Supplemental Post #1 - Cailin O'Brien 2/6/18

Dyer, Eckert & Maria LaPlace (producing & consuming the women’s film”

I would like to start off my saying that I highly appreciate the viewpoints of the authors we have been presented with here: Dyer, Eckert & LaPlace. They all don’t take a soft edge when addressing the illegitimacies and issues that devour the film industry, outside society and the stars it makes use of.

Secondly, these three readings brought to my attention the importance of not only consumerism within the film industry, but in particular the importance of the female consumer of the film industry. Now today it is common knowledge that “tie ups” and other various corporate contracts are drawn up within Hollywood to create a co-op of entertainment and advertisement. What I did not realize was the extent to which producers manipulated the female population at the time. In her article “Producing and Consuming the Women’s Film”, Maria LaPlace puts it perfectly by stating “on one level, the empowerment of women, for the appeal is to female desire itself, to wants and wishes, to (libidinal) pleasure, sexuality & the erotic, and a species of economic decision & choice. What consumerism attempts to do is to liberate these forces through the creation of a female market, only to contain them in the service of patriarchy & capitalism” (page 12).  While women were finally feeling as though they had some sort of voice in household matters, this was the extent of the freedom they would receive. They were tricked in not one but two ways. One involving the false belief that they may be on a more equilateral playing field with their male counterparts in society. And the second involving a generated sense of need for consumer products such as cosmetics and “star-labeled” clothing articles.

What also struck me was the way LaPlace picked apart Better Davis’ character, Charlotte, in Now, Voyager. The more into detail she went in regards to Charlotte’s disapproval with herself and ways in which she is cured through “metamorphosis” into a glamour girl. While this film may be from the 1930s, we still see these “ugly duckling” turned “beautiful” storylines today. I could not stop thinking about The Princess Diaries and the way that Anne Hathaways character resembles Charlotte. While at the end of the movie she realizes that she has put material popularity and things before her closest friends, the emphasis on beauty still seems, in my opinion, to trump this latter message.