The sacred monster
Jul. 9th, 2009 08:03 am"At the other extreme, some stars exist to shock and outrage the audience. The sacred monster's every gesture, every response, challenges the assumed, the expected, the 'right'. He (or she) may be aloofly wrapped in mystery like Garbo, or aggressively tormented, like Brando; either way, the audience is swung between hopeless adoration and noisy contempt, and passionate identification co-exists with something like fascinated hatred. Garbo and Dietrich with their strange accents came from vague foreign lands which are really the 'nowhere' of a late romanticism -- indeed, the femme fatale is a romantic obsession, burgeoning in Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci, blossoming in Swinburne and d'Annunzio, whose poems inspire the great Italian divas, who in turn inspire their American adaptations (Theda Bara), and so on through Nazimova, Negri and Baclanova (who import the French interest in Slav femme fatales) down to the last romantic vamps of the '30s (Garbo, Dietrich). More often than we realize, Hollywood 'vulgarity' is simply the direct heir of high literary fashion. By the 1950s there are no romantic nowheres that haven't been flown over by the U.S.A.A.F. and Kim Novak, like Dean and Brando, is 'neurotic' so as to be unpredictable, fascinating, exotic. If the silent vamps, male and female, mirror the dreams of the kid next door, Novak, Dean and Brando, in an age dominated by psychological realism (not to say self-consciousness taken by popular pseudo-Freudianism to the point of hypochondria) reflects his conflicts. Their exoticism is only a pretext, for intensifying, lifting to the level of acting-out, conflicts in which the spectator feels he can recognize his own impulses, inhibitions and sufferings. With Valentino, the '20s audience escaped a brash, bustling world. Brando doesn't don Arab costume, and his name has intimations of immigrant vulgarity rather than of Latin languor. His inarticulacy signals his resistance to the rationalist, optimist, conformist, utilitarian, anti-emotional tendencies of middle-class Anglo-Saxondom. His struggles to speak, his fluttering eyelashes, his evident sensuality, his unreasonableness and male integrity-in-immaturity, subvert the middle-class ideal of the man well and unemotionally adjusted to routine action rather than passionately responsive to experience: in short, a ghost in a machine."
--Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (1967)
--Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (1967)