Movies
I’ve actually seen a couple of current movies. I really enjoyed the first ten minutes of Art School Confidential, with its entertainingly mean caricatures of art school students. Then it went into a predictable crime plot, with a lame romantic sub-plot. I was ultimately disappointed.
The Notorious Bettie Page is a bio-pic of, um, Bettie Page. Spoilers below the virtual fold.
As a movie, it felt somewhat shapeless to me. At first, I thought there was absolutely no moral to the story. The film suggests clearly that, as a girl, Page was being molested by her father. She went on to a physically abusive marriage. Soon after striking out on her own, she’s gang-raped.
Her modeling begins by accident when an amateur photographer at the beach asks to photograph her. She soon moved on to posing nude, and then to photos and films of bondage and discipline (all of which were fairly tame by modern standards.) Ultimately, her major employer was put out of business by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency; her aspirations as an actor had gone nowhere; she realized her modeling career was approaching its sell-by date. She took off for Florida (if I recall correctly) where she returned to her childhood religion.
In contrast to the vile things in her early life, it’s striking that absolutely nothing bad is portrayed as occurring as a consequence of her modeling. The worst things are that once, while she was tied and gagged, the photographer sang a bawdy song she objected to, and a love interest objected to her career (but he was a bit of a jerk, anyway.) The people she deals with professionally are consistently kind and respectful.
On further reflection, I decided there was a moral to the story: Being a bondage model? Not so bad. Being a woman coming of age in the ‘50’s? Now that sucks.
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