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THE GARBO FORMULA
30 October 2005
Between the two great female icons of the silent era, Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo, lies a gulf of profound depth. Ironically,
though Pickford often played girls, they were girls of great pluck and determination, who succeeded through strength of character
and will. Garbo played a sexually mature woman but a woman wholly limited by her sexuality, and thus in many ways more infantile
than a Pickford heroine. Pickford's resourceful girls seem quaint to many today, decidedly old-fashioned, while Garbo still
seems modern -- yet the Garbo icon in fact represented a colossal step backwards for the image of women in our culture.
Pickford's films were essentially created by her -- she had the power to pick her stories and her directors, to shape
her own image. That alone should make her portraits of women a matter of great and abiding interest to us, since very few
women in movies after Pickford ever had that kind of control over their work. Garbo's image and persona were the creations
of men -- and most particularly of Irving Thalberg, who supervised, on "The Temptress", the codification of "the
Garbo formula", which dictated the basic structure of all her films. In this formula, Garbo would be cast as a smoldering
object of sexual desire, usually married to an older man but attracted to a younger and more potent one. From this conflict
the drama would emerge. (Mark Vieira, in his commentary on the "Temptress" DVD, outlines the Garbo formula and
amusingly suggests that it even applies to "Ninotchka", in which Communism serves the role of the older husband.)
In "The Temptress", Garbo's role as a chaotic erotic force wreaking havoc on the lives and the honor of men
is considerably softened by the suggestion that she has been sexually exploited by her husband -- that men make fools of themselves
over her for her beauty, but don't really care about her as a person. By the time MGM made "Flesh and the Devil"
this small concession to female humanity had been wholly abandoned. The Garbo character there is not exactly a wicked woman,
but she is not quite human, either -- she is just a sexual force, apparently amoral and decidedly lethal.
In the Garbo formula, the sexual power of woman is recognized, glamorized, celebrated -- even as it is resented, feared, despised.
Garbo is relegated to the realm of flesh alone, to object status -- she is the test men meet or fail, the trophy they fight
over, the devil they succumb to at the cost of their own souls. (As a title card in "Flesh and the Devil" puts
it -- "My boy, when the devil cannot reach us through the spirit . . . he creates a woman beautiful enough to reach us
through the flesh.")
The hatred of women inherent in the Garbo formula is not far from the surface -- and probably not far from the psyche
of Irving Thalberg. In normal life, nerdy little jerks like Thalberg don't end up marrying women who look like Norma Shearer
-- unless they have lots of money and lots of power. A Norma Shearer is one of the prizes men with money and power claim
-- but even as that prize serves as a a visible trophy of success, it is also a constant reminder to the male in question
that, without his bank book and corporate clout, the woman would hardly give him a second glance.
The psychopathology of all this is present in the Garbo formula -- which tries to have it both ways . . . celebrating
the sexual value of the star, as though it were a kind of commodity, while reducing her to a moral cypher, whose actual respect
for a man is not worth much, a matter of chemistry and/or convenience.
Portraits of women, even women like the Garbo character, seen from the perspective of women did not entirely disappear
from the screen with the triumph of the corporate functionaries in the Twenties. They came in through female screenwriters
and story editors and from literature not controlled by the corporate nerds -- but the nerds were always there with some variant
of the Garbo formula to frame the image of women to their liking . . . such as the rule that the feistiest and most independent
of women must submit docilely to a man in the last reel.
It is almost impossible to calculate the effect on our culture, on the souls of young women, of formulas like this, concocted
by insecure males like Irving Thalberg, who still run Hollywood. On a more hopeful note we are also reminded of the deep
truth articulated by Camille Paglia when she observed that misogyny is not a by-product of a powerful patriarchy, but of a
collapsing one. Truly powerful men have no need to despise and fear women.
Someday, perhaps, our culture will realize again that Mary Pickford is every bit as alluring and sexy as Thalberg's vision
of Garbo -- intoxicating as that vision might be in an age of collapsed manhood. And once you disassociate Garbo from the
formula that tried to contain her, you can still revel in the mystery of her powerful sexuality without any compunction to
share in her handlers' pathetic terror in the presence of it.
It should be added that Garbo was quite aware of the image being created for her by MGM and did not approve of it. "Always
the vamp I am," she said around the time of "Flesh and the Devil", "always the woman without a heart."
She fought an epic battle with Louis B. Mayer for more say in the roles she played, and she won it, but the Garbo formula,
softened a bit, stayed in place. (One of Mayer's "negotiating points" in this battle was a threat to have her deported,
to prevent her from seeking better terms at another studio. It's really almost impossible to exaggerate how vile a man he
really was.)
It should also be added that there's much more to "Flesh and the Devil" than Irving Thalberg, and the culture
he represented, working out their neuroses about women. It's a wildly entertaining soap opera, graced by the very considerable
art of Garbo and of Clarence Brown. It has some of the loveliest (and sexiest) images in the history of movies. But it's
strangely conflicted in the way it tells its story -- the conventional morality of its text is thoroughly subverted, the truly
despicable behavior of the Garbo character thoroughly endorsed at every stage by the glamorization of the actress playing
her. When filmmakers lie to us this way it's always interesting to ask why.
WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?
2 October 2005
It's moving -- for the second time this year -- and it's taken up most of my time for the past two weeks, which is why
there's been such a long gap between reports here, for which I apologize to all visitors.
I think it's natural to go into denial about the logistics of moving, because if one faced up to them directly one would
never find the courage to attempt a move at all. My friend Jae came out last month to help me move the heavy and awkward
things (and a friend who'll cross most of a continent to help you with a move is . . . a FRIEND) and I thought it would be
easy enough to shuttle the smaller things over in my car, which is pretty big.
I simply did not imagine how many small things there were to be moved, how many boxes they would fill and how exhausting
it would be in the 100-degree heat to carry them down the stairs at the old place and up the stairs at the new one.
I finished the job at 4am on 30 September utterly exhausted, bone weary and mentally defunct -- the repetition of packing
and hauling and unpacking almost undid me.
Above is a picture of my old doorway before I picked up the doormat -- the last thing I carried out to the car.
But a little while later I sat back in the La-Z-Boy recliner at the new apartment, looked out at the lights of the Strip,
of which I have a stupendous view, and realized I was home -- for a while, anyway. It was as though the past two weeks had
never happened. My trusty hand-cart looked like an alien device, instead of my constant companion navigating the pathways
of Hell. I was overwhelmed with joy and satisfaction.
The nights are getting cooler these days -- almost a harbinger of Fall in the Mojave. I laid out a fire in the fireplace,
against the first night it grows cold enough to light one. I know where I'll be spending Christmas. Life is good.
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