ABSTRACT

Unlikely as it is as a starting point for a consideration of women, work and the image, I want to start with the Hollywood movie, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes released in 1953 (Figure 9.1).

Based on a novella from the 1920s by Anita Loos, the film starred Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as a pair of nightclub dancers and singers who go on a trip to Europe and get in a spot of bother with the law over a diamond tiara before being suitably married in a huge double wedding. Beneath the gloss and glamour of a major Twentieth Century Fox musical directed by Howard Hawkes, the film is about two working-class women, from the wrong side of the tracks, as their opening song informs us. Their route out of Little Rock is sex, a polite form of prostitutionalization that is naturalized by the fact of their being showgirls in the plot, a fictive scenario that doubles the fact that these characters are played by, in the case of Marilyn Monroe, a working-class factory girl who made it as a pin-up and a movie star. This reflexivity of the fictive and the concrete makes any viewer consume the sexualization, commodification and specularization of working-class women so naturally that it becomes almost synonymous with cinematic pleasure. While the axis of sexual difference on which this creation of woman as icon has been thoroughly explored, its class dimensions remain less visible. Laura Mulvey has written: This was the time when, in the context of the Cold War particularly, advertising, movies and the actual packaging and seductiveness of commodities all marketed glamour. Glamour proclaimed the desirability of American capitalism to the outside world, and, inside, secured a particular style of Americanness as an image for the newly suburbanized white population. In this sense, the new discourse of marketed sexuality and the new discourse of commodity consumption were articulated

Lorelei, played by Monroe, is all shiny blonde, typically dressed in glittering costumes, with hard surfaces like the diamonds she herself claims as her best friends, although the 'rocks that don't change their shape' will maintain a stability and an unchanging value in complete contrast to the merely transient sparkle and desirability of any actual woman's body or looks. The second leading character, Dorothy, played by Jane Russell, is dark haired, and characterized as genuine, down to earth, level-headed, and looking for true love irrespective of money. This duo of the light and dark facets of the modem 'working girl' perform their dance routines in perfect synchronization, offering their industrialized images as both commodity and spectacle in a (dis)embodiment of the concept of mass ornament that Kracauer discerned in capitalism's anti-humanist work-disciplining of the body-machine.2