Dorothy Arzner viewed herself as “one of the guys” in the film industry. Arzner has been around the theatre and actors her whole life. Her father, Louis, had owned a famous Hollywood restaurant right next to a theatre. Arzner saw most of the fine plays that had come from there. All of the early movie and stage actors went to her fathers’ restaurant for dinner. She had no personal interest in the actors because they were too familiar to her, she was around them and because of that was kind of included as being “one of the guys.”
The way she started into and then dominated an industry that not many women were in made her again seem like “one of the guys.” It all started with her standing in front of William Demille, saying, “I think I’d…show more content… While she did consider herself to fit right in with the men, it was a bigger deal than usual when she was named writer-director by Paramount, it was even a headline in the paper, “Lasky Names Woman Director.” Her gender did differentiate her from the rest. But, nonetheless she still dominated the film industry and was, in her words, “a famous director then.”
In Dance, Girl, Dance, dance functions in the delineation of different types of women/characters. The two main characters are completely different types of women. Bubbles dances not for artistic transcendence but for the money. She offers a completely different alternative to Judy’s philosophy of dance as she “struts and teases and titillates the male audience.” Bubbles was even describes as being “off-color,” so it seems that they have paired her skin tone with dancing that involves “slapping her ass, gyrating her hips, and being the one who lands all jobs” with her sexual…show more content… Structural coherence is provided by the woman, and this is what calls into question the “dominant discourse” and the nature of patriarchy into which it locks. In her films, we are scrutinizing males, which is unfamiliar. It’s a new perspective. Claire Johnston says, “It is only the discourse of the woman, and her desire for transgression, which provides the principle of coherence and generates knowledge, and it is in woman that Arzner locates the possibility of truth within the film text.”
I interpreted the women’s stage performances in Dance, Girl, Dance as both objectification and female self-representation. The women are objectifying themselves in front of these men, dancing and moving their bodies in ways that they know men will enjoy. Then, when laughed at, Judy confronts the audience and famously scolds them. In everything she said, she defended her and Bubbles’s stage performances. After her speech, a female member of the audience stands up and applauds her; in a way they bond together and show that they aren’t the weaker
