Monday, March 16, 2009

It's not about dreams...




I am spending a few days in the desert and brought a few movies with me in case I wanted that sort of distraction. Turns out I did, and last night I watched Robert Altman's 3 Women. I had seen it before, but not in a long time. Coincidentally, the film is set in a fictional town that is based on the one that I am in. I hadn't remembered that when I picked it up, so it was a surprise when the first scenes of the area appeared. There is an aquifer beneath this town, so people come here to take the waters. There is something strange about this incredible water in the middle of the desert, and 3 Women uses the dry, minimal landscape combined with the idea of healing water to explore and metaphorically describe the landscape of femininity and the societal positions of women. The three main characters are Millie, Pinky, and Willie, but they all get wrapped up in Millie by the end of the film, and it made me think a lot about the way men think about women and the ways in which women think about themselves. Between the three of them, the characters present just about every female stereotype. They are also always changing and exchanging characteristics, presenting a stereotype in itself, that of the maleable, chameleon-like female personality. These women are foreigners to themselves, each other, and to others around them. They have no tools and perhaps no desire to understand themselves, and they are therefore constantly constructing their personalities through the materiality at hand. It is an immediate and swift kind of self-recognition and adaptation, and it is acutely disturbing in its familiarity. Watching the film again last night reminded me that I had been part of the audience for a filmed performance made as part of a series of films by Amy Granat and Emily Sundblad that included a projection of 3 Women as a backdrop. Driving with Granat and Sundblad to dinner afterward in their rented car felt kind of like the movie, all of us wondering who we are all at once and perpetually making it up as we go along.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You made me think of another Altman movie, "McCabe and Mrs Miller". McCabe's character, unlike the layered complexity of the 3 women in "3 Women", is just one guy with a bunch of tics, zero complexity beyond raw nerves, a sort of existential bafflement and man's primordial instinct to build something. I don't see heroes like that enough in movies, but he's totally heroic, (and doomed, and cool.)

Corrina Peipon said...

Who are you, Anonymous? McCabe and Mrs. Miller is another favorite. The Leonard Cohen soundtrack is fantastic. I agree that McCabe is indeed a super interesting - and very cool - character. I hadn't thought about this particular parallel, but M&MM and 3 Women have in common a theme of role reversals and exchanges. While in 3 Women the identities of all three main characters are blurred through twists in the narrative, M&MM presents a more straightforward male/female type reversal, wherein Mrs. Miller is the blunt, rugged, business-minded, detached (sterotypically male) character and McCabe is the soft, confused, inarticulate, emotional (stereotypically female) character. It is he who pursues her, deferentially waiting for her emotions to grow, for her to show some sign that she might care for him.