Rebecca Traister at Salon has a good piece on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue. You know the one — the cover features designer Tom Ford and two wax figures. Oh, wait. Aren’t those Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansen?
You may ask yourself why they’re sitting next to a clothing designer yet wearing no clothes. He, of course, is fully dressed, though his manly hairy chest is on display. Well, see, this is Tom Ford’s Hollywood, Tom Ford being the guest editor for the issue, and his Hollywood apparently involves a lot of waxen nude women and nude women’s body parts. And racial stereotypes. But men get to keep their clothes on. Unless they’re black.
Oh, but the nudity on the cover was “accidental!” Just part of Tom Ford’s spontaneity.
As for Ford’s claim, to editor Jim Windolf, that it was an “accident” that he plopped himself in the middle of the cover shot (fully dressed, because only the chicks have to take it off), a quick glance at the magazine’s cover line (“Tom Ford’s Hollywood”), its cover-photo caption (“Ford’s Foundation”), its full-page contributor’s bio of Ford, the letter from editor in chief Graydon Carter titled “Vanity Fair’s Tom Ford Moment,” a story about the making of the magazine called “Welcome to Tommywood!” and multiple pictures of Ford (walking sexed-up 12-year-old Dakota Fanning to her photo shoot, taking a bite out of Mamie Van Doren’s inflated breast, strutting around in Wellingtons) provide subtle clues that there is nothing “accidental” about Ford’s megalomania.
Not everyone got on board with the nudity, which came as a surprise to the actors and actresses who showed up for the photo shoot. But whether those objections were honored depended on which set of parts the objector had between the legs. First, the story of Rachel McAdams, of the female persuasion:
Rachel McAdams (“Wedding Crashers,” “Red Eye,” “The Family Stone”), one of the women scheduled to pose for this year’s cover, arrived at the photo shoot only to learn that Ford wanted her naked. I had not thought a willingness to disrobe was a condition of appearing on the front of Vanity Fair, but reluctant ecdysiast McAdams not only lost her spot, she is mentioned in the magazine only as “a certain young actress” who “bowed out when the clothes started coming off,” thus squelching “Ford’s plan of having a gorgeous female threesome.” There you have it, ladies, straight from Vanity Fair: We don’t care if you star in three successful movies in one year; if you won’t get naked for a “threesome,” you can forget your spot in our pages!
In other words, Rachel, it’s all your fault you’re not part of Tom Ford’s Hollywood, because you’re clearly frigid, and that will never do. Yet those with boy parts somehow got accommodated:
But the terms of inclusion seem shaky in other ways as well. Vanity Fair editors write that Miramax pugilists Bob and Harvey Weinstein balked at Ford’s idea of photographing them mud wrestling, and Ford tells Windolf that “Munich” star Eric Bana “wasn’t comfortable” appearing in just a Speedo. Why is it OK that the Weinstein boys appear next to each other in suits, Bana got to wear a robe, but Rachel McAdams is not in the magazine? Why is it OK to run a photograph of a plastic surgeon in the Hollywood issue, but not a single director or screenwriter who’s not also an actor? Maybe all this isn’t even worth pointing out. As the L.A. Times’ Robin Abcarian wrote about V.F.’s cover, in Hollywood “the combination of the dressed male and the naked heterosexual woman is merely a metaphor for how things are, have always been, and will probably always be.”
And not only were the women encouraged to be nude, their bodies were visually hacked up into disembodied parts for the pleasure of the men, who remained intact:
Aside from himself, what has Ford chosen to feature in his vision of Hollywood? By the numbers: Seventeen women (average age 31) and 19 men (average age 34). There are 16 visible female nipples (erect or exposed) to 17 recognizable female faces. Only five of the women are over 30, and two of them — 75-year-old Van Doren and 38-year-old Pamela Anderson — are honored not for their talents, exactly, but for their identities as “The Breast Friends.” There are three female ass-cracks, one naked headless woman (in a photo of “Shopgirl” star Jason Schwartzman), two manicured female feet (for Viggo Mortensen to tickle), one pair of shapely female legs (upside down, for Topher Grace to maneuver as if he might at any moment spread them and dive) and one giant Dada-ist breast on a golf course in front of a featured plastic surgeon.
There’s much to be said about the appeal of a well-placed arm, leg, breast. But extremities tend to be more compelling when attached to, say, a body. Ford is not celebrating the female form: He’s hacking it apart and selling off the parts to male stars in need of girl-flesh to gussy up their own boring images. (For more on the use of disembodied lady parts as sales devices, see Women’s Studies 101 chestnut “Killing Us Softly.“)
Apparently, in Tom Ford’s Hollywood, women are just props, without a life of their own or personalities, and somehow he managed to have all the life sucked out of the women who posed for the issue, with the exception of Michelle Yeoh (and really — can you imagine anybody sucking the life out of her?). The effect is strangely unsexy, despite all the nudity. I suppose it might have to do with the fact that Tom Ford is someone who is not only gay, so not sexually interested in women, but whose business is dressing women. He spends a lot of time around mannequins and dress forms, which have no heads, and fit models, whose job it is to keep still and just wear the clothes. Now, most gay male designers probably have no problem viewing women as human beings, but combine a professional detachment towards women’s bodies with lack of attraction to them and a raging ego, and you have Tom Ford’s Hollywood.
And let’s not forget the images of submission and infantilization:
Ford shows us a girl on a car — the relatively unknown Michelle Monaghan, splayed upside down so that she’s further unrecognizable — and 10 pages later, a girl in a car. (Zooey Deschanel, dubbed “The Living Doll” and dressed in lacy tights with legs in the air for a particularly twisted piece of cheesecake; it looks as if she’s been kidnapped and stuffed in the back of the car, awaiting assault.) In contrast to the maturely decked-out child-star Fanning, Ford pictures Reese Witherspoon, Oscar nominee and mother of two, in a baby-doll dress, clutching a dolly. Witherspoon’s photo caption reads “The American Beauty,” but it looks like she should be called “Betsy-Wetsy.”
It doesn’t end there, of course. Misogyny is not the only order of the day. Oh, no. We have racial stereotypes to pound home as well:
But it’s Joy Bryant’s picture that is most disturbing. The African-American Bryant, her blurb tells us, earned straight A’s in Bronx public schools, went to Yale, scored roles in “Antwone Fisher” and “Get Rich or Die Tryin'”… and now appears in Vanity Fair, where she is called “The Wild Honey,” and photographed wearing expensive jewelry and nothing else. Congratulations, Joy Bryant, on breaking class and racial barriers so that you can be reduced to your breasts and bling on the pages of a national magazine!
…
To be fair, the V.F. men don’t win out, either, though they did get to keep more of their clothes. A couple (Joaquin Phoenix, looking like a Tiger Beat centerfold, and Eric Bana) are semi-shirtless; Jonathan Rhys-Meyers might be naked, but since he’s only photographed from the neck up, it’s tough to tell. Only poor Taye Diggs comes close to true bare-assed nudity — a black man on a bear rug, an image reliant on some of the most repugnant stereotypes of black male sexuality. Mostly, though, the guys are in suits and tuxes.
As Traister points out, this is a particularly disappointing issue for Vanity Fair because their previous Hollywood issues paid tribute to the families and histories of Hollywood, as well as the behind-the-scenes talent (Ford included no directors or writers who weren’t also actors). They’ve also included photos of near-nude Hollywood stars that leave the impression that the sexuality in the shot is very much their own.
In the end, of course, controversy sells magazines.
As Liz Smith wrote in her syndicated column on Sunday, Graydon Carter is smart to have put out an issue that everyone is so angry about that they can’t stop buying it. According to Abcarian, V.F.’s Web site got 3.1 million page views on Tuesday and Wednesday, which spokeswoman Beth Kseniak called “a whole lot more than normal.”
But I won’t be buying.