\n<\/p>\n
Anderson likes to be makeup free<\/a>; away from work, so does her character. Shelly loves being a showgirl \u2014 \u201cfeeling beautiful, that is powerful\u201d \u2014 but when she puts on her costume, she\u2019s cosplaying an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Onstage, she plays a fantasy. When she\u2019s offstage, Shelly is a person with a life, everyday concerns and friends, mostly women, who look at one another with gazes that find common cause. Coppola sees the world of \u201cThe Last Showgirl\u201d as a metaphor for the America dream, one in which commodified bodies come with expiration dates. It is also an emblem for women in film, who have long fought against their perceived disposability and continue to find common cause in female-driven work.<\/p>\n IN A CRUCIAL CHAPTER<\/strong> in his 1972 book \u201cWays of Seeing<\/a>,\u201d the art critic John Berger surveyed the figure of the female nude in Western art since the Renaissance and argued that \u201cthe essential way of seeing women\u201d hadn\u2019t changed. \u201cWomen are depicted in a quite different way from men,\u201d he writes, \u201cnot because the feminine is different from the masculine \u2014 but because the \u2018ideal\u2019 spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.\u201d The obviousness of this is evident to anyone who\u2019s strolled through, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its figurative and abstract representations, its Madonnas, courtesans, queens, servants, dancers, bathers and come-hither nudes.<\/p>\n The same could be said about the movies, with their sweethearts and vamps, adventurers and homebodies, mothers and wives, dutiful and defiant daughters. The early 20th century brought new women with new looks, sensibilities and desires to the screen<\/a>. In her film history \u201cFrom Reverence to Rape,\u201d the critic Molly Haskell<\/a> writes that as the 1930s got underway in Hollywood, women \u201cwere conceived of as having sexual desire without being freaks, villains or even necessarily Europeans.\u201d Soon after, the industry instituted more rigorous self-censorship to stave off government censorship. It wasn\u2019t until the \u201970s gave way to the \u201980s, Haskell writes, that grown-up women \u201cbegan to return to cinema\u201d; it\u2019s been a slow re-entry.<\/p>\n Actresses \u2014 in Jim Crow Hollywood, most were white \u2014 lifted and broke hearts while sustaining a studio system that turned some into goddesses but that could be brutal. In her memoir \u201cThe Lonely Life,\u201d Bette Davis writes that after her 1931 debut in \u201cBad Sister<\/a>,\u201d she learned that \u201caccording to all existing Hollywood standards, my face was not photogenic.\u201d And while Judy Garland\u2019s addictions are well known, when the 1939 classic \u201cThe Wizard of Oz\u201d plays, it should be prefaced with this stark revelation from her: \u201cFrom the time I was 13, there was a constant struggle between M-G-M and me \u2014 whether or not to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. I remember this more vividly than anything else about my childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n