Camille Paglia's Target Practice

"Huh?"

"Okay, here's Meg Ryan, Miss Bland, who doesn't speak to her mother, won't talk about her mother. Hypocrite! Because there are all kinds of dark aggressions in her that she won't reveal. I find her so saccharine. Actually, she's perfect, she's perfect as an idol of this generation, perfect. She's less interesting than Sandra Dee. I thought we got rid of Sandra Dee. She's less talented than Sandra Dee. Sandra Dee, she had a kind of perky, comic quality and vibrancy. Meg Ryan is just vapid, vapid, VAPID. Julia Roberts. I don't get her, either. There's no deep sensuality to her. She's a perky little girl. I hate perky."

"If they make a movie of your life, and they probably will, who would you like to see play you?"

"Brenda Vaccaro," Paglia answers without a moment's hesitation.

I spit out my water. "Brenda Vaccaro?"

"Yeah, I love her. Everyone has said that she should play me since I was part of a rebellion against the president of Bennington College in the '70s. She's another person who you think should have had a better career, better roles. She's just so forceful, so fiery."

"Never struck me that way."

"You know how there are just some actresses that you like, no matter what? And you wish more for them than what really happens in life. I was just thinking the other night about Jessica Walter, who was in Play Misty for Me. Now there was a great movie. And Suzanne Pleshette, who you might not think of as a great actress. But I do. I think those two are women who never were given the proper roles in Hollywood. Just the other night, they showed a movie from the early '70s, and Jessica Walter was in it. She is one of the most high IQ actresses in the history of Hollywood. And she was never given the roles that she deserved, except for Play Misty. I think, in many ways, the women in Hollywood are vapid. And Suzanne Pleshette, she's so tough and she's fabulous and she's sexy. Now why didn't this woman have a fabulous career with terrific roles?"

She's waiting for me to respond, but I can't think of a damned thing to say.

That doesn't stop Paglia. "That reminds me of this thing I read a few weeks ago, where Germaine Greer was quoted as saying, 'Jodie Foster's the kind of so-called feminist only Camille Paglia could love.' Now as it happens, Jodie Foster is a very PC feminist, the kind Camille Paglia does not like. My problem with Jodie Foster is I feel that she is very manipulative, which I hate to see. Because she uses the press when she has a movie to promote, and then--nothing. She's out there preaching to people about male oppression, patriarchy. Don't be preaching to us about your stupid feminist rhetoric. To me she's very hypocritical. I thought she was great in The Silence of the Lambs. I thought she was excellent in The Accused, which was falsely considered a feminist movie. I think it's perfectly right down the line, so that if you're a feminist you see it one way, if you don't agree with the feminist line, you see it the other way. But back to Jodie: she can't do accents. Every time I see her try to do one, I laugh. It's ridiculous. I think her problem now is that she's not maturing as a woman, she lacks womanliness. She's gonna be like Meryl Streep, which to me is this very bleached, sanitized, goyish thing, where they've got a highly intelligent mind operating, operating, operating. The cinema is not theater, okay? The lens comes up close to you. I don't want to see you thinking. So I think that right now she's in a major crisis. Okay?"

"Did you see The Age of Innocence?" I begin. "Because..."

"No. I saw a clip of Michelle Pfeiffer and I went, I'm not gonna go and sit in a theater and watch Michelle Pfeiffer pretending to be in her costume thing. I heard her whining and it drove me crazy. I'm a great analyst of body language, too, and there's a certain way women held themselves in the 19th century. The old Hollywood films had it down. They knew how you would hold your elbows, how you'd walk. And I saw this clip of Michelle and her limbs were so loose that it drove me nuts. Once I saw Jacqueline Bisset in a TV movie of Anna Karenina. Now, I love Jacqueline Bisset. But in the first scene, she walked into the room and her arms were swinging like she was about to play tennis. These small things are very important to me, so I couldn't continue watching."

"You were right about Age of Innocence," I tell her. "It was overpraised and boring."

"Like Orlando," she says with a sigh. "What a piece of shit. I saw so many rave reviews, all these PC reviews talking about how wonderful it was. People were falling over themselves, saying how true it was to the book. I mean, the book is not even that good anyway. Virginia Woolf was bored with her own book. But how could you make a bad movie of that book? There's so much exciting stuff in there."

"What do you think about the women in Hollywood," I ask, "like Dawn Steel or Sherry Lansing? Women have a lot of power in Hollywood now. How do you think they're using it? Did you read Julia Phillips's book, You'II Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again?"

"I leafed through the book. Of course, she has her own problems, beyond just being a woman in Hollywood. The drug thing was another issue. I think Sherry Lansing is more of a good role model, because I like the ballsy kind of chicks who are out there and don't claim feminism and prejudice all the time. They just go out there and do the work. I saw Penny Marshall in an interview where she said that she's sick and tired of women who are always talking about how they don't get a fair break, and when she sees one of those women, she runs from them, she doesn't even want to hire them. I love that attitude. Just get out there and do the work and stop kvetching. When you produce things that make money, okay, you will be treated equally. Come on. All right?"

"Anyone you think is under-appreciated out in Hollywood? Or overappreciated?"

"I like Kathleen Turner, but I think she's always being overpraised. They're always saying that she is the one who's like Carole Lombard. Please, give me a break. I think she's a little out of control."

"Which is what I thought was gonna be great about her, but it wound up being her downfall," I say.

"I loved Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger with Susan Sarandon. I could do a whole parody of it. She is so fabulous to me. She has such presence. Women, I just don't know, they've lost the sense of the archetype, they've lost a sense of glamour. I like Susan Sarandon a lot, by the way. I think she's really smart. I don't like the way she's choosing her roles. Now she makes all these sort of kitchen-sink dramas where she plays down the glamour. I'm dowdy, so I like to see women who are really glamorous playing up to that. Okay? I loved What's Love Got to Do With It. I thought that there was a movie that really tried to be truthful about costume and manners and everything from those decades. And the way that violence happened, the way he exploded, I thought that was wonderful, too. The way everything works up into the violence. I did not see The Piano, because I knew I would hate it. And I didn't see Philadelphia, because all I had to see was the beatific scene where this guy with AIDS is holding the baby and everyone's going, 'Oh, you're so wonderful,' and I'm thinking, in what life?"

"Well," I say, reaching for my tape recorder, "I guess that's it..."

But Paglia has one more thing to say. "When are people going to stop wearing those red ribbons? I hate this sanctimony about AIDS. I've never worn a red ribbon, ever. When is this gonna stop? It's obscene. You can be perfectly sympathetic to AIDS without the self-advertisement. This has gotta stop. The movie industry has never dealt honestly with AIDS, but they make sure they've got their red ribbons on. Gay men created fashion, and now these red ribbons are ruining the lines, ruining the look. So I say, for the sake of gay men everywhere, please stop wearing these things."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

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Martha Frankel interviewed Anna Sui for the September issue of Movieline.

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