The prevalence of the transformation theme throughout various decades and genres of Hollywood cinema has been explored in this book, along with the accompanying notion these films foster, that exterior changes can impact on the interior identity of the woman who undergoes them. As has been examined, Hollywood films have found a variety of ways to suggest that such external changes are necessary, even salutary, and simultaneously promoted mechanisms, like the ‘true self’ idea, to mitigate the anxieties the very fluid self seemingly proposed by such films creates in turn.
What fascinates and intrigues me more than anything, I think, with these films, is the way they seem at once both to respond to specific historical moments and to maintain a very unchanging thematic and aesthetic mode of telling and showing the metamorphosis stories. Perhaps it is the genius of capitalism that makes the triangulation of Hollywood cinema, costume and self-improvement through consumables a perennially perfect fit.
At the beginning of this book I compared two film artefacts, one very early and one recent, and found elements of continuity in the transformation theme running through them despite their differences in practically every other respect. In closing, I now consider another pair of artefacts, sundered in time, but joined in the seeming belief that the transmutation of the self through exterior alteration is an exciting and positive act for a woman.
The June 1939 issue of Screenland carries an article on Joan Bennett entitled ‘Brunette vs Blonde?’ In this, the writer, Kay Proctor, gushingly describes the overwhelming changes that have occurred in the actor’s career – and life – since she decided to dye her hair – originally ‘mousy’ (29), then made blonde under a fiat from Bennett’s studio boss Samuel Goldwyn – dark brown. As a brunette, Bennett is described as having had her whole personality altered; things she loved, she now dislikes, things she had avoided she now craves:
…Joan found herself changing in many ways. Colors she formerly had liked now definitely antagonise her. The same is true of materials, jewelry, perfume and furs… But most important, she has discovered strange changes in her own personality and thoughts, in her reactions to people and their reactions to her. Joan Bennett is a new person, and all because of a pot of dye! (28–29)
In the interview with Bennett, Proctor neatly balances a fashion article about today’s must-have items in the latest colours – achieved via the pictures and their lengthy captions that accompany the piece – with a more vaguely psychological piece about the mystic changes that have come with Bennett’s hair change. Not only has Joan changed her sartorial ‘type’ by forsaking the brassy blonde, necessitating an expensive change of wardrobe, she seems to have changed her personality through adopting darker hair:
…she found her reactions to life infinitely more exciting, stimulating and satisfying… ‘That is not as far-fetched as it may sound,’ Joan explained. ‘Almost every woman has experienced a strange change in her spirit and morale, for example, merely by wearing a certain color. Perhaps it makes her feel younger, or more alluring, or gayer, or imbued with an unexpected self confidence for no particular reason. I found wearing darker hair did unexpected things to me, and things I liked.’ (31)
The article goes on to detail more changes in Bennett’s life since her hair colour alteration, and a tacit message seems to emerge. Although a paragraph talks about how much more ladylike Bennett now seems without her brassy chorus-girl colour – ‘her new quiet poise of a gentlewoman…she belong[s] behind the tea table in a gracious drawing room’ (84) – and another notes that her deep and husky voice now matches her appearance, the real transformation seems to have been an increased sexualisation, interestingly linked to augmented feelings of agency and control in Bennett herself:
She is conscious of a new adventurous spirit…she now is driven by sly urgings to take chances, gamble on things, try her wings a little… And finally there is her new ‘umph’, that all-important quality in a woman be she blonde, brunette, or redhead. If darkening her hair hasn’t increased Joan’s sex attraction, a lot of men have been dialing her number for the sheer fun of playing with the telephone. (84)
There is something suggestive in the image conjured up of men ‘playing with the telephone’ which entirely fits with the tone of the article; it seems to be trying to let its readers know that Bennett has become more sexually alluring and powerful through this significant change without spelling out her new possession of an inappropriately unfeminine magnetism. Interestingly, the article tells readers that they will be able to judge for themselves how successful the new hair is in a forthcoming film – ‘Watch for her in “The Man in the Iron Mask”’ (84): – but does not belabour the point that her new hair colour was first adopted for a film part and has subsequently won her a different type of role. Bennett went on in the 1940s to star in a number of films noirs in which she often played the dark and smouldering, sexually powerful and ambivalently motivated femme fatale, including The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1948). Her hair change thus allowed her to move into different and more complex roles than before, during her chorus-girl blonde stage. Both career-wise and in her personal life, then, the simple use of ‘four minutes’ time and a $15.00 pot of dye’ (84) had a transformatory effect on Bennett. With a new wardrobe and new hair, she acquired a new more sexualised persona and acknowledged this in the magazine, albeit in ameliorated, slightly coded language which hinted rather than flaunted her increased success (‘she feels more “aware” of herself as a woman and has noticed an exciting response from men…’) (84).
Sixty-nine years later, an article in Allure magazine unconsciously revisited the scenario in which Bennett had found herself, with uncannily similar results. Although Allure’s article, ‘Making Change’ by Cara Litke, underlines that it is dealing with ‘Real-life women’ rather than movie stars, the terms in which the results of the makeovers are discussed entirely echo the experience reported for Bennett; as the feature considers eight women involved in ‘revamping their most defining skin, hair, and makeup looks’ (2008: 114), the language used to describe their reactions to the changes is reminiscent not only of the Screenland article but also evokes images and moments from the transformation scenes described in this book, even down to referencing The Devil Wears Prada,1 as well as portraying the changes and their agents in terms reminiscent of the source myths and fairy tales on which movie metamorphoses have always drawn.2
The article starts by assuring the reader that an exterior transformation has an effect that goes beyond merely skin-deep; like the transformation moments shown so often in Hollywood cinema, there is asserted to be an intimate connection between the exterior and the interior:
A makeover may start with a physical change, but it often reaches beyond the confines of the mirror. A new look can alter how others see you – and how you see yourself. ‘Updating an aspect of your appearance is an easy way to help improve your self-image,’ says hairstylist Mark Townsend of the Sally Hershberger Downtown Salon in New York City and the Byron Williams Studio in Los Angeles. ‘It can bring a woman out of her shell and change her personality completely – I’ve seen it happen’.
That’s especially true when the makeover affects a distinctive part of a woman’s aesthetic, altering her image and self-image in one fell swoop. ‘When someone who’s had brown hair all her life becomes a blonde, her color isn’t the only thing that’s affected – her clothes, her makeup, and even the way she walks shift, too’, says colorist Rita Hazan, owner of the Rita Hazan salon in New York City. (Litke: 116)
While in this introductory paragraph the specific hair colour change described is brunette to blonde, the exemplar transformation dealt with in the pages of the feature goes the other way, repeating the Bennett alteration of blonde to brunette. Julie Dobson, an executive at a swimming pool company (117) explains that she has been dying her mousy hair for years but has tired of its high maintenance. This very closely resembles Bennett’s first inclination to go brunette – becoming tired of having to retouch her roots so often (Proctor: 30). Each of the makeovers in the Allure article divides into different sections: ‘What she wanted’; ‘What she got’ and ‘What she learned’. With Julie, this latter is again evocative of what Bennett had learnt almost seventy years previously:
What she learned: I feel much more confident as a brunette, and I don’t look in the mirror half as often or worry about the awful roots. The color also looks really good with my skin tone – I haven’t wanted to go tanning since I dyed my hair, and that’s major for me. And it feels thicker and healthier than it did when it was blonde. The best part is that my sisters, who know me best, said that they think my new brown hair fits my personality better. (117)
Bennett’s increased ‘awareness of herself as a woman’ is very like Dobson’s increased ‘confidence’; and, in true transformation style, the dramatic alteration turns out not to be a change so much as a confirmation: the woman’s ‘true self’ is revealed by the new hair colour, as attested by those who know her best.
I have drawn attention to these two non-filmic artefacts to show both that the language and imagery of the transformation moment has remained remarkably consistent over a substantial period and that it has succeeded in saturating other media in addition to the cinematic, while still using the filmic imagery as its keynotes. John Ellis in ‘Stars as a cinematic phenomenon’ (1982) suggests that extra-cinematic information on film stars, such as magazine articles and photographs, acts ‘as an invitation to cinema’ (598) because only there can the favoured star be seen in motion. We can add to this that while these artefacts point their way towards the cinema so that it can supply what they cannot, the reverse movement is also needed, as the film cannot halt the image and enable the viewer to gaze perpetually uninterrupted by narrative and action at the admired star. The circularity of this happy relationship between film and star-based artefacts ensures that sales continue to be made – both of film tickets and of extra-filmic material, from photographs to magazines and even to artefacts – in an endless round in which each new purchase piques, rather than satiates, the appetite for the star experience; it also reminds me very much of the rapport which exists between transformation moments in film and the consumables showcased there as being both at once personality-changing and identity-affirming, accessing the ‘true self’.
Micki McGee’s argument then (2005), that American consumers have been particularly enjoined to shop their way to happiness at times of crisis in the state, which chimes with Brenda Weber’s (2005) notion of the zeitgeisty nature of Extreme Makeover, runs up against a problem: however the country’s economy is doing, whatever the threats from without or within, women have always been told that they need to buy something new to wear, both to render them into the latest incarnation of the desirable (or appropriate) female archetype and simultaneously to return them to the real selves they somehow, at some point, let slip away. While it is thus easy to point to the Depression of the 30s and the economic downturn of the early noughties as factors in the metamorphosis injunctions in two of this book’s case studies, Anni and Andy’s stories, it is not so easy to ascribe societal anxiety over money problems to the third, Calam’s narrative. The affluent 1950s seem to me, by contrast, to be able to afford – in both senses – to insist on certain types of passive femininity, as mandated by conduct literature, which impacts on the approved model of womanhood Calam is exhorted to follow. Abundance, rather than scarcity, seems the driving force of the alterations prompted by a film like Calamity Jane. What this differing economic background to a transformation narrative suggests, then, is that Hollywood will always be happy to urge magical alteration via some sort of purchasing.
What also seems perpetually applicable within these films is the nature of the relationship of exterior to interior, and the invocation of a narrow range of origin stories: the natural maturation idea (caterpillar to butterfly), the Pygmalion tale, in which the male artist-lover is the agent of change for the woman, and the Cinderella narrative, where the downtrodden young lady of noble birth is restored to her rightful place in society through marriage to her handsome prince, enabled by a magical transformation by her Fairy Godmother which allows her to be seen by others as she really is inside. Throughout all these source tales it is taken as obvious that the changing of the female’s exterior renders her desirable to the superior male, who will confirm the success of her transformation by choosing her above other women.
One major question not answered in this exploration of the transformation story in Hollywood cinema is whether the man can ever be the subject of the alteration, in the same way as the woman so frequently is. While another volume would be needed to do this question justice, it can be confidently answered that men have been portrayed as needing change in mainstream films during the same span of Hollywood cinema. The tropes and elements that make up the female alteration story so frequently, however, are found in different combinations or are entirely absent: the traditional emphasis on the man as the agent within the story is clearly problematised by a tale that renders him passively made-over into an altered state. Despite this reluctance to devote the same emphasis and aesthetic to the male transformation tale, however, it is noticeable that the masculine metamorphosis via sartorial change seems to be becoming more common. The year 2008 gave us Hancock, Wanted, Iron Man and 21, in all of which the central male character changes his outward costume to reflect inner alterations he feels have occurred, or, indeed, to induce them.
I want to look here in brief, now, at how the Hollywood transformation story is affected by having a male centre, instead of a female one; what kinds of accommodations does it have to make to its aesthetic, to its themes, in order to portray the story of a man whose costume change seems to impact on his inner self? What kinds of tensions are caused by admitting that there are indeed such men? While women have obviously been the target of interludes and almost whole films advocating the transcendent power of shopping, the notion of the ‘true self’ has arisen to mitigate against the anxieties caused by thoughts of their over-pliability. What kind of torsions will the story have to perform in order to prevent implying that men have such malleable identities that they can be adapted just through purchasing and donning different clothing?
Films which overtly or tacitly depict the story of the improvement in men’s exterior are rarer in Hollywood cinema but can be found; while, as we have seen, the traditional female-centred story which depicts a sartorial transformation sends out the message – to both characters and audience – that wearing fabulous clothes is good, shopping for clothes is good, and that it is always one’s duty to look one’s best, these injunctions are not directed in so bold a manner at male characters. In fact, an improvement in the male wardrobe seems inevitably accompanied by a decline in morality, which has definitely no part in the women’s transformation trajectory.
Male-centred transformation stories maintain the connection between inside and outside, interior identity and exterior appearance, but whereas, in the female-centred tale, any transformation will inevitably be presented not as one that brings her new beauty but that brings out the beauty that was always dormant inside, with the man’s story, attention to the exterior means neglect of the interior. Where the female transformation brought inner and outer beings into alignment, the interior and exterior are connected in a different manner for men: they are still connected but obliquely, so that narratively the elevation of one necessitates the decline of the other.
Thus even in the transformation moment, a scene enshrining narcissism and self-regard in Hollywood films, the impetus against portraying men through their clothes is strong: a space which allows characters (and thus audiences) to tap into their fantasies of self-improvement seems barred for men, since the inevitable consequences of superior clothing seem to be inferior morality. Men are thus blocked from enjoying the dream of simple sartorial self-improvement which the transformation scene fosters for women: their attention should be elsewhere, the films imply, puritanically punishing those who allow themselves to be concerned with costume, and thus tying back to a tacit injunction against male narcissism.
I’d like to look in depth at an example which bears out this stance, and have chosen A Place in the Sun (1951), directed by George Stevens, partly because of its status as an exemplary classic Hollywood film, partly also because of the attention Maureen Turim paid to its costuming in her ‘Designing Women’ article, as considered earlier. Turim, it will be remembered, asserts the film is robbed of the critique of the destructive power of capitalism inherent in its source, Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy (1925), due to the distracting beauty of the costumes designed by Edith Head for Elizabeth Taylor’s character, Angela. While I admire Turim’s article, I think perhaps the Edith Head gowns have seduced her attention too. It is very noticeable that, if the costumes for Angela do not have the novel’s contempt for capitalism sewn into them, the wardrobe for the hero, George Eastman, does. His sartorial changes contain a significant relation to the source novel’s mistrust of wealthy finery, to the extent that A Place in the Sun can flippantly be described as the story of a man whose character gets worse as his wardrobe gets better.
The film introduces us to its hero, George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) during the opening credit sequence: we start the film seeing a man in the distance hitchhiking, he comes nearer and nearer always with his back to us, facing the oncoming traffic. Eventually, just as the credits end, the film teases us no longer but allows us the full sight of Montgomery Clift’s face. Although he looks attractive, if rebellious, in his white tee shirt, black leather jacket and trousers, he does not look elegant, and yet he already has a yearning to do so.
In the film’s back-story, George had met his wealthy uncle, who had promised to help him out in a career. Believing him, George has given up his menial job and hitchhiked across country to his uncle’s town, hoping for a job in his swimsuit factory. After he has spoken to his uncle on the phone and been invited up to the house, George’s first move is to go shopping. He is aware that his leather jacket is not the correct attire to wear to his uncle’s house for an evening cocktail, so he splurges what we must assume are some of his last dollars on a tweedy suit. George projects himself across the glass – and class – barrier of the shop window into a fantasy of acceptance by his rich relatives. In a slow fade, the film shows how unfounded this fantasy is: changing slowly from the mannequin…not into George himself but into George’s cousin Earl.
A Place in the Sun: George covets tweeds
The film seems to mock the ‘transformation’ convention that would hold that changes of clothing and status are accompanied across a fade like this – the heroine often gazes, desires, purchases and transforms in the space of an editing trick. But A Place in the Sun shows us that it is not that simple – the audience is wrong-footed in its idea that George will appear in the next shot sartorially elevated. Instead we see Earl, who holds himself erect with the same grace as the mannequin, but significantly is dressed in the correct clothes for evening wear. The film achieves a complex mingling of effects; it both mocks Earl, as nothing more than a stuffed dummy, at the same time as undercutting George, showing how mistaken his desires are. He can project himself into the tweeds, but not into the gentlemanly status and ‘old money’ confidence he thinks they will convey, because tweeds are ‘wrong’ for the evening. The Eastman relatives judge George, hold him off from themselves, because of this same type of rubric, the etiquette that dictates what is worn at certain times of day and for certain events, yet this only piques his ambition to be like them still further.
George’s tweed suit is out of place for cocktails and seems equally unsuitable for the manual labour he finds himself undertaking at the Eastman factory. Cast back again into his white tee shirt, he finds himself more confident. Working with his hands in boxing up swimsuits, George’s tee shirt shows off his physique and good looks, enough to capture the attention of Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters) whom he soon begins to date.
But George’s morals are declining as his fortunes improve. Moved up to a desk job in the factory, with his uncle pleased with him and rich Angela his new girl, George’s confidence grows in bounds and he finally buys the right outfit for an evening party, entering his uncle’s house at last wearing the right clothes and with the right accessory – a beautiful heiress – on his arm. Mingling with Angela and her wealthy friends introduces George to exciting new sartorial opportunities: clothes for boating, clothes for horse riding, clothes for a Polynesian themed dinner, clothes for afternoon casual strolling. George is wearing such a casual outfit when he meets Alice again – she has seen him in the society pictures of the newspaper and gone to meet him, threatening to tell Angela about her relationship with George – and their imminent baby.
Playing for time, George takes Alice out for the afternoon; he hires a small boat, and takes her out on a deserted lonely lake… Although he changes his mind about killing her, the boat capsizes and Alice drowns anyway. George flees, but is captured and put on trial. Here the smart suit he dons cannot help him: his aping of the costume of his ‘betters’ only underlines his ambition to join them and furthers the motive he has for doing away with the working-class girl who would have tied him to his origins. George’s final outfit is his prison uniform. He has sunk below the level at which he started – the white tee and leather jacket – and is uncomfortably outfitted and badly coiffed by the prison in which he spends his last days before his execution.
George’s sartorial fortunes and his moral ones are linked but in an inverse ratio, so the better dressed he is the more dissembling and grasping is his character; unlike the more common female transformation which encourages the woman to improve her appearance, the male transformation, as evinced in A Place in the Sun, works in a different way, condemning the man who is shallow enough to be concerned, as is George, with wearing the right garment, the right fabric, to the right event. While Maureen Turim finds the film buying into the capitalism that its source novel condemns, because of the beautiful costumes of the central woman, I think we can see in the trajectory of the central man’s wardrobe that the film preserves Dreiser’s distaste for consumerism.
A Place in the Sun thus maintains the traditional trajectory associated with those films which use the transformation story, but with one significant alteration: while the woman’s tale seems to be a rise in fortunes, marital, sexual, financial, once she puts on the correct apparel, here we have a rise and fall, more like the customary arc of the gangster film. Perhaps the American dream aspect of the sartorial transformation is appropriate only for the women of the nation.
The film can however be seen employing some of the same tropes in the telling of its tale of wardrobe improvement. It does not contain a scene in which George is witnessed by the viewer trying to improve his looks and fortunes. Instead, the more common invisible transformation trope is used; here not for its ability to make change seem both magical and natural, but to highlight with greater poignancy (or satirical edge, depending on one’s sympathies for George) his attempts to fit in, and his failures. George is given a moment which tallies with the shopping scenes in the women-centred films: instead of their agency in picking and choosing this or that garment and accessory, he is passively observed staring spellbound through a shop window. It does seem poignant that the tweedy outfit seems to him at this point the acme of elegance and style, yet when he purchases it and puts it on, he seems shrunken within it, and one can imagine the coarse and itchy fabric irritating his skin by the way he holds himself uncomfortably in the suit, while the snooty Eastmans surround him in their impeccable evening wear.
I noted above that the film seems sufficiently aware of the conventions of filmic transformations to tease the viewer. The shot of George gazing at the suit, followed by the very slow dissolve, should encapsulate the desired change, but, as stressed above, it is Earl and not George who appears at the other end of the dissolve. The film continues its conscious use and inflection of other transformation tropes with its take on the misrecognition moment, again manipulating the motif to suit its story, and endowing it again with a certain poignancy achieved not only by Clift’s performance but by the extremely canted, noiresque framing. While George is suffering with his inferiority complex at the Eastmans’ house, in breezes Angela Vickers in a glittering white ensemble, every inch the princess. Standing between his aunt and Angela, made tiny by perspective and by social standards he fails hopelessly, George gazes at the beautiful young woman but she does not see him at all. The misrecognition moment becomes one of non-recognition, of total non-seeing. Angela had previously driven past George and tootled her car horn merrily at him while he was hitchhiking but she does not do a double take here, gradually realising that the hunky young man in the black leather jacket is now transformed into a middle-class business man in tweeds, as the film could have set up, were it going the happy (and traditional female transformation) route. He is simply invisible to her.
The chief transformation trope the film employs is, perhaps, the idea of the false transformation. Again there are the negative overtones to the motif. Unlike the women of Final Analysis and The Last Seduction who pretend, via wardrobe changes, to adopt a new persona but really are undertaking a masquerade, George is not conscious that he is presenting a false exterior; the film condemns him not for wilfully projecting an untrue persona, but for believing that clothes can change him at all. He does not seem to have a ‘true self’ which emerges when he puts on the right clothes; perhaps he earns the narrative’s censure because his personality is so fluid he does not have a fixed identity at all. The amelioration motif also features in A Place in the Sun, and works particularly harshly; at the end of the film George’s standard of elegance has descended back through the arc it rose through, back through the glamorous clothes he got to wear as Angela’s boyfriend, past the casual work clothes in which he began the film, to conclude in a prison uniform, and with his trademark well-coiffed hair shaven down in a rough crop.
The film punishes George in the end, not only because he is interested in wearing the appropriate clothes for the right events and audiences, but because he also seems to hope that this, the female route to success, will transform his fortunes too. George has seemingly set his sights not on working hard to earn money (the male American dream) but by trying to dress appropriately, to marry it. George is thus doubly feminised and doubly condemned by the film.
Despite the severe treatment meted out to George Eastman, it is possible for Hollywood cinema to treat the male sartorial transformation without ultimately condemning their central men – as long as the film is a comedy. In Come Blow Your Horn (1963) the metamorphosis of Buddy Baker to a virtual clone of his older brother Alan (played by Frank Sinatra in full swinger mode) is not meant to censure the young man but to flatter the older one, the film’s star. The wardrobe revolution is again accomplished during a musical interlude, when Alan takes Buddy through New York City to various shops to outfit him as a grown up, sexualised man; Alan sings the title song to his brother whilst outfitting him in almost identical clothes, and, most tellingly, gives his brother’s transmutation the seal of approval by the pan up the youth’s body so often found in the female-centred metamorphoses. This comic film then has no scruples about using the traditional alteration tropes, both visual and thematic, since Buddy’s costume change alters his personality and makes him such a playboy that even his experienced brother is impressed. Alan’s admiring regard here up the young man’s body seems to have more to do with narcissism than any more potentially heterodox desire – perhaps explaining why Buddy’s outfit resembles Alan’s own so minutely.
While, then, Hollywood can use the transformation story and its common imagery and elements for a male star’s vehicle, there are yet several points that disavow the more threatening aspects of implying masculine permeability along the lines traditionally accorded the female. In the Sinatra vehicle, he is clearly the star and he does not change; his younger sibling is the one transformed, and moulded overtly into the likeness of his sexually successful brother. The malleable personality is therefore a young man’s, not a grown one’s, and the film slyly links the alteration of Buddy’s wardrobe with an equal and related alteration in his virginal status. Seemingly, a costume change is okay for men as long as it is undertaken to get the guy laid. This is not so different from the overt sexualisation undergone by the initially prudish wives in the early films; shopping helps Buddy, as it helped Why Change Your Wife’s Beth and The Smiling Lieutenant’s Anna: to become more alluring. The main difference is, of course, that the women were vixenising in order to attract just one man each, their husbands, and prevent them from straying further; Buddy’s transformation turns him into the type of playboy portrayed by his screen brother Sinatra in many films throughout the Fifties where he is surrounded by, and sleeping with, multiple female partners.
Come Blow Your Horn: Doppelganger brothers
Do these male transformations, while they use equivalent elements and images, tap similarly into the narrow range of foundation stories which seem to prompt the female metamorphosis? More research needs to be done to answer this question comprehensively, but Come Blow Your Horn perhaps suggests that the maturation theme, the inevitable caterpillar to butterfly notion, can work in male-directed films. (This is somehow preferable to viewing Sinatra’s character as a Pygmalion who busily crafts a duplicate of his own image…) The woman can, at times, be allowed to be the agent of change, too, altering the male wardrobe and thus adopting a Pygmalion role. It must be noted, however, that such scenes are generally not dwelt upon in nearly as much detail as the corresponding moments in female-focused narratives. Drive Me Crazy (1999) has Nicole (Melissa Joan Hart) lead unwilling Chase (Adrian Grenier) into a store, suggest a few items and then convey her desires for his wardrobe by standing next to, and linking arms with, a store mannequin. A cut achieves the metamorphosis: Chase is now sporting the entire outfit. This is all we get of the shopping and invisible transformations: the film moves on to other things, with Chase now rendered potential boyfriend material. Similarly, Molly Brown (Kathy Bates) in Titanic (1997) can perhaps be viewed as a Fairy Godmother to Jack Dawson (Leonardo di Caprio), in that she lends him the evening wear he needs to eat dinner on the upper deck, but again her role is downplayed, her task very swiftly accomplished, and the outfit only a temporary one.
While much work remains to be conducted to compile a more complete picture of the male transformation in Hollywood films, it can be seen that some of the same tropes, both thematic and visual, are employed at times by the film-makers; though the male metamorphosis may be something of an anomaly, it is still dealt with in some of the same terms by Hollywood. Outside mainstream American cinema, however, in films from other corners of the globe, many other narratives are built around the transformation story and it would be a further interesting project to chart and explore the methods by which other cinemas attempt to portray these tales, the points and motifs they have in common with the Hollywood treatments and the places they diverge.
The motif of the true self being released into the world by a change of frock, for example, is very evident in the 1992 Australian film, Strictly Ballroom. In this the young woman is a typical, almost parodic caterpillar who metamorphoses into a dazzling butterfly when she becomes confident through the attentions of the one she loves. Significantly, however, here the transformation, though brought about in entirely familiar terms – better clothes, more flattering hairstyle, the removal of glasses – is conducted without recourse to the Hollywood tropes we have been exploring here. The change is a gradual one, so there is no big reveal, no moment when the man looking past his partner is the surest sign that she has altered herself sufficiently to become his partner; no pan up her body, no slow-motion, no staging of significant moments on stairs.
Similarly, three recent films from different world cinemas have presented the transformation of the central female, but, while maintaining the frequent incident of the increased sexualisation of the woman through her metamorphosis, each chooses to depict this in a way unlike the Hollywood films. While St Trinian’s (UK, 2007) presents the transformation of the new girl in the now customary music montage, it does not slow down but actually speeds up the segment to show the creation of several different looks in the course of one session. The wartime thriller Black Book (Netherlands/Germany/Belgium, 2006) presents its heroine’s transformation as a necessary part of her membership of the resistance against the Nazis, and her hair dyeing and sexualised clothing thus speak of a masquerade undertaken for a noble cause, but there is again no ‘big reveal’; even her hair colour transformation is staggered since first her head hair is revealed as dyed but later, the director, Paul Verhoeven, perhaps alluding to the most notorious moment of his own previous work in Basic Instinct, shows several shots of the dark-haired heroine bleaching her pubic hair to match… Finally, in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (USA/China/Taiwan/Hong Kong) a young revolutionary girl is chosen to seduce and entrap an important Japanese collaborator, entailing a radical change of wardrobe for her in order to play her cover part of a bored and wealthy housewife. Although this does lead to sensuous shots of the girl pulling on silk stockings, and her dressing in sumptuous fabrics, these are not shot in the customary aesthetic so often used by Hollywood, and in none of the three are slow-motion or panning camera work used to highlight the changes. The transformation story may thus be an international tale which can be drawn on for inspiration in many different forms, but within Hollywood cinema, as has been revealed, a number of distinctive tropes remain perennially in use whenever the metamorphosis narrative needs to be told. This tale of transfiguration through wardrobe seems to have saturated American media beyond just films, however; there are signs of the transformation everywhere, and these are, again, not just of recent inauguration. For example, in the late 1950s the Glad Toy Company invented a doll, the ‘Poor Pitiful Pearl’, who came in a box wearing a shabby tattered dress but also with a beautiful party gown to change into, in true Cinderella fashion.3 While Pearl does not seem to be manufactured anymore, little boys and girls who want to rehearse the transformation story can always play with Barbie’s Amazing Makeover book (she ‘can’t wait to go to the big gala tonight – but first she needs the perfect dress, the most glamorous make-up, and some sparkly jewellery! Pull the tabs, turn the wheel, and lift the flaps to help…’).4 Fifty-year-old Barbie may be looking remarkably good for her age, but for the rest of us, according to programmes like Extreme Makeover and The Swan, plastic surgery is now a realistic solution and not one to which only film stars have recourse. As Debra Gimlin reports in her consideration of various types of Body Work (2002), more and more women (and men) are now going beyond changing merely clothes, hair and makeup to include body re-sculpting, and thus undertaking risky and expensive medical procedures in order to bring about their own transformation.
In one of the seemingly inevitable twists of reference invoked whenever transformations are discussed, thinking about body work brings us back to film stars, perhaps the ultimate symbols of self-transformation which we behold not only every time we step into our multiplexes or turn on our televisions, but whenever we pick up one of our magazines dedicated to charting such stars’ every wardrobe, hair, name, makeup and partner change. To mention one final film: a 1959 movie starring Shirley MacLaine, Ask Any Girl, acts as a kind of self-reflexive primer about film stardom. Through a series of narrative exigencies, our heroine, Meg Wheeler (MacLaine) comes to work for a public relations firm (a very new and hip concept in 1959, judging by the pains the film takes to explain just what a PR company does). Wheeler finds herself falling for one of the two brothers who runs the firm, Evan (Gig Young), and decides to secure him for herself by conducting public relations research to discover what type of girl he would be likely to marry. She enlists the help of his older brother Miles (David Niven) in this project. His job is then to wine and dine, date and woo the contents of Evan’s little black book and report back to Wheeler what Evan likes about them.
With her new knowledge of what her ‘customer’ desires in his ideal ‘product’, Meg makes herself over repeatedly and incrementally, changing her hair, her laugh, her way of dancing, her perfume, her style of jewellery. While the film’s plot goes on to arrange itself in customary romantic comedy form so that Meg realises she loves Miles, the amount of time and energy devoted to the sequential metamorphoses in the film seem radically in excess of what is necessary. The impact granted these scenes, their almost uncanny lustre, seems to inhere in the similarity between what Meg is doing in order to win Evan, what starlets were doing every day to secure their places in a limited firmament of working actresses, and what, indeed, women in the audience were constantly being enjoined to do: change aspects of themselves in order to get what they want. Ask Any Girl does not bother with ideas about the ‘true self’ of Meg Wheeler; she views herself as a product which needs to meet its public’s demand if it wants to be a successful part of the supply. This brings us in closing back to considering the notion of the ‘Hollywood catwalk’. The Hollywood films continue to bring us stories we can use like customers at a fashion show: to tell us not only what to wear but how and when to wear them, and to underline that transcendent moments, such as when the model emerges into the spotlight at the top of the catwalk and pauses for a moment to receive gasps of admiration, can be ours too, as long as we keep on purchasing.
Although the three case studies helped to demonstrate that instructions on appropriate behaviour, appearance, desires and agency could never be unambivalently directed at a female audience, who might choose to valorise where they should supposedly be censuring, Hollywood has perpetually tried to issue them. It has also tried to insist the heroines’ needs for perpetual improvements in appearance and etiquette are not only ours too, but can be similarly met: through the judicious application of cash or credit, through the transformatory power of clothes that can bring out a new us, and the true us simultaneously.
I had hoped to end this book in considering just one more film, one just being released, adding the consideration of its sartorial transformation to the taxonomy in this book and seeing what tropes and elements it employed. Alas, at the time of finishing, it had not yet opened in the UK. But this is perhaps the message that ultimately underlines this book: there is always another film we have yet to see, another garment to buy, another transformation to make: another Hollywood catwalk.