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 21st
century feminist aware of 3rd 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.
