Art House

Seattle Art Museum is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and “the gamine beauty, grace, and wit of Audrey Hepburn” by screening five of her films, one of which is, of course, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Last week, I declared on Slog that Dorothy Dandridge (the “tragic mulatto”) was the most beautiful actress in the history of moving pictures. All of the commenters disagreed with me. They selected other screen stars for the position: Gene Tierney, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, and Hepburn. True, these actresses had beautiful faces, but their bodies did not exude enough sexual energy.

Let’s recall what Roland Barthes said about Greta Garbo: “Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philter, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.” This is not sex. This is something like a sculpture, a concept, a heavenly form, a goddess. This is why Audrey Hepburn’s role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not convincing; she is all beauty and almost no sex. You can’t imagine her fucking, sucking, biting, moaning.

Now picture Dorothy Dandridge or Rita Hayworth: We see all kinds of sex. These women are made from flesh and bone. Their bodies drip with sweat—they are “funky,” which means “good sweat,” sweat not from fighting but from dancing and fucking. You can imagine a piece of meat stuck between Dandridge’s or Hayworth’s teeth. You can imagine your tongue finding that piece of meat while lost in a French kiss. A Hollywood beauty who has no sex is only an idea and not an animal, a living being.

Earth Angel: The Films of Audrey Hepburn, Seattle Art Museum, July 7–Aug 11.