Week of May 4, 2006, Issue #550
FILM
Bettie Page hard to pin down
PAUL MATWYCHUK / paul@vueweekly.com
For someone who became famous for her cheerful willingness to take her clothes off, the legendary ’50s pin-up model Bettie Page has always kept her inner life well covered up.Between 1959, when she experienced a religious awakening and quit modeling, and the mid-’90s, when revived interest in her career inspired a couple of biographers to track her down, she seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Perhaps that’s part of her appeal: the notion that this woman who was once nicknamed “The Pin-Up Queen of the Universe,” could disappear so completely from the public eye.
Even today, at the age of 80, she rarely allows photographs of herself to be taken—there are, however, a couple of pictures of her from 2003 available on the internet. Touchingly, she’s still got her trademark bangs.
Gretchen Mol, who plays the title role in the mildly interesting new biopic The Notorious Bettie Page, does a very good job of capturing Bettie’s appeal. She’s got Bettie’s womanly body, a reminder of the kind of lush, natural curves that defined beauty in the days before every model was expected to look like a dead-eyed teenaged aerobics instructor. And, more importantly, she captures that wonderful, amateurish enthusiasm that Bettie brought to every frame—the way that she could make even bondage photos look like an innocent game of “let’s play dress-up.”
But director Mary Harron (who co-wrote the script with Guinevere Turner) doesn’t seem to have a clear grasp on what might have been going through Bettie Page’s mind when she wasn’t posing for the camera. We get glimpses of Bettie’s early years, growing up in a repressed household in Nashville, being gang-raped as a teenager, entering into a brief marriage to an abusive soldier and eventually moving to New York City, but Harron’s deliberately flat directorial style (she also made American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol) doesn’t give us the slightest indication as to what effect those experiences had on Bettie’s attitudes toward sex or her relationships with men.
Would she still have posed for nudie photos if she hadn’t been raped? Were those photos a form of guilty self-abasement for her? Or were they a way for her to feel good about herself as a sexual being? How does she feel about the way every man immediately starts staring at her? Proud? Embarrassed? Oblivious? It’s impossible to tell.
Harron seems to regard Bettie as little more than a blank slate, a nice girl who basically did whatever people told her to, from posing for girlie magazines to converting to Christianity.
That’s the weird thing about Bettie Page: for a world-famous bondage pin-up queen, she’s really not that interesting a person.
This was the same problem local playwright Paul Morgan Donald ran into with his Bettie Page musical Kink!: the most interesting characters in Bettie’s life are actually peripheral figures like Paula and Irving Klaw, a sweet-natured brother-and-sister team whose temperaments seemed better suited to running a shoe store than a porn empire.
And when The Notorious Bettie Page is over, you don’t feel as if you’ve learned anything much about Bettie, the Klaws, or America’s hypocritical attitude toward sex. All you know for sure is that Gretchen Mol looks really good in dark hair and seamed stockings, but I didn’t need a 90-minute movie to tell me that. V
Opens Fri, May 12
The Notorious
Bettie Page
Directed by Mary Harron
Written by Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner
Starring Gretchen Mol, Lili Taylor,
Chris Bauer, David Strathairn