Reimagining the Dressing Room in American Film

Last summer, a video essay by professor Desirée Garcia was selected to screen at the Marienbad Film Festival, an international competition in the Czech Republic focused on audiovisual essays and videographic criticism.

The video features excerpts from early American movies that take place primarily in dressing rooms—a genre Garcia introduces and illuminates in her new book, The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film.

Garcia, who serves as chair of of the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies, traces her fascination with dressing rooms in film to her research on American movie musicals, which resulted in two earlier books: The Movie Musical for Rutgers' Quick Takes series and The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream, which charts the history of early sound era musicals from the makers of African American films and the transnational networks of Yiddish and Mexican cinema.

In a Q&A, Garcia details her discovery of this new film genre, the archetypal characters we meet in dressing rooms, and the lasting allure of these "liminal" spaces to filmmakers and the public.

What led you to focus on portrayals of dressing rooms in film?

I realized over the course of writing my first book that the "backstage musical" or "show musical"—where people burst into song but in plausible situations, like on a stage—are far more prevalent in Hollywood history than the musicals where people burst into song in completely unlikely situations and spaces. I was drawn to the question, why do we have these movies about performers that come back again and again?

As I started digging around, I realized that we see this narrative split between backstage, real-life situations and the on-stage performance world in all kinds of genres. We see this in melodrama, for example, specifically in stories about wives and mothers who are torn between their career ambitions onstage and their commitments to husbands and children at home. Imitation of Life, for example, or All About Eve are very much about that. There's a really fascinating Barbara Stanwick film from the 1940s called Lady of Burlesque, based on one of Gypsy Rose Lee's stories, with all these chorus girls in the dressing room. There are boxing films, like Raging Bull, which is bookended with dressing-room scenes, as well as superhero movies like The Joker.

I find it fascinating how widespread this is in American film. The dressing room is the space that is liminal. It kind of sits "in between." It is positioned backstage, but it is the gateway to the most private realm that the actor occupies in the theater. So the dressing room gives us that most intimate glimpse into who these people really are.

You've said that the stakes are high in dressing rooms. What do you mean by that?

Dressing rooms tend to be very tense spaces for the characters. They're loaded. When you think of a dressing table, it's got a lot of stuff on it. There are things on the wall, postcards tucked into the mirror, trunks, costumes, and hats. It's a stuffed, detailed kind of space. And it tends to be a space where characters are about to go on and perform. So there's a ticking clock associated with being in a dressing room space where something has to happen. The character has to successfully transform themselves into a role in order for the show to go on. And the show has to go on. At the turn of the 20th century, the show had to go on because if the show didn't go on, no one would get paid.

So the stakes are high because the performer has to achieve that transition successfully. They've got to make it out of that dressing room door and onto the stage successfully if they are going to succeed in life and be recognized as someone who is worthy to have social and economic mobility, prestige, and personal fulfillment. If they aren't able to make that jump, then none of those things can happen for them.

Your book identifies specific character types who pop up with regularity in dressing rooms. Who are these characters?

So the first chapter is on the Black maid, who was a very standard character from the beginning of cinema until after the Civil Rights movement. She was very prevalent in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. And she always occupies anterior space, in the background of the dressing room, and of course always serves the white female star.

Chapter two introduces what I call "sisters." These are films that show collectives of women, groups of women, and pairs of women in the dressing room. They tend to be single women, scantily clad. All of those voyeuristic associations that we make with dressing room spaces get played out in these films. There is a fascination our society has with what these women do in private. This includes the Barbara Stanwick film Lady of Burlesque as well All About Eve, Black Swan, and the 1970s movie Sparkle, the first film to feature groups of single Black women in the dressing room.

From there I go on to a chapter on wives and mothers; those characters are probably some of the most prevalent from the beginnings of American film up to the present day. We've always been curious about how wives and mothers negotiate their public and private desires. And those include a lot of biopics, like even the most recent Judy Garland biopic with Renee Zellwegger, Judy, What's Love Got to Do With It [about the rise of Tina Turner], Gypsy. And then a really interesting, complicated film by John Cassavetes from 1977 called Opening Night, with Gena Rowlands, who plays a woman who decided to forego marriage and children in pursuit of a career, and what happens to her as a result, which you can imagine is not good.

Chapter four looks at the leading man. A curiosity about the crises that leading men go through in their dressing room has been persistent across time. So Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Joker and Birdman are more recent examples, but it really stretches back to Charlie Chaplin films like Limelight [1952], a film like White Christmas, A Star Born, or Magic Mike; Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues adds a really interesting dimension to that.

You said that as you were writing these chapters, you noted that the dressing room in American film has historically been a very white and female space. The final chapter of your book explores the racial and gender breakdown of the space.

You start asking the question, where are the people of color? Do people of color in American film history ever play performers? Or, to put it more directly, do they play performers who get access to backstage spaces? Where they are truly developed characters and where you can start to delve deeply into who they are and what they desire?

There are examples of people of color in Hollywood films who perform, but they tend to be one-offs. So they get Carmen Miranda or Nicholas Brothers treatments: They do these virtuosic performances but they don't actually play a role in the narrative of the film. They're just there for spectacle.

I searched for examples where people of color get access to backstage space and all of the themes that are associated with it: self-realization, transformation, being able to have a chance at stardom, which represents a kind of social mobility and social value. They're few and far between compared to all of the films that are about white performers. However, I did find some. And I explore them in the last chapter of the book.

You note that these films are divided into two main groups: those involving blackface minstrelsy, and those involving some kind of shape-shifting or cross-dressing. Can you offer examples from each of these categories?

In the first group, where the performers are blackface minstrels, I look at what these films are saying about the nature of racism in American society. I start with Al Jolson films like The Jazz Singer and Singing Fool from the late 1920s and early 30s. I also look at race films, which were Black-produced and Black-acted films made in the 1930s for Black audiences.

The second part of the chapter is about what I call forms of cross-dressing. There is the literal sense, a drag performance; and then there are films in which people of color are deliberately changing their identity as a way of showing that identity is not a fixed concept. So I look at a 1947 Carmen Miranda film called Copacabana, where she plays two different characters in the film. It's her in both roles, but she's drastically different. She's blonde and French in one, and she's the Brazilian bombshell in the other. It breaks down this notion that we'd built up of her—that she is this exoticized spectacle, the way that Hollywood had portrayed her.

I also discuss this really interesting film called The Ritz, which was a stage show initially. It stars Rita Moreno as a singer in a gay bathhouse in New York City. It's a comedy and she also plays someone who's shape-shifting in that role. She came up with that character, named Googie Gomez; she talks about it in her memoir. She was sitting in her dressing room, coming up with this idea for a character that was all of the stereotypical representations that Hollywood had forced her into, like the fiery Latina. She takes them all to excessive heights with this character.

I look at these films as forms of cross-dressing and show the limited opportunities that people of color have had to backstage spaces, but also, when they did get access, what they were able to do with them, and ultimately the kinds of critiques they were able to level at American society with those roles.

In the course of your research, did anything surprise you?

The ways in which certain archetypes fall away over time while others remain surprised me. For example, I was really interested in how the "single woman in the dressing room" character has diminished in frequency. These films tend to be about female relationships with other women—whether in friendship and mentorship, or in competition. They're very prevalent in the 1930s and 1940s, but then they started to peter out. And the few that we still get today tend to be rather, dare I say, conservative. For example, a film like Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, the story of a ballerina who has to occupy both the white swan and the black swan roles in the same production, is about how female characters can't have both lightness and darkness to them. They can't have good-girl and bad-girl qualities. They have to be one or the other; if they try to have both, they ultimately die.

That is such a 19th-century interpretation of the female gender: you're either good or you're bad. You're either promiscuous or you're virtuous. The idea that you can't occupy a middle ground or have qualities from both sides is deeply problematic. Much earlier films out of Hollywood, like Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance, for example, with Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara, are much more nuanced. O'Hara's character starts out as the virtuous ballerina but then starts to realize that's not her true nature, and the film doesn't punish her for it, like Aronofsky does his main character. I find it fascinating that even today, we're still tied as a culture to this fear of the complex woman.

What do you hope readers take away from this book?

We all feel like dressing rooms are very familiar, which is a strange thing because most of us don't occupy dressing rooms on a day-to-day basis. Dressing rooms are only familiar to us because they've been so prevalent in American film over a century. So we should recognize first that it's really cinema's unbound potential that gives us the very privileged access to this space.

And then, why do we keep going there? Because we're fascinated by the people we find there—and the kinds of challenges they are faced with and have to overcome. This book really foregrounds how so much of American life is about performance—how we all feel like we are performers in some way, who have to play a specific role in order to succeed. So we go into dressing room spaces again and again as we watch movies in order to figure out, how do we get ahead?

In some ways this book is about dressing rooms, but in other ways it's really about who we are as a society.