paris

Representations of Paris in the Hollywood Musical

The typical American perception of Paris is filtered through popular images of the city and stereotypes of Parisian culture created by American media. With this limited and idealized view, untravelled Americans visualise Paris to be romantic, luxurious, gay, and frivolous. The popular materials which inform the uneducated American mind are generally not original Parisian novels and documents, but instead American produced, mass marketed movies.

In the 1950s musical Gigi, Parisians focus on love and champagne (and certain dirty old men are distinctly pedophilistic). In the animated film Gay Purr-ee, again, Parisians (only this time as singing cartoon cats) are concerned with love and champagne. Paris is the symbol for and center of all superficial frivolity and gaiety.

That is, the characters claim to be gay and frivolous, the films’ advertisements extol the joyous decadence of Paris, and the general impression of the films depicts a wondrous, sparkling city and society. But watching the films again, I realize that despite the images of the movies, despite the adjectives used to describe the films (“gay,” “full-of-love,” “delightful,”) and despite the characters’ dialogues, Paris did not embody frolicking romance as everyone seems to think it does. The movies introduce Paris as the “City of Love, “ but then proceed to show only its corruption; yet somehow the audience remembers just the city’s glamor and giddiness.

Representation of Parisian women in film is significantly altered from the more nefarious characters in nineteenth-century French novels. Whereas in novels by Balzac and Flaubert women are portrayed as selfish prostitutes, the women chosen to represent Paris of American films are innocent and virtuous. Usually played by Leslie Caron, the American-Parisian woman is actually a girl. If allowed to grow up, she too will become prostitutional. So, more often than not, she revels in and is admired for her youth and inexperience, while the women around her are condemned for their looser morals.

The story of Gigi is carefully constructed around the idea that Gigi is not fully mature. She is a “little girl,” a “child,” or an “infant,” but never a woman. The women in the movie--Grandmamma, Aunt Alicia, Gigi’s unseen mother, and Liane are well versed in the art of love and seduction. They are sophisticated courtesans. Although the women receive plentiful courtship while they are still able to flaunt their youthful beauty, they do not interest men as young Gigi does.

Honore sings “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” and older women bore him. It is no wonder that fresh young girls grow into dull women. Tradition teaches them from the beginning that they will be used and discarded, and as Aunt Alicia teaches Gigi, women must use their charms to milk men for all the money they can while they have the chance. Under the guise of love in which they seen to believe, the courtesans financially and politically navigate their paths through society. But a young girl not yet jaded by the lifetime of pretensions that awaits her, is infinitely more appealing to Parisian men. Honore advises his nephew Gaston to stick with youth. A young girl “could amuse you for months.”

No one but Gigi questions what will happen after the months of amusement end. An innocent young girl, after a series of romances, will become an experienced woman, at which point men like Honore and Gaston will discard her. Honore prides himself on the long line of women that trails behind him, and teaches Gaston to follow suit. Liane’s ritual “suicide” is a notch in Gaston’s belt of masculinity. Women are for man’s temporary pleasure--when he tires of one, he will get himself another.

When we analyze the politics of love from the aspect that partners were deceptive, selfish, and manipulative, the stories sound typical of nineteenth-century French literature. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is teeming with the underhanded dealings within romance, the prostitutional nature of women, and the fickle whims of men in love. But the characters of Gigi speak happily of their arrangements. They focus on romance, a romance which they believe to be delicious and lighthearted.

When watching Gigi, the American audience too believes in the gay, pleasurable side of love. We trust Maurice Chevalier, narrating the story as Honore (a character who appears only briefly in Colette’s novel); when he assures us that everyone in Paris is in love with love, we can enjoy their romance as well. So we are amused when Gigi is dumbfounded by the Parisian obsession with romance. After all, as the audience, we can take part in the romantic fantasies of the screen, and Gigi is just a little girl who will grow to appreciate romantic relationships.

Gigi’s confusion with the Parisian attitude toward love is well founded. How can she “understand the Parisians, wasting every lovely night on romance,” when those characters who are so opaque to her are not Parisian at all, but American ideas of Parisians? The characters, who in Colette’s novel are often bitter and resentful of their imposed situations, are portrayed in the movie as the embodiments of romantic happiness.

Notwithstanding the story’s plot, a viewer perceives Paris as the glossy Technicolor landscapes and lilting songs of a 1958 musical. Grown women are the only irritant in an otherwise satisfied community. In An American in Paris , Leslie Caron again illustrates an admirable, joyous youth surrounded by dull, lifeless age. The movie stars her as a young girl (again not a woman) who is forced into a relationship with an elderly man. By this prostitution of herself, Caron’s character ages to the brink of womanhood. She has almost lost her youthful zest when a young man’s love saves her from such a dull, unromantic fate.

Caron begins the movie young and in love with youth--the American ideal of a romantic Parisian woman. The bulk of the film then delves into her torment at being sold to an older man for the sake of propriety--the grim reality of Paris. But the last few minutes of the movie ties up into a happy little package, and the American audience is reassured that Paris is indeed a gay, romantic city. The plot is repeated yet again in Fanny, although Paris is only represented through Chevalier's sophisticated city-like presence.

In fact, a simple analysis of the dream sequence in An American in Paris illustrates the corruption of Paris. Paris is anything but romantic; it is the perpetually unfulfilled promise of romance. The dance between Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly whirl them through a lifesize sketch of Paris and the countryside. When dancing amongst the familiar landmarks of Paris: the Place de la Concorde fountain, the Arc de Triomph, the Eiffel Tower, Caron plays the coquettish tease. She dances seductively, but never allows Kelly to catch and hold her. However, in the pastoral landscapes, she is attainable. Her dancing is more demure, and she looks at Kelly with signs of true love, not superficial flirtation. Kelly can hold Caron in the country, but when in Paris she eludes his grasp. The city, then, turns women into prostitutes. Generalizing, we can conclude that Paris is a city of courtesans not because it attracts the prostitutional personality, but because the city actually corrupts otherwise innocent girls into manipulative prostitutes. If living in Paris is like living in a dance, then women are quickly taught the steps to survive.

No movie about Paris can exist that is more Americanized than the 1962 animated film Gay Purr-ee. Using an exaggerated New York accent on French words, animation several strata below the quality of Disney films, and featuring the voice of the all-American Judy Garland (former wife of Minnelli, perhaps there is a family fascination with Americanizing Paris) Gay Purr-ee can only be described as pure kitsch. This feature-length cartoon self consciously depicts the American idea of Paris. It allows no realism to interfere with its stereotypes, generalizations, and puns.

Interestingly, in 1970 Disney came out with The Aristocats, another animated musical about French cats. How did the cat become representative of France? Independent, sensual, languorous, elegant, and sometimes playful, the personalities of cats parallel the idea of Parisian culture. It is ironic that the French are also infamous for their disdain of cats--The Great Cat Massacre propounds that the French historically killed stray cats for mere pleasure.

As in other movies I have discussed, only even more obviously, Gay Purr-ee describes Paris as the divine center of luxury and love, and then becomes a nightmare of corruption for the protagonists, who by the the end, once again joyfully sing throughout the Parisian boulevards.

Mewsette, a beautiful, innocent country cat gets whisked off to Paris with dreams of champagne, champignons, and the Champs-Elysees. Upon her arrival in the city, she is trained as a prostitute, and sold to a wealthy, old American cat. In the end, of course she is saved from such an awful fate by her true love, the young, virile Jaune-Tom.

Paradoxically, Paris is at once romantic and corruptive. How does Paris maintain its myth of being the capital of romance, when that title is purely superficial? Americans, with their preconceived notions of Paris, seem to not notice or not care about the actual plots of the films they watch about the city. They have heard that Paris is romantic, the movies introduce Paris as romantic, but when the movies continue and Paris is no longer romantic, Americans tune out. They leave the theater and remark upon the romance of Paris.

However, each of these movies is undeniably a romance. They all end happily. So perhaps Paris is the center of romance in that its corruption occasionally brings people (or cats) together out of moral necessity. These movies focus on the single success story surrounded by so much empty decadence and bedhopping. Can we change the definition of romance, then, in order to befit Paris, to the luck of finding true love in a society that is terribly inconducive to it? The popular conception of romance entails ease of falling in love. If romance is the ephemeral delight of flirting and courtship, and not the permanent bond of true love, then certainly Paris is the city of romance. But then, using the same definition, the stories depicted in these movies are not romantic; they are Anti-Romances. They depict the rejection of romance as an immoral, corrupt state of being, for the sake of permanent, conservative love.

Romance is a constructed concept used by Americans to describe Parisians. The concept can be applied to any aspect of love or sexuality to make the actual subject matter, sex, less apparent. Uptight Americans have found an object upon which to displace their own sexuality--Paris. Parisians have been granted the permission to do almost anything--they can eat snails and build useless towers--so who would stop them from expressing their sexual nature? Certainly not Americans, not when Parisians are so convenient as a removed culture through which they can experience free love vicariously.

Thus Paris has taken a special place in the hearts of Americans. Even now we associate France with love, and when we need to convey a romantic notion, we often do so with French phrases. American pop bands, especially during the disco era, often use French lyrics in their songs.

Back in the 70s, (and made popular again by Li'l Kim et al in the 2001 Moulin Rouge soundtrack), Lady Marmalade repeated the question “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" to a disco beat and mobilized the entire nation to proposition one another in French. Children said it, mothers said it, and everyone was so proud to know that what they were saying was dirty, but permissible because it was in French.

Then Debbie Harry, lead singer of the disco-punk band Blondie started singing various lyrics in French. It was incongruous to see the bleached blonde, New Yorker speaking in such an elegant language. But she was the embodiment of sexuality, the object of endless teenage lust, and her French words made her all the more exciting, captivating, and fascinating.

Countless non-French artists have appropriated the French language for their songs. Billy Joel, Grace Jones, Deee-Lite, the Style Council, the Police, Jonathan Richman, Kate Bush and other popular musicians have sung in French or about Paris either as an homage to the romanticism of Paris, or to deal with sexual subjects in an acceptable, more seemingly elegant or wistful manner.

Paris is truly a figurehead of romance for Americans. We rarely think about the Parisian economy or politics. Rather, when we think about Paris, it is with sensual associations; of perfume and fashion, for sexual attractiveness; rich foods, sumptuous, sinful, and almost aphrodisiacal in their decadence; and huge collections of art, depicting more and more beauty. Paris is a city of aesthetics, it is a city of surfaces. In reality, we do not care if Paris is or is not romantic; it appears romantic, it has the aura of romance, and we believe it to be romantic. And for Americans, our beliefs are often enough.