No-Necked Monsters: The Notorious Bettie Page: A FilmExposed Review

A FilmExposed Review

The Notorious Bettie Page (18)

Dir: Mary Harron, 2005, USA, 98 mins
Cast: Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Lili Taylor

The notorious Bettie Page, the pin-up queen of her generation, the "dark Marilyn" was the star of a series of scandalous bondage films and pictorials in the early 1950’s, which led to a senate committee hearing and earned her her dubious title. Director and co-writer Mary Harron explores Bettie's life leading up to the committee hearing in The Notorious Bettie Page, a glossy character study centred on the irony of Bettie's notoriety in the face of her wholesome and very moral self-image.

Harron is no stranger to the recent past: In American Psycho (2000) she served up a bloodily stylised 80s and in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) she thrust headfirst into the angry radicalism of the 60s. With The Notorious Bettie Page however, Harron tempers her style, much like Todd Haynes in his take on 50s melodrama, Far From Heaven (2002), opting not simply for the look of the era but also a decidedly 1950s sensibility.

The early misfortunes of Bettie's life are intimated with frustrating propriety: panning cameras and out of shot screams shield the modesty of the actors and the audience. Bettie's black and white New York existence is neatly counterpointed with the washed out 8mm of the film shoots and the saturated hyper-colour of the Miami Beach scenes, which recall the sun-drenched beach comedies of Frankie and Annette. By today's standards the pictorials and fetish scenes aren't likely to raise even the faintest of schoolboy blushes, though Harron manages to allude to the brazenness of Bettie's work at the time through the characters that surround her, judge her, and support her.

Gretchen Mol puts out a sublime portrayal of Bettie. She charismatically winks, pouts and poses her way through the role. She shouldn't succeed as well as she does. Bettie is a gloriously free-spirited naïf, seemingly unaware of the world around her and in a contemporary setting Mol's performance just wouldn't wash, but there is something innocent about Bettie's world, something that makes it entirely believable that lacing on some "costumes" and growling at the camera could be just "a bit of silly fun".

Perhaps it is alarmist severity of the senate committee who, to the prevailing worldliness of a contemporary audience, seem astoundingly, even comically prudish, or perhaps it is Bettie's bewildered reaction to her obsessive fans, but there is a sense that everybody outside the studio got it wrong. And it is Mol who is the lynchpin to the audience buying into this. If Mol weren't so alluringly joyous in front of the camera, if she weren't so amiably oblivious to the ambitions of the photographers, the film could be dismissed as a paper-thin glorification of Bettie's popularity. Instead, Mol's Bettie is an intriguing creature: complex in her very simplicity.

There’s no doubt that this could have been a darker film. A deeper examination of how physical and sexual abuse marked Bettie's life would have added some welcome weight. As it stands, The Notorious Bettie Page is an interesting depiction of an exhibitionist whose worldview sat outside the puritanical mindset of her time.