From: adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Dietrich, Madonna, etc.
Date: 9 Oct 1992 12:20:24 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: mizar.usc.edu

Several days ago, Baby Gladys's number one fan was outraged when I
dismissed his assertion that Madonna is an icon:

> > > Madonna is not an icon?  Could an icon be seen as 
> > > something, or someone, with symbolic power to some
> > > arbitrary number of people?  
> > 
> > By that definition, Connie Chung is an icon.  No.  
> 
> Connie Chung does not cause hundreds of thousands of screaming 
> fans to fill the streets of European culture-capitals when
> she walks out onto a balcony.  Connie Chung is not asked to
> host gala fundraising events.  Connie Chung is not paid
> eighty-million dollars a year to be Connie Chung.  Fashion
> magazines do not trip over themselves to get Connie Chung on
> their cover.  
> 
> Madonna is all these things.

It's clear that our definitions of "icon" differ widely.  The word
still retains its religious overtones for me.  A super-famous, super-
rich, super-powerful person is not necessarily *mythic*.  Dietrich is. 
Quite simply, Dietrich created a sexual aesthetic.  Open any fashion
magazine and you'll see Dietrich (at several removes) in picture after
picture.  (I might point out here that it was in the mid 30s that what
we think of as the modern fashion model appeared (skinny, tall, angular, 
haughty, and that the most chic of them -- Lisa Fonssagrives, for 
instance -- quite clearly based their look on Dietrich.  That look
has continued.)  Watch teenaged girls trying on clothes at a mall, and
you'll invariably see one of them make Dietrich-esque expressions into
the mirror.  That the teenaged girl who's making the expressions is
unaware of Dietrich means nothing.  As I asked Nelson: do you have to
know about Oedipus in order to have an Oedipus complex?  Besides all
this, Dietrich made androgyny glamorous.  It is because of Dietrich
that fashion designers started to make pants for women, a fact you can
find in any standard history of fashion.

Madonna is mega-powerful, mega-famous, mega-rich, but she is not
mythic.  Oh, well, perhaps she is.  Madonna is like Proteus, but she's
a Reaganoid Proteus.  Madonna is a wonderful example of the '80s
huckster: she latches onto trends just as they're dying down among the
people who are truly at the cutting edge (such as Voguing among NY
drag queens) and introduces the trend -- watered down, of course, for
mass consumption -- to her adoring public.  Two weeks later, once the
receipts have tapered off, and she's doing something else entirely.
Her guiding principle seems to be "get it while you can".


The president of America's Sweetheart's fan club asserted that there
are more movies today than ever.  I replied:

> > What are you talking about?  The number of American-produced 
> > movies released annually has decreased steadily since the
> > 1920s.  
> 
> American-produced movies are not the only movies people watch. 
> And your figure is as full of shit as you are.  Major releases,
> yes. 

Well, I was talking about the movies that one can see in a movie
theater.  The number of those movies *has* steadily decreased since
the 1920s.  Pick up any reference book and look at the numbers.  What
were *you* talking about?

> Add in 'made-for-tv' flicks.  Add in direct-to-video flicks. 
> Add in the cable industry.  There is a hell of a lot more
> volume out there than there ever was.  Then, just for fun, you
> can throw in films coming from overseas.

<Yawn>  Fine.  You can count episodes of soap operas too. 

I admit to having been stumped by Little Mary's best friend's
question:

> > > Does this change the fact that in the presence, these
> > > celebrities are not icons to those living in the present.

In the presence of what?

> You've said elsewhere that an icon is, by definition, timeless.  

Yes, that's true.

> Madonna has been a major media figure for what, a decade?  

"Like a Virgin" was released in 1984.  I would date her major media
figure-hood from then.  Eight years.

> She shows no signs of fading anytime soon. 

Who's to know?  I wouldn't be so confident, though.

> What was the length of Dietrich's active movie career, 
> snookums?  Was Dietrich not 'an icon' when she was a movie
> star? 

I've already answered this elsewhere.  Dietrich's active movie career
was about 30 years in length (1923 to 1952).  And then she started her
concert/nightclub career, which was wildly successful, and which
lasted for another 25 years.  I just don't see Madonna having that
kind of staying power.  

> Madonna is more than 'famous' and more than 'rich.' Madonna has
> power to influence the Majors.  Madonna is, herself, a 'Major.'
> Madonna is a movie-star's movie star.  

What a joke.  In any case, not only has Madonna proved over and over
and over that couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag, but, even
worse, she has absolutely *no* luminescence on screen.

> > Mary Pickford!  The model for Norma Desmond!  That's just 
> > too delicious!  [Listen, moron, Norma Desmond is quite 
> > explicitly based on the Gloria Swanson/Pola Negri type of 
> > *glamorous* silent movie star.  Little Mary Pickford was 
> > many things -- rich, powerful, a control freak -- but never,
> > ever, ever in a million years would anyone, *could* anyone,
> > describe her as *glamorous*, on screen or off.]
> 
> This is bullshit.  Pure and simple.  Her screen character was
> never glamorous.  She was the sweet little thing.  In 'real'
> life, Pickford set fashions for twenty years.  

Maybe at Lane Bryant.

> It was the Pickford of Hollywood, not the Pickford of the 
> screen, on which Desmond was modeled.  

Yeah, right.  

> Perhaps you are aware that Pickford was approached *before*
> Swanson for the part?

So what?  Perhaps you are aware that MGM purchased The Wizard of Oz
for Shirley Temple?  And that she would have been in the film had not
the contract negotiations failed?

> Desmond lived in a walled up castle in Beverly Hills.  Desmond
> "Had more money than all this 'new' Hollywood trash."  Desmond
> owned chunks of downtown Los Angeles.  Desmond owned oil wells.
> Norma Desmond was all these things in the forties.  

Yes.

> What was Gloria Swanson in the forties?  A washed up was-been.
> Gloria Swanson did not live in Pickfair.  Gloria Swanson did
> not have more money that all the new Hollywood trash.  

Oh dear.  Do you understand the concept of fiction, sweetheart?
I never said that Norma Desmond was Gloria Swanson.  What I said was
that it is quite clear in the film that Norma Desmond was a glamorous
silent movie star quite explicitly based on the Gloria Swanson model. 
At the height of her movie career, Norma Desmond was not squeezing her
middle-aged and ample girth into schoolgirl frocks and pretending to
be a 12-year old.  Norma Desmond was a Gloria Swanson/Pola Negri/Mae
Murray type -- a super-glamorous movie queen with exotic pets,
maharajahs as suitors, and men committing suicide for love of her. 
Was the star of "Hulda from Holland", "The Poor Little Rich Girl",
"Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm", and "Polyanna" a beautiful, radiant,
glamorous, exotic movie star?  <Snort>  Of course not.

> The phantom party that Swanson threw alluded to the hey-day of
> Pickfair's bashes - or would have were it more than phantom
> dreams.  

Mary Pickford was the only movie star to throw big bashes?

> Gloria Swanson was not Mary Pickford, and Norma Desmond was.  

<Snort>

> But here's the clincher.  "I (Desmond) made Paramount
> Pictures."

Sunset Boulevard was a Paramount movie, for crying out loud. 
Should she have said that she built MGM?  Universal?  Republic?

> Zukor himself, dining with Pickford in the New York Paramount
> Building in the twenties, said to her:
> 
> "You built this building, Mary"

How very nice.  I don't see how that proves that Norma Desmond is
meant to be Mary Pickford.
 
> Pickford defined 'drawing power.'  Mary Pickford's name above
> a film meant it would be a smash.  Paramount's early days
> were lived because Mary Pickford was theirs.

If it hadn't been for Clara Bow, Paramount would have gone under in
the late 1920s.  So what?  One-eyebrowed Deanna Durbin saved Universal
from the creditors with her series of chirpy movies.  So what?
 
> So as educated as you are, Dolphie, on this one you can eat
> shit and die.  You don't know what the fuck you're talking
> about, you are responding off the top of your over-stuffed
> brain, without considering the reality of the two women's
> careers.

You're so hot under the color, dear!  I apologize for making fun of
the plump frump star *and* screenwriter of the deathless "Lena and 
the Geese".  But I stand by what I said earlier.  Norma Desmond is
represented as having made glamorous movies in the '20s, as having
been a glamorous movie star.  Both are true of Gloria Swanson.  Mary
Pickford made saccharine movies in the '20s and she was closer to
Queen Mother than Queen of Hollywood.
 
> > Whoever said Mary Pickford was an icon?  Mary Pickford was an
> > extremely successful, extremely powerful (she was one of the
> > artists of United Artists), extremely rich movie star.
> > And that's it. 
> 
> *I* said Pickford was an icon.  As one of the participants in
> this argument, such is my right. 

Then I'll assert my right to call her a frumpy businesswoman.

> It is obvious our definitions of icon cannot be reconciled. 

Obviously not.


Arne