Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  With her fluent Middle Eastern movements and daring semi-nudity, Salome became a vehicle for the liberation of the female body from prudish Victorian inhibitions and restrictions, including the suffocating cage of the corset. Several American women leaders of the modern dance movement were attracted to Salome. Loie Fuller performed an innocent, childlike version of Salome, with music by Gabriel Pierné, at the Comédie Parisienne in Paris in 1895. Maud Allan, clad in a shockingly revealing pearl brassiere, opened her production of The Vision of Salome (based on Wilde’s play) in Vienna in 1906. She did hundreds of performances and became known as “The Salome Dancer.” Allan’s dance of the seven veils was her dramatic climax, as it also was for Richard Strauss in his opera, Salome, which premiered in 1905 and has become canonical to the repertory. Strauss had seen Wilde’s play in Max Reinhardt’s 1902 production in Berlin and had begun concentrated composition of the opera the following year. Salome was everywhere in this period, even in the exotic dancing of Mata Hari, the Dutch adventuress who was executed as a spy in France in 1917. Theda Bara, Hollywood’s first “vamp” (man-destroying vampire), starred in a sexually suggestive 1918 movie version of Salome (now lost) that caused a conservative backlash in the United States. In Billy Wilder’s classic film noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), the aging, reclusive silent-film star Norma Desmond is obsessed with Salome, about whom she is writing a voluminous script as a vehicle for her comeback. Norma literally becomes Salome—replicating her femme fatale role by murdering her lover and then, in the final seconds of the film, dancing seductively toward the camera as she puts her spell on us, the audience.

  In the dynamically populist new genre of cinema, the Middle East became symbolic of an alternate reality, breaking the Western code of logic, morality, and even space and time. The use of ancient Middle Eastern legends and locales for displays of pagan sensuality was already evident in D. W. Griffith’s multi-layered epic, Intolerance (1916), which depicts the decadence and fall of ancient Babylon, and in Cleopatra (1917), where Theda Bara, near-nude in a glittering metallic brassiere ingeniously coiled like a serpent, hypnotizes her male conquests with her penetrating gaze. Hollywood’s super-heated projection of sex and sin into Middle Eastern antiquity, piously followed in the script by Judeo-Christian salvation and purification, was a commercial strategy to boost ticket sales while evading the punitive censorship of civil and religious authorities. This clever tactic—showing as much flesh as possible before ending with a moral message—can be seen from the era of silent films through the wide-screen Technicolor epics of the 1950s. For example, in The Egyptian (1954), based on a 1945 novel by the Finnish writer Mika Waltari, an idealistic doctor during the reign of Akhenaten is destroyed by a heartless, ravishingly charismatic prostitute from Babylon but attains enlightenment through the doomed pharaoh’s prophetic vision of monotheism. In Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), renegade Hebrews reverting to idolatry stage a wild, orgiastic party around the Golden Calf, until Moses descends from Mount Sinai to hurl the stone tablets of the law at them, as the earth cracks open with hellfire.

  Hollywood’s other mode of representing the Middle East, as in the classic silent film, The Thief of Bagdad (1924), starring the athletic Douglas Fairbanks, was as a fairy-tale realm of magical wonders, where carpets fly and genies pop out of golden lamps. Even when the supernatural was de-emphasized or excluded, as in Arabian Nights (1942), where Scheherazade is played by Maria Montez, or in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), the Middle East is represented as a fluid, opaque, and subliminally menacing zone where cruelty, torture, and slavery are the norm. Female roles are limited to kidnapped princess, harem inmate, or sorceress. In 1992, despite decades of second-wave feminism and multiculturalism, there was little variation in the traditional tropes in Walt Disney Pictures’ animated musical, Aladdin, which was a gigantic commercial blockbuster, earning well over a half-billion dollars worldwide.

  After over a century of movie-making, it is remarkable how rarely Middle Eastern women have been featured in major productions of the Western film industry. In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for example, which treats Bedouin tribal life with attention and respect, women are virtually invisible, barely glimpsed as silhouettes or heard ululating in a distant wadi as their men ride to war. In Justine (1969), set in the 1930s and based on novelist Laurence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Anouk Aimée (her stage name) plays the title role of a mysterious Jewish woman who is married to an Egyptian Copt and who is secretly involved in smuggling weapons to the Zionist underground in British Palestine. Terrorism was again the theme in Black Sunday (1977), where the Swiss actress Marthe Keller plays a Palestinian conspirator on a suicide mission to blow up the crowded football stadium where the president of the United States is attending the Super Bowl. However, the ancient and enduring values of Middle Eastern culture, with its family loyalty, ceremonial hospitality, and religious contemplativeness, have been neglected or poorly portrayed by Hollywood. There are two exceptions in epic Bible films: Yvonne De Carlo playing Sephora, the self-possessed eldest daughter of the nomadic sheik of Midian who becomes Moses’ devoted wife in The Ten Commandments; and Haya Harareet (an Israeli born in Haifa in British Palestine) as a Jewish slave of the House of Hur who falls in love with her master, played by Charlton Heston, in Ben-Hur (1959). With admirable reserve and dignity, both actresses project a quiet strength and womanly grace that seem distinctly pre-modern.

  Today, as the stereotypes of Orientalism are fast receding, the women of the Middle East will no longer accept definition or representation by others. They have found their voice and will speak for themselves.

  * [Foreword for Birgitte C. Huitfeldt, Usensurert: Midtøstens kvinner/Ti møter (Uncensored: Middle Eastern women/ten ways), ten interviews with Middle Eastern women (Oslo, Norway, 2017).]

  23

  ON AYN RAND*

  Many people have noticed the very real parallels between Ayn Rand and me. A New Yorker profile of Rand several years ago in fact called her “the Camille Paglia of the 1960s.”

  Ayn Rand was the kind of bold female thinker who should immediately have been a centerpiece of women’s studies programs, if the latter were genuinely about women rather than about a cliched, bleeding-heart, victim-obsessed, liberal ideology that dislikes all concrete female achievement. Like me, Rand believed in personal responsibility and self-transformation as the keys to modern woman’s advance.

  Rand’s influence fell on the generation just before mine: in the conformist 1950s, her command to think for yourself was brilliantly energizing. When I was a college student (1964–68), I barely heard of her and didn’t read her, and neither did my friends. Our influences were Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Ginsberg, and Andy Warhol.

  When my first book finally got published in 1990, a major Rand revival was under way. I was asked about her so often at my book-signings and lectures that I researched her for the first time. To my astonishment, I found passages in her books that amazingly resemble my own writing: this is certainly due to the fact that we were similarly inspired by the same writers, notably Nietzsche and the High Romantics.

  The main differences between us: first, Rand is more of a rationalist, while I have a mystical 1960s bent (I’m interested in astrology, palmistry, ESP, the I Ching, etc.). Second, Rand disdains religious belief as childish, while I respect all religions on metaphysical grounds, even though I am an atheist. Third, Rand, like Simone de Beauvoir, is an intellectual of daunting high seriousness, while I think comedy is the sign of a balanced perspective on life. As a culture warrior, I have used humor and satire as the most devastating weapons in my arsenal!

  * [In response to a reader question (“You remind me a lot of Ayn Rand”), “Ask Camille,” Salon.com, October 28, 1998.]

  24

  THE DEATH OF HELEN GURLEY BROWN*

  Helen Gurley Brown was a pioneer and prophet of the sexual revolut
ion who triumphed over the American puritans attacking her from both the Right and the Left. Inspired by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, which jettisoned Christian guilt to re-wed sex to the pleasure principle, Brown was determined to liberate women from the masks of simpering modesty imposed on them by the postwar cult of neo-Victorian domesticity. In doing so, she resurrected the daring verve of women of the Jazz Age who had taken up free love along with the vote.

  Born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and later transplanted by her impoverished, widowed mother to Los Angeles, Brown worked her way up the secretarial ladder to become a highly successful advertising copy writer. It was her self-help book, Sex and the Single Girl, published in 1962 when she was 40, that propelled her to fame. Selling millions of copies around the world, the book became a film starring Natalie Wood that helped break down the censorship of the Hollywood studio code.

  Brown became a major player in media when she was named editor of the venerable but pallid Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965. She went boldly sexy with her decolleté cover girls, all shot by Francesco Scavullo as vampy tigresses reminiscent of the bikini-clad Ursula Andress fiercely emerging from the sea in Dr. No. These flamboyant icons represented a new kind of female sensuality for the U.S.—aggressive, confident, and vaguely European.

  But the feminist movement, which was revived with Betty Friedan’s co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, targeted Helen Gurley Brown as an archenemy. Kate Millett, who led a feminist posse invading the Cosmo offices in 1970 (Brown was forced back against a radiator), accused her of “reactionary politics,” above all for her celebration of “man-hunting” and seduction. Cosmo’s fashion-magazine look was a major irritant: the beauty and fashion industries were automatically condemned as oppressive to women.

  Thus at the very dawn of second-wave feminism, a cultural split had opened up between grimly fundamentalist vigilantes like Millett and other young women (like myself) who were avid fans of popular culture. European art films had become increasingly sexually explicit, while fashion magazines in the era of Diana Vreeland were documenting the dynamism of Mod London, with its hip new faces of the international youthquake.

  On TV talk shows in the 1970s, the petite Brown was a frequent charming presence, speaking self-deprecatingly of herself as a homely “mouseburger” who had to work extra hard to advance in life. She was a stellar model of an ambitious businesswoman and entrepreneur. No insult flung at her by feminists rattled her or provoked a catty reply. Brown became a heroine to me for her grit and tenacity in fighting off her humorless critics.

  In the 1970s, feminists were attacking even the exhilarating Charlie’s Angels TV series as sexist exploitation. My dissident wing of feminism, pro-pop and pro-sex, was being crushed and silenced before it could even get off the ground. It was not until the 1990s that, thanks to Madonna’s racy music videos, pro-sex feminism finally overthrew the Stalinist commissars of the feminist establishment. By 1998, the TV series Sex and the City debuted and swept around the world as a generational expression of female sexual freedom, fulfilling Brown’s vision of smart, energetic, sophisticated career women.

  Kate Millett, on the other hand, faded into obscurity, despite her enshrinement on a 1970 cover of Time magazine. But the damage she did remains: her book Sexual Politics started the still entrenched style of trashing great male authors and artists for their hidden sexism. As a graduate student, I saw Millett in action in 1970 at a sparsely attended workshop called “Free? Women” at the Yale Law School. I found her to be a morose philistine, extrapolating her personal grievances into universal issues—exactly as was done by Gloria Steinem, with her painfully chaotic childhood. These women were already locked into a doctrinal catechism. Male-bashing had become their addictive reflex: men were responsible for all the evil of history, and women were their victims.

  Helen Gurley Brown most offended feminists for her tenderness toward men. She said of her husband, “I look after him like a geisha girl.” Dismissed at the time as a confession of subservience, this declaration, coming from such a powerful professional woman, actually contains its own wisdom. It says in effect that men need nurturance and that a woman’s love can supply it.

  Helen Gurley Brown was a great lady and a fearless bulldog. She has beaten them all!

  * [“Helen Gurley Brown: The geisha fought the man-haters—and won, says Camille Paglia,” News Review, The Sunday Times (London), August 19, 2012. After Brown’s death. This is the original text, cut down in print for space.]

  25

  LEGENDS OF DIANA*

  Is Diana dead or alive? I write from a galaxy far, far away, where we know Diana only as a media image, a dancing hologram. In the U.S., we never see the royals’ charity openings and walkabouts, and we are spared the debate over whether the monarchy embodies high national ideals or is merely a parasitic anachronism. Similarly, we knew little of the wrangle over Diana’s memorial fountain, from its commissioning to its recent unveiling as a mediocre sump of diarrheic waters and malignly algae-slick stones.

  Hence for me, as surely for thousands around the world, Diana remains teasingly alive. Though seven years have passed since the terrible accident in the Alma tunnel, the sudden extinguishing of so bright a light still seems unreal, preposterous.

  Americans have largely ignored the tell-all books about Diana by unchivalrous butlers, bodyguards, and companions. But the steady stream of allegations about her infatuations or dalliances has certainly dimmed her reputation. After the release of Andrew Morton’s blockbuster 1992 book (when I first wrote about her cultural significance), popular sentiment completely supported Diana as the abandoned wife, a pensive princess in her gilded cage.

  But as time passed, one began to wonder whether Diana could sustain romance of any kind, due to insecurities that she herself traced to an unsettled childhood. It was hard to imagine how that merry prankster and mistress of worthy causes could be subject to such punishing mood-swings. The round-the-clock communications and solicitude evidently required for her maintenance demanded a heroism if not masochism in her patient allies.

  I am reminded of what the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote to his wife of his first meeting in 1870 with the reclusive Emily Dickinson: “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.” Lucky man to have lived before the era of late-night nuisance phone calls.

  Diana had a burning but erratic energy like that of the great Hollywood stars, who gave deeply but fed off their fans. The greatly gifted are sometimes vampiric. But Diana will always remain a sympathetic figure because of the extraordinary circumstances that cruelly thrust her into a global spotlight with only the most rudimentary preparation or support. Like a heliotropic plant, she turned toward warmth and light, which unfortunately were the blinding flashes of cameras.

  “Atavistic religious emotions,” which I once described in the modern cult of celebrity typified by Diana, certainly erupted after her death. Intermingled with labyrinthine conspiracy theories have been apocalyptic New Age fantasies spread by the Web. Visions of Diana were reported from Kosovo to Althorp. A statue of Diana in the robes of the Virgin Mary was exhibited in Liverpool. A paparazzo was immolated in a grisly suicide. The Alma bridge, it was claimed, was built at a site of pagan sacrifice and ritual combat for the Merovingian kings. The tunnel replicated an ancient underground chamber, and it all tied up with the Holy Grail. Through a bizarre “Lourdes effect,” pilgrims have been dipping holy water from Diana’s polluted fountain in Hyde Park.

  Diana will have eternal life through her resurrection in the innumerable documentaries that are on regular rotation on U.S. television and elsewhere. Their roster of dazzling images is annually expanded by increments, as happened with bardic lays after the fall of Troy. What these programs indisputably show is that the photogenic Diana made an immense contribution to world visual culture, in my
view exceeding the work of painters and sculptors as well as most filmmakers in the same period.

  Diana’s ability to command the moment, to make dramatic use of a sliver of time, was close to genius. She used minimal exposure to maximum effect. Working within the constraints of royal ceremony, she combined an impetuous, coltish physicality with high glamour and a flirtatious, seductive allure. Her early taste in clothing, all Sloane set ruffles and tweeds, was conventional. But during the 1980s, she discovered fashion as it discovered her. Her metamorphosis from plump, shy Di to a confident, chic woman of the world was a coming-of-age drama, like a Bildungsroman.

  My all-time favorite of Diana’s charismatic fashion epiphanies occurred at the Serpentine Gallery on the night in 1994 when Charles was confessing infidelity on TV. Clad in a svelte, off-the-shoulders, pleated black chiffon cocktail dress with a floating side panel, Diana fairly leapt from her car with mischievous ebullience and majestically bore down, with mannishly outthrust arm, on Lord Palumbo in the receiving line. To compensate for their quite different heights, the charging princess in her black stockings and stiletto heels made a deft diagonal dip, then a dynamic swoop into full-frontal camera range. It was a classic scene in twentieth-century performance, whose only equal is in film. I think, for example, of Bette Davis (also in a daringly shoulder-baring evening dress) whirling on the stairs at the cocktail party in All About Eve to say with a dark smile, “Fasten your seat belts—it’s going to be a bumpy night!”

  My least favorite of Diana’s fashion sallies was her crisply athletic diving shows off the Al Fayed yacht in the final weeks of her life. Perhaps her sleek, animal-skin pattern bathing suits were a homage to her friend Gianni Versace, who had recently been murdered in Miami. But so gaudy (and borderline Eurotrash) a style made her look like a pampered odalisque rather than the mother of the future king. If she meant to upstage Camilla Parker-Bowles (then celebrating her 50th birthday at Highgrove House), there was something forced and excessive in her gestures of freedom and defiance. Vacationing aimlessly in the Mediterranean, she was an uprooted English rose. Her unseemly end, in flight from the Ritz after botched dinner plans, parallels the one suffered by the possessed ballerina (played by Moira Shearer) in The Red Shoes—dancing to her death off a parapet onto the railroad tracks at Monte Carlo.