Making Meaning: Publicizing Iain Softley's the Wings of the Dove (1997)
2004; Salisbury University; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoTo date the majority of academic readings of Iain Softley's Wings of the Dove (1997) have focused either on issues of textual fidelity or directorial technique. Dale M. Bauer praises it for its successful rendering of Jamesian content, along with the experience of the complex act of reading and identification that James demands in his late masterpieces (247). Mark Bousquet approaches Wings as a Gen-X melodrama, in which youth finds itself in an intellectual bind that represents the collective desire to find the outside of a capitalist-hypercapitalist system (233). In this article I want to investigate a very different world of meaning for Wings-one defined by the link between industry practices and social values of the 1980s and '90s. For this purpose, I shall employ a methodology derived from Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning, where she aims to show features of the family melodrama might have been negotiated to different ideological ends through value systems in operation during the original release (37). By analyzing publicity interviews, posters, and the press-book, Klinger demonstrates that Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1955) was marketed as an adult film (exploiting increasing trends toward sexually explicit representation in the media), offering the kind of consumer fantasies that captured the post-World War II spirit of affluence (37-38). I will also focus on similar materials to show Miramax-the film's producers-conceived the publicity for Wings of the Dove in accordance with current discourses on feminism and consumer culture. On the one hand the was portrayed as a bold analysis of female identity in a changing world. This issue was believed to be of particular significance to filmgoers in the 18-34 age group, who were thought to prefer more up-to-date material than might normally be found in a costume drama (Disney Revives 10). On the other hand Miramax marketed Wings as a superior costume drama with its period locations, colorful photography, and exotic costumes. This construction represented a deliberate attempt to translate the film's visual elements into sites for consumer desires, grounded in specific '80s and '90s discourses of social transformation. The publicity for Wings placed particular emphasis on Kate Croy's search for self-expression in a society that gave her very little opportunity to do so. The press-book contained a Director's Statement in which Iain Softley observed that in the novel James asks a question that continues to be of consequence to lovers in the late twentieth century: how can a person reconcile heart with ambitions in a world that puts tremendous pressure on both? (Director's Statement 13). Such statements were designed to resonate with women of the late '90s, whose opportunities for self-expression might be equally restricted. One writer claimed that contemporary feminism had wrought tremendous changes: Not only are most women working, most young girls are raised to think of themselves as capable of anything they wish to do, and to know they must be economically viable (AlienMills 7). By contrast Germaine Greer claimed that, unlike counterparts in the '60s and early '70s, when the feminist movement was gathering momentum, many women of the '90s had been indoctrinated by multinationals selling their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them [women] and cultivating dependency (416). Susan Isaacs's Brave Dames and Wimpettes draws attention to the frequency with which women in '80s and '90s films were portrayed as victims of male tyranny (for example, Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs [1991]). Isaacs looks back nostalgically to the 1940s, when actresses such as Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday [1940]) and Katharine Hepburn (Adam's Rib [1949]) offered dandy role models of a modern independent woman (107-09). According to Wings' screenwriter Hossein Amini, Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) sought to resist this kind of stereotyping. …
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