The Notorious Bettie Page

Director Mary Harron refuses to judge the infamous '50s Pin-Up Queen in her biographical film, The Notorious Bettie Page. She and co-writer Guinevere Turner see Page's story, in some ways, as an attempt to escapeprying eyes and judgemental attitudes. Her parents think she should settle for the simple life of a teacher, even though the male students gawk at her and refuse her attempts at discipline. Her boyfriend thinks she should give up on modeling, the only thing she's really excelled out, because it makes him feel uncomfortable. She frets constantly about her religious values and whether or not they clash with her choice in occupation. And even the Senate eventually intercedes to put an end to sales of her salacious photographs.

So in response, Harron has filmed a movie utterly devoid of judgement. She presents Bettie as a child-like innocent, a hopeless small-town naif, who wandered into the Big City and immediately descended into a shadowy business she could not begin to understand. I don't know much about Page's personal life, so I can't be certain if this view is indeed accurate, but it's a bit hard to believe.

An even bigger problem with the approach is that it prevents the movie from actually focusing on Bettie. To probe or to analyze, to really delve into Bettie's feelings about bondage and nude photography and becoming the first American sex symbol of the modern age after a lifetime of subjugation and abuse by men, you'd have to offer some kind of judgement. Good or bad. You'd have to set her actions into some kind of personal context, to look at what might have made her the ideal pin-up model and what then might have caused her to turn her back on that life and embrace Jesus.

As Harron clearly feels hesitant to do that, to deconstruct or reduce Bettie's life story into a compelling cinematic form, the character becomes a cipher, all spunk and curves and can-do spirit. How can you have a central character with no inner life? It works sporadically, in fits and starts, but never coheres into anything that feels like an actual movie. More a dramatic recreation of some of the major events in the life of Bettie Page.



It's a shame that the movie doesn't do more with Page's story, both because it's interesting and because the casting of Gretchen Mol in the lead role is inspired. Despite only a vague physical resemblance to the real Page (Mol looks the part fine in middle-distance, but not so much in close-up), she nonetheless captures the contorted poses, the jarring smile and the campy enthusiasm of the actual photographs. An innovator in the field of bondage and fetish photography would have to have an open-minded, curious nature, and Harron really pushes the limit of believability with Bettie's cheery experimental streak, but Mol's unforced enthusiasm works for the most part.

Take the first scene in which Bettie agrees to pose nude for a photographer. Mol eagerly slips off her bikini, doing a little full frontal, before the photographer informs her that pubic hair mustn't make it into the shot. So she turns it into a game, turning around just enough to keep her privates out of frame, testing the limit to see how close she can come to revealing it all. It's a perfect compression of the randy charm of vintage erotic into a single moment, capturing the Big Lies at the center of all stripteases: that the model is showing off her body for the first time, that she's shy about it and that it's making her excited.

Unfortunately for both the actress and the film, the overall conceptualization of Page is the very definition of one-note. She opens the film as an optimistic simpleton, heading to New York after a failed marriage to an angry drunk (Norman Reedus). This sets the scene for most of the male characters in the film, and in Harron's entire filmography, really. From the outright seething male hatred of I Shot Andy Warhol to the craven, pornography-fueled sadism of American Psycho, and now the ceaseless degredation and patriarchal cruelty evident in Notorious Bettie Page, Harron has never met a man she couldn't depict as a perverse, angry, mean-spirited, chauvanistic lout.

Which is perfectly within her rights. I mean, I Shot Andy Warhol is about a real-life radical feminist agitator, and American Psycho is about a defiantly fucked-up man and based on a book written by a man, so it's not like I'm saying it's wrong for her to treat male characters this way. It's just that, for the purposes of Notorious Bettie Page, the portrait is overly simplistic.
There are interesting themes at play in this story, ideas about the male gaze and the notion of the fetish and how certain kinds of behavior can trigger peculiar and counterintuitive responses. In one scene, a creepy "fan" of Bettie's bondage pictures approaches her in a club and asks for her autograph. Being the innocent, wide-eyed simpleton, Bettie signs her name without thinking. The fan then acknowledges that Bettie must think he's a freak, following her around and asking her to sign half-nude photos of herself whipping another women, but Bettie brushes off this suggestion. To her, looking at such pictures is totally normal, a way for some men to let off steam. (As a kind of side joke, it becomes clear that the fan was hoping to be chastized for approaching Bettie in this way, that he would get off on being "disciplined" by her in real life, and is then disappointed that her actual personality doesn't match the dominance of her public persona.)

And then the scene ends, leading into a generic, expository confrontation with Bettie's generic, mook boyfriend. Yet this was an interesting encounter! Is Bettie really not bothered at all by being fantasized about and then approached by such men? She seems to be personally modest in her daily life (she doesn't drink regularly attends church and abhors swearing), and yet we don't get a single scene in which she thinks twice about posing for nude photographs or satisfying bizarre and smutty requests from cameramen or chatting up the weirdos who masturbate to her pictures.

Is Harron presenting her as a Christ figure, totally incapable of experiencing shame or passing judgement on others? (The final shot, in which she reads the Bible while framed in heavenly light, would seem to suggest this interpretation.) Or is she just too shallow to think of such things? For her, is a fan just a fan, someone who likes her and is therefore a good person?

Mott Hupful's cinematography expertly mimics the films of Page's era (particularly the mid-'50s), seamlessly blending black and white photography in with old grainy stock footage for the first half and then switching back and forth between black and white sequences set in New York and shimmering Technicolor when in Miami Beach.

(Interestingly, the only color photography in the film's first half is a brief montage of Page's famous magazine covers, recreated with Mol. The suggestion seems to be that the reserved Bettie came alive only when posing for the camera, hence her desire to act full-time).

The filmmaking itself, regrettably, does not adhere to the professional old-school Hollywood standards of the visuals. Eventually, Harron seems to tire of Bettie completely, turning her focus on the Claws, the brother and sister team responsible for taking and selling her photographs (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor, who sports an unfortunate New York Jew accent). The Claws get in trouble with the law for mailing risque photographs over state lines, and are eventually shut down after an inquiry by a Senate sub-commitee helmed by famed Midwestern statesman Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn).

These sequences are just dull. It's at this point familiar material, an easy condemnation of the BS morality witch hunts of American's past that unfortunately still come up every few years or so, when there's an election to be won. (Joe Lieberman used to pull this crap all the time, going so far as to declare "Friends," arguably the most mild sitcom of our time, unfit for family viewing.) Yes, we recognize that mainstream films often included scenes with tied-up women without fear of retribution. Yes, clearly these sorts of Senate hearings are designed more for political grandstanding than problem solving. Surely there's some more interesting facet of Bettie Page's life to focus on for the last third of the film than the civic action taken against the phtographers who used to shoot her.

Initially asked to testify on behalf of the Claws, only to be turned away, Bettie sits outside the courtroom for 12 hours straight, listening in on the panel. When she hears the estimony of a father whose son died (apparently through auto-erotic asphyxiation), she feels a sudden twinge of guilt. Could her pictures have turned him to a life of deviant sex and self-abuse?

It's an utterly ridiculous scene. After years of posing for dirty magazines, putting in ball gags and whipping other women while topless, surely Bettie must have considered that men might use those photos to pleasure themselves. And that furthermore, some people might look down on such behavior and blame her for all manner of incidents that aren't really her fault. Forget for a moment whether this moment would even be believable. If this is what the real Bettie Page was like, is she worth making a movie about?