The Notorious Bettie Page
Directed by Mary Harron
Morocco, Blonde Venus, The Devil is a Woman
Directed by Josef Von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg overshadows this week’s sex comedies: The Notorious Bettie Page, Kinky Boots and I Am a Sex Addict. Three of Sternberg’s vintage sex dramas—Morocco (’30), Blonde Venus (’32) and The Devil is a Woman (’35)—have at last just been made available on Universal DVD, and their still-provocative insights remain the greatest examples of erotic rapture and spiritual stress in American movie history. Their depth provides what you might call prophylactic protection from contemporary banalities.
A smirking self-seriousness diminishes these new films. The revisionist biography of ’50s model Bettie Page is as much of a conceit as the moralizing drag queen homilies in Kinky Boots. It’s as if the filmmakers prided themselves as taboo-busters just for pursuing sex as a topic. Sternberg shames them because his films (still being sold as Marlene Dietrich vehicles) weren’t concerned with being transgressive. Instead, Sternberg sought the popular audience’s empathy, not the approval of hipsters. Sternberg expected all viewers to identify with Dietrich’s glamorous agonies or simply to be shaken by her various spiritual struggles.
Much less is asked by The Notorious Bettie Page. Director Mary Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner have fashioned the late model into a free speech martyr. They posit a Tennessee backwoods innocent (played by Gretchen Mol) entering the transgressive world of big city pornography completely unawares.
Despite surviving a gang rape and various exploitations, Page becomes a prodigious prop in the underground fetish photography market. She’s such a blank that when the film’s final scene offers the first suggestions of spiritual turmoil, it seems a very dry joke: Page is seen reading from the Bible as a street-corner proselytizer—an image that goes up in flames. It suggests the ideological equivalent of secular book burning, since Harron and Turner’s attitude is that Page was hoodwinked by religion as much as pornography.
Sternberg would have made such a proposition deeply tragic , but Harron and Turner are “smarter.” They cast Mol to depict Page as a cipher (her trim body passes for mid-century suppleness). Showing no emotion other than enthusiasm, she’s a po-mo, post-feminist tool: Candide as a pin-up. But this psychological vacancy is actually the filmmakers’ cop-out. Sternberg enmeshed us in Dietrich’s downfall. Here, we’re outside the abused heroine; encouraged to laugh at Page’s willingness to wear eight-inch stiletto heels, show “beaver” to a club of randy shutterbugs, put a rubber ball gag in her mouth and presumably pose without pay. Sacrifice makes her a natural porn saint.
Scenes of Page failing her acting-class exercises are doubly strange because of Mol’s own unsuccessful bid at stardom. (The film’s notion of female exploitation is complicated by Mol’s history in which a poking-nipple Vanity Fair cover is her claim to dubious fame.)
When a ’50s congressional hearing concludes without bothering to hear Page’s testimony, she puts on white gloves as a pathetic illustration of her blamelessness regarding the insult. Decrying female exploitation from all angles, Harron and Turner get deliberately satirical about ’50s porn. Most of the film is shot in b&w, resembling 8mm loops while mocking the overwrought alarums of such moralistic docu-dramas as Reefer Madness.
The Notorious Bettie Page is most facetious when it presumes to show the secret history of pornography: a business also practiced by women (Lili Taylor plays a greedy picture-seller); and outraged hypocritical men (David Strathairn repeats his Ed Murrow glumness, this time as Senator Estes Kefauver). Yet this was the only libidinal outlet for some (then labeled sexual deviants).
This moral fallacy caricatures the censorship ethos established by Hollywood’s 1934 Production Code. But Sternberg’s Dietrich films (made before the Code) are testaments to a sexual awareness that has been historically misrepresented—and misunderstood. Sternberg’s candor and sensuality are too often laughed off as camp, an attitude that sent cinema sensuality further underground into licentiousness. Dietrich’s remarkable androgynous gender-flip in Morocco and her astounding “Hot Voodoo” number in Blonde Venus were overt explorations of lustful and racial role-playing that very few academics have yet caught up with.
Harron and Turner don’t seem to know of Sternberg’s advance. Their film’s closing admonition that Page need not be ashamed of her misadventures because “What [pornographers are] doing now would curl your hair” is just plain disingenuous.
Bettie Page takes the position that it is the patriarchy’s exploitation of women—and not women’s complicity—that characterizes America’s repressive impulse. A word for such ideological banality would be some female equivalent to “misogyny”—or a political version of “penis envy.” Whatever it is, it’s exemplified in bad films like Bettie Page, Monster and Boys Don’t Cry, where hostile heterosexuality becomes, in the end, anti-sex. But check out Sternberg’s oeuvre. He specialized in the secret history of desire.
