Popcorn Venus by Marjorie Rosen

First published: 1973

Type of work: Social criticism

Form and Content

Films came into existence in the closing years of the nineteenth century and were thus born in an atmosphere of Victorian morality, but Marjorie Rosen points out that their birth also coincided with, and hastened, the genesis of the modern woman. In Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream, the question Rosen explores is: To what extent has the modern woman found adequate images of herself on the screen? The answer, Rosen suggests, is less than encouraging.

The first two decades of the century constitute the formative years of the cinema. Those years saw the rise of a new phenomenon: the film star. Women stars were not all cut from the same cloth. Theda Bara’s vamp figure was a grotesque variation on the venerable theme of the woman as temptress and destroyer. Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” specialized in playing children and adolescent girls whose combination of pluck and innocence won the hearts of audiences. Bara’s vogue was shortlived, however, and audiences refused to let their sweetheart Mary grow up. She was still playing little girls well into her thirties. What both Bara and Pickford may represent, then, is the early cinema’s reluctance to deal honestly with the experience of women. Even the greatest filmmaker of that era, D. W. Griffith, saw women largely in terms of Victorian conventions of sentimentality and idealization.

The 1920’s and the 1940’s represent for Rosen periods of relative, though finally compromised, liberation. The flapper of the 1920’s, most eloquently captured in the performances of Clara Bow, spoke for a woman’s right to enjoy freedoms comparable to those taken for granted by men. Yet the films assured their audiences that the flapper would ultimately find fulfillment in marriage to the right man, who might turn out to be the flapper’s millionaire employer. One value the flapper surely symbolized was social mobility; she might finally respect moral boundaries, but she was undaunted by the boundaries of class.

The relative emancipation of the 1940’s arose largely out of the necessities of wartime. Women were required to step out of their stereotypical roles and to assume responsibilities long regarded as masculine. While this period saw the emergence of the pinup girl (Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth) and the bobby soxer, it also paid significant attention to the theme of women living without men. Love might remain the central point of conflict, but the films of stars such as Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn, especially when Hepburn teamed with Spencer Tracy, suggest that self-awareness and professional elan may exist side by side with romance.

The 1930’s and 1950’s, however, were periods of relative regression and repression. Women suffered disproportionately from the effects of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, but neither the reality of their lives nor the generosity of their aspirations found more than intermittent expression on the screen. The period had its share of powerful female stars. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich found new complexity and depth in the figure of the mysterious woman, and Jean Harlow and Mae West embodied in their different ways the woman as subject, rather than object, of desire. Too often, however, the women of Depression-era films appear as sacrificial lambs, willingly denying their own needs for the sake of their men, or as profligate socialites in the social fantasies that were among Hollywood’s favorite strategies of denial.

By the 1950’s, women had become the numerical majority in American society, but the films of the era reveal a shift away from the relatively autonomous heroine of the 1940’s. Whereas in the real world the national divorce rate was climbing precipitately, films were asserting the value of marriage over a career. The woes of the “woman alone” became a common subject, and not even Katharine Hepburn, in such “spinster films” as The African Queen and Summertime, managed to depart from the premise that the middle-aged unmarried female was merely half a person. One of the great stars of the period was Marilyn Monroe, who is viewed with sympathy by Rosen but is ultimately classified with her many imitators under the heading of “Mammary Madness.”

From the perspective of 1973, Rosen’s view of what the 1960’s and after represent, while not without hope, remains tentative at best. She can, in speaking of this period, use words such as “revolution” and “renaissance,” but she follows them with a question mark. Finally, she is uncertain whether the future holds the promise of breakthrough or the threat of backlash.

Context

Marjorie Rosen’s subject in Popcorn Venus is the portrayal of women in motion pictures from the beginnings to early in the 1970’s. The subject had not received extended consideration before 1973. Ironically, in that same year, Molly Haskell’s From Revernece to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, which covered much of the same material, also appeared.

It is not surprising—although it must have surprised both authors—that these two books appeared in 1973. The women’s liberation movement, which had emerged in the 1960’s, had reached by 1973 a point of maturity and influence that made it inevitable that attention would turn to the treatment of women in popular culture and in art, and films belong to both categories.

In its exploration of images of women, including such topics as film characters as role models for women in society, Popcorn Venus represents a relatively early stage of feminist criticism. Some later feminist critics would look more closely at how masculine values are embedded in basic film structures and strategies. The emergence of a number of woman directors in the years following the publication of Popcorn Venus has provided others with their subject, leading to attempts to define what a woman’s cinema might be. In addition, some feminist critics have found in the very films Rosen considers more liberating qualities than she acknowledges. Rosen herself has been criticized by some feminists for letting ideological categories narrow her perceptions.

Yet Rosen’s belief that life imitates art remains justified. As long as films continue to affect how people perceive reality and how they process their perceptions, what Marjorie Rosen has to say will remain relevant.

Bibliography

Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. In the “woman’s film” the author locates a dialectic of repressions and hidden liberations. Basinger places in a later perspective many of the materials examined by Rosen.

Byars, Jackie. All That Hollywood Allows: Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Byars, like Brandon French, finds in the American films of the 1950’s more complexity than Rosen does; many films of the period, Byars argues, challenged sacrosanct gender roles.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Focusing on one of the three decades covered by Basinger, this is an academic, theory-driven, difficult book. It may provide a useful and suggestive alternative to the more empirical approaches of Basinger and Rosen.

French, Brandon. On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. Examining the films of a decade that was, for Rosen, especially depressing from a feminist point of view, French sees things differently: Many films of the decade explore critically the malaise of domesticity and the untenably narrow boundaries of the female role, foreshadowing the feminism of the 1960’s.

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Published almost simultaneously with Popcorn Venus, Haskell’s book was perceived by a majority of critics as the more psychologically astute and critically sensitive of the two, although some later critics have been disturbed by what they regard as Haskell’s cultural conservatism. The second edition brings the story forward to 1987, finding evidence of progress and of unfinished business.

Lesser, Wendy. His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Several essays in this stimulating collection discuss cinema. Lesser challenges what she regards as the “orthodox feminist” treatment of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and film stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Barbara Stanwyck. Her interests intersect provocatively with those of Rosen.

McCreadie, Marsha. “The Feminists.” In Women on Film: The Critical Eye. New York: Praeger, 1983. Compares Rosen’s work to that of Molly Haskell, who is, in McCreadie’s view, more stylistically and referentially sophisticated. Rosen, says McCreadie, has absorbed the standards of the women’s liberation movement uncritically and has applied them mechanically.

Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Methuen, 1988. A close feminist analysis of the work of one of the major filmmakers discussed by Rosen. Modleski’s flexible and sophisticated approach illuminates nuances invisible to Rosen.