Following our discussion of Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, it might be worth chasing up the filmed versions – Julien Duvivier’s of 1930, and Andre Cayatte’s of 1943, both released under the title Au Bonheur des Dames. However, here I’m succumbing to temptation and posting a clip from Michael Gottlieb’s 1987 film Mannequin. The film stars Andrew McCarthy (Pretty in Pink), Kim Cattrall (Sex and the City) and James Spader (Crash etc.). Generally understood to be a rather pointless and graceless remake of the little-known film One Touch of Venus (1948), it in fact owes a lot to both Zola’s novel and Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The clips posted here – from Mannequin and Modern Times respectively – both make use of the notion of the department store as a space of play and fantasy as, in both cases, nightwork is occurring and the building appears deserted, creating a greater scope for illicit non-consumer activity. In both cases, the women are present without authorisation (snuck in by Charlie, a mannequin come to life) and are taking part in a fantasy of consumption (without spending) and of romance. You will note the presence of a fur coat scene in both – strangely chaste in the case of Modern Times, with a greater presence of lingerie (Zola’s obsession) in the Mannequin version. Both films have a central protagonist who is unable to hold down a job, although the Depression context of Chaplin’s film contrasts strongly with the 1980s of Mannequin. Notably, in the latter context, Jonathan (McCarthy)’s rise from postroom boy to manager follows a classic narrative arc of the American dream, a rise that is achieved by his efforts to create window-dressing spectacles which bring great prosperity to a previously ailing store. Mannequin essentially forms an unlikely conflation between Zola’s novel and Chaplin’s film, pushed into strange new forms as a mass-market, feel-good film of an unashamedly spectacle-oriented and materialistic period in US culture.
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[...] After Hours In our session on department stores, and in this previous blog post, we noted an interest in after-hours, non-spending exploration of department stores in literature [...]