Cabaret Travels: Cynthia's Written Assignment #3

Coolly Subverting the Gender Binary: Marlene Dietrich’s Impersona in Morocco

German actress Marlene Dietrich’s first American movie, Morocco, brings together many threads of our Cabaret Travels project: situated at the intersection of German and American cultural production, the film includes several representations of cabaret scenes, non-normative sexuality and gender play, and is set in an exotic “Oriental” locale.  For the purposes of this response, I chose to focus on the infamous tuxedo-wearing cabaret scene. 

I found Elizabeth Ann Taylor’s analysis of Dietrich in Morocco somewhat simplistic; she seems determined to see female empowerment no matter the situation and overly reliant on Amy Allen’s work as a theoretical model.  Nevertheless she does provide some interesting description, contextualization, and interpretation of the scene, and I will situate my reading of the scene in relation to hers.

As a viewer who enjoys gender subversion and queer desire, Dietrich’s performance brought me pleasure.  Elegant old Hollywood high feminine glamour meets top hat and tuxedo-wearing masculinity, combined with a narrow waist, full bust, and feminine singing voice.  But most of all, I’m drawn to Dietrich’s economy of gesture, imperviousness to audience boos or accolades, the coolness and aloofness of Dietrich’s gaze and performance.    I am reminded of the tawaifs’ strategy of controlling the gaze of the rasika/patron, renegotiating a male heterosexual gaze by making a male viewer come to you, emotionally, by not giving too much.  In connection to my previous research on the Harlem cabaret, I’m also reminded of Shane Vogel’s characterization of cabaret singer Lena Horne, whose impersonal style was atypical:

She offered not love but hostility, not warmth but aloofness, not presence but absence, not immediacy but hesitation, not touch but distance, not an old friend but a stranger.  She did not seek her listener out in the anonymity of the concert hall, but compelled her audience to come after her.  This aloofness characterizing her early career could be understood within the theatrical and gendered discourse of the diva. (Vogel, 167)

Vogel goes on to say, “[]Horne withheld herself in performance and contradicted the expectation of the cabaret stage as a place of performed plenitude” (169).

            Vogel characterizes Horne’s performance as an “impersona” (167) that evacuates the self, and I would tend to read Dietrich’s performance in this scene in the same way.  This directly contradicts Taylor’s reading, which interprets the scene as a “a way to express her true self” (73).  Taylor reads the female beloved addressed in the French song that Dietrich/Jolly sings as a confession of Jolly’s bisexuality.  Dietrich’s aloof impersona, in addition to the fact that this scene is narratively framed as a cabaret performance and not, for example, as a confession of sexual attraction to a female beloved, makes this interpretation interesting but somewhat suspect to me.  Interestingly, Taylor argues that the performative frame may have been what allowed for the provocative content of the scene to pass film censors:

Even Gaylyn Studlar agrees that the notion of performance allowed for the censors to let this controversial scene pass. "We can only speculate that perhaps these sophisticated, wordless hints at the transgression of gender and sexual norms were tolerated because they were contextualized as being part of the heroine's performance. (Taylor, 71)

This reminds me of the transgressive role that song and dance sequences can play in Bollywood films.  Song-and-dance sequences often depart from or rupture a film’s plot; according to Gayatri Gopinath, they are also subject to less rigorous state control than the rest of a Bollywood film (100).  Gopinath theorizes that the very “fragmented and episodic” nature of Bollywood’s film genre allows “[q]ueer spectators to seize on the numerous ruptures, slippages, and inconsistencies produced by the cinematic text’s heterogeneity in form and address to produce pleasures and identifications that may not necessarily be authorized or condoned within the ideological framework of the text itself” (98).

            Taylor reads Dietrich’s performance as a cross-dressing towards power, empowering a female subject by taking on male mannerisms, clothing, and thus male power.   She claims that Dietrich/Jolly’s “donning of male garb gives her the ability to move and function powerfully among men” and that “[t]he tuxedo indicates role reversal as a means of female empowerment, not merely androgynous appeal” (Taylor, 69-70).  She situates this in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation that

the definition of woman as female and man as human being forces woman into a position of male-imitation at those times when she most wants to be viewed as a human being (Taylor, quoting DelGaudio, 70-1)

From my position as a 21^st century feminist aware of 3^rd wave, transgendered and genderqueer challenges to the gender binary, this statement gives me pause.  For one thing, is it not possible to be an empowered, fierce femme?  And isn’t there a difference between embodying masculinity and male-imitation?  At this moment, my predilection is to read this scene as a pleasurable defiance of gender binaries, not as a woman imitating a male because she wants to be a human being.  Indeed, I wonder whether it’s necessary to read Dietrich/Jolly as a female at all in this scene.

            The most provocative part of the scene, where Jolly plucks a flower from behind a giggling female audience member’s ear, kisses her, and then tosses the flower to Tom Brown is also, for me, the most politically ambiguous part.  Given the cabaret context, I feel unsure whether Jolly’s kiss expresses queer desire or is merely for shock value.  Interestingly, this connects to my research on the women-loving blueswomen, who operated in a realm where bisexuality (as opposed to lesbianism) was seen as titillating and adventurous, and where, according to Angela Davis, many famous blues singers “purposefully seemed to present the images of themselves as bisexual, or purveyors of same-sex female relationships, in order to spark the interest of their audience” (37).  In addition, the sequence of events, where plucking a woman’s flower (a possible metaphor for taking her virginity) only to give the flower to a man, concludes with a heterosexual frame.  How differently would the scene have read if the sequence was reversed, and Jolly had plucked a flower from Brown’s buttonhole, only to give it to a woman along with a kiss, before sauntering offstage, hands in pockets?

            In relation to my previous research, both Dietrich in this scene and the queer blueswoman engaged in performances of non-normative sexuality and gender play.  Indeed, Gladys Bentley’s tuxedo and top hat outfit is strikingly similar to Dietrich’s clothing in this scene.  A key difference, however, is that the blueswomen engaged in self-representation that expressed the complexities of African-American working class women’s experiences, while I do not see this film, which was directed by a male director, Josef von Sternberg, as a instance of Marlene Dietrich’s self-representation, though I am sure Dietrich exercised agency within the parameters of the role.  In connection to our creative work for Cabaret Travels, it makes me wonder at the potential of impersona and coolness as a performative tactic that occupies a different space from performing the self and performing the other.

References

Taylor, Elizabeth Ann.  2009.  Dietrich and Sternberg: From Cabaret Performance to Feminist Empowerment.  MA Thesis, San Jose State University.

Gopinath, Gayatri.  2005.  Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Davis, Angela Y..  1999.  Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.  New York: Vintage Books.

Vogel, Shane.  2009.  The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.