Review of ‘Variety’ (Bette Gordon, 1983)
‘Variety’ was first released in 1983 and is in some ways a counterpart to ‘Cruising’ and ‘Looking For Mr. Goodbar’, as well as Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’, in its delineation of voyeurism and the pitfalls involved in leading a double life. It also works as a precursor to Susan Seidelman’s ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ in its focus on the female gaze and the way we may let go of notions around respectability in order to understand one’s authentic self, stripped of our penchant for sticking within the imposed, patriarchal constraints of conventionality, and looking for one’s core self through the space of transgression.
In ‘Taxi Driver’, a male protagonist went on an odyssey of New York City in a quest that was as much about cleansing the self as it was the city streets, and in ‘Variety’ Sandy McLeod plays Christine, an inexperienced, middle class twentysomething from Michigan who, in order to make ends meet, does something out of her comfort zone by working in the ticket booth at a seedy porn movie theatre near Times Square, exactly the sort of place to which Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) brought Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) in Scorsese’s magnum opus. But, ‘Variety’ inverts the male gaze, with Christine tantalized and turned on by what her patrons are watching, and she channels the intrigue and sense of danger that is unleashed by following one of the men who tries to seduce her into a world that, like that of Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) in Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’ (Christine even resembles Rosanna Arquette’s Marcy from that picture), turns into a nightmarish, unpredictable and intoxicating ride, involving mafia connections, from which there may be no return.
The premise of the film is though smarter than the execution which includes endless shots of Christine undertaking surveillance of her quarry and following him into motel rooms and warehouses where, should she be caught, she might not survive. But this thrill of the chase is what motivates her as Christine increasingly becomes an unstable presence, no longer returning her concerned mother’s telephone calls and leaving her ticket box, at which she has resorted to reading porn, in order to check out the film within the auditorium behind her. Just as at the end of ‘Taxi Driver’ where it is no longer clear to us whether Travis is fantasizing a life in which he has found purpose and connection within the squalid milieu where he plies his trade, so Christine has, at the end of ‘Variety’, started to live out the plot of one of the movies that has now consumed her as she calls her prey, insists that he meets her in public and appears to be threatening blackmail against this mobster figure.
The noirish shot of a nocturnal city corner with just a lamp barely illuminating the rain-soaked streets is an appropriate image with which to end the story, in which neither we nor Christine quite know within which version of reality she is operating. She has imbibed and been transformed/corrupted (or both) by the world of pornography, and we see her increasingly occupying dangerous spaces of sex shops and magazines which offer fleeting pleasure which she is destined to keep playing out ad infinitum. If she is in Hell this is a world that she finds enticing and into which she wants to go deeper and deeper, constantly intrigued but never satiated. ‘Variety’ is especially good at playing with the conflicting, paradoxical threads of attraction and repulsion and how one cannot quite exist without the other.
