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Hollywood Glamour in Postwar Italy
Although it was forged in the rarefied climate of southern California, glamour
took shape at the intersection of political, social, and economic trends. In the
Depression years, it was a means whereby privilege and inequality not only could
continue to exist in an increasingly democratic and mass world, but also could
actually serve to justify it and render it acceptable. It did this by simultaneously
creating the impression of distinction and accessibility. This was achieved through
spectacle, through the foregrounding of new not inherited wealth, through the
display of the pleasures of consumption over production, and consequently of
femininity (with its particular associations with beauty, showbusiness, and now
consumption) in place of the more obviously power-related masculinity. Instead
of envy and class hatred on the one hand or apathetic deference on the other,
glamour fostered feelings of desire, aspiration, wonderment, emulation and
vicarious identification. In short it fed individual dreams not collective resentments,
ostensibly undermining class barriers while in fact reinforcing a hierarchy
of status and money.
Glamour, it may be said, is the language of allure and desirability of capitalist
society. Its forms change but it is always available to be consumed vicariously by
the masses who see in glamour an image of life writ large according to the criteria
of a market society. As a language it is a hybrid, in that it mixes luxury, class,
exclusivity, and privilege with the sexuality and seduction of prostitution, entertainment,
and the commercial world. Aristocratic forms and styles persist within
modern glamour but – without the beauty, color and sexual enticements of the
popular theater and high-class prostitution – the drama, dynamism, scandal, and
feminine display that are central to glamour would be absent. Because it is dedicated
to femininity and fashion, as well as sex and display, showbusiness supplies
people, stories, modes, and avenues of mobility that are unique. 4 Historically, it
also provided the air of scandal and sensuality that were so important in titillating
middle-brow morality.
The highly polished, hyperbolic, and manufactured image that characterized the
specificity of Hollywood glamour was not an original or, still less, the first modern
form of glamour, but it was the most readily recognizable and potent. Film was
the only medium that gave rise to extended discussions of the phenomenon and
film studies is still the only field in which glamour has in any way been evaluated
seriously. Specialists including Richard Dyer, Laura Mulvey, and Annette Kuhn
have concentrated on the images produced in movies and stills and highlighted
the importance of abstraction and standardization. 5 In an advanced industrial
society, in which movies and stars were produced for consumption like automobiles
and refrigerators, glamour was a code of allure that necessitated a person
(usually a woman) being fetishized as a fictionalized and surveyed object. It also
entailed “deception, the interplay between appearance and reality, display and
concealment, and ambiguity and role-playing.” 6
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