|Costume and Film|
The importance of costume has been presumed to go beyond the purely functional to attain levels of symbolic resonance by both film theorists and by practitioners, the costume designers and couturiers who themselves create the clothes to be worn on screen. In her important recent works (2003; 2007), Deborah Nadoolman Landis, herself both a film-costume theorist and an Oscar-nominated costume designer, is the latest practitioner to remind film theory of what it has previously overlooked: that costume designers are fully aware of the significance of every aspect of a costume – its cut, colour, outline, fabric – and its potential for conjuring up a character, even before that costume is placed on the body of the actor. Edith Head summed up industry practice, both of her own time and as it still operates today, when she spoke of costumes which helped embody character facets and assist the narrative as ‘story-telling wardrobes’ (Turim, 1984: 8).1 Film theorists have subsequently built on this notion, to show that serving the narrative is not always what the costumes of a film do; they can by contrast contradict the dominant narrative trajectory. With costume holding this much potential to support or undermine the characterisation and narrative of the film, it seems important to consider some of these theories before moving on to discuss what the radical on-screen changing of costume can signify. This section thus discusses some pieces of costume analysis I have found thought-provoking and fruitful, before briefly going on to explore the literary and cultural antecedents of the transformation texts.
‘DESIGNING WOMEN’
Maureen Turim’s piece, first published in Wide Angle in 1984, is one of the earliest, and one of the most useful, articles to discuss film costume. It discusses both particular films, especially A Place in the Sun (1951) and Les Girls (1957), and their particular and changing contexts. Turim’s article provides a model for future costume analysis: it sets its historical context, discusses ideological and symbolic implications of the chosen outfit and relates all these to female viewers, purchasers both of film tickets and the real-world versions of the film frock.
Turim examines an influential dress design, adopted by Hollywood film designers and then by dress manufacturers: the Americanised version of the New Look, which she dubs the ‘sweetheart line’. This design maintained its eminence as the fashion for everyday wear into the mid-50s and its dominance as the shape for bridal gowns for even longer. Turim stresses the sheer amount of fabric and foundation needed to create the look, and the implications which became accreted to it:
The sweetheart line depended on bras that were molded to a point and often strapless, corsets or girdles, and crinolines, layered, ruffled slips made of stiffened organza and net that supported the bell-shaped skirts to their great width at the hemline…The ‘princess’, the ‘true-woman’, the ‘debutante’ and the ‘bride’ are all connotations born [sic] by this dress as it enveloped America’s would-be sweethearts. These connotations were sewn into the style not only by the history of fashion but by the way Hollywood costume design seized upon the style, prolonging its life and positioned it in reinforcing narrative roles. (7)
The article goes on to discuss several of the films responsible for building up this dominant image of the sweetheart line as the fitting garb for ‘America’s would-be sweethearts’. Turim asserts the work of the sweetheart line was to clothe young women, to act as a liminal shape for the ‘transition to womanhood and marriage’ (8). She cites Father of the Bride (1950) as an example text, in which the bobby-soxer heroine, played by Elizabeth Taylor, is rendered by her wedding gown as a vision of ‘nuptial splendor’ (8).
Moving to consider the sweetheart line’s ideological implications, Turim criticises use of the sweetheart dress worn by Elizabeth Taylor’s character, Angela, in A Place in the Sun. Turim finds that the film, based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy (1925) is robbed of its source’s critique of the destructive power of capitalism, due to the distracting beauty of the dresses. In the novel, the hero is torn between two women, rich Angela and poor Alice, desiring the rich one not for herself so much as for what her wealth can bring him. In the film, however, such is Elizabeth Taylor’s loveliness, as set off by her Edith Head gowns, that Angela shifts from being an empty-headed rich girl into ‘the proper sweetheart’ (8), a beauty whose appearance in the hero’s drab life seduces both him and the audience into wishing for a fairy-tale ending.
Turim finds that while real debutantes would be familiar with the New Look from high-fashion magazines, middle-class aspiring debs needed to look to the movies for the right clothes to confirm their rites of passage; although she does not underline this point, the idea of Hollywood cinema acting as a catwalk for viewers is inherent here. Thus films like A Place in the Sun served to authenticate the sweetheart dress as fitting attire for young would-be beauties; the article cites Head’s proud comment that the dresses were so popular ‘Someone at Paramount counted at a party 37 Elizabeth Taylors dancing!’ (8).
Turim recounts that the sweetheart silhouette began to be varied by the mid-50s; an alternative outline, the slinkier tight skirt, also began to be seen in films. Significantly, Turim finds that this tighter skirt was first used to mark out ‘sexual warriors and golddiggers’ (9); by the late 50s the tighter skirt began to signify older women also, ones who had matured beyond the illusions of youthful innocence and had instead garnered some experience. In Les Girls, for example, flashbacks show the three friends in versions of the sweetheart line while later sequences show the older and wiser women in more severe tailored gowns. The association of youth with the sweetheart line now has more pejorative connotations, connoting inexperience and gaucherie.
As her final point, Turim considers the symbolic resonance behind the sweetheart outline and ponders reasons for the success of this particular shape: she concludes this was due to its power as an overt symbolic rendering of the female form. Firstly the outline, consisting of two heart shapes meeting at their thinnest points at the woman’s waist, draped and highlighted the curves of the idealised female body; then the fabrics themselves evoked the hidden female sexual zones through their emphasis on slippery tactile layers and folds. Turim finds the sweetheart dress not only came to stand for the female body during this protracted period; it then restricted its movement through the tightly cinched waist, its engulfing and protruding layers of fabric, symbolically ensuring the woman’s inactivity. The dress enjoyed its widespread success, she therefore concludes, because it symbolically chimed with the version of femininity contemporary American society was keen to endorse – decorative, youthful and passive.
This article is significant not only for its intriguing findings but as a model for costume analysis. Interestingly, it holds the germs of ideas touched on by Turim but developed by other authors in different contexts. For example, the final consideration of the emblematic qualities of the sweetheart line are reminiscent of the work of Sue Harper (1987 and 1994) on the costumes worn by heroines in the Gainsborough pictures, British films roughly contemporary with those showing the sweetheart line. Harper suggests one of the reasons for the popular success of the Gainsborough films, such as The Wicked Lady (1945), was their accent on excess and female pleasure, encapsulated by the costumes. Harper posits female audience members in particular being able to read the Wicked Lady’s costumes, with their suggestive loops and folds, and her hair with its vortex-like arrangement of curls, as evidence of ‘vulval’ symbolism operating within the film, perceiving that such symbolism privileged the importance of the female body and its pleasures (1987:182; see also 1994: 130).
Similarly, Turim’s discussion of the recurrent figure of Elizabeth Taylor forecasts work that has been done more recently by Rachel Moseley on Audrey Hepburn (2003 and 2005) and by me on Doris Day (2005 and 2007), on the connection between star persona, costume and film. Turim suggests Taylor’s dresses in A Place in the Sun evoke the youthful innocence and beauty of previous roles where her characters were without the ideological impact of Angela. Whether the similarity of Angela’s dresses to those worn in other Taylor roles is intentional or not, their likeness underlines the persistence of the star’s meanings at that time – of youthful beauty and budding womanhood – outside any criticism of her social class and the privileges it accords her. Taylor’s casting in the 1951 film thus inevitably works against potential criticism of her character because of the positive associations of her star persona.
Finally, Turim’s piece, by showing how costume in A Place in the Sun removes the ideological criticism inherent in the source novel, anticipates an important film costume concept brought to the fore by Jane Gaines in her influential 1990 chapter, ‘Costume and Narrative: How Dress tells the Woman’s Story’. This is the idea that costume has the potential to offer an oppositional discourse within a film, operating a distinct code against the dominant narrative trajectory. While Gaines uses the notion to discuss how costume can set up a distinct ‘temporality’ (204) out of synch with the main narrative, Turim asserts that the costume can go against more than just the timing and flow of the film to subvert its very purpose. Significantly, while Turim does not say that this subversion was a conscious one, it can be seen as inevitable that a Hollywood product would ameliorate the savagery of Dreiser’s original attack on capitalism. As we will see in discussing the transformation scenes’ relationship to consumerism, Hollywood has never been likely to condemn fashion or spending.
Turim’s piece thus embodies some critical lessons for the film-costume analyst and points the way forward to several more. The chapter by Jane Gaines has similar links with evolving film-costume theory and has indeed been one of the foundational texts of this body of work.
‘HOW DRESS TELLS THE WOMAN’S STORY’
This chapter is from the collection on costume and film which Jane Gaines edited with Charlotte Herzog, Fabrications (1990). While the introduction to the collection also usefully lays out points of theory and avenues of approach, it is Gaines’ own chapter which has been especially influential for later authors. Gaines includes quotations from industry practitioners such as Helen Rose and Edith Head, as well as actors and directors, to lay out the general rules about costume operating within Hollywood films. She then offers a particular focus on melodrama, a genre that could, on occasion, buck these general rules. The chapter thus offers an account both of common practice in costume and more specific suggestions of how costume could be used on occasions when sartorial excess was permitted, as in Letty Lynton (1932) and Dark Victory (1939).
Gaines asserts that, from silent film onwards, three linked dominant tenets have been held (180–1): costume should be kept subservient to the narrative; it is used as shorthand for personality; and it is especially female characters that costume is used to typify: ‘…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 screen’ (181).
While Gaines’ assertion here complements the idea – which as will be seen permeates the transformation – that the woman changes/enhances her interiority through a revolution in wardrobe, closer examination of various texts clearly shows male characters also have their personalities indexed through their clothes; although my book concentrates on the transformed woman, its conclusion points the way towards further exploration of the male metamorphosis.
Gaines’ melodrama section contains the most significant part of her argument about the potential of film costume. She chooses to discuss this genre in particular, she says, because it offers opportunities for the full expression of costume’s possibilities; wardrobe need not always be subjugated to the needs of the narrative in melodrama, which traditionally employs symbolic mise-en-scene, allowing elements of design, such as costume, to carry extra levels of meaning (202).
Gaines confirms that melodrama, rather uniquely amongst Hollywood genres, can permit an escape from realism. She finds this escape employed in two areas, historical and economic, elaborating that the genre is comfortable allowing anachronistic details in costume, and not insisting that a character’s economic restrictions be allowed to impact on her wardrobe’s luxuriance. She also cites Thomas Elsaesser’s influential article on melodrama, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury…’ (1987), agreeing that the emotions in melodrama overflow their narrative confines and find expression in the mise-en-scene, including costume. Like the Sirk films Elsaesser studies, she feels ‘the woman’s film’ from the 1920s through 1950s also ‘tends toward an aesthetic luxuriance which sometimes matches the emotional opulence. Like the passions in these films, the costuming is unrestrained and relatively indulgent’ (204).
Here Gaines raises one of the most significant lines of her argument. She remarks that, while melodramas may permit ‘aesthetic luxuriance’ at variance with the strictly functional costuming in other film genres, directors of melodramas had their own codes of conduct. For a big dramatic scene, the directors still did not want the audience distracted from events by an overly eye-catching outfit: ‘in other words, the actress should be dressed down for the high emotional scenes and dressed up for the less significant moments’ (204). This point seems very clearly to set out a process whereby ‘big’ narrative moments are accompanied by ‘small’ outfits, and vice versa. This is a contentious idea, but one which Gaines backs up in her subsequent paragraph, where she also mentions other ideas which have also become very significant to film-costume theory:
In these superfluous scenes the heroines may do nothing more than answer the telephone or pen a note, but she carries out this mundane task in the most visually stunning and complex costume featured in the entire film. And here lies the danger. The costume plot organises an idiolect with its own motifs, variations, surprises, anticipations and resolutions, which unfold in a temporality which does not correspond with narrative developments, whose climaxes occur in alternation with key dramatic scenes, in the undramatic moments. (204)
This paragraph contains several ideas that have influenced subsequent film-costume theory: her ‘big’ moment and ‘small’ costume notion; the idea that costume can constitute a specific ‘idiolect’ of its own within the film; that this is organised regardless of, and sometimes in opposition to, the dominant narrative of the film; and that it contains its own patterns of interest and theme, just as the dominant narrative does, but completely different to these.
Another significant notion Gaines raises while mentioning this alternative temporality is that the vestural code can offer ‘anticipations’ at odds with the main narrative. This seems very significant and further contributes to the concept of the oppositional discourse. If the costume code suits itself, ambling through the film with its own projects and themes, then there is no reason why it should take notice of the main narrative’s moments of suspense and conclusion. However, while Gaines suggests that the vestural code’s alternative trajectory thus has its own ‘motifs, variations, surprises, anticipations and resolutions’ (205), she declares that these cannot actively work against the narrative: ‘Costuming, however, cannot anticipate narrative developments so closely that it gives away the plot. The heroine cannot wear all-black before the tragedy’ (205).
Despite this assertion, I think the type of alternative pathway through the film Gaines suggests, concentrating on costume rather than event, would be likely to contain different notions of suspense and conclusion, ones operating around what the heroine wore, rather than what she did. In the same way that the audience interested in the clothing would then wait breathlessly to see what the heroine wore to ‘answer the telephone or pen a note’, rather than what she was wearing for a big narrative occurrence, as Gaines advocates above, suspense around narrative developments would be likely to be abandoned as secondary to costume revelations.
Indeed, it is possible to see films with costume codes advancing symbolic wardrobes which actively dismantle or wrong-foot the carefully wrought suspenses of the dominant narrative. For example, in the career girl romance-drama, The Best of Everything (1959), the costumes clearly operate a code for its three female characters, constructed around Turim’s dichotomy of the sweetheart line for the innocent girl versus the slinkier sheath outline for the ‘sexual warrior’ (Turim 1984: 9). The overt ‘bad girl’, Gregg (Suzy Parker) is dressed throughout the film in tight-fitting clingy dresses which advertise her sexual experience, just as innocent April (Diane Baker) has her virginal status confirmed by her tight-waisted, full skirted outfits. Seeming ‘good girl’ Caroline (Hope Lange), however, is revealed by the costume code to be just as experienced as Gregg since she too wears the sheath outline, albeit in more sober colours as befits her more rigorous grasp of reality. While the film, therefore, seeks to surprise the audience with its late-scene revelation of Caroline’s post-virginal status (‘Leave me alone, Eddy!’ – ‘That’s not what you said that night in Cape Cod!’), the costume has been telling the acute visual reader the truth about the couple’s relationship all along.2
Both Gaines and Harper have suggested the existence of such acute readers in the audience; both argue for the likelihood of female viewers going to the movies to see clothes, as well as stories and stars, whether with a view to adapting them for home sewing (Gaines & Herzog, 1991) or as a key to reading the film which celebrates rather than punishes the sexually active female protagonist (Harper, 1987).
Finally Gaines elaborates on her ‘big moment, small costume’ idea: having asserted that directors would insist on relatively plain gowns for intensely dramatic scenes, Gaines then suggests that such intense moments did actually call for ‘important’ designs (204), particularly if the dramatic event occurred during a scene requiring evening wear. Gaines suggests a way out of this impasse, positing a distinction be made between ‘textual extravagance’ and ‘design extravagance’ (204). Textural extravagance can work with the scene, Gaines implies, because of the symbolic resonance of certain fabrics: ‘For on the bodies of the female heroines, such fabrics as lamé, silk velvet, duchesse satin and chiffon, simulate skin and thus seem to render tangible an emotional hypersensitivity’ (204).
She elaborates on this ‘textural’ code later: ‘Richness of feeling deserves enriched texture, and velvet, wool jersey, chiffon, satin, bugle-beading, or sable are often used on the bodies of [the melodrama’s] heroines’ (207).
Gaines here sees the possibility of fabric offering a code of meaning which will enhance rather than detract from the main narrative’s themes. My problem with this suggestion is that the means of judging the success of this fabric code seems rather subjective, and brings us back to the symbolic reading of costume as feeding into character which Gaines elsewhere in her article takes pains to eschew. She expands on the symbolic potential of silver lamé in her discussion of Letty Lynton, where she finds the eye-catching outfit made of this fabric, worn in a scene of high drama, aptly conveys the characteristics of the heroine wearing it:
…the textural rigidity (heartlessness) of the silver lamé fabric, overwhelming even the design feature (the asymmetrical cut of the capelike collar as well as the peplum) is a visual ‘knockout’ in its own way. While some directors might see such visual brilliance as undercutting the scene, to me it is one of a few cases in which the connotative charge in the one system is equal to that of the other. (206)
Discussing the appropriateness of the outfit for the scene in which Letty (Joan Crawford) poisons her lover in terms of its revelation of her character is not qualitatively different from noting that an ingénue wears chiffon or the vamp black satin, costume characterisations which Gaines has dismissed throughout her article as both tired typifications and as subjugating costume design to narrative exigencies. Perhaps Gaines can bear the weight of characterisation placed on the silver lamé gown because its design and textural ‘extravagance’ are in themselves eye-catching; however, this means that, against her own suggestion, in this film a big moment is not accompanied by a small outfit. While I see some problems with the specific film used to exemplify Gaines’ theories, the chapter as a whole provides some important concepts which have become foundational within film-costume analysis, and which will be used to regard the role of costume within the transformations which are the central focus of this book.
Further fruitful investigations of the impact of costume both to the films they are in and the lives of the viewers who watched them are found in works by Jackie Stacey, and Sarah Berry. Stacey’s 1994 book, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship reports the findings of a survey the author undertook amongst a sample of around 300 British women; the questions asked were designed to invite the respondents, cinema goers in the 1940s and 50s, to discuss which American stars they particularly followed, identified with and emulated in their style of dress. This latter section naturally feeds most directly into my interests here; Stacey finds that her respondents derived enormous pleasure from identifying with various stars, at times stretching to emulation of their favourites’ clothes, hairstyles and accessories. How ordinary women could transform themselves through imitating the looks – and, at times, the signature behavioural traits, like eye rolling (167) – obviously connects with the topic of this book. It would have been interesting to find out whether the women remembered which specific films they had particularly responded to and if the narratives of their favourites themselves contained stories about self-transformation.
Sarah Berry looks at the Hollywood stars of the 1930s in her book, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (2000). Berry, like Turim, returns her observations about costume within film to the specific historical and social contexts that surrounded their production and release. Berry looks at films which implicitly attempted to sell clothes and beauty products to the women in the audience through their narrative focus on fashion and self-improvement. The drive towards emulating one’s favourite star examined by Stacey through its effects on the audience, is matched by Berry’s exploration of the same impetus from the point of view of the endorsing industry. Berry notes the prevalence of motifs of self-improvement and the transcendence of class and social origins in ‘shopgirl’ films of the 1930s, finding the means to achieve the elevation is most often figured through costume. Very interestingly, Berry cites a comment by film theorist Peter Wollen about the origins of Hollywood itself; he considers the fact that the moguls who originally founded the film studios almost entirely came themselves from various garment industries: ‘It was only natural that they should want to associate the cinema with extravagant and spectacular clothes’ (Wollen 1995: 14). Perhaps the ideas of improving one’s social position and both achieving and embodying a new higher status through costume was thus stitched into the very fabric of the Hollywood story from the first; Berry points out also that ‘the mythology of the “makeover” became synonymous with the Hollywood star’s rise from obscurity to fame’ (xviii). With both founding fathers and key players acutely aware of their own original mismatch between outer appearance and inner ambition, it is little wonder that the transformation story should achieve such potency within Hollywood.
While the topic of film costume as a whole may often be found by its investigators to be under-researched, the relatively small size of the extant body of work on the topic enables a swift review of its main tenets and means that parallels can be drawn across articles with comparative ease. I feel that the new turn towards historical embedding evinced by the more recent work links back to the strengths inherent in Maureen Turim’s early piece on the potential for meaning of a particular costume design. I wish to follow her lead in situating, not a dress style, but a concept about changing styles, in specific historical periods, tracing both the ongoing development and persistence of tropes concerning self-metamorphosis through costume.
Armed, then, with the ideas from these articles this book will be aware of the potential for costume to: carry and provoke both meaning and emotion; set up a system of emblematic significance based around the curves and folds of the female body which opposes the usual idea of ‘phallic symbolism’; and intersect with specific stars and the ways in which their own star personae develop over time. Attention will thus be paid not just to design but also to fabric as possible carrier of meaning and mood; this book will be quick to search for a costume narrative operating outside or against the dominant narrative trajectory; and to consider whether, contra-Gaines, the costume can indeed forecast future narrative events. In discussing the gowns and other items of clothing used as indicators of transformation we will thus not only be alert to the possibilities of costume’s character connotations, but to its potential for suggesting the radical changes to come in the transformation scenes.
ANTECEDENTS AND INFLUENCES
The blurb on the website for Channel 4’s makeover programme, Ten Years Younger advertised the 8 July 2008 episode thus:
This week…we have our very own fairytale. Jane S…is a real life Cinderella, but with two very glamorous older sisters instead. This plain Jane has boring bobbed brown hair, bottle bottom glasses and wears her 14 year old daughter’s cast offs. It’s going to take some real magic to scrub up this Cinders. With a few waves of the mascara wand and a little expert know how, our very own Fairy Godmother Nicky will soon have Jane ready for the ball.3 (Emphasis in original)
Transformation television may be very prevalent right now but, as will be seen from this quotation, despite the currency of the up-to-the-minute fashions draped on the transformed woman, such programmes still reach back to much earlier folklore and fairy tales to evoke the magic of the exterior revolution. In filmic transformations, too, the Cinderella tale is referred to both openly and subtly. Thus despite the topicality of what Rachel Moseley has deemed the ‘makeover takeover’ of television (2000), many of these media texts root themselves in stories and myths with much older foundations.
This section of Hollywood Catwalk looks briefly at these influential mythical and folkloric antecedents, teasing out some of the less obvious points that connect with the transformation motif; it will then look at some of the other work that has been attempted on such films.
There seem to me two major archetypal sources for the transformation narrative: the myth of Pygmalion, which was first written down in the Metamorphoses of Roman poet Ovid (8 AD), and the Cinderella story, which, as fairy-tale authorities Iona and Peter Opie discovered, has been told in similar form worldwide for ‘at least one thousand years’ (1980: 15). The main significant difference between these narratives is the identity of the agent for change. In the Pygmalion story the man is the creator of a beautiful statue with whom he falls in love; while the goddess Venus animates her, it is the man himself who has wrought the thing he desires. Throughout the various versions of Cinderella, by contrast, the heroine is aided by magic, whether through the good offices of a Fairy Godmother, as in the account made famous by Perrault in 1697, or the magic calf, fish or bird of other versions.
Looking at the range of transformation texts, it seems that only a few precisely follow the Cinderella story, while the remaining majority split into two. Of these, half adopt the Pygmalionesque option, having the male as the agent of change, but the other half show the woman herself deciding to transform. While she may need to beseech professional help – from hairstylists, shop assistants and the like – in achieving the transformation, it is her decision to alter her exterior. There does not seem to be a cognate myth for this version of the transformation narrative. While the Opies note Perrault’s written version of the Cinderella story made the heroine more passive than other folk versions (154), none of the renderings of the story they mention have the heroine alter her external state by herself, independent of magical intervention. Yet films using transformations, for all that they evoke Cinderella on the surface, very frequently do give space to the woman’s decision to metamorphose. Perhaps Hollywood cinema has created a new archetype, an autonomous woman who changes herself, electing, for whatever reasons the plot throws at her, to be her own combination of Pygmalion and Fairy Godmother.
While the passivity of Perrault’s Cinderella irked the Opies, the inanimate compliance of Galatea in the Pygmalion myth inevitably far exceeds it. The tale as set down by Ovid concerns an artist, sickened by the vanities and vices of the live women around him, creating his ideal to provide himself with chaste and virtuous company; enamoured of his handiwork, he implores Venus, goddess of love, to give it life. When he returns home from offering prayers and sacrifices he finds his request granted, feeling the statue warming to life under his hand.
Victor Stoichita (2008) has researched the Pygmalion myth, tracing its influences from Roman Ovid to medieval literature and art,4 into contemporary popular culture artefacts, including Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and the Barbie doll (1959). In doing so he has amassed a wealth of visual material picturing various scenes from the story. He draws attention to the ‘…continuity in the animation strategies deployed by the artists of the West’ (201) in rendering the moment of transformation. Stoichita notes that early artists frequently elected to show a series of images, providing a ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison, the statue inanimate in one, alive in the next: the transformation is accomplished unseen in the interstices between pictures. As will be seen, there is similar continuity in the filmic strategies for rendering the alterations, which frequently draw on this ‘before’ and ‘after’ idea and omit, as did the early artists, the ‘during’.
Importantly also for our purposes here, we should note that Ovid makes Pygmalion’s devotion to his art show itself through the offering of gifts including clothing; from being one of the ways in which the fond artist hopes to create the impression that his statue is alive, the symbolism of the gift of clothing becomes one of the major ways to create the new female herself. While many of the transformations in film seem inspired by the version of Pygmalion familiar from George Bernard Shaw’s play5 or its musical incarnation, My Fair Lady (1956), rather than Ovid’s poem, the emphasis on the clothing of the heroine is much more emphasised in the Latin text. Shaw (1916) briefly describes the filthy clothing which his Galatea, Eliza Doolittle, is wearing when the audience first encounters her, but the emphasis on subsequent outfits which the filmed musical version advances is not in the play. Thus the moment when the heroine appears in a dazzling costume is an invention of the film: we owe the sight of Audrey Hepburn in the magnificent Beaton-designed gown at the Embassy Ball to the movie and its makers, rather than Shaw’s intervention, since the playwright refers to Eliza’s outfit only in a stage direction, and after the event.6
Similarly, the earlier transformation moment which seems to lie waiting at the centre of the stage text, when Eliza appears newly clean, and clothed in a costume which shows her lady-like potential, is not expanded; instead it is thrown away in a typically thoughtless order from the Professor to his housekeeper:
Higgins: Take all her clothes off and burn them. Ring up Whiteley or somebody for new ones. Wrap her up in brown paper til they come. (Act II: 29)
The moment where the woman emerges newly glamorous, which we know from its frequent iteration in cinema, is not featured here at all. Therefore the weight laid on the importance of costume to mark the featured moment of transcendence may come from the Cinderella story. Again and again, throughout the versions that the Opies found – occurring in different countries and at different periods – the varieties of the Cinderella narrative mention the magical granting of an outfit which compensates for the dirty rags the heroine wears in her kitchen-maid incarnation. Whether it is ‘braw claes’ (fine clothes) for Rashin Coatie to wear to church, a gold and silver dress for Aschenputtel to don to meet the prince, or a cloak of kingfisher feathers which the Chinese Yey-hsien puts on for the festival, the different Cinderella tales all stress the importance of the fabulous outfit (152–8).
What the Opies also point out most intriguingly, however, is that the garment allows a return to the heroine’s real self rather than an elevation. The dirty version of Cinderella is the enchantment. As the folklorists explain in their account, fairy tales are rarely attempting to alter the status quo:
In the most-loved fairy tales, it will be noticed, noble personages may be brought low by fairy enchantment or by human beastliness, but the low are seldom made noble. The established order is not stood on its head. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are girls of royal birth. Cinderella was tested, and found worthy of her prince. The magic in the tales (if magic is what it was) lies in people and creatures being shown to be what they really are. (Opie: 14)
Importantly, the Opies highlight the fact that all the various stories grant Cinderella noble birth, as daughters of kings or aristocrats. She has a rightful place at court which an evil enchantment manages to obscure, forcing her into a humble and subservient position: ‘[Cinderella is] under enchantment not when she is in her beauteous state, for that is her natural condition, but when she is in her kitchen state’ (15; emphasis in the original).
It is also important that the high-born man who will eventually marry the heroine and thus restore her proper class status must recognise her worth and fall in love with her while she is still in her lowly persona:
The prince’s admiration for her in her party dress is worthless. It is essential he plights himself to her while she is a kitchen maid, or the spell can never be broken… The transformation was not an actual transformation but a disenchantment, the breaking of a spell…we are aware that the person was always noble, that the magic has wrought no change in the person’s soul, only in…her outward form. (17)
The significance of these points for our consideration of the transformation motif within film will become most apparent when we discuss the trope of the ‘true self’, with which those Hollywood films using the metamorphosis narrative seem obsessed. Such films constantly juggle the emphasis on the external transformation, trying to give it the focus of something new and exciting (often visually) while also suggesting simultaneously that the change is actually a return to an authentic self previously forgotten or unachieved (often narratively). Not only Cinderellas, but the transformation heroines, are shown, through their metamorphoses, ‘to be what they really are’.
It is also interesting that although the Opies insist the prince must be able to see Cinderella’s worth when she is in her lowly state, film transformations rarely follow this. The hero’s act of viewing the woman once she is transformed is fore-grounded – it is as if, although he has interacted with her, he has not really seen her before: her metamorphosis changes her from invisible to visible. Since this is the only significant element of the tale that the movies all reject, we should ask why this should be. Both overt reworkings of the Cinderella tale, such as Pretty Woman (1990), and others which only borrow elements of the story, appropriating the seemingly magical reversal of fortunes, such as Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (2008), revolve around the moment of self-improvement: when, workday clothes cast aside, the ‘princess’ is revealed. As will be seen, the Hollywood transformations have an intimate relationship with consumerism, and their own reasons for not wanting to perpetuate stories in which one’s inherent worth is evident even when one is in rags…
The Cinderella story has become perhaps the most obvious reference for the transformation that is both sartorial and status-enhancing; it can be found, as noted, in films, but also throughout the wider culture and as a metaphor within the film industry too. For example, the film Pretty Woman self-referentially provides its own epithet when one of the characters calls prostitute Vivian’s rags-to-riches story that of ‘Cinda-fuckin’-rella’. Various Hollywood stars, from Joan Crawford to Audrey Hepburn, have been associated with the story through recurrent plot-lines in their vehicles as well as their own career trajectories. A 1959 text advising girl teens on everything from how to lose weight to gain a boyfriend, McCall’s Guide to Teen-Age Beauty and Glamour (Keiffer), begins its introduction with a contradiction: the text tells us that ‘No matter what it is we want…we have to work at getting it… No one else can do it for us…’ while the picture at the top of the page shows a happily smiling woman with an older woman, smiling, floating in the air and wearing a witch’s pointy hat. We can almost hear the ting! as her wand works its magic: since we have come in with the ‘after’, we cannot tell what it is that the kind lady has changed, but judging by the way the younger woman is smiling, she is very happy with what the spell has accomplished. While the text enjoins hard work to achieve ambitions, then, the illustration suggests that we too would be wise to find a Fairy Godmother, implying perhaps the book may fulfil this role.
Invoking the Cinderella myth as symbolically significant to the cinema as industry, theorist Jeanne Allen, in an article on ‘The Film Viewer as Consumer’ (1980), sets out a series of relations between film and commerce, illustrating the financial and symbolic links between ‘film viewing and consumerism’ (482). Allen attests the necessity of fostering such links was felt early on in the industry’s history, so that from the 1920s onwards films supported and reinforced the necessity of consuming other goods, and vice versa. But Allen notes that it is not merely purchasable goods, but also a mode of behaviour, which films endorsed; she describes the film itself as a type of Fairy Godmother that could be used to transform its audiences. Just as viewers would be seeing what to buy and wear, they would also be seeing how to kiss and work, marry and obey. Fan material illustrated how audience members used the movies for etiquette tips; Allen feels that the influence was conscious, and consciously exploited, with industry professionals, reformers and government aware that film could be ‘the means of transforming Cinderella into a suitable mate for a prince’ (486).
Hollywood films were thus acting as shop windows not just for purchasable commodities but more intangible personal qualities also; however, different images had different potential to wield such influence. Allen notes that the female body very soon came to occupy a privileged place on screen; tacitly echoing Mulvey’s influential ideas (1975) about the potential of the female star to halt the narrative through the power of her iconic image, Allen suggests that such ‘Ritualistic moments of narrative stasis’ (488–489) were used to highlight not only the female figure and the star persona of the actor personifying her, but also the rich consumer goods that acted as her mise-en-scene.
Further, not only were the women on screen enshrined as emulatable icons of behaviour and appearance; the women members of the audience were also being especially targeted as more likely receptors of filmic messages. Mary Ann Doane, building on several points of Allen’s article, argues (1987) that the female audience member was considered by advertisers the ultimate consumer from the beginning of the twentieth century (23) and that films were considered an excellent method of reaching and influencing her. Doane puts forward an outline of three specific types of product sold in the film: the figure of the female star; objects which receive more or less overt ‘product placement’, and the film itself.
Hollywood, Doane claims, excelled in producing a filmic product that would serve to promote all three at once: the genre known as the ‘woman’s picture’ (27). In assessing and reviewing all these goods on show, Doane asserts, a different type of ‘look’ was called for; she posits the existence of a female ‘consumer glance’ (30) operating in Hollywood cinema:
At the cinema, the consumer glance hovers over the surface of the image, isolating details which may be entirely peripheral in relation to the narrative. It is a fixating, obsessive gaze which wanders in and out of the narrative and has a more intimate relation with space – the space of rooms and of bodies – than with the temporal dimension. It is as though there were another text laid over the first…In this other text, the desire to possess displaces comprehension as the dominant form of reading. (30)
Doane credits the female viewer specifically with this ‘consumer glance’, granting her more interest in objects on screen than plot events. This attention which ‘hovers’ over the narrative, disregarding incidents which the story insists are important, in favour of dwelling on stars, bodies and objects, could easily be expected to be aware of the costumes also and, if not being interested necessarily in what they connote, at least be aware of how they make the star look, acting as desirable commodities themselves. This attention can thus be seen to link up with Harper’s idea of a particularly female aptitude for reading the costume narrative in films (1987 and 1994). It also ties in with Laura Mulvey’s influential ideas about the ‘male gaze’ (1975) but Doane posits a more nebulous glance which homogenises film images by reducing everything to the category of ‘things to buy’.
This consumer glance can also ‘isolate’ (30) specific items and details, dwelling on them to the exclusion of others. Doane links this isolation of particular details to the way women are taught by advertising materials to break their own bodies down into specific parts:
Commodification presupposes that acutely self-conscious relation to the body which is attributed to femininity. The effective operation of the commodity system requires the breakdown of the body into parts – nails, hair, skin, breath – each one of which can constantly be improved through the purchase of a commodity… The ideological effect of commodity logic on a large scale is therefore the deflection of any dissatisfaction with one’s life or any critique of the social system onto an intensified concern with a body which is in some way guaranteed to be at fault. (31)
Dissatisfaction with ourselves, as audience members, works to support the cinema infrastructure in two ways: it makes us want to consume the images of more perfect female stars on screen, and to attempt to emulate their perfection and improve ourselves through the consumption of purchasable products. The elements Doane says advertising urges us to improve, ‘nails, hair, skin’, are frequently emphasised in the makeover scenes of transformation movies. The concept of the transformation, of both the necessity for and the possibility of, self-improvement, is thus edited into films themselves through their visual arrangements of shots as well as their thematic handling of metamorphosis themes.
Furthermore, as Doane’s final point makes clear, this attention to self-improvement suits the status quo because while we are worrying about our own failures and trying to alter them we are not thinking about the inequities of the societies of which we are members. Focusing attention on the woman’s need to improve her image can distract her (and us) from wondering about and working on more social problems. If as a whole the Hollywood film industry supports transformations, then, it may well be both to ensure our dedication to shopping and to dwelling on the personal improvements we can make. Changing ourselves distracts us from any need to change society.
The transformation story can thus be seen holding a special place within Hollywood film; to a certain extent it could be posited as the Urtext, the original story, since its internal theme complies so neatly and fully with its means of being made. The same look that criticises the self appreciates the beauty of other women and objects, while the stories off and on screen work to convince that the application of consumables to the body will improve it. While the Pygmalion myth may be influential within film transformations, the tale of Cinderella stands as a more ubiquitous touchstone for the particular motif the films all adopt – that of the transcendent power of costume to reveal the princess. While many of the films which employ the transformation theme do not directly evoke either Pygmalion or Cinderella, advancing instead a female character who decides to change her appearance for her own reasons and under her own impetus, the transformations themselves evoke resonances which return to the ideas centred in the two foundational stories; for example, the notion of the ‘true self’ which nestles uncomfortably at the heart of so many of these narratives owes much to the Cinderella narrative, and to the idea that the heroine’s authentic state is that of glorious princess.
Although these metamorphosis films seem to me to be so widespread within Hollywood cinema, appearing in different genres, at various historical conjunctions and with diverse emphases, previous critical work on such films has been quite limited. Two examples need to be considered here; both reduce the more thematic concept of the transformation to the more surface level of the ‘makeover’ and, by reading these films as operating solely within a female market, do not pursue the idea of male transformations. Focusing on one sex alone has the effect of rendering those texts which are explicitly targeted at a female audience less significant than they actually are: homogenising all ‘makeover movies’ so that their address is female flattens out the differences between films which are actually dissimilar.
PREVIOUS WORK ON TRANSFORMATIONS
In their book-length study, The Makeover in Movies (2004), Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell posit that the makeover is such a popular idea within mainstream American cinema it makes up a genre of its own. They too suggest that this genre harks back to the myth of Pygmalion and the story of Cinderella, then trace the lines of these two foundational narratives in a succession of more contemporary products, including Shampoo (1975), Working Girl (1988) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). However, they assert that Hollywood woke up to the potential of the film transformation in the 1940s, and thus neglect years of film history.
For Ford and Mitchell, 1942’s Now Voyager is the master text, and they devote their opening chapter to showing how this film lays out ground rules for the rest of the genre’s products; they call it ‘the first high-profile film with a physical makeover at its centre’ (9). While the ‘before’ and ‘after’ signifiers they list (including heavy brows, dumpy figure and glasses) do appear in Now Voyager, they also feature in Why Change Your Wife?, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1920 feature which details the metamorphosis of Beth Gordon (Gloria Swanson) from frumpy wife to passionate partner via costume and cosmetics. Thus, although Now Voyager clearly offers a number of the defining tropes found in such films, it is not a text which originates either the wider themes or the smaller visual tropes of the filmic transformation. Because they anoint Now Voyager ‘the mother of Hollywood makeover movies’ (19), the authors miss the prevalence of the metamorphosis theme in earlier decades of film.
The fascination with self-, and other-directed alterations was already firmly in place in the 1930s but gained special resonance in that decade when coupled with the star persona of Joan Crawford, as will be examined in the case study on The Bride Wore Red (1937). The actor’s stardom was marketed as a form of fairy tale – ‘Joan Crawford is a modern day Cinderella’, her studio biography asserted (Barbas 2001: 125) – and vehicles for her were created which overtly evoked the story’s trajectory, banking on the opportunity for a rags-to-riches story to afford plenty of occasions for costume display. Because Ford and Mitchell, then, dismiss the 1930s as a decade purely of screwball comedy, with films producing heroines who were, at the start of the movie ‘already stunner[s]’ (91), they overlook the prevalence of the costume change as indicator of profound internal changes, both in the 30s ‘shopgirl’ films and many earlier texts.
As the discussion of Méliès’ La Chrysalide in the Introduction suggested, early films demonstrated their makers’ obsession with the new possibilities of the technology, and one of the main ways to display this was by turning an object or person into something else. It is interesting to note that Méliès himself made films using both Pygmalion and Cinderella as source texts; both found their way into his early works; his Cinderella (Cendrillon) of 1899 was at that point the longest and most complex film he had attempted. Méliès’ American counterpart in film pioneering, Thomas Edison, also included titles such as A Modern Cinderella (1910) in his catalogue; the American Film Institute lists twenty American versions which present the story directly or drew inspiration from it before 1930 alone. Rather than springing into celluloid maturity in 1942, the film transformation thus has its antecedents in various genres and interests; it draws on the late nineteenth-century obsession with magic (Ezra, 2000); a filmic tradition of Cinderella films, and early twentieth-century ideas about self-improvement, as advised by the growing ‘conduct literature’ industry which became fully operational in America with the 1922 publication of Emily Post’s Etiquette, which advised on and mandated social behaviour (including, significantly, the correct attire to wear for specific occasions).
Overall Ford and Mitchell’s approach to their topic is exemplified by their choice of the word ‘makeover’; this signifies the surface changes that a character can undergo, and their observations remain on the surface, noting that class and gender identity is involved with the translation of self that the makeover marks, but not pursuing their examinations further to consider why the impetus to improve oneself should be pushed at audience members, for over a century of Hollywood history. Ford and Mitchell seem fond of the films they write about, and perhaps their book hopes to defend them. While the authors end by declaring that there are both helpful and harmful examples of the metamorphosis film, their conclusion remains vague, however: ‘At their best, these films can provide us with useful and important ways of thinking about ourselves, not just familiar forms and predictable outcomes…’ (207).
Since the pair set out on their endeavour wanting to declare the ‘makeover movie’ a genre in its own right, the book’s ending should feel able to valorise generic material without apologising, yet Ford and Mitchell here seem to distance themselves from the mass of transformations in film – ones built around ‘familiar forms and predictable outcomes’. Surely what is interesting, however, is the very continued currency of these forms and outcomes despite their well-worn status. The fact that these films find the same ways visually and thematically to tell the transformation story is to me what makes them fascinating, not discardable.
Suzanne Ferriss’ chapter in her co-edited book on Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies 2007, with Mallory Young, evinces a similar ambivalence to her topic of interest. Her chapter, ‘Fashioning Femininity in the Makeover Flick’, looks specifically at Funny Face, an independent film, Party Girl (1995), which reverses the usual trajectories of the transformation text, taking its heroine, as a tagline might declare, from fab to drab, and The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Ferriss makes one particular point which I want to consider and contest; she claims the underlying message of these films, and of the transformation trope in general, is that ‘women do not need to change – at least physically’ (43), asserting that the ‘makeover makes nothing over: it is ultimately unnecessary since the protagonist never really needed to change physically, but only to recognise – and be recognised for – her true worth’ (44).
I find this an intriguing premise – the idea that the ‘makeover’ actually is unnecessary – given the prevalence of the transformation theme in Hollywood cinema across a range of historical contexts, and the emphasis placed on the actual metamorphosis within such texts. I think Ferriss concludes the makeover is not really needed because she can see that the heroines of all the films she cites are already lovely, and indeed it is hard to fault the attractiveness of female stars Audrey Hepburn and Anne Hathaway.7 However, it needs to be remembered that within the films’ worlds the women are not valued for the way they look at the beginning. Funny Face’s Jo Stockton (Hepburn) is derided by a photographer and a magazine editor for her lack of style (‘The hair, the hair – it’s awful, it must come off!’). Similarly, within the diegesis of The Devil Wears Prada, it is understood that Andy Sachs is plump and dumpy, with none of the style and élan of the other Runway women. While the audience can see the glamour of the actors, the films promote a fantasy in which the characters they play do not possess this, pre-transformation.
In insisting that such heroines do not really change, Ferriss’ chapter perhaps wants to indicate her awareness of the tension in films which adopt the transformation motif around the idea of the ‘true self’, as will be discussed more fully below. The significant thing for me about this idea, however, is that it attempts to resolve anxieties but can never truly hold them in check, rendering those metamorphosis texts which employ it uneasy, fascinating in their discomfort in trying to reconcile opposing ideas.
Ferriss concludes that the parade of clothing and other consumables accompanying the filmed transformation is harmless since they do not seriously represent items the audience members might be able to buy; she denies that the films carry the tacit message that we too should seek to improve ourselves and our fortunes by overhauling our looks and wardrobe, suggesting this is instead ‘the stuff of fantasy’ (54). Perhaps in trying to reassure readers that makeover movies are not harmful, she under-emphasises the importance of the actual transformation within such films and overstates the ease with which their heroines can find ‘recognition’ at work and in relationships. Part of the way she implies this is through the particular films she chooses as her examples: she uses Funny Face as her instance of the older way of conducting such stories and picks newer examples which do not end in the traditional manner, with the woman’s capitulation to the male. The history of the transformation, however, does not support this perfectibilist manifesto: looking at these texts from different periods does not indicate the rise of the self-determining heroine in recent years. This type of character, the woman who decides to change her appearance for her own reasons and on her own initiative is not a new one; as we shall see in the discussion of the various tropes used in the metamorphosis film, she is as likely to turn up in a 1927 film such as It as one from almost 70 years later. Just as we find seemingly feminist notions of self-determining agency and control in It, however, we can also find ‘old-fashioned’ female characters in much more recent films who allow themselves to be made over by a male figure, as with the heroine of She’s All That (1999), and even Andy from The Devil Wears Prada relies on the assistance and skill of a male expert who moulds her to fit a desired image.
While Ferriss’ examples seem superficially to suggest that the makeover genre is a harmless one both because the transformation is ‘unnecessary’ and because the woman herself is now more in control of her image change, the idea that such films are improving by abandoning their previous sexist ideas about the importance of women fitting pre-constituted ideas of regularised beauty needs to be contested. We are just as likely to find active and independently minded women in the earliest examples of the transformation as the latest; what is interesting about the genre is not that its products are undergoing some notional ‘improvement’, themselves transforming so that their unpalatable factors disappear, but that they actually display such continuity across decades. The reasons to transform, and the methods of telling and showing the story of the transformation, have remained remarkably consistent within Hollywood film across time, across generic boundaries and regardless of how central the metamorphosis itself is to the whole narrative. Rather than revealing an ideological progression from a deluded past to a self-satisfied present and future, film transformations parade an intriguing continuity of theme, image and methodology, tropes which will now be examined more closely.