Naked Exhibitionism

Gendered Performance and Public Exposure

Claire Nally, Angela Smith, Claire Nally, Angela Smith

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857737953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to be naked in public? Approaching this question from across the disciplines, this book examines the evolution of female exhibitionism from criminal taboo to prime-time entertainment. Taking an interdisciplinary approach which brings together all fields of popular culture, including literature, media, film and linguistics, Claire Nally and Angela Smith offer an examination of gendered exhibitionism from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. They ask whether bodily exposure provides the liberation it professes to or restricts our most secret selves to the sanitised realm of socially-sanctioned gender roles. From the art of burlesque as a riotous kingdom of the imagination to reality TV which helps women to unearth their 'true' and buried feminine selves, Nally and Smith explore how the critical history and theory of exhibitionism intersects with the wider movement towards gender equality. Examining effects of second-wave feminism to problematise the naked female form, female and gender-transgressive performers from Bette Davis to Dita von Teese are placed in their cultural context.
In order to demonstrate that female exhibitionism reamins at the heart of popular culture, this book also examines the works of Peter Ackroyd and the controversial playwright Sarah Kane, uncovering the contradictions behind evolving representations of public exposure. Within a post-feminist framework, the cultural constructions behind the repackaging of female exhibitionism are explored and the prominence of bodily exposure in popular culture examined, along with the implications of those artists who perform gender as a public masquerade. Finally, hit TV shows 'Ladette to Lady' and 'How to Look Good Naked' are interrogated to expose the buried contradictions behind this public unveiling: are women seizing control of their own identity, or is this revelation an illusion? Innovative, unflinching and pertinent, 'Naked Exhibitionism' explores naked bodies in the public gaze and critically reformulates the feminist and cultural debate around the performance of gender.

CHAPTER 1

THE NAKED UGLINESS OF BEYOND THE FOREST (1949)

Martin Shingler

Introduction

Since its release, Beyond the Forest (King Vidor, 1949) has been generally derided as an overblown pot-boiler, widely considered to be of little importance other than for demonstrating the decline of Davis’s film career after 1945 and for being a camp classic beloved by gay audiences. It is, however, more interesting than this since it contains one of the most original and radical depictions of the female body of any Hollywood film of the studio era. The keynote of this film is naked ugliness. Although devoid of nudity, the film consistently draws attention to the star’s body, particularly her breasts, so much so that many critics in 1949 considered it to be in bad taste and an insult to an actress of Davis’s calibre. The suggestion at the time was that Bette Davis was demeaning herself by appearing in this way but, with hindsight, the film can be seen as a demonstration of her courage and originality as a performer and, in particular, her willingness to shock and horrify audiences with an uncompromising portrayal of evil and ugliness. So shocking was this that the studio inserted a warning at the start of the picture in the form of a written foreword superimposed over the opening images, stating that,

This is a story of evil. Evil is

headstrong – is puffed up. For our

soul’s sake, it is salutary for us

to view it in all its naked ugliness

once in a while. Thus may we know how

those who deliver themselves over to

it, end up like the scorpion, in a mad

fury stinging themselves to eternal death.

Once the action begins it is revealed that the evil at the heart of this story is female, evil personified in the classic form of the femme fatale.¹ The audience is told that it is in its own interest to look upon this, to gaze upon it in all its naked ugliness to discover how evil women are destined to destroy themselves. Prior to this warning, posters had appeared across the United States announcing the release of the film, declaring that ‘Nobody’s as good as Bette Davis when she’s bad!’

Bette Davis had a reputation for playing bad girls, having done so with great success in Cabin in the Cotton (Michael Curtiz, 1932), Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934), Dangerous (Alfred E. Green, 1935), Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938), The Letter (William Wyler, 1940), The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941) and In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942). The claim made by the posters that Davis did ‘bad’ better than anyone else was supported by her Academy awards for her roles in Dangerous and Jezebel, and her nominations for The Letter and The Little Foxes. Beyond the Forest, however, was not to be one of her critical successes, with only Max Steiner’s music being nominated for an Oscar. Davis’s performance was generally derided by the critics as histrionic. Many were appalled by her acting and her appearance. For instance, Otis L. Guernsey Jnr., writing in the New York Herald Tribune, stated that, ‘Miss Davis plays her part to the hilt, and it is perhaps not her fault that the picture has no hilt at all to keep it in limits’, adding that, ‘There is too much for one actress or one picture to carry in all this, so much too much that if the fiction didn’t expose itself in its own overstatement it would border on bad taste’ (Guernsey Jnr. 1949).

‘Life in Loyalton is like sitting in a funeral parlour and waiting for the funeral to begin. No, not sitting, like lying in a coffin waiting for them to carry you out.’ So says Bette Davis’s character Rosa Moline in Beyond the Forest. Frustrated by her life as the local doctor’s wife in a Wisconsin lumber town, she declares that, ‘if I don’t get out of here I’ll die’, adding, ‘if I don’t get out of here I hope I’ll die’, she pauses, ‘and burn’. Like her literary predecessor, Emma Bovary, Rosa yearns for something more exciting than middle-class provincial domesticity and seeks escape via an adulterous affair. Unlike the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857) though, Rosa does not amass huge debts in order to lavishly furnish her home or to buy expensive clothes. Her misdemeanours are much more serious, killing an old man and aborting her unborn child.

In comparison to Emma Bovary, Rosa Moline is much more aggressive and destructive, lacking charm or any other redeeming feature that might lend her some small degree of sympathy. Despite living in the finest house in town, she despises her home, denouncing it as a ‘dump’. She treats her maid (Dona Drake) like dirt and is just as dismissive of her husband Lewis, the kindly but dull, ever-patient doctor (Joseph Cotton). In a bid to escape this life, she seduces wealthy businessman Neil Latimer (David Brian) at his twenty-bedroomed hunting lodge in the woods, hoping that he will marry her and take her with him to Chicago. Although fascinated by Rosa, Latimer has no intention of marrying her, at least not at first. By the time he has changed his mind, Rosa has become pregnant with her husband’s child. Everything she has dreamed of is within her grasp, if only her lover remains ignorant of her pregnancy. Thus, when the old gamekeeper Moose (Minor Watson) threatens to acquaint Latimer with the true facts, Rosa shoots him, making it look like a tragic hunting accident. She then terminates her pregnancy by throwing herself down a mountain-side, inducing a miscarriage that results in a fatal attack of peritonitis. Rosa’s death is not brought about (like Emma Bovary’s) by taking poison but it is self induced and ensures that both her crimes and her vanity are ultimately punished by an ugly death. Despite a raging fever, Rosa adamantly refuses any medication from her husband, accusing him of trying to poison her. In one last desperate bid for freedom, she struggles into her clothes and staggers towards the railway station, still determined to become Mrs Neil K. Latimer. Finally, as the train pulls away, Rosa collapses, falling dead into the dirt.

In August 1949, MGM’s lavish production of Madame Bovary (Vincente Minnelli) premiered in New York City, starring Jennifer Jones, with James Mason, Van Heflin, Louis Jourdan and Gladys Cooper in the cast. Two months later, Beyond the Forest was released as a star vehicle for Bette Davis, this being one of a long series of ‘Bette Davis films’ to be produced at Warner Bros during the 1930s and 1940s. This, however, was to be the last for some time as, during the film’s production, the studio abruptly terminated her contract, thereby ending its eighteen-year association with the actress having made her one of Hollywood’s greatest stars and most critically acclaimed screen performers.² The film was released in New York in October 1949 to unfavourable reviews and poor box-office returns, failing to match the critical and commercial success of earlier Bette Davis films, such as Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtiz, 1939), All This and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940), The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941), Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin, 1943), Mr Skeffington (Vincent Sherman, 1944) and The Corn is Green (Irving Rapper, 1945).

This film is nowadays regarded as one of the camp classics of Hollywood cinema.³ It is deemed so partly for its star’s performance, often recreated by female impersonators, and for her character’s acid wit, most notably when she delivers the line ‘What a dump!’ while gazing around contemptuously at her provincial home.⁴ It is also the ‘too muchness’ of the film that renders it camp. For Susan Sontag, ‘the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’ (Sontag 2001: 275). Sontag used Bette Davis in her essay on camp, originally published in 1964, to illustrate the concept, describing her as one of the ‘great stylists of temperament and mannerism’ (Susan Sontag 2001: 279). ‘Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style,’ she wrote, ‘but a particular kind of style,’ adding that, ‘[i]t is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are not’ (Susan Sontag 2001: 279). Thus, Rosa Moline is camp because of an obvious discrepancy between actor and role, producing the vivid impression of things being ‘off’. At forty-one years of age, Davis plays a small town siren, a woman so attractive that she provokes wolf-whistles as she walks down the local high street. However, Davis’s rather puffy face, tightly fitting clothes and long black hair (clearly a wig) make this seem unlikely, rendering her character a caricature and enhancing the sense of this being a bad film. Nevertheless, this has ensured its cult status among lovers of camp and bad taste cinema.⁵

For cult audiences, Beyond the Forest is proof that nobody’s as good as Bette Davis when she’s bad, in the sense of being ‘off’, miscast or appearing in a bad movie. However, alongside the camp and bad taste elements of this film is a radical deconstruction of femininity, which is all the more remarkable given that it was produced at a time when countries such as Britain and America were attempting to reconstitute the conservative gender ideologies temporarily suspended during the years of the Second World War, when millions of women had taken on jobs previously done by men. At a time when Hollywood cinema was part of a more general project to persuade women to surrender such jobs in favour of maternity and housewifery, Beyond the Forest posed a rare challenge to orthodox notions of gender. This comes most clearly to light when the concepts of masquerade, the grotesque and the abject are deployed in relation to this film in order to understand how Davis’s performance and her physical form exhibit potentially threatening aspects of femininity. By using these concepts, I shall demonstrate how this film exposed what was otherwise generally excluded from most Hollywood films of the classical era (i.e., 1920–1960), thereby resulting in a negative response from film critics and audiences during this period. I shall, however, also reveal how attitudes towards this once despised film have changed to the extent that it has received praise and admiration from a new generation of audiences, critics and film historians in more recent times.

Bette’s Bad Body

Bette Davis’s body is foregrounded from the start of Beyond the Forest, even before the actress appears on screen. Following the written passage quoted earlier, a male voiceover introduces the audience to the town of Loyalton. The narrator then introduces Rosa Moline. Before we see her, we are told that, ‘each day Rosa used to walk down to the station, moving easily, freely, every man’s admiring eye upon her, Rosa Moline!’ In this way, Rosa is introduced not just as an object to be looked at by men but also as a fluid body. The terms used to describe her connote confidence, even wantonness, but they also summon up Elizabeth Grosz’s observation that in the West, ‘the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self containment’ (Elizabeth Grosz 1994: 203). The fluidity of Rosa’s body certainly proves to be one of the film’s most significant and disturbing aspects, particularly when peritonitis destroys her physical appearance, bringing about her death in the film’s final moments. Here she seems to be melting, bathed in sweat and loose-limbed, rolling around in a delirious state. This volatile body not only flows and melts but also erupts, resisting all attempts to contain it until at last it dies. As a result, it demands constant attention. Thus, from beginning to end, images of this excessive body dominate the film and its mise-en-scène. Rosa’s continual gazing at herself, along with Davis’s emphatic posturing, consistently alert the audience to it. This is a body, moreover, that is both vividly corporeal and inseparable from its environment.

Throughout the film, Rosa’s body and her environment are inextricably linked, especially within the cluttered confines of her house, beyond which can be seen the belching chimneys of the nearby factory while, on the soundtrack, there can be heard the incessant and insistent siren screaming out, four times a day.⁶ At one point she stands out on the porch, occupying the right hand side of the screen in a medium-close shot, a telegraph pole at the centre of shot (and in the middle-ground) with cables that appear to link Rosa in the foreground right with (in the background, on the left), a large furnace, consisting of a broad single tower topped by a crown of flames. This huge fiery tower (it requires little imagination to see this as being essentially phallic) competes for attention with Davis’s prominent breasts that point towards it, spot-lit from above, highlighting her cleavage in a low cut top. The symbolism of this image is stark, even crude: namely, phallus plus breasts (with the + sign being supplied by the shape of the telegraph pole). This image accompanies Davis’s dramatic line that if she doesn’t get out of there she’ll die and if she doesn’t get out of there she hopes she’ll die. After delivering this line, the actress moves out of the shot in order to sit down heavily upon a wicker sofa before completing the line by stating ‘and burn’, with the fiery phallus now over her left shoulder on the right side of the frame. This is just one of many instances in the film where Davis’s body interacts directly with her environment but it is one of the more remarkable.

In this instance, it would appear that a connection is forged between the factory furnace that dominates the landscape of the town and Rosa’s body (also established as a dominant feature of the town). At one level, it poses a question: namely, is the furnace (i.e., the fiery phallus) the source of Rosa’s frustration or is her smouldering desire and distress fanning the flames of the furnace? Either way, there is a correlation between the two, constituting a vital link between the two most outstanding elements of the film’s mise-en-scène, as well as between a female body and a powerful symbol of masculinity. Beyond the Forest’s narrative, of course, is more concerned with femininity than masculinity. In general, femininity is not only an (unobtainable) ideal but one that involves a denial of corporeality, operating as a mask to disguise the real female body, ordinarily constituted by such things as soft, high-pitched voices, false eyelashes, plucked eyebrows, styled hair, corseted waists, high-heeled shoes, etc. Consequently, this feminine ideal stands in direct opposition to the qualities, effects, needs and operations of the female body. For instance, from the 1940s to the present day, advertisements in women’s journals and film magazines have continually stressed that feminine skin should be more like porcelain than flesh, smooth and flawless rather than porous, wrinkled, sweaty, tactile and alive. It is noteworthy that, despite her high heels, tightly fitting clothes, long hair, long eyelashes and unnaturally high-pitched voice, Bette Davis fails spectacularly to achieve this ideal in her 1949 film.

In 1929, twenty years earlier, the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere published an article under the title of ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, with the intention of demonstrating that ‘women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and retribution feared by men’ (Joan Riviere 1986: 35).⁷ Here, Riviere argued that womanliness, in the form of flirtatious and sexually provocative behaviour accompanied by the wearing of excessively feminine costumes and make-up, could ‘be assumed and worn as a mask to avert the reprisals expected if she were found to possess it [i.e., masculinity]’ (Joan Riviere 1986: 38). Bette Davis, like many professional and intelligent women, used femininity as masquerade at various times during her career, performing such instances repeatedly in her films of the late 1930s and 1940s.⁸ Indeed, by the time she made Beyond the Forest she was well versed in this practice, although never before had she presented such an extreme version (see Nally for further discussion of camp as cultural practice).

Throughout the film Davis is seen to adopt aspects of the feminine masquerade, the high-pitched voice, the excessive make-up, the revealing costumes and the wig. The problem is that something else continually seeps through. She is certainly self-constructed, as femininity demands, but she is simultaneously self-de-constructing. As such, she wears her mask askew. Indeed, her body seems to have out-grown the mask and, consequently, it no longer fits. Thus, in 1973, writing about Beyond the Forest, feminist film historian Molly Haskell declared, ‘here is Davis, not beautiful, not sexy, not even young, convincing us that she is all these things – by the vividness of her own self-image, by the vision of herself she projects so fiercely that we have no choice but to accept it’ (Haskell 1987: 221). But do we accept it? Does Davis convince her audience that she is beautiful, sexy and young or is she playing a more complex and ambiguous game? For in Beyond the Forest Bette Davis presents her character’s femininity not just as a masquerade but as a grotesque masquerade.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his book Rabelais and His World (1965), defined the grotesque in terms of exaggeration, hyperbolism and excess (the very qualities of Beyond the Forest) and described the grotesque body in terms of the ‘gaping mouth, the protruding eyes, sweat, trembling, suffocation, the swollen face’ (Mikhail Bakhtin 1984: 308). His description aptly describes Bette Davis ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Naked Ugliness of Beyond the Forest (1949)
• 2. ‘Look! Hands Off!’: The Performance of Female Exhibitionism in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus
• 3. The Abject Body in Sarah Kane’s Mise-en-Scène of Desire
• 4. ‘Waving Genitals and Manuscripts’: Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Butler’s Excitable Speech
• 5. Cross-Dressing and Grrrly Shows: Twenty-First Century Burlesque
• 6. From Girl Power to Lady Power?: Postfeminism and Ladette to Lady
• 7. Bingo Wings and Muffin Tops: Negotiating the Exhibition of ‘Imperfect’ Bodies in How to Look Good Naked
• Notes