Careers in All About Eve: An Analysis of Gender, Competencies, and Institutional Dynamics, Slides of Acting

Download Careers in All About Eve: An Analysis of Gender, Competencies, and Institutional Dynamics and more Slides Acting in PDF only on Docsity! 1 All About Careers in All About Eve Kerr Inkson The question to be answered in this essay is: ‘How are careers constructed and presented in the film All About Eve, and how far do these constructions corre- spond to scholarly representations in the career studies literature?’ I will focus particularly on theatre as a context for careers; and the influence of gender, career competencies, roles and cycles. I will use career studies as presented in my book Understanding Careers1 as a template against which to consider the careers in the film. Careers as Drama Career studies is seldom used as a lens to study drama or film, careers perhaps being considered too workaday to illustrate great themes. Yet films such as Citizen Kane and the Godfather trilogy illustrate major career themes, and biopics are popular and often instructive about careers. A characteristic of careers is their evolution over time, and 1Kerr Inkson, Understanding Careers: The Metaphors of Working Lives (Sage Publications, 2007). 2 it is the time-based development of character and circumstances of career actors2 that provides the change and dynamism on which good films depend. Careers are there- fore often conceptualized, not least by those who enact them, as ongoing stories involving central heroes and heroines. Narrative analysis is increasingly popular as a theory and method of career counseling.3 All About Eve (hereafter referred to as AAE) traces the early career of actress Eve Harrington, as she befriends star actress Margo Channing and the members of her elite theatrical clique, then uses these contacts to progress quickly to stardom, a process involving her not just in conventional career development but in dissembling, lying, seduction and blackmail. For each major career protagonist in AAE, Eve and Margo, there is a compelling career storyline about striving for high goals, forming alliances, overcoming obstacles and moving to new places. What kinds of story and genre do such careers suggest? Is Eve a tragic heroine who pursues noble goals but is defeated by her transgression of cosmic laws or her own character flaws? Is she, like those who work for shady law firms, or secure contracts through bribery, making Faustian deals with the Devil? Or is her story a melodrama that bears little resemblance to the regular world of careers, yet documents fundamen- tal truths? Career studies may offer insights. A central dynamic in careers that is strongly represented in AAE is the tension between individual agency and societal institutions.4 Agency-driven views of career portray career actors as assertive controllers of their own destiny. Institutional views note the effects of wider forces such social class, gender, ethnicity, education, labor- market conditions and organization structure, which may provide opportunities for career actors’ agency, or constrain them.5 But films are often romantic creations that emphasize individual triumph over institutional forces. Reality may be different. For every stage-struck wannabe like Eve who succeeds, how many thousands are there who fail? AAE is bound to be a biased story, and in any case it contains various implausibilities.6 However, feature films are not documentaries but dramas. So here, 2‘Career actor’ is a term commonly used in career studies to denote any person in their role of pursuing a career. The term is used in that sense here and is therefore not restricted to people whose profession is acting. 3Inkson, Chapters 10 and 12. 4See, for example, Maury A. Peiperl and Michel B. Arthur, Topics for conversation: career themes old and new. In Career Frontiers: New Conceptions of Working Lives, edited by Maury Peiperl, Michael B. Arthur, Rob Goffee and Tim Morris (Oxford University Press, 2000). 5Inkson, Chapter 2. 6For example: Untrained actors without experience are unlikely to be given lead roles in their first plays, let alone win national awards for acting on the basis of one part in one play for a few months. Playwrights generally do not select the casts for particular productions of their plays, let alone delegate that task to their untrained wives. 5 and Margo. As Staggs notes, ‘Anne Baxter (Eve) and George Sanders (Addison), por- traying two characters of ambiguous sexuality, form parenthesis around the two het- erosexual goddesses (Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe)’.8 Here, Miss Caswell, wearing a glittering gown and a white fur stole, stands looking elegant and makes vacuous talk in the breathy, child-like Monroe manner, epitomizing the ‘dumb blonde’ aspirant star. Addison, far ahead of everyone else in understanding the incipient undercurrents of the plot, first takes Miss Caswell’s stole and pushes her gently in the direction of the producer Max, and then deposits the stole into Margo’s arms to be put away, a task previously performed by her PA Eve. The never-will-be and the has-been thus dis- patched, Addison then takes Eve’s arm to escort her into the party. In contrast to the striving, conflicted women, the men in AAE, Addison excepted, appear dull and complacent. (Addison is not dull, but he is the most complacent of all.) Lloyd the writer, Max the producer and Bill the director have moments of emotion and anger at the women: ‘Listen, junior, and learn,’ says Bill patronizingly to Eve before delivering an unsolicited seminar on the nature of theatre. But in the AAE story these men are nonentities. It is difficult to imagine that any theatrical production led by them could possibly have originality or sparkle. They do not have careers, so much as solid, secure occupations, in which they are all effortlessly successful. Even Addison tells Margo: ‘As you know, I have lived in the theatre as a Trappist monk lives in his faith. I have no other world, no other life.’ He too is utterly secure in his career. The men are also privileged with power. They mount the productions, author the roles, audition, cast and direct the players, and write the newspaper columns that can make or break careers. Their attitude to the women is nicely summed up by Lloyd in a line to Margo: ‘It’s about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto’. In Lloyd’s musical metaphor, actresses are not even musicians, they are mere instru- ments. In the figure-ground of AAE the men therefore provide little more than an institutional ground, of opportunity and constraint, upon which the figural women enact their careers. Do the women, then, have any power of their own? Eve, Margo and Miss Caswell maneuver to use the men, and their relationships with the men, to reach their career goals. And AAE occasionally utilizes the familiar ‘power-behind-the throne’ stereotype of female activity. For example, Eve and Karen plot to get Eve taken on as Margo’s understudy: ‘But what about Mr. Richards? And Mr. Sampson?’ asks Eve anxiously. ‘They’ll do as they’re told,’ replies Karen firmly. Elsewhere, AAE calls to mind the ‘casting couch’: but whereas the casting couch legend is usually taken as a symbol of powerful men’s oppression of gullible women, in AAE the women take the initiative. Eve tries to seduce both Bill and Lloyd, and at the party Miss Caswell, prompted by Addison, glides off towards Max in a predatory manner and secures an audition. When Margo arrives late for the audition in which Eve has substituted for her, she finds Bill and Lloyd lauding Eve, and lets fly a series of patronizing put-downs: she knows 8Sam Staggs, All About All About Eve (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), photo captions. 6 seduction when she sees it, and she knows it need not necessarily involve a bed (though, interestingly, there is one on-stage). Overall, though, the women’s strategies only underline their desperation in the face of overwhelming male domination. The film thus reprises the post-war Rosie the Riveter phenomenon9 in which return- ing male war heroes displaced the female workers who had learned to do their jobs equally well, for lower pay. The contrast of taken-for-granted male career success with angst-ridden female career striving could scarcely be more marked. Nevertheless, in the acting profession, there is at least a pinnacle of success (symbolized by the Sarah Siddons Award) for women, because they are not competing with men. Notwithstanding women’s recent advances in occupations such as law and medicine, there seem pre- cious few women playwrights, producers or directors, let alone CEOs.10 One analysis suggests that this is because, notwithstanding the competitive female behavior in AAE, women’s characteristic career orientation is to ‘communion’ whereas men’s is to ‘agency’, and that in the end women find the pressure and politics of the male world too aggressive for them and, like Margo, ‘drop out’.11 Career Competencies in All About Eve In AAE, how do career dynamics play out in the women’s careers? In one model, the Intelligent Career, career outcomes are based on the career competencies knowing- why (motivation and values); knowing-how (relevant experience, skills and expertise) and knowing-whom (personal relationships, networks and reputation).12 The careers of the female characters in AAE, especially Eve, provide instructive examples. Knowing-why In the West, career motivation is often based on a concept of individual success. This is described in AAE using mystical imagery, with terms such as ‘dream’, ‘girl on the moon’, ‘gods and goddesses’ and ‘rising in the East like the sun’. Also, AAE is framed, at its beginning and end, by the presentation ceremony for the Sarah Siddons Award, a prestigious symbol of success. In the closing scene of the film, Phoebe, her eyes shining, says she wants such an award ‘more than anything else in the world’. 9Connie Field (producer, director), The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. Documentary film, 1980. See IMDB. 10See Inkson, pp. 38–41 for a summary of the literature on women’s careers. 11Judi Marshall, Women Managers Moving On (Thomson, 1995). 12Polly Parker, Svetlana Khapova and Michael B. Arthur, The intelligent career framework as a basis for interdisciplinary inquiry. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2009, 75, 291–302. 7 AAE’s female characters focus on the success associated with being a ‘star’, but provide different interpretations. Phoebe poses happily with the Award, cradling it to her bosom and admiring her reflection in the mirrors: a narcissistic image. Miss Caswell appears mainly interested in extrinsic status symbols: she eyes a bundle of luxurious fur coats: ‘now there’s something a girl could make sacrifices for’. In contrast, Eve discusses with Addison the beginning of her new career path: Addison: All paved with diamonds and gold? Eve: You know me better than that. Addison: Paved with what, then? Eve: Stars! Eve does not crave the baubles of theatrical success, but its mystical dream. She appears to love the theatre. When she watches Margo’s acting, she looks tense, and breathes more heavily. Twice, when she contemplates the rewards of theatrical star- dom, she is half-caught-out in her deceptions. She forgets herself, steps out of role and speaks from the heart: If there’s nothing else, there’s applause. It’s like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine ... To know, every night, that different hundreds of people love you ... they smile, their eyes shine, you’ve pleased them, they want you, you belong. Just that alone is worth anything. The audience, and its recognition, are at the heart of Eve’s motivation. But by the end of the film she is already showing signs of being habituated to success. And, of course, objective career success, defined by measurable criteria such as money, awards, adula- tion and status, may be very different from subjective career success, the internal feel- ing of career satisfaction.13 Eve, in the final scene, is a sad figure. She has no friends left apart from the serpentine Addison, and even he prefers to go to another party. As her first response to stress she is already pouring a whisky. Then we see Phoebe in the next room, preening and posing with Eve’s dress as Eve once did with Margo’s, and we realize that success is all too transitory. Knowing-how In the knowing-how area, the career of Eve is again instructive. She is not just a moti- vated actress who networks effectively and gets lucky. Despite having no acting train- ing or experience, she apparently has consummate acting talent, which she uses first to take in a set of sophisticated theatre people; later, in audition, to captivate Addison, 13See, for example, Hugh Gunz and Peter Heslin, Reconceptualizing career success. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(2), 105–111. 10 comforting hand, Eve fastens the hand in a vice-like grip (focused on camera), and brings a new, hard edge into her breathy voice as she blackmails her friend. Thus, in an act of huge role plasticity, Eve changes instantaneously from little girl lost to Evil Catwoman. As she moves chameleon-like from role to role, her audience of celebrities is taken in, but one by one its members see her for what she is. Eve’s attempted seductions of Bill and Lloyd raise the interesting question: is Eve genuinely in love with these men, or is she playing lover merely as a role, in order to use them for her own career advancement? The speed with which she apparently recovers from the failure of the seductions strongly suggests the latter. Career Cycles Careers are cyclic. As people age, their lives are patterned chronologically – for exam- ple, through successive career stages of growth, exploration, establishment, mainte- nance and disengagement.19 Models based on the notion of seasons provide an element of predictability in careers.20 AAE presents Eve and Miss Caswell as striving to move from the springtime to the summer of their careers, Margo as preoccupied with autumn and Phoebe as a neophyte springtime girl. As the film proceeds, Margo mentions her age with increasing frequency. ‘Ten years from now,’ she tells Karen, ‘Margo Channing will have ceased to exist.’ In this, she sees what the men cannot, or will not: Lloyd says: ‘Stars never die, and never change.’ He and Bill are blinded by Margo’s talent and character, and cannot see seasonality and change. Addison, in contrast, cattily recalls Margo’s first appearance as a four-year-old fairy and suggests she reprise her performance in Peter Pan. Margo’s mid-career crisis is triggered by remarks by Eve about actresses who ‘continue playing roles requiring a youth and vigor of which they retain but a dim memory’. Wiser than the men, Margo resolves the issue not by defying the seasons, but by redirecting her career into a dif- ferent occupation which she calls ‘being a woman’ and ‘a foursquare, upright, down- right, forthright married lady’. Contemporary renditions of career cycles note how the seasonal cycle is overlaid and sometimes disrupted, especially for women, by another cycle, the courtship-and-family cycle,21 a truth that Margo has evidently taken on board. More broadly, AAE embodies a powerful appreciation of the cyclic nature of career success. All of its actors except Marilyn Monroe, were to find, retrospectively, that AAE 19Donald E. Super, ‘The life-span, life-stage approach to careers’, in Career Choice and Development, edited by Duane Brown and Linda Brooks (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990). 20Daniel J. Levinson and J.D. Levinson, The Seasons of a Woman’s Life (New York: Knopf, 1996). 21Saroj Pararuraman and Jeffrey H. Greenhaus (eds), Integrating Work and Family: Challenges and Choices for a Changing World (Westport, CT: Quorum, 1997). 11 represented the apex of their careers. And the final scene of AAE demonstrates with frightening clarity the possibility of the success cycle being very short indeed. Conclusion Returning to our starting-point, agency versus institution, I have tried to portray AAE as a tournament of women acting in a masculine way in an arena, and according to rules, dictated by men but susceptible at the margins to female game-playing such as Eve’s. I have shown how the nature of the theatre industry, the overlap of working and non-working lives, the deployment of career competencies and role plasticity, and the cyclic form of careers frame specific forms of career agency, both in general and in the careers of AAE characters. Despite its genesis 60 years ago, and its quirky thea- tre setting, All About Eve embodies many key themes about careers, particularly women’s careers, and could plausibly be used as a multi-purpose case study in any careers textbook.