It’s rarely ideal to find yourself held behind a pane of glass. Consider police lineups, artefacts in airless museum cabinets, and trapped specimens awaiting examination. But to catch your own reflection while in that state of vulnerability is something particularly miserable, as if being assessed by a wiser version of yourself. A newly waxed Cadillac hood, a makeup compact, or the surface of a sunlit puddle can all do the trick—revealing your strained face and unkempt hair as you rush to the supermarket or run across a wild intersection. You don’t have to be confined by something bulletproof to appreciate the demeaning function of the mirrors that surround us. Being forced to meet your own gaze is often punishment enough.
But what is the difference between feeling watched and feeling seen? First released in 1983, Bette Gordon’s gorgeous neo-noir Variety is awash in all those fraught surfaces that illuminate and reflect: gaudy vanities, swimming pools, projection rooms, neon marquees, and ghostly street lamps. Like the male-coded spaces in which they recur—baseball games, fish markets, porn theaters, dive bars, and urban alleys—these are gendered tools of voyeurism designed to elicit submission. It would surely trouble the women of Variety too, if they weren’t already preoccupied with claiming those environments in the process of constructing their identities. By embracing the constant presence of their reflections, whether in a grimy bathroom mirror or the polished panel of a phone booth, they access a kind of self-possession that counteracts the discomfort of being forever watched by men.
This is especially true of the film’s unassuming heroine, Christine (Sandy McLeod). Eager for any kind of employment, she takes a job selling tickets at Variety, a Times Square porn palace. On her first shift in the cloistered box office, she looks to be something of a caged animal to the men on the street. It doesn’t help that her new coworker Jose (Luis Guzmán) shouts a peddler’s gospel from nearby: “The most tempting, delicious, luscious, most favorable young lady you ever wanted to meet is here on the screen.” Surrounded by windows that catch the city lights all around, it’s not until Gordon’s camera enters the booth that we see the street from Christine’s perspective.
With a mirror propped up in the far corner of the desk, her body is doubled in the shot, dominating the various men who stop by to slip $10 bills across the counter. Here the booth operates more as a surveillance platform than a vehicle of entrapment. A similar visual ploy unfolds in the preceding sequence, where Christine and her friend Nan (Nan Goldin) get dressed in a swimming pool locker room. Discussing their mothers while sharing a tube of Sin City lipstick, the pair address each other from opposite sides of the room. For a stretch of dialogue, Christine is entirely out of the frame. But Gordon’s placement of a full-length mirror in the center of the space means that both are permitted to occupy the same plane. It’s an equalizing technique that’s complemented by Christine’s humbly tongue-in-cheek remark: “People will do anything for work… including me.”
This positively unpredictable approach to reflections is established from as early as the film’s title sequence. We see the neons of Times Square pulsing in their programmed fashion while the credits crawl across the screen from right to left. The text is colored a shade of green somehow more lurid that the marquee lights themselves. The whole thing flickers in a way that reminds us of Gordon’s roots in the hyperactive stylings of Structuralist filmmaking. Suddenly, what had seemed like a regular frame is revealed to be a warped reflection on the hood of a car. As the vehicle pulls aways—all black and slick like a wet pebble—it wreaks havoc with the surrounding colors, filling the screen with a garbled flurry of fluorescence. The director has played the first of many tricks on us. In the world of Variety, as scripted by the experimental novelist Kathy Acker, our assumptions around the form and function of images are no longer reliable.
This is a familiar imperative for noir cinema, the idea that all surfaces are untrustworthy. But instead of being misogynistically directed at the sensuous femme fatale, this destabilization of images operates on a positive basis. All that is typically characterized as dominant is now not to be understood as such. In Gordon’s film, everything is slippery. It’s sometimes only the scorching jazz score from her Downtown compatriot John Lurie that reminds us in what genre we’re working.
Accordingly, Christine functions freely in the masculine space of Times Square—a block where some 2,300 crimes were reported annually by 1984, including felonies like murder and sexual assault. She has no trouble lifting weights at the gymnasium, exploring the fish markets after midnight, or playing a game of pool with a bunch of off-the-clock suits. She doesn’t bat an eyelid while perusing the sex shops where her male peers would rather not be seen. Dining with her journalist boyfriend Mark (Will Patton), she listens to him explain his investigation into mafia-led corruption in the seafood workers’ union. Pressing her to discuss her new workplace, he is horrified by his girlfriend’s sordid tales from Variety and promptly leaves without paying his check. Bemused, Christine retreats to local bar Tin Pan Alley and enjoys a frank conversation with a sex worker about the intimate nature of the business. It’s not long before her own domestic and work lives begin to cross-pollinate, bringing home a poster for adult flick A Place Beyond Shame (1980) and receiving filthy messages on her answering machine. Open-minded and open-hearted, she isn’t beholden to the normative rules of public space.
This speaks to Bette Gordon's trademark reckoning with both the trauma and delight that circulates sexual imagery—memorably addressed in the monologues of Anybody's Woman (1981), violently revived in Handsome Harry (2009), and forever underscored by her collaborations with photographer Nan Goldin. These aren’t empty provocations, either. After all, Variety premiered less than a year after the landmark 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality sparked the so-called “Feminist Sex Wars” between anti-porn and sex-positive feminist groups. It had been just two years since the release of both Bonnie Sherr Klein’s documentary Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography and Andrea Dworkin's book Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Gordon, like Christine herself, is carnally curious and intimidated by very little.
By contrast, the rituals of manhood performed throughout the film are all caught up in the business of insecure obfuscation. When an enigmatic patron of Variety, the wealthy businessman Louie (Richard M. Davidson), invites her to his private box at Yankee Stadium, Christine is genuinely intrigued. After he abruptly leaves their date halfway through the game, she decides to trail him through the city as he makes a series of clandestine meetings on dimly lit street corners. Curious as to whether Louie is the mafioso at the center of Mark’s story, she makes a daily habit of following him around town, wholly immersing herself in a criminal milieu that her boyfriend insists should only be approached “from the edges.”
Her mind soon becomes consumed with the impenetrable transactions made between men. Even when she tries listening to a meditation class on cassette, we’re treated to a brilliant montage of every furtive handshake that Christine has witnessed Louie give to his shady associates. Repetitive and eternally inscrutable to the security camera gaze of Gordon’s lens, this is human behavior as something watched rather than something seen. And it’s a world away from Christine’s increasingly freewheeling relationship to her public image. By the film’s final quarter, our protagonist is in more self-actualized command of her physicality than ever before. Her leather-bound “private investigator” outfit has now become her daily uniform—traded for silk lingerie after dark as she lounges in her bedroom and admires her body in an assortment of mirrors. She no longer bothers with politeness at work and continues recounting the explicit storylines of her favorite pornos to her repulsed boyfriend. It all culminates in a surreal moment where she enters the theater at Variety and imagines watching herself in an impossible on-screen encounter with Louie. She has become the ultimate erotic object, albeit in her own fantasy.
When we see Christine for the last time, she is seated on her bed in restless frustration. From somewhere, “The Diary” by Little Anthony and the Imperials plays over the scene—a late-’50s ballad about the impenetrable nature of a woman’s private thoughts. Picking up the phone to confront Louie with her suspicions over his illicit behavior, she recites his daily movements back to him, from Asbury Park to the Flamingo Hotel and back again. He asks if she’s a cop or if she wants to extort him and she quickly denies both. Instead, with flinty assuredness, she replies: “In an hour I’ll be on the corner of Fulton and South streets. You meet me there.” With her menacing tone, she reveals to Louie his grossly mistaken reading of her as some inoffensive ingenue. It’s no accident that upon their first meeting Christine sat in the theater lobby beneath a poster for Laura’s Desires (1977), evoking the central painting in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944)—that other great noir about deceptive embodiment and misguided male projection.
In the film’s closing moments, Gordon turns her camera to a street corner soaked with rain. Vacant save for a pair of glaring street lamps, we’re left to wonder if we’re seeing the aftermath of the would-be meeting or its suspenseful beginnings. Alluding to the similarly desolate urban ending of Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962), this elliptical shot again emphasizes that those environments which had once been strictly male-coded are now up for grabs. Although neither Christine nor Louie have yet appeared, it hardly matters much. Each potential outcome has atomized and now drifts off into the darkness. For all its troubling vagueness, as the frame fades to black and Lurie’s score howls into the night, what becomes clear is that Christine is in control.
Betty Gordon's Variety (1983) plays on October 26, 2019 at FFFest in New York.