“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” was
imprinted indelibly on the memory of the big screen with Marilyn
Monroe’s legendary 1953 performance in Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes, and has taken on a number of reincarnations
and reinventions since, presenting a unique vision of sex
and femininity to the viewer, an intriguing combination of
desire and commerce. Two of the most notable revisions to
date of Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s
Best Friend” number have been Madonna’s 1985 “Material
Girl” music video, and Nicole Kidman’s performance
as the courtesan Satine in Baz Luhrman’s 2001 Moulin
Rouge! On the big and small screens, the icon of Monroe’s
presentation and manipulations of the song itself have become
part of common popular culture knowledge, and performances
of femininity and sexuality have also taken on new meanings
in each version. By examining some cinematic elements of each
of these representations, such as how the power of women is
presented to the audience, including issues of style, sexuality,
and ownership; interaction of the central performer with other
women; the composition of the mise-en-scene, including color;
and the politics of what Laura Mulvey has called the male
gaze, which encourages the audience to identify with the male
protagonist and participate in the objectification of the
female character, through demystification or fetishism; and
the unique aspects of each woman and performance, it becomes
possible to assess each representation with a critical eye
and address the discourse surrounding femininity and sexuality
in each of these versions of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s
Best Friend.”
Though each of these revisions are unique, there is also a
similarity binding them all together, which is their identity
as performers, not only as actresses and musicians in the
“real world,” but within the scenes themselves
which each plays. Inside the microcosms of these two films
and music video, the character each woman embodies is an actress
in at least one sense of the word. Monroe, as Lorelei, is
a nightclub singer, as well as putting forth the posturing
of social graces in an attempt to gain acceptance from the
higher classes, seeking specifically the masculine validation
of her fiancé and his father. One of the men watching
Madonna’s performance within the performance of her
music video says of her that “she is a star.”
Finally, Kidman, as Satine, is a singer and dancer at the
Moulin Rouge, and is also a courtesan, convincing men of her
love and desire; as Satine says at one point to Christian,
played by Ewan McGregor: “I’m a courtesan. I’m
paid to make men believe what they want to believe.”
In addition, each of them is embodying a different idea of
femininity, negotiating both gender and sexuality as performative.
According to Anthony Summers in Goddess: The Secret Lives
of Marilyn Monroe, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
is the film in which Monroe reached the status of being “officially,
a full-fledged star” in the eyes of the studio and the
movie-going public. As Richard Buskin reminds us in Blonde
Heat: The Sizzling Screen Career of Marilyn Monroe, she
plays the role of Lorelei Lee, a breathless, “scorching
blonde bombshell with a fondness for money,” trying
to wed her millionaire fiancé against his father’s
wishes. Lorelei and her friend Dorothy, played by Jane Russell,
sail for Paris, where Lorelei’s fiancé is to
meet and marry her; once they arrive, they find Lorelei’s
letter of credit revoked and themselves penniless. Both find
work at a nightclub, and it is here that Monroe as Lorelei
performs “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,”
which Buskin calls “the single most identifiable sequence
pertaining to the career of Marilyn Monroe.”
One aspect of Monroe’s on and off-screen persona that
has proven particularly problematic for historians and biographers,
as well as for the woman herself during her too-short life,
was her constructed star image of being entirely innocent,
and yet sexually knowledgeable and available, simultaneously
both the virgin and the whore. Monroe expressed no embarrassment
when the Golden Dreams calendar shots, featuring Monroe in
the nude, became public; though she did ask for the public’s
sympathy, she felt she had nothing to be ashamed of, and spoke
openly and candidly of her sexuality. According to Clare Booth
Luce in “‘The Love Goddess’ Who Never Found
Any Love,” when “asked, years after the shot had
been circulated worldwide, what she had on when she posed
for it, she replied ‘The radio.’” However,
in the films late in Monroe’s life, most notably The
Misfits (1961) with Clark Gable, Monroe tried to move
away from her sexualized star image, or at least attempted
to actively negotiate it, and she never gave up her fierce
desire to be taken seriously as an actress, a feat studios,
audiences, and the demands of the market would not allow her
to achieve. When the associate editor of Life magazine interviewed
Monroe in the summer of 1962, shortly before her untimely
death, Monroe commented on her sex symbol status, saying “I
never quite understood it – this sex symbol –
I always thought symbols were those things you clash together!
That’s the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I
just hate to be a thing. But if I’m going to be a symbol
of something, I’d rather have it sex than some of the
other things they’ve got symbols of!”
This dichotomy of sexuality is presented to the viewer in
Monroe’s performance of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s
Best Friend,” where her attitude of innocence is paired
unforgettably with a hard-edged savvy of money and sexual
power. Monroe actively uses her body at times throughout the
song, engaging in a wiggling, bump and grind style of dance.
Monroe’s facial expressions, as well, reflect the complicated
negotiation of sexuality she is engaged in, though both her
face and body never lose their aura of playfulness. Monroe
has the power to say “no,” and does so repeatedly
before launching into the body of the musical number, punctuated
by Monroe slapping the men surrounding her with her fan. However,
the good-natured smile never leaves Monroe’s face, calling
up for the critical viewer some of Charlene Y. Senn’s
ideas from “The Research on Women and Pornography: The
Many Faces of Harm” – a version of the “rape
myth” threat, a sense that while she is saying “no,”
she could, with manipulation, be read as meaning “yes,”
depending upon the perspective. Though Monroe is never explicitly
threatened with violence, she is surrounded by men throughout
the entirety of her performance, and is at times pulled from
place to place upon the stage, from one group of men to another,
her movement dictated by the men rather than her own power.
In large part, Monroe seems to be catering to male desire,
but it is worth noting that at many times throughout “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” the men are kneeling
before her, obeying her commands, serving as physical props
for her dance number, and, at one point, lift Monroe high
above them, glorifying her, though they are simultaneously
objectifying her.
Issues of ownership are slightly problematic in Monroe’s
“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” There
is little doubt that Monroe has complete ownership of herself,
but her ownership of the diamonds in question is more uncertain.
Monroe is wearing many diamonds as she performs this song
– a necklace, earrings, and two bracelets, all glittering
and nearly larger than life. However, though she pulls on
the prop belts of diamonds offered to her by the surrounding
men throughout the musical number, she claims only one, which
she promptly throws to her fiancé Gus, who is seated
in the audience. Monroe’s failure to take the jewels
being offered to her is a riddle with many possible answers:
Perhaps the dynamics of the stage performance within the larger
film required that the diamonds as well as the song and dance
number itself be read as artificial. It is possible that Howard
Hawks, in his role as director of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
wanted to represent an embodiment of femininity that is polite
and proper, waiting to receive rather than taking, a product-driven
version of an aware sexuality that waits to be taken rather
than manifesting itself in unladylike desire. Or maybe Monroe
is presenting “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”
with a brand of tongue-in-cheek humor future audiences would
see more directly with Madonna’s revisiting of the number.
It is possible to argue each, and no one answer can be championed
over the others, but the fact that Monroe does not take the
offered jewels makes an enigmatic statement about power and
femininity, which would not be matched in reincarnations of
the song. It is worth noting that in a reprisal of “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend” at the end of the film,
Lorelei and Dorothy are walking down the aisle together, matching
brides in a double wedding, each claiming a large, diamond
engagement ring.
Marilyn’s air of innocence, however complicated, sets
her performance of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best
Friend” apart from all that would follow. This naiveté
is all the more striking in the context of Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes because the film came so closely after the Golden
Dreams calendar scandal, and the studio went to great lengths
to foreground the near-childlike aspect of Monroe’s
star image, changing at least two aspects of the “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number in order to play
down the sexuality of Monroe. According to Buskin, the song
“had two verses excised due to lyrics that were then
considered too racy for the screen. The first ended with the
lines ‘But buyers and sighers / They’re such Goddam
liars,’ while the second verse was even more risqué:
‘Some girls find / Some peace of mind / In a trust fund
that banks recommend / But if you are busty / Your trustee
gets lusty.’” The second change made in the scene
centered on Monroe’s costuming. Buskin states that Bill
Sarris, designer Bill Travilla’s assistant at the time,
said “‘the costume that Bill initially dressed
Marilyn in was like a leotard with all of these rhinestones,
and it was very nude looking … This was after the calendar
had come out, and it didn’t take long before Bill received
a call from Zanuck’s office saying, ‘Cover her
up.’ So … he [Travilla] designed the shocking
pink dress. That used a very heavy fabric and was not fitted;
they just belted it in.” In both dress and speech, the
studio accentuated the innocence of Monroe in Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes, without entirely subverting the sexuality
of her image, again falling back on the virgin/whore dichotomy,
both sides of which they demanded the same woman embody simultaneously.
Monroe shares the stage with several other women, though never
for an extended period of time, and none of whom come close
to matching the brilliance of Monroe’s person or performance.
Before the song and dance number begins, Monroe is sitting
very demurely with her back to the nightclub audience, while
men in black suits dance with women in full pink gowns. When
Monroe turns to the audience, the other female dancers fall
back to the sides of the stage, becoming almost unnoticed.
They return to surround her mid-way through the song, looking
up to Monroe as if for advice, which she gladly gives them
with an almost matronly demeanor, cautioning them that “there
may come a time when a lass needs a lawyer / But diamonds
are a girl’s best friend.” However, though the
women surround Monroe, their arms around one another in visible
sisterhood, the politics of touch seem to keep them from extending
their arms to surround Monroe. The message is clear: she is
not one of them, and no matter how much adoration they may
look upon her with, she can never be one of them, nor can
they be her. Monroe is friendly and smiling, confiding in
these other women, yet she is utterly unattainable, separate,
isolated. More troubling in the representation of women during
Monroe’s performance are the black-clad women, their
bodies bent in various contorted positions to act as human
chandeliers. Their faces are frozen in smiles and they never
move, entirely objectified, signifying to the critical viewer
the danger posed to women, a perspective from which they can
be seen not as human beings but simply as things, and the
even more horrifying reality of compliance. Indeed, Monroe
is allowing this objectification to happen to these women,
just as studios and audiences allowed the same objectification
to happen to Monroe herself, turning her into the sex symbol
of her generation, a fact which she was very uncomfortable
with and resentful of, and fought against until the day she
died. According to an article by Gloria Steinem, Monroe once
responded angrily to a drama coach who commented on her outward
sexuality while performing, “‘I want to be an
artist, not an erotic freak … a celluloid aphrodisiac.’”
Regrettably, in many ways, much of the biographical and historical
work on Monroe has continued to objectify her; however, the
entering and increasing presence of feminists into the discussion
and reading of Monroe’s star image is offering Monroe’s
memory a new empathy and respect, focusing on Marilyn Monroe
the woman, rather than Marilyn Monroe the pin-up.
The mise-en-scene of Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a
Girl’s Best Friend” number is also very reflective
upon Monroe’s role within the scene as a performer.
The film audience is shown almost the entire scene from the
perspective of the traditional male gaze, almost as though
the viewer were seated among the nightclub audience watching
Monroe onstage. The viewer is ushered rather explicitly into
the performance when, just before Monroe begins, the camera
shows us a man in the audience, looking at her and smiling,
before turning the camera immediately back on Monroe. The
composition of camera angles deviates from the traditional
male gaze in two places: first, when Monroe looks directly
into the camera, delivering the line “But get that ice
or else no dice,” seeming to encounter the gaze and
stare back, and again when we see Lorelei’s fiancé
Gus from her point of view as she tosses him the belt of diamonds.
Monroe is clad in Bill Travilla’s now-famous pink gown,
with matching three-quarter length gloves, singing and dancing
against a background of a darker shade of pink, nearly red.
The composition of the set and shots themselves, therefore,
created not only one of the most memorable segments in film
history, but also framed a fairly traditional, if at times
problematic, version of femininity and sexuality for the 1950s,
stuck somewhere between the demand for quiet, ladylike conformity
and the desire for a more sexualized female identity and expression,
locked in indecision between the virgin and the whore.
Over thirty years later, Madonna would revisit the “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend” concept from Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes with her “Material Girl” video,
putting a new spin on the classic. Madonna had already attracted
several comparisons to Marilyn Monroe, to which she replied,
“‘I saw it as a compliment … because she
was extremely sexy and had blonde hair and so on,’”
but much as Monroe had complained about her status as a sex
symbol, Madonna confessed, as recorded by Barbara Victor in
Goddess: Inside Madonna, “‘It started
to annoy me because nobody wants to be continuously compared
to someone else.’” Madonna also noted some dramatic
differences between herself and Monroe, most importantly that
“’Marilyn was a victim, and I’m not.’”
For many aware of and grieved by Monroe’s fate, Madonna
offered a similar combination of innocence and sexuality;
as Dr. Joyce Brothers commented, Madonna is “childlike
and innocent but at the same time naughty.” However,
along with these qualities, Madonna possessed a strength and
shrewdness that had been unmatched by Monroe; as Mark Bego
writes, “Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe died at the
pinnacle of their fame, but Madonna’s survival instinct
is too strong for that.” Much like Monroe’s experience
with the Golden Dreams calendar shots, shortly before
Madonna’s “Material Girl” video, nude photographs
of Madonna appeared in Penthouse. Victor comments
upon the similar experience shared by Monroe, Miss America
winner Vanessa Williams, and Madonna, writing that “the
difference between how Williams and Monroe reacted to the
release of nude photographs and how Madonna reacted tells
a great deal about the latter’s character. While the
former Miss America and Monroe pleaded for sympathy from their
adoring fans, Madonna was more concerned that she had neither
artistic nor financial control over the photographs,”
upset by the vulnerability she experienced in respect to her
representation and capital, rather than being at all embarrassed
or ashamed. Madonna brought this strength to the screen, reinventing
the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”
image Monroe had made famous, with a new dimension of power.
Madonna wears a replica of the pink Travilla gown from Monroe’s
unforgettable Gentlemen Prefer Blondes performance,
with a similar pink background and cadre of male dancers surrounding
her. Even some of the choreography echoes that familiar from
Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”;
for example, in her “Material Girl” video, Madonna
is also pulled around and lifted off the ground by the men,
though Madonna is clearly in control of the scene playing
out, and there is no sense of the vulnerability and danger
called up by some moments of Monroe’s performance. Madonna
has the power to draw men to her with the smallest gesture
and can push them away from her just as easily, even shoving
one man to the floor at her feet, and planting a high heel-clad
foot in the middle of his chest. Madonna may be an embodiment
of male desire, but her performance and the way in which she
carries herself make it immediately recognizable that she
will not cater or submit herself to those desires, is not
automatically available; instead of revisiting the virgin/whore
dichotomy, Madonna invents a new category altogether, a space
in which she is nothing more nor less than her own woman,
perhaps still a sex symbol of sorts, but, according to Kevin
Dayle, “a sex symbol who talks back.”
With her “Material Girl” video, Madonna also claims
ownership with a far steadier hand than Monroe was able to
more than a quarter of a century earlier. Not only is Madonna
in full possession of herself, she is also not afraid to take
what she wants, and she doesn’t stop at diamonds. Throughout
the course of the video, Madonna takes furs, the ring from
a man’s finger, and money from a man’s pocket,
imposing herself physically upon the men who surround her.
She is showered with gifts to the point of annoyance; as she
tells a friend over the telephone during the introduction
to the song, “yeah, he’s still after me …
he thinks he can impress me by giving me expensive gifts.”
But when Madonna sees something she truly wants, she doesn’t
wait for it to be offered; she simply takes it.
Another new dimension that Madonna brought to the “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend” concept was a flair
for humor and irony, saying or presenting one thing while
meaning the exact opposite. A prime example of this is Madonna’s
“Boy Toy” nickname and famous matching belt buckle.
Madonna chose the nickname for herself, finding it humorous
in its double meaning, commenting that “‘I can
see how the rest of the world thinks I’m saying, ‘Play
with me’ and ‘I’m available to anyone.’
Once again, it’s a tongue-in-cheek statement, the opposite
of what it says.’” The “Material Girl”
video operates much along the same premise. As Madonna professes
with the song’s lyrics: “They can beg and they
can plead / But they can’t see the light, that’s
right / ‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash / Is
always Mister Right, ‘cause we are / Living in a material
world / And I am a material girl.” Indeed, she does
claim quite a large amount of jewelry and cash throughout
the course of the video, but money and gifts do not guarantee
a potential suitor her time or attention, as becomes readily
apparent at the beginning of the video. In the end, it is
the man with the daisies and the pickup truck who is graced
with her company. However, the pickup truck is rented, and
the man is performing just as much, if not more than Madonna
is herself, taking on the role of a man he thinks she will
find attractive and acceptable; once again, it is Madonna
who is in control in the final scenes of the “Material
Girl” music video. Madonna may still be performing a
role of femininity, but she is thoroughly enjoying it, and,
at the very least, she is not performing alone.
Unlike Monroe’s performance of “Diamonds Are a
Girl’s Best Friend,” Madonna acted out her reinvention
of the image without the company of other women. Not a single
other woman appears on screen anywhere close to Madonna; the
only other woman in the video at all is fairly far in the
background, wearing a pink dress as Madonna, now dressed in
white, climbs into the pickup truck. Judging from the importance
of color within the entirety of the video, one reading of
the second woman’s significance could be that a woman
as a performer acts out a certain version of sexuality until
the cameras are off, at which point she can be herself, or
perhaps simply take on a new role of femininity. In the case
of “Material Girl,” at this point, Madonna is
off the set as a performer within the video; she has finished
the shoot for the day, and can perhaps relax. The second woman
dressed in pink, not on-stage or posing before a camera, could
serve as a reminder to audiences that gender and sexuality
are always at least partially performative, whether the woman
herself is a performer by occupation or not.
The mise-en-scene is, in large part, nearly identical to that
of Monroe’s scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
though the “Material Girl” video interacts with
the male gaze in a slightly different way. The viewer sees
Madonna through a couple of different perspectives: that of
the quintessential audience, and that of the bearded man pursuing
her. From the man’s perspective, the viewer sees Madonna
first on film, as he is screening the video, her image projected
larger than life. He speaks of her to the man who is watching
the video with him, saying “I want to meet her …
now.” His smile shows that he is attracted to Madonna,
desires her, and from this point he begins following her and
gazing at her quite insistently, from outside the door of
her dressing room and from a set of stairs looking directly
out over the set on which she is performing. In this case,
the look follows the voyeuristic pattern of the male gaze,
as Mulvey puts it, where “the determining male gaze
projects its phantasy on to the female figure, which is styled
accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women
are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance
coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can
be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (emphasis
original). In the performance of an actress such as Monroe,
where the woman being watched is vulnerable, this perspective
would be unsettling and terrifying, a threat of danger. But
with Madonna’s edge of hardness and strength, his watching
becomes quite comical, because it is Madonna who controls
what he sees in her, and it is ultimately she who controls
the way he acts towards her. Madonna also has an effect on
the way in which the audience views the music video as well,
challenging the male gaze by often looking directly into the
camera, the sex object looking as well as talking back.
Nicole Kidman, in the role of the courtesan Satine in Moulin
Rouge!, brings a style of femininity, sexuality, and
commerce unparalleled by either Monroe or Madonna’s
earlier versions of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best
Friend.” Moulin Rouge!, directed by Baz Luhrman,
tells the story of Satine and Christian, the young writer
she falls in love with; it is a tragic love story, as the
two find themselves separated by Satine’s obligations
to the Moulin Rouge and its key investor, the Duke, as well
as Satine’s diagnosis and death from consumption. Satine
and Christian’s first meeting is on the floor of the
Moulin Rouge, with Satine’s performance of the “Diamond
Medley,” which lyrically brings together both “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and Madonna’s
“Material Girl.”
Kidman possesses a great deal of power in the “Diamond
Medley” scene. She begins her performance by dropping
from the ceiling in a sparkling swing, surrounded by cascades
of glitter, literally above and untouchable to the audience.
While both of her predecessors, Monroe and Madonna, began
their “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”
numbers with their backs to audience and camera, the first
shot of Kidman is a side profile, aslant by the line of the
black top hat she wears, identical to those of the men staring
up at her from the nightclub’s floor, encouraging the
film’s audience to an awareness of the power of gender
association, as well as aspects of play and performance. Julia
M. Klein compares Moulin Rouge! to The Rocky
Horror Picture Show, a notorious camp classic, the similarity
“in its [Moulin Rouge’s] gender-bending,
high-camp musical sequences and aggressive in-your-face relationship
with the audience, whose expectations it continually and gleefully
confounds.”
Kidman plays on the expectations called up by Monroe and Madonna’s
earlier performances to her greatest advantage, and then builds
upon these; Kidman’s “Diamond Medley” is
by far the most sexual, aggressive incarnation of the three.
As she reaches the floor, she is quickly surrounded by men,
and touches and is touched by them, seeming to delight in
her personal control of her representation of sexuality and
the control she has over her audience. The most direct sexual
content in this sequence occurs during the “Material
Girl” sequence of the medley, as the cries of “Tiffany!
/ Cartier!” segue into Madonna’s familiar refrain:
“Cause we are living in a material world / And I am
a material girl”; as this point in the number, Kidman
is positioned and shimmying over a man laying flat on his
back on the floor. Immediately after, she stands, throws him
a kiss, turns her back, and calls out “come and get
me, boys,” reasserting her control of the personal,
artistic, and commercial situations at hand. As Monroe and
Madonna before her, Kidman is lifted into the air by her surrounding
men, though there is no sense of danger in this revisitation
of the theme, with Kidman relaxed, even feigning a yawn as
she is carried to the stage.
In Satine’s identity as a courtesan, there is a more
direct correlation between sex and commerce in Kidman’s
performance than has even been implied in Monroe or Madonna’s
earlier performances; in the “Diamond Medley”
performance, the experience seems to be rather positive. Satine
is using her employment as a courtesan as a stepping stone
to becoming a serious actress, a desire the character shares
poignantly with Monroe; she has no regrets and makes no apologies
for the life she lives. As earlier demonstrated, Kidman wields
a great deal of power and is not subjected to the use of,
as Aline phrased it in “Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad
Girls Go Everywhere,” “the word ‘whore’
expressed as an insult, a put down, a cut … a broad
floating term used to perpetuate social myths and hatred and
fear of women.” Satine is a courtesan of the highest
echelon, a public performer, but nowhere near being privately
available to the masses; her favors are reserved for the most
wealthy and powerful of the Moulin Rouge’s patrons,
and she conducts herself, off-stage as well as on, with a
grace and elegance that separates her from the working girls
who share her stage, and the street prostitutes briefly glimpsed
early in the film.
Much like Madonna’s “Material Girl” performance,
Kidman has no trouble taking ownership, claiming the offered
diamonds, but only the diamonds. Men bearing cash and flowers
are brusquely refused; Kidman only has eyes for the gems.
However, in Moulin Rouge!, Kidman’s ownership
extends far beyond the material offerings of her male audience.
She owns her image, her desire, her choices, and her ability
to continue choosing for herself, enabled not only by her
power, but also by her awareness of herself as a woman, and
more specifically, as a courtesan; immediately following the
conclusion of her “Diamond Medley” performance,
Kidman approaches the young writer Christian, played by Ewan
McGregor, for the next dance, announcing to the cadre of men
vying for her attentions that the next song is “ladies’
choice,” with a control and ownership that continue
with her character throughout the film.
During her “Diamond Medley” performance, Kidman
interacts with a fairly large group of other women, though
almost always in a peripheral capacity. The rest of the Moulin
Rouge’s ladies of the night sing backup from the fringes
of the room, never interacting directly with her. Where Monroe
sang to surrounding women that “there may come a time
when a lass needs a lawyer,” Kidman sings a duet of
sorts with Harold Zidler, the proprieter of the Moulin Rouge,
played by Jim Broadbent, during which Zidler teases her with
diamonds and theatrically pinches her rear. Kidman is surrounded
by other can-can dancers during a mid-medley costume change,
but their backs are all turned to her as she preens in the
center. None of the women look at, acknowledge, or speak to
her; instead, the closest person Satine has to a confidante
is Zidler, who is aiding her in the costume change, and encouraging
her performances for the evening, both on stage and off.
Turning to the mise-en-scene, Moulin Rouge! both
adheres to and challenges the male gaze in a manner unmatched
by earlier versions of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s
Best Friend.” In many respects, the audience views Kidman
much as the male audience on screen does, eroticizing her
body. Kidman is clad in a sparkling silver and black leotard,
much like that originally designed, and then scrapped, for
Monroe’s performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
This costume is paired with three-quarter length black gloves,
which Kidman removes during the course of the performance,
an act implicitly speaking to the possibility of privileged
nudity to come, behind closed doors revealed to those fortunate
enough to be chosen to share her company. The male gaze works
directly on Satine as well, who is referred to as “the
Sparkling Diamond,” her valuation both linguistically
and through the politics of the gaze resulting in her being
viewed as an object rather than an individual human being,
a dramatic example of what Mulvey describes as “fetishistic
scopophilia, [which] builds up the physical beauty of the
object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself.”
Kidman also goes to great lengths in playing at feminine roles,
seen from the perspective of Zidler, during the isolated costume
change; discussing her meeting with the Duke, a possible investor,
later that evening, Satine asks Zidler, “What’s
his type? Wilting flower? Bright and bubbly? Or smoldering
temptress?” To which Zidler replies, “I’d
say … smoldering temptress,” prescribing the role
of femininity and sexuality she should play to please the
man paying for her favors. However, it is difficult to categorize
the “Diamond Medley” scene as adhering strictly
to the dynamics of the male gaze. As Douglas Jones writes,
“In the movie, the Moulin is defined above all by the
selling of illusions. Nothing is as it appears on the surface
– hence the play with mirrors and tricks of perspective,
as if the movie itself were inviting us, almost taunting us,
to read beyond its surface claims,” and Kidman’s
playfulness blends well with director Baz Luhrman’s
innovative filmmaking style. Much as Madonna’s “Material
Girl” lyrics were quite tongue-in-cheek, Kidman is saying
one thing, but meaning quite another, redeemed by her ownership
of self and the playful nature with which she approaches her
own representations of femininity and sexuality, reveling
in the extraordinary range of expressions and possibilities,
trading seriousness for irreverence, and finding enjoyment.
Cinematically speaking, Kidman also counters the male gaze
by staring directly into the camera at consistent intervals
throughout the “Diamond Medley,” her own gaze
aggressive and unflinching, with a power unmatched even by
Madonna’s “Material Girl” performance; this
returned look not only disrupts the viewer’s comfort
and complacency within the familiarity of the male gaze, but
also draws attention to constructions of femininity, both
expected and unexpected, challenging that which the reader
looks for, and reasserting the control Kidman wields of her
own representation.
A reprise of the “Diamond Medley” near the end
of the film, in the song “Hindu Sad Diamonds”
complicates this reading of Kidman’s earlier performance.
At this point in the film, Satine has learned that she is
dying, has sent Christian away with the lie that she does
not love him, and has resigned herself to joining the Duke
at the conclusion of the nightclub’s first legitimate
theatrical performance, for the good of the Moulin Rouge.
Singing a truncated version of the earlier rendition of “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” consisting now simply
of “kiss, hand / Diamonds best friend … Men, cold
/ Girls, old / And we all lose our charms in the end,”
the playfulness of representation has disappeared altogether,
leaving only despair, directing the attention of the viewer
to the drastic difference of context and construction of meaning.
In this performance, Kidman does not actively claim the diamonds,
but rather has them placed around her neck with a sense of
one being bound, imprisoned; the diamonds also become a claiming
mark of ownership, as on stage Zidler embraces Satine, with
the whispered words, “she is mine,” identically
echoed by the Duke as he sits in the audience. At two different
points in the film, in the performance of “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Kidman both finds and
loses herself, claims and is robbed of her agency and power,
a situation both intriguing and problematic. Looking at the
film in the context of its entirety, it is reasonably safe
to say that as Satine dies, she is herself, loving, honest,
and still seeking power over her own representation, as she
orders Christian to write their story.
Representations of femininity and sexuality have played an
integral role in style variations of the musical number “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend” throughout the last
fifty years. Brought to the big screen and made unforgettable
by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the
concept has been revisited by the popular music superstar
Madonna in her “Material Girl” video, and Nicole
Kidman in Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge!, among
others. United by a playful awareness of the performative
nature of femininity and sexuality, these three representations
each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, but each
negotiates and invents new meanings of these representations,
changing with the time periods of each performance, the woman
performing, and the perspective of the film or video viewing
audience, merging the delight of play with the seriousness
of feminine and sexual representation.
January 2006
From guest contributor Alissa Burger
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