FIRST, LET US not confuse the pin-up girl with the pornographic or erotic imagery that dates from the dark backward and abysm of time. The pin-up girl is a specific erotic phenomenon, both as to form and function.
A wartime product created for the benefit of the American soldiers swarming to a long exile at the four corners of the world, the pin-up girl soon became an industrial product, subject to well-fixed norms and as stable in quality as peanut butter or chewing gum. Rapidly perfected, like the jeep, among those things specifically stipulated for modern American military sociology, she is a perfectly harmonized product of given racial, geographic, social, and religious influences.
Physically, this American Venus is a tall, vigorous girl whose long, streamlined body splendidly represents a tall race. Different from the Greek ideal, with its shorter legs and torso, she thus differs distinctly from European Venuses. With her narrow hips, the pin-up girl does not evoke motherhood. Instead, let us note particularly the firm opulence of her bosom. American eroticism—and hence cinematic eroticism—seems to have moved in recent years from the leg to the breast.
The parading of Marlene Dietrich and of her legs, with their almost mathematically perfect contours, the success of Rita Hayworth, the success (this time de scandale) in Howard Hughes’ film The Outlaw of Jane Russell, whose twin hemispheres were inflated by an airborne publicity campaign to the size of clouds, are an indication of this sweeping displacement in the geography of sex appeal—or rather, since the term is already out of date, in “man appeal.” The vanguard of feminine attractiveness stands today at the level of the heart. I offer as proof reports which reach us from Hollywood, and the suit that Paulette Goddard has brought against a journalist who dared to suggest that she wore falsies.
An adequate physique, a young and vigorous body, provokingly firm breasts still do not define the pin-up girl for us. She must also conceal that bosom, which we are not supposed to get a peep at. The clever kind of censorship which clothing can exercise is perhaps more essential than the most unmistakable anatomic affirmation.
The typical garment of the pin-up girl is the two-piece bathing suit—which coincides with the limitations authorized socially by fashion and modesty in recent years. At the same time, however, an infinite variety of suggestive degrees of undress—never exceeding some rigorously defined limits—show off to advantage the charms of the pin-up girl while pretending to hide them. For my part, I am inclined to consider these niceties somewhat decadent: a contamination of the pure pin-up with traditional erotic imagery. At any rate, it is only too obvious that the veils in which the pin-up girl is draped serve a dual purpose: they comply with the social censorship of a Protestant country which otherwise would not have allowed the pin-up girl to develop on an industrial and quasi-official scale; but at the same time make it possible to experiment with the censoring itself and use it as an additional form of sexual stimulus. The precise balance between the requirements of censorship and the maximum benefits one can derive from them without lapsing into an indecency too provocative for public opinion defines the existence of the pin-up girl, and clearly distinguishes her from the salaciously erotic or pornographic postcard.
The science of these forms of provocative undress has been developed to a nicety: today Rita Hayworth need only take off her gloves to draw admiring whistles from a hall full of Americans.
The multiplication and absurdity of today’s supporting decors in contrast to the childlike and unsophisticated simplicity of the first pin-ups, can be explained by the need felt by the artist or photographer to vary his presentation. There are several thousand ways to show a pretty girl in a bathing suit, but certainly not hundreds of thousands. But as we see it, this development is a disintegration of the ideal of the pin-up girl.
A wartime product, a weapon of war, with the coming of peace the pin-up has lost her essential raison d’être. In the process of its revival this wartime myth is being separated into its two components, eroticism and morality. On the one hand, the pin-up girl tends to revert to the category of sex imagery and all its hypocritical vestiary complications; on the other to post-mobilization domestic virtues. Furthermore, in the United States there are even contests for “pin-up mothers” and “pin-up babies.” And finally, the advertisers of tonic waters, chewing gum, and cigarettes are trying to convert the various salvageable surpluses for peacetime purposes.
In a general history of eroticism, and more specifically in a history of eroticism as it relates to the cinema, the pin-up girl embodies the sexual ideal of the future. In Brave New World Aldous Huxley tells us that when children are produced in test-tubes, relations between men and women, sterile henceforth, will have no other purpose than unrestricted pleasure. Huxley neatly sums up the ideal of beauty and female sexual attractiveness in an epithet that is at once tactile, muscular, and visual, the adjective “pneumatic.” Is not the pneumatic girl of Huxley the archetype, projected into the future, of the Varga girl? In a long-drawn-out, distant war of invasion, the feminine ideal necessarily represents imagination, sterility, play. The pin-up girl is the expression of this ideal, extended to the pure status and scope of a myth, in a society where Protestantism still maintains a vigilant censorship.
If I have had little to say of cinema up to this point, it is because the pin-up girl is not originally part of it. The pin-up was not born on the screen but on magazine covers, on the fold-outs of Esquire, on the cut-out pages of Yank. Subsequently the cinema adopted this erotic mythology as its own, and soon the American star resembled the drawings of Varga.
The screen already had a solid tradition in this field. The women in clinging bathing suits who people the trick-shot skies of Georges Méliès derived, too, from a naïvely erotic imagery whose glory, at the turn of the century, was the princess of Caraman-Chimay. A little later, in America, Mack Sennett, that astute precursor in the field foresaw clearly the popularity of the bathing suit, but the performances of his bathing beauties as a group, rather like those of the music hall, gave no hint as yet of the higly individual future of the pin-up girl and the star. Thus the cinema from its beginning was predisposed to the use of the pin-up, and reciprocally to reinforce the feminine ideal she represents in the imagination and taste of the public.
I do not value this kind of cinematic eroticism very highly. Produced by special historical circumstances, the feminine ideal reflected in the pin-up girl is in the last analysis (despite its apparent anatomical vigor) extremely artificial, ambiguous, and shallow. Sprung from the accidental sociological situation of the war, it is nothing more than chewing gum for the imagination. Manufactured on the assembly line, standardized by Varga, sterilized by censorship, the pin-up girl certainly represents a qualitative regression in cinematic eroticism. Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, Dietrich in The Blue Angel, Garbo, now Ingrid Bergman—are after all quite different from Rita Hayworth!
In 1931 the stars were living on grapefruit and hiding their bosoms. At the same time, the tidal wave of the Hays office censorship was breaking over Hollwood. The danger, though seeming to come from the opposite direction, was at bottom the same: phoniness. Cinematic eroticism wasted away in artifice and hypocrisy. Then came Mae West. The Mae West of the future will doubtless not have the generous curves of a Fifi Peachskin. But neither will she have to react against the same artificialities and shams; shocking or chaste, shy or provocative, all the American cinema needs from her is more authenticity.