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Why A Sexy Cover Is Not Always A Good Cover
posted Friday, 26 May 2006
In the hunt for a new book to read I headed a few days ago into one of my neighborhood bookstores (there are four within walking distance of my apartment, six if you count comic book stores) and looked over the aisles for something that would catch my interest.
In the biography section I spotted just such a title. It was the new autobiography of the celebrated b-movie actress Adrienne Barbeau, who beyond starring in such classics as The Fog, Escape From New York, Creepshow and Cannibal Women in the Avacado Jungle of Death (I swear I'm not making this last one up and I also swear that it can accurately be described as a classic of its own special kind) also made headlines when she gave birth to healthy twin boys at the age of 51. Now if you have to ask why I would want to read such a book, then I have to wonder if you really know anything about me at all--this book was freakin' made for me!
Still, I hesitated about buying it.
Why?
Because this is its cover:
Now don't get me wrong--this is an awesome cover. I would go so far as to say that it is one of the best covers in the history of the printed word, which if you admit the truth and cop to the fact that a book can be judged by its cover, would make this one of the greatest books of all time. I truly wanted to own a book with this cover, but still I hesitated buying it.
Why?
Because I was afraid of what the person who sold me the book would think of me.
As my entries describing my brief Life in Porn prove, the people who sell you things do judge you as your make your purchases, regardless of what their apathetic looking expressions would suggest. I knew that when I took this book to the cash register to pay for it, the person at the register would assume that I was doing so only because of the amazingly enormous breasts on the front cover. They would have no idea that I was a serious student of the kinds of films that Ms. Barbeau's filmography was nearly entirely composed of or that I was a fan of c-list celebrity autobiographies in general. True, they also wouldn't know that I had once written an article for a magazine in which I used the breasts on this cover to draw a connection between Hal Needham's The Cannonball Run and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and October1, but that wouldn't help my case, would it? As far as they were concerened it would be about the tits and nothing else. Did I really want to face that? Wouldn't it be better not to buy the book and not be branded as another example of the crude depravity of the male species?
After mulling this dilemma over in my head, I did end up buying the book. But I cannot help but wonder if there might be other people out there like me who wanted to buy it, but stopped themselves for the very reason I had to overcome. I think the lesson here is that sometimes a cover can be too awesome for its own good.
As for the book itself, it's a lot of fun and provides an insight into the mind of someone who admits that most of the time she failed to clue into the reality of the situations she found herself in. A good example of this is her description of working on The Cannonball Run, an experience she did not enjoy at all:
I suppose my problem was that I took it too seriously...I had a character to
create. I was making choices. Everyone else was having a great time and I
was acting. It never once crossed my mind that my character was simply the
crux of a running tit joke: stupid male becomes blithering idiot when faced
with exposed mammeries...I needed to prove I was talented...In a purple
jumpsuit with a workable zipper? All the talent I needed was attached to my
breastbone. But I didn't think that. I was worried about acting.
I find these kind of admissions to be endlessly fascinating, as they prove that even the worst films (and The Cannonball Run is one of the worst of films) are made by people who want to believe that what they are doing is important and good. This is why even the possibility of being thought of as a perve by the slacker at the register in Chapters is not enough to stop my from buying a book like this.
1 "All snarkiness aside, the film is not a complete disaster as it does make frequent and intelligent use of the God’s great bounty that was Adrienne Barbeau’s early-eighties cleavage. But even this sumptuous sight is somewhat bittersweet, as it reminds us that--like Communism--Adrienne Barbeau’s breasts were always better in theory than in practice. Here in this film they were the best breasts our imaginations could ever have devised, but once we all saw them fully unleashed in other films like Swamp Thing, we learned the sad, disappointing truth. In this way, one could consider The Cannonball Run a spiritual heir to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October, where the uplifting images of the worker’s revolution are undone by the sad realities of Marx and Engel’s great social experiment. " From "Needham? I Hardly Touched Him!" Hitch Magazine #37, Summer 2005
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