Vampiric Lesbianism 2: Dracula's Cinematic Daughters

Gloria Holden as as Countess Marya Zaleska in Dracula's Daughter (1936)

Ingrid Pitt as Mircalla Karnstein (aka Carmilla) in The Vampire Lovers (1970)

Catherine Deneuve as Miriam Blaylock in The Hunger (1983)

Although the pale-skinned, (usually) dark-haired figure of the sapphic vampire - or, if you prefer, vampiric lesbian - first emerged in its modern form in a short novel written by an Irishman in 1872, it established itself as a popular and pervy cinematic trope in the twentieth-century ...

Vampyr (dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1932)

Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer was the first to (loosely) adapt Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla for the big screen in his 1932 film Vampyr. Regrettably, however, he chose to ignore the lesbian aspects of the work, although he did succeed in making a controversial film full of disorienting visual effects (one that was hated by most critics and audiences at the time, but which is now considered far more positively).


Dracula's Daughter (dir. Lambert Hillyer, 1936)

It was Dracula's Daughter that gave moviegoers the first hints of lesbianism in a vampire film - despite the Hays Code! In one particularly memorable scene, the title character, played by the English-born actress Gloria Holden, preys upon an attractive innocent she has invited to her home under the pretence of wanting to use her as a model for a painting. As the young girl starts to strip, the Countess moves in for the kill. Universal even played up this aspect of the film in some of their original advertising, using the tag line: Save the women of London from Dracula's Daughter!


Blood and Roses (dir. Roger Vadim, 1960)

Roger Vadim's take on the story of Carmilla, entitled Et mourir de plaisir (1960) - released in the English-speaking world as Blood and Roses - shifts the action to modern Italy and plunges us into the midnight zone beyond the grasp of reason. Starring the lovely Danish actress Annette Strøyberg, the film cheerfully explores (and exploits) the erotic aspects of Le Fanu's novella (although most of the queer sexual content was cut for its US release). It perhaps should've been subtitled Et Dieu… créa la lesbienne.


The Vampire Lovers (dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

Perhaps my favourite film of this genre is The Vampire Lovers (1970), a typically camp and raunchy Hammer Films production, starring Ingrid Pitt in the lead role (an actress whose very name evokes pleasurable memories amongst those of a certain generation) and Madeline Smith as her nubile lover-cum-victim (the fact that Peter Cushing and George Cole are also in the cast is hardly here-or-there). It was the first (and arguably best) in a series of lesbian vampire flicks from the Hammer studios known as the Karnstein Trilogy.      


The Hunger (dir. Tony Scott, 1983)

A cult favourite amongst goths as well as lesbians, The Hunger is an erotic horror starring Catherine Deneuve as the incredibly ancient (but still sexy, stylish and sophisticated) vampire, Miriam Blaylock, and Susan Sarandon as Dr. Sarah Roberts, a gerontologist who falls under her spell, even though she's slightly repulsed at the thought of drinking blood in order to gain immortality. Obviously wanting to love the film, but not quite able to do so, Camille Paglia regards The Hunger as a failed masterpiece that mistakenly focuses on violence rather than sex, thus making it a little crude and pedestrian in places.*     


Whether these films help or hinder the rights of non-fictional (and non-vampiric) women - particularly those outside of the heterosexual mainstream - is debatable; they tend to suggest, for example, that lesbianism is the result of a corruptive and malign influence and it's pretty clear that they were not made primarily for the enjoyment of gay women, but, rather, for a straight male audience excited by the thought of girl-on-girl action and a bit of bloodshed.

However, it's also clear that there are many women - gay, straight, queer and trans - who identify with mysterious and powerful undead figures such as Dracula's daughter and find something strangely liberating in the aesthetics of evil.           

* See: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 268.

For a trailer to Dracula's Daughter (1936), click here.

For a trailer to Blood and Roses (1960), click here.

For a trailer to The Vampire Lovers (1970), click here.

For a trailer to The Hunger (1983), click here.

For part one of this post on vampiric lesbianism, with reference to Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872), click here.

Vampiric Lesbianism 1: Carmilla (How Beautiful She Looked in the Moonlight!)

Illustration by David Henry Friston 

for Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872)

I. 

19th-century Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu may not today be a household name, but the fact remains his ghost stories and horror books were central to the development of queer gothic fiction in the Victorian era and he is rightly celebrated within lesbian circles for his novella Carmilla (1872); a romantic tale of the relationship between the title character, the alluring Countess Karnstein - who happens to be a vampire - and the young female narrator, Laura:

"Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, 'You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever'."  [1]

It's not exactly D. H. Lawrence, but, like many others who grew up watching Hammer horror films, I can't resist a bit of fantasy lesbianism of this kind; i.e., what might be described as sapphism with added bite and often involving the seduction of (presumably) heterosexual young women by predatory lesbian vampires.    

II.

Carmilla, it is interesting to note, pre-dates Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by a quarter of a century and the latter admitted his indebtedness to Le Fanu - as have many later writers, though, of course, Le Fanu himself drew upon several earlier works, thereby demonstrating the intertextual nature of literature in which ideas, like vampires, feed off other ideas, in a perverse and unholy orgy of inspiration and bloodsucking.  

Having said that, I think we can concede that the character of Carmilla is the prototype for a legion of vampiric lesbians; she selects exclusively young and pretty female victims and isn't adverse to becoming emotionally (and, if given half-a-chance, sexually) involved with those she puts the bite on; she has a powerful physical presence that many find irresistable; she is able to change human form into that of an animal (in her case, a large black cat); she sleeps in a coffin; she can only be killed with a stake through the heart, etc.   

Whether this work - and others like it - help or hinder the rights of lesbians living in the real world who don't happen to have the charms, fangs, and supernatural powers of Carmilla, is debatable. But I can cerainly understand why many women have embraced the latter and bought into the darkly romantic ideas of vampirism and satanism that flourished in the late 19th-century Decadent movement - there is something strangely empowering in the aesthetics of evil and in openly declaring oneself against nature.   

However, there's also a downside to reactivating all the old stereotypes to do with both femininity and homosexuality. It's certainly worth remembering that the perverse lesbian given to us by poets such as Baudelaire and Swinburne and belonging to the (male) pornographic imagination, is shaped by desire but marked by misogyny and homophobia. 

In other words, I'm not entirely convinced that the fictional figure of Carmilla the vampire - or even the utopian politics of Renée Vivien embodied within her Sapphic verse - is enough to counter the profound fear and loathing for otherness that characterises morally and sexually straight society.  

Notes

[1] Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, (1875), chapter IV.

The above work is available to read as an ebook thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here.

To read part two of this post - on Dracula's cinematic daughters - click here.

Sympathy for the Devil: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Luciferianism (Easter with the Anti-Christ 2020)

William Blake: Satan in his Original Glory (c. 1805)

Ink and watercolour on paper (429 x 339 mm)

tate.org.uk

"Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong." [1]

"Jesus becomes more unsympatisch to me, the longer I live: crosses and nails and tears and all that stuff! I think he showed us into a nice cul de sac." [2]

"Yes, I am all for Lucifer, who is really the Morning Star. The real principle of Evil is not anti-Christ or anti-Jehovah, but anti-life. I agree with you, in a sense, that I am with the antichrist. Only I am not anti-life." [3]

These three brief extracts from Lawrence's letters, written between January 1925 and June 1929, reveal much about his relationship to Christianity; a relationship which became increasingly marked by hostility to the Nazarene on the one hand and sympathy for the Devil on the other. 

I'm not sure Lawrence would ever have gone as far as Nietzsche in characterising Christianity as the "extremest thinkable form of corruption" and the one "immortal blemish of mankind" [4], but he certainly positions himself like the latter as versus the Crucified and takes up Nietzsche's project of revaluation in poems such as 'When Satan Fell'; a lovely postromantic text, reminiscent of Milton and Blake, which makes perfect reading for an Easter beyond good and evil [5] ... 

When Satan fell, he only fell
because the Lord Almighty rose a bit too high,
a bit beyond himself.

So Satan only fell to keep a balance.

"Are you so lofty, O my God?
Are you so pure and lofty, up aloft?
Then I will fall, and plant the paths to hell
with vines and poppies and fig-trees
so that lost souls may eat grapes
and the moist fig
and put scarlet buds in their hair on the way to hell,
on the way to dark perdition."

And hell and heaven are the scales of the balance of life
which swing against each other. [6]

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), letter number 3343, [26 January 1925], p. 205. 

[2] Ibid., letter number 3516, [26 October 1925], p. 322.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, letter number 5140, (12 June, 1929), pp. 331-32. 

[4] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 62, pp. 196-97.

[5] It's important to note that when Lawrence writes of Lucifer (or Satan), he does so without subscribing to the Christian belief that, post fall, he became the enemy of mankind and the source of all evil in the world. As the last lines of the above verse make clear, for Lawrence, heaven and hell are both vital states of human experience necessary for 'the balance of life' and should not be given a simplistic moral interpretation.  

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'When Satan Fell', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 624.

Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, on D. H. Lawrence and the poetry of evil: click here.

For the 2013 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here.

For the 2019 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here. 

In Memory of Honor Blackman

Honor Blackman (1925-2020)

as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964)

I have to admit that I'm more of a Mrs Peel and Mary Goodnight man than I am a Cathy Gale and Pussy Galore devotee (it's a generational thing I suppose). Nevertheless, I was saddened to hear of the death of the English actress Honor Blackman earlier this week, about whom there were several things worthy of admiration:

(i) She retained her beauty and style long into old age ...

(ii) She was an East End girl (born in Plaistow) who always cheerfully identified as a Cockney ...

(iii) She played Mrs Fawcett in Christopher Miles's 1970 film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novella The Virgin and the Gipsy.*

(iv) She declined a CBE in 2002 on the grounds of staunch republicanism ...

(v) She called out her Bond co-star Sean Connery in 2012 for being a hypocrite of the first order: "I disapprove of him strongly. I don't think you should accept a title from a country and then pay absolutely no tax towards it. He wants it both ways. I don't think his principles are very high."**

Doubtless there are numerous other reasons to commend this talented and intelligent woman, but even this brief list demonstrates she was a good egg. 


* Thanks to James Walker for reminding me of this.

** From an interview with Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph (27 August 2012).

As Bees to Wanton Boys

Garth Knight: The Last Honey Bee (2010)

angelinecollinsart.com

Any entomophiles thinking of reading D. H. Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911), should be warned that it opens with a very disturbing scene involving the narrator, Cyril Beardsall, and his friend George Saxton:  

"'I thought,' he said in his leisurely fashion, 'there was some cause for all this buzzing.'

      I looked, and saw that he had poked out an old, papery nest of those pretty field bees which seem to have dipped their tails into bright amber dust. Some agitated insects ran round the cluster of eggs, most of which were empty now, the crowns gone; a few young bees staggered about in uncertain flight before they could gather power to wing away in a strong course. He watched the little ones that ran in and out among the shadows of the grass, hither and thither in consternation. 

      'Come here - come here!' he said, imprisoning one poor little bee under a grass stalk, while with another stalk he loosened the folded blue wings.

      'Don't tease the little beggar,' I said. 

      'It doesn't hurt him - I wanted to see if it was because he couldn't spread his wings that he couldn't fly. There he goes - no he doesn't. Let's try another.'

      'Leave them alone,' said I. 'Let them run in the sun. They're only just out of the shells. Don't torment them into flight.'

      He persisted, however, and broke the wing of the next. 

      'Oh dear - pity!' said he, and he crushed the little thing between his fingers.'" 

Although Cyril is clearly made uncomfortable by George's will to knowledge - an often lethal lusting for intellectual understanding and an exercise of power that combines curiosity and cruelty - he doesn't physically intervene on behalf of the young bee, tormented (unsuccessfully) into flight and then casually crushed between fingers.

Perhaps, subconsciously, Cyril harbours a fear of insects (entomophobia); or maybe he has a secret crush fetish and derived a certain perverse pleasure from watching his brutish friend squash the little bee, despite asking George not to tease the poor creature. I've no evidence to support either suspicion; nor do I know, as some commentators have suggested, if Cyril is full of (homoerotic) admiration for George's masculine indifference to suffering:

"Then he examined the eggs, and pulled out some silk from round the dead larva, and investigated it all in a desultory manner, asking of me all I knew about the insects. When he had finished he flung the clustered eggs into the water and rose, pulling out his watch from the depth of his breeches' pocket.
      'I thought it was about dinner-time,' said he, smiling at me."

But in the queer fictional universe created by Lawrence, aka the priest of kink, anything is possible ...  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1-2.

Interestingly, in a poem originally published under the title 'Song' in 1914, but composed before the summer of 1908 - i.e. at the same time he'd have been working on an early version of The White Peacock - Lawrence again plays with the idea of a black and amber field bee that has only just left the hive and is creeping and stumbling about in the warm spring sun, as it attempts to unfold its heavy little wings. See 'Flapper' in The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 16-17. Or click here to read the version that appeared in Poetry (December, 1914).

Field bees, for those who don't know, are worker bees - the smallest and most numerous members of a hive - which are old enough to leave the nest in order to search for pollen, nectar, and water. 

For a related post to this one on insect fetish (with specific reference to melissophilia), please click here.

Tales from Storyville 3: The Poet and the Prostitute (Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey)

Photo of Natasha Trethewey by Nancy Crampton 

and photo of a Storyville prostitute by E. J. Bellocq

I.

According to Susan Sontag, only men find something romantic about prostitution; women look at things - including photographs of naked women taken in Storyville - differently don'tcha know. Nevertheless, there's something distinctly romantic about Natasha Trethewey's second collection of verse, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). 

The work, divided into three main sections, consists of a series of poems in the form of an epistolary novella meditating on an imaginary and composite figure (Ophelia) supposedly captured by Bellocq's camera. It occasionally makes for uncomfortable reading, detailing as it does the life of a mixed-race prostitute in the early 1900s who had nothing to fall back on (as Toni Morrison would say).

But what's really interesting, philosophically, is that whilst Bellocq directs his gaze towards female flesh, Trethewey attempts to offer us a glimpse into Ophelia's soul; transforming her from an anonymous sex object into a unique subject whom we might know, value, and grow to love.

Most people would probably find nothing wrong with that; would think it a beautiful thing to do. But Foucault calls this process subjectivation and regards it as the exercise of power favoured by liberal humanism; i.e., the way in which the (amoral and irrational) forces and desires of the body are codified, coordinated, and given personal expression.

(I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but it is something worth thinking about ...) 

II.

If asked to choose, I suppose my favourite part of the work is found in section two and entitled 'Letters from Storyville'; the part in which Ophelia recounts her initial experiences as a prostitute, including her name change to Violet, something which fans of the film Pretty Baby (1978) will knowingly smile at.

That said, I'm also very fond of this sonnet from section three of the book, with which I'd like to close this post:

'Storyville Diary,' Photography 1911

I pose nude for this photograph, awkward,

one arm folded behind my back, the other

limp at my side. Seated, I raise my chin,

my back so straight I imagine the bones

separating in my spine, my neck lengthening

like evening shadow. When I see this plate

I try to recall what I was thinking -

how not to be exposed, though naked, how

to wear skin like a garment, seamless.

Bellocq thinks I'm right for the camera, keeps

coming to my room. These plates are fragile,

he says, showing me how easy it is

to shatter this image of myself, how

a quick scratch carves a scar across my chest.

See: Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, (Graywolf Press, 2002). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part two of this post - on Bellocq's photographs - should click here.

Tales from Storyville 2: The Photos of E. J. Bellocq (With Notes from Susan Sontag)

Photo of a Storyville prostitute 

by E. J. Bellocq (c. 1912)

Storyville may have been closed down in 1917 - and knocked down in the 1930s to make way for public housing - but thanks to the photographs of Ernest Joseph Bellocq (1873-1949), images of the period continue to haunt the pornographic imagination and inspire artists and onanists everywhere. 

Born into a wealthy family of French créole origins, Bellocq established himself as a professional photographer who specialised in pictures of landmarks, ships, and machinery. However, unbeknown to but a small circle of acquaintances, he also enjoyed taking photos of the seamier side of life in New Orleans, as found in the opium dens of Chinatown, for example, and the brothels of Storyville.

After his death, most of Bellocq's pictures were lost or destroyed (including the Chinatown series). However, by a stroke of good fortune, the Storyville negatives were later discovered and eventually purchased by a young photographer and artist, Lee Friedlander, who, in 1970, mounted a show at the Museum of Modern Art (curated by John Szarkowski) featuring prints from Bellocq's original 8" x 10" glass negatives.

All of the images were of women: some nude, some dressed; some looking bored, some smiling and playfully posing. In my favourite picture, "an exceptionally pretty woman with a dazzling smile reclines on a chaise-longue; apart from her trim Zorro-style mask she is wearing only black stockings" (Susan Sontag).

A book, Storyville Portraits (1970), with a preface by Friedlander, was published to coincide with the exhibition and, overnight, Bellocq's posthumous fame was assured [1]. The images were said to have a unique poignancy and beauty, as well as great cultural-historical importance (serving, for example, not only as a record of what the prostitutes of Storyville actually looked like, but also providing clues as to how the interiors of the brothels were decorated). 

And I suppose that's true; though there's also an undercurrent of violence present in some of them - which might be said to manifest itself in the fact that several of the negatives were deliberately damaged, with the faces of the women scrubbed out. Probably this was done by Bellocq himself, though no one knows for certain who did this or why. [2]
     
The fact that we have so little biographical information about Bellocq has encouraged several writers to create fictional accounts of his life, filling in the gaps with made-up details and fantasies of their own. A cinematic version of Bellocq was famously played by Keith Carradine in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978), a film I have recently discussed: click here.

The Storyville pictures have also inspired a good deal of imaginative literature about the women in them and in part three of this post we shall examine Natasha Trethewey's collection of poems Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) ... 

Notes

[1] A more extensive collection of Friedlander's prints was published with an introduction by Susan Sontag in 1996. Sontag argues that, above all else, the pictures are unforgettable once seen and notes how there is much about them that affirms current taste: "the low-life material; the near mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as objets trouvés, and a gift from the past." See Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, ed. John Szarkowski, (Random House, 1996). 

[2] Sontag seems to deny this violence, although she also is disturbed by the attempt to (literally) deface some of the amorous objects. In an interesting passage (marred only by the sexism of her final sentence), she writes: 

"Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn't have dictated to them how they should pose - whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer or, absent the customers, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were. How far we are, in Bellocq's company, from the staged sadomasochistic hijinks of the bound women offering themselves up to the male gaze (or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki or the cooler, more stylish, unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of the images devised by Helmut Newton. The only pictures that do seem salacious - or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute's life - are those [...] on which the faces have been scratched out. [...] These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for this viewer. But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution." (Ibid.) 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part three of this post - on Natasha Trethewey's poetic musings on Bellocq's pictures - should click here.

Tales from Storyville 1: Shame Upon Those Who Think Badly of It (With a Note on Tony Jackson)

Photo of a Storyville prostitute 

by E. J. Bellocq (c. 1912)

For those who don't know, Storyville is not simply the title of an excellent series of BBC TV documentaries made by various international filmmakers. It was also the red-light district of New Orleans, established by municipal ordinance to officially regulate (and profit from) prostitution between 1897 and 1917.

The ordinance originally designated a thirty-eight block area to be known as The District, but it was soon universally referred to as Storyville, after Sidney Story, a city alderman, who wrote the guidelines to control activities within this zone of tolerance. Story, whose big idea was to replicate the port cities of Europe that legalised prostitution, was not amused by this. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Storyville soon became the most popular - and swingin' - part of town [1], both with locals and tourists who were able to purchase Blue Books to familiarise themselves with the district and give an indication of what girls and services were being offered at which houses (prices, however, were not included). These guides, priced 25c, and available from saloons, barbershops, and street corner vendors, were inscribed with the French motto (more usually associated with the British Order of the Garter): Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Although the brothels employed black, white, and mixed race prostitutes, African-American visitors were barred from legally purchasing services within them, demonstrating how, at this point in time, racial concerns (and racism) trumped even commerce [2]. Despite this restriction on a potential source of income, by 1900 Storyville was fast-becoming New Orleans's largest centre of revenue; the world's oldest profession proving itself to still be the most lucrative.        

So why did it all come crashing down in 1917?

The answer, of course, has to do with the puritanism of wartime leaders, who suddenly rediscover their moral backbones: the US Navy had sailors located in New Orleans and the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, did not want them to have any distractions before being sent to fight. And so he pressed to have the whorehouses of Storyville closed and for prostitution to be recriminalised throughout the entire city. This included even the famous Mahogany Hall, an establishment employing forty women run by Lulu White, which drew its clientele from amongst the wealthiest and most influential men in Louisiana.

Baker - with the support of the American Social Hygiene Organization - is on record saying of the young men he was about to send overseas in order that they might have the (dubious) honour of killing and dying for their country: 'I want these boys armed and clothed by ther government; but I also want them to have an invisible armour ... a moral and intellectual armour for their protection overseas.' 

Whilst the New Orleans Mayor, Martin Behrman, and others strongly protested the closure - You can make prostitution illegal, but you can't make it unpopular - Storyville officially shut up knocking shop at midnight on November 12, 1917.

It continued, however, in a much subdued (and, thanks to Prohibition, sober) manner to be a centre of entertainment throughout the following decade. But essentially the wild times were finished and almost all the buildings in the district were demolished during the 1930s to make way for public housing. Today, there are just three saloons still standing from the Storyville period.  

Notes

[1] Many of the more more upmarket brothels would hire a piano player and sometimes a small ragtime band. Thus, although jazz did not originate in Storyville, it flourished there as in the rest of the city and it was where many visitors first encountered this new style of music, associating it thereafter with vice. Musicians who emerged from Storyville include Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Tony Jackson, the latter of whom would become the most popular (and flamboyant) entertainer in New Orleans. As Louis Balfour reminds us, even fellow musicians conceded that Jackson was the hottest performer in town - which is nice. He was also the best-dressed and many attempted to copy his style; the argument being that whilst you couldn't hope to play the piano as well as him, at least you could try to look as good. 
       
Many remember Jackson today as the writer of the song 'Pretty Baby' (1916), the original lyrics of which were said to refer to his male lover of the time. This much-covered song later inspired the 1978 film of the same title, directed by Lois Malle, and starring Brooke Shields as a 12-year-old prostitute (Violet), working in a Storyville brothel: click here for a recent post on this.   

[2] Even the Blue Books, which alphabetically listed the names and addresses of all the prostitutes of Storyville, separated them on the basis of race; going so far as to categorise girls with one great-grandparent of colour (i.e., who were only one-eighth black by descent) as octoroon.   

To read part two of this post - on the photos of Storyville taken by E. J. Bellocq - click here. 

To read part three - on the poetry of Natasha Trethewey - click here. 

Les Fleurs du Mal: Iris and Violet

Jodie Foster as Iris in Taxi Driver (1976) and 

Brooke Shields as Violet in Pretty Baby (1978)

For those like me, born in February, the iris and violet are flowers that hold special significance; the former taking its name from the ancient Greek goddess of the rainbow (coming as it does in a wide array of colours); the latter a symbol of fertility associated with Saint Valentine, that holy fool adored by lovers and epileptics the world over.   

But iris and violet are not just types of flower; they are also popular (if slightly old-fashioned sounding) girls' names.

Indeed, they happen to be the names of cinema's two most famous child prostitutes: Iris, played by 12-year-old Jodie Foster, in Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976); and Violet, played by 12-year-old Brooke Shields, in Pretty Baby (dir. Louis Malle, 1978). 

I was of a similar age to the above girls when these films came out, so don't really remember the reaction at the time; probably there was some controversy and a certain degree of moral outrage from the usual quarters, but I'm pretty sure that today giving these roles to such young actresses would be inconceivable.

Indeed, the only recent film I can think of employing a child actress in a similarly controversial manner is Kick-Ass (2010). But 12-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz was playing a comic-book character (Hit-Girl), not a prostitute. And whilst she certainly participated in the on-screen violence and freely used obscene language, neither Moretz nor her character were overtly sexualised (if one overlooks the schoolgirl uniform, etc.).  

Looking back, Foster has spoken of the at times uncomfortable atmosphere on set whilst filming Taxi Driver and confessed that she cried when she first met the costume designer and put on Iris's (now iconic) hooker outfit. A self-confessed tomboy, she naturally hated having to wear hot pants, halter tops, platform shoes and a big, floppy hat. In other words, it was her wardrobe rather than the psycho-sexual complexities of her role that upset Foster.

Shields, too, seems not to have been psychologically or emotionally damaged in any way by her experiences as a child actress and has stated she has no regrets starring in Pretty Baby alongside Susan Sarandon and Keith Carradine. Indeed, she remains resolutely proud of the movie and her role in it: "It was the best creative project I've ever been associated with, the best group of people I've ever been blessed enough to work with," she told Vanity Fair in an interview to mark the 40th anniversary of the film's release [click here].  

Quite how she feels about the Sugar and Spice series of eroticised nude photographs she posed for, aged ten, taken by Garry Gross, I don't know ... But that, as they say, is a post for another day ...

Notes

For a related post to this one on the case of Iris Steensma as fashion icon, click here.

For a musical bonus - Blondie's 'Pretty Baby', from the album Parallel Lines, (Chrysalis, 1978) - click here. 

The above track was inspired by the film; the film, however, took its title from an earlier ragtime song called 'Pretty Baby', written by Tony Jackson, that has been recorded by (amongst others) Bill Murray (1916), Bing Crosby (1947), Doris Day (1948), and Dean Martin (1957).

Reflections on The Blue Lagoon

A sensual story of natural love ...

Having briefly served as a ship's doctor - a role which took him to various exotic locations in the South Pacific - the Irishman Henry De Vere Stacpoole decided to become a full-time writer.

In 1908, he struck gold with The Blue Lagoon - a romance novel about two children marooned on a lush tropical island who discover the joys of coming of age (nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean, know what I mean, say no more).

The work has been adapted for film many times over the years; firstly in 1923, and then, more famously and with the addition of sound, in Frank Launder's 1949 version, starring Jean Simmons and Donald Houston as the incestuous teen lovers living their paradisal existence in naked innocence.

Perhaps the most notorious cinematic version, however, is that directed by Randal Kleiser (1980), starring 14-year-old Brooke Shields and 18-year-old Christopher Atkins. The film contains full-frontal nudity and fairly explicit sexual content,* which perhaps explains its huge commercial success and the fact that it has lodged itself within both the popular and pornographic imagination.

The critics, of course, hated it - and I can't say I blame them. As Roger Ebert points out, The Blue Lagoon could have been an interesting tale of wilderness survival, or a thrilling adventure epic, but it's neither; worse, it even fails as a work of soft-core porn, although that's how the movie was teasingly (and deceptively) sold to the viewing public.

At best, we can say that by offering us a glimpse of underage sex wrapped in primitive purity and moral sentiment, the filmmakers got away with something that they would very likely not get away with today. But, ultimately, as lovely as the young actors are to look at, I'd sooner go swimming with the Creature from the Black Lagoon than sit through this movie again ...      

* Note: Shields was, of course, already notorious for her performance (aged 12) as a child prostitute in the movie Pretty Baby (dir. Louis Malle, 1978). However, whilst in The Blue Lagoon Shields performed many topless scenes with her hair glued to her breasts, all of her fully nude scenes were performed by a body double, Kathy Troutt; an actress, model, deep sea diver, and dolphin trainer, known to her many fans around the world as Australia's Original Teenage Mermaid. For his part, Atkins gamely performed his own nude scenes and posed for Playgirl in 1982 on the back of his new found fame, much to the delight of his mostly female (and gay) fan base.