Not All Sex Kittens are Catty ...

 

Cover of the French magazine  

Noir et Blanc (12 June 1959)

 

 

Despite the best efforts of the press in the 1950s to create a rivalry between the Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe and her younger French counterpart Brigitte Bardot, the two - very different [1] - women never came to blows or traded insults.

 

In fact, following their only meeting - in the ladies’ dressing room of the Odeon Leicester Square, for a royal film premier on 29 October, 1956, at which both Bardot and Monroe were formally introduced to the Queen [2] - the former, still only 22, was clearly a little star-struck by the latter, then in her prime. 

 

Many years later, writing in her 1996 autobiography, Bardot confessed that she simply stared at Marilyn, too nervous to speak, other than to shyly say hello: "I found her sublime. She was always for me what every woman, not only me, must dream to be. She was gorgeous, charming, fragile."     

 

She goes on to add: 

 

"I have a lot of things in common with Marilyn and she is very dear to my heart. Both of us had childish souls despite our starlet bodies, an intense sensitivity that can't be hidden, a great need to be protected, a naïveté!" [3]

 

Which really just goes to show that not all sex kittens are catty ...

 

Interestingly, however, a third screen goddess was also present at the royal film performance in 1956; namely, the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg. 

 

As with Bardot, this was the only time that Ekberg's path crossed with that of Marilyn, about whom she once commented in a 1999 Arena documentary on the BBC: "I think she's a good actress: you can't play stupid unless you're very intelligent", which I suppose is a compliment. 

 

But in the same televised interview, Ekberg denies that Bardot was beautiful, insisting she was simply "very pretty [...] like a Barbie doll." [4] 

 

Which shows that some sex kittens are catty after all ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Monroe, born in LA in 1926, spent much of her childhood in foster homes and orphanages, before becoming a factory worker; Bardot, on the other hand, was from a solidly middle class Parisian background and trained to become a ballerina. At fifteen, Bardot was invited to pose for the cover of Elle, whilst Marilyn was appearing as a nude pin-up model in rather less respectable magazines. 

      However, both women went on to achieve global fame as movie stars and both, interestingly enough, caught the attention of intellectuals; Monroe married the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956 and Bardot was described by Simone de Beauvoir in her 1959 essay The Lolita Syndrome as the most liberated woman in post-War France.  

 

[2] The film being premiered was The Battle of the River Plate (1956), a British war film by the writer-director-producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film stars John Gregson, Anthony Quayle, and Peter Finch.     

 

[3] Brigitte Bardot, Initiales B. B.: mémoires, (Grasset, 1996). 

      Note that I'm relying on an anonymous English translation of these lines, so can't vouch for its accuracy. However, I have no reason to doubt such and Bardot makes clear her admiration and affection for Marilyn in an interview posted on YouTube: click here. 

 

[4] To watch the clip from this Arena documentary, directed by Nicola Roberts, in which Ekberg comments on Marilyn Monroe, click here. To watch the clip in which she comments on Brigitte Bardot, click here. 

  

B is for ... Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

B is for ... 

Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

 

 

There are many French things that I love beginning with the letter B - from a big bowl of bouillabaisse served with crusty baguette slices, to Brigitte Bardot on the beach in her bikini [1]. 

 

Even four of my favourite French writers have surnames beginning with the letter B - Messrs. Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes and Baudrillard - and this perhaps explains why it is that I can never think of one without also thinking of the others [2].  

Obviously, as a 19th century poet and critic, Baudelaire knew nothing of those who came a century after him. But it might be interesting to briefly recall what Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard said about the author of Les Fleurs du mal ... 

 

 

Bataille on Baudelaire (Désirer l'impossible) 

 

In his essay on Baudelaire in La Littérature et la Mal (1957), Bataille says that the former desired the impossible as a response to the utilitarian demand that we be reasonable as well as make ourselves useful. It is in this desire for the impossible and a useless expenditure of energy, that man discovers his authenticity and poetry locates its task. 

 

This, of course, is a Romantic vision; but it is one that Bataille in his own quest for the impossible - i.e., a simultaneity of contrary experiences - continues and yet exceeds. 

 

 

Barthes on Baudelaire (La Vérité emphatique du geste)

 

Whilst it's true that he only produced one sustained piece of writing on Baudelaire - and this on a relatively marginal aspect of the latter's work, namely, his failed theatrical projects - Baudelaire nevertheless remains a point of reference throughout Barthes's oeuvre. 

 

Indeed, as one commentator has recently pointed out, the phrase quoted from Baudelaire's Exposition Universelle (1855) concerning 'the emphatic truth of the gesture in the important moments of life' is one that "punctuates Barthes's published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority" [3]. 

 

Baudrillard on Baudelaire (L'Objectivation absolue de l'art)

 

By his own admission, Baudrillard's relationship with the world of art has always been one marked by a certain ambivalence: "I come from a moralist, metaphysical tradition, a political and ideological tradition that has always been wary of art and culture in general [...]" [4]

Nevertheless, he is obviously interested in how art from Baudelaire to Warhol has been involved in staging its own disappearance and meeting the challenge posed to it not only by an age of mechanical reproduction, but by consumer capitalism which turns everything into merchandise (i.e., objectifying everything in terms of market value).

 

It was Baudelaire, says Baudrillard, who first came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of offering a defence of the traditional status of the work of art based on aesthetic value and seeking art's salvation in and on its own terms - art for art's sake - Baudelaire calls for an acceleration of the processes unfolding within modernity and for art's absolue objectification:

 

"Since aes­thetic value risks alienation from commodity, instead of avoiding alienation, art had to go farther in alienation and fight commodity with its own weapons. Art had to follow the inescapable paths of commodity indifference and equivalence to make the work of art an absolute commodity." [5]

      

This, says Baudrillard, is what a work of art should be; "it should take on the characteristics of shock, strangeness, surprise, anxiety, liquidity and even self-destruction, instantaneity and unreality that are found in commodities" [6]. 

 

The reason Baudelaire still interests and seems so relevant today is not because of his poetry, but because via his ironic logic the work of art was able to sparkle in its own venality and become "a pure object of marvellous commutability" [7].   

 

 

Notes

[1] Readers may recall that I wrote about the history and politics of the bikini in a post published in August 2016, which was illustrated with a photo of 19-year-old Bardot wearing her two-piece swimsuit on the beach at Cannes in 1953: click here.

[2] Of course, there are other reasons apart from an onomatological coincidence as to why these four writers are closely related and it would make for an interesting philosophical and literary study to trace out their shared ideas and concerns.   

 

[3] Douglas Smith, '"La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie": Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture', Irish Journal of French Studies, Vol. 21 (2021), pp. 99-121.  

      In this essay, Smith examines the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes and attempts to answer the question of what that might tell us in turn about the former. He does this by tracing out the manner in which Barthes deploys the quotation from Exposition Universelle and by paying particular attention "on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes)". 

 

[4-6] Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008): click here to read online. 

      This paper was given as a lecture at the Whitney Museum (New York) in 1987. It also appears in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2005), pp. 98-110.

 

Simone de Beauvoir: Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (Pt. 2)

IV. BB and the Feminine Mystique

Four years after de Beauvoir published her fascinating little study of Bardot and the Lolita syndrome, the American feminist Betty Friedan gave us her seminal work The Feminine Mystique (1963).

In it, Friedan examines the problem that has no name - namely, the pressure exerted upon women to fulfil an ideal of femininity that is mysterious yet, nevertheless, rooted in biology and closely related to the creation and origin of life.

According to the proponents of this feminine mystique, it's a fatal mistake to think women are just like men, or can behave and become just like them. Instead, they should accept and value their own nature "which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love".

It is this kind of thinking that has succeeded, says Friedan, in burying millions of women alive. But it is this kind of thinking that Bardot seems to challenge. And thus whilst all men are surely drawn to her seductiveness, by no means are they kindly disposed towards her. BB simply doesn't play the game that they are used to and expect of her:

"Her flesh does not have the abundance that, in others, symbolizes passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she strips she is not unveiling a mystery. She is showing her body, neither more nor less, and that body rarely settles into a state of immobility. She walks, she dances, she moves about. Her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive. In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is a prey. The male is an object to her, just as she is to him. And that is precisely what wounds masculine pride."

In other words, BB silently asserts her equality and her dignity; she's never the victim and never anybody's slave or fool. She disturbs men by refusing to lend herself to phallocratic fantasy or idealistic sublimation, restoring and limiting sexuality to the body itself; to her breasts, her bottom, her thighs, etc.

De Beauvoir writes approvingly of the manner that Roger Vadim brings eroticism back down to earth in a society with spiritualistic pretensions. For when love has been disguised "in such falsely poetic trappings", it's refreshing to see a woman on screen who is libidinally prosaic.  

Having said that - and perhaps reminding herself that existentialism is, after all, a humanism - de Beauvoir regrets the rather dehumanising aspect of Vadim's project; i.e. the manner in which he reduces the world, things and bodies "to their immediate presence" (without history or a context of meaning).

Vadim does not seek the viewers' emotional complicity; he doesn't care if we find his films unconvincing or fail to relate to his characters. We know no more about Bardot's character (Juliette) at the end of And God Created Woman than at the beginning, despite having seen her naked. In effect, Vadim de-situates her sexuality, says de Beauvoir, turning spectators into frustrated voyeurs "unable to project themselves on the screen."

No wonder so many men describe (and condemn) Bardot as a pricktease [allumeuse].


V. Afterword on BB and Free Speech

De Beauvoir closes her little study of Bardot by expressing her hope that the bourgeois order will not find a way to silence her, or compel her to speak lying twaddle: "I hope that she will not resign herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity. I hope she will mature, but not change."

One can't help wondering what de Beauvoir, who died in 1986, would have made of the woman Bardot is today ...

Would she still declare her to be the most liberated woman in France and an engine of women's history? Would she regard her recent statements on immigration and Islam as a legitimate expression of free speech, or as an unacceptable form of hate speech?

Bardot certainly hasn't been silenced or resigned herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity - but has she matured, or simply become an elderly reactionary? She's certainly changed. But then, as Bardot herself says, only idiots refuse to do so and she doesn't give a fig about politically correct forms of feminism.  


Notes

Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, (Four Square Books / The New English Library, 1962).

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (W. W. Norton, 2001).

To read part one of this post, click here.

Simone de Beauvoir: Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (Pt. 1)

I. Initials BB

In 1959, Brigitte Bardot - the world's most outrageously sensual film star - was the subject of a 64-page study (with many half-tone illustrations) written by Simone de Beauvoir - France's leading female intellect.

De Beauvoir is intrigued by the sneering hostility that many of her compatriots feel for BB. Not a week goes by, she notes, without articles published in the press discussing her love life and analysing her personality; "but all of these articles [...] seethe with spite".

Many parents, priests and politicians seem to object to Bardot's very existence. At the very least, they call for her films to be banned in order to prevent her corrupting influence on society, particularly amongst the young. Of course, as de Beauvoir writes, it's nothing new for self-righteous moralists "to identify the flesh with sin and to dream of making a bonfire of works of art" that depict it in pornographic detail.

However, such puritanism still doesn't quite explain the French public's very peculiar hostility towards Bardot. After all, many other actresses have taken their clothes off on screen and traded on their physical charms without provoking such anger and dislike. So the question remains: why does BB arouse such animosity?


II. The Lolita Syndrome

If we want to understand why Bardot was regarded as a monument of immorality, it's irrelevant to consider what she was like in real life. The important thing, rather, is to place her within a modern mytho-erotic context and examine what de Beauvoir terms the Lolita syndrome; i.e., what is for some the shocking and deplorable truth that older men are often sexually attracted to much younger girls.   

Idealists want their arts and entertainments to have an element of romance. But they also expect things to remain wholesome and familiar. The male lead in a movie, for example, should be clean-cut and the object of his affection a woman who doesn't deviate too far from the girl-next-door. And at the end of the film there should be the sound of wedding bells. 

Post-1945, however, serious film-makers were heading in a rather different direction. Their model of eroticism was obsessive and destructive: amour fou. And they were interested in creating a new Eve who was part hoyden, part femme fatale and whose youth opened up that pathos of distance that seems so necessary to (middle-aged male) desire:

"Brigitte Bardot is the most perfect specimen of these ambiguous nymphs. Seen from behind, her slender, muscular, dancer's body is almost androgynous. Femininity triumphs in her delightful bosom. The long voluptuous tresses of Melisande flow down to her shoulders, but her hair-do is that of a negligent waif. The line of her lips forms a childish pout, and at the same time those lips are very kissable. She goes about barefooted, she turns her nose up at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, make-up, at all artifice. Yet her walk is lascivious and a saint would sell his soul to the devil merely to watch her dance."


III. BBeyond Good and Evil
      

But BB is not just sexy in a conventional sense. Nor even is this "strange little creature" fully human:

"It has often been said that her face has only one expression. It is true that the outer world is hardly reflected in it at all and that it does not reveal great inner disturbance. But that air of indifference becomes her. BB has not been marked by experience [...] the lessons of life are too confused for her to have learned anything from them. She is without memory, without a past, and, thanks to this ignorance, she retains the perfect innocence that is attributed to a mythical childhood."

In a sense, Bardiot is inhuman - or superhuman - or both; a force of nature who doesn't act before the camera but just is. Nevertheless, she does seem to reinforce traditional ideas of femininity; temperamental, unpredictable, wild, impulsive ... a feral child in need of taming and the guidance of an experienced male. 

However, this sexual stereotype and sexist cliché - which so flatters masculine vanity - is no longer tenable; cinema goers in the post-War period were no longer prepared to believe in this phallocratic fantasy in which the old order was restored and everyone lived happily ever after.

And this is why Roger Vadim's 1956 film starring Bardot - Et Dieu… créa la femme - is a great work; one that doesn't fall into triviality and falsity, but remains honest to the spirit of the times by presenting us with a character, Juliette, who will never be subordinated, or settle down and become a model wife and mother.

De Beauvoir writes:

"Ignorance and inexperience can be remedied, but BB is not only unsophisticated but dangerously sincere. The perversity of a 'Baby Doll' can be handled by a psychiatrist; there are ways and means of calming the resentments of a rebellious girl and winning her over to virtue. [... But] BB is neither perverse nor rebellious nor immoral, and that is why morality does not have a chance with her. Good and evil are part of conventions to which she would not even think of bowing."

She continues:

"BB does not try to scandalize. She has no demands to make; she is no more conscious of her rights than she is of her duties. She follows her inclinations. She eats when she is hungry and makes love with the same unceremonious simplicity. Desire and pleasure seem to her more convincing than precepts and conventions. She does not criticize others. She does as she pleases, and that is what is disturbing. [...] Moral lapses can be corrected, but how could BB be cured of that dazzling virtue - genuineness? It is her very substance. Neither blows nor fine arguments nor love can take it from her. She rejects not only hypocrisy and reprimands, but also prudence and calculation and premiditation of any kind."

Bardot is a woman who lives only in the present - now/here - and for whom the future is one of those "adult conventions in which she has no confidence". And this is why so many people fear and hate her. If she were a conventionally bad girl figure - coquettish and calculating - there'd be no real problem. But when evil "takes on the colours of innocence", then good people everywhere are radically disconcerted. 

In sum: BB is "neither depraved nor venal". She might lift up her skirt and flash her knickers, but there is a kind of disarming candour, playfulness, and healthy sensuality in her gestures: "It is impossible to see in her the touch of Satan, and for that reason she seems all the more diabolical to women who feel humiliated and threatened by her beauty."


See: Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, (Four Square Books / The New English Library, 1962).

Note: this post continues in part two: click here.

In Praise of the Ballet Flat

Brigitte Bardot wearing her red Repetto ballet pumps 

in And God Created Woman (dir, Roger Vadim, 1956)

I have voiced my aesthetico-political objection to flip-flops elsewhere on this blog; a kind of anti-shoe masquerading as a sandal, which makes even the prettiest female feet look flat, tired, and unattractive.  

As I said, it's not the bareness of the feet with which I have a problem - but neither is it the flatness of the shoe per se. Were this the case, then, obviously, I wouldn't care for ballet flats either and, as a matter of fact, I love this form of shoe with little or no heel, which achieves the impossible of making comfort appear chic.

Also, unlike the flip-flop, which is born of a nostalgie de la boue, the ballet flat demonstrates that even the simplest of designs can add sophistication and style ...

Dating back to the 16th century, when flats were worn by both sexes, they went out of fashion amongst the rich and powerful following the introduction of the high heel; an innovation in footwear credited to fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici, who had a pair of shoes designed for her wedding day in 1553 that would add to her stature and provide a sexy swagger when she walked.         

Two-and-a-half centuries later, however, after the ill-fated shoe lover Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine in a pair of heels, wealthy women decided they didn't want to be seen dead in them - and so the ballet flat was back in vogue ...  

Fast forward to 1947, and Rose Repetto gave us her brilliant take on the design, hand-stitching a pair of ballet flats for her son, the renowned dancer and choreographer, Roland Petite. Soon, bright young things all over Paris wanted a pair.

And when, in 1956, she created a special version - known as the Cinderella Slippers - for Brigitte Bardot, Repetto conclusively demonstrated that when God created woman, he created her wearing ballet flats ... not flip-flops!  

Note: those interested in reading the earlier post - Life is Ugly in Flip-Flops - click here.

Jump! On Defying the Spirit of Gravity (With Reference to the Work of Philippe Halsman)

If there's one thing to which Zarathustra makes himself supremely hostile above all other things, it's der Geist der Schwere - what in English is termed the Spirit of Gravity. 

He prides himself on all that is light-footed and light-hearted in his nature and says that the revaluation of all values begins only when man learns how to love himself and how to fly like a bird, rather than living like a beast of burden weighed down with morality and bad conscience.        

In order to fly, however, man must first learn how to stand upright on his own two feet; and then how to walk, naked and light, before running, dancing, skipping and jumping for joy - no longer taking life seriously and refusing to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. 

We find some of this Nietzschean defiance of the Spirit of Gravity in the marvellous series of 178 pictures taken by American portrait photographer Philippe Halsman and published collectively in his Jump Book (1959), along with his humorous essay on the aesthetics of jumpology.

Starting in the early 1950s, Halsman asked every celebrity or VIP that he photographed to jump in the air for him. His hope was that he might momentarily glimpse and capture on film the spontaneous and carefree individual beneath the formal, self-conscious public persona.

Amazingly, Halsman not only convinced many of the great comics and movie stars of the period to jump for him, he also persuaded many well-known politicians, scientists, artists and members of the House of Windsor to briefly forget themselves and dare to defy gravity.

Arguably, these are amongst his more arresting images. But, for Zarathustra, there's nothing lovelier than nimble young women with fine ankles. And so, above are Halsman's joyous photos of B.B., Marilyn and Audrey leaping barefoot into the future and the Dionysian imagination ... 

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969).

Philippe Halsman's Jump Book, (Damiani, 2015).

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On the History and Politics of the Bikini

A bikini-clad 19-year-old Brigitte Bardot 
at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953

Someone writes to say that my recently published post discussing the French burkini ban [click here] left them feeling irritated and disappointed:

"You not only failed to condemn the actions of the mayor of Cannes, but you also missed the opportunity to put on record your opposition to all forms of racism and Islamophobia. Instead, by placing a serious issue within the context of a song from a Hollywood musical of all things, you turn it into something that can be treated in a lighthearted manner. Let me assure you it isn't funny for those Muslim women affected by the ban." 

Apart from the slightly worrying fact that I seem to irritate and disappoint a lot of people these days - and not just readers of this blog with a proverbial bee in their bonnet, chip on their shoulder, or stick up their arse - this criticism essentially leaves me cold. Cold with contempt, rather than in the sense of being unmoved or indifferent. For not only is it presumptuous, but it's ultimately an attempt to force me into taking a position in line with the speaker's own. And - for the record - I'm not sure I share my critic's ideological interpretation of events, or political worldview.

First of all, I don't think in oppositional or dualistic terms. Nor do I subscribe to any form of ascetic militancy or militant asceticism that seeks to pass judgement. So I didn't fail to condemn the actions of David Lisnard - I chose not to.

What's more, I sympathise with the mayor and, whilst not wishing to endorse his actions, I understand where he's coming from. For he's not simply reacting to the terrible events in Nice, so much as actively defending the values of Western modernity; values which, for the fashion-conscious, sexually liberated inhabitants of the Côte d'Azur, are embodied forever in the ideal figure not of Marianne, but a bikini-clad Brigitte Bardot.

In order for this to be appreciated, perhaps a brief history of the bikini is in order ...

Whilst the two-piece swimsuit existed even in classical antiquity, the modern itsy-bitsy bra-top and teenie-weenie bottoms combination as we know it today was designed by a Frenchman, Louis Réard, in 1946. He named it after an atomic bomb test site in the Marshall Islands, Bikini Atoll, and hoped that his revealing outfit would create "an explosive commercial and cultural reaction".

Made from just 200 square centimetres of material, the bikini was advertised as smaller than the smallest swimsuit and came packed in a little box measuring 5 x 5 cm. When Réard had difficulty finding a model willing to showcase his daring and devastating design for the atomic era, he hired a 19-year-old nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, from the Casino de Paris. Following her appearance at a press launch on July 5th, 1946, held at the Piscine Molitor, she received over 50,000 fan letters.         

Although initially banned in Catholic countries including Spain, Portugal and Italy, following the Vatican's declaration that it was sinful, the bikini soon became a must have item of beachwear among young women; particularly after fashion models and film stars, such as Brigitte Bardot, posed in them for glamorous photo shoots. I think a reporter writing for Le Figaro understood best what was going on:

"People were craving the simple pleasures of the sea and the sun. For women, wearing a bikini signaled a kind of second liberation. There was really nothing sexual about this. It was instead a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys in life."

That surely is the crucial point: the bikini is not merely a skimpy swimsuit. Rather, it's a symbolic garment and a vital form of self-expression within the post-War Western world; a sign that we belong and want to belong to a more liberal and more secular form of society in which - rightly or wrongly - truth loves to frolic semi-naked on the sand.    

And that's why I don't think it's being culturally insensitive to ban women in burkinis from the beautiful beaches of the French Riviera. Au contraire, I think it's arrogant that some Muslim citizens display such wilful ignorance of the history, politics and fashion of modern France that they fail to see why the burkini is likely to cause offence; it's an affront to the European way of life and to French joie de vivre.  

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