Historical Text

Some Like it Hot 1959



Billy Wilder

Some Like It Hot (1959) is a comedy film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon

Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4TuJv7dgj0



The protagonist of this film is a female and this is fairly suprising as it was produced in 1959,before this women never played a main role and were mere eye candy to male audiences,the reason for a female having the protagonist role could be the accurrance of the first wave of feminism when women began to be recognised in society and therefore it was starting to be reflectd in society.

The film stars Mariyln Manroe,a media sex symbol.In the film she is represented as passive and naive. However although she is represented in that way her costume is also very revealing and her breast's and beauty are often focused on throughout the film. This is done to attract male audiences to satisfy their sexual pleasures. Throught the film she uses her assets to get money and sexual plesure.Doing this can also show her power as she is able to get money and please herself through simply seducing a man, this makes the male character seem foolish .

Men in the film are also represented as powerful through the use of guns etc however in more recent texts propps like these are used by females to show their power and authority for example "Tomb Raider".

The female gaze is also applied in this film as marilyn manroe wants to have sex and gazes over at the man she wants,female audiences will identify with her and also do the same.

Sex and the city differs from Some Like it Hot in the sense that mariylyn manroe isnt shown as inependant and working with a job, where as all four girls in sex and the city have well paid jobs in the city which result in the being very materialistic girls.

However it is also very similar in ways they use there body and beauty to seduce men and get what they want.

The character of samantha is very self absorbed and career obsessed and at the end of the film decided to leave her actor boyfriend so she can live her life, she says at the begining of the film "you know me i dont really believe in marriage now botox on the otherhand works everytime", this shows that women are now more in to them selves their looks and careers rather than settling down and getting married to have children.

This is not much the case in Some like it hot as getting married is represented as the most important thing to do in a young womens life.



Suprisingly women started appearing in comedies like these very early.



"Some Like It Hot" depicted a male world so predatory that the heroes were literally forced to abandon their sexual identities in order to survive"

http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/masterpiece/2002/02/11/some_like_hot/print.html





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Like_It_Hot




-Judith Butler: "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader.
-David Glover and Cora Kaplan: "Introduction: Gendered histories, gendered contexts, from their book Genders.
-Maggie Humm: Feminism and Film.
-Laura Mulvey: "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in Film Theory.
-Marry Ann Doane: "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body" in Feminism and Film.