All About Eve, the 1950s film from 20th Century Fox, seemed to me to be a metacritical portrayal of the consequences of stardom. It’s interesting how Bette Davis and Ann Baxter are portayed as each end of the stardom spectrum. Bette Davis is older, clearly worn by the spotlight. Her hair is curled, though not nearly as tightly as Baxter’s. She is also brunette and white, which continues to showcase the new/old mentality of Hollywood. Margo Channing (Davis) is forced out by the newer model of her, Eve Harrington (Baxter).
(Davis)
(Baxter)What interested me most was how the rise to stardom was positively correlated with the sexual performance of Eve, portrayed by Ann Baxter. Eve Harrington, Baxters’ character, is introduced to the audience as a good, old fashioned girl who has had a hard life, but dreams of being on stage. She is modestly dressed. Her makeup is light, the focus is on her innocence and glow.
In the scene where she tells her backstory, she is the center of the camera frame. The rest of the group is gathered opposite her in the dressing room, interrogation style, and are enraptured by her tale. To that end, the viewer is also placed in the position of those people, enraptured with the tale of Eve Harrington.
Throughout the film, however, as Eve gains more and more of the celebrity she craves, she starts to dress and behave differently. Her necklines get lower. The camera angles focus on her chest and full body. She is still the center of most scenes, but often she is portrayed like Marilyn Monroe, at an angle so her physical features are accentuated. Her makeup also gets slightly darker and sexier. Her eyes are played up and she gives off an alluring air.
In Richard Dyer’s “Stars as Signs”, he states “What is abundantly clear is that the stars are supremely figures of identification…and this identification is achieved principally through the star’s relation to social types (and hence norms)”. Her portrayal in this film is the star identity. So not only is Ann Baxter holding this identity of star herself, she is also exemplifying that identity on screen in this film in a meta way. Eve Harrington is falling deeper and deeper into this star identity and conforming to the social types she feels she must, the sexualization of her body and a flirtatious mannerism.
In the final scene, she lays draped on a couch, feeling the effects of stardom and not seeming too happy about it. This draping of her body on the couch in it’s own way focuses on the body. She is no longer poised, she is relaxed. The young actress sits across from her on the couch and is stiffer. There is a Mise en Scène,. “the cinematic rhetoric of lighting, colour, framing, composition, placing of actors” (Dyer), about this placement. There is soft lighting. It seems conducive to her personality at the time, worn but soft and still sexual. She is juxtaposed with the young actress and now becomes the end of the stardom chain and the new actress is the beginning, just as she was the new in comparison to Margo Channings’ old.
Her voice is also low and gravely in this scene, she sounds tired. She is seductive, if tired, and playing into that seductiveness. This is the climax of the movie’s gradual sexualization of her character. She has now completed her arc and the viewer gets to see her physical “deterioration” from innocence to sexuality. This mirrors her descent from innocence and genuine love for acting to her disillusionment with Hollywood, after being blackmailed and used for her “newness” and stardom.
I wonder if it is necessary to show such a physical change, or if it is a technique by the film to attract viewers. Could they not get away from sexualizing the female body? Is that what stardom comes down to, conventional beauty and the exploitation of it? It all seems wrong to me.