Tamar Jeffers McDonald,
Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film.
London: I.B. Tauris, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1848850408
US$28.00 (pb)
256pp
(Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris)
Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s latest book Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film attempts to pick apart one of the most peculiar, enduring and stupidly satisfying film tropes – the makeover. It covers a cornucopia of Hollywood cinema, including the shopping sprees of Pretty Woman (USA 1990) and Gold Diggers of 1935 (USA 1935), the makeover montages of Clueless (USA 1995) and She’s All That(USA 1999), and the dramatic metamorphoses in films as diverse as Now Voyager(USA 1942), Single White Female (USA 1992) and Miss Congeniality (USA 2000).
All these metamorphoses, says McDonald, are reworkings of the Pygmalion and Cinderella stories in which either “the man is the creator of a beautiful statue with whom he falls in love” (pp. 26-27), or more commonly, in which the woman transforms herself often with the help of a fairy godmother figure. Pervading both is the sense that the beautiful ‘after’ state is in fact her natural state to which the woman is rightfully returning. However much Henry Higgins moulds, educates and crafts Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) from street tramp to princess, the machinations of stardom are such that her glorious transformation is actually a return to the star we know better.
Having introduced the foundational texts and theories relating to themes of self-metamorphosis through costume, McDonald then identifies its key tropes. These include Visible Transformations in the form of the makeover scene in which, often to the tune of a pop song, a woman is made over into a sexier, more confident, more sophisticated version of herself. The Invisible Transformation involves the same result, but the process is hidden in favour of the ‘big reveal’ – often to create a greater sense of anticipation or shock. The False Transformation, says McDonald, is often an unsettling or duplicitous transformation more commonly associated with thrillers, in which “the new persona is a masquerade” (p. 73). The ‘True Self’ transformation occurs when a woman’s exterior qualities are jazzed up to match her already lovely interior qualities, and involves “not so much a makeover as a make-clearer” (p. 82). Amelioration occurs when, in a film like Miss Congeniality, “the height of glamour attained by the woman during her radical metamorphosis proves untenable or inappropriate in her day-today life” and a compromise is reached (p. 95). McDonald also includes the visual tropes of shopping sequences in films like Thoroughly Modern Millie (USA 1967) or Clueless; the moment of misrecognition; and of course the moment of the big reveal, usually in slow motion, down a staircase, and accompanied by an upward camera tilt.
These tropes, says McDonald, constitute an ‘aesthetic of transformation’ which is deployed again and again in scenes of sartorial metamorphosis. Her description of the ‘visual grammar’ of the Hollywood makeover cliché is the most interesting part of the book, and the sheer volume of textual examples McDonald draws on indicates that it’s a concept ripe for analysis. Unfortunately McDonald doesn’t examine the motifs that she identifies so much as define them and demonstrate just how prolific they are. Instead McDonald saves her close analysis for case studies of The Bride Wore Red (USA 1937), Calamity Jane (USA 1953) and The Devil Wears Prada (USA 2006). Why go to such lengths to show readers how enduring and pervasive these Cinderella makeover myths are across the entire history of Hollywood cinema, only to finish with a discussion of how they work within three individual films? While the textual analysis is solid enough, it felt like this was a way of avoiding the more difficult, but much more fascinating task of analysing and historicising a complex cultural myth.
The biggest problem with Hollywood Catwalk is that McDonald has defined the makeover trope in such a specific and descriptive way that it inevitably over determines the questions she chooses to explore, and the conclusions she comes to. For McDonald, the alteration of interior self through exterior sartorial makeovers are reworkings of Cinderella and Pygmalion stories, and therefore provoke a series of questions including: “Is male agency always necessary to effect the transformation, or can the woman change by her own volition? Can the woman ever change the man? How do these transformations themselves transform as time passes and cultural assumptions about female beauty modify?” (p. 7). But there are many other sartorial transformations in Hollywood which don’t draw on Cinderella/Pygmalion stories. These include the toughening up of female leads in horror and action films (especially across sequels) like Ripley in the Alien movies, Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, and others like G.I. Jane (USA 1997) or The Long Kiss Goodnight (USA 1996) that McDonald mentions but never analyses. Similarly, non-Hollywood films like the French original of Nikita (France/Italy 1990) are excluded, says McDonald, on the basis that they sometimes work differently and use a different visual grammar to their American counterparts (although Méliès’ La Chrysalide et le Papillon d’Or is described in detail). Surely this is reason to include them rather than exclude?
The most obvious omissions, to my mind, are superhero movies like the Superman, Spiderman or Batman films in which young men (mostly) undertake dramatic makeovers as part of their self-transformation into superheros (or super villains). A number of scenes from these films draw on many of the same metamorphosis tropes that Hollywood Catwalk identifies. Looking at these films might have helped develop the book’s discussion of gender in relation to the changes in interior self brought about through exterior costume transformations. Had McDonald been focused entirely on fashionable makeovers, then these criticisms wouldn’t apply, but she specifically states the book isn’t interested in simply the Hollywood makeover, but rather self-transformation through the use of costume change, and this demands dealing with some of those other examples I mention.
The scene of the newly re-made woman making her debut to astonishment, admiration and a slow upwards tilt of the camera is so pervasive and prolific that it has stopped being a well-worn cliché and become something else. Like the hero disappearing into the sunset or the beast carrying the pretty maiden under his hairy arm, the Hollywood makeover is a trope that seems to have only gotten thicker with time, becoming fat with cultural significance. While Hollywood Catwalk doesn’t entirely satisfy as a broader analysis of the negotiation of interior-exterior self through costume transformation, as an overview of the themes, films and specific motifs of the Cinderella/Pygmalion myth in Hollywood, however, it is a thoughtful discussion of a trope well deserving of interrogation.
Maura Edmond,
University of Melbourne, Australia.
Created on: Tuesday, 16 November 2010