The other night a friend and I saw The Notorious Bettie Page. I liked the black and white parody of 1940s and 50s movies, but we still found it a little lacking in depth. I think this was Mary Harron's intent-- to argue that the tame S&M pictures and films Bettie made were harmless and innocent, or at least Bettie's participation was.
The only really good moment in the film for me was when Bettie's Meisner-trained actor boyfriend discovers the bondage photos and is appalled at how "deviant" they are. Bettie responds that the people who like those pictures are just people like everybody else, who just happen to like funny costumes. In one way, this comes off as completely naive, but in another, it's profoundly sophisticated.
Bettie's religious conversion at the end (she's "born again") seemed forced and ambivalent. At first it seems she's so personally hurt by her notoriety, that she'll do anything to wash away the stigma, including take it upon herself. But then it appears that religion is just another thing for which she has a natural talent. I wasn't convinced. I know the film was trying to accomplish something by glossing over the dark details of Page's life story, but I'm still not entirely sure what that was.
Speaking of S&M, there's a hilarious song by the Magnetic Fields on 69 Love Songs that both parodies and celebrates it as a country-gospel hymn. For some reason I kept thinking of it while watching the Bettie Page movie. It would have been great for the sountrack. The first three lines are "He is my Lord, he is my Savior / And he rewards / My good behavior. . ."
2 comments:
Petticoats, schoolgirls, and Bettie Page on your first posts... you ought to monitor the visitors to your blog very closely indeed! Incidentally, this doesn't seem to have been the only Page biopic of recent years: http://www.bettiepagedarkangel.com/Layout.htm
I'm always interested in the relation between deviance and evangelical christianity: on Page's experience see http://www.jesus21.com/content/page/index.php?s=bettie_page
Keep up the good blogwork: I love the layout. It resembles a subterranean Parisian opium lounge (not that I've ever been in one!)
Ooh, my first comment! And such a nice one, too. Thanks, Faustus (and I like your moniker because I like Marlowe, Mann and Goethe).
Parisian opium lounge is praise too high for this humble blog, as I'm still fiddling with the template, but I'm quite flattered nonetheless.
I've deleted the kamikaze schoolgirl post because I felt it was uncollegial, so now it's just petticoats, Page, and music. A little less provocative for now, I'm afraid.
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