  by Max Sparber
Bettie Page, with her button-nose, open-mouthed smile, severe bangs and sun-worshipping nudist poses, has been hovering around the edges of public consciousness for a few decades now. She’s long been a darling of enthusiasts from a variety of groups—it’s not unusual, for example, to see young women in rockabilly revivalist groups sporting Page’s trademark bangs, or to see contemporary burlesque artists impersonating her poses. Even comic books fans have demonstrated a taste for Bettie Page—Rocketeer-creator Dave Stevens styled the female protagonist in his 1980s throwback to ‘30s serial adventures after Page. In the past decade, the cult of Page has continued to grow; each new form of hipster nostalgia seemed somehow to connect to Page, and many of the model’s foremost fans seemed to be women.
 That
so many of her fans are female is worth noting: After all, some of the images
for which Page is most notorious are a series of bondage and light S&M stills
and 16-mm featurettes she made for photographer Irving Klaw. These images, seen
free of context, can still be worrying: Page appears in some trussed and harnessed,
appearing terrified and degraded. Images of sexual humiliation are unlikely
to find favor among young women who were raised steeped in feminism, and yet,
curiously, these same young women seem to have taken to Page. In fact, the new
biopic of the model, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” was lensed by
director Mary Harron, a seminal figure from New York’s punk scene and
an avowed feminist.
Harron’s film is surprisingly breezy, in part because she conceives of
Page as a sexual neophyte. As played by Gretchen Mol, Page is a wide-eyed innocent
in the world of sexual perversion: In one scene, Page is chained to a wall,
a ball gag hanging from her neck, confessing with palpable embarrassment that
she has done some topless naturalist photography, blithely oblivious that most
of her contemporaries would shrug at her nude figure studies but respond in
horror to her leather-clad fetish work. All she knows is that Irving Klaw and
his sister Paula (played with genteel, nervous mannerisms and thick Brooklyn
accents by Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor) are “very nice people,”
and if some of their clients prefer photographs of women in costume, well, what’s
the big deal?
Director Harron is quite clever with the film’s structure. In the early
scenes, Page is seen in a series of violent sexual misadventures, abused at
the hands of family, husband and genial strangers. These scenes are filmed obliquely
and tastefully, but they contain a palpable sense of menace; one, in which Page
has inadvertently found herself trapped in a car with a group of silent, scowling
men who refuse to tell her where they are taking her, is genuinely terrifying.
It isn’t until Page turns to cheesecake modeling that she finds safety—first
in relatively tame work posing for photography clubs, who may occasionally express
their approval of Page’s memorable figure (“There’s the keister!”
one calls out), but where touching is strictly verboten and met with a sharp
reprimand.
 Later,
when Page goes to work for Klaw, he greets her genially in his fleabag studio,
sending her back to wear six-inch stiletto heels with a suggestion that, if
she’s hungry, she might also have some “nice brisket” that
he’s provided. Klaw’s primary patron is a bow-tied lawyer who is
scarcely capable of making eye contact or raising his voice above a whisper,
except to give occasional reports about his mother’s illness. They hardly
seem like criminals, or participants in a deviant sexual underworld. Harron
culminates these scenes with a long trip to a cottage in upstate New York where
the group performs calisthenics, sunbathes, plays croquet and ends the day by
filming a movie in which a leather-clad Bettie kidnaps a near-naked women and
flagellates her. The whole of it has such a kitschy innocence to it that, when
the Klaws are eventually hauled before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency,
and an image they produced of a bound Bettie Page is held responsible for the
death of a Boy Scout who was found bound in a similar position, the transition
is shocking. As the senators and psychiatrists mull over the meaning of such
images (and others—the film doesn’t mention the fact, but this same
subcommittee was deeply concerned with the deleterious effects of crime comic
books on the juvenile mind), Page waits her turn to testify, sitting outside
the Senate chambers, lost in thought.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t give much of a peek into whatever it is
that Page is thinking about. Moll does a superlative job playing Page—she
has mastered the model’s distinctive poses and cutesy face-making, as
well as Page’s unintentionally awkward style of dancing—but she
also gives Page an admirable forthrightness and thoughtfulness. Unfortunately,
Page is written as such a naïf that she often comes off as surprisingly
dimwitted, despite the film reminding us that the actual Page was very nearly
her class valedictorian. It is simply impossible to believe that Page was oblivious
to the fact that she was part of a despised sexual underworld, or that others
might be shocked by her photographs. In fact, the film’s Page is almost
entirely sexless, but for her tendency to take off her clothes. One suspects
the real Bettie Page had a sexual identity and appetites, but they are never
addressed in this film, replaced with a cheerful naivety that’s simply
beyond credibility.
In fact, the film glosses over, or completely ignores, any element of Page’s
biography that might complicate the story, and her character. Page reportedly
had episodes of real violence, and a troubled enough psyche that she was in
and out of mental institutions, including a nine-year stint in one later in
her life, none of which the film even hints at. Neither does the film address
the economics of Page’s work as a nude model, which was certainly the
driving force behind much of her modeling career—famously, Hugh Hefner
once bailed Page out when she was on the verge of bankruptcy. Instead, it seems
as though Page became a model for the fun of it, and because she enjoyed the
attention of her male (and, with increasing frequency, female) photographers.
In fact, when Page first takes her top off for a photographer, early in the
movie, she seems to do so exclusively out of a sense of fun—there is no
indication that she might have been motivated to do so based on the fact that
nude figure photography paid more than bathing suit cheesecake shots. While
such details might have made for a muddier film, they would have granted Page
a clearer intelligence and a more formidable personality. Gretchen Moll plays
Page with such sharpness and fearlessness, it’s just too bad she wasn’t
given more Bettie Page to play. ||
"The Notorious Bettie Page" shows two nights only, Wed 4/26
- Thu 4/27: 2:40, 4:50, 7:20, 9:40, at the Lagoon
Cinema. 1320 Lagoon Ave, Mpls.; 612.825.6006.
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