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In this interview, Bette Gordon talks about her film VARIETY, which stars Sandy McLeod as a writer who takes a job selling tickets at a porn theater and then becomes obsessed with the films being shown and the people who watch them. Amid this tawdry atmosphere her own sexuality is piqued.
Emerging from the underground New York arts scene, Gordon made her mark by putting ideas about feminism and pornography under a microscope (through the lens of cinematographer Tom DiCillo), and by taking control of the power of voyeurism. The iconic talents she assembled include musician John Lurie, who scored this landmark film. Kino Lorber’s 2020 2K restoration enabled a new release.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The look and the soundscape of the Variety are very neo-noir. How did you work with both the cinematographer Tom DiCillo for the distinctive visual look and also John Lurie with the score?
I met Tom through Jim Jarmusch. We were all hanging out together. And Jim was in a band called The Del-Byzanteens. I used to go to hear him, but we would always go hear John Lurie playing with the Lounge Lizards. [When I] met Tom, he had shot the first part of Stranger Than Paradise, and around that time, I had just done a film called Empty Suitcases, which was about a woman who builds a bomb in those days of radical revolution.
Tom and I got along really well. I took him to all my favorite places in New York. We loved the Staten Island Ferry Building. We just kind of haunted these places and talked about shots. And we designed the look [of Variety]. And because it was based on film noir, we already knew that it would have a kind of glint to it in the same way that you look at noir, which was mostly black and white, but there were moments of color noir, too.
I worked at a place called the Collective for Living Cinema, which was a movie theater in Tribeca. It was all avant-garde films, experimental films, old Hollywood films, and horror movies. The person who programmed it was great [Renée Shafransky], and she became the producer for Variety. We didn’t really know much about producing, but she was like, I’ll produce it anyway. And Tom said, Yeah, okay, I’ll shoot. It was very organic, like a jazz thing. Like, I respond to you, you respond to me. And we walked around and just kind of talked about the color and the light. [And] we did a lot of stuff without any light. But even better for the noir look, right? It’s one key light for noir, and no fill. So, you get that kind of mystery. And Tom was into all of that, which was great.
I listened to the Lounge Lizards over and over. I loved every song. John is really smart and also trained, as is his brother Evan, who played in the band with him. So, the two brothers played on the score and a couple of other good band members. But John and I would sit and watch movies from the past. You know, you look at Elevator to the Gallows, the Louis Malle film, and you hear Miles Davis. It’s all jazz. And John was so amazingly retro but present, like taking retro and refitting it to the moment.
We started to work, and we did a spotting session where I went through the film with him, and we outlined music here, music there…we designated where we wanted the music to speak. And then he’d call me up sometimes. He’d be working on the score, and he had a harmonica, and he would play harmonica with a kind of theme song, asking, what do you think of this? And it was hysterical. He was the best sax player ever, but he also wanted a second sax player, so he went out onto the streets in Times Square, and he found a guy playing on a corner, a random guy. He brought him into the studio, plus the guys in the band and Evan, of course, and they started recording. He made a beautiful score.
Objectification surrounds the character of Christine in Variety. She’s being looked at and looking at herself and at the porn films in the theater where she works. Mirrors and glass are everywhere in the film, and in that ticket booth it’s almost as if she’s on display in a case – what other films were you thinking of that present characters in this way as a reflection of their interiority?
When I came to New York in the end of the 70s as a visual artist and a filmmaker, I was looking for the underside of New York City. I grew up watching black and white TV and Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street and The Naked City by Jules Dassin. Film noir was such an appealing genre for me, not only for its look, which is the half-lit dark streets, but also for its female characters who possessed a kind of dangerous, intriguing sexuality, an unrestrained sense of sexuality for women, which you didn’t see in mainstream movies. Also, film noir has a kind of moral ambiguity. You have to break the law sometimes to do good.
So, I grew up with that somewhere in my background. And Hitchcock films always attracted me and scared me because they possess this kind of obsessional quality…Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho.
With Variety, I thought, what about turning the genre of the noir thriller on its head so that the woman would be the investigator and the male would be the enigmatic figure? So, by disrupting the conventions of the genre, she usurps the position of the male. She becomes the sleuth, the detective in a thriller whose terrain is really what the film is about: the language of desire. The language of desire is what cinema is in a way. When we go to the cinema, the lights go out, and it’s like a dream.
You’re sitting next to people, but you don’t know that they’re there. Your journey is one of watching something on the screen with lights flickering back and forth and in and out. There’s nothing as sexy as watching a film in a movie theater. When I showed the film re-released in Paris, I said one of the reasons that I think for 40 years I’ve been showing this film [is because] I think it is really about cinema itself. It’s about the pleasure in looking.
One of the most fascinating elements of the film to me is Christine’s erotic monologues – especially as presented to her boyfriend, Mark. While Christine is reciting these monologues to him, it’s almost as if he’s not there at all – particularly the pinball scene when she’s giving a monologue…he’s just playing, drinking beer, not looking at her, and not seeming to listen. What was your intent with these scenes in the sense of portraying their relationship and the different ways that men and women present and consume erotic material?
They’re monologues that Kathy Acker [the film’s screenwriter] and I played with. She was a lot of fun to work with. She would give these readings and performances, and she would take the audience into her hands and completely captivate people with her highly sexual monologues.
No one speaks their sexuality out loud. You don’t even tell your best friends some of your fantasies. But [Acker] spoke out loud. Which is why Christine is not only taking desire and language, but she’s using language as a mechanism to retake and recontrol the form itself. In other words, when she takes over the male language of pornography to say, I can take that language too. And guess what? It makes [Mark, played by Will Patton] feel uncomfortable. [With the pinball scene], you should watch closely because you see tiny little things that Will Patton is doing.
I wanted to investigate pornography because I thought that it offered me a way to explore and to see what it had to say about desire and fantasy for women. Unlike the Women Against Pornography, I thought it offered a kind of way for us to look and learn at what it has to say about desire and what it promises. You look at porn movies…they’re usually more or less devoted to men, but when a woman takes back the narrative, the man gets a little nervous. I wouldn’t say that he’s not listening. He doesn’t really know how to respond.
When Christine finally calls the mysterious porn theater patron she’s become obsessed with and has followed, Louie, and confronts him with all this seemingly criminal intel she has on him, demanding they meet, it leads to a very ambiguous ending – what was your intent for leaving the ending so empty? It’s like this erasure.
Pornography does something special. It substitutes the look for the touch. It’s an image on the screen that you can’t touch. You can’t have that woman on the screen. It sustains desire for something. It promises, but it doesn’t gratify. So it keeps you coming back for more.
The narrative [of Variety] itself kind of follows that same model. I wanted to use that as a kind of model for both pornography and narrative itself. And I get to the end of the film, Christine’s basically taken over Louie’s role. And for Louie…I was looking for Michel Piccoli, the French actor in movies that I loved. When I cast Sandy MacLeod, I was looking for Hitchcock’s Kim Novak from Vertigo. So finding these sorts of representations of narrative itself.
She says, you meet me there. [He asks] Is it about money? What do you want? But we only hear her end of the conversation: I’ll know when I get there. And we’re left with this restlessness. And then we have this ending in which we don’t see them, and they don’t show up. We have an empty street corner, and we have rain, and we have light. Desire leaves an opening into the unknown… [a place] between desire and gratification. Because if you gratify your desire, it’s over. So don’t let desire end. There’s an empty street full of possibility, and it’s up to the viewer to fill that emptiness with their own desire.
Photos and intro copy courtesy of IndieCollect and IFC Center.
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