—Masha Tupitsyn, Beauty Talk & Monsters

Rosemary Woodhouse has ulcers, or some mysterious, insufferable pain that made her emaciated and look like a ghost. She ends up giving birth to Satan’s son. Why is it that when a woman is pregnant in a movie she is somehow equated to a monster? Like Charlotte Gainsbourg in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. She was so sado-masochistic and witchy that it turns out she actually wanted her son to die. Look at the way that she put his shoes on him. She put a left shoe on his right foot and a right shoe on his left foot. She was torturing him the whole time! Rosemary ends up being “okay” with the fact that she gave birth to the devil’s son. Maternal love is totally fucked up that way.

It seems like it’s more about the way men think about women thinking about themselves. Think about all the those big male directors who make big movies about women falling into madness by way of “becoming” another woman: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Brian De Palma’s Sisters, Robert Altman’s 3 Women, David Lynch’s Muholland Drive, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Of course all of these women are thin, sultry, Hollywood beautiful, and can’t really “become” one another without there being some form of lesbian sex scene.

In Persona, Bibi Andersson speaks of an explicit sexual encounter while sunbathing nude on a beach with a girlfriend and two boys. Mila Kunis fucks Natalie Portman in her fluffy, pink bedroom like a naughty schoolgirl.

‘Beauty’ pulls the wool over everyone’s eyes. So does sexiness. A beautiful, sexy woman can never become an “ugly” woman. Madness only befalls those who are beautiful and fashion forward.

Rosemary wears the greatest outfits. Short sundresses with floral prints. She covers the house with new floral wallpaper; soon her dreams are projected on it. In one of her dream sequences, a group of women lounge on a boat while wearing floral bikinis.

Robert Altman said that the idea for 3 Women came to him from a dream.

Rosemary cuts her hair short and becomes ghostly pale. She rejects the feminine norm since short boy-like hair is not as sexy as long hair. Her husband (John Cassavetes) tells her that cutting her hair is the biggest mistake she ever made. He is such a dope in the movie. All the men in these movies act all knowingly about what the woman wants, or what’s “good” for them.

Willem Dafoe plays Gainsbourg’s husband and psychiatrist. He will mend her wounds and bring back the normal woman inside.

Rosemary is most frightened when she is by herself, trapped with her self and the baby. Like when she is the telephone booth waiting for the phone to ring. Her and her baby alone in a tall, glass box. Everyone around her wants the baby inside that is making her sick and skinny. Not sexy skinny, but hollow. What is Rosemary’s baby, but all the female norms and expectations rolled into one enormous ball in her stomach? One enormous ulcer. What cures stomach pains but throwing up what’s inside?

In Brian De Palma’s Sisters Danielle lays in an angelic white gown on the bathroom floor. She writhes in pain, clutching her stomach. A floral cake is decorated in oozing pink icing. She becomes Dominique.

Rosemary catches sight of herself on the side of a toaster. Her spidery fingers holding the bloody congealed insides of a dead bird up to her mouth. Horrified, she rushes to throw it up in the kitchen sink.

Walter Klemmer straddles Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. He shoves his huge cock down her throat. She throws up on the floor. What is inside that needs to come out?

I used to not eat in front of anyone. I thought it looked unattractive. After eating in solitude, I would purge in solitude. I would even try to purge after not eating. Only acids rising up my body. I was throwing up my insides. My best friend in high school said to me that I if I ever got pregnant I would throw up my baby.

I remember Natalie Portman throwing up in the bathroom stalls in Black Swan. I imagine her throwing up a swan and then fucking it.

When you watch a movie, you feel a false sense of privacy and intimacy. You think it’s your baby, your secret, your sexy disclosure…

I see Rosemary lying in bed all by herself. I see her the way I want to see her. She is mine.

**All italicized lines are from Masha Tupitsyn’s Beauty Talk and Monsters (Semiotexte, 2007)

More of Christine Shan Shan Hou’s writing and art can be found on her blog, “Hypothetical Arrangements“

From “Toddlers and Tiaras” (the child beauty pageant show that spawned “Here comes Honey Boo-Boo”) to “My Strange Addiction” (a show that focuses on anything from a man who is in love with his prosthetic girlfriend to a woman who is addicted to makeup), this channel has got you covered in crazy.

To broaden your horizons, you might want to check out other TLC gems such as: “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant” and “Strange Sex,” or the non-TLC documentary: “Married to the Eiffel Tower.” Good times. Steel love.

We have created a helpful YouTube Channel with some suggested watching for hours of fun. Below is a gem from our historical collection. It really hits all the marks.

Unbelievable!

However, Hayes work requires closer inspection than my knee-jerk reaction. Listening to her monologue, “Everything Else Has Failed, Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love?” initially performed outside the UBS Bank in Midtown Manhattan in 2007 actually added something to the representations of protest one is likely to come across in main-stream media. In the audio piece, Hayes is addressing an unknown lover, and talking about the hope and disappointment protest can bring. The simultaneous desperation and resignation in her monologue resonated with me. People don’t just take to the streets because they are angry, they take to the streets because they are miserable, because their dreams have been broken, because they don’t know what else in the world to do.

Performing a speech on the street to a lover is about as raw and desperate as the act of protest itself.

In another room, video projections showed Hayes attempting to recite the words of Patty Hearst, an heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 . Hayes fails to memorize all of the words Hearst says, but is assisted by an unseen crowd of onlookers who coach her untill she gets the words just right. In addition to being a fascinating look into a history, Hayes performance shows the transformation effected by a crowd, as the onlookers coach her. It’s unclear who is actually controlling the speech.

When she was arrested, Hearst was said to have suffered from Stockholm syndrome, wherein she identified with her captors. In Hayes’ performance, it’s hard to say if it was the syndrome talking, or some more righteous part of Hearst that felt the SLA’s demands to feed Los Angeles’ poor were somewhat noble.

Patty Hearst’s mugshot

In one of the most interesting and understated pieces of the exhibit, Hayes has collected quotes about women’s voices throughout history. The quotes show the ways in which different female voices are categorized and qualified often in conjunction with or disjunction to the speaker’s femininity. The phrases appear in an approximately 11-inch square corner of wall space, projected on the wall to be read as cultural projections. They represent times, eras and speakers that are left unidentified, but the words have a unified and familiar quality to them. Some of the statements refer to Hillary Clinton’s voice, others to that of Simone De Beauvoir. Each quote is its own fascinating anthropological study of femininity. The quote that I have collected refers to Hayes herself, and is taken from a New York Times article reviewing the show, in which the piece in question was not mentioned.

Her performances and sound installations mash up soapbox rants and romantic monologues, diatribes and cris de coeur, all delivered in her own bell-clear, strident voice.

Yes, the voice in which Hayes’ work is delivered is “her own,” but only loosely. Her voice is the voice of Patty Hearst, it is the voice of the anonymous, it is the voice of a disillusioned but sensitive generation, it is the voice of the downtrodden yet incredibly unique American everyman. Yayoi Kusama was okay too.

See Hayes’ Work at the Whitney through Sept. 9

Image Source: Sharon Hayes (b. 1970), still from Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, 2003. Four screen video projection, color, sound. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery (From Whitney website)

Feel free to stop watching after 3:09, unless you have some strange desire to learn how glasses are made.