Interesting stuff on Greta Garbo

[dickinsons]

So I'm writing a paper on two Greta Garbo films, and I love what I've found so far. I don't know if you've seen or heard about Queen Christina, a wonderful film made in 1933 about the Swedish queen. I've liked Garbo for years, but somehow I hadn't seen Queen Christina yet. I'm not saying I've watched many of her films, I've only watched four of them, but this is one of her most iconic roles.

What I loved so much about Garbo was the contrast between her screen persona and her private life, but I've come to appreciate how her characters became closer to who she was (and who she liked to be) on the screen when she gained more control over her career. At first she had several vamp/femme fatale roles, which she disliked, and she was even forced to film when she was devastated by her sister's death. Queen Christina is an example of what she did when she had the chance to choose what she was doing. And it's awesome! 

The similarities with her life were also noticed at the time. The actual Swedish queen was probably a lesbian (she was very much involved with women, such as Ebba, and it is unclear whether she had relationships with men too, but I don't think it's fair for me to rule that option out since there was at least one man who was said to have been involved with her and I don't have much information about that) and the same can be said for Garbo (she definitely had relationships with women and loved women, whether she was actually interested in men too is unclear to me but I can't 100% rule it out; in any case she seemed to prefer women afaik), they were both very masculine in the way they dressed and behaved (Greta always wore men's clothes in her daily life and outside of movies in general, and people said she walked like a man and stuff like that; Christina was educated as a man would've been at the time, and she also wore manly clothes), and they both left Sweden to find their place somewhere else. The best part of this is, not only is the 'real' Greta similar to the person she plays in the movie, but her star persona is also present as the fictional part of the film: while the first part of the film portrays Christina as a masculine queen involved with women, the second part has her falling in love for a man and becoming feminine (she starts wearing dresses and such). On the one hand, this seems related to the trope of the tomboy who becomes girly thanks to falling in love with a man that is easy to identify in many movies. In fact, I remember reading an essay by Barbara Creed where she uses this film as an example. And I'm sure it was read as such and intented to be, but I feel like there's more to it. In a very interesting chapter of a book I was reading today (Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space), it was said that the second part of the film mirrored Greta Garbo's real life too, but other parts of it. Can it be that John Gilbert was cast as Greta Garbo's love interest to offer a parallel to the fiction of her life as a star? That love story was made up for the film to cover up Christina's real sexuality, and as much as it is a possibility that John Gilbert and Garbo had a sincere relationship, I find it believable that it was actually fabricated. The relationship was highly publicized and made lots of money, since they starred in several movies together after Flesh and the Devil, but they never got married and it was the only relationship with a man that Garbo seems to have had in her years as a star (every other that I can think of that was rumored was actually with gay men). And at the same time, when this book suggests that John Gilbert's character represents Mauritz Stiller, Garbo's Swedish mentor who was rumored at the time to have been involved with her romantically and who died like the character in the film, I can't help to wonder if the scenes of the film where he is presented as sexually ambiguous can be related to the fact that Stiller was, in fact, gay.

Somehow I forgot the way I wanted to end this post, if there ever was, and it might be because it's almost 1 AM and I'm quite sleepy. I hope someone finds this as interesting as I do.