Peeping Tom

From: Andre Mayer
To: Rachel Giese
Subject: Tom Ford’s Hollywood

Before launching into outrage, let me say that I am always drawn to Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood scrapbook. I enjoy artful photographs of gorgeous stars as much as the next person. And I agree, in principle, with Tom Ford’s contention that the feature had become hoary — I’m fairly certain that Nicole Kidman and Tom Hanks were as tired of seeing their dimly lit selves as we were. In theory, change is good.

In practice, I’m doubtful. The cover features Scarlett Johansson lying nude on her stomach, her tuchus there for all to see. Keira Knightley is seated, also nude, with an arm carefully placed so as to cover her breasts. To complete the tableau, Tom Ford is slouching, clothed, behind Knightley, nuzzling her neck. I am beset by a riot of thoughts: Scarlett, how could you? — Keira, you didn’t! — Who’s the dude?

Ultimately, I’m depressed that young female actors still need to subject themselves to this sort of debasement. When you open the magazine and go through the photo shoot, the pattern is obvious enough. Of the 17 female stars photographed, five are starkers. That doesn’t include the female entourage surrounding George Clooney in his nautical montage; they’re clad in sodden beige underwear, so on a first pass, you think they’re naked, too. Clooney, for his part, is wearing a shirt, pants and boots. Though a little windswept, he’d be entirely presentable at church. The only man to pose naked is Taye Diggs — albeit with a silk robe covering his groin.

A little flesh goes a long way to sell magazines. I know and accept that. But this is not a little flesh.

From: Rachel Giese
To: Andre Mayer
Re: Tom Ford’s Hollywood

No, it’s not a little flesh. Nor is it, at least on the cover, all that erotic. The photo is so posed, so airbrushed and so contrived that it sucks the life out of two women who are, in fact, quite spirited and beautiful. Scarlett Johansson looks terrifyingly pale (did the makeup artist paint her alabaster?) and her famously voluptuous body is unflatteringly posed. Keira Knightley just looks pained. But who wouldn’t be with skeevy Tom Ford nibbling at their ear?

Speaking of Ford, my favourite quote from the Vanity Fair publicity machine was his explanation for his presence in the photo — he stepped in after Rachel McAdams, who was scheduled to be the third naked starlet in the three-way cover shot, balked at taking off her clothes. Ford said that “three girls in a bed is a bedful of girls, but two girls in a bed are lesbians.” I dunno, three girls in a bed sounds kinda lesbian to me, but maybe Ford knows something I don’t. So he objects to the possibility of the cover looking too lesbian, but doesn’t think the image of a fully clothed, 40-ish man frolicking with two naked actresses in their 20s is a little, um, pervy?

I’m not in the least a prude about nudity, but aside from a bad-boy desire to épater les bourgeois, I’m not sure what the point is. The photo doesn’t give me new insight into either of the actresses. Nor, frankly, is it any more shocking or revealing than an upscale perfume ad. Like you, Andre, I’m curious about Keira and Scarlett’s motivation. Both have solid, respected careers as “thinking” actresses. Do they feel that they need the publicity? Is Knightley trying to break out of her bodice-and-bonnet image? Is Johansson trying to cement her reputation as the lost girl consort of older men (Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, and now as Woody Allen’s latest muse)? Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is no way that Vanity Fair would have asked Terrence Howard, Joaquin Phoenix and Eric Bana to pose naked together on the cover (three boys in a bed being, I suppose, incontrovertibly gay). It’s not what’s expected of serious actors. But serious actresses like Keira and Scarlett assume, apparently, that it’s just part of the job.

What did you make of the Hollywood feature itself? Did Ford do what he said he’d do and shake things up?

From: Andre Mayer
To: Rachel Giese
Re: Tom Ford’s Hollywood

Heh-heh, the only thing more confounding than Ford’s art direction is his rationalizing. Field this one, Tommy boy: if three women on a cover suggest “a bedful of girls” and two women on a cover suggest “lesbians,” what do two women and a gay man suggest? On second thought, don’t answer that. You’ll probably give me a headache.

I agree, Rachel, that for all its licentiousness, the cover is shockingly unsexy. It looks like a still from the set of Six Feet Under. (Not an episode I’d want to see, either.) Where’s the flush of desire?

Putting my annoyance aside for a moment, I do like some of the inside pictures. The pic of a naked Angelina Jolie in the tub is tasteful and yes, hot. The shot of The New World starlet Q’Orianka Kilcher is stunning (and she’s fully clothed). And I thought the photo of Peter Sarsgaard in a suit and trussed up in rope was good fun.

There’s no doubt Ford has shaken things up — otherwise, we wouldn’t be getting into a froth over this. But I hesitate to say that he’s done something new. Granted, he’s stripped some pretty high-profile actresses down to their birthday suits, a request that other art directors/photographers might have been too timid to make. Ford thinks that showing an actress in the nude reveals something honest about her. The guy clearly has no grasp of literalism and metaphor. Physical nudity does not equal emotional nudity. I hope he never goes into directing movies.

From: Rachel Giese
To: Andre Mayer
Re: Tom Ford’s Hollywood

Given that Ford’s much-hyped plans to get into film production have so far yielded nothing, I think your cinematic sensibilities are safe for at least a while, Andre.

I agree that Ford has been successful in creating a buzz, and pretty good at selecting what he calls “The New Hollywood.” This has been an exciting year for American film, with the success of small pictures like Capote, The Squid and the Whale and Brokeback Mountain. This was the perfect opportunity to bring VF out of its tiresome publicist-delegated stories. (Remember when VF declared Gretchen Mol the next “It Girl”?) Indeed, this issue has plenty of worthy choices: Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, Natalie Portman and Patricia Clarkson. But then there’s the usual headscratchers: Zooey Deschanel (really?) and Jennifer Aniston (hasn’t she proven herself to be box office poison?). VF would have made these choices on their own anyway. Who hasn’t been buzzing about Angelina Jolie recently?

What strikes me the most is the oddness of Ford’s aesthetic. For Ford, who is openly gay, it’s pretty long on female exposure and short on male beefcake. He has the fashion world love-hate thing going for women’s bodies — celebrating the female form in theory, while simultaneously being revolted by any body that fails to meet a very narrow, very limited standard of beauty. Female bodies (and body parts) are everywhere in this spread, from a gratuitously nude and faceless woman with Jason Schwartzman to the pair of legs being fondled by Topher Grace, yet they’re devoid of any sensuality. If I could make a generalization, it’s to say that when straight men objectify women it’s by seeing them solely as sexual toys. When gay guys objectify women, it’s by seeing them either as icons (think of a drag queen impersonating Marilyn Monroe or Bette Davis) or as dress-up Barbie Dolls (think of 90 per cent of fashion designers).

From: Andre Mayer
To: Rachel Giese
Re: Tom Ford’s Hollywood

The disembodied female limbs scattered like doll parts throughout the shoot is by far the most galling aspect of Ford’s art direction. And I wonder: weren’t the male participants a little creeped out by the whole thing? Topher Grace and Jason Schwartzman seem like intelligent, principled fellas. Or maybe they just play them in the movies.

The fact that Ford is gay is an interesting subtext. Ford and photographer David LaChapelle (also gay) are doing more to objectify women right now than any straight image-maker I can think of. At the risk of sounding hysterical, I would say LaChapelle has produced some of the most appalling, retrograde images in recent pop culture. I recall an image of Lil’ Kim on the cover of Photo magazine, in which she’s made up to look like a blow-up doll: her eyelashes are all perked up, her lips a perfect circle. It turned my stomach. Granted, Lil’ Kim struggles to remain clothed at the best of times, but I doubt very much that she went into that shoot saying, “Make me up like a plastic sex toy, Dave.” That was LaChapelle’s imagination at play.

Ford’s spread isn’t quite as shocking, but it also fetishizes the female form. Instead of turning the female body into an object of sexual desire, it turns it into a hideous, cartoonish exaggeration of femininity. I can’t pretend to know what’s going on in Ford or LaChapelle’s head when they conceive such images — whatever it is, it’s not furthering the cause of feminism.

From: Rachel Giese
To: Andre Mayer
Re: Tom Ford’s Hollywood

Yeah, but feminism doesn’t sell magazines. Except maybe Ms.

However ultimately tepid — to us, anyway — the results, Ford’s vision has paid off for VF. Tuesday, the day before the issue hit the stands in New York and Los Angeles, was the biggest day in VanityFair.com’s history, with 700,000 hits to see the cover and a video from the shoot, which you should watch, by the way, just for the fun of seeing Scarlett Johansson obliviously gabbing on the phone the entire time she was there.

Vanity Fair has had such a tremendous comeback from the dreary old days post-9/11, when editor Graydon Carter declared irony dead — not noticing, evidently, the irony in running features about Africa’s blood diamonds in the same issue as ads for luxury jewels. The magazine still has the same gushy features on obscure European royalty and the tedious, Tourette’s-like name-dropping of Dominick Dunne. But with James Wolcott and Christopher Hitchens’s entertaining and occasionally maddening columns, the interest generated from September’s exclusive profile of Jennifer Aniston, January’s Lindsay Lohan controversy and now this, the magazine is on a roll.

Gossip has it that Geoffrey Knoop, the ex of Laura Albert — the woman recently revealed as the author of books and articles attributed to JT Leroy — is working on a tell-all story for an upcoming issue. What’s next? James Frey and Oprah Winfrey posing together nude on the April cover?