Fetish, Costume, Sex, Hollywood, USC

Stella Bruzzi’s “Desire and the Costume Film” diverges from conventional, scholarly notions of costume dramas that typically center around three themes: a “sceptical distrust of the film’s motives, their prioritization of bourgeois ideals, and their conservative, nostalgic view of the past” (35). Because male writers have shied from the genre entirely, reducing costume dramas to something merely feminine, melodramatic, and therefore outside the canon of critical discourse, a dearth of scholarship has left Bruzzi with what she admits is a wide gap to fill. Her interpretation however is much more complex than the rather uncritical afterthoughts of male writers. Boldly, she goes beyond femininity and melodrama in her analysis of three films (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Age of Innocence, The Piano) that both typify and transcend the genre to suggest the costume drama’s power lies in the fetishistic and erotic potential of the costumes themselves.

Sex is always a difficult subject on which to write. Many in the academy, for better or worse, tend to fall back on what (I still hold on to feeling) are unfounded, dated assertions by psychoanalysts. Bruzzi addresses Freud and Lacan but does not dwell on their writings, moving on to more recent scholarship by Metz, Kunzle, Steele, and others, and ultimately tossing clothes into a series of binaries. The power of the fetish, she posits, lies in coalescence of the natural (the naked body) and the unnatural (clothes), pain (corset) and pleasure (tiny waist), the real (skin) and veiled (cloth), etc.

Not bound by in-depth, somewhat redundant, narrative analyses that characterize the Bruzzi essay’s second half, Jane Gaines in “Costume and Narrative: How Dress Tells the Woman’s Story” outlines an empirical history of costuming in Classical Hollywood, particularly how designers like Edith Head worked in the studio system. Unfortunately, Gaines’ essay steers clear of fetish, her history of silent and early sound film costuming devoid of sex, particularly when discussing star making. What of Mack Sennett’s leggy bathing beauties, Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland nearly falling out of their corsets in Gone With the Wind (a female melodrama in the guise of an epic) or a svelte, seductive Barbara Stanwyck revealing a line of flesh in a black halter top in The Lady Eve? Hollywood has always pushed the erotic envelope, something that continues to challenge Middle America’s values of decency and modesty. This is somehow sidelined in a rather dry but respectable run of scholarly work, limiting costume to its mere semiotic, exaggeratory, and storytelling functions.

The Hollywood fetish and male scopophilia (per last week’s discussion) is very important because its legacy endures: insecure celebrities demanding drastic plastic surgery (read: Heidi Montag); paparazzi chasing around skinny stars in bikinis (read: all actresses); and the American porn industry (read: creepy, old white men like Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt), all part of this wonderful tapestry called Southern California. In all seriousness and confidence, I think USC makes note of this exceptionally well.