Peggy Song - Core Response #1

“Lean, hot-eyed and Latin, Valentino was every woman’s dream…” No doubt, Rudolph Valentino was very popular among the female spectators. As sparked by the emancipation and their integration into the consumer culture after WWI, women spectators were classified as “socially and economically significant group” (Gledhill, 262). The cinema was explicitly addressing to the female spectators because they drove the industry. With the changing course of femininity and sexuality, Valentino was one of those stars that closed the gap between traditional patriarchal ideology and the awareness of the “female experience, needs, and fantasies of the other” (263).

Before the 1909, the players’ names were not known to the public, but by 1912, most of them had been discovered which was probably due to the credit system. The credit system in films was started by The Edison Company, which was one of the earliest and most aggressive companies to promote their players. This strategy was seen in the silent film we watched last week, The Sheik, where the characters were introduced with the actors’ names. With people began to recognized these actors (and attaching the characters’ names to the actors’ names), fan magazines became useful in exploiting both the films and their players—and they became a profit-making machines. By 1912, the “star system” was truly born. The audiences were certainly “seeing them” and knowing that they were seeing them.

The most definite form of identification in Valentino films was that of recognition. Valentino films were driven by his “charisma” since the films he did were essentially adapted from costume dramas, which were notoriously known to have weak narratives. So to engage his viewers, Valentino had to live up to his “Latin Lover” status through the succession of masks, disguises, and scenarios.  His characters combined two sides of a “melodramatic dualism” (271). In The Sheik, Ahmed was known as the barbaric son of the desert until it was revealed at the end of the film that he was of British descent. As a woman spectator, she recognized him in all of his disguises and she essentially knew who he was; while the female protagonist, Lady Diana in this case, who found out who he truly was and only to fall deeper love with him in the end.

But it was not only his charisma or his disguises that drive his female spectatorship. His unruliness and barbarian characteristics emphasized on the sadistic aspect of the Valentino persona. The act of force and keeping Lady Diana captive could be seem as an interesting instance of sadomasochistic role-playing. Plus, his representation as the “he-man” or the “the menace” was widely advertised to the audiences—and the women “were to find in The Sheik a symbol of omnipotent male who could dominant them as the men in their own lives could not” (272). A scene that demonstrated this idea was when Ahmed told Diana to lie still on his horse—displaying his virility and dominance. In a sense, it represented his masculinity as the “Latin Lover.” He was different and the female spectators found pleasure at the prospect of being humiliated by the British-bred Barbarian (273). In a better example (or lack thereof) of the current culture, Valentino’s character was like Christian Grey of Fifty Shades of Grey. Their domineering personas made the female spectators “swoon” even in the most sadistic way.

And also a familiar pattern of this type of characterization was staging the exchange of looks between Valentino’s character and his female lover. As Hansen suggested in her article, “whenever Valentino laid eyes on a woman first, we can be sure that she would turn out to be the woman of his dreams, the legitimate partner in the romantic relationship” (265). This is quite apparent in The Sheik when Ahmed first laid his eyes on Lady Diana and when the camera singled out her in the shot within his point of view. As the camera panned to his face, we can see that “awakening desire.” Moreover, the scene when he stopped and stared at Diana while she was sleeping clearly demonstrated that effect where the female presence “freeze the flow of action in the moments of erotic contemplation” (266).

All in all, Valentino was marketed as a blend of sexual vitality and romantic courtship and his foreign status or his “exoticism” allowed the female spectators to indulge in a fantasy. Therefore, it is unsurprising that Valentino’s body became their fetish; Valentino received intimate garments from his fans in the male with the request to kiss and return them (281). This type of fan service is still present today (and even in the teenage culture). Young fans of the British boy band One Direction also threw their undergarments onstage in hopes that the boys would “keep it.”