12
FEMININE FASCINATIONS
Forms of identification in star-audience relations
Jackie Stacey
THE LOST AUDIENCE
Throughout this book—as throughout most film studies—the
audience has been conspicuous by its absence. In talking of
manipulation …consumption…ideological work…subversion …
identification…reading…placing…and elsewhere, a concept of
audience is clearly crucial, and yet in every case I have had to
gesture towards this gap in our knowledge, and then proceed as if
this were merely a gap. But how to conceptualise the audience—
and the empirical adequacy of one’s conceptualisations—is
fundamental to every assumption one can make about how stars
and films work.1
My mother obtained a job at the State cinema when I was ten.
For me that meant a ticket to Paradise, and regularly I worshipped
at the shrine of the gods and goddesses. I couldn’t wait for the
moment to come when the velvet curtains would sweep apart, the
lights dim, and a shared intimacy would settle on the hushed
audience. (D.H.)
The first quotation is taken from the conclusion of Richard Dyer’s study on
stars, the second is written by a film fan remembering the pleasures offered
by Hollywood stars in the 1940s and 1950s. Since the publication of Stars in
1982 there has been little work to fill the gap referred to in Dyer’s
conclusion. It is particularly important for feminists to challenge the absence
of audiences from film studies, since it has reproduced an assumed passivity
on the part of women in the cinema audience. Wanting to find out about
female audiences and their relationship to stars, I advertised in two of the
leading women’s weekly magazines for readers to write to me about their
favourite Hollywood star of the forties and the fifties. These decades
interested me since much feminist work on Hollywood has looked at the films
of this period, which was, as well, a time of changing definitions of
femininity in Hollywood and in society generally.
The enthusiastic response of over 300 letters, including some from Canada,
the United States and Australia, testifies to the continuing significance of
Hollywood stars in women’s lives and imaginations. Many letters were
several pages long and offered detailed recollections of particular favourite
stars, as well as of the cinema generally during this period. Respondents
included photos, scrapbooks and original newspaper cuttings about their
favourite stars, as well as detailing their appeal in their own words. The
letters covered a broad range of topics including how much the cinema, and
stars in particular, meant in women’s lives; the role of the cinema in wartime
Britain; why women stopped being fans of stars; and the particular pleasures
of the cinema experience in the context of the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter
looks firstly at the reasons for the continued absence of the audience from
film studies and then offers some preliminary findings from research in
progress into aspects of the relationship between female Hollywood stars and
women in the audience.
Within film studies generally, the study of stars has remained
predominantly textual. Although Dyer’s work challenges some of the
existing boundaries of film studies, by linking textual models of semiotic and
narrative analysis to a sociological approach to stars, very few studies have
succeeded in developing this project in relation to questions about cinema
audiences. Analyses of stars have continued to focus on the production of
particular significations within the film text, or within other aspects of the
cinema industry such as publicity, rather than on how audiences might read
them within particular cultural and historical contexts.2
There is surprisingly little feminist work on Hollywood stars, and even
less on their audiences. Attention to genre (especially melodrama, the
woman’s film and film noir), to narratives (especially those reproducing the
oedipal drama) and to forms of looking (especially voyeurism and fetishism)
have tended to dominate the feminist agendas of the 1980s. It is especially
puzzling that stars have remained a relatively undeveloped aspect of
Hollywood cinema within feminist work since female stars might seem an
obvious focus for the analysis of the construction of idealised femininities
within patriarchal culture. In the work which has emerged, feminist film
theorists have also tended to reproduce a textual analysis of stars. Despite their
very different theoretical positions, the two key perspectives within feminist
film theory, namely the ‘images of women’3 approach and the ‘woman as
image’4 approach, have also shared a common reliance on textual analysis,
ignoring the role of the audience in the cinema.
Molly Haskell, for example, discusses the female stars in Hollywood
cinema in terms of stereotypes which limit and control definitions of
146 STARS AND SOCIETY
femininity in a male dominated culture. She contrasts, for example, the
‘treacherous woman’, associated with stars such as Rita Hayworth in
Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai with the ‘superfemale’, such as Bette
Davis in Jezehel, who, ‘while exceedingly “feminine” and flirtatious, is too
ambitious and intelligent for the docile role society has decreed she play’,
and with the ‘superwoman’ who ‘instead of exploiting her femininity, adopts
male characteristics in order to enjoy male prerogatives, or simply to
survive’.5 This latter female type is exemplified by stars such as Katharine
Hepburn and Joan Crawford and is different again from the ‘sweet and
innocent’ type, associated with June Allyson, Olivia de Havilland and Judy
Garland: ‘For every hard-boiled dame there was a soft-boiled sweetheart…’6
Although Haskell’s analysis refers outside the film texts to feminine
stereotypes in society generally, and to a patriarchal culture in whose interest
they are perpetuated, Haskell’s discussion of the stars themselves is restricted
to the characters portrayed and their narrative treatment in the films.
The other approach to stars within feminist film criticism has been the
investigation of female stars as objects of the ‘male’ gaze. Laura Mulvey, for
example, analyses Sternberg’s use of Dietrich as the ‘ultimate fetish’ in her
well-known essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’:
The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she
is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body,
stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the
direct recipient of the spectator’s look.7
This fetishism of the female star within Hollywood cinema is one form of
scopophilia (or pleasure in looking) offered to the spectator, the other is the
voyeuristic pleasure in the objectification of the female star on the screen. To
illustrate this latter process, Mulvey discusses the heroines of Hitchcock’s
films who are constructed as passive objects of the sadistic controlling
voyeurism of the male protagonist, and, by extension, the spectator: ‘The
power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze
voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as object of both.’8
Little attention, then, has been paid to female stars in Hollywood by
feminist film theorists outside the ways in which the stars function within the
film text.9 There are, however, a few exceptions which have tried to bring
together textual analysis either with ethnographic investigation or with a
historical contextualisation of audiences. Helen Taylor’s recent book
Scarlett’s Women, for example, analyses audiences’ readings of Vivien Leigh
in Gone with the Wind.10 Jane Gaines has examined the different definitions
of femininity constructed in 1940s fan magazines through which female stars
could be read.11 Angela Partington, whilst maintaining the focus on genre,
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 147
offers a convincing analysis of the place of female stars in the production of
an ‘excess’ of femininity in melodrama in the 1950s, which can only be
understood in relation to other representations and consumer practices, not
solely in terms of its own textual operations.12 Finally, in Heavenly Bodies,
Richard Dyer offers a reading of Judy Garland’s star image through
discourses of gay male subculture. Based on responses to an advert, Richard
Dyer’s analysis demonstrates the importance of meanings produced outside
the film text to the readings audiences make of Hollywood stars. Indeed there
could not be better evidence to illustrate the argument against textual
determinism, since the readings made by these fans are so clearly based not
just outside the film text, or even the cinema, but outside mainstream culture
itself, and within a subculture which reverses and parodies dominant
meanings.13
Investigating audiences
Whilst these studies show that work on audiences is developing,14 there remain
several difficulties in this emerging area of work. One of the particular
difficulties with analysing audiences from past decades is that they are not
easily accessible. What then are the possible sources for their
investigation?15 First, box-office statistics can give us an indication of which
films, and perhaps which stars, were popular and when. Film magazines such
as Cinematograph Weekly, or Picturegoer, ran popularity polls on stars, and
these may also indicate in more detail which stars were favoured, when, and
for how long. Other surveys done at the time may indicate who went to
which films and why, such as the work at the Mass Observation Archive at
Sussex University,16 or the market research produced for commercial
reasons, or the sociological research on the ‘effects’ of films on audiences.
Sometimes this information is broken down according to class and gender
divisions, which enables conclusions to be drawn about which genres were
popular among specific audiences, for example.17 However, this information,
whilst it may give a broad indication of likes or dislikes, offers little insight
into the more qualitative dimensions of those preferences.
A richer source of information which offers more details on preferences
and audiences’ tastes has been what audiences wrote about stars at the time.
Letters pages in film magazines contain examples of audience opinion about
stars, as well as about other issues. Magazines’ and newspapers’ letters pages
typically include complaints, criticism, appreciation and likes and dislikes
letters. They are generally responding to an article or feature on a particular
star, film or director, or to controversial questions set up by the editor. The most
popular magazine of this kind in the 1940s and 1950s, Picturegoer, for
example, regularly featured provocative pieces such as ‘Charm not Curves’
148 STARS AND SOCIETY
by Vincent Keene, which questioned what constituted desirable femininity.18
The letters pages in the weeks following were full of differing and wide
ranging answers to this question. Letters from readers could be a useful
indicator of audiences’ preferences and responses to stars, bearing in mind
that the topics raised in the letters are shaped by the magazine as a whole and
its own editorial criteria. The mode of the magazine thus produces very
particular generic conventions through which the readers’ letters are
channelled.
In addition, the editorial decisions about which letters get published clearly
determine what kinds of opinions we can have access to now.19 Thus letters
pages in weekly magazines are interesting in terms of studying the magazine
and its role in framing Hollywood in Britain, but less useful in terms of
offering detailed sources on audiences.
Fan clubs offer another source of information about audiences in the 1940s
and 1950s, but these are often difficult to trace, and much of the fan mail
written at this time has been lost or destroyed. The fan clubs which
responded to my letters of enquiry said they no longer possessed such old fan
mail from Britain.
The final possibility for investigating audiences of the 1940s and 1950s is
to analyse people’s memories and recollections of the cinema at that time.
Yet, as is true of all the sources discussed so far, the rules of enquiry frame
the kind of information elicited. Answers to an advertisement asking for
recollections of favourite stars inevitably produce a particular set of
representations, which are clearly framed by a specific cultural context. First,
in my own case, the research concerns women’s memories of Hollywood
stars. The kinds of selections respondents make when remembering what
Hollywood stars meant in their lives are therefore mediated in a particular
way. Which stars are remembered and how they are remembered must
additionally be influenced by the cultural constructions of those stars since
that time. For example, audiences may remember stars differently depending
on whether the stars are still alive, and if not, how they died (e.g. Marilyn
Monroe); whether they still have a fan club (e.g. Deanna Durbin); whether
the star continued to have a successful career (e.g. Katharine Hepburn and
Bette Davis); whether their films have been shown frequently on television
and indeed whether the stars went on to have a television career (e.g. Barbara
Stanwyck).
In addition to these factors, memory introduces a particular kind of
selection process. What gets remembered and what gets forgotten may
depend not only on the star’s career since the time period specified, but also
upon the identity of the cinema spectator. Having asked women to write
about female stars, the kinds of representations offered will be informed by
issues such as self-image and self-perception, particularly in relation to
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 149
gender identity. The different constructions of femininity within Hollywood,
such as the power and rebelliousness of Bette Davis or the sexual
attractiveness of Marilyn Monroe, or the clean-livingness of Deanna Durbin
may have particular appeal in retrospect, and may have come to mean
something over the years which it did not in the 1940s and 1950s.20
It is this final approach to historical audiences that I am using in this
chapter. In particular I want to explore one of the recurring themes of the
letters which were sent to me by women in response to my advertisement: the
processes of identification at stake in the exchange between female stars and
the female spectator. I have chosen to focus on this aspect of the relationship
between stars and spectators not only because of its recurrence as a theme in
the letters, but also because of its theoretical centrality within feminist
criticisms of Hollywood cinema.
A QUESTION OF IDENTIFICATION
The term ‘identification’ has been central to many debates within
psychoanalytic theory and film studies. Within psychoanalytic theory,
‘identification’ has been seen as the key mechanism for the production of
identities. Freud analysed the unconscious mechanisms through which the
self is constituted in relation to external objects. In her paper ‘Identification
and the Star: A Refusal of Difference’, Anne Friedberg quotes Freud on
identification:
First, identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object;
secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal
object-tie, as it were by means of introjection of the object into the ego;
and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality
shared with some other person who is not an object of sexual instinct.
The more important this common quality is, the more successful may
this partial identification become, and it may thus represent the
beginning of a new tie.21
The role of vision in identification has always been part of the Freudian
formulation (the emphasis on the moment of the sight of sexual difference,
for example) but the ‘specular role of identification’ has taken centre stage in
Lacan’s theories of the mirror phase, through which subjects are ‘constituted
through a specular misrecognition of an other’.22
These models of identification employed within psychoanalysis to explore
the developments of unconscious identities have been seen by some film
theorists, such as Christian Metz,23 as analogous to the cinematic experience
of spectatorship. As Friedberg outlines:
150 STARS AND SOCIETY
Primary identification as Metz describes it (as distinct from Freud’s
‘original and emotional tie’) means a spectator who identifies with both
camera and projector, and like the child positioned in front of the
mirror, constructs an imaginary notion of wholeness, of a unified
body…. Secondary identification is with an actor, character or star …
any body becomes an opportunity for an identificatory investment, a
possible suit for the substitution/misrecognition of self.24
Psychoanalytic film theorists have thus developed a complex analysis of
cinematic identification, based on an analogy between the construction
of individual identities in infancy in relation to others, and the process of
watching a film on a screen. Whilst this may be an appealing analogy,
especially given the centrality of the specular in later psychoanalytic
accounts of the development of identity, the question remains as to the
validity of such a straightforward transposition: how similar are these
processes, and what is being left out of the account of spectatorship by
focusing so exclusively on its psychic dimensions? Such a framework offers
limited purchase on understanding cinematic identification, with no evidence
other than a conceptual analogy of the processes occurring in individual
psyches.
In film studies more generally, the term ‘identification’ has been widely
used to suggest a broader set of processes. Drawing on literary analysis,
identification has often been used rather loosely to mean sympathising or
engaging with a character. It has also been used in relation to the idea of
‘point of view’, watching and following the film from a character’s point of
view. This involves not only visual point of view, constructed by type of
shot, editing sequences and so on, but also narrative point of view, produced
through the sharing of knowledge, sympathy or moral values with the
protagonist. Identification has thus been used as a kind of common-sense
term within film and literary studies, referring to a very diverse set of
processes, and has yet to be adequately theorised in a manner which provides
a satisfactory alternative to the more reductive psychoanalytic models.
Interestingly, feminist writing on the subject of identification in relation to
gender identities has developed in two opposing directions. On the one hand,
the psychoanalytically informed film criticism following Laura Mulvey’s
original attack on the visual pleasure of narrative cinema is still marked by a
suspicion of any kind of feminine role model, heroine or image of
identification. Mulvey’s films (such as Amy!, 1980), as well as her influential
theoretical work, have advocated a rejection of the conventions of popular
representations, not simply for the images of femininity constructed, but also
for the processes of identification offered to the cinema spectator.
‘Identification’ itself has been seen as a cultural process complicit with the
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 151
reproduction of dominant culture by reinforcing patriarchal forms of identity.
Anne Freidberg sums up what feminists have seen as the problematic
functions of identification thus:
Identification can only be made through recognition, and all
recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of an existing form. The
institutional sanction of stars as ego ideals also operates to establish
normative figures. Identification enforces a collapse of the subject onto
the normative demand for sameness, which, under patriarchy, is always
male.25
On the other hand, some feminist cultural theorists have attempted to rescue
the process of identification from such criticism, and have instead drawn
attention to the empowerment through certain forms of identification within
the consumption of popular culture. Valerie Walkerdine, for example, offers
an analysis of the way the different members of a working-class family read
Rocky II, which demonstrates the shifting significance of the metaphor of
fighting in Rocky’s character.26 Gender differences produce different and
conflicting identifications in Walkerdine and the family members;
nevertheless identification is reclaimed in Walkerdine’s analysis as
potentially producing rebellious feelings and a desire to fight the dominant
system, as well as being a necessary aspect of cultural consumption.
These two perspectives, then, represent opposite positions on processes of
identification in the visual media: the first criticises identification of any kind
for reproducing sameness, fixity and the confirmation of existing identities,
whilst the second reclaims it as potentially empowering and expressive of
resistance. They coincide, however, in taking psychoanalytic accounts of
identification as central to their understanding of spectatorship.
Whilst there are detailed psychoanalytic accounts of the psychic processes
of identification,27 however, there has been less investigation of the broader
cultural and social dimensions of identification in the cinema. Therefore
instead of applying psychoanalytic theory to a film text to investigate
identification in the cinema, I shall take the audiences’ representations of this
process and its meanings as my starting point. This is not to argue that
audiences are the source of ‘the true meanings’ of films or of stars; clearly
audiences’ recollections are themselves a highly mediated set of cultural
representations, as I have discussed above. Instead, the purpose of this
investigation is to look at the production of the meaning of stars in the terms
of how audiences construct them.
Particularly striking in the letters I received was the diversity of processes
represented which could loosely be termed identification. To the extent that
identification involves various processes which negotiate the boundaries
152 STARS AND SOCIETY
between self and other,28 these processes take on a particular significance in
the context of popular cinema where women in the audience are offered
idealised images of femininity in many different forms. Some of these quite
clearly relate back to the psychic processes described by psychoanalysis, and
others move into the domain of cultural consumption more generally.
There is a problem finding a term to refer to the women in the audience
whose letters are used in this analysis. The term ‘female spectator’, used so
widely within feminist film theory, has been a confusing one; it has been
used to refer both to the textual positions constructed by the film, and, often
implicitly, to the female members of the cinema audience.29 At best it is
acknowledged that the two processes may, to some extent, be separate, but
generally an implicit textual determinism defines assumptions about
spectatorship.30 In addition, the singularity of the reference of the term
spectator implies a unified viewing experience, and its usage carries with it a
very passive model of how audiences watch films.
I am using ‘spectator’ here in a rather different way to refer to members of
the cinema audience. However, there is a further problem using the term to
discuss practices which take place beyond the cinema, since spectator, in this
broader sense, refers to a person still in the cinema. This is itself
symptomatic of the limited interest in what spectatorship might mean outside
or beyond the cinema experience. Spectatorship, when considered as an
aspect of cultural consumption, should no longer be seen simply as an
extension of a film text replicating infantile misrecognition, nor as an isolated
viewing process, but rather as part of a more general cultural construction of
identities.
The analysis of the letters which follows is divided into two sections. The
first addresses processes of identification which involve fantasies about the
relationship between the identity of the star and the identity of the spectator.
On the whole these forms of identification relate to the cinematic context.
The second section examines forms of identification which involve practice
as well as fantasy, in that spectators actually transform some aspect of their
identity as a result of their relationship to their favourite star. These practices
extend beyond the cinema itself and thus spectatorship is considered in
relation to the construction of feminine identities more generally.
Cinematic identificatory fantasies
Devotion and worship
I wanted to write and tell you of my devotion to my favourite star
Doris Day. I thought she was fantastic, and joined her fan club,
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 153
collected all the photos and info I could. I saw Calamity Jane 45
times in a fortnight and still watch all her films avidly. My sisters
all thought I was mad going silly on a woman, but I just thought
she was wonderful, they were mad about Elvis, but my devotion
was to Doris Day. (V.M.)
Some letters do not even mention the self, but simply offer evidence of
devotion to a female star. However, this is unusual; most letters I received
framed their comments on stars in relation to their own identities. In this first
group, many of the letters speak of the pleasure produced by some kind of
difference from the star, the distance produced by this difference providing a
source of fascination. Stars are frequently written about as out of reach, and
belonging to a different world or plane of existence:
Film stars…seemed very special people, glamorous, handsome and
way above us ordinary mortals. (J.T.) I’ll never forget the first time I
saw her, it was in My Gal Sal in 1942, and her name was Rita
Hayworth. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, she was the most perfect
woman I had ever seen. The old cliché ‘screen goddess’ was used
about many stars, but those are truly the only words that define that
divine creature.… I was stunned and amazed that any human being
could be that lovely. (V.H.)
Stars were fabulous creatures to be worshipped from afar, every film
of one’s favourite gobbled up as soon as it came out. (P.K.)
These statements represent the star as something different and unattainable.
Religious signifiers here indicate the special status and meaning of the stars,
as well as suggesting the intensity of the devotion felt by the spectator. They
also reinforce the ‘otherness’ of the stars who are not considered part of the
mortal world of the spectator. The last example, however, does introduce the
star into the mortal world by a metaphor of ingestion reminiscent of the act
of communion. Worship of stars as goddesses involves a denial of self found
in some forms of religious devotion. The spectator is only present in these
quotes as a worshipper, or through their adoration of the star. There is no
reference to the identity of the spectator or suggestion of closing the gap
between star and fan by becoming more like a star; these are simply
declarations of appreciation from afar. The boundaries between self and ideal
are quite fixed and stable in these examples, and the emphasis is very
strongly on the ideal rather than the spectator. Even in the last statement,
where the self is implicit in that the star is to be gobbled up, the star none the
less remains the subject of the sentence.
154 STARS AND SOCIETY
The desire to become
In other examples, the relationship between star and audience is also
articulated through the recognition of an immutable difference between star
and spectator: ‘Bette Davis was the epitome of what we would like to be, but
knew we never could!’ (N.T.). Yet here the desire to move across that
difference and become more like the star is expressed, even if this is
accompanied by the impossibility of its fulfilment.31 The distance between
the spectator and her ideal seems to produce a kind of longing which offers
fantasies of transformed identities.
These desires to become more like the stars occur on several levels. Many
of them are predictably articulated in relation to appearance:
I finally kept with Joan Crawford—every typist’s dream of how they’d
like to look. (M.R.).
And of course her [Betty Grable’s] clothes—how could a young girl
not want to look like that? (S.W.)
Although I wished to look like a different star each week depending
what film I saw, I think my favourite was Rita Hayworth, I always
imagined, if I could look like her I could toss my red hair into the wind…
and meet the man of my dreams…(R.A.)
Clearly, stars serve a normative function to the extent that they are often read
as role models, contributing to the construction of the ideals of feminine
attractiveness circulating in culture at any one time. The age difference
between the star and the younger fans is central here: stars provide ideals of
femininity for adolescent women in the audience, preoccupied with attaining
adult femininity. Part of this kind of identification involves recognising
desirable qualities in the ideal and wanting to move towards it:
Doris Day…seemed to epitomise the kind of person who, with luck, I
as a child could aspire to be. (B.C.)
I loved to watch Deanna Durbin. I used to put myself in her place.
She lived in a typical girl’s dream. (J.G.)
These examples demonstrate not simply the desire to overcome the gap
between spectator and star, but a fantasy of possible movement between the
two identities, from the spectator to the star.
Pleasure in feminine power
However, the difference between the female star and the female spectator is a
source of fascination not only with ideals of physical beauty, but also with
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 155
the stars’ personalities and behaviour, which are often admired or envied by
spectators. These identifications demonstrate the contradictory pleasures
offered by Hollywood stars, on the one hand reproducing normative models
of feminine glamour, whilst on the other hand offering women fantasies of
resistance. For example, some female stars represented images of power and
confidence. These were frequent favourites because they offered spectators
fantasies of power outside their own experience.
We liked stars who were most different to ourselves and Katharine
Hepburn, with her self-assured romps through any situation was one of
them. We were youngsters at the time, and were anything but self
confident, and totally lacking in sophistication, so, naturally, Bette
Davis took the other pedestal. She who could be a real ‘bitch’, without
turning a hair, and quelled her leading men with a raised eyebrow and
sneer at the corners of her mouth…(N.T.)
Bette Davis…was great, I loved how she walked across the room in
her films, she seemed to have a lot of confidence and she had a look of
her own, as I think a lot of female stars had at that time… (E.M.)
Powerful female stars often play characters in punishing patriarchal
narratives, where the woman is either killed off, or married, or both, but these
spectators do not seem to select this aspect of their films to write about.
Instead, the qualities of confidence and power are remembered as offering
pleasure to female spectators in something they lack and desire.
Identification and escapism
This movement from spectator to star is part of the pleasure of escapism
articulated in many of the letters. Instead of the difference between the
spectator and the star being recognised and maintained, the difference
provides the possibility for the spectator to leave her world temporarily and
become part of the star’s world:32
It made no difference to me if the film was ushered in by a spangled
globe, the Liberty Lady or that roaring lion, I was no longer in my seat
but right up there fleeing for my life from chasing gangsters, skimming
effortlessly over silver ice, or singing high and sweet like a lark. (D.H.)
I was only a girl, but I could be transported from the austerity and
gloom of that time to that other world on the silver screen. (J.T.)
Joan Crawford—could evoke such pathos, and suffer such
martyrdom…making you live each part. (M.B.)
156 STARS AND SOCIETY
In these examples, the movement from self to other is more fluid than in the
previous categories, and this fluidity provides the well-known pleasure of the
cinema: ‘losing oneself’ in the film. Here, in contrast to the distinction
between self and ideal maintained in the processes of spectatorship discussed
above, the spectator’s identity merges with the star in the film, or the
character she is portraying.
In this first section I have discussed processes of spectatorship which
involve negotiating the difference between the star and the spectator in
various ways: beginning with the denial of self, in favour of praising the
screen goddesses, and moving on to the desire to become like the star, but
realising the impossibility of such desires, and ending with the pleasure in
overcoming the difference and merging with the ideal on the screen.
Extra-cinematic identificatory practices
Now I want to move on to discuss representations which concern what I shall
call ‘identificatory practices’ of spectatorship. These nearly all relate to
forms of identification which take place outside the cinematic context. These
practices also involve the audience engaging in some kind of practice of
transformation of the self to become more like the star they admire, or to
involve others in the recognition of their similarity with the star.
Pretending
…there was a massive open-cast coal site just at the tip of our
estate—there were 9 of us girls—and we would go to the site
after school, and play on the mounds of soil removed from the
site. The mounds were known to us as ‘Beverley Hills’ and we all
had lots of fun there. Each of us had our own spot where the soil
was made into a round—and that was our mansion. We played
there for hours—visiting one mansion after another and each
being our own favourite film star…(M.W.)
I really loved the pictures, they were my life, I used to pretend
I was related to Betty Grable because my name was Betty, and I
used to get quite upset when the other children didn’t believe me.
(B.C.)
Pretending to be particular film stars involves an imaginary practice, but one
where the spectator involved knows that it is a game. This is rather different
from the processes of escapism in the cinema discussed above whereby the
spectator feels completely absorbed in the star’s world and which thus
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 157
involves a temporary collapsing of the self into the star identity. The first
example given above is also different in that it involves a physical as well as
an imaginary transformation. Furthermore pretending does not simply
involve the privatised imagination of the individual spectator, as in the
process of escapism, but also involves the participation of other spectators in
the collective fantasy games. This kind of representation of the relationship
between star and fan is based more on similarity than difference, since the
fan takes on the identity of the star in a temporary game of make-believe, and
the difference between them is made invisible, despite the recognition of the
whole process as one of pretending.
Resembling
Bette Davis—her eyes were fabulous and the way she walked
arrogantly… I have dark eyes, in those days I had very large dark
eyebrows…and my Dad used to say… ‘Don’t you roll those Bette
Davis eyes at me young lady.…’ …Now Doris Day, that’s a
different thing—we share the same birthday…(P.O.)
There are numerous points of recognition of similarities between the spectator
and the star. These are not based on pretending to be something one is not,
but rather selecting something which establishes a link between the star and
the self based on a pre-existing part of the spectator’s identity which bears a
resemblance to the star. This does not necessarily involve any kind of
transformation, but rather a highlighting of star qualities in the individual
spectator. The significance of particular features, such as ‘Bette Davis eyes’,
seems to exceed physical likeness, to suggest a certain kind of femininity, in
this case a rebellious one which represented a challenge to the father’s
authority.
Imitating
Unlike the above process of recognising a resemblance to a star, many
spectators wrote about practices which involved transforming themselves to
be more like the star. This is different from the fantasy of becoming the star
whilst viewing a film, or even expressing the desire to become more like the
star generally, since it involves an actual imitation of a star or of her
particular characteristics in a particular film. In other words this
identificatory practice involves a form of pretending or play-acting, and yet it
is also different from pretending, since pretending is represented as a process
158 STARS AND SOCIETY
involving the whole star persona, whereas imitation is used here to indicate a
partial taking-on of part of a star’s identity.
Several letters gave examples of imitating singing and dancing of favourite
stars after the film performance:
We used to go home and do concerts based on the songs and dances we
had seen in the films, and one of my friends had an auntie who was a mine
of information on the words of songs from films…(B. F.)
The films we saw made us sing and sometimes act our way home on
the bus…(J.T.)
My favourite female star was Betty Grable. The songs she sang in
the film, I would try to remember, I would sing and dance all the way
home…(P.G.)
The imitation of stars was not limited to singing and dancing, but was clearly
a pleasure in terms of replicating gestures, speech and star personalities: ‘I
had my favourites of course.… One week I would tigerishly pace about like
Joan Crawford, another week I tried speaking in the staccato tones of Bette
Davis and puffing a cigarette at the same time’ (D.H.).
Copying
Although imitation and copying are very closely linked as practices, I want to
use them here differently to distinguish between audiences imitating
behaviour and activities, and copying appearances. As the attempted
replication of appearance, then, copying relates back to the desire to look like
stars discussed above. However it is not simply expressed as an unfulfillable
desire or pleasurable fantasy, as in the earlier examples, it is also a practice
which transforms the spectators’ physical appearance.
Copying is the most common form of identificatory practice outside the
cinema. Perhaps this is not surprising given the centrality of physical
appearance to femininity in general in this culture, and to female Hollywood
stars in particular. The ‘visual pleasure’ offered by the glamour and sexual
appeal of Hollywood stars has been thoroughly criticised by feminists
elsewhere.33 Here I am interested in how women audiences related to these
ideals of femininity as presented by Hollywood stars on the screen, and
particularly in how identification extends beyond individualised fantasies
into practices aimed at the transformation of identity.
I was a very keen fan of Bette Davis and can remember seeing her in
Dark Victory…. That film had such an impact on me. I can remember
coming home and looking in the mirror fanatically trying to comb my
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 159
hair so that I could look like her. I idolised her… thought she was a
wonderful actress. (V.C.)
This process involves an intersection of self and other, subject and object. The
impact of the film on the spectator was to produce a desire to resemble
physically the ideal. In front of a reflection of herself, the spectator attempts
to close the gap between her image and her ideal image, by trying to produce
a new image, more like her ideal. In this instance, her hair is the focus of this
desired transformation. Indeed hairstyle is one of the most frequently
recurring aspects of the star’s appearance which the spectators try to copy:
My friends and I would try and copy the hair styles of the stars,
sometimes we got it right, and other times we just gave up, as we
hadn’t the looks of the stars or the money to dress the way they did.
(E.M.)
Now Doris Day…I was told many times around that I looked like
her, so I had my hair cut in a D.A. style. Jane Wyman was a favourite
at one stage and I had hair cut like hers, it was called a tulip.… Now
Marilyn Monroe was younger and by this time I had changed my
image, my hair was almost white blonde and longer and I copied her
hairstyle, as people said I looked like her. (P.O.)
These forms of copying involve some kind of self-transformation to produce
an appearance more similar to Hollywood stars. Some spectators clearly have
a stronger feeling of their success than others; the first example includes a
sense of defeat whilst the last seems to be able to achieve several desired
likenesses, especially bearing in mind this respondent is the one who had
‘Bette Davis eyes’. The difference then between the star and the spectator is
transformable into similarity through the typical work of femininity: the
production of oneself simultaneously as subject and object in accordance
with cultural ideals of femininity.
Copying and consumption
Copying the hairstyles of famous film stars can be seen as a form of cultural
production and consumption. It involves the production of a new self-image
through the pleasure taken in a star image. In this last section I want to
consider an extension of the identificatory practice of copying where it
intersects with the consumption of cultural products in addition to the star
image. The construction of women as cinema spectators overlaps here with
their construction as consumers.
160 STARS AND SOCIETY
To some extent copying the hairstyles of the stars overlaps with this.
However I have separated hairstyles from other aspects of this process, since
changing hairstyles does not necessarily involve the actual purchasing of
other products to transform the identity of the spectator, although it may do.
The purchasing of items such as clothing and cosmetics in relation to
particular stars brings into particularly sharp focus the relationship between
the cinema industries and other forms of capitalist industry. Stars are
consumable feminine images which female spectators then reproduce
through other forms of consumption.
and I bought clothes like hers [Doris Day]…dresses, soft wool, no
sleeves, but short jackets, boxy type little hats, half hats we used to call
them and low heeled court shoes to match your outfit, kitten heels they
were called…as people said I looked like her [Marilyn Monroe] I even
bought a suit after seeing her in Niagara. (P.O.)
It was fun trying to copy one’s favourite stars with their clothes, hats
and even make-up, especially the eyebrows. Hats were very much in
vogue at that time and shops used to sell models similar to the styles
the stars were wearing. I was very much into hats myself and tried in my
way (on a low budget) to copy some of them. Naturally I bought a
Deanna Durbin model hat and a Rita Hayworth one. (V.C.)
I’d like to name Deanna Durbin as one of my favourite stars. Her
beautiful singing voice, natural personality and sparkling eyes made
her films so enjoyable, and one always knew she would wear boleros;
in one film she wore six different ones. I still like wearing boleros—so
you can tell what a lasting effect the clothes we saw on the screen made
on us. (J.D.Member of the Deanna Durbin Society)
Stars are thus identified with particular commodities which are part of the
reproduction of feminine identities. The female spectators in these examples
produce particular images of femininity which remind them of their favourite
stars. In so doing they produce a new feminine identity, one which combines
an aspect of the star with their own appearance. This is different from
imitation, which is more of a temporary reproduction of a particular kind of
behaviour which resembles the star. It transforms the spectators’ previous
appearance, and in doing so offers the spectator the pleasure of close
association with her ideal.
As teenagers and young girls we did not have the vast variety of
clothing and choices of make-up that is available today, so hairstyles
and make-up were studied with great interest and copied… I seem to
remember buying a small booklet by Max Factor with pictures of the
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 161
stars, M.G.M.mostly, with all the details of their make-up and how to
apply it…(E.H.)
Their make-up was faultless and their fashion of the forties platform
shoes, half hats with rows of curls showing at the back under the hat….
We used to call the shoes ‘Carmen Miranda’ shoes… I felt like a film
star using Lux Toilet soap, advertised as the stars’ soap. (V.B.)
Through the use of cosmetic products, then, as well as through the
purchasing and use of clothing, spectators take on a part of the stars identity
and make it part of their own. The self and the ideal combine to produce
another feminine identity, closer to the ideal. This is the direct opposite of the
process of identification I began with in the first section, in which the
spectator’s own identity remained relatively marginal to the description of
the pleasure taken in female Hollywood stars. In this final process, the star
becomes more marginal and is only relevant in so far as the star identity
relates to the spectator’s own identity. As has been noted by other
commentators, these latter practices demonstrate the importance of
understanding Hollywood stars and their audiences in relation to other
cultural industries of the 1940s and 1950s.34
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Having outlined some of the different forms of identification in audience-star
relationships represented in these letters, it is now important to reconsider
some of the earlier models of identification and spectatorship in the light of
this research. First, the diversity of processes of identification, including
forms of desire, evident in these letters is striking. The idea of a singular
process of identification, so often assumed in psychoanalytic film theory,
seems unsatisfactory in the light of the range of processes discussed above.
In addition, the use of the term ‘female spectatorship’ to refer to a single
positioning by a film text seems equally inappropriate in the light of the
diversity of readings of stars by different women in the cinema audiences in
the 1940s and 1950s.
As well as categorising the many different kinds of identification in the
relationships between audiences and stars, I have also drawn attention to the
broad distinction between two different forms of identification: identificatory
fantasies (pp. 149–52) and identificatory practices (pp. 153–7). This is not to
suggest that the practices do not also involve fantasies, nor that fantasies
cannot also be considered as practices. But rather, it is important to extend
our understanding of cinematic identification, previously analysed solely at
the level of fantasy, to include the practices documented by these spectators,
162 STARS AND SOCIETY
in order to understand the different forms of overlap between stars’ and
Figure 12.1 Lux advertisement, from Picturegoer, 22 January 1955
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 163
audiences’ identities.
Another significant distinction is that between cinematic identification,
which refers to the viewing experience, and extra-cinematic identification,
referring to the use of stars’ identities in a different cultural time and space.
So far, film studies has, not surprisingly, been concerned with the former.
However, the importance of these extra-cinematic forms of identification to
the women who wrote to me came across very forcefully in their letters. Not
only was this one of the most written-about aspects of the relationship
between stars and audiences, but the pleasure and force of feeling with which
they recalled the details of the significance of stars in this context was also
striking.
All the above forms of identification relate to a final distinction which I
have used to frame the sequence of the quotations: identification based on
difference and identification based on similarity. The early categories of
identification concern processes where the differences between the star and
the spectator produce the sources of pleasure and fascination. The
representations of these processes tended to emphasise the presence of the
star and de-emphasise the identity of the spectator. The later categories
concern processes where the similarity, or at least the possibility of closing
the gap produced by the differences between stars and spectators, is the
source of pleasure expressed. In these examples the reproduction of the
spectators’ identities tended to be the focus of the commentary.
Thus identifications do not merely involve processes of recognition based on
similarity, but also involve the productive recognition of differences between
femininities.
Indeed the processes of identification articulated most strongly in terms of
difference seem to be those relating more directly to the cinematic context
where the image of the star is still present on the screen. The processes, and
practices, which involve reproducing similarity seem to be those extracinematic
identifications which take place more in the spectator’s more
familiar domestic context, where the star’s identity is selectively reworked
and incorporated into the spectator’s new identity. Even in these cases,
identification does not simply involve the passive reproduction of existing
femininities, but rather an active engagement and production of changing
identities.
The assumption behind much of the psychoanalytic work discussed earlier
is that identification fixes identities: ‘identification can only be made through
recognition, and all recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of existing
form’.35 Many of the examples I have discussed contradict this assumption
and demonstrate not only the diversity of existing forms, but also that
recognition involves the production of desired identities, rather than simply
the confirmation of existing ones. Many forms of identification involve
164 STARS AND SOCIETY
processes of transformation and the production of new identities, combining
the spectator’s existing identity with her desired identity and her reading of
the star’s identity.
This research also challenges the assumption that identification is
necessarily problematic because it offers the spectator the illusory pleasure
of unified subjectivity. The identifications represented in these letters speak
as much about partial recognitions and fragmented replications as they do
about the misrecognition of a unified subjectivity in an ego ideal on the
screen. Thus, cultural consumption does not necessarily fix identities, destroy
differences and confirm sameness. If we take audiences as a starting point for
understanding the consumption of stars, the active and productive elements
of the star-audience relationships begin to emerge.
In challenging previous models of passive female spectatorship, and
demonstrating the diversity and complexity of identifications between stars
and women in the audience, however, I am not suggesting feminists look at
cultural consumption uncritically. Taking audiences as a starting point can
present problems for a feminist analysis: how can we remain critical of the
dominant meanings of gender produced by Hollywood, whilst at the same
time taking seriously the pleasures female spectators articulate about their
favourite stars? Perhaps this problem is itself a reason for the reluctance by
feminists to analyse female audiences and their relationship to dominant
idealised feminine images, such as Hollywood stars.
In asking women to write to me about the appeal of Hollywood stars, it
was inevitable I would receive an enthusiastic response. The
discrepancy between the passion with which women spectators wrote about
their Hollywood favourites and feminist criticisms of the patriarchal
constructions of femininity in Hollywood produces a familiar dilemma for
feminists working in many areas of cultural analysis. Simply to use what
women wrote to me to illustrate the subordinating operations of patriarchal
capitalism seems to me to be overwhelmingly patronising, as well as rather
pessimistic. But simply to embrace the enthusiastic spirit of the pleasures
they describe would be equally problematic, and would reproduce an
uncritical populism which leaves behind crucial feminist insights. It therefore
remains a challenge to feminists analysing Hollywood cinema to produce
critical accounts of dominant cultural representations whilst at the same time
developing theories of female cultural consumption as an active and
productive process.
NOTES
Acknowledgements
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 165
I would very much like to thank Richard Dyer, Sarah Franklin, Anne
Gray, Hilary Hinds, Richard Johnson and Celia Lury for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and their encouragement and
support for this research project. I would also like to thank Christine Gledhill
for her interest, enthusiasm and patience.
1 Richard Dyer, Stars (London, BFI Publishing, 1979).
2 A notable exception to this is Leo Handel’s Hollywood Looks at its Audience
(Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1950). Handel’s findings are developed
further in Andrew Tudor, Image and Influence: Studies in the Sociology of Film
(London, Allen & Unwin, 1974), chapter 4.
3 Typical of the ‘images of women’ approach are Molly Haskell, From Reverence to
Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974);
Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus (New York, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan,
1973); and Brandon French, On The Verge Of Revolt: Women in American Films
of the Fifties (New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1978).
4 Typical of the ‘woman as image’ approach are Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other
Pleasures (London, Macmillan, 1989); and Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and
Film Theory (New York, Routledge, and London, BFI Publishing, 1988).
5 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, 214.
6 Ibid., 194.
7 Laura Mulvey, Visual, 22.
8 Ibid., 23.
9 Robyn Archer and Diana Simmonds, A Star Is Torn (London, Virago, 1986).
10 Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: ‘Gone With the Wind’ and its Female Fans
(London, Virago, 1989).
11 Jane Gaines, ‘War, women and lipstick: fan mags in the forties’, in Heresies, 18
(1986), 42–7.
12 Angela Partington, ‘Melodrama’s gendered audience’, in Sarah Franklin, Celia
Lury and Jackie Stacey, eds, Off Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies (London,
Unwin Hyman, forthcoming). See also chapters by Herzog and Gaines, LaPlace
and Weiss in this volume.
13 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London, BFI/Macmillan,
1986), chapter 3. See also Andrew Weiss in this collection.
14 See Bruce A.Austin, Immediate Seating: A Look at Movie Audiences (Belmont,
California, Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1989).
15 For discussions of historical audiences see Janet Staiger, ‘The handmaiden of
villainy: methods and problems for studying the historical reception of a film’,
Wide Angle, 8, 1 (1986); Philip Corrigan, ‘Film entertainment as ideology and
pleasure: towards a history of audiences’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter, eds,
British Cinema History (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983); and Sue Harper,
‘Popular taste and methodological problems: British historical films in the 1930s’,
paper given at Popular European Cinema conference, University of Warwick,
September 1989.
16 See Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan, eds, Mass-Observation at the Movies
(London and New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).
166 STARS AND SOCIETY
17 See Janet Thumin, ‘Super special long-run propositions: revenue, culture and
popularity in “Cinematograph Weekly” ’s annual review’, paper at Popular
European Cinema conference, University of Warwick, September 1989.
18 Vincent Keene, ‘Charm not curves’, Picturegoer, 14 October 1950. Letters
responding directly to this article appeared in Picturegoer, 9 December 1950.
19 I am grateful to Jane Gaines for pointing out to me that the authenticity of the
letters published on film magazine letters’ pages remains in question. However the
Mass-Observation Archive at Sussex University holds all the original letters written
to Picturegoer in the year 1940, which would provide a more reliable source for the
historical analysis of cinema-goers.
20 See Popular Memory Group, ‘On popular memory’, in Bill Schwarz et al., eds,
Making Histories: Studies in History, Writing and Theory (London, Hutchinson,
1982).
21 S.Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921, chapter 7, quoted in
Anne Friedberg, ‘Identification and the Star: a refusal of difference’, in Christine
Gledhill, ed., Star Signs (London, BFI Publishing, 1982).
22 Ibid., 49.
23 Christian Metz, ‘Le Signifiant imaginaire’, Communications, 23 (1975); tr. Celia
Britton, Anwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, Alfred Guzetti, Psychoanalysis and
Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London, Macmillan, 1983).
24 Anne Friedberg, ‘Identification and the Star’, p. 50.
25 Ibid., 53.
26 Valerie Walkerdine, ‘Video replay: families, films and fantasies’, in Victor Burgin,
James Donald and Cora Kaplan, eds, Formations of Fantasy (London, Methuen,
1986).
27 For example, see Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London, Verso,
1986), Mary Anne Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1987), and Teresa De
Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London, Macmillan, 1984).
28 For a typology of audience-star relations, see Andrew Tudor, Image and Influence,
80.
29 See Tania Modleski, ‘Introduction: Hitchcock, feminism and the patriarchal
unconscious’, in The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist
Theory (London, Methuen, 1988).
30 This problem is addressed by Annette Kuhn, ‘Women’s genres’, in Screen, 25, 1
(1984), 18–28.
31 For a discussion of the representation of desire between women produced by their
differences, see Jackie Stacey, ‘Desperately seeking difference’, in Screen, 28, 1
(1987), 48–61.
32 For a discussion of the pleasurable feelings escapism offers to the cinema
audience, see Richard Dyer, ‘Entertainment and utopia’, Movie, 24 (Spring 1977),
2–13.
33 See Laura Mulvey, Visual, and E.Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the
Camera (London, Methuen, 1983).
34 See Partington, ‘Melodrama’s gendered audience’.
35 Friedberg, ‘Identification and the Star’, 53.
FEMININE FASCINATIONS 167