Museum Crawl
I’ve been haunting Pittsburgh museums a lot lately. My favorite thing to do is get a pass to the Museum of Natural History on my lunch break and just stroll through the Hillman Hall of Minerals & Gems. That exhibit, however, will be closing soon so they can cycle new material in. I guess I’ll finally have to man up and see Dinosaurs in Their Time: T. rex vs. T. rex. The revamped exhibit has attained an almost mythic status in my mind due to my love of the original and the additional T. rex, and I’m afraid I won’t like the new version. (I have peeked on the ‘net, though. Check out the rockin’, high-resolution press photos here. Total eye candy and desktop wallpaper fodder!)
It seems like everything is aimed at kids these days in most museums, a problem that was made explicit by my recent trip to the Carnegie Science Center. If little brats can’t fondle, slurp, and sniff an exhibit the museum isn’t interested. (And honestly, it’s all about engineering anyways–the practical application of technology. Not really pure science.)
Against my better judgment I also went to see the Science Center’s Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition. Just like Bodies, it was all sensationalism and spectacle. Instead of discussing something scientific, like how the ship sank, how the artifacts survived, or how the artifacts were recovered, the exhibit instead focused on a narrative of the ship sinking and personal stories. I was even given a boarding pass, and was cheerily encouraged to “see if you survive the voyage”. Jacques Heath Futrelle, whose “boarding pass” I was given, died, although his wife survived. I thought it was in very poor taste the way children and adults alike ran to the roster board at the end of the exhibit to “see if I survived”. (Life-size replicas of rooms from the ship further encouraged this role-playing.) Even if it was intended as a sobering activity, it sure didn’t turn out that way.
I did, however, enjoy The Alps, an Omnimax feature chronicling John Harlin III’s attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger. Although it wasn’t brilliantly constructed or particularly illuminating in terms of geology, climatology, or mountaineering, the footage of the Swiss Alps was stunningly beautiful. They also used a bunch of Queen’s songs for the soundtrack, which I was more than pleasantly surprised by.
If I don’t make it to Mars, perhaps I can make it to the Alps.
On a related IMAX note, I saw The Dark Knight and though it was terrible, although not worse than Batman Begins. Poor editing and pacing (save in the action sequences, of course!), a flat and uninteresting Batman (par for the live-action course), a claptrap, bombastic, and ultimately trite set of characters’ motivations (I’m looking at you, agents of chaos), and finally a Ledger performance that didn’t live up to hype. Some of the method acting on Ledger’s part was just terrible. All that tongue wagging? Honestly!
:: Bibliography ::
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Franzos, Joshua (photographer). 17 June 2008. Staff Preview Day for Phase Two of Dinosaurs in Their Time: T. rex vs. T. rex . Carnegie Museum of Natural History. http://www.carnegiemnh.org/news/08-apr-jun/061708preview.htm (28 August 2008).
Catwoman and her Costume (Redux)
Mrrow.
My sister was telling me about the Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy exhibit at the Met and mentioned that she’d seen Catwoman’s costume from Batman Returns there, among other things. (You may remember that I posted a video about the making of Catwoman’s costume a while back.) They’ve a pretty interesting interview with Bob Ringwood (a costume designer for Batman Returns) and Jeff Gent (of Syren Couture, who constructed the costume, pictured above, for the exhibit). Also, an unattributed essay discusses Catwoman’s costume, although I don’t agree with the assertions the author makes at the essay’s conclusion. I’m reproducing both here because it’s too much to paraphrase, and because exhibit websites have a funny way of disappearing after the exhibit closes. (Think of it as an archival version, Met, and please don’t sue me!)
Catwoman
We had to justify the catsuit. Where did the Selina Hasting (Kyle) character get it? So we (Mary Vogt and I) discussed with the Tim Burton idea of shooting a scene were she made it herself out of a shiny black raincoat and used her sewing kit to make the claws. The scene works well in the film and has charm and is quite amusing.
I felt from the start that the catsuit had to be sexy but not trashy or cheap. It had to be classy. Black, shiny fetish clothing can very easily slip into the sleaze/porn world and this, after all, was a film for family viewing.
We tried to give the suit a playful, kittenish quality while still retaining a sleek, sexy appeal. The rough white home-made stitches on the shiny black suit were whimsical yet helped elevate the design by giving it an abstract graphic art quality. The whole design presented the head and face and the only colour in the costume is on the lips.
The makeup reinforced the monochrome black-and-white concept of the design, which was punctuated by the bright red lips, adding hugely to the impact. This was helped a great deal by the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer. She played the character with a refinement and wit that helped keep the design wholesome and playful, yet still remaining extremely sexy without becoming vulgar.
—Bob Ringwood
My work on the Catwoman costume for Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, began by sorting through Syren Couture’s Archives to see what I could find from our work on Batman Returns. I was able to locate several detailed drawings, which mapped the location of each of the individual cast-rubber sets of “stitches” on the costume; a critical piece of information for the re-creation. Bob Ringwood, the costume designer, was nice enough to send several high-resolution photographs of the costume for reference. The Warner Brothers Archive was very helpful by allowing me access to the original Catwoman costumes to take extensive measurements and photographs of the original suits.
A new pattern was created using all of these resources, but to get the proper fit, draping directly on the mannequin was the best solution. Each pattern piece was then cut from garment-quality rubber sheeting which we import from England. Since rubber will tear easily if sewn, we use a custom-formulated glue to hold the seams together. I made several prototypes of the costume, making adjustments of the fit while each was still on the mannequin. When the basic rubber suit had been perfected, it was time for the final touches.
—Jeff Gent, Syren Couture
Paradoxical Body
Superhero comics have tended to promote an ideology that is both masculinist and driven to mastery. Nowhere are these biases more blatant than in the representation of female superheroes. With unabashed and unapologetic obviousness, women are portrayed as objects of male desire and fantasy with absurdly exaggerated sexual characteristics. While it is true that the costumes worn by male superheroes can also be defined by an overt sex appeal, those worn by their female counterparts tend to reveal a lot more bare flesh. But the frisson of fetishistic sexuality presented by female superheroes is adduced with one hand only to be dismissed with the other. This offering and denying of sexuality, which helps to resolve the sexual fears and desires of developing males, is the eternal paradox of the superheroine.
Catwoman, through her radical split of conscience between “good girl” and “bad girl,” literalizes this contradiction. Created by artist Bob Kane, she was inspired, in part, by Hedy Lamarr, whom Kane admired for her “great feline beauty.” When she first appeared in Batman No. 1, Spring 1940, she was known simply as The Cat, a female burglar. Her real name was Selina Kyle, and originally she was characterized as a sybaritic socialite whose initial impulse to steal stemmed from ennui. Over the years, both her origin story and her costume have undergone several redesigns. While in some cases the costume changes parallel (and signal) character transformations, in others they seem to be purely for the sake of fashionable appearances. Indeed, in another instance of comic-book chauvinism, female characters are typically subject to more stylistic makeovers, whether radical or restrained, than their male counterparts. Submission to the dialectics of fashion is presented as another expression of a fetishized femininity. Fetishism is a defining ingredient to Catwoman’s wardrobe. She is best known, perhaps, for catsuits that cleave to the body, due in large part to the portrayals of the character by Julie Newmar in the television series Batman (1966) and Michelle Pfeiffer in the film Batman Returns (1992). Typical of the intermedia cross-pollination for which superheroes are famous, the costumes of both actresses served to inspire and influence those worn by Catwoman in her comic-book representation.
As apparel, the catsuit has long been identified with the dominatrix, an archetype frequently associated with Catwoman. Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance strengthened this connection by spotlighting the themes of alpha-cat and submissive kitten-like behavior. Her costume, which co-opted the traditional iconography of the dominatrix, included associated paraphernalia such as a whip, gloves, and high-heel shoes.
The visual and symbolic language of Catwoman resonates strongly in fashion, especially in the work of Thierry Mugler, John Galliano, Dolce & Gabbana, Gianni Versace, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Alexander McQueen. All these designers, like Catwoman (and, indeed, female comic-book characters generally), have been attracted to the wardrobe of the dominatrix and its associations of a liberated sexuality. Conceptually loaded and psychologically coded items such as catsuits, corsets, bustiers, and harness bras, usually in black “wet-look” materials like leather, rubber, and polyvinyl chloride, have in the hands of these outré designers achieved widespread acceptance as exotic-erotic haute couture. But in co-opting these sexual clichés, fashion has, in the process, muted their meanings and sanitized their subtexts. In much the same way as comic books, fashion presents elements of fetishistic sexuality stereotypically, undermining, or at least redirecting and repositioning, its subversive, sadomasochistic underpinnings. While presented blatantly, erotic energies, like the feral nature of Catwoman, are tamed, neutered, and, ultimately, neutralized.
:: Bibliography ::
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paradoxical Body | Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy | Special Exhibitions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/special/superheroes/paradoxical.asp (16 July 2008).
- Ringwood, Bob, and Jeff Gent. Costume Designer Quotes | Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy | Special Exhibitions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/special/superheroes/designer_quotes.asp (16 July 2008).
