“Put the Blame on Mame”: Fragmentation and Commodification in Gilda

The fact that even if that zipper did come down it would simply reveal more dress, a never-ending vortex of clasps and corsets leading to nowhere, seems precisely what the femme fatale is: the illusion of danger neutered by the realities, a being encased in a body that comes with its own connotations and agency. It’s a catch-22: the femme fatale cannot control herself unless she fully exposes herself, taking the power away from her image. The strip, the sacrifice of her own bodily privacy to the ends of illuminating everything, is perhaps the only way for her to achieve autonomy.

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In June 1946, an airplane called Dave’s Dream flew over the island of Bikini Atoll. The tide lapped over quiet shores; all personnel had been evacuated, but observers watched in a ring 10 miles away, wearing dark glasses and staring toward the center to witness a controversial atomic test: Operation Crossroads. Surrounded by drones ready to record the results of the drop, Dave’s Dream climbed. At 518 feet, the load was let loose, and a bomb, emblazoned with the image of America’s most glamorous redheaded star, went whistling down to earth. When Gilda detonated, five ships were destroyed. If anyone had been on board, they would have seen Rita Hayworth hurtling toward them, exploding in the air above.

Rita/Gilda on Dave’s Dream. YouTube screenshot

Gilda, the bomb’s namesake, is a somewhat mediocre film. The 1946 noir, starring Rita Hayworth in the titular role, feels deeply confined; the palpably low-ceilinged and bizarrely paced plot takes place in in Buenos Aires, where a Nazi, Ballin Mundsen, runs a tungsten monopoly from a cramped panopticon within his crowded resort. He spends most of his time watching guests spend money within a circuitous casino economy, which reinforces the insularity of Gilda’s world. In the middle of all of this, Gilda, a performer at the resort, is traded as a commodity within a closed loop of powerful men. She starts as the wife to Ballin, then marries his associate Johnny Farrell, then finds another man, but ultimately ends up tossed back to Farrell: the plot is denigrating and dizzying. The saccharine ending, nonsensical and unearned, ensures that one leaves feeling both nauseated and dissatisfied.

Despite its shortcomings, I, and many others, love this film, and furthermore, love Hayworth in it. The IMDB page for Gilda has a “Connections” section longer than the cast list: Hayworth-as-Gilda is referenced and shown in over 100 films and television shows. Of the more notable moments on this list, Hayworth pops up in The Shawshank Redemption, first in a cell block presentation of Gilda, and later when Morgan Freeman gifts her poster to Kevin Costner. The exchange speaks volumes: Hayworth is a fantasy shared among men, a gift that they can freely give. Posters of Hayworth, upright on a bed in lingerie, or languid in black with a hanging cigarette, have become iconic as something not only that men love to look at, but that men love to own. If one looks closely at this list, one sees that her picture appears overwhelmingly in male spaces, marking the walls of army barracks, jail cells, the aforementioned atomic bomb, and plenty of boys’ bedrooms (that of my high school crush, for one).

“People go to bed with Gilda and wake up with me,” Hayworth famously lamented. The quote has come to represent a dogma of sorts: people fall in love with a fantasy that inevitably fades to reveal a reality, and Hayworth’s image is as fantastical as it gets. She began her career as Spanish dancer Margarita Cansino, but after being pigeonholed as too exotic for Hollywood, she was thoroughly de-Latinized by Columbia Pictures, ultimately popping out of the studio machine as the slight, strawberry-blonde Rita Hayworth. Though dieting, electrolysis and hair dye had whitened her look, the studio took extra caution to tamp down her roots, marketing her as a glamour girl and not a dancer. Yet it is her dancer-like movement that defines her. Her presence has a certain bounce to it, vibrating within each frame; even in apple-pie musicals like You’ll Never Get Rich and You Were Never Lovelier, Hayworth’s instincts go against the grain, which gives her a singular dynamism. Fred Astaire called her his favorite dance partner (so much for Ginger), and one can understand why; the culture writer Anne Helen Petersen puts it best: “When you see [Hayworth] onscreen, it seems like everyone else is just sleepwalking.”1

Around the time of Hayworth’s rise to fame, Hollywood was at a turning point. Facing changing norms and a healthy dose of disillusionment, for every toe-tapping musical made there was a slick film noir to counter it. In the 1940s, while men were away at war, women were given a taste of a different kind of independence, the nature of which upset the patriarchal order. Noir indulged in a gothic expression of this tension; on shadowy stages, women rise in monstrous form and die violently at the hands of those whom they’ve seduced. Few of these women are able to communicate more than the inevitability of a male moral code; they are at first very seductive, then very evil, and finally very dead, and their arcs rarely break from this pattern. The femme fatale is presented as a distinct and knowable package: even in a world of greed and corruption, she is the absolute worst, as deadly as an atomic bomb. Take one exchange from the 1944 noir Double Indemnity: “We’re both rotten,” says Barbara Stanwyck to Fred MacMurray. “Only you’re a little more rotten,” MacMurray replies.

Gilda attempts to trap Hayworth within this tradition, and aesthetically it does. Critic Richard Dyer writes that Hayworth is

dressed in [Gilda] with that combination of artifice and sensuality characteristic of the noir woman (cf. especially the use of long hair, coiffed to appear naturally “un really” lustrous and flowing, and of tactile fabrics like velvet and satin made into dresses that make obvious use of bones to distort the figure).2

It seems fitting that Dyer provides no clarification as to the nature of these bones; the word is to be understood as dress boning, but the quote suggests a deeper, more visceral modification. Hayworth had just had a child, and many of costume designer Jean Louis’s designs (with help from the camera) worked in service of disguising her body and framing her best parts. Due to this presentation of hyper-feminine fragments, the audience comes to see Gilda less as a full person and more as an array of beautiful images. In her first scene, 19 minutes into the film, her husband, Ballin, shouts “Gilda, are you decent?” In a fluff, Gilda’s hair pinwheels into frame. We meet Gilda’s hair before we meet her.

This kicks off a string of fragmentations: Gilda’s calf peeks out of a gaucho costume, a dress bares one shoulder as she sings, and a camera fixes on her disembodied leg as she pulls on a stocking. She is framed constantly by men in dark suits who flank her, stand in front of her, or block her from the light. In one scene, Gilda lies on a bed face down, rolling in and out of sharp light panes, partaking in her own bisection. She is never fully illuminated; she turns her head and hair into the light, but we lose her body behind her husband’s silhouette. These isolated features become synecdoches for Gilda, signifying her body as whole without ever completely presenting it.

Film theorist Mary Ann Doane writes that “if the femme fatale overrepresents the body, it is because she is attributed with a body which is itself given agency independently of consciousness. In a sense, she has power despite herself.”3 This is precisely Gilda’s problem: Through this tight cinematography and blocking, it is as though the camera is giving Gilda’s body its own set of close-ups and opportunities to express itself, all to the detriment of Gilda’s agency as a conscious subject. What exactly is a woman to do with such a quandary, the fact that her very body signals to viewers something that she may not actually want to convey? How can Gilda gain control over herself and what she projects to the men in her life?

The only way Gilda can attempt to regain any agency is to view the reaction that her image provokes; to not only be looked at, but to look back. Gilda collects this information through performance. After fleeing Buenos Aires and escaping her new husband’s clutches, she sings the song “Amado Mio” to a new lover offstage. In a two-piece outfit that sections her body into parts (more fragmentation!), Gilda moves cleanly, slowly, to a predictable melody. Watching her in this scene is like watching a battery charge; her garments spark with a kind of voltage: the stems of the sequined flowers shimmer like circuitry. As she looks at the man watching her, her movements become more animate. This energy reaches a surge when Gilda, having built up a store of power from his observation, breaks into a glorious dance. Within this is not only exuberance, but presence: it is clear that she is enjoying her body and delighting in all that it can do.

With its traditional stage setup and finite end, the “Amado Mio” number seems a fairly contained depiction of this particular power transaction. However, Gilda is forced to move back to the casino, and the next musical number indicates a shift toward the defiant. “Put the Blame on Mame” is the song of choice; the tune is about a woman being blamed for all of the world’s problems (film noir in a nutshell). Gone is the respectable stage setup of the “Amado Mio” number; in this scene, Gilda does not walk onto the stage but rather into it, immediately immersing herself in the man’s world – they can touch her if they reach out. The camera angles down from high above and a spotlight streams as Gilda’s leg slices out of her black satin strapless gown; she shines as though lacquered. With her arms down, her long black gloves provide the illusion of modesty, but when she flings her arms up and tangles her gloves in her hair, she looks nearly naked: the camera shoots from the bust up, missing the dress completely. Against the dark background, Hayworth’s white arms and shoulders stand disembodied; Gilda forces her hair to defy gravity, a freeze-frame of the introductory hair flip.

This moment marks Gilda’s major turn toward self-possession. She slips her gloves from her glowing white arms as though peeling away the shadows; by removing her own clothes, she possesses the act of her exposure and the camera cannot stop her. If she were naked, no angle could deny that reality. The camera could conceal her, but she would still be in the room, fully exposed.

When the song finishes, vigorous, drooling applause erupts from the audience. Gilda offers herself up to the masses, saying “I’m not very good at zippers, but maybe if I had some help. . . .” She stands back as men jump up to unzip her. As if bookending the scene, she holds up her hair in her bare hands. The audience must bear witness to her illumination, and even aid in the process. Before this can happen, she is whisked away by her husband, who slaps her. Hard.

The ultimate threat of the striptease is not just that Gilda could be naked, it’s that she could be unclothed, unpackaged, no longer a compilation of pretty fragments but a unified, autonomous subject. The slap comes in response to this risk; if Gilda is set free, then everything, including the entire film itself, would unravel.

Of the Gilda dress, the costume designer Jean Louis said,

It was the most famous dress I ever made . . . inside there was a harness like you put on a horse. We put grosgrain under the bust with darts and three stays – one in the centre, two on the sides. Then we moulded plastic softened over a gas flame and shaped around the top of the dress. No matter how she moved, the dress did not fall down.4

The Gilda dress was a remarkable and symbolic innovation; despite Hayworth’s organic, characteristically fluid movements, the dress would always move the opposite way. No matter what her body actually wanted to do, the dress had been engineered by Jean Louis to oppose it; in other words, that dress was never coming off, even if someone managed to unzip it. She is not a woman dancing in a dress, she is a woman dancing with a dress, two partners sharing the stage.

The fact that even if that zipper did come down it would simply reveal more dress, a never-ending vortex of clasps and corsets leading to nowhere, seems precisely what the femme fatale is: the illusion of danger neutered by the realities, a being encased in a body that comes with its own connotations and agency. It’s a catch-22: the femme fatale cannot control herself unless she fully exposes herself, taking the power away from her image. The strip, the sacrifice of her own bodily privacy to the ends of illuminating everything, is perhaps the only way for her to achieve autonomy.

Returning to Hayworth’s initial quote, it seems that what holds the ability to overpower is less the role of Gilda than its outward trappings, the connotations of femininity that it carries and signals. The fragmentation of the woman via camera, via dress, via poster, results in the dangerous distillation and commodification of image. It seems ironic that Gilda as a character struggles with the very quandary that she ultimately presents to Hayworth: a participation in a performance she may not want to partake in. Gilda may love to dance, but men love to watch her dance; one cannot quite know which came first.

Promoting scrap metal donations during World War II. Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Hayworth did not take kindly to being plastered on the side of a bomb. “Rita almost went insane, she was so angry,” said her then-husband Orson Welles.5 She attempted to get her image off of the bomb and tried to hold a press conference to relay her intention, but her efforts were dashed by Columbia Studios chief Harry Cohn, who deemed her objection unpatriotic. Welles tried to convince her that the whole thing was flattering, an expression of admiration on behalf of the flight crew.

Gilda dropped on Bikini Atoll as planned, forever tying Hayworth to ideas of American power and the bombshell image. It seems no coincidence that Cohn used the word “unpatriotic” to describe her objections, as though the meticulous whitewashing and Americanization she endured for her career gave the world license to use her as they saw fit. There is a point at which the performance stops being fun; not only was Hayworth forced to watch men use her image as a weapon against her will, she was urged to be grateful for it. As an explosively beautiful woman, a threat in the eyes of men, Hayworth was never allowed the autonomy she was entitled to. She was forever trapped within the image of Gilda; try as she might to unzip herself, the dress stayed put.

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Except where noted, all images are screenshots from the film’s trailers or DVD.