>>PREVIEW
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE
STARRING Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer and Jared Harris
DIRECTED BY Mary Harron
Opens Friday, May 12
Uptown Screen
Inevitably, the photographs and films of Bettie Page, raven-haired model and sex icon, have a campy sort of quality to them half a century after they were taken. Whether it’s "Jungle Bettie" carrying on in a leopard-skin bikini, or the faux-stern "Mistress Bettie" doling out a spanking to a bound, lingerie-clad ingénue, there’s an insouciance, a playfulness that seems a part of the era when they were taken.
But in 1956, Page was summoned to appear before a senate committee that sought to put a stop to the corrupting influence of the salacious images for which she and other young women posed.
"I don’t think she ever really entirely understood or thought about the implications or consequences of posing in those sorts of photographs," says filmmaker Mary Harron, who spent more than a decade bringing Pages’ story to the screen. "It was just playing dress-up and play-acting as far as she was concerned. It was harmless."
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
Harron’s feature filmography evinces a writer-director interested in paradoxical characters, like Valerie Solanas, the author and feminist turned failed assassin in I Shot Andy Warhol, or Patrick Bateman, the bland, successful yuppie whose buffed and polished surface conceals a homicidal maniac in American Psycho. Though free of violent urges, Page constitutes a similar enigma – a devout Christian from a strict southern home who became a pin-up favourite and a pioneering bondage model in puritanical 1950s America.
Page, who turned 83 last month, has shunned the public eye since her retirement from modelling in 1957, her subsequent personal life marked by failed marriages and bouts of mental illness. For two decades, she was all but unknown until a small publishing house called Belier Press started reprinting her photographs in the late 1970s. Before long, a new generation of fans had emerged, captivated by Page’s dark-haired, voluptuous beauty and the unselfconscious audacity she projected.
Harron first encountered Page’s photos in 1993 and was intrigued by the person behind the pictures. She and collaborator Guinevere Turner (with whom she co-wrote the screenplay for American Psycho) began to research Page, interviewing key players in her life to piece together a sense of who she was.
"It was hard to turn a real life person’s story into a movie – you know, where do you start and where do you end, how much of their childhood do you include and so on," she says.
The Notorious Bettie Page, which Harron had planned as a short film, spent the next 10 years in development as Harron wrote and rewrote the script with Turner, taking breaks to make her two other features and to give birth to two children. Eventually the co-scenarists decided to focus primarily on Page’s time in New York, where the bulk of her modelling career took place, prefacing it with some episodes from Bettie’s life in her hometown of Nashville. Though Harron and Turner chose to touch on the sexual abuse Page suffered at the hands of her father and a sexual assault that befell her in early adulthood, Harron says she wanted to avoid psychologizing Bettie’s behaviour.
DELICIOUS BUT DISTANT
"I suppose that might have played into her desire to be a model – it’s very common for people who choose these kinds of careers to have incidents of abuse in their past," Harron says. "But the woman in my first film, I Shot Andy Warhol, also suffered similar abuse and she went on to become a raging feminist. So I don’t think we can say, ‘oh, Bettie’s life played out in that way because of what happened earlier in her life.’"
In fact, Harron’s film seems to avoid altogether speculation about Page’s inner life. The portrayal may be sympathetic, but it’s enigmatic – perhaps no less enigmatic than the subject was in real life.
"It’s funny because I had a chance to speak with her first husband, Billy Neal, before he died. He said that Bettie was very sweet on the whole, she was a kind person, she was very tolerant for someone who was raised in the south at that time, but that there was something remote about her," Harron says.
"She had a lot of boyfriends and she was married four times, but the more we talked to people who knew her, the more we got the sense that even people who were close to her found her to be a bit of a mystery. So we reached the point where we thought maybe we aren’t supposed to solve this mystery."
Maintaining the mystery while fleshing out the person was a challenge that reared its head during casting. Harron says she saw countless actresses who were a good physical match, but who lacked the intangibles that gave Bettie her lasting appeal. She eventually auditioned Gretchen Mol, who she had met while casting American Psycho. Harron says Mol effortlessly channelled the same spirit evident in Page’s photos.
"It went on for months and months and months – that’s part of why the film took so long to make, because we didn’t have a Bettie," Harron says. "We saw many people, we also looked at a lot of movies trying to find the perfect voluptuous brunette, and in the end it was a rather slender blonde. But Gretchen had the innocence and the sexiness and the effervescence. She’s not just imitating someone, she brings Bettie to life in a way."
THE QUIETLY HORNY ’50s
Though the film has no single antagonist, Pages’ life and career are a foil for the repressive and hypocritical attitudes toward sex in 1950s America. Harron says it’s interesting that the story should come to take on greater relevance during the decade she prepared it for the big screen.
"We started in the Clinton years looking at this subject," she says. "Clearly the moral panics and battles over censorship in America, I don’t think the terms of that debate ever change very much – you know, the corrupting power of an image and how much we should protect our youth.
"But then when Bush came into the White House, there was clearly a more conscious attempt to return America to the ’50s – to the traditional values, to the conformity, like a reaction against the ’70s. What’s interesting is that it wasn’t a safer, more stable society necessarily. It was just a more tightly repressed one. Those things were kept underground, but it doesn’t mean those things weren’t there." |
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