In her book The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Professor Sarah Churchwell describes Monroe as “that icon of uber-femininity… This reference to the film and pop culture star, Marilyn Monroe, is highly appropriate as the film Some Like It Hot (1959), often described and dismissed as just a ‘mere entertainment’, showcases her performance. By extension, Monroe becomes a lens through which the film articulates the subject of gender.
Now, more than ever, we might propose that the issue of how the cinema can represent gender is especially powerful: go onto Twitter and you’ll find the hashtag: #representationmatters. Such an example illustrates the way in which film language communicates values, reminding us once more how particular films provoke discussion and discourse that, in turn, can then exert a new profile on the film that sustains and gives it ongoing relevance. The film provokes debate and the debate then refashions and refreshes the ways that the film communicates its messages.
Cinema’s continuing high profile and influential status as a means of mass communication only heightens its relevance to cultural issues. How interesting, then, to look back at a film that was made almost sixty years ago and explore some of the ways in which it might continue to be of interest and relevance to the contemporary audience. Indeed, understanding the evolution of cinema in terms of how it represents ‘reality’ is a key responsibility of the thoughtful film viewer. Some Like It Hot uses the narrative language of the comedy and the farce genres that had been so long-standing in the Hollywood cinema tradition. It’s useful to indicate the qualities that define farce as they very clearly manifest themselves in the film: very improbable situations, characters that are highly stereotyped. Farce is also, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica indicates, considered a low form of comedy. That said, it is a form of comedy that endures. Certainly, with this fleeting definition in mind we can see how it alludes to the way in which the humour of Some Like It Hot works in terms of taking two men who chose to disguise themselves as women to avoid an imminent threat.
Contexts Context of Production
Films are shaped by the contexts in which they are produced. They can therefore be understood in more depth by placing them within two important contextual frames. The first involves considering the broader contexts of a film at the time when it was produced – its social, cultural and political contexts, either current or historical. The second involves a consideration of a film’s institutional context, including the important contextual factors affecting production such as finance and available technology. Every film reflects the concerns of its time, the particular way of looking at the world in that culture, that society, that time. To fully understand a film, you need to know something of the era that spawned it. As you will have already considered in your Edusites Core Units, film is very much a cultural artefact, a reflection of the society that created and watched it. Each film is influenced by all of the films that have gone before it – the collective consciousness of how we ‘look’ at a film - and will have specific conventions that link it to others of its genre, its type. For your examination, an understanding of the film’s production and of events in the world at that time will offer perspectives on how to better view its narrative presentation and thematic concerns.
Additionally, there will be factors specific to the makers of each film – perhaps struggles with financing (scenes in Terminator shot with minimal crew because they had run out of money), locational issues (famously the shoot for Apocalypse Now that nearly killed half of the cast with jungle diseases) or disputes over artistic visions, the control over editing. The latter is responsible for the many ‘Director’s Cuts’ prevalent on DVD – True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Once Upon A Time in America etc. – films whose initial versions were often hacked or altered to meet the wishes of studio producers fearful of films that might not have a favourable impact at the box office. A good example being the ending of True Romance where in the original Tarantino conception Alabama kills Clarence. The murder ending was filmed but, in addition, a second ‘happy’ ending was also filmed with Clarence and Alabama escaping and, in the closure, playing on a beach with their son, Elvis. Studio executives – fearful of audience reaction to a ‘downbeat’ ending - insisted that the film play with the happy ending (for comparison both versions – at least what remains of the Tarantino - can be found on the DVD special edition). All films are produced in a creative, industrial and cultural context and Some Like It Hot is an exceptional example of this combination of contexts coming together to construct the ‘meaning’ of the film. As a production of a major Hollywood studio, United Artists, Some Like It Hot was a product of the Hollywood studio system at what we might describe the height of its powers. As the product of a one of the Big Five Hollywood studios of the era, the film is a fascinating study of the Classic Hollywood filmmaking style that is the focus of this Unit of the exam. It is of interest coming at the end of that era, serving as a study of film-making transitioning from the more conventional morality of the earlier part of this period to the more liberal tone of the sixties and the so-called New Hollywood films-making that would follow.
Social / Political Context
Some Like It Hot was directed by Billy Wilder, and the films that Wilder directed in Hollywood have been usefully summarised as:
“films that humorously treat subjects of controversy and offer biting indictments of hypocrisy in American life."www.britannica.com/biography/Billy-Wilder#ref1198095 At the time of the film’s production, post-World War Two prosperity was well established and, to some extent, because of this, the role of women in mainstream culture was beginning to shift, seeing them move beyond being represented in only the domestic sphere.
Synopsis
Some Like It Hot centres around a simple plot that is driven by the fusion of two film genres: the crime film and the romantic comedy. The film follows two musicians, Jerry and Joe, on the run after witnessing a gangland murder. To disguise themselves they masquerade as women and find themselves hired to join a band, fronted by the glamorous Sugar Kane (portrayed by Marilyn Monroe). Throughout the story, Joe (portrayed by Tony Curtis) tries to win Sugar’s interest by disguising himself as a yachtsman. Jerry (portrayed by Jack Lemmon) meanwhile, becomes increasingly comfortable with his feminine qualities, to comically telling effect.
Auteur
This sequence is vital in answering the set tasks on this film. You need to understand the idea of an auteur and how Billy Wilder might be seen to fit into such a view of film-making.
Billy Wilder, director of Some Like It Hot, has long been recognised as particularly interesting example of a Hollywood auteur: a director who was able to work within the commercial and genre demands of the Hollywood system whilst also being able to imprint the demands of genre with his own particular and identifiable filmmaking identity. To develop an understanding of Wilder as an auteur we need to break down the ways in which we can understand the term auteur.
The idea of the film auteur was defined in the late 1950s among French film critics and it was founded on the concept that the director of a film could be regarded in the same way as the author of a novel: as the driving force behind the creation of a cultural artefact that might aspire to be considered in the same light as great literature or painting. The concept of the auteur was key concept in enabling academics and critics to give legitimacy to their investigation of films produced to be watched (consumed) by the mass audience that had previously been dismissed as ‘populist genre film-making’ of little artistic value.
Since the 1960s particularly, the concept of film authorship has developed from initially being an intellectual concept to being most widely recognized as a marketing tool: for example, the marketing of the 2017 film Dunkirk was focused in significant ways around the fact that its director was Christopher Nolan.
The idea of authorship, then, remains perhaps most popular, accessible and fundamental to our thinking about cinema, perhaps because it humanises a very technical and technological medium. Authorship is a concept that appears to remain an attractive framework within which to understand a film and its particular creative and expressive achievements. A director controls the thematic ‘meaning’ of a film through particular stylistic choices and patterns to bring the script to life as a film.
The idea of authorship, then, on a film production emphasises how a director has the potential to ‘write’ a film because it is they who are drawing together the varied creative contributions into a coherent whole. In America, the critic Andrew Sarris laid out the concept of film authorship in his Notes on the Auteur Theory (1962). His overview of the approach determined that a film’s significance and artistic merit was dependent on “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature”. The issue here, of course, is that filmmaking, and certainly Hollywood studio filmmaking, involves quite a large number of people in collaboration. We also need to be careful not to be too slavish to the idea of authorial intention: the film can only be ‘about’ what the director says it is. Audiences also construct the meaning of a narrative based on their own real-life experiences and their experience of watching other movies.
Remember this: the concept of authorship is a construction that forms a part of cultural discourse around film. Just think how much we take it for granted when we talk about the new ‘Kathryn Bigelow film’ or the new ‘Jane Campion film’. In those simple ‘labels’ so much is suggested in terms of subject and the creative treatment of it.
There’s a case to be made, then, for a particular film being another ‘chapter’ in a particular director’s body of work (just as a series of novels are the work of an author), and Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot is typically considered in this way.
The creation of a film, though, is not exclusively determined by the concepts and considerations of the director. A film director has to adhere to some extent to the rules of a given genre within which ‘their’ film belongs. In effect, it’s a creative conversation in which generic needs inform the filmmaker and, in turn, the filmmaker manipulates and adjusts the rules of the genre to what they see as the best way to direct the elements of script, actors’ performance, lighting, framing, music and editing towards a coherent whole.
In his book Film as Film, V.F. Perkins writes of the director’s role that “Certainly, one of (his) most important jobs (is) to stand in the place of the future spectator … to inspire actors and technicians that they give the clearest and most convincing realisation of each character and event…His other most vital responsibility is that of coordination. There are, though, views that oppose Andrew Sarris’s definition of authorship. In their book Film Art: An Introduction, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson write that “Collective film production creates collective authorship – the author is the entire group."
This observation concisely turns the established thinking on its head. Paul Watson, in An Introduction to Film Studies, writes that authorship identities “are key to the cultural capital of fan communities, cinephiles and aficionados. Watson then goes on to explore the extra textual aspect of film authors: that is to say they exist independent of the films they have directed in the cultural discourse. He then goes on to comment that “Claims that the author is somehow dead, or a theoretical irrelevancy, appear out of step not only with our institutions, but more crucially with contemporary media culture. The way in which Some Like It Hot, and, by association, its director continues to be discussed testifies to this.
In her book Cinema and Cultural Modernity, Gill Branston writes that “The notion of authorship can be traced back to humanist, early modern, Romantic notions of the individual, and back beyond that to medieval western idea of God given inspiration, literally of ‘giftedness’ for certain individuals.
With this definition in mind we have a clear sense of the reasons why we talk about film directors as we do and the value judgements we bring to bear on their work even if we have not viewed it. Even if we have never seen a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman we may have some basic, albeit unsophisticated, sense of what their films are ‘about’. Branston goes on to explain that “Given the huge expansion of empirical knowledge about the specifics of set design, costume, performance and cinematography since the 1950s, and their proliferation into journalism, advertising, and publicity discourses, we are now well beyond the stage at which the director-directed focus of this term remains useful.
In a profile of Billy Wilder for the Senses of Cinema website, film critic Richard Armstrong usefully summarises the place of Wilder in the Hollywood studio system, in doing so making a comment that draws together considerations of context and authorship: “Bridging the transition between the studio system and the rise of independent producer-directors, and still active in the ‘New Hollywood’ era, Billy Wilder was a key player in the American cinema throughout the post-war period. A ’30s screenwriter who became a contract director in the ’40s, by 1950 Wilder had come to be regarded as a consummate studio auteur. Producing from the mid-1950s, he and his co-screenwriters were renowned in front office and fan magazine for making money, teasing audience sensibilities, and pleasing the critics. If the early-1960s saw a critical downturn, by the mid-1970s Wilder’s reputation led to accolades and awards.http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-director/Wilder
Some Like It Hot is perhaps Wilder’s most famous film as auteur and we can consider it as a comic iteration of themes and character scenarios that he explores in his previous and later genre films. As s director fulfilling his collaborative duties within the Hollywood system Billy Wilder collaborated with particular screenwriters over sustained periods of time. These two screenwriters were Charles Brackett on the Wilder-directed films The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Billy Wilder’s other key collaboration was with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond and Some Like It Hot was one of their projects.
As a Hollywood director, Billy Wilder worked across a range of genres: film noir in Double Indemnity, melodrama in Sunset Boulevard and comic farce in Some Like It Hot. Beyond Some Like It Hot, Wilder went on to direct Sabrina a romantic comedy and Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama. Anna Dizain notes that “Wilder’s work has…received much criticism over the years, including the suggestion that his reputation would have been greater has he been more of a film stylist." http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/wilder-2/
A ‘film stylist’ in Hollywood at the time that Wilder was directing films would have been best personified by Alfred Hitchcock. Dizain goes on to explain that Wilder adopted a film aesthetic that emphasised transparent, invisible style in the Hollywood classical style. Speaking about his choice of a visual style, Wilder once commented that “I would like to give the impression that the best mise-en-scene is the one you don’t notice. You have to make the public forget there’s a screen…if you try to be artistic or affected you miss everything." http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/wilder-2/ Billy Wilder’s visual style was founded on a sense of realism and in turn this emphasised a relatively rare production approach in Hollywood at the time: urban, location film. Indeed, film scholar Richard Armstrong has discussed Wilder as a poetic realist which, in turn, in fact allows Wilder’s work to draw on the example of expressionist cinema with its emphasis on light and shadow. Even Some Like It Hot’s farcical plot begins within the context of a murder being witnessed. The storyline that then follows sees the two male protagonists dressing in disguise as women: this dramatic device of deception and disguise is a motif and plot device in other Wilder films; notably Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment.
Film Language and Mise-en-scene
The visual style of Some Like It Hot is built around the conventions of classic Hollywood cinema. This classical Hollywood approach is defined by David Bordwell, Janet Steiger and Kristen Thompson almost immediately in their book Classical Hollywood Cinema (Routledge,1985) explaining that “For the Hollywood cinema, the practices of film production constitute a major component…Film production must be understood not simply as a background to individual achievement but as a crucial ‘condition of composition’ of resemblances among texts. The ways that films are conceived, planned, and produced leave their marks upon the films – not only directly, but structurally as well… We would find that the Hollywood cinema sees itself as bound by rules that set stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern…that the Hollywood film purports to be ‘realistic’…that the Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling’; that the film should be comprehensible and unambiguous’ ; and that it possesses a fundamental emotional appeal that transcends class and nation.
Key Sequence Analysis
For this resource, then, let’s now consider several scenes that indicate the film language of Some Like It Hot.
In the ‘Us Girls Should Stick Together’ scene the action of the scene is set on a train: Sugar wakes Daphne (portrayed by Jack Lemmon) and thanks her for covering for her. Monroe is lit in a very glamorous way in this scene. The dialogue in the scene is laced with double entendre allowing the scene to be sexually suggestive and define the drama and comedy of the scene in terms of heterosexual attraction but its presented through the joke of Jack Lemmon in drag. The scene combines close ups and a medium wide shot that is used to emphasise the physical humour of the scene in terms of Jack Lemmon’s character trying to suppress his heterosexual impulses.
In the second scene, Joe and Jerry, in their newfound disguises as women, first encounter Sugar, who they find alone, drinking whiskey on the train. She explains to Joe and Jerry, not realising they are men dressed as women, that if she gets caught drinking she’ll get thrown off. The framing and lighting of the scene alternates between a series of wider shots that emphasise the comedy of the physical proximity of the men to Kane with close ups on her that are more about Monroe as performer. She is framed centre shot and the lighting on her is very glamorous. It’s the character and it’s Marilyn Monroe.
In the third scene selected for this resource we have a moment that’s been many times screened outside of the context of the film as it showcase Monroe performing as Sugar Kane at a club. She is singing I Wanna Be Loved by You. As Kane alluringly performs for the audience in the club within the world of the film it is also Monroe performing for the film’s audience. Key to the scene’s execution is the contrast between Monroe’s sexual suggestiveness and the broad comedy of Jerry and Joe, dressed as women, performing in the band. Like the other scenes selected in this section of this resource, the scene derives its comic tension from the way that the men-disguised-as-women must struggle to suppress their attraction to Sugar Kane.
The girl Musicians clip, they are in drag making their way to the train for Florida. The visual humour of the scene derives very much from them adjusting, and struggling, to walking in high heels. “How do they walk in these things?" asks Daphne. It’s all about how women’s’ clothes make the two men feel about themselves, and by extension, how they are being perceived.
Criticial Debates
Some Like It Hot has, in more recent years, featured on many ‘greatest movie’ lists that typically feature in bestselling fan magazines such as Empire and Total Film. They are published for entertainment, but they do also serve another function: they contribute to the discourse of film culture. Films become part of our cultural vocabulary and frames of reference not only because of the films themselves that we may or may not have seen but because of the great variety of ways that films are subsequently referenced and quoted and appropriated by the culture beyond cinema. Certainly, Some Like It Hot has become so embedded in film culture and the importance of Marilyn Monroe in relation to this cannot be underestimated.
Upon the original release of Some Like It Hot, A.H. Weiler in The New York Times reviewed the film as follows: “A viewer might question the taste of a few of the lines, situations and the prolonged masquerade, but Mr. Wilder and his associates generally make their points with explosive effect.“http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E07E2D8103EE63BBC4850DFB5668382649EDE
Part of the film’s ‘explosive effect’ is directly related to the power and allure of the film’s three-star performances. In discussing Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and, most powerfully, Marilyn Monroe, we are, of course, discussing film stars. A film star is a creation, a cultural and film-industry construction made from the combination of performer, producer (film studios and individual producers and directors) and marketing elements.
Marilyn Monroe is perhaps the most significant star of the three in the film as her image and life are so intertwined. Scholar Will Scheibel has noted that “Publicised, promoted and received as an erotic female object, Marilyn Monroe’s celebrity image represented both ‘pure’ femininity and ‘immoral’ female sexuality for post-war American culture. However, her film performances reveal an embodied female subject, and the self-awareness, irony and contradiction in her roles often elicit sympathetic female identification." http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19392397.2012.750095?src=recsys&journalCode=rcel20
A film star fulfils several functions, one of which is to be a commodity that the film producer can sell to audiences. Each film star brings with them particular meanings. A film star can often be the basis on which a film will centre all of its marketing activity. Film stars connect to both concepts of the male gaze and of the female gaze. In making this point we can make a connection to Laura Mulvey’s celebrated essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. First published in 1975, the essay has become an essential piece of reading in terms of film studies. In the essay, Mulvey makes points that are rooted in an expression of feminism. We can readily consider Mulvey’s ideas in relation to Some Like It Hot. In the BFI Cinema Book, Mulvey’s densely written and highly influential essay is summarised as follows: “Mulvey saw the main project of the classic Hollywood narrative cinema as the generation of pleasures for the male viewer which depended on deploying the body of the female star."
Critically, the movie star arguably serves as a means by which certain societal concerns are expressed and so the film star fulfils a cultural role and an economic role in that the producer makes a financial investment in the film star not only as a performer but as a vital means of promoting the film and attracting audiences to it. Like pop stars, movie stars do something other than only ‘entertain’ audiences. The film star’s capacity for displaying diversity in their choice of roles, and in being open to contradiction between their performance and their off-screen identity, is key to how they find a place in the responses of film audiences. In many cases, the identity of the film star is as important as the characters they portray. In a sense, there’s a real blur between the two. Key to the way in which film stars are constructed is the issue of how much effort an actor has apparently put into creating a character and, by suggestion, the psychological authenticity of the character. Their versatility as a performer is key to how they are perceived. Performance can be considered in terms of a film star’s physicality, vocal delivery and interaction with other performers. Stars are media texts that are encoded and can be decoded for their meanings and values. Film stars allow audiences to access emotional states, issues of gender, and aspirational behaviour and situations. Recalling his work with Monroe on Some Like It Hot, Wilder identified Monroe’s skills as a comic performer: “It’s very difficult to talk seriously about Monroe, because she was so glitzy, you know. She escaped the seriousness somehow; she changed the subject. Except she was very tough to work with. But what you had, by hook or crook, once you saw it on the screen, it was just amazing. Amazing, the radiation that came out. And she was, believe it or not, an excellent dialogue actress. She knew where the laugh was. She knew.https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1999/10/billy-wilder-199910
Narrative
Certainly, familiarity is key to the success of every genre and part of this familiarity extends to what we expect a film star to do. Some Like It Hot showcases how a director can play with the image of a film’s star, building an entire narrative around this. Before anything else, this occurs in relation to genre.
Genres are comprised of semantic and syntactic elements. The semantic elements are the ‘building blocks’ of a genre. The term ‘syntactic elements’ refers to the way in which the building blocks are arranged by the effect of plot and character in a given story. Film stars are one of the many semantic elements in evidence in every film.
Genres communicate values and messages, and these are expressed by the behaviour of a given film’s characters, each of whom embody an ideology or way of being in terms of the choices they make and reactions they express within a narrative. The messages and values of a film can also be considered in terms of how they might be seen as reflecting some of the concerns of the society that produces, and consumes, the film. In relation to Some Like It Hot, the most potent concern is with gender relations.
Genres of all kinds change over time, evolving and adapting to the economics and tastes and expectations of a given moment. Film stars are a prominent way in which to consider this aspect of genre. Film scholar Tom Ryall, in 1978, usefully described genre as being considered as a combination of the ‘text’, the producer of the text and the audience ‘consuming’ it. Genres depend on repetition and patterns that audiences recognize and use as an entry point for a film. It’s in this regard that Some Like It Hot subverts the crime film by fusing it with a comedy.
To give Some Like It Hot a genre definition it is a comedy crime film that explores gender relations and expectations around what constitutes masculine and feminine behavior. It’s useful here to reference scholar Judith Butler who has made the point that sex is biological, and that gender is cultural. Some Like It Hot addresses both concepts.
Some Like It Hot is also particularly interesting in its use of the film star and the subversion of their image on screen. We might argue that it’s in comedies that comment is at its most acute; much more so than in serious drama. The film has later successors, also comedies, that chart how men come to understand the experience of women in films such as the Hollywood productions Tootsie, Mrs Doubtfire and What Women Want. In each of these films a major male star portrays a man who ‘becomes’ a woman. Some Like It Hot’s director, Billy Wilder, was very aware of the tone of the narrative and he reflected on it many years after the film’s production, demonstrating great awareness of his role as the director: “I was asked by (producer David O.) Selznick what I was working on. I told him it was a comedy set in the 20s, in the era of Prohibition, based around the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. He said, “Oh my God, you’re not doing a comedy with murder They’re going to crucify you. They’re going to walk out in droves! It’s just going to be embarrassing." I told him, “I’m going to take a little chance here." We would be careful and delicate about it, but . . . that’s the picture. It was set around the massacre, and that’s the way it was. We did some comedy at the top, then Saint Valentine’s Day, the massacre, and they swallowed it because they were with me already. The two guys, Lemmon and [Tony] Curtis, up on the stage playing those instruments... that set the mood that allowed us to spill a little blood.
Spectatorship
A central part of Film Studies is exploring how films address individual spectators through particular shots, editing, music and performance as well as narrative and genre to engage their interest and emotions. Films are generally constructed to provide the spectator (or audience) with a particular viewing position, most often aligning the spectator with a specific character or point of view. This in turn raises questions about how ‘determined’ spectators’ responses to a film are - how much we are controlled our have our ideas shaped for us by the director - and how far spectators can and do resist the position they are given.
You must consider how far spectators are ‘passive’ or ‘active’ in their responses to film and how social and cultural factors, as well as the specific viewing conditions in which a film is seen, influence spectators’ responses. The following list of ideas are always vital to considering the role of the spectator:
how the spectator has been conceived both as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ in the act of film viewing
how the spectator is in dynamic interaction with film narrative and film features designed to generate response
reasons for the uniformity or diversity of response by different spectators
the impact of different viewing conditions on spectator response
the analysis of narrative, visual, musical, performance, genre and auteur cues in relation to spectator response
the possibility of preferred, negotiated, oppositional and aberrant ‘readings’ of film
A central aspect of Film Studies is the exploration of how films address individual spectators through particular shots, editing, music and performance as well as narrative and genre to engage their interest and emotions.
Films are typically constructed to provide the spectator (or audience) with a particular viewing position, most often aligning the spectator with a specific character or point of view. This in turn raises questions about how ‘determined’ spectators’ responses to a film are - how much we are controlled our have our ideas shaped for us by the director - and how far spectators can and do resist the position they are given.
In considering Some Like It Hot, we can think about how far spectators are ‘passive’ or ‘active’ in their responses to film and how social and cultural factors, as well as the specific viewing conditions in which a film is seen, influence spectators’ responses.
In his book Cultural Theory, John Storey explains that audience or spectator response can be considered as a process of decoding the meanings and stimuli that a film has been encoded with and that this is central to our understanding of reception. In terms of this film, being aware of the challenging production conditions arguably informs the way that we can decode the film. Storey writes that “popular culture is a semiotic battlefield in which audiences constantly engage in a conflict…between an imposed set of meanings and pleasures…" Audience experience is usefully understood as the collective, and individual, act of the ways in which we encounter a film and a range of discourses and process around it.
Audience experience, then, is usefully understood as the collective and individual ways in which we encounter a film and a range of discourses and processes around it. By extension we need to define an understanding of the term audience reception. Chris Barker refers to how a new range of reception studies has stressed that “audiences are active creators of meaning in relation to texts. They bring previously acquired cultural competencies to bear on texts so that differently constituted audiences will work with different meanings."
Another key concept to bring to our work states that audience response to a film text is both referential and critical. The term referential response means “an understanding that reads (a text) as if it were referring to reality." The term critical response means “an awareness of the constructed nature of the text." Almost unconsciously, when we watch a movie, we move back and forth between these conditions and Some Like It Hot builds on both our familiarity with particular genres and, most importantly, our engagement, consciously, or otherwise, with the idea of gender. We also need to be aware of how audience expectations are constructed and manipulated by film producers not only in terms of the film text but also in terms of the discourse surrounding a given film.
Ideology and Themes
In the book Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey writes that “Ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people." He further explains that ideology can “indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality." This concept provides us with a very immediate recognition of Some Like It Hot’s resonance and in turn this becomes an issue of how a film represents a subject and, more specifically, different kinds of identity.
The term representation refers to the ways in which characters, situations, images and sounds in a film stand for, or depict, aspects of the real world. That said, it’s appropriate to note that there is potentially no single reality, but instead many versions of reality. Films re- present the world to us, and the visual power of films is particularly effective in making us believe in the worlds they represent.
Each film genre is an ideological construction and so the film star expresses certain values and attitudes in terms of the character they portray and may be associated with beyond the film. In the book Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey writes that “Ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people." He further explains that ideology can “indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality."
The BFI website usefully parses Some Like It Hot’s ideological interest in its comment that “Both the gangster story and the screwball antics hark back to Hollywood films of the 1930s, but Wilder’s outrageous and subversive play with gender was truly boundary pushing and helped lead to a loosening of censorship after United Artists released the film without certification."
The film’s importance to representation of gender is that the film ignored the regulations of the time in which it was produced. When the film was produced The Motion Picture Production Code was well established (established in 1930 and finishing in 1960) and it had been established to define and dictate the morality and ethics being expressed in American cinema. It was a censorship device.
At the time of the film’s release, controversy about its perceived ‘morality’ formed part of the discourse around the film. The Catholic League of Decency described Some Like It Hot as “seriously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency…" This idea of what is and is not acceptable is a major, but largely, ‘taken for granted’ aspect of film culture. Some Like It Hot was banned in Kansas. The film had the last laugh, we might say, as it went on to receive six Academy Award nominations and is now considered an essential example of what Hollywood can achieve at the highest creative level.
In 2017, when gender and the representation of gender are so much a part of popular culture modes, there’s value in recognising how comedy can function as the most powerful way to articulate ideas and understandings and relationships.
Some Like It Hot, then, can be discussed in terms of homosexuality, the male gaze and female objectification and misogyny. This laugh-out-loud comedy is in fact concerned with very serious matters that continue to resonant in the early twenty first century.