Variety

Shot in New York in the early 1980s, Variety is the first feature film by American filmmaker Bette Gordon. Co-written with Kathy Acker (a pro-sex feminist writer and artist), photographed by Tom DiCillo (among other things, cinematographer on Jim Jarmusch's early films), and accompanied by a soundtrack conceived by John Lurie, the film features appearances by Nan Goldin (who photographically documented the shooting) and Cookie Mueller. More than 40 years after its making, Gordon's film, lit by neons and red lights, seems to capture the spirit of an entire era, seducing both with its documentary dimension and its reflection on the paradoxes of female desire in a culture heavily marked by patriarchal imaginaries.

The protagonist of Variety is a naive young woman whose experience as a ticket seller at a pornographic cinema in Times Square leads her to explore her own drives and desires. Unlike what happens in the classical Hollywood films that Variety unashamedly references, Christine (Sandy MacLeod) is not a simple, passive object of male fantasies and the male gaze. On the contrary: Variety inverts the configuration of the so-called “male gaze.” The latter refers, in short, to the way classical cinema tends to grant male characters the prerogative of the gaze, objectifying and reducing female characters to the condition of an image or a “being-for-the-gaze.” Attracted by the sounds escaping from the cinema hall, Christine quickly leaves the tiny glass ticket booth where she's exposed as an additional attraction, and enters the semi-darkness of the screening room. There, she too can see without being seen the pornographic images that parade across the screen and exert their enigmatic power over the male spectators. These images (almost always relegated off-screen by Gordon) hold her gaze and her imagination. Progressively obsessed with one of the cinema's clients (an ordinary man who invites her to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium and who she vaguely suspects is involved in shady business), Christine assumes the active voyeuristic position usually associated with the male hero. In Gordon's film, it is the protagonist, with the air of a Hitchcockian heroine, who pursues the male object of her curiosity and fantasies through the streets.

Documenting a now-disappeared New York, from the Fulton Fish Market to Asbury Park, Christine's wanderings constitute a confrontation with her own drives: a learning of desire. Paradoxically, it is the scopophilic drive (an instrument of oppression) that allows Christine to access the condition of a desiring subject. While in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) the character of Scottie transforms Judy into Madeleine—the elusive object of his desire—in Variety, Christine recreates herself in the image of her fantasies. That these fantasies are triggered by the voyeuristic imaginary of pornography is part of the contradictions that Gordon wishes to address. Written by Acker, the raw and poetic monologues spoken by Christine are also a way of exploring the paradoxes of female desire in a patriarchal culture.

If Gordon's film inverts the roles that characterise the classical thriller, its debt to the film noir genre is evident—and not just because Christine possesses something of the menacing and intriguing sexuality of the femmes fatales who inhabit it. As in most films of the genre, the relationship with the city is also fundamental. Symbolised by a nocturnal Times Square, lit by garish neons like those that adorn the facade of the old pornographic cinema that gives the film its name, Manhattan's red-light district is the ideal setting for Variety. The film not only documents some of the iconic landscapes of the decadent New York of the 80s: Variety also pays homage to the underground milieu in which it emerged. Look, for instance, at the sequences at Tin Pan Alley, a famous Times Square bar that employed only women (including Nan Goldin) and hosted exhibitions and performances. It is there that Christine and other women exchange confidences, claiming the night and the nocturnal for themselves as a space-time that is also conducive to solidarity and female emancipation.