In Which We Are Having Champagne With You Fine People

Dolls

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Titanic
dir. James Cameron
194 minutes

James Cameron’s Titanic immediately prompts a series of awkward poses and bulky pomp: Rose’s half-cupped hand resting shyly on her forehead as Jack draws her naked, or the flimsy way in which she touches the brim of her boarding hat, or their kiss on the boat’s bow — gawky and oddly angled — or Jack and Rose’s post-coital embrace, his boyishly sweaty head resting on her maternal bosom. The entire film plays out like puberty — self-conscious and smug, as if clocking in future nostalgia, now.

And yet, we all watched it and we all remember it well. And for those didn’t and still haven’t, that reluctance, by some means, has joined the spectacle too.

Made for 200 million dollars, the story is of course quite simple. Wandering artist, Jack, spots engaged society girl, Rose. He’s told he cannot have her. Their meet-cute, so to speak, transpires during her failed suicide attempt off of the boat’s stern. As the ship sinks a few days later, and the two clutch its railings, Rose reminds Jack, “This is where we first met.”

Their friendship soon turns to courtship and Rose’s mother forbids her daughter to see him, reminding Rose of their family’s dire financial troubles as she tightly laces her corset. Rose defies. The ship hits the iceberg. Jack and Rose go down with it, and as they wait for the lifeboats to return, Jack asks Rose to promise him that she’ll survive, that she "won’t give up."

Plot aside, nothing provokes our nostalgia quite like images of what Leo and Kate looked like then. Despite some bad roles, they’ve both continued to rise and work with great directors, but something about their pairing as Jack Dawson and Rose Dewitt Bukater remains crystallized. They are the Prom King and Queen of 90s disaster movies; Ben and Liv a distant second.

DiCaprio used to be much smaller. He didn’t fill out his shirts and his head was not yet square. His jaw line was sharp and flanked the contour of his heart-shaped face. As Jack, when he’d bite into a roll of bread or gulp a glass of beer, or smile breathlessly at Rose, one could see it most in his jaw. His eyebrows were devilish and no matter what he was thinking, there was always a chance it wasn’t good, though almost certainly fun. He threatened charm and mischief, both — that’s what 90s heartthrobs did. A fortune of personality! Funny props in photo shoots! Rare flashes of teeth!

Like Annie Hall, Jack hails from Chippewa Falls. And like Annie Hall, the way he pronounced his hometown endowed him with a preparedness that outdid anyone else on the boat. We trust him from the very start: “You jump, I jump.” For all we know Chippewa Falls is the land of boy scouts and tomboys. La-di-da, la-di-da...

At the time, Kate was a relative unknown. I have a distinct memory of reading a mini-piece in Seventeen where Winslet was asked questions about her co-star. We weren’t yet interested in her. Un-American, she was the opposite of Claire Danes. Kate didn’t appear dreamy and dopey, or stare longingly out of windows or stand willowy against door thresholds. She was neither long-winded nor wary. She wasn’t another Winona or a tongue-tied sweetheart like Gwyneth. Her hair was not flat. She was not a 90s waif. She didn’t seem to harvest much angst.

So who exactly was Kate Winslet? On a 1998 cover of Rolling Stone she’s wearing an unbuttoned peacoat, lace bra, and pleated skirt. The whole thing looks cheerless and uncoordinated. But inside, Winslet seems happier: one shot sultry, the other one goofy and grungy with coastal messy hair and a white Lifesaver (get it?!) cased in her cushiony lips.

As Rose, Winslet looked incredible; especially so in the second half of the film, post-berg, ice cold. Most actresses (and women) do. Think Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago, Uma Thurman in Beautiful Girls, Joan Allen in The Ice Storm, and Kate, again, in Eternal Sunshine. Cheeks naturally narrow, lips darken, skin gets slightly severe with occasional blushes. Even in that first scene where she meets Jack on the stern, her hair appears extra red and ribbony. If you’ve never played with or petted cold hair, not wet just cold, I highly recommend it. The smell of morning shampoo and cold air is dreamy.

Her dresses, diaphanous with filmy layers of beaded constellations, with cinched waists and framed necklines, were somehow intended for lapping seawater, or to float up beside her as she wielded an axe, rudderless and storming through rising tides and flickering lights. Winslet’s great at expressing urgency and obligation. Her brow furrows, her eyes dart. I bet she’s great at charades.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about the director Barbara Loden. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

The 1990s Elapsed Much Faster Cinematically

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Elizabeth Gumport on Wild Things

Hanson O'Haver on Airheads

Alex Carnevale on Indecent Proposal

Emma Barrie on While You Were Sleeping

Jessica Ferri on The Devil's Advocate

Molly O'Brien on Pulp Fiction

Durga Chew-Bose on Titanic

Molly Lambert on Basic Instinct

Alex Carnevale on Singles

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In Which What Made It Special Made It Dangerous

Beauty

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

In a 1972 episode of The Mike Douglas Show, co-hosted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Barbara Loden is introduced by her hosts as "a very lovely lady," as "married to a very famous gentleman," as "wife of Elia Kazan," as "a mother," and as a "filmmaker in her own right." Seconds later, polka-dotted set doors slide open and Loden appears.

She is wearing white jeans, a black knit shirt, and lace-up boots. Her bangs flop over her forehead and her blond highlights have grown out — color-blocking her long, thin and wispy hair. Loden looks like a dream. She has the smile of a young Cloris Leachman, she begins her sentences with "Gee" and speaks of being "bashful." She is from another time. Like a woman in a Sunkist beauty ad — the kind from Teen magazine: "Leaves your hair looking squeaky-clean, smelling lemon-fresh." It’s as if at any moment she might turn, stare straight into the camera, and sell you a bar of Dial soap.

Loden’s voice is soft and her words are considered. It is nerve-wracking to listen to her, a cause for concern. She is wary when discussing her marriage to Elia Kazan, especially in comparison to that of John and Yoko: "We lead a rather insulated life. We don’t get around much." Loden barely reacts when it’s made clear that Douglas hasn't even watched her film, Wanda, but is posing questions nonetheless.

However, once she starts talking about her movie — the only one she would ever write and direct — poise outdoes caution. Loden speaks faster and with finality. Her thoughts accrue in increments. She uses her hands. Her focus turns urgent. It’s clear she feels a deep kinship with her character, Wanda Goransky, a woman Loden says is living "an ugly type of existence," a wife and mother who has abandoned her marriage, her children, and herself. She is uncertain of what she wants but persuaded by what she doesn’t want. Loden is her advocate. Wanda is Loden’s orbit.

"She’s trying to do the best thing that she can. Life is a mystery to her," she says, though not to Douglas, not to John or to Yoko, but to some perhaps doubtful though vital, and resolving side of her nature.  

Premiering at Venice in 1970, Wanda, was released a year later in New York and L.A. Largely ignored and omitted in the United States, like so many endangered American independent films, Wanda was revered in Europe. Marguerite Duras, who writes in The Lover, "My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women," as well as Isabelle Huppert, who released a DVD of Wanda in France in 2004, were fans.

The film begins with a shot of a Pennsylvania coal mine. The landscape is lunar and the machinery looks miniature: crater-sized puddles and Tonka-sized trunks. Mountains of coal denote work, hard work, repetition, and men. We immediately know that Wanda, the title character, whoever she is, is likely detached from this world, these men, this work — especially if the work is hard and repetitive. A Woman Under the Influence, which also starts at a work site, is called to mind. Five Easy Pieces, too. Mabel Longhetti, Rayette Dipesto, and Wanda Goransky: all women whose lives, in various ways, have been trivialized. As Loden puts it, they simply "drop out."

But it’s the echoing sound of machinery at the start of these films that creates a discrete type of stillness: moving parts that carry out tasks, strictly physical, toiling tasks — tools, methods, with functions that function. When Wanda appears moments later, waking up on a couch — a single white sheet as her blanket — she is hungover and bothered by a wailing baby. Wanda is neither functioning nor ready to carry out tasks. If this family and town are hers, they are hers to escape.

Before the movie really takes off, a series of events where Wanda is alone or Wanda is with someone who makes her feel even more alone, unfold. A portrait is painted of a woman who is trying to get as far away from herself as she can and who hasn’t yet found her "use." She walks far distances — a tiny white blemish crossing mountains of gunmetal gray coal — to beg for money, to catch an empty bus, to show up late for divorce court, to look at the judge, point to her husband and say, "They’d be betta off with him."

Too slow as a seamstress, she loses her job at a factory. Too broke to buy a drink, she wakes up hungover in motel beds with men who hurry out in the mornings, who reluctantly drop her off anywhere. In one scene she stands on the side of the highway, licking ice cream as a man peels away in his car. Never did a woman with a goofy high top ponytail look so scrappy, so dejected and doomed.

Aimless, either looking at clothes in a department store and standing beside mannequins which bear an uncanny resemblance to her, or going to the movies, only to fall asleep curled up in her seat, her purse two rows down, emptied of what little she had, Wanda continues to wander. And yet, shit out of luck, she doesn’t mope or mourn — her nothing-to-lose manner is less attitude and more delusion and wear. She’ll look for a comb to neaten her bangs instead of accounting for where she’ll be sleeping that night. The camera gets near to her face, as if convincing us that Wanda is unafraid, if not entirely withdrawn.

But then she meets Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins), a hapless robber and miserable man, and she attaches herself to him. Maybe it’s his gruff way or that he tells her who he is, what to do, and what he doesn’t like — "I don’t like nosy people," "Go back to your comics," "Why don’t you do something about your hair? It looks terrible." Whatever it is, Wanda is fastened to and maybe even fascinated by Mr. Dennis. 

He buys her spaghetti at a diner. She eats it with her fork in one hand and her cigarette in the other. "Did you want that piece of bread?" Wanda asks. “That’s the best part,” she continues while mopping up the leftover sauce. Later, when Mr. Dennis orders her to take the wheel and drive, she does. But Wanda does not use it as opportunity to take control. She follows instructions. She does as she’s told.

Unassuming, loyal, already on the lam, Wanda makes for a perfect accomplice. But first, her clothes have to go. "No slacks! When you’re with me, no slacks!" Mr. Dennis yells. "No hair curlers! Makes you look cheap!" He throws both her pants and her box of curlers out the car window. When Wanda asks him where they are going, he barks: "No questions! When you’re with me, no questions!" While his tone is threatening, Wanda’s been with worse. He’s a bully — a hapless, miserable bully. 

In one scene, Mr. Dennis’ temper dissolves. Standing in an open field as Wanda sits on the roof of his car, the two drink beers and eat sandwiches. The sun is setting and he lends her his jacket. It’s the first moment in the film where two people talk to each other, where vulnerability isn’t an action or inaction, but a single sentence that reveals more than we were ever expecting to learn about Mr. Dennis: "If you don’t have money, you are nothing."

For Wanda, who ignores questions about her kids while painting her nails on the side of the highway, who exchanges her ponytail for a smarter-looking pin-cushion top bun, yet still looks taken down, being "nothing" isn’t so bad. Like Rayette in Five Easy Pieces, whose Stand by Your Man adages are infinite and misguided — "I'll go out with you, or I'll stay in with you, or I’ll do anything that you like for me to do, if you tell me that you love me" — Wanda, too, will do anything, especially if it keeps her moving and at length from recognizing what it is that she wants. 

Barbara Loden died of breast cancer ten years after making Wanda — a debut which feels incredibly close to the writer, director, actress; a debut which is a cumulative expression and hopefully, liberation of herself. Her marriage to Kazan appeared restrained and guarded, and while in some interviews he praises his wife’s film, in his memoirs he writes: "She wanted to be independent, find her own way. I didn’t really believe she had the equipment to be an independent filmmaker."

The word "equipment" is interesting to note. It implies invention and esprit, substance, smarts, ideas of Loden’s own, courage. It is also used by Barbara herself on Mike Douglas' show. When describing Wanda’s inability to take control of her life, to claim desires, Loden says, "She has no equipment." It is a startling coincidence, a fluke that might mean nothing, but one nonetheless. It underpins Loden’s pressing need to make a film about a woman whose story had been told for so long in other people’s words. Her vision was born from a gameness she often concealed as a model, actress and wife, but that she laid bare, masterly, on grainy 16mm, shot over the course of ten weeks with a crew of four.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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The new album from Das Racist, entitled Relax, comes out tomorrow and you can purchase it here.

In Which Just Saying It Could Even Make It Happen

Almost Divine

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Alice in the Cities
dir. Wim Wenders
110 minutes

Philip Winter is stricken with writer's block. Having missed his magazine deadline, he sells his car to a garage in Queens, bringing to a close his failed American road trip. Nearby an organ ushers us through a pan of Shea Stadium on a clear day and eventually settles on the organist, an elderly woman with cat-eye glasses and a sedate smile.

This scene near the start of Wim Wenders’s Alice in the Cities, isn’t extraordinary. In fact there is something remarkably untouched about it, as if it were cut from a reel of lost documentary footage. The camera's surveying sweep and soft focus appears infinite yet arbitrary, as though the movie might turn on itself entirely and follow a trail of summer vestiges instead: colossal cranes at a downtown construction site; teenagers on the boardwalk; an overcrowded public pool and the patter of kids racing to the diving board, oblivious to the lifeguard's warning whistles.

In road movies these tangents acknowledge the necessary — stops for food, sleep, an empty gas tank — but also salute those fugitive, sometimes beguiling pockets of prosaic realism; a young boy bicycling alongside a stranger's car, peddling fast to keep up, or another child, in another city, leaning against a café jukebox and humming along tunelessly to "Psychotic Reaction." As long as there is road ahead, digressions like these last two, collect, and the push to keep moving abides.

But momentum isn't pure motion; it's also the power that inhabits a moving object. Meet Alice (Yella Rottländer), a nine-year-old girl who Philip (Rüdiger Vogler) is forced to care for while her mother, Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer), disappears for a few days. With nothing more than a photograph of her grandmother's home in Germany, Alice and Philip return to Europe and set out to find the house. In this odyssey, the capricious and improbable nature of their relationship--largely buoyed by Alice's intuitive silence and gamine stomp — outdoes the possibility of threat. Instead, their shared withdrawal and homelessness induces a sense of fantasy.

In one scene Phillip concedes and deposits Alice at the local police station in Wuppertal. In vintage Wenders design — serendipitous Americana souvenir — he attends a Chuck Berry concert in the same German city. The event is surreal. The departure is loud and electric, and resembles a dream. But once the show is over, as if waking from this dream, Alice reappears at Winter's car door. Though their reunion is expected, the way in which it materializes is almost divine. Like the Polaroids that Winter compulsively takes, she too 'develops' promptly and somewhat eerily.

There are two types of precocious girls that exist in film. The first being more patent, cherubic and dovelike, who parades her show business smile and displays a homespun sense of superiority towards adults. Her accessories? Germane. A balloon, a hula hoop, a gold fish, a letter from a dead father, a loose ribbon in her hair that she might later tie around a boy's wrist. This girl asks questions about morals, her mother's first time, and local, unsolved murder mysteries. We won't wonder about her once the movie is over.

And then there are girls like Alice. Agile around adults yet slightly departed. Breathless. She sort of knows what's going on in the next room; she is suspicious of sex. She is clever but not cheeky and her affections might be confused as indifference. We envy her retroactively, hope to win her approval, and wonder about her adolescence: in love for the first time, she'll appear disenchanted; corruptible and sometimes curt, she'll still wear the same ALASKA varsity jacket from childhood. We imagine her in the future as slightly inelegant, a fast runner, whip-smart, warmhearted but impatient. Alice's gestures anticipate a later self rather than entertain a temporary quirk or tap dance.

For Philip, she offers something foreign, or at the very least, forgotten: the dewy and resolute charges of childhood. Alienated by the American landscape, Winter meets Alice at a particularly lonely time in his life. "Not one picture leaves you in peace," he announces near the beginning as he considers the lifelessness of his Polaroids — a rest stop like any rest stop; the framed ashen fragment of a nameless beach. But Alice does not fill this void, she joins it.

At first their exchanges are limited and take on a Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, incoherence. Later he takes a Polaroid of Alice as they ride the ferry. As it develops, Winter's worn-out reflection appears on the photograph. A barefaced metaphor, this image does however band with the movie's larger influence. While some films wonderfully entertain and distract, and offer immediate familiarity, humor, distress, fear, or romance, others impart mood and psychic moments of recognition that inexplicably resonate despite foreign intrigue, foreign relationships, humiliation and heartache. Instead of happening to you, these movies chime in and out with discerning reciprocity.

Less involved with choice, Alice in the Cities patiently imparts emotion to inaction. Stillness, like Philip slowly unplugging the bathtub with his toe, is who we are when our emotions no longer have dramatic gestures or words. Delay, dissatisfaction: these sensations cannot be seized in one cartoonish sigh. These sensations exist uninterrupted. Like Alice, slouched in the passenger seat, as if her entire self might stem from the center of her wilted torso. When I see it, I will know, she repeats to Philip as they drive up and down Wuppertal's gangly streets. Her certainty tolls, and we believe her.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. 

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