What Have Clothes Got To Do With It

Southern Methodist University
What Have Clothes Got to Do with It? Romantic Comedy and the Female Gaze
Author(s): PAULA MARANTZ COHEN
Source: Southwest Review, Vol. 95, No. 1/2 (2010), pp. 78-88
Published by: Southern Methodist University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43473039
Accessed: 04-06-2017 18:56 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Southern Methodist University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Southwest Review
This content downloaded from 128.226.136.66 on Sun, 04 Jun 2017 18:56:14 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
PAULA MARANTZ COHEN
What Have Clothes Got to Do with It?

Romantic Comedy and the Female Gaze
When I was growing up, I used to hurry through dinner to watch

films like My Favorite Wife and Bringing Up Baby on Million Dollar
Movie , a nightly feature on Channel 9 in the New York metropoli-
tan area. My love for romantic comedy was born at that time, and it
continues unabated to this day. I get excited if Turner Classic Movies
is showing It Happened One Night , and anything with Jean Arthur
makes me absolutely ecstatic. Yet despite my initiation into vintage
romantic comedy, I can also get pleasure from more contemporary
additions to the genre. I am not ashamed to say I liked Two Weeks
Notice and 27 Dresses - the latter, which showed up regularly on
certain cable channels, I've watched more than once at 3 a.m. during
periodic bouts of insomnia. It's true that some romantic comedies
are better than others, but all films in the genre do basically the same
thing, and basically, it's the genre I like.
I should begin by clarifying my nomenclature. Cinematic romantic
comedies are often referred to under the rubric of chick flicks. In an
earlier era, they were called women's pictures, and you can go further
back still, to their literary antecedents, where they were called domes-
tic novels. But these terms are too general. They conflate what in fact
are two narrative strands, both directed at women but with different
plot lines and tonalities. One has its origin in Samuel Richardson's
epistolary novel Clarissa , the mother of the melodramatic plot, in
which a woman is put through the mill while maintaining an air of
long-suffering virtue. Movies like Dark Victory, Stella Dallas, Imita-
tion of Life and, more recently, Love Story, Terms of Endearment,
and Stepmom are the heirs to this weepie tradition. The point is to
remind women of how much their sex has suffered and to give them
a good cry on their own behalf. I don't want to denigrate these films;
I know they have their following. But I can't say I would go out of my
way to see one.
Cohen / 79
The other narrative strand, and the one that I would go out of my
way for, derives from the novelistic tradition associated with Jane
Austen, who launched the courtship plot in all its conventionalized
glory. Invariably there is a heroine of pluck and intelligence who, after
a variety of fairly predictable misadventures and misunderstandings,
is united with her soul mate at the end. In tone and pacing, these
stories are "light and bright and sparkling" - the phrase that Austen
used to describe her most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice. One of
the salient characteristics of that novel's heroine, Elizabeth Bennet,
was cheerfulness. She was cheerful even as she faced a future of spin-
sterhood in the company of an impossibly enervating mother. With
very few exceptions, the heroines of cinematic romantic comedy have
this quality as well. Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, and Katharine
Hepburn, and for that matter, Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore,
and Sandra Bullock are cheerful in their roles and inspire viewers to
approach life with liveliness and zest.
But these films do other things as well, which are unrelated to their
literary predecessors. After all, a Jane Austen novel and a romantic
comedy on film (even a cinematic adaptation of a Jane Austen novel)
are very different things. The difference is not only one of degree (we
all know that Austen is peerless, so why even go there), but of kind .
Literature relies on words that can plumb depths and describe contexts;
movies show us bodies in motion, engaging with material things. And
romantic comedies engage with material things in a particular way:
they glory in them and glorify them; they make them an expression
and an extension of the self. As such, they appeal to the "material girl"
in viewers (male and female alike) - or translating Madonna's idiom
into more academic terms, they appeal to the female gaze .
I say this in opposition to the general theory, propounded by film
theorist Laura Mulvey, that the balance of plot and spectacle in Holly-
wood films is designed for the male gaze. The plot portion of the
film, Mulvey's theory goes, is its linear storytelling function; this
is analogous to the male sex act in its insistent forward motion, its
drive for closure and conclusion. The spectacle portion of the film
is what diverts from this forward plot drive. Women on screen, ac-
cording to the theory, constitute spectacle,- they do not move the
plot forward but are useful resting points and diversionary asides,
made part of the hero's reward at the end of the story (think of Maid
8o / Southwest Review
Marian in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, the Hitchcock blonde,

or any of the Bond girls for that matter). Together, plot and spectacle
are fitted to the heterosexual male gaze, according to Mulvey, with
female and male homosexual viewers expected to mimic or acquiesce,
buying into a plot-spectacle hierarchy in which action is paramount
and material objects - and women themselves - occupy a secondary,
fetishistic position.
This is the standard formula for narrative film (and even female
melodrama can be made to conform to it) but not, I maintain, for
romantic comedy. Here, women gaze as women, disconnected from
a conventional male economy of desire, whether or not a man made
the film or a patriarchal perspective informs it. What constitutes the
difference is that the plot-spectacle hierarchy, which Mulvey associ-
ates with the male gaze, is turned on its head. In romantic comedy,
spectacle becomes central, and plot, secondary. As a result, these films
have been denigrated as trivial or silly, and only recently have third-
wave feminists noted that they offer unique pleasures. I want to go
further and argue that women watch romantic comedies not just for
the anomalous pleasures they afford but for more substantive reasons:
to learn how to use the material world creatively and to assimilate
things into a style of being that defines and empowers them.
I should note that male characters, as well as female ones, often have
a material presence and a relationship to things in romantic comedy
that has nothing to do with plot. Fred Astaire not only distinguished
himself by dancing on screen, an activity in counterpoint to linear
action, but also embellished his physical presentation through an as-
sortment of stylish accessories: white tie and tails, top hats and canes,
ascots, cravats, cardigan sweaters, and ties doubling as belts. William
Powell poured his cocktails with stylish aplomb; Cary Grant's suits
were impeccably tailored, and he wore them with panache,- and Clark
Gable sported a shock of hair over his right eye that was as artful in
its way as any ascot. We have few actors today who have signature
elements on a par with these great male stars, and yet one can still
find evidence of male material glamour in Matthew McConaughey's
sculpted torso, Clive Owen's picturesque stubble, and Hugh Grant's
dazzling teeth. The British accent, incidentally, may well be the
modern-day equivalent of white tie and tails, perhaps accounting for
why so many Brits - Grant, Owens, Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, and
Cohen / 8i
Jeremy Northam - are so popular in romantic comedy nowadays. My

personal contemporary favorite, however, is George Clooney, who has
some of the sartorial flair, if not the effortless grace, of a Cary Grant.
Yet for all that the men in romantic comedies can evoke interest in
their material being, their existence is rarely central to the films. It
is the women in their singularity, their thickness , to appropriate an
anthropological term, who capture our gaze.
One obvious reason why women occupy center stage in the mate-
rial world of romantic comedy is because they have more accessories
at their disposal than men. There is more for them to work with, and
for us to look at, in their clothes, hairstyles, makeup, and surround-
ing décor. This may also be why women tend to be middle-class or
above in these films - they need to have access to a large assortment
of expressive (and expensive) items. One might initially think that
these things are connected to their sexual desirability, but any aficio-
nado of "rom-com" (as my daughter calls it) knows this is not true.
Clothes and accessories are rarely seductive or revealing in romantic
comedy, and women rarely appear naked, even in our contemporary,
permissive climate. (Male nudity is another story, but it serves more
as an aesthetic element than an incitement to lust - think not only
of McConaughey's six-pack but of the many flashes of shapely male
derrière in Sex and the City.) The female body, when it is revealed,
serves more to amuse the viewer than to seduce the male lead. Thus,
Diane Keaton traipses through the 2003 Something's Gotta Give in
turtleneck sweaters only to have the revelation of her naked body serve
as a startling moment of hilarity - a comic pratfall. We are shocked,
not by the seductiveness of Keaton's bare body, but by the spectacle
of it. The effect could be compared to the shock of seeing Audrey
Hepburn newly Frenchified in Sabrina or transformed for Ascot in
My Fair Lady - the change in each case is breathtaking because
of what it says about the possibilities for change inherent in the
character. Usually these possibilities are expressed by changing clothes
but, in Keaton's case, by removing them. Although she does manage to
captivate the incorrigible Jack Nicholson in the end, it's not her naked
body that effects this accomplishment but her proud, unaccommo-
dating persona - more the turtlenecks than the body underneath. She
catches him not by sexual means but by material ones: by engulfing
him in the powerful spectacle of her character as expressed by how
82 / Southwest Review
she lives her life, which includes what she chooses to wear.
Consider another example of how romantic comedy relays female
power through clothes in the 2008 remake of the 1939 The Women.
Both the original and the remake, both based on the Clare Boothe Luce
play, push the genre to its limit, maintaining the heterosexual romance
plot without having a male figure ever appear on the screen. The origi-
nal is a delightful concoction, awash in 1930s décor and fashion, with
a cast of some of Hollywood's most powerful actresses. But the remake
(though the reviewers trashed it) has its points as well. This includes
one scene that seems expressly designed to delight the female gaze.
In it, "the wife," played by Meg Ryan (Norma Shearer's role in the
original) runs into the "other woman," Eva Mendes (the Joan Crawford
role), while both are trying on corsets in an upscale lingerie boutique.
The women have á "face-off" - Ryan in a white, front-hooked contrap-
tion, Mendes in a black, lace-up one - turning what are designed to be
seductive garments into metaphorical coats of armor. At this moment
in the film, it is irrelevant to consider who is right and who is wrong,
the white and black corsets notwithstanding (it's clear that the man
in question, whom we never see and never care about, doesn't deserve
either one of them). What is of interest is the dramatic fact of these
women's respective wills and our delight in watching them "act out"
in these elaborate and costly undergarments. Corsets of this sort are
obviously not present in the original version of the film, but Norma
Shearer does favor a very fancy dressing gown with a metallic sheen
suggestive, in its own right, of fine-mesh armor.
The fact is that I never cease to be amazed by what romantic com-
edies can do to transform absurd garments into bulwarks for the self,
and thus into clothes that I might consider wearing. There's a stock-
ing cap that Katharine Hepburn wears in The Philadelphia Story , a
ridiculous headdress under normal circumstances, which she manages
to make look almost professorial. There are the mink coats, worn by
Myrna Loy in The Thin Man and Jean Arthur in Easy Money, that make
me forget political correctness and want one. There's Ginger Rogers's
feather dress in Top Hat that so annoyed Astaire that he parodied it
with Judy Garland in Easter Parade , but which, seventy-five years
later, makes "Cheek to Cheek" the most memorable number in the
movie. The familiar conceit of a woman in impossibly high heels walk-
ing with difficulty through rough terrain strikes me as emblematic of
Cohen / 83
my point. High heels, which second- wave feminists condemned as a

byproduct of patriarchal oppression, can be the expression of female
assertiveness when viewed in the context of these films.
Among my favorite examples of how romantic comedy uses clothes
to empower character occurs in the 1937 film The Awful Truth.
The film is an example of ,Ř screwball comedy," the term used for
Depression-era films that worked frenetically to dispel the gloom of
the outside world ( Bringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night and My
Man Godfrey are other noteworthy examples). It also happens to be a
"comedy of re-marriage," Stanley Cavell's phrase for a spate of films
made in the 1930s and 1940s that feature a husband and wife whose
partnership has grown stale and needs to be revitalized. In this case,
Cary Grant and Irene Dunne play the married couple who, owing to a
few well-timed misunderstandings, decide to separate, only to become
entangled in relationships that ultimately lead them back to each
other. Central to the film's effect is Irene Dunne's wardrobe. It consists
of an ever-changing collection of dresses with strangely affixed collars
and hats in odd shapes and sizes. The clothes are spectacular but hardly
sexy; they border on the absurd. But Dunne carries them off. Watching
her stride through a fancy nightclub or into her stylish apartment in
these getups, one can't help feel that this is one secure woman, thus
supporting the idea that one can recommit to another person after
having asserted oneself as an individual. The clothes are funny, not
funny at the expense of Irene Dunne, but in support of her.
If, according to patriarchal ideology, the balance of power in marriage
always tips in favor of the man, The Awful Truth shifts it the other
way. Dunne's outfits make her more than a match for the suavely
epigrammatic and admittedly stylish Grant. At one point, battling
over custody of their dog, Dunne and Grant call the dog from opposite
ends of the courtroom - the judge having promised to award him to the
one he goes to. The dog stands frozen, unable to choose, until Dunne
wags a little toy under the folds of her coat and breaks the impasse in
her favor. So it is with the clothes. Cary Grant is charming and funny
and urbane and handsome,- Irene Dunne is charming and funny and
urbane and beautiful - but she also has those clothes which, like the
funny little toy with the dog, give her a priority in the film over even
the most devastating of leading men. We - or should I say our gazes -
are pulled toward her, even in the face of dapper Grant.
Let me reinforce my point by jumping forward to a recent example

of the genre: the 2001 film The Wedding Planner . The plot of the film
is particularly inane. In the opening scene, Jennifer Lopez, in the title
role, is saved from being flattened by a rolling dumpster by a cute pe-
diatrician, played by the ab-sculpted McConaughey, who turns out to
be the prospective groom of her richest client. Things look hopeless,
but after a series of misunderstandings and embarrassments, Jennifer
and the pediatrician are finally united in the end.
Although Lopez and McConaughey are no Dunne and Grant, The
Wedding Planner resembles The Awful Truth in a number of ways.
Lopez, despite her famous body, never appears naked or even half-
naked in the film. Instead, it is her clothes and how she wears them
that promote her centrality as an eye-catching, in-control presence. As
with Dunne, the clothes are funny - the crux scene with the dumpster
occurs because her impossibly high Gucci shoe gets caught in a sewer
grate. Lopez's shoe is ridiculous - who in her right mind would wear
such a thing? - but somehow it elevates, rather than diminishes, her.
Likewise, the weddings she plans. These lavish, absurdist masterpieces
of material design and display are extensions of the clothes. Lopez, in
short, is the maker and controller of spectacles, including her own.
As counterpoint to these spectacles is the romantic plot inhabited
by the sweet, if negligible, co-star. It is a sop that we all agree must
be provided so the heroine has something to do and because we all
believe in the saving powers of love. But the film belongs to Lopez in
her stilt-like heels, her wraparound leather coat, and the glue stick
which, with other fix-it materials, she carries inside her jacket for the
last-minute mending of bridesmaids' hems and sagging bodices.
If one looks at some of the more highly acclaimed examples of the
rom-com genre in the films that Preston Sturges wrote and directed in
the early 1940s, one might argue that my argument doesn't hold up.
Most of these films have men at their centers. In Sturges's Sullivan's
Travels, Veronica Lake is a sidekick to Joel McCrea, and in the The
Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck is the means by which Henry Fonda can
move from a simple chump to a wise one. Even in The Miracle of
Morgan's Creek , the ill-fated Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton), on
whose predicament the plot hinges, is less the ostensible focus than
Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), the man who helps her. Sturges, in short,
seems intent on using women in the more conventional fashion de-
Cohen / £5
scribed by Mulvey, as the vehicles through which his male alter egos
can learn lessons or acquire authority. And yet when I think back
on these films, I don't remember the plots or the male protagonists,
but only the women in their material being: Lake's blond curtain of
hair, the shirtwaist dresses of Hutton, and Stanwyck's high-heeled
pumps (made especially memorable when she purposely trips Henry
Fonda and sets the plot in motion - another version of Jennifer Lopez's
instigating pump in The Wedding Planner ). Sturges was a master of
wisecracking dialogue, and I admit that few romantic comedies come
close to the kind of wit and intelligence that his films offer. That said,
the appurtenances that pertain to the women in these films impress
themselves on me in a way that even the witty dialogue doesn't.
One might argue that romantic comedies, at least the classic ones,
are mostly about talk. Indeed, this is Maria DiBattista's claim in her
book Fast-Talking Dames, in which she praises the comedies of the
1930s and 1940s for their snappy, pungent dialogue. I admit that
no one talks smarter and faster than Rosalind Russell, drawls more
pointedly than Katharine Hepburn, delivers a more skeptical rejoin-
der than Ginger Rogers, articulates a pointed barb with more bland
sophistication than Myrna Loy, or spats with more zest than Barbara
Stanwyck. Those of us who value language have a tendency to think
that the dialogue these actresses have to work with makes these older
comedies different from the newer comedies in which the dialogue
is lackluster. But it is a hallmark of romantic comedy that the literal
message is less important than how the message is relayed, whether
in a spunky diatribe by Jean Arthur or a far less articulate expostula-
tion by Meg Ryan. In other words, talk in these films, even at its most
crackling and clever, is really only an adjunct to style and, as such,
exists as part of a lexicon much like clothes (which is why the great
costume designer Edith Head was as famous as many of the screen-
writers of the same period). Together, the quirky, emphatic language
and the silly, over-the-top outfits form an expressive idea that can
serve as permission to women to be themselves - to look and talk in
outlandish and idiosyncratic ways.
Clothes and talk are also part of a larger material context that often
includes spacious, beautifully furnished homes. The art deco sets in
the Astaire-Rogers musicals, the commodious apartments in The Thin
Man , the swanky house in My Man Godfrey , even the well-appointed,
if less grandiose, apartments in contemporary romantic comedy, are

stage sets for the performance of the female self. When Sandra Bullock
visits Ryan Reynolds's sprawling home in Alaska in the 2009 The
Proposal , we know that she must marry him because a setting of this
sort seems worthy of her (Austen tells us that Elizabeth Bennett felt
this way when she first saw Pemberley; with film, we can see this for
ourselves). It's not wealth in itself that seduces the heroine but the
wealth of things available for self-expression.
If the homes in question take the material aspect of the characters
and extend them in space, the heroine's final embrace of the hero
distills the material aspect to its most basic form. It is one of the hall-
marks of romantic comedy that it manages to make the bodies of the
male and female leads fit each other, even when this seems initially
incongruous. Astaire and Rogers are perhaps the example - he, knife-
thin and rather dry; she, voluptuous and shiny - yet forming on the
dance floor a perfect whole. The class-sex complementarity ascribed
to them is really, one realizes, a metaphor for the literal fact of their
material complementarity as physical beings. Hepburn and Tracy
reflect another sort of complementarity. Her angular, draped body
complements his rather squat and unkempt one, so that the ethereal
and the real seem to merge in their coupledom. William Powell and
Myrna Loy, more physically similar, are in their mutual phlegmatic
cool wonderful adjuncts to each other. This is what women want: to
find themselves, not reduced or negated, but set off and amplified by
a partner who, literally, fits them like a well-tailored dress.
In most romantic comedies, the consummation of love is signaled
by a kiss, a merging of bodies that, incidentally, doesn't require the
removal of clothes. In the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice starring
Keira Knightley, a kiss, absent from the more Austen-loyal British ver-
sion, was added in the American version. The latter seemed to me to
make sense. Whatever Jane-ite purists may say to the contrary, a kiss
seems fitting, even necessary, where one doesn't have Jane Austen's
textual voice to tie things up. It marks the end in a succinct and mate-
rial way. No kissing is necessary in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musi-
cal because a final dance, another sort of expression of closure, takes
its place. In one of the best, if lesser known of the Astaire-Rogers films,
the 1935 Roberta, a gala fashion show occurs near the end of the film,
directly preceding the final dance number. I have yet to find a woman
Cohen / 87
(or stylish man, for that matter) who doesn't go gaga over this scene,
set to the wonderful Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields song that intones:
"Lovely to look at, delightful to know, and heaven to kiss" - a recipe,
if there ever was one, for the trajectory of romantic comedy. Interest-
ingly, it's a revealing dress (cut very low in the back) that alienates
the hero from the other woman in Roberta, while the heroine, Irene
Dunne, remains sheathed from tip to toe in extravagant couture. The
more fabric, it seems, the more successful the leading lady.
It is possible to think of the female gaze, with its fascination for
the material world, as another means of manipulating women into
dependence on a consumer culture. There may be something to this,
and I may have been so manipulated myself, but I don't really care - or
at least find the rewards of such dependence enough to outweigh the
deficits. Whatever their ideological side effects, these movies' delight
in the material world serves to showcase character even in its most
minute and seemingly trivial aspect. It is about being present and
artful in every choice regarding the self.
In closing, I want to invoke one of my favorite, more contempo-
rary romantic comedies, the 1996 One Fine Day , which I watched
just last week with my daughter for the 22th time when it showed
up on a cable channel. The film, which uses children in much the
way The Awful Truth uses the dog - as a cute and stylish prop - stars
Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney, reincarnations if there ever
were of Dunne and Grant. A charming scene comes at the end, after
they have annoyed each other for much of the film. They have finally
arrived at her apartment, their respective kids are asleep, and they
have successfully negotiated a prolonged first kiss. Conventionally,
this would mark the end of the movie, but in this case, it doesn't.
Pfeiffer, who has been caught off-guard in a stained T-shirt and baggy
sweatpants, runs into the bathroom to fix herself up - she wants to
look her best now that she has found her soul mate. There follows
a montage of female self-adornment, done to the accompaniment of
the title song. Pfeiffer shaves her legs, brushes her teeth, puts on her
makeup, curls her lashes, and tries on a succession of tops in front
of the mirror. The scene is literally showstopping because it short-
circuits our involvement with the soppy romantic plot and wrenches
our attention to Pfeiffer, anointing her the definitive star of the film,
a role that Clooney, like Grant, has the good grace to accept without
a struggle. Thus, it makes perfect sense that when Pfeiffer leaves the
bathroom, dressed and coiffed to her own liking, the presumed goal of
all this preparation, the locus of the male gaze, is fast asleep, leaving
the finished spectacle entirely to us.
Author's Note. Readers interested in this subject may find the following books
worth consulting: Two classic books on the subject are Pursuits of Happiness:
The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell (Harvard UP, 1984); and
Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges by James Harvey (Da
Capo Press, 1998). Also of interest are The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic
Comedy of the 1930s by Elizabeth Kendall (Cooper Square Press, 2002), which
looks at the way the plots of these films reflect female assertiveness; Fast-Talking
Dames by Maria DiBattista (Yale UP, 2003 ), which concentrates on the empowering
dialogue in these films; and Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies
by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (Routledge, 2007), which deals with both
narrative strands - the melodrama and the romantic comedy - and discusses them
in terms of third- wave feminism.

What Have Clothes Got To Do With It

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

What Have Clothes Got To Do With It

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

What Have Clothes Got To Do With It

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Southern Methodist University

What Have Clothes Got to Do with It?

When I was growing up, I used to hurry through dinner to watch

Marian in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, the Hitchcock blonde,

Jeremy Northam - are so popular in romantic comedy nowadays. My

my point. High heels, which second- wave feminists condemned as a

Let me reinforce my point by jumping forward to a recent example

if less grandiose, apartments in contemporary romantic comedy, are

You might also like