3 - Mid-Century Masculinities: Presentation as Subtext in Photoplay January 1955

Summary

The value of fan magazines as historical artefacts has until fairly recently been contentious. In his 2011 article, Mark Glancy discusses the fan magazine's place in popular culture during the Second World War. He notes that historians had been reluctant to use fan magazines as a primary source of historical evidence since they are neither transparent nor neutral in their views. Further, and somewhat more revealing of certain historians’ underlying biases, Glancy reports that the readers of the magazines are also found wanting since historians’ ‘reluctance has stemmed partly from the traditional view of fans as passive, gullible, undiscriminating consumers’ (2011, 455).

Similarly, in Star Attractions: Twentieth-Century Movie Magazines and Global Fandom (2019) editors Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Lies Lanckman cite Anthony Slide's generally held assumption that the fan magazine was aimed at a reader who was ‘an average member of the moviegoing public who more often than not was female’ (1). They explain that fan magazines initially ‘summarized the plots of particular films in a story format’ but widened their content to encompass reviews, news and articles focusing on stars and related gossip (1). Therefore, if we replace the word ‘fans’ with ‘women’ in the quote by Glancy and consider this in combination with the seemingly lighthearted nature of fan magazines, it is not unreasonable to infer a gendered bias so entrenched that there was a failure to recognise the value of the magazines as primary historical evidence.

Using articles from a single issue of Photoplay, January 1955, this chapter will demonstrate how magazine editors communicated information about stars to their readers via a blend of visual signifiers and subtext. Four male stars are prominent in this issue – Victor Mature, Marlon Brando, Edmund Purdom and Rock Hudson – the presentation of whom demonstrates how editors constructed multilayered profiles avoiding explicit proclamations, but relying upon visual cues and allusions to tropes and stereotypes to hint at various subtexts, confident their skilful readers would pick up on their insinuations.