the eroticising gaze and shows her stroking Stewart's body as he lies half asleep.
The contextualisation of this action emphasises, on a literal level, Ada's control
over Stewart. The exchange also carries the more abstract connotation that Ada,
through her relationship with Baines, has discovered an attraction for the male
body. An example of the reversal of the traditional voyeuristic dynamic in which
the intermediary figure of Ada is dispensed with occurs as the naked Baines is
presented dusting and caressing the piano (which is, by its direct association with
her, a fetish substitute for Ada). This image of the private, naked Baines who is
classically unaware of being looked at, directly confronts the spectator-voyeur
with an unconventional representation of masculinity as the object of the female
gaze. Baines (in what is a feminist inversion of Laura Mulvey's theorisation of
the voyeur/object male/female relationship) is placed 'in direct erotic rapport
with the (implicitly female) spectator' (Mulvey 1975: 311). For most of the film
Stewart and Baines are oppositional images constructed as the expressions of Ada's
desire; the sensualisation of Stewart's body is, therefore, unexpected because
it uses many of the same features as the scenes between Ada and Baines, most
notably the erotic play between garments and exposed flesh. Furthermore,
Stewart's nakedness, like Baines's, is bathed in a lusciously sensuous orange light.
The Piano, particularly in the two scenes in which Ada caresses Stewart, 11 has set
down a radical challenge to the normative gender organisation exemplified by
Picnic at HanainB Rock.
As Ada is demonstrably capable of fetishism and of possessing the active,
scopophilic gaze the traditional paradigms with which the discussion of fetishism
and Picnic at Han9in9 Rock started need to be reassessed. A demonstrable piece
of women's cinema such as The Piano (Campion herself eschews the attribution
'feminist') challenges the conventional male assumptions about fetishism as artic-
ulated by Freud and psychologists such as Fliigel and Krafft-Ebing who developed
and extended his ideas. Freud's understanding of fetishism was motivated by a
desire to explicate male sexuality, and as such saw women as passive fetish objects
who stood for and expressed a libido which was exclusively male. Peter Weir's
Picnic at Han9in9 Rock is a male fantasy which continues this patriarchal tradition
in which Miranda and the other girls are the eroticised substitutes for the veiled
phallus. This view of fetishism as pertaining only to the active male sexual drive
is questioned by a fashion commentator such as Kunzle who, in his discussion of
the secret dialogues between women concerning tight-lacing, refutes the belief
that women are not fetishists. If one further links Kunzle's argument to that
posited by Foucault in A History if Sexuality, then the possibility of clothes as sexual
discourse becomes solidified. Such a discourse is predominantly aligned with a
female sexuality and point of identification, as official histories of sexuality have

62
 Desire and the costume film

tended to disregard active, feminine eroticism and to likewise view women's

clothes as representative of a passive, repressed pattern of desire. Gamman and
Makinen, for instance, question the statistical evidence (used by Freud, Krafft-
Ebing and others) which suggests that women are not active fetishists, asking
'(c]ould the importance that is attributed to fetishism be because it is located so
firmly on the protection and valorisation of the phallus?' (Gamman and Makinen
1994: 103). From a feminist perspective, Gamman and Makinen counter Freud's
theory that a fetish is the substitute for the mother's castrated penis, although, as
I have indicated, his model holds true for certain male-orientated fantasies such
as Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The sexualisation of costume, from 1940s historical melodramas to The Piano,
similarly stems from an acknowledgement that such a pattern of female fetishism
exists and can be articulated. In a broader sense, however, all three films discussed
in this chapter respond positively to fetishism because of its inherent, complex
ambiguity. The attraction for Wharton (and Scorsese after her), for example,
is towards distance, difference and the simultaneous avowal and disavowal of
eroticism. The overriding preoccupation with detail in The Age of Innocence derives
from a fascination with the power of displacement and metaphor, and the
concomitant emphasis on what is left unstated rather than what is stated. In
Harper's Bazaar Wharton once remarked:

I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, how pitiful provision

was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brown
facades, and then have concluded since, for reasons which escape us, the
creative mind thrives best on a reduced diet, I probably had the fare best
suited to me.
(Scorsese and Cocks 1993: 183)

The clothes discourse in The Age of Innocence and The Piano is reliant on the
imagination, on the power of allusion over statement. In this, the use of period
costume resembles the ostensibly dissimilar function of couture designs in films.
Both groups of films put in place an alternative, independent dialogue between
costumes and the spectator. Subsequent chapters will examine more specific ways
in which such a discourse has been continued and expanded.

63
 Part II
GENDE R
 3

THE INSTABILITIES OF THE

FRANCO-AME RICAN GANGSTER
Scarface to Pulp Fiction, Casino, Leon

Throughout the gangster genre clothes are equated with status, money and style.
In the opening scene of Little Caesar, two small-time crooks dream of becoming
big-time gangsters. Joe turns to Rico and muses, 'Gee, the clothes I could wear!'.
Clothes are also over-valued objects of fetishism, which symbolise the gangster's
identity. In Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos, Jean loses a fragment of his trench-
coat as it gets stuck in a car door, and the piece of cloth turns out to be a vital
police clue. Even such apparently innocuous damage to the gangster's appearance
signals his vulnerability. The trait that distinguishes the screen gangster from the
majority of other masculine archetypes is his overt narcissism, manifested by
a preoccupation with the appearance of others and a self-conscious regard for
his own. The fixation on style and superficiality that characterises the gangster
genre as a whole is particularly evident in the reflective relationship between the
American and French traditions, the mutual scavenging, cross-referencing and
straight copying that has been perpetrated since the French cinema of the 1950s
began to express its fondness for Americana (itself a fetishism of detail). The
ultimate focus of this discussion is the gangster film today, but, in such an intro-
verted and self-conscious genre, the look of Martin Scorsese's Mafia movies,
or the postmodern eclecticism of Reservoir Dons, Pulp Fiction and Leon needs to be
contextualised in terms of history and generic evolution. The Franco-American
context, for instance, is important to both Tarantino and Besson: Tarantino makes
specific reference to the films of Melville, Godard and Truffaut, and Besson, after
making chic crime films like Subway and Nikita in France, has set Leon in New York
and is currently working on a remake of The Driver. Walter Hill's The Driver is,
in turn, a remake of a French thriller of the 1960s, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le
Samourai·. This limited sequence of films attests to one important area of overlap
between the French and American crime film traditions, namely the number of
copy-cat texts that have been made. To name but a few: A bout de sotdfie has been
remade as Breathless, Nikita as The Assassin, The Killin& as 23h58. There are also, in

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these films and others, specific allusions to the other country's tradition, such as
the appearance of French actress Isabelle Adjani in The Driver and Butch's French
wife in Pulp Fiction, or the use of American women in both A bout de soriffie and Le
Samourai", none of which serve any narrative purpose. Similarly inconsequential to
the action but significant to the iconographic framework of these gangster films is
the predilection for citing details from past films. The extreme close-up of 'The
Wolf' ringing Jimmie's doorbell in Pulp Fiction, for example, echoes the three-edit
sequence showing Charles Aznavour likewise ringing a doorbell in Truffaut's Tirez
sur le Pianiste, whilst Silien's brief visit to his stables at the end of Melville's
Le Doulos recalls the final shot of Huston's The Asphalt Junsle. The individual
film-makers, therefore, are keen to perpetuate the self-consciousness ofthe genre,
and, to be inferred from this mutual veneration, even Roger Avary's shambolic
American in the Paris heist film Killin& Zoe, is an essential narcissism that informs
most aspects of the genre's overall development. The clothes and identity of the
gangster have evolved along similar lines to the genre as a whole, the definitive
screen gangster look having been constructed with the major Hollywood pictures
of the 1930s and 1940s, ironically critiqued and cited in the French films of the
1950s and 1960s and shown to be disintegrating in the 1980s and 1990s.
Men's dress is usually considered to be innately stable and to lack the 'natural
tendency to change' of women's clothes, displaying instead, by virtue of being
functional rather than decorative, a tendency to 'stereotype itself' and 'adopt
the uniform of a profession' (Laver 1945: 185-6). There is also, therefore, the
suspicion with which flamboyant male dressers like dandies and dudes have tradi-
tionally been viewed, because 'real men' are not supposed to be narcissistically
preoccupied with their clothes and appearance. As Jennifer Craik affirms, men's
fashion has been a contradiction in terms:

Accordingly, the rhetoric of men's fashion takes the form of a set of denials
that include the following propositions: that there is no men's fashion; that
men dress for fit and comfort, rather than for style; that women dress men
and buy clothes for men; that men who dress up are peculiar (one way or
another); that men do not notice clothes; and that most men have not been
duped into the endless pursuit of seasonal fads.
(Craik 1994: 176)

The most repeated assumption about men's clothes held by fashion historians
and writers such as Fliigel, Quentin Bell or Laver is that men worthy of the
name are not interested in fashion, and that the non-expressive uniformity which
has by and large characterised male dress codes since the early 1800s is the result
of a belief that 'overt interest in clothing and appearance implied a tendency
towards unmanliness and effeminacy' (Breward 1995: 171). 1 Men's allegiance to
functional and more professionally orientated dress codes is conventionally

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

presumed to attest to an overwhelming impulse to conform, to blend in with

the crowd as Newland Archer does in his grey suit and bowler hat in The Aae if
Innocence. Darian Leader begins the psychoanalytic ruminations of Why Do Women
Write More Letters Than They Post? with just such an observation, claiming:

While most men like to be included in generalisations, many women don't.

This fact is well known to retailers: if you want to sell a coat to a man, you
can tell him that everyone in the City or on Wall Street is wearing it, but if
you want to sell it to a woman, it is better to say, on the contrary, that no
one is wearing it.
(Leader 1996: vii)

Vanity in a man also came to signify evil and degeneracy (the most obsessively
narcissistic gangster is often the most violent), until the acceptance of style-
conscious men in the 1980s which problematised everything. Masculine attire,
traditionally characterised by consistency, functionality and durability, is exem-
plified by the suit. Supposedly symbolic of traditional manliness, this ubiquitous
garment, as one writer suggests, 'denotes holding back personal feelings, or self-
restraint, and focusing energy on achieving organisational goals, or goal-directed
behaviour' (Rubinstein 199 S: 58). It is interesting that, unlike restrictive feminine
clothing, readily taken to be shimmering with furtive erotic potential, comparably
limiting masculine dress is perceived to be blandly straightforward: the suited man
is dependable, the dandy is not.
Such puritanism, and the normative disassociation of men from narcissistic
self-admiration, has similarly controlled too many discussions of the desexualised
representation of men in cinema. Laura Mulvey's prescriptive assertion, 'Accord-
ing to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back
it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is
reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like' has remained hugely influential (Mulvey
1975: 310). In the early 1980s Steve Neale, in his essay 'Masculinity as spectacle',
applied Mulvey's arguments concerned primarily with the eroticisation of the
female form in mainstream cinema to the representation of men, suggesting that
the explicitly erotic look at the male body is deflected and disavowed within
classical narratives through the use of action and other legitimising tactics, so 'We
are offered the spectacle of male bodies, but bodies unmarked as objects of erotic
display' (Neale 1983: 18). Neale's conclusions arise from a similar adherence
to rigid gender boundaries as Mulvey, culminating in the claim that only the
'feminised' man (not a category that is adequately explained) 'is presented quite
explicitly as the object of an erotic look' ( 18). The notion of the desexualised male
body is a firmly held but flimsily proven truism that can be contested, from the
perspectives of both fashion and representation, with reference to the figure of the
gangster. So many screen gangsters invite comments about their appearance, show

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themselves off, openly admire each other's clothes and are obsessively consumed
by their own image, as to question such opinions about male representation.
However, neither do these gangsters, in any meaningful way, lapse into the
category of the 'feminised' man, and although they are men of action, they are
also men of fashion.
When considering the costumes of the screen gangster the spectator is struck
by this ambivalence, that here are characters who have both cultivated an aggres-
sively masculine image and are immensely vain, and whose sartorial flamboyance,
far from intimating femininity or effeminacy, is the most important sign of their
masculine social and material success. The screen gangster's narcissism has an
actual reference point in the attitudes to clothes of their real-life prototypes,
which is subsequently transferred to the attention paid to costume detail in the
films. Robert de Niro, for instance, stipulated that he wished to be dressed, when
playing AI Capone in The Untouchables, by Capone's old tailor, and even demanded
the same Sulk and Son silk boxer shorts. As genres go, gangster films are notably
defined by superficiality and attention to detail. Colin McArthur divides the
'recurrent patterns of imagery' that permeate the genre into three categories, two
that concern the iconography of the gangsters' milieux and the technology (such
as cars and guns) at their disposal, and one that surrounds 'the physical presence,
attributes and dress of the actors and the characters they play' (McArthur 1972:
23-4). Extending even to Leon, there is a pronounced consistency in terms of
appearance, the gangster persona having been developed and refined, particularly
since the mutual homages of the French and American traditions began, into an
outwardly stereotypical role.
In Mytholoaies Roland Barthes comments:

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary its function is to talk about
them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a
natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of
an explanation but that of a statement of fact.
(Barthes 1957: 156)

Barthes' idea of myths being created through the process of speech and
identification is borne out by the development of the mythologised gangster. The
gangster's identity, or rather his imagined identity, is created out of, to use
Jacques Lacan's discussion of the ego, 'the superimposition of various coats
borrowed from what I will call the bric-a-brac of its props department' (Lacan
1954---5: 155). Each screen gangster is defined, largely iconographically, against
his predecessors and, more importantly, is shown to be consciously striving to
emulate that mythologised ideal by obsessively judging how he looks in front of
an actual mirror or through the approval of others. In this the distinguishing
clothes a gangster wears are (with few exceptions) mandatory. So, for example,

70
 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster
when Henry in Gooc!fellas returns home in his first flashy suit and the camera pans
slowly up his body, his horrified mother inevitably exclaims, 'My God, you look
like a gangster'. The myth of the gangster is proclaimed and codified by the way
he dresses, the suit, hat, accessories and trenchcoat being the most common
identifying marks of his status. As McArthur suggests, the gangsters' square
outline 'is an extension of their physical presence, a visual shorthand for their
violent potential' (McArthur 1972: 26). When considering the interrelationship
between clothes and art history Anne Hollander remarks, 'One might say that
individual appearances in clothes are not 'statements', as they are often called,
but more like public readings of literary works in different genres of which the
rules are generally understood' (Hollander 1975: xv), a notion that is pertinent
also to cinematic genres with their rules and perpetual modifications. The 'rules'
that assist the mythologisation and are translated from one film to the next
usually facilitate the easy and immediate identification of the composite screen
gangster, a figure who wants recognition as a gangster and, as so many of them
say, to stand out.
This desire to conform to an already established model that will be instantly
identifiable to characters and spectators alike is conventionally distilled into
shorthand devices like the use of nick-names in gangster films up to and including
the 'Mr' men of Reservoir Dogs. A more evocative example is the genre's recurrent
use of silhouettes, shadows or outlines as signifiers of the stereotype. Silhouettes
and shadows are used traditionally as doppelgangers, as in the German Expressionist
films of the 1920s and 1930s. Although visually reminiscent of Noiferatu and
M, for example, a film such as Scaiface uses the shadow or silhouette as a complex
metaphor symbolising not just the gangster's repressed side, but the abstraction
of the myth or ideal he both constructed and strives to live up to. In a minor
crime movie such as Bullets or Ballots, in which chiaroscuro lighting accompanies
Humphrey Bogart wherever he goes, the shadow (even creeping up Murnau-
esque stairs) is a straightforward suspense device to signal the imminent arrival
of the gangster. The symbolic function of the silhouette is, like much else,
emphasised and stylised to excess by the French films of the 1950s and 1960s.
Through the wet windscreen of his stolen car at the beginning of Le Samourai·,
Alain Del on's etched outline (the felt hat, trenchcoat and cigarette) instantly
proclaims his identity. Melville's play on the irony of the shadow (that it is both
iconic and empty, to be feared and a trick of the light) is carried to almost
self-parodying extremes in Le Doulos, as, in the semi-darkness, one gangster's
silhouette is mistaken for another, and the wrong man is shot. The shadow
crucially elides the abstract and the corporeal. The overriding tension of the
genre, as it constructs and upholds the mythic gangster, is between the unresolv-
able desires of each character to assert individuality, whilst paradoxically seeking
to conform to the idealised silhouette. This collision is exemplified by the heist

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movie (R!fifi, The Asphalt Jungle, Reservoir Dogs) in which the bringing together
of disparate (and often desperate) individuals and the imposition of an uneasy
uniformity ultimately prove fatal.
This tension between conformity and difference is similarly prevalent,
particularly in the Prohibition films of the early 1930s, in the traditional gangster's
mode of dress, which is both derivative of and distinguishable from the dress
styles of the contemporary gentleman. In his chapter on underworld fashion,
the French fashion historian Farid Chenoune notes that the elegance of the
legitimate businessman and that of the 1930s and 1940s gangster (in both America
and France) were never comparable, because 'dark ties on light shirts are as
different from light ties on dark shirts as day from night' (Chenoune 1993: 196).
Gangsters, therefore, are expensively dressed but can nevertheless be told apart,
so Jean Gabin in Npe le Moko is proclaiming his status through his black shirt
and cravat, just as Richard Widmark is through his dark shirts and light ties in
the 1950s. The underworld developed its own exaggerated style, patronising
certain tailors who produced exclusive mobster clothes, like the Marseilles
shirt-maker Severin who specialised in silk shirts with the customers' initials
embroidered on the breast. Such attention to detail, which Chenoune rather
censoriously observes, 'betrayed a certain coarseness' (Chenoune 1993: 196), is
something which many of the costume-orientated films utilise, inserting shots
which are, in narrative terms, irrelevant. In Miller's Crossing, for example, there is
a leisurely close-up of Leo's embroidered slippers before he goes downstairs
to blast his potential ambushers. The clothes-fetishist gangster is identified
instantly by such details, as in Some Like it Hot when all that is required to denote
the arrival of an important mobster is an unblemished pair of spats. Another
affectation of the real gangster that is mimicked in the films is his penchant
for excessive colour coordination, every accessory matching the suit and coat. The
use of white or off-white ensembles to denote extreme brutality probably derives
directly from AI Capone. Both the real and the fictionalised gangster, therefore,
occupy a paradoxical position in relation to fashion: whilst they appropriate the
styles of high fashion, they do not ultimately want to blend in or be lost in it,
so they cultivate 'an identifiable school of stylishness that, far from operating as
camouflage, ultimately functioned like warrior dress' (Chenoune 1993: 196). It
should not be forgotten, though, that however vulgar mob fashions were deemed
to be, in the 1920s and 1930s the styles were, like many others in America, hugely
influenced by the sartorial experimentations of the iconic Prince of Wales, whose
trips to America in those years were reported daily in the fashion pages. The
future Edward VIII was particularly fond of combining loud, dissonant colours and
mixing patterns, checks and stripes, so the ensemble Tony Camonte is sporting in
Scaiface when Poppy exclaims 'that outfit's enough to give anybody the yips' would
not have been untypical of him.

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

3.1 Paul Muni as Tony Camonte in Scaiface

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

The archetypal screen gangster was born in the 1930-33 period in Hollywood
with such films as Little Caesar, Public Enemy and Scaiface; in the years, therefore,
immediately prior to the Volstead ('Prohibition') Act being repealed in 1933 and
the tightening in 1934 of the Hays Code guidelines concerned with the repre-
sentation of violence . The ubiquitous impeccably dressed and violent narcissist
created in these films also symbolised a response to the erosion of masculinity that

73
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occurred in the Depression years. In a parody of the American dream, the films
characteristically chart the rise and fall of the immigrant, underprivileged small-
time crook who climbs the 'queer ladder of social mobility' (Bell D. 1960: 115)
to become a successful gangster, only to die the ambiguous tragic hero. This social
ascent is again clearly signalled through costume. As 'the most reliably consistent
trait of movie gangsters was their sartorial progression from dark and wrinkled
nondescript clothing to flashy, double-breasted, custom-tailored striped suits with
silk ties and suitable jewellery' (Rosow 1978: 185), the transition point from
petty hoodlum to successful mobster is often the acquisition of a new wardrobe.
The gangster's new-found power is put on display, crudely shown off, often in a
scene that shows him getting fitted for a suit, as in Public Enemy when Tom (James
Cagney) visits a tailor after executing his first big alcohol raid. In the subsequent
scene he and Matt arrive transformed at a club, wearing their full finery of
Homburg, belted coat, suit and breast-pocket silk handkerchief. Although
this grand entrance echoes the traditionally feminine Cinderella scenario, the
spectator is emphatically reminded that the gangsters' exquisite clothes signify
desirable (rather than dubious) masculinity when Tom and Matt immediately
prove able to pull two girls away from 'the couple of lightweights' they are with.
The most outrageous of the peacock gangsters is Tony Camonte in Scaiface, who
is so impressed by Johnnie Lovo's dressing gown ('Hey, that's pretty hot ....
Expensive, huh?') that the first thing he shows off when he gets rich is his own
very similar one. Tony's rapid rise, like Tom's, is signposted by his transformed
wardrobe. He buys loud suits, jewellery and tissue-wrapped shirts in bulk,
bragging to Poppy, for instance, that he intends to wear each of his new shirts only
once. The 1930s gangster's continuing rise is further marked by ever more refined
accessories and details, and often he is shown (as is the case with Tony) in full
evening dress when he is at the height of his powers.
The gangster's increased power being signalled by his expanding wardrobe
problematises many of the conventional assumptions about men and fashion this
chapter initially identified, not least the belief that the more narcissistic, the
less butch the man. In his discussion of Annie Leibovitz's portrait of Clint
Eastwood (in casual clothes and bound in rope) Paul Smith includes 'the careless
ordinariness of his J. C. Penney clothing' among the features that 'contribute to
Eastwood's presence within this culture as one of the more legitimated bearers of
its masculinity, "real" or otherwise' (Smith 1995: 78). To be inferred from
Eastwood's T-shirt, cords and trainers, is that he is a man of action with no
time for vanity, and that fashion is for the idle. A refreshing alternative view was
offered in the 1920s by Gerald Heard in Narcissus: An Anatomy rif Clothes in which
he begins by casting suspicion on those men who, when they visit the tailor,
give the impression that they do not care about clothes, accusing such men of
'practising a sustained deceit'. Heard continues by disputing the antithesis

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

between decoration and use (arguing, quaintly, that a tiger is no less efficient than
a non-stripy cat) and asking, 'When did people begin to think a splendid and
striking appearance betrayed a poor and vulgar mind?' (Heard 1924: 10-11).
Heard later comments, however, that 'the study of clothes ... suggests the rise
of a complete self-consciousnes s' (21 ), suggesting, therefore, that an obsession
with clothes parallels a growing absorption with the self rather than others.
Freud, in his essay 'On narcissism', refers to an antithesis between ego-libido
and object-libido, that 'The more of the one is employed, the more the other
becomes depleted' (Freud 1914: 68), and thus how, in the narcissist, the
attraction to the self takes over from the attraction to others. This transferral of
sexual energy away from the expected attraction to others (in this context the
'right woman') is already implied by the traditional gangster's sexual dysfunc-
tionalism: for example, Tony Camonte's incestuous attraction for his sister Cesca,
Rico's latent homosexuality in Little Caesar, and the tragic love triangle between
Eddie, Panama and Jean in The Roaring Twenties. Sexual energy is similarly dis-
placed onto clothes, the mutual admiration between gangsters frequently being
expressed through an excessive attraction for each other's sumptuous garments
(witness the scene in Scarface in which Tony feels Johnnie Lovo's dressing gown).
This over-identificatio n with appearance and thc open display of fetishistic interest
in each other's clothes has obvious homoerotic undertones, signifying a dual
attraction for a man who the gangster both desires and wants to become. Further
into his essay Freud lists what, according to the narcissistic type, a person may
love as: 'what he himself is, what he himself was, what he himself would like to
be, someone who was part of himself' (Freud 1914: 84). This simultaneous
refraction and condensation of the image in the construction of an 'ideal ego'
offers a productive way of extending the instabilities of the gangster beyond the
American model, where competition and emulation are clearly foregrounded,
towards the French gangster who is caught obsessively measuring his actual ego
by the ego ideal he himself has created from past cinematic images.
In Godard's first film A bout de sotiffie, the protagonist Michel Poiccard (Jean-
Paul Belmondo) is obsessed with American crime films. In one of its defining
moments, Michel looks up at Humphrey Bogart's image on the poster for The
Harder They Fall and murmurs 'Bogie' to his idol. He then becomes mesmerised by
a publicity still of Bogart, stares back at it and imitates Bogie's gesture of running
his thumb across his lips. Whereas the American criminals of the 1930s to 1950s
were straightforwardly narcissistic, the comparable gangsters in the French films of
the 1950s and 1960s are overtly reflective, taking the earlier Hollywood films as
their common reference points and engaging in a mannered, self-conscious way
with a specifically cinematic history. Michel, accumulating layers of Lacanian bric-
a-brac, exemplifies this self-consciousnes s as he creates for himself a composite
gangster ideal, appropriating the 'ideal' by collapsing the boundaries between his

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icon (the cinematic stereotype) and himself. From the moment Michel kills the cop
at the beginning of A bout de sotiffie with an ostentatiously old-fashioned Colt
revolver, he has constructed his own American B-movie around him; he embodies
'Bogie'. As with Freud's narcissist, Michel is in love with himself, what he (as
an abstraction of a cinema gangster) was and what he would like to be (a perfection
of the type). He similarly both references and modifies the conventional attire
of the gangster, wearing a felt snap-brim hat (albeit a Trilby at a very jaunty,
un-Bogart-esque angle), a loud check jacket and shades. The gangster has retreated
into his own image and become a statement, his character has become distilled into
a series of citations and gestures that, without the (fictional) original, would not
exist.
Costumes in this context do not support but rather substitute characterisation.
These men become gangsters when they look like gangsters, when their outline
fits the mythical silhouette. As Heard suggests when saying, 'changes take place
first in the outer and so pass to the inner' (Heard 1924: 40), appearance in some
instances affects character or personality, not vice versa. The French film
gangsters offer a meta-commenta ry on their American prototypes' dependency
on appearance for an identity, both mimicking and critiquing their vanity and
obsession with the right clothes. This is frequently achieved comically, as in the
sequence in A bout de sotiffie when, on seeing Michel in the street, the first thing a
friend docs is to reprimand him for putting silk socks and a tweed jacket together,
forcing Michel to defend his dress sense. Truffaut once commented that, having
started shooting Tirez sur le Pianiste, he realised he disliked the gangster genre and
so began treating it ironically, a reaction that clearly impinges on the car scene
towards the end of the film in which Fido's kidnappers brag about the mythical
luxury gadgets they can now afford: an air-conditioned hat, a London suit made
from Australian wool, Egyptian leather-ventilate d shoes and a tie that feels like
silk but is made out of metal.
The gangster has been reduced to a silhouette, a series of metonyms that,
as shorthand, signify and substitute for the whole. In his armoury the most
consistent of the overdetermined accessories is the essential sharp felt hat. Taking
his prompt from Freud's 'A hat is a symbol of a man (or of male genitals)' (Freud
1911 : 4 78-80), James Laver, in one of his wilder speculative moments, develops
the idea that the hat is a 'symbol of potent masculinity', maintaining that it is
possible to gauge the curve of women's emancipation 'from the height of men's
hats'. Laver's argument posits that, in the 1850s when male domination was at
its height, so were men's hats, hence the popularity of the top hat. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century, however, 'men began to wear, so to speak,
the very symbol of their bashed-in authority: the Trilby hat'. Laver concludes his
discussion by further suggesting that women wearing hats (as opposed to bonnets,
which he saw as a sign of 'submission to male authority') was a defiant gesture by

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

which they were symbolically saying 'votes for women' (Laver 1969: 121-3). As
if they too have read the same pages of The Interpretation if Dreams, several screen
gangsters form disproportionate attachments to their hats, although some of them
unfortunately have to make do with a literally bashed-in Trilby like Sterling
Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle. In Scaiface Tony Camonte's secretary (a sort of
parody of a parody Italian) adjusts his Homburg in front of the mirror before
answering the telephone; he then removes his hat, lifts up the receiver and
promptly proceeds to talk into the wrong end. Without his hat he's nothing.
In the 1930s 'doulos' or 'bitos' became French gangster slang for 'hat', and,
as Melville's Le Doulos states at the beginning, 'doulos' also came to mean 'police
informer'. Melville's criminals are frequently shown checking their reflections and
adjusting their clothes, Bob in Bob le Flambeur, for example, or Jef in Le Samourai',
but nowhere is the hat as much of an overdetermined object as in Le Doulos.
Although the attachment is never spelt out, there is a clear symbolic affiliation
between Silien (Belmondo) and his flat-crowned Trilby. Two moments in the film
are particularly significant in this respect. On arriving at the Americanised jazz bar
The Cotton Club Silien deposits his trenchcoat and hat at the cloakroom. This
seemingly insignificant action is made significant by the manner in which it is
filmed. Belmondo takes his hat off and places it on the counter, holding it very
precisely at the peak of the crown, a gesture that the cloakroom attendant copies
directly as she takes up the hat and puts it on the shelf behind her, finally tucking
a number 13 ticket into its ribbon. Melville stresses the opaque importance of
this moment by following the movement of Silien's hat in close-up and resting
on it (rather than the characters) at the end of the shot. The other loaded hat
moment occurs in the last scene of the film as the fatally wounded Silien staggers
over to a telephone, calls his girlfriend to tell her he will not be going round
that night, checks his reflection in the mirror then dies. Again, Melville's degree
of stylisation adds an alternative dimension to this otherwise traditional denoue-
ment. Belmondo's face and hat are perfectly enclosed by the small mirror at the
centre of a heavy gilt frame, and the camera rests on this image as he scrutinises
his reflection, raises his hat to smooth his hair, replaces it then slumps out of
frame. The ironic theatricality of this end, the needless fetishisation of detail, is
Silien's final recognition of the importance of appearance; he wants to go down
looking like a perfect gangster. This vain ritual, however, is undercut by the final
shot of the film: the upturned (useless, empty) hat resting on the floor.
In A bout de sotdfie Melville plays a writer who declares, at a press conference,
that his ambition is to become immortal and then die. This honour is in danger of
being bequeathed to the gangsters' hats not the gangsters. The Coen brothers'
Miller's Crossing is another self-reflective film (this time referring back to the
American films of the 1930s) that dwells on the gangster's over-identification with
his hat. Hat imagery runs through Miller's Crossing, as an elusive chain of coded

77
3.2 Jean-Paul Belmondo as Silien in Le Doulos
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

78
 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

references to egos and alter egos. In the title sequence an immaculate Fedora,
carried by gusts of wind, wafts through an autumnal wood and comes to rest, in
close-up, amongst the leaves. The Fedora, associated throughout Miller's Crossing
with Tom (Gabriel Byrne), becomes an insistent symbol of his masculinity
and integrity, thus his only moments of vulnerability are when he is temporarily
separated from his headwear. In absurd, nightmarish 'fort-da' fashion, Tom loses
and regains his hat many times in the course of the film. He gambles it away, has
it knocked off his head in several fights and even has a dream (echoing the title
sequence) in which a gust of wind seizes it; and yet it always comes back. In his
last gesture of the film, after saying goodbye to the Irish gang leader Leo, he pulls
his (unscathed) Fedora particularly low over his forehead, obscuring most of his
face. In this small, ostensibly meaningless gesture Tom indicates the desperation
of the gangster whose identity is so caught up in his hat that losing it, having it
wrested from his head, would mean losing himself.
In Melville's Le Samourai" the hit man Jef Costello performs a ritual each time he
leaves his flat: he looks at himself in the mirror and runs his finger and thumb along
the brim of his Trilby. Le Samourai"is a film constructed around gestures rather than
words. For the first ten minutes there is no dialogue (which is why, reputedly,
Delon immediately accepted the part of Jcf !Nogueira 1971: 129]), and Jef, who
eschews verbal and emotional communication, exists as an icon comprising a
limited range of perfect clothes and precise actions. This cold, analytical film charts
the inevitable disintegration of a mythic masculinity, an implosion directly signalled
through his clothes. Referring to Bob le Flambeur Melville comments:

There is a moment of truth in all my films. A man before a mirror means a

stock-taking. When he walks up the rue Pi galle at the beginning of the film,
it's in front of a rusty mirror that Bob mutters to himself: 'A fine hoodlum
face!' With that phrase he sums up his entire life.
(Nogueira 1971: 54-5)

Jef's routine scrutiny of his own reflection is a security measure. His image is
his identity, and at the start of Le Samourai· it is refined and complete. Every
subsequent moment of crisis in the film is marked by the fragmentation of Jef's
self-possessed image- the repeated removal, either by others or by himself out of
necessity, of crucial identifying garments such as his black Italian-style suit, Trilby
and trenchcoat. The first potential crisis occurs during the line-ups in a Paris
police station, Jef having been called in after a local night-club owner has been
killed. At the first line-up Jef, looking rather ostentatiously like the only potential
hit man, is positioned between an absurdly dissimilar group of both women and
men, and, despite having been clearly seen after the shooting, is not identified.
In the second line-up he and this time similar men swap garments in order to
confuse the witnesses. This time, however, another witness is immediately able

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to put together the correct 'composite image' of Jef's face, hat and trenchcoat,
Costello's rebus clues for 'gangster'.
Jef Costello's fallibility is rooted in his over-reliance on his image. He not only,
as Freud outlines in The Eao and the Id, identifies with and introjects the attributes
he sees in others (namely past gangster icons), transforming them through his
unconscious to create his ego's 'ideals', he lacks any sense of an identity beyond
those appropriated 'ideals'. Like Lacan's uncoordinated infant for whom 'the
mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world' (Lacan 1949:
3) and who generates a unified sense of selfhood by making an imaginary
identification with the whole reflection, Jef imposes and constantly identifies
with the superficially self-sufficient image he has constructed for himself. As
Lacan suggests, however, the unity projected by this mirror-image is an illusory
consoling device that only appears to offer an emboldening correlation between
the subject and the imagined ideal. The infant, like Jef, mis-recognises him/herself
in that total form, the mirror stage being described by Lacan as a drama 'which
manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the
succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form
of its totality.... and lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating
identity' (4). Jef Costello serves as the epigrammatic distillation of the cinema
gangster myth, a figure whose identity is signalled only by his superficial adherence
to an imaginary, fictional and ultimately destructive ideal. As Lacan comments in
'Aggressivity in psychoanalysis', the 'human individual fixes himself upon an
image that alienates himself from himself' (Lacan 1948: 19).
Jef wanders aloof through Le Samourai· as if defying his inevitable entry into the
Symbolic where the falsity and fragmentation of the Imaginary ego is confirmed,
defiantly denying speech and social communication in the knowledge, presumably,
that such interaction will defeat him. The use of space and physical barriers are
important in this respect, paralleling in part the significance of the archetypal
clothes, as Jef is only secure when inside his apartment shut off from the outside
world. When that space is invaded by the bugs planted by the cops, although he
finds the devices easily, Jef's vulnerability is exposed. These spatial intrusions
mirror the critical dissolution of Jef's sartorial image, moments of crisis in Le
Samourai· being marked by the gradual, painful fragmentation of the initial Trilby,
suit and trenchcoat 'ideal'. The crisis moment that graphically embodies Jef's
inevitable disintegration occurs after he has been shot going to collect his money
for the hit job at the beginning of the film. For the only time, Jef is forced
to remove his 'suit of armour' in order to dress the bullet wound. In terms of
clothes iconography this is a complex sequence. Fashion or clothes often seem
to substitute an ideal body for the real body, and the sight of Delon's real body in
a white T-shirt doubly signals Jef's vulnerability and the loss of his ideal, as he has
become both the incomplete gangster and the object of the erotic gaze (the white

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3.3 Alain Del on as Jef Costello, shot through his trenchcoat in Le Samourai" and Alain
Delon nursing his wound in Le Samourai·
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

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T-shirt conventionalised within cinema as an article of clothing that legitimately

sexualises the male form).
From this scene on, Jef is no longer impregnable (he is, after all, forced to
exchange his trenchcoat for another coat after being shot), and, as he becomes
increasingly more desperate, so even his restabilised appearance signals his frailty.
This new discrepancy between ego and ideal is emphasised during the protracted
chase sequence through the Metro. At a time when it would be sensible, one would
think, to travel incognito, Jef defiantly asserts his old gangster image by never even
removing his give-away hat, as ifit is this that still renders him whole. The elements
that have fatally collided for Jef are his imagined and his actual identities; as Graham
Dawson comments (in an essay about Lawrence of Arabia and British masculinity),
'Masculine identities are lived out in the flesh, but fashioned in the imagination'
(Dawson, G. 1991: 118). Jef has made up, imagined an identity that is only
impregnable in that imagination, as his suicidal reassembly and elaboration of
his gangster image at the end of Le Samourai" emphasises. Clad in full battle gear
of black coat, felt hat and pristine white gloves, 2 and carrying an unloaded gun
to indicate that he has no intention of carrying out his final job, Jef arrives at
the American bar ostensibly to shoot the pianist. Looking so much the part of the
quintessential hit man he is inevitably, target practice-like, shot dead.
The self-conscious posturing of the excessively cool Michel Poiccard and Jef
Costello exemplify an ambivalent attitude to the mythic gangster, both ironic and
reverential. There is something precariously pathetic about Jef's earnestness, that
Delon, with his 'harsh and pitiless' face (McArthur 1972: 170), is the ultimate
French hard man with real underworld friends, whose only sustained relationship
in Le Samourai" is with his caged, female bullfinch. 3 Jef's fragility is his solitude.
Referring to comic book heroes, Peter Middleton comments that, 'Men who
become self-sufficient cease to be men' (Middleton 1992: 25); in films such as
A bout de solfifle, Le Doulos and Le Samourai· the 'heroes' even stage their own
reflective deaths. At the end of A bout de solfifle the wounded Belmondo staggers
to precisely the end of the street, takes a last drag of his cigarette and utters
'It really makes you sick' before closing his own eyes. Belmondo and Delon have
the last call, because the subject wants to possess the wholeness offered by
the mirror image; the motivation of the 'I' is to attempt to halt the process of
fragmentation. In reality trying to freeze a developmental, subjective process that
cannot be frozen is futile, in fiction it is not. As Melville cryptically utters in A
bout de solfifle, perfection is to attain immortality then die. This is the apotheosis
of the gangster, deified by the fictional narrative, not troubled by the realm beyond
the myth and still cool in death. It cannot last.
There are two ways in which the 1980s and 1990s French and American films
have articulated the disintegration of the mythic gangster: one is by emphasising
the tackiness of the nouveau riche mob lifestyle and milieux, as Married to the Mob,

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

Gooc!Jellas and Casino do; the other is by continuing the French films' self-conscious
dismantling of the icon, as occurs in Reservoir Doas, Pulp Fiction and Leon. Too many
problems now crowd in to permit the gangster to 'become immortal and then
die', which is still arguably the romantic endeavour of Coppola's Goc!Jather trilogy,
which is as regressive in its views on organised crime and masculinity as it is in its
tuxedo and waistcoat-centred costumes (which, in passing, are so inaccurate that
dating the action is not always easy). Gooc!fellas relates ambiguously to its generic
predecessors; it feeds into the myth, as perceived through Henry Hill's wide-eyed
awe at the beginning, and it shows the flip-side reality of the Mafia's organised
crime and increasingly flamboyant sleaze. The central correlative of Gooc!Jellas is
between violence and wealth, a fusion epitomised in the loud glamour of the
mob's clothes. Scorsese himself has confessed to the attraction of this: 'When
you're a kid you look and see these guys and they're very interesting people. To
a kid they are beautifully and elegantly dressed, and they command a great deal
of respect in your small world' (Scorsese 1990: 21 ). This fascination and awe is
transposed to Henry's opening voice-over in Gooc!fellas:

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me,

being a gangster was better than being President of the United States. Even
before I wandered into the cab stand for an after-school job, I knew I wanted
to be a part of them. It was there that I knew that I belonged, and to me it
meant being somebody in a neighbourhood that was full of nobodies.

Henry imagines and craves the immortality; the trajectory of Gooc!Jellas, however,
progresses towards an end where Henry, far from being immortalised in death,
enters the Witness Protection Programme and becomes an 'average nobody'
wearing a towelling robe and collecting a paper off his suburban lawn. Although
the real Henry Hill maintains he is now 'glad to be a shnook' (Hill 1990: 149), in
mythic terms the fictionalised character is worse than dead, he's anonymous.
Scorsese has frequently said that Gooc!fellas is a film about lifestyle. His represen-
tation of the American 1960s and 1970s Mafia underworld emphasises realism and
superficiality, sidelining the huge event (in Gooc!Jellas, the Lufthansa robbery) in
favour of the details of the Mafia's quotidian existence. This is a clear echo of the
nouveau riche values displayed by the 1930s Mafia gangsters such as Tony Camonte,
whose first impulse when he makes it big is to indulge in the trappings of instant
wealth: silk dressing gowns, loud suits and gaudy furnishings. Unlike the French
hit man Jef Costello who kills for money he never seems to spend, Henry Hill
and the others in Gooc!fellas (or the equally vulgar families in Jonathan Demme 's
contemporaneous Married to the Mob) want their wealth to be seen and envied. In
evoking the allure of wealth Scorsese, as he did with his adaptation of The Age if
Innocence, fuses film style and narrative detail in Gooc!Jellas and its virtual sequel
Casino4 to create the spectacle of conspicuous consumption. The stylistic excesses

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enforce an identification between the spectators and the characters who find
themselves irresistibly drawn to the trappings of Mafia wealth. In Gooc!Jellas, for
example, when Karen, accompanied by the grandiose banality of 'Then He Kissed
Me' on the soundtrack, is swept into the Copacabana on her first date with Henry,
her enchantment is mirrored by the heady, uncut steadicam shot following her
entrance through the club's back rooms to Henry's specially arranged front-row
table. There are similarly dynamic, empowering sequences that integrate style and
narrative in Casino (Ginger throwing the gambling chips in the air, the low-angle
shots of de Niro standing over the casino), the purpose of which is captured by
Jonathan Romney's review when he refers to this as 'the flashiest, most superficial
film Martin Scorsese has ever made- which is to say, it serves its theme brilliantly'
(Romney 1996: 40).
Conspicuous consumption has, since Thorstein Veblen's moralistic dissection
of the economics of style in The Theory cf the Leisure Class, been identified as a
crucial attribute of fashion. Veblen's thesis is founded on the premise that esteem
is granted only if wealth and power are not merely possessed, but flaunted and
wasted, and that 'the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile
expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore
intrinsically ugly' (Veblen 1925: 124). After noting, with some exasperation, the
incompatibility between 'expensiveness' and 'artistic apparel' (by which is meant
aesthetically pleasing dress sense), Veblen is forced to conclude that 'restless
change' is an end unto itself, and that the instabilities of fashion owe much to
being representative proof that the wearer can afford newer (and uglier) clothes. 5
Excess, newness and ugliness are what dominate the Mafia lifestyle and the
aesthetic of the films that represent it. The proud display to others of newly
acquired wealth and possessions is a ritualistic moment in both Gooc!Jellas and
Casino, as when Karen, now Henry's wife, shows off her false York stone wall
or Ginger talks her bemused baby daughter through her jewellery collection. The
characters fall in love with wealth. A comparably sensual though vacuous routine
is the pan or track along rows of clothes, mesmerising because of their sheer bulk.
Veblen emphasises that the woman is the man's functionary or 'chattel', a display
cabinet whose consumption is not for her own sustenance but 'contributes to
the comfort or the good repute of her master' (Veblen 1925: 62-3). Although
in Casino this is very much the role Ginger is allotted by both the production
(for whom she is the quintessential 'clothes horse') and her husband Ace, who
presents her with a fully stocked walk-in wardrobe after their wedding, in general,
Scorscse's Mafia men are those who show off their wealth, not just those who
generate it. As Karen in Gooc!Jellas notices about the Mafia wives at her first hostess
party, they 'had bad skin and too much make-up. And the stuff they wore was
thrown together and cheap, a lot of pantsuits and double-knits'. The money goes
into dressing the men.

84
 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

In keeping with generic tradition if not with established perceptions of

masculinity, it is Scorsese's male characters who are the primary objects of
spectacle and fetishisation. Narcissism mixed with consumerism is traditionally a
feminine trait, and the man who mixes the two (as Julian does in American Gigolo)
is necessarily viewed as deviant. To counter the potential passivity of this reduction
to pure spectacle, men in cinema often adopt aggressive postures or ostentatious
display mechanisms; thus resuming the active role by seizing the initiative and
showing themselves off, as Henry Hill does when he appears in his first flash
suit and, with a big smile and his arms outstretched, asks his mother, 'What do
you think?'. Henry therefore deflects femininity by embracing narcissism. The
pan from Henry's shoes to his face as his mother tells him he looks like a gangster
intentionally echoes the same camera move that a few minutes previously had
picked out the patent toes, turn-ups, double-breasted jacket and pinkie ring of
a mob leader. Goorifellas signals Henry has conclusively made it when Ray Liotta

3.4 Ray Liotta as Henry Hill (with Joe Pesci) in Gooc!Jellas

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

(as the adult Hill) is introduced in 1963 with the same lazy, fetishistic pan up his
body, taking in his tasselled grey loafers, the stirrupped trousers of his grey sheen
suit and his trademark Gabicci-style striped shirt over white vest.
Conspicuous consumption and restless change tends to prevail in Scorsese
gangster films amongst the gangsters on the make . Whilst the older, established
gangsters in Goorifellas such as Paulie Cicero have an equally established and

85
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consistent image built around short-sleeved silk shirts over slacks, a character such
as Henry is forever manically tinkering with his style; his clothes are showy, and
get more extreme as he gets more important. The recurrent features of Liotta's
wardrobe are his light wool shirts or cardigans and the narrow, pointed collars of
his evening shirts which, at the height of Henry's powers, are outrageously long.
In Casino Ace is given fifty-two costume changes in all, an extravagant display of
excessive consumption transferred to the level of production. Scorsese refers, for
example, to the elaborate ritual he and costume designer Rita Ryack went through
every morning choosing 'which shirt, then which tie, then which jewellery' down
to the matching watch-faces, even for the opening explosion sequence (Christie
1996: 10). The wealth for wealth's sake aspect of Ace's particular brand of
conspicuous consumption is illustrated by this daily routine being applied to the
selection of outfits that are not markedly different one from the other except in
colour. Virtually every suit Ace wears has the same leitmotif: a single colour or
matching tone that coordinates suit, shirt and tie. In his visual consistency Ace
thus refers back to the older Mafiosi like Paulie Cicero (and in a sense de Niro
in Casino has become a Scorsese elder statesman), and to AI Capone's quirk of
wearing ensembles based on one colour.
The fetishising of the male clothes in Goorifellas and Casino preserves the childish
awe experienced by both Scorsese and Henry when they first see the neighbour-
hood gangsters wearing and parading their affluence. Because the clothes are what
makes a gangster a gangster, it seems appropriate that the demise of both Henry
and Ace is symbolised through costume. Henry emerges from his suburban home
at the end of Goorifellas in a towelling robe; the uniform of a loser, a nobody, a
garment that is not just ordinary, but one that frequently signifies a character who
cannot be bothered to get dressed. Ace's image disintegrates to a similar level
of sartorial banality, as at the end of Casino he winds up wearing a conspicuously
ordinary and large pair of reading glasses. His hysterical, obsessional fixation with
his appearance is, however, used prior to this demise as a metaphor for Ace's
hubristic instability. When, for example, a call comes through to his office to say
that one of the city officials has come to see him, Ace gets up from his desk and is
revealed to be wearing, beneath his classically immaculate shirt and tie, only boxer
shorts, shoes and fine, almost sheer socks. He walks over to his wardrobe to select
the trousers that will match. This moment is a comic reflection on the Mafia's total
absorption with the superficial and ephemeral; it also marks the beginning of Ace's
decline. Although Scorsese's gangster costumes are tastelessly showy rather than
understatedly chic, there is a parallel to be drawn between Ace's downfall and Jef
Costello's in Le Samourai·, in that both are represented through the gradual (at first
insignificant) disrobing of the narcissistic hero, emphasising the vulnerability of the
men through the brief exposure of their bodies. Appearance is all to the wise guys
of Goorifellas and Casino; as one shouts to the cops arresting Paulie, 'Whoever sold

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

you those suits had a wonderful sense of humour'; worse than death is the
anonymity they have to endure if they survive.
Scorsese's focus is on Mafia reality, on tackiness, greed and instant wealth, and
in this he most clearly recalls the Hollywood films of the 1930s. In the last films
to be considered, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Leon, there are stronger visual and
costume links with the self-conscious films of the French tradition. The films
of Tarantino and Besson are also preoccupied with citing and acknowledging the
representation of the fictional gangster over the real. Tarantino's two features as
director have been attacked for being pieces of cinema about cinema. Reservoir
Dogs, for instance, was wearily labelled 'a film about film, about fiction' (Taubin
1992: 4), and 'unmistakably cinematic' (Rich 1992: 4 ), and Tarantino's rather
self-inflating retort to the criticisms of his films as cheating pastiches is 'Great
artists steal, they don't do homages' (Dawson J. 1995: 91). Perhaps there is a point
to reinstating the positiveness of the homage, which, as has been suggested
throughout this discussion, has been the impetus behind much of the gangster
genre since the 1930s. Gangster films are about looks, they are about making the
spectator desire what the gangsters possess (if only, as in the moralistic Hollywood
films of the post-1934 era, to set up materialistic, violent demons just in order to
shoot them down). Tarantino understands this, commenting about costume, 'I've
always said that the mark of any good action movie is that when you get through
seeing it, you want to dress like the character' (Dargis 1994: 17). These are the
dual mechanics of desire and identification that function in the successful gangster
film. As the gangster's own narcissism fused and confused love of the self with love
of the Other, so the spectator's response to his image incorporates recognition
and idealised envy. Tarantino's comment in the same interview about how, for
Jean-Pierre Melville, it was important to give his characters 'a suit of armour', is
echoed visually in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, in which the hit men wear
similar Italianate suits to Jef Costello, but have dispensed with the hats and coats.
As with Melville's protagonists, the disintegration or fragmentation of the care-
fully constructed look marks significant junctures in each character's narrative.
There is, though, an ironic understanding from the start of Tarantino movies that
these suits are covering up for a lack of identity and represent his characters'
dysfunctionalism.
The black suits worn for the heist at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs were
all designed by Betsy Heimann to be similar but slightly different. They are
reminiscent in part of the costumes in several earlier films, such as John Woo's
The Killer, and conform to the early 1990s retro-chic (of French designer Agnes
B., for example) which was heavily influenced by the Italian-cut suits of the
late 1950s and 1960s as worn by Alain Delon in Le Samourai'. The sharp linea
ltaliana, which over those decades dominated men's fashions in Europe and
America, comprised tapered, cuffless trousers and a slim-fitting single-breasted

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jacket which had to be short, so ' even in a sitting position [on a Vespa] it would
not touch the seat' (Chenoune 1993: 244). Although far from overtly sexual, the
lack of pleats and excess material meant that the 'continental look' followed the
contours of the man's body much more closely than previous styles had. The
versions in Reservoir Dogs remain intact symbols of virile, active masculinity until

3. 5 Harvey Keitel as Mr White in Reservoir Doss

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

88
 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

precisely the end of the title sequence, when the 'dogs', having dissected the lyrics
of Madonna's Like A Virnin over breakfast, swagger 'Wild Bunch style' and with 'a
sort of unnatural slowness', as Andrej Sekula, the cameraperson on the film, puts
it (Dawson J. 1995: 62), to their jewellery heist. Tarantino has said, 'You can't
put a guy in a black suit without him looking a little cooler than he already looks'
(Tarantino 1993: 53). Whether or not this is the case, the focus of Reservoir
Dons is the dismantling of this faith in image as armoury - whilst, paradoxically,
retaining the allure that the spectator would like to emulate. From the titles on,
the film charts the crumbling of this coolness, already furtively undermined
by the presence among the suited men of Nice Guy Eddie in his fluorescent shell
suit.
Reservoir Dons is a film about disguise and the ability to sustain a disguise, a
feature that is represented by the persistent use of juxtapositions between charac-
ter and dress, the most blatant example of which is Mr Orange, an undercover
cop who over several scenes is shown laboriously assembling his persona as a
gangster. There are several stages to this construction of a false identity. First Tim
Roth goes through his lines to himself, he then progresses to acting them out from
a makeshift stage to a colleague, before finally recounting his learnt history to the
'dogs' in a bar. Mr Orange's transformation is symbolised through his changes in
costume from a check shirt to a white T-shirt and leather jacket, which is the out-
fit he wears when leaving for the job. That this is a parody of the self-identifying,
self-validating manoeuvres of Melville-esque gangster heroes is illustrated by
Mr Orange, immediately prior to leaving, turning to a reflection of himself in the
mirror and reassuring himself, 'you're super cool'. So Mr Orange learns the codes
of the gangster, and demonstrates the performative value of masculinity itself
which, like the ubiquitous suit, can be put on and taken off. The uniform suits are
an elision mechanism whereby any subtext that might disrupt that image's integrity
remains masked. Reservoir Dons is full of reminders of the fragility of this 'cool'
image and the hopeless dysfunctionality of a group which, superficially, looks
cohesive. There are, for example, the homoerotic implications that fleetingly
surface, first as Mantegna's St Sebastian is glimpsed on Joe's wall just prior to the
boisterous homosocial fight between Mr Blonde and Eddie, and secondly as the
physical tenderness between Mr Orange and Mr White develops, culminating in
a pieta-like pose at the end. The defining contradiction is between the symbolic
signification of the sharp suits (conventionalised masculinity) and the frailty they
expose, as for most of the film they are roughed up and drenched in blood.
Tarantino uses the symbolism of the dark suit to similar effect in Pulp Fiction.
In this second film, however, the assured masculinity embodied at the outset by
Jules and Vincent in their black Agnes B. suits is more gradually and pathetically
eroded, as over the course of the action their studied suaveness is slowly dis-
mantled and finally ridiculed. When talking about the film, Tarantino has referred

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to the tension between getting 'these genre characters in these genre situations'
and then plunging them 'into real-life rules' (Smith, G. 1994: 34). The same
could be said of how Pulp Fiction puts together and then fractures a masculine
ideal. In its focus on the anxieties of traditional cinematic action heroes on which
the male characters are substantially based, Pulp Fiction charts, through its
fragmented narrative structure, a series of struggles to challenge but, some would
argue, to ultimately reassert those archetypes (Fried 1995: 6-7). Although the
issue of proving masculinity is also what drives the representation of subsidiary
characters such as Christopher Walken's war veteran and Butch (Bruce Willis),
the boxer who refuses to take the fall, the fragile composition of the ideal is more
overtly critiqued in the Jules and Vincent sequences.
In the first section, 'Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's wife', the two hired
hit men are in control of their dialogue, their image and the situation. As with
Reservoir Dogs the collapse of the image is signalled by the use of excessive amounts
of blood that, on a prosaic level, simply ruin their outfits. This is elaborated in
part three, 'The Bonnie situation', which begins with two accidents: the 'miracle'
of Jules not being touched by bullets shot at point-blank range, and Vincent killing
the hostage in the back of the car. The desire to preserve their image at all costs
is represented through the symbolic acts of washing themselves and the car's
off-white interior, to regain the wholeness they thought they possessed at the
beginning. After scrubbing down, 'the Wolf' (Harvey Keitel), despite being in a
hurry, indulges in a piece of ritualistic humiliation of Jules and Vincent. He orders
the two blood-drenched gangsters to strip as he, and t.he would-be macho Jimmie,
hose them down. This scene of mockery relegates the sight of debilitated,
depleted masculinity to the level of indulgent spectacle. As was also the case in
Le Samourai', the point at which we are shown the gangster's real body under
the idealised 'suit of armour' is also the point at which the myth is lost. This
realisation is underlined after the hosing down in Pulp Fiction by a cut from black
to Jules and Vincent in bright T-shirts and shorts; a disastrous image that even the
towelling-robed no-hoper Jimmie feels superior to as he mocks, 'you look like
dorks'.
In both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction the image of masculinity is destroyed in
the most spectacularly obvious way possible, negating the view that what we are
really witnessing here (as has been suggested) is paranoid masculinity's flight from
the return of its silent Other. The discrepancy between man and myth is under-
lined in Pulp Fiction's final sequence. After an attempted robbery, Jules and Vincent
leave the cafe they have ended up in. They try to swagger out of the diner as if
nothing had happened, tucking their guns into their waistbands and synchronising
their movements, just as they had done at the beginning; but whereas earlier they
were still dressed in their designer suits, now they are in bright and cheery nerd
colours. Jules and Vincent want only to put their suits on and face the world,

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

instead they find themselves condemned to the perpetual ridicule of the Emperor
in his new clothes. As Tarantino comments, 'What's interesting is how they
(Vincent and Jules) get reconstructed ... their suits get more and more fucked
up until they're stripped off and the two are dressed in the exact antithesis'
(Dargis 1994: 17). The immaculate attire spied only briefly at the beginning of
Tarantino films fulfils a similar function to Lacan's elusive phallus, persuading the
characters to go in search of an ideal that they think they once embodied, but
which was never theirs for the taking.
George Simmel in his chapter on fashion concludes that, 'the peculiarly piquant
and suggestive attraction of fashion lies in the contrast between its extensive,
all-embracing distribution and its rapid and complete disintegration' (Simmel
1904: 322). No sooner is a dominant look established, therefore, (and in film
terms becomes generic), than it crumbles. In Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction the
emphasis is on the transition from integrity to fragmentation. In Luc Besson's Leon,
the wholeness is absent from the start, as the unidentified Other of gangsters past
hangs over its shambolic 'I', a dishevelled French-Italian-American New York hit
man. Peter Middleton begins The Inward Gaze with the question 'What happens
when a man reflects on his gender?', to which he answers, predictably perhaps, that
the 'real man' is a fantasy (Middleton 1992: 3). It could be mooted, therefore, that
men who reflect on themselves necessarily find themselves wanting. Echoing
Lacan's idea of an ego resembling the superimposition of various coats borrowed
from its props department, Middleton also speculates that 'the fantasy of manhood
seems to be created out of a bricolage of fragments from the masculine public
world' (20), thus suggesting (despite the desire to hold onto a fixed notion of
manhood that permeates much of the book) that masculinity is necessarily a
performative act. When discussing sexual difTerence Stephen Frosh asserts,
"'Masculinity" might be a constructed category, but it is one which has been taken
to have content' (Frosh 1994: 90). If one takes the multiple redefinitions of the
screen gangster as examples of a male-dominated genre perpetually deconstructing
ideals of masculinity, then it could be proposed that, by the films positing the very
possibility that construction is content, the act of construction not only reveals
but creates this lack. Leon focuses the issues of performative masculinity, of an
identity constituted only at the moment of performance and construction, within
the specific confines of a cinematic genre.
Leon's look is gangster anti-fashion, although as Simmel, for one, comments,
'the man who consciously pays no heed to fashion accepts its forms just as much
as the dude does' (Simmel 1904: 307). This notion of denial as affirmation can be
transferred to how Leon fits into the gangster genre, as his demode and eccentric
counter-image suggests that he simultaneously acknowledges and discards the
tradition he belongs to. The costumes Leon wears comprise all the correct
components, but are unconventional versions of each of them. In fact, the

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3.6 jean Reno as Leon in Leon

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

conventional gangster image belongs to the corrupt DEA official, Stansfield (Gary
Oldman), and it is he who worries that a bullet fired at him has ruined his beige
suit. Leon has a hat, but it is a woollen skull-cap, not a Fedora; he has braces
(like Vito Corleone, for example) but they are overT-shirts and buttoned vests;
he has pleated trousers, but they are threadbare and short; and he has a coat,
but it is, tramp-like, several sizes too large. Sartorially, therefore, Leon offers a
commentary on the gangster's generic evolution and definition, something which
is also carried through into his character traits and affectations.
Leon is the inverse of the Tarantino films in the way it juxtaposes conventional
reality and ideality. Both Reservoir Doas and Pulp Fiction put the gangster ideal on
display in order to demonstrate its unobtainability, so each man is measured
against an oppressively uniform and masculinised look that, from the outset, is
bound to decompose. As a gangster Leon always looks wrong, so the anachronism
functions in reverse. His outward scruffiness, therefore, (usually taken, as in
Smith's discussion of Clint Eastwood, to symbolise 'butch') jars with his role as
the fit, trained, masculine action hero stereotype when doing his job. He also fore-
fronts, very self-consciously, the notion that men are constructions just as much
as women, by selecting a particularly haphazard and eclectic array of signs, as if
any masculine model will do, just so long as he's male. In one scene we see Leon
open-mouthed at a Gene Kelly roller-skates routine, whilst in another, during
a version of charades, he (very badly) impersonates John Wayne. Leon is the

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 The instabilities of the Franco-American gangster

comic, posturing reflection of the self-taught loner trying to construct himself too
consciously according to archetypes, not knowing which to follow or which
attributes to appropriate.
The performative aspect of this wayward masculinity is clearly expressed in his
relationship with his under-age moll Matilda. Leon, unlike most gangsters who
have preceded him, resembles a child. At the beginning of the film he cannot read,
his money is minded by a boss who gives him instalments of pocket money,
and he seemingly lives off milk. As Leon and Matilda establish their nomadic
relationship, it is Matilda who appears the more adult and street-wise of the two
and who teaches Leon how to read. In return, he reluctantly instructs her in the
art of 'cleaning' (being a hit man/woman), getting her fit and giving her sniping
practice. As the film progresses, Matilda gradually takes on Leon's attributes, so,
for example, when she goes into the DEA building intending to kill Stansfield, she
has acquired a skull-cap and dark glasses similar to his. Although Leon had been
impressed by her ability to hit a jogger in Central Park during shooting practice,
he is also slightly disconcerted. Besson's film, considering Matilda's age, is tinged
with a dubious romanticism, but it also represents the collapse of the gangster's
image and identity. It is more than Leon's image which is emptied here. Through
the transferral of himself and his ideal to Matilda, Leon reveals his essential lack.
Gangsterism, if it can be so quickly learnt by Matilda, is no longer related to
'essence' or 'content' or even to masculinity, because masculinity itself is a
collection of mementoes to be discarded or assumed by whoever chooses to pick
them up. By the time we arrive at Leon, the screen gangster's image comprises a
set or arbitrary but immediately intelligible signs, garments and accessories that
distinguish the gangster and define his identity, but that are no longer a safe haven
for the man's fragile ego.
Like most male-centred genres, the cycle of gangster films is about the
man's acquisition of attributes that prove his masculinity and differentiation from
the feminine. It also problematises this genderisation by making one of the key
signs of the protagonist's success a concern with appearance and self-display. The
complexity of the gangster figure is that much of the time his masculinity is
directly measured by his narcissism: the smarter the clothes, the more dangerous
the man, and the more damaged the clothes, the more vulnerable the man. One
of the intentions of this chapter, therefore, has been to examine narcissism as
a component rather than opponent of masculinity, which is more in keeping
with how style, fashion and spectacle are currently viewed positively in relation to
men. But there is simultaneously a tension here. Just as male fashions reputedly
demonstrate conformity and a dislike of change, so the development of the
gangster genre, with its extreme reflectivity and introspection, has proved not
only adaptable but retrogressive. Melville continued, well into the 1960s, to nod
back to 1940s noirs, Godard re-evaluated American popular cinema and culture,

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Scorsese consistently cites Truffaut as an influence, and Tarantino references

Melville, Godard and several other past film-makers. Throughout the genre's
innovative scavenging, there has lurked the uncomfortable undercurrent that,
perhaps, however conventional, the assumed gangster image cannot offer power
or control or define identity. Clothes only make the illusion of the man.

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 4

THE SCREEN'S FASHIONING OF

BLACKNESS
Shaft, New jack City, Boyz N the Hood,
Waiting to Exhale

Robert Townsend's 1987 film Hollywood Shtiffie, about Hollywood's first black
acting school, is a satire on the roles traditionally available to black actors in white
mainstream cinema. An advertisement for the school runs:

Learn to play TV pimps, movie muggers, street punks. Classes include Jive
Talk 101. Shuffiing 200. Epic Slaves 400. Dial 1-800-555-COON. Don't
try to be cool. Call Hollywood's first black acting school.

Townsend's argument is with the enforced stereotyping of blacks by a white

industry, that if a black actor wants to work, s/he has to be prepared to portray
the heirs of Mammy and Stepin' Fetchit. An additional dilemma is that even many
mainstream black films, despite being made by black film-makers and frequently
funded by black backers, deal in a similar currency of cliches. The critical issue,
from Blaxploitation to Samuel L. Jackson parading in pristine 'pimp gear' through
The Lana Kiss Goodnisht, is stereotyping. A reason for the current revival of interest
in Blaxploitation is perhaps a recognition of the films' irony and kitsch value,
that Shcift, Supeifly or Cleopatra Jones offer knowing reconfigurations of traditional
images of blackness, at least to a postmodern audience familiar with the com-
plexities of quotation and recontextualisation. This discussion of black cinema,
like the accompanying discussions of gangster films and femmes fatales, has as its
focus characters who are defined and read via their clothes, but whereas the
gangster or the femmes fatales exploit and play on notions of gender, stereotypes
and the masquerade, the black characters in black films from Shcift to Waitins To
Exhale enact a more complex, ambiguous tension existing at the juncture between
gender, dress and race.
Three major factors led to the emergence of a mainstream black cinema in
the early 1970s: a substantial drop in American cinema audiences, a drop in the
average age of that audience, of whom, between 1969 and 1971, 74 per cent were
under the age of 30 (Reid 1988: 29), and an increasingly vociferous and militant

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black contingent which, following on from the last decade's civil rights action, was
demanding greater recognition and visibility in mainstream culture for African-
Americans. Hollywood, therefore, needed a formula for cheaply made films that
would make some quick money and could be relied upon to attract a mixed-
race youth market. The wave of black action films which came to be dubbed
'Blaxploitation' (low-budget Hollywood products using black stars and directors)
began with the almost simultaneous release in 1971 of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet
Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Gordon Parks' Shcift. Both films were immensely
(and unexpectedly) successful; Shcift, for example, grossing $12m in its first year
in North America alone, having cost a fraction of that to produce, and thus
saving MGM from bankruptcy (Bogle 1994: 238). These two films established
the prototypes for subsequent black action characters: Sweetback the hustler
brought up in a brothel, John Shaft the cool private detective who averts a
black/Mafia New York gang war. A year after Sweetback and Shcift, Supeifly made
$11m within two months, and 'outgrossed every movie on the market' (Bogle
1994: 239).
Prior to Blaxploitation, the presence of blacks in film had been minimal, and
largely confined to insignificant (usually servile) characters who hung around the
peripheries of white narratives. African-Americans in mainstream cinema were
too often depicted as brutal primitives (Birth if a Nation), dippy servants (Gone
with the Wind, Duel in the Sun) and, if they acquired any prominence at all,
unthreatening, largely asexual bourgeois sophisticates usually played by Sidney
Poitier (To Sir with Love, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner). An interestingly ambivalent
role that conflates many of the racist stereotypes whilst part of an ostensibly
liberal, anti-racist film, is that of Tom in To Kill a Mockin9bird. Tom, who has lost
the use of one arm, exemplifies one racist stereotype (the symbolically castrated,
emasculated servant) whilst finding himself wrongly accused of fulfilling another
(the raper of white women). He is either construed as vulnerable and in need of
help from the articulate, sympathetic white man, or as a bestial outcast. Both
stereotypes repress any sense of Tom's blackness other than how it pertains to the
white characters. He is their hidden Other, whether this is the defendant's
repressed sexuality or the lawyer Atticus' fear of the vengeful oppressed. On the
whole, however, blacks were absented from cinema and television screens, a
denial which bell hooks describes as constructing an 'oppositional gaze':

Watching television was one way to develop critical spectatorship ....

Black looks, as they were constituted in the context of social movements for
racial uplift, were interrogating gazes .... Before racial integration, black
viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context
where looking was also about contestation and confrontation.
(hooks 1992: 117)

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

hooks describes the melodrama Imitation if Life (in which one character, though
born to a black mother, is so pale she can pass as white) as being a crucial juncture
in her development as a critical black spectator of mainstream film. The film's
denial of the daughter's black identity leads hooks to literally stop looking and to
turn away from Hollywood, 'to protest, to reject negation' ( 121 ).
The alternative to turning away, epitomised by Blaxploitation, is to increase
African-American visibility within the mainstream structures already in place.
By the early 1970s the presence of black artists in white cultural contexts was
increasing; Otis Redding at Monterey in 1967 and Sly Stone at Woodstock in
1969 performing to huge, primarily white audiences were no longer isolated
exceptions. Entry into the dominant culture was critical. As Van Peebles has
commented about Sweetback, he elected to make the film for a mass, 'unpoliticised'
black spectatorship because

the film simply couldn't be a didactic discourse which would end up playing
(if I could find a distributor) to an empty theatre except for ten or twenty
aware brothers who would pat me on the back and say 'it tells it like it is'.
(Reid 1988: 26)

Although Van Peebles wanted 'a victorious film. A film where niggers could walk
out standing tall' (26), the argument against the kind of exposure granted by
the Blaxploitation movies has always rested on the assumption that the films,
predominantly produced by whites, were necessarily compromised from the
outset. Both Sweetback and Shaft were directed by African-Americans and used
blacks in other capacities besides acting (on Shaft, for example, the soundtrack is
by Isaac Hayes and the editor is Hugh A. Robertson); but both were also produced
and distributed by whites.
There has been much debate in the black community surrounding
Blaxploitation, much of the negative criticism tending to emphasise the lack of
creative and financial control granted to the films' directors and the representation
of the male protagonists as macho sex machines. The films were quickly deemed
exploitative by black activists, and certain civil rights groups sought to have
Blaxploitation films banned. In his analysis of the films Reid concludes, 'so, they
did not create mythic black heroes. Instead, like doll-makers who painted Barbie's
face brown, they merely created black-skinned replicas of the white heroes of
action films' (32), whilst a more vituperative attack is launched by Tom Brown,
then editor of Black journal, when he labels the Blaxploitation films 'a phenomenon
of self-hate' (Singleton 1988: 20). Conversely, the views among black audiences
was that Blaxploitation films gave them what they wanted, namely 'blacks who
won' (Silk and Silk 1990: 164). There is a particular conflation of signs and
characteristics that render black action films more pleasurable and spectacular to
a black audience than the criticisms imply, a dynamism based on the fusion of

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music, sexuality, success and flashy clothes that signals the arrival of a strong
identifying model for a black audience. Why these films have recently been revived
is that they achieved iconic status, symbolising a significant, transitional moment in
the history of black involvement in popular cinema. As novelist Mike Philips
remembers:

I nearly hadn't gone to see Shcift. Up to that time I tended to avoid

Hollywood movies with black people in them, because- with exceptions ,
such as In the Heat if the Niaht, - the experience was usually irritating or
embarrassing, if not downright offensive. Shcift was different. If my reaction
to it had changed a few years on, at the time, along with most of the black
people I knew, Shcift made me feel good.
(Philips 1996: 25)

Blaxploitation films are distinctive for their extreme fetishisation of clothes,

and the significance of appearance to the heroes' identities. In Shcift, Supeifly
and Cleopatra jones, costumes function as important signifiers that transfer to the
spectacular the success and desirability of the protagonists who wear them . John
Shaft is the most measured of the three, and most overtly aspirational in terms

4.1 Richard Rowntree as Shaft in Shcift

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

98
 The screen's fashioning of blackness

of his appearance. His wardrobe is streamlined and consistent, compnsmg a

selection of brown tweed suits, beige, polo necks and two long leather coats. As
the action progresses, his clothes get increasingly black and cool, until the final
ensemble (in which he saves a kidnap victim and averts a gangland war virtually
single-handed) is a long black leather coat, matching leather trousers and black
polo neck. The image Shaft exudes is one of control, the clothes functioning
metonymically to draw together the disparate facets of his character: his compe-
tence as a private detective, the ease with which he operates in the inner city,
and his sexual irresistibility. Shaft's wardrobe represents his equivocal social
position, simultaneously comfortable in the white-dominated establishment (see,
for instance, his sharp tweed suits) and the black-dominated urban street. It
is, however, significant that John Shaft is also symbolically independent of the
film's oppositional social forces, differentiated from Androzzi whose clothes are
worn and scruffy, and from the black community which falls into three dominant
stereotypes: classic gangsters (felt hat, old-fashioned suits), street-wise hustlers
and informers (large cap and shades as worn by the Antonio Fargas character),
urban terrorists (Afro hair, hippie shirts). Shaft's last look is significantly black,
and an obvious allusion to the all-black chic of the Black Panthers. The change
in dress also coincides with the overt strengthening of Shaft's alliance with the
black sections in the film (the urban terrorists and the kidnap victim) at a time
when the divisions within the narrative (notably the imminent gang war) are along
racial lines. Above all, John Shaft's image was credible to a black audience, the
first realistic portrayal of black masculinity on the sc1·een. As Mike Philips says,
'The funny thing was that I knew dozens of guys who looked and sounded like
him, but I'd never seen a black man who was anything like them up on the screen'
(Philips 1996: 25).
Youngblood Priest in Supeifly is a more exotic and more problematic
Blaxploitation hero. Although as a film Superfly recalls the social commentary
aspect of Shcift (as in the opening high-angle shot of a rough urban street revealing
the desperate trying to hustle a bit of money), Priest is also an excessive 'clothes
horse' whose costumes to an extent precede and define him, thus establishing
a discursive link between clothing and spectator not unlike that discerned in
couture-led films such as Trap Belle Pour Toi!. The clothes in the later black action
movies function independently of character and narrative, and the changes are
frequently unmotivated by either. The extreme example of this prioritisation of
dress style is Cleopatra in Cleopatra jones, whose whole- look alters with every
sequence, and whose wardrobe is made up of a shambolically eclectic variety of
turbans, floaty skirts, fur coats, platform footwear and jewellery. Despite the
serious intent behind Supeif!y (which has largely been overlooked), it shares with
Cleopatra Jones the compulsion to read the characters through the costumes.
Priest's successful pusherman look of long, relaxed hair, wide brimmed hat, flared

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4.2 Tamara Dobson as Cleopatra Jones in Cleopatra jones

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

coat and stacked heels was widely imitated on the street in the early 1970s, and
known simply as 'fly' (Singleton 1988: 20). Priest classically embodies the funk
styles of the early/mid-1970s, a loud, radical reaction to the suavity an icon such
as Poitier embodied, or the attitude that bred Motown Records' 'charm school'
for teaching black singers how to be more white in their dress, choreography and
deportment. These were images that would appease rather than threaten the
white community. The funk look of Blaxploitation and the musicians George
Clinton and Bootsy Collins, on the other hand, is preoccupied with difference not
assimilation. In terms of dress, 'funkiness' came to be expressed by the 'Pimp
Look', an eclectic amalgam of clashing styles most often seen on pimps, hustlers
and other ghetto figures who had got rich by dubious means. Ivan (Jimmy Cliff)
in The Harder They Come is a classic incarnation of the Pimp Look, posing for

100
 The screen's fashioning of blackness

photographs in a garish combination of white cap, leopard-skin shirt open at the

chest, long chain, leather waistcoat and snakeskin shoes. The Pimp Look is
blatantly sexual, tight around the hips and crotch and low cut over the chest; the
funksters are 'dressed to slay' (Wolfe 1977: 184).
Supeifly, like the funk scene, is memorable for its clothes, predominantly the
gaudiness and the detail of Youngblood Priest's hustler costumes: the oversize
white stitching on his black suit, the swishing maxi coat, the pale snap-brim hat.
Unlike Shaft's homogenous look that denotes stability, Priest's wayward wardrobe
interferes with the film's more depressing, less macho message that drugs run
the black ghettos and Priest will probably never escape that environment. The
sheer number of costume changes given to Ron O'Neal in Supeifly, like Robert de
Niro in Casino, are part of a pattern of conspicuous consumption, exemplifying the
attitudes of both his character (the successful cocaine dealer) and the clothes
fetishism that intrudes on the film as a whole. Supeifly is a clothes movie where the
costumes also get in the way of narrative comprehension; as a subsidiary character
walks into frame wearing a striking red 'stingy-brim' (pork-pie) hat, one inevitably
forgets to listen to the dialogue. Like Cleopatra jones after it, Supeifly's fixation
on clothes means that the film regularly contravenes continuity logic by adding

4. 3 Ron O'Neal as Priest in Supe'fiy

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

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accessories or changing outfits altogether mid-sequence. In one particularly

frenetic sequence towards the end of the film (when the use of the same music
track suggests continuous action) Priest leaves his apartment in a beige jacket and
hat, gets out of his car having acquired a long brown suede coat and finally arrives
at his friend Eddie's in a different leather and suede Cavalier-style suit. The clothes
arc thus on show more than the man. Through his costumes, Priest, unlike Shaft,
does not show ofT his social aspirations (for all their glamour, these are recognisably
street clothes) but rather his instant wealth. These arc nouveau riche clothes, the
Harlem equivalent of Ray Liotta's shiny suits and pointed collars in Goor.!fellas.
Priest, like the white gangsters, defies the supposed rule that the strong, virile
male cannot also be eroticised, vain and glamorous; but 1970s funk and black
fashions often undermined that kind of conservatism.
What Kobena Mercer has termed a 'defiant "dandyism"' has historically been
the underpinning feature of black subcultural styles, 'where 'flashy' clothes are
used in the art of impression management to defy the assumption that to be poor
one necessarily has to 'show' it' (Mercer 1994: 120). Ted Polhemus makes a
simple yet useful distinction when commenting, 'There are two basic moves in
streetstyle: Dressing Up and Dressing Down' (Polhemus 1994: 17). Whilst many
white groups express the latter tendency, the majority of black fashions illustrate
the former. The most influential black male street style was probably the 1940s
zoot suit, which combined extrovert glamour with the aggressive assertion of
black identity. The 'zootie' look worn by African-Americans and Mexican
'Pachucos' (later mimicked and modified by the zazous in Paris) comprised a
large, exaggeratedly long jacket, padding to the shoulders and hips, heavily
pleated trousers that tapered sharply to show detailed, often two-tone leather
shoes, a wide-brimmed and perhaps feathered felt hat and long gold chains that
drooped from the belt line to shin level. The fascination of the zoot suit is
summarised by Malcolm X's detailed description of acquiring his first zoot suit:

I was measured, and the young salesman picked off the rack a zoot suit that
was just wild: sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knee and angle-narrowed
down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a long coat that pinched my waist
and flared out below my knees. As a gift, the salesman said, the store would
give men a narrow leather belt with my initial 'L' on it. Then he said I ought
to also buy a hat, and I did- blue, with a feather in the four-inch brim. Then
the store gave me another present: a long, thick-lined, gold-plated chain
that swung down lower than my coat hem.
(Malcolm X 1968: 135)

Malcolm X walked through crowded public places just to turn heads, a habit
eulogised in the opening sequences of Spike Lee's biopic Malcolm X, during which
Malcolm and his partner swagger ostentatiously through crowded Boston streets

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

in bright zoot suits, feathered hats and gold accessories, looking to be looked at.
Wearing a zoot suit was not just about style, as Lee's portrayal implies, but about
increasing visibility. The zoot suit took on political connotations during the 1940s
by deliberately violating wartime rationing laws which, in 1942, advocated a 26
per cent cut-back in the use of cloth for a man's suit, effectively outlawing the
manufacture of anything as extravagant as the zoot suit. As the number of 'zooties'
did not decline, however, the wearing of the zoot suit came to be regarded as
unpatriotic, leading to the 1943 riots across America between zooties and the
army and police. Like many black street styles since, the suit became, as Stuart
Cosgrove argues, 'an emblem of ethnicity and a way of negotiating an identity.
The zoot suit was a refusal: a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the
manners of subservience' (Cosgrove 1989: 4). As Elizabeth Wilson comments:

In the early days of the Harlem expansion, ghetto fashions seem to have
expressed the desire of a particularly oppressed urban multitude for some
joy and glamour in their lives, and counter-cultural dressing is usually most
distinctive when it expressed hedonism and rebellion simultaneously.
(Wilson 1985: 200)

Black identity has always been more emphatically expressed through clothes and
appearance than white identity has, and the zoot suit was an aggressive assertion
of both difference and sexuality. Blaxploitation costumes, likewise exaggerated
and parodic, could also be viewed as complex signifiers, symptomatic of a
desire to make a political statement through the extreme visibility of a physical,
confident, narcissistic look. The black 'macho goddesses' (Bogle 1994: 251)
emerged as a stereotype in the 1970s with Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier's
Blaxploitation roles, later echoed and mimicked by Grace Jones. Dobson in
Cleopatra Jones constructs an image of blackness as exotic, non-specific 'otherness'
which flits between African, Middle Eastern, Indian and hippie influences, appar-
ently indiscriminately. Cleopatra is introduced wearing a multi-headed fur coat,
and an assortment of bright turbans, a feathered hat, long tunics, chains and high
heels; her extreme appearance is incoherent and excessive, and hardly suited to
her role as government agent. Yet the disparity adds to the exoticism. Cleopatra's
obsessive costume changes can (like those in Supeifly) be viewed as fissures which
(consciously or not) undermine the narrative by preventing identification with
and absorption into the action. Gone, with Cleopatra Jones, is any semblance
of the realism or social awareness of Shcift or even sporadically Supeifly, and as a
result her clothes exist as pure spectacle beyond the boundaries of the dominant
narrative trajectory. This potentially liberating intrusion which interferes with
a traditional identification between spectator and female image is, though,
compromised during the final chase sequences, as Cleopatra detaches her skirt
to facilitate her karate kicks. Moments such as this problematically fetishise the

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representation of female power (Tasker 199 3: 21), and reduce the woman to the
level of gratuitous spectacle.
The films' commodification of blackness is a consistent feature of
Blaxploitation. As John Shaft, Youngblood Priest and Cleopatra emphasise
sexuality and aggression so, the detractors argue, they do not articulate new
models but instead perpetuate old, demeaning stereotypes. A reassessment of
these limiting opinions is dependent largely on how the protagonist's appearance
is to be read in relation to such historical stereotypes. As Tasker comments whilst
grappling with the unresolved ambiguities of black action movies, 'As with the
production of the action heroine as phallic woman, the construction of the black
action hero as a stud both acknowledges, makes visible, and also retains elements
of that history of representations' (Tasker 199 3: 38-9). Blaxploitation films could,
therefore, be interpreted as arguing against the prescriptive white mythologisation
of the black hero/heroine as a figure defined by his/her sexuality and corporeality
through ironic distanciation. Underlying Tasker's analysis is a probing into the
reasons why initial critical reactions to black action movies were so vehement.
Arguing for a positive reconsideration, Tasker concludes, 'The black action films
may well prove to be so unsettling precisely because they seem to be so acutely
aware of the issues of representation that are at stake in their construction of the
black hero' (Tasker 1993: 39). An interpretation which allows for knowingness as
opposed to naivete on the part of those involved in Blaxploitation films goes some
way towards explaining the continued references to the genre (such as Samuel
L. Jackson's jherri-curl wig and sideburns in Pulp Fiction and his immaculate
pimp gear in The Lana Kiss Goodniaht) and the current re-releases of the original
films.
The next resurgence of black cinema came in the late 1980s, the catalyst for
which was Spike Lee's hugely influential first feature, She's Gatta Have ft. This new
wave of films was more realistic, analytical and politically self-critical than the
Blaxploitation movies had been, less celebratory of black machismo and more
aware of the tensions within the communities. A 1990s film that clearly recalls
the style emphasis of Blaxploitation is Mario Van Peebles' New jack Ci9'. The
stylisation of the costume and production designs for New jack Ci9' consciously
goes against the gritty realism of contemporaneous 'Home-Boy' films such as Boyz
N the Hood or Straiaht Out cif Brooklyn. New jack Ci9' blends realism with mythic
exaggeration and symbolism. The crack baron Nino Brown, for instance, as he
acquires more power and gets more ruthless, wears an increasingly caricatured set
of clothes. The action takes place in 'The City', a representative location that
strongly resembles New York and its pattern of cocaine consumption in the 1980s,
and spans the years 1986 to 1989 (a period of maximum expansion in the real
North American crack trade). In these three years Nino Brown, in a cynical
reworking of the American dream, goes from being a standard successful dealer

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

to commandeering an entire apartment block (The Carter Building) which

becomes his hyper-efficient mass-production crack factory decked out in chrome
and plastic. The Carter, with its elaborate security system, production line,
dispatch chute and smoking room, is a department store version of the tightly run
'?ficina Terry Williams describes in The Cocaine Kids, and like 'Ja '?ficina', The
Carter mimics the structures of legitimate business. By the late 1980s, Williams
notes, around 80 per cent of New York's cocaine users are buying rocks not
powder, and that, with lower prices, faster service and better quality, cocaine
distribution 'increasingly resembled a fast food chain' (Williams 1990: 52),
leading to several large, run-down properties being taken over by dealers to cope
with increased demand.
Nino, like The Carter, is both plausible and mythic, a duality illustrated by the
parodic hyperbole of his street-influenced clothes. Nino embodies the 'stereo-
typical chain-wearing, elaborately coiffured, sex and violence crazed black drug
dealer' (Merelman 1995: 108), but not in the most stereotypical way, as his
costumes juxtapose a variety of black and white reference points which, visually,
transport him out of the narrow confines of the 1980s cocaine scene. Though
sartorially confusing, Nino's look remains symbolically coherent. The most
expected design touchstones for Nino's costumes are the B-boy/hip-hop styles
of the mid to late 1980s; his 'Dukie Ropes' and medallions, though, are bigger
and gaudier than anyone else's, and his earrings and rings heavier. But, as with
the Blaxploitation heroes his styles recall, Nino's clothes possess an additional
imaginative eclecticism. Other specifically black fashions are alluded to, such as
the urban terrorist chic of the Panthers' all-black uniform, scarf and beret and
the ubiquitous tight polo neck of the Blaxploitation era. The image is then
complicated by a number of symbolic references to other fashions and styles.
Nino's gold braid and buttons recall the traditional styles of military uniforms
(and, ironically, those of the Salvation Army), as do the high collars and flat-
fronted shirts he wears throughout the latter part of the film. Conversely, his
fedoras are a clear citation of the Hollywood gangster style of the 1930s, an old
fashioned affectation that is consistent with New Jack City's persistent references
to the grandiose romanticism of Mafia movies such as The Goc!father: the emphasis
on the crime 'family', the obsessional loyalty and the violent betrayal. Within
Nino's look there are also more idiosyncratic citations, such as the range of
side-buttoned shirts which echo John Wayne's ubiquitous Cavalry shirts.
If one is seeking an overall influence on Nino's costumes, the designer whose
work they most readily resemble is the Parisian couturier Coco Chanel, however
inappropriate this seems to the narrative context of New jack City. The features that
echo Chane! are the clean silhouettes, the use of single bold colours and the
presence of excessive gold accessories. Chane!, in creating her revolutionary
'classic chic', espoused a definitive ethos that was entirely compatible with black

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4 .4 New jack City

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

street fashion's notion of 'dressing up' and of using clothes as a means of displaying
identity. Chanel's perspective on the relationship her fashions had with street styles
was very different from that found in the later work of some of the 'street cred'
designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier and Gianni Versace, who sought inspiration
from styles evolving beyond the restrictive confines of haute couture and the upper
classes. Perhaps because she came from a country which, like Italy, the other
important centre of European haute couture, lacks an extensive street style tradi-
tion, Chane! preserved a distance between her styles and the street, commenting
once, 'I like fashion to go down into the street, but I can't accept that it should
originate there' (Mackrell 1992: 73).
Chanel's relevance to much black fashion stems both from her actual styles (in
particular her costume jewellery) and her prioritisation of clothes for the street
and work over clothes for the drawing room . From 1924 when she opened her
accessories workshop and launched her 'fake jewellery that looks real' range,
costume jewellery became an integral part of Chanel's 'classic chic'. Chanel's
square-cut box suits (which were sold, in barely altered form, from the 1950s
onwards) and her use of ostentatious fake jewellery became her most recognisable
trademarks. Her use of fake gold and gems is a feature strongly echoed by the
black hip-hop styles of the 1980s/ 1990s, most notably her chunky gold-look
chains which were used as belts or handbag straps, the matching buckles and
buttons which adorned her tweed suits and patent shoes, and the huge Byzantine

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

crosses studded with brightly coloured glass. Chanel created a new chic out of
what had previously been discarded by couturiers for being fake and cheap. This
glamorisation of the ordinary proved, in fashion terms, to be a radical innovation,
prompting Christian Dior (whose excessively feminine styles Chanel loathed) to
remark, 'with a black sweater and ten rows of pearls she revolutionised the world
of fashion' (Mackrell 1992: 33). Putting on fake finery for work, and thus
collapsing the boundaries between leisure and functional wear, is precisely what
characterises the opulence displayed by the 'classic black chic' in New Jack City.
The exaggeratedness of Chanel's accessories (accentuated the more by being
contrasted with the understatedness of her actual garments) is a parody of the
inherent exclusivity of couture. In a similar vein Nino's costumes are an ironic
synthesis and self-conscious allusion to the ways in which blacks have traditionally
been equated with excess.
The dominant leitmotifs of both Nino's costumes and Chanel's designs raise
questions about the construction of a subcultural style. Both denote, in different
ways, an oppositional attitude to a culture or structure which has been established
as normative; in Chanel's case the expensiveness and glamour of haute couture,
in Nino's whiteness. As with zoot suits and Blaxploitation clothes, Nino's flam-
boyance is recognisably black. The use of bold colours, generous tailoring
and expressive accessories (recalling the zoot suit) construct and define his racial
identity rather than merely reflect it. Black dress has traditionally become defined
as symbolic of opposition because it offers a visual challenge to the dominant
white codes of dress and openly defies, through its studied opulence, the social
position a racist society has allocated its black community. In this sense the
complexities of black street clothes signal a social fissure and a desire to affirm
and rearticulate racial identity. What is most interesting about Nino's appearance
is the ostensibly arbitrary appropriation of fashions and designs from elsewhere,
and their subsequent recontextualisation within a new, cohesive symbolic frame-
work. In Subculture and the MeaninB rf Style Dick Hebdige refers to the manner in
which subcultures articulate and define their difference and Otherness through
the recycling of objects (such as the punk's safety pin) which can, when newly
appropriated, 'take on a symbolic dimension' they previously lacked (Hebdige
1979: 2). In this way the 'stolen' subcultural sign is 'open to a double inflection:
to "illegitimate" as well as "legitimate" uses' and is 'made to carry "secret" mean-
ings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which
guarantees their continued subordination' (18). Thus the reappropriation of the
standard insignia of socially dominant groups can be divested of their original
meaning by being placed within a different, unfamiliar context. There is, however,
a coherence inherent in this selection procedure and a cogency about many of
the black signs which complicates Hebdige's belief in the arbitrariness of the
objects chosen.

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A quintessential example of the fetishisation of the ostensibly insignificant

object occurs in Spike Lee's Do the Riaht Thina when one of Buggin' Out's Air
Jordan Nike trainers is soiled when a white neighbour accidentally runs over it
with his bicycle. At over $80 a pair, these Nikes are not purely arbitrary signs
randomly appropriated, but are status symbols because of their economic value.
The significance of this confrontation is established in advance by Buggin' Out
being the most overtly political figure in Do the Riaht Thina, who tries, for
example, to effect a boycott of 'Sal's Famous' Pizzeria over an argument about the
Pizzeria's exclusively Italian-American 'Hall of Fame' photographs. Following the
chaos theory that imbues much of the film (that a seemingly insignificant action
can precipitate a major confrontation), the dirtying of the pristine trainers proves
the catalyst for an argument with the yuppie about white attitudes and ownership
of brownstones in a black neighbourhood like Bed-Stuy. At the centre of this
argument is an overdetermined object (the Nike) which becomes loaded with a
signification it initially did not possess, a discrepancy which is in turn underlined
by the discrepancy between the alternative attitudes to it expressed by Buggin'
Out and the neighbour. By locating the Nike within a different context, Buggin'
Out constitutes a new, exclusive black signifier. Later in the film, as if consoli-
dating his integrity and victory (over a character we never see again and who is,
significantly, the scruffiest individual on the block), Buggin' Out's Air Jordans
are shot in extreme, reverential close-up as he repairs the damage with some
whitener.
Do the Riaht ThinB reduces several of the racial identities to a series of such
overdetermined objects or garments, the most personal being Mookie's baseball
shirt which had belonged to Jackie Robinson (the first black Major Leaguer) and
had been given to Lee by a friend. More stereotypical are the cartoon Italians (Sal
and his two sons) who run the Pizzeria, straightjacketed into the tired, macho
cliche of white vests and medallions. Costumes are similarly used as simplifying
signifiers where the black characters are concerned, for example in the portrayal
of the trio of older African-American 'corner men' who sit all day on the
sidewalk in their white caps, Panamas, tight shirts and trousers, the epitome of
the old racist image of the work-shy Negro. Lee is adopting a very old-fashioned
form of cinematic typage in this film, symbolising a character through a single
gesture, garment or accessory; a reductive technique that loses the celebration
of eclecticism found in either Blaxploitation movies or New jack Ci0'. Thus Radio
Raheem's political anger is conveyed via his oversized boogie box blasting
out Public Enemy, his (brass) 'Love' and 'Hate' knuckle rings and his sharply
cut flat-top; whilst the bumbling, simple Smiley, clutching his photographs of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and wearing smart button-down shirts and
peg tops, signifies a gross oversimplification of the choice facing African-
Americans in the 1960s.

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Indeed, very few of the objects appropriated by recent black subcultures

are arbitrary. Although the stealing of Volkswagen insignia might be construed as
such, the stealing of Mercedes signs cannot, because again the prohibitive price of
the car it is attached to is a significant factor in its appeal. Similarly the fetishisa-
tion of the designer label within black street styles (the progression, for example,
from Adidas to Vuitton and Gucci) is not the result of random selection, but a
coherent socio-political statement which is proof that street kids can afford luxury
items. It is also significant that the hip-hop styles of the 1980s caricatured func-
tionalist clothing (the crotch on jeans hung near the knee, sports jackets drooped
off shoulders, and trainers left unlaced); they were ironic, subversive gestures that
implicitly criticised the styles they were citing. As the argument returns to the
designer, it now appears that films such as Do the Right Thing and New jack City
pose a further problem with regard to the construction of a black subcultural
style. Hebdige's theorisation of subcultures centres on difference and the sign-
posting of opposition to the dominant, normative culture. As Hebdige articulates
it, the process put in motion by the evolution of a subculture 'begins with a crime
against the natural order' and ends with the formation of a recognisable style that
is 'a gesture of defiance or contempt [and] signals a Refusal' (Hebdige 1979: 3).
But what occurs when this 'Refusal' becomes assimilated, through exposure in the
mainstream media or commercialisation, into the normative culture? Hebdige
makes reference to Stuart Hall's argument that the resistant otherness of a
subculture is perpetually being returned to the 'dominant framework of meaning'
by being mass-produced and commercialised. This has occurred at a very obvious
level with the reappropriation (and thus sanitisation) of black, music-based
subcultures of the 1980s and 1990s, as white adolescents (as demonstrated by
Kids) affect and reclaim the styles of their black counterparts (baggy jeans, unlaced
trainers, baseball caps). This movement is the inverse of Nino's adoption of a style
which refers (however ironically or unconsciously) to the exclusivity of haute
couture, but is nevertheless part of the same cycle of homogenisation. Nino's look
is the correlative of his capitalist aspirations, and he is at least partly motivated
by a desire to be understood and found symbolically compatible with those he
emulates. What gives the representation of Nino a dynamic ambivalence is that
the continuous struggle between assimilation and segregation is enacted through
the eclecticism of his appearance. A subcultural style, therefore, can be both
confrontational and conventional.
The pursuit of fashionability has, primarily by those who despise it, been
characterised as a repetitive tussle between exclusion and inclusion. The guiding
paradox of many black street styles is that, whilst their distinctiveness proclaims
the wearers' difference from the normative, white hegemonic model, the effec-
tiveness of such looks is dependent on being instantly recognised as a member
of a group, gang or subculture by those both in and outside it. One of the more

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significant aspects of how black street styles particularly embody the duality of
radicalism and conservatism is through their interaction with more mainstream
culture. In the early 1900s George Simmel offers an explanation for the evolution
of fashion, later referred to as the 'trickle down' theory, which perceives trends to
be started by the rich, upper classes and copied by those on the street. Once the
styles are being copied and have thus become passe, however, the style innovators
progress to different fashions which, in turn, become appropriated by the less
wealthy in an attempt to remain a!a mode (Simmel 1904: 297-9). 1 The cycle is thus
perpetuated over and over. Simmel's understanding of fashion as a general psycho-
logical tendency towards imitation is appropriate to the fluctuating interaction
between white and black fashions, where the imitation increasingly goes both ways,
as current haute couture is influenced by street styles, and not just vice versa. The
significance for this argument of the social tendencies outlined by Simmel lies in
the realisation that, contrary to expectation, style (and even a subcultural style)
is necessarily preoccupied with sameness and homogeneity as much as it is with
segregation and difference.
The film which most clearly exemplifies this conflict between integration
and segregation, and the concomitant expressions of these differing attitudes via
dress, is John Singleton's Bo/z N the Hood. This is an excessively schematic 'home-
boy' movie narrativising the difference/sameness duality as options facing the
black male kids in South Central Los Angeles. It is both more hopeful and more
problematic than its contemporaries Straiaht Out if Brooklyn and Menace 11 Society.
Bo/z is a 'rite of passage' film, charting the maturity and development ofTre from
his childhood, when his mother (Reva) sends him to live with his father (Furious),
through to his adolescence. The costumes, though realistic, have a representative
function, symbolising the fundamental choice facing the adolescent Tre between
the paths of 'good' and 'bad' manhood, represented by his father (Furious) and his
best friend (Doughboy). Although the differences between these two contrasting
figures are clearly delineated, the film also indicates how subcultural signs, like
clothes, can be misinterpreted. A third of a way through the film there is a party
to welcome Doughboy home after his most recent stint in detention, a sequence
which crystallises the dilemmas facing Tre and the signifying of those dilemmas
through costume. Tre is dressed in an expensive ensemble of black peg tops and
a black and orange shirt, to which the classically attired home-boy Doughboy
responds ambivalently, fir~t taunting Tre for being 'GQ smooth', and then
exclaiming, 'you look like you been selling rocks'.
The cliche is that in urban black communities (and in films that take place in
them) there is an inevitable correlation between crime and affiuence, so smartness
on the streets of late 1980s LA is instantly equated with crack dealing. Clean-cut
Tre laughs Doughboy's insinuation off, but the brief exchange succinctly identifies
a problematic area in terms of black clothes, identity and self-identification. The

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness
sartorial links Tre is striving to make are with his respectable, working, articulate
father Furious, who, rather than signifying a 'hood affinity, represents a conformity
which is less threatening to the white-dominated community beyond. Flash street
styles are also (once again) representative of socio-economic aspiration and desire;
to look and be as rich as white kids, and gradually to become indistinguishable from
them. As Mike Davis comments:

But the Crips and Bloods - decked out in Gucci T-shirts and expensive
Nike airshoes, ogling rock dealers driving by in BMWs- are also authentic
creatures of the age of Reagan. Their world view, above all, is formed of an
acute awareness of what is going down on the Westside, where gilded youth
practice the insolent indifference and avarice that are also forms of street
violence.
(Davis, M. 1990: 31 5)

The signs, however, are not always clear. As is the case with uniforms, culturally
symbolic clothes usually collapse the difference between identity (how the wearer
conceives of his/her clothes) and identification (how society understands them).
This uniformity is particularly prevalent in inner-city gang and drug cultures, as
exemplified by the colour-coded differentiation of the 'Bloods' and the 'Crips' in
Dennis Hopper's Colors, which is set in a similar South Central location. Terry
Williams describes how the members of the drug ring followed in The Cocaine Kids
all wear the 'obligatory' gold ropes and half-laced sneakers which signify their
membership of a particular gang (Williams 1990: 56). Remaining recognisable is
as mandatory for the gangs and drug rings as looking cool and well dressed; it is
a declaration of group affiliation. Reading identity into a black male's outward
appearance can also lead to dangerous social stereotyping, as occurred during
the Operation Hammer raids carried out by the LAPD in the late 1980s around
South Central. Their Chief of Police, Daryl Gates, gave the officers involved in
the anti-gang manoeuvres license to arrest anyone whose clothes and hand signals
suggested that they might be gang members; so red shoe laces and giving high-
fives became tantamount to a proof of guilt (Davis, M. 1990: 272-3).
These exaggerated and exhibitionistic 1980s/ 1990s hip-hop styles are worn
in the film by Doughboy (lee Cube) and the other adolescents except Tre. The
characters mimic the real fetishisation and display of designer labels, the upmarket
sportswear and the jewellery, first made into a universally recognised street
uniform after the success of Run DMC's 1986 hit 'My Adidas'. This iconography
then becomes the basis for conventional rap images of aggressive, posturing
masculinity, exemplified by the controversial video for Ice T's OG - Original
Gangster. For all its verisimilitude, Boyz N the Hood has also been widely interpreted
as a parable of an adolescent's progression to manhood (Diawara 1993, Dyson
1993). The exclusive, confrontational styles worn by the kids are counterbalanced

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4.5 Ice Cube as Doughboy in Boyz N the Hood

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

by Tre's overtly symbolic father Furious, who stands for the alternative option to a
rap life on the street. At a time when there are more single mothers in the African-
American community than any other in North America, the issue of masculinity,
and in particular the progression from adolescence to manhood, has been
addressed and readdressed from several perspectives. One writer on the current
state of African-American masculinity makes a comment pertinent to Boyz N the
Hood when saying, 'The socialisation of black males without conscious and caring
black men around is, more often than not, replaced with gangs or other negative
groups' (Madhubuti 1990: 73) . The overriding source of tension in 1980s urban
black households is identified as the men's sense of inadequacy when confronted
with the effects of a racism which prevents them from carrying out 'their expected
traditional sex roles' (Spencer 1995: 34). The problems and questions that face
all adolescent men in America, Spencer and others argue, are exacerbated in the
specific case of African-Americans, who find it harder to form a solid self-identity
because the role models they should have (fathers or significant others) are often
absent. The defining relationship in black homes is reputed to be between a domi-
nant woman and an emasculated man, a discrepancy that is 'of major importance in
fostering an exaggerated masculine style' (Spencer 1995: 37). Adopting similarly
exonerating language, Haki Madhubuti talks of African-Americans who have been
'destroyed' and ' neutralised' in their homes and communities, and so 'have ceased
to have a major influence on the development of their children' (Madhubuti 1990:

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

72). In this context of worrying about growing up to be good men, there is a tacit
condoning of the need for male aggression to be somehow displayed, and an over-
whelming belief (as visualised in Boyz N the Hood) that single mothers have 'serious
difficulty raising sons' (Madhubuti 1990: 7 3).
This background explains the emphasis on the importance of available role
models in films such as Boyz N the Hood, juice and Strai9ht Out if Brooklyn, whether
the model is Dennis' violent, alcoholic, downtrodden father in Brooklyn, or the
articulate Furious in Boyz. The choices in Boyz N the Hood are stark and the only
governing factors male: either emulate the staid Furious or slide into the red polo
necks and 'Dukie Ropes' of the gang members who kill Ricky. Unlike Doughboy's

4.6 Cuba Gooding Jnr (Tre) and Larry Fishburne (Furious) in Boyz N the Hood
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and D esigns

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crowd, Furious embodies, in his chinos, check shirts, knitted wool tops and
glasses, the utopian vision of the politicised but moderate black adult male.
Although he is an active member of the depressed South Central community,
Furious's repertoire of sartorial signifiers make him into a latter-day Sidney
Poitier, a positive black figure who both appeases whites and pleases blacks and
wears the ubiquitous style of the colourless middle classes. Furious, like his
clothes, is reasonable and moderate; his look is safe rather than oppositional.
The relationship, however, between black styles and the clothes of the white
American middle classes is not straightforward, for instance the so-called Preppie
look allegedly originated in Harlem (Lurie 1981: 99). What is being offered as a
'good' role model to the adolescent males in Boyz N the Hood is a universal,
unthreatening image all sectors of the audience would be able to identify with.
Ricky, Tre's friend from across the street who wants to go to college on a foot-
ball scholarship, dresses much like Furious in shirt, tie and dark peg tops when
trying to impress the university representative. This is the image of respectability.
Furious remains the film's mouthpiece for black community consciousness, who
gives Tre and Ricky a lecture about keeping the neighbourhood black and resisting
white 'gentrification', but his costumes counter-producti vely indicate that in
order to achieve stability or respectability the black male must renounce such
'bad' demonstrations of racially specific excess and flamboyance as the hip-hop/
rap looks. Furious's look and demeanour tacitly affirms that such styles are
inevitably allied to violence. In Chapter 2 of this book, J. C. Fliigel's notion of the
'Great Masculine Renunciation' is discussed in relation to the anti-exhibitionis tic
uniformity of men's fashions from the 1850s onwards (Fliigel1930: 110-19). The
motivation for the move away from spectacular and individualistic clothes as
idenitified by Fliigel was the growth in middle-class jobs and hence the increase in
male professional employment; a development which led to clothes becoming
recognisably work-related and functional. Furious, who works as a real-estate
agent (for which he wears a mundane suit and tie), is, significantly, the only major
male character in Boyz N the Hood to have a steady job. As he represents the 'good'
role model and the street kids the 'bad', the blandness of Furious's look is, as
Fliigel suggests, symbolic of sophistication and a progression away from that baser
model.
Correlatives of this transition away from self-display are seen by Fliigel to be
the man's renunciation of the passive croticised position and the displacement
of his eroticism onto the increasingly fetishised female body. The underlying
suggestion that (heterosexual) men are not narcissistic was challenged at length in
the previous chapter discussing American gangsters. What is of more concern
here is the idea that men are no longer overtly sexual in their dress and social
appearance, and that they perceive such a 'loss' to be a necessary precondition of
their successful ascent into adulthood. There is an interesting comparison to be

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

made between Furious in Boyz N the Hood and Nino in New Jack City on this issue.
Furious not only recalls Poitier's functional, suave and unspectacular dress style,
he also echoes Poitier's seriousness and lack of overt eroticism. Despite a series
of discussions about sex in which he issues Tre with fatherly advice ('any fool with
a dick can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children'), part of
Furious's mature persona is that he, not unlike the Poitier role model, has been
desexualised. To be taken seriously, does a black man have to renounce sex?
Certainly Tre implies this by holding back on sleeping with his girlfriend (until
their college places and 'escape routes' from South Central are assured), whilst
his fellow teenagers are getting their partners pregnant.
Nino, on the other hand, recalls the sexualised, spectacular black male body of
the Blaxploitation films. He, like Shaft or Priest, is a 'sex machine' (to quote from
the title track of Shcift and James Brown's 1970 funk hit, 'Sex Machine') who
alternates between business and sex with a racial cross-section of women. An
over-attention to Nino's physique, his 'absolutely corrupt male body' (Fuchs
1993: 207), runs through New Jack City, and in particular the fetishisation of
his well-developed chest. In one scene with his partner Gee Money and their
girlfriends, Nino is wearing an electric blue silk suit and gold chain, but with
no shirt - the black trimming on the jacket and the bright rope around his neck
thus drawing attention to his muscular torso. Nino 's chest is similarly focused on
in a self-conscious, fetishistic way later in the film when, playing basketball with
members of his gang, it glistens with sweat (whereas the other bare chests do not).

4.7 Wesley Snipes as Nino Brown in New jack City

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

115
 Gender

Nino is a fantasy figure, reduced, at moments like this, to the purely spectacular.
It is also apparent that it is the women who are attracted to and pursue Nino,
implying that his desirability (like that of the Blaxploitation prototypes) is more
important than his own desires. The black buck stereotype (the black man in
popular iconography becomes over-identified with his sexuality and genitalia) is
obviously hugely problematic. This reduction and objectification of the black male
(as in Robert Mapplethorpe's Man in a Polyester Suit) has been the most insistent
criticism of 1970s Blaxploitation characters, who are frequently judged to be a
'string of witless, brutal black heroes' who kill white villains and satisfy their 'sex-
ually unsatisfied white women' (Cripps 1978: 130). Nino is dangerous because he
is attractive. He also conforms to the phobic, neurotic image of the black man
who is defined by his sexuality, who is his penis. The sexual commodification
of the black hero has, paradoxically, become a means of sustaining his difference
and independence; Nino Brown, after all, would not find himself invited into the
bourgeois white drawing rooms of Six Degrees if Separation, successfully passing
as Sidney Poitier's son and smoothly integrating himself into white society.
Conversely, Furious has constructed an identity around the visual disappearance
of Otherness and the repression of overt, aggressive sexuality. In this he has made
himself accessible and unthreatening to a multiracial audience.
Access to the dominant culture and the middle class has been a recurring and
important feature of black cinema, as has the necessary desire to increase the
visibility of blacks on the screen. These issue are interestingly complicated in the
recent adaptation of Terry MacMillan's Waiting to Exhale, a narrative centred on
the interconnecting lives of four significantly differentiated women (Savannah,
Bernadine, Gloria and Robin). Waitin9 to Exhale is a well-intentioned 'feel good'
movie which focuses on the importance of all-female friendship regarding
relationships with a succession of men who are represented crudely as either drop-
outs, sexual inadequates or conformist Poitier clones. The strength of the film is
that it unquestioningly positions the black, affiuent, successful woman as the norm
against which the other characters are to be compared and judged. Blackness is no
longer deviant, exotic and Other: this is an unchallenging, mainstream, middle-
class film. In fact Waitin9 to Exhale radically reverses the traditional pattern of racial
identification that conditions the black spectator to view most Hollywood films
with bell hooks' critical, oppositional gaze. Here it is the white spectator who,
finding her/himself marginalised on the level of representation, is compelled to
access the narrative through identifying with the dominant black characters. This
is a simple inversion, but one that radically challenges the traditional imaging of
normativity as (in terms of race) white.
The costumes and appearance of the four protagonists issue a challenge to the
preconceptions of the white audience expecting Otherness and at least an implicit
sense of their own stable identity. The argument, being undertaken at the level of

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

4.8 Waiting to Exhale

Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive

design, is with the assumption (held by blacks as well as whites) that the less
contrived a black individual's style, the more in touch with her /his racial
identity s/he is. Kobena Mercer, for example, (with reference to Michael Jackson)
questions the suggestion that 'hairstyles which avoid artifice and look natural, such
as the Afro or Dreadlocks, are the more authentically black hairstyles and thus
more ideologically right-on' (Mercer 1994: 98- 9) . A conventionalised example
would be Nino Brown in New jack City, whose excessively sculpted hair reflects
his 'bad' character. As if tempting its audience to think along these lines, Waiting
to Exhale fetishises hairstyles and the endless potential of 'relaxing', (largely via
Gloria who works in a hair salon), and only has one overtly symbolic haircut,
which is Bernadine's radical crop after her husband leaves her. None of the women
look 'natural', instead, they suggest serious investment in hair creativity, manu-
facturing a range of curls, flicks and waves. Mercer continues his chapter on hair
by requesting the depsychologisation of hair-straightening, asking us instead
to 'recognise hairstyling itself for what it is, a specifically cultural activity and
practice' (99). Hair the raw material has no innate significance, it becomes
invested with 'meaning and value' by such cultural practices ( 10 l). Mercer's
argument asks for the relaxation of Hebdige's prescriptiveness when interpreting
oppositional looks as necessarily reflective of identity, suggesting instead that the
variety of black hair shapes and styles 'may be seen as both individual expressions
of the self and as embodiments of society's norms, conventions and expectations'

117
 Gender

(I 00). Whereas the politicised Malcolm X condemned his conk and zoot suit
years, Mercer argues that now, with the range of cremes, gels, dyes on the
market, experimentation with hair-straightenin g does not mean the same as it
did before the era of the Afro and Dreadlocks (124); that the conk and other
forms of 'syncretic practices of black stylisation ... recognise themselves self-
consciously as products of a New World culture; that is, they incorporate an
awareness of the contradictory conditions of interculturation' ( 121).
Waiting to Exhale likewise confronts the notion that a strong black identity is
only symbolised through clothing which conventionally emphasises difference.
With few exceptions, the four protagonists of Waiting to Exhale wear safe, anti-
exhibitionistic, generically middle-class clothes that are not ostensible statements
of a specifically black identity. Gloria, an older single mother, is the only character
who expresses a consistent racial identity through the afrocentricity of her clothes
(loud prints, bright colours); the other women by and large dress in unexceptional
but expensive business wear, although Robin's white dress knotted at the waist to
reveal her midriff is a notable exception. Style and identity, the film implies, is
about appropriating diverse elements from anywhere and giving them a new, fluid,
relaxed intonation; it is not confined to the construction of a stable, identifiable
image. The costumes further suggest, along with the emphasis of the narrative
itself, that this is a film that prioritises gender over race, which means that they
should not be interpreted exclusively as referents to a racial identity. As Waiting
to Exhale redefines the relationship between white and black that constitutes
the former as the norm and the latter as Other, so it also inverts and subverts
the conventional dynamic between men and women. The subjects of the film are
the four women, and it is the men who are objectified, caricatured, marginalised.
bell hooks concludes her essay 'The oppositional gaze' by making reference
to Stuart Hall's contention that identity is constituted 'not outside but within
representation' (hooks 1992: 131). Subjectivity, therefore, is constructed through
visibility. The importance of being able to look at blackness on the screen is what
links all the films examined in the process of this discussion. Waiting to Exhale, to
which the notion of visibility is of particular importance, highlights the need
to rethink the conflation of style and racial 'identity', to acknowledge that black
subcultural discursive strategies are less restrictive than they once needed to be.
Racial politics are here only implied, in that omnipresent blackness is the film's
given, and it is whiteness (as, for instance, in the case of Bernie's husband's new
partner) which is abnormal and has to be explained. Although films such as Boyz N
the Hood similarly focus on exclusively black environments, the spectre of
Otherness, the knowledge that what is being depicted is a ghettoised community,
hangs over them. 'Home-boy' movies are all about what it means to be black.
In Waiting to Exhale, the factor which links the women is not race but gender, to
the extent that (with little respite) the action and dialogue revolve around their

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 The screen's fashioning of blackness

ruminations on sex with and desertion of men. In the street films of the 1980s, the
analysis of racial identity was 'a man's thing', and women remained peripheral to
or, in extreme cases, excluded from the dominant narrative. Sometimes this bias is
formalised, as occurs in Boyz N the Hood in which Tre is symbolically handed over
to Furious with Reva's words, 'I can't teach him how to be a man; that's your job';
at other times it is not even acknowledged. Waiting to Exhale is a riposte to such
unthinking sexism, that in the process demarginalises blackness by establishing it
as normative.

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 5

CLOTHES, POWER AND THE

MODERN FEMME FATALE
The Last Seduction, Disclosure, Single
White Female

The assumption that the femme fatale is a figure of male fantasy has always seemed
dubious. A classical femme fatale, the dead Rebecca who lingers over Hitchcock's
film with the pungency of an expensive scent, is symbolised in death by her
renowned beauty and the clothes Mrs Danvers has obsessively preserved. Rebecca,
however, despised and mocked the men she ensnared with these trappings of
femininity; seducing the male in order to destroy him. In 'Fragments of a fashion-
able discourse' Kaja Silverman furnishes a reason for this resistance and unease
when she comments (after Fliigel):

The endless transformations within female clothing construct female

sexuality and subjectivity in ways that are at least potentially disruptive, both
of gender and of the symbolic order, which is predicated upon continuity
and coherence. However, by freezing the male body into phallic rigidity,
the uniform of orthodox male dress makes it a rock against which the waves
of female fashion crash in vain.
(Silverman 1986: 148)

Expressed here is a traditional conflation: that, whilst remaining 'potentially

disruptive', the vicissitudes of female dress ultimately undermine the woman and
render her subservient to (and the victim of) the man who retains his iconographic
stability. The justification for this sacrificial offering of the desirable, feminine
woman has been sought in her appearance: the conscious eroticisation of her look
through seductive clothing and make-up, and the use of this look to manipulate
men. But why presume that a tempting female image is necessarily conditioned
by either the narrative of the films she inhabits or the framework of male fantasy?
This discussion of the modernjemmefatale (who can be dated from Body Heat) sets
out to challenge some of the established arguments surrounding feminine
appearance and dress, and to develop the theorisation of women's clothes as an
alternative or disruptive filmic discourse begun in the opening chapter on haute

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 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale

couture. Women, both on and off the screen, have been over-identified with their
image, and the self-conscious irony of a film like The Last Seduction, for example,
begins to suggest that women are capable of using this enforced identification
for their own ends. The rejection of the belief that the way a woman looks is
conditioned by men is consolidated in the discussion of Sinale White Female, a film
that sheds doubt on the conventional idea that women dress for the benefit of men
at all.
Historically, feminist reactions to fashion have been negative. In her vituperative
attack on women and dress in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir detects a direct
correlation between a woman's eroticisation through dress and her lack of power
and freedom:

Woman [unlike man], is even required by society to make herself an erotic

object. The purpose of the fashions to which she is enslaved is not to reveal
her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her as prey to male
desires; thus society is not seeking to further her projects but to thwart
them.
(de Beauvoir 1949: 543)

De Beauvoir's argument rests on the opposition between adornment or display

and 'natural' womanhood, condemning with particular vehemence those details
of fashionable styles (from high heels to fragile hats) that are both constricting
and non-functional. A dangerous extrapolation made in these pages is that the
accentuation of femininity is a natural correlative of male rather than female
fantasy. Fashion is used, in de Beauvoir's estimation, to absent woman and reduce
her to an idealised sign, so that 'once she is "dressed", [she] does not present
herse!fto observation' but rather 'the character she represents but is not' (547).
Women are so conditioned to resemble and identify with 'something unreal,
fixed, perfect' (54 7). In a particularly sharp passage de Beau voir concludes, 'In
her evening dress the wife is disguised as a woman, to serve the pleasure of all
the males and gratify the pride of her proprietor' ( 546-7); she is a commodity
with no intrinsic value, reduced to an over-identification with the ephemeral
superficialities of appearance. The pursuit of elegance and beauty, therefore, is
oppressive, trivialising and demeaning.
Later feminist rejections of feminine clothes have perhaps been most succinctly
expressed by Susan Brownmiller in her book Femininity, published in 1984 and
clearly much influenced by The Second Sex. Brownmiller, quite comically at times,
dwells on clothes as polarising agents: between feminine and feminist women;
between the real and the artificial; between women and men. By consistently
emphasising difference (men's clothes are functional, women's are not; skirts are
signs of oppression, so trousers become a feminist statement) Brownmiller
inevitably condemns any attire that is not trousered anonymity as 'bad', 'frivolous'

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and 'indulgent' because 'the nature of feminine dressing is superficial in essence'

(Brownmiller 1984: 56). Brownmiller writes as if skirts themselves are morally
reprehensible, and adopts a tone of resigned superiority when commenting, for
example, that 'Serious women have a difficult time with clothes, not necessarily
because they lack a developed sense of style, but because feminine clothes are
not designed to project a serious demeanour' (74). Such puritanism is not only
self-defeating but disingenuous, as Brownmiller obviously misses the excessive
frivolities she deems inappropriate to a feminist demeanour, and persists in only
attributing stylishness to a fashionable but rejected femininity. At one point,
Brownmiller rounds on the 'backsliders' who apologetically but relentlessly began
reincorporating feminine details (namely the reviled 'skirts and dresses') into
their wardrobes, accusing them of weakly missing 'some whimsical indulgence in
the feminine aesthetic' (55). She does, however, rather endearingly, appear to be
transferring her own loss onto the condemned 'backsliders' as the protesting tone
of this passage attests:

They missed the frivolous gaiety of personal adornment, they missed the
public display of vulnerability and sexual flirtation .... Some of them longed
to show off their legs again, and some of them, I know, missed shopping.
(55)

Of course it is the barely disguised Brownmiller who misses flirting and

shopping. What is significant about this passage is that it implies, as did de
Beauvoir's analysis, that there is an inevitable and universally accepted corres-
pondence between the feminine aesthetic and political weakness. Nevertheless,
for all her disavowal of femininity, Brownmillcr in trousers is as much a slave to
patriarchal oppression as her be-skirted sisters; she simply sees herself as rejecting
rather than pandering to an omniscient, omnipresent male gaze:

At this particular moment in history when the ratios of sexual preference

seem to have gone awry and vast numbers of homosexual men and straight
single women are roaming the range in search of love, sex and meaningful
relations, it is obvious that these two groups dress up to enhance their sexual
attraction while lesbian women or heterosexual men dress more carelessly
or conceal their bodies, having no urgent need to attract the judgmental
male eye.
(70)

In later paragraphs it becomes abundantly clear that the category 'women' does
not encompass lesbians: so only men pay attention to outward appearance and
women lack scopophilic discernment? If they achieve nothing else, the implicitly
lesbian clothes-obsessed scenarios of films such as Black Widow, Basic Instinct and
Single White Female emphatically restore the erotic social gaze to women.

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 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale

De Beauvoir and Brownmiller are in accordance with many male fashion

historians and commentators in their belief that women's emancipation could only
occur with the rejection of feminine clothing. James Laver, for one, assumes that
the first thing an emancipated woman does is to try and look like a man by cutting
her hair and disguising her waist, whilst George Simmel sees in the would-be
liberated woman not just the desire to emulate men but to stress 'her indifference
to fashion' (Simmel 1904: 31 0). A dissenting view which could be transposed to
1990s stilettoed feminism is proffered by David Kunzle in Fashion and Fetishism.
The majority of this study concerns tight-lacing, as discussed in Chapter 2 of this
book, but Kunzle expands his arguments to include other garments and looks.
He comments, for instance, that feminist fashion writers too easily conflate the
social application of the term 'freedom' with its use when talking about clothes,
suggesting that, far from being looser and more 'liberating', women's fashions
(the 1870s corset or the Edwardian 'hobble skirt') were tighter and ostensibly
more restrictive during periods of greatest political gain (Kunzle 198 2: 40-2).
Kunzle 's response to fetishism could be extended to imply the existence of an
interrelationship between provocative and erotic clothes and women feeling and
being in possession of power. The presumed incompatibility between wearing
sexually alluring clothes and being a feminist, however, prevails into the 1990s.
In her sceptical response to the 1980s vogue for feminine parody and pastiche
exemplified by Madonna's constant metamorphosis, Rosalind Coward in Our
Treacherous Hearts states:

These ideas seem attractive ... hut they have failed to dislodge a fundamen-
tal unevenness between men's and women's relationship to sexual display
and adornment. Women are still unshakeably concerned with rendering
themselves sexually desirable and conforming to prevailing ideals, even if on
first glimpse these ideals are many and various.
(Coward 1993: 154)

Although the male gaze is never explicitly mentioned by Coward, a perception of

sexual difference and fixed gender disparity underpins this well-worn argument
based on the notion that 'It is still women, not men, who are the aesthetic sex'
(154). Perhaps women who acknowledge the ideas of play and pastiche in the way
they dress are in large measure reacting against the monolithic fatalism of
Coward's brand of feminism: that the 'prevailing ideals' will always be male, that
women will always be looked at, and that the gender dynamic is never going to
change. 1
The logical extension of these feminist arguments against fashion is that women
who 'dress up' are the 'treacherous' collaborators; as ridiculous an assertion as
Edmund Berglcr's that fashion is essentially created by homosexual men who
impose deliberately 'punitive' and 'caricaturing' styles on women because of their

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 Gender

'hidden enmity against the female customer' (Bergler 1953: 4-8). In a letter to
the feminist magazine Spare Rib written in 1983, a woman enquired, 'Do you
criticise your sisters because they don't wear dungarees and Kickers? Is a woman
any less emancipated because she "chooses" to wear make-up and stilettos?'
(Coward 1993: 153, Wilson 1985: 236). The divergent responses of Elizabeth
Wilson and Rosalind Coward to this same letter exemplify the opposing feminist
views on fashion. Coward's discussion is permeated with a not so closeted puri-
tanism which, after acknowledging the growing belief 'outside feminist circles'
that 1970s feminism 'got it wrong', goes on to insinuate that there is 'harm in
women's cultivation of their sexual appeal' (Coward 1993: 153). Wilson, instead,
detects a crucial ambivalence in the traditional feminist approaches to fashion,
that, with a puritan voice, they condemn the 'consumerist poison of fashion',
whilst with a pro-free choice voice they 'praise the individualism made possible
by dress' (Wilson 1985: 237). Wilson goes on to suggest that the pervasive
'feminist uniform' of the 1970s was as prescriptive as the New Look appeared
to Simone de Beauvoir, and makes the essential observation, 'If liberated dress
meant doing your own thing, no one ever commented on how strange it was that
everyone wanted to do the same thing' (Wilson 1985: 240).
Femininity, from Freud onwards, has conventionally denoted passivity,
weakness and vulnerability, all qualities that individuals of both genders should,
it could reasonably be assumed, wish to reject. The supposedly paradoxical
notion of 'powerful femininity' has, as it was in discussions of fashion, been the
premise for many feminist and other analyses of female representation in film
noir. Noir has traditionally been approached in terms of difference, both within
the narrative and in terms of the spectator/text relationship, a concern with
genderised binary oppositions which ultimately concludes that these women-
dominated films are pieces of 'men's cinema' after all. Of the classic femme fatale
Janey Place, writing in the late 1970s, states, 'Film noir is a male fantasy, as is
most of our art. The woman here as elsewhere is defined by her sexuality ...
women are defined in relation to men, and the centrality of sexuality in this
definition is a key to understanding the position of women in our culture' (Place
1992: 35). There are very similar assumptions being made here as were being
made in the feminist discussions of feminine fashion, most significantly that
a woman defined by her sexuality is necessarily oppressed because she is defined
for and in relation to men. Despite her ability to manipulate and seduce the men
around her, therefore, the femme fatale is somehow impotent and harmless.
Mary Ann Doane, for example, tries to define the constitution of the femme fatale's
deadliness:

Her power is of a peculiar sort insofar as it is usually not subject to her

conscious will, hence appearing to blur the opposition between passivity

124
 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale
and activity. She is an ambivalent figure because she is not the subject of
power but its carrier . ... In a sense, she has power despite herself.
(Doane 1991: 2)
Doane's argument comprehensively disempowers the femme fatale, who she defines
as only unconsciously and vicariously powerful, the construct and embodiment of
a dominant male fantasy. 2 The opaqueness of this description of the femme fatale
pertains to a tradition which defines women as needlessly mysterious. Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith, for instance, says in 'Minnelli and melodrama', "'Masculinity",
although rarely attainable, is at least known as an ideal. "Femininity", within the
terms of the argument, is not only unknown but unknowable' (Nowell-Smith
1987: 72), a distinction repeated virtually verbatim by Steve Neale in 'Masculinity
as spectacle' when he comments, 'Masculinity, as an ideal, at least, is implicitly
known. Femininity is, by contrast, a mystery' (Neale 1983: 19). The problem
with such a delineation is that the woman, by being relegated permanently to the
realm of the 'unknown', is also rendered invisible except in the imagination.
Femininity thus becomes an empty surface on which male fantasies can be
incessantly imposed and enacted, which is how the femme fatale has been widely
treated. A component of such a hierarchical structure of fantasy is that the femme
fatale is destroyed at the end, so cancelling out her potential danger.
Film noir dwells self-consciously on the manipulation and exaggeration of
femininity, the extreme artificiality of the femme fatale's look and the equally
excessive innocence of her on-screen counterpart. In Out if the Past, for example,
Kathie's duplicity is emphasised by the 'naturalness' exuded by the 'good', small
town, outdoor Ann. Both Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice begin
with Phyllis and Cora looking in mirrors and applying lipstick, whilst they in turn
are being looked at by the men they are about to seduce. Similarly the 1980s noir
Black Widow opens with Catherine/Renee making up her face. The eroticisation of
the femme fatale's body is signalled as important for establishing the subjective look
as male, a scopophilic containment of the female image that is often crudely indi-
cated, as in The Postman when Frank's lust is mirrored by a titillating pan from the
lipstick Cora has dropped, along the floor, past her pristine peep-toe sandals and
up her long bare legs. As Kathie tells Jeff at the end of Out if the Past, though, he
has chosen to imagine her as someone she never said she was. The knowingness
displayed by both Phyllis and Cora, the recognition that they are intentionally
adopting a physical image compatible with the most stereotypical male fantasies is
elided by commentators such as Place and Doane, and is picked out by a radical
later noir like The Last Seduction. Many of even the 1940s femmes fatales use their
sexuality consciously and so obviously (like Cora closing the door on Frank as
he ogles her) that they are belittled by being seen as powerful 'despite them-
selves'. As Elizabeth Cowie points out in an essay which challenges the tendency
to characterise noir as a consistently masculine form, 3 'these films afforded women

125
 Gender
roles which are active, adventurous and driven by sexual desire', and such a strong
image of women cannot simply be cancelled out by a conventionalised ending
(Cowie 1993: 135-6).
Contained within the traditional interpretations of both feminine fashions and
the visual representation of the femme fatale is the belief that a strange sublimation
process occurs when women dress which does not allow for dissonance; that there
is a necessary correspondence or identification between body, mind and clothes.
A woman (and a female film character) is more likely to be 'read' through the way
she looks than her male equivalent. As Jane Gaines posits in her analysis of
the narrative function offemale dress in classical Hollywood, 'a woman's dress and
demeanour, much more than a man's, indexes psychology; if costume represents
interiority, it is she who is turned inside out on the screen' (Gaines 1990: 18 1).
The symbolic iconography of the classic femme fatale is a limited, clearly demar-
cated register of clothes, based on the contrast of light and dark (in keeping with
the chiaroscuro mise-en-scene but also indicative of duplicity), frequent wardrobe
changes (not necessarily motivated by action) and the insertion of distinctive,
often anachronistic garments or accessories. The most insistent anachronism is the
use of pale clothes (for example the white dress and hat Kathie is wearing in
Out if the Past when she first meets Jeff in Acapulco), a clear example of inverse
symbolism. More interesting is the occasional use of intrusive, significant detail

5. I Jane Greer as Kathie Moffatt (with Robert Mitchum) in Out cif the Past
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

126
 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale
such as the nun-like headwcar added to the already stylised costumes for the final,
fatal appearances of Cora at the end of Postman and Kathie in Out of the Past. Jane
Gaines discusses how one of the 'rules' of classic Hollywood was that 'costume
must be justified or motivated by characterisation', and if, as George Cukor says,
it 'knocked your eye out', then it had failed to do its job (Gaines 1990: 192-5).
Although not notably decorative, Cora's folded white towel (which frames her
face like a Madonna's) and Kathie's exaggeratedly demure travelling outfit arc
not discreet complementary costumes, but jarring narrative interjections that
question, as well as underline, the femmes fatales' duplicity. Is not the gaze of the
hapless men in film nair at least in part mocked because they never understand
the complexity of what they arc looking at?
This question is more conclusively answered by looking at the later nair-inspired
films, notably The Last Seduction. Whatever 'backlash' counter-strategies are put
into play in these 1980s/ 1990s films, and there are many, subjectivity resides more
with the woman than the man. In these modern noirs, the castrating potential of the
femme fatale is not always nullified by the conventional narrative closure pattern
of the 1940s; in both Body Heat and The Last Seduction, for instance, the cool,
phlegmatic heroines out-smart all the men and get away with it. The narratives fail
to contain their threat. The Last Seduction is John Dahl's third noir-esque film after
Kill Me Aaain and Red Rock West. It centres on Bridget, a quintessential contempo-
rary femme fatale who, in addition to being more intelligent, scheming and alluring
than any of the men in the film, is also professionally successful. This final attribute
is what differentiates most modern jemmesfatales from their 1940s predecessors.
Not only is the entry into the job market important for signalling the femme fatale's
ability and intention to usurp the traditional social male role, but it is also an
indication that she is no longer defined by her appearance alone. One of the most
desperate scenes among the classicfilms noirs is the bored Cora listlessly cleaning
her sandals of an evening.
Bridget is the embodiment of the self-conscious femme fatale who successfully
uses a conventionalised, overtly sexual image of femininity which acknowledges
its cinematic antecedents and suggests a full awareness of how that image affects
men. The ambiguity, therefore, no longer rests with the image (whether such
a stereotyped femininity can be perceived as feminist) but with the possession of
the image. The Last Seduction confronts (even more clearly than Bridget's classic
predecessors) the issue of excessive femininity being compatible with feminism,
as it is Bridget who controls the effect of an image (based on short, tight black
skirts and stilettos) that no doubt Brownmiller and Coward, for example, would
term 'oppressed'. The fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier describes his ideal
woman as 'the daughter of the one who made women's lib. She knows her power,
but she uses it in a determined way, with a jerk and a twist. I hate the image of
servility.... Codes arc changing' (Kaplan, L. 1993: 267). One scene in The Last

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 Gender

Seduction exemplifies the change that has occurred in the dress codes traditionally
deemed to define and confine within a patriarchal discourse. By this point in the
film, Bridget has run off with her husband's money, decamped from New York to
Beston, Buffalo, changed her name to Wendy Kroy and started dating Mike. One
morning, Bridget and Mike are talking in bed, and he starts a sentence which
Bridget completes: 'I'm beginning to feel like some sort of ... sex object? Live
it up.' Dressed only in black knickers, stocking and high heels, Bridget then strides
away from the bed, dominatrix style. The importance of this obvious fetishisation
of the female form is that it presents an argument against a possible conventional
reading of the scene which would emphasise how Bridget's legs are exposed
and framed with the tireless male gaze in mind. Feminist film criticism based
in psychoanalysis has wrongly prioritised modes of representation and the
scopophilic, fetishistic engagement of the spectator with the classical film image
over every other factor, including narrative contextualisation. The Last Seduction is
one of the most challenging examples of modern cinema in this respect, a film
that does not shrink from using and confronting the eroticisation of the female
body, but re-contextualises that eroticisation within a narrative constructed
around a dynamic female subject. A knowing walking stereotype, Bridget dares
Mike and the spectator to desire.
Bridget, like other femmes fatales, conforms to a positive feminist appropriation
of Joan Riviere's theory of 'womanliness as masquerade', when 'women who
wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the
retribution feared from men' (Riviere 1929: 35). Riviere's notion of the powerful
woman who alleviates male anxiety by disguising her 'masculine' strength behind
a mask of feminine sexuality, flirting with men rather than challenging them, offers
a model for how Bridget operates in relation to the lovers she seduces. The manip-
ulation of femininity outlined by Riviere in her analysis of her client does not
readily conform to the view of womanliness as passive, because the active agent in
the relationship remains the woman performing the masquerade. As Mary Ann
Doane suggests, the masquerade possesses destabilising effects that confront the
masculine structure of the look and defamiliarise female iconography (Doane
1991: 26). This form of distanciation is emphasised in Bridget's relationship to her
own seductive social image. From her first meeting with Mike when she perversely
turns him on by telling him to 'fuck off', The Last Seduction offers a categorical
denial that Bridget's overt sexuality (not only her clothes, but her sharp, dismissive
repertoire of gestures) signifies a submissive desire to be desired by men. Instead,
her hard-edged image is an emphatic denial of male presumption, a mark of aggres-
sion, not covert compliance, in keeping with the equivocations displayed by
Riviere's patient who also feels intense hostility towards men. The Last Seduction
rejects, therefore, the notion that womanliness as masquerade is simply a placatory
gesture which, rather than challenge masculine supremacy, merely affirms it.

128
 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale
The most radical aspect of Riviere's analysis is her argument against 'genuine'
womanliness. Instead, she proposes that there is no difference between woman-
liness and the masquerade: 'whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing'
(Riviere 1929: 38). The strength, from a feminist perspective, of this position
cannot be understated; for in rejecting essentialism, Riviere paves the way for a
rejection of femininity as a construct of male fantasy, dependent as that fantasy is
on a notion of 'woman' as fixed and immutable. It is the radicalism of the assertion
that womanliness and masquerade are the same thing which greatly preoccupies
Stephen Heath in his response to Riviere. In 'Joan Riviere and the masquerade'
Heath maintains that by 'Collapsing genuine womanliness and the masquerade
together, Riviere undermines the integrity of the former with the artifice of the
latter' (Heath 1986: 50). Heath is adamant that the masquerade is undertaken for
the benefit of the to-be-pleased man, that, 'the masquerade is the woman's thing,
hers, but it is also exactlyfor the man, a male presentation, as he would have her'
(50). This slippage is crucial, and exposes an intensely male fear of the very concept
of masquerade: why is the performance of excessive womanliness a presentation
for the man 'as he would have her'? Heath's panic presumably stems in part from the
realisation that, if there is no such thing as 'genuine' womanliness, then there is no
such thing as 'genuine' manliness or a stable subjective male position.
The Last Seduction realises a male nightmare by granting the stable, subjective
position to its female protagonist, thus running counter to the formal insistence
of most classic noirs upon the subjectivity of the male, usually granted through
control of the voice-over narration. First, Bridget's control of her masquerade
is indicated by the uncharacteristic consistency of her appearance. The femme
fatale's duplicity is traditionally manifested through the persistent alteration of
her look, her changeable wardrobe becoming a straightforward metonym for her
untrustworthiness. The need always to present a different image, however, is also
a mark of psychological and emotional instability, and thus an undermining mech-
anism that, from the perspective of potentially threatened men, nullifies the femme
fatale's potential danger. A pattern seems to be emerging suggesting the more
costume changes, the more deranged theJemme fatale, that her pathology is some-
how inscribed on her clothes. This tendency is consistent, for example, with
the restless representation of the pathological Laurie in Gun Crazy, whose sartorial
instability is echoed by later examples such as Dolly in The Hot Spot, Catherine/
Renee in Black Widow, Jude in Mother's Boys or Hedy in Sinale White Female, all
of whom undergo multiple costume changes and alterations of appearance.
Their more dangerous counterparts are those, like Bridget in The Last Seduction
or Matty in Body Heat and Catherine in Basic Instinct, who either wear the same out-
fits twice (usually at key narrative junctures) or present a heavily consistent image.
The control these characters exert over the action and characters around them is
straightforwardly reflected in their controlled appearances.

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As the women in these films acquire greater stability and strength, so the
traditionally male subjective privilege is denied the film's men. These 'designated
fucks' (as Bridget labels Mike) are marginalised, ignored, beaten, without having
recourse to even a narrational voice. Physically, these men are shown to embody
lack, and so function as symbolic opposites to the films' images of feminine
sophistication. This lack is likewise expressed iconographically through how these
characters are dressed. The male lovers in films noirs are normally portrayed as
inadequate where clothes are concerned, compared with the sharply dressed
femmes fatales. The Last Seduction relishes this imbalance in scenes such as the one in
which Mike runs out into the street, blithely parading his loss of power dressed
only in crumpled boxer shorts. Tom's stained tie at the beginning of Disclosure,
or Nick's middle-aged V-neck jumper for the night-dub scene in Basic Instinct
similarly function as symbols of emasculation, of not belonging, of not under-
standing the rules of the game. In most instances, these men are also verbally
declared to be stupid, the most direct put-down being Matty's during her
first conversation with Ned in Body Heat: 'You're not too smart. I like that in a
man'. The men vainly attempt to retaliate against being categorised as inadequate
with lumbering assertions of their masculinity. Nick in Basic Instinct repeats, for
example, with evident pride, that he considers sex with Catherine to have been
'the fuck of the century', and the rebuffed Mike tries to ingratiate himself once
more with Bridget during the first bar scene in The Last Seduction by telling her he
is 'hung like a horse'. Bridget counters this counter-measure by unzipping Mike's
trousers and going in search of that 'certain horse-like quality'. This bumbling
need to crudely state their masculinity is evidence, if any were needed, that the
penis is nothing like the phallus. It is significant, therefore, that both Mike and
Tom are only sexually aggressive when the femmes fatales, Bridget and Meredith,
force them to be. This manliness as masquerade is phallic panic, a desperate,
embarrassing, hysterical reaction to encroaching insignificance.
In The Last Seduction this insignificance is signalled by Bridget's successful
deployment of masquerade in her relationship with Mike. Mike, as Stephen Heath
would advocate, goes vainly in search of the 'genuine' womanliness behind what
he perceives to be the 'facade' of Bridget/Wendy Kroy, but Bridget defies this
fixity, and presents instead a recurrent reminder of femininity's performative
value. Mike, during the 'dominatrix' scene described above, probes Bridget for
an explanation for her hardness, and asks her softly what she is so scared of.
In response, Bridget plays along, putting on an act of vulnerability and explaining
'l'\'e been hurt before'. Mike, eager to be restored to the position of masculine
protector, willingly falls for this, but is jolted from his feeling of superiority when
Bridget truculently comes out of character asking, 'Will that do?'. She performs
and breaks one masquerade to reveal that there is no outer skin, and no 'inner'
womanliness. What is interesting about The Last Seduction is that Bridget's

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masquerade-within-a-masquerad e (when she is feigning the sweet or vulnerable
woman) is bad and unconvincing. To the spectator, it seems implausible that
anyone could be gulled by this superficial performance of an insubstantial stereo-
type. Whenever Bridget performs helpless femininity it is deliberately and
ironically transparent. It is as if she has no need to try, because Mike and the
others will believe what they want to believe. Bridget's successful manipulation of
others hinges on this received notion that men (there are no other major female
characters in The Last Seduction) see in women a reflection of their own desires.
She thus aggressively presents her body and her repertoire of clothing cliches as
the site of male inadequacy, which rather than comfort Mike confront him (and
any men who may identify with him) with the unobtainability of his fantasy. The
spectator, therefore, compelled to witness this performance, is also compelled to
identify with Bridget, a direct reversal of what occurs in most 1940s film s noirs.
Bridget's masquerade is characterised by its reflectiveness; she does not mirror
Mike's desires but throws them back at him. Her most brutal performance is saved
for the end as Mike, who has been persuaded to kill her husband Clay, is in her
New York apartment. Having chickened out of murder, it is left to Bridget to
dispatch Clay, who now lies dead on the sofa. Bridget has arrived for this scene in

5. 2 Linda Fiorentino as Bridget in The Last Seduction

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

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an uncharacteristic masculine trouser suit, complemented by white vest, braces

and two-tone brogues. Dressed, therefore, like a man, Bridget subsequently
reveals to Mike she has discovered the secret of his unsuccessful marriage, namely
that his wife Trish is a transvestite. She laughs and drops her trousers to reveal a
pair of male underpants, goading Mike into raping her with taunts of 'I'm Trish,
rape me'. Bridget's final, most elaborate and cruel masquerade reflects back
at Mike not her excessive femininity, but Mike's terror of his own repressed
homosexuality. In another reversal of convention, the male becomes dependent
on the female for self-definition; the masquerade, therefore, far from reinforcing
the stability of the masculine position, effects its destabilisation.
The most conclusive masculine renunciation of them all occurs in Disclosure, a
film imbued with a weary resignation, which is nevertheless intent on converting
castration into triumph. Disclosure, which, like The Last Seduction, has at its core a
similar preoccupation with gender relationships between a successful and aggres-
sive woman and a more submissive man, fails to convert this radical potential, and
instead opts for a 1940s narrative conservatism by closing with the recuperation
of masculine integrity, however debilitated and compromised. Tom is a loser.
Overlooked for promotion in favour of an old flame, Meredith, he then manages
to be manipulated into starting to have sex with her. Although he breaks this off
and subsequently wins a ludicrous sexual harassment case against her, he is not
restored to a position of superiority by the end, but rather overlooked at work
again in favour of another woman. Most regressive is the film's representation
of Meredith, the phallic woman who possesses both professional and sexual
power but is conventionally defeated by being humiliated and sacked. Disclosure
remains a man's film, but an apologetic one constructed around the persistently
emphasised weakness of Tom.
As with Mike's in The Last Seduction, the fragility of Tom's masculine ego is
represented through the rise of the homosexual repressed. Returning home after
the aborted sex with Meredith, Tom has a nightmare in which Bob, his boss, makes
a pass at him in the lift. It is not immediately apparent that this scene is a dream (it
cuts from Tom sitting up in bed talking to his wife to a pan down from black to the
office building entrance), and for a while is intended, bizarre as this seems within
such a regressive framework, to string the spectators along. The two men have
a detailed discussion about Tom's uncharacteristically suave suit. Bob starts by
admiring it and asking Tom if he can feel it, after which he becomes intrigued by
the fabric ('Is it tropical wool?'). Tom replies matter of factly that it is a wool/
viscose mix which is 'what makes the pants drape so well'. Bob's advances become
more overtly sexual as he touches Tom and compliments him on his physique, then
echoing Meredith's words from earlier that evening: 'Now you have the power
Tom, you have something I want'. Finally Bob lunges towards Tom to kiss him, and
with this distorted, close-up point-of-view shot Tom wakes up screaming.

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 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale

5.3 Michael Douglas as Tom (with Donald Sutherland) in Disclosure

Courtesy of the Ronald Grant Archive

The overriding connotation of the nightmare in Disclosure is that, as in cinema's

pathologisation of the gangster's vanity, male fascination with dress and appear-
ance is a perversion, and representative of disintegrating heterosexual masculinity.
Following on from Nietzsche's assertion that 'woman would not have the genius
for finery if she did not have the genius for the secondary role' (quoted in
Heath 1986: 50), or de Beau voir's remark that, 'A man's clothes, like his body,
should indicate his transcendence and not attract attention' (de Beauvoir 1949:
543), Tom's scream is a response to having transgressed the stereotyped rules
and having imagined himself in the feminine role. Furthermore, Tom does not
reluctantly inhabit this role, but is content to be in it, for the more revealing
aspects of this sequence are Tom's ease during the conversation with Bob and
the narcissistic idealisation of himself as an expensively dressed man . Masculine
functionalism, however, is restored in the subsequent scene when Tom enters
in crumpled trousers. The lift scene is a moment of disruption and une ase, when
the camouflaged danger of subversive sexuality is fleetingly permitted to surface.
Many noirs (most famously Double Indemnity's representation of the relationship
between Neff and Keyes) show the male fear of the feminine as a denial or deflec-
tion of a fear of homosexuality. The source of the male terror is expressed in
The Last Seduction and Disclosure: there is only one thing more frightening and
emasculating than being seduced by a phallic woman and that is being seduced
by a man .

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As consolidated by his 'victory' in the sexual harassment hearings against

Meredith, Tom's masculine self-assertion is presented through the submission
of the feminine. Unlike Bridget's similarly aggressive, ultra-feminine image in
The Last Seduction, Meredith's blurring of the boundaries between sexuality
and work (in terms of her sex life and work) is ultimately what, within a far more
traditional film, defeats her. Until this defeat, however, Meredith is another
masculine woman who masquerades, a very 1990s femme fatale with a history
of seducing subordinate male colleagues she has then sacked rather than killed.
One pervasive attitude towards women's clothes established in the 1980s is that
erotic femininity and professionalism are incompatible, a view most elaborately
expressed in John T. Molloy's influential book Women: Dress for Success. According
to Molloy, his exhaustive studies of women's office clothes 'prove that to succeed
in business and dressing to be sexually attractive are almost mutually exclusive'
(Molloy 1980: 21 ). In this highly prescriptive book, Molloy draws up guidelines
for the successful woman's 'business uniform' which include the de-emphasising
of the bust by a blazer which 'should cover, not accentuate the contours of your
body' (70), the below-the-knee skirt suit and low-heeled, plain pumps. Molloy's
discussions of gender distinctions as they pertain to clothes are contradictory, and
imply an unresolved relationship between sexuality and social appearance. Molloy
denounces any style that emphasises femininity, whether this is the 'secretarial'
sweater or bras that fail to completely obscure the nipples, but he also argues that
the 'imitation look' (a woman directly emulating a man by wearing masculine
clothes or fabrics) makes her look 'winsome not authoritative' (28). Either
extreme, whether feminine or masculine, is ultimately bad in Molloy's estimation
because they both, whether through proximity or distance between gender and
image, emphasise femininity. The resulting paradox is that women in business
should be identifiably female but asexual; sexed but not sexed.
Molloy's dogmatic guidelines have been substantially modified in the late 1980s
and 1990s. The 'power dressing' of the more modern executive woman conforms
to a different, more directly sexual dress code that includes the stilettos and tight,
short skirts worn by both Meredith and Bridget. Disclosure, though, betrays a
similarly regressive attitude towards the cross-over between sex and work to
Molloy's book. Meredith embodies everything Molloy advises against: she wears
a skirt inches above the knee, high-heeled shoes, a close-cut waistcoat, she sports
bare legs and keeps her hair long. Like Tess in Mike Nichols's WorkinB Girl, she has
'a mind for business and a bod for sin'. The ambivalence of this image, its potential
for radical masquerade is inevitably dissipated in Disclosure. During the harassment
hearings Meredith, the businesswoman, is punished for violating the unspoken
code which forbids the fusion of professionalism and sex when she admits, 'I am
a sexually aggressive woman, I like it.' This is signalled as the beginning of
her demise by the horrified, condemnatory silence of those present. It is hardly

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surpnsmg, therefore, that in a film which denigrates female independence as
keenly as it disavows male dominance, the person who replaces Meredith in her job
should be a safe and unthreatening Molloy archetype : a middle-aged mother in
'serious' rather than 'frivolous' clothes (to use Brownmiller's juxtaposition), the
sort of woman any man would entrust a job to. One of the reasons a femme fatale
such as Meredith is disliked and destroyed is surely that, for all her femininity (and
the suggestion of passivity and weakness that reputedly brings) her image remains
representative of power.

5.4 Demi Moore as Meredith in Disclosure

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

Both in terms of fashion and film iconography, the clearest illustration of this
ambivalence lies in the femme fatale's quintessential attribute, her legs. Women's
legs, because of their contradictory connotations, have been the site of much
debate among feminists and others. The exposure of women's legs, after centuries
of concealment, has been both welcomed and criticised because, although women
have become more mobile, their bodies have also been put more prominently on
display. Historically, the relationship between women's legs, sexual politics and
eroticism has been complex. As legs inevitably facilitate movement, in times of
greatest oppression, fashion historians such as James Laver have argued, they have
been hidden and restricted. The most extreme examples in western fashion have
been the 1860s crinoline, which gave the woman the appearance of floating rather
than walking, and the 191 Os Hobble-skirt, which, with the accompanying fetter
worn underneath to prevent the ripping of the narrow skirts, made it impossible

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for women to take steps of more than two or three inches (Laver 1969: 224-5). In
China the enforced binding of women's feet performed much the same incapaci-
tating function. 4 It is because the shrouding or binding oflegs became indicative of
women's thwarted power that dress reformers such as Amelia Bloomer in the
1850s and Viscountess Hambledon in the 1880s rebelled against the imposition of
cumbersome skirts and tried to pioneer the wearing of trouser-like garments
instead. As Anne Hollander notes, 'naked legs were active' (Hollander 1975: 214),
an observation that the more liberated women's fashions to emerge after the First
World War such as the Flapper dress would seem to confirm. Similarly, Fliigel
celebrates the emergence of women's legs when, in 1930, he writes, 'legs have
emerged after centuries of shrouding, and adult woman at last frankly admits
herself to be a biped' (Fliigel 19 30: 161).
In addition, however, Fliigel also notes that legs, after skirts were raised in the
1920s, became the woman's 'chief erotic weapon' (162), a link with sexuality
which has only occasionally been broken. 5 The sexual importance of legs (and
particularly women's legs because of their forbiddenness) is to do with their prox-
imity to the sex organs; the seventeenth century poet John Donne, as he travels
around his mistress in Love's Proaress, discovers that the vulva can be arrived at more
swiftly from the feet and legs, and Hollander remarks that, 'Legs appear in art
when the theme is overtly dirty-minded' (Hollander 1975: 218). When discussing
'bifurcation' (literally splitting in two, but in the nineteenth century a euphemism
for a pair of women's legs hidden from view) Brownmiller first applauds the advent
of shorter skirts in the 1920s as 'an important advance in the history of women's
rights' (Brownmiller 1984: 58), but then feels compelled to condemn the 1960s
mini (the extreme result of this advance) for its eroticisation of the female form.
Feminist writers on clothes have not found an adequate response to the liberated
exposure of women's flesh, keen to damn the crinoline but equally uneasy when
considering the hotpants, minis and other skimpy garments. As Elizabeth Wilson
comments, Brownmiller is abiding by a false logic that, if her argument is to be
sustained, must necessarily position the erotically appealing and the functional as
opposites. The rationale for such an opposition is ideological, not practical.
Thejemmejatale is 'characterised by her long, lovely legs' (Place 1978: 45), and
the male character's desire is often signalled by a directed glance at them (as in
The Postman Always Rinas Twice). Both The Postman and Disclosure also introduce Cora
and Meredith directly through close-ups of their shoes and legs. Similarly there is
a frequent over-identification of the femme fatale with accessories that adorn her
legs, the accessories functioning as coded messages between her and the man who
desires her. At the first meeting between Phyllis and Walter, Double Indemnity
labours the metonymic use of Phyllis's anklet (engraved with her name) and her
pom-pom sling-backs, a link between the man's desire and the woman's shoes
even more blatantly underlined in an early scene in Dennis Hopper's 1990

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 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale

5.5 Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson (with Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

neo-noir The Hot Spot. Harry's attraction to Gloria is here shown through a
subjective pan up her legs and a lingering close-up on her ostentatious, fruit-laden
sandals. Dolly (who is also interested in Harry) notices the attention he pays
Gloria's shoes and interjects, 'I have a pair of shoes like those, I'll wear them more
often; they seem more effective than I remembered'. In the sex scene in Disclosure,
Tom's comparable look at Meredith's exposed legs is not a simple a case of lust,
it also registers their potential danger. Meredith's threat is represented by the
small gesture of shifting the position of her legs from being almost demurely
together to being assertively and invitingly apart, a movement which suggests both
the assumption of a more masculine pose and her sexual availability.
The significance of the femme fatale's 'long, lovely legs', therefore, is that, as
symbols for femininity, they represent two things: power and sexuality. The two
attributes are brought together in the consistent emphasis placed on high-heeled
shoes, particularly the ubiquitous black stiletto worn by the majority of the
modern femmes fatales, an ambivalence discussed by Kunzle in relation to fetishism
and sado-masochism:

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There are those whose locomotion in high heels is an aggressive appropria-

tion of space and time (which is why high heels are no enemy to feminism),
the contrary and complementary associations are with precariousness and
imbalance .... The higher and more unstable-looking the heel, the more
clearly these contradictions are expressed, and the more clearly is the
duality exposed between woman immobilised, viewed as passive sex-object,
and woman elusive, (literally) impedina sexual fulfilment.
(Kunzle 1982: 18)

The established feminist response to sado-masochism is again offered by Coward

when talking about fantasies: 'After all, it is invariably women who are represented
in the masochistic position, usually in the most cliched ways, and that remains
a problem when women are still subject to real sexual assault and real sexual
victimisation' (Coward 1993: 182). Coward, who is obviously unfamiliar with the
more common sado-masochistic scenarios, dismisses as 'myth' the possibility that
women could explore sexual extremes without 'harmful consequences'. This is
not the only way in which feminists have approached sado-masochism; Gamman
and Makinen, for example, in their discussion of female fetishism and the leather-
clad Emma Peel from The Avenaers write that 'this sort of active image is rarely
discussed by critics as pleasurable at all', and that feminist debates too frequently
'dismiss all images of strong women as enacting "phallic replacement'" (Gamman
and Makinen 1994: 205-6). Coward's blinkered analysis misses the point that
women can appropriate the pleasures of sado-masochism, and that most accounts
of sado-masochistic relationships stress the ritual of male not female masochism.
Krafft-Ebing, for example, recounts several turn-of-the-century cases of men
known to prostitutes as 'boot lovers' because they enjoyed nothing better than to
be trodden on in high-heeled boots or shoes (Krafft-Ebing 1899: 160-78), and
Clave! Brand, writing in 1970, similarly tells the stories of various men who
like being trampled on by women in stilettos, one of whom enjoys having his
erect penis trodden on (Brand 1970: 69-89). Shoe fetishism scenarios (alluded
to iconographically in film no irs) are strongly sado-masochistic, and almost always
structured around the woman as the strong, dominating partner who is wor-
shipped by the weaker man, as Krafft-Ebing comments, 'It is highly probable that
the majority- and perhaps all- of the cases of shoe fetichism [sic], rest upon a basis
of more or less conscious masochistic desire for self-humiliation (Krafft-Ebing
1899: 159). Such scenarios are also commonly structured around ornate, feminine
and high-heeled footwear, not unlike the shoes worn by thejemmesjatales.
For all the superficial compatabilities in the representations of Meredith and
Bridget, there remains a fundamental difference with regard to the current
debates about gender power dynamics. The Last Seduction explores the male desire
for humiliation, that Mike is aroused by being hated, treated like a sex object and

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 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale
manipulated by Bridget. Disclosure alludes to a past sexual relationship between
Tom and Meredith likewise based on violence and power, but when Meredith
assumes the dominating role, she is perceived as predatory and deviant. The
conventional gender dynamic of the film nair (and the recent derivative films) is
that of the submissive male/ dominant female, but most of the films deny and defy
this, in favour of a last-gasp reassertion of male subjectivity. The Last Seduction does
not collude in this unerring belief in the fixity and endurance of the dominant
masculine position, rather it poses the question of what happens if the woman is
the film's only viable point of active spectator identification and heats them all.
Disclosure, like the majority of films featuring a fatal woman, offers the sanitised
alternative: the battered, bruised but morally victorious wimp.
In Single White Female the fetishistic shoe becomes a murder weapon as a man is
stabbed through the eye with the silver heel of a black stiletto. A film such as Single
White Female shifts the emphasis away from difference and the victory or otherwise
of the emasculated 'hero' hy following the other dominant trend of these current
noir-esque films: the exploration of relationships between women. Within this
convention, the female characters become defined against each other and not
against a male opposite. The doubling or mirroring of female characters has
emerged as a consistent feature of modern no irs, and pertains to the cinematic
fascination with symbiotic relationships between markedly different women estab-
lished in films such as The Dark Mirror and All About Eve. The mirroring patterns
in the modern noirs is heavily schematic, and the symbolism of the costumes
functions in the most obvious ways. The most consistently employed oppositional
model juxtaposes good and bad women, subsequent films echoing the mirroring
of Beth (the 'good' wife) and Alex (the 'bad' mistress) in Fatal Attraction. The
significance of the opposition between the two women is made very clear in the
final scene as it is the injured, weak Beth rather than her husband who eventually
kills Alex, the Medusa-curled monster from the deep. This pattern, a development
of the original.film nair matrix of older husband, unhappily married femme fatale and
male lover, is adopted in 1980s/ 1990s films such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,
Presumed Innocent and Mother's Boys. Sometimes modifications are made (in Presumed
Innocent, for instance, the 'good' woman turns out to be 'bad'), but the format
remains the same. The opposition is usually enforced by thefemmefatale, who early
in these films creates a conflict with the other 'innocent' woman. Meredith in
Disclosure requests to see Tom's family photographs and passes comment on his
wife's homely appearance, whilst Jade in Mother's Boys goes to visit her estranged
husband's girlfriend at her work. What then ensues is a territorial game in which
the 'good' women strive to fend off the encroachment of their 'bad' rivals. These
rivalries are further emphasised by the contrasting physical appearances of the
two women and their symbolically differentiated costumes. A standardised set of
signifiers have evolved for the femme fatale, such as bleached hair, boldly coloured,

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sexual clothes, heavy make-up and cigarettes. Conversely, their 'good' counter-
parts usually possess a more 'natural' look of brown hair, minimal make-up and
more casual, looser and paler clothes.
This use of female opposites (which inevitably stereotypes women along
Madonna/Magdalen lines) is developed into the more complex configuration
of ego/ ego-ideal set up in films such as Body Heat and Basic Instinct, in which the
differences between paired female characters, in terms of looks, clothes and
identities, become blurred rather than exacerbated. Matty in Body Heat is not only
mistaken for her closest friend, Mary Ann, but has in the past exchanged identities
with her. Likewise in Basic Instinct, Catherine Tramell looks significantly similar to
her two confidantes and lovers, Roxy and Hazel, and at college was involved in
an obsessional lesbian relationship with one of the other murder suspects, during
which time the two students started to look increasingly alike. This play on fluid,
unfixed identities is in some respects a simple problematisation of the instability
of the femme fatale's appearance; it is also, however, a narrative manoeuvre (partic-
ularly as the men in these films are at best dispensable) that engages with lesbian
and 'homosocial' attraction. Alison Lurie comments that, 'To put on someone
else's clothes is symbolically to take on their personality' (Lurie 1981: 24), an
exchange that, from classic examples like Rebecca and All About Eve, has been a focal
concern of obsessional woman/woman-based films. Jackie Stacey, when referring
to issues of lesbian and female spectatorship, argues that a fascination between
women is not necessarily propelled exclusively by identification or by erotic desire,
but is rather 'a desire to see, to know and to become more like an idealised
feminine other' (Stacey 1988: 11 5). In a later consolidation of this article, Stacey
emphasises that her intention is not to de-eroticise desire by suggesting an over-
lap between desire and cinematic identification, but to eroticise identification
between women (Stacey 1994: 29). In many of the obsessional new noirs this com-
plex intersection between sexual and platonic recognition is played out within
the narratives. In Black Widow, this complex process of identification operates
throughout the relationship between Alex, a reporter, and Catherine/Renee, a
woman who changes identity each time she kills a husband. Despite the ostensible
heterosexual framework within which the deadly 'black widow' operates, the
film's eroticism, its tensions of identification, are contained within the obsessional
interaction between the two women. At the beginning of the film the physical
disparity between the two women is accentuated: Alex is dishevelled and asexual,
whilst Catherine/ Renee wears bright, eroticising clothes and has a heavily made up
face. As the film proceeds and Alex hunts Catherine/Renee down, the women
become increasingly physically similar, and it is significantly the weaker Alex
who alters to look like her double. This erosion of the two women's physical dif-
ferences directly parallels the developing lesbian attraction-identification between
them which culminates in two kisses, one during mouth-to-mouth resuscitation

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 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale
practice, the other on Renee's wedding day. Catherine / Renee is ultimately caught,
therefore, by an elaborate process of self-identification with a mirror image of
herself.
The melodramatic apotheosis of the ego/ ego-ideal film arrives with Sinale
White Female, the most overtly lesbian of the obsessional fatal women films,
and one that offers a pathological example of this subtle fusion of desire and
narcissistic identification. At the beginning of the film, Allie, who has recently
split up from her boyfriend, and Hedy, the 'deviant' flatmate she mistakenly
chooses to live with her, look very different: Allie dresses in smart New York suits
of short skirts and belted jackets, whilst Hedy shuffles into the apartment in a
shapeless pinafore and cloche hat. Despite looking safely gauche, she is, however,
introduced through a close-up of her feet as she creeps up on Allie unawares, and
so is generically defined as fatal from the outset. It is Allie who, at this stage, para-
doxically resembles the cliched image of the femme fatale, in tight, black clothes
that focus the attention on her long, lovely legs. In an obsessional narrative the
confusion and ego-weakness this ambivalence reflects is significant because it
suggests Allie's vulnerability to the predatorial encroachment of a neurotically
possessive character such as Hedy. Gradually Hedy (who, rather predictably, is
still mourning the twin she wrongly feels responsible for killing) alters her look
until she closely resembles Allie. It is at this point that Allie realises her flatmate
is dangerous, and, although she only wants Hedy to leave, she ends up having to

5.6 Bridget Fonda (Allie) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Hedy) in Single White Female
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

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kill her. Hedy's fatal pathology is the destructive desire to both acquire and assume
the character of the other, to destroy Allie as she becomes her, to steal Allie's
identity in order to create her own. The assumption that identity is synonymous
with appearance is similarly treated as pathological. The recurrent symbolic
moment repeated throughout Sinsle White Female to denote the shifting relations
between Hedy and Allie is the double reflection in the mirror. This preoccupation
with checking and rechecking their image is both a sign of weakness (Allie
and Hedy both seek validation of the self through the acknowledgement of
the symbiotic Other) and a means of charting the gradual disintegration of the
physical differences between them.
Countering the prevailing opinion that women who dress fashionably do so
within an exclusively heterosexual framework and with the male erotic gaze in
mind, Jennifer Craik notes, 'Despite the rhetoric that women dress to please men,
other evidence suggests that women primarily dress to please other women'
( Craik 1994: 56). The alternative exclusively female dynamic proposed here
suggests a way in which the notion of an eroticised identification can be linked
with the obsessive belief that clothes reflect an individual's identity: that swapping
clothes is both a sexual and a social manoeuvre. The loss of identity and the appro-
priation of the Other that occurs throughout Sinsle White Female is not simply the
return of a repressed homoeroticism as has been proposed, it is a more confused
(and confusing) smudging of the lines between appearance and personality, a
searching for an ideal based on a recognition of the self in the superficial attributes
of another. The standardised 'homosocialism' of these films is indicated in Sinsle
White Female through a series of bonding sequences just after Hedy has moved in:
decorating the apartment together, taking a photograph of themselves cavorting
on Allie's bed with their new puppy. Hedy has moved in because Allie has recently
split up with her adulterous boyfriend Sam, and her jealousy escalates as Allie later
renews this heterosexual relationship. This is familiar territory; the complexity
resides, however, in the mutuality of the obsessive fascination between the two
women, that it is Allie, for example, who instigates a shopping trip and admires
Hedy as she tries on new clothes that happen to look just like her own, and who
later sneaks around her flatmate's room dabbing on her perfume and trying on
her earrings. As with many euphemistic film representations of homosexuality,
it is Allie's unarticulated narcissism that provokes her intense preoccupation
with Hedy. She becomes fascinated by someone who is fascinated with her,
following much the same pattern as Black Widow. As Sinsle White Female develops,
the ostensible stability of sameness, of looking like someone else, becomes a
nightmarish metonym for the instability of both Allie and Hedy.
Hedy has been borrowing and wearing her clothes for some time, but
Allie's crisis point comes when she discovers that her flatmate has replicated, not
merely scavenged or emulated, her entire wardrobe. This transitional moment is

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 Clothes, power and the modern femme fatale
emphasised by Allie walking between the two cupboards and holding up the
identical sets of clothes for scrutiny. Again there is a destabilising confusion
between sameness and difference, and the horror lies not in the pathological
pursuit of someone else's identity (which is a commonplace cinematic scenario),
but in the ease with which one character can pass for another. Allie's shock,
therefore, registers more the accuracy and success of Hedy's mimicry than the
obsessional instability behind it, a response captured in her annoyed disbelief as
Hedy descends the stairs in the hairdressing salon having been given the same red
bob. Comparable scenarios in other films tend to preserve the differences between
women who appear similar, so the two identities interconnect, but do not coalesce.
Hedy's copying of Allie is not so obviously a performance or a falsification; she can
even have sex with Sam without him immediately noticing she is not his sexual
partner. Sam's error is to conflate appearance and identity, to presume that a silver
coat, black stilettos and red hair signify the person (Allie) he recognises from
that collection of signs. Whilst discussing the tacit segregationalism of Allie, a
single white female, placing an advertisement specifying that she is 'seeking the
same' ,6 Lynda Hart comments how she also 'pays an exorbitant price for failing to
recognise the terrors of sameness' (Hart 1994: 114). This is a slightly reductive
appraisal of the complex mutations and elisions operating in Single White Female,
and the parameters of this terror should be widened to encompass the notion of
unfixed and performative identities the film touches on. To return to Riviere, who
posited that there was no such thing as 'real' womanliness, only the masquerade,
Single White Female suggests a similar lack of faith in essentialism. It is manifestly so
easy to pass for someone else. This lack of self, rather than the duplication of the
self, is what Allie needs to bury and destroy, a feat she accomplishes during
the obligatory Fatal Attraction-like exorcism of the demon woman at the end.
Despite this ritualistic cleansing, the final image is not a photograph of the happy,
united family (as in Fatal Attraction), but a collage of Hedy and Allie's faces making
up a single image. To extend Lurie's comment, clothes and superficialities are
identity.
It is worth mentioning again the scene in Single White Female in which Hedy,
dressed as Allie, goes to Sam's hotel room at night and performs oral sex on him.
Sam fails, until it is too late, to realise his partner is not Allie because he believes
in the correlation between appearance and identity, a 'blindness' which Hedy
punishes by stabbing out his eye with that most equivocal of signs, the stiletto.
Sam's credulity is representative of a distinctly male understanding of women and
clothes, rooted in the assumption that women are readily decipherable through
how they look, a misapprehension already being played upon in classic noirs, and
complicated further in these more recent films. All three of the fatal women
discussed in this chapter (Bridget, Meredith, Hedy) open up the potential for a
radical strategy to counter this limiting interpretation of feminine imagery, as they

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 Gender

all test, manipulate and discard the stereotypes on offer, and thus render these
supposedly transparent signs unreadable. In the course of this chapter two further
assumptions about femininity and clothing have been challenged, namely that
power and sex in a woman is a destructive, mutually exclusive combination and
that women who dress in anything other than a functional way do so with male
eyes and a male audience in mind. Both The Last Seduction and Sinole White Female
give space to women's erotic identification with the female form, the former
through the narrative contextualisation of Bridget's aggressive sexuality, the latter
by situating desire within an exclusively female framework. Both films also
destabilise and weaken the male position. Not only do these strategies question
the omniscience of the male gaze as a necessary concomitant of the mainstream
representation of women, but they rearticulate the masquerade. If appearance is
identity, as the scenario in Sinole White Female suggests, then an individual is the
sum of their superficial, socially constructed parts. The films discussed here
nevertheless adhere to the notion of fixed genders, and in the two subsequent
chapters the radical, performative possibilities of clothes are examined with
relation to films that, at their core, are problematising gender itself.

144
 Part Ill
BEYOND GENDER
 6

THE COMEDY OF
CROSS-DRESSING
Glen or Glenda, Mrs Doubtfire, The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert

The intention behind this final section of the book is to contrast the questioning
and blurring of gender identities that occurs when characters do not wear the
clothes deemed socially appropriate to their sex. These discussions suggest an
important difference, too frequently elided, between the mechanisms and effects
of 'cross-dressing' and 'androgyny' as they are used in film. Whereas in cinema
cross-dressing is used to desexualise the transvestite and deflect the potential
subversiveness of the image through comedy, androgyny sexualises the transvestite
by increasing the eroticism of their ambiguous image. The former is about laughs,
the latter about sex. A gag which runs through Howard Hawks and Cary Grant
comedies, for example, is the number of times the narratives necessitate Grant to
cross-dress. The device is most extensively used in I Was a Male War Bride in which
Grant, as Henry Rochard, must masquerade as an Admiral's wife in order to leave
Europe after the Second World War with his new American wife, but also appears
in both Bringing Up Baby and Monkey Business, which both require him to don, in
extremis, an item of women's clothing. The motivation for the cross-dressing in
Monkey Business is particularly weak, as Grant/Barnie gets cold in an open-topped
car, and the nearest garment to hand is his wife Ginger Rogers' /Edwina's fur
jacket. In Bringing Up Baby, Susan (Katherine Hepburn) has dispatched the clothes
of the man she is in love with to the cleaners in order to prevent him from leaving
her house. After showering, the only garment David (Grant) can find to put on is
a precariously diaphanous woman's dressing gown with fur trimming, the outfit
he has on when he answers the door to Susan's aunt Elizabeth. The femininity of
David's appearance is accentuated by being immediately juxtaposed with the
image of one of Hollywood's rich, hearty, masculinised matriarchs in felt hat, loud
check suit and sensible shoes. 1 Bypassing pleasantries, Elizabeth immediately
draws attention to the anomaly of a tall man in a dainty woman's robe, telling
David he looks 'perfectly idiotic' and enquiring why he is wearing those clothes

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 Beyond gender

anyway. Most accounts of this exchange focus on Grant's reply that he 'just went
gay all of a sudden', taking this to be a teasing allusion to the actor's, now well-
documented, bisexuality (for example, Garber 1993: 396). More interesting in
terms of what the scene conveys about gender and mismatched clothes than this
possible double entendre on the word 'gay', however, is the dog George's reaction
to the vision of a cross-dressed man. From the moment he sees David slumped on
the stairs, George remains transfixed, unable to avert his gaze and provoked into
several minutes of incessant, dose-range yapping. (If it is presumed that this is an
incidental, insignificant detail, it should be noted how the barking interferes with
the audibility of the simultaneous conversation between Susan and Elizabeth.)
Clothes are not just clothes as the naive David thinks, they are how the social
world 'reads' and contextualises the individual. The traumatised George thus
functions in Bringing Up Baby as a comic verbalisation of a fearful, desperate anger
at seeing gender identity boundaries transgressed rather than neatly defined.
One interpretation of the deployment of cross-dressing is that the donning of
opposite sex clothes does not undermine but rather reinforces prescriptive gender
codes, that a person's 'core gender identity', as Robert Stoller terms it, shines
through despite and even because of the contradictory apparel (Stoller 1968: 29).
Cary Grant's masculinity, therefore, is re-emphasised by being veiled. Neverthe-
less, this does not explain the violence of George's reaction to David's unruly
image, which pertains much more to the notion of drag as an abnormalising
process than a normalising one. Peter Ackroyd recounts how historically
transvestism has also been emblematic of danger, chaos and rituals of misrule, and
outlines several cases of cross-dressing being adopted during riots and uprisings as
a sign of rebellion. In 1631, for instance, peasants rebelling against the King's
enclosure of forest land went under the name of 'Lady Skimmington', and in the
1830s and 1840s male rioters against Welsh turnpike tolls were led by 'Rebecca'
and other transvestites. As Ackroyd comments, 'In such cases transvestism has a
central, anarchic purpose in the destruction of the established social order', and
cross-dressing becomes an act of defiance, not a signal of stable affirmation
(Ackroyd 1979: 54). There is something in Grant's disconsolate and increasingly
aggressive image during this brief exchange in Brinsina Up Baby that continues in
the tradition of the cross-dressing rioters, adding a tinge of nonconformity and
perversity to this otherwise felicitously formulaic comedy.
The importance of George the dog is that he is not a participant in the cross-
dressing scene but its spectator, and as such occupies much the same position in
relation to the unfolding narrative as a cinema audience does when watching a film.
As such, George's reactions to Grant's attire signal a fissure (in the instance of
Bringing Up Baby, barely disguised) between the normalising intentions of the
traditional cross-dressing scenario and the abnormalising subversion of that by the
unconventional costume. If the normalising reaction to a male character in drag is

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 The comedy of cross-dressing

along the lines of, 'he's really a man under those feminine clothes, so let's treat him
as such', the abnormalising response might go something like, 'you're worrying
me in those clothes, take them off and put on some proper ones'. The latter, like
George's frenetic barking (and telling pursuit of Grant into the room where he is
going to change into some men's clothes), is the response of the spectator who,
whatever safety mechanisms are in place, nevertheless comprehends the potential
deviancy of the masquerade. Besides examining the exclusively fictional uses of
cross-dressing in films such as Tootsie, Mrs Doubtfire and The Adventures if Priscilla,
Qyeen if the Desert. this chapter will also include a discussion of Ed Wood's semi-
autobiographical Glen or Glenda, in which Wood and his alter ego 'Shirley' play a
transvestite modelled on himself. Real cases of transvestism offer more disruptive
images than the tempered and rationalised counterparts created by mainstream
cinema. Glen/ Ed Wood does not (intentionally) sanitise or commodify the poten-
tial deviancy of the cross-dresser through the mechanics of comedy.
Since Deuteronomy decreed, 'The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth
unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for all that do so
are abomination unto the Lord thy God' (Deut. 22:5), dress codes have been
conditioned by a belief that clothes should solidify gender identity, not question it.
In the genderised costumes examined in the last section of this book, clothes were
indeed reflective of the dominant, established and unquestioned sex of the wearer.
Cross-dressing severs this relationship between body and social appearance, signi-
fying that the biological body is also culturally inscribed. For the purposes of this
discussion of the cracks evidenced by the cross-dresser in mainstream narratives,
the divergent theoretical standpoints of Robert Stoller and Marjorie Garber seem
particularly useful. First, however, the terms 'cross-dressing', 'transvestism' and
'drag' should briefly be differentiated. Cross-dressing has become the generic term
for the set of social and psychological conditions that necessitate the wearing of
clothes of the opposite sex. Whilst Garber uses the terms 'cross-dressing' and
'transvestism' interchangeably, Stoller emphatically differentiates between the
two, stipulating that transvestism should only refer to fetishistic cross-dressing,
'that is erotic excitement induced by garments of the opposite sex' (Stoller 1985:
176). This distinction between sexual and non-sexual cross-dressing is of particular
relevance to the comic use of cross-dressing in mainstream film. Stoller also
proffers the opinion that the female transvestite does not exist, that women only
cross-dress to gain access to the greater social freedoms afforded men. His
contention that, 'I have never seen or heard of a woman who is a biologically
normal female and does not question that she was properly assigned as a female,
who is an intermittent, fetishistic cross-dresser' ( 195) will be expanded upon in
the following chapter's discussion of The Ballad if Little Jo. The final category,
'drag', is exclusively applied to cross-dressing as theatrical performance, primarily
in a gay context as seen in The Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the Desert.

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 Beyond gender

Firmly imbued with an intensely Freudian phallocentricism, Stoller places a

determined emphasis on the 'real' sex of the individual cross-dresser, rejecting the
idea that transvestism or cross-dressing can alter the individual's 'core gender
identity'. Thus the transvestite's relationship to his (sic) clothes is sustained by
the desire to reinforce sexual difference, the femininity of his appearance para-
doxically reinforcing the his essential masculinity:

Transvestite men may try to be very feminine when dressed in women's

clothes. Yet they do not truly feel that they are females. They wish they were
(at least to the extent of being a woman with a penis) and their transvestism
is an acting out of that wish, but they know they are not. Their core gender
identity is male; that is, they know their bodies are male, that they have been
assigned since birth to the male sex, that they were reared as males, and that
all the world unequivocally considers them to be and always to have been
males.
(1985: 30)

This paradoxical overdetermination of the 'real' sex under the apparently sub-
versive clothes (and in Stoller's rather hysterical tone there lurks the suggestion
that he doubts himself on this point), is supposedly not far removed from the
gangster in his suit and fedora or the femme fatale in her high heels and seductive
skirts. Transvestites, in Stoller's estimation, have simply chosen a different outfit
with which to demonstrate their essential sex. Marjorie Garber's understanding
of cross-dressing is very different, proposing a radical rethinking of the subject and
calling for the cross-dresser/transvestite to be seen as a 'third term' which exists
outside traditional gender binaries. Garber's argument is that the tendency has
been to 'erase' this third term, and that this appropriation of the cross-dresser
'as' one of the two sexes is emblematic of 'a fairly consistent desire to look away
from the transvestite as transvestite, not to see cross-dressing except as male
or female manque' and thus to 'underestimate' the object (Garber 1993: 10).
This theorisation of the transvestite precipitates a 'category crisis', not just by
questioning firmly held notions of 'male' and 'female', but by eluding categori-
sation altogether and occupying instead 'a space of possibility structuring and
confounding culture' ( 17). Cross-dressing, as Garber perceives it, therefore, is a
state of perpetual mobility and mutability, which clearly runs counter to Stoller's
firm belief that binary gender classifications cannot be transcended.
Garber's formulation of cross-dressing as a consistently radical act is only
consistently evident in real cases. Mainstream cinema's limitation of its subversive
potential occurs through the marginalisation of fetishistic transvestism, Ed Wood's
persistent references in his films to his own angora fetish proving a rare counter-
balance to this conservatism. The cross-dressing in films such as First a Girl and its
remake Victor I Victoria, Some Like it Hot and the later Hollywood examples Tootsie

150
 The comedy of cross-dressing

and Mrs Doubifire are what Garber terms 'progress narratives' (67) or plots in which
the cross-dressing is forced upon characters reluctantly, usually for reasons of socio-
economic necessity. Thus the two musicians in Some Like it Hot become Josephine
and Daphne to flee the Mob, unemployed performers like Victoria in Victor I Victoria
and Michael in Tootsie cross-dress in a last-ditch attempt to make money, and Daniel,
the divorcee in Mrs Doubifire, takes a job as his ex-wife's housekeeper so he can
see more of his children. These are all clear strategies to generate comedy and to
side-step the latent issue of perversion, similar to Stoller's (as derived from Freud)
notion of transvestite disavowal which one could gloss, 'I am impersonating a
woman but nevertheless you and I know that I am still a man'.
The fissure between the sexed body of the actor and the gender being
performed is often crudely emphasised, as in two quintessential popular images of
cross-dressing set against overtly macho military milieux: Henry Rochard (Cary
Grant) as 'Florence' in I Was a Male War Bride and Sgt. Klinger in the television
series MASH. Both these examples pursue 'progress narratives', as Rochard,
caught up in military bureaucracy, has to disguise his sex to be allowed on an
American ship, whilst Klinger dresses as a woman in a vain attempt to get sent
home from Korea. The drawing together of uniforms and cross-dressing is
particularly rich (and titillating) because of the military's innate conservatism. Ed
Wood, for instance, had red panties and a bra under his uniform during the
Second World War (and was most concerned about being injured lest someone
should discover his feminine underwear); Klinger's draft dodging has historical
antecedents. As Magnus Hirschfeld recounts in Military Fitness and Transvestism,
there have always been cases of men presenting themselves before draft commit-
tees in women's clothes, only some of whom were real transvestites. Far from
ostracising either Rochard or Klinger from the macho arena, their cross-dressing
appearances ensure that they are subsumed into it; in a manner reminiscent of
Stoller, their outfits serve to accentuate not dissipate their masculinity.
Garber has noted a tendency on the part of critics 'to look through rather than
at the cross-dresser, to turn away from the close encounter with the transvestite'
(Garber 1993: 9). This is a crucial observation for characters such as Rochard
and Klinger who, with every gesture, act through their women's clothes to deny
and defy their relevance. A significant visual feature of both costumes is how
makeshift they are. The intention is not to create, in either case, a credible illusion
of femininity, but to reflectively allude back to masculinity via an ill-composed
caricature created from a few thrown-together signifiers. The supreme detail of
this distancing procedure is Henry's horse's tail wig, crudely tied in a knot under
his cap. This functions as a costume version of the conventionalised gestural slip
(the male cross-dresser tripping in high heels, hitching up stockings and adjusting
girdles) which likewise serve as reminders that the performer is uneasy in
women's clothes and ready to discard them.

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 Beyond gender

6.1 Cary Grant as Florence in I Was a Male War Bride

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

To look 'at' as opposed to ' through' the clothes would be to acknowledge

what is perceived to be problematically deviant about cross-dressing, namely an
attraction to the clothes themselves. (Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis brackets
transvestites as 'clothes fetishists', so making this point; Krafft-Ebing 1899: 238).
The attempted normalisation of the cross-dressing process within mainstream
narratives is, however, a falsification of the actual experience of, and reasons for,
transvestism. What characterises the majority of transvestite case histories
(excepting the accounts of frustrated transsexuals) is an acute sense of the pleasure
derived from dressing up. The catalyst for adult transvestism is often an incident

152
 The comedy of cross-dressing
in childhood which has little to do with pleasure, such as the child being com-
pelled by a parent to wear the clothes of the other sex, being told they cannot have
a certain item and so developing a fetish for it, or running out of a garment and
so borrowing their sibling's (Krafft- Ebing 1899, Stoller 1968); all scenarios
that ostensibly conform to Garber's 'progress narrative' pattern in which cross-
dressing is necessitated rather than desired. What subsequently predominates in
the real case histories, however, is a passion for the clothes themselves. One of
Hirschfeld's cases describes how it gives him erotic satisfaction to look at himself
in a mirror 'wearing a corset, dainty petticoat, charming clothes, a hat, a veil,
bracelets and necklaces' (Hirschfeld 1935: 197), whilst the seventeenth-century
nobleman Fran<;:ois Timeleon de Choisy recounts entering a room dressed in
women's clothes and being 'gazed at to my heart's content: the novelty of my
robes, my diamonds and other finery all attracted attention' (Ackroyd 1979: 9).
Like Mark Simpson's definition of drag as 'an ecstasy of surfaces' (Simpson 1994:
188), these descriptions evoke a sensuous, detailed and affectionate enjoyment of
the clothes themselves.
Allied to the pleasure of being seen dressed up, is the cross-dressing narcissism
specific to the transvestite. Hirschfeld identified various categories of transvestism
(concisely listed in Docter 1988: 6-20) including the 'automonosexual' trans-
vestites who, like the case study quoted above, direct all their desires towards the
contemplation of their own cross-dressed image in the mirror. This is the most
extreme form of transvestite narcissism, but there are diluted transmutations
which are far more common. Peter Ackroyd rather dogmatically assumes that the
transvestite's moment of self-contemplation in front of a mirror is a sad, lonely,
indulgent activity which leads to a 'fruitless corifrontation with his new mirror
image' (my italics; Ackroyd 1979: 18). Most of the time transvestites do not
describe anything remotely resembling a 'confrontation' with their cross-dressed
image; as one man comments to Nancy Friday, upon seeing this other reflection
'it becomes an effort to avoid collapsing or fainting with ecstasy because now
I am quaking and trembling all over' (Friday 1980: 416). Another one of Friday's
male interviewees also describes enjoying dressing up as a girl saying, 'I look
in the mirror and usually have a hard-on from the soft panties and novelty of
looking so cute' (408-9). What characterises all of these cases and distinguishes
them from straightforward narcissism is the enforced segregation between actual
body image and the different gender-assigned body the transvestite routinely
eroticises. In this respect, therefore, the transvestite does not merely blur gender
as Garber, for one, suggests, but also embodies difference, as both genders
become somehow inscribed on the performative reflective image. This final
manoeuvre is exemplified by Julien Eltinge's series of trick photographs depicting
a wedding between his masculinised and feminised personae.
In Glen or Glenda Ed Wood upholds the theory that the transvestite is made up

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 Beyond gender

of two halves. Glen or Glenda is categorised as one of the worst films of all time,
and is remembered for Ed Wood's signature incongruities: bizarre pieces of
archive showing buffalo stampedes, cars cruising on the freeway and steel works
inserted at grossly inopportune moments; Bela Lugosi as a baffiing omniscient
puppet master; incomprehensible dialogue. It is probably not remembered as one
of cinema's very few attempts to offer a serious analysis of transvestism. After a
preface asking society to 'judge not' what they are about to see, Glen or Glenda
opens with a dramatisation of the real suicide of a transvestite and the subsequent
discussion between the police officer assigned to the case and a sex therapist.
The doctor then recounts the parallel stories of Glen and Alan, the former a
transvestite, the latter a transsexual, to indicate to the policeman that not all
cross-dressing cases are alike. Glen (played by Ed Wood) is the focus of the film,
and his story contains most of its autobiographical references, although Alan's
cross-dressing during active service in the 1940s alludes to Wood's own wartime
experiences. Glen or Glenda has a thesis which it pursues in earnest (namely that
transvestites and transsexuals are not criminals despite their social stigmatisation)
which is interwoven with the representative narrative of Glen and his engagement
and eventual marriage to Barbara. The film is a confused and confusing patchwork
of documentary-esque explanations of transvestism, idiosyncratic psycho-babble,
unrelated library footage that Wood just happened to possess, and expressionistic
dramatisation. Due to Ed Wood's lack of time, budget and talent it is impossible
to offer a theoretical analysis of Glen or Glenda that can be in any way meaningful.
Instead, it stands as a unique alternative to the cross-dressing comedies, a personal
testimony which in turn emphasises all the 'perverse' details such sanitised views
omit.
Glen or Glenda significantly reinstates the fetishistic element of cross-dressing
and thus the importance of women's clothing to both the character's arousal and his
identity. There is, for example, the repeated pacing (as both Glen and Glenda) past
the window displays of lingerie stores, the sensual attachment to Barbara's angora
sweater and the lingering perusal of a diaphanous night-gown. In its unintentionally
comic, earnest way, Glen or Glenda stresses the pervasiveness and normality of the
transvestite's arousal from women's clothes, asking the spectator to imagine the
'soft, pink panties' a rough, tough labourer might be sporting under his overalls
and making the crucial distinction between transvestism and homosexuality.
Substantiating this there is a sequence showing a 'deviant' homosexual trying to
pick up Glen dressed as Glenda and a ponderous piece of voice-over stating matter-
of-factly that the transvestite's sex life 'in all instances remains quite normal'. Ed
Wood is here responding to a common misconception, frequently worked into
cross-dressing comedies, that the sexuality as well as the gender of those in the
wrong trousers is ambiguous and perverse. Both Victor /Victoria in Victor I Victoria
and Michael/Dorothy in Tootsie are presumed to be gay and/ or lesbian at crucial

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 The comedy of cross-dressing

6.2 Ed Wood and Dolores Fuller in Glen or Glenda

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

junctures, and Daniel/Ephigenia in Mrs Doubtftre is brandished a 'deviant' by the

divorce courts .
Glen or Glenda is a touching (if far cical) indictment of the social prejudice
implicit in cross-dressing comedies. In a sequence such as the one showing a
bearded man relaxing in satin leisure wear and earrings accompanied by a voice-
over asking 'what would happen if this individual were to appear on the street?',
Wood is confronting us with our dismissal cf such an image as comic . Half-way
through the film there is a protracted fantasy/nightmare sequence (for which
the term 'expressionistic' is apposite if a little grandiose) which represents the
confrontation between the cross-dresser and an oppressive society. Leaving to one
side the Nosferatu-esque devil who appears to symbolise Glen's conscience whilst
he remains closeted, this medley of scenes contains two important points: first,
that most individuals in private have exotic sexual fantasies, and second that
society is too dependent on gender binaries. Thus women in transparent robes
squirm on sofas, being flagellated or tied up, and Glen imagines being hounded
by a group comprising of men, women and the devil, whilst the voice-over taunts
him with chants about the differences between girls and boys. The nightmare
subsides as Glen/Glenda emerges triumphantly through the crowd dressed in

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 Beyond gender

his/her ubiquitous angora sweater, tight office skirt, heels and jewellery. Ed Wood
realises this is a utopian fantasy, but in this moment, as the conservative hoards
disperse, Glenda embodies the notion of the 'third term' and challenges the
absolute belief in fixed gender identities the others represent.
The comic portrayals of cross-dressing generally repress anything so trans-
gressive. One of the most successful Hollywood cross-dressing films has been
Tootsie, the story of out-of-work actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), who, in
a last-ditch attempt to raise the money for his flatmate Jeff's new play, becomes
'Dorothy Michaels' and lands a female role in a leading daytime soap. An insidious
film implying that men make better women than women do, Tootsie has, never-
theless, been championed by Garber, who argues for a 'metadramatic' element
within the narrative that implies a similarly fetishistic fascination with women's
clothes to that found in a film such as Glen or Glenda. The scenes which Garber
feels substantiate this reading are those in which Michael discusses and looks
through his Dorothy outfits with his bemused and worried flatmate Jeff (Garber
1993: 5-9). Despite Jeff's perceptive enquiry, 'Are you really doing it for
the money, or do you like wearing those little outfits?', Tootsie is sadly rarely
as enticingly deviant as Garber suggests. 2 Garber's interpretation stresses the
enjoyment Michael derives from creating Dorothy, but this is habitually under-
mined by a vehement affirmation of Michael's masculinity. A sequence that
demonstrates this regressive deflection away from the fluid radicality of her 'third
term' category occurs when Michael (having got the soap opera part of Emily
Kimberley) is caught in his underwear by his friend Sandy, having been on the
point of trying some of her dresses on. As Sandy is in the shower, Michael steals
into her bedroom and finds a couple of her frocks, gradually getting more relaxed
and extravagant with his feminine gestures as he swishes about in front of the
mirror holding the dresses up to himself. As Sandy returns to find him virtually
naked, the only option open to Michael, if he is not going to be thought deviant,
is spontaneously to declare his desire for Sandy (saying 'Sandy, I want you')
and to sleep with her. Transvestite clothes are thus used as a comic prelude to the
reinstatement of Michael's true sex and heterosexuality.
It is significant that transvestites often express narcissistic love through the
distantiating desire for what some of them identify specifically as 'the Other',
because it is during this exchange that a 'third', independent identity is created.
There are several documented cases which signal this very clearly, among them
that of the shoemaker arrested for stealing female undergarments recounted by
Krafft-Ebing, who at night 'would put on the stolen clothing and create beautiful
women in imagination, thus inducing pleasurable feelings and ejaculation' (Krafft-
Ebing 1899: 238-9). Michael in Tootsie is forever praising Dorothy, saying she
is 'brighter' than he is or that she 'deserves' a better wig and nicer clothes, but,
like Krafft-Ebing's case, he seldom collapses that identity into his own. (The later

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 The comedy of cross-dressing

Hollywood cross-dresser Daniel Hillard is similarly vain on behalf of his creation

Mrs Doubtfire, and is visibly aggrieved when he hears that the Court Liaison
Officer has described her as 'very unattractive'). The narcissistic 'third term'
is created as the transvestite image is performed in front of the mirror, in the
imagination or in a photograph. Such radicalism is clearly avoided in Tootsie as, by
the end, the conformist distinction between Michael and Dorothy is absolute. In
the final scene Michael tells Julie (the woman who, by this point, he is in love
with) that Dorothy is still here: 'I've just got to learn to do it without the clothes'.
Even though they walk off engaged in a 'girlie' conversation about dresses, Tootsie's
closure is signalled by Michael's desire to leave the deviant woman behind, and
indeed to incorporate her into himself as his (socially acceptable) 'feminine side'.
Being a woman, therefore, is part of being a good man.
The innate paradox of most fictional mainstream representations of
cross-dressing is that, despite suggestions of imminent danger, they remain
unthreatening because they subsume any disruptive potential into an analgesic
farce. There are various ways in which the fundamental tension between danger
and safety is manifested, the most obvious being the discrepancy between
character and costume or body and clothes. In Mrs Doubtfire, for instance, Robin
Williams's prosthetic mask literally slips at one point. The importance of the
films' often manic oscillation between the character in and out of disguise is only
partly to generate laughter; the device also functions as moral ballast, a reminder
of the continued existence of the 'real' person under the complicating make-up.
Similarly, there are the moments of danger when the cross-dressed character risks
discovery (almost always involving bathrooms or beauty routines) and his/her
ever increasing desire to drop the disguise. Much mainstream comedy uses the
cross-dressing scenario as an obstacle to signal denial and the frustration of desire.
For most of Tootsie, therefore, Michael's impersonation of Dorothy comes in the
way of his pursuit of Julie, and Victoria's masquerade as Victor in Victor I Victoria
temporarily prevents her from getting together with King.
The transvestite image itself is a fault line, a crack between sex and gender, a
site of ambiguity and change. The incomplete transvestite image is invariably
more perverse and sexual than the completed or 'closed' one, and it is precisely
this which, in cross-dressing comedies, is rarely allowed to linger. The hairy
transvestite reading his newspaper in Glen or Glenda (which the voice-over
presumes the audience will laugh at), Michael Dorsey in pantyhose and girdle in
Tootsie, Tony Curtis in male blazer and slacks plus dangling earrings in Some Like
it Hot all represent, like Grant in BrinainB Up Baby, the moment of transgression
itself. Conventionally, therefore, the point at which the cross-dresser breaks the
disguise by ripping off the wig and revealing who s/he 'really' is is reassuring
for both the audience and the character coming out of disguise. The necessary
concomitants of this dismantling scenario, this transvestite striptease, are the

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categorical instatement of difference and the simplification of the cross-dresser's

gendered identity.
A rare instance, though, when perversity wins over legitimacy is the finale of
Some Like it Hot. In this scene Daphne/jerry Qack Lemmon) is trying to extricate
her/himself from the engagement to Osgood, an old millionaire suitor who has
been in pursuit since Daphne/jerry joined an all-female band to escape the
Chicago mob. Getting increasingly desperate, Daphne offers Osgood several
reasons why she will not make a suitable wife ('I'm not a natural blonde', 'I
smoke', 'I have a terrible past'), but he shrugs them all off in turn. As a final
resort, Daphne pulls off her wig to reveal Jerry: 'You don't understand Osgood,
(voice lowers) I'm a man'. Such a blatant exposure tactic can usually be relied
upon to shock and anger those characters who have been gulled by the cross-
dressing (at a similar juncture in Tootsie, for instance, Jessica Lange slaps Dustin
Hoffman), but Osgood simply smiles and replies, 'Nobody's perfect'. Some Like it
Hot ends on the glorious image of a panicked Jack Lemmon in a frock, earrings
and masculine hair confined forever to the point of transgression and doubt.
Osgood is smiling because he knew all the time. When, as in Some Like it Hot, the
segregation of the 'real' from the 'false' image fails to horrify, the destabilising
chaos of the 'third' sex is foregrounded rather than repressed. The attraction of
even ostensibly non-radical cross-dressing narratives is that the normalising
manoeuvres never quite cancel out the abnormalising ones, that the spectator,
like George in Bringing Up Baby, is privy to the intermittent displays of
perversion whilst at the same time being instructed not to fret unduly over their
implications.
This is a moment of phallic panic, when the mere possession of a penis under his
dress is not enough to assure the conventional dissolution of Jerry's transvestite
image. The panic signals the most terrifying fissure of all, that someone can desire
the ambiguous, 'third term' body. In Mrs Doubifire, Daniel Hillard experiences a
similar moment of phallic panic as a bus driver who has taken a shine to Mrs
Doubtfire sees an excessively hairy knee between a skirt and a droopy stocking and
shows not disgust but attraction, saying he likes 'the Mediterranean look' in
women because this is as 'God intended' them. Mrs Doubtfire, needless to say,
hurriedly covers up the transgressive knee. Mrs Doubifire is a 1990s 'progress
narrative' about a newly divorced father who adopts the disguise of a 60-year-old
Scottish woman and takes the position of housekeeper in his old home. Unlike Some
Like it Hot, Mrs Doubifire, though rife with subversive ambiguities, appears all but
unaware of its potential deviancy, and as a result crystallises many of the debates
surrounding cross-dressing in the context of ostensibly non-confrontational
cinema. In its attention to elaborate make-up, Mrs Doubifire recalls the very
different methods of presenting the feminine of drag - theatrical cross-dressing.
Misogynist cross-dressing directs the gaze of the spectator towards the woman's

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 The comedy of cross-dressing
body and away from the man's; as Simpson comments about drag, this also entails
the ridicule of the woman's body through representation:

Much of the entertainment of drag depends upon the improbability and

inappropriateness of a man in a frock, wig and 'falsies'. But this in turn
depends upon not just the improbability of a man dressed as a woman but
the 'improbability' of the female body itself.
(Simpson 1994: 179)

Although pertaining very much to the tradition of quasi-credible cross-dressing

established in films such as Tootsie and Victor I Victoria, Mrs Doubtfire is also part of
the convention of drag in that it cites and makes strange femininity in the manner
found, for example, in the gay drag films La Cage Aux Folles and its Hollywood
remake, The Birdcage. Mrs Doubtfire is something of an anomaly among con-
ventional, comic cross-dressed characters, in that she is both grotesque and her
disguise intricately conceived.
The intricacy of Mrs Doubtfire's costume and appearance is principally evident
in the extensive use made of prosthetic make-up. At first glance it would seem
justified to formulate an equation which proves the more ardent the pursuit
of credible femininity, the less male-orientated or misogynistic the impersonation.
As in male fetishism's ambivalent over-valuation of the feminine, though, the
methodical disguise of Robin Williams's masculinity becomes an elaborate
counter-measure for containing the transvestite threat, and thus another way of
displacing deviancy. The emphasis of the make-up and hair artists on the film (Greg
Cannom, Ve Neill and Yolanda Toussieng) was to hide Williams 'in the manner that
was needed for the plot' (Loren 1994: 91), which meant that heavy foundation and
a prosthetic nose alone, as they had originally intended, was insufficient. What the
make-up artists subsequently constructed were more elaborate rubber masks (both
full appliances and single-piece masks for scenes in which Williams was required to
change back and forth between Daniel and Mrs Doubtfire), of which forty copies
were made as each could be used only once. To accompany this, a full body suit was
created which extended from Williams' chin to his knees (Loren 1994: 91), and a
curly wig to balance the actor's strong jaw. The whole application process took
three hours every day. These would remain incidental details if it were not for the
fact that this entire procedure is reproduced within the film in the sequences
involving Frank (Harvey Fierstein), Daniel's gay make-up artist brother.
Like the actual make-up artists, Frank and his partner begin optimistically with
minor prosthetics, creating two possible disguises, a black-bobbed Cleopatra/
Louise Brooks type and a Yiddish granny. Everyone decides that they need to go
a stage further, so a plaster mould is cast of Daniel's face and a latex mask made,
resulting first in a Barbra Streisand-esque mistake and finally 'Mrs Doubtfire'. This
last successful image is assembled for the spectator through a montage of extreme

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 Beyond gender

6. 3 Robin Williams as Mrs Doubtfire in Mrs Doubifire

Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

close-ups (made-up eyes, stockings being pulled up, a skirt being buttoned),
before the full-length person is revealed, the height of desexualised demureness
in glasses, round-collared floral shirt, pale blue cardigan, sensible skirt and lace-
up shoes. This fragmentation and assembly of the over-feminine image echoes the
conventional cinematic fetishisation of the female form. This construction process
is a departure from the prototype of maximising the surprise and contrast with
the original masculinity by cutting sharply to the new 'dragged-up' image as
occurs in both Some Like it Hot and Tootsie, and is closer to the emphasis on the
transitional phase of Glen or Glenda. In Mrs Doubiflre, however, the very effort of

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 The comedy of cross-dressing

creation distances the new image and prioritises (visually and theoretically) the
disguised masculine body, for the over-falsification of the appearance paradoxically
implies (in the imagination) that which it ostensibly hides. More clearly than many
other films Mrs Doubifire articulates through costume the function of full, faultless
disguise as the mechanism for ostensibly suppressing the radical subversiveness
of Garber's 'third term'. The repressive and painstakingly composed appearance
(a preponderance of florals, pleated skirts and high-collars clasped tightly in
prim brooches) attests to how hard it is to keep deviancy at bay. Mrs Doubtfire's
appearance is thus a hysterical barricade against the dangers of ambiguity. The
threat of ambiguity is signalled by Daniel himself, who, in his successful attempt
to get the job, impersonates over the telephone to his wife Miranda a range
of unsuitable women supposedly interested in the position of housekeeper, of
whom one is a transsexual. In another scene, during which Daniel has to change
rapidly into Mrs Doubtfire for the Court Liaison Officer, he loses his latex mask.
As he checks his hybrid reflection in the mirror Daniel gasps, 'Aah - Norman
Bates!' before deciding the only option is to bury his face in a cream gateau
and pretend it is a beauty treatment. Eccentricity is infinitely preferable to
psychotic perversity.
It has been posited that the reason for so many male transvestites looking 'drab'
and 'old-fashioned' is that their notion of femininity is fixed by their early
memories of their mothers, and that their clothes 'represent a kind of desperate
conformism' and an 'attempt to pass unnoticed' (Ackroyd 1979: 23). The
implication behind Ackroyd's comment is that the transvestite does not wish to

6.4 Robin Williams as Mrs Doubtfire with his family in Mrs Doubifire
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

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 Beyond gender

be found alluring. Male to female cross-dressers in film are iconographically coded

as undesirable, their clothes are excessively prudish and unrevealing, and if they
dress up they are usually painfully demode. They are also often set against more
conventionally attractive pictures of femininity such as Jessica Lange, Geena Davis
or Sally Field. Because these cross-dressed characters are in the wrong clothes 'of
necessity', the conscious eroticism is exorcised from their appearance, and praise
for their style (such as the compliments paid to Dorothy Michaels' 'lovely blouse'
or 'cute little figure' by other women) or the fact that other men find them
desirable are ironic. Garber's interpretation that Dorothy in Tootsie 'is more
attractive, even seductive, in some ways than any other character in the film'
(Garber 1993: 7) is a romanticisation of the intentions behind the image, and, in
theoretical terms, a wilful misreading of the feminine iconography, which codifies
Dorothy and Mrs Doubtfire as ugly and asexual in their high-necked night-gowns,
curlers and A-line skirts. Garber, therefore, would seem to be responding to
the attraction of the metaphoric, as opposed to the physical, appeal of the
transvestite as the site of confusion, frisson and danger.
A concomitant necessity of this unthreatening appearance is the reminder (to
the audience) that the masculinity of the wearer is to remain threatening. The
'phallic woman' is an imperative notion for the transvestite; the disguise of the
penis, in the sure knowledge that it is retained, is the determined emphasis of
much performed cross-dressing. As Stoller suggests, 'An essential part of his [the
transvestite's] pleasure is to know that while dressed as a woman he has a penis'
(Stoller 1985: 13), and as Garber elaborates, 'Cross-dressing is about the phallus
as constitutively veiled' (Garber 1993: 390). The hidden penis (or, alternatively,
hidden breasts and vagina) is also one of the eroticising features of the transvestite
body which, for the spectator, remains an imagined fantasy. As one transvestite
prostitute ('Jack Saul') conveys when describing cruising through a ball on the
Strand, 'I do not believe there was one real female in the room, for I groped ever
so many of them, and always found a nice little cock under their petticoats'
(Ackroyd 1979: 61). The dormant fear which accompanies the need to check and
double-check that the penis, though 'veiled', is still intact (on others, clearly, as
well as on oneself) manifests itself clearly in Daniel/Mrs Doubtfire's obsessive
preoccupation with his ex-wife Miranda's new suitor, the film's idealised phallus
in the form of the fit, tanned, athletic Stu (Pierce Brosnan). The rivalry scenes,
during which Mrs Doubtfire vandalises Stu's Mercedes, passes ribald comments
concerning the inverse ratio of big cars to size of genitalia and even tries to poison
him, demonstrate the ambivalence not only of the cross-dressed body but also of
the cross-dressing clothes. The motivating force behind these actions is Daniel
who, both veiled/protected by his costume and trapped within it, is caught in the
double bind of the 'progress narrative' cross-dresser: the disguise nominally
accentuates Daniel's masculinity but also renders it inexpressible.

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 The comedy of cross-dressing
The most transgressive incident in Mrs Doubifire is, predictably perhaps, a
moment of phallic revelation, involving the ultimate 'potential Waterloo' (Garber
1993: 4 7) of the cross-dressing film, the bathroom. One of Daniel's three
children, Chris, inadvertently bursts in on Mrs Doubtfire, in cardigan, skirt
and pearls, urinating standing up. The son understandably panics, and shouts to
his sister Lydia that Mrs Doubtfire is 'half man, half woman'. To recuperate the
situation and prevent his children from calling 911, Daniell Mrs Doubtfire lowers
the tone of his voice to reveal to them who, under his clothes, he really is. They
then signal their joy and call Daniel 'dad', despite the clothes and make-up. Whilst
Lydia is happy to hug 'dad' in his prosthetics and pearls, Chris refuses physical
contact (as Daniel understands, 'it's a man thing'), asking warily, 'You don't really
like wearing that stuff?'. It is on the level of spectatorship that the most radical
cracks in Mrs Doubifire are revealed, between the outward stability of the old
housekeeper's image and the veiled phallus and, more pervasively, between the
bland exterior of the mainstream narrative and mise-en-scene and the closeted
skeleton of perversion. The bathroom scene is, despite its unerring attempts
to function as restorative 'normalisation', a deeply transgressive interlude, when
the veneer of mundanity is brutally scarred. A child sees his father, dressed as
a woman with his penis out, and is pleased to have him back? Garber, at the end
of Vested Interests, contends that cross-dressing itself is a 'primal scene', an image
(conventionally of parental love-making) based in reality and constituted in
fantasy, 'not only constitutive of culture, but also, by the same repressive
mechanism, a deferral and a displacement' (Garber 1993: 389). Similarly the
phallic disclosure in Mrs Doubifire conceals as much as it reveals and fails to
stabilise anything at all.
As a sign of the irresistible force of the 'progress narrative', Daniel, towards
the end of Mrs Doubifire, is affronted at now being branded a 'deviant' by the
divorce courts, and only permitted to see his children if supervised. There are not
many conventional narratives that could sustain such a gross inflection as Chris's
'primal scene', and not crack, but Mrs Doubifire is devoid of overt reflectivity. This
discussion began with reference to the laborious make-up procedure needed to
make Robin Williams a 'convincing' older woman, and just as that approximation
of the 'real' belied a subversive intent (to accentuate the masculinity so heavily
disguised), so does the film's classic narrative. By emphasising its sanity, probity
and conservatism, Mrs Doubifire protests too much, and in effect emphasises,
through distance, the perversity it is straining to conceal. By the end, the final
normative act is performed as Daniel separates from Mrs Doubtfire (who has
become a children's television celebrity) and is allowed, dressed as himself, to
look after his kids every day after school. But even this straightening out of the
cross-dresser cannot whitewash away the deviancy. In The Adventures if Priscilla,
Qyeen if the Desert there is a comparable father I son relationship to the one found

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 Beyond gender

in Mrs Doubifire, between Tick/Mitzi and Ben. Mitzi is a drag queen, a female
impersonator who mimes to Abba songs, but his ex-wife (Marion) ensures that
this is not concealed from their son, who winds up watching his father perform
and directing his spotlight. Whilst the conformist scenario in Mrs Doubifire
camouflages the 'perversity' of cross-dressing, the nonconformist drag act
camouflages 'respectability'. The fundamental shift that has occurred is that in
a film such as Priscilla, cross-dressing is performance rather than 'necessity'.
There have been various national theatrical traditions, from the Greeks and
Romans onwards, in which cross-dressing has become an accepted and formalised
type of performance, most notably, in the modern era, in Italy, Japan, China and
England (Ackroyd 1979: 89-122, Baker R. 1994: 23-95, Garber 1993: 234---66).
The emphasis of many such (male) cross-dressed actors was on performance or
citation of femininity, as Goethe comments of the seventeenth-century Italian
opera use of castrati in female roles:

Thus a double exposure is given in that these persons are not women but
only represent women. The young men have studied the properties of the
sex in its being and behaviours ... they represent not themselves, but a
nature absolutely foreign to them.
(Ackroyd 1979: 98)

In China, the 'tan' actors, or female impersonators rose to prominence in the

late eighteenth century, after women had been banned from the stage for moral
reasons. Chinese theatre developed a tradition of female impersonation based
on an ornate and rigid vocabulary of gestures, costume and make-up (Baker
R. 1994: 72), and there were several distinct categories of roles for 'tan' actors, all
of which demanded specific skills and emphases, from the elegant woman (or
'chingyi') to the lower-class woman (or 'huatan'). What was sought, as in Italian
seventeenth-century opera, was a prescriptive enactment of femininity, a state-
ment of and about women, not a replication. The confusion between these Chinese
female impersonators and women forms the basis for the play and film M. Butteifly,
loosely based on the true story of a diplomat (Rene Gallimard in the play) who falls
in love with a Chinese actress who subsequently turns out to be both a spy and a
man. The playwright David Henry Hwang suggests, as an explanation for his
extreme naivete, that Gallimard became so infatuated with a symbolic represen-
tation of Oriental femininity, based partly on the cliched stereotype offered by
Puccini's Madame Butteifl.y, that he did not question his lover's supposed modesty
which had kept him from ever seeing his 'girlfriend' naked. The last sequence of
David Cronenberg's otherwise awkward adaptation of this story encapsulates the
painful improbability of the masculine citation of femininity, as Gallimard (Jeremy
Irons) performs a one-person show in prison in which he applies the operatic
make-up, talking as if he has become his lover, and kills himself.

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 The comedy of cross-dressing

Many of the comic narratives cited above utilise performance as a means of

legitimising cross-dressing and the deviancy of the straight characters' behaviour.
Both Michael Dorsey and Daniel Hillard are barely employed actors, not because
they are bad, but because they are principled. Tootsie begins by cross-cutting
between Michael giving acting lessons and attending auditions or rehearsing,
which is when he walks out of a production over a disagreement with the director.
Similarly Mrs Doubifire establishes Daniel as a capable performer, in this instance
in a dubbing theatre laying down the various voices to accompany a children's
cartoon, who walks out because the producer disapproves of an anti-smoking line
he has ad-Jibbed into the script. Victor! Victoria makes use of a similar initial
premise for the stage transvestism of destitute singer Victoria Grant (Julie
Andrews) who, adopting a Shakespearean 'double drag' in reverse (girl plays boy
plays girl), becomes the most famous female impersonator in 1930s Paris. The
difference, however (as, to a certain extent, with M. Butteifly), lies in the film's
overtly gay backdrop used to tentatively erotic effect towards the end as King
(James Garner) and Victoria have started their straight affair, but can only go out
together to Brassal-esque gay and lesbian night-dubs as Victoria is still thought to
be 'Victor'.
The significant link between the historical conflation of cross-dressing
with performance and gay drag is the notion of citationality, of self-consciously
putting femininity in quotation marks. Drag as gay entertainment has currently
been undergoing a radical reassessment, most notably in the work of Judith Butler.
In her discussion of drag in Gender Trouble, Butler criticises Esther Newton's
writing on the subject in the 1970s. A fundamental discrepancy is between
Newton's comprehension of drag as governed by difference and Butler's notion of
performativity and fluid identities, a debate that focuses on the relationship
between the exteriority and interiority of the drag performer. Newton begins by
asserting that 'The principal opposition around which the gay world revolves is
masculine-feminine' (Newton 1979: 100), pursuing this into a discussion of two
different levels of drag. Within the 'sartorial system', Newton suggests, this
male/female binary is enacted by the clear juxtaposition of first two layers of
gendered clothes, either feminine on the outside and masculine on the inside, or
vice versa. The clothes that are visible are defined as 'costume' and presumed to
be symbolic of a role or an act, whilst those that remain hidden reflect the wearer's
'inner identification' (100-1 ). The 'second level' of female impersonation juxta-
poses the (stable, gendered) body with one set of gendered costumes, which
poses an opposition between one sex-role sartorial system and the 'self',
whose identity has to be indicated in some way. Thus when impersonators
are performing, the oppositional play is between 'appearance' which is
female, and 'reality', or 'essence', which is male.
(1 01)

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 Beyond gender

Here, drag is still perceived to be a primary indicator of difference: the exterior

is consciously citing a gender which remains distinct from that of the concealed
body.
Arguing for a different interpretation of drag, Simpson focuses specifically
on the stereotyping of femininity that in Newton's differentiation between
'appearance' and 'essence' remains implicit, commenting that 'the travesty of
drag' can go beyond 'mere carnival' and

can take the form of an incitement to rebellion. It can express a desire to revolt
against that most tyrannical of laws, the 'natural' link between sex and
gender. This drag-as-rebellion, strange to relate, can even represent a
rejection of the denigration of women's bodies on the basis of lack.
(Simpson 1994: 180)

Under attack here, therefore, is the propensity for misogyny in drag, the use of
costume to pass negative comment on women, as occurs in both the 'progress
narratives' and old-fashioned heterosexist impersonations such as Dick Emery's
'Oooh you are awful- but I like you' woman, and the drag acts of Benny Hill or
Les Dawson. A film such as The Adventures 1 Priscilla, Qyeen 1 the Desert clearly
positions itself not merely within the context of gay drag, but drag as anti-
misogynistic. There is a brief flashback, for instance, in which one of the drag
queens (Adam/Felicia) recalls an uncle's attempted sexual abuse of him being
curtailed by the uncle's penis getting trapped in the plug-hole. This is not a film
overly concerned with the preservation of the penis or heterosexism, nor is it
a text tied to a preoccupation of fixed gender identities.
Judith Butler's radical response to most previous writings about gender
questions the idea of gender identity itself. As she comments in her response to
Newton, 'drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic
space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion
of a true identity' (Butler 1990: 137). In a manner which carries forward
the arguments (raised in the discussion of femmes fatales) about femininity as
construction identified in Riviere's analysis of masquerade or de Beauvoir's
dictum, 'One is not born a woman, rather one becomes one', Butler reverses
the dynamics of the body I social performance relationship as they have been
traditionally understood:

According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or

incorporation, however, it is clear that this idealisation is an effect of a
corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce
the effect of an internal core substance, but produce this on the suiface of
the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never
reveal, the organising principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures,

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 The comedy of cross-dressing

enactments, generally construed, are peiformative in the sense that the

essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications
manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive
means.
(136)

This assessment of the body I appearance dynamic is relevant to both a discussion

of drag and to clothes generally, as it emphasises (as does Garber's concept of the
'third term') the fluidity of identity and the construction of that identity simply
at the moment of performance. Clothes are always performative in that they
function as signs or enactments on the body to give that body the illusion of
integrity and substance. They are not, however, always read as such, particularly
when they become costumes for a film where, of necessity, they function as
signifiers for solidifying characters who, from the standpoint of production and
intention, are completed and non-fluid entities. Costume does, though, have
performative potential if one transfers Butler's discussion to the act of spectator-
ship, as, at the point of reception, the on-screen characters are always mutable,
and comprise a series of enactments and gestures which can be identified and
engaged with in multifarious ways.
The Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the Desert is the story of three characters (two
drag queens - Mitzi/Tick and Felicia/ Adam and a transsexual - Bernadette)
travelling across Australia from Sydney to Alice Springs on a bus called 'Priscilla'.
As a film it clearly desires and suggests such fluidities as Butler proposes on
both the textual and the spectatorial side. Ostensibly a minimalistically plotted
drag road movie, Priscilla offers a playful critique of gender and sexual identity
on many levels, not least within the narrative framework itself which subverts
and dismantles conventional mainstream structures. As if extending the recent
arguments about the performativity of drag, the way in which drag performance
itself is contextualised within Priscilla allows it no stability or normalisation. The
mime/dance numbers performed by the three principal characters pertain in one
sense to the logical development of the film's narrative (for example as they top
and tail the film); tangentially they exist also as emblematic counterpoints to this
causality as narrative interjections or moments of emblematic stasis, functioning
in a comparable way to songs in musicals. This duality forces attention onto the
act of performing (the costumes, the song, the dance routine), an emphasis that
is underlined by the performances being directed largely to or for the camera.
Priscilla is an assembly of citations of gender and sexuality, and as a film is
intensely aware of establishing the characters' very different relationships with the
drag and the non-drag or heterosexual spheres. Within the film the notion of fluid
and split identities is focused on the issue of naming. Names are of fundamental
significance to any individual who cross-dresses. Hirschfeld, for one, identified the

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 Beyond gender

act within male transvestism of taking a female name as being a symbolic and
important step, and one that came after years of sporadic public and private cross-
dressing. As a route into her discussion of Paris is Burning Butler comments, 'the
occupation of the name is that by which one is, quite without choice, situated
within discourse' (Butler 1993: 122). In the domain of drag, however, naming
can become a dynamic discursive practice which can problematise identity and
definition. A name can thus exist as a point of negotiation between the private and
public domains, and although that relationship is inherently mutable, the name
offered at any particular moment temporarily stabilises it. In most drag scenarios
the use or alteration of a name symbolises the way in which the individual or
character is to be viewed at that time; for instance, Michael Dorsey's simple inver-
sion of his name to Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie, because it is not too far removed,
serves to underpin the femininity of his 'act' with a constant, already established
masculine identity. In the case of Glen or Glenda the issue of naming becomes more
complex: Ed Wood, playing an autobiographical role of a transvestite is, within
the script, Glen/Glenda; his own name for his cross-dressing alter ego, though,
was 'Shirley', and for the film's credits he goes under the name of Daniel Davis.
The significance of a name to the subject can perhaps be gauged by how random
or deliberate the choice is; the name 'Mrs Doubtfire', for example, is concocted
on the spur of the moment from a newspaper headline. The ambiguities of
the naming process can be elucidated by referring to a case of the nineteenth-
century transvestite Countess Sarolta/Count Sandor outlined by Havelock Ellis.
Throughout his account Ellis refers to his subject as Countess Sarolta V., despite
her having passed successfully for several years as Count Sandor (as whom she had
several love affairs with women, and entered into a 'marriage') and wishing to
be known by that name. Ellis ignores 'Sandor' in the belief that a person's name
and gender are necessarily both constant and consistent. As a counterpoint to
Sandor/Sarolta there is the far more recent case of the pop singer Boy George,
who states he does not consider himself to be a transvestite because he never
wears female undergarments and makes the distinction: 'I call myself Boy George,
not Scarlett O'Hara .... I'm proud to be a man' (Kirk and Heath 1984: 112).
The junctures at which characters are called by their male or female names
in Priscilla is equally significant. Two of the queens have more than one name:
'Felicia' and 'Mitzi' are the drag names of Adam and Tick (or Tony) and all
options are used at some point. Conversely, the transsexual Bernadette is only
given one name in the final credits, and reacts angrily whenever Adam/Felicia,
out of spite, calls her by her birth name 'Ralph'. Names in Priscilla are thus (quite
conventionally in many respects) linked to sex, although how sex is attributed in
the film is unconventionally allied to clothes and appearance, not the body. The
dividing line is that Bernadette exists entirely in feminine clothes (either on or off
stage) whilst the others oscillate between drag costumes and male clothes. In one

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scene the play on naming and identifications is of particular importance. 'Priscilla'

has broken down on a deserted stretch of road and, having gone in search of
'the cavalry', Bernadette hails a straight, middle-aged couple who give her a lift
back to the bus. The couple are implicitly accepting of Bernadette because, as
one of them murmurs, she 'looks like a woman'. Bernadette's elegant, subdued
image is deemed acceptable by the couple because it can be reconciled with
the iconography of heterosexuality. As if consciously continuing this heterosexist
dialogue Bernadette, when they arrive at the broken-down bus, introduces her
travelling companions as Tony (rather than the usual Tick) and Adam, presumably
in an attempt to normalise the situation still further. When the couple are greeted
by Tony dressed in a green sequinned body, however, they hurriedly drive off, the
implication here being that the discrepancy between name and appearance proves
too much.
The exchange between gay camp and the traditional gender matrix is a
persistent concern in Priscilla, and an area in which the instabilities of identity are
highlighted. An important narrative strand is Bernadette's relationship with Bob,
a small-town bar owner who helps the 'girls' fix their car and in return gives them
a performing spot. Although they go down very badly (much more successful
is Bob's wife whose particular trick is firing Ping-Pong balls from her anus), Bob
falls in love with Bernadette and joins the trio on their travels, nominally as their
helpful mechanic. The attraction of the drag queen for the heterosexual man has
frequently been recognised, as one queen explains:

Years ago we didn't think drag was sexual. In fact we used to whoosh to the
balls in drag, rush home and change and then go out to pick up a bloke. Now
you leave it on, 'cos you know you can pick up straight guys'.
(Kirk and Heath 1984: 58)

The normative procedure in mainstream cross-dressing films is to treat same-sex

attraction as a perverse mistake or the result of the confusion surrounding the
'real' gender of the cross-dresser, and to dissipate the anxiety through farce.
The Bob/Bernadette relationship elides such tensions, both in the significant and
ironic casting of straight 1960s sex symbol Terence Stamp as Bernadette, and in
the way that the partnership is portrayed as the film's romantic interlude echoing
conventional, heterosexual love scenarios, as when the couple pass a slushy night
by the camp fire and decide to remain together at the end. Although one can
surmise that Bob's attraction is for precisely the unconventional femininity
embodied by Bernadette (precisely, therefore, the unstable figure straight cross-
dressing films banish), this choice is never discussed or stated and is therefore not
marginalised by being rendered radical or extraordinary.
The film's probing of normative stereotypes counters the enactment of
heterosexuality by Bob and Bernadette with notably untraditional representation

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 Beyond gender

of Tick/Mitzi's familial relations with his ex-wife and son (Marion and Ben). In
the flashback to their wedding, Tick is in a white dress and Marion is in men's
clothes, a gender blending echoed later as Tick boasts to Marion that, having
got trimmer, he can now fit into the frock she had given him. Both sets of
relationships (Bob and Bernadette; Tick, Marion and Ben) identify themselves
with and through the conventional heterosexual model and the subversive drag
model simultaneously. Tick tries, in an example of male masquerade, to closet his
drag side and to reconstitute himself as an 'acceptable' macho role model when
re-establishing his relationship with Ben, wearing no make-up, a bland beige man's
shirt and telling his son that he does not only dress up in women's clothes, but
does Elvis and Gary Glitter impersonations too (ironically, invoking two glam
cross-dressing icons). It is then Ben who rejects the masquerade by asking Tick if
he has a boyfriend back in Sydney, and if he does performs Abba songs. A child
who has no problem with his father being a drag queen operates very differently
from the child who, like Chris in Mrs Doubifire, whilst accepting that his father
'had' to dress as a woman, would not treat him as a father until the cross-
dressing had gone. The reversal functions on a sartorial level as well, as Tick is an
awkward, posturing figure in straight men's clothes, and much more expansive
and relaxed in his own.
Drag queens proclaim their homosexuality through their clothes, which is the
reason for the middle-aged couple accepting Bernadette and rejecting 'Tony' in
costume. In Priscilla, the drag clothes, very romantically, become a liberation.
After the father/son bonding scene (and the 'liberation' of Tick from the straight-
jacket of heterosexuality), Bernadette, Mitzi and Felicia get dressed up in long,
upright ostrich and peacock feather headgear, gaudily coloured cloaks, tutus, fur
and walking boots and go to King's Canyon. What Priscilla achieves by its focus on
the performance of drag through clothes is the queering of the stigmatisation
identified by Newton when she says that drag queens 'represent the stigma of
the gay world' (Newton 1979: 3) through what they wear. In much the same way
as the relationships, characterisations and other narrative anomalies subvert rather
than sanction normalisation, so do the retro-meets-Las Vegas costumes. This use
of costume in Priscilla goes far beyond the unthreatening, gender-preoccupied
cross-dressing of a traditional Hollywood product such as Mrs Doubifire, and incor-
porates the notions of clothes as statements, as fluid constructions, as narrative
interventions that open and proclaim the sorts of fissures and tensions to do with
sexuality, deviancy and the vagaries of gender the Hollywood films strive
so painstakingly to submerge. As Butler intimates, 'In imitating gender, drag
implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contin-
gency' (Butler 1990: 137). Priscilla ignores the body I costume binary of much
straight drag, vetoing the stabilising urgency that imposes the assumption that
the two are correlatives, going some way towards the imitative fluidity Butler

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 The comedy of cross-dressing

6.5 Terence Stamp as Bernadette and Hugo Weaving as Mitzi in The Adventures of Priscilla,
Qyeen of the Desert
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

suggests. The film's closing rendition of Mamma Mia is illustrative of the imitation
game, a multi-layered pastiche on the whole concept of being able to 'do' others.
Mitzi and Felicia, using a series of stylised Abba gestures, wigs and sequinned
1970s clothes, are parodying an image that is constituted in fantasy rather than
fact, therefore citing the Abba women in such a way as to question the very notion
of an 'original'. Just as voguing comprises such detached imitative gestures that
what is being imitated no longer informs the present performance, so Abba are so
displaced in Priscilla that they are invoked simply to be de-invoked.
This chapter began by referencing Bringing Up Baby, a text that, in a small
sense, sought to position the spectator as an important defining element in how,
within the cross-dressing scenario, the performed image of a transvestite figure
can be received. Within the context of mainstream comedy, cross-dressing is
defined by an acknowledgement of the fixity of sexual difference: there is always
a sex which is being disguised, and a gender which is being constructed. Any
radical blurring of that difference occurs, this discussion contends, on the level
of fantasy, for Tootsie or Mrs Doubifire are not interested in positively evoking the
subversiveness of Garber's 'third term'. If the dangers of fluidity and uncertainty
are evoked, then this occurs 'against the grain' or through the cracks in the surface

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 Beyond gender

of the conventional text. These tensions are absent from Glen or Glenda and The
Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the Desert because the underlying intention of both
is to signal the attraction of the ambivalent, transvestite image. The dependence
of the cross-dressed image on duality and conflicting, contrasting and changeable
genders is ultimately what renders that image radical and transgressive: it cites
the instabilities of sexual difference. The intention in the following chapter is
to suggest why the blurred ambiguity of the image itself makes androgyny a far
more erotic form of transvestism to watch than cross-dressing, because it is not
defined by an acceptance of the fixity of gender binaries, but rather by the effect
of ambiguity.

172
 7

THE EROTIC STRATEGIES OF

ANDROGYNY
The Ballad of Little }o, The Crying
Game, Orlando

In Josef von Sternberg's Morocco the chanteuse Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich),
fresh off the boat from France, is preparing in her dressing room for her first
performance since arriving in Morocco. She assembles a by now infamously
androgynous look of black tails, waistcoat, masculine white shirt and sprung
top hat, nonchalantly checking her reflection before going on stage. During
her opening number Amy starts to mingle with the crowd, each action and
exchange resonating with an ambiguous eroticism which is overtly veiled but
covertly flaunted. The androgynous Dietrich is the scenario's controlling subjec-
tive agent, as well as the object of the multiple, conflicting gazes dissecting each
other across the dim club. Amy's actions denote both aloofness and availability as,
for instance, she sits on a wooden railing, one foot dangling lazily off the ground,
her legs provocatively apart, only to walk away from the man who touches her
on the sleeve in a fleeting, subliminal response to her sexuality. In a matter of
moments, Amy has become the centre of erotic attention, a threat, an alluring
icon, the sensuous focus of the desires of men and women alike, the climactic
dialogue being the triangular exchange with both a woman and a man, Tom (Gary
Cooper). Invited over to a table for some champagne, Amy straddles the rail again
and toasts a woman sitting between two men. She makes as if to leave, but then
turns around, looks the woman up and down, and plucks the flower from behind
her ear, finally stooping (in man's attire) to kiss her full on the lips. Upon returning
to the stage, amidst laughter and applause (as if the audience cannot decide how
they should respond), Amy sniffs the flower she has filched and throws it to the
doting Tom, before, hands in pockets, ambling off stage.
Much has been said about von Sternberg's fetishisation of Dietrich's image (for
example, Mulvey 1975), and in this sequence from Morocco the direct fetishistic
rapport with the spectator is correlated with the indirect patterns of desire
rehearsed within the narrative. As an emblem for androgyny (and the multiple
patterns of desire it enables), Amy's representation as a sexual entity is complicated

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 Beyond gender

7.1 Marlene Dietrich as Amy Jolly in Morocco

Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive

by its intersection with gender identity and confusion. Arguing against the tendency
among feminist critics to force a conflation between gender and sexuality, Valerie
Traub distinguishes between terms (such as 'sexual difference') which denote a
aender relation and those (such as 'sexual identity') which denote an erotic one
(Traub 1992: 94). Traub places androgyny into the first, gender-based category,
and so, like Marjorie Garber who considers androgyny only briefly in Vested Interests
as the 'blurred sex' (Garber 1993: 11), absents it from the arena of eroticism .

174
 The erotic strategies of androgyny

Upon considering the imaging of Dietrich (or similarly Greta Garbo in, for
example, Qyeen Christina) it seems absurd to repress the eroticism of the androgy-
nous figure, or, by implication, to have it subsumed into the confused genderisation
of the hermaphrodite. In the subsequent pages of Desire and Anxie0', Traub goes
on to contemplate the question of erotic identification, proposing that, when
watching a love scene in a film, the spectator's identification and/ or desire can
shift during the interaction on screen. In these pages Traub is arguing against the
psychoanalytic assertion that desire will follow gender identification, and as such is
excluding androgyny from the identifying fluid, erotic mode. Part of the intention
of this chapter is to reinstate androgyny into the desire matrix, to suggest ways
in which the androgynous figure, more so than the screen representation of the
cross-dresser, borders two spheres of reference (the real and the imaginary) and
necessarily straddles, like Dietrich, the domains of gender and sexuality, both of
which it intrinsically represents.
In the scene from Morocco described above the dual mechanisms of androgyny
appear very apparent: whilst Dietrich is smudging the defining boundaries of her
femaleness (principally through adopting the overtly masculine signifiers of dinner
jacket and trousers, an easy swagger and a cigarette), she is simultaneously making
herself the point of multiple erotic identification. In a discussion of how public
forms of fantasy operate, Elizabeth Cowie theorises a similar duality, arguing for
fantasy as both 'a series of wishes presented through imaginary happenings' and
a structure, as fantasy is also 'the mise-en-scene of desire, the putting into a scene,
a staging, of desire' (Cowie 1984: 149). Cowie's conclusion is that 'What is
necessary in any public forms of fantasy, for their collective consumption, is
not universal objects of desire, but a setting of desiring in which we find our
place(s)' (Cowie 1990: 168); that the specifics of a scene are not as crucial as
the imaginary patterns with which they connect in the spectator. Dietrich in
the night-club scene from Morocco, like Grant in the sequence from Brin9in9 Up
Baby discussed at the beginning of the previous chapter on cross-dressing, has
two audiences: the audience in the film and the audience in the cinema. This
double observance necessarily locates Dietrich at the intersection between various
conflicting looks. The object of focus for these multiple sets of eyes is not only
Amy Jolly I Marlene Dietrich but a sartorially, iconographically masculinised
woman; an embodiment of fluctuating, unrestrained desire. It is important that
the androgynous image is not confined, in terms of what it is empowered to
suggest, to either sex, but can function as a symbolic substitute for both. Whilst
the androgyne is of 'blurred sex' (conveniently divided at the end of several
Shakespearean comedies into the more manageable figures of 'woman' and
'man'), s/he is also of 'blurred sexuality', and thus, unlike the traditional cross-
dressed figure who ostensibly masks his/her sexuality and desire, an agent of
discovery and danger. It is significant that cross-dressing comedies such as Tootsie

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 Beyond gender

and Mrs Doubiflre conform to the Shakespearean model and, at the end, split the
potentially transgressive transvestite figure in two. Dietrich as Amy Jolly is a
catalyst for erotic identification in others, both men and women, precisely because
her performance of gender is slippery, ill defined and mutable. The androgyne is
a potent figure of fantasy because s/he, as Cowie's model suggests, pertains to
both the real and the imaginary, and it is a coalescing of the two which generates
the eroticism of the image.
The question of images needs to be stressed and reiterated because, too often,
the androgyne (if s/he is not to be confined to the more corporeal definitions
of the hermaphrodite, the mixed gender body) is theorised into absurdity or
abstraction. One such absurdity is the correlating of the ultra-feminine New
Look, pioneered by Dior in 1947, with androgyny, a claim made by Wilson (1985:
46) and backed up by Cook (1996: 58-9). Androgyny would appear
to have little in common with such champions of the full-skirted, tight-waisted
New Look as Grace Kelly, Queen Elizabeth II or Jane Wyman, but similarly
to be more physical than the abstract notions attributed to it. The androgyne,
for example, has been conceptualised as a pre-sexual Platonic ideal, a romantic
trope or 'figure of a privileged language in which sign is transparent to idea' (Weil
1992: 2), an image representative of 'purity' or 'universality' and a figure
perceived as 'superior' to either sex which 'incarnates totality and hence per-
fection' (Singer 1977: 44). Such flights into intangible, symbolic fantasy capture
only half of the power of an image such as Dietrich's in her early films with
von Sternberg (or, much later, Tilda Swinton in Orlando). Dietrich is also, more
concretely, a woman whose features are accentuated by their juxtaposition with
masculine clothes; the crucial question is why is this attractive? One woman, who
wrote to Robert Stoller querying his assertion that there is no such thing as a
female transvestite, gives an indication as to why, when she describes herself
as having no desire to pass as a man but likes the confusions that ensue when
she wears 'unequivocally male clothes'. The woman concludes, 'One perversity,
perhaps, is that I like the idea of looking like a rather feminine male' (Stoller
1985: 140-1). Whereas cross-dressing is a collision between genders which are
nevertheless identifiable, androgyny is a fusion that can encompass these shifts
and permutations. Despite signalling danger and transgression, the cross-dressed
or 'dragged-up' body still utilises the difference between the sexes for effect,
whether through camouflage or exaggerated citation. It is therefore mistaken to
attach the term 'androgyny' to even a radical cross-dressed image, as Anthony
Slide does when referring to the delicious comic deviancy which concludes Some
Like it Hot (Slide 1986: 125). On the androgynous body is enacted ambiguity, the
diminution of difference, and what is manifested is a softening of the contours
- between corporeality and metaphor, male and female, straight and gay, real
and imagined.

176
 The erotic strategies of androgyny

In her essay 'Notes on camp' Susan Sontag identifies two ostensibly incom-
patible forms of camp: androgyny and 'the exaggeration of sexual characteristics'.
Of androgyny Sontag comments:

the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined
form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most
beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
(Sontag 1964: 108)
Sontag contrasts this with a similarly camp exaggeration and relish for 'personality
mannerisms': the 'flamboyant femaleness' of Jayne Mansfield or Gina Lollobrigida
or the 'exaggerated he-manness' of Victor Mature (1 09). It is significant that
Sontag does not juxtapose androgyny with drag but with a hysterical re-emphasis
of gender grounded in a consciousness of sexuality.
The impetus to dilute difference in the creation of an alternative allure is also
one which has increasingly preoccupied fashion. Through the 1960s and 1970s
several designers pursued unisex themes, Nino Cerruti, for example, causing
something of a stir when he produced his collection of interchangeable 'his and
hers' clothes in 1967, and Giorgio Armani (who trained under Cerruti) adapting
the cut of his men's trousers for his first women's collections. Ralph Lauren's
hugely influential Annie Hall look similarly advocated the wearing of not just
masculine but male clothes by women, and the pages of Vooue in 1977 testify
to the immediate impact of the style Lauren created for Diane Keaton. Whilst
Armani's conflation of men's and women's collections has been primarily about
expanding the designer's ethos of comfortable chic through the creation of what
could loosely be termed androgynous styles for women's office and evening
trouser suits, Lauren's gender-blending clothes play around with the possibilities
of hiding femininity in order to accentuate it through loss. There was something
paradoxically feminine about the Keaton-inspired fashion which pervaded every
type of women's clothes shops in the late 1970s. By not being fitted and not
accentuating the feminine curves the distance between the masculinity of the
clothes and the femininity of the body became magnified, although Lauren
himself often made overt reference to hidden femininity by juxtaposing masculine
tweed jackets, for example, with lace-embroidered blouses, a 'symbolic qualifica-
tion', according to Fred Davis, that 'in effect advises the viewer not to take the
cross-gender representation at face-value' (Davis F. 1992: 42).
The designer who has best articulated the eroticism of androgynous clothes has
been Yves Saint Laurent who, since the first version of his 'Smoking' evening
jacket for women in 1966, has produced various male-inspired women's looks.
Unlike Lauren's Annie Hall style constructed around genuine menswear items
(ties, waistcoats, huge jackets and trousers), Saint Laurent, like Cerruti and

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 Beyond gender

Armani, adapted men's styles for women. Saint Laurent's ethos was that a woman
was no less feminine in a pair of trousers than she was in a skirt, but he also sought
to emphasise and not downplay femininity, commenting, 'A woman who dresses
like a man - in tuxedo, blazer or sailor suit - has to be infinitely feminine in order
to wear clothes which were not meant for her' (Duras 1988: 227-8). In this, Saint
Laurent follows on from Marlene Dietrich's ironic, complex appropriation of
men's clothes, and was indeed directly influenced by her for his 1975 version of
the women's pin-stripe suit. He accentuated the femininity of these masculine
looks by adding details that were quintessentially feminine, such as the silk blouse
underneath the 1975 double-breasted suit, or the translucent blouse under the
1966 'Smoking' which flaunted the eroticism of androgyny. The most recent
examples of the marketing of androgyny as overtly sexual are Calvin Klein's early
1980s underwear collections and his 1990s jeans and perfume advertisements, in
which gender differences are minimised and androgyny becomes synonymous
with pubescence and precocious sexuality. His androgynous boxer shorts,
Y-Fronts and boys' vests are still present, if in diluted form, in today's women's
underwear styles. The current sick waif styles dominate both male and female
fashions, with the tighter, effeminising cut of men's clothes (trousers, shirts
and jumpers) suggesting that androgyny in dress no longer means simply the
appropriation of men's styles for women. The wilder examples of feminine men's
fashions, such as Jean- Paul Gaultier's experimentations through the 1980s and
1990s with the male skirt, when compared to the work of Saint Laurent, clarifies
the distinction between androgyny and cross-dressing. Saint Laurent or Klein
are enticed by the sensual possibilities of gender blurrings, whilst Gaultier
(like Marjorie Garber) is interested in the intellectual transgressive potential of
cross-dressing.
The element missing from the ways in which cinema images cross-dressing is
eroticism, the expression of desire through the image itself. A critic such
as Garber is excited by the transgressive potential of the cross-dressed body, but
this does not necessarily mean that eroticism is being enacted on the surfaces
of that body. Dietrich's androgynous, blurred identity is importantly symbolic of
dangerous sexuality rather than deviancy, and as such encompasses the domains
of gender and sexuality that Traub segregates. This chapter will focus on the
residual tensions the androgyne brings to the surface, and the sexualisation of the
androgynous image in three modern films that are informed by the eroticism
of ambiguity, The Ballad if Little Jo, The CryinB Game and Orlando. All three films
enter into complex negotiations with both gender and sexuality, and display a
preoccupation with constructing characters as neither male or female, 'but as both
or either' (which Annette Kuhn believes to be characteristic of recent art cinema
as a whole; see Kuhn 1994: 232-3).
Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad if Little Jo is loosely based on the life story of

178
 The erotic strategies of androgyny

Jo Monaghan who, after having an illegitimate child and being banished from
home by her father, acquired a set of cowboy's clothes and began life as a man. In
the film, Jo joins the gold trail, but is advised to get a steady job and so becomes
a sheep minder, finally buying a homestead and a flock of her own. During her
lifetime two men find out about her 'real' sex (Percy and 'Tinman' her lover), but
neither tell, so the first the community knows about Little Jo's secret is from the
village undertaker. Little Jo works, at the outset, as a 'progress narrative' in
the tradition of Tootsie or Mrs Doubiflre. ]o changes her clothes when fleeing from
two potential rapists; she crashes wet and bedraggled into a clothes store and
buys a set of men's clothes, only because the dresses are not ready to wear. The
most obvious statement being made through Jo's transvestism is the rejection
of the frailty associated with femininity and the adoption of a male disguise as
social protection. Women dressing as men is frequently viewed as a political act,
not merely an expedient one. Robert Stoller bizarrely claims that men's clothes
have no erotic value, so the wearing of them could not possibly provoke sexual
desire, whilst Janice Raymond deduces that 'a woman putting on a man's clothes
is, in a sense, putting on male power and status, whereas a man putting on
women's clothes is putting on parody' (Raymond 1996: 217). 1 Both are reductive
alternatives, upholding the views that a woman putting on men's clothes is an
act unrelated to pleasure, and that men's clothes carry significant symbolic status
that women's do not. Similarly Otto Weininger, in the early 1900s, claimed
that 'A woman's demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in direct
proportion to the amount of maleness in her'; that it is a woman's masculinity
(which, for Weininger, is her 'external bodily resemblances to a man') which
makes her politically aware and assertive (Weininger 1906: 64). In this, Jo
Monaghan's narrative is typical, for, despite it being against the law to dress
'improper to your sex' in nineteenth-century America (as the woman in the
clothes shop reminds her), Jo does, through doing so, find the privileges afforded
a middle-class man, including property ownership and the right to vote.
From the earlier allusion to Marlene Dietrich, it appears that eroticism plays
some role in female transvestism, and there are cases and instances within Little jo
where desire and attraction (both for the masculine clothes and the androgynous
image) contradict the strictly political assumptions about women adopting male
dress expressed above. Of the cases of women transvestites who questioned the
validity of Stoller's contention that they simply do not exist, one woman's story
is of particular significance because it attests to the mutual existence, in female
transvestism, of power and fetishistic motivation. This woman ('Case 3') has an
attraction to that distinctly unisex item of clothing, Levi jeans. Levi's (importantly
even the more recent 'girl cut' models) made this woman both extremely sexually
aroused, in a way that no other item of either men's or women's clothing
could, and gave her a sense of empowerment by making her feel 'emotionally

179
 Beyond gender

strengthened, assertive, confident and totally unafraid' (Stoller 1985: 142).

Among jean brands, Levi's particularly have become ubiquitous symbols for
androgyny and sexuality; one just has to think of the iconography and scenarios in
their UK advertising campaigns, not just the by now infamous Laundrette, but also
Eddie Cochran, in which Eddie's date puts on a pair of stone-washed jeans for a
party.
Although using different particular items, there is a similar ambiguity in the use
of Jo's masculine clothes in The Ballad if Little jo, that they are at once functional
and an eroticising agent. This conflict between necessity and sexuality is accentu-
ated at the moment of Jo's switch: the juxtaposing of flashbacks showing Jo at
the 'height' of her femininity during her fleeting affair with the family portrait
photographer who gets her pregnant, and the current change to a credible man.
The manner in which the changing room scene is filmed intentionally emphasises
the femininity being eroded not the masculinity being gained. The close-ups of
Jo undoing her corset, or caressing and unplaiting her luscious hair even as she
hacks it off, function as metaphors for loss not acquisition or growth. The French
photographer Brassa:i considered the lesbian transvestism he observed in 1930s
Paris clubs to be likewise a 'sacrifice' en route to the unattainable goal of becoming
a man, appearing particularly moved at the loss of feminine hair, which is deemed
'woman's crowning glory, abundant, waved, sweet-smelling, curled' (Brassal
1976). Jo's transformation is completed by a final act of masochism as she scars
her face with a cut-throat razor. This is not, though, a scene concerned with
conveying the suppression of femininity as traumatic deprivation. Immediately
prior to 'Little Jo' emerging as a young man in search of rubies and gold, there
are two brief, shadowy shots of Josephine reflected in an uneven mirror, her image
fractured and blurred. Ifthis is intended to be a sad farewell, the images are hardly
evocative of a perfection about to be lost; rather they suggest an aroused fascina-
tion with the impure, ill-defined androgyne about to be gained. In this, The Ballad
if Little jo functions quite differently from films such as either Mrs Doubifire or
Priscilla in terms of its use of transvestism. The conventional cross-dressing images
discussed in the previous chapter represented a process of multiple elisions, one
of the most fundamental being the denial or eroticism of the ambiguous. Although
danger and transgressiveness were symbolised, desire within (not just of) the
image was repressed.
Before examining the film's deployment of fetishism in its representation of the
androgynous body, one facet of Little jo that links it firmly with the established
cross-dressing tradition is a preoccupation with the 'phallic woman'. A common
way in which mainstream cinema undermines female potency as it becomes
threatening is to reinstate archetypal femininity. Following her mesmerising
performance in tails, trousers and top hat, Dietrich's next appearance in Morocco
is in a very short black dress, making the focus her legendary legs. In iconographic

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terms, Amy Jolly goes both ways, oscillating between sadism and masochism,
threat and containment. Garber has noted that the male cross-dressing perfor-
mance in an exclusively male arena 'is a way of asserting the common privileges
of maleness' (Garber 1993: 60), a means whereby the possession of the phallus
can again be related to biological difference and the possession of the penis. What,
then, of the female cross-dresser in the all-male context of the Western? As a
means of explaining the centrality of the phallus as metaphor in Western culture,
many feminists (and others) have turned to Lacan's distinction between the penis
and the phallus, the latter existing exclusively in the Other as a signifier which
'can only play its role as veiled' (Lacan 1958: 82), the symbolic and unattainable
representation of desire. The obsessive fetishisation, however, of the signified
which is never shown (and which, in the assignation of sexual difference, is
inevitably reduced to that anatomical difference which 'comes to _figure sexual
difference' [Rose 1982: 42]) perpetually leads back to a reconsideration of the
penis as phallus, frequently in the realm of metaphor, as in the Western.
The gun is a common symbol for that which remains veiled and, as in Howard
Hawks' Western Red River (see the scene in which John Ireland and Montgomery
Clift admire each others' guns), stands for desire as much as for the penis. For the
Western's 'phallic woman' (or the impotent, castrated 'penisless man' as Stoller
would have her [Stoller 1968: 196)), the possession of a detached phallic symbol
is a survival imperative. Even as she climbs onto the stage singing, in a dress and
married to Bill, Calamity Jane has a gun hidden in the folds of her skirt ('just in
case any more actresses roll in from Chicagee! '). Bill, though, ever mindful of his
role and safety, passes the gun to a well-wisher in the crowd and rides off with the
gunless Calam. The fundamental difference between Calamity Jane and Little Jo
is that whilst the former is a tomboy, the latter is a woman passing as a man, and
as such the phallic symbols Jo utilises are intrinsically more threatening by being
disguised as closer to what is assumed to be a male body. Little Jo literally learns
how to be a man through mimicry of the gestures and attitudes shown by the men
around her, and one lesson is teaching herself how to shoot accurately, which she
does whilst tending sheep over her first winter alone. The proximity between
symbol and presumed penis later becomes crucial as Jo wants to get rid of
the aggressive cattle company owner trying to buy her land: in a gesture copied
from many past Westerns, she slowly opens her jacket to reveal the handle of a
centrally positioned revolver peeping out over the waistband of her trousers.
The possibility of equating the phallus with the penis is overtly dependent on
a masculine appearance, a prefiguration which Jo, in her male ensemble of wide-
brimmed hat, rough tweed jacket, trousers and collarless shirt, readily conforms
to. The violence of the male reactions at the end of the film to the discovery that
Little Jo was in fact female stems from her dead body symbolically confronting
them with their own potential for lack. If anyone can possess the phallus, so can

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7. 2 Suzy Am is as Little Join The Ballad if Little jo
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 The erotic strategies of androgyny

a woman. It is likewise symbolic that Frank, a lifelong friend of 'Little Jo',

literally reassembles Jo's male image, clothing the corpse in her man's clothes and
balancing it on a horse for a final photograph. This ambivalent act gestures both
acceptance and disavowal. An interesting comparison can be made with Havelock
Ellis's case of Count Sandor (cited briefly in the last chapter), who was brought
to court by his father-in-law in 1889 for having married his daughter Marie under
false pretences, namely that he was in fact a woman, the Countess Sarolta. A
great deal of the father-in-law's obsessive testimony dwells on Sandor's false
(metonymic as opposed to metaphoric) penis: the stuffed handkerchiefs that gave
the 'appearance of sexual organs', the 'something like an erect member' he
thought he saw, and the pretence at urinating like a man behind trees. All his wrath
is thus directed at being duped by Sandor's male impersonation. Of no concern
is the obviously quite content Marie who, as Ellis reveals at the end of the case
history, 'retains her love for the Countess, whom she calls the grandest of women,
and she longs to be her companion for life' (my italics; Ellis 1897: 279-87).
Whilst undergoing questioning, Sandor refused to cooperate with the doctors
until they addressed 'her' as a man. Was the satisfaction Marie derived from her
partner perhaps not in some way related to the eroticism of this smudged duality?
In The Ballad of Little jo the comparable moment of discovery is similarly
charged with sexual attraction and aggression rather than repellence. Percy, Jo's
unbalanced mentor and the first to discover her 'true' sex, tries to rape her on
finding out; but Tinman, the frail 'Chinaman' she has working for her when
she has acquired her own homestead, falls in love with the person he realises
is not 'Mr Jo'. Whilst Jo and Tinman arc building the wooden extension to the
hut for him to live in, Jo falls and Tinman catches her, feeling her female body
through her clothes. During the subsequent sex scene, the emphasis, both
in terms of the camera work and costuming, is on sensuousness; the extreme,
caressing close-ups on skin, for example, and the juxtaposition of that skin with
the rough, cotton male underwear they both have on. In the realm of comic,
misogynist drag, a woman gently unbuttoning female underwear because she
desires the man it adorns is a virtually inconceivable scene, but here the dynamics
permit such eroticism. In iconographic and narrative terms, this is due to the
moment of Tin man's discovery prompting a fusion rather than a severance
between the polarities male and female. Jo and Tinman are significantly similar,
and so unrepresentative of categorical difference: they wear the same vest/long-
john ensembles, Tinman has a long, feminine plait running down his bare hack
and they both have prominent scars. The man Jo falls in love with, therefore, is as
feminised as she is masculinised, and both of them are androgynous. In social
terms, theirs is a reciprocal bonding in which they share roles and transgress
traditional gender boundaries: Jo is the boss, Tinman cooks, and they arc both
outsiders. Jo is not attractive to the spectator or Tinman because, after all, she can

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 Beyond gender

look graciously womanly, but because, through being 'found out' she retains and
amplifies the androgyny she had all along.
In fact, like Divine when playing a man (as in Trouble in Mind) Suzy Amis
gives the impression of being in drag when she is dressed as the feminine Jo. In
accordance with this, the only disagreements Jo has with Tinman occur when
she shows him her overtly feminine side. The first time Jo brings out the only
photograph she has of herself as Josephine, Tinman fails, until prompted, to
recognise the 'society girl' in the picture and admits 'I like you much better as
you are'. On one level the costumes signal that Jo cannot change, an effect, partly,
of the stability of her screen image and the notable lack (since the initial change
at the beginning) of the more conventional alternations between the 'real' and
'false' personae: the frenetic collisions between chest hair and girdle, between
masked and unmasked faces that mark comic cross-dressing narratives. When Jo
does attempt to reinstate a feminine appearance by making herself a skirt and
bodice and combing down her hair, she is undermined by both Tinman who is
angered by her coy, ingratiating desire to be complimented for her looks, and the
costume design, as the new, plain cotton outfit (unbleached white and buttoned
down the front) strongly echoes the male underwear she has temporarily rejected.
The impersonation of either gender makes Jo look androgynous. She fails to
conform or belong, whether in check shirts and dwarfing jackets or floor-length
skirts, and remains man-womanly or womanly-manly, to use Virginia Woolf's
appropriately awkward terms, to the end.
The fluidity of Jo's androgynous visual identity is signalled as erotic and not
purgatorial through the standardised mechanisms of image fetishism. Jo's own
protective instincts lead her, when first she appears as a man, to obscure her
face, dip her head and disguise her contours within the shapeless form of her
clothes. Such partial concealment classically serves to intensify the attraction by
heightening the mystery; although in a highly unclassical way, The Ballad if Little
Jo breaks the identifying bond between the two significant subjective looks: the
look between characters and the look from the spectator to the screen. Whilst, in
the first scene in Ruby City, the other male characters jest about Jo's boyishness
and seek proof that he is not a dandified 'dude', the complexity of the projected
image is complicated and eroticised through the interplay between light and shade,
visibility and invisibility. The curve of Jo's cheek is mirrored by the sweep of the
hat that casts the rest of her face in shadow, creating a similar image of enigmatic
danger to that of Clint Eastwood as he enters the bar at the beginning of Hish
Plains Drifter. Androgyny in Little Jo is thus represented as seductive because
it remains concealed and intangible, our image of Jo remaining fragmented,
incomplete, either hidden by mannered lighting or engulfed in layers of clothes.
Even the undressing and exposure of the sex scene is ambiguous, as the intense
close-ups render the images almost abstract. Here androgyny is not a means to a

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7.3 Suzy Amis as Little Join The Ballad cifLittlejo
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 Beyond gender

gender-specific end, and dressing as a man is not merely part of being a woman.
The other characters besides Jo and Tinman display an anxiety about the potential
loss of sexual difference, expressed most vehemently in Frank's gesture of dressing
the dead Jo up in her man's clothes. To 'prove' Jo was a fraud, he sends this and
the old picture of Josephine, the rich society girl, to a newspaper, and a shot of
the two images set side by side ends the film. But what does this imposed ending
prove? Far more alluring than the neat division between male and female is the
gender blending suggested by the buttoned long johns and the undecorated calico
dress; the eroticism of the space in between.
It is, perhaps, a considerable leap from a commercially unsuccessful woman's
Western such as The Ballad cf Little jo to Neil Jordan's much more successful and
sensationalist The Cl)'ing Game, but the films share a common preoccupation with
the fluidities and complexities of sex and gender identities and a similar desire
to eroticise the androgynous body, although The Crying Game approaches the
questions of androgyny through the notion of passing. At the time of its release,
much of the controversy and debate surrounding The Crying Game, the story of
an IRA man who falls in love with the transvestite lover of the soldier he helped
kidnap, centred on a scene the film-makers implored critics and audiences not to
divulge which shows the male transvestite (Oil) being undressed by a man who,
until that moment, does not realise his date is not a woman. The significance of
this sequence, which occurs roughly half-way through the film, is that, contrary
to cross-dressing tradition, the spectator has not (in theory at least) been granted
the privilege of advance knowledge, and is as surprised as the other character,
Fergus, when Oil's secret is revealed. There was subsequently a proliferation of
'had you realised?' conversations, and several articles and reviews dwelt on how
it is barely credible that Fergus had not previously spotted the difference (see, for
example, Simpson 1994). What causes Fergus to retch, and audiences to convince
themselves that they had not been outwitted, is fear of the individual who
successfully passes (in this instance as a woman), and the assumption that such a
figure is manifest of a subversive threat. The common reaction suggests that,
whilst most people remain happy with the character they know is cross-dressing,
and can likewise relish the exotic eroticism of the androgyne, such pleasure is
a correlative of certainty, of knowing how the transgressive body evolved and what
(gendered, sexed) elements it contains.
The Crying Game is a multi-textured film from a director who has regularly
been concerned with the trauma of the changing body and the psychological and
emotional transmutations and uncertainties that accompany metamorphosis, as
demonstrated in other films such as The Company cf Wolves or Interview With a
Vampire, both of which deal with a similar correlation between mutation and
sexualisation. In keeping with Jordan's other films, the moment at which the
transgression and tension between fantasy and reality becomes visible in The Cl)'ing

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 The erotic strategies of androgyny

Game is a primary erotic catalyst. Oil has invited Fergus (going by the name of
Jimmy) back to her flat for a second time, they kiss, and Fergus waits on the bed
as Oil goes into the bathroom to change. On returning, dressed in only a light,
silky robe, Oil lets Fergus touch and undress her. As Fergus unties the gown, the
camera (matching Fergus's point of view) pans down Oil's body to reveal its flat
chest and male genitals, like the androgynous coquettishness of Oonatello 's David,
flaunted with a calm knowingness. Oil assumes Fergus knew, Fergus did not, and
his reaction is to hit Oil, throw up and say he's sorry, before rushing out. This
response marks, with violent confusion, the erosion, in seconds, of his subjective
potency. The shock of viewing Oil's masculinised femininity also necessitates in
the spectator an intellectual fragmentation of the integral image. The androgynous
body becomes a chaotic assembly of syllables that seem meaningless in their
current order: long hair, make-up, penis, tattoo, painted fingernails, hairless body.
It is at this point of exposure that the process of normalising reassembly begins,
starting with the reconstruction of prior events fuelled by the nagging worry that
one should have known.
The (not terribly insightful) way to destroy the film has been to destroy
the illusion, to cast cynical aspersions on the idea that Oil could have 'fooled'
anybody. As Mark Simpson comments in parentheses, Oil, 'it must be said, is an
obvious transvestite to anyone who has not lived a sheltered life' (Simpson 1994:
172). But this is to miss the point that The CryinB Game is an extended interplay of
inconsistent, fluid identities. The ironic mechanisms operative within The CryinB
Game offer a critique, not just a heterosexual validation, of 'passing'. Oil is
consistently presented against a backdrop of shifting identities, and loses much
through being viewed in isolation. Fergus, in hiding after the botched kidnap
of Jody, goes by the name of Jimmy when in London; Jude, the female IRA
member, changes disguise or look three times; Jody (the soldier who is kidnapped
and dies) confides to Fergus about Oil, but never reveals she is a transvestite. And
then there is the ironic, complex use of ostensibly straightforward love songs: three
versions of 'The Crying Game', one by a woman (used for Oil's mime in the
Metro), two by men, and 'Stand By Your Man' sung by Lyle Lovett, a straight, male
new-wave Country singer. Oil is therefore contextualiscd by this procedure of
distanciation and irony, exemplified by the first conversation with Fergus in
the Metro conducted through the detached, choric figure of Carl the barman
who performs the role of interpretative go-between. On a superficial level this
extremely self-conscious exchange is an exclusory game at Fergus's expense, as Dll
and Carl absent Fergus (whilst simultaneously engaging him) by referring to him in
the third person as if he is not there ('D'you see that Carl? He gave me a look';
'That was a look'). The conversation also, however, functions as a metaphor for
Oil: the insistence on performative naming procedures (the substitution by Carl
of the indirect 'she' and 'he' for any direct forms of address) paralleling the

187
7.4 Jaye Davidson as Oil in The C')'in9 Game
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 The erotic strategies of androgyny

citationality of Oil's androgyny. The Crying Game examines the naming and
gesturing procedures that go into delineating the 'I', the apparent subject, and Oil,
at the centre of this, repeatedly constitutes her androgyny by citing and disavowing
herself (miming to 'The Crying Game', referring to herself as 'she').
In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler feels compelled to clarify the idea of
performativity and to wrest it from the clutches of those who interpreted
the term, after Gender Trouble, as a license for a citational free-for-all, attesting that,
'a performative "works" to the extent that it draws on and covers over the constitutive
conventions by which it is mobilised' (Butler 1993: 227), and that 'femininity',
for instance, is 'not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm'
(232). With regard to The Crying Game, the importance of these differing state-
ments concerning the interest and potential radicalism of any gender-blending
or gender-subverting act lies in how they perceive the relationship between the
performative and a pre-existent structure of signification. The issue that concerns
The Crying Game is 'passing', the valuation of the perfect rendition of 'realness', a
visual homogeneity irretrievably disrupted after Fergus's (and our) 'primal scene'.
If one focuses almost exclusively (as Garber does) on the transvestite act, then
'passing' will be conceived of as radical whether or not it is discovered because
its transgression resides in the performance itself. If, however, spectatorship and
the critical distanciation between act and reception are prioritised (as suggested in
part by Butler), 'passing' is not radical unless recognised as such or discovered and
brought into the realm of knowledge and discourse. What is paradoxically
interesting about The Crying Game, therefore, is the discovery of the failure of Oil's
impersonation.
In a very basic sense, the man or woman who successfully 'passes', who
perfects 'realness' and cannot be told apart from that which is being cited, is the
theoretically perfect androgyne who has fused genders to disguise his/her own sex.
In the documentary Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's film about New York
African-American and Latino drag balls, there are several categories within which
the contestants can compete, 'realness' being the one which is treated at greatest
length. 'Passing' indicates being able to effect 'realness' in various different
contexts: skin colour, sexuality, gender. For the spectator of this film, however,
'realness' is left as a theoretical category because the documentary contextual-
isation impels us to recognise that these are all performances (the narrativisation
tells us what we are looking at/for and so cites the 'realness'). The performances
that 'work' are those which defy 'reading': the act of exposing the failures of the
constructed appearance and thus its artifice. As Butler remarks when discussing
Paris Is Burning, 'the impossibility of reading means that the artifice works, the
approximation of realness appears to be achieved, the body performing and the
ideal performed appear indistinguishable' (Butler 1993: 129). Is there validity,
however, in a fictional film couching a radical discussion of passing and the fluidities

189
 Beyond gender

of identity within a character who passes successfully? There are cinematic

examples which have answered this question very differently, as in the uncredited
transvestite performance of Debra Winger in Made In Heaven or Linda Hunt's
(credited) cross-gendered performance as a male character in The Year cif Living
Dangerously. The real point of interest as a spectator in these situations is being able
to 'tell', the efforts of the make-up and costume departments notwithstanding,
otherwise the inconsistency is only compelling in retrospect.
For those watching The Crying Game who do not 'guess' that Oil is a transvestite
before this is revealed, there is in the pre-exposure performance a transparency, a
coincidence between 'what appears and what it means' (Butler 1993: 129). Oil's
identity is, as it were, read from the outside in - although the inverse is assumed,
because of the conventionalised reading of clothing as indicative of the sex and
gender of the body it adorns. There are also no deliberate mistakes, trips or the
hitching up of uncomfortable pantyhose to give the spectators an opportunity to
'read' the image. After the exposure scene, the relationship between clothes
and body is inevitably destabilised, in a way that enables Oil's appearance to be
'read', despite the clothes and the overall image remaining ostensibly the same.
The complexities of meaning rebound off the consistency of the visual look in the
second half of the film, and the discrepancies are named rather than elided,
impelling the spectator/Fergus to speculate as to how the two ever seemed
indistinguishable.
The issue of passing, of not being vulnerable to reading, is fundamental to trans-
sexualism, gender blending and third sex identities. Jan Morris has commented,
'The whole point is lost, it seems to me, when people become obsessed with
the idea that they have to prove to the world, by making visible changes in them-
selves, that they have undergone a process of psychological adaptation' (Singer
1977: 52). This desire for invisibility (the emphasis on the 'psychological' and the
concomitant denial of the corporeal) is further a desire for anonymity within one
or other of the traditional genders. A very different view is proffered by Kate
Bornstein in Gender Outlaw, in which gender fluidity (as opposed to Morris's fixity)
is argued for as a radical means of transgressing boundaries and subverting the very
notion of boundaries as stable divisive structures. As Bornstein remarks, 'It's hard
to cross a boundary that keeps moving' (Bornstein 1994: 52). If a radical statement
is intended, a public declaration of dissidence, what is the point of keeping
the motions of that transgression (the gender fluidities) invisible, wrapped in the
secretive veils of passing? This is not intended as an argument against passing per se
as a personal activity, but against the belief that passing can undermine gender if it
remains hidden. Gender is a social construction, its normative rules understood
and fabricated in a social context; if its dictates are to be subverted, snubbed or
violated, radicalism behind closed doors or zipped-up strides is a meaningless
public gesture that only becomes interesting and oppositional if found out or shown

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 The erotic strategies of androgyny

as in The Crying Game. If no narrative use had been made of Oil's transvestism, if
the danger, the boundary crossings, the tensions had been elided, where is the
polemic? This is why knowledge of who 'she really is' is critical to a comprehen-
sion of Oil's androgyny and other gender and sex negotiations going on in The
Cryins Game, because the finding out precipitates an awareness of transgression.
Despite the violence of his reaction, Fergus remains attracted to Oil through
the latter half of the film. Although Fergus cannot contemplate sex, they continue
to kiss and date through an increasingly complex film. In a scene that appears soon
after Fergus finds out Oil is a man, Fergus cuts Oil's hair, an exchange that parallels
their first meeting when Fergus went to Millie's hairdressers to get his hair
trimmed by Oil. Fergus then forces Oil to put on Jody's cricket clothes, which
have been standing eerily in Oil's flat dressing a mannequin. The explanation
offered by Fergus for his actions is 'I want to make you into something new'. The
symbolism of Jody's clothes is complicated. It is evident from the opening scenes
in Ireland that, whilst guarding Jody, Fergus falls in love with him, and that this
love is a strong motivation for going in search of Oil. Simpson argues that 'Oil
stands in for Jody' (Simpson 1994: 172), a substitution illustrated by the swap in
costume and Fergus's frequent fantasies of Jody bowling (in his cricketing
'whites'). The intrusion of the latter (in soft focus and slow motion) as Fergus
climaxes having been given his first blow-job by Oil, underlines the identification.
The act of putting Oil in Jody's clothes also carries with it the more generalised
symbolism that, having been repulsed by Oil as a man in women's clothes, Fergus
is now reinstating a more conventional, gender-affirming compatibility between
clothes and sex, so collapsing the differences that were the source of his initial
trauma. The differences cannot be eradicated completely, however, and in Fergus's
continuing love for Oil and the perpetuation of a relationship between them, he
also manifests an attraction for the blurred space occupied by the androgyne, the
figure who is eroticised because s/he is both genders and neither. During
the revelation scene, this attraction to the ambiguous body is represented through
the literal blurring (on the level of style and mise-en-scene) of the initial sexual
exchanges between Fergus and Oil that predominantly take place behind veils. In
the latter part of the film, when dressed in Jody's cricket clothes, Oil retains the
allure of the androgyne by failing to pass as a convincing man, instead embodying
the inverse complexity of the manly-woman. Oil's androgyny is created through
the play between passing and not passing and between the changes of clothes and
appearance and the consistency of Oil's bodily image, as if 'knowing' Oil's sex
increases rather than quells the eroticism of his body.
In the non-eroticised cross-dressing narrative, the affirmation of the corporeal
identity of the previously ambiguous figure (when that character is categorically
'proven' to belong to one of the two traditional genders), is a crucial piece of
exposition. After such a revelation, the sexual response to the cross-dresser is

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 Beyond gender

usually directed at the divulged 'real' sex. In Victor/ Victoria, once King Marchand,
hiding in the bathroom cupboard, sees that the female impersonator Victor is a
woman, this permits him to unproblematically look at and desire her as such. In
the case of the androgyne, sexual attraction is grounded in unease and doubt. As
Annette Kuhn comments about Fergus finding out the 'truth' about Oil in The
CryinB Game, 'this visually guaranteed knowledge neither puts an end to Fergus's
resolve to keep his promise to Jody, nor forces any transformation in sexual
identity or orientation on his part' (Kuhn 1994: 233). A comparable discovery to
King's in Victor/ Victoria, therefore, complicates rather than simplifies the matter
of attraction. So far this discussion has focused on the desirability of the veiled,
blurred androgyne, the enticement of the 'wistful and cool androgyne look
[which] can be more haunting than the obviously all-male or all-female seductive-
ness' (Zolla 1981: 55). Such an image is attractive precisely because, on a visual
level, it destabilises gender identity and sexual difference. Both Woolf's novel
Orlando and Sally Potter's film adaptation start from an alternative premise to
the other films previously discussed in these two chapters, which is to treat with
indifference the notion of sexual difference. Orlando is a mythic figure who lives
across centuries but does not increase substantially in age, and who, at the age of
30, changes, without warning, from a man to a woman and remains one from that
point on. The eroticism of androgyny in Potter's Orlando is not grounded in the
blending or blurring of subjective identification and identity according to sexual
difference, but in a disinterest with that very mode of classification. The film is
thus proposing a radical reassessment of the relation between the gendered image
and its interpretation. Kari Wei! in AndroBYny and the Denialrf Difference suggests,
'The androgyne is at once a real, empirical subject and an idealised abstraction, a
figure of universal Man' (Weil 1992: 2). In Orlando's teasing contemplation of
the female body in the mirror there lies the paradox informing the film's similar
interpretation of androgyny as both an abstraction and a corporeal state.
A prerequisite of Orlando the film is that Orlando's androgyny must be located
in a body which is present, visible and non-abstract. It is not, however, made
hugely significant that the pure, androgynous body is in this instance female, as
Tilda Swinton's femininity whilst playing the role is disregarded rather than
disguised as Debra Winger's is, for instance, in Made in Heaven. Sally Potter has
referred to the decision not to add any facial hair and other male characteristics
to Swinton's appearance because, in cases of women disguising their femininity
in order to perform male roles, 'you spend your time as a viewer looking for the
glue, the joins between the skin and the moustache', electing instead to assume
that everyone would know that it was a woman playing a man and so to
acknowledge that and 'try to create a state of suspended disbelief' (Donohue
199 3: 10). She was also against casting two actors to represent the male to female
switch in Orlando because the film 'would have lost exactly that sense of seamless

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individuality across genders. This really is a story about a person who happens
to be a man then happens to be a woman' (Potter 1993: 17). This 'happens to
be' attitude is the indifference to sexual difference signalled at the outset of this
discussion, and is an attitude that permeates Orlando from the opening narration:
'There can be no doubt about his sex, despite the feminine appearance that every
young man of the time aspires to'. This playful disinterest is also applied to
Swinton as Orlando, for instance the repetition of 'he' over a close-up of her
female face, a disjuncture that names that difference until Orlando turns to the
camera and interjects to replace the 'he' with, 'that is - I'. This 'I', as opposed
to the tense juxtaposition between 'he' and 'she' which drives most narratives
preoccupied with gender, lies at the heart of Orlando's radical, utopian androgyny:
an androgyny less about transgressing genders than leaving them behind. As
Swinton comments:

I'm beginning to think that gender politics in principle have become a

distraction. What I mean by that - a contentious statement - is that what
we're really concerned with now, whether we know it or not, are more
pressing questions of mortality.
(Swinton 1993: 20)

Many of Swinton's comments about her involvement (from a very early stage)
with the project are imbued with such sobriety, which rather belies the film's light
ironic touch. One obvious irony (also prevalent in the novel) is the adherence to
a vision of androgyny as existing outside sexual difference whilst having Orlando
represented throughout (either physically or in the imagination) by a woman. 2
Woolf's understanding of androgyny is expanded upon in A Room <j One's Own,
which she wrote in 1928 contemporaneously with Orlando. In A Room ~[One's Own
Woolf declares, 'It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex ... to be a
woman or a man pure and simple; one must be womanly-manly or man-womanly'
(Woolf 1928a: 102). Fixed gender, in Woolf's estimation, is repressive, a barrier
to the communication of ideas which she envisages filter through the quaintly
'resonant and porous' androgynous mind 'without impediment' (97). What
differentiates the far less academic Orlando from A Room <j One's Own is the absence
of fear of the body and sexuality, perceptible in the abstracted arguments of the
latter. Elaine Showalter, for one, rejects Woolf's genderless utopianism, calling
her androgyny an evasive 'Hight' from her own femininity and repressed sexuality
(Showalter 1977), and pinning her dislike on the fact that Woolf refuses to write
about her own 'female experience'. For her discussion of androgyny from Woolf
onwards, Weil rather unexpectedly hijacks the writings on sexual difference of
Luce Irigaray, whose firm advocacy of an ethics of sexual difference Weil perceives
as removing 'the dream of androgyny from its circumscription by the patriarchal
fantasy of one, undifferentiated sex, replacing it with a vision of a meeting (not a

193
 Beyond gender

joining) of two, positively different sexes, governed by (at least) two different
standards and value systems' (Wei! 1992: 169). lrigaray's feminist adherence
to the importance of sexual difference, it would seem, has little to do with
androgyny, as she declares the wish to dispense with sexual difference to be a 'call
for a genocide more radical than any form of destruction there has ever been
in History' (Irigaray 1993: 12). Later in the same essay Irigaray posits that any
possibility of equality between men and women must stem directly from a 'theory
of gender as sexed' (13). Irigaray's views on difference have altered very little
from the mid-1970s, when she wrote Speculum if the Other Woman, to the 1990s.
In 'Writing as a woman' [ 1987), she is still fighting for a culture of the subject to
'progress toward a culture of the sexed subject and not towards a thoughtless
destruction of subjectivity' (Irigaray 1993: 58). Like Showalter, therefore,
Irigaray believes subjectivity to reside in the affirmation not the dissolution of the
sexes. To Woolf, however, and this is made particularly clear in Orlando, her
female experience is characterised by the capacity to reject fixed, corporeal
boundaries rather than embrace them; to both be and disavow her womanhood.
In the film adaptation of Orlando the rigidities of 1970s and 1980s gender-
aligned feminism are rejected, Sally Potter even refusing to attribute the term
'feminist' to her work, saying, 'I can't use the word any more because it's become
debased. My simple observation is that if I use it, it stops people thinking. They
close down' (Florence 1993: 279). When asked why the theme of androgyny
is pertinent to the 1990s, Potter replies that the questioning of sexed identities,
precipitated by two decades of the women's movement, 'has led to a sense that
we really don't know any more what it is to be a man and what it is to be a
woman', believing, as a result, Woolf's hypothesis that 'we're born simply as
human beings ... and that mostly it's how we're perceived by others that makes
the difference, rather than what we are' (Potter 1993: 16). This social, public
perception of Orlando is examined and expressed through the film's fluctuating
costumes, which alter according to gender and historical period whilst the body
wearing them (Swinton's) remains the same. Wei!, in her analysis of Woolf's
androgyny, argues for Orlando as a performative text (Wei! 1992: 157), basing her
interpretation on the novel's oft-quoted passage about clothes: 'Thus, there is
much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may
make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our
brains, our tongues to their liking' (Woolf 1928b: 132). In the subsequent
paragraph, however, Woolf proposes an alternative reading, arguing:
The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity.
Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in
Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a
womans' sex.
(132)

194
 The erotic strategies of androgyny

The film's costumes (designed by Sandy Powell) reflect the ambitious ambiguity
of the relationship between clothes and the body proposed by Woolf, existing
between performativity and essentialism, between utopian androgyny and sexual
difference. The performative potential of clothes is realised through the reactions
of other characters (the servants of the house and Harry) who know Orlando as
both a man and a woman, and do not know how they should respond when s/he
changes sex. In a film version which is as much a critique of the English class and
colonial system, the lack of surprise which Orlando's servants feign upon seeing
their master in women's clothes after the ambassadorial trip abroad indicate
how easy it is to make people accept and believe the gendered images they are
offered.
In line with the strict colour-coding imposed by the film's designers Ben van
Os and Jan Roelfs (which in turn is a realisation of Woolf's own colour-based
delineations between the various periods), Powell's compatible costumes are
citational interpretations as opposed to realistic reproductions. As articulated by
Potter, 'the premise for Orlando is that all history is imagined history' (Florence
199 3: 277); the clothes, like Orlando, exist on the cusp between the abstract
and the real. The costumes likewise oscillate between being overtly resonant of
gender and androgynous, although the costumes are not (until, arguably, the final
sequence) in the traditional mould of androgynous dress, which self-consciously
camouflage difference, such as Dietrich's costumes in Morocco. Orlando's female
period costumes are excessively restrictive caricatures of a feminine appearance,
and in no way ambiguous. The pre-twentieth-century women's clothes obviously
restrict Orlando's movement, and function as the metaphoric site for the tradi-
tional struggle between the freedom she craves and the role society has allotted
her, particularly during the middle section of the narrative dominated by the fight
for power, property and identity. The first time we see her in female clothes, the
social distinction between men and women is directly symbolised through
Orlando being pulled and laced into a tight bodice. The recurring action repre-
senting the tension between the personal and the social is Orlando hitching up her
voluminous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century skirts and trying to run, an
uneasy movement which ironically recalls the opening sequence of the film in
which the male Orlando, late to greet Elizabeth I to his family home, is able
to gallop towards the house with unfettered strides. The most remarkable of
these sequences straddles the historical transition from 1750, when Harry
proposes to Orlando and is turned down, to 1850, when she falls on the ground
and meets her future lover Shelmerdine who has been thrown by his horse.
Orlando's action of raising her skirt off the ground to facilitate movement is
consistent throughout the sequence, as she runs from Harry and into the
narrow pathways of a maze where, over one edit, she is transported from one
century to the next.

195
 Beyond gender

Orlando's masculine costumes, on the other hand, are not only more physically
liberating but also less obviously genderised. Many of Orlando's outfits when a man
are overly elaborate and effeminate, like the huge bowed neckerchief he wears
when affecting the style of a seventeenth-century poet, or the heavy, curled wigs
worn a hundred years later. Androgynous clothes (or clothes that intentionally
disguise sexual difference) occur in the film at traumatic or critical junctures. Just
such a moment of significant change occurs as Harry arrives unexpectedly in
Constantinople to escort Orlando back to England. Harry is shocked to find
Orlando wearing an ivory turban and Turkish robes, although Orlando has happily
rid himself of the heavy western wigs and cumbersome clothes, and is loathe to
reinstate them. Likewise, Orlando's transition from man to woman is marked by an
engulfing black robe which leaves only Swinton's face visible. (In the novel Orlando
puts on 'those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either
sex' [Woolf 1928: 98), thereby emphasising the androgynous intention). The
contemporary sequence that concludes the film adopts the most clearly conven-
tionalised androgynous costume, as the female Orlando wears a heterogeneous
mixture of old-fashioned biking leathers (brown leather jacket, jodhpurs and long,
laced boots) and modern white shirt. This last image, offering a bridge to the
present, is expressive of the narrative's utopianism: that gender is irrelevant and
that clothes are perfection when they too become a timeless hybrid of genders,
periods and styles.
This is not a compromise but an ideal, and one that is rooted in the unimpor-
tance of Orlando's 'real' sex. This returns the discussion to the problem of the
corporeal representation of an intellectual conceit. Androgyny is so much more
exciting and sexual than its physical counterpart the hermaphrodite that it must,
as a notion of desire, exist beyond the limits of the body, but maybe it is only
in its intellectualisation that the androgyne is able to transcend gender, or in the
pre-sexual state as suggested by Freud and Lacan. Perhaps, on the other hand,
androgyny is simply an impossibility. Many critical assessments of Woolf's notion
of androgyny alight on its lack of eroticism, the absence of physicality and desire
(Heilbrun 1973), which, whilst a justified stance to adopt when considering
A Room rif One's Own, is an inaccurate representation of Orlando. The novel,
once described by Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson as 'the longest and most
charming love letter in history', is full of moments of Sapphic desire and longing,
to use Woolf's phrase, which the film, in a notably 1990s manner, inflates into an
eroticised, sensual, more heterosexual portrait of androgyny.
In both novel and film Orlando's change from man to woman is an easy,
painless process, Woolf writing bluntly, 'It is enough for us to state the simple
fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has
remained so ever since' (Woolf 1928b: 98). In the film version Orlando, waking
from one of his great sleeps, lies in bed, his face framed by the opulent finery of

196
 The erotic strategies of androgyny

7. 5 Tilda Swinton as Orlando in Orlando

Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive

his long curled wig and lace linen and caressed by a bleached golden light. As
the wig is slipped off, Orlando's long, red, feminine hair tumbles out, signalling
the juxtaposition and the fusion of the two sexes. The representation of the scene
celebrates the ease of the transition; Orlando's calm, fluid movements reflected
by the slow, sweeping camera, for example. The increased sensuality creates a
liberating moment, as when the light catches the sparkle of the water and the lint
against the dark background as the now female Orlando bathes her face. Whereas
the revelation of a character's 'real' sex in a cross-dressing narrative is a moment
of crisis and trauma, here Orlando serenely contemplates her poised, balletically
posed nakedness in the full-length mirror and displays a muted surprise as she
finds there is 'no difference, no difference at all- just a different sex'. As Potter
comments on Orlando's transition, 'I think that most notions of sexual difference
are really about mystification, and that it's much simpler than that' (Potter 1993:
16). In more tortuous ways, both The Ballad if Little jo and The Crying Game
conveyed that the point of demystification (of showing the sex of the body) can
also be the point of greatest eroticism, which is what sets the androgynous texts
apart from the cross-dressing comedies in which the horror of the trauma proves
insurmountable.
The eroticisation of Orlando's change of sex is reinforced by the 1850 sequence
with Shelmerdine, in which androgyny is shown not to belong exclusively to

197
 Beyond gender

either the female or more particularly the lesbian domain, as is suggested by

Woolf. The attraction between Orlando and Shelmerdine is at first a mutual
acknowledgement of the self in the Other. As they both speculate what kind of a
member of the opposite sex they would be ('If I were a man ... '; 'If I were
a woman .... ') they articulate a desire for the ambiguity and fluidity of the
androgyne which they both, to an extent, possess, Orlando by virtue of her
unstable gender, Shelmerdine by his appearance, with his Romantic opened shirt
and tousled long hair. The likeness between Orlando and Shelmerdine (or Jo
and Tinman) dispenses with the necessity for absolute difference, as androgyny
comes to encompass both the corporeal and the cerebral. Their ambiguous, shared
desire is then represented, when they are in bed, through the abstraction of the
body. A slow close-up pan runs along the contours of Orlando's outstretched
body, from her leg, along her hip, waist, ribs and shoulders to her half-concealed
face. The proximity of the camera to Orlando's pale, blue-lit skin, the contrast
of her white, hilly contours against the black void of the background, make the
body (the most obviously gendered sign of all) into an abstract, unrecognisable
image. In the duality of this single moment, the notion of a sexed androgyny
becomes crystallised as both essence and ideal, an image onto which the meanings
imbedded within the narrative can be imposed and through which the multiple
desires of the spectator can be realised. In 'The face of Garbo' Roland Barthes
makes a classic distinction when saying, 'The face of Garbo is an Idea, that
of [Audrey) Hepburn, an Event' (Barthes 1957: 64); in a sense androgyny that
is both abstract and real elides these differences. The radicalism of Orlando's
representation of androgyny is that its abstract and real connotations (that it both
pertains to the body, language and sex and possesses a symbolic potency as it
transcends all these) are locked into the same image. The abstract and the real
become the same.
Abstraction is the key to the film and its representation of an androgynous
self 'that lies beyond gender' (Glaessner 1992: 14). As Potter states elsewhere,
the book Orlando does not so much explore sexual identities as dissolve them, a
'melting and shifting' she wanted to convey in the film (Florence 1993: 283).
Preventing this view of a transcendental subjectivity from becoming tautological
is the dogged attachment to the physical, resulting not in a denial of sexual
difference but in a de-emphasising of its significance. The corporeality at the heart
of Orlando also avoids the biologically anomalous form of the hermaphrodite,
the body forever inscribed with the fear of incompleteness. Jonathan Dollimore
comments that 'androgyny typically envisages a unity ostensibly beyond sexual
difference, but in fact inseparable from it; androgyny especially has too often been
a genderless transcendent which leaves sexual difference in place' (Dollimore
1991: 262). This chapter has posited that such a reaffirmation of difference is what
marks the cross-dressed body not the on-screen androgyne, whose ambiguity

198
 The erotic strategies of androgyny

cannot be so easily made to conform to the old binary system. The androgynous
body is never complete because it is innately unstable; it always possesses the
capacity for mutability and transformation, and, unlike the cross-dressed body,
does not hold onto the notion of its single, 'real' sex. Contrary to much writing
about androgyny that considers it to be an impossible idealisation or a non-sexual
state, most cinematic representations of the androgyne stress the eroticism of
his/her ambiguity. This sexualisation pertains directly to the acts of watching and
desiring the ambiguous body, and so is an intrinsic component of the act of
spectatorship itself.
One of the aims of this book has been to explore the multiple ways in which
clothing interacts with the body in the formation of identity. The relationship
between these two elements is at its most fluid when approaching the androgynous
image, because established correlations between how one looks and how one is
looked at here become unworkable. The arguments posed have had as their basis
issues of gender construction through and by clothing, and it is in the realm of
androgyny that such categories are most manifestly questioned and undermined.
As the conversation between the female Orlando and Shelmerdine attests, one
can imagine oneself into a gender, or indeed imagine oneself to be genderless; so
costume or clothes are no longer merely forms of consolidation and social
communication, but also testaments to fantasy and desire.

199
 NOTES

1 CINEMA AND HAUTE COUTURE

See also Leese 1976, Prichard 1981.
2 See also the numerous accounts Edith Head, Hollywood's foremost costume designer,
gives of her trade and the differences between costume and fashion design, for
example, Head 1959 and 1983. Head is particularly informative about her numerous
collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock and on the way the costume designer's role is
to realise the symbolism, the ideas about colour co-ordination in the mise-en-scene, the
character interpretation that the director has formed before the production process
begins.
3 Greer, who became the head designer at Paramount, had worked at both the New
York and Chicago branches of Lady Duff Gordon's house. After the First World War
he went to Paris and worked under, among others, Poiret and Molyneux before
returning to America and working in cinema and establishing his own couture house
in 1927. Adrian was invited to Hollywood after Valentino and Rambova had seen his
costumes for the 1923 Irving Berlin musical Music Box in New York. His first feature
was The Hooded Cobra, which was never released, but he is probably most famous for
his work in creating the looks of Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.
4 For a discussion of the influence of Gilbert Adrian's 'Letty Lynton' dress on women's
ready-to-wear fashions in 1932 see also Herzog and Gaines 1984. At one party in
1951 seventeen replicas of Liz Taylor's off-the-shoulder ballgown from A Place in the
Sun were seen, although Edith Head, the film's costume designer, has on occasion
inflated the number to thirty-seven (Head 1983: 97-8).
5 For a discussion of the relationship between women spectators and stars see Chapter
6, Stacey 1994.
6 Robert Gustafson claims that the 'Sabrina neckline', square across the chest and held
up by two bows on either shoulder, was in fact far from original, having been 'sold
for years' in various catalogues and magazines (Gustafson 1982: 14).
7 Shopping films is still part of the costume designer's remit. Ellen Mirojnick, who
designed Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, defends the practice and comments, 'Just
because you shop a film doesn't mean it's not designed!' (quoted in Troy 1989: 51).
8 One such copy of Chanel's cape is Helen Storey's 'Death in velvet' dress for her 1994
collection.
9 During the final credits the collaboration of Yves Saint Laurent is also mentioned.

200
 Notes

10 The anti-romantic view of how alien clothes can function against a woman is exem-
plified by Rebecca. Whenever Joan Fontaine experiments with different looks she is
mocked or ordered to go and change.
11 See Greenberg 1991 , Miner 199 2 .
12 The Saint Laurent dress is pictured in Duras 1988: 154-5, 183; the Roehm dress in
Milbank 1989.
13 This was the most revealing dress Grace Kelly wore in films, and interestingly, in
most publicity shots the shoulders are splayed still further to make the top even more
decollete. (See also Engelmeier 1990: 147.)
14 In January 1962 Yves Saint Laurent established his own fashion house, and after his
inaugural show Life magazine proclaimed his to be 'the best collections of suits since
Chane!' (quoted in Duras 1988: 226).
15 Although Chane! is not credited at the end of Trop Belle Pour Toil (whilst Saint Laurent,
who provided Gerard Depardieu's suits, is), the Chane! office confirmed to me that
Bouquet wears exclusively Chane! designs throughout the film.
16 See also Peter Lehman, 'American Gi9olo: the male body makes an appearance of
sorts'; Patricia Mellencamp, 'The unfashionable male subject'; William Luhr,
'Gender representation in Paul Schrader's American Ginolo'; Robert T. Eberwein,
'Framing and representation in American Gwolo', in Ruppert (ed.) 1994: 8-40.
17 Nino Cerruti has designed costumes for The Witches if Eastwick, Fatal Attraction, Reversal
1 1
Fortune, Indecent Proposal, In The Line Fire and Pret-a-Porter, among others.
18 Armani usually sues if his name is used in dialogue as a short-hand for a certain type
of man.
19 Cerruti dressed Kim Basinger, Marcello Mastroianni, Rupert Everett, Tim Robbins
and Danny Aiello.

2 DESIRE AND THE COSTUME FILM

Andrew Higson, for example, notes that in the conventional heritage film 'Camera-
work generally is fluid, artful and pictorialist, editing slow and undramatic. The use
of long takes and deep focus, and long and medium shots rather than close-ups,
produces a restrained aesthetic of display' (Higson 1996: 233-4). This sort of style is
very different from the sensuous fetishism of The Ane 1 Innocence.
2 Witness is not strictly speaking a 'costume film' in that its setting is contemporary
America. But because the strict Amish sect eschew modernity and wear traditional
clothes, Kelly McGillis' costume (particularly in the eyes of the 'modernised'
Harrison Ford) take on a particular, archaic eroticism.
3 Sara is consistently represented as deviant: she is, for example, an orphan, poor,
solitary and is clearly in love with Miranda.
4 Later on it is Edith who, refusing to climb any further, runs back down the rock
screaming; another indication (if one interprets the rock as somehow related to
sexual initiation) that she lacks the maturity of the others. As they approach the rock
Miranda tells her fellow schoolgirls to look up at it, but Edith the unready looks
down.
5 'Brattoilette', in Wiener Caricaturen, 22 March 1890; quoted in Kunzle 1982: 12.
6 This is the reverse of the Truffaut three-edit sequence in Tirez sur Ie Pianiste which
Scorsese has said he puts into every film.
7 Freud and others have declared, for example, that male fetishists are in fact disgusted

201
 Notes

by the sight of the female sex organs, and thus want to maintain that distance. See
Freud 1927.
8 Although Janet Patterson stresses the authenticity of Baines's costume she and
Campion decided that his clothes should, more generally, denote an internationalism
and a desire to travel (Patterson 1993 and Campion 1993: 9).
9 This shot would not have been so ambiguous if in fact Ada had died. It is her mind's
fantasy of the perfect tragic (and feminine) death.
10 Brand also discusses another case from this century of a woman who uses a pair of
home-made velvet underpants as a fetish, but uses them only as foreplay ( 11 3-120).
For a further discussion of female fetishism see Gamman and Makinen 1994.
11 For a further discussion of the importance of touching in The Piano see Bruzzi 1995.

3 THE INSTABILITIES OF THE FRANCO-AMERICAN

GANGSTER
Breward notes, however, that there is evidence to disprove men's assumed disinterest
in fashion, even in the nineteenth century when there was already 'a variety of forms
possible in the cutting and decoration of the staples of jacket, waistcoat and trousers'
(172).
2 See Introduction: xiv-xv.
3 Melville was particular about all the details in the film, for instance the white editing
gloves that all his killers wear, and the bird. Melville used a female bullfinch 'because
it is just black and white, without the male's orange breast' (Nogueira 1971: 136),
which fitted in with his plans 'to make a colour film in black and white' (130).
4 Not only are their subject matters similar, but both are adapted by Nicholas Pileggi
and Martin Scorsese from two of Pileggi's books and have similar casts, Joe Pesci
playing a virtually identical character in Casino to the one he played in Gooc!fellas.
5 Several writers on fashion, including Quentin Bell whose On Human Finery was hugely
influenced by Veblen, have assumed that aesthetic and utilitarian perfection in clothing
can be attained and then 'restless change' will cease to be necessary.

4 THE SCREEN'S FASHIONING OF BLACKNESS

See also Grant D. McCracken, 'The trickle-down theory rehabilitated', in Solomon
1985: 39-49.

5 CLOTHES, POWER AND THE MODERN FEMME FATALE

In fact Rosalind Coward also ignores the dramatically increased concern among men
with appearance, body shape and desirability, pressures which she attributes only to
women ( 154). Simply looking at the sales of men's lifestyle magazines and the
growing number of exclusively male fashion shops indicates that the balance is
shifting.
2 Among these films it is, ironically, a noir without a duplicitous female at its core-
Otto Preminger's Laura - which most explicitly deals with femininity being a male
construction, as Laura's image is embellished in her absence by the men around her,
and collides with rather than consolidates her actual character.

202
 Notes

3 For instance in Walker 1992, Krutnik 1991 , Hirsch 1981.

4 The mutilation of women's feet was not peculiar to China. If one examines, for
instance, the various European versions of the Cinderella fairy-tale, a similarly
extreme deformation of the female foot is taking place. In one particularly violent
version from Russia, a girl chops off her feet in order to fit into the glass slipper,
comforting herself with the thought that as a princess she will never ha\"e to walk
again.
5 James Laver cites the long 1930s evening dress as an example of a style which under-
cut the erotic potential of women's legs and instead emphasised the back (Laver 1945:
150-2). A more recent example would be the 'maxi' which was introduced in 1969.
6 The title of the original book is Single White Female - Seeking the Same.

6 THE COMEDY OF CROSS-DRESSING

A woman in these functional, controlling and notably unfussy clothes almost invariably
signifies no-nonsense strength, another almost contemporaneous example being the
representation of Max de Winter's sister in Hitchcock's Rebecca.
2 It is therefore surprising that Garber does not remark upon a scene which is particu-
larly interesting in this respect. Before going on a weekend with Julie, the woman he
is secretly in love with, Michael is getting Dorothy's clothes together and casually asks
Jeff, 'Do you know where my night-gown is? You know, the pink one, the one with
the flowers?' Now what is Michael, who has to this point only appeared as Dorothy
fully dressed in social, daytime situations and always changes into mufti back at home,
doing with a night-gown obviously not bought especially for the weekend? And why
does Jeff respond as if he is asked this sort of thing all the time?

7 THE EROTIC STRATEGIES OF ANDROGYNY

For further discussions of the political power aspects of women dressing in men's
clothes, see Gamman and Makinen 1994, Wheelwright 1989.
2 Orlando the novel was similarly written with a woman in mind (Woolf's lover Vita
Sack ville- West), and photographs of Sackville-West are used in the text as represen-
tations of Orlando.

203
 FILMOGRAPHY
Title, director, date, costume designer

Adventures if Priscilla, Qyeen if the Desert, The (Stephan Elliott, 1994)

Costume designers: Lizzy Gardiner, Tim Chappel
Aoe cif Innocence, The (Martin Scorsese, 199 3)
Costume designer: Gabriella Pescucci
American Gioolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)
Costume designer: Alice Rush
Additional wardrobe: Giorgio Armani (Richard Gere)
Ballad cif Little jo, The (Maggie Greenwald, 1993)
Costume designer: Claudia Brown
Belle de jour (Luis Bufiuel, 1967)
Costume designer: Helene Nourry
Additional wardrobe: Yves Saint Laurent (Catherine Deneuve)
Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
Costume designers: Darryle Johnson, Shirlene Williams
Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995)
Costume designers: Rita Ryack, John Dunn
Cleopatra jones (Jack Starrett, 1973)
Costume designers: Giorgio di Sant'Angelo (Tamara Dobson). Tommy Welsh (men's
costumes)
Cook, the Thiif, His Wife &_Her Lover, The (Peter Greenaway, 1989)
Costume designer: Jean-Paul Gaultier
CryinB Game, The (Neil Jordan, 1992)
Costume designer: Sandy Powell
Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994)
Costume designer: Gloria Gresham
Do the Rioht ThinB (Spike Lee, 1989)
Costume designer: Ruthe Carter
Doulos, Le (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)
Costume designer: not credited

204
 Filmography
Glen or Glenda (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1954)
Costume designer: not credited

Gooc!fellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Costume designer: Richard Bruno

Kika (Pedro Almodovar, 1993)

Costume designer: Jose Maria Cossio
Additional Wardrobe: Jean-Paul Gaultier (Victoria Abril), Gianni Versace, Yves Saint
Laurent

Last Seduction, The (John Dahl, 1993)

Costume designer: Terry Dresbach

Leon (Luc Besson, 1994)

Costume designer: Magali Guidasci

Mrs Doubifire (Chris Columbus, 1993)

Costume designer: Marit Allen

New jack City (Mario Van Peebles, 1991)

Costume designer: Bernard Johnson

Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992)

Costume designer: Sandy Powell

Piano, The (Jane Campion, 1993)

Costume designer: Janet Patterson

Picnic at Han9in9 Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

Costume designer: Judy Dorsman

Pret-a-Porter (Robert Altman, 1994)

Costume designer: Catherine Letterier
Additional Wardrobe: Cerruti 1881 (Simone Lo's collection and others), Xuly Bet (Cy
Bianco's collection), Vivenne Westwood (Cort Romney's collection), Jean-Paul Gaultier,
lssey Miyake, Christian Lacroix, Sonia Rykiel, Gianfranco Ferre for Christian Dior
(featured as themselves), Agnes B., Giorgio Armani, Azzedine Alala, Chane!, Jean-Charles
de Castebajac, Paul Smith, Chantal Thomass, Yohji Yamamoto, Yves Saint Laurent,
Comme des Gan;:ons

Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990)

Costume designer: Marilyn Vance-Straker.
Additional wardrobe: Cerruti 1881

Pulp Fiction, (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Costume designer: Betsy Heimann
Additional wardrobe: Agnes B.

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

Costume designer: Edith Head

Reservoir Dons (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)

Costume designer: Betsy Heimann

205
 Filmography
Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954)
Costume designer: Edith Head
Additional wardrobe: Hubert de Givenchy (Audrey Hepburn)
Samourai; Le (Jean-Pierre Melville 1967)
Costume designer: not credited

Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971)

Costume designer: Joe Aulisi
Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992)
Costume designer: Eileen Kennedy

Supeifly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)

Costume designer: Nate Adams
Additional wardrobe: Hill & Reed

Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)

Costume designer: Ruth Morley
Trap Belle Pour Toil (Bertrand Blier, 1989)
Costume designer: Michele Marmand-Cerf
Additional wardrobe: Chane! (Carole Bouquet), Yves Saint Laurent (Gerard Depardieu)

Untouchables, The (Brian de Palma, 1987)

Costume designer: Marilyn Vance-Straker
Additional wardrobe: Giorgio Armani

Voyager (Volker Schlondorff, 1991)

Costume designer: Barbara Baum
Additional wardrobe: Giorgio Armani (Sam Shepard)

Waiting to Exhale (Forest Whitaker, 1996)

Costume designer: Judy L. Ruskin

ADDITIONAL FILMS
A bout de sotiffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
Asphalt Jungle. The (John Huston, 1950)
Assassin (John Badham, 1993)
Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992)
Black Widow (Bob Rafelson, 1987)
Blanche Fury (Marc Allegret, 1948)
Bloodline (Terence Young, 1979)
Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981)
Breathless (Jim McBride, 1983)
Daughters if the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)
Diary if a Chambermaid, The (Luis Bufiuel, 1964)
Dillinger (Max Nosseck, 1945)
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Driver, The (Walter Hill, 1978)
Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)

206
 Filmography
Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987)
Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957)
Golden Braid (Paul Cox, 1990)
Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The (Curtis Hanson, 1992)
Hollywood Shr.iffie (Robert Townsend, 1987)
Hot Spot, The (Dennis Hopper, 1990)
jassy (Bernard Knowles, 1947)
KillinB, The (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)
KillinB Zoii (Roger Avary, 1995)
Letty Lynton (Clarence Brown, 1932)
Little Caesar (Mervin LeRoy, 1930)
Made In Heaven (Alan Rudolph, 1987)
Married To The Mob (Jonathan Demme, 1988)
Mother's Boys (Yves Simoneau, 1993)
My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)
Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990)
Out if the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
Palmy Days (A. Edward Sutherland, 1931)
Pepe le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
Place in the Sun, A (George Stevens, 1951)
Postman Always Rinas Twice, The (Tay Garnett, 1946)
Presumed Innocent (Alan J. Pakula, 1990)
Rosa Luxemburs (Margarethe von Trotta, 1986)
Scaiface (Howard Hawks, 1932)
She's Gatta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)
Sister My Sister (Nancy Meckler, 1995)
Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
Sommersby (Jon Amiel, 1993)
Tirez sur le Pianiste (Fran9ois Truffaut, 1960)
Tonisht or Never (Mervin LeRoy, 1931)
23h58 (Pierre-William Glenn, 1993)
Witness (Peter Weir, 1985)
Year if LivinB Danserously, The (Peter Weir, 1982)

207
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Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects c:J'Popular Culture, New York: Doubleday, 1962
Wei!, Kari ( 1992) Androayny and the Denial if Difference, Charlottesville and London:
University Press of Virginia
Weininger, Otto (1906) Sex and Character, London: William Heinemann, 1910
Wharton, Edith (1920) The Aae if innocence, London: Virago, 1993
Wheelwright, Julie (1989) Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dress as Men in Pursuit
of Life, Liberty and Happiness, London: Pandora
Williams, Terry (1990) The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story if a Teenaae Drua Rina, London:
Bloomsbury
Wilson, Elizabeth (1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Berkeley and Los
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Wolfe, Tom (1977) 'Funky chic', Mauve Gloves &_Madmen, Clutter&.. Vine, New York
Wollen, Peter (1995) 'Strike a pose' Siaht and Sound 5, 3: March
Wollen, Tana (1991) 'Over our shoulders: nostalgic screen fictions for the 1980s', in John
Corner and Sylvia Harvey (eds) Enterprise and Heritaae: Crosscurrents'![ National Culture,
London and New York: Routledge
Woolf, Virginia (1928a) A Room OJ One's Own, London: Penguin, 1945
- - (1928b) Orlando, London: Penguin, 1993
Zolla, E!t~mire ( 1981) The AndroBYne: Fusion '![the Sexes, London: Thames and Hudson

216
 INDEX

A bout de sotiffie 7, 67, 68, 75-6, 82 sexualdifferencexx, 174,175,176,

Abba 164, 170, 171 177, 181, 183--4, 192, 193--4, 195,
Abril, Victoria 10, 12, 13 197-9; and sexuality 175-6, 177, 178,
abstraction (and androgyny) 176, 184, 180, 183, 184, 193; see also
192, 195, 198 cross-dressing, drag, eroticism
Ackroyd, Peter 148, 153, 161, 162, 164 Anael at My Table, An 36
Adidas 109, 111 Annie Hall 7, 177
Adjani, Isabelle 68 Armani, Giorgio xvi-xvii, 3, 7, 8, 25-30,
Adrian, Gilbert 4, 5 31, 177, 178
Adventures if Priscilla, @een if the Desert, Asphalt Junale. The 68, 72, 77
The xv, xx, 149, 163--4, 166, Assassin, The 67
167-172, 180 Avary, Roger 68
Aae if Innocence, The xvii, 35, 37,49-53, A venaers, The I 38
55, 61, 63, 69, 83 Aznavour, Charles 68
Aiello, Danny 32
All About Eve 139, 140 B., Agnes 87, 89
All That Heaven Allows 49 'Backlash' , the 127
Almodovar, Pedro 10, 11 Baker, Roger 164
Altman, Robert 31, 32, 33 Ballad if Little Jo, The xx, 149, 178-86,
Amants, Les 7 197
American Giaolo 7, 26, 85 Ballhaus, Michael 49
Amies, Hardy 7 Barbarella 7
Amis, Suzy 182, 184, 185 Barthes, Roland 17, 31, 32, 33, 70, 198
androgyny xx, 147, 172, 174---5, 176, Basiclnstinct 122, 129, 130, 140
184, 187, 189, 191; and cinema Basinger, Kim 3 3
173--4, 175-6, 178-9, 180-1, Bass, Saul and Elaine 49
182-90, 191-3, 195-9; and clothes Beetham, Margaret 36
179-80, 194, 195-6; definitions of Bell, Daniel 74
191-2, 198-9; and desire 183--4, Bell, Quentin 31, 32, 33, 38, 68
191-2; and fashion 176, 177-8; and Belle de jour xvii, 18, 19, 21-2, 25
femininity 179, 184, 192; and Belmondo, Jean-Paul 75-6, 77, 78, 82
masculinity 173, 175, 176, 178, 179; Bergler, Edmund 123--4
psychology/theory of 176, 177, 183, Bernstein, Elmer 49
189-90, 193-5, 196, 198-9; and Besson, Luc 67, 91

217
 Index

Birdcane. The 159 Cane Aux Folles, La 159

Birth of a Nation 96 Cagney, James 74
black cinema: Blaxploitation xviii-xix, Calamity jane 181
95-102, 103-4, 105, 108, 115-16; camp 177
and clothes 98-100, 101-2, 103-4; Campion, Jane 37, 57
New American xviii, 95, 102-3, Capone,Al28, 70,72
104-19 Casino 83, 84, 86, 101
Black Panthers, the 99, 105 Cerruti, Nino 8, 15, 26, 27, 31, 33, 177
Black Widow 122, 125, 129, 140, 142 Chane!, Coco xvi, 3, 7, 8, 14, 20-1,
blackness: cinematic representation of 24-5, 30, 32, 105-7
95-7, 104, 113-14; and clothes Chariots of Fire 35
102-3, 107, 109, 110-11, 113, 114, Chenoune, Farid 5, 72, 87-8
115, 116-17 (see also 'pimp look', Christie, Ian 49, 86
streetstyle); eroticisation of 115-16; Cleopatra jones 95, 98, 99, 103-4
exoticisism/otherness of 103, 109, Cliff, Jimmy 100
116, 118; stereotypes of 95, 96, 103, Clinton, George 100
105, 108, 111, 116; and women clothes: and the body 30-1, 32-4, 61,
118-19; see also masculinity 86, 88, 90, 157; as discourse xvii, 36,
Blanche Fury 59 37, 60-1, 62-3, 120-1; and
Blaxploitation see black cinema, blackness femininity 40, 43, 121-4; and identity
Blier, Bertrand 14, 2 5 14-15,67,70-1,89,94,98, 102-3,
Bob le Flambeur 77, 79 110, 118, 140, 142-3, 156, 166, 199;
Body Heat 120, 127, 129, 130, 140 and sexual difference 41 , 46, 191 ,
Bogart, Humphrey 71, 75 194-5; theories of 41-2, 53-5, 57,
Bogle, Donald 96 148; see also androgyny, costume,
Bornstein, Kate 190 cross-dressing, eroticism, fashion,
Bouquet, Carole 14, 19, 20, 21, 22,24 femininity, masculinity
Boy George 168 cocaine (crack) 104-5, 110, 111
Boys From the BlacksttifJ 36 Coen brothers, the 77
Boyz N the Hood 104, 110-14, 118, 119 Collins, Bootsy I 00
Brand, Clavel61, 138 Colors Ill
Branton, Travis 5 Company of Wolves, The 186
Brassai' 165, 180 Connery, Sean 27, 28
Breathless 67 conspicuous consumption (in gangster
Breward, Christopher 68 films) 84-6; see also Veblen,
Brideshead Revisited 35 Thorstein
Brin9in9 Up Baby 147-9, 157, 158, 171, Cook, Pam xiv, 50, 176
175 Cook, the Thiif, His Wife and Her Lover, The
Bronte, Emily 57 xvi, 9-10
Brooks, Louise 159 Cooper, Gary 173
Brosnan, Pierce 162 corsets 46, 180; tight lacing 44-5, 62
Brown, James 115 Cosgrove, Stuart xviii, 102
Brownmiller, Susan xix, 121-2, 123, Costner, Kevin 28
127, 135, 136 costume: and androgyny 184, 194-5;
Bullets or Ballots 71 comparison with fashion 14-17; and
Butler, Judith xv, xx, 165, 166-7, 168, cross-dressing 151-2; design history
170-1, 189, 190 4-6; and femininity 15, 126, 195; and
Byrne, Gabriel 79 masculinity 58, II 0, 196; and

218
 Index

performativity 167; period costume deMille, Cecil B. 4

films xiii-xiv, xvii, 35-8, 42-9, Deneuve, Catherine 19, 20, 21,22
58-63; and spectacle xv, 126-7; Deuteronomy 149
theories of xv-xvi, 36; see also clothes, Diary c:fa Chambermaid 42
fashion Dietrich, Marlene 173, 174, 175, 176,
couture see fashion 178, 179, 195
Coward, Rosalind xix, 123, 124, 127, Dior, Christian 20, 31, 107; the New
138 Look 4, 5, 20, 176
Cowie, Elizabeth 125-6, 175 Disclosure 130, 132-3, 134-5, 136, 139,
Craik, Jennifer xv, 14, 25-6, 30, 68, 142 143
Crawford, Joan 4, 200 Distant Voices, Still Lives 36
crinoline, the 38-9, 60, 135, 136 Divine 184
Cripps, T.S. 116 Do the Right Thina I 08
Cronenberg, David 164 Doane, Mary Ann 48, 124-5, 128
cross-dressing xx, 147-9, 151-2, 15 3-6, Dobson, Tamara 103
157-62, 163-4, 167-72; and clothes Docter, Richard F. 15 3
150, 151-2, 153, 156-7, 158, 160-1' Dolce Vita, La 7
170, 179; comic usc of 147, 149, 151, Dollimore, Jonathan 198
154, 155, 157, 165, 169, 171, 175-6; Donatello 187
definitions of 147, 149; history of 148, Donne, John 136
149, 164-5 (theatrical tradition); Double Indemnity 125, 133, 136, 137
psychology/theory of 150, 152-3, Douglas, Michael 133
156-7, 162, 165-7; and sexual Dou~~ Le67, 68, 71, 77, 78,82
difference xx, 148, 150, 151-2, drag xv, 149, 153, 158, 165, 166, 167,
157-8, 159, 160-1, 165-6, 171--2; see 168,169,183, IS9;seealso
also androgyny, drag, transvestism androgyny, cross-dressing,
Cryina Game, The xx, 178, 186-9, 190-2, transvestism
197 Driver, The 67
Curtis, Tony 157 Duel in the Sun 59, 96
Duras, Marguerite 30, 178
Dahl, John 127 Dyer, Richard 20
dandyism 68, 184; black I 02
Dargis, Manohla 87, 91 Eastwood, Clint 74, 92, 184
Dark Mirror, The 139 Edward Vlll, Prince of Wales 72
Darwin, Charles 41, 57, 58 Ellis, Havelock 168, 183
Daughters of the Dust 35 Eltinge, Julien 153
Davis, Fred 177 Elvis (Presley) 170
Davis, Geena 162 Emery, Dick 166
Davis, Mike Ill Enalishwoman's Domestic Maaazine, The 36,
Dawson, Graham 82 45
Dawson, Jeff 87 eroticism 57, 59, 63, 115, 125, 136, 140,
Dawson, Les 166 144; and androgyny 147, 172, 173--5,
Day Lewis, Daniel 52, 54 177-8 (and fashion), 179, ISO, 183,
de Beauvoir, Simone xix, 41, 121, 123, 186-7, 191, 192,196,197, 199; and
133, 166 clothes 36, 39,41-2,44-5,46, 51,
de Niro, Robert 28, 70, 84, 86, 101 56, 57, 59, 60-1 (and striptease), 120,
de Palma, Brian 27 12 3, I 35; and cross-dressing 15 3, 162,
Delon, Alain xiv, 79-80,81,82,87 183; and male body 62, 80-2

219
 Index

fashion: and black cinema xviii, 99-100, Fli.igel, J. C. xvii, 33, 41, 53-5, 57-8,
101-2, 111-16 (see also streetstyle); 59, 62, 68, 114, 120, 136
and cinema (general) 3--4, 7-8, 9-13, foot-binding 41, 136, 203
26-7, 31; and costume design 14-17; Foucault, Michel xvii, 39, 41, 60-1
and femininity 18-26, 121, 126; and Four Weddinos and a Funeral 26
feminism 38, 121--4, 138; and Freud, Sigmund xvii, 37, 76, 77, 80, 124,
gangsters 73--4, 76, 85; men's 87-8, 150, 151, 196; and fetishism 39--41,
68-9, 71, 72; men's in film 28-30; as 50,55-6,62-3, 201-2;and
spectacle xvi-xvii; 11-18, 24-6, 34; narcissism xviii, 75, 76
theories of 17, 32; women's 123, Friday, Nancy 153
135-6, 142; see also clothes, costume Frosh, Stephen xv, 91
Fatal Attraction 13 9, 14 3 Fuchs, Cynthia J. 115
femininity xvii, xix, 18-25, 40-1, 43--4, Fuller, Dolores 15 5
46, 48,50-1,60, 124-5, 127, 128, Funk 100, 102, 115
129, 134, 180; and androgyny 176, Funny Face 6, 13
193, 195; and clothes 14-15, 20, 40,
42, 60, 120, 123, 126, 127, 134 (for Gabin, Jean 72
business), 178; and cross-dressing Gable, Clark 26
150, 151, 157, 158-9, 160, 161-2, Gaines, Jane xiv, 17, 34, 126, 127
164, 165, 166, 168; and desire Gamman, Lorraine and Makinen, Merja
61-2; and feminism xix, 38, 44, xvii, 63, 138
121--4; as performative 130-1, 189; gangsters: black I 05, Ill; classic French
and power 124-5, 128, 134, 135-6, xiv-xv, 71-2, 75-82; classic
137, 138-9; and stereotypes 60, 125, Hollywood 43, 67, 71-2, 73-5;
131,135,144, 164;seealso Contemporary French/White
masquerade American xiv-xvv, 67-8, 70, 77, 79,
Jemmesjatales 124-5, 136-7, 139--40; 82-94; identification with clothes 70,
classic Hollywood 120, 125-7, 131; 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 80-1, 83, 86-7,
and clothes 126-7, 128, 129, 130, 88-9, 90, 92; relationship between
131-2, 139--41, 142, 143; French/ American traditions 67-8, 75,
contemporary xvii, xviii, xix, 120-1, 82-3, 93--4; stereotype of 71, 75-6;
125, 127-37, 138--44; duplicity of traditional look of 28, 72, 91-2; see
126, 127, 129; theories of 124-5 also masculinity, narcissism
fetishism 37--41,46, 55, 58, 62, 108, Garber, Marjorie xv, 148, 149, ISO, 153,
117, 137, 159, 201-2; and androgyny 156, 162, 163, 164, 167, 174, 178,
173, 179, 180, 181 (see also phallus); 181, 189
and cinema 42--4, 49-50, 55, 184-5; Garbo, Greta 175, 198
and clothes xiv, xvii, 24, 26, 38-9, Garcia, Andy 28
40,42,43,44-5,46,48, 51, 53, Garr, Teri 32
56-7, 61, 62-3, 67, 72, 85, 86, 108, Gates, Daryl Ill
111, 138 (shoes), 201-2; and the past Gaultier, Jean-Paul xvi, 3--4, 6, 8-13, 25,
SO, 51; and transvestism 149, 150, 27, 31 , I 06, 127, 178
152, 154, 156, 160 Gere, Richard IS, 16, 26
Field, Sally 162 Givenchy, Hubert de S-6, 7, 13, 15-18
Fierstein, Harvey 159 Glaessner, Verina 198
film noir 124, 125-7, 131, 133, 139, 143 Glen or Glenda 149, 153-6, 157, 160,
Fiorentino, Linda 131 168, 172
First a Girl 150 Glitter, Gary 170

220
 Index

Godard, Jean-Luc 67, 75, 93 Herzog, Charlotte xiv, 4, 15, 20, 24

Goc!Jather, The 83, 105 Hi9h Plains Drifter 184
Golden Braid 42 Higson, Andrew 35-6
Gone With the Wind 96 Hill, Benny 166
Gooc!Jellas 71, 83, 84---7, 102 Hill, Henry 83
Granger, Stewart 59 Hill, Walter 67
Grant, Cary 147, 148, 151, 175 Hirschfeld, Magnus 151, 153, 167-8
Grant, Richard E. 32 Hitchcock, Alfred 43
Great Gatsby, The 7 Hoffman, Dustin 156, 158
Great Masculine Renunciation xvii, xviii, Holden, William 16
53-5, 57-8, 114; see also Fliigel, J. C. Hollander, Anne 5, 8, 71, 136
Greenaway, Peter 9-10 Hollywood Sh'!lfie 9 5
Greenwald, Maggie 178 'home boy' movies xix, 104, 110, 118
Greer, Howard 4 homosexuality 122, 123--4; and
Greer, Jane 126 cross-dressing 154---5, 170; fear of
Grier, Pam 103 133; implied 26, 75, 89; see also
Gucci 109, 111 masculinity, narcissism
Gun Crazy 129 homosocial attraction 140, 142
hooks, bell96-7, 116, 118
hair 117-18, 180 Hopper, Dennis 111, 136
Hall, Stuart 109, 118 Hot Spot, The 129, 137
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The 139 Howards End 36
Harder They Come, The 100 Hunt, Linda 32, 190
Harder They Fall, The 75 Hunter, Holly xiii, 59
Harlow, Jean 4, 22 Huston, John 68
Harper, Sue xiv, 35, 37 Hutton, Lauren 26
Hart, Lynda 143 Hwang, David Henry 164
hats 28, 60, 76; as symbols of masculinity hysteria 23, 24---5, 57, 130
53, 55, 58, 69, 76-9, 82
Hawks, Howard 147, 181 I Was a Male War Bride 147, 151
Hayden, Stirling 77 Ice Cube Ill
Hayes, Isaac 97 Ice T 111
Hays Code 73 Imitation if Life 97
Head, Edith 5-6, 15, 17 In the Heat if the Nisht 98
Heard, Gerald 74---5, 76 Interview With a Vampire 186
Heath, Stephen 129, 130, 133 lrigaray, Luce 19 3--4
Hebdige, Dick xviii, 107, 109, 117 Irons, Jeremy 164
Heilbrun, Carolyn 196 It Happened One Nisht 5
Heimann, Betsy 87 Italian fashion 30, 87-8, 106
heist movies 68, 71-2, 89
hermaphrodite 175, 176, 196, 198 Jackson, Samuel L. 95, 104
Hemming, Lindy 26 Jassy 37, 59
Hepburn, Audrey 5-6, 13, 15-18, 198 Jones, Grace I 03
Hepburn, Katharine 147 Jordan, Neil 186
heterosexuality (and heterosexism) xviii, Juice 113
39, 43, 46, 62, 122, 133, 140, 142,
156, 166, 167, 169, 170, 187, 196 Kaplan, Louise, J. 37
Herrick, Robert xiii, 56-7 Keaton, Diane 177

221
 Index
Keeve, Douglas 31 Livingston, Jennie 189
Keitel, Harvey xiii, 88, 90 Lollobrigida, Gina 177
Kellerman, Sally 32 Lana Kiss Goodniaht, The 95, 104
Kelly, Gene 92 Loren, Christalene 159
Kelly, Grace 18, 19, 176 Lovett, Lyle 187
Kika xvi, 10-13 Lugosi, Bela 154
Kill Me Aaain 127 Lurie, Alison 140, 143
Killer, The 87
Killin9, The 67 M71
KillinB Zoe 68 M. Butteifly 164, 165
Kirk, Kris and Heath, Ed 168, 169 McArthur, Colin 70, 71, 82
Klein, Calvin 178 MacMillan, Terry 116
Krafft-Ebing, Dr R v. 39--40, 62-3, 138, Madame Butteifly 164
153, 156 Made in Heaven 190, 192
Kuhn, Annette 178, 192 Made in Milan 31
Kunzle, David 44-5, 62-3, 123, 137-8 Madhubuti, Haki R. 112-13
Madonna 89, 123, 127
Lacan, Jacques xviii, 18, 44, 70, 75, 80, Mafia, the 83, 84, 86, 105
91, 181, 196 make-up (and cross-dressing) 157,
Lambert, Anne 47 159-60, 163, 164, 192
Lang, Fritz 11 Malcolm X 102-3
Lange, Jessica 158, 162 Malcolm X 102-3, 108, 118
Lapsley, Robert and Westlake, Michael male gaze, the 24, 43, 46, 50, 58, 122,
14-15, 18-19 12 3, I 28; see also spectatorship
Last Seduction, The 121, 125, 127-8, 129, Mansfield, Jayne 177
130-2, 133, 134, 143, 144 Mapplethorpe, Robert 116
Last Year in Marienbad 7, 8, 10 Married to the Mob 82, 83
Lauren, Ralph 7-8, 177 Marshall, Garry 14
Laver, James xvii, xviii, 38-9, 41-2, 60, masculinity xv, xviii-xix, 48, 50, 53-5,
68, 76-7, 123, 135 82, 91, 93--4, 112-13, 128, 129,
Leader, Darian xv, 69 130-1, 132, 134, 139; and blackness
Lee, Spike 102, 104, 108 97-8, 99, 111-14; and clothes 58-9,
Leese, Elisabeth 4 68-9, 74, 76-7, 79-80, 82, 86-7,
legs: andjemmesjatales 125, 134, 136-8, 88-9, 90-1, 111-12, 130, 132-3; and
141; and women's fashion 122, cross-dressing ISO, 151, 156, 159,
135-6, 203; see also stilettos 160, 161, 162, 163, 169, 181; and
Leibovitz, Annie 74 fetishism 48-9, 55-6; as performative
Lemmon, Jack 158 91, 92-3; and repressed
Leon 67, 70, 83, 87, 91-3 homosexuality 75, 132, 133--4; as
lesbianism 122, 140-1, 155, 165, 180, spectacle 59-60, 69-70, 85, 115-16;
196, 198 and stereotypes of 58, 90, 92, 133;
Letter From an Unknown Woman 49 women's appearance of 181-3; see also
Letty Lynton 4 fashion, gangsters, narcissism
Levi jeans 179-80 MASH (television series) 151
Light, Alison 36 masquerade 128-9, 130-2, 134, 143,
Lindsay, Joan 42 144, 149, 166, 170; see also Riviere,
Liotta, Ray 85, 102 Joan
Little Caesar 67, 73,75 Mastroianni, Chiara 33

222
 Index

Mastroianni, Marcello 31 New jack City xviii, 104-5, 106-7, 108,

Mature, Victor 177 liS
melodrama 49, 59, 63; Gainsborough Newton, Esther 165, 170
xiii-xiv, 35, 37 Nicolson, Nigel 196
Melville, Jean-Pierre xiv, xv, 67, 68, 71, Nike 108
77, 79, 87, 89, 93 Nikita 67
Menace Il Society II 0 Nogueira, Rui xv, 79
Mercer, Kobena xix, 102, 117-118 Noiferatu 71, I 55
Merchant-Ivory 35 Notebook on Cities and Clothes 31
Merelman, Richard M. lOS Now Voyaaer 14
Metropolis II Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 125
Metz, Christian 37, 42
MGM (Metro Goldwyn Meyer) 96 O'Neal, Ron 101
Middleton, Peter xv, 82, 91 Oldfield, Bruce 17
Miller's CrossinB 72, 77, 79 Ophuls, Max 49
Mirojnick, Ellen 200 Orlando xx, 176, 178, 192-9
mirrors 43, 141-2, 153, 156, 157, 180, Orry-Kelly 5
19 2, 197; in gangster films 70-1 , 77, Orton, Joe 33
79, 80 Out cifthe Past 125, 126
misogyny (and cross-dressing) 158, 159,
166, 183 Paris is Bumina 168, 189
Mitchum, Robert 126 Parker, Alan 35
Mizrahi, Isaac 31 Parks, Gordon 96
Molloy, John T. 134, 135 passing xx, 97, 168, 186, 187, 189-91
Monkey Business 147 Patou, Jean 4
Moore, Demi 135 Patterson, Janet 58
Morocco 173--4, 175-6, 180, 195 Peck, Gregory 59
Morris, Jan 190 Penney, J. C. 74
Mother's Boys 129, 139 Pepe le Moko 72
mothers (single) I 13, 118 performativity 130, 143, 153, 165, 167,
Motown Records 100 187, 189, 194, 195
Mrs Doubifire xx, 149, 150, 154, 157, Persuasion 38
158-64, 165, 170, 171, 176, 179, 180 perversity 37, 45, 133; and androgyny
Mulvey, Laura xviii, 37, 43, 62, 69, 173 176; and cross-dressing I 5 I, I 54,
Muni, Paul 73 157-8, 161, 163, 164, 169
My Brilliant Career 36 Pesci, Joe 85
myth (and gangster) 70-1, 83, 90 Pescucci, Gabriella 5 I
Pfeiffer, Michelle 52
nakedness 31, 33--4, 42, 62 'phallic woman', the 104, 132, 133, 138,
names (significance for cross-dressing) 162, 180, 181-3
168-9, 187, 189 phallus44, 57, 62, 63, 91, 120, 130,
narcissism xv, xviii, 59, 69, 114; and 138, 183; and cross-dressing I SO, I 58,
cross-dressing 153, 156-7; and 162, 163, 181; symbols of 76-7, 181
deviancy 26, 85, 133; female 141, Philips, Mike 98, 99
142; and gangster 67, 68, 70, 74-5, Piano, The xiii-xiv, xvii, 35, 36, 37, 38,
80, 85, 86-7, 93--4 40, 53, 57-62, 63
Neale, Steve xviii, 69, 125 Picnic at Hanaina Rock xvii, 37, 38, 42-9,
Neill, Sam 58 53, 55, 62, 63

223
 Index

Pileggi, Nicholas 202 Room With a View, A 35

'pimp look' 95, 100-1, 104 Rosa Luxembura 36
Place, Janey 124, 125, 136 Rose, Jacqueline 181
Place in the Sun, A 5 Rosow, Eugene 74
Poitier, Sidney 96, 114, 115, 116 Rowntree, Richard 98
Polhemus, Ted 102 Run-DMC Ill
Postman Always Rinas Twice, The 125, 127,
136 Sabrina S-6, 17-18, 20
Powell, Sandy 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, Sackville- West, Vita 196
198 sadomasochism 21-2, 137-9, 181
Pret-a-Porter 9, 2 3, 31-3 Saint Laurent, Yves 7, 15, 20-2, 25, 30,
Pretty Woman 14-17, 20, 23 177-8
Pride and Prejudice 38 Salvation Army, The 1OS
Public Enemy 73, 74 Samourai; Le xiv-xv, 67, 68, 71, 79-82,
Pulp Fiction xiv, 67, 68, 83, 87, 89-90, 86, 87, 90
91, 92, 104 Scaiface71, 72, 73, 74, 75,77
Schiaparelli, Elsa 4
Quant, Mary 7 Schlondorff, Volker 28
Qyeen, The 45 Schoonmaker, Thelma 49
Qyeen Christina 175 scopophilia 43, 55-6, 57, 58, 62, 122,
Queen Elizabeth II 176 128
Scorsese, Martin 31, 49, SO, 51, 53, 63,
Rabanne, Paco 7 67, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94
RaainB Bull SO Sense and Sensibility 36
Rea, Stephen 32 Shaft 95, 96, 97, 98-9, 103, 104, 115
Rear Window xvii, 18-20, 24 Shakespeare (and androgyny) 175, 176
Rebecca 120, 140 She's Gotta Have It 104
Rebel Without a Cause 7 Shepard, Sam 29
Red River 181 Showalter, Elaine 19 3, 194
Red Rock West 127 silhouette (significance to gangsters) 71-2,
Redding, Otis 97 76
Reid, Mark A. 95 Silk, Catherine and Silk, John 97
Reno, Jean 92 Silverman, Kaja 120
ReservoirDoasxiv, 67, 71, 72, 83, 87, Simmel, George 91, 110, 123
88-90, 91, 92 Simpson, Mark 153, 159, 180, 186, 187,
Rich, Ruby 87 191
Rififi (aka Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes) 72 Singer, June 176, 190
Riviere, Joan xix, 128, 129, 166; see also Sinsle White Female xvii, xix, 121, 122,
masquerade 139, 141--4
RoarinB Twenties, The 75 Singleton, Janet 97, 98
Robbins, Tim 31 Sirk, Douglas 49
Roberts, Julia 15, 16, 32 Sister My Sister 35, 36, 42
Robertson, Hugh A. 97 Six Dearees cif Separation I 16
Robinson, Jackie I 08 Smith, Paul 74
Roehm, Caroline 17 Some Like it Hot 72, 150, 151, 157, 158,
Roelfs, Jan 195 160, 176
Romney, Jonathan 84 Sommersby 35
Room cif One's Own, A 193 Sontag, Susan 177

224
 Index
Spare Rib 124 Townsend, Robert 95
spectator, the 44, 46, 48, 63, 87, transvestism 32, 132, 147, 149, 150,
124, 128, 131, 132, 139; and 152-3, 154-5, 156, 158, 162, 165,
androgyny 173, 175, 183, 184; and 168, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191; in
cross-dressing 148-9, 154, 158, 162, women 176, 179, 180, 183, 190; and
163, 167, 171; female xix, 23-4, 35, rebellion 148, 166; see also
37,48-9, 61-2, 140; and passing cross-dressing, drag
189-90; and race 96-7, 116, 118; Traub, Valerie 174, 175
see also male gaze Treacy, Philip 32
Spencer, Margaret Beale et a/. 112 Trap Belle Pour Toil xvi-xvii, 7, 14, 18,
Stacey, Jackie 140 19, 20, 22-5, 99
Stamp, Terence 169 Trouble in Mind 184
Stealina Beauty 26 Truffaut, Frans:ois 67, 68, 76, 94
Steele, Valerie 45, 56-7 Tulloch, Carol xviii
stereotypes see blackness, femininity, 200 I A Space Odyssey 7
masculinity
Stewart, James 18, 19 Ullman, Tracy 32
stilettos (and high heels) 123, 124, 128, Untouchables, The xvi, 26, 27-8, 70
134, 137, 138, 143 Unzipped 31
Stoller, Robert 38, 148, 149, 150, 151,
153, 176, 179, 180, 181 Valentino, Rudolph 4
Stone, Sly 97 van Os, Ben 195
Storey, Helen 200 Van Peebles, Mario 104
Straiaht Out if Brooklyn 104, 11 0, 113 Van Peebles, Melvin 96; 97
Streets if Fire 26 Vance-Straker, Marilyn 15-17, 27-8
streetstyle (black) 102-3, 106, 107, Veblen, Thorstein 83-4, 85-6
109-10, 111; hip-hop 105; and rap Versace, Gianni 10, 106
111 ; relationship to white fashion Victor/Victoria 150, 151, 154, 157, 159,
105-7, 110, 114 165, 192
Streisand, Barbra 159 violence 69, 73, 83, 105, 114
Subway 67 Vionnet, Madame 4
suits (men's) 69, 87-8 Voaue 177
Supeifly 95, 96, 98, 99-100, 101-2, 103, Volstead Act 73
104, 115 von Sternberg, Josef 43, 173
Sutherland, Donald 133 von Stroheim, Erich xxi
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Sona 96, 97 Voyaaer xvi, 26, 28-30
Swinton, Tilda 176, 192, 193, 194 voyeurism see scopophilia
Vuitton, Louis 109
Tarantino, Quentin xiv, 67, 87, 89, 91,
94 Waitina to Exhale xix, 95, 116-19
Tasker, Yvonne xviii, 104 Wayne, John 92, 105
Taubin, Amy 53, 55, 87 Wei!, Kari 176, 192, 193, 196
Taxi Driver 50 Weininger, Otto 179
Tirez sur le Pianiste 68, 76 Weir, Peter 43, 62
To Kill a Mockinabird 96 Wenders, Wim 31
To Sir With Love 96 Westerns 181, 186
Tootsie 150, 151, 154, 156-7, 159, 160, Westwood, Vivienne 3, 32, 33
162, 165, 168, 171, 175, 179, 203 Wharton, Edith 50, 51, 53, 63

225
 Index

What the Butler Saw 33 Wollen, Tana 35-6

Wicked Lady, The 37 Woo, John 87
Widmark, Richard 72 Wood, Ed 149, 150, 153, 154, 155,
Wild Bunch, The 89 168
Wild One, The 7 Woolf, Virginia xx, 184, 192, 193,
Wilder, Billy 5 194, 195, 198; and utopian
Williams, Robin xx, 157, 159, 160, 161, androgyny 193, 196
163 Working Girl 134
Williams, Terry 105, 111 Worth, Charles 30
Willis, Bruce 90 Wyman, Jane 176
Wilson, Elizabeth 30-1, 33, 38, 40, 103,
124, 136, 176 Yamamoto, Yohji 25, 31
Winger, Debra 190, 192 Year rif Living Dangerously, The 190
Witness 42
Wolfe, Tom 101 Zoller, Elemire 19 2
Wollen, Peter 8-9, 25 Zoot suits 102-3, 118

226