PERSPECTIVES ON THE TEXT
Perhaps the first aspect of this film’s complex, teasing playfulness is found in the
ironies and reverberations of its title. Despite Addison DeWitt’s promise in the
opening scene to tell ‘all about Eve later’, the film does not deliver. Or, we could
argue that what we learn transcends any mere ‘tell all’ explanations about the
eponymous character. We do, before the end of the film, discover that Eve’s name is
really Gertrude Slescynski, but the choice of ‘Eve’ by Mankiewicz is suggestive. In a
film in which religion has no role, but with the erudite script alluding to literature,
theatre, culture, in almost every line, we are reminded of the traditional story of
Adam and Eve. We notice the loss of innocence caused by consuming the fruit of
the tree of knowledge, the film’s concentration on women as bearing the weight of
moral and social values and decisions, the presence of evil in this fallen world.
Visually and metaphorically, All About Eve is full of doorways, laneways and
thresholds. Karen first speaks to Eve in the dark narrow alley behind the Curran
Theatre, not seeing her initially because the young woman is tucked into a niche.
From this moment, it’s possible to see Eve’s movement as an emergence. She
moves tentatively into the light here, and is drawn in by Karen through the doors
which are a barrier between the world of the theatre and that without. It is significant
that Karen, on the lowest rung on the theatre ladder—she’s there because she’s
married a playwright—is the means of Eve’s entry into the light of Margo’s dressing
room. A parallel scene is found later when Karen, with her back to the camera is
struck by inspiration to give Margo a kick up the backside. If we can explain her
gullibility in the first instance, it is more difficult to justify her decision later. Her own
rationalisation emphasises the moral murkiness of her ‘inspiration’. Is it because she
is essentially an outsider, like Eve, or just not as tough, talented and intelligent as
Margo is?
Mankiewicz uses doors to transition from scene to scene, to convey meaning, to
symbolise both exclusion and acceptance. Most of the film’s settings are interiors;
the characters are rarely alone and private, yet they ceaselessly explore and reveal
their own interiors. The exception to this, of course, is Eve. In a film which is
basically concerned with performance, Eve is the character who is performing in
almost every scene. Her lack of sincerity is hinted at from the start, at the very least
from the way the camera treats her in the first dressing room scene, with the other
characters arranged around her as her audience, and from Birdie’s response to her
‘opening up’. It is ironic that the cynical Margo is moved to tears; Mankiewicz
suggests that Eve’s performance is, indeed, outstanding. The confusion between
theatre and real life can also be seen when Bill and Margo talk on the stage after
Eve has so impressed with the reading which Margo missed. Here Mankiewicz
merges the two: they emotionally discuss their relationship on a stage, with no
audience. There are rarely audiences in the empty theatres of All About Eve; the
audience is us. Bill absentmindedly pats the stuffed dog near the stage bed; artifice
and actuality coalesce. As in many other instances, the language is the language of
the stage. Bill comments, ‘You know there isn't a playwright in the world who could
make me believe this would happen between two adult people.’
As Eve intrudes further and further into the sphere which Margo dominates, ushered
in by Margo’s best friend, Margo herself begins to move towards the margins,
signified visually by her being positioned on the periphery of shots. This sidelining is
exacerbated by her realisation of and response to what Eve is doing. Her fury and
hostility are dismissed as ‘paranoia’; her obsession with aging—not unreasonable
given the roles offered to females both on and off the stage in the America of 1950--
is seen to stem from jealousy. If Eve jokes about being a ‘carbon copy’ of Margo, the
film invites us to respond in several ways: with chilling, sweet insidiousness Eve is
invading every aspect of Margo’s life, and in fact in doing so destroying it—stealing
it. Yet, Mankiewicz insists, Margo possesses qualities not replicable, and with all his
faults, Bill recognises this. Her obtuseness, the violence of her reactions, the
brilliance of her dialogue, barbed and witty, suggest qualities that are unique and
worthy of a degree of admiration. She is rarely alone, while Eve is a figure isolated
by choice, turned in on herself. Eve is perhaps the only character whose dialogue is
not rich with allusion and vivid repartee; almost every time she speaks, she is
delivering her lines. We never see her actually acting on the stage; we do not need
to; we see her performances.
There are many instances of doors both blocking and providing access. The ideas of
transgression and of the quest can be relevant. Mankiewicz refers both to the
intrusion of the serpent of knowledge, and thus of evil into the garden of innocence,
and to the epic journey towards understanding the identity of oneself in relation to
the world. Many viewers would have difficulty in accepting Eve as hero, in spite of
her name being in the title. Yet, in a sense, she does journey from a kind of
innocence to knowledge; she is successful in her quest on one level. The knowledge
she attains is that the party is not for her, but for ‘this’—the award and what it
represents. The epilogue enforces the idea that the quest for success is the quest for
illusion, that what seems like success is as insubstantial and ephemeral as what we
see in mirrors.
The epilogue also affirms the director’s interest in ideas that reach beyond a study of
life in the theatre. As Margo spits out venom towards the end of the party sequence,
she sneers at Karen, ‘Please don't play governess, Karen, I haven't your unyielding
good taste, I wish I'd gone to Radcliffe too but father wouldn't hear of it—he needed
help at the notions counter... (to Addison) I'm being rude now, aren't I? OR should I
say “ain't I”?’
Margo’s attack on her friend is couched in terms of class; Karen has been born rich
and privileged, has access to the theatre world through her husband, but Margo is
self-made—the epitome of what the American Dream promises. Consistently,
Mankiewicz arranges his characters in hierarchies, most obviously just before Margo
enters in this party scene. Eve and Marilyn Monroe’s Claudia Caswell, a ‘graduate of
the Copacabana school of acting’, are sitting on the bottom stair; Bill and Addison on
the next level behind them; Karen alone behind them, at the apex of the triangle. Eve
and Miss Caswell are both aspiring actresses, suggested by their juxtaposition here.
But later we see that Miss Caswell literally does not ‘have the stomach’ to do what
Eve will do for fame, when she is vomiting in the Ladies’ Room at the theatre. Bill
and Addison DeWitt are paired; the latter claims, ‘We all have abnormality in
common. We are a breed apart from the rest of the humanity, we theatre folk.’ But
not only is DeWitt a critic, which gives him an ambiguous place in this world, a notion
suggested by the way many of the shots with him in are composed, his affirmation of
likeness with Eve undercuts any moral authority we might grant him. It is Bill who
refutes this, and in so doing, in conjunction with what happens in the rest of the film,
opens out the idea that we are looking at a microcosm of American society.
And we do look. Laura Mulvey writes of the cinema’s questioning ‘of the ways the
unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structure ways of seeing and pleasure
in looking.10 She argues that the power of ‘the Hollywood style’ emanated from, in
part, ‘its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged,
mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal
order.’11 Thus looking, the gaze, endows the looker with power, objectifying the one
who is gazed at; Eve has derived pleasure from looking at Margo, watching all her
performances, but quickly becomes dangerous as a competitor, greedily attempting
to become her.
© VATE Inside Stories 2014 — ALL ABOUT EVE 23
Is Eve in “All About Eve” a lesbian villain seen through Cold War-era homophobic paranoia
Jeff Saporito | October 23, 2015 |
During the time of the Hays Code, the set of moral guidelines which all Hollywood films produced from 1930 to 1968 were required to abide by, didn’t make it easy to represent “taboo” subjects like homosexuality. Although homosexuality wasn’t specifically addressed by the code (it merely stated “sexual perversion or any reference to it is forbidden"), it was one of many subjects avoided by mainstream pictures which instead resorted to discussion via subtext and inference.
Some scholars studying All About Eve (1950), Joseph Mankiewicz’s classic film about an aging theatrical star and her nefarious apprentice, have concluded that the film’s titular character Eve (Anne Baxter) was coded as a lesbian through a number of scenic and dialogue cues. Makiewicz, despite his legendary aptitude for writing intriguing female characters, has oft been cited as a womanizer and staunchly heterosexual to the point of homophobic, which could indicate why Eve, an implied lesbian, is the villain of the piece. (The other villainous character of Addison DeWitt, played by George Sanders, shares homosexual cues, furthering the association with malice.)
The Lavender Scare in America was a parallel to McCarthyism, though a less-discussed component of the practice. It kicked off the same yearAll About Eve was released and was a belief that homosexuals often sympathized with communist views which led to social outcasting and scapegoating of homosexuals during the time. McCarthy hunted gays along the same lines as communists, resulting in a pathological repression of homosexuality in the social presence of those in the community.
Robert J. Corber, a professor and novelist about The Cold War and homosexuality, states the fundamental theme in All About Eve centers around defending heterosexuality, upholding traditional patriarchal marriage, and depicting the homosexual as a bereft predator. The film’s two heterosexual couples of Bill (Gary Merrill) and Margo (Bette Davis), and Karen (Celeste Holm) and Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe) are contrasted against the empty and loveless life of Eve (and Addison). Eve attempts to break up both couples during the course of the film to no success.
In his book “American Cold War Culture,” author Douglas Field speaks at length about Eve’s lesbianism going beyond a Hays-era representation of malice and speaking to Cold War insecurities and fears. He writes, “Starting with Vito Russo in his classic study 'The Celluloid Closet,' scholars of images of gays and lesbians in classical Hollywood cinema have argued that Eve belongs to a long line of predatory celluloid lesbians in the Production Code era of Hollywood films… Eve’s villainy differs from that of other lesbians of the Code era in one crucial respect. She has an ability to impersonate normative femininity that they do not, and thus she resembles the lesbian of the discourses of national security.”
The message in the film come to fruition by its ending with Margo and Bill announcing their marriage. Early in the film, Margo scolds Karen for being a “happy little housewife" but by the end finds herself monologuing about the virtues of marriage and the way a true woman is defined by the association with her husband. The final award scene depicts the married couples offering condescending words to Eve, who heads home to solitude, amplifying the era's value of traditionalism over the devious pursuit of homosexuality.
The coded scenes in the film are infrequent but identifiable. The character of Birdie (Thelma Ritter) is one who is capable of seeing through Eve’s facade from the start. After Eve resides with Margo for a while, Margo and Birdie engage in a conversation as Margo rests in bed:
Margo: She thinks only of me, doesn’t she?
Birdie: Well, let’s say she thinks only about you.
There’s a sapphic undertone in Birdie’s delivery that installs our first sense that Eve’s infatuation with Margo goes beyond professional respect. (And, of course, the different preposition also makes the distinction that Eve may not have Margo's best interests at heart.) Later, on the staircase during Bill’s coming home/birthday party, another conversation takes place:
Margo: Eve would take my clothes off… tuck me in, wouldn’t you Eve?
Eve: If you’d like.
Margo: I wouldn’t like.
In the film’s final scene, when Eve leaves the Sarah Siddons award party and returns home alone, she finds Phoebe (Barbara Bates) asleep in her apartment. After the initial shock wears off, Phoebe mentions the time and says she should head home. In a breathy, seductive manner while relaxed on her couch, smoking a cigarette for the first time in the film (as her transition into Margo is complete), Eve replies, “You won’t get home til all hours.”
Douglas Field continues in his book, “All About Eve needs to be understood as a Cold War movie. Since Michael Rogin first defined this category of Hollywood film in 1987, cultural studies scholars have expanded it to include movies that, unlike those examined by Rogin, do not deal directly with the Cold War but that nevertheless underwrite or legitimate Cold War ideologies, especially those regulating the construction of gender and sexuality. As we shall see, Eve’s queerness, which consists of a combination of femininity and lesbianism that unsettles homophobic stereotypes, indirectly ratified the form of heterosexual femininity that become normative in the Cold War era. Mankiewicz, who wrote as well as directed All About Eve, claimed that he conceived of Eve as a lesbian and that he coached Baxter in how to play her as one.”
The first time we see Eve she’s dressed in a trench coat and hat, looking very masculine. Symbolically, the image establishes that any femininity we see in Eve in the following scenes is a performance; Eve’s true self is the one who meets Karen in the alley dressed in male clothes.
As with most great works of literature or film, various interpretations are possible with Eve’s sexual affiliation -- and to that point, Addison’s. Both characters often appear prominently asexual, aligning any sexuality they do exude to power over gender. Both characters seek to control the lives of others. This is what Addison finds so appealing and intriguing about Eve. Specifically labeling Eve or Addison as homosexuals may be superficial, as both, particularly Eve, seems capable of slipping through whatever sexuality will reap the most gain, since she doesn’t operate based on sexual desire but the need for people to love and applaud for her. She does, at one point in the film, speak to the power of applause. She lies to Addison about being in love with Lloyd -- but only so much as he can write great plays for her. Being beloved by an audience is the pinnacle of desire for Eve, something that exists outside the boundaries of sexual pursuit.
Still, as Mankiewicz may have intended Eve as a lesbian character, there is credibility to the academic assessment of her character representing 1950s (and Cold War) fearful sentiments about homosexuality.
Fortunately, as society has progressed from the McCarthy era and 1950s Hays Code censorship, All About Eve’s legacy is preserved by the film’s wonderful writing, campy overtones, and multiple Academy Award-nominated performances, more than its darkly homophobic subtext. As Bette Davis developed a large homosexual fan base in her later years and became a supporter of gay rights in the 1970s, the implications of homophobia colouring the movie are overshadowed. There’s humorous irony in the fact that All About Eve, now colloquially referred to as “the bitchiest film ever made,” was written by a staunch man’s man.
Reference:ScreenPrism