ballet – Bad Reputation

When You Are Queen: Christian Louboutin at the Design Museum

Hodge — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 05:58:08 +0000

Last time I bought a new pair of high heels, an eleven-year old admired them.

‘I like your shoes!’ she said. ‘They have red bits at the back!’

‘Thanks,’ I said, beating a swift retreat before she noticed that the ‘red bits’ were in fact open wounds filled with my encrusted blood, patching the backs of my ankles like some kind of visceral rash.

I should have said ‘They’re Christian Louboutin’.

Christian Louboutin's 'Ballerina' slippers, with an 8-inch heel

Vertigo

The shoe designer beloved by female celebrities everywhere (Jennifer Lopez has a whole song about them) is so proud of his trademark ‘red sole’ that he recently took erstwhile collaborator Yves Saint-Laurent to court over red sole copyright infringement. He’s also currently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Design Museum.

He’s notorious for being one of the first designers to insist, in the early 90s, on a heel that truly towers – his shoes average at about 4 1/2 inches; the highest peak at dizzying 6 (‘but mostly only dancers can wear them‘) and if you’re looking for someone to blame when you survey the heights on the high-street and sigh, you could be more unjust than to point your finger at this foot-obsessed Frenchman.

As a teenager, Louboutin’s eye was caught by a ‘No Stilettos’ sign at the Museum of Oceanic Art, Paris: ‘I wanted to defy that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.’ He’s stuck to this original image for most of his career: there are very few wedges or block heels in his collections; instead, his heels are thin, vertiginously high and splattered with those red soles.

Earthbound

Where such heights can lead is well illustrated by the fate that meets Little Women‘s sixteen-year-old Meg, who wears high heels to a ball – ‘The stupid high heel turned… It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get home’.

The sign Louboutin recalls inspiring him as a child

Yet this is the sort of height we’re talking about, for the 1860s. Poor Meg was rather dowdily earth-bound compared to Louboutin’s fantastical ‘ballerina’, whose eight-inch high ‘slippers’ are displayed above left. ‘Isn’t the classical dancing ballet slipper the ultimate heel? The heel which makes dancers closer than any other women to the sky, closer to heaven..’ waves Louboutin, airily, in explanation.

Elevation

He’s predictably fascinated with elevation – the exhibition is full of ‘pedestals’ and ‘birds’. But he’s gone a lot further than previous designers: Meg may have been dowdy in comparison, but even the flappers of the Twenties had modest block heels, and the Fifties heel looks almost mumsy nowadays.

One of the pairs exhibited here is accompanied by an apologia from Louboutin, thus: ‘This shoe is not suitable for walking in. You can only walk from the taxi to the nightclub, and back, on the arm of a man’. When asked about the point that women can’t run in his heels, intended for his ‘confident and empowered’ working women (apparently) Louboutin was incredulous: ‘Who runs at work?‘.

Yet he’s also fascinated by showgirls and ‘classic’ vintage-style women (such as his great admirer, Dita Von Teese, who makes a holographic appearance in this exhibition morphing into a Louboutin pump, in a rather literal appropriation of the fetish we’ll come to presently). Such women, he says, can dance and gyrate for hours at a stretch from atop dizzying heels – Louboutin learned all about this during an early career stint at the Folies Bergere, where showgirls used to put cuts of bloodless meat inside their heels to make them more comfortable.

Perhaps this is echoed in the sexualised red Louboutin sole (originally hastily-applied Chanel nail varnish) – a flash of red as easily representing the raw and bloodied foot itself as the raw and (un)bridled sexuality of the wearer.

Venus in Furs

Helmut Newton's Self Portrait With Wife and Models

‘A good shoe is one that doesn’t dress you but undresses you’, Christian reckons – a statement with which Helmut Newton (left) would undoubtedly have agreed. The short David Lynch / Louboutin collaboration film Fetish (2007), extracts from which are on display here, shows sequences of otherwise naked women wearing a series of ‘unwearable’ Louboutin shoes – following Louboutin’s conviction that the part of the female body most naturally fetishised is (you guessed it) the foot.

He’s even got a mini foot anatomy: one of the pumps on display here has a very low vamp, which was initially unpopular. ‘Then I realised, it’s because of the slit‘, he recalls – an unfortunate word, given that he means ‘toe cleavage’. Too much ‘slit’ apparently makes women feel ‘dirty’, but Louboutin’s well into it, although the instep is his favourite part of the foot, perhaps because of his famous belief that the appeal of the high heel is its approximation of the shape a woman’s foot assumes during orgasm.

The fetish

Of course, Sigmund Freud uses the shoe and foot as an illustration for his writings on the fetish – the mother’s shoe, says Sigmund, represents the penis the child originally assumed she has, and to fixate on it assuages castration anxiety. But symbolic castration via the foot pops up in Louboutin’s favourite fairy tale (whose centrepiece shoes he’s working on for an upcoming film):

‘[The eldest step-sister] could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.”

The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son […] He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red.’

– Cinderella, The Brothers Grimm

The mad but occasionally insightful Bruno Bettleheim sees the stepsisters here attempting to make their big feet more dainty, ‘and therefore prove their femininity’ through a symbolic castration (with a literal twist in stage versions, where they are usually in drag). The problem of the shoe being too dainty is one surprisingly near to Louboutin’s methods: although the average female foot size is a 5, he designs and constructs his shoes in size 4 ‘because I prefer to work on a small thing’.

‘He understands women and makes them feel like Cinderellas’ purrs Diane von Furstenberg on the designer. Indeed, it feels appropriate that stilettos, whose c20th renaissance is credited primarily to the 1950s couturier Roger Vivier (for Dior) owe their name to the Italian ‘dagger’ (hence their unpopularity with parquet flooring).

Domination

For me, the images in Fetish of these women crawling and sidling about in painfully unwearable shoes sums up this retrospective rather well: a fascination with immobility, and a craving for Fabulous Female Domination that suggests more power than it would actually have were it being negotiated from atop a pair of Louboutin pigalles.

But you look like you could walk down the treacherously lumpy terrain of my naked back, make me lick your Louboutin boots…

‘I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,’ said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica.

– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Christian Louboutin, Retrospective at The Design Museum, London SE1. Until 9 July 2012.

Check Out My Ego: Aronofsky’s Black Swan

Hodge — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 09:00:36 +0000

Now, I know we already have our own Film Cricket here at BadRep, and I should really be off writing an alphabetical list of something, but I feel impelled to speech by the power of Swan Lake (and not just because I used to spend hours trying to make my chubby little six-year-old legs form the Cygnet Dance).

Oh matron. Natalie Portman in the poster for Black Swan.

Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s latest filmic offering, hinges upon the idea of a cunning duality running through Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake (1877). We know this because within about fifteen minutes of the film’s opening, the creepy French dance teacher Thomas (Vincent Cassel) has given a rather thinly disguised explanation of what the whole film is about, clumsily telling a room full of professional dancers what the plot of this ‘done-to-death’ ballet is.

Except he doesn’t. The plot of Swan Lake is a composite of various Russian folk tales and a German short story called ‘The Stolen Veil’. It features Prince Siegfried who is reluctant to marry, despite the wishes of his queen-mother. But one night he meets the swan-queen Odette and is completely won round: alas, tragedy ensues when Rotbart, the evil magician, sends his daughter Odile (the ‘black swan’) off to impersonate Odette at the Prince’s birthday party, which she does so well that he mistakes her for his True Love. Yada yada yada. It’s a fairly clear example of the ‘fairy bride’ tradition (where a man meets a magical woman whom he marries and inevitably loses), and typical of Romanticism and other Romantic ballets in its interest in man’s relationship with the supernatural and the ideal: Odette is fundamentally unattainable, an imagined perfection, not a representation of sexual love.

But not if you’re Aronofsky, who can’t resist a little Psychology 101: the Black Swan (whose appearance on stage in the original ballet amounts to a measly few dances) becomes Odette’s ‘EVIL TWIN’, a good old fashioned Id to Odette’s Ego. Just to clarify, that’s Black Swan = BAD, White Swan = GOOD (repeat ad nauseum). Siegfried, whose own sexual stand-offishness and maternal relationship is a lynchpin in the ballet, is all but gone in the film, where he functions simply as a sort of pole for the prima ballerina to dance around. She, on the other hand, now has all his issues and then some: the White Swan is FRAGILE and VIRGINAL (yet has somehow managed to woo her reluctant prince into marriage in the course of a single night), and, in perverted-Ugly-Ducking style, no one wants to fuck her (boo hoo). Meanwhile, the Black Swan is a bit oh-matron, a Sexy Seductress. Were she living in 21st century Manhattan, Aronofsky decides, she would be taking drugs, listening to her iPod, sexin’ down the clubs, and carrying a black singlet around ‘in case she ends up somewhere unexpected’. Gosh darn it, isn’t she exactly like this rather pouting ingenue who can’t dance very well, but has lots of passion?

Thus this Romantic tale – which actually has much to offer Black Swan‘s premise through its use of supernatural and metaphorical elements, illusion, ideals and identity – becomes a tired old angel/whore dichotomy, and an indirect sort of homage to the ur-backstage bitches backstabbing drama, All About Eve (1950). I can’t help feeling here, though, that Aronofsky may have arrived at the party a bit late: as Spanish cinema fans will remember, back in 1999 Pedro Almadovar made a brilliant film based on just this cinema classic, and also managed to fix the 1950s gender politics in the process, making the whole thing a loving tribute to women’s endurance, rather than a film about how women always screw each other over.

'Not you, grey swan!' Photo par Hodge.

But even if you read Black Swan as a straight portrait of mental disorder rather than a supernatural horror story (a lazy choice to give an audience, and a bit clever-by-numbers, don’t you think?) the whole thing still hinges around a sexual awakening that portrays lesbianism as a freakish Other, sex itself as A Bit Naughty and the definition of a successful woman as ‘a seductive one’. And from this angle, too, Black Swan is derivative of a much finer (and less misogynistic) film, Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001), which, er, features as its main character a self-mutilating, sexually repressed champion piano player who lives with her obsessive privacy-intolerant mother who wants to live through her daughter.

This post has not been attempting a sword-swinging defence of the sacred Swan Lake story: as Matthew Bourne has shown, it is a skeleton on which vastly different interpretations can hang beautifully. And, yeah, I get metaphor and that. But what really bothered me was this feeling throughout the film that despite the constantly pummeled ‘BLACK SWAN WHITE SWAN’ contrast, manipulation of Tchaikovsky’s music on a scale not seen since Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (itself based on another Tchaikovsky ballet) and the whole ‘ballet theme’ thing, Aronofsky really has no interest in any of those things except as they make him look Clever and link up (in a feminine sort of way) with his Grand Theme of vocations that require you to abuse your body (a la The Wrestler). A case in point is Nina’s much-touted ‘minor eating disorder’, which is presumably introduced as part of the whole ‘dancers are thin and they lust after physical perfection’ thing, and something I have a couple of key problems with. These are: firstly, its yawn-inducing predictability, exploiting the one thing everyone knows about ballet; and secondly the fact that, even though eating disorders are supposedly ballet’s Defining Feature, Black Swan makes no attempt to examine their specific relationship to a career that demands major energy output 24/7.

Plus, of course, the whole ‘Ah yes. She’s a dancer who wants to do well in her career. So let’s give her an eating disorder to really symbolise that drive for perfection. But eating disorders – they’re not all that SEXY are they? The BLACK SWAN must be SEXY… So let’s shove a bit of eating disorder in there, just so we know this is a film about a woman with a perfectionist streak, then forget all about it and focus on the sexy wanking and the sexy lesbian sex.’

Such heavy-handedness sits strangely at odds with the elegance of the dance-world – which, of course, does involve great physical hardship, a short career and an inevitable amount of luvvie backstabbing. That said, I’m not going to attempt to deny I had fun: it’s a rip-roaring yarn, and a splendid performance from Portman. But perhaps if Aronofsky had taken less time to think about how clever he considers himself, and more time to consider the intricacies of the ballet he takes as his framework, Black Swan would be less derivative, less cocky and – as a film – infinitely superior.

Hodge’s List of Related(ish) Films That Don’t Leave Her Toffee Nosed

La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher)
Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother)
…and if you want something specifically balletic, Hable Con Ella (Talk To Her)
If you can get over the sexual politics, All About Eve (1950) is a fantabulous film (YEAH, BETTE)
And for backstage meta kind of stuff, a lot of the 1950s musicals are still some of the most fun and unpretentious mainstream films you can watch: my particular favourites would have to be Singin’ In The Rain (1952), Show Boat (1951) and Kiss Me Kate (1953).
And for all this black swan ‘dark side’ type stuff, there’s always Belle De Jour (1967). Its views on women could be read as fairly atrocious, but aren’t necessarily – one day, we’ll discuss it over pork scratchings.