The closer they get to the top - the nearer they get to the bottom
A week in films and books 📽 📚
This week we shall go…
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) dir. Russ Meyer
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a film which is at once 500 years behind the times and 500 years in front of them. This is the type of cult production which spurs a certain class of person to make very long video essays and post them on YouTube. The modern viewer might see ‘representation’ and then despair as it is apparently rescinded or cancelled out within a few seconds. The film’s logic of justice and morality is a strange thing. Â
One of the main hallmarks of movie camp is that it imitates life - we can see a real enmity festering in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and in Funny Girl Barbra Streisand’s real career and self-perception is laid out before us. BVD takes this to daring heights. Sharon Tate’s real murder is echoed in tones that partially prefigure the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and partially call back to a faded Looney Tunes short.Â
All the best colours and visual motifs of the era are here, but a whiplash committee approach leads to a lack of truly memorable single images and compositions. I thought briefly of Hong Kong director Li Han-hsiang and his psychedelic sex fests. I also thought of the unsettling pace of late-30s epics like Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. The resounding feeling, in the end, is that of a ‘90s sitcom parodying a film from the year 1970.
Don Juan, Or If Don Juan Were a Woman (1973) dir. Roger Vadim
Brigitte Bardot, carefully laying out her playing cards on the floor of her submarine, embodies an archetype straight from the wastelands of Ancient Greece - a woman completely in control, preparing to meddle in the fates of man. She is all of the Moirai at once. She fondles Jane Birkin as the sky outside turns unbelievably blue. She wanders among huntsmen and writhes in flame. Bardot is a mistress of elements, and Vadim (namer of the discotheque) places her just behind the fog, waiting to emerge, potent.
(Life imitates art: Bardot in Don Juan, Laura Prepon at the World Poker Tour. This archetype is fulfilled for me also by Faye Dunaway in Eyes of Laura Mars. The world is viewed each time through a mechanism controlled by an icy blonde woman, androgynous in bearing.)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence is a mini-Madame Bovary - shrunk down and told in an obvious, plain, English-as-first-language way, suited to an America beginning to adapt to exactly this. We do not see inside the head of the adulteress and nothing immediately scandalising happens. This is fine. Wharton has a way of writing about love that switches deftly from switched-off Austen to switched-on Flaubert. The excitement of a married man’s love interest lies in what we are not shown - the mysterious backstories never told, the bodices never ripped open.
I am not surprised that Scorsese chose to adapt this, because it is earnestly masculine and very slightly tacky. Â
Women in Love by D.H Lawrence
(I did not know this was a sequel to The Rainbow, which I have not read.)Â
The joy of Women in Love lies in its descriptive writing. We all learned what ‘pathetic fallacy’ was during GCSE English for some reason. Here, the state of the natural world does more than mirror the plot - it drives it. Nature has the capacity to swallow and destroy human life. Characters are constantly pontificating on its beauty in long, Impressionistic passages - Man’s relationship to woman and their shared relationship to nature becomes the novel’s central theme, so it makes sense that the outside world in every European form - town, city, stately home, country lane, lake, iceberg - melts together into a fifth main character. As the Dakota is the villain of Rosemary’s Baby, the entire outdoors grows into the antagonist of Women in Love.Â
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae is this book’s closest relative (she has called it a ‘profound influence’), and her conception (once Nietzche’s) of the Apollonian helped to decode one of the clearest threads in the book, that of homoerotic paleness and ice in opposition to plastic water, mud and death. Â