THE PIN-UP |
Although the pin-up is a concept familiar to everyone, there have been few scholarly examinations of the genre. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has no article on the subject, nor has Encarta. Books which re-print photographs of glamour queens of the past make no attempt to explain either the fascination of pin-ups or what they say about people's imaginations.
The most common misconception
about pin-ups is that it is a recent, Twentieth Century invention. Pin-ups have
been traced as far back as a suggestive woodcut in 1491, and
in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, postcards adorned with pin-ups were
popular. Since then pin-ups have been reproduced in magazines and books, on
posters and cigarette cards, on calendars and record covers.
What is the enduring attraction of a pin-up? Over the past fifty years there have been various ideas, none of them really plausible. One school of thought believes a pin-up is a private matter, representing one person's ideal image of the opposite sex. The obvious flaw with this theory is that people with quite different tastes in real women often have the same taste in pin-ups! Some feminists contend that pin-ups are an indication of masculine inadequacy, and show that men prefer to dream about fantasy females rather than deal with real women. However, men whose lives prove they are unintimidated by women also have their pin-up favourites, and women have their pin-ups as well.
Almost certainly the lure of pin-ups is a combination of factors, many of which are rooted deep in human nature.
Most people instinctively appreciate beauty for its own sake. They are willing to stop and admire a setting sun, a glorious cloud formation or a picturesque landscape. This admiration is not confined to visible beauty. People respond to beautiful sounds - a smooth voice, a sweet violin tone, an echo in a natural acoustic - and delight in the feel of high quality fabric or well-made furniture.
Another aspect of human instincts is our readiness to admire physical excellence, be it sporting prowess, dancing skill or personal elegance.
A further feature of human nature is that most people
have a limited capacity for reality and, away from the barest fundamentals of
life, prefer fantasy to reality. This instinct convinces us that a newly
elected politician will be honest and work for the public good. It dupes us into believing that the person with whom we have fallen in love is different from other people.
It tells us that some-one who is polite and charming must have an honourable character
as well. It persuades
us that we understand
what drives and torments public figures we have never met, like Marilyn Monroe
and Princess Diana, even though all we really know about them is what the media
has chosen to propagate.
A combination of these different strands of human nature prompts us to admire beautiful people, and to deem them more interesting than other people. This admiration is not necessarily prurient, but it does create in us an inclination to look with pleasure at images of glamorous women, be they in magazines, on advertisement hoardings or pasted to a factory wall. It has always made men enjoy looking at show girls in theatres and night clubs.
Given that the fascination of pin-ups involves a measure of fantasy, it was inevitable that the worlds of movies and pin-ups would overlap.
Movies hold three main lines of fascination for the general public. The first is that movies provide a socially respectable object for our voyeur instinct, an instinct we are unable to control. The second is that movies are well suited for telling stories. As most people have an affinity with narrative, this make movies engrossing; the better the story, the more compelling the film.
The third is the deployment of unusually attractive women.
Throughout the world, throughout history, and regardless of local cultures, one of the major conventions of narrative is that the heroine should be young and attractive. There have been very few deviations from this convention. In a novel, the author has to describe the heroine and make her attractive. A movie can show the heroine and photograph her in ways that are borrowed from the world of pin-ups.
It is not surprising that one of the first general responses to movies was curiosity about the actresses. It is no coincidence that the period when the movie industry incorporated the pin-up culture was also the period when movies had their widest appeal. It is not by chance that the most popular and admired 'Bond girl' is still Ursula Andress, the only Bond actress to have been a phenomenal beauty. Nor is it a coincidence that today, when the movie industry no longer admires beauty for its own sake, new movies appeal to a smaller section of society than ever before.
If the movie industry wishes to regain the interest of all age groups, all income brackets, and all social spheres in all the countries of the world, there are two main avenues for it to explore. One is to have better stories. The other is to employ actresses who do not look like the young women who work in the local supermarket, who do not resemble the girls who travel on the same train to work as the rest of us, and who seem to have very little in common with the girls who work in the office down the hall.