Go West, Young Women! - Hilary Hallett

Скачать книгу

as non-Anglos and foreigners linked the vamp to the femme fatale type so prevalent in fin de siècle European culture. “Grab everything you want and never feel sorry for anyone but yourself,” was how one vamp, played by Louise Glaum in Sex (1920), summed up their general philosophy.149 Like the femme fatale, the vamp was an amoral predator who used her sexual power to triumph over weak-willed men. Many films about vamps featured their destruction of a man who exercised the day’s sexual double standard, which permitted men’s libertinism with less respectable women. The vamp emerges unscathed after cynically using that double standard to get what she wants. Her forgettable leading men, who represent generic stand-ins for a sort of everyman elite, are left wrecked on the shoals of her sexual power.150 Actress Theda Bara—initially described as half French, half Arab—became synonymous with the type after the release of A Fool There Was (1915).151 Olga Petrova, whose vamps were nearly as well known as Bara’s, was exclusively promoted as “a European star.” “Madame Petrova is truly an international character,” her press assured fans in 1917, “having been born in Warsaw, educated in Paris, London, and Brussels.”152 Fashioned as dark exotics, Bara, Glaum, and Petrova’s location outside the American racial mainstream supported their more sexually graphic representations, suggesting why they openly endorsed not just woman suffrage but also feminism, a new concept associated with women’s interest in sexual freedom. A widely publicized statement by Bara called her destruction of men a long overdue vengeance for her sex. “Women are my greatest fans. I am in effect a feministe,” she declared.153

      The vamp and the serial queen’s shared expression of sexual virility and physical prowess placed their stars on the most volatile boundary that actresses performed in their redefinition of the public woman. A playful story entitled “Lady Gunman” savored explaining the connection created by their taste for masculine conquest. In real life, both vamp Louise Glaum and serial queen Mary Fuller could “handle a six-gun with all the sincerity of Douglas Fairbanks himself,” readers were assured. Ellis Oberholtzer, head of Pennsylvania’s powerful state film censorship board, objected to just such promotions. In a tract written to channel the growing dismay about the movies’ moral influence, Oberholtzer charged that vamps, “sex photoplays,” and serial-queen pictures provided the most damning evidence of the need for federal control. Oberholtzer decried how the typical serial depicted its heroine “in high air; in a sewer without an outlet; under straps on a log while the saw draws nearer and nearer.” “If I were to travel the country over I should not know where to find women who conceal revolvers in their blouses, or in the drawers of their dressing-tables” or a woman who grasps “an iron from the fire-set on the hearth or seizes the inevitable paper knife to slay the villain, her lover rising in time to take the blame for the crime.”154

      As movie production settled around Los Angeles after 1915, publicity promoted its new habitat as a western frontier that fostered this kind of fearless femininity. “Out in Culver City the girls are growing militant,” was how one fan magazine described the behavior of some dare-devil actresses in this new locale: “quick on the trigger, and not one of them is afraid of the smell of [gun]powder—they’re used to various kinds.”155 “The ‘feel’ of Hollywood at this time was like carnival, or the way one feels when the circus is coming to town, only the circus was always there,” Lenore Coffee recollected, echoing a sentiment shared by many who attempted to capture the ambience created when the flickers came to town.156 One early account tracked a reporter wandering around the “big, bustling Western” ranches-cum-studios in “Motion-Picture Land.” Here, “in the dazzling California sunshine” a “bewildering democracy” prevailed among players. Here, playacting and reality fused. “No part of the world” was free from the “invasion” of these players, whose work spilled into the cityscape so often that one looked about for a camera when anything happened “unexpectedly.”157

      Another article in Photoplay used the mythic history of the West to depict the sex-specific opportunities of this frontier circus by the sea. “The early years of the twentieth century brought to American women the same vast, almost fabulous chances that came to their grandfathers,” a writer interviewing Pearl White intoned.158 “What the expansion of the West and the great organization of industry opened up to many a young man,” the article continued, “the motion picture spread before such young girls as were alert enough, and husky enough, and apt enough to take advantage of it.” “With the exception of Mary Pickford, I can think of no girl who has reaped her field of chance so completely, opulently, securely, as Pearl White.” White’s good fortune derived from a spirit that made her a “female Alexander” bent on finding “new worlds to conquer.” But her achievement was also cast in the more modern terms associated with corporate success: Pearl White possessed “that which is really the quality of few men: the true financial instinct.” The actress-heroine of Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale (1921), an early novel about the movie colony, defends her little sister’s decision to run away and join her in Los Angeles in a manner straight out of the Pearl White mold. “All over the world was full of runaway girls striking out for freedom and for wealth and renown,” the heroine of the novel thinks.” “Let love wait! The men have kept us waiting for thousands of years, till they were ready. Now let them wait for us.”159

      CHAPTER 2

      Women-Made Women

      Writing the “Movies” before Hollywood

      We built the modern movie industry on the star system, but the public made the stars

      —Adolph Zukor

      Prominent stories about Mary Pickford and Pearl White in magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Photoplay augured the rise of the type of journalism that the star system shaped and spread: celebrity reporting as mainstream news. Advertising “movie” personalities—the nickname that stuck despite many insiders’ preference for the higher-toned “photoplay” and “motion picture”—quickly became essential to the industry’s profits. Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zukor won the gamble that audiences would pay more to get closer to favorites, teaching a lesson that became an early axiom of movie production: stars best forecast box office success. Thus, women’s preeminence in the movies’ celebrity culture emerged from the shared assumption that women mostly decided which of the era’s exploding number of consumer goods succeeded. The idea positioned the female consumer at the center of the struggle between an established ethos of production that prized the industriousness necessary to produce a mountain of things and an emerging ethos of consumption that celebrated the abandon needed to buy them (possibly even on credit!). As many have shown, the nation’s budding advertising industries often addressed this consumer as a paranoid, passive, irrational conformist who needed the guidance of advertising elites to navigate this new landscape of desire.1

      But the movies more often addressed women as experts who understood their importance as figures who acted as the arbiters of what counted as successful popular culture in modern times. “Three out of every four of all cinema audiences are women. I suppose all successful novels and plays are also designed to please the female sex too,” instructed film curator Iris Barry in The Public’s pleasure (1925). The alarm prompted by this idea, after all, generated much of the mounting concern over the feminization of American culture that intellectuals like Hugo Munsterberg expressed. Yet if the task is to explain the broad power of the mass culture consumed by women, rather than to judge its moral implications or aesthetic properties, then what becomes apparent is how it acted as a market domain that tirelessly discussed the problems and promises of managing a new womanhood. Put differently, in becoming a consumer bloc considered to share core interests and desires, movie fans participated in “an intimate public,” in Lauren Berlant’s influential formulation. Mass-mediated stories about movie personalities addressed fans as holding a common worldview, thereby cultivating a sense that women writers, celebrities, and readers were sharing confidences about their common travails and triumphs. Participation in this fan culture offered lessons not just about how to choose the right things but also about how to help each other survive and thrive in the wider world. Calling herself “a woman’s woman” in one interview, Pickford noted in another: “I like to see my own sex achieve. My success has been due to the fact that women like the pictures in which I appear. I think I admire most

Скачать книгу