The naked and the dead are becoming tiring
What beauty. One of the covers of the TIFF 40 Festival Style magazine has Christopher Plummer, 85, in a shirt and woolly sportsjacket, all covered up. On the back cover is the British model-actress Cara Delevingne, 23, entirely naked beneath a black dress thrown open and almost revealing her pubic mound.
The magazine is illustrated Daily Mail style, the men usually fully dressed and in headshots, while the women are shot head to toe with flesh showing. You couldn’t find a better symbol of the film industry chasm between men and women. The men are paid more, valued even when old or ugly, wear what clothes they want whether exquisite or beggarly, are paired onscreen with women 30 years younger, play a huge variety of roles and are almost always directed by other men.
Women are powerless, so they are photographed looking that way.
I was alerted by a reader and my first thought when I saw Delevingne was “Quick, call an ambulance.”
Her face is so expressionless it’s corpse-like. Only a half-glimpse of her eyeballs shows she’s still with us. Fashions in faces change and The Eyebrow is in right now. Hers, which I’ve seen combed and coloured in various shades, look like two black minnows swimming across her forehead.
The porning of American women began in the ’90s. Whether they knew it or not, they adopted the look of the porn actress with huge pulped lips, a heavy tan, thick flat hair, enlarged breasts and a manic mien.
Now lips are more defined, as is the philtrum (the narrow groove in the upper lip). Paler skin is favoured and eyes are made to look emphatic rather than giddy with wonder.
I am describing how the male gaze in action has changed the appearance of women over the generations. If you look at Clara Bow in the ’20s or Bette Davis in the ’40s, you’ll see changes in emphasis, shape, colour and hair.
But Delevingne, so young against the battered flaking couch — which is as lined and leathery as Tommy Lee Jones’ face and as spotted as Bill Murray’s — is selling a tube of red lipstick in its golden shaft and casing. Yves Saint Laurent makes a good lipstick and I buy it.
Like tampons, lipstick is sold via its attendant gear and the YSL tube is placed to look as though it’s about to be inserted where it shouldn’t be. It’s from the school of FHRITP (“F--- Her Right in the P----”) that is tormenting female TV journalists across Canada. Delevingne is fresh from something, her hair messy and strewn across her face. She’s wearing a tuxedo dress with satin lapels, which women wear to fit in with men at work parties. It’s basically a men’s jacket worn without pants.
It’s a sexy photograph, depending on your taste. In another ad, a woman modelling Stuart Weitzman boots is bending over for a spanking. If you like women passive to the point of paralysis, they’re on offer.
In fashion magazines, even Tina Fey looks blank, her facial scar airbrushed. Mario Testino photographs Jennifer Lawrence mentally overpowered by overblown flower arrangements, while his male sub- jects in his new book, Sir, are lively and strange, never passive. They are allowed personalities.
I like erotica and there’s some not-bad porn being made. But porny attitudes bleed into the mainstream where women are trying to achieve things. They want to write, produce and direct films, or be alive in one. If TIFF — a place to lick, slurp and slaver over the rich and famous — helps them achieve that, good luck.
But the problem extends itself. I tire of dead women. It’s not Delevingne flaked out on a couch, it’s actresses dead or nearly there. There are so many dead women on cop dramas that you trip over bodies, the more weirdly contorted the better.
I loved Game of Thrones until I grew sick of watching women being raped by silly men in chain mail. It’s George R.R. Martin’s fantasy. It’s fiction. There was no need for it.
The ultimate was the opening scene of The Bridge, the 2012 Danish-Swedish TV thriller about a naked corpse found on a bridge. She’d been cut in half. Bonus: The two halves didn’t quite match, thus there were two dead women. Two for the price of one. How magical. hmallick@thestar.ca