GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (Howard Hawks, 1953)

The presentation of both Marilyn Monroe (Lorelei) and Jane Russell (Dorothy) as leads indicates that the director was pandering to the male portion of the movie-viewing audience, but analyzing the acting, mise-en-scène and cinematography of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes reveals that Howard Hawks engaged in a masterful manipulation of the male gaze.

In the opening scenes after the introductory musical number, both the female stars retreat into their dressing room, followed shortly by Lorelei’s swain du jour, Gus Esmond. Lorelei arches her back and poses, bare leg jutting out from her robe; this is presumably for the benefit of Gus, but the angle is such that it is evidently displayed more for the audience’s sake. In contrast, Dorothy stands with her shoulders rolled forward, her body turned at a three-quarter angle to the camera. All the focus is on Lorelei, but in a clearly posed way--it seems to disregard the narrative in the same way that her leg sticks out of the robe, and for that moment, Lorelei is in complete control of Gus, the camera, and by extension, the audience.

Another instance of the male gaze subverted comes as the women prepare to board their trans-Atlantic ship. They strut through a corridor of male admirers, but the crowd is completely indistinct, blurred with a dim, warm light. Only the women are in sharp focus, the color crisp and bright. This could serve to merely highlight the eye candy as it waltzes past, but the anonymity of the crowd signifies the utter disregard the women have for others’ opinions when paired with Lorelei and Dorothy's knowing, possibly even smug, expressions.

Dorothy’s interaction with the Olympic team asserts the total power of these two women in this world. The males are interchangeable, beautiful, athletic, and objects--they appear totally naked, but wear flesh-colored shorts (more blatant packaging than most women engage in, even now) and perform their routines mechanically. Dorothy wears a skintight black outfit and dances around, belting out a song about love while eying the athletes with lascivious glances. She ends up in the pool and emerges, lifted by some of her Olympian lackeys, as a dripping, singing, sex-kitten.

The most stunning example of cultural sabotage comes with Lorelei’s performance of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend.” The sight of women wrapped in what appears to be PVC or, more likely, leather, immediately calls to mind the costumes of bondage enthusiasts. Their arrangement as set decoration (chandeliers, lampposts, etc.), the diamonds they wear, and their joyous expressions, are all surreal in the extreme and blatantly challenge the viewer’s expectations of pretty girls wearing pretty things. Clearly Hawks is self-reflexively presenting these attractive women as inanimate objects to point out the common treatment of women as less than fully human, and rubbing the audience's collective nose in its collusion with the process.

Gentleman Prefer Blondes offers a stark contrast to many decades of mainstream Hollywood cinema; it both anticipates and transcends (in some moments at least) the paradigm proposed by Laura Mulvey in her seminal work "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The film accomplishes this by reversing the stereotypical visual and narrative presence expected of female characters: they are not offered as objectified objects of the male gaze as a "visual presence [that] tends to work against the development of a story-line" (40). Instead, it is feminine desire (or at least the desire of the female characters) that is in fact the driving story-line of the narrative and the masculine that becomes objectified.

There is no ambiguity to the sexually assertive quality of Dorothy (Jane Russell). Besides acting as a guardian to the slightly dim-witted, though always conniving Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe), Dorothy makes no apology for her plans to make good use of their time traveling the Atlantic in a cruise-liner: "Nobody chaperones the chaperone" she remarks. That Dorothy's desire is so direct and unabashed is enough in itself to break with norms--it is all the more crystallized in the musical number "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" As Dorothy performs the song, a group of male Olympians wearing nothing but tight, flesh-toned shorts surround her in a choreographed dance routine. The presence of multiple yet indistinguishable male bodies takes the typical place of the female, who is normally expected to be "looked at and displayed," and in the men's blank gazes and suggestive movement they invite "to-be-looked-at-ness" (40). Here the male presence is fetishized as fragmented body parts of Dorothy's desire (biceps, legs, even buttocks). This striking visual presence serves no narrative purpose other than a materialization of Dorothy's desire.

This seeming aberration in which the male-gaze is displaced in favor of the desiring female is tempered, though, by its context within a musical number. Although the lyrics of Dorothy's song are filled with innuendo, the overall nature of the scene as spectacle at large prevents identification between the audience and Dorothy. She may be desiring-woman, but her desire in this scene maintains a level of abstractedness: what she seeks cannot be realized in these male drones. What begins as unimpeded sexual desire in the midst of half-naked male bodies ultimately succumbs to a standardized narrative, and ends with Dorothy's desire properly relegated beneath a white wedding dress.

In the veritable "pressed duck" of variations on the male gaze that is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the most compelling manner in which Hawks exploits and capitalizes on the nature of the male gaze is with regard to the way the film resolves the conflict of Lorelei Lee as the object of visual pleasure--with Lorelei Lee as the inducer of "eroticized phantasmagoria" (Mulvey 39). When the film ends Lorelei no longer evokes, or threatens to evoke anxiety: instead there is a "complete disavowal of castration" with regard to Lorelei's presence in the narrative and on the screen, because the film has turned Monroe into a fetish "so that [she] becomes reassuring rather than dangerous" (Mulvey 42). The narrative takes a great deal of trouble generating both the visual pleasure of Monroe as object, as well the anxiety that Lorelei Lee evokes in the narrative. The complicated, tenuous relationship between Lorelei and Gus Esmond, the presence of the Olympics team on board the cruise ship, and Lorelei's amoral dimwittedness all serve to evoke anxiety. At the same time, eroticizing fashion, song and dance numbers, and an exaggerated lack of intellect enhance Lorelei Lee's "erotic identity" (Mulvey 39).

The element of film noir in the narrative allows for a dramatic increase in tension between these two forces and sets the stage for their eventual resolution. The presence of elements of film noir (the private detective, the crime and the flight) are significant because they suggest a genre which takes as one of its conventions the "devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object" (42). The film, however, ingeniously backs away from conventions of film noir by invoking one of film noir's most well-known conventions, the double, or instance of mistaken identity. Even this move, though, is subverted because the case of mistaken identity is completely over-the-top and happens in a courtroom, with the complicity of the "good brunette" and the private detective, a reversal of the way mistaken identity works in, say, Double Indemnity. Furthermore, this reversal in the tension between Lorelei as visual pleasure and Lorelei as that which induces anxiety recalls an element of the uncanny: we are "at home" in the conventions of film noir, but it's unlike film noir. The feeling of the uncanny is further developed when Lorelei gives Gus the "Men like you have made me what I am" speech. This idea of the bad woman as the victim is another convention of film noir, although rarely is it delivered so glibly.

As the film ends the narrative thread affirms that Lorelei has been "neutralized": she successfully interviews with Esmond Sr., the venerable icon of class respectability, who declares her not nearly as stupid as everyone had claimed, and in doing so indicates that she no longer poses a threat. It's likely that Esmond Sr.'s endorsement amounts to what Mulvey calls "overvaluation, the cult of the female star" (42). However, if that is the case then it would seem incongruous that Esmond Sr. would be the best candidate for this role. Wouldn't Piggy Beekham make a better candidate? After all, he's rich in the most superficial, tacky way (new money, as opposed to Esmond's old), and susceptible the Lorelei's wiles. Is there a conflict in this resolution, or am I chasing my own tale?

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Last update: 8/27/2004