Of Sex Pots & Beautiful Girls, Beauty & Art, & Carole Landis

In case you hadn't noticed, I am as much 'anthropologist' as 'historian' and 'smut fan' -- modestly educated in each, but mostly of the well-read self-taught variety.

As all three, I welcome a more contextual approach to biographies than the usual gushing over the pretty cheesecake of yesterday. So I was really excited to discover that Eric Lawrence Gans, Professor of French & Francophone Studies at UCLA, founder of Generative Anthropology and author of several books (in anthropology and other areas), has been working on a book about Carole Landis.

Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl (Hollywood Legends Series), is due this June from University Press of Mississippi. You can pre-order it at Amazon now -- but while you eagerly await the work, why not enjoy his notes in progress?



Of particular note, in the broader question of 'broad appeal', his article Carole Landis and the Concept of Public Beauty, from which the following is excerpted:

The experience of beauty--true beauty, not the mimetic sign of a fictive other’s desire--is the worldly correlate of what we call immortality, the timelessness of the realm of signs. It is an individual, not a collective experience, one that finds its guarantee on the individual’s internal scene of representation rather than on the public scene of ritual from which it derives.

The beauty of art is a beauty of representation, of signs rather than things. Because artworks are composed of human signs, the postmodern spirit that sees natural difference as the product of cultural victimage tempts us to construe them entirely within the "socially constructed" orbit of mimetic desire and its deferral. But mimetic desire, even as a specifically human phenomenon, is founded on appetite, with which it loses contact only at the point of madness.

The prototype of Kant’s idea of natural beauty is landscape, a source of esthetic pleasure less in itself than by analogy with landscape painting. But by far the most intense experience of natural beauty, indeed, of beauty tout court, is that of human beauty. In classical civilization, this beauty was more likely to be masculine than feminine, but beginning with the troubadours and medieval courtly love, the terms "beauty" and "beautiful" have been applied more and more exclusively to women. Since the demise of the Old Regime eliminated the sacred/aristocratic notion of self-display, the norm of masculine dress has become sober and conventional, whereas women’s clothing and adornment remains attuned to displaying the body to advantage.

Some feminists have complained of the "objectification" of women in such things as beauty contests. Yet historically, the increasing insistence on feminine beauty parallels the growing equality of women. Today, when women are arguably closer to equal public status with men than ever in history, young women’s dress seems geared more than ever to the flattering display of the body. The obvious difference in the respective degrees to which sexual selection has reshaped male and female bodies obliges us to conclude that, lacking special cultural circumstances, female beauty will always be more humanly significant than masculine. Nor is this beauty appreciated exclusively or even predominantly by men. Not only do women actively seek out examples of female beauty to imitate; they are touched by it, perhaps more authentically than men. Of the many people to whom I have shown Carole’s pictures, a far greater proportion of men than women feel the need to deny her exceptionality. To my mind, this difference is attributable to the interference of the shame of masculine desire with esthetic judgment. In particular, interest in the bosom is so vulnerable to ridicule that efforts to avoid it dominate whole historical eras, for example, the 1920s, during which time men’s real tastes in women’s bodies could hardly have undergone some mysterious mutation. Women, unencumbered by male embarrassment, are much more ready to acknowledge female beauty when they see it.

While earlier on, Gans' adoration of Landis is quite apparent with poetic praise -- which he will again and again return too -- it's his context and tone of unapologetic anthropological study which makes me believe Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl will be more than just the usual biography of a babe.



Gans continues:

I would not be writing about Carole if I saw her as one among many beautiful and talented actress whose lives were shortened by exploitation and calumny and/or unjustly neglected by history. My experience of Carole is of someone unique, and it would be unfaithful to that experience for me not to begin from the premise of her uniqueness. This leads to an anomaly that must be faced head on. How can it be that during the era when Hollywood wholly dominated the generation of images of public beauty, only one person has left us a truly beautiful public image, and, if this is so, how is it possible that this person and her images are so nearly forgotten today?

Although many are reluctant to admit it, a woman’s beauty begins with her body, which the glamour photograph can only suggest; with a few possible exceptions, such as the infamous Marilyn Monroe calendar, nude photography before the 1970s was either art photography or pornography, neither of which are modes of what I call public beauty. The subject of the picture says to us, "take this image as a substitute for what I cannot show you, but which I promise you is there." Yet the typical glamour shot (classically, an 8x10 black and white glossy), even of the presumably most beautiful stars, promises something it cannot deliver. The disparity between the physical beauty that the subject’s dress and comportment promise us and what our objective judgment concludes is really there is a measure of the mimetic element in our cultural perception; one is expected to sacrifice one’s judgment on the altar of cultural mimesis to the (implicitly collective) suggestion emanating from the picture itself. The spectator must supplement the image’s failure to fulfill its promise (a relative failure, to be sure, but the promise is of "absolute" satisfaction) with images of the star’s film roles, perhaps of her off-screen life. The success of the Hollywood publicity machine in determining our sense of public beauty is a tribute to the effectiveness of this sacrificial operation.

Do yourself a favor and peruse the Carole Landis pages of Gans.