Hedy Lamarr

Much has been made recently of actress Hedy Lamarr as an inventor, with the convenient and predictable backstory of "beauty and brains."

Feh.

Why is it that one's appearance, over which one has little control, could somehow preclude one's having intelligence? Do men really want dumb but good-looking women, or more to the point, do they believe that all good-looking women must of necessity be dumb?

Hedy Lamarr didn't make a lot of great movies, and is far from an icon today, as Rhagen Russell writes in her preceptive article, In Which Hedy Lamarr Refuses To Stand Still And Look Stupid. To some extent it may be that she looked so good she didn't look real, and the filmmakers couldn't figure out what to do with her. She might, also, not have been that great an actress. But one thing is absolutely certain—she was beautiful. Russell has her own ideas on the subject:

In a culture that compels women to view themselves as they imagine others view them, and to act always in anticipation of or response to that assessment, the camera is a perfect catalyst for self-objectification. The vast public eye becomes a special Panopticon for women already given to excessive body discipline and commodification of self. Selecting to consciously utilize one’s feminine sexual assets (and thereby present oneself as an object to others) in a bid for empowerment is a far trickier game than most anticipate. To put it simply, we more often than not fall for our own tricks — we become the objects we imitate, and buy into the gender roles we contrive to exploit. This was Lamarr’s story, on a grander scale than most.... She was ever-aware of her aesthetic allure, and deftly wielded it to get ahead in her career and manage her love life. The same maneuvering may well have engendered the inescapable emptiness of her film roles and real-life romances, and deeply distorted her personal standards of success.

An article of interest both to movie fans and students of sexual politics.