Thousand Ways There Are to Move: Camp and Oriental Dance in the Hollywood Musicals of Jack Cole1, The

Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, Spring 2003 by McLean, Adrienne L

Of course Marilyn Monroe is not visually, recognizably, an oriental dancer, just as the dancers in On the Riviera are not. Yet I believe that, in Cole's hands, Orientalism was part of an often transformative and empowering Camp discourse; whether one calls her a phallic woman or not, what would Marilyn Monroe be without her musical performances, or the humor, ironic sense, confidence, and authority revealed by them? Even while Jack Cole was, as an Orientalist, as a man, as an American man, an "oppressor" in some senses, he also understood what it was, as a gay man, as an artist, as a dancer, to be oppressed. He had a great deal of sympathy for female stars such as Monroe and Rita Hayworth and the "ordeals" that their celebrity brought to them; this is why he was in such demand as a choreographer and coach by women stars (Loney 1984: 208). Yet he could be brutal and demanding, and had a infamous and occasionally violent temper.32 The scantily clad women tied to chandeliers in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, for example, can also be read, like much appropriated Camp discourse, as "straight" misogyny (Loney 1984: 205).33 In short, Cole's work is most interesting because of its different hidden transcripts and the way that, filtered through the dominant discourse that is classical Hollywood cinema, different forms of oppression intersect in it.

I also suggest that, even when performed by Marilyn Monroe or Jane Russell, American dance is profoundly marked by Cole's Orientalist practices, assumptions, and input, just as it is by African, Latin, Spanish, and other ethnic dance forms. In fact, film scholars may have taken only a limited interest in Jack Cole's work until now precisely because it looks so familiar, so similar to that of other choreographers who have acquired the status of film auteurs, such as Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse.34 But it was Cole's work, both through his films and, more crucially, through the dancers and choreographers who worked for him, that was the influential force. Over and over again dancers talk about how important Cole was: Barrie Chase believes that his "combining of modern, Oriental, and jazz movement, his way of digging into the ground, of breaking down dance steps and body movement, of exact counting of every part of every step" made Jack Cole "the innovator of the way we move now" (Delamater 1981: 115). According to Barton Mumaw, Jack Cole "[changed] the shape of nightclub, film, and theater dance in his comparatively brief lifetime" (Sherman and Mumaw 1986: 151). Agnes de Mille admits that other choreographers, including herself, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins, "all stole from Jack Cole" (Gottfried 1991: 81). Although Jack Cole "was the first choreographer working in Hollywood to revolutionize dance in both technique and content," as a Fosse biographer writes, Cole remains unknown by all but the most "concerned" of scholars and fans (Grubb 1989: 57).

Musical numbers, even in Hollywood films, can permit, in ways we have only begun to think about, what Judith Hanna calls the "exploration of dangerous challenges to the status quo without the penalties of the quotidian" (Hanna 1993: 120). She goes on to say that any musical number potentially not only "reflects what is but also suggests what might be" in terms of sexual mores and gender roles (Ibid., 132). In the end, as Orientalism, as a product of Said's "imaginative geography" and its racism and homophobia, Jack Cole's Orientalist dance practice enabled him in the context of Eurocentric domination of non-Western cultures, just as the fact that he was a male enabled him in the context of American patriarchy. Cole's Orientalist practice was disabling to him too, because through it he identified himself with qualities-femininity, passivity, homoeroticism-that both Orientalism as a department of thought and expertise and American culture itself insisted were incompatible with American masculinity. According to dance scholar Svea Becker, Cole's use of ethnic dance allowed him to observe and comment upon, as well as satirize, American society; but to do this, "he had to go outside of it" (Becker 1989:11).