It (review)

During the week that I read Joseph Roach's discerning and erudite account of the phenomenon known as "It," Carla Bruni, aka Madame Sarkozy, was visiting Britain. The former model was photographed in the tabloids nude at 15; she was compared in the "posh" papers, such as the Times and the Guardian, to Jackie Kennedy and Princess Di. Her clothes were discussed in great detail as was every gesture and turn of her pretty head. Surely, Carla Bruni Sarkozy has It. It seemed a fitting coincidence, since Roach's book begins with his personal sighting of Uma Thurman on the cover of GQ while in the barber's chair, and continues with his musing on her "countenance, the effortless look of public intimacy well known in actresses and models, but also common among high-visibility professionals of other kinds, [...] one part, albeit an important one, of the multifaceted genius of It" (3).

Yet this book is really the achievement of a performance scholar who is most emphatically a theatre historian, and Roach spends most of his time on the late 17th and 18th centuries, the period of the Stuart Restoration. He is interested in the way the public intimacy associated with It came into sharp relief during the reign of Charles II, when the King and the crop of new actresses on the Restoration stages brought the concept into focus, and then moved right down through the centuries into Hollywood and Clara Bow, eponymous It girl, by the 1920s. Although the book's pages are mostly occupied with the icons of the earlier era—their accessories, clothes, hair, skin, flesh, and bones (titles of the chapters)—it extends into the present, to Princess Di and even Margaret Thatcher in a sleight of hand/mind that proclaims: "The deep eighteenth century is the one that isn't over yet" (13).

The key device for this elastic approach is Roach's discovery and deployment of Elinor Glyn, who established the meaning of "It" in her novel of that name (1927). Elinor and her sister Lucile were born middle-class Victorians, but according to Roach, had the temperament of Edwardian "new women" who had moved from England to Hollywood. Lucile was a dressmaker who created "emotion dresses" for beautiful women, including costumes for Florenz Ziegfeld, while Elinor worked for Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer writing novels and screenplays, and teaching actress-icons such as Clara Bow how to behave and succeed—a little like Professor Higgins remade Eliza (the main subject of the chapter on flesh, Pygmalionism, is a key concept throughout). Glyn's prescient analysis joined the past to the present in the moment of the rise of the movie star:

Refracting the light of Hollywood star power through the peculiar lens of her romantic and archly royalist understanding of English history and culture, Glyn interpreted modern celebrity as a survival or longed-for revival of what she called the "ancien régime," which for her represented a return of the enchanted and enchanting "noblesse oblige" of monarchy, particularly that of the Stuarts, and above all that of Charles II, her favorite king.

(22)

Roach points out the affinity between Glyn and Samuel Pepys, whose diaries Glyn read and loved, and who was also an ambitious and active figure on the sidelines of celebrity and power in his time. Roach looks at Pepys's "awareness of the rise of synthetic experience" (26), which made him an excellent precursor to Glyn and guide to It at the court and in the theatres of the Restoration era.

Readers will recognize the extension of Roach's brilliant circum-Atlantic study, Cities of the Dead (1996), in the conceptual categories of this book. Surrogacy, effigy, and the kinesthetic imagination—the key terms that evoked the embodied transpositions of the human being in movement toward both death and preservation in cultural memory—are extended here into a vocabulary that seeks to define the afterimage of celebrity, the charismata and stigmata...