Lilia’s best rates caricature
tsy uavia coursen
What would people say about a
director whose gailery of female
characters consisted almost en
tirely of whores, bitches and nag
ging housewives whose sole pur
poses in life seemed to be to tor
ment, control and dehumanize the
working class studs who love
them?
And what if that same director's
idea of humor were to show the
revulsion of one of those studs at
the prospect of sex with an (ugh)
unattractive woman not just by
showing the facial contortions
with which the man registers his
disgust but by using the distorting
perspective of a fisheye lens to
make the woman appear even fat
ter (i.e. more repulsive) than she
actually is, in order to help the au
dience sympathize with the man
as human and to laugh at the
woman as an object?
And what if that same director
had a fondness for rape scenes in
which the women — foolish things
— resist for a while but eventually
succumb to the pleasures that can
only flow out of the loins of man?
And, finally, what if that director
unashamedly and self
consciously (and often for no good
reason) mimicked the styles and
visual motifs of — to name a few
— Antonioni, Fellini, and Ber
tolucci, and even plagiarized the
color textures from Liliana
Cavani’s The Night Porter?
Well, if the director's name were
Lina Wertmuller, people would
call her a major new cinematic tal
ent, the first distinctively female
director in contemporary cinema.
Of course, the viewer whose sole
criteria for merit in film is the ab
sence of sexism might do well to
avoid most movies, and if imitating
the work of other directors were
prohibited, no films would have
been made for forty or fifty years.
But with Wertmuller, too often sex
ism passes for feminism,
plagiarism for originality, and
more to the point, cruelty passes
for compassion and confusion for
ambiguity.
Not only does Wertmuller take
pains to show people being op
pressed by their social or political
environments, but she examines
their sufferings with such
enormous gusto and enthusiasm
that it's hard to avoid the suspicion
that it’s the suffering, not the op
pression that is Wertmullers real
interest.
Thus the setting of Seven
Beauties, a concentration camp in
which one man drowns himself in
a pool of shit and another collabo
rates with his Nazi keepers (and
shoots his best friend) may be the
definitive Wertmuller setting. The
director's defenders would no
doubt argue that her films present,
but do not endorse, degradation
and debasement. But that fish
eye shot (in The Seduction of
Mimi) — extreme but by no means
unique — plays physical deformity
strictly for laughs and in so doing
eloquently attests to the depth of
Wertmuller s insensitivity.
Despite these limitations,
Wertmuller has matured since
Mimi, and, at her best, has a fine
feel for the comic aspects of con
temporary life, politics, and sexual
mores, and a wild anarchic
energy. Sometimes the limitations
are still hard to ignore, and her
political ambivalence still degen
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erates into simple confusion, but
she has discarded — at least tem
porarily — that fish-eye lens,
and, in her most recent film Seven
Beauties, even showed a meas
ure of compassion for her (male)
characters.
All Screwed Up (made before
Swept Away and Seven Beauties
but only now opening in Eugene
at Cinema 7) showcases
Wertmuller's strengths and con
ceals her limitations perhaps as
effectively as any of her films to
date. Unfortunately, about half
way through the film there is a
"comic" rape scene as insensitive
as anything Wertmuller has done.
It seems that the victim — the
provocateur — having refused to
sleep with her loved one without
marriage, or to marry him (note
how the situation is so loaded our
sympathies immediately to the
man), finally gets what she de
serves. During the assault, the
woman resists until she finds her
hands full with a falling television
set; if she drops it, she may defend
herself but the TV will surely be
destroyed. This “comical" di
lemma immediately trivializes the
forcible sexual violation of a
woman in several ways: the
woman's values are so corrupt
that, since she values a television
set more highly than her sexual
integrity, she more or less de
serves to be raped. The act itself is
not very violent and since the man
is the woman's boy friend, the
rape is not really rape anyway and
immediately after the assault,
Wertmuller lovingly pans over the
woman’s discarded clothing to the
couple in an affectionate em
brace, and the woman — who
has, naturally, loved it — asks for
more.
The woman is not here, as in
Swept Away, actually made to
beg for sex from the man, nor is
she here transformed into a "real
woman" by the incident, but in
both films the patronizing treat
ment of the woman, her sexual
identity, and her personal integrity
is as vicious and insidious as
comparable scenes from the work
of any male director — even Russ
Meyer, the King of the Nudies. In
addition, in each rape scene
Wertmuller totally identifies with
the male perspective or rather
with male fantasies so macho they
are not even shared by most men.
It's particularly unfortunate that
such a completely offensive,
gratuitous scene occurs in All
Screwed Up. Aside from that, and
other, less serious lapses All
Screwed Up is possibly
Wertmuller's least offensive, most
forceful film. The opening is a
masterful example of evocative,
efficient film-making; as two
characters wander across an in
credibly congested urban land
scape, the audience experiences
urban claustrophobia in an almost
tactile way, and the only relief we
get sets up an even more comi
cally tangible intrusion of urban
life into individual existence. The
film is full of niceties like this open
ing and a perverse "dance” of the
cadavers and workers in a slaugh
terhouse.
Still, while Wertmuller's nasti
ness, here as elsewhere, limits
her characterizations to the super
ficial, it also gives her a vivid
sense of caricature; my favorite
example is a slimy gangster with a
blonde streak in his hair. And of
course the characters are meant
to be this way, dehumanized by
the conditions in which they are
forced to live. In fact, characters
that exist as ideas rather than
people are ideally suited to play
the role of abstract victims.
The energy, bite, and humor of
All Screwed Up. suggest that, de
spite her limitations, Wertmuller
does have genuine talent and that
if she acquires a sense of human
dignity, a measure of compassion
for women as well as men, for the
ugly as well as the beautiful, she
may grow into the major artist her
admirers claim she already is. But
her most recent film, Seven
Beauties celebrates survival,
even purchased at the expense of
human dignity, and a director who
believes in survival above all is not
likely to renounce the superficial
malice that has won her such
general commercial and critical
success. In any case, All Screwed
Up, — Wertmuller's least com
mercially successful film, may well
be her most forceful, if not coher
ent, look at the pains and disloca
tions of modern life.
All whose children?
The first three weeks of this col
umn have dealt with the history of
“All My Children." But from now
on, the assumption is that people
know the characters and the has
sles they've dealt with over the
last seven years.
Three weeks ago, we left Ann
with her baby girl nestled nicely in
her arms. While you'd never con
vince her of it, all is not well with
Ann s baby. Tests results are in,
and there is no doubt that the baby
contracted toxoplasmosis while in
the womb. While perfectly normal
on the outside, there is at least
some damage, though how much
is not clear.
Ann, having adopted Erica's
approach of simply ignoring that
which is unpleasant, is slowly
going off the deep end. When
Beth (Elizabeth is the name of the
newest Martin) developed a small
sniffle, Ann held her to her breast
and came away convinced that
she loved the germs right out of
Beth's small female form.
But there really hasn t been
much action in that corner. Where
it's really getting hot is between
Line, Kitty, and her ersatz mother
Mona Kane returned to Pine Val
ley Tuesday to find Line and Doc
tor Charles waiting for her at the
(Continued on Page 7B)
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