Dorothy Stratten; beat by the
Game.
Dorothy Stratten
will forever be trapped in a limbo of sexualization, an ageless wrinkle free
and constantly beaming face that puts in us the knowledge of a dark other existence:
an image, an un-self. Dorothy Stratten’s death could be classified under man’s consuming
ownership of her image, seeing her hollow and flat to be acquired or controlled
for accessorizing lives.
Picked up at the
checkout of Dairy Queen, by a man that swindled a girl on a smile (who’d
torture, rape and kill her); a varied but similar rendition of stolen girls and
their deaths, which followed, like either: Bob Dylan’s It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue or Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Dorothy was swept out of a small
life in Canada, to be brought to the steps of stardom by a man, Paul Snyder.
Proponents of
hers and champions for her can’t help but assign Stratten the definition of her
death: a romantic end, which made
her. Peter Bogdonovich, who wrote The
Killing of the Unicorn, chronicling the much of the last eighteen months of
Stratten’s life, does nothing but paint her image as anything but sexual, which
with the knowledge of it being a posthumous portrait, is irksome. If her
greatest supporter puts her legacy to use through extreme sexual
characterization, then the foreboding sinks in. When you realize Dorothy
Stratten was going to be left continually off fitting into men’s hands: there
was no end for her but what happened.
As of now there
is no version of Dorothy Stratten’s story shown from any point of view but a
mans (least of all Dorothy’s), which moves all moves the stories around
themselves, putting them at the major points of her life, making those moments
theirs: Playboy’s Life of Dorothy
Stratten (Hugh Hefner), The Killing
of the Unicorn (Peter Bogdonovich),
Death of a Centerfold or Star 80 (each
being Paul Snyder). Though her story is a tragedy that ends with her corpse, and maybe for that reason,
no man can help putting themselves into the staring role of her story, coiling
her and twisting the story around them and finally, absolving themselves the
blame for her remains, which they skillfully help themselves to.
No doubt exists
that Dorothy Stratten was beautiful in a rare way, as her appearance inspired a
violent idealism that can be brought out in men and a resonating confusion from
inside herself. A powerful and exportable American beauty made half in fantasy
with the other half in Canada. Dorothy was the id reward buried (not so deep)
in men and in being that, Stratten left men free of the nagging sight of sullen
clouds overtaking her. Nor a suspicious guard that kept her from affability,
easiness and engagement with the men of the world. A smile that allowed us to
keep drawing from her boundless wells, a being that was nothing short of manifesting
as she had been promised to us as: “ultimate genetic perfection.”
In many ways,
Stratten embodied what every actor should have to: a draw for us, an etched
beauty but something far more: inspiring and photogenic. Stratten’s path was
unique however during her short career she suffered as many like her do, as a
victim of legitimacy. Following Dorothy on her path would lead most to porn and
prostitution but Stratten’s staggering sculpt brought her quick fame in photos,
several films but rarely would she be seen as legitimate.
Stratten wasn’t
a bad actress, never given the chance to grow and kept from being acknowledged
as a career model (stemming from Dorothy’s arrival as tits and teeth) Dorothy excelled
the little she appeared on screen, in ways so many actors can’t. So it stands
that Dorothy Stratten’s biggest tragedy was her inability to see the legitimacy
and purpose of her image; of pictures persuasive abilities from their specific
stimuli and the power she could have controlling it.
In Bogdonovich’s
book The Killing of the Unicorn, the
portrayal of Hugh Hefner as a sadist is too easy a shot; keeping to opportune vagueness
that hardly make a believable villain. Hefner’s intentions, as claimed by
Bogdanovich, only to “expose and possess” Stratten is not menacing but
forgettable, while you are surrounded by the truly villainous text. Tossed
around and treated like she had a player’s debt to a game she was dropped into
the midst of, but no peer player in: Dorothy Stratten was born lost in a sea of
users.
The misogynistic
text of The Killing of the Unicorn
shows Bogdanovich being just as much a grown adolescent as Hefner but far less
aware, successful or uniquely minded. Peter Bogdanovich is left seeming only
obsessing over sex with Dorothy, remembering her sexuality as her most
prominent feature.
Bogdonovich’s
deluded belief of his own socially evolved state, leads to pages of poorly
written brooding, name-dropping conquests with models (other than Dorothy) and
an occupational biography; all written on a level of an amateur tabloid, reading
like a high school contemplation. Bogdanovich paints Dorothy Stratten as a mute
Cassandra, beautifully forelorn, leaving himself uncover Dorothy’s story for
her and in doing so, claims her as his own: sealing his fate as the worse of
two evils, between himself and Hefner.
“From time to time Dorothy had a faraway look that I
didn’t understand…perhaps she felt as I did that we had touched the heavens,
and she was afraid to speak lest the holy thing we had together be taken away
from us.” – The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980, (1983) Peter Bogdanovich
The Killing of the Unicorn often reads
like Dennis Reynolds: An Erotic Life,
exaggerating and masking sociopathay or anything close to reality with the
women he fills the pages with, the writing is self-delusional fantasy. Again we
come back to the image that Stratten inspired out of men, the vacancy they put on her canvas: her image’s
reflection to men, which led her directly to death.
Star 80 may be another male centered
view of her story, but that cannot derail facts. A stellar script by Bob Fosse
its director, a career performance by Eric Roberts and Mariel Hemingway’s lead
during a peak in her career keep the machine of the film moving at a break neck
pace without losing a beat. The talking heads that pass Dorothy’s story off from
one to another aren’t introduced and depict regretful confessions, each not wanting
to speak for long. The film summed up by Roger Ebert surrounds Roberts’
performance as “…filled up with so much reality, we feel horror…” and Eric
Roberts truly excels at the portrayal of a vile human being, but Star 80 is much more than Roberts’ role.
The script is
smarter than it wants credit for from its handling of the tensions between
Stratten’s husband and Hugh Hefner to all of the interlopers in her life. We
are always made aware of the tragedy’s end, but are brought on a quick and
unrelenting narrative that doesn’t focus itself around Dorothy Stratten. Star 80 is probably the most humane
depiction of Stratten’s slaughter because it centers on Roberts’ (or Paul
Snyder’s) deterioration; instead of using Dorothy, Fosse makes us Paul Snyder.
We sit and grow
enamored with the blonde, following Roberts’ first extension to her, until we
watch him come to his end. Any argument that his character was underdeveloped
is wrong because Paul Snider’s life was entirely Dorothy Stratten and her
depiction in Star 80 is more
dimensional than most female characters. In Star
80 we are watching the growth of a futile man’s fruitful creation, its
derailment of him of as a man and his inadequate response.
Mariel Hemingway
does an incredible job with the depiction of a complex, entangled, mentally and
emotionally provoked young girl; the second time for Hemingway. Mariel
Hemingway might hold the record for unparalleled performances by against anyone
of her age range in English language film, rivaled only by Alicia Silverstone.
The depth in
Hemingway’s performances cannot be understated. Her growth, beginning with Manhattan (four years earlier when she
was eighteen) to Star 80, the fullness of her performances are unique and you have
to parallel Hemingway and Stratten as young women: Dorothy’s mind and
dimensional form given that Stratten died so young at twenty (while Star 80 filmed when Hemingway was
twenty-two). Hemingway’s depiction of Dorothy Stratten hits every crucial point
for a performance; of course the minimum requirement demands of the visual,
which in the case of Stratten was vastly important as well the actor’s intellectual
side that was able to master the doe innocence Stratten possessed and projected.
The rarity of
these performances does not come from most actresses being incapable of this,
but that in those roles their characters aren’t given the full expanse of a
good female character. Dorothy Stratten’s life is tragic and fits a model that
could be reduced to cliché (with respectful hesitation from it ending with her
bloody corpse) but it also fights against the lessening of women’s roles in
‘men’s cinema’ to illustrate the immeasurably important roles of Beauty, Use
and Death. Mariel Hemingway plays at us as the vulnerable girl, better than
most and in doing is able to take what most would dismiss as stilted drama, and
turn it into a stunning dramatic cinematic performance.
Expanding on the
vagueness of the images that are set up, what is wrong with mirroring Playboy’s utilization of what men are
attracted to in women and abstracting that to substantial drama? To provoke an
insight or a feeling is part of the nature of art.
As a character,
Stratten was shown in depth in ways most women are not on film. The danger for
women comes, as the ultimate image of women is never drawn with substance, when
a “good” female character is devoid of a subject’s substance and only left as a
decorative object to the narrative.
Hemingway was
able to show the distraction in Stratten’s mind between the life she was living
and the person she was told she was. Hemingway built Stratten as a character
whose nature attracted everyone to the shy girl. Dorothy Stratten is played as
a victim of her life but Hemingway understood, and let it show, the wrenching
nature of being indentured to a free society where her body was her work. Star 80 is an interesting study of a
person owned by fame, which required of Hemingway a sexually layered
performance.
Stratten was
kept constantly distracted by Paul Snider, who swallowed her photo shoots,
relationships, image, and life; which left Eric Roberts to fill the screen as
well our minds.
Because Star 80 does not put Stratten directly
at its center Hemingway was left to interpret significant moments of Stratten’s
life off screen for the most part, while we faced the realities of Paul Snider,
yet Stratten flowed naturally and Hemingway grew, hitting every mark. Stratten
grows, Snyder doesn’t. She is a success, while he’s a failure. Paul Snyder was
not meant to grow old so, in jealousy he took Dorothy Stratten with him.
Star 80 doesn’t seek to attach further
meaning to the story beyond the dismaying acts. We’re not left to dwell on
those she left behind: who or how she left them in whatever ended up happening
to each. Fosse as a director never wallowed in the sappy but thrived in the
presentation of weighted material as important drama.
Playboy’s Totemic depictions of women are
simple while complex. Its pictures, stylizations and synthetic-isms fit
themselves directly into the basics of film and its female depictions. Not
misogynistic necessarily because of their overt sexuality, but chauvinistic for
their contemptuous nature.
Depiction of
women is always chauvinistic when you have to depend on shallow displays, which
are essential to a picture’s image. The question has to be asked is Playboy’s shallow depiction of women
worse or more harmful overall than Bogdonovich’s selfish treatment of women
disguised as honorific art.
In film, picture-image is everything and Dorothy emanated exactly what the
camera needed. Though haute couture
never sought Dorothy for their flexural canvases, Dorothy Stratten would find
legitimacy in pictures, with her born gift.
Restricting the sexual
element of women’s characters to nothing or soporific attributes, leads only to
stale characters and drama. This isn’t an argument of exclusive portrayals of
women but rather an aspect to widen an already plain and ordinary depiction,
that’s often so dull to the point of boredom.
Dorothy Stratten
would star as the titular character in drive-in master William Sachs’ (Van Nuys Blvd., The Incredible Melting Man)
sci-fi creation, Galaxina. In 1980,
low budget cinema would had a landmark and Dorothy Stratten would shine at her
at her best on the silver screen not used as a canvas but as a Totem (though in
movies that never hurts). Galaxina was
a natural flow into film for Dorothy and not as shallow as it would seem.
The late 1970’s
yielded a crop of movies that designed for the drive in, would be the only
American films to reach true levels of independence since 1938 and the rigorous
codes that stuck up every cinema-house. Drive-in’s flourished from the 1950s
onwards and these movies evolved to audiences’ demands for more features, all at
an ease of cost of production, and with all new methods the medium of film was
briefly reinvented.
Most of work
veered to sexual audiences tastes. This new genre slightly resembled the
Japanese genre pinku eigu (pink
movie) that produced generations of unique films, which now stand beside Japan’s
titan works. The similarities between genres were films that gained unique
flavors that made their stories move steadily and knowingly jumped according to
budgetary demands.
Van Nuys Blvd. the classic from 1979,
directed by Galaxina’s William Sachs,
included many of these form shifting requirements. Van Nuys Blvd. was a hit at drive-in’s and played nationally for a
number of years, influencing a number of filmmakers and films that would come
later like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and
Confused: a tribute to the drive-in classic.
Van
Nuys Blvd.’s interlude is a scene where the characters go to a disco and we
are witness to a 4-minute dance number by a Kansas City cheerleading squad. The
girls were not nude and the length of the sequence was determined by one of the
film’s funders; the owner of a Kansas City Basketball team and their Cheer-squad,
that he brought on tour and wanted to advertise.
Galaxina was a script that came to
Dorothy Stratten during time of her reign at Playboy. A fun sci-fi yarns that like much of Sachs’ work is beyond
the quality of competing peers. For its era, budget and story the film is
diversely cast and reaches as a story in that way than most other film at its time
wouldn’t even conceive of.
A genuinely
strange spoof, space story and one I’d only be able to come across if written
within the free reach of a comic book. A traveling police station’s
intergalactic officials and criminals are each surprisingly well-defined
characters for a film like this: darker and more explicit about the future of
space travel than most other sci-fi’s of the time.
Don’t you know in space no one can hear your siren?!
Galaxina spoofs much of Star Wars and Alien, similar to what would be lampooned by Mel Brooks in Spaceballs, nearly a decade later. Like the majority of Sachs’ work the
film tries for easily tapped responses of humor to action to sex, Galaxina is no different but at no point
does it become stale, which is
testament to its maker.
The whole film
is fun and smartly put together, the dinner scene is a mix of Tom Jones and Alien and manages to be sneakily explicit about life at this place
in time; jello that sustains a body for months, the full sweep of automation in
the world, the unorganic nature of the future as well their conversation where
they condemn man and machine relations.
As for the First
Officer, what is a man supposed to do when trapped in with an ultimate, perfectly
engineered being? The first officer’s lusting for Galaxina is never overwrought
and always touched with humor without forgetting what it plainly says. Sachs
uses Stratten only for her body but puts her in a vehicle that offered her the
chance to play an interesting role and make a statement that reached beyond its
text, even if Dorothy didn’t believe
it herself.
Playing a
machine with feeling: sculpted by mans hands with the awing power of “emotion”,
as its opening scroll tells us. Stratten plays her well, giving strongly
symbolic role a needed solid base.
Galaxina acts
like a robot while serving dinner, cleaning up after fights, or soldering her
circuit board and most like a woman when chased down by men, seeking from her
the forbidden. Protected by a separate built in mechanism the first officer
kisses her that sends jolts of electricity through him.
Why build a
machine with emotion and cut man off at the same time? The answer is that under
its surface Galaxina is about the
tragedy of women, and it rests itself on Dorothy Stratten and her performance.
The use of
Dorothy Stratten in the film can’t be made irrelevant or unseen by an audience
because of the proximity of her death to the finishing of Galaxina’s shoot. The films resolution is a terrifying sequence of
a man’s loss of love for his wife and the evil feeling that warps into burning
hatred, along with her complete realization along with him.
Paul Snyder
abducted Dorothy Stratten, taking her from her job, her friends and her family,
in his last feeble attempt to control and keep her, which by that time had left
Snyder with one option: to own Dorothy’s corpse.
Women killed by
men, broken for the power of their image are ways for men gain control over autonomy.
The dangers from women only seen through men’s eyes are the image that women
establish in men’s heads. Women’s lives are turned into the “game” of society,
never equals but collateral for life.
The power
Dorothy Stratten had over men, the vision of herself, would be tested as she tried
making something of her own, using only herself and under pressure it failed, leading
her to death: an object in a world where men are the only subject.
Tragic as
everything about Dorothy Stratten is, one is implored to ask is objectification
of women’s image wrong, when men are objectified in equal measure with damages
not too dissimilar? With Sly Stallone playing a conditioned muscle or Arnold
Swarzenegger resembling a human being that none could become; these heroes
don’t portray healthy models for boys, let alone give boys something to idolize
in a healthy way. Men’s characters face reduction to totemic hero roles that
set another generation up to fail in fitting their image.
Great female
characters whose objectification was utilized intelligently are Adrienne
Forrester portrayed by Alicia Silverstone in 1993’s The Crush, a teenage temptress girl who turns the life of Cary
Elwes upside down, turning the man (justly, in many ways) into the victim for
the entire film. One that also can’t be ignored the character, performance and depiction
from Sue Lyon of Dolores Haze in the film Lolita,
who, again, justly victimizes the men in her life as her way of retribution.
Women, when only
seen through men’s eyes, are in a dangerous position as the man establishes an
image for her and she could eventually, unknowingly, let dream deteriorate. Hugh
Hefner never lets the image die. Hef’s proclamation that he “could never just be
with one women again” according to Bogdonovich, is not Hefner being piggish but
giving us an insight into how and why he affords the life he does.
Hefner doesn’t
want to break the tricky glass and let the whole of a woman settle in and Hugh Hefner
is afforded the ability to live in his pictures. In Playboy, the image that’s jagged into men’s minds from its
pictures, the vision that Hefner doesn’t want to die, is one jammed with men’s
vague romantics.
Dorothy is kept
in a perpetual state, immortalized in compromise with commodity. And with this
idea permeating society, women’s lives are held as entertainment and games, never
to amount to equal consequence. If one would elaborate on the vague sketch we
get of women, by inserting character bits into their roles they can build the
archetype into something of depth.
To believe that
an evolution in the dramatic depth of women’s work is to put women in the place
of men, is to believe that women’s natural archetypes are too fragile to bend,
too shallow to fill and have to be kept, protected, like precious porcelain: breakable
gems, delicate unicorns.
At the end of
her life, though her careers financial prospects were bright, Dorothy Stratten
failed to find solace from her own perceived lack of legitimacy. Given scripts
that relegated her characters to minimal roles, due to lack of sufficient
character details inherent to belief that archetypes can’t bend. Dorothy was
also kept out of serious circles of art and photography; for a start in the
business that was seen as illegitimate and sleazy, Dorothy was discriminated into
a corner.
Forced into her
corner, she was alone. Surrounded by a confused world that wanted her as
nothing but an insubstantial person and moneymaker, when Dorothy wanted much
more. Dorothy Stratten reached out for the hand of the man who first took her
off and saved her: Paul Snyder.
This Disneyland…where people are the Games.
- Dorothy Stratten, poem (excerpt)
Aren’t there always hunters in pursuit of the unicorn, and others who
stand by and watch and weep?
-Peter
Bogdonovich, The Killing of the Unicorn
"Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!' 'Well, now that we have seen each other,' said the Unicorn, 'if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you."
-Lewis Carroll
