Variety (Web Exclusive)
by Diana Drumm

Produced by Renee Shafransky; directed by Bette Gordon; written by Kathy Acker, based on an original story by Bette Gordon; cinematography by Tom DiCillo and John Foster; props by Elyse Goldberg; edited by Ila von Hasperg; music by John Lurie; starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Richard M. Davidson, Luis Guzmán, Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, Spalding Gray. Blu-ray and DVD, color, 100 min., 1983. A Kino Lorber release.

Director Bette Gordon likes to look. This impulse brought her before the Variety Photoplay theater more than forty years ago and pulled her into the lobby, drawn in by the neon lights of the marquee. Gordon made her way into the projection booth and was fascinated, not merely by the bodies writhing and exposed on screen (for this was, at that time, a porn theater) but by the audience watching. So enthralled by these layers of looking, she decided to extend and expand on this sensation with a full-fledged narrative film, her feature debut, Variety (1983).

Is it revolutionary for a woman to look? Arguably not, but within the terms and texts of cinema, it is most definitely bold and subversive. Treading on the literal and figurative footpaths of film noir and Hitchcockian suspense, Gordon’s Variety takes place on a grimy edge at the center of New York City—pre-Giuliani Times Square (although the actual Variety Photoplay theater was located on Third Avenue in New York’s East Village)—and follows an attractive blonde box office cashier at a porn theater whose curiosity about a regular theater attendee turns into an obsession with his intriguingly murky, possibly mob-connected, dealings and goings-on.

The film starts on a close-up of Christine (Sandy McLeod) in profile, preparing to dive into a swimming pool and, by extension, plunge into the film’s story. Starting with the stunning resemblance of Christine’s profile-then-turn motion in her yellow swim cap to that of the iconic profile-then-turn motion of Kim Novak’s coiffed updo in Vertigo (1958), Gordon opens on Christine’s physicality to the sounds of splashing water, rather than a sweeping score by Bernard Hermann. The camera follows Christine’s dive, swimming into a stretched backstroke, and then lingers on her legs, setting an unsettling voyeuristic visual tone. Rather than turning into a Technicolor-hued Esther Williams–style showcase, the primary colors (yellow swim cap, red-and-white swimsuit, and chlorine blue pool) are subdued by the grainy film stock and commonplace surroundings, or arguably enhanced, depending on your aesthetic preferences. In Amy Taubin’s characteristically superb booklet essay accompanying the Kino Lorber Blu-ray, she describes this image and opening “as an entry into a cinematic forbidden zone.”  

Cut to the ladies’ locker room, a dour and dully colored space reserved for women. While “locker room talk” has become synonymous with raunchy banter, at least for men, Christine and her friend Nan (photographer Nan Goldin) discuss self and employment in various states of (un)dress, with Nan chiming in that she knows of a job but doesn’t think that Christine would like it.

Following the Laura Mulvey school of thought and the André Bazin lineage of theory, Gordon was and remains a strong believer in the pleasure one derives from cinema and the power of the image. By framing Variety’s protagonist as both object and subject (played by an able and able-to-project-on McLeod), Gordon invites the viewer to turn voyeur in both watching her and watching with her, reaching a plane of narrative previously limited in cinema by the typical trajectory of desire summed up in Mulvey’s phrase “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.” In doing so, Variety welcomes in the audience and implicates them, if not making them fully complicit, with the narrative on screen. 

In her new job, Christine sits in a box office booth and exchanges money for movie tickets. The booth itself amplifies her presence to patrons and protects her from the outside world, including those very same patrons. As she later explains to her boyfriend Mark (Will Patton), she feels that her presence, alongside the neon lights and porn film posters, is in some way an attraction for the men and perhaps even helps bring them in. On a break (being covered by Luis Guzmán, both boss and fellow theater worker), she stumbles around the theater lobby and is approached by one of these men, a theater regular named Louie (Richard Davidson), who proffers a replacement Coke for the one she had spilled moments before. What this Michel Piccoli-type (Gordon revealed this aim about Davidson’s casting on the disc’s audio commentary) does not know is that though he is offering bait to a doe-like blonde, she will be the one to stalk him like a stag through the hills and valleys of male-dominated spaces throughout Manhattan, the Bronx, and as far away as Asbury Park.

In the making of Variety, the cameras (operated by Jim Jarmusch collaborator Tom DiCillo, John Foster, and Gordon herself) and McLeod enter multiple spaces stereotypically reserved for and/or given priority to men. Each place takes on an experimental, experiential feel as we see how long Christine can last within its surroundings. In the porn theater, she bobs in and out of the projection booth and extends her stay when some scenes catch her eye. In the smut shop, the clientele keep their distance while she surveys the magazine racks and video booths, until a random guy begins acting “like a real jerk!” and she bursts out of the shop. At the Fulton Fish Market, a site that Mark says is rumored to be controlled by the mob, and where Louie shakes hands with several men, Christine is able to wander without interference, without attention (wanted or unwanted) being paid to her. At Yankee Stadium, to which Louie has invited Christine for a date, she is treated to a box with a view, with the ball game becoming a backdrop in the two-shot of her and Louie, almost like rear-screen projection in a Hitchcock film (as Gordon notes in the audio commentary). Their date, including a shared bottle of champagne, is abruptly cut off when Louie dashes out on some unspecified urgent business. After catching Louie’s scent at the theater and, to borrow more hunting lingo, appearing for The Meet that was the ball game date, Louie’s abrupt departure acts like a double horn, sounding the beginning of Christine’s hunt, one in which her character develops from hound to Huntsman while Gordon remains the Master.

Prior to this film, Gordon was mostly what Amy Taubin dubbed a “good girl” filmmaker, balancing the pressures of contemporary feminist discourse without yet fully addressing or exploring the question of women’s desire on screen, as elaborated in Taubin’s Artforum piece about “The Films of Bette Gordon” retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in 2011. As Gordon reflected later, “I felt that women’s pleasure had not been represented very well in cinema, especially not up through the Women’s Movement as it examined film and I wanted to reinsert that as a question.” Then, through the Downtown Art Scene, Gordon connected with Kathy Acker, a “bad girl” experimental postmodernist writer and performance artist.  

If Gordon liked to watch, Acker liked to speak (Acker passed away from breast cancer in 1997). In the Seventies and early Eighties, she made a name herself with outlandish and taboo-shaking first-person narrative recitations to club and living room audiences in Lower Manhattan, incorporating observations of the bohemian cultural set and her own experiences as an Upper East Side rich kid turned sex worker-cum-secretary turned voice of the avant-garde underground. One of Acker’s more formal ongoing experiments was rewriting women into the central roles of classic male-centered novels such as Don Quixote and Great Expectations.  

With this sensibility and frequent use of pornography within her own work, Acker was well-suited to putting Gordon’s vision into words as they worked together on what would become Variety’s script, based on Gordon’s premise and treatment. Unlike the antiporn and antistructure narrative of Women’s Movement–associated filmmakers of the late Seventies and early Eighties, Gordon and Acker sought to subvert patriarchy-laden art (be it cinema or literature) by using its own mechanisms as weapons and thereby to create statements empowering women, their stories and their desires.  

As Christine grows into herself and the aesthetic, and follows her curiosity and desires, she alienates her journalist boyfriend with Brechtian monologues—reminiscent of early (before he bid adieu to language) Godard—of porn fiction and sexual fantasies. These speeches are the words and confrontational staging spirit of Acker, but recited to the assuredly inviting, almost seductive without turning overtly licentious, tone of self-help tapes and meditation exercises. This comparison is made more direct later in the film when Christine lays back and listens to a meditation tape that Gordon herself had stumbled on.

Circling back and furthering Variety’s double ties to film noir and now-vintage pornography, a keen eye will spot posters of Laura’s Desires (1977) and A Place Beyond Shame (1980) in the film. Both titles have hints nodding toward classic noir (Otto Preminger’s Laura [1944] and Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place [1950]), and take on a narrative of their own, enhancing Christine’s, as they first appear at the theater and are later to be found in her apartment. It is at her apartment that we see how much she has changed while working at Variety. In her private space, Christine goes from listening to phone messages (from worried mother to worried landlord) while eating ice cream in casual clothes to glamouring up in front of the mirror with a stunning blue bustier, smokey makeup, and pigtails. As New York–based film critic Hillary Weston points out in the audio commentary, Christine takes the neon of the theater and its aesthetics home with her. 

The film’s colors and overall palette enhance in time and step with the story and Christine’s own character development, the effect of which is made all the more striking in this director-approved 2K restoration, laminated with the emblematically subversive grain quality of 16mm filmmaking. The bonus features include galleries of production stills by Nan Goldin, location scouting stills, and storyboard illustrations, which give further insight into the film’s visual process and more art for the eager viewer to consume. Gordon’s short Anybody’s Woman (1981) is also included as a bonus and proves to have laid the groundwork for pieces later incorporated into Variety (including sexual fantasy discussions, recitations from women to disconcerted, disengaging men, and the Variety Photoplay theater itself).

Variety is a story of obsession turned actualization, with a palpably pulp script shot so bare that the images are open to projection and interpretation, inviting the viewer’s complicity in the voyeur experience—that is if they don’t almost immediately disengage like Christine’s boyfriend, whose receding silence makes her voice sound all the stronger. As a feminist text inside a film noir (or a Hitchcock first act) with touches of the erotic, Variety teeters on and veers off the modes of narrative film, pornography, and the avant-garde. The sleuth narrative that flourished in the Forties bleeds into this vibrantly Eighties setting, meshing Classic Hollywood and independent filmmaking. The film is also an artifact of a not-that-old New York, somewhere between Taxi Driver (1976) and After Hours (1985), with hints of Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), but featuring the distinctive style of Bette Gordon and the radical Downtown Art Scene of the Eighties to which she and Acker belonged.  

As to why Variety is not discussed more often among those aforementioned films, many contemporaneous critics were thrown by its porn aesthetics (leaving some disappointed it wasn’t raunchier, others upset by the act of engaging positively with pornography at all) while others did not respond well to its failure to conform to noir or thriller narrative expectations, exacerbated by an arguably unfulfilling ending. For an example from Cineaste’s own pages (Winter 1985), Susan Jhirad concluded her mixed to negative review: “If one wishes to see a film that deals seriously with the tragic link between pornography, big money, and violence against women, one would do better to see Star 80, an underrated feminist movie made (alas) by a man.” After being selected for the Toronto and the Cannes Film Festivals (1983 and 1984 editions, respectively) and a not-showy 1985 theatrical release, Variety was generally dismissed and nearly forgotten for three decades outside of niche film circles and Amy Taubin as its continuing critical champion. In 2009, the Tribeca Film Festival featured Variety in a lineup tied to Gordon’s recent feature Handsome Harry (2009) and her debut feature has since benefited from the more recent waves of critical and general viewer interest in the work of overlooked women filmmakers.

Gordon herself cites her growth as film fan and filmmaker through rediscovering the work of Dorothy Arzner. Arzner’s influence is felt not only as one of few women filmmakers in Classic Hollywood but also more directly in Gordon’s naming of her short (Anybody’s Woman) for Arzner’s 1930 pre-Code film and the scenes in Variety involving the real stories of nonprofessional actresses. The conversations Christine has and listens to with down-and-out, surviving-the-struggle, or just-getting-by women in Tin Pan Alley (the bar where Nan works, and where Nan Goldin the photographer actually worked) are an updated echo of the energy found in women’s conversations in Arzner’s Anybody’s Woman and Working Girls (1931). Christine herself can be seen as an update on Judy (Maureen O’Hara) in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), who in an impassioned speech directed at a leering theater audience, admonishes, “What do you suppose we think of you up here with your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of?” which in turn, like Variety, comments on women as subject of the male gaze and, in a fourth-wall-breaking move, directs that question to the film’s viewers and implicates them in the looking.

With this captivating and important Kino Lorber Blu-ray release, Variety is finally getting its due. Nevertheless, there is still much more to do in the reassessment of women filmmakers (feminist or otherwise) and the restoration of their films, as well as the literature of Kathy Acker and more bohemian women writers. From 1983 alone, underappreciated film titles include Lizzie Borden’s recently lauded Born in Flames (released on DVD and Blu-ray by First Run Features in 2018) and Sally Potter’s almost-forgotten The Gold Diggers (although the lowest price of the DVD available from Women Make Movies is $89!). The women who like to watch are always on the hunt for more cinema. Unlike the original response to the film’s ending—which lingers on a rain-glistening street corner, accompanied by John Lurie’s atmospheric jazz score, waiting for a scheduled encounter that never materializes—this Variety Blu-ray is sure to satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity of today’s cinephile.

Diana Drumm is an assistant editor at Cineaste and freelance film journalist whose bylines include ELLE, IndieWire, No Film School, and RogerEbert.com. She can be followed at @dianaddrumm.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 2