a different perspective, from the Guardian:
The vanity, the vanity
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Ten actresses, supposedly the most talented and lovely of their age, are photographed for a magazine cover shoot. Don't be fooled by their painstakingly seductive poses, argues Tanya Gold - this image betrays a hierarchy of beauty and age that is as cruel as Hollywood itself[/font]
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Wednesday February 2, 2005
The Guardian
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The 'Hollywood issue' cover. Photo: Exclusively for Vanity Fair by Annie Liebovitz
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The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday February 4 2005
Sienna Guillory, not Sienna Miller, played the part of Fenella Maxwell in the 1993 TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper's Riders.
When Marilyn Monroe lay dying in Hollywood, I doubt she guessed her poisonous legacy. Marilyn lived in the era of wriggle, casting couch and actress-as-available-flesh, and she embodied it. No one seemed to care whether JFK's "lollipop" could act; they just wanted the glistening pout. The planet may have changed since 1962 but Tinsel Town hasn't. The proof will be staring out of the shelves in WH Smith on Friday when the March "Hollywood" edition of Vanity Fair - the glossy with a frontal lobe - will be ready for its close-up.
The cover shot, which was taken by Annie Leibovitz, has already been splashed across the planet, to much production of saliva, jealousy and despair. It features 10 successful and nearly successful actresses in an almost Last Supper-like tableau (except the apostles are thinner, prettier and less obsessed with Jesus Christ). Like the William Thackeray novel it is named after, this Vanity Fair is a loveless world. It has imposed a brutal hierarchy on its exquisite models, who flew into Culver City, California in December for the shoot, that is enough to make a minger smile. Don't be fooled by the puff that this edition of the magazine has 10 cover girls: the photograph has been divided into three smaller tableaux and folded over twice. Only Uma Thurman, Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet pout out from the cover proper; they won the Celebrity Death Match and are in poll position. Claire Danes, Scarlett Johansson, Rosario Dawson and Ziyi Zhang are folded over behind it in a first runners-up cover. Meanwhile Kerry Washington, Kate Bosworth and Sienna Miller are stuck in the second runners' up section of the triptych, a vacuous, lipglossed no man's land buried between the handbag and perfume adverts.
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VF considers its Hollywood issue an event - "This is a very big issue for us so close to the Oscars," a PR told me - but actually, it is a desperate sight to make all feminists tremble. This is Disempowerment as she is dressed by Versace. On the first rung of the paper podium Kate, 29, Cate, 35, and Uma, 35, mug ferociously for the camera lens, trying to ease each other out of the viewers' eye in a nightmare of expensively dressed passive aggression. Uma has her hand resting on her neck and stretches out lasciviously in a parody of post-sexual languor. Cate has chosen to fling out her arms and toss her hair as if she's been caught on board a ship in a gale. She too is doing the repulsive yearning thing, which should only be done in secret, with a lover. Kate is arching her back and flinging her hand across her crotch, with enormous "No, don't f*ck her - f*ck me" eyes. And these three are the talented ones.
On cover part two it gets younger, nastier and more reckless. Here are the ingenues: think Eve destroying poor Bette Davis (who never wasted a f*ck-me look on a camera; she saved them for men) in All About Eve. Claire Danes, 27, is actually lying supine in her crumpled green dress. She reminds me of a peeled banana that can speak. It says, "I'm available. Swallow me." In her golden courtesan gown I can see as much of 20-year-old Scarlett Johansson's breasts as I've ever seen of my own and her pout, always volcanic, seems almost nuclear. It's Chernobyl-esque. Rosario Dawson, 25, the first of three strategically placed ethnic minority representatives (remember VF, like the Oscars, is a global marketing phenomenon these days: they are present but not too prominent) has done controversial for the shot. She is actually smiling - well, a little. But you can see the aggresive pulled in abs, the thrown back shoulder, the preening flesh. Ziyi Zhang, 26, is glaring and pushing her breasts together. On a VF cover, only the breasts are friendly, and then only to their pair. Between the women themselves, this is sex appeal at dawn.
On to the sorry third fold - the "who the hell are they?" section, and a mere vale of tears. It is desperate. Kerry Washington, 28, who appears in the Ray Charles biopic Ray. Pout lip, arch back - check. Kate Bosworth, 22, dating Lord of the Rings star Orlando Bloom. Breasts saluting, crotch on the offensive, slightly angrier pout - check. Sienna Miller, 23, famous for starring in the television adaptation of Jilly Cooper's Riders and for potentially marrying Jude Law, is trying to look "London" in a black John Lennon cap. She has raised her left leg in the air, like a Labrador relieving itself in Hyde Park. I feel soiled gazing at this photograph, and it's not just jealousy. It reminded me of Caravaggio's famous chicken in the National Gallery; it's just as p*rn*gr*ph*c. Leibovitz's cover is a simply a casting couch, a homage to the blowjob values of 1950s Hollywood. To watch 10 beautiful women (of which at least four are talented) bicker for the lens's attention like tarts in an upper class brothel is dispiriting. I'm off to buy the Socialist Worker. They don't do drama and the t*ts are smaller.
And Scarlett has won me over too, I adored her in "Girl with a Pearl Earring". But I would like to see more black actresses on there, who are well known and give outstanding performances because I have no clue who is Kerry Washington.
