GUEST BLOGGER: Why I Will Never Think Pink

This post is by a suspiciously similarly-named author, Samantha Lockhart, 2010 graduate of the College of William and Mary, environmental activist and organizer and former member of my household.  Following are her thoughts on a childhood favorite, the Fred Astaire - Audrey Hepburn musical  Funny Face (1957).

Contrasting career choices in Funny Face

FUNNY FACE

It is a special experience to rewatch a film that was a favorite as a child, but which you have rarely seen since.  It brings this feeling of comfortable familiarity – like you both know and don’t know what’s about to happen next.  Like having a recurring dream or watching a new M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Often, it means noticing things that you did not see as a child either because your innocence shielded you from it, or simply because you could not have gotten the reference without the social vocabulary that only a liberal arts education can provide.  But for me, and others like me, who grew up watching movies all the time; for those that were raised in part by film and whose life was chronicled in large part by the movies that populated each phase – rewatching these formative movies means so much more.  It’s like finding the pieces of the puzzle that make you who you are today.  Suddenly, you make sense to yourself in some small but important manner.  Like tracing your heritage and discovering your ancestral routes, it is an exercise which can help to show a clearer roadmap that has somehow helped determine fundamental things about the course of your life, your ambitions and your dreams.

Some of this has always been obvious to me, because the watching coincided so closely with my own consciousness of growing-up and self-discovery.  I always knew that The West Wing was a huge part of why I was interested in politics.  That was never a mystery that needed solving, that puzzle piece always fit for me squarely on Wednesday evenings at 9pm on NBC from ages 11 to 17.  But the stuff I watched when I was far too young to notice its impact or to remember it – rewatching those films can be incredibly revealing.  Sometimes it’s in small ways, like realizing that the reason that every time I have only one high heel on, I have the urge to say “Look! I was born on the side of a hill” has something to do with Bringing Up Baby or that every time I wish I was invisible I still shimmy goofily with my arms up because of Time of Their Lives.  But sometimes, the marks that these films leave can reveal themselves to be oddly profound.

Funny Face was one of my favorite movies as a kid, before Fred Astaire’s complete lack of sex appeal bothered to detract from the romance of it.  I remembered most vividly how stunningly beautiful the film is, filled with soft lighting contrasted with sharp, vivid colors that frame Audrey’s stunning face – the true star of the film, but somehow I had forgotten almost everything else. Yet as I watched it, somehow I found myself knowing every word.  One of the tests out there of whether a film has a feminist edge is whether two women ever have a conversation about something other than a man.  Well, Funny Face opens with a scene from a powerful, smart, sophisticated female editor of a major magazine talking to her staff of smart women. True, they’re talking about the color pink, but somehow it doesn’t matter.

Pink=ORDINARY

And the opening number "Think Pink" ends with an hilarious and somewhat empowering moment in which someone asks the fashion editor, Maggie, why she is the only one not in pink, to which she replies “I wouldn’t be caught dead” and walks away in a chic gray suit.  What I love about this is that Maggie is admitting that she is a marketing genius who has manipulated women across the country to like whatever she tells them to like. Right off the bat, this character means more to me than I ever recognized at the time.  Her success is not tied to a man, she is decisive, smart, elegant, sophisticated, wise – and she refuses to wear pink.  I have obstinately refused to wear pink since the age of 4.  I have always associated it with profound mediocrity.  I am obsessed with black and grey. Maggie is extraordinary, and she would not be caught dead.

Modeling=DUMB.

Jo – a boy’s shortening of what is assumed to be a longer girl’s name (Joanne? Josephine?), much like mine – Sam - is smart and never thinks of herself as being beautiful.  She finds fashion and modeling trivial and stupid.  I was a very cute kid.  I was more than cute – I was a stunning little girl.  I’m not saying that to be obnoxious, it’s just true.  I don’t think I measure up now nearly as well.  At the age of four of five, however, I could barely go anywhere without someone asking my parents if I was interested in modeling to which I replied a vehement “NO.”  My mother was confused.  She had been a dancer and actress and occasional model, had no moral objection to the venture that she could have passed onto her young daughter.  My parents were in financial straits and a little modeling money probably would not have hurt, but no one was going to make me do anything I didn’t’ want to do and I did NOT want to model. I perceived modeling as being trivial and stupid.  Of course, I believe that I was too young to appreciate the emotional transformation that Jo undergoes, feeling by the end of the film that modeling could be art, could be glamorous, could help her find the man she loves and could get her a ticket to fulfill her philosophic dreams.  HOWEVER, I do think that I picked up on some other things about Jo.

Sticking to your guns

For one thing – Jo has very strong principles that center around this concept of empathy.  She works in a bookstore in Greenwich Village and worships a philosopher in France.  Though she finds herself falling in love with drama and glamour of the fashion world through Dick, she does not lose herself to it.  Dick believes that once she has fallen in love with him, it means he “has” her.  She has entered his world and left her own.  She does not see it this way and gets angry with him, essentially ending the relationship by saying that they are “too fundamentally different” to be together.  She talks a lot about the importance of her principles which Dick seems to make fun of.  She is willing to give up on her budding relationship before she would give up on what she believes in.  I think this lesson hit home with me and has given me solid footing on the otherwise rocky terrain of love. 

Don’t Rescue Me

Dick’s condescending insistence that he knows better serves only to anger Jo.  Rather than let him fight her battles, she fights her own.  From getting the last word (or dance) in the café following Dick’s attempts to embarrass her to hitting Professor Flostre over the head with a statue – she can take care of herself. I’ve always been a fan of fighting my own battles, paying my own way, and living my own life and was known to yell at Gaston during Beauty and the Beast “When a lady says NO, she meeeaaans NO!”  And while studying abroad in India during college, threatened and shouted obscenities at the Indian men who made lude assumptions about Western Women.

Ya gotta be happy.

But the final and perhaps most important lesson from Funny Face  is “On how to be lovely, you gotta be happy.”  This marks the second time in the film in which women interact together in a burst of YaYa level female empowerment!  Maggie, the magazine editor, teaches Jo how to talk to the press about herself and provides a significant lesson.  In order to be beautiful, like Audrey Hepburn, you have to be joyful.  I have finally learned that my overwhelmingly positive and unflinchingly optimistic disposition can all be traced back to a profound and fundamental vanity. 

But…really?

Of course – I see in this film what I believe I saw then at age four or five.  I am following the interpretation that seems most familiar to me, like finding your way home when lost based on sheer instinct.  Were I to watch this film with completely fresh eyes, I may also point out that Dick is incredibly condescending about Jo’s philosophy and even says of Flostre “he has as much interest in your intelligence as I have” indicating, of course, very little.  Yet Jo, this incredibly beautiful, young, brilliant, principled, woman still ends up with Dick – the condescending photographer with no interest in her intelligence.  I could note that while Maggie is a successful female figure, she also appears to be unmarried and after all, is successful in the field of “fashion” – one typically assigned to women anyway.  I could choose to highlight that Professor Flostre does turn out to be a fraud and only after Jo for romantic reasons, as if to indicate that Dick was right all along and all Jo needed was a good man to show her the way. 

So perhaps it is a chicken and egg situation – maybe I was always a strong and principled girl and the parts of this film that spoke to that in me were the ones that I chose to listen to. But whether it was me looking for a story and  female figures to help more sharply define characteristics I already had or it was me building myself from scratch from the lessons taught by these films, it hardly seems to matter.  Either way, I hate pink.

Neutered

Janet McTeer trying to convince Glenn Close to quit trying.

There is almost nothing to be said about such an inert piece of pandering Oscar-bait like Albert Nobbs (2011).  I can see the development meeting:  "We don't need a story or characters!  Glenn Close is dressed as a guy!  She's old now, so she's not pretty any more, and she's guaranteed to get an Oscar nomination!  We'll shove it out during award season and nobody realize it's completely empty and dull!"

This is a clear demonstration that a famous actor need only stutter, put on a clubfoot or dress as the opposite gender to get an Oscar nomination.  Why do I say that?  Because Close made the mistake of putting herself side-by-side with a lesser-known actor, Janet McTeer, who is also in male drag and mops the floor with Close.  Close's concept of a woman acting like a man is to hold very, very still so as not to wiggle anything.  McTeer adopts a bold swagger and mashes Close's amateurish work into the dirt.

And to be clear, Ms. McTeer is a very attractive woman.  She just hasn't been a lazy, self-congratulating Hollywood actor for 30 years, so she hasn't learned how to put on a complicated make-up or add some lines to a screenplay or take a title as executive producer so she can pretend she's really acting.  McTeer just shows up, does her work and kicks Glenn Close's butt.  Rent the movie if you must, but fast forward to McTeer and skip the rest, unless you have persistent insomnia.

Don't grow accustomed to your face...

"...I said I'd make a woman and indeed I did," sings Henry Higgins in a reprise of "You Did It" (cutting off the song "Without You") late in the second act of My Fair Lady.  In that context, it was just an obnoxious solipsistic way of dismissing a woman's claim of self-sufficiency, by merely claiming that he had always wanted the woman to be assertive and independent, while in fact he could not tolerate anyone of any gender not bowing to his whim.

In short, it was meant to be funny and it was.

It's not funny and not meant to be in The Skin I Live In (2011) the creepiest and most perverse variation of the Pygmalion myth I've experienced (leaving aside straight-out horror movies, which are usually intentionally risible).  To use a phrase I loath, "SPOILER ALERT."  (I don't bother with this idea because (a) the concept of this blog is to have a conversation with the reader about films, not to review them, and respecting the distributor's marketing plans is not part of the agenda here; and (b) because the idea that the main interest in the narrative is the surprise in being caught up with the twists and turns is a 20th and 21st century perversion of the ancient art of storytelling, which consisted in keeping the listener rapt EVEN THOUGH the listener knew the story, knew all the stories, and wanted to see what you do with it.)

(Continuing this exegesis -- theatergoers do not want Hamlet to come out all different and surprising, and do not want their Mozart piano concertos to have trick endings.  These sorts of demands for endless novelty are, I maintain, MARKETING considerations, NOT artistic ones.  And there is research to show that people enjoy stories better when they already know the ending.  More of this in my next post.)

Luckily, Almodovar understands at the deeper level what he's doing.  The story, which is appalling as any Greek myth, tells of a man who mourns his dead wife by converting his hysterical and suicidal daughter's rapist into a fireproof replica of her.  Take that, Medea!  Represent, Oedipus!  Clearly this is not meant to be accepted as events that could have actually happened at any real time in any real place.  Almodovar signals this with the make-believe production design -- all solid colors, mostly primary, surfaces unblemished, a kitchen with no mark of ever having been used, a lecture hall that looks like it was completed minutes before shooting.  There are no signs or indicators of real life here, of the quotidian details of existence.  This is the stuff of myth, which is the only way Almodovar could get away with it (if only he did).

Two other observations and I think I'm done.  One is that the entire first half hour and the double meaning of the title are virtually a red-herring.  Much footage is devoted to the perfection of flame-proof skin, presumably as a reaction to the protagonist's wife's terrible death in a flaming car accident.  But that ultimately is of no consequence.  That gun that Almodovar puts in the drawer in the first act is never taken out again.  The experimental subject never encounters potential injury by fire, fire is no part of the plot.  Frankly, the details of gender-reassignment are of far more significance.  And when Banderas's boss tells him to stop this line of experimentation, he does, without complaint and without secretly carrying on, like any decent self-respecting mad scientist.

Yes, the title is there because of what the characters do, the guilt they bear, the burdens they carry, all the questions of identity that such a title raises.  But the double meaning it reaches for is by way of a cheat, of a plot situation that is simply grafted onto the story.  That really should have been re-thought.

Finally, I have no idea what Banderas is doing in this movie, other than that he has a history with Almodovar, they helped build each other's careers and there must be a sense of mutual obligation.  Because he is clearly miscast.  What Banderas does is contained fury.  That's his brand.  The script calls for contained madness, a note not within Banderas's range.  There is never a thing to suggest to irrational, or even really the dangerous quality of this character.  In an effort to contain the insanity of the story, Banderas exhibits a calm impassivity which registers as indifference, especially when he casually abandons the experimentation that is supposed to be the premise of the film.  Banderas's face does not yet have the visual complexity to convey two thoughts at once (compared to, for instance, an Anthony Hopkins or a Kevin Spacey), so for most of the film he seems to be merely obeying the script's dictates, without any conviction that there's anything to them.

Almodovar has always wanted to marry insightful drama with scenes of revulsion and horror, but backed to the wall on this film, he seems to have settled for the latter.  Pity the better film lying just under the skin of this one.

Broken

I have been interested in live theater almost as long as film and have more hands-on experience in the former when one includes non-professional and semi-professional activity. And because of my interest in both media, and because it is often impossible to see plays live in the theater for years at a time, I have always had a special curiosity about film adaptations of theater pieces.

One of the principal differences between the media is the use of dialogue. For film, dialogue is one of the possible modes of expression, but it is only one and it is always subservient to image, and often in an inferior position to other elements of the soundtrack, such as music and effects. Great movie dialogue is often elliptical, enigmatic, riddled with subtext. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." "If you build it, he will come." "Go ahead, make my day." "We rob banks." No poetry here, except the poetry of understatement, fused with story and character.

Whereas in the theater, dialogue is the principal means of expression. Characters tell us what they're thinking, what they're feeling, what they're going to do, what they just did, what happened offstage. None of this is necessary or even desirable in film. And in theater, they often make beautiful music with their speech--I don't need to quotes, open Shakespeare to any page.

This makes translation from stage to screen so tricky, because the dialogue may be the very seat of the play's value, but could prevent it from being effective onscreen. There are successful talky movies--Network, The Maltese Falcon, My Dinner With Andre, gabfests all. But that talk has been designed for film, designed to work in concert with all the other elements, and it knows that dialogue in film has two audiences--onscreen character and film viewer. And somehow, it takes less time to grasp the ideas when the camera can show us those eyes, those lips, those brows that are issuing that speech. It's almost like that thing where you can't understand what someone is saying until you put your glasses on.

I missed Bent (1997) on stage, and to be honest, the subject has little fascination for me. I'm sure one can argue that homosexuals were treated worse than Jews, but death does not seem to me to be a matter of relativity. The film has some interest because it represents Clive Owen in an early leading role, two years before his breakout film, Croupier. The first half hour of the film eschews the play's politics and seems determined to upset or offend the non-gay audience with a great deal of simulated gay porn (in that definition I include a performance by Mick Jagger in drag). Finally, the film settles down to what it's going to be about, and 45 minutes in, commences the relationship which is the centerpiece of the film.

So after a long patch of trying to be "cinematic" Bent settles down to be a straightforward dialogue-driven theater adaptation. In this mode it presents its one and only point of interest. The two principal characters are gay men imprisoned by the Nazis (one pretending to be Jewish). They are under constant surveillance and are not permitted to touch. Using words only, standing stock still, side by side, they have an extreme erotic encounter. This has several functions. It establishes the bond between them. It establishes the power of words. It makes for some discomfort among much of the non-gay audience; at the same time, most must recognize the common elements between homosexual and heterosexual encounters-- which both relieves and increases the discomfort. And despite the fact that the driving aspect of the encounter is verbal, the film medium reinforces it by maintaining a steady, still gaze, fixing the characters in the center of the frame and reinforcing the stillness around them.

After all, stillness in the theater is the default mode. A fixed frame, fixed set, often the words the only animating factor. But such a circumstance is special, heightened, in film. Stillness demands special attention on screen. So for a moment, theater and film themselves touch hands and work together.

Then it falls apart. Because, presumably following the lead of the play, in a subsequent scene the verbal sexual encounter is repeated. And where it might have had a cumulative effect in the theater, because we are in the world of words and more words is more meaning, it is simply redundant in film. Because the action, not the word, is the key in film, and we have seen and registered this action. It means nothing to repeat it, even if the actual words are different this time than last. And from there on, the film grinds to its stagy conclusion in highly formal, artificial compositions which only heighten the writer's and director's failure to bridge, or even acknowledge the gap between stage and screen.

Dizzy

What new thing can be said about Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)? If it is not Hitchcock's best film, it is certainly his most written-about and commented upon film. I am sure that is engendered by both its strangeness and its apparently personal nature. Surely something meant to be a mere entertainment would not need to be this twisted and perverse. The viewer feels that Hitchcock must be trying to tell us something, whether he means to or not.

I will confine myself to a couple of observations and random thoughts that this latest viewing in Film Studies inspired. First, having seen Rope just this past fall, I noted what seems to have been an aesthetic doodle, an unfulfilled impulse in that film, his first in color. There is a use of color reflected from neon signs outside the apartment which is the entire mise-en-scene of the film. It suggests the intrusion of the outside world and the garishness of the color suggests an air of sickness which has pervaded the principal characters. But it never really pays off--it feels like a flourish.

Whereas in Vertigo, the conversion of Judy into Madeleine is consistently signaled by the reflection of the green neon outside of Judy's hotel window. Coupled with a strange white light, when Madeleine finally reappears, she seems to have emerged from the world of the dead. I wonder if Hitchcock would have arrived at that idea without the half-experiment in Rope.

My other thought is literally perverse. The air is full of remakes of Hitchcock films and reworking of his ideas. Nearly all of Brian DePalma's career is based on reworking of Hitchcock. DePalma even literally reworked Vertigo as Obsession, also featuring a Bernard Herrmann score. This is just silly. Why say what's already been said?

My concept is to layer ideas of gender identity onto Vertigo. A man falls in love with a woman who dies before his eyes. Then he meets a transvestite, who we learn (but he does not) IS the woman he fell in love with. When the man learns his lover is a man, he pressures him to get transgender surgery. Of course it's weird, but it preserves Hitchcock's central conceit, that the person you fall in love with may just be a person in your own head. Maybe I can sell it to HBO. Whaddaya think?