DeMille was often heard advising his designers to accentuate the visual element, to "get

it on the screen," since "the camera has no ears" (Chierichetti 22). Coincidentally, his

suggestion seems to echo Walter Benjamin's method of having nothing to say, only to

show.

 Again and again, that desire to show overwhelmed the narrative. In Don 't Change

Your Husband (1919), for instance, DeMille drew on Orientalist motifs in costume and

set design. Gloria Swanson, who is referred to as a "Lovely Chinese Lotus," is showcased

repeatedly like a mannequin. At one point, Higashi points out, delightedtd by a beaded

gown unpacked for a costume party, she drapes the fabric around her body in a pose"

(153). Her story can wait. The moment matters much more in non-narrative terms. In

Cobra (1925), Nita Naldi tries to seduce the Italian count, played by Rudolph Valentino,

who comes to America pretending to be a sheik. When the seduction succeeds, the plot

literally comes to a halt, as Naldi slowly reveals her black gown. As Howard Gutner

describes it, the gown's "only embellishment [is] a lightning bolt of silver sequins

cascading from the right hip to the hem like a shock of desire" (20; emphasis added). And

in Madam Satan (1930), DeMille himself exploited the pleasure of couture for visual

effect. In the climactic scene, where Kay Johnson tries to win back her husband by

posing as a seductress at a masquerade ball, DeMille dressed her in a "volcano" gown.

Describing the gown as a visual exclamation point on screen, Jane Gaines argues that it

"could only be worn to be photographed and is never properly worn but is rather hung

and stuck on the actress who becomes something like a moving mannequin" ("On

Wearing the Film" 171). What these examples illustrate is that throughout the 1920s