The Notorious Bettie Page
**½
Directed by Mary Harron
Written by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner
Starring Gretchen Mol
Classification: PG
Mary Harron's movie about fifties' pin-up girl Bettie Page is a story about an odd kind of innocence. It is not about innocence lost, really -- though in the course of her life, Page was molested by her father and gang-raped by a group of Tennessee good ol' boys, before she reached fame posing for innumerable naughty photographs in bondage outfits.
Throughout, Page seems to have remained fundamentally untouched. She went from Bible-belt country girl beginnings to a New York career where she became a star by projecting wholesome Doris Day warmth in the pages of under-the-counter smut magazines. In 1957, Page, who is still alive, gave up posing and returned to preaching Christianity with the same ardour she had formerly given to lesbian spanking movies.
Page's career remained dormant until the early eighties, when her wholesome/raunchy image became a cult icon, celebrated in comics and fanzines (Jennifer Connolly played a Page-inspired character in the comic book adaptation The Rocketeer). Mary Harron, the New York-based, Canadian-born director, came to the material relatively late in 1993 but she has been trying to make this film long before her successes with I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and American Psycho (2000).
Anyone expecting another dark satiric film in the same vein of Harron's earlier movies will be disappointed. Perhaps as befits a bondage-themed picture, The Notorious Bettie Page is very restrained, even a little starchy. The movie was made for HBO, and has some of the same camp-lite approach that spoiled Mrs. Harris, the portrait of the Scarsdale-diet murderess: bland period music, mocking set-ups that suggest the corniness of the high-school "hygiene" films of the 1950s, and a gee-whiz quality to the dialogue.
In Harron's movie, Page is played by real-life blond Gretchen Mol (Hollywood's next-big-thing-that-didn't-happen about eight years ago). Soft, smooth and a pleasantly empty looking, she radiates even more sweetness than Bettie Page did: Here's an icon for the gag-and-whip set who makes B&D look like it stands for bubbly and delightful.
We first meet her, in proper white gloves and a suit, sitting in the hallway outside the 1955 hearings by Senator Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn) on juvenile delinquency, where Page's employer, photographic smut dealer Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), who runs a mom-and-pop dirty-photo business with his wife (Lili Taylor), is being investigated. A teenaged boy, who had a copy of one of their publications died, apparently while engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation.
One of the conceits of the film is that Page is so innocent that she just doesn't seem to get what all the fuss is about. Adam and Eve were naked before they sinned, she points out. When a pornographer with the improbable name of John Willie (Jared Harris) asks her how she reconciles God and dirty pictures, she explains, while trussed up in a crucifix pose, that God gives each of us a gift, and hers is posing. When her boyfriend gets upset with her lesbian bondage photo spread in a magazine, she is perplexed: It was just horsing around that seems to make some special customers happy.
Like her contemporary, Marilyn Monroe, Page wanted to be a real actress and we see her studying earnestly under the tutelage of a benevolent Method coach (Austin Pendleton). As she chews through George Bernard Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, it's obvious she's not very talented, but unlike Monroe, she's not tormented about it. Neither does she have any burning need for sexual reassurance: When we see her picking up a muscular young man at the beach in Miami, her interest seems more about companionship than lust. The sexual abuse that is portrayed early in the film (off screen, of course, consistent with the fifties' aesthetic) seems to have left no psychological scars, beyond leaving her emotionally stunted.
Harron's film takes its inspiration from the Bettie Page archival material -- the postcards, the magazine covers, the grainy film reels -- and the images provide what social critique there is. The late feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, in a hostile review of work by the erotic cartoonist Alberto Vargas, caught the flavour of forties' and fifties' mainstream erotica accurately: "There are lots of bright red nails but no rib cages or muscles, no fat because there is no flesh; there are hard nipples, vacant smiles, painted toe nails, infantilization, hairless bodies; big eyebrows to designate the hairiness not seen; the blondes are good and childlike; the redheads are a little tougher; black hair is the sign of the wicked woman."
Of course, some brunettes, like Bettie Page or the Archie comics' Veronica Lodge were really sunny blondes in wicked brunette wrapping, more interested in playful titillation rather than dangerous desires. Harron uses the archival material to suggest rather than impose a social critique. The most glorious of Page's photos were colour images by a female photographer, Bunnie Yeager, who shot Page on the beach and in an African animal park in Florida in 1954. She portrayed Page as a pagan goddess, with twin cheetahs as her companions.
This is in contrast to the black-and-white shots in New York, taken by homely men who watched her beauty through their lenses with fascination, shame and resentment.
The weakness of Harron's film is that Bettie Page as a personality, as opposed to a kitsch iconic camera subject, never really comes into focus. Where we need Velcro; we get Teflon. Mol's performance is pretty and winsome but not quite real as the character's humanity gets smothered in ironic knowingness and crisp, stylish art direction.
Liam Lacey