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Andy Warhol's Red Beard - influence of Ben Shahn and Shirley Temple on Warhol
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2001 by Blake Stimson
Temple's sexuality and its place in film history have been observed by many film historians and critics. Molly Haskell, for example, has argued that Shirley Temple functioned as a "deviant in disguise" and as the "ideal post-Production Code sex kitten," while another commentator labeled her "a stunted figure of feminine sexuality in an era of economy and restriction." (77) In this regard, Temple did to Mae West exactly what the G-man did to the gangster: she sublated an image of transgressive excess into a socially acceptable form. However, such accounts that focus on the repression of sexuality by housing it in the more protected, more regulated body of a child explain only part of her appeal.
The best study on this question is Charles Eckert's 1974 essay "Shirley Temple and the House of Rockefeller." In Eckert's analysis Temple's appeal as a character served specific narrative functions that we can also apply to West and her gangster predecessors: "to soften hard hearts (especially of the wealthy), to intercede on behalf of others, [and] to effect liaisons between members of opposed social classes."
More than simply a toned-down, code-passable form of sexual surplus, Temple's characters used that sublimated surplus as a medium for social change, breaking down the boundaries between existing social groups. As Eckert describes her new mode of being in the world without conforming to its categories, "The solution Shirley offers is natural: one opens one's heart." Like the gangster and Mae West, Temple offered her audiences an image of autonomy and escape from the strictures of existing social institutions. With the industry no longer able to sell tickets with graphic images of violence and explicit references to sex, Shirley Temple raised the bar by sublimating the mobile sexuality of West and invoking an alternative ideal of abstract, disinterested, noninstitutional love--the love of an orphan--love without enduring ties to any single individual or social group but instead equally available to all. (78)
Temple's special powers as a child-adult thus made her different from the C-man. Where the C-man fully institutionalized violence in the service of the law, shoring up the boundaries that delineated acceptable from unacceptable social forms, Temple retained the abstract, boundary-crossing imperative of her transgressive antecedent, Mae West. Neither Temple nor West represented group interests; their characters were typically free of stable relations with friends, lovers, families, neighborhoods, or any larger social institutions, and their affective bonds with others were grounded on universal principles of love and desire rather than on family histories or community mores. Temple's appeal as a child was her unguarded, seemingly unmediated affection; her appeal as an orphan was her availability. Like West, her characters circulate freely in her films without responsibility or attachment to family or other social unit. She was in this way alone like West and the gangster before her, and her ebullient personali ty--her capacity to radiate love outward toward all those around her--was rendered as an abstract social principle: fluid, mobile, unattached. Temple's great appeal, the way in which she contributed to the spectacular "idiotic euphoria" of the 1930s, was that she made love casual and occasional, free from the rule of family, community, or state, divorced from the rule of governing social institutions.
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