Wanda now on DVD

  One of the first road films directed by a woman is the haunting Wanda, made by Barbara Loden in 1970.    It showed at the Venice Film Festival that year, but rarely again.  At long last, this film has become available in the US on DVD.  I highly recommend it.

This film anchors my argument that women serve as the keystone of the road films of the late sixties and early seventies—I’m thinking of Penn’s Bonnie, Coppola’s Natalie in The Rain People, Hellman’s Girl in Two-Lane Blacktop, Malick’s Holly in Badlands, Spielberg’s Lou Jean in The Sugarland Express, Scorsese’s Alice, even Bogdanovich’s Addie.  These and other women in road films of this era prove that male buddy stories like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy are the exception rather than the rule.  As Terrence Malick said of his character Holly, “I liked women characters better than men; they’re … more demonstrative.”  Au contraire, Terry, what Wanda demonstrates is a woman who is sick and tired of carrying the emotional weight of a narrative. 

The mobile women of New Hollywood’s road films are not rebels, but bitter reminders that women are exploited and deadened by patriarchy at the dawn of America’s sexual revolution. 

I got this idea by recognizing the sisterhood between Wanda and Maria, heroine of Joan Didion’s fabulous novel Play It as It Lays of 1969 (the film version came out in 1972) —each protagonist bumbles through life with a passivity that becomes utterly self-destructive.  These are not stories of autonomy that inspire rebellion among female audiences, but bleak documents of women’s dependence upon their sexuality to move within the gender-segregated wastelands of Hollywood’s Rodeo Drive or Pennsylvania’s strip-mined hills.  These women repress their feelings so they can tolerate their desolate lives and dissolute responses to their unhappiness.  It’s a painful period of dysfunction to look back upon—thank goodness for modern methods of therapy.

Played by Loden, Wanda wanders aimlessly through a state scarred—raped—by coal mining.  The utter poverty of this landscape reflects Wanda as an empty shell, devoid of drive or desire.  She leaves her husband and kids, caring nothing about losing them.  She travels by sleeping with whomever will take her, passing a night here and there with a stranger, sleep(walk)ing her way through life.  When she meets Mr. Dennis, an angry man who consistently calls her “stupid,” she does whatever he says, including agreeing to drive the getaway car at his bank heist…Only she gets sidetracked and doesn’t make it to the bank in time.  She doesn’t do anything well.  When Mr. Dennis is gone, she gets by the only way she can muster for herself—going along with any man who will buy her dinner and a beer, then let her stay in the motel room after he’s done with her. 

Loden brings her considerable acting talents to bear on the role of Wanda, a role she apparently knew well.  Her own ex-husband called Loden a “floater,” one of the girls who floats from one man to another to get what she needs. 
Loden’s ex- was the powerful director Elia Kazan, who not only cast Loden in a number of his films—Wild River and Splendor in the Grass—but also kept her as his mistress for years before he eventually divorced his first wife to marry her.  They divorced after a number of years. 

And it’s as Kazan’s wife that Loden can be compared to Maria in Didion’s novel, which critiques the aborted potential of Hollywood directors’ wives in the late 1960s.  Like Wanda, Maria is a beauty who tires of the roles she’s prescribed to play; like Maria, Loden was the trophy wife of a legendary film director.  By making Wanda, Loden rebelled against the sexist roles she depicted, just as she also rejected the passive and precarious position of being a squeeze box.  This was the extremely patriarchal and exploitative time of filmmaking, those heady days when auteurs ramped up their careers by moving from making art house films to directing low-budget, drive in-theater films at studios like AIP, hoping to make it as big as they eventually did.  Maria circulates in this moral economy as a sexually available lay, currency in the era’s bottom line of sex, drugs, and misogyny that she eventually rejects through nihilism.  Happy stuff.  Sure, Didon’s selfish Carter Lang is younger and less powerful than Kazan, but the parallels aren't rocket science. 

Loden’s own real-life alternative to this stultifying scenario was to make her 16 mm film in conjunction with Foundation for Filmmakers rather than shopping at Barney’s or lunching at the Ivy, but her character Wanda is the low-class twin to Didion’s chic but lost Maria.  These characters simply can no longer muster up the investment to care or rebel.  Loden clarified in an interview in 1970 that Wanda “has been numbed by her experiences, and she protects herself by behaving passively and wandering through life hiding her emotions.”  Maria and Wanda are sad reminders that people often sink into passive aggression when they refuse to act on their own behalf and, instead, acquiesce to their own exploitation. 

Based on my research, I believe women are the very medium upon which the rebel auteurs of New Hollywood put their signatures and made their reputations—the women who encouraged the careers of the up-and-coming filmmakers, acted in their films, and yet whose significance to this celebrated era is all but invisible, even to feminist film historians.  All of you looking for road stories created by women will do well to study these two texts, overshadowed by the epic tales of the men, tales that perpetuate the aura of the era as one of auteurism rather than recognize it as the moment the road film became a genre, thanks in part to the unsung contributions of women in the frame or behind the scenes (but always in the bed).  The male filmmakers resist seeing their road films as part of a genre, insisting instead that they were expressing their unique sensibilities by just happening to put their heroines on the road (see page 138 of my book). 

In contrast, Loden crafted Wanda’s rough edges purposefully, rejecting the false portrait of female automobility embodied in Bonnie in the 1967 road film Bonnie and Clyde:
I wrote the script about ten years before Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde….I didn’t care for [the film] and it glamorized the characters.…People like that would never get into those situations or lead that kind of life—they were too beautiful….Wanda is anti-Bonnie and Clyde. 
(Not only was Loden herself beautiful, but the enchanting Faye Dunaway (who played Bonnie) actually plays a character modeled after Loden in Elia Kazan’s semi-autobiographical film The Arrangement.)  What Didion and Loden offer isn’t pretty or heroic, but it IS important. 

I can’t say that I consider as feminist their response to the condition of women circa 1970, but these two texts capture the contradictions and ambiguities in which women became mired during the revolution in Hollywood in 1969 and 1970.  Sure, women can wish they’d find in Wanda or Play It as It Lays a heroic and triumphant tale of women’s rising agency and impact, but we don’t really need another Cinderella story, do we?

While Wanda failed to generate much enthusiasm in the U.S., Europeans appreciated and screened the film long after the Venice Film Festival.  Its recent comeback is thanks to actress/producer Isabelle Hupert, who bought the rights for its distribution in France last year, which led to this new release in the U.S.

My foundational definition of “automobility” as autonomy and mobility reveals that in Wanda and Maria, mobility is the only way these numbed women can run from the responsibilities of their autonomy.  Rather than stand up and screaming they’re sick as hell of patriarchy, as Thelma and Louise did a long generation later, they serve as wheels in the cog. 

I explain the history and theory behind my ideas in greater depth in chapter 6 of my book.

Credits: Berenice Reynaud's "For Wanda"  Senses of Cinema

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