‘House of Gucci’: handbags and the male gaze
Earlier this week, Ridley Scott said something that I thought was very dumb. On the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, Scott declared that millennials were to blame for the commercial failure of his latest box-office bomb, The Last Duel, saying, “What we’ve got today is the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cell phones. The Millennian do not want ever to be taught anything…unless you are told it on the cell phone.” He then made some vague claim about the problem with “this latest generation” being represented in what “we’re dealing with right now with Facebook” giving young people “the wrong kind of confidence.” It’s very old-man-yells-at-cloud and I’m not totally sure what he even means by it.
Maybe that’s because I listened to his words on my laptop rather than a cellphone and, as we all know, Millenials refuse to learn things unless it’s taught via phone, but I highly doubt Scott really knows what he meant either. For one thing, he references “the Millennian” ( a word that is not often used to describe Millenials) as being “the latest generation,” seemingly unaware that Generation Z–the actual latest generation to begin hitting adulthood–and Millenials are separate groups. For another, his go-to example for how that latest generation is being corrupted by technology is their use of Facebook, the social media site Gen Z almost unanimously believes is “for old people.” Research shows that Baby Boomers are nearly 7 times more likely to share fake news on Facebook than users under 30–how’s that for “the wrong kind of confidence”?
I don’t expect Scott to know all this offhand, but it seems a bit silly to deflect the personal responsibility of your film’s commercial failure by blaming an entire generation for issues you clearly know little about. Maron and Scott portray themselves as confused over the flop, Maron saying the “excitement of the idea of the period and the action” should have brought a young audience to the film which Scott agrees with, adding that the casting of Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Adam Driver was an asset as well. It’s hard to grasp how out-of-touch these men actually are. Does Marc Maron genuinely think young people are clamoring to see action-based period pieces? Does Ridley Scott really believe twenty-year-olds care about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon? Especially of the latter claim, the notion is absurd.
The dialogue annoyed me in two ways. Firstly, the Boomer instinct to blame all individual and societal failures onto Millenials/Zoomers and their goddamn smartphones is tired and receives far too much shallow exploration (admittedly, I too am oversimplifying the generational divide right now as I pin this whole thing onto a Boomer mentality despite Scott being at least a decade too old to qualify).
Secondly, I think it’s unfair how freely middle-aged-and-older white men in the entertainment industry get to insult whole groups of people with little-to-no consequence. As an opinionated person myself–who, likewise, often doesn’t know what she’s talking about–I ultimately think it’s nice that someone as successful as Scott gets to go onto a podcast and bitch about whole generations of people, even if I disagree with the substance of his rant. Unfortunately, women in film are held to a much higher standard of civility, many of Hollywood’s biggest female stars voicing constant fear over being deemed “difficult” and losing jobs in repentance. Katherine Heigl had her entire career derailed for saying her character’s depiction in Knocked Up was “a little sexist,” while directors like Scott and Martin Scorsese go around openly trashing superhero movies as a genre, Scott saying in the past that the scripts for Marvel and DC comic films are straight-up “not any fucking good.”
If the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements didn’t already make it clear, men in the film industry hold a ridiculous amount of power and privilege that actively undermines the importance of non-male perspectives. Even in film criticism, this has become a running theme throughout history, most notably identified by the popular concept of the “male gaze.” It’s a term that’s been bastardized plenty of times (I’m about to do it here!), but it mostly refers to ways in which female bodies are shown on film in popular media. You’ll see it most often applied to gratuitous shots of women’s bodies in overtly sexualized manners, but the main concept revolves around perspective. For most of history, movies have dominantly been 1) made by men, 2) starring men, and 3) aimed at men, meaning the ripple effect of the male gaze can extend to movies where women’s bodies are barely involved.
I’m not putting this idea forth as a way to deride men as a group or the “male gaze” as a concept. It’s absolutely fine that some movies are made with a male audience in mind and anyone can enjoy filmmaking that comes from a masculine perspective regardless of gender identity (personally, I have a soft spot for the 2007 movie, Beowulf, which is male gaze all over). What’s problematic is how the male gaze has become a mainstream film language default.
This brings me to House of Gucci.
House of Gucci, a fictionalized take on the real-life downfall of the Gucci family’s fashion reign, is mostly a good movie. At times, it’s a great movie, especially in scenes anchored by the performances of Lady Gaga (playing the film’s main character, Patrizia Reggiani), and Jared Leto (playing the Gucci brand’s one-time chief designer, Paulo Gucci). I’m biased for my Mother Monster, but trust that I wouldn’t compliment Jared Leto’s creepy-ass unless I had to; his and Gaga’s characters are the focal points of the film’s campy potential, a welcome contrast against the more serious tones of the other Gucci’s tense family drama (plenty of critics have panned Leto’s performance, but I uphold that his work in the film only suffered due to the stiff performances of the other actors who may as well have been in a different movie).
Ridley Scott is an undoubtedly talented director and plenty of his films, specifically Alien and Thelma and Louise, have received attention for the development of their main female protagonists. Especially in the case of Thelma and Louise, praise for the film’s feminism is well earned and I respect the emphasis Scott’s films typically place on the female experience. That said, like old white men in the industry have the privilege to openly discuss concepts they barely understand and not fear for the stability of their careers, they also have the privilege of taking on projects they have little business in manning. Ridley Scott’s direction of House of Gucci is adequate and the film is good enough, yet I still can’t help but think about what a masterpiece it could have been with a director who better understood the material.
Funnily enough, by “material” I almost literally mean the fashion. Gucci is not just an empire with a fascinating history of in-family feuding, it is one of the most influential clothing brands of the 20th and 21st centuries, yet the filmmakers appear expressly disinterested in exploring that history of fashion. Even when it starts to dabble in it, bringing in fictionized versions of Tom Ford and Vogue’s Anna Wintour toward the end of the film, it’s by that point too little too late–afterthoughts following sprawling narratives of criminal activity and familial tensions without much reference to the beloved clothing that holds the Gucci name up.
As applied to female bodies, a hallmark of the male gaze is shots of women’s body parts disconnected from the totality of their person–close-up shots of legs, lips, tits, ass, etc. Such a technique could have actually been utilized in a positive way on House of Gucci’s fashion, but it rarely is. Gucci purses occupy the background of shots as set decor or are central in frame so long as a character is discussing them for plot purposes, but there are no sweeping shots of lush fabrics or magnificent designs, leaving little opportunity for audiences to revel in the actual products that make Gucci famous. It’d be disingenuous to claim fashion has nothing to do with the film’s storytelling (you can find plenty of breakdowns on the clothing choices online and the costuming department certainly did their best with the material they were given), but it never rises beyond traditional film set-design in a way that truly honors the history of one of fashion’s biggest brands.
Consider in contrast another comedy-drama with a fashion-industry backdrop. The Devil Wears Prada, released in 2006, also explores the ethically-compromising drama of fashion marketing, though this time revolving around the fictional fashion magazine Runway, a stand-in for the real-life Vogue. One of the film’s most famous scenes contains a monologue in which Meryl Streep’s character, a stand-in for the real-life Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, chastises Anne Hatheway’s protagonist for disregarding the influence of fashion’s most elite taste-makers thereby belittling an industry that supports “millions of dollars and countless jobs.” The scene verbalizes a love for fashion and an insistence on taking it seriously that’s reinforced through the rest of the movie’s filmic language. There are many lingering shots on individual pieces, montages of wardrobe changes, and references to various designers that remind the audience of how the clothing industry is filled with reverence-worthy material. Filmmakers on The Devil Wears Prada just seem to value fashion far more than Ridley Scott appears willing to explore on House of Gucci, despite the two depicting aspects of the same industry.
Scott’s movie has an element of male gaze in that way. It’s not in how the female participants are characterized or shot per se–though it does extend to that in how little emotional development Patrizia actually receives–but in how a male perspective pervades the film’s disregard for the femininely-perceived fashion industry. So much time is spent hashing out tedious disagreements between the patriarchs of Gucci that the film leans far more in the direction of The Godfather than is advantageous for the source inspiration. There’s so much opportunity for trashy grandeur and an over-indulgence of material goods that are squandered by scenes of men in cool-toned suits trying to raise tension through dialogue alone.
The problem is not that Ridley Scott is male or that men can’t tell stories that honor an industry with a traditionally feminine audience. The Devil Wears Prada is also directed by a man and both films have a female screenwriter, but The Devil Wears Prada seems firmly aware that the movie is a chick-flick. House of Gucci as a crime drama could never quite go the same route tonally, but it could certainly be more playful in how it expresses its campy nature. Not only do the filmmakers seem disinterested in fashion, it appears they also didn’t realize or consider the audience the film’s casting and subject matter was going to accrue. You get the sense that House of Gucci’s creative leads believed the film’s showings would dominantly be populated by dramatic crime-film lovers, rather than the very gay, very Gaga audience coming to watch Mother Monster gesticulate with an Italian accent for two-and-a-half hours.
More so than her pop peers, Lady Gaga helped bring high-fashion into the world of mainstream celebrity culture, and her fans know that. Casting Gaga in a film about a fashion empire while barely exploring the fashion itself is a missed opportunity that leaves the film feeling empty in contrast to what it could have accomplished.
Much like the generational demographics sharing fake news on Facebook, Ridley Scott doesn’t seem to understand the implications of the movie he’s cast and directed. Gucci and Gaga have legacies in the world of high-fashion that are meaningful and monumental, but Scott’s direction wrongly assumes House of Gucci’s audience won’t care about them as he likely doesn’t.
That being said, I do recommend House of Gucci for the things it does well (mostly, that is, letting Gaga and Leto have free reign over their fantastically campy characters), just maybe not as much as I recommend The Devil Wears Prada.