Screening the Male

Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema

Steve Cohan,Ina Rae Hark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134900091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

Screening the male re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory.
Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theroies have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masuline motivation at the core of the system. The essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and questions just how secure that orthodox male position is.
Screening the Male brings together an impressive group of both established and emerging scholars from Britain, the United States and Australia unified by a concern with issues that film theorists have exclusively inked to the femninie and not the masculne: spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class and generatonal differences.

Part I

STAR TURNS

Figure 2 Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding

1

VALENTINO, ‘OPTIC INTOXICATION,’ AND DANCE MADNESS

Gaylyn Studlar

Dance critic Sigmund Spaeth once noted that ‘the decade between 1910 and 1920 can be identified primarily as the period in which America went dance mad’ (quoted in Stearns 1968: n.p.). The American cultural scene was transformed by a virtually unprecedented interest in dance. Dance madness was characterized by the popularity of new, social dance forms perceived as indecent. At the same time ‘art dance’ brought a decadent sensuality to the American concert stage, to vaudeville, and to hundreds of local halls across the country as dancers like Ruth St Denis and Roshanara performed interpretive ‘ethnic’ dances that invariably linked Orientalism and eroticism in capitalizing on a longstanding American fascination with the East and eastern dancing.

As a consequence, by the time Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes arrived in the United States in 1916, Americans were already familiar with dance’s capacity to disturb sexual and ethnic conventions. In true American entrepreneurial spirit, Gertrude Hoffman’s Les Saisons De Ballet Russes had not only proceeded to rip off the Diaghilev/Fokine Schéhérazade as early as 1911, but she also co-opted Diaghilev’s Cleopâtre and Strauss’s opera Salome. The latter had an aborted debut at the Metropolitan Opera House, killed by censorship, but Hoffman’s dance version persisted nicely, with one critic remarking: ‘It grovels, it rolls in horrible sensuality … can we endure this indecent physical display’ (Kendall 1979: 75)? How indeed? Dance was developing an astonishing physicality: nationwide it was regarded as ‘slightly dangerous,’ or as one critic called it, an ‘optic intoxication,’ that was ‘awakening all our latent and barbaric sensibilities’ (Kendall 1979: 119).¹

Elizabeth Kendall notes that dance’s shocking displays of the body possessed ‘a special appeal for women – perhaps because of their very unrestraint’ (Kendall 1979: 80). After the turn of the century, women filled concert halls to view matinée dance performances. They enthusiastically responded to the demonstrations of physical freedom offered to them by female dancers who, in embracing modern idioms of dance, appeared bare-legged and bare-footed, sometimes in defiance of censors. In 1920, one female commentator pointedly criticized Americans for being ‘below par in appreciation of dancing’ because:

We are still prudes … the minute a dancer appears there is a tightening of the muscle and a closing of the mind, as prone as we are to be ashamed of the body. We are still shocked by bare feet.

(Russell 1920: n.p.)

Women were so dominant in American dance that it was suggested that the participation of more men ‘would help relieve the dance of the curse of femininity and cure us of the false idea that dancing is female and frippery’ (Caspary 1926: 60). Nevertheless, when male dancers did appear, they often were derided. Vaslav Nijinsky provoked special antagonism among the nation’s male critics who dismissed him for his ‘lack of virility’ and ‘unprepossessing effeminacy’ (MacDonald 1975: 174–5);² yet, it was assumed that he appealed to women; a New York Journal reporter asked: ‘what is it … that exercises such an extraordinary fascination? His charms appear to lie entirely in his figure. His face can hardly be an attraction, unless there are some women who love ugliness’ (MacDonald 1975: 179).³

Because dance was so closely associated with a heightened awareness of the body, its fascination for women was noted with varying degrees of alarm. In spite of art dance’s controversial inscriptions of the human body, aesthetic motivation (and European inspiration) often provided an adequate excuse for the shock of the new. As a result, condemnations of dance were frequently directed beyond the proscenium arch, at American social dancing, which was fostering a startling casual intimacy between men and women (Erenberg 1981: 154).⁴ Objectionable dances like the tango, turkey trot, and grizzly bear were denounced by one Catholic clergyman as being ‘as much a violation of the seventh commandment as adultery’ (Loxley 1939: 8).

Angela McRobbie has suggested that dance evokes strong emotional response from females and occupies a unique place in many women’s fantasies (McRobbie 1990: 41–4), yet film scholars have paid scant attention to the link between film, dance, and female-centered spectatorship. One notable convergence of these elements was played out in complex intertextual terms through the career of dancer turned actor Rudolph Valentino. Recently Valentino has become the center of scholarly interest, largely because of his overwhelming popularity among female film audiences of the 1920s. His great number of women fans were counterpointed in their devotion by his well-documented rejection by American men: in terms of popular discourse, he was a ‘pink powder puff,’ a ‘wop,’ and, in the opinion of the Chicago Tribune, the most influential instructor in Hollywood’s effeminate ‘national school of masculinity’ (Anger 1981: 107).

The female cult surrounding Valentino’s ‘ambiguous and deviant identity’ has been read as a radical subversion of traditional American gender ideals (Hansen 1986: 20–1). Certainly he appeared to violate twentieth-century codes of American masculinity rooted in a Rooseveltian virility cult, and his popularity as a ‘Latin Lover’ also seemed to contradict the virulent xenophobia directed during the 1920s at immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. That xenophobia has led Sumiko Higashi to ask: ‘Was it coincidental that Valentino achieved stardom as a Latin lover during the same years that Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were unjustly tried and executed?’ She concludes that ‘Such questions require a more detailed probing of history than has been provided by previous scholarly work on Valentino’ (Higashi 1991: 116). But what aspects of history should we probe to understand the relationship between Valentino and the historical moment in which he achieved fame?

As I have argued elsewhere, Valentino’s appeal to women spectators cannot be understood in isolation from the intertextual web of discourses that supports and shapes films (Studlar 1989; Studlar 1991). As contradictory as Valentino’s stardom may seem, it was the logical result of trends already apparent in film and other cultural arenas. In this article, I wish to explore how one of these arenas – dance – figures as an important dimension of Valentino’s controversial masculinity. I will argue that Valentino’s dance background was a significant factor in shaping his textual and extratextual ‘construction’ (and reception) as a male matinée idol for women, and that dance conventions figured heavily in his representation of masculinity. Thus, I am suggesting that the paradoxical rise to fame of Rudolph Valentino can only be understood by reference to the codification of masculinity pre-existent in dance, in both its ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural manifestations. Nevertheless, dance has been all but ignored in attempts to delineate the source and meaning of Valentino’s enormous popularity with female audiences or to account for the problematic status of his masculinity within American culture of the 1920s.

THE MELTING POT SIZZLES

The rise of dance culture in the United States between 1910 and 1920 took place within a broader ideological framework marked by women’s growing economic and sexual emancipation. To many observers, American women’s challenge to traditional sexual roles and male domestic authority was exemplified by the popularity of tango teas and nightclub dancing. In the 1910s, dancers like Maurice Mouvet, Vernon and Irene Castle, Mr and Mrs Douglas Crane, Joan Sawyer and Carlo Sebastian, and Bonnie Glass and Rudolph Valentino appeared in nightclubs that catered to both men and women. However, in nightclub ballroom dance exhibitions, the sexually transgressive aspects of popular dance, as well as its all too obvious violations of class and ethnic norms, still could be controlled. One demonstration of how that regulation might be achieved occurred with the tango.

Credited with bringing both the tango and the apache dance to the United States, cabaret dancer Maurice Mouvet consciously exploited the sensual, lower-class origins of these dances. Establishing a precedent for other dance teams, Maurice also exploited the apparent ethnic contrast between himself as a dark ‘foreigner’ (he was really from Brooklyn) and his female partners, particularly blonde Madeleine d’Arville (Mouvet 1915: 35–46; Erenberg 1981: 165). As with Valentino, the dangerous ‘Latin gigolo’ aspect of Maurice’s appeal was inseparable from his association with dances (like the tango and apache) that played out ritualized extremes of sexual domination and submission. It was no surprise then that Maurice was regarded as a ‘tiger’ for women to ‘both desire and fear’ (Erenberg 1981: 165), an ambivalence of response later exploited with even greater success in Valentino’s career. Ted Shawn cynically suggested that Americans’ extreme self-consciousness and their fear of being different contributed to the toning down of dances like the tango (Shawn 1936: 47).⁵ Public discourse usually cited moral concerns behind the demand that suggestive and barbaric dances be cleaned up. In any case, the era’s most popular dancing team, British-born Vernon Castle and his fashion-setting American wife, Irene, happily obliged. Irene commented in their autobiography: ‘If Vernon had ever looked into my eyes with smoldering passion during the tango, we should have both burst out laughing’ (Castle 1914: 164).

Less amenable to moral safeguards than cabaret dancing and accordingly regarded with disdain by social commentators were the afternoon ‘tango teas’ in which women rented male escorts to take them through the new steps. These teas were condemned as a dangerous violation of sexual, ethnic, and class norms: middle-class women were participating in the ‘careless forming of undesirable acquaintances, the breaking down of barriers of necessary caution’ (Erenberg 1981: 82). The paid dance partners at tango teas were often immigrant, lower-class Italians and Jews who had acquired a sufficient veneer of clothes and manners to allow them to cater to American women’s new preoccupation with the pleasure of dance (Erenberg 1981: 83). If, as Irene Castle declared, ‘dancing is the language of the body’ (Erenberg 1981: 166), then the women who frequented tango teas were learning to speak in a foreign dialect. Dance was making the American melting pot sizzle.

Tango teas were regarded as evidence of how, more generally, American women were changing gendered norms of behavior. Although worrisome in the 1910s, these changes were thought to be spiraling out of control in the postwar period. Women’s active search for public (and private) pleasure was replacing their traditional role as spiritual and maternal guardian of the domestic sphere. While women were swooning in the embraces of tango pirates, their ‘husbands and sons [were] slaving away in downtown offices,’ but even these dutiful husbands and sons were not immune from the debilitating influence of dance as a social phenomenon: it was believed that women’s ‘[p]leasure would ultimately force respectable men to ape the manners of these menial and sensual men to hold their own women … and this process would leave them lost and adrift, incapable of success’ (Erenberg 1981: 83). One editorial remarked ironically that young men should stop worrying about studying law or business: ‘why slave in an office or behind a counter when one may dance with the wives of tired businessmen or their youthful daughters and get from $30 to $100 a week for doing it?’ ([Tango] clipping 1914: n.p.). Women’s pleasure, dance, and the future of American male identity were united in popular discourse even as Rudolph Valentino, film star, would be grafted on to this same controversy.

WOMAN-MADE MAN AND THE ‘MALE BUTTERFLY’

With their reversal of the expected gender alignment of sexual commodification, the tango teas vividly demonstrated the dreaded possibilities of a ‘woman-made’ masculinity, much discussed and denounced in anti-feminist tracts, general interest magazines, and popular novels. In 1914, at the height of dance madness in the United States, Michael Monahan warned readers of the magazine Forum that Americans were ‘suffering from too much womanism,’ a situation that was ‘preparing the way for a nation of mollycoddles.’ Already, Monahan declared, ‘the tradition of great men’ was lost; taking its place was ‘an epicene type [of man] which unites the weakness of both sexes, a sort of man-woman’ (Monahan 1914: 878–9). By 1927, Lorine Pruette was telling readers of The Nation: ‘If it is true that man once shaped woman to be the creature of his desires and needs, then it is true that woman is now remodeling man…. the world is fast becoming woman-made’ (Pruette 1927: 200).

Rudolph Valentino seemed to exemplify the epicene results of women’s perverse search for a new model of masculinity that defied normative American models. As a former paid dancing partner to café society matrons, he was easily dismissed as one of the ‘menial and sensual’ immigrants who made their living by exploiting women’s desire for pleasure. His commodification as a dancer threw him into the category of ‘male butterflies,’ the ultimate in ‘woman-made’ masculinity described by one novelist as ‘young men of extremely good looks … [who are adopted by women] for amusement much as kings in olden times attached jesters to their persons’ (Wiley 1926: 8). Valentino, in the words of Adela Rogers St John, represented ‘the lure of the flesh,’ the male equivalent of the vamp (St John 1924: 21).

Valentino’s good looks, however, did not immediately catapult him into film stardom. After playing assorted ethnic villains in the late 1910s, Valentino’s first leading role came in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), an epic family melodrama that became the biggest box office hit of the 1920s. The notion that such an epic production necessitated the casting of ethnic actors like Valentino to insure its authenticity was implied by promotion and quickly picked up by reviewers. A New York World review noted that ‘The characters [are] used primarily to give color to the picture – South American natives, Spanish, French, and German specimens – are all strikingly individualized …’ (New York World c. 1921: n.p.); another reviewer remarked of Valentino: ‘Here is a particularly well chosen player for type. Especially so since the part calls for an adept dancer of the Argentine tango, for Valent...