Beyond the Multiplex

"Bettie Page" director Mary Harron talks about why Bettie's topless shots were more joyous than erotic. Plus: Four movies kinda, sorta about sex.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Mary Harron, Beyond the Multiplex

Mary Harron

April 13, 2006 | Mary Harron has been described as looking like Martha Stewart. Like most of the jokes journalists make, that one's cheap and superficial. The difference between La Martha and the director of "The Notorious Bettie Page" (along with "American Psycho" and "I Shot Andy Warhol") is all a matter of "codes, signs and signals," to borrow a phrase Harron herself used late in our interview.

Harron meets me in a refrigerated hotel room in downtown Austin, Texas, on the day "The Notorious Bettie Page" will have its United States premiere. She's wearing a leopard-print jacket and a flared, pleated '50s-style skirt, and the effect is ladylike and edgy at the same time. Stewart could never pull it off. In another era, you might have called Harron a "classy dame," meaning that she's a handsome woman of indeterminate middle age (she's 49), with an impressive combination of manners, intelligence and bearing.

Despite her slender body of work, Harron is one of the signature American independent filmmakers of the last decade, as well as an inspiration to late bloomers everywhere. Her movies straddle the sometimes-narrowing, sometimes-widening gap between the underground and the mainstream, Hollywood and the avant-garde. As we discussed in Austin, her influences range from the great Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel to Hollywood melodramatist Douglas Sirk to B-movie master Sam Fuller. (We didn't discuss Stanley Kubrick, who, to me at least, hovers over Harron's first two films like an unacknowledged father.)

She's a profoundly unromantic and unsentimental filmmaker, which has led some viewers to assume that her stance is one of chilly noncommitment, or that she seeks no emotional connection with her subjects or her audience. Harron still seems troubled by this reaction; in our conversation she worried that audiences would misunderstand her nonjudgmental and profoundly sympathetic portrayal of Bettie Page, the '50s pinup goddess portrayed memorably in the film by Gretchen Mol.

I suspect she can quit worrying. "The Notorious Bettie Page" is a gorgeous, glorious movie, packaging Mol's remarkable performance in lustrous black-and-white cinematography -- with some sequences shot in an enriched color process resembling Technicolor -- that captures the innocence and darkness of America in the '50s as no recent motion picture has. It should clearly be the biggest hit of Harron's career and mark a professional turning point for her. (Read Stephanie Zacharek's piece today about the film and the real-life Bettie Page.)

There have been a lot of those already. You wouldn't know it to look at her -- well, unless you can interpret those codes and signals -- but Harron was a pioneering rock journalist, present for the creation of the punk scene in London and New York. She interviewed the Ramones in 1975, when no one outside New York's Lower East Side had heard of them. (She was 19 at the time.) Some of her interviews appear in "Please Kill Me," Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's legendary oral history of New York punk -- and in a strange but appropriate turn of events, Harron is trying to adapt that book into a film.

The daughter of Canadian actor Don Harron, a staple of such '60s and '70s TV shows as "The FBI" and "Twelve O'Clock High" -- and a long-running performer on "Hee Haw," of all things -- Mary Harron was raised first in Toronto and then in London. She went to Oxford for a while (where she reportedly dated Tony Blair), then fled to New York, where she witnessed the dying days of disco and the dawn of punk, and wrote a long 1977 article in the Village Voice explaining London's exploding musical scene to New Yorkers. She has worked on documentaries for the BBC, PBS and Fox, once hosted a late-night British talk show, and briefly roomed with RuPaul in New York. Through all of it: the ladylike quality, and the edginess.

This history also suggests that for Harron, the ironic mode is not a too-cool-for-school affectation, but her inevitable manner of confronting the world. By background, by temperament and by breeding, she's a perpetual observer and outsider. While "The Notorious Bettie Page" is likely to be understood as her warmest film, it is nonetheless not easily categorized. It's about a proto-porn legend and contains significant nudity, but it's neither erotic in manner nor moralistic in tone.

Harron's work could hardly be more different from that of Nicole Holofcener, whom I interviewed last week. But the fact that two of the spring season's most important indie releases were directed by women -- not just by women, but by middle-aged working mothers -- shouldn't go overlooked. While the movie world remains far from genuine gender equity, Harron and Holofcener are no longer anomalies. They've been allowed to build their careers gradually and organically (including taking time off for their family lives) and have emerged as two of the distinctive visionaries of American film. We've come a long way, baby.

Next page: "I was interested in what life was like for women then, and what life was like for those poor girls who were very beautiful"