The Roommate, a major motion picture released in February, has come and gone.
But its chilling terror remains. No, that isn’t so, but I like to watch trashy genre films when they are somewhat new to DVD; that is, when they are more objects of study than a viable, if disquieting, plan for a night out.
Here is an excerpt from my lofty notes on the film, notes toward a study of this peculiar genre of women’s films that I call Unchained Heat: “Cuddles, you are so dead!”
Cuddles is the sweet, tiny kitten that the hapless, stunning Rebecca (a name that is, of course, freighted with cinematic bad-lady mojo) sneaks into the L.A. dorm room that she shares with the equally beautiful, immediately off-putting Sara.
Solid biblical names, hot girls with promising futures in art and design. What can go wrong?
A great deal, as it turns out, and late into the film after a huge body count has formed (cats, it turns out, do not get cuter and fluffier in driers), you may wonder why this sort of story keeps getting told.
The most obvious parallels are to Single White Female (1992) and, most recently, Black Swan, but the notion of the young woman trying to assume the identity of another runs rampant throughout pop, from trash to the mother of all body-snatching broad films, All About Eve (1950). It is the plot of Vida Demas’s brilliant young adult novel First Person, Singular (1974), in which the fetching heroine brilliantly shakes off a creepy imitator by dressing like an imbecile and speaking like an Archie comic. It is the ongoing drama of Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie, still allegedly fighting because the latter stole the former’s husband and, theoretically, entire life.
It – the story of one woman trying to steal another woman’s shine – is two things.
One: It is a great movie formula, one that is very much like the Women in Prison or Caged Heat films, a largely self-reflexive genre that peaked in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s and gave us such thrilling events as Cellblock Sisters, Under Lock and Key, Caged Hearts and the excellent, tongue-in-cheek Reform School Girls and its feminist mantra “So Young, So Bad, So What?”
The WiP films always feature the death of a helpless, tiny animal (the formidable Pat Ast stamps on a poor kitten in Reform School Girls); scenes of sexual torture and violence, girl-on-girl action and, ultimately, the liberating of the once-naive protagonist through her own bravery, strength and guile.
The Unchained girls also always express sexual confusion; are victimized by pervy older men and cheating boyfriends; and, after being damaged by a man, try to fill the void with a raging crazy person: the wannabe doppelganger.
The film always ends with the death of the psycho (well, Eve Harrington merely moves to Los Angeles), and the wretched creature always whispers something plaintive.
“I just wanted you to like me,” Sara gasps at Rebecca.
“You were never my friend,” the cruel Rebecca says as she twists the knife.
“I fluffed and folded Cuddles for this?!” Sara gasps.
No, she doesn’t, but the film suffers for this omission.
Fantastically awful (the requisite degenerate, a design teacher, tells Rebecca, “You have two things I can’t teach: style and design”), sexually tantalizing and marginally creepy, The Roommate – and this is the second factor – is excellent evidence of the complexity of female relationships.
Especially when we are young, and still forming ourselves, or designing and styling who we are; who we want to be.
We are still works in progress at this age, and leery of others looking at the process too closely.
The shifting self is vulnerable, hence a young woman’s genuine fear that, as little girls say: ‘So-and-so is trying to copy me!’
I have never met a young poet who was not afraid that other writers and editors are going to steal their ideas (“This kid just rhymed breast-song and Donkey Kong! Plagiarize this STAT!”)
And young women feel the same way about their partners, their look, way of speaking and all-around style. There is a homosocial element to the copycatting – not homoerotic, however frantically trashy directors try to make one girl stealing another girl’s hairstyle a soft-core porn event.
It is not an unfounded fear: Any of you who has ever had someone imitate you constantly knows that it is not at all flattering.
Or maybe you’re more of a Sara, and did the copying? The boyfriend-stealing, the “Ooops, did I buy your exact shoes and purse?” game?
The good news is that it all ends at some point, as we age. But not for the poor Rebeccas.
In the film, the girls go to a Richard Prince show and look at the gruesome Nurse of Greenmeadow.
“You can see in her eyes she just wants to help,” Sara says.
They do, these terrible girls with their secret bipolar disorder and desire to sketch you all day long. It’s love, after all, and one you will never forget, in nightmares or in dreams.
