Dancing Nudes
The Last Showgirl, The Substance, Fatal Attraction, and mascara
Sad
CW: rape is briefly discussed in this section of the newsletter but is not described in detail
The Substance (2024) is without a doubt the most disgusting movie I’ve ever seen, given I’m not a gore fan, but this movie left me actually physically nauseous. I watched a fair chunk of it through my fingers. I knew it would be a lot for me going in, but I felt I needed to do it for feminism. I’d heard about the film for months, that it was a subversive, dark feminist fairy tale masterpiece. Well, colour-me-surprised when it did not strike me as an especially feminist film! A solid 25% of the film has to be tight, close up shots of Margaret Qualley’s naked or near naked gleaming, nubile body.
at Bimbo Summit had this to say:I really wanted to interpret this as a hyperbolic statement about the absurdity of the male gaze. But if I’m being honest with myself…I don’t actually think this prolonged focus subverts anything. It just perpetuates what it’s supposedly critiquing. It feels more like indulgence than rebellion, like the film is still playing by the same rules it’s trying to call out. As my friend… Rachel Milligan texted: “it’s the limits of French feminism.”
I also thought this video short by a stylist was also quite telling, where she says that “despite the message of the film, I came away from it like ‘I have to look like [Margaret Qualley]’ .”
I believe that French director and writer of The Substance, Coralie Fargeat cares about critiquing the ways women are treated in society, but there was something dated to the way in which The Substance went about getting across its feminist message. There was something a little “actually, girls look prettier without makeup!” about it. Age, disfigurement and ‘trying too hard’ are still served up here as the ultimate dehumanisation for a woman. By the end of the film, Demi Moore’s character is so deformed that you reflect sadly on how much better she would have looked if she just left herself alone. Idk if “hey ladies, it’s ok to age gracefully : )” is the feminist critique of our misogynist culture I’ve been holding my breath for, y’know? Particularly when Moore herself (though she gives a brave and brutal performance here) has had plastic surgery and otherwise upholds all other beauty standards, such as thinness, and is not anyone’s idea of a realistically aging 62 year old woman.
#Metoo came late to France, but 2024 was the year of Gisèle Pelicot’s mass rape trial— to my mind perhaps the most explosive and affecting legal victory feminism has had in a number of years. Pelicot’s case challenged both the archaic French view on marital rape and ideas of what a sexual abuse victim looks and acts like, not to mention made headlines around the world. I’m bringing this up to say that there are more interesting things happening in feminism, even in France!, than somewhat outmoded pretty white girl beauty standard discussions. I do think there are interesting things to say about whiteness, beauty, youth and the societal pressure on women to conform, but The Substance didn’t do it for me. However, I did think the film worked well as a critique of the ways we exist within a violent capitalist structure that encourages addictive behaviour to keep itself fed, but for more on that I’ll refer you back to Wuehle’s piece on The Substance.
For me, The Last Showgirl (2024) was the more interesting feminist film and tackled a similar topic, aging in the entertainment industry, with much more nuance. The Last Showgirl follows 57 year old dancer, Shelly (in an incredibly raw performance by Pamela Anderson), as she deals with the fact that the Las Vegas show she’s been dancing in for thirty years, the Razzle Dazzle, is considered antiquated now and is folding. It’s clear Shelly has no plan for her life outside of the high she gets from being a glittering jewel on stage in a “classic” Las Vegas show that she considers artistic and “French” in contrast to all the bump and grind to be found elsewhere on The Strip. Shelly speaks in a soft, Marilyn Monroe voice, projects old Hollywood dance movies onto the wall of her living room and tells the young dancers she works with, who see her as a mother figure, about the good old days when the Razzle Dazzle was the biggest show in town.
But a mother figure, Shelly is not. Babyish not just in voice but all the way down to her soft after work athleisure and pink pout, she oppsie-daisies her way through life as if everything that isn’t the Razzle Dazzle is an unfortunate dream. Her actual daughter, a collage age girl named Hannah, has been raised by someone named Lisa (whose relation to Shelly is never clear) and is on a first name basis with her mother, who she rarely sees. Shelly keeps breezily encouraging Hannah to come see her in the Razzel Dazzle, which Hannah initially responds to incredulously. However, she does eventually go see the show on one of its last performances to a nearly empty house, and angrily confronts Shelly afterwards. “What was it all for?” Hannah demands. “You’re not even the main dancer. You’re topless in the back of eighty other topless women.” Hannah recalls Shelly leaving her for hours alone in a parking lot with a Gameboy so she could go perform. Shelly storms out, refusing to be judged for her choices.
Shelly, in a later scene, tearfully tries to defend her life while out on a date. She extolls the rhinestones and feathers of the Razzle Dazzle, the sets, the costumes. “I get to feel beautiful every night! That’s power!” she cries furiously. Access to this supposed ‘power’ has diminished everything else in her life. She recounts missed opportunities to get out of Vegas, the missed opportunity to raise her daughter, unable to leave the dark den of what she sees as the divine feminine. Shelly is confused by everyone’s frustration with her. Isn’t this what women are supposed to be? To do? Devote themselves to beauty? She has! She has put beauty above literally everything else in her life, but she is still going to be punished for her choices and left with nothing. No matter what choice a woman makes, it is always going to be the wrong one. Jamie Lee Curtis is also amazing in this film as a former Razzle Dazzle dancer, and best friend of Shelly, who is mourning her diminished youth and beauty as well. She performs a dance to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, unnoticed, on the floor of a casino jammed with slot machines that is truly heartbreaking.
Famous
It wasn’t until I watched Fatal Attraction (1987) with someone else that it ever occurred to me to view the protagonist, Dan, as anything but entirely spoiled rotten. “Dan seems bored and trapped financially and wants to do something for himself and doesn’t know how to do it without being destructive,” my co-viewer said to me after I suggested we try to diagnose the psychological problems of Dan (Michael Douglas) and Alex (Glenn Close). I was startled by this. Later, reading various essays and reviews about Fatal Attraction and listening to a podcast about it, I was further surprised by the robust analysis of Dan as unhappy in his life, financially pinched and maybe having a bit of a midlife crisis. I had watched the film a number of times and this never occurred to me, I only ever saw him as someone with everything he could ever want in life who callously threw it away for nothing.
Fatal Attraction is one of the most famous films of the 20th century, a huge hit and a film that burned itself into the cultural lexicon (“bunny boiler”) and film canon. For anyone not acquainted— it is the story of successful family man Dan who has a hot weekend affair with the magnetic Alex when his wife and child are out of town, who then reveals herself to be a mentally unstable stalker. If this sounds like a million other films it’s because the lightning-in-a-bottle of Fatal Attraction has attempted to be captured again and again since its release in the late 80s. I’ve seen the film probably a dozen times, the draw for me being, not the horror of Alex’s descent into madness, but the beauty of the life Dan jeopardises so carelessly.
Director Adrian Lyne, famous for sexually charged films like Indecent Proposal and Flashdance, fills Dan’s life with cozy, lived in details—his home so warm and inviting one feels they could run up the stairs and ring the bell, settle in on the couch. His wife, Beth, is a beautiful, self-effacing stay at home mom with an easy smile, his preschooler daughter is sweet and funny. They live in (to my millennial eye) an expensive spacious flat in Manhattan with lots of windows and original wood. They are looking to buy a house in the country, perhaps on Long Island, close to where Beth’s parents live along the coast. A scene often referenced when discussing the limits of Dan’s finances is one where he is working from home, wearing headphones as his daughter watches Sesame Street on the couch— poor man doesn’t even have a home office! But all I ever saw was a honey toned scene of familial bliss, Dad working comfortably in his lovely home, his child peaceful by his side.
Dan is affably cock-blocked by both dog and child early in the film, before meeting Alex, but in a way that to me implied the regular ups and downs of a life filled with love and occasional inconvenience, not a long suffering drain on his manhood that would drive him into the arms of another woman at the first opportunity. But into the arms of another woman at the first opportunity he goes. They have a hook-up weekend together and then he wants straight back to the life he pushed aside so he could greedily stuff his face into the trough of hedonism as if nothing happened. Alex will not let him do this.
Despite myself, despite my total lack of sympathy for Dan, I allow myself to be pulled along the wave of hating Alex as she grows more irrational and dangerous. She will not step aside, she will not be put back on the shelf. My fear is not for Dan but for his beautiful life, my fear is for the lie that will hold it all together like a silk ribbon in a bow. Preserve the happy child! Preserve the beatific wife! Let her blithely restore a big house in the countryside in shades of mauve and taupe, let the child run in meadows with her yellow lab, let them sleep soundly, let them believe in something that isn’t real. The real is so awful, always pacing outside your window with long, shiny teeth stretched into an unhinged smile, waiting gleefully for you to catch a horrified glimpse of it. It’s not that I want Dan to “get away with it”, it’s that I don’t want the innocence of his wife and child disrupted by his fucking stupidity. He doesn’t deserve the weight of misery that knowledge of his actions will cause.
Contrasted with the cheerful domestic clutter of Dan’s family, Alex lives in monotone—wild white hair, sharply cut trendy wardrobe of black, grey and white. Scenes not set in Alex’s home are rich, fully of colour, texture, life. When we are with Alex, who lives in the meat packing district of NYC, we are often made aware that just beyond her domicile are chopped up bodies, dangling red and bloody. Inside her flat the walls and the furniture, everything, all white. At first this comes across as sparse, industrial and modern— Alex is cool and edgy. Eventually it takes on the air of a locked mental ward. In her final scenes Alex wears a long sleeved, close fitting white dress, reminiscent of a straight jacket. Visually, Alex is empty, a blank page, while Dan full to bursting with obligation, yes, but also joy.
Spying on Dan and his family in the countryside, a rejected Alex watches Dan present his daughter with a bunny rabbit while he and his wife smile and laugh next to a blazing fireplace. Alex promptly turns away and vomits in the bushes. How could anyone ever possibly feel sorry for Dan. Who has not been Alex in some way? Looking in on a life you desperately want but will never have? Still, I want Dan’s family unblemished by her desire and his idiocy. Listening to the Fatal Attraction episode of the excellent film podcast You Must Remember This, Host Katrina Longworth discusses the cultural climate of the late 80s when the film was released. How the original film ending, of Alex committing suicide, was rejected by test audiences. They wanted her to die, but not by her own hand, she must be murdered. Adrian Lyne reshot the ending, and to great box office success, audiences got what they wanted.
Glenn Close was strongly against this change. She felt Alex was mentally ill, not evil, and to this day regularly says she’d like to see a version of the film from Alex’s point of view. Longworth discusses male audience members yelling ‘kill the bitch!’ at Alex in screenings. The late 80s was a time when there had been many gains for feminism but there was a growing conservative backlash— a sense that feminism had gone “too far” and that men were unmoored and suffering with their loss of traditional roles, uncertain where to turn (hm, where have I heard this before???) and Fatal Attraction gave them an outlet for their anger. It’s worth noting that audiences demanded that Beth, the stay at home mom, be the one to murder Alex, the single successful career woman, in order to feel sated by the film.
It’s interesting to me that no one ever suggests a version of Fatal Attraction from Beth’s point of view. We want mommy to clean up the mess daddy made, to forgive, to restore order, but we don’t really want to hear her side of things. I often note this in media of whatever sort, books, film—the story is the affair, the story is not the marriage. The story is never the complexities of the woman who loves, commits, devotes herself to her partner and family, only her reaction to betrayal and then, usually, her forgiveness. Very recently this has changed a bit with more women writing about their experiences of motherhood, of marriage but historically the humanity is reserved for the man who has the affair, the rage for the woman he has the affair with and the nice wife is a paper doll cut out in the background.
As the film closes, after Alex’s murder, we see Beth and Dan holding each other as they walk into the living room after the police have come and the camera slowly closes in on a portrait in a frame of Dan, Beth and their daughter, all smiling, none of them aware of the horror in store. I think this image is meant to impress upon us that order has been restored, the family preserved. However, I always wonder what happens after. Do Dan and Beth stay together? Do they see a therapist? Can Beth every trust him again? In a way, no ending could satisfy me, as my concern remains for the beautiful life Dan abandoned, which no murder could ever revive. My heart stays with his wife and child, not because they represent traditional family values which I don’t give a fuck about, but because they were just living their lives, because they committed no betrayal, no crime, because they were voiceless, subjected to a violence they did nothing to incur besides lightly inconveniencing a man they both deeply loved, by simply existing.
Lash Rec
Idk about you, but I struggle with mascara. I am not into the heavily lashed look but I do like my lashes to look lightly defined. I often find mascara to be really heavy and uncomfortable, so I tend to go for eyelash tints. I’ve had good luck in the past with 19/99 lash tint in brown and benefit’s They’re Real lash primer in brown. But lately, idk if it’s some kind of change in my body or what, but everything, everything, everything flakes. Some worse than others but it’s fucking annoying. So I decided to swing back to mascara and see what the story is there. As I am a huge Lisa Eldridge fan, I thought I’d give her new Kitten Lash mascara in Burnt Umber a shot. I like it! It is super duper light weight which I am delighted about—I forget it’s on and it barely flakes, like to the point where I have to really get close to the mirror to notice if it has at all. So I’m pretty happy. If you are someone who also finds mascara uncomfortable, this is worth a shot.
Small Potatoes
If you follow me on social media you might have seen me in recent weeks peddling my new mailing list called Small Potatoes. My friend
and I started a sticker shop (Big Challenges) in March and this is our mailing list for it. Small Potatoes will be sent out infrequently, and our main goal with it is to make it actually enjoyable for people to get, so we will be sharing links to funny things, little treats like colouring pages, and of course news of sales and discounts and that kind of stuff for the shop. It’s meant to be a light and lowkey little email treat and I’d really appreciate your support if you’d like to sign up for it!
I saw The Last Showgirl and was disappointed, but I love your reading of the scene where Shelley insists that being beautiful is power and the total dissonance she displays in terms of...power to do what, exactly? I also thought it was fascinating how much the film emphasizes Shelley's lack of solidarity with other women or her own family, which seems to be a comment on how capitalist structures alienate through competition. I think I was overall thrown off by the fact that Shelley was so unlikable, yet the film itself and all the critical reception positioned her as the protagonist when she's actually more of an antihero.