‘Once in a fiction workshop my professor critiqued a scene because “women wouldn’t ask about a hookup’s performance in bed” and a girl replied “that’s literally the first thing you talk about” and the way he said “oh” will stay with me til I die’– @girlinabasement
Object permanence – that is, the ability to understand that objects continue to live in the world, even if they exist outside of one’s frame of vision – is said to develop in infants as young as five months. And yet, for many men in the world, this formative developmental process seems to have stopped short of realising that women, too, experience rich and complicated inner lives. Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983), a neo-Hitchcockian thriller about a young woman’s sexual awakening, takes aim at this distinctly masculine conceit. Stare long enough into an abyss, gentlemen, and the abyss will stare back.
Young, fashionable and strikingly beautiful, Variety’s Christine (Sandy McLeod) could be an archetypal ‘Hitchcock blonde’. A young twenty-something in eighties New York, Christine lives alone and is struggling to find a job. Her outspoken friend Nan (played by photographer Nan Goldin) has heard about an opportunity, but hesitates: “I don’t think you would want it. I really don’t think you’re the type”. Christine nevertheless persists. The film cuts to Christine in the ticket booth for pornographic theatre Variety in New York’s Times Square, wearing a brown blazer and a pearl necklace, selling two-dollar tickets to predominantly male cinemagoers.
Placed in a street-level ticket booth outside the theatre, Christine becomes the de facto gatekeeper to the pleasures exhorted by Variety’s exterior. “The most tempting, delicious, luscious, most favourable young women you ever wanted to meet are out here on the big screen,” shouts Christine’s coworker Jose (Luis Guzmán) to curious passers-by. Men come and go out of Variety, some less confidently than others. Christine negotiates some breaks with Jose, which she uses to sneak into screenings, thus sparking her growing curiosity with erotica and eventually, a particular fascination with one of Variety’s wealthy patrons.
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Bette Gordon co-wrote the script to Variety alongside late novelist Kathy Acker, now a widely celebrated icon of countercultural punk feminism. It is unsurprising, then, that the product of their collaboration explores in deft and occasionally jarring detail the abysses of female sexual desire, which are often ignored for their unpalatability to the male gaze. Indeed, Christine’s burgeoning sexuality does not delight her boyfriend, the fantastically bland Mark (Will Patton), but rather confuses and alienates him. In a scene that will speak to many a viewer, Christine narrates an erotic story while a stony-faced Mark ignores her, focusing his attention instead on playing his pinball game.
This is the strange and impossible double bind faced by women in an era that is both hypersexualised and driven by a neo-Victorian moralising impulse. The surfeit of female sex objects in Variety – Pussycat playmates! flashes a neon sign outside Variety; Live on Stage XXX! asserts another – is juxtaposed against a social landscape that offers little room for understanding women as agential sexual subjects. It is Sigmund Freud’s Madonna-Whore complex come to life: a schematic of the two archetypes through which female sexuality is commonly understood – a woman is either the pristine and clean ‘Madonna’ to whom sex happens; or the kinky, debased ‘whore’ who has sex. Though the archetypes may be on opposite sides of the sexual divide, what they both share is the ability to neuter female sexuality by keeping it within the confines of masculine power.
Against the backdrop of #MeToo, Variety offers a sage and prescient commentary on the stunted psychosexual landscape of heteronormative masculinity. The men who frequent Variety, Christine observes, are often “lonely, down-and-out types; some business guys who can’t get it up anymore”. Seeing Christine at the ticket booth may entice some men, she speculates, to come, “because they think I’m some sort of attraction, but mostly I think they’re just sort of embarrassed that I’m there”. The presence of a woman guarding the gates to a space that touts itself as being replete with ‘beautiful, luscious ladies’ is seen, ironically, as a disturbance. The latter women are hidden behind a cinematic screen: they will neither taunt you for ‘not getting it up’, nor cast aspersions on your sexual capabilities (or lack thereof), and when you look at them, they will not look back. These women, in their versions behind the screen, neutralised and imprisoned, exist expressly for the pleasure of others.
This is the necessary result of centuries of gendered conditioning. Men are taught to equate vulnerability with weakness, compassion with perversity, and sexual desire with sexual dominance. Sex becomes, in this self-abnegating emotional landscape, a narcissistic quest for mastery rather than a relational act of mutual love. The darker, understated dimensions of intimacy and attraction are diluted and denied, replaced by unimaginatively homogeneous visual signifiers, à la Hugh Hefner’s prototypical array of model-thin, twenty-something blondes. In this configuration, any women who incites feelings of vulnerability – any women who refuses to adhere to a tidy and neat script – is a threat to male dignity and dominance. In Variety, at Variety, Christine’s presence at the ticket booth becomes an uncomfortable and embarrassing challenge to its male patrons; she is an inconvenient disruption in the otherwise idyllic space of masculine sexual freedom promised within.
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Writing in the Guardian about #MeToo and the recent revelations of widespread sexual harassment, Dayna Tortorici considers the issue predominantly through the lens of masculinity, ego, and anxiety: “The way they had learned to live in the world – to write novels, to make art, to teach, to argue about ideas, to conduct themselves in sexual and romantic relationships – no longer fit the time in which they were living.”1 Anticipating criticisms that she focused too much of her critique on men, Tortorici notes: “If my approach was too much about men, my defence is that the situation was about men from the beginning.”2 Speaking about men is different from giving them power: in fact, it is only through the former that the latter can be challenged. In Variety, Christine’s power is mediated through her explicit examination of predominantly male spaces. She tails a Variety patron to an all-male sex store, then an all-male fishmonger’s market, and various all-male business gatherings. It is her vision that becomes the unassailable, omniscient frame of reference. Men and their goings-on become the relativised ‘other’, their existence and narratives contingent on her continued attention.
It is said that the grip of ideology starts to falter at the moment in which its masters feel compelled to defend their dominance. For the knotty question of masculinity, there may yet be some time to go. At this year’s Golden Globes, where attendees wore black in solidarity with the Time’s Up movement against sexual violence, it was the women who spoke out against harassment – because they had to; nobody else would do it for them – while the men skirted past in their standard black tuxedos, continuing to field questions only on their careers, aspirations, and hopes for the future. An ironic and somewhat disappointing twist: the subjugated should not be obliged to rectify the mistakes of their oppressors. The last scene of Variety is deliberately ambiguous: the camera lingers on a street corner just before a highly anticipated and fateful meeting. The future of gender relations, too, rests on this indeterminate horizon of possibility.
1. Dayna Tortorici, ‘Reckoning with a culture of male resentment’, December 2017, The Guardian (Online). 2. Ibid.
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‘On Variety‘ by Bette Gordon
Exploring New York City’s underground in the early eighties, late at night, I came upon the Variety theatre. Its neon marquee looked like something from the past, and I couldn’t stop looking. I wanted to investigate the theatre. It had once been a vaudeville theatre, and before that, a stable for the Stuyvesant family. At that time, it was a porn theatre. I like to watch. I have always been fascinated by the cinema and the secretive, voyeuristic pleasure I get from looking at people on the screen. Since the basic condition of cinema is an exchange between seeing and being seen – voyeurism and its flip side, exhibitionism – I wanted to make a film that explored these issues. In Variety, Christine (Sandy McLeod) works in a porn theatre as a ticket-seller. The film is set in the world of the voyeur. But. in this case, the traditional male role is reversed: Christine becomes obsessed with watching and following a male client. Her obsession is, in a sense, pornographic. Hitchcock had used the cool blonde female, always as the object of the male gaze, the enigma – but Christine usurps this position. She is the sleuth in a thriller whose terrain is the language of desire.
As a visual artist and filmmaker who moved from Boston to New York City in the eighties, I was attracted to places like this: the underside of the city I’d seen in movies like Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948). I made the city into a character with its own personality, glimpsed through the garish night-time quality of Times Square; the hyperreal overlit look of the Fulton Fish Market; or the Yankee Stadium, which loomed like a backdrop in a Hitchcock movie. Film noir was an appealing genre for me, not only for its half-lit dark streets but also for the female characters who possessed a dangerous and intriguing sexuality – an unrestrained sense of female sexuality. Hitchcock films including Vertigo (1958), Rear Window (1954), and Psycho (1960) attracted me because they possessed an obsessional quality – and when it came to making my film, I decided to turn the genre of the noir thriller on its head, presenting a woman as the investigator and a man as the enigmatic figure.
Variety is a film about looking. I used frames within frames, windows, doorways and reflections in order to visually capture the idea of looking and being looked at. Influenced by Laura Mulvey’s essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, I was drawn to the idea that a cinema-based pleasure in looking is connected with the centrality of the image of the ‘female’. Men look and women are looked at. The film uses pornography as a backdrop to explore the themes of voyeurism, obsession and desire through a noir-like story about a woman who dares look back. The subject of the film is desire (not pornography) and the heroine, Christine, acts out the fears and fantasies of an entire generation of women coming to terms with their own sexual aggression and behaviour. Below is an interview I gave to Christine Noll Brinckmann, published in Frauen und Film, Spring, 1984. I reviewed my answers, edited and added detail for Another Gaze. Brinckmann is a professor, theorist and filmmaker living in Germany.
CNB – How did pornography come to be a subject for your first feature film?
BG – In some ways, sexuality was the subject and that was what led to pornography. A great deal of my work before Variety was concerned with sexuality and the representation of images of women. The idea of ‘looking’ was also crucial to my early short films, but the emphasis was on the look of the viewer at the image. In Empty Suitcases (1981) the hypnotic gaze of the viewer is deconstructed through the prefacing of each shot with black. My work in pornography comes from my interest in cinema as a kind of object that requires the viewer to take pleasure in looking at it, rather than from the social interaction of women in this culture who have talked about pornography as either for or against it. I think the subject of pornography and sexuality in culture is more interesting than whether or not it should be censored. I was not interested in the arguments against pornography that simply reduced sexism to sex, and used explicit sex to demonstrate explicit sexism. Pornography is not a monolithic construction, and instead consists of a variety of practices operating across various institutions, places and times, and is therefore open to intervention. The codes and conventions can be interrupted; the prevailing representations are not givens or natural phenomena. For me, then, pornography was a means of exploring desire and representation. I wanted to explore the gap between my sexual fantasy and my sexual identity, and in that gap there are a number of issues at the intersection of feminism and film. I wanted to challenge the notion of sexuality as a fixed identity and, in addressing my own sexuality with a voice other than censorship, to use fantasy to investigate desire.
CNB – So in Variety, we see a woman’s look at the way the cinema looks at her?
BG – Yes, I think that’s really crucial and central. My film takes the leap of equating traditional mainstream cinema with pornography. Both employ the voyeuristic mode to exploit women as object of male fantasy and desire. It has to do with the pleasure of looking, which is central to all cinema. Being looked at and looking are two opposite ways in which the cinema posits the representation of the female image. To paraphrase Laura Mulvey’s essay: women in cinema are to be looked at; they are objects of the male look. In the classic narrative thriller genre, the woman is pursued by a man and is seen as spectacle, as a way to facilitate the man’s (usually a male detective) exploration of woman as obstacle. In Vertigo, Jimmy Steward tries to make over Kim Novak into the image of the woman Kim Novak was playing – the wife. He re-makes her hair, her clothes, her makeup. Variety plays with reversing this systematic situation. My character is not being made over by a man: she remakes herself. I also set up situations where the vulnerability of the woman is established and intrusion and victimisation is expected. Instead, the character crosses the limits of the situation, surveying the man, reversing the norms of the genre. And yet it’s more complicated than that because there’s a different relationship set up between the woman and the man in my film. She’s curious, she investigates, she finds out intimate details, and yet, for me, it is more about a quest for her own sexual identity than it is a quest for power. I remember a Hollywood thriller where this dynamic of looking is part of the story. The woman in Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944) breaks a taboo by following a man into a club. She stares at him for such a long time that he is totally unnerved by her look and proceeds to drop a bottle, and when she follows him into the night, he is even more nervous. In a blind attempt to escape her look, he runs outside, but he steps in front of a car and is accidentally killed. Men are not used to being the object of the look.
CNB – There is considerable restraint in Variety to actually show the pornography that figures so importantly in the plot. Other films that tackle the subject – most notably and deplorably Not A Love Story (Bonnie Sherr Klein, 1981) – never seem to be able to get enough and they gloat over their hardcore examples as if they were jewels. Can you comment on your decision to show so little?
BG – When I first began to develop the ideas for the film, I was attracted to having the pornography spoken rather than see. On one level, I thought that the audience would be forced to imagine their own images rather than simply watching already constructed images of sexuality. Freud and Lacan stressed the relation between language and sexual fantasy. Desire is based on language in psychoanalytic explanations of child development. I thought that if the viewer had to imagine their own images based on what was heard, they would then be implicated more in developing their own fantasies. I’ve always hoped to create a more active spectator in my work, a spectator who would have to participate in the film process. Another principle at work for me (as described in an article by Paul Willemen in Screen)1 was that pornographic cinema substitutes the look for the touch. Pornography offers representations that are incapable of actually fulfilling the fantasies that they generate within the viewer. While purporting to offer fantasy, it instead sustains desire for an ever-promised by never found gratification. I wanted to develop a story that would function in the same way, creating that desire but not satisfying it. So there are some brief moments where we see what is on the screen in the cinema where Christine works, but these are clearly not reconstructed by me. I was trying to problematise those images within the context of my story, always calling attention to ‘watching’ and ‘looking’. Additionally, these moments are dislocated from their original context and are intentionally abstract. We see a shot of a gloved hand on a part of the body, but are unable to determine which part of the body. We see several shots of women’s faces, that express pleasure and are involved in sex, but we don’t see what is going on, just the face isolated from the rest of the body. Initially, I intended to show much more graphic and hardcore material, but the more I looked at those images the less they intrigued me. I ended up being attracted to the most ambiguous shots from porn movies. Perhaps my own sexual desire is aroused more by what I don’t see, what I imagine than by what is too present, too visible.
CNB – Does Variety differentiate between male and female sexual fantasy?
BG – Christine describes the porn movies she sees to her boyfriend. The longer she works at the theatre, the less her descriptions are about the movies and more about her own imagination and fantasies – not based on what she sees, but on what she wants to see. Describing sexual fantasies is taboo in our culture, even to those close to you. So I was also attracted to the idea of Christine articulating her fantasies in public to her boyfriend. It makes her boyfriend Mark feel uncomfortable when she speaks this language of sex and later he becomes anxious and leaves their lunch. In scenes with Christine and Mark, he usually speaks first and talks about his work, as a reporter and journalist. When she speaks, it is almost like two monologues: they don’t really speak to each other or communicate. He is quiet, uncomfortable and often looks around to see if anyone else can hear them. When presented with her fantasies, he doesn’t understand, and asks: “Why are you telling me this? Are you OK?” Christine replies: “I’m telling you about my life.” On the third encounter, he plays pinball and she speaks. He no longer even tries to speak. He is silent. Her language has taken over his. Similarly, in the first scene in the porn store, when Christine enters an overwhelmingly male terrain, all the men near her move away. Other men are complicit, but a woman is not – she is supposed to be the object of their look, or of their speech or jokes. She is not supposed to be someone who looks in the way they do. I don’t know if the film posits a difference between male and female sexual fantasy. I don’t think so. I think that the language of desire is male (and, as we know, language is a patriarchal construction) but that Christine’s articulation of sexual fantasy represents a new and radical activity. The film suggests that women, even in patriarchal culture, are active agents who can interpret and utilise cultural symbols; they are not just passive objects of those symbols. I am interested in pornography as a site on which to explore its lessons about desire and the kind of fantasies it mobilises. Christine works on her own problems and relationships by investigating her sexuality, her desire. She takes pleasure in following, in looking. In fact, it is precisely the gap between (my) sexual fantasy and (my) sexual identity that interests me in this film. I am absolutely not interested in creating a separate or alternative feminist erotica, because this would suggest a marginality – the “other place” outside of the culture to which women have already been assigned. I don’t want to maintain that outside-ness: I prefer to challenge the existing culture from within. Christine’s act of speaking out her sexuality challenges the role she would have been assigned in representation, she would be ‘spoken’, not speaking. The responses of audience members to those sections of the film where Christine speaks her sexual fantasies have been interesting. Some men express discomfort while some women identify strongly with Christine at these moments. I believe that this discomfort is the result of a successful subversion of the power structure.
CNB – The ending of Variety seems to be intentionally ambiguous. What are the reasons for this?
BG – This ambiguity is essential to me because I wanted to set up a narrative structure that would both parallel and point to the structure of pornography, with its offer of fantasy and denial of gratification. And, more importantly, I wanted the viewer to continue the investigation set up in the film, to provoke them into a state of analysis and self-analysis. Actually, at the time of the first screenings of Variety, the most controversial aspect was not the inclusion of porn or the fact that the filmmaker was embracing porn as a kind of expression. More disturbing to people was the ending, which didn’t provide an absolute conclusion. The dark empty street at the end says that between desire and gratification lies an empty space – but that this space is full of possibilities.
1. Paul Willeman, ‘Letter to John’, in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, ed. by Screen Editorial Collective (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.171-83
Stills by Nan Goldin. Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and one of Another Gaze’s staff writers. Bette Gordon is an American filmmaker and a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts who has been making films since the mid-1970s.
This article first appeared in Another Gaze 01. You can buy the full PDF, print issue, or subscribe here.
