Ponders the myriad pathologies of pop culture.
Obsesses about actressing at the edges.
Loves grilled cheese.
ARCHIVE OF SUPPORTING ACTRESS SUNDAYS & THE SMACKDOWN
from BLUEBOY - The National Magazine about Men
There are times, in approaching a film for Supporting Actress Sundays, where I'm fairly certain I know exactly what I'll say about the featured performance. But one thing I've learned as a result of the careful attention obliged by the StinkyLulu method (in which I screen the performance at least three times: once in the context of the whole film, a second time while I clock the performance's screentime, and a third while I gather screenshots) is that, the more certain I am about what I think I'll think about a performance, the more likely my prejudgments will be completely off-base. Sometimes I'll remember a performance as all nuance and sophistication, only to be stunned by its simplistic shallowness. Other times I'll recall a performance as negligible only to be shocked at the depth, sophistication and craft actually at work, as in the case of...
The character of Judy is deceptively simple. On first glance, she seems merely a rebellious innocent prone to big talk, daddy issues, and life-changing crushes on bad boys.
Even as Judy's proto-delinquent path crosses Jim's -- the new good/bad boy in town (James Dean in a fascinating, iconic performance) -- there doesn't seem much in the way of surprises with either the character of Judy or Natalie Wood's performance in the role. Yet, director Nicholas Ray and actress Natalie Wood are crafty devils, emphasis on the crafty. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ray and Wood's work in the film is how baldly the first scene proclaims Judy's subtext, backstory, her entire character really: she's a petulant adolescent who resents her father for not paying attention to her. And in those first screechy, weepy scenes, Natalie Wood nails the truth of that anxious, self-involved despair. The tricky part? Ray and Wood are not showing Judy's hand, but laying the foundation for what comes next.
Comparably, Wood efficiently accomplishes the ruse of Judy's badgirl mask, when she first meets Dean's Jim and idly rides along as "the kids" taunt and torment him. Wood clearly and simply shows Judy sliding in and out of the tough tart part, punctuating the scenes with tiny private moments (checking to see that Buzz is ok after the previous evening's chicken contest, startling herself in her compact mirror with a flash of recollection of the previous evening's jailhouse travails).
Between these two sets of scenes, Ray and Wood vividly depict two faces of Judy. Whether either Judy is an act becomes less important than the fact that she's so adept at being both, of being whoever she needs or wants to be at any given moment. And to her credit, Wood seems to get this. The actress seems to appreciate Judy's "pretend" as a mode of self-protection and self-preservation. (It's frankly impossible for me to consider the character of Judy and not interpret her daddy fixation as somehow symptomatic of intrafamilial child-sexual abuse: that Judy's gotten "too old" for Daddy's special attention; that the mother's at once attuned and oblivious to "something" going on between her daughter and her husband; that Judy shares a curiously protective bond with both her younger brother and Plato... Judy's not only a textbook badgirl, but also a textbook survivor.)
In Judy, Ray and Wood construct a really smart and effective exploration of teen identity experimentation. It's not that Judy doesn't know who she is. Rather, she's not sure who she needs to be. And, in the thirty or so hours of her life that the film depicts, Wood's Judy has some experiences that transform her from desperate child to fearful young woman.
Indeed, when Buzz's car goes off the cliff, and when she's abandoned by all her friends, Judy's at a loss for who to be -- until she finds a new idea of herself reflected in the sweet horndog gaze of Dean's Jim.
I was prepared to dismiss Wood's work in this role because I only remembered her mommy-presence in the post-chicken scenes, when the three outcasts (the rebel, the badgirl, the freak) played house in the abandoned mansion.
This time through though, after paying close attention to the scenes that precede the legendary sequences in the mansion, I began to appreciate how -- for Judy at least -- "playing" a role is not something she does to escape her life, but something she does to survive it. There's a lucidity, a strategy, in Wood's performance as Judy that I had missed before. Wood's Judy always knows what she's doing even if she doesn't know why she's doing it (as when she agrees to go "explore" with Jim in front of the fireplace).
Nicholas Ray built an intricate architectural masterpiece with Rebel without a Cause. Every piece fits and Natalie Wood's does so perfectly. When Wood's Judy slides Plato's lost loafer onto his foot, it's a gesture of courtesy, respect, tenderness and utter confusion. (That stretcher scene between Jim, Judy and the housekeeper over Plato's dead body just slays me every f'n time -- yes, StinkyLulu is a 13 year old girl, and will always be.) For the first time, Judy doesn't want to play a part but all she knows to do is replace Plato's shoe.
I doubt that Judy and Jim's new relationship survived the week, or that they named their first born son Plato, but golly I'm glad Jim introduced her to his parents at the end of that extraordinary night -- if only so's I could grab a screencap of this perfect shot.
I'm still somewhat stunned that I emerged so impressed by Natalie Wood's work in the role of Judy. Smart, effective, understated, actorly in all the best ways with a simple, sublime honesty throughout. I still don't know if I love the performance, but I'm newly impressed by the work.
Well-played, Miss Natasha, well-played. You got me, you really got me.
StinkyLulu offers the following "5 Stinky Thoughts" as my contribution to the Queer Movie Blogathon instigated by Queering The Apparatus:
click image to be routed to video
...and every film that StinkyLulu contemplated in preparation for this event illuminated one aspect of what StinkyLulu so treasures about queer film: Female Trouble's garish, gaudy sloppiness; Poison's giddy genre games; Parting Glances's smart, sexy subterfuge; Shortbus's explicit, passionate, acrobatic and memorably musical perversions; Bell Book & Candle's oblique curves; Law of Desire's puddling heat; The Queen (1968)'s heart-stopping theatricality; Watermelon Woman's meta-cinematic marvels; The Times of Harvey Milk's lost moment in time; Cruising's buttfuck homo panic; Myra Breckenridge's buttfuck gender panic...it's a dizzying merry-go-round of faggots and trannies and queers --- OH MY!!! Yet, even as each of these titles gives its own distinctively heady whiff of the pungent power of queer cinema, only one film -- in StinkyLulu's experience -- delivers the full wallop of the complete bouquet: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's queerest conundrum, Querelle (1982).
...whatta a man, whatta a mighty -- Fassbinder's Querelle (like the Genet novel from which it riffs promiscuously) presents a sweaty meditation on a diverse range of eroticized masculinities, arranged in constellation as a testosterone-soaked backdrop for the narrative's shooting star: the sailor/cipher Querelle (a breathtakingly beautiful Brad Davis). Fassbinder populates his film's landscape with tawdry two-bit Tom of Finland knockoffs to underscore that Querelle exists as an active object of/for penetration, which -- in the film's brilliant distillation -- operates as a synedochic gesture of masculine abjection, objectification and transcendence (video). Everyone wants to fuck Querelle. Or kill him. Or both. The journey of the film follows Querelle as he intuitively reconfigures himself to perform himself within the roles constructed by the film's various, salacious gazes. As Querelle, Brad Davis -- in a performance that's equal parts dim-witted pout, adolescent arrogance, and penitent surrender -- offers an astonishing portrait of a man "becoming" more than "coming" out into a different, and differently dangerous, self...
...me that the film is so easily mistaken for a "kill the faggot" movie (example 1, 2). Yes, there's a lot of death and violence there, and the film does end with a hopelessness that's chilling, but Fassbinder does something with this narrative that's resoundingly profound: at its core, Fassbinder's Querelle reminds us that queerness itself is a matter of life and death. The "choice" to express one's queerness is mortally dangerous, the choice not to -- perhaps more so. For me, Querelle is Fassbinder's homage to his queer forefathers (Genet of the novel, Wilde of the "each man kills" epigram), an acknowledgment of the deadly stakes of queer erotic -- and queer aesthetic -- self expression. This homage is perhaps the part of the film that's most elusive to contemporary audiences, the overlay of homo=death being a bit too much to bear. Indeed, Fassbinder's Querelle arrived in the early 1980s -- right as Vito Russo's influential Celluloid Closet thesis (film wants gays and lesbians dead) started to take hold and just as the apocalyptic onslaught of the early AIDS era began to be felt and at the same time of the filmmaker's now mysterious death and not long before Brad Davis's own HIV-related passing. A mournful caul yet surrounds Querelle, somehow obscuring Fassbinder's shocking lucidity about the queer condition: that the costs of living queerly might be high, but the costs of not doing so are equally grim. It's this stark poignancy that I admire so about Querelle, this vivid, life-&-death portrait of the queer conundrum...
...that gets me every time, though -- even as I'm wrestling in the pit of Querelle's queer conundrum -- is just how darkly humorous Fassbinder made this film to be. It's basically a comedy. See, every time it gets all superhorny or superprofound, Fassbinder ruins the moment with a brilliantly sloppy joke. The film's intense imagery is so conspicuous that it's easy to get all hopped up about -- oh -- Brad Davis getting plowed, or to get all grim about the violence, the misogyny, the racism. But, truth be told, every seam of the film is sutured with brutal irony, simply riven with courageous camp. From the genius goof of the voiceover, to the phallic scenography, to the silly fight choreography, to the fact of Jeanne Moreau's cabaret act. The whole film is a deep dark camp joke, albeit layered with porno-spiritual overtones, and laden with life-&-death consequences. BUT just such a mix is -- to me -- the absolute essence of queer film.
Indeed, that StinkyLulu - he does love this film. Fassbinder's Querelle is hard work, to be sure, but there's a generous, tender, truthfulness amidst the shocking camp, hypertheatricality, lurid violence, terrorizing sexuality, and roiling despair -- something worth hacking through your own fears and judgments to get to, I promise. Of course, StinkyLulu's a bit biased: Querelle happens also to be the first film to truly shake StinkyLu's proto-cinephiliac foundations. When I saw it for the first time, in a college class twenty years ago, Fassbinder's Querelle was "the" film to fundamentally inspire me to think deep and hard. I had been watching movies carefully, thoughtfully, adventurously for ten years already, but Querelle was the first film to truly demand that I start engaging film as I had previously only engaged literature and theatre: as a mode of creative, aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual self-inquiry. So, Fassbinder's Querelle -- in a very specific way -- "took" my cinematic innocence (which was hardly naive at the time), insisting that I begin to understand that movies would no longer just be diverting commodities but essential waystations on my path to myselfI concluded last week's Supporting Actress Sunday profile with a meditation on "the accretive nomination" -- the nominations that sometimes emerge for a performer's accumulation of work in a particular year or phase of their career. It's the kind of thing that peeves some "awardies" (the award show equivalent of "foodies") to no end: "give the prize for the performance, not the career," they moan. Yet, the accretive nom is an undeniable part of award show tradition. And this week, 1955 might bring us yet another example -- a singer who gave both her most memorable screen performance as well as this one, the performance that earned a Supporting Actress nomination for...
McCarg strong-arms Pete Kelly into making Rose the girl singer for his band, which does not endear Rose to Pete. Yet, when Pete Kelly sees the casual cruelty of McCarg's treatment of Rose, he takes a liking to her.
Rose blossoms in his presence, nourished by the courtesy and dignity he affords her.
Pete and Rose also play well together, with Rose's talents as a singer quickly counterbalancing whatever burden her presence might have initially brought Pete's band.
Yet there's a sadness that emanates from Rose, a mournful numbed anguish that's amplified by every drink she takes
Peggy Lee's Rose is fascinating -- enigmatic and heartbreaking. Lee's singing is beyond gorgeous, and her distinctive presence imbues the character with the palpable thrall of mystery.
The problem comes when Lee's inexpertness as an actress combines with Jack Webb's flatfooted direction. Webb was a radio guy, newly arrived to the visual media of film and television when he directed this piece. In Pete Kelly's Blues, it seems he cast for voice -- with each of the principal characters having a precise and distinct vocal affect. The vocality and presence of each character is strong even as their visual and physical dimensions are awkward and stiff.
And it's in Peggy Lee's Rose that Webb's directorial deficits are most conspicuous. With Ella Fitzgerald, who's so painfully self-conscious in her scenes that it's clear Webb was working with a gifted performer possessed of little acting talent. But with Peggy Lee's Rose, it seems equally clear that, with Lee, the director had all the makings of a brilliant performance. Lee's line deliveries are apt, character-based and drenched with emotion. The singer's ethereal gifts as a monologist texture the phrasing of her every line. But, it seems, Lee has no idea how to share her performance with the camera. She hides from the camera, or stands tense before it. And what's worst: Webb apparently has no idea how to help. He directs Lee's performance as he did his own -- it's all herky jerky stiffness, with awkward freezes and amateurish, indicative gestures. On Lee, the director's clumsy handprint is everywhere it shouldn't be.
Yet, somehow, the "something" at the center of Peggy Lee's performance withstands the disastrous direction -- a fact that's made clear in the devastating, bizarre asylum scene that provides Rose's haunting coda.
Rose is in the state mental institution "with the brain of a five year old," having experienced either a psychotic break or permanent brain damage as a result of McCarg's repeated beatings. Pete Kelly visits her, in the hopes that she might yet be able to provide a necessary clue to McCarg's misdeeds on a fateful night years earlier. Underscored by the tinkling sounds of a toy piano, Rose dithers and rambles about "her baby" - an improbably dredlocked rag doll she cradles in her arms. In this extended, incredibly bizarre scene, Lee registers abject insanity and absolute lucidity, openhearted hope and self-protecting fear, electrifying pain and benumbed despair, giddy girlishness and the weariness of age. But, once again, Webb botches it all: as a director, he flattens it in wide shot; as a scene partner, his obsequious banality blunts every one of Lee's moments. It's just astonishing to watch as Webb's every move tamps each of Lee's sparks.
Nonetheless, something was happening in Peggy Lee's performance, something that the cruelties of pan-and-scan vhs transfer and/or the idiocy of Jack Webb's direction render almost illegible today. Something -- buried beneath the banality of this film. (Indeed, Lee's line reading of "he was mean to my baby" has haunted and chilled StinkyLulu's heart for weeks now.) Perhaps as a result, I find myself entertaining the fantasies of what Peggy Lee's performance might have looked like in the hands of a more intuitive, more demanding director -- what might have Lee's Rose looked like under the guidance of Altman, or Campion, or Haynes, or even Scorsese? It's a loss, truly...
A possibly great performance nearly lost in this flat, boring mess of a film.
