#24
Post
by mmacklem » Mon Feb 16, 2009 8:29 pm
(some spoilers follow...)
When I was listening to Altman's audio commentary, he was talking about the desert with quite a bit of disdain, and when he discussed Millie's over-reliance on style and fashion magazines in her attempts to get those around her to embrace her, he said things like "these people are all over these desert towns". He also talked about how the central premise in the movie is what happens in the world when the women chase off the last man (even talking about the case where they haven't saved anything in test-tubes), and relating this to seals sunning themselves on rocks, where the female seals will chase the male seals off of the rocks so that they can sun themselves. He also mentions about how he tried to cast all of the men in the movie as unattractive, even the police officers and doctors, with Edgar being the ultimate example. With this, the ending is one where the three women have their types that they fall into in the absence of men (grandmother, mother, and child), with the process of the movie being the constant shifting of each of the women between these three roles.
The reason I mention this is not to argue for Altman's comments as specifically authoritative, or that his take on his own enigmatic document 30 years after the fact is entirely representative of what's on the screen. However, after I saw the film, something just didn't sit right with me, and I thought that some of his comments brought to mind my negative response.
Unlike some of the other commenters in this thread, I did not immediately warm to this film, or to the two main characters. For one, we are presented with two facets of each of the Millie and Pinky characters: one which we can empathize with, perhaps with a sense of recognition in ourselves (such as Millie's desperate look to idealized images of society as a model for how to appear and behave, and Pinky's similarly desperate look to Millie for the same guidance); and one which we are repulsed by (such as Pinky's behaviour in public settings due to her naivete, or her reading of Millie's diary, and Millie's treatment of Pinky in general). Obviously the latter in many cases is a natural outgrowth of the former: Pinky acts awkwardly in public because she lacks an existing image of how she is supposed to act, and Millie treats Pinky with disdain because in many ways she sees her as expendable because of her lack of conformity to the idealized image of society. But as Pinky and Millie exchange characters, we simply see them change from one flawed character to a different flawed character. Obviously, if we are intended to empathize with them in being stuck inside this central human dilemma of how do we act within the world around us that expects certain behaviour from us, or of where do we look for guidance in navigating this question, the property of our empathy towards these characters changes dramatically depending on whether or not we are intended to "like" them in addition to empathizing.
Some of my response to this film reminded me of my response to Dogville, Dancer in the Dark or Breaking the Waves, where von Trier basically structures his films around putting the central female character into a controlled scientific environment designed to see how much they can take before breaking. Put this way, these films seem reprehensible and indefensible... except that in each case these characters are clearly the strongest characters in the films, and are clearly loved by von Trier and are presented to be admired and loved by the audience. In the case of 3 Women, I feel like we are presented with the same type of controlled scientific environment, except that I don't feel like the intention is to love these characters. Perhaps not to laugh at them, not to join in with their environment on their tormenting. But also not to love them. Empathize yes, but from a distance.
Which brings me to another of my main problems with the film: in Altman's commentary, he talks about the 3 Women in the title as obviously being Millie, Pinky, and Willie. I went through the entire movie thinking that the third woman was the one that Pinky became after the accident, and it wasn't until the final shot that it became apparent to me that Willie was supposed to be the third woman. I thought she was another of the background characters, I never got the sense that the intention was to have her be the third part of the centre of the movie. In his commentary, Altman mentions that Willie was originally given more dialogue, and that that was taken out early in the development of the film, with the motivation being that through her marriage to Edgar, her character is discouraged to the point of being distanced in communication to the world around her. Fine, I think I get that, having been told that. But when two of the characters have this clear symmetry to them, and the third character not only lacks the symmetry, but also the language to say anything at all (aside from through her paintings), this _makes_ her a background character in comparison to the other two. Calling the movie 3 Women and expecting that to put Willie into the mix moreso than the material provided to her in the film itself warrants feels manipulative to me.
Okay, think I'm done now.
Can someone tell me if its still possible to locate my posts from the past forums? If yes, how to reclaim them?
