From Tuxedo to Gown: Dietrich's Haunted Dressing Room(s)

The Haunted Queer Body—An Introduction

Although many feminist film scholars have written about Marlene Dietrich's body through the lens of feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and semiotics—particularly in the 1990s¹—there is a current gap in performance studies literature regarding ways in which Dietrich's always already femme fatale body is haunted not only by her celebrity, but by her previous roles as a stage cabaret performer, which contain explicitly queer content. My essay joins the ongoing conversation about queer embodiment by braiding together three strands of theory in regard to Marlene Dietrich's theatrical performances on screen: performance phenomenology, haunting/ghosting, and queer futurity. In order to create a fuller understanding of the potential of the queer body to resist, subvert, invent, and become, I position the dressing room as both a metaphorical and literal space of transformation.

This article focuses on Marlene Dietrich's queer female embodiment and her theatrical use of tuxedo-and gown-drag, specifically situating this theatrical site of gender transformation to be the dressing room space in Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film Morocco.² To theorize Dietrich's queer-haunted embodiment in this space, I lean on Marvin Carlson's theory of ghosts and hauntedness as a method for grounding the intertextuality of Dietrich's body as she changes from tuxedo to gown.³ I utilize my own performative queer voice in this essay as a deliberate addition to the academic archive. Embodied experiences, particularly those of marginalized populations, have historically been omitted from the archive.⁴ By discussing Dietrich's queer embodiment using my own queer embodied voice, I join scholars who are also creating new forms of theorizing queer embodiment as well as creating new methods of queer historiography.

The Dressing Room: A Haunted (Queer) Space for a Haunted (Queer) Body

Have you been in a dressing room before? Can you remember how it looks? How it smells? Can you go a little further and feel backward⁵ affectively through time to an instance when you sat at a mirror putting on stage makeup, glancing over at a bouquet of flowers an admirer sent you, and maybe—if you try hard enough—can you even read the little rectangular card that says, "Break a leg!"? As I begin the body of my essay, I hope you are with me in this dressing room where the power of potential transformation buzzes in the air. Yes, there is a particularly embodied and heightened energy that takes place in a dressing room prior to a performance that involves a performer managing material objects and harnessing an array of converging internal conditions before taking the stage. The dressing room is a space unlike other theatrical spaces, in which bodies can transform into beings that have only existed in the imagination. It is here that audiences and performers alike expect the actor's embodiment to shift from ordinary to extraordinary through the use of costuming and makeup.

Depending on the theatre's architecture and/or the context of a performance itself, a dressing room experience can run a wide range. A performer may encounter everything from a no-frills makeshift curtain hung from PVC pipe in an offstage corner next to the prop table to a luxurious private dressing room complete with upscale furniture and warm, cozy lighting. As a performer moves incrementally toward the heart of a performance—from the street outside, through the stage door, into the dressing room, then off to the wings, and finally onto the stage itself—an actor uses these spatial markers to transition from their personal identity into the identity taken on in the performance onstage. The average person does not often (or ever) see this journey toward the stage. However, Marlene Dietrich starred in many films that grant us access to this journey. In these films, audiences are allowed a glimpse at such a theatrical transformation as layers are peeled back from both the on-and off-stage embodiment of a cabaret performer.

It seems only fitting at this time to invite the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, dressed as Amy...