I'm struggling to the finish line with my 2022 viewings. I have a lot of movies I could watch, but the collective exhaustion is sapping my will a bit.
So when I had an afternoon to myself on Sunday and just wanted to unwind with a movie, I chose to watch something from 1981.
It'll be the first in the new bi-monthly series I announced less than a week ago. I figured I'd be cramming it into the period between January 25th and January 31st, once I'm well and truly done with 2022 movies. But the truth is, after that I like to take a day or two off from watching movies entirely, and I've already got two others I need to squeeze in before the end of the month due to various other commitments, both on this blog and elsewhere.
And though this series is devoted to the films of women, I had to get through one man first.
I didn't realize it at the time I selected this series, but Kathryn Bigelow had a co-director on her feature debut, who was also making his directorial debut. His name is Monty Montgomery, and I'm choosing to blame him for why I liked The Loveless so little.
It's also the film debut for Willem Dafoe, but I don't blame him for the movie's problems. It's not his fault they asked him to play a too-cool-for-school motorcycle greaser from the late 1950s, one of my least favorite recurring character types on film. But I'll get to the specifics of what I don't like about this film in a moment.
Now, Monty Montgomery has some good credits to his name. He would go on to work as a producer with David Lynch on Wild at Heart, which is not a huge surprise as that movie shares some DNA with this one. (Though to be clear, I like that one much better.) In a particular coincidence for this series, he also served as a producer on The Portrait of a Lady, which is a film directed by Bigelow's series partner, Jane Campion. Who knew I'd be able to link the two so successfully in terms of mutual collaborators.
Interestingly, though, Montgomery is not a director -- not even on this film, according to IMDB. Yes IMDB lists him as co-director on the film's main page, but if you go to Montgomery's page, he only has producer, writer and actor credits, getting only a writer credit on The Loveless if you were to go just by that. His acting career was not a lot more prolific, as his primary credit is playing The Cowboy in Mulholland Drive.
David Lynch, Jane Campion and of course Bigelow are great collaborators, but I still want to blame Montgomery for what I dislike about The Loveless, even knowing as little about him as I do.
One of the reasons for that is the movie has a hard time accumulating much of a female perspective. In order to tell you the ways it falls down in that area, I should probably set up the plot a bit.
Plot? Yeah there isn't really one. We meet Dafoe's Vance (heh, a nickname I sometimes use, but it did not ingratiate me to him) as a solo biker out on the road, who stops to help fix a flat of a woman broken down by the side of the road. He proceeds to extract more of a cash fee from her than she wanted to give, plus a non-consensual kiss that she seems to start to like as it goes. I can't specifically fault the film for this sort of thing as not only were we considerably less concerned about the agency of attractive women in films 42 years ago, but the film is also set in what appears to be the late 1950s, when society was even less concerned about such things than it was in 1981.
The opening is a bit of a false friend, though, as Vance is actually part of a larger group of bikers who are on their way from (they say) Detroit to Daytona, when one of the bikers has trouble with his Harley and needs to stop in a small Georgia town to get it repaired. There, now I've given you pretty much the whole plot.
The action, such as it is, involves the bikers standing around looking cool, chain-smoking cigarettes, continuing to pop the tops of ten-cent Coke bottles from the vending machine, sneering at each other and the locals, playing various games of chicken with each other (the most memorable being a game where they repeatedly throw a knife as close as possible to the other's boot without hitting it), and generally creating trouble. Each guy is trying to look tougher and cooler than the guy next to him, though there is also one female biker.
Anything resembling a story comes in the form of a local teenager Vance hooks up with, who drives a convertible sports car. She tells Vance about how her mother killed herself when she could no longer tolerate the girl's abusive father, and the girl shows a scar on her forehead courtesy of the old man as well. (Since I'm disappointed in the representation of the film's female characters, the least I can do is name the actress here. She's played by Marin Kanter, who only made five more films.) Of course Vance ends up despoiling her, though at least this liaison appears to be consensual.
The father becomes an antagonist to the bikers, eager to run them out of town and perhaps even try to kill them.
The film spends so much time on nothing that the only conclusion you can really reach is that its primary raison d'etre is to show how cool bikers are. I hardly think that would be a reason Bigelow would list for wanting to make a movie, but it was her first movie, and sometimes you don't get a lot of choice in subject matter in such a situation. I will say that the filmmaking is plenty credible, even though it is in service of something that does nothing for me.
I've just never thought that someone posturing in a leather jacket and combing grease through their hair made for a very aspirational icon. I'm completely immune to the charms of such a character, which I think might be one of the reasons I was slow to become interested in Elvis Presley, though certainly that's only one incarnation of Elvis as a performer. I did like the Fonz in Happy Days, though, so who knows. Maybe it's just these particular greasers I don't care for. All the sneering and the false bravado and the worshipping of vehicles with loud engines and the idea not to mess with them because they could end you ... it doesn't work for me either when this type is put on a pedestal or when it is critiqued, the latter of which is probably supposed to be the case in The Loveless. I'm just too quick to find such a person an insecure, infantile personality, even in a movie 42 years ago where the character deficits of such a person were not nearly as clear as they are now.
Should I be giving The Loveless a pass for the period in which it was made? I don't think so. In whatever period you make a film, you have to decide whether you are going to put the effort into a compelling story or are just going to trot around your characters for 80 minutes and decide that's story enough.
And yes, the depictions of women are bad. Other than the biker chick, the stalled motorist and Telena, the girl with the convertible and the bad daddy, the most prominent female character is the bored waitress in the diner where a lot of the action takes place. She ends the film performing a striptease at a local bar, for reasons not entirely clear.
Two telling bits from this end portion of the film that I jotted down:
1) The song that plays during the striptease is something called "You're Wasting My Time." Indeed.
2) In one of his last lines of dialogue in the film, Dafoe's Vance says "We're going nowhere. Fast." You said it Vance, not me. It's an on-the-nose comment not only for these characters, but for how I felt the entire time watching this movie -- which seemed like an eternity even at barely 80 minutes long.
I have no doubt Bigelow's career and her depictions of women will start to improve with Near Dark, her next in the series, and certainly by the time of Blue Steel, which features Jamie Lee Curtis as a cop.
Before then, though, I've decided to go with Campion's first film I haven't seen, An Angel at My Table, in March.
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