DANCING TOWARDS FEMINISM

CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA:

Sequence Analysis: Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

Judy O'Brien, a frustrated dancer who works with a troupe in the night, becomes unemployed. Anyway, her dream is to perform on the great ballet. She shares stage with Bubbles, a beautiful and sexy friend who has always been successful with men and who, after the firing, choses the burlesque to continue with her career. Their fate changes when they meet Jimmy Harris (Figure 1), a rich and unhappy man who will debate between the two girls to forget his failed marriage. Judy tries to audition with Steve Adams, a dancing businessman, but afraid of not being good enough leaves without trying, and she accidentally meets him. Bubbles, knowing Judy’s dream, invites her to join her show as Tiger Lily at the burlesque, being her ballet stooge. When Bubbles discovers that Judy shared some drinks with Jimmy, they have a terrible fight on stage. Finally, neither of them ends up with him, even though Bubbles takes advantage of his drinking issues and marries him for money. Jimmy finally returns to Elinor, his wife, after Bubbles set him free for 500.000$, and Judy becomes a dancer with the help of Steve, who is in love with her.

Following the concept of the well known style of the Classical Hollywood Cinema, we could agree that Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940) is part of that pattern. Nevertheless, as fas as I am concerned, this film is not part of representative system of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. We could think that this film does match the system, as Gombrich says, because “after the making, the schema can be modified in each particular case by the artist purpose (usually the short of information that the artist wants to convey)” (1985: 8). But this can be our view if we have enjoyed the film superficially, following the story and the aesthetics without analysing. Even though the film does follow some of the Classical Hollywood way of filmmaking, after diving into it we see its feminist recognition and how innovative this film is.

As mostly of all the Hollywood cinema from the time, our film has a romance narrative as one of the central significant strand and its final resolution involves the romantic reunion of Jimmy and Elinor. However, this is not the main story of the film. In Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940), we can appreciate another story in the depth of the plot. The main story is Judy’s dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer (Figure 2). If the plot focus openly only on this story, this wouldn’t have been accepted by the time, because if we take a deeper look, there’s some short of sexual tension between her and Bubbles. In order to tell the feminist and openminded gaze story that she wants to tell, but evading the censorship of the Hays Code, Dorothy Arzner uses the narrative economy resource to hide her original purpose. She leaves to the cinematic language and the mise-en-scene the feminist story of the two protagonists. The base of narrative economy is to let the characters speak the less about their story and let the actions and camera movements drive it. In this particular case, this is something more than necessary because during that period, a story about two independent and strong women with unresolved sexual tension would have been unacceptable for Hollywood. Therefore, the heterosexual triangle during the plot, is completely necessary for her to be accepted in the Hollywood Cinema parameters. “All we have before us is the plot -the arrangement of material in the film as it stands. We create the story in our minds on the basis of cues in the plot” (2004: 71) . As Roman Jakobson defends, a film is understood differently depending on the spectator’s previous habits. By this time, this story wouldn’t be something to have in mind in the popular belief. It is shown in a shallow way, so this is not a concern for the audience or the censorship.

The Classical Hollywood Cinema was made like a fordist working chain and the audience was accustomed to a certain pattern of story that was easy to follow and with no deep meaning. That is why a clever Arzner put on display the Jimmy Harris story to tangle up with the girl’s one. However, this film represents a rebellion of the romantic classical Hollywood belief.

The film gives us two parallel stories that will converge during the plot. As we can see on the scheme (Figure 3), we have the story of Judy and Bubbles on the one hand and, on the other hand the Jimmy Harris one. The film starts in the moment where Judy and Bubbles meet Jimmy. The film’s plot starts in media res, which means that it starts in the moment of disequilibrium. However, we could still identify it with the classical Hollywood scheme, because this disruption makes the audience think about an earlier equilibrium on the story that, as the film goes on, we will discover. We can imagine this previous equilibrium by the characters conversations and actions. For example, we know that Jimmy Harris looked unhappy at the bar on the start of the film because he was getting divorced. This shows us an untold past of a happy life with his wife.

As Mulvey says while talking about psychoanalysis in Classical Hollywood Cinema “woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it” (1975: A). In this film, marriage (or love interests) is not equivalent to the female happiness. Arzner takes advantage of the melodrama and comedy that has surrounded the female representation during theclassical Hollywood era to confront the female condition of her characters. She tries to show how stupid it is for a strong female lead to have as her only goal in life the seek of that true love above everything else. Her two female leads have higher objectives. Bubble takes advantage of her sexiness to become a famous vedette (Figure 4). She fools man to do whatever she wants them to do, but they as we could imagine. She is happy to change him for an enormous amount of money that will give her freedom to discover whatever she wants to do. We see that her major desire is to be independent. One of the most important things of this film’s plot is the bond of friendship between Judy and Bubbles, that goes further than their love interests. This is why, even though Bubbles is a little bit selfish, she puts her partners first and decides to dance in order to get them a new job. The team spirit that this women have is evident, and this is another strong point of the feminism that was yet to come (Figure 5).

Judy, as well, doesn’t focus her future in achieving the American dream. Otherwise, from the very beginning, she knows that her happy ending is ballet and she fights to accomplish her dream. This is related with her work and her life as a human being, not as a part of a romantic interest. Unlike Bubbles, Judy avoids the burlesque world and all the sexualisation of the female body for just men’s pleasure. Even though Bubbles always achieves everything she wants through that sexiness, she refuses to act like her, because she prefers to be truth to herself. But this doesn’t make her feel any kind of disdain for her or her methods, or any kind of toxicity envy for her achievements. She has enough sorority with her friend to agree to be her show’s warm up. During her show, man jeer Judy’s dance because it is not what they have paid for. One of the nights, she reproaches them with a feminist speech how is the woman seen on the show business only as a pleasure for the male’s desire gaze (Figure 6). That speech, is something very risky for Arzner to do, because during Classical Hollywood period , patriarchy was so intrinsic that was not even a thing for the audiences to think about. With Judy’s words, some people could have started to think differently about burlesque and the woman’s denigration of it. We appreciate that Judy avoids to adopt the common roll of the sensual classical female character. When she first meets Steve Adams, she is in a typical “lady in trouble” situation and he tries to help her desperately. She doesn’t think she needs to be saved by him, because she is enough valid to safe herself. “Woman (...) stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (1975: A). Nevertheless, in the film we appreciate that women have her own goals independently of men and they are the real meaning of the film. The lighting, the camera movements, the colour, the sound and all the technical features of this film follow the system. Therefore, Dance Girl Dance (1940), is definitely not based on the system due to her creator’s gaze. As Rebordinos says, Arzner was a feminist and lesbian woman who, without breaking the rules of the Hollywood system, she managed to shared the stories of women that cinema was not

telling until she arrived, and she did all this slipping past to censorship. She showed to

the conservative American people that women could live without a man and build

something out of themselves with their own effort.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet and Thompson, Kristin (1985): “An excessively obvious

cinema”, in “The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and the Mode of Production to

1960” (London Routledge), pp.3-11

Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin (1985): “Classical narration”, in

“The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and the Mode of Production to 1960” (London

Routledge), pp.24-42

Bordwell, David & Thompson, Kristin (2004): “Narrative as a formal system” in “Film Art:

An Introduction” (New York: McGraw Hill, 7th edition), pp. 68-107

Martínez-Salánova Sánchez, Enrique: “Dorothy Arzner, La subversión del imaginario

romántico femenino de Hollywood”, Portal de la Educominicación, blog, updated on 18/11/2019

(source: https://educomunicacion.es/cineyeducacion/figurasdorothiarzner.htm )

Mulvey, Laura (1975): “Visual pleasure in narrative cinema” in “Screen Vol. 16” (University

o f G l a s g o w ) , p p . 6 - 1 8 ( f o u n d i n : http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/

visual_pleasure_and_narrative_cinema(printversion).html )

FILMOGRAPHY

Arzner, Dorothy (1940): Dance, Girl, Dance (RKO Pictures)