Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Women at the cinema 139
Escapism is always a historically specific two-way event. Stacey’s women, therefore,
were not only escaping into the luxury of the cinema and the glamour of Hollywood
film, they were also escaping from the hardships and the restrictions of wartime and
post-war Britain. It is this mix of Hollywood glamour, the relative luxury of the cinema
interiors, experienced in a context of war and its aftermath of shortages and sacrifice,
which generates ‘the multi-layered meanings of escapism’ (97).
Identification is Stacey’s second category of analysis. She is aware of how it often
functions in psychoanalytic criticism to point to the way in which film texts are said to
position female spectators in the interests of patriarchy. According to this argument,
identification is the means by which women collude and become complicit in their
own oppression. However, by shifting the focus from the female spectator constructed
within the film text to the actual female audience in the cinema, she claims that
identification can be shown often to work quite differently. Her respondents continually
draw attention to the way in which stars can generate fantasies of power, control
and self-confidence, fantasies that can inform the activities of everyday life.
Her third category is consumption. Again, she rejects the rather monolithic position
which figures consumption as entangled in a relationship, always successful, of domination,
exploitation and control. She insists instead that ‘consumption is a site of
negotiated meanings, of resistance and of appropriation as well as of subjection and
exploitation’ (187). Much work in film studies, she claims, has tended to be productionled,
fixing its critical gaze on ‘the ways in which the film industry produces cinema
spectators as consumers of both the film and the [associated] products of other industries’
(188). Such analysis is never able to pose theoretically (let alone discuss in concrete
detail) how audiences actually use and make meanings from the commodities
they consume. She argues that the women’s accounts reveal a more contradictory relationship
between audiences and what they consume. For example, she highlights the
ways in which ‘American feminine ideals are clearly remembered as transgressing
restrictive British femininity and thus employed as strategies of resistance’ (198). Many
of the letters and completed questionnaires reveal the extent to which Hollywood
stars represented an alternative femininity, exciting and transgressive. In this way,
Hollywood stars, and the commodities associated with them, could be used as a means
to negotiate with, and to extend the boundaries of, what was perceived as a socially
restrictive British femininity. She is careful not to argue that these women were free to
construct through consumption entirely new feminine identities. Similarly, she does
not deny that such forms of consumption may pander to the patriarchal gaze. The key
to her position is the question of excess. The transformation of self-image brought
about by the consumption of Hollywood stars and other associated commodities may
produce identities and practices that are in excess of the needs of patriarchal culture.
She contends that,
[p]aradoxically, whilst commodity consumption for female spectators in mid to
late 1950s Britain concerns producing oneself as a desirable object, it also offers an
escape from what is perceived as the drudgery of domesticity and motherhood
which increasingly comes to define femininity at this time. Thus, consumption