|Tropes|
INTRODUCTION
A trope is a familiar convention, an idea or visual image recurrent within narratives, whether literary or cinematic. A common thematic trope, for example, would be the pattern of the rise and fall of the mobster in the classic gangster film. We are familiar with the story arc which gives us the rookie criminal, acquaints us with his ambitions, shows us his increasingly serious crimes and reaches its high point at the middle of the film where he has attained the top position in his gang. From there on, it is all downhill; the gangster is betrayed from within or overpowered from without; he dies in a hail of bullets.
Within this recognisable thematic trope, the gangster film also frequently presents smaller visual tropes; Colin McArthur succinctly sets them out in his chapter on the iconography of such films (1972), noting the dark suits and fedoras, rainy streets and big cars as the visible signs of the genre. The gangster genre, interestingly, also has a sartorial trope it often employs: from early works like Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) to more recent films such as GoodFellas (1990), the rookie marks his achievements in gangsterdom by ordering new clothes Cagney’s Tom Powers in Public Enemy underlines his own transformation, from wild boy to violent man, when he is fitted for a fancy suit.
A range of recurrent conventions can also be found operating across the various films that contain narratives of transformation. As we found with the comparison of the French and American versions of Nikita, Hollywood has found a way to tell the story of sartorial alteration to which it returns again and again: both the narrative of transformation itself, and the methods of showing the change and its effects, recur across films and genres. There seem to be eleven major repeated tropes that persist across such films; seven are thematic and four visual. The first four thematic tropes indicate the ways in which the transformation is achieved, how they are staged, while two concern more internal qualities of the change, and the remaining one importantly qualifies the transformation. The visual traits are recurrent iconographic methods for showing the alteration; these will all now be considered and exemplified in turn.
1) Visible Transformations – The ‘Makeover’ Scene
Somewhat surprisingly, given the focus of these films on external transformation, scenes showing the actual alteration of a character are rather rare. While the ‘makeover’ scene is the most obvious trope of the film transformation, then, it is paradoxically not one of the most common. When the transformation does permit the viewer to witness the work needed to render the ‘ugly duckling’ into the beautiful swan, it is often presented within a musical interlude, a fantasy space outside the normal narrative drives. Here costume can be allowed to halt the flow of the story, as Gaines (1991) warned over-elaborate designs threatened, and the viewer is actively encouraged to enjoy witnessing the suspension of the dominant trajectory in favour of shots of consumer goods cut to a catchy tune.
In Clueless (1995), for example, the heroine Cher (Alicia Silverstone) gives her new friend Tai (Brittany Murphy) a makeover in order to make her more popular. Cut to the up-tempo sounds of a poppy track, the scene shows Tai at first hesitantly but eventually joyously embracing the new her that Cher crafts with the aid of some hair colour, scissors, and loans from her own extensive wardrobe. Cher and her styling assistant, best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) transform Tai from a lower-class young woman, who fits only with the déclassé slacker group at Cher’s exclusive high school, to a yuppie princess like themselves. While the young woman is marked from her first appearance by her non-designer trainers, baggy trousers and check shirt, Cher’s borrowed clothes enable her to ascend to a higher social echelon within the school and eventually, if only temporarily, to rival the popularity of Cher herself.
In The Princess Diaries (2001), Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway) is groomed in keeping with her newly recognised royal status when famous stylist Paolo (Larry Miller) renders her unruly curly hair sleek and straight, tames her eyebrows, provides mani- and pedicures, all to a funky beat. Similarly, the transformation of the heroine, Valerie, in Earth Girls are Easy (1988) is encompassed within the space of a full-scale musical number. Valerie has detected a lack of interest in her fiancé Bob and asks her boss at the Curl Up and Dye beauty salon, Candy, for advice. Candy confidently leads her into the public space of the salon and calls on the other customers and assistants to help: ‘Come on everybody, we’re doing a makeover!’ She then sings the song, ‘Brand New Girl’, as Valerie is rendered less ‘wholesome’ and more sexualised. Her red-brown corkscrew curls are straightened and bleached and her brown eyes changed with blue contact lenses, so that Valerie seems to be a completely different, as well as a Brand New, Girl. Candy’s idea is that if Bob is straying, Valerie should be the different girl with whom he dallies. A more overt sexuality is the ticket to increased popularity, for Valerie as well as for Tai, whose rather androgynous original look is discarded for a more feminine appearance.
A similar arc of transcendence from outcast to popular through the right outfitting can be found in the short 1935 Disney cartoon, The Cookie Carnival. This eight-minute fantasy whimsically presents a parade and beauty contest in Cookie Town. After a march-past by various kinds of humanised biscuits, we meet our hero, a hobo gingerbread man. He meets a gingerbread girl who is sobbing because she has nothing to wear to the parade. Like Cinderella, these sartorial woes are relieved by a Fairy God-(father) figure, as the gingerbread man takes pity on her plight and confirms that she will not only go to the party but be crowned Cookie Carnival Queen. He then transforms her, using tools in keeping with the cookie theme. First he turns her hair from drab brown to gleaming blonde with the aid of icing, artfully twirled into a long curl on one side. He replaces her plain dress with a gown made from blobs of frosting, over a petticoat made from a cupcake case, decorated with cookie sprinkles as jewels. The icing sugar from a marshmallow acts as face powder while rouge and lipstick are supplied by more sprinkles; as the finishing touch, the new beauty is allowed to admire herself in the shiny mirrored surface of a lollipop.
We can note here that Tai, Mia, Valerie and the gingerbread girl all have helpers who effect the external transformation for them; not all of the films where we are shown the transformation scene rely on the benevolence of an outside agent, however. In The Major and the Minor (1942), the central character Susan Applegate (Ginger Rogers) creates an outfit which transforms her into a younger version of herself in order to travel half-price on a train. Realising that she cannot afford the fare home and seeing a nine-year-old girl being given half fare, Susan retreats to the ladies’ room in the station and contrives a rejuvenating outfit. Wiping the makeup off her face, she rolls up the waistband of her skirt to make it shorter, swaps her heels for flats, makes stripy socks by cutting up a jumper, and finally emerges with her hair in plaits looking shy and gamine.
Similarly, in two Clara Bow vehicles, It, and Hula (both 1927), the central female herself again achieves the revision. In It, released in February 1927, Betty Lou Spence (Bow) works in a department store and is attracted to her boss Cyrus Waltham Jr (Antonio Moreno). Asked out by his friend Monty (William Austin), Betty Lou agrees if they can go to the Ritz, where she knows Cyrus is dining. Monty reluctantly agrees, and Betty Lou goes home to sort out her outfit. Viewing her wardrobe critically, the young woman decides that her best option is the plain black dress she wears to work. She then acts decisively to achieve her goal of a fashionable outfit: picking up the scissors, she cuts away at the dress while still inside it, cutting a deep V neckline and removing the sleeves, until it reveals itself (and her) as a more stylish and desirable item. The comparable scene from Hula (released August 1927) comments on the earlier film; here Bow’s Hula Calhoun models an expensive dress for her beau. When he hints that he doesn’t like it, she cheerfully tears handfuls of the fabric away until it reveals more of her. Again the accent is on suiting herself rather than the sanctity of any existing dress form; in Bow vehicles, the clothes exist to be modified to suit their wearer, rather than to confer on her a predetermined image.
The 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, True Lies, contains a very similar scene in which the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis attempts a remake, drastically altering her dress while wearing it to effect a similar change on herself. In this film, Helen Tasker (Curtis) does not know that her husband Harry (Schwarzenegger) is a government agent. Feeling alienated from her spouse, she is almost seduced by a lothario pretending, by coincidence, to be a government agent, one who is seeking to recruit her too to a similar post. Once her husband finds this out he decides to punish his wife by calling on her to perform an undercover job: he tells her to come to a smart hotel dressed in her sexiest outfit. Helen duly arrives but examines her reflection critically in a hotel mirror just before the rendezvous. She decides the dress she had chosen – black and formal – is too frumpy, and tears off the puffy sleeves, before rending several inches off the hemline. With the dress purged of its more bourgeois detailing, she feels ready to tackle her assignment. While the narrative shows Helen obviously being manipulated by her husband into thinking she must dress differently in order to become a Mata Hari, it yet allows her through her own agency to alter her appearance. This is a significant moment within the film as Helen has until now been marked by her passivity, as much as her frumpy overlong skirts and drab shapeless cardigans. Furthermore, tearing up the black dress to make it more overtly sexy reveals not only Helen’s desire for a more exciting life and marriage, but also Curtis’s trim star body. This marks another of the defining features of the filmic transformation when it employs a star as the central character needing to be changed: the return of the familiar star in her customary form to her audiences.
Just as Bette Davis is hidden beneath the padding and heavy eyebrows in 1942’s Now Voyager, so Curtis, whose fame in the 1980s and 1990s was heavily predicated on exposure of her very wrought body, is hidden for the first part of the movie under shapeless, all-encompassing clothes which conceal her shape. In both films the viewer waits impatiently for the first sight of the star as her familiar self. This can set up an alternative trajectory to the dominant narrative one, creating a story interested in the changes in costume and body rather than plot developments; as explored in the previous chapter, the wardrobe choices in both films are allowed the potential of establishing an oppositional narrative running separately from the main one. One of the chief pleasures of the transformation thus consists in a dual act of concealing and revealing: the famous star is first hidden, swaddled in unbecoming outfits or heavy body padding until the transformation scene reveals her in her more usual starry glamour.
Another recurrent trope is the reaction of men to the alterations. Their approval is the proof that the metamorphosis is complete and has been successful. Tai’s metamorphosis in Clueless is met by male approval at school the next day; Valerie’s straying boyfriend Bob is aroused by her new look, and the gingerbread girl is crowned queen of the Cookie Carnival by the ecstatic unanimous decision of a panel of male judges.
The transformation scene from Moonstruck (1987) similarly portrays the woman as becoming more attractive to men through her cosmetic alteration. Loretta (Cher) is a quiet, hard-working widow, affianced to Johnny Cammarini (Danny Aiello). When she meets his devil-may-care brother Ronny (Nic Cage) Loretta feels a new passion, both for him and life; after they have slept together once, she tells him she cannot see him again but he begs her to accompany him to the opera; after this one-time date he will leave her alone. Loretta agrees. Later she goes to the neighbourhood hairdressers (knowingly called the Cinderella Beauty Shop) and commands the attendant to ‘Take out the grey’. Loretta is transformed in the salon from a respectable widow with greying hair in a bun to an attractive woman, her newly raven hair styled into a bouffant do, eyebrows trimmed and makeup warming her pale lips and eyelids. While she portrays this transformation to the women in the salon as being appropriate for going to the opera, Loretta is really remaking herself as a person interested in life. As she leaves the salon two men exclaim about her looks – ‘Wow, look at that!’ Loretta hears this and seems heartened, rather than annoyed, at being reduced to an objectified ‘that’. While he had been attracted to her before this self-revisionist exercise, Ronny is also affected by her transformation, gasping in astonishment at her new look.
The success of Loretta’s transformation can also be measured by the fact that it returns the star, Cher, to us in her familiar glamorous state. Like the masquerade of the female star in Now Voyager and True Lies, part of the appeal of Moonstruck is the suspense set up by the unorthodox appearance of the star. Loretta dresses in a modest and self-effacing manner, quite the reverse of the star playing her; while her opera dress does not emulate or evoke the frequently shocking outfit choices made by the star – for example, her infamous Bob Mackie outfits worn for successive Academy Award ceremonies – the transformation sequence does restore the star’s customary dark hair and carefully made-up face.
The films discussed above come from a variety of genres, indicating that the transformation theme and its concomitant tropes traverse generic boundaries. Other films which include the on-screen metamorphosis include the thriller, The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), teen-pic The Breakfast Club (1985), historical drama Marie Antoinette (2006), superhero spoof My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) and war/action oddity, G.I. Jane (1997), as well as more obvious ‘makeover movies’, Miss Congeniality (2000) and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008). Each of these employs the occasion of the female’s remaking, whether by herself or by others, in order to advance the action as well as providing an occasion for spectacle. Marie Antoinette, for example, uses the moment to show the Austrian princess being claimed by the French court; their ownership of her is enacted by their disposal of all her clothes and personal effects. While the stripping away of the layers of skirts and petticoats shows the princess at her most vulnerable, away from home, claimed by a foreign and seemingly hostile people who, as we know, will eventually go on to cause her death, the literal stripping of the actor playing the princess, Kirsten Dunst, displays her naked body also to the camera and viewer. The unwarranted shot of Dunst naked is included as an attempt to render the exigencies of history more interesting, more immediate, to a modern audience.
Both The Long Kiss Goodnight and G.I. Jane play with the audience’s awareness of the star persona of their lead actors by a reversal of the trait, mentioned previously, of withholding the star in her familiar guise. Both films instead feature the on-screen alteration of the star from her familiar appearance to a different one, and in both this is achieved through cutting off the hair. The heroine of The Long Kiss Goodnight (Geena Davis) is a government agent; rendered amnesiac, she had settled in a small town, and made a life there for herself and her child. Her memory begins to return under pressure; finally an outbreak of violence against her awakens her former persona and she fully emerges, dismayed at the domestic, maternal woman she has become. To announce the return of her ‘real’ self, she cuts off and bleaches her hair, and begins to wear more assertively sexual clothing.
While Samantha/Charlie in The Long Kiss Goodnight displays different versions of femininity, based around a sexual/maternal dialectic embodied through hairstyles, Jordan O’Neill (Demi Moore) in G. I. Jane similarly demonstrates dual, warring, views of the feminine, with her ‘before’ (long flowing) and ‘after’ (shaven) hair. Moore’s on-screen shaving of her own head is narratively explained as confirming her commitment, as the lone woman Navy Seals recruit, to being treated solely as a soldier and not as a female one: it is a demand for equality. However, the visual spectacle of a top A-list star significantly and truly (no head double) altering her looks in such a radical way swamps the act as plot point and becomes instead a part of the publicity1 and mythology of the film.
While the on-screen scene of transformation is, then, quite rare, those instances where the film does play it up choose to do so in order to highlight a range of issues – femininity, desirability, popularity – but are always aware of the spectacular nature of what they show. By contrast, the invisible transformation determinedly withholds the spectacle of the change being performed; more numerous than the shown metamorphosis, these concealed moments of alteration will now be discussed.
2) The Invisible Transformation
The invisible alteration is much more commonly found within Hollywood films. The process by which the changes are wrought is withheld here, so that the viewer is granted the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ with no intermediate ‘during’. But why do films choose to deny viewers the pleasure of seeing the changes effected? Examining examples of the trope at work reveals there are various reasons for this decision.
Most frequently where the actual work required to render the woman altered is not seen, the transformation is withheld in order to create suspense or surprise, or indeed frequently both: the viewer is worked upon to wonder what the alteration will have achieved, and the moment of revelation is filmed in appropriately grand style. In the 1938 novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson, a dowdy out of work governess has her life totally transformed in the space of 24 hours; after a day of excitements, she finds herself about to be launched on the London night club scene in borrowed finery. Her two mentors, actress Miss LaFosse and beautician Miss DuBarry, prepare to make up her face and dress up her body, but Miss Pettigrew herself elects an invisible transformation:
Miss DuBarry sat her in front of the mirror.
‘No’, said Miss Pettigrew firmly, ‘I think not. I’d rather see the final result: nothing spoiled by seeing the intermediate stages, thank you.’ (Watson: 93)
Just as Miss Pettigrew here chooses to skip seeing the work necessary to turn her into ‘A woman of fashion: poised, sophisticated, finished, fastidiously elegant’ (98), a move which the 2007 film version of the book retains, so films which select the invisible transformation elide the labour to preserve the sense of mystery which might be dispelled if it were shown. The transformation can seem more magical if the work needed to accomplish it is kept, like the tricks behind a magician’s legerdemain, out of sight. A similar instance of the transformative labour being withheld occurs in 1921’s Forbidden Fruit, where the narrative renders the change in poor seamstress Mary (Agnes Ayres) even more magical since she does not have to spend money to attain the glamorous wardrobe which achieves her transformation. Tapping overtly into the story of Cinderella, Forbidden Fruit shows Mary being inveigled into masquerading as a wealthy young woman. The costumes necessary to this imposture are provided by her employer, Mrs Mallory, a society matron who needs to procure ‘the prettiest girl in New York’ to entice her husband’s potential business partner into staying in town. Mary ironically therefore gets to don the gowns she usually alters and mends for other women; DeMille stresses the magnificence of the sumptuous gowns on loan to Mary by having them designed by famous Parisian couturier Paul Poiret.
The film can also be seen to be making rather subversive use of the Cinderella story, since Mary is a married woman rather than a maiden. Her husband is a gambler and petty thief, easily made jealous and not above hitting her when riled. The plot of the film happily arranges to have him killed off so that Mary can legitimately enjoy the benefits of her relationship with her ‘prince’, the wealthy young captain of industry she secures through her new glamorous appearance. The film not only echoes the Cinderella tale through its basic narrative structure; it also contains extensive fantasy sequences which directly enforce the parallel by showing Mary as Cinderella, both by her kitchen fire and, after her metamorphosis into a dazzling princess, at the ball. These lengthy scenes are intercut into the main narrative, couched as the imaginings of Mary or her ‘prince’, and feature even more outlandish and sumptuous outfits and settings than the ‘modern-day’ scenes.
A film’s generic allegiances can also dictate using the invisible transformation. In the thriller, Final Analysis (1992), two sisters are involved with a psychiatrist, one therapeutically, the other sexually, but both with an ulterior motive. When the woman who has slept with the psychiatrist then kills her husband while suffering a bout of ‘pathological intoxication’ and is put in prison, she is forcibly transformed out of her usual glamorous and sexy outfits into the institutional uniform of denim shirt and trousers. This levelling outfit, which renders all prisoners visibly similar, then enables the woman to escape by trading places with her sister. The film wryly makes use of the fact that one blonde woman is easily interchangeable with another, as Kim Basinger substitutes for Uma Thurman, and escapes confinement by simply changing her clothes. The transformation which allows this plot manoeuvre is not shown in order to create suspense and surprise for the viewer.
But the suspense/surprise combination need not be used as the hinge for narrative action; it can be evoked to involve the viewer more with the character. For example, in Now Voyager, the central character, Charlotte, all clumpy shoes and unkempt eyebrows, is taken off to recuperate from a nervous collapse to Cascades, the rest home of her medical adviser, Dr Jacquith. While there Charlotte is given a better diet and prompted to exercise, so that she already looks healthier when her sister in law visits her; her glasses are also abruptly broken by Dr Jacquith to prove to Charlotte that she does not need them, but has been hiding behind them for years. Significantly, she claims that she feels ‘so undressed without them’. The glasses have become part of the old Charlotte’s wardrobe and must be removed as part of the new Charlotte’s transformation. Dr Jacquith states that ‘It’s good for you to feel that way’, preparing the viewer for the more sexualised and sensuous outfits that Charlotte dons once her cure is underway.
While Charlotte seems improved at Cascades, she is still recognisably the same unhappy woman she was back in Boston at the home of her domineering mother. Jacquith mandates a cruise to establish her as a totally rejuvenated person, and it is here that the real transformation takes place. The scene, as noted before, restores the famous star Bette Davis to her public in her familiar form. Charlotte is on board the ship; the other passengers are waiting for her to come on a shore visit. Their waiting and suspense at meeting the enigmatic ‘Miss Beauchamp’, Charlotte’s shipboard alias, are felt by the viewer too; Charlotte’s entrance, and progress down the stairs of the ship to where the others await her, acts as her ‘big reveal’. The arrival of the transformed Charlotte at the top of the gang plank evokes her original entrance in the film, when she slowly made her way down the stairs in her mother’s house, the camera focusing on her thick ankles and heavy shoes. The work necessary to change Charlotte from her old unhappy self to her braver new persona, wary and fragile, but out in the world, is not elaborated beyond Jacquith’s breaking of the glasses, and the interim scene where Charlotte seems healthier and more slender. The film employs suspense instead of showing scenes where the transformation is achieved.2
Now Voyager 1: ‘Before’ the transformation which Charlotte needs
Now Voyager 2: ‘After’ – chic ‘René Beauchamp’ steps out
Grease (1978) similarly chooses to withhold the scene of Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) changing from good girl to bad. Danny (John Travolta) has been successful in a car race, and everyone is celebrating; only Sandy seems sad. Having quarrelled with Danny about their relationship, Sandy has watched the race from a distance. Frenchy (Didi Conn) who has worked in a beauty parlour, kindly comes over to her, and Sandy asks for her help. This, and her comment to herself, in the form of a sung soliloquy, prepares the viewer for her transformation; reprising the song sung mockingly about her earlier by the other girls, in which she is compared to Sandra Dee,3 the 1950s starlet, Sandy bids farewell to her nice girl persona.
In the next scene, Danny appears having traded his T-Bird leather jacket for a letterman jacket (the exterior sign that he has tried to take one school subject seriously and has earned some credit in track running). The other T-Birds view this garment – softer, knitted and white – as a betrayal, but do not have long to worry – Danny’s partial transformation is very short-lived. For just then the new Sandy arrives.
Sandy’s before and after are so radically different that no ‘during’ is necessary; the point is to surprise both Danny and the viewer. Had the film elected to show Frenchy changing Sandy’s hair, makeup and wardrobe, the mingled suspense and surprise of this moment would be lost. The enormity of the transformation is best revealed by having it sprung on the viewer rather than worked up to by degrees. Gone are Sandy’s neat blonde bob, her wide-skirted pastel dresses, ankle socks and saddle shoes. In their place are a (very anachronistic, 1970s) curly perm, skin-tight black trousers, off the shoulder top and red high heels. Sandy has consciously changed her exterior appearance from a good girl to a vamp; while her behaviour shows that she has not yet changed her inner self, her readiness to look sexually experienced indicates to Danny that she is now willing to renegotiate about this, the major cause of conflict in their relationship.
Another reason that the work necessary to turn Sandy from a pure maiden into a raunchy-looking vamp is withheld is because this makes the transformation not only more of a surprise, but also more magical, more like a fantasy. Danny is discussing his own partial transformation with his fellow T-Birds when she arrives; he has just told them that he has ‘lettered in track’ to get the jacket, evoking the horrified response, ‘Danny Zucko turned jock?!’ Danny explains that though ‘you guys mean a lot to me, it’s just that Sandy does too and I’m gonna do anything I can to get her, that’s all’. As two of the gang stare at Danny in hurt bewilderment, the other looks away – and sees the transformed Sandy. The reverse shot that would reveal her is withheld, however, so that the audience views his startled face, then his slap on the shoulder of his friend, his startled look of surprise and so on, through the T-Birds ranks. Before we can see Danny observe the surprise, however, we are at last given, to accompanying wolf-whistles, the sight of Sandy’s legs, now clad in skin tight black satin, striding through the crowd. At last we see Danny turn, see the woman, look her up and down and then recognise her: ‘Sandy?!’
After the whole gang is reconciled and another dance number is encompassed, Sandy and Danny roll up in his car and proceed to fly off into the sunset, both clad in leather jackets. There seems to me no reason why a film which can end with this fantasy of eternal youth and freedom, signified by the bright blues skies, fluffy clouds and flying car, should not also be prepared to fantasise about the good girl magically turning bad rather than breaking up with the boy. Like Danny’s avowal of his feelings for Sandy to his friends, the film wants the couple to be reinstated to attain a happy ending and is ‘gonna do anything [it] can to get’ them together. Transforming Sandy from prude to vixen without showing any intervening stages is then not only important for the surprise of the scene, it is entirely necessary in order to maintain this fragile bubble of fantasy, which might rupture if made to accommodate scenes of hair perming and ear piercing.
Grease: ‘Bad girl’ Sandy makes her appearance at Rydell High
Musical interludes were seen to be significant for the enactment of the visible transformation in the last section and are no less prominent in the trope of the unseen change. In Madame Satan (1930) and Silk Stockings (1957) the alteration in the central female is accompanied by or encompassed within a musical number.
Madam Satan features Angela Brooks (Kay Johnson) whose husband Bob (Reginald Denny) has been straying with singer Trixie (Lillian Roth). After meeting Trixie, Angela decides to fight to keep Bob. She goes, anonymous and masked, to the party on a dirigible that Bob’s best friend is hosting, announcing herself as Madame Satan, and proceeding to vamp her own husband. While Angela’s metamorphosis is not in terms of quality of clothing, as some others of the transformations considered here are, since as a rich woman she always wears furs, jewels and couture, the alteration is significant in terms of sexualisation. Like Sandy in Grease, Angela must fake being a ‘bad girl’, sexually knowing, in order to keep her man. Again like Sandy, the external transformation occurs before the internal experience the exterior seems to guarantee: Grease’s Sandy appears a sexually knowing temptress before being initiated by Danny. This external change before the internal one is necessary in order to allow the internal one: looking like a vamp is necessary if Sandy is to become one. While Madam Satan presents a married woman, rather than the virginal girl, as its central female, the film viewer is still encouraged to read Angela in maidenly terms: her frequent wearing of white, and modest demeanour, testify to a lack of sexual experience in her married life. As Sandy is contrasted with the Pink Ladies, especially sexually active Rizzo (Stockard Channing), Angela is contrasted with lively flirt Trixie. Dressing more like bad girls allows the good girl heroines to ensnare the men they desire and ensure they themselves become sexually knowing. In this way, the appearance of both women forecasts the way they will become and attracts the man who is the necessary tool of that becoming.
Again the work rendering mild Angela into wild Madam Satan is withheld for suspense and surprise; the audience is invited onto the dirigible first so that Madam Satan’s grand entrance is staged for us, as well as the other party guests. We are then surprised to see how altered she is, both in appearance and demeanour. Adopting a faux French accent, Madam Satan has the courage to make a spectacular entrance, announce herself in song and then insult Trixie and intrigue her husband, emboldened since the voice, mask, name and costume hide her real identity.
Silk Stockings is a remake of Ninotchka (1939) and retains its story: a dour Soviet officer is transformed into a happy romantic when she falls in love in Paris. In both films the external sign of her ideological alteration comes in the form of the acquisition of material goods. The 1930s heroine, played by Greta Garbo, appeared after her metamorphosis in a ‘ridiculous’ hat she had previously criticised for its uselessness. Romance makes her realise beauty is important too. The musical version, featuring Cyd Charisse in the Ninotchka role, opens up the scene into a much more elaborate dance number, where the woman retrieves her illicit new purchases from their various hiding places around her hotel room: earrings in the typewriter and a hat in a jar. Her shedding of her drab green army uniform and trying on of the new filmy, feminine and seductive stockings, shoes, slips, dresses, is reminiscent of a caterpillar shedding its chrysalis and becoming a glittering butterfly; falling in love has awakened her need to look and feel more feminine and her purchases enable her to do this, and to attract the man’s approval for this alteration.
As noted, the usual transformation trajectory is one that connects sexual desirability with the appearance of sexual experience, and thus one which prompts the woman to become more overtly sexualised in her dress. The reverse route can occasionally be found, however; in Pretty Woman, Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and The Last Seduction (1994) the woman’s transformation takes the form of toning down her usually overt sexuality.
When several different alterations occur to the woman’s appearance and dress style, the incremental changes, the varying degrees of alteration from before to after, are registered in different scenes. In My Fair Lady (1964), for example, based as noted on the Pygmalion myth and thus on one of the foundational texts of the transformation theme, Eliza’s dirty and multi-petticoated outfit which she wears when meeting Higgins is taken away by his maids and burnt once she lives in his house. Her subsequent outfits are all neat, clean and becoming, as is her hair, although none of them approach the glamour of the two (designed by Cecil Beaton) that she wears to Ascot and then to the final ball which wins Higgins his wager. While Rachel Moseley has written eruditely on the recurrence of the Cinderella myth in star Audrey Hepburn’s film roles (2003), it should be noted that the transformation in My Fair Lady is an incremental one, rather than a radical metamorphosis. Further instances of incremental change, and thus of multiple small transformations which are not shown, occur in The Women (1939) and Mahogany (1977). In the former (and its two remakes, The Opposite Sex (1956) and The Women (2008)), the frequently found character of the disappointed wife is found; Mary’s husband, like Angela’s in Madam Satan, has been having an affair. Over the course of the 1939 film Mary transforms from a relaxed and confident wife, suiting her leisure activities to those of her husband in checked shirts and corduroy skirts which evoke his hunting garb, to a more poised and autonomous woman with a wardrobe of outlandish evening dresses at her disposal and a perfect manicure of ‘jungle red’. Tracy, the sometimes-eponymous heroine of Mahogany, is shown at various stages of her career as a model and designer; the film begins with the woman, elegant in a mahogany-coloured self-creation poised on the eve of her greatest success as a couture designer, as her Kabuki collection is hailed as a triumph. The film then steps back in time, and in levels of glamour, as it follows Tracy struggling to hold down a day job and take classes in fashion drawing at night. In these scenes, set in urban Chicago, Tracy’s outfits are simple and plain, obviously inexpensive, day dresses. When she accepts the offer of a famous photographer to visit him in Rome and become his latest muse, however, her costumes begin to become more extreme in terms of design and colour. The changes are not a ‘makeover’; the alterations that occur in Tracy’s off-camera wardrobe and hairstyles occur gradually and incrementally, as those in her work outfits as a model alter radically and swiftly.
The films that use the invisible transformation trope do so, as has been seen, for a variety of reasons. Predominant amongst these is the evocation of suspense and the surprise when the change is finally revealed; in the films discussed above, the impact of the radical alteration would be lost if the work necessary to achieve it was shown in detail. Not showing the self-revision undergone by the women in these scenes also allows the change to seem more magical, more like a fantasy, although, by contrast, when the changes are shown to occur in increments, gradually, it can seem more like real-life modifications of personal style.
While the past two sections have dealt with films which choose to show, and to withhold, the moment which renders the female star transformed, as has been seen, a third option is open to film-makers who decide to use the metamorphosis motif. In this, very popular, trope, a particular form of the labour required to change the woman – shopping – is dwelt on at length, as will now be considered.
3) The Shopping Sequence
The previous two sections noted that on-screen depiction of the transmutation is quite rare, and that films tend to prefer to make use of the surprise and suspense that can be generated by not revealing the actual work of change. By far the most numerous instances of the transformation trope, however, concern shopping, which is presented as a kind of transformation in itself. In the films discussed below, simply buying the outfit is enough to initiate its powers of alteration. Just purchasing the skimpy dress, the dizzyingly high heels, is enough, in films, to reap their benefits. Shopping is transformation, these film sequences tell us.
Again frequently achieved during a musical interlude or montage, the shopping sequence not only prepares the central character, and the viewer, for her metamorphosis by displaying the commodities she is purchasing to achieve it; shopping is the very labour necessary to accomplish it. In Gold Diggers of 1935, for example, a musical number with Ann Prentiss (Gloria Stuart) and Dick Curtis (Dick Powell) is the occasion for the woman’s rather unbridled spending, using her mother’s charge account. Although her mother, Matilda Prentiss, is a millionaire, Ann has been deprived of the nice things she feels herself entitled to – dresses, jewellery, fun and boys. In the film’s early scenes she appears in a series of shapeless dresses which do not accentuate her slim body or her bust; with her plain hairstyle and no obvious makeup, she appears more like the rich Mrs Prentiss’ assistant or companion than her heiress daughter. Even Ann’s brother pleads with their mother to let the girl have some nicer clothes. Eventually Ann makes a bargain with her mother – in return for a promise to marry the rich idiot Matilda has picked out for her, Ann gets to ‘have fun’ for the summer. This fun largely consists of being allowed at last to buy and wear the wardrobe of her dreams; any thoughts of meeting men to have fun with are frustrated by the fact that Mrs Prentiss also provides Dick as a chaperone.
Dick at first resents having to be Ann’s minder and objects in particular to going shopping with her. He tells her that if they were sweethearts he would have the right to comment on her clothing and could even serenade her while she made her choices. This brings the scene to its culmination in the song ‘Going Shopping With You’. Dressed in one of her plain day dresses, Ann is allowed to acquire expensive lingerie, diamond jewellery, hats, shoes, gowns; she also gets herself a permanent wave in the beauty parlour, eventually transforming herself, in her new black evening gown and ostentatious accessories, into an icon of excess.
While Ann shops, Dick sings: this is the division of labour between them and allows him to keep up an ironic running commentary on all the expensive goods that she desires. His song also couches their imagined future relationship in terms of things to purchase, including a cottage, a mortgage, and baby blankets, after, of course, a wedding, which is again alluded to by the necessary purchase – ‘On your fourth little finger/A ring’s gonna linger’.
At the end of the scene, surrounded by boxes overflowing with expensive items, Dick sings ‘Behold the finished product! Behold a dream come true!’ Ann’s transformation has been invisible, in that the viewer has not witnessed her perm, or her trying on of any of the clothes. Yet the shopping that has been illustrated acts as the moment of alteration; pointing to Ann, as she holds a pose elevated above him in an elaborate new dress with a large black fan, Dick indicates the modified woman amidst the agents of her change. It is not only Ann’s dream that is embodied on the screen; the film here caters to its Depression-era audience’s fantasies of riches and abundance, allowing its members to feel vicariously as if they had some share in Ann’s bounty since they had been allowed to see it accumulate.
Although shop assistants, rather than a friend, act as the Fairy Godmothers helping to plan and achieve Ann’s new look, the scene acts like the ones in Clueless and Forbidden Fruit to elevate the social status of the woman. Interestingly, in Gold Diggers, Ann has always been the daughter of a rich woman, but now in the appropriate clothes she finally appears one. It is easy to imagine Depression-era audiences revelling in the commodities on show here, and sympathising with dressed-as-poor-girl Ann’s desires to acquire a range of exquisite items. In the shopping scene, the film luxuriates in the opulent goods displayed for the camera and audience and allows a vicarious enjoyment of the spending spree.
Gold Diggers of 1935: The culmination of Ann’s spending spree
Ann’s increased social status, written on her body in the form of more elaborate and costly garments, is matched by her increased sexualisation. While her new clothes do not dramatically reveal her flesh, they do draw attention to her curves, and her new hairdo and use of makeup accentuate a more overt femininity. It is also noticeable that while Dick is pleasant to Ann before her transformation, it is only while escorting her about in her new finery that he falls in love with her and they become a couple. Her plain hairstyle and lack of makeup or accessories in the ‘before’ part of the film, contrast with her later construction as a society beauty through the acquisition of commodities.
While the shopping sequence can stand in for the transformation, visible or invisible, when a metamorphosis scene is provided, it removes the necessity for a lengthy scene of acquisition. In Moonstruck, for example, having shown the beauty professionals at work altering Loretta’s hair, the film seems not to feel it also needs a shopping montage. The woman walks past a store and sees a strapless red dress; she is shown entering the shop and then leaving again with several carrier bags. Arriving home, she unpacks and then revels in her purchases. This is where the focus of the scene is then found: Loretta pours herself a glass of red wine and sits by the fire in her bedroom examining her purchases: lipstick, scarlet shoes, dress, wrap. With soft music in the background, when Loretta begins to unbutton her blouse the scene takes on even more the feel of a seduction, especially when the sexy saxophone begins as she takes off her top. But the one being seduced is Loretta herself; she examines herself wearing her new shoes and wrap, studying herself as though seeing a new woman. The scene’s autoerotic tone is meant to convey Loretta’s long-dormant sexuality and sensuality returning to life, but also displays the easy association of the woman with the products she has purchased. Loretta has turned herself into a wow-worthy ‘that’ by having her hair done; buying expensive new, more sexualised, clothes achieve the transformation, as the reaction, not merely of bystanders, but the new significant man in her life, Ronny, attests.
The importance of music during the transformations was noted in both earlier sections, and indeed the musical interlude is also linked with the shopping montage, as seen in this moment from Moonstruck, the musical number in Gold Diggers, and the comparable one in Enchanted (2007), in which princess Giselle (Amy Adams), newly arrived in New York City, is joyfully taken on a shopping spree by a little girl armed with her father’s emergency-use credit card, an item the little girl declares knowingly is ‘something better than a fairy godmother’. The use of music confirms the connection of the invisible transformation with the magical or fantastic, as discussed in Grease; since shopping is shown instead of (and as) the work of transformation, it is unsurprising to find the musical sequence occupying such a prominent and important position in shopping segments too.
It is noticeable that in these shopping scene transformations, the trajectory has been from the sexual innocent to a more poised and seemingly experienced incarnation of the woman. An earlier film which deals with the same issues and reproduces the same magical transformation through the adoption of different clothing is Cecil B. DeMille’s Why Change Your Wife? (1920). The heroine, Beth (Gloria Swanson) is a prudish matron who refuses to celebrate the physical side of her marriage, and ends up divorcing her husband. Her troubles begin when her husband Robert (Thomas Meighan) tries to spice up their home life by buying her a present – a saucy negligée with matching boudoir slippers and stockings. This garment, draped with ropes of beads, dripping with fur and lace, seems to be a forecast of the type of costumes worn in DeMille’s famous biblical epics from the later 1920s: it connotes the foreign, the exotic and thus the erotic.
Beth rejects the symbolism of this garment however; whereas Sally, the dress shop modiste who models the negligée for Robert, wants to look provocative in the item, and removes the gown’s under-slip so that the sheer fabric shows the maximum amount of skin, Beth replaces the missing slip with one of her own bulky cotton ones, prompting Robert to remark ‘…in the shop, it looked – thinner’. Beth and Sally are contrasted overtly here; the lawful wife wants no physical contact or erotic disturbances in her calm, ordered life, while the eventual girlfriend, Sally, is more than keen for a physical relationship with Robert. The film shows that Sally manages to tempt him to stray through an assault on his senses – her lair features soft furnishings, heady perfumes, pulsing rhythmic music and the lavish provision of alcohol – significantly a liqueur called ‘Forbidden Fruit’. Robert is tempted to kiss Sally and then remembers his marriage vows, but this small error is enough to make Beth divorce him; smelling Sally’s perfume on her husband’s clothes, she insists on a separation.
But Beth really loves her husband and is miserable after he is gone. Having lost him over a disagreement about decency in dress, which has deeper symbolic resonances of her attitude to sex, she receives her moment of epiphany, appropriately, in a dress-shop cubicle. Her aunt Kate is trying to cheer her up after the divorce by suggesting a new wardrobe; Beth claims she hates ‘clothes – and men!’, showing that she is aware how closely the two are involved and how the attraction of one depends on the attractiveness of the other. She then overhears two women in the cubicle next door criticising her dress sense and blaming this for her recent divorce. Beth becomes furious and determines to confound her critics by becoming the ultimate vamp, violently tearing off her own modest clothes and draping herself in new seductive fabrics, ordering dresses that are ‘sleeveless, backless, transparent, indecent’.
Significantly, and illustrating how the shopping sequence works as transformation, merely ordering and selecting these garments is enough to confer the type of active sexuality which Robert prefers and the film endorses as ensuring a healthy marriage. Appearing in a scandalous bathing outfit at an exclusive resort, Beth manages to attract her former husband back to her. While all her behaviour is seen to alter – she is flirtatious, sensual and seeks erotic contact – it is in her dress that the most obvious and radical transformation has occurred, and because of her acquisition of these new garments that she has become a new woman.
Why Change Your Wife? 1: Beth as prudish matron…
Beth eventually wins her former husband back; a coda shows them together again enjoying all the sensual delights she had formerly banned from their home. Listening to throbbing music, dancing together, letting him smoke his cigar and drink in the parlour, the new Beth has one more revolution to make: she slips away and then returns dressed in the original negligée that caused the friction between them. A matter-of-fact final shot shows the servants pushing the couple’s twin beds together again: marriage-sanctioned sex is the result of the wife’s new style of dress.
While the entire film pays witness to the power of clothing to alter oneself and attract others, the specific power of shopping as an agent for change is attested by the scene in the dress shop. Beth can alter her behaviour, swapping prudery for flirtatiousness, simply by a change of clothing: she becomes the woman her husband wants, a totally different personality type, by buying the clothes that type of woman would buy.
Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) usefully embodies many of the elements accompanying the shopping transformations already cited, and crystallises a new one. Millie Dillmount (Julie Andrews) comes to New York City in 1922 to be a typist. The film’s credit sequence begins with Millie dressed in old-fashioned garb: she wears a grey suit, with a long ankle-length full skirt, lace-up boots and a hat trimmed with flowers over long curled hair. Over the length of the title song, sung by Andrews in voice-over (i.e., not performed by her character within the scene, but over it), Millie transforms from this staid young woman of the 1900s to a dashing flapper of the roaring twenties. First she changes her hair, substituting a bob for her curls, and then changes her outfit and footwear. Finally she gains the flapper’s boyish silhouette.
Why Change Your Wife? 2: …and as sexy spouse
Throughout the scene Millie is prompted to make her purchases by viewing other women already enjoying theirs. She sees the sleek bobbed hairstyles of other women on the street and this gives her the idea to emulate them. Each time she emerges from a shop wearing her new acquisition, she smiles happily at conforming to this latest fashion, but quickly realises there is something else needed before her transformation is complete. Having achieved the correct hairstyle, Millie is content until she notices the old-fashioned length of her hemline and her sturdy boots. Next, exiting a dress store clad in a light grey knee-length day dress, grey stockings and shoes and an iconic twenties cloche hat and rope of beads, Millie is smugly sure of herself, confidently striding down the street until, again, she notices a difference between herself and the other women passing, women who have got it right: their beads hang straight… This scene aptly acknowledges one of the truths about fashion and consumerism: there is always something else to buy. Millie is the ideal consumer, as she constantly monitors her own clothes and accessories against those of others, and spends in order to fit in with them.
Millie also weighs her success as a clued-in shopper by the reaction of men. After her haircut, but before she changes her outfit, she sees two men stare at a well-dressed young woman in the street. One of the men sports a straw hat with a very noticeable polka-dot hatband, and this enables the viewer to identify him again later in the scene, when, once more parading down the street, he and his companion turn their heads to follow another well-dressed female – this time it is Millie, who receives their approbatory glances with a mock bashful lowering of her eyelids and a smug smile.
One final element to note in this sequence from Thoroughly Modern Millie is that it too employs that withholding of the star in her familiar guise that we have noted as a recurrent factor in the transformation. While the audience recognises Julie Andrews’ clear, bell-like tones singing the opening lines of the title song, her appearance at the start is very different from usual; with her long curls and Edwardian clothes, Andrews seems very unlike her usual film persona. Once she has had her hair cut, however, she emerges from the Madcap Beauty Spot to the waiting camera and confirms herself as the star we recognise: her short crop now returns to us the actor as we remember her from The Sound of Music (1965). Although the shorter hair does fit with the time period, the haircut seems more 1960s than 1920s, more designed to evoke ‘Julie Andrews’ than 20s flapper: her haircut is shaped closer to her head than the bob which fits the chronology, such as worn by Clara Bow in It and Hula.
The shopping sequence thus employs elements found in the other transformation tropes such as the musical interlude, the use of male attention as the affirmation of the revision’s success, and the play with the star’s own persona; it also emphasises that the usual arc of change is from modest to sexually overt, prude to vixen, at least in appearances. The shopping sequence falls between the visible and invisible transformations as a means to show the alteration of the central figure; it does not show the labour required to achieve the revolution in looks as the rare, visible, transformation does, but it does supply scenes of effort and labour missing from the invisible transformation. This motif suggests that shopping is the labour that will accomplish the desired change, and it is easy to imagine why this should be such a popular concept. Not everyone has the willpower and stamina to undergo rigorous training, dieting and exercise to achieve a new physique; most people do have the necessary finances, however, to buy a new outfit or a magazine with a radical diet plan in it. By showing us that attaining change is as easy as committing to it through purchasing, the films that use the shopping montage encourage viewers to feel better about themselves by spending.
Using the glamour of stars to sell individual products has a long history in advertising, and it can easily be imagined how the vast distance between the transcendent star on the screen and the lowly audience member was exploited by marketing departments, assuring purchasers that buying a face cream or shampoo would bring the star’s glamour within the ordinary viewer’s reach. The shopping sequence employed in the Hollywood film which features transformation makes the achievement of radical change seem magically easy, encouraging viewers to emulate the stars on screen by buying consumer goods. The reinforcement of the importance of spending can be seen as an obvious message for Hollywood to endorse: it too is in the business of making people buy goods, from the essential movie ticket to various tie-ins. While all film industries, and not just the American mainstream, are in the business of making money, in Hollywood, the overt recognition of this fact occasionally surfaces in the films themselves. In the 2001 romantic comedy Kate and Leopold, for example, there is a self-reflexive moment when the wheels of the plot seem almost audibly to grind to a halt as the heroine, musing over why she has never met the perfect man, reflects on the industry surrounding romantic love:
Kate: …maybe that whole love thing is just a grown-up version of Santa Claus, just a myth we’ve been fed since childhood so we keep buying magazines and joining clubs and doing therapy and watching movies with hip-hop songs played over love montages, all in this pathetic attempt to explain why our Love Santa keeps getting caught in the chimney…
Kate may here be testifying to the difficulty of finding true love in the late twentieth century in New York; she is also rather overtly pointing out that the solution to this difficulty, constantly urged on us, is spending money, whether on magazines, which would feature that new diet or outfit, gym club membership for the outer person or therapy for the inner, or indeed movies themselves. Just as Thoroughly Modern Millie’s heroine is perpetually reminded that, no sooner has she made one purchase than another commodity arises that she needs to buy, the film viewer is constantly encouraged to spend money in an everlasting cycle of self-monitoring, dissatisfaction and fleeting pleasures. Shopping montages give viewers a momentary frisson of contentment as they can vicariously enjoy the fantasy accumulation of abundance; when, as so often, they are cut to the upbeat strains of a nostalgic song, as in the shopping sequence in Pretty Woman (1990), the feelings of positive pleasure that accompany the purchasing involve consumer capitalism in a warm glow, making us feel good about goods.
Very rarely, just as the transformation moment has as its antithesis the invisible transformation, the shopping sequence also finds its shadow-other in film, in the invisible shopping scene. I found one example of this much rarer trope in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931). Here the familiar element of the musical interlude which provides a bridge over a period of time is used again; in this sequence the musical number also acts to distract attention from the strangeness of the scene, a shopping sequence with all of the acquisition but none of the purchasing.
The scenario of the sequence runs thus: Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins) has married Nikolaus ‘Niki’ von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier), a lieutenant in the Austrian army. Although this is socially an elevation and politically thus a very good move for Niki, he seems cold and uninterested. Anna discovers he already has a girlfriend, Franzi (Claudette Colbert), the leader of an all-girl orchestra. She summons Franzi to the palace for a showdown, but instead of turning into a catfight for the man, their meeting becomes the occasion for Anna’s transformation. During the first minutes of their meeting, while each is summing the other up, judging her appearance and weighing it against her own, the two women are antagonistic to each other, but their conversation and actions revolve around clothing: their sexual and emotional rivalry is displaced onto their outfits. Anna takes Franzi’s jacket politely, as a hostess should, but then throws it on the floor petulantly. Franzi looks the princess up and down coolly and dismisses her outfit as being in bad taste. After this brief skirmish, the two exchange slaps and then both fall onto Anna’s bed sobbing. After a time Anna gets up and gets two handkerchiefs from a drawer; she and Franzi both enthusiastically blow their noses, the matched actions and sobs here reinforcing the idea that they are, underneath their social differences and dress styles, very similar women. They go on to discuss Niki and again the conversation centres around clothing. Anna praises him in his uniform, but then says she likes him best in his evening suit with straw hat – the very outfit the audience has previously seen Niki wearing while visiting Franzi. She agrees, but then adds, ‘If you think he’s handsome in that, wait till you see him in –’ before breaking off. Franzi’s relationship with Niki has been sexual, while he has yet to consummate his marriage. This risqué scene, by devoting its imagery to clothes, can tap into what lies underneath them when it wants to, suggesting the naked sexual body under the concealing layers.
Franzi breaks away from this tricky subject by noticing her hostesses’ piano, and goes over to look at the sheet music arranged on the top. The titles of the pieces Anna is accustomed to play give further proof of her innocence and inexperience: ‘Cloister bells’, ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’. In a seemingly bizarre non sequitur, which sets up the theme of the imminent musical number, Franzi at once demands: ‘Let me see your underwear!’ When Anna hesitantly lifts her dress hem to reveal knee-length embroidered bloomers, the case of her own popularity and Anna’s neglect by Niki is solved for Franzi; after revealing the filmy silk scanties she herself is wearing, she sits down at the piano and begins to sing, ‘Jazz up your lingerie!’
Franzi’s song links jazz with colour, tactility and decoration in undergarments; her metaphor, suggesting that they both ‘wear music’ as their undergarments, works a parallel between Anna’s starchy cotton bloomers, her staid classical music and Niki’s lack of interest in her, versus her own satin undies, fast modern music and sexual experience. While Franzi exhorts Anna to ‘be happy, choose snappy/Music to wear’, the other woman supplies the occasional line to make the song a hesitant duet; but this ceases as the number continues and becomes the transformation scene. As Franzi sings and plays, Anna moves from sitting beside her at the piano to the middle of the room where she performs a few jazzy arm gestures. This image dissolves to one of a basket, into which then falls a mass of blonde hair – the transformation has begun. A cut takes the camera to the fireplace, and a fire onto which the offending cotton bloomers are placed. A large nightgown on the bed dissolves into scanty lace alternatives. Then another cut to the shoe closet reveals six pairs of button and lace-up boots: by a dissolve these resolve themselves into more fashionable shoes. This pattern is repeated in another cut to the wardrobe; four long-sleeved wide-waisted dresses dissolve to reveal sleek, sparkly and fur-trimmed replacements, slender and sleeveless. Throughout the scene the changes, but not their agents, are shown.
When the song and the scene ends, the two women leave Anna’s palace bedroom. Significantly, both are transformed. Franzi no longer sports the floaty, décolleté dress she entered the palace wearing; she now is dressed in a skirt and jacket, with black hat and gloves; she seems to have shed her glamorous and romantic appearance and to be coded much more as ‘career woman’. Since this transformation scene marks her handover of Niki to Anna, it can be seen that all Franzi has left is indeed her career, so this choice of outfit is appropriate.
Anna has changed more radically, however. Gone is her staid hairstyle of neat centre parting and plaits wound round her ears; instead her head is crowned by a smart modern permanent. Her dress style has changed too from a shapeless tube tied under the bust, to a gown cut on the bias, with spangled asymmetrical bodice and layers of ruched tulle below. The two women have not swapped places, exchanging dowdiness and sophistication; instead, while Anna has taken Franzi’s place, dress-style and man, the career woman has stepped out of the romantic position and dress style, as she now steps out of the film.
What is significant about this transformation is what it renders invisible. Other films, as explored, chose not to show the work required to turn each ‘good’ girl into a ‘bad’ one, as with Sandy in Grease, for example, or Madame Satan, in order to maintain suspense and surprise for both characters and audience. Here, however, the emphasis is placed differently. What is elided by the invisibility of the transformation is both time and labour – the labour of others. To make Anna into the new jazz baby who will attract Niki, the work of several servants and professionals must be necessary. Someone must cut and ‘marcel’ her hair; someone must burn the offensively maidenly knickers; someone else go out to buy the replacement shoes and gowns or bring in samples of likely outfits from suitable shops.
The magical nature of this transformation is played down by the matter of fact revelation of the two metamorphosed women opening the door and stepping into the corridor. The dissolves and cuts have elided the time and amount of help necessary to render them into their new incarnations – career woman and fiery jazz baby – and in later scenes it also seems that Franzi has taken the time to teach Anna jazz piano. The ease and rapidity of these fundamental changes are accomplished without fuss but with wealth. Presumably this is why the Hollywood film is set in the world of European royalty; this fantasy world is one in which radical transformation can be wrought through the magic that is money. Employing a make-believe country and its princess as one of its heroines allows the film to step outside real life into a fantasy zone. Strikingly, the shopping montage, as found in and as so many transformation scenes, manages to co-opt the same fantasy of effortless alteration for stories set in modern urban society, in ‘real life’.
In both the shopping sequence and its invisible twin, the emphasis is on the acquisition of new clothes and accessories as the sole labour needed to render the woman metamorphosed into a more glorious version of herself. Significantly, as has been noted in previous sections, the confirmation that the woman has successfully accomplished the transformation is inevitably found in male approbation: in The Cookie Carnival, the made-over gingerbread girl is crowned queen by a panel of male judges; in Grease, Sandy is hailed by not only Danny but his friends and other assorted males with whistles and astonishment, and in both Why Change Your Wife? and The Smiling Lieutenant the two newly sexualised wives both manage at last to secure the amorous attentions of their husbands. As will be considered in the following section, however, the ultimate proof of success in the act of self-revision is the occasion that sometimes comes before male approval – the instant where the woman is simply not seen because she is so different.
4) The Misrecognition Moment
This misrecognition moment is a recurrent trope in the context of the transformation. As noted above, it acts as the definitive evidence that the metamorphosis has been a success by implying that the alteration is so radical, the person revised is not recognisably her anymore. While rarer than some of the other tropes examined here, the misrecognition does appear often enough to merit exploration, especially as it features in two of the films which will be the focus of the case studies.
The misrecognition moment is also one of the most homogenous tropes; when found, it tends to play out in exactly the same visual and thematic terms each time. For example, returning to the moment at the end of Grease when Sandy appears metamorphosed from rigid maiden into willing vixen, there is a clear if brief instance of the misrecognition trope. Danny’s friends see Sandy’s alteration and gape at it before he himself notices; even then, before we see his reaction, we have a reverse cut to the object of all the visual and oral attention, as Sandy’s legs in her tight black trousers and high-heeled red shoes strut into the scene. The cut back to Danny shows him glance in the direction of his friends’ gaze, and then briefly away. He has seen the woman but simultaneously not seen her: he does not know who she is. Sandy’s alteration is so extreme, from the prudish Sandra Dee character in her pastel sweetheart-line dresses (with all this outline, as Turim (1984) has explained, connotes about her sexual innocence), to the raunchy high school femme fatale showing off her dangerous curves, that Danny does not at once realise it is the same person. Examination of his face shows a clearly distinct if rapid progression between non-recognition, doubt and dawning comprehension, as the miracle of his fantasy’s fulfilment is made plain.
Pretty Woman contains another similar scene, where the man’s incomprehension of the identity of the woman before him acts to confirm her success in transforming. As we will explore, notions of identity and of internal and external are intimately intertwined with the transformation metaphor; here, the woman’s apparent other identity actually confirms the fulfilment of the potential always inherent in her own identity but never before attained. Vivian (Julia Roberts), a prostitute on the streets of Los Angeles, has been purchased as a companion for the week by millionaire Edward (Richard Gere) in order to accompany him to various dinners and social events. Obviously, her hooker garb will not be appropriate wear for these occasions, so he empowers her to go shopping with his credit card. Edward has agreed to meet Vivian in the bar of his hotel; entering, he looks around, sees the woman but again does not see that it is her. The scene reinforces the significance of the moment for both of them through its choreography, revealed through deep focus: in the background Vivian sits at the bar with her back to the room, while Edward is seen in the near-ground looking around for her. Before he realises the well-dressed and elegant woman at the bar is indeed her, she turns her head, perhaps sensing his stare. He turns towards the camera and viewer; she turns simultaneously, producing a satisfying symmetry which gives the scene a pulse. Their relative viewpoints shift, from him looking unknowingly at the back of her head, to her looking at the back of his. We have seen neither of their faces; now the film returns them both to us and gives us the first view of Vivian transformed into a lady in her cocktail dress. The camera set up then changes, becoming placed between them for Edward’s reaction shots, as he realises who the elegant woman must be: he turns back to her, narrows his eyes as if both appraising and doubting his vision.
An even more pronounced instance of the misrecognition moment occurs in Silk Stockings: after Ninotchka’s autoerotic ballet with her new consumer durables, she comes down in the lift to the foyer of the hotel where her lover, Steve (Fred Astaire), is waiting for her. He is seen leaning against the front desk indolently; as Ninotchka steps out of the lift to the collective astonishment of the other men in the lobby, he continues to stare off into space. Even when Ninotchka approaches him directly he gives her only a rather dismissive glance and then looks away, as if being importuned by another beautiful woman. But then he ‘gets it’ and looks back with a start and a wide-armed gesture of amazement, ‘Oh no, it can’t be!’
This misrecognition perhaps hints that it is the clothes and not the woman, or perhaps the messages and meanings that the clothes seem to bear, or the money she has obviously spent on the clothes, that the men in these misrecognition scenes are reading, since Ninotchka has not altered her hair and seemingly wears no makeup. It is not her face or hairstyle, but only her outfit which has changed from military, utilitarian and desexualised, to glamorous, ultra-feminine and sensual.
While, then, the misrecognition moment is one of the rarer tropes found recurring in the filmic transformation, it does occur with sufficient regularity to make it noticeable, and with a certain visual inevitability that renders it significant. As it also gestures towards ideas about identity and about authenticity of the self, concepts that circle round the idea of transformation, it justifies attention. The misrecognition moment relies on the man not witnessing the work that has been done to change the woman: were he to see the actual scenes of the transformation, he could no longer respond with his spontaneous act of misidentification. This accounts for the misrecognition moment accompanying the invisible transformation, as with Grease, Madame Satan, Pretty Woman and Silk Stockings. Although Pretty Woman shows the audience the shopping montage that stands in for, and acts as, Vivian’s metamorphosis, and the other films provide narrative hints that self-revision will be attempted, the man who is the occasion for the transformation must not be allowed to observe it.
Many of the tropes utilised to tell the Hollywood transformation story are, as noted, bound up with ideas about identity and authenticity. With the next trope examined, however, the intimate connection between external and internal, and their effects on each other, is fiercely disavowed: profoundly involved with ideas of disguise, concealment and deceit, the false transformation acts to reinforce the habitual association of appearance and character by providing specific circumstances in which these associations are undermined.
5) The False Transformation
Madam Satan is a useful place to begin the examination of the false transformation trope, since its basic plot-lines and events have already been reviewed. The false transformation operates when the central protagonist appears to have undergone a radical metamorphosis, but this is in fact not so: the change is only feigned, the new persona a masquerade.
Angela differs from the wronged wives in Why Change Your Wife? and The Smiling Lieutenant because, unlike them, her change of costume, although as extreme as theirs, is not meant to be symbolic of an equivalent personality alteration. While all three films set up very stark binary oppositions between prim and willing, prudish and frank, sensuous and ascetic, with the women first on the more staid side of the dichotomy, crossing over to the other more liberal side after their transformatory outfit is donned, Angela, unlike Beth and Anna, has not really been altered so easily. The film takes great pains to show that her performance as Madam Satan is just that, a performance, and one that is also not entirely tasteful to her. Angela has been driven to seeming, rather than becoming, her contrary, whereas Beth and Anna enthusiastically embrace their polar opposites. Angela’s masquerade is adopted first in rage, to oppose the showgirl who has stolen her husband, but then it is used in the hope of convincing Bob that he really does prefer the modest, more passive type of woman, like his wife.
Madam Satan ends as the other two films also do, with the married couple happily re-established, but Angela’s work to achieve her happy ending is more difficult than the other women’s. She has not changed, bringing herself into line with her husband’s desires for a more sexually responsive partner; moreover, Bob feels she has humiliated him through her pretence. Angela’s agency has been turned to pretence, to masquerading as another woman, rather than, more acceptably, becoming one through costume, styling and shopping.
Phantom Lady (1944) seems to grant a good narrative excuse to its heroine, Carol ‘Kansas’ Richman, for her masquerade; she undertakes it in order to save the life of her boss (whom she loves), when he is accused of murdering his wife and sentenced to death. Carol believes in his innocence, and sets out to prove it. One attempt at finding evidence necessitates vamping a low-life jazz drummer, Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook Jr) who also plays in a theatre orchestra. Carol entices him to reveal his knowledge of the real murderer, but significantly does not do so in her proper person. She transforms herself, becoming the kind of girl that would tempt Cliff: Jeannie, a ‘hep kitten’. A cut between scenes effects Carol’s change from smart-suited secretary to cheap date; the camera finds her sitting in the theatre audience giving Cliff the eye. But Jeannie herself is twice the object of the camera’s pan-up of approval. The second look reproduces Cliff’s as he eyes up the woman flirting with him, but the first is linked to the camera and thus the viewer alone. This sweep up her body, dwelling on her legs in fishnets, her tight satin dress, overly made-up face and excessive junky jewellery, underlines the extremity of the transformation from good girl to bad: without this intense stare at the woman we might not recognise in her the plucky heroine. This look of non-recognition is repeated in the next scene when Carol/Jeannie goes to a jam session with Cliff; he kisses her and she retreats to a mirror to reapply her lipstick. The look of misrecognition she gives is then at herself, what she has become because of this masquerade; Carol shakes her head in revulsion at the depths to which she is prepared to sink in order to save her man.
The film too seems worried about the excessive charge of Jeannie’s sexuality and does not dwell on how the prim Carol amassed the cheap items she needs for her masquerade as the evidently lower-class, sexually experienced woman. Thus even given the best of motives for their protagonists, Hollywood films find the false transformation worrisome and often punish the woman who indulges in them; Carol is menaced and eventually attacked by the real murderer.
This tacit disapproval for the woman who merely appears to change is often found accompanying the false transformation; in Madam Satan, although she does win Bob back, Angela has to work hard to do so and to dissipate the negative charge carried in the narrative for her as a woman who uses active powers not to change herself but to attempt to change her husband. In The Major and the Minor, Susan Applegate’s masquerade as her own younger self, Su-Su, is sanctioned generically as she is in a comedy and narratively because she is a nice girl trying to flee the many male wolves in New York City; even so, although her disguise allows her successfully to ride the train for the wrong fare, it prevents her from getting what she then comes to want, a romantic relationship with Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland), and she suffers many comic embarrassments until she gives up the deception.
The taint of deceitfulness that surrounds the alteration of the exterior when it is not matched by a similar change to the interior person explains why the false transformation is often found given a negative portrayal, especially in narratives from darker genres like the thriller or noir. The notion of the metamorphosis being not merely a disguise but also temporary inheres in this trope, further unsettling the connection between exterior and interior.
As mentioned, the changing of outfits in Final Analysis employs the invisible transformation trope in order to maintain the suspense of the narrative. The occasion of Diana (Uma Thurman) changing clothes with her sister Heather (Kim Basinger) is not the only transformation in the film, however; the story is concerned throughout with ideas about transformation, seeming and false-seeming. It also appears highly referential; while the repeated emphasis on metamorphosis of the caterpillar to butterfly only coincidentally echoes the Méliès film with which this book began, the evocation of Vertigo is very much meant. Vertigo is intimately concerned with doubling, seeming and being, and the Pygmalion role in crafting the woman to look like – herself. Final Analysis borrows the Hitchcock film’s San Francisco setting, flawed hero and fall from tall building, but also makes use of the central idea that costume provides character information. In trusting this, the film’s hero, Ike (Richard Gere) is led into the deception plot.
Diana is in analysis with Ike, and turns up to her sessions with him drably dressed. In the first analytic session we see, the pair have an exchange of dialogue which neatly introduces the metamorphosis theme:
Diana: Compared to [sister Heather] I always felt like a creeping and crawling caterpillar.
Ike: Well, a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, doesn’t it?
Diana: Heather’s the butterfly, isn’t that obvious?
This conversation comments on the earth-toned outfits that Diana habitually wears in the first part of the film, and sets up the expectation that she will attain her metamorphosis later on. It also hints that Diana and Heather are not two sisters, but two versions of the same person, Diana the ‘before’ and Heather the ‘after’. Since both sisters turn out to have psychological complexes rendering them dangerous, this doubling of the female in one form acts to suggest their pathology; unlike a patient with a split-personality, these two women have one personality between them, one personality with two chronological stages.
When Ike meets Heather, who comes to his office to talk about her sister with the psychiatrist, she appears in his doorway in visual terms that inevitably evoke the femme fatale. With half her face in light, and the other half in darkness, Heather is reminiscent of the evil spider-women of film noir, who classically appear with their personality splits made evident by the chiaroscuro lighting which is a hallmark of such films (Place and Peterson: 66–67). Whereas the use of this stylistic device in Double Indemnity (1947) and The Big Heat (1953) is meant to signal the femme fatale’s good/bad character division, a rupture in the wholeness of her personality, with Heather the duality hinted at in these visual terms finds embodiment, not in another side of Heather herself, but in her sister.
Heather appears throughout the first part of the film in clothes as glamorous, figure-hugging and sexualised as her sister’s are drab, shapeless and de-sexing. When Diana finally adopts this more co-ordinated, classic and colourful style, it is at the moment that her sister is in her prison uniform of denim casuals: the sisters maintain the duality between them, as Heather now steps into the glamorous side of the binary and Heather declines into the dowdy. Diana overtly asserts as much when she goes to meet Ike after her sister is imprisoned: slipping into the seat opposite him in a restaurant, now wearing a purple top and black suit, with her hair both more lush and more consciously styled, Diana now resembles the glamorous and confident woman her sister was previously, and tells the surprised man, ‘Caterpillar’s become a butterfly’. But the transition is impermanent; having realised that Ike has used her against her sister, Diana’s loyalties veer back the other way, and she willingly takes back the lacklustre garb, allowing for the substitution and escape analysed earlier. At the end of the film, when the narrative strings have been tied up and the viewer has seen Heather fall to her death trying to kill Ike, a brief coda hints that the pathology inherent in the sisters has not, unlike Heather, been vanquished. Diana, again glamorised, wearing an evening dress, is sitting in an intimate restaurant. She tells her male dining companion that she is an only child, that her name is Heather – and, accepting a glass of champagne, that she really isn’t supposed to drink… This somewhat incoherent ending seems to suggest that the sisters’ murderous mischief will continue, although the working of the original duplicity depended on there being the two sisters, one to hook in the psychiatrist, the other for him to romance. Although this ending is a rather shaky one narratively, it does serve to underline the stark dichotomy of positions available to the women; the continued association of the character ‘Heather’ with sexualised glamour inevitably implies the presence of her shadow-other, drab Diana, even if the woman in the final scene describes herself as an only child.
If Final Analysis presented the doubling of two women and the Manichean inevitability of their linking, The Last Seduction provides false transformations in even more giddying numbers. Although there is only one woman to view in her various outfits, these and the changes they seem to attest in her personality, are very numerous. ‘Seem to’, however, is the moot point, since the protagonist of the film is only too aware of how clothes are read as indicative of the person inside them.
Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) is involved in a drug deal with her husband Clay (Bill Pullman). When he returns to their New York home with the money, Bridget runs out on him, taking the money and escaping to upstate New York, where she stops in a small town near Buffalo and begins to try to find legal means, via divorce, of keeping the money and keeping away from Clay. She finds a job in a local company and gives herself a false name, Wendy Kroy.4 She also finds a man to have sex with: Mike Swale (Peter Berg), a young local.
Significantly, Bridget’s outfits do not modulate because she has moved from the fast-paced, cut-throat metropolis to the more sleepy semi-rural town: she continues to wear the uniform of black jacket, short black skirt, white blouse, black panties, black stockings and black high heels, in which we first saw her at her job in New York, despite the fact that her new colleagues and neighbours dress much more casually. Bridget’s identity seems quite stable, then; despite Stella Bruzzi’s assertion (1997) that the femme fatale is inherently instable, and shows this instability in the number of unmotivated costume changes she makes (129), Bridget maintains her uniform and her selfhood, even during sex, which she generally enjoys either dressed or semi-clad.
Bridget is fully conscious, moreover, of how this outfit makes her seem: a tantalising mixture of the efficient and sexy, the prim and fetishistic. Throughout the film she is shown to be aware of the effect her clothes have on others: when she wants to convince Mike to take part in her next money-making scheme, she changes her look, transforming herself by wearing his denim shirt to enforce the bond he wants there to be between them. This is a conscious costume manipulation very much along the lines of another piece of theatre she stages: again to convince him that she is romantically attached to him, Bridget doodles ‘I love Mike’ on a memo pad, leaving it prominently by her bed. In both instances Bridget plays on Mike’s fantasy that ‘Wendy’ has a softer, more vulnerable side; her costume change is a visual parallel to this lexical pretence.
The film offers other scenes where Bridget/Wendy consciously adapts her costume in order to manipulate the reactions and fantasies of the men around her. When her husband manages to track her down and has his hired detective sit in his car outside her house, she dons a lacy apron and goes out to the car with freshly baked cookies – and a spiked stick to put under the tyres. The detective reads the outfit of the woman and assumes that there is a connection between it and her personality; as seen throughout these transformation tropes, the intimate connection of internal and external, the latter acting as an index of the former, is constantly assumed by the films and their characters. In this instance, however, Bridget seems to step outside the diegesis, acting as her own costume designer to control the way others read her. Thinking her a generous housewife, the detective does not pay attention to her actions and ends up with a flat tyre.
Other men within her orbit make the same mistake, reading her clothes and assuming some consonance between them and the person inside them, and these others pay more dearly for their inaccurate assumptions. The secret of Mike’s former marriage is revealed to Bridget when she puts on a blazer, picks up a clipboard and masquerades as an official from the State Health Department. Notably, Bridget adopts male clothing, including men’s Y-front pants under her masculine suit, for the climax of her plotting, when she manages to tie up her scheme by murdering Clay and successfully blaming Mike. Despite her employment of masculine clothing here, Bridget has not abandoned her feminine costume. In the film’s final scene she re-dons it, but now eschews her usual black and white ensemble and its crisp structured look, for a floor-length supple tube of sludgy green. Bridget partly resembles a caterpillar before its metamorphosis, and partly seems like a roll of dollar bills. Perhaps this is most appropriate as she is now, with all her plots accomplished, extremely wealthy. The butterfly metaphor might also suggest that having served time dressed as men want her to appear – as a sexy dominatrix – Bridget can now afford to ignore their fantasies and give herself time to contemplate how she wants to appear, who she wants to be – to pupate, perhaps, into a different person.
It is rare to find an instance of the false transformation outside the thriller genre or one having its overt deceit condoned by the narrative. One comic example inflects the false transformation so that its duplicity becomes permissible: in Overboard (1987), the transformation is wrought by a man on a woman who has lost her memory. The amnesia acts as a plot device to effect her total transformation; despite the film’s light tone and eventual happy ending, however, the trope still draws attention to issues around identity and authenticity, just as the darker films do. Having lost her memory, the heroine is, seemingly, wiped clean: she has no character until her ‘husband’ tells her what she is like. Since he is making up her personality, the woman is patterning herself on someone who never existed, acting as a copy for which there is no original. While thus a light-hearted romantic and comic film, Overboard still maintains the false transformation’s habitual association with unsettling concepts.
Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) is a snooty rich woman, living on a yacht with her husband. She hires local handyman Dean Profitt (Kurt Russell) to make her a closet on the yacht but dislikes his work, refuses to pay him and knocks him overboard. She herself later falls off the yacht and suffers a concussion which leaves her an amnesiac. The police issue her picture and Dean, seeing it, realises he can be revenged on her: he claims her as his wife, ‘Annie’. Taking her home, he introduces her to ‘their’ children, their house and their past history together. In putting this latter together he is careful to choose details that are the precise opposite of the truth of Joanna’s past and personality as he knows or imagines these to be. He thus presents her with a list of dichotomies, based on her now-unknown self, so that Joanna transforms by passing from one half of these stark binaries to the other:
Rich |
Poor |
Prim |
Liberal |
Puritanical |
‘Slutty’ |
Clean |
Dirty |
Educated |
Unschooled |
Unimaginative |
Creative |
Mean |
Generous |
Cold |
Affectionate |
Frigid |
Passionate |
As we can see, while the line between these binaries remains rigid, which side is ‘right’ modulates throughout the film. The film has no doubt that it is better to be rich as Joanna originally is, than poor like Dean and his sons; equally, however, the narrative endorses Joanna’s increasing warmth and generosity, as she relaxes into family life and comes to care for Dean and the boys. While Dean operates to a certain extent as Pygmalion to Joanna’s Galatea, in crafting her persona while she is still blank from the concussion, the woman she eventually becomes having spent time with the family is not the hillbilly slattern he initially projected, but a creative and happy woman with smart ideas.
Having set up Dean’s deceitful manipulation of Joanna, the film cannot allow her to continue to live with and love him unaware of his trickery: the masquerade must be exposed in comic films. Joanna regains her memory and realising the imposture perpetrated upon her, returns to her yacht. Once back in her ‘real’ life, however, Joanna evinces signs of a hangover from her stay with the Profitts: she prefers beer from the bottle to champagne, and no longer treats her servants snootily but befriends them, finding them more down to earth and congenial than her own family. Eventually she chooses to jump overboard again and swim back to Dean, who loves her too.
Overboard allows Joanna a second chance at being a real human being, and a hiatus, a space, where she can learn to be different. The transformation of her character is thus real even though its original premises were false. Having been wiped clean by the amnesia, Joanna has no character, she is blank like the material from which Pygmalion carved his masterpiece, the statue with whom he falls in love, just as Dean does. By suggesting, however, that underneath the front of hauteur and arrogance Joanna maintains there is actually nothing fundamental, the film unsettlingly hints that there may be no true self behind her mask – and those of how many others? This notion of the ‘true self’ is one which is profoundly connected with the transformation motif, and will now be considered in detail.
6) The True Self
Throughout the explorations of films which use the transformation motif, there has been the recurrent notion of the metamorphosis acting somehow both as a change and simultaneously as a confirmation of qualities already inherent in the woman. An illuminating example is provided by She’s All That (1999), a teen-pic which loosely revisits ideas in Shaw’s Pygmalion. Zach Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr) is the most popular boy in high school; dumped by his girlfriend, he asserts to a friend that he can make any girl win the Prom Queen’s crown just because she’s with him. His friend picks geeky, artistic outsider Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook), calling forth Zach’s protests even though the audience can see that Laney is gorgeous under her paint-stained overalls and heavy glasses. The film does not attempt to suggest Zach himself could achieve a convincing makeover of Laney; instead his younger sister goes to work on our heroine, with a makeup box and a new dress. This scene is acutely spoofed in Not Another Teen Movie, where the sister character, eyeing up and appraising ‘Janey Briggs’ critically, declares ‘This might seem crazy, but you’re going to have to trust me’. Her radical action is to take the girl’s hair out of its customary ponytail and remove her glasses: everyone is astonished at the results, while she herself exults ‘I’m a miracle worker!’ The spoof makes use of the audience’s extra-diegetic position, being aware of the heroine’s real attractiveness, and mocks the convention which insists that the glamorous star can ever be dowdy.
She’s All That conforms to the notion that the metamorphosis Zach instigates is not so much a makeover as a make-clearer: Laney has always been a lovely person, but now her exterior matches her interior qualities, rendering her properly visible for the first time. Importantly, then, although Laney has her hair and clothes changed, the film insists that her only personality alteration is the gaining in confidence which accompanies her acceptance by Zach. Her transformation allows the ‘real Laney’, beautiful and desirable, to be released from her shy and insecure shell. In reality she has always merited the queen’s crown, and the romance with Zach as Prom King that accompanies it.
While She’s All That devotes much of its running time to the ongoing transformation of Laney which Zach accomplishes, turning her from outcast freak (artist, intellectual) into glamorous babe, the scene where, newly glamorised by Zach’s sister, she reveals her new look, is endowed with resonance within the narrative and, with its romantic music, glamour lighting and diegetic audience of astonished, impressed males, acts as a highlight of the film. The film thus dwells on the Pygmalion aspects of the plot while also insisting that Laney does not really alter in anything except increased confidence. This is an illogicality that transformation texts repeat compulsively.
These films present the central metamorphosis visually and narratively as a radical revolution and concurrently as something that merely makes obvious what always was. This raises, it seems to me, two questions: why should there be an assumed link between exterior form and interior quality, and why should the metamorphosis work so hard both to show the necessity of external change and then deny it actually represents ‘change’ at all?
Richard Sennett, in his examination of evolving notions of public and private, The Fall of Public Man (1977), notes that different cultures and historical periods have differing ideas about the significance of clothes; costume has not been seen at all times and in all countries as the external manifestation of the self. He dates the assumption that exterior form does echo interior qualities, and can thus be read as an index of personality, to the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe. Before going on to look in detail at Thomas Carlyle’s influential 1838 tract about the power of clothes, Sartor Resartus, Sennett notes that by the time Carlyle was writing it had become accepted that external ‘appearances are direct expressions of the inner self’ (153) and therefore ‘clothes are expressions of individual personality’ (189). As the perfume seller remarks to Ann in the Gold Diggers shopping sequence, choosing the right consumer item can be a quest to find the one which ‘brings out all the charm in your personality’. Costume and its accompanying accessories can act as guides to the inner self.
Sennett raises another point which has significance for this study of transformation motifs in film: he notes a problem in assuming that clothes act as indices of their wearers’ character which lies in costume’s existence as a commodity, an item exchanged for money. While there is fashion, and silhouettes, hemlines, fabrics come in and go out of favour, people will be buying new clothes and thus adopting different costumes without necessarily possessing the qualities the clothes suggest they possess. Clothes therefore cannot act as the guarantee of internal quality:
…in fashion, once anyone could pass on a certain set of terms, those terms became meaningless. A new set of clues, a new code to penetrate arises; the mystification of personality is as continued as the mystification of new goods in stores. (168)
While Sennett considers the difficulty of reading inner personality from outer garments in terms of the person’s continued unknowability, it is very suggestive that he compares this unknowability, the ‘mystification’ of the character, with the ‘mystification of new goods’. This phrase implies both the innumerable nature and the allure of new commodities: as the heroine found in the opening sequence of Thoroughly Modern Millie, there is always something else to buy, to wear; there is always something remaining to suggest about one’s self.
Sennett’s point also indicates a further cause for unease: the very mutability of the self, the instability of its parameters if it can be altered by an external garment. Inconsistently, while Hollywood vaunts the power of external items to provide information about a person’s character, the films which subscribe to this common idea do not suggest that one’s personality is unstable or susceptible to external forces. This is the basic paradox within the transformation concept: the person both has a defined character which can be read through her clothes and one which is mutable by the costumes which adorn it.
It thus seems to me that the transformations’ compulsive return to the notion of the ‘true self’ is explained by its role as a concept which attempts, however feebly, to smooth over the tensions inherent in the paradoxical insistence both on the self’s stability and the visible evidence to the contrary which these movies rely on. Insisting that each of us has an authentic identity that is enhanced, rather than altered, by an overhaul of our wardrobes permits the films a cake-and-eat-it licence: they can show the satisfying revolution of the exterior shell and yet deny the interior is so unstable that a mere haircut or new dress can affect it.
Intriguingly, while She’s All That and other films knowingly evoke the Pygmalion myth, the ‘true self’ motif actually taps into the Cinderella narrative, removing the emphasis on male agency as the impetus for the changes made and returning it to magic. As Iona and Peter Opie noted, the enchantment on Cinderella is not when she is at the ball, glittering and adored, but when she is in the kitchen, sooty and over-worked (1980). The glamorous state is her true self, which evil, generally in the form of a wicked step-mother, conspires to hide under the grubby disguise of the kitchen slavey. In this way, Laney and all the other transformed females are not themselves when they are dowdy and drab and bespectacled; they just need to clear away the enchantment of the false exterior to reveal the true beauty which lies within.
To recap, then, there has been a traditional belief in the linkage of a person’s external form and internal character in Western culture since the mid-nineteenth century, and this is what the film transformations can clearly be seen tapping into: whenever a character changes her outfit and is hailed as a new, more attractive person all-round because of that costume change, the old assumptions about exterior mirroring interior are in play. At the same time, however, films which exploit the transformation motif are keen to stress that when the exterior alters it somehow enhances, releases, the inner beauty that was always there, rather than wiping away one set of characteristics and replacing them with another. The ‘true self’ idea is there to attempt to unite these flagrant contradictions.
Many of the films already considered in other sections can be seen to be using their transformation scenes to attest the stable existence of the central female’s authentic persona. For example, in Moonstruck, Loretta’s dowdy ‘before’ exterior hides the fact that she is a strong, passionate and sensual woman: although her metamorphosis allows these qualities to be revealed, it does not originate them, they were there already, lying dormant and waiting for the right circumstances (love, sex, clothes) to liberate them. This permanence of character contrasts with the shifting, mutable nature of appearances; again the films create the paradox around the metamorphosis that it seems to initiate radical change but is actually merely unlocking characteristics that were already there.
Films that use the metamorphosis concept therefore need to keep some kind of balance between suggesting the revision is a total revolution and maintaining that nothing of any consequence has changed. Perhaps this could explain why the scenes which deal with the transformation – whether by actually showing it being worked on, or by showing its visual stand-in, shopping, or its effects, in the ‘big reveal’ scene and its concomitant, the misrecognition moment – are generally accompanied by music: this both hints at the fantasy aspects of the scene being unfolded and also carries the viewer along with its emotion. Shopping scenes cut to popular hits thus carry both visual and aural charges, creating spectacular moments which distract the viewer from the contradictions being bundled together on screen, as can be seen in Pretty Woman; by achieving the transformation within the space of a song, the viewer is distracted from unsettling notions of personality impermanence. Even the most radical of transformations, ones which seem to act to negate the woman’s past sexual experience, as with Vivian in Pretty Woman and Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, are carefully presented in ways which stress the permanence of character, even if this then necessitates backpedalling at the level of the narrative.
The release by schlubby Seymour of Audrey’s inner good girl is played out as a musical fantasy sequence on one occasion, as she daydreams about being married to him, living ‘in a tract house of our own/Somewhere that’s green’, a safe space of abundant consumables and domestic expertise where ‘I cook like Betty Crocker/And I look like Donna Reed’. Audrey’s wish to transform herself from city slut to suburban housewife is simply achieved in her daydream through a costume change, a mere alteration of outline, from the curve-hugging garb of Turim’s ‘sexual warrior’ to the multi-petticoated innocence of the ‘sweetheart’ dress. As Audrey sits in her cramped one-room apartment in a tight, strappy dress, she visualises her fantasy self in the suburban bungalow in a series of typical fifties ‘sweetheart line’ dresses, all in Tupperware-shade pastels or with prominently displayed spotless white collars and cuffs, symbols both of her new unbesmirched sexual history and her material affluence.
For Audrey associates being a good girl, a woman who has played the game and kept herself pure for marriage, with being a good consumer, a housewife with not only a house and a husband but ‘a washer, and a drier, and an ironing machine’. Her fantasy is not simply to swap her sadist boyfriend for kindly Seymour, but also to escape her one room in Skid Row for a well-appointed house in the suburbs. Despite the obvious differences both of surroundings and wardrobe, however, continuities between reality and fantasy help to suggest that Audrey’s true self would only be released, rather than created, by the changes. Audrey’s hairdo, a lacquered helmet of bouffant blonde hair, persists into her daydream, as do her neatly manicured and red-tipped nails. Having her hair and skin remain the same, while only the clothes alter during the reverie, enables Audrey to imagine herself embodying the perfect housewife.
While Audrey dreams of a simple costume transformation both achieving and signalling her renewed sexual innocence, when Seymour claims her for himself later in the film, the metamorphosis involves even less material: far from being a matter of new clothes, it is a simple removal that will return Audrey’s wholesomeness. Altering the even more ephemeral and superficial layer of her exterior, her makeup, Seymour assures her, will enable Audrey to resume her true self:
Seymour: Audrey, [the past is] all behind you now. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. You’re a very nice person, I always knew you were. Underneath the bruises and the handcuffs, do you know what I saw? A girl I respected, and still do…
[Sings:] |
|
Lift up your head, wash off your mascara Here take my Kleenex, wipe that lipstick away Show me a face that’s clean as the morning |
………… |
|
|
Audrey: |
|
Suddenly Seymour He purifies me Suddenly Seymour Shows me I can Learn how to be more The girl that’s inside me… |
While Audrey has acknowledged her seamy sexual past, Seymour insists this can be cancelled out as easily as shedding its external signs – the lipstick and mascara. Seymour ‘purifies’ Audrey by seeing through the makeup-wearing woman to the ‘girl that’s inside’ her; in this way he nullifies the suffering and victimhood that she has experienced, as well as the sexual knowledge which instigated it.
Because Little Shop of Horrors is a musical fantasy, it can insist the simple act of wiping her makeup off removes Audrey’s past. Pretty Woman, on the other hand, although tapping into both the Cinderella and Pygmalion stories and being a romantic comedy, is still a generic construction with some obligations towards realism. Simply changing hooker Vivian’s wardrobe and makeup from exhibitionist to modest is not, therefore, enough to undo her sexual past. At this point, interestingly, the narrative works to support the costume transformation; rather than leaving the character reading at the indexical level of costume, so that while Vivian’s past is acknowledged between the couple it is not visually dwelt on, the dialogue works to support her new assumed/regained innocence. Vivian, it turns out, is not such an experienced hooker after all: in an intimate scene she reveals that she fell into prostitution through loving the wrong man, who then abandoned her in LA with no money; after trying to make enough money for rent at low-paid jobs, she became a hooker and ‘got some regulars’.
Since this confession is made during Vivian’s week-long tenure as Edward’s hire, it makes her professional life seem like a series of longish encounters; the back-story excuses her career choice as an unfortunate accident rather than a conscious decision. The significant factor of prostitution – not that it involves sex with many partners but that it is sex for money – is downplayed, despite the fact that Vivian is only able to admit her past to Edward, as they both lie naked, post-coital, in his hotel bed, because he has paid her to be there with him. Because the film by this point has its eye on the conclusion of the narrative when, per generic dictates, the couple must be together forever, it is careful to present their relationship as a real romance rather than a business transaction.
The linked motifs of finance and commodification raised in Pretty Woman are important ones to the transformation. Although often the narratives which deal with this theme manage to find ways to avoid emphasising the money necessary to achieve a new look, tapping back into the Cinderella tale to provide a Fairy Godmother who will conjure the new wardrobe from nothing (as with Cookie Carnival and Clueless, for example), at other times the lavish expense of the garments and other accessories purchased is part of the pleasure arranged for the character and, vicariously, the viewer, as in the Gold Diggers’ shopping spree which ends with the millionaire mother fainting amid a swathe of bills.
Micki McGee, in her study of self-improvement literature, Self-Help Inc., Makeover Culture in American Life (2005) suggests that at key moments throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first consumers have had to become more aware of themselves as products because of the pressures of the labour market. As products, people are subject to fluctuating market value but also possess the potential for upgrade and improvement. In order to remain employable, she finds, workers are encouraged to remake themselves, transforming themselves into whatever their jobs demand. McGee finds this true of both salaried positions and the unpaid job of housewife; in both, constant attention to self must be paid in order to prevent being replaced by a newer, cheaper, model.
McGee’s exploration of self-help and improvement literature finds that women especially are increasingly being counselled both to alter themselves, improve their skills and personae, in order to keep up with what is needed in the market, and simultaneously to believe in the existence of, and take pains to nurture, their inner, authentic selves outside of the world of money. This paradox plays out similarly to film transformations’ concurrent dwelling on and denial of the changeable nature of the self. As McGee notes:
Paradoxically, the imperative of inventing the self that is found in the literatures of self-improvement is often cast in the form of discovering or uncovering an authentic, unique, and stable self that might function – even thrive – unaffected by the vagaries of the labor market. (16)
McGee asserts that ‘Americans turn to self-improvement literature… in times of despair’, concluding that the very material sought out to calm worries and suggest recuperation and progress, the self-help books, actually ‘may foster, rather than quell, their anxieties’ (17). It could also be posited that transformations attempt simultaneously to assuage and agitate the same anxieties in their audiences: the films both show how the lead character determines to make the best of herself and suggest we should be thinking about doing the same. McGee herself does not comment on transformations in film, although she does note the recent flourishing of makeover television (17–18); her contention that Americans seek products that both alleviate and aggravate their worries especially at times of crisis would be interesting to consider in light of observable proliferations of metamorphosis films at specific historical moments.
One point at which the self-help literature as studied by McGee seems to diverge from the filmed transformation is the relative ease with which the latter posits the metamorphosis can be achieved. While films suggest that letting out the true self is as easy as buying the right clothes, haircuts and makeup, McGee finds the books under her consideration suggest mere shopping is not enough:
While the purchase of a commodity – mouthwash or dandruff shampoo – was once the route to some sense of interpersonal social security, today the simple purchase of a commodity is insufficient: all too easy. Instead one must embrace a lifestyle, a series of regimes of time management or meditation, of diet and spiritual exploration, of self-scrutiny and self-affirmation. (18)
By contrast with this summation of the literature’s goals, films using the transformation suggest ‘the simple purchase’ is enough to ensure the implementation of a ‘lifestyle’. The shopping transformations in particular show that purchasing is sufficient for amendment: their goal is to convince consumers that change is both easy and lasting.
McGee’s suggestion that the self-help literature purposely creates the conditions for its own continued consumption through positing unachievable goals echoes the endless cycle of necessary purchasing at which Thoroughly Modern Millie hints in its revealing opening sequence. It also chimes with Kate’s momentary disillusion with the consumer byproducts of ‘that whole love thing’, as cited in the scene from Kate and Leopold. Kate notes that advertisers seem to promise the delivery of true love via a variety of other smaller products necessitating constant consumer action. Kate’s speech couples each purchase with a different verb conveying the action of consumption: ‘buying magazines…joining clubs…doing therapy…watching movies’. That the purchasable nouns are in the plural also suggests the never-ending nature of acquisition.
The idea of a person owing a duty to herself to make the most of herself is one which can be found in both the self-help literature and the transformation in film. Repeatedly the metamorphosis moment is accompanied by the notion that one owes it to oneself to be the best one can, to reflect the inner true beauty in one’s external form. This can be found, along with several other transformation tropes, in Hairspray (2007), in the transformation scene of Tracy’s mother, Edna Turnblad (John Travolta). As so often with these metamorphoses, the sequence is played out as a musical interlude; here the song ‘Hey Mama, Welcome to the Sixties’ seems at first to suggest the establishment of a new decade accompanies that of a new Edna. But then the familiar tropes of the ‘true self’ creep in: Edna’s metamorphosis is not so much a change as a return to her real self. Edna is presented as an agoraphobic (‘I haven’t left the house since 1951!’) who now overcomes her anxieties with a change of hairdo and outfit.
The Turnblads go to a dress emporium for larger ladies called The Hefty Hideway, whose proprietor, Mr Pinky, wants to use Tracy as a spokesperson and model, promising ‘complimentary couture’ to both mother and daughter. Mr Pinky’s establishment is then the scene for Edna’s overhaul. Magically, during a single revolution of the swivel chair in which she is sitting, Edna’s hair is worked over from clipped-back to bouffant, although her new sparkly pink dress takes a little more work to get into. But during the transformation, which is allowed to unfold on screen even as it is accomplished through editing and is thus both visible and invisible, the emphasis is on the recovery of the old Edna at the same time as the new one is revealed. The beauticians-cum-dress shop assistants give Edna various instructions about embracing makeup and high heels, then enjoin her to ‘find a style to make you feel like you’. Edna is therefore not so much changing herself, in altering her appearance, as becoming herself. She echoes this sentiment herself after her transformation when she sings along with Tracy:
Edna: Your mama’s hip, your mama’s in Your mama’s lookin’ at herself and wondrin’, where you bin?
Edna’s line here recognises that she has been away from herself in allowing her shyness and depression to overcome her authentically ebullient identity; the change of hair and dress allow her true self to return. The transformation of Hairspray’s Edna neatly encapsulates the major element of the ‘true self’ trope, which seeks to resolve the tension set up by the idea of the fragile, mutable self through the appeal to an authentic inner core of personality. As noted, however, in considering the notion of the false transformation, the anxiety that the emphasis on the easily changed persona causes results from fears that an identity that alters too quickly cannot be a very stable one. I have posited that filmic transformations try to cure this problem by presenting changes as returns to real, true and authentic inner identities; other films, especially those from the darker genres of thriller and film noir, however, acknowledge these tensions and seek to explore them.
One final film example in this section illuminates the frictions that this disquieting side of the trope pushes forward. Single White Female (1992) is a thriller which gives New York career girl Alison Jones (Bridget Fonda) the flatmate from hell in the form of Hedy Carlson (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Hedy seems at first shy but given a little encouragement by her new friend then becomes frighteningly intense about their relationship. The significant point that motivates the unfolding of the plot occurs in a beauty parlour; having previously sported shapeless baggy dresses and jumpers, with her long dark hair shaggy and unkempt, Hedy now treats herself and her friend to a haircut. But this ‘surprise’ is double-edged: while Allie has her usual crop renewed, Hedy has her own locks coloured and styled to match Allie’s exactly. She appears at the top of the salon’s staircase and holds the moment smiling unnervingly at Alison, before slowly descending. Her outfit, which like the rest of her wardrobe had become increasingly modelled on Allie’s, now matches too: both young women wear tight black shirts over short skirts, their legs bare.
The moment of the transformed Hedy’s appearance at the top of the stairs sets off resonances of twins, doppelgangers, reflections. Hedy has built up the event to Alison as being a pleasant treat: ‘I have a surprise for you’. Perhaps she imagines that Alison will be pleased the two of them look like identical twins, that her ego will be stroked by the flattery of having someone want to look like her. Alison, however, picks up on the other resonance, that of the uncanny as explored by Freud (1919/1985). A useful definition of the uncanny is that it is ‘the familiar made strange’: what could be more familiar than one’s own face, made strange by seeing it on someone else, not in a mirror but on another person? In his article, Freud cites the work of psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch (1906) on the uncanny and notes the earlier author’s grouping together as uncanny objects those which create doubt about their human or living status, such as waxworks, dolls and automata (Freud: 347). The doppelganger, the double of oneself, traditionally presages death in folk mythology and in psychoanalysis hints at the instability of the personality. Freud notes that the doppelganger arouses feelings of the uncanny because it ambiguates boundaries between the self and other so that:
The subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. (1990: 356)
Hedy forces Allie to experience this shifting sense of self by transforming to look like her. While in Hedy this ‘doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self’ can be taken as the symptoms of mental illness, in Allie the enforced doubling angers and frightens her; she views it as an eerie trespass on her own identity. Indeed, copying Allie’s looks is part of Hedy’s plan not just to bring the pair closer but to enable her to pass herself off as her roommate.
Eventually ‘Hedy’ needs to disappear; a simple change of hair colour and a reversion to the baggy clothing of her earlier persona enables the woman to erase all signs of the character. While Alison fights back and wins in the end, killing Hedy in self-defence, the film ends with a coda which ambivalently suggests the cycle of self-transformation may not be over. The camera, seemingly replicating Alison’s intense stare, focuses on a composite image of the two women made into one: the left half of a photograph of Alison and the right half of one of Hedy are juxtaposed to make, apparently, one woman. Alison’s voice-over comes in to assure the viewer that she is trying to rebuild her life, attempting, every day, to forgive herself for surviving since ‘I know what can happen to someone who doesn’t’. The long-held close-up on the composite image more ambiguously works to suggest, however, that these words are mere bluster: she too has become unhinged, her personality dangerously fluid.
The alteration in Single White Female is thus used not to comfort the woman who undergoes it, to return her to some engagement with a notionally authentic identity, but to underline the fact that she possesses a very fluid sense of self which can incorporate elements of the biography and appearance of those she lives with. While there are elements of a back-story provided for Hedy, with a ‘real’ identity, an estranged family and dead twin, there is a sense that these details are arbitrary and that the real dread Hedy evokes comes from the nebulousness of her personality and past. Hedy absorbs the looks and stories of other women; what then is behind her borrowed mask? The film’s coda seems to hint that, if Hedy could become any woman, any woman could just as easily become Hedy, that is, nothing.
Film theorists have found much of relevance in the famous 1929 article ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ by psychoanalyst Joan Rivière (Doane, 1982; Heath, 1986). The article posits that women who have achieved career success in their chosen areas sometimes feel they must abase themselves by appearing weak in other arenas; apologising for their career success, they attempt to compensate for seemingly unfeminine mastery of their subjects by showing deficiencies in others. The audience for this abasement and apology is men; the successful women do not want to repel male attention and thus, Rivière suggests, put on a mask of hyper-feminine weakness. The most extreme aspect of Rivière’s argument is that there is no controlling persona behind the masquerade – there is, simply, nothing:
The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. (Rivière, 1986: 38)
This psychoanalytically informed reading posits that ‘womanliness’ itself is a disguise which actually hides nothing: there is no authentic, true self secreted behind the mask. This ties in with the fears that the transformation’s display of unproblematic self-alteration engenders: the reason the self can be transformed so radically by a new dress or hairdo is that there is no stable, fixed identity inside, no core of authenticity. Single White Female and the other edgier films which make use of the transformation theme in this way do not seek to allay these fears through employing the ‘true self’ motif, but to exploit them, making use of our dread of looking, and finding nothing behind the mask. This fear is taken to its extremes in The Stepford Wives (1975), which manages to effect its transformation of a whole town of forward-thinking, trouser-wearing feminists into submissive, traditional home-makers clad in floor-length gowns, through a simple expedient: replacing all the real women with their robot doubles. Here the doppelganger myth really does spell death for the original: central character Joanna (Katharine Ross) sees her own double moments before the automaton – terrifyingly empty-eyed – kills her. The feminising transformation is thus seen in The Stepford Wives to signal the destruction rather than the enhancement of or a return to the authentic self; anxieties about the exterior transformation affecting the interior, present in so many Hollywood films and warded off by the ‘true self’ notion, here coalesce in a product of the horror genre, hinting that there may indeed be nothing behind the mask and that the self is destroyed in being altered.
7) Amelioration
The final thematic trope which appears with regularity during the filmic transformation is that of amelioration. Here the height of glamour attained by the woman during her radical metamorphosis proves untenable or inappropriate in her day-to-day life. Not forgetting the lessons that the transformation has taught her about bringing out her true self and dressing in a more feminine and artful way, the woman nevertheless modifies the magnificence of her new wardrobe to make it more appropriate for the everyday. In Miss Congeniality (2000), for example, Gracie Hart does not maintain pageant levels of glamour once she goes back to ordinary cop life, but nor does she return to her old slovenly ways of dressing and behaving. She has learnt how important attractive self-presentation is if you want to get a boyfriend. It can be noted also that the film’s sequel shows Gracie loses her edge as a FBI officer because of her new commitment to glamour. In Miss Congeniality 2 (2005), instead of actively pursuing detective work in the field, she becomes a public relations officer for the FBI, endlessly giving interviews, appearing on chat shows and having her photograph taken; these more passive tasks require less activity on her part but a concomitant increase of attention to her appearance. Although the movie’s trailer relates that ‘this cover girl…is going back under cover’, there is still an emphasis, even when she does become more active, on ‘playing dress up’, as the plot exigencies take her first into disguise and then to Las Vegas to don a showgirl outfit.
The House Bunny (2008) presents several metamorphoses, shifting along a sliding scale of glamour; our heroine, Shelley (Anna Faris) is a Playboy Bunny, tricked into leaving the Mansion by a jealous rival. She finds a sorority house at a nearby university and is made house mother. Her task then becomes transforming the young women of Zeta House into more popular versions of themselves, via a makeover which metamorphoses them from geeks to babes. The sorority women find themselves no longer ‘the Unhot’, as they had been before, but ‘smoking’; they also eventually find their own new and constant attention to surface details of appearance makes them superficial and quick to judge others by the same shallow standards they themselves were so recently being held as failing to meet. The Zeta women then ameliorate the overly provocative outfits and makeup schemes Shelley had helped them achieve, toning this down to a more everyday level of attractiveness with less overt sexualisation. Notably, they also go to work on Shelley too; just as she had transformed them into variations of herself, they now make her nerdy, putting her hair in a bun and giving her a pair of spectacles to make her seem more intellectual. Both these sartorial masquerades, it should be noted, are in order to attract male attention.
Now Voyager also highlights the necessity for the heroine to find a level of glamour with which she is comfortable. Charlotte begins the film dumpy and overweight, clad in unflattering clothes – voluminous knee-length dresses, thick stockings and clumpy shoes, heavy glasses over her heavily browed eyes, with hair in a lifeless and heavy bun – which age her and make her look more like her mother’s younger sister than youngest child. Setting out on her recuperative cruise, Charlotte Vale is encouraged to take the name, cabin and wardrobe of glamorous ‘Renée Beauchamp’. The cruise acts as an opportunity for the woman to emerge from her previous drab persona; caterpillar-like, she sloughs off the old Charlotte and emerges in Renée’s borrowed finery, an advance the film makes overt when it has her don an evening cloak with embroidered butterflies across the shoulder.
Charlotte borrows Renée’s garments on her cruise-holiday, but when she returns to her home in Boston, although she does not revert to the old-fashioned frumpy garments she had worn previously, she does tone down the glamour of her outfits. The evening dress worn under the fritillary cloak, for example, is a shining white, sleeveless column of a dress with diamond clips; her first evening dress worn at home by contrast is long-sleeved and black, more full in the skirt; although her mother finds this dress unacceptable, it is toned down in glamour compared to the white one worn to dinner with Jerry (Paul Henreid) on the boat. After her romance with Jerry and return home, Charlotte finds and maintains her own level of glamour and femininity in her dress, several steps up from the shapeless frumpy outfits she wore before her breakdown, but also a few down from the glittering allure of Renée’s shipboard wardrobe.
Charlotte thus goes from borrowed finery at the height of glamour on the cruise, to a more restrained everyday wardrobe which retains its chic, but also speaks to elements of her persona and history. For example, later in the film Charlotte meets an eligible man, Elliot (John Loder) and is engaged to be married to him but then encounters Jerry again and realises she will only ever truly love him. When breaking off her engagement to Elliot, Charlotte wears a flattering tight black day dress which is reminiscent of many items in her wardrobe; this one, uniquely, however, is patterned with palm trees, leaves and flowers. This visually hints at the reason Charlotte cannot marry Elliot (because she remembers the romantic idyll she and Jerry enjoyed in exotic Panama, where palm trees and luxurious flowers formed their backdrop) while the phallic nature of the palm tree pattern and the explosive, orgasmic starbursts of the flowers symbolically underline the passion so evident in her relationship with Jerry and missing in that with Elliot.
While films which feature the transformation motif frequently work to show the specific wardrobe choices foisted on the central female are not entirely right for her, and that she must find her own way to a comfortable level of attractiveness, none of the transformation stories examined portrayed the metamorphosis as something to be entirely sloughed off or reversed. This is significant in underlining the central message of the transformations: it is a woman’s duty to herself to look her best, and this best is generally achieved through buying and wearing nice goods. Thus no story seems to narrativise backsliding from couture to bargain-basement clothing; although the heights of glamour are often attained by the application of high-end labels and these heights are shown to be too rarefied for the heroine to maintain, when she tones down her look it does not result in a complete reversal back to the inadequate point from which she started. All the women in the three case studies of this book ameliorate the extremity of the glamorous femininity they attain at their film’s high point, but do not slip back to their original unfashionable selves.
Having explored here the frequent recurrence of thematic tropes in Hollywood films dealing with the self-alteration story, the remaining section investigates the habitual use also of visual tropes. Hollywood films choose not only to tell their metamorphosis narratives in the same way: they use the same tools to show them in the same ways too, as will now be considered.
8) Visual tropes
Single White Female contains the first visual trope we will examine here, which is the use of the staircase to display the transformation. As noted, Hedy appears at the top of the stairs in the beauty salon with her hair cut and coloured to look like Alison’s; she pauses at the top of the stairs, smiling, before descending. The motif of the staircase and descent occurs sufficiently frequently alongside the transformation for us to ponder its meaning. The staircase, as Mary Ann Doane has pointed out (1987), is a potent symbol within Hollywood cinema and is habitually associated with the display of the female:
An icon of crucial and repetitive insistence in the classical representations of the cinema, the staircase is traditionally the locus of the spectacularization of the woman. It is on the stairway that she is displayed as spectacle for the male gaze…(136) (Italics in the original)
In the ‘paranoid woman’s films’ which Doane investigates, the staircase is also the path to the danger that besets the central female. Thomas Elsaesser (1987) finds the staircase used as a staging place for action throughout American melodrama since its structure permits movement through the family home and this up-and-down motion accords well with the ascending hopes and crushing disappointments found in the genre (60).
Similarly, in an interesting chapter on the use of the staircase motif in Hitchcock films, Michael Walker (2006) notes that the director often eschews the more obvious symbolism of the stairs (ascent = aspiration = good, descent = resignation = bad) in order to use the architectural feature ‘as an aspect of the landscape of the mind’ (351). In Hitchcock films, as in both the gothic and domestic noir films studied by Doane, threats can lurk at either end of the staircase. In this way, the staircase exists at a more basic level as emblematic of motion, as a liminal place symbolising progress from one place or state to another and, therefore, symbolising change. The stairs are hence the most appropriate place for the transformation to display the completed metamorphosis as they themselves signify movement between positions, statuses. Fascinatingly also Walker cites an insight about the intimate connection between the female star and the staircase motif:
Another familiar use of the staircase…is as a setting for the female star to make a (usually) impressive star (and/or social) entrance, descending to be greeted by her admirers at the foot of the stairs. In the BBC series, Architecture of the Imagination…the psychologist James Hillman described this feature of Hollywood films as ‘like a mythical moment: it’s not just the descent of the film’s main actress, it’s the descent of Aphrodite or Venus into our human world… Heaven has opened up, and she’s come down’. (BBC 2, tx 6/8/1993) (352)
This moment of apotheosis has amplified significance for the transformation. The transformed female within the narrative feels like a princess, a model, a star; equally the actress feels herself admitted to the pantheon of other goddesses by being permitted a grand entrance. The motif thus perpetuates itself as the mode of enshrining the female star, since both diegetically and extra-diegetically the descent is taken to indicate transcendence.
Interestingly, since so often the transformation acts to improve the woman’s social position, it is rare to find the transformation symbolised by the act of climbing stairs; though status elevation would fit with the elevation of the body through ascending the stairs, this matching is not used. Instead, when stairs are used as a motif to display the achieved metamorphosis, it is for a descent that the staircase is featured. Hedy descends towards Allie in Single White Female; Maggie descends the stairs having been made-over from druggie murderess to groomed hired killer in The Assassin/Point Of No Return. In that instance, as noted in the Introduction, Maggie’s ascent of the stairs to Amanda’s studio signifies her willingness to change and become the externally refined young woman her bosses desire her to seem. When she then descends the stairs, the dichotomy between her previous and current posture and costume (thick boots, clumping footsteps/dainty high heels, graceful movement) underlines the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of her persona-alteration.
Now Voyager, as also noted previously, similarly uses the staircase as a locus of gauging the status of its heroine. At the beginning of the film, when Charlotte is unhappy because of her poor relationship with her domineering mother, she is overweight and dresses in a style much older than her actual years. Her reluctant arrival at the tea party which will introduce her to Dr Jacquith has her halt on the stairs and pose there – seen only to the calf at first – while she overhears her mother being unkind about her. The significance of this halt on the stairs is that it provides an opportunity for the distance between the before and after of the transformation to be measured: when she has later become the elegant ‘Renée Beauchamp’ on the cruise which is part of her cure, Charlotte is again viewed by the camera poised at the top of an elevation (this time a gangplank). Furthermore, stairs continue to play an important part in the film after this transformation: though outwardly altered, Charlotte still remains unhappy and unconfident because of her mother and suffers a relapse when the latter dies. She returns to Dr Jacquith’s sanatorium and is just about to go up the stairs to her room when she sees a little girl crying in another chamber – this is her lover’s daughter, Tina, and Charlotte stops thinking about her own woes to care for the child. Poised at the foot of the steps prior to moving between one place and another echoes Charlotte’s psychological position between one state (unhealthy) and the better one to which she aspires. Finally, at the end of the film when Charlotte has helped Tina to overcome her shyness and depression, Tina descends the staircase at Charlotte’s home to meet her father. As he embraces his child, his eyes rise to Charlotte as she too slowly descends; while he holds one, and looks at the other, he speaks to both as he says the healing words, ‘I love you’.
Single White Female and the Stairs motif
As other authors have noted (Studlar, 2000; Moseley, 2003), Audrey Hepburn’s star persona is one which seems particularly linked to notions of self-transformation through costume and to the Cinderella story. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find the staircase being used as the symbol of changing or already-altered status in films with the star, including Funny Face and My Fair Lady (1964). Other movie musicals made use of the visual trope also; it can be seen in the Harmonia Gardens scene in Hello, Dolly! (1969) during the eponymous number: Dolly Levi, the widowed matchmaker, here reveals herself transformed – or, with the ‘true self’ motif in mind, recreated – as a glamorous and ardent woman in a décolleté gown. As the waiters at the restaurant hear about her arrival and cluster expectantly at the foot of the grand staircase, one notices her entrance and announces ‘She’s here!’ The camera pans slowly up the stairs to where Dolly waits. She holds the pose for a long moment for all viewers, both diegetic and extra-diegetic, to regard her, then begins her descent to the opening bars of the musical’s key song.
Staircases feature in the transformation so regularly that their usage can attract parody. In the teen romcom take on the Pygmalion story, She’s All That, the transformed Laney descends the stairs to where a pair of admiring men – her brother and boyfriend-to-be – await her; again the camera focuses on her legs as she comes down the stairs, a focus which both highlights the motion between states of before and after, unwanted and desirable, and simultaneously fetishises her limbs as they are showcased by the wedge heels below and short red dress above. Not Another Teen Movie satirises this moment precisely when it replays the scene almost shot for shot; even its comic effect of having ‘Janey’ trip and fall through the stairs is only a humorous exaggeration of the original, in which Laney does trip and fall at the bottom of the stairs because she is so unused to heels.
The use of stairs themselves as a stage for the exhibition of the successful transformation carries more than symbolic weight, however; it is also linked with the fashion industry. Lucille was a London couturier of the 1890s who designed costumes for theatrical productions and whose fashion empire spread to include branches in Paris, New York and Chicago. Using legitimate theatre to advertise her designs, she also theatricalised her showrooms and claimed to be the first to use live models or ‘mannequins’. While this has been disputed (Kaplan and Stowell, 1994: 116), her invention of the model’s runway – the catwalk – is not in doubt:
In or about 1900 Lucille’s drive to theatricalise fashion marketing was made literal with the building of a ramp and curtained recess at one end of her shop. Here, picked out by limelight and accompanied by the playing of soft music, the most accomplished of her mannequins introduced gowns to small groups of invited clients. The resulting mannequin parades, forerunners of the contemporary fashion show, were innovations of which Lucille could be justly proud. (Kaplan and Stowell: 117)
Significantly, Lucille later worked designing costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and these shows were also famous for their stately parade of costumed women descending elaborate ramps and staircases (Dyer 1992: 70). While Lucille’s use of a ramp in her couture shows differs from the stairs found in the filmic transformations, it is easy to see the link between the two and to find from early cinema onwards the overt use of the catwalk and fashion parade in films. In her chapter in 1990’s Fabrications, ‘“Powder Puff” Promotion: The Fashion Show-in-the-Film’, Charlotte Herzog observes that including fashion shows within the diegesis of a film occurred frequently in the 1930s and that these segments worked to foreground the clothes on show by a variety of means. Herzog discusses Roberta (1935), set in a fashion house, which features several fashion scenes where the main narrative action halts for the audience to scrutinise and enjoy the clothes on show. Roberta, furthermore, features a staircase moment when the couturier, Stephanie, stages a fashion show, using herself as the model for the most elaborate gown, which she wears descending a staircase and singing, all for the admiring and loving gaze of her partner.
These films which foreground modelling and fashion also highlight the link between the visual motif of the staircase and another which is often found accompanying it in the films showing transformations: what I call ‘the catwalk moment’. This is an instance where the progress of the narrative halts for a second or so as the recipient of the metamorphosis pauses both to show off the changes and to receive exclamations of praise and astonishment from her audience. Like the staircase motif, it allows a moment of deification to the newly transformed female: she has changed from being faulty woman to perfect goddess.
Often in the catwalk moment the staircase is still employed as the emblem of changed status, although the altered woman does not move down the steps but holds her pose at the top of them. The catwalk moment exists in this moment of stasis and it is this rather than the descent which captures the eye of the camera and, significantly, the man whom the heroine wishes to attract. This variation on the descent occurs very frequently also and is found recurring in Hollywood films, from 1921’s Forbidden Fruit to 2007’s Enchanted: in both scenes the transformed heroine pauses at the top of the stairs and arrests the attention of the man with whom she is fated to be paired. Hedy’s catwalk moment similarly occurs as she pauses at the top of the stairs in the salon; smiling insistently, she poses for Allie to take in the extent of her alteration before descending to meet her. The catwalk moment grants the transformer the attention of the camera, the other characters, and the audience, isolating the moment not of change but of the appreciation of its magnitude in order to stress its importance. As noted, the landing above the stairs often acts as a suitable stage for this moment; frequently, even if stairs do not feature, some sort of elevation is employed in order for the transformed woman to be raised up above her audience. This is not merely so that she can be more easily seen and marvelled over, but also to emphasise her elevation over those who have not undergone a transformative experience. The catwalk moment that comes in Gold Diggers of 1935 at the end of the shopping sequence places Ann Prentiss in her ultimate purchases of couture gown, fan and diamonds amongst but high above the boxes and packages which contain the rest of her haul, as well as above the worshipping Dick.
Musical numbers again provide the opportunities to showcase the catwalk moment which celebrates the success of the transformation. In Hairspray, after Edna’s transformation, it is Tracy’s turn for a metamorphosis; while Edna continues to dance about, Tracy is whisked away down a path of attendants who then form a line concealing her. Each peels off, alternately to the left and right, until, as the music builds to a pinnacle, Tracy is finally revealed, now with a pink sequinned dress that matches her mother’s. Just as the music does, she also pauses for a second with her hands outstretched in a ta-da! gesture and Edna gasps appreciatively. Similarly, with the Hello, Dolly! number, Dolly’s catwalk moment exists at the top of the stairs in the hush and pause before she begins to descend and the orchestra starts its grand vamp into the song.
The significance of the catwalk moment lies in what it suggests to the audience about the importance of self-improvement. By using the visual effects of cinema – close-ups, camera panning – films which use this motif stage a scene in which the full weight of the transformation is felt. The woman transformed can stop the music, she can stop traffic, she can stop the narrative flow: the stasis often accompanied by a pause in the soundtrack highlights her power to command all eyes and ears. Since narratively it is often ordinary women, rather than models and princesses, who are granted this moment of supreme audience attention, the catwalk moment can be seen as permitting Everywoman to become the epitome of glamour for an instant. Interestingly, this visual filmic trope, along with the linked motif of the staircase, has become so much part of the language of the transformation that it has been co-opted into makeover television wholesale. In Extreme Makeover (2002–2005), ‘the big reveal’ of the metamorphosis is staged at a grand party: the changed person appears at the top of a flight of stairs and holds the moment to the gasps of the audience before descending to be reunited with them.
These two visual tropes for marking the successful metamorphosis are, as will have been noted, ones of mise-en-scene and staging; the other two elements which recur in highlighting the transformation involve the camera. Again also, just as the staircase and catwalk moment motifs are frequently linked, the remaining two visual tropes can also be found accompanying them. The first of these is a particular look of the camera, a pan up the body; the second is the use of slow-motion.
We have seen the particular look I am identifying as a recurrent visual trope of the transformation before, in both Grease and Moonstruck. In the former, it comes in the scene where the made-over Sandy strides through the crowd to meet the astonished gaze of the T-Bird boys. As viewers, we watch the three boys react in turn to an amazing sight, before the next shot reproduces their viewpoint and shows us Sandy – starting at her red peep-toe sandals and rising up her black satin legs to her leather-jacketed torso, newly curled hair, red lips and nails. Her whole transformed body – newly visible, in its tight clothing – is shown off in a single fluid motion of the camera which reproduces the feeling of a captivated bystander ‘giving her the once over’. This look is again used to confirm the successful transformation of Loretta in Moonstruck: although the audience has seen Loretta accumulate the various portions of her outfit for her opera date, and witnessed her visit to the beauty salon, it has not seen the complete effect these new garments and styling produce before she turns up to meet Ronny at the opera. As she emerges from a taxi, however, the camera gives her that swift upward sweeping glance, beginning with her scarlet high-heeled shoe and carrying on up her body in appreciation.
The shot which showcases the body of the woman is obviously not restricted to the filmed transformation, but is very common.5 One notable occurrence is when it acts to introduce the character of femme fatale Cora (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); in a series of 13 shots, the camera reproduces the ocular interactions of the pair who will go on to become lovers and murderers. Firstly the camera gives the audience the look of the central male character, Frank (John Garfield) as he notices first a lipstick roll near his feet, and then the lipstick’s owner, as she asks him to return the item. The camera sweeps up Cora’s body, revealing as it reaches them in turns her shoes, ankles and legs up to the knee. However, it is very noticeable that in the first shot of Cora, which seems to link to the transformation swooping look, the shot stops at her shapely knees and then cuts to Frank’s reaction. Unlike the swooping camera pan, which shows the woman in her metamorphosed state in her entirety, coherent and total, here the film is edited to cut her up into different sections. After the reaction shot of Frank gasping at Cora’s appearance before him, we return to look at her again but do not continue the progress up her body but now see her full-figure framed in a doorway. A few shots later there is a tight close-up of her face. The Postman sequence does not follow the pattern of the filmic transformation in making the materialisation of the metamorphosed character the central focus of the shot through its attention to all details in one coherent sweep, but allows the camera to dwell in fetishistic pleasure on parts of Cora’s body, cut up and dislocated from each other in the filmic space. The transformation’s swooping look, by contrast, allows for the presentation of the unified body, in order to reveal the full extent of the alterations in one coherent exposure and attesting the woman’s new sense of wholeness, in having an exterior which finally matches her interior true self.
This partial, cut up, treatment of the woman’s body, as shown in The Postman…can be contrasted with the usage of the swooping camera pan in Now Voyager.6 Charlotte pauses on the stairs before the first meeting with Dr Jacquith, on hearing her mother talk about her. At this point in the film, the camera shows us her descending legs, up to the calf, but does not follow the swoop up to the rest of her body; this hiatus underlines the fact that, at this point, Charlotte is unhappy. The interruption of the shot’s completion illustrates her misery. When she comes down the ship’s gangplank, in the sequence which visually rhymes with the first one, again the camera focuses on her legs as she pauses at the top of the gangplank but this time completes the sweep up her whole body. Now this sense of freedom, of completion, corresponds with the progress Charlotte has made psychologically: her unblocking emotionally is echoed by the unblocking of the camera’s unfettered sweep.
Hairspray and the Catwalk moment
Thoroughly Modern Millie also uses ‘the look’, and again makes its appearance, signalling approval and achievement of the successful transformation, chime with an earlier look of dismay. Millie compares her Edwardian outfit to the up-to-the-minute flapper garb of the other women passing her on the busy New York street. The camera follows and then reproduces her gaze as her head tilts to look down at her own body and outfit. This downward swoop marks her realisation that her costume does not fit with contemporary fashions. Striding determinedly into the convenient Jazz Rags Dress Shoppe, she emerges through a time-eliding edit seconds later clad in the latest mode. Now the camera, placed outside the shop doorway, starts at her fashionable pointed shoes and moves up her body to her smiling face, employing that fluid sweep that signals the triumphant transformation. The upward motion of the camera answers the previous downward look, but while the former connoted disappointment, awareness of not fitting in, this upward swoop affirms Millie’s successful application of money to the problem, her triumphant consumerism elevating her to the ranks of stylish women around her – until she realises the next new thing she needs to buy. We can note too that the initial downward look of disappointment is presented as Millie’s own point of view, while the answering upward glance of approval, by contrast, seems to come from outside her, illustrating how the ideal consumer perceives a purchasing success as others’ looks of approbation.
Similarly, Hello, Dolly! uses the same sinuous camera pan to move up the grand staircase and Dolly Levi’s body simultaneously, the look reproducing the ardent gaze of the admiring body of men waiting at the bottom of the staircase. In many of these instances of the transformation being confirmed by ‘the look’, the camera movement evokes the toe-to-top assessing of the woman’s body by a male viewer. At the end of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, however, the look floats free of male agency; here the now-familiar pan up the woman’s body is integrated more elegantly into the scene since it seems to answer a preceding movement over the body of a man. The camera’s viewpoint roams down the damaged body of Jeff (James Stewart), revealing he now has two broken legs, before swooping up the body of Lisa (Grace Kelly), now clad not in haute couture as was her custom but ready for action in loafers and jeans, topped with a practical shirt. The camera’s caressing progress up Lisa’s body reveals its coverings transformed but, the film slyly assures us, this does not confirm that the woman inside is internally altered, since her preferred reading matter is still Harper’s Bazaar rather than a travel book.
In two other film transformations where we find this look, unusually replicating a female point of view, the technique is used not to affirm the successful metamorphosis but to signal its need. In Clueless, Tai’s first appearance at Cher’s high school introduces her to her female classmates during tennis lessons. Clad in her grungy slacker garb, Tai is subject to the critical looks of her peers: here the sweeping pan of the camera implies not the alteration but its necessity. As Amber, a bitchy classmate, compares Tai to a farmer in her checked shirt and baggy brown trousers, we see Cher looking at the newcomer and the next shot, giving the camera’s slow scrutiny of her clothes as it travels in its smooth arc up from her feet to face replicates Cher’s sympathetic appraisal of the girl: ‘She is so adorably clueless!’ Cher’s gaze, which the camera pan conveys here, delivers her evaluation of Tai’s need for metamorphosis if she is to blend in with the other students, and motivates the next scene, where the change is accomplished.
In a similar fashion, the camera’s feet-to-head appraisal of another woman in The Major and the Minor indicates the occasion for, rather than the completion of, the transformation: despairing of travelling without sufficient money to pay for her fare, Susan Applegate sees a young girl being bought a half-price ticket. Camera and performance together suggest the dawning of her idea: as Susan walks away from the ticket counter her body moves but her head remains riveted in the direction of the girl; the reverse shot, when it comes, implies Susan’s own gaze at the child and travels up her body from her flat shoes, bare legs, short skirt and plaits. Another reverse shot to Susan’s face shows her eyes flicker to the right as if getting the idea for the imposture. Here the sweep up the body shot is detached from the approval element that often accompanies it: Susan is not looking the girl ‘up and down’ in a prurient way but an appraising one, pondering if she could resemble her given the right clothes. Her look is more akin to Millie’s at the other fashionable women on the streets of New York, comparing herself to another and calculating her own deficiencies, rather than the salacious stare at an attractive woman by men which the look in Grease imitates.
The final visual trope to consider is rarer than the other three but nonetheless often occurs to mark off the moment of revelation; this is the use of slow-motion camerawork. Although known in silent cinema, slow-mo has been more regularly used since the late 1960s; Stephen Farber, in a 1969 review of The Wild Bunch, notes its use of ‘very contemporary tricks of film-making’, including slow-motion (2). The use of slow-motion, often in descending the stairs, is found already feeling like a quotation in She’s Out of Control (1989), a decade before She’s All That and its close parody, Not Another Teen Movie; the scenes where the transformation of Laney/Janey from grungy bespectacled artist to glamorous babe are unveiled occurs using all the above-mentioned visual motifs, stairs, catwalk moment and camera-pan ‘look’, as well as a dreamily romantic tune, ‘Kiss Me’, on the soundtrack in both instances. The young woman descends down the staircase, halts for her catwalk moment to receive the adulation of her assembled males, then proceeds in slow-mo as ‘the look’ pans up her body. The film-makers responsible for the spoof movie evidently thought these motifs regular enough both to copy and to comment on; while descending, Janey is told by the makeover-designing sister, ‘Congratulations, you just got your first slow-motion entrance’.
Miss Congeniality similarly stages its revelation of the transformation of policewoman Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock): after being worked on all night by beauty professionals, she emerges to greet the disbelieving eyes of her fellow officers both in slow-motion and to the triumphant strutting sounds of ‘Mustang Sally’. Here the catwalk moment and the use of slow-motion mingle, as the latter serves to highlight the former, stretching out the scene of Gracie’s embodiment of goddess status.
Another use of slow-motion to mark the significance of the transformation occurs in the horror film Carrie (1976), when the outcast teenager (Sissy Spacek) suddenly seems, Cinderella-like, to have had her dreams come true. Previously the film has shown Carrie wearing seemingly hand-me-down outfits, oversize skirts and shirts that reinforce the shy little girl persona she presents to the world. Having made herself a sleek pale pink satin gown, however, Carrie’s fortunes seem to change: arriving at the prom, she finally receives all the things previously denied her: a handsome prince, a beautiful dress, the approbation of her schoolmates and, to top it all, the award of Prom Queen. As she goes up to the dais to collect her crown, the film employs slow-motion as a way of conveying Carrie’s feelings; having never had friends before, and now being acclaimed her schoolmates’ queen, makes her feel as if she is living in a fantasy, a state of unreality which the slow-mo aptly conveys. When her dream becomes a nightmare, however, as she realises she has been tricked into standing on the stage directly under a bucket of blood, the slow-motion itself transforms from aptly conveying the sense of fairy-tale happiness Carrie had felt to being the appropriate visual medium to connote the horror and eeriness of her unleashed telekinetic powers.
In all four instances of its usage examined here, the slow-motion footage is used to communicate to the viewer the feelings of the transformed woman, her excitement and amazement at her own alteration and her acknowledgement of the approving looks of those around her.
This section has set out to show that both the stories about transformations, and the ways of staging and presenting these stories, frequently recur within Hollywood cinema, and to suggest some of the reasons why this might be so. The recurrences stretch from the macro – the Galatea, Cinderella and self-determining female storylines, predicated on whose agency advances the change – to the very micro – the constant repetition of the motif of shaggy eyebrows needing grooming7 – taking in the repeated thematic and visual tropes and elements explored above. It is now time to move on and see these various motifs and themes in action, explored in detail in films which have been set in their precise historical contexts.