Week four introduced us to Bette Davis and her groundbreaking work as a star and her unique take on the star image. By 1939, Bette Davis was one of America’s greatest actresses due to her unique delivery of her roles. Bette was known for her “mannerisms”, which drove the story and communicated ideas without the use of words. Davis’s ability to draw her audience in through the use of movements and body language, rather than he sexuality like Monroe and Dietrich, is what solidified her as not merely an actress, but an artist. Many of the films that she performed in began to be known as “a Bette Davis picture”, describing the way she used her personality to outshine her costars in the films. Davis’s appeal resided in the fact that she was not seen as a sexy or as a sex symbol. This appeal came with the rise of her stardom along with her established career as an actress. The reading looks to discover how Davis was able to merge these two aspects of her life and balance them at the same time. Davis did this by making acting a central part of her personality. She used acting as a “metaphor for human identity,” which gained her popularity with moviegoers who felt that a part of their daily routine was to perform desirable characteristics such as gays and women. But this unveiling of her image, layer by layer, film by film, took us further away from who Davis truly was; the more that was revealed, the less we truly knew about her.
The film All About Eve, starring Bette Davis, is an example of the metaphors she used in her acting. Davis’s character in the film is an actress who is being overtaken by her younger, more beautiful understudy. As Davis’s character beings to lose popularity, her understudy only gains popularity, leaving Davis in a distressed state about the difficulty of being a star and the bitterness of watching it all come crashing down. The film, like her film The Letter, is used to depict the difficulty she faces balancing being a star and an aging woman. She uses this as a metaphor for the ways in which women have to compromise parts of themselves to be successful in their work. A connection can be seen between this film and the point that the reading brings up about how we know less about an actress the more we find out about them. After viewing this film, we see Davis less as a callous woman that we imagine her to be, which can be difficult for the audience to accept. As her image molds into a version of Davis that we are not familiar with, the less we feel we know about her.
