Anti-feminist feminist Camille Paglia takes aim at the follies and foolishness of the film world.
Camille Paglia is an equal-opportunity pain in the ass. Anyone who's been around her for more than an hour can find something to piss them off.
For instance: she loves Madonna and has praised her "great instinctive intelligence." She thinks that Woody Allen, in his Soon-Yi phase, is far more interesting than Woody Allen, sensitive nerd. She says that there "is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. They are monsters at the extremes of personality." She believes that Elizabeth Taylor is the one true queen of Hollywood.
On the upside. Paglia has had it with the victim mentality. She's tired of women whining about sexual harassment and date rape. She would rather be dead than politically correct. She loves Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, and thinks that today's actresses are bland copies. And she thinks Marlon Brando, "like Elvis Presley... is a supreme sexual persona, an icon who has entered our dreams and transformed the way we see the world."
Paglia is an academic who is spellbound by pop culture. Her first two books, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and Sex, Art, and American Culture, and her new one, Vamps and Tramps, have tackled everything from the Marquis de Sade and Emily Dickinson to drag queens and Clarence Thomas.
This self-described "lesbian amazon queen" is at once infuriating and hilarious, and she's smart, really smart. Although Sexual Personae may seem profoundly unreadable to anybody who doesn't have to read it for a college course (and to many who do), Sex, Art, and American Culture and Vamps and Tramps are laugh riots. In these two, Paglia gives us her take on the movies, and makes her case that Hollywood and the entertainment business are the most important and profound things to come out of the 20th century. Instead of bitching and moaning that this is the end of civilization as we know it, she can't wait till dinner's over so she can watch "Entertainment Tonight."
It's 100 degrees outside, but Paglia shows up for our lunch in a downtown Philadelphia hotel (she's a professor of humanities at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia) in long pants, a T-shirt and a jacket, with gold hoop earrings framing her small face. There is something so endearing about these earrings, so innocent and girlish, so unlike the raging virago I'm expecting to encounter. She begins talking before her tush even hits the chair. Nothing has prepared me for how fast she speaks: I know already that when I listen to my tapes later on, it will sound like I'm on Quaaludes and she's on speed. You don't exactly have a conversation with Paglia--all she needs is two or three words to set her off on an awesome talking jag.
"I must have some sustenance," she tells our waiter, who wants very much to tell us the specials. "I've had nothing since breakfast. I would like a small salad to begin, with the dressing on the side. Then I'll have your sesame ginger capellini, whatever the hell that is. And Perrier, as quickly as possible. Bring two."
She dismisses him with a quick flick of the wrist, then she turns to me and smiles.
"Camille," I begin, speaking for all of us, "it's one thing for you to defend Madonna on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. But we're movie lovers and we've had it with her half-assed attempts to be an actress."
"No, no," she says, jumping around in her chair like a first-grader who needs a hall pass. "I attacked her in the new book. Now listen, I think she's a terrible actress, okay? Madonna has no talent whatsoever. It's a tragedy to me. She has no business at all going into acting. However, in the videos she's made, it was a great art form. As a dancer..."
"Then she should stick to dancing and not make us watch her on the big screen," I sulk.
"Absolutely. There was a great period, and you can't take that away from her, when she was the crest of the wave of the world, the whole world. All right? Okay? And now her influence is so everywhere, we don't need her anymore. Now she's in a terrible period. Why is she trying to act?
"It's really sad," Paglia continues, without pause. "Here's one of the most famous women in the world, and I'm a writer who's a fan, and we've had a million opportunities to get together... Spin magazine tried to bring us together, Penthouse tried to bring us together, Esquire tried to bring us together, and HBO wanted to do a My Dinner With Andre type of format with Madonna and me. And Madonna wouldn't do it. And I'm like a major intellectual of the world. Okay, all right?"
"I don't think she really likes strong women," I volunteer.
"I know. I got to know Sandra Bernhard a little bit. And she told me about how Madonna just drops people. I hate that. I'm Italian, I'm very loyal. Now she's Italian, too, so what is that about? If Madonna's Italian, she should be having friends for life. Okay? All right? What is this? She goes through people and drops them? I got an earful not only from Sandra, but also from her collaborator, John Boskovich. And he said, 'Sandra is friendly with, like, the manicurist that she knows from high school. And Madonna is too grand for that. Madonna has to be the number-one person in the room at any time.' That's what happens if you never sit around and schmooze with people, you never learn anything. And so she's always performing. Like on 'Letterman,' what are we talking about? This is a major star, and she is doing what a 17-year-old starlet would do. Why does she have to do anything? A major star should be grand. I'm talking about Dietrich's kind of class. I mean, you come out, you just sit there, all we want to know is: 'What did you have for breakfast this morning? Or yesterday? What are you doing tomorrow? What's been happening in your life?' Let the camera just look at you. And you can see her screaming inside. She's pathetic. She's so removed. But the SEX book, that was the last straw. I think it's embarrassing. There is nothing remotely sexy about that book. And this thing with the lesbian skinhead ... they look like plucked chickens. Okay, all right?"
"Okay," I say. All right, already. "Who do you think is sexy onscreen?"
"Well, I loved Sharon Stone's performance in Basic Instinct. I'm one of the only feminists who went for that film. I'm not sure if she'll ever find another vehicle as great as that again. I hope she doesn't say, 'Well, now I've done that sort of Whores of Babylon routine, now I've got to have a serious script to show my other sides.' I don't want to see her other sides! I want her to stick with it, because there's an incandescence, that femme fatale persona, that we want to see more of. I love the idea of a femme fatale, because every woman is fatal to every man. Woman dominates the universe. So I feel that in Hollywood cinema and the great art films, the European art films, they all love this thing of the femme fatale.
"I realize that I have a kind of gay guy way of looking at things, and I feel a lot of cinema is about sexual personae. It's about presentation of 'self.' I love any footage of Sharon Stone arriving at an opening. She stands there and she does this thing with her eyes, and she just glitters, glitters, glitters. I love that, because I love mannequins, I love the fashion model, I don't think that the fashion model is an oppressor. Okay? All right?"
I'm exhausted already. "I remember you said this thing about Meryl Streep..."
"What I said was that Meryl doesn't translate, she is stuck doing those accents to hide the fact that there isn't much there. Try dubbing her for a movie house in India... there'd be nothing left except that horsy face, moving its lips. I hate the way she whines that women are paid less in Hollywood. Men get paid more because the men have not renounced their glamour! All right? Okay? Meryl Streep comes on like this new breed of actresses. Their attitude now is: 'We're not going to play that old Hollywood game anymore. We're actors, not actresses.' Excuse me, okay, that's what Hollywood is about, that's what people pay to see. Don't be bitching that you're not being paid, because the men are doing the action and adventure things, they are sticking to the traditional lines of masculinity, they have not renounced their masculinity or their glamour. Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, well, you still have men acting like that. The women made a serious error when they renounced glamour. Now, Sharon Stone knows how to do it. People want that. Whitney Houston, she can do it all. She can look boyish, she can look glamorous, every time she comes out it's like a lovefest, she's so glamorous. This has to do with how the gods were looked at..."
"Who else do you see doing good work? I know you've got opinions on everything."
"Oh, God, yes," she says, taking a sip of water before bravely relaunching.
"Meg Ryan drives me crazy. I can't take her seriously, because I saw her on 'As the World Turns.' I think she is so fucking bland. She's such a hypocrite, too, and this is on the record, because she won't speak to her mother."
"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.