The idea of movie stars was born in 1910. Before then, the studios generally cloaked their casts in anonymity until the early moguls realized that the public desired demigods and goddesses, idols. The emerging machinery of popular culture began to polish and elevate the shadowy figures of the silver screen, endowing them with an attribute that would soon be called glamour. As Indiana University English professor Judith Brown notes in her new book, when Virginia Woolf cryptically stated that in 1910, “human character changed,” she probably imagined something other than the celebrity culture Hollywood would vigorously promote.
Glamour and golden age Hollywood are inseparable, and the stars of long ago haunt many pages of Brown’s Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (published by Cornell University Press). But the book’s scope is wider than Hollywood and its author shows that the movies didn’t invent glamour. What Hollywood did was help to codify a fin-de-siecle aesthetic associated with Oscar Wilde and circulate it to the corners of the world.
The etymology of glamour is significant to Brown’s thesis. The word’s origins lie in the occult, in the conjuring of delusions. Her book’s title and six chapters acknowledge the doleful numerology of six, hex in Greek, the root of 666. Commenting on Jean Harlow, the platinum forerunner of Marilyn Monroe, Brown describes glamour as “cold, indifferent, and deathly.” Glamour “relies on abstraction, on the thing transformed into idea and therefore the loss of the thing itself, curling away from human concerns as if in a whiff of smoke.” Like much of Modernism, glamour favors “blankness” but transmutes the polished surfaces of indifference “into something that is seductive, powerful, and often simply gorgeous.”
Glamour can be deceptive, but it’s more than mass deception, as the Marxists simplistically claimed. It’s an aesthetic that was integral to the rise of modernity, straddling high culture and popular entertainment. Consider Brown’s meditation on the cigarette, a symbol in the early 20th century of modernity and even the ostensible “liberation” of women. “Slim, streamlined, ephemeral, and ultimately deadly, cigarettes produced, through their veil of smoke, a sense of style, transgression, and danger that, together, created glamour.”
The glamorizing of tobacco, sweeping aside all objections of morality and health, is as much a signifier of Brown’s thesis as the movies that spread the glamorous image of smoking. By 1910 the human character was changing. “Charm, magnetism, and fascination quickly emerged as the desirable traits of the twentieth century, replacing such fogeyish terms as virtue and strength of character.” She neglects to add, though she is certainly aware, that charm, magnetism and fascination are also terms rooted—like glamour itself—in magic.
Glamour, she writes, was a response to a lost authenticity and spirituality in the modern world, maintaining “the qualities of ecstatic illumination while, at the same time, forgoing any possibility of depth or meaning.” Put another way, glamour was an anesthetic for the loss of heart and soul, numbing and seductive as heroin for the imagination.
A work of rare brilliance and insight, elegantly written and densely packed with ideas, Glamour in SixDimensions is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of culture in the last century. Ambivalent about the present status of glamour and its future, Brown points out that the drag queen Divine and ‘70s glam rock were essentially nostalgic, and this was often true, if paradoxically so in the retro-futurism of Roxy Music and David Bowie. But the glossy spreads of Vogue signal that the mesmerizing allure of glamour has not exited the stage.
