Picturing the Hollywood Past(iche)

You may have seen the recent spread in Vanity Fair in which current Hollywood stars pose in iconic moments from Hitchcock films. You may also have seen Lindsay Lohan's recent spread in New York Magazine, in which photographer Bert Stone replicates the even-more-iconic final photo shoot he had with Marilyn Monroe before he death.

It seems no coincidence to me that two such photo shoots would be released within a week of each other, and I think it's somehow emblematic of a particular vision of the Hollywood past that we are trying to refract through a current Hollywood lens. One could call it a kind of palimpsest, in which a more recent representation overcodes and denies the impact of an "original" (the term is originally a reference to artists who would paint over their older works with newer ones). And, it would be tempting also to suggest that such re-presentations of these images merely reinforce the superiority of the "original" images. Nevertheless, I feel that both interpretations of this kind of re-shoot would miss out on the kind of tension that exists between the two existing representations, as each vie for a prized place in the individual viewer's memory of that image. It would be absurd to suggest that any remake could completely remove the effects of an original, and I've always found the idea of automatically privileging an "original" version of any media artifact to be somewhat silly. As Linda Hutcheon has argued in A Theory of Adaptation, there is a significantly more complicated interaction here between adaptations and the works that are being adapted. That the images being adapted have the status of genuine Hollywood iconography (a status that seems destined to be conferred upon these re-visions as well, at the very least through association with the originals) complicates even more how viewers actually look at the images and how it may change our perceptions of the Hollywood past it literally re-presents for us.

Take the Hitchcock photos, for instance. The Vanity Fair photos all strive for the polish and sheen of a classic Hollywood film, most likely using various camera filters and digital processes to replicate the claustrophobic chiaroscuro and the eye-popping vastness of Hitchcock's black-and-white and Technicolor compositions, respectively. Each image painstakingly seems to recreate the kind of gloss one would associate with the slick self-promotion of an old movie press kit. Such a recreation of the original context of the use of these images as stills from the films also competes with residual memories of how we've seen such stills circulated on the internet for other purposes. And yet, here they are now, appearing as high art in one of the most elitist American magazines available today.

More importantly, the choice of actors to "stand in" for the original actors presents an interesting dynamic of how we see the images. All of the images necessarily present themselves as iconic, but in terms of the actors "playing" each role, our reaction depends most dramatically upon whether we're familiar with the images from their original cinematic contexts. In this sense, the most "successful" photos (if we're judging their success in terms of whether the actors in these re-shoots completely "own" these roles) are probably those images from films that many of the magazine's readers likely haven't seen. In terms of the sheer images alone (divorced from the original parts they're supposed to play), I would completely buy Naomi Watts as Marnie had I not seen the film; likewise Charlize Theron in her role as the would-be murder victim in Dial M for Murder or the "heroic" crew of the Lifeboat (having seen the films, however, these poses obviously compete sometimes ironically with how I understand the overall films themselves). However, from the discussion I've seen on message boards, no one seems to buy Seth Rogan as a stand-in for Cary Grant, and it's almost impossible not to see Ironman when Robert Downey, Jr. stands in for the same in To Catch a Thief.

What's really fascinating about all of these examples is how obsessively these actors attempt to strike the pose that most easily fits into our preconceptions of what old Hollywood looked like. Oftentimes, the specific content/context of the film is completely eschewed in favor of a pose which represents not a character, but nostalgia itself. The actors seem to be posing as a simulacrum of fond memories of a master at work, and thus, rather than using the opportunity to "act" in roles that they had previously had no opportunity to play, the actors are really engaging in a different kind of make-believe, a game of "dress-up." This is an opportunity for Scarlet Johansson to become Grace Kelly: she's not believable here as a character entranced by the possible devious games her beau has ensnared her in, but she looks awfully pretty, like a soon-to-be princess dignitary. As someone has kindly pointed out in conversation with me, this is precisely why we don't buy Seth Rogan: there is no pretense that he could possibly be Cary Grant, which is precisely what is wrong with image to so many people. It's a gross violation of the audience's expectations, and it thus fails to provide the affect of nostalgia so necessary in this particular kind of photo shoot.

Such a dynamic is even more vexed in the Lohan/Monroe pictorial. As reported by Cinematical, representatives at New York Magazine discuss the value of the original iconic Monroe photos: "But the pictures are also remarkable for the raw truths they seem to reveal. In them, we see an actress whose comedic talents were overshadowed by her sex appeal, a woman who is cannily aware of her pinup status, yet is also beginning to show her 36 years. In many shots, she is obviously drunk. This was an unhappy time for Monroe." The magazine deliberately attempts to foreground the context of the original shoot in order to shut down the possibilities of a nostalgia for a Hollywood past: these photos represent in some ways the manner in which Hollywood could destroy the very icons they prop up in the first place. And, it seems, such an interpretation of classic photos attached to such a troubled contemporary actress seems to imply not a nostalgia for values that have disappeared, but rather a cautionary tale regarding the destructive values that still seem to prevail even today. Such a replication this time around doesn't empty out the content of the original photos into a simulacrum by foregrounding a break with the past, but rather enhances them to advance a particularly vicious argument about the continuities with the past, that every re-presentation is still very much present as an indicator of larger cultural forces that constantly batter at us.

***UPDATE***: Just to add more to the pot, Jessica Alba did a shoot for Latina Magazine, in which she replicates famous shots from horror movies (she even takes on Psycho, as Marion Cotillard had already done (better), and The Birds, as Jodie Foster had already done (counter-intuitively) in the Vanity Fair shoots). The Alba shoot is interesting because she's such a notoriously bad actress and because it thus emphasizes the kind of nostalgic posturing going on here.

Even weirder, Annie Leibovitz recently shot some famous stills from animated Disney films with famous actors. This one adds a whole new dimension in terms of the relationship between animation and live film: the actors aren't cartoons, but they try their best. I also wonder if it's a veiled commentary on the manner in which animated projects in the past decade or so have required major celebrity talent to succeed, something that you don't really see in the older Disney films as much.