Bette Gordon’s 1983 film Variety

Bette Gordon

Bette Gordon’s gritty, raw, and yet poetically beautiful film Variety is transgressive in the best sense, in the noir sense (the trappings of film noir are everywhere, in the same way they’re everywhere in Taxi Driver, a film Variety references visually). With a script by Kathy Acker (!!!), Variety was filmed on a shoestring.

Despite its low budget, the film doesn’t feel sparse or limited in any way. The visuals are gorgeous: Gordon’s eye is piercing, she uses mirrors and reflected glass constantly, and the color red often drenches the screen (there’s an amazing scene where two characters meet at night by the Hudson – and a huge neon sign across the way turns the river a deep bloody red. This is an “effect”. This is Gordon seeing what’s there in the environment.

There are scenes in Yankee Stadium. There are scenes all over New York, even a long sequence in Asbury Park, on the boardwalk and in the Flamingo Motel. Sandy McLeod plays Christine, a woman who works as a ticket-taker at a porn theatre called Variety (which was a real place). She sits in the little glass booth, taking tickets, and sometimes taking breaks, where she wanders through the theatre, into the projection booth, and sometimes into the theatre proper, where she sits and watches the films. A casual interaction with a regular patron (Richard M. Davidson) is transformative, but so is the porn she’s steeped in. She starts to follow this guy around. Stalking him, essentially. She tracks him to Fulton Fish Market, she peeks around corners, watching him conduct mysterious transactions, shaking hands with people. Behavior as hieroglyphics: what does it mean? She literally has a “Follow that cab” moment. The guy is clearly up to something shady, he may be rich but he’s no good. In one riveting moment, sitting in the Variety theatre, watching a porno, suddenly the movie shows a scene between the guy and herself, a fantasy heated up by her unnamed un-verbalized obsession with him. Why is she obsessed? What does he represent? Periodically she meets up with her friends in a bar, all played by Gordon’s real-life group of friends, strippers and sex workers and artists. (The bartender is played by photographer Nan Goldin). The sense of reality people like this bring cannot be manufactured. These people are who they say they are.

The manager of the porn theatre, a good-natured extroverted guy, is played by one of my favorite character actors, Luis Guzman. The dramatic film-noir old-school score was composed by John Lurie. And Tom DiCillo was one of the cinematographers (there were two). The cinematography is one of the reasons to see it, as well as it being a documentation of New York in the early 80s, when the smut was overwhelming, when the dirt was everywhere, when things were more dangerous but also … the overtness was a kind of consolation. You knew where you stood. It was the dirty sexy city. Anything could happen.

Highly recommended. A transgressive sex-positive underground art film. Here’s a really good interview with Gordon about the making of Variety.