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A Review of Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream Abrams, Brett L. Hollywood Bohemians: Transgress ive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream. New York: McFarland and Co., 2008. 256 pages, with photographs
Garbo. Her gender-bending image is iconic. She appears in a tux, smoking a cigarette, flirting, kissing. To whom are her innuendos and advances directed? Men? Women? Both?
Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream by Brett L. Abrams takes up Garbo and other gender-bending and sexually transgressive figures and topics of the early Hollywood period from 1917 to 1941 to render for us a complex picture of how an industry, consciously or not, mobilized sex to sell. In his handsomely written and well researched volume, Abrams subtly counters past work by Vitto Russo and William J. Mann that recognizes the contributions of sexual outlaws to Hollywood while focusing on the generally negative images of such outlaws in Hollywood films and promotional materials. Instead, contends Abrams, an historian and archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, images of "sexual transgression" in Hollywood were used both to bolster gender and sexual norms and to entice movie- goers' and patrons' attention with a "taboo" yet exciting Hollywood lifestyle.
Abrams developed his thesis while doing archival research in the Library of Congress's Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. Looking specifically at depictions of Hollywood by Hollywood - including movies, seventy Hollywood novels, and gossip columns and stories in a variety of industry newspapers, magazines, and tabloids - Abrams noted how images of adulterers, homosexuals, crossdressers were often presented as "bohemians," not just sinners, perverts or social outcasts. The difference is subtle but ultimately profound, and we can sense the power of such bohemian images still today in the tuxwearing figure of Garbo, whose image seems designed more to lure than to censure.
But lure to what? Abrams posits the following thesis: "Unlike all the other images of Hollywood, the bohemians linked these famous movie industry places with unusual people and...