Mary Harron
Issue #27
The director casts a revisionist lens on pinup goddess Bettie Page
By Michael Hastings
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
It’s a short distance from Bettie Page’s nudie photos to Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. Every time Lil’ Kim shows up in public with postage stamps on her nipples or Calvin Klein stages his magazine ads to look like illicit backroom photo shoots, someone owes the so-called queen of the pinups a royalty check. Or at least a huge spiritual debt.
It’s this 50-year-old legacy that filmmaker Mary Harron attempts to redress with her third feature, The Notorious Bettie Page. Having cast an objective eye on Factory-era wannabes in I Shot Andy Warhol and the murderous yuppie scum of American Psycho, Harron now turns to the life of the reluctant sex icon, played in a career-invigorating turn by Gretchen Mol. Appearing in photos that ranged from cloying and shy to brazen and domineering, Page set the tone for sexual expression for generations to come, merely by throwing some adoration back at the camera.
“It’s so much a part of fashion and popular culture now,” Harron says. “You can do it in the windows of Barneys. Madonna did all that bondage stuff, the Gaultier cone-breasted bra and chains. You can wear any kind of bondage you want to. In the ’50s, you would’ve been arrested.”
It would stand to figure, then, that the woman lashing all the whips and chains was one tough-ass broad. But as Harron and her co-screenwriter, Guinevere Turner, tell it, Page’s life story was one of a brainy country girl who stumbled into dicey situations and prurient pin-up employment with (to paraphrase a review that appeared in these pages) all the pluck and insouciance of Forrest Gump in a bra.
“She had this kind of naïveté that drove her through,” Harron explains, mentioning the young Page’s almost “primal innocence.” “At the same time, she always had a lot of inner tension and darkness.”
Certainly, for a woman to experience so much trauma in her formative years — rape and molestation figure prominently in the film — it comes as a surprise that she’d be willing to submit herself to “nature” photography (i.e. topless shots) or that she’d acquiesce to the advances of the mysterious policeman who met her on the beach and shot her first pinup portfolio.
But Harron doesn’t subscribe to the comforting falsehood that victims of abuse automatically shed their vulnerability. “I think people assume that if bad things happen to you, then you learn from them and change your course. That’s not always true,” she says. “[Bettie’s] continuing naïveté is pretty astonishing.”
The director also wanted to take a more objective stance on the means by which women are, well, objectified. The movie demystifies the entire process of ’50s smut-making, suggesting that Page’s poses were usually within her comfort zone and control. And the people behind the lens are often sympathetic women, like the calm, collected Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson) or the comically frazzled brother-and-sister duo Irving and Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor), who peddle primitive black-and-white snapshots to fetishists. If the film’s skin scenes fail to scintillate, that’s part of the point.
“I took from this my knowledge of what filming is like, for any kind of photo shoot,” Harron says. “They’re simply not erotic environments. The product may be erotic, but the atmosphere of the shoot itself is not. It’s all business.”
In the movie, Page’s reaction to all the things she’s asked to do — lacing up thigh-high boots, straddling frayed furniture with a gag in her mouth — is one of bemused compliance, not shock or deep-seated shame. With all the women surrounding her, Harron explains, “it created more of a pajama party atmosphere…I don’t think she would’ve ever done anything if there were men in the photographs, or if she was being asked to do anything specifically sexual. That would’ve crossed a line for her, I’m sure.”
Though Page may have been unfazed, the United States government was not, and Klaw — and by implication, his star pinup — came under the FBI’s scrutiny, resulting in an obscenity witch-hunt. It’s here where Harron draws her closest parallels to the current political climate: The movie begins to resemble the similar historical allegory Good Night, and Good Luck., with Night’s David Strathairn even making an appearance as a puritanical senator.
“It’s so odd, you go 10 degrees toward something racier, and then suddenly everyone’s hysterical,” Harron says, musing on the comparison between Page’s pictures and Jackson’s Super Bowl incident. “I think these things are timing, because people are ready to make a fuss about something.”
The director is no stranger to fuss herself: Before American Psycho could be released, she had to excise a few choice moments of “thrusting” in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. In some small way, she admits, that experience informed her view of Page’s censorial plight.
“I think it’s amazing how similar the arguments still are. They keep circulating,” Harron says. “[They] are still in almost exactly the same terms, which in America is always about the corruption of youth and the corrupting power of an image. And that an image can be like a virus and infect a whole community or a whole country.”
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