From Salon.com (part 2
(continued)
Topless bodies found in brainless magazine
Ford shows us a girl on a car -- the relatively unknown Michelle Monaghan, splayed upside down so that she's further unrecognizable -- and 10 pages later, a girl
in a car. (Zooey Deschanel, dubbed "The Living Doll" and dressed in lacy tights with legs in the air for a particularly twisted piece of cheesecake; it looks as if she's been kidnapped and stuffed in the back of the car, awaiting assault.) In contrast to the maturely decked-out child-star Fanning, Ford pictures Reese Witherspoon, Oscar nominee and mother of two, in a baby-doll dress, clutching a dolly. Witherspoon's photo caption reads "The American Beauty," but it looks like she should be called "Betsy-Wetsy." The only great image of a woman is of Michelle Yeoh, pulling herself up on a trapeze in an evening gown.
With that notable exception, Ford presents femininity as passive, plastic. These are mannequins, their energy extinguished, or at least temporarily bronzed, like Portman. They recall the creepy female figures whom Ford groped and squeezed in a ludicrous
photo spread in W this summer, which he passed off as commentary on plastic culture, but in which only the women were dummies. In V.F., he bites Van Doren's false breast, sniffs Knightley's neck; all this chomping and snuffling may seem less predatory because Ford is openly gay, but that only makes clear that his attention isn't about passion, but about consumption and commodification. The women's bodies in Vanity Fair are -- as they were in W -- props, toys, jokes.
To be fair, the V.F. men don't win out, either, though they did get to keep more of their clothes. A couple (Joaquin Phoenix, looking like a Tiger Beat centerfold, and Eric Bana) are semi-shirtless; Jonathan Rhys-Meyers might be naked, but since he's only photographed from the neck up, it's tough to tell. Only poor Taye Diggs comes close to true bare-***ed nudity -- a black man on a bear rug, an image reliant on some of the most repugnant stereotypes of black male sexuality. Mostly, though, the guys are in suits and tuxes.
Then there's
George Clooney in an unbuttoned shirt and Wellies directing a bunch of half-submerged anonymous women in flesh-colored bras and panties in a sendup of Géricault's
"The Raft of the Medusa." Clooney is dubbed "The Boss" in honor of his growing role as gentleman auteur, but this image makes no sense. His movies,
"Good Night, and Good Luck" and
"Syriana," are not filled with anonymous broads. Ford told
ABC that he conceived of the shot as "every woman's dream" (Oh, to stand in cold water and wet underwear while getting bossed around by George Clooney!), but that's a lame line. These women are there purely for, well, t*ts and giggles.
At the front of the magazine, editor Jim Windolf optimistically opines, "Taken as a whole, the pictures remind us that, beneath the trappings of wealth and carefully tended public images, the film industry remains a community of artists." But Tom Ford's Hollywood actually does the opposite of what his editors may have hoped.
Previous Hollywood issues have included reunited casts from beloved movies ("Carnal Knowledge," "The Big Chill," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") and family portraits (the Hustons, the Goldwyns, Angelina Jolie with father Jon Voight). Often, the photos have spoken to each other; last year, Hilary Swank charged down a beach in a bathing suit, her body hardened for her role as a boxer in "Million Dollar Baby." On the next page was the reunited team behind "Raging Bull," a film for which Robert De Niro famously transformed his body to play boxer Jake LaMotta. Less artistically ambitious groupings have included a photo of survivors of Hollywood's Blacklist. It wasn't sexy, but it was a reminder that Hollywood is a place with a history, with politics, with families, with consequences.
Maybe Tom Ford doesn't want to look at a bunch of octogenarians. And that's fine. But then he should present a lucid vision in their place, and he does not. His "new" Hollywood includes 13 subjects who have been featured in previous Hollywood issues. He has claimed that his criteria for inclusion in the portfolio involved asking himself: "Am I tired of seeing them?" I don't know where Ford has been hanging out, but if I see one more picture of Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston sipping a latte, browsing at Barneys, picking up dry-cleaning or pulling out of a parking lot, I'm going to ***********. I don't care if they're naked.
But the terms of inclusion seem shaky in other ways as well. Vanity Fair editors write that Miramax pugilists Bob and Harvey Weinstein balked at Ford's idea of photographing them mud wrestling, and Ford tells Windolf that
"Munich" star Eric Bana "wasn't comfortable" appearing in just a Speedo. Why is it OK that the Weinstein boys appear next to each other in suits, Bana got to wear a robe, but Rachel McAdams is not in the magazine? Why is it OK to run a photograph of a plastic surgeon in the Hollywood issue, but not a single director or screenwriter who's not also an actor? Maybe all this isn't even worth pointing out. As the L.A. Times' Robin Abcarian
wrote about V.F.'s cover, in Hollywood "the combination of the dressed male and the naked heterosexual woman is merely a metaphor for how things are, have always been, and will probably always be."
Not that Hollywood isn't built -- it has always been built -- in part on skin. But what has made it America's most successful product has been the seesaw tension between the vapidity and the complexity, the aesthetic and artistic, performance and embodiment. As soon as we give ourselves over entirely to the fake, the plastic and the insincere, we destroy the balance, relinquish any hold on film as art, and descend into idiot adolescence.
I know, I know. I'm just rising to Ford's glistening bait. As Liz Smith
wrote in her syndicated column on Sunday, Graydon Carter is smart to have put out an issue that everyone is so angry about that they can't stop buying it. According to Abcarian, V.F.'s Web site got 3.1 million page views on Tuesday and Wednesday, which spokeswoman Beth Kseniak called "a whole lot more than normal."
But before Graydon Carter -- a vocal critic of the Bush administration -- pulls a muscle patting himself on the back, maybe we should consider that dumbing down the discourse and appealing to the lowest common denominator are tricks that help not only to sell magazines, but to win elections. Shouldn't we aim higher?
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
-- By Rebecca Traister
[/FONT]
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/02/14/tom_ford/index1.html