And of course he broke her heart, cruelly, suddenly. It didn’t mean as much to him. How could it? He didn’t want anything permanent.
Mr. Dennis, for all of his abuse, does love Wanda. He loves her because he sees her. In that moment, them sitting on the car, he sees her.
The film, in its way, is a strange, fucked-up love story. They are the opposite of the glamorous Bonnie and Clyde. Loden maintained in interviews that she thought of her film as an anti–Bonnie and Clyde. She also made clear that although the films came out at around the same time, she wrote the screenplay years before.
Faye Dunaway was Barbara Loden’s understudy in After the Fall, which Elia Kazan directed, where Loden played the Marilyn Monroe apparition.
Dunaway then later played the Barbara Loden muse figure in the film version of The Arrangement with Kirk Douglas as the antihero—even though Loden was promised the part. After all it was about her. Or Kazan’s version of her.
In Kazan’s autobiographical novel, The Arrangement, the mistress character, Gwen, is a spitfire apparition whose role is to provoke his character, to shake him out of his complacency, his numb bourgeois existence as an advertising exec. In their life, Loden was the one who pushed him to start writing screenplays.
In The Arrangement, the Barbara Loden figure is a one-dimensional sexpot. “But Gwen had no closed doors, no forbidden rooms.”
After a small part in his film Wild River, Kazan cast Barbara Loden a year later as the flapper Ginny Stamper in Splendor in the Grass, who pushes her brother, Warren Beatty, to come out from under the thumb of their domineering father. In that mint-green cloche hat shooting daggers at the judging church congregation. “I hate it here! I’m a freak in this town.” In blonde curls playing her ukulele, such fury and glee against the disapproving father. In Clara Bow red hair with that spit curl, dancing around in her underwear and thigh-highs, flap-flapping around, powdering her armpits, humming she’s the talk of the town.
A manic performance as opposed to the minimalism of Wanda. In Wanda Loden gives a performance stripped of anything. We only get her amazing face, both open and closed, her bruised looks, her mumbling speech. Her staring out at the highway, like into outer space. Her collaborators on Wanda portrayed her as “sensitive,” as “insecure,” and yet Kazan in his autobiography depicted her as a “bitch,” as “white trash.”
* * *
Sometimes Ronnie and I would share horror stories of our breakdowns. She told me she was once so depressed she shit the bed. I feel a betrayal writing this. But that’s what she told me.
I never saw Ronnie cry. But I saw Ronnie vomit because she was so heartbroken and depressed over the rejection by the scholar.
No one mourned like Ronnie. When that man broke her heart, she shut herself inside her little room, sleeping on emptied cereal bowls, spoons, fashion magazines. She was immoveable. I recorded this site of absolute devastation somewhere inside of me and resurrected it for the depression scene in Green Girl, where my Ruth, a blonde, slippery, impenetrable girl, recovers from something like a broken heart through the relief found in catatonia.
Maybe that’s why Lol Stein is so fixated on the past—going back to her traumatic scene of rejection. The last time she felt that eruption of intense emotion, having her heart destroyed.
* * *
In my published novel the breakdown scene is much shorter than the version I first wrote. Originally I had Ruth stay inside and sleep all day for at least thirty pages. Pages upon pages on her dirty mattress on the floor, shuffling back and forth from the fridge, watching screens until she was bleary-eyed. Everyone who read it told me to cut it down. All that depression—who wants to read it? They didn’t understand the grand spectacle, the funereal ritual she needed to undergo. And also I wanted to somehow convey the boredom and banality of being depressed.
* * *
At first during the time he’s away John and I talk on the phone or Skype a couple times a day. He wants to see my face, see the puppy. Eventually we Gchat once a day. I find it more of a fluid mode of communication. I need to tell someone how lonely I am. How in the morning I’m busy, taking care of the dog, making food for myself. But how I spend afternoons curled up on Genet’s dog bed.
* * *
At the end, everything awash in miserabilism, alone again, no partner in crime, Wanda becomes paralyzed. She sits at a bar as the television announcer narrates the event, the bank robbery a terrible failure, Mr. Dennis shot dead. She allows a soldier to pour drinks into her. She only wakes up when he drives her to the desert and forces himself on her. Her high-pitched scream. She escapes into a forest, breaks down into tears. At the end, she wanders into another bar, finds herself in a booth, people talking at her, giving her a cigarette, a drink, a hot dog—she accepts them all wordlessly, numbed out again. All dirty blonde ponytail, dazed and grasping her drink amidst the blur of the bar crowd.
In her review of Wanda, Pauline Kael expresses horror at the character’s catatonia, her lack of empowerment. She writes: “It’s such an extremely drab and limited piece of realism that it makes Zola seem like musical comedy. Wanda is a passive, bedraggled dummy. We’ve all known dumb girls, and we’ve all known unhappy girls; the same girls are not often, I think, both dumb and unhappy.”
* * *
The Appalachian woman in Airless Spaces reminds me of Wanda. Debra Daugherty “an obviously once beautiful chick who now looked like a wasted Appalachian from a Dorothea Lange photograph of the thirties. In other words ‘white trash.’” All day lying on the couch in the main area complaining. Later living in a “trashed” Section 8 apartment on Avenue D in NYC. Her family gave her Clinique makeup for Christmas (my mother and those yellow bottles of moisturizer, the free giveaways).
* * *
The depressed, ambitious Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar fantasizes of changing into a girl she calls Elly Higginbottom. This imagined alter ego is a simple girl, who wants nothing more than to be married to some sailor and have lots of children.
Of course the story of Wanda is a reminder that even muted girls can be terribly sad. The violence that they internalize.
I wonder in a way if Ronnie is my Elly Higginbottom, my alter ego. Like Wanda was for Barbara Loden. Some sort of twinning. Perhaps the objects of our obsession, our characters we fictionalize, can be a way to try to figure out something of ourselves, of our pasts, how our presents could have been different somehow.
* * *
“What do you do all day?” My new therapist has that discomfiting way of looking directly at me. I have started regular therapy, for the first time in many years. The insomnia has returned, the night sweats, the tingling through my veins, a bomb inside of my body with hair triggers.
It might also have had something to do with the fleas. They came on as soon as John returned. A plague of them. Something to do with the abnormally warm winter. I think we both went deranged. We would see one little black speck crawling around Genet’s deflated ball sack, and the day would suddenly be overthrown. All day cleaning and vacuuming. We began to wake up in the middle of the night and throw our sheets off to see if we could see any black stains on the white. The raised red map of persistent bites around my knee and left thigh, where Genet curls into me while we’re sleeping. I was itching constantly. I think I had some sort of allergic reaction. I began to think bugs were crawling on me all the time.
I chose my therapist because she went to Harvard and worked in the DBT ward at McLean. She is a tiny woman, about my age, with a halo of frizzy hair, who wears airy pastel skirts. She looks a bit like David Mamet’s wife, that actress who plays neurotic roles. She has an old-fashioned name that suits her. I don’t think she particularly likes me. No charm offensive works on her.
Although I liked the idea that she worked with wrist cutters and tortured girls, I want to remind her I am not one of them. I am not mute and stubborn. I am, instead, hyperverbal, eloquent, discussing psychological theories and concepts. Still she corners
me on my tics of self-deprecation. When I tell her that I struggle with feelings of inferiority, with convictions as to my own stupidity.
Writer’s block. How boring. I am supposed to be working on an essay, this essay in fact, but something stalls me. I cannot enter into it. I am unsure what is the use of all of this first person anymore.
* * *
In Airless Spaces the narrator remembers being medicated and sleeping all day after the hospital. So much about the tyranny of the day within the hospital. Every minute controlled and accounted for so one doesn’t go off schedule.
* * *
What do you do all day? I am looking for anything to do to distract myself. I wouldn’t be a good fictional character in a short story because I surround myself with other screens. I watch anything. I find myself on YouTube looking at videos of David Letterman interviewing starlets. All of their shiny, hard legs—Emma Watson, Claire Danes, Katie Holmes. Katie Holmes has this summer announced her separation from Tom Cruise. I wonder how many others have gone to these videos recently, to attempt to trace out any meaningful emotion or interiority amidst the banal cheerisms and the typical flirtation, the fingers through unbearably glossy hair. Something about having to wear a mask over the loneliness—or perhaps not even allowing the monologue to rise up at all.
The fantasy narrative is that she is a suppressed wife who suddenly is free from a Svengali husband. That she has experienced an awakening.
After Wanda, Barbara Loden planned on directing a film adaptation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, a turn-of-the-century novel about a woman who comes into her own as an artist, and decides she wants a life outside of being mother and wife.
Edna Pontellier, like Wanda, is a passive character. Like Wanda, but more like Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. At the beginning she is viewed as an object, a commodity, by her husband, who likes to collect expensive things. She allows herself to be collected. She never questions the way society is supposed to go. Simone de Beauvoir writing of the Wife in The Second Sex: “The temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing.”
Those silk dresses Ronnie would keep in a box in the closet, and that she would take out, from time to time, to stroke lovingly. Remnants from the past. Gifts from a former lover. Like Sasha’s fur coat in Good Morning, Midnight.
I find myself watching a video of Katie Holmes going out for ice cream in New York with her daughter. I feel totally creepy doing this. “Katie and Suri Spotted Smiling.”
In The Awakening, Edna is the expensive wife whose days are segmented. All the oppressive rules and rituals that sink her soul, make her unexplainably depressed. She finds a temporary freedom when her days open up, in the summer. In the city, in New Orleans, she becomes a flâneuse, walking, circling, wondering. Coming into consciousness.
* * *
I’d like to imagine Loden playing Edna in her version of The Awakening. It is the part she was meant to play. I’d like to see her in a different register. A different layer of autobiography. The existentially trapped wife who becomes the tentative artist. It makes sense that Loden would move on from the abject poor wife to the wealthy one.
I wonder how Barbara Loden would have played Edna. I only know her as the femme fatale or the frozen Lavinia, her hands and tongue cut off, who allowed brutality to happen to her. The woman who murders or the woman who is murdered. I would like to see her play someone closer to who she was. The artist woman. The smiling woman who realizes her society is a trap. Who doesn’t wish to be surveilled any longer. Who wants to attain sovereignty.
In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier begins to spend all day painting, even begins to find some financial independence as a painter. With Wanda too, Barbara Loden became an artist.
Edna giving herself up in ecstasy to Mademoiselle Reisz’s piano—the music stirring something in her soul that makes her see herself anew. Apparently Ronnie studied to be a classical musician, but then gave up. I don’t know why. She wouldn’t talk about it. You couldn’t get her to. She’d just close up. She’d shrug her shoulders and go inwards. She didn’t even have her instrument anymore. She had hocked it. I mean, I understood that. At some point I too had pawned all of my expensive things, although all I really had were expensive junky things, the gold jewelry given to me for my confirmation.
One of her occasional jobs was as a telemarketer for the Chicago Symphony and sometimes she would get free tickets. She was always trying to get me to go with her. I never did. But I can imagine her sitting there silently, yet offering herself up to the music. She knew how to enjoy things more than I did. I always admired that about her.
* * *
In therapy we discuss my reluctance for publicity, my anxieties and nerves over reviews of this new book I have coming out that’s about my obsession with the lives of famous literary wives, how personal reviews can seem. How I google myself constantly. There is no sense, from her, that any of this fear and loathing might come out of the culture, the sense of badness and dumbness and failure I carry around with me as a woman, as a woman writer.
I feel, when she tells me I judge myself, that she is judging me for judging myself, and this makes me feel angsty.
A writer I just met offers to ask her Jungian analyst if she’ll Skype in with me for occasional sessions, just to get me through the fall. “You’d be better off having a Goodreads reviewer as a therapist,” she writes me over email, about this woman I drive for a half hour to go see once a week in Durham.
Even though I feel myself resistant, even though she doesn’t take my insurance, I keep on returning to her. I feel, somehow, that I want to please her.
* * *
I can’t imagine what Barbara Loden must have thought when she read Pauline Kael’s acidic dismissal in The New Yorker. Although there are small praises (Loden’s gift for “character”), the overall pronouncement is that this is a small, muted film, too small, too muted, with two unlikeable characters. In other words, a failure. Not worthy. Did she take it personally? Did she go in passively, inwards, like a shot in the arm? Like Wanda reacts passively, as if expected, to Mr. Dennis’s critical pronouncements.
Kate Chopin was also ostracized when she wrote The Awakening; her beautiful book was dismissed for decades. Reviewers of The Awakening were not only morally outraged about this narrative of a woman who wants something outside of marriage, but also dismissive that her “torments” were worthy of literature.
* * *
What do you do all day? I’m always curious about others’ quotidians. More than anything I want to know what people do when they are alone.
Although I’m enthralled to others’ quotidians, I don’t know how to write it, let alone how to live it.
In The Bell Jar Esther feels trapped in her mother’s house in the suburbs one long blank summer. She cannot figure out how to survive her days.
How to structure your days: the question of the depressive as well as the writer. How does one write when there’s no way to break up time?
My therapist encourages me to follow a practice of mindfulness. As I’m beginning to understand it, mindfulness is an attempt to live and exist in the actual world, even when it’s slow or boring or uncomfortable or painful.
The example she gives is being mindful when going to the bathroom. I hate when people say “going to the bathroom.” She says be aware of everything, of opening the door, of sitting down, of turning the faucet on, of carefully washing one’s hands. When I walk into the little house that holds her practice in Durham, I often see a patient coming out of the bathroom, walking slowly, slowly, down the hall.
* * *
Ronnie somehow managed to exist through her days. Even when unemployed. I think she was a model of solitude for me. She knew how to soothe herself. She would take long, luxurious baths with these little French soaps she bought. Even when she had no money she would go to the dollar store and buy little things that amused her.
She was religious about the rituals of coffee. She would wake up in the morning, her hair c
urtaining off her face, and prepare her French press, and pour it into her grandmother’s china cups, and she would drink it all day, even when the milk became sluggish. She would wade through the New York Times all day every Sunday. She subsisted mostly on coffee and popcorn. She would make a big bowl of popcorn and would nibble at it all day. The stale chewiness of cold popcorn. Sometimes she would make a pot of chicken soup, putting in a whole boneless chicken that she dragged home from the Jewel off of Ashland, and we would eat that all week.
* * *
My mindfulness exercises are often of the domestic variety. I attempt to thoughtfully, meditatively prepare food and fold laundry, all the real-life activities I have been shirking. As I slowly and inexpertly chop onions, I think about this. Even though I am trying so hard, to be free of distractions and noise, of a cycle of anxiety and negative thinking, I am not sure I want to be a completely balanced, enlightened person. And what is the difference between this concept of mindfulness and the domestic monotony of Jeanne Dielman, Chantal Akerman’s Belgian housewife? I guess it’s all in perspective.
I saw online an image of a page of Sylvia Plath’s journal, where she reflected on reading Virginia Woolf’s diary. And how gratified she was to learn that Virginia Woolf also became the good housewife when she was dreading reviews of her book. I read this and I feel some sort of doubling, link, with both of them.
* * *
I have begun swimming. It helps me work off excess nerves. Like an edge has been taken off. I am calmer, more open afterwards. I swim at the local community pool. I try to avoid the snarls of hair on the benches, like filthy lures.
There is hardly a moment of exercise when I am not keeping time, anticipating when I can get out of the pool, when my twenty minutes is up. In the filter at the shallow side I always stop to regard some object washed up. A soaked-through cigarette butt. A wad of chewing gum. A filthy Band-Aid. A spider.
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