Wanda

History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light.

—Anne Boyer, ‘No’.¹

It’s late and they are in a hotel room, somewhere indistinct and in-between. The almost-stranger, Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins), directs Wanda (Barbara Loden) to go out and buy him three plain hamburgers. Wanda disappears. When she returns, he instructs her to remove the “garbage” (lettuce, onions, tomatoes), and Wanda complies with devastating grace, plucking off the salad with cautious little movements. Wanda is svelte, slumped, and alien to life. She wears crumpled white; sometimes a blouse speckled with periwinkles; and, later, a fake, plush pregnant belly – a wardrobe which Loden, the film’s writer-director as well as its star, spent seven dollars on. Stunned into composure, Wanda bears the hallmark expression of someone either very young or very ancient, who knows both nothing at all and too much to bear. Loden’s hard-won sole feature, Wanda (1970), observes the continual dispossession of a poor Pennsylvanian housewife: first of the family she is too despondent to care for; then of all the things she totes around in her white vinyl handbag after she latches onto Mr. Dennis, a crass hopeful outlaw, like a fly to rotting fruit. 

Loden was inspired by the true story of Alma Malone, a poor, unassuming woman who became an accomplice to a botched bank robbery in 1960, at the climax of which her lover-leader was shot dead. When a judge sentenced Malone to 20 years of imprisonment, she thanked him – presumedly for liberating her from the expensive obligations of clothing, feeding, and housing herself. Wanda, too, is doomed to swap one carceral existence – of sweatshops, slagheaps, and dirty nappies – for another – of abuse, violence, and vagrancy. When Wanda premiered to a small, divided American audience, some critics were repelled by Loden’s character, deeming her an offensive totem of feminine submission. In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael alleged Wanda’s inarticulateness and dependence on men made her “a passive, bedraggled dummy” and “a sad, ignorant slut.”² Yet Wanda’s zombie-like air is a revelation, insofar as it highlights the necromancy of patriarchal, capitalist America – a system which both stultifies life and insists on its continuation for the sake of reproduction and productivity. To Wanda’s acolytes, there is wisdom in its heroine’s worldly hopelessness, as Loden dispenses with the tired idealism of the Hollywood dream machine. To Isabelle Huppert, who financed the film’s 2004 rerelease in France, Wanda was a mystery. To a teenage Annie Ernaux, she was a crystal ball. To Marguerite Duras, she was a “miracle” within whom existed “a very powerful glory, very violent, very profound.”³

From tabloids to criticism and scholarship, references to Loden’s artistry have, in the act of placing her, often displaced her, projecting onto her the images of others until it’s difficult to see what’s underneath. For Adèle Cassigneul, Wanda serves as a symbolic placeholder for the films other women could never gather the resources to make, and thus “carries the ghost narratives of many wronged, silenced, and erased women.”⁴ Meanwhile, a futile project to discover and define Loden is the subject of Nathalie Léger’s elegiac Suite for Barbara Loden (Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden), in which she writes: “Barbara Loden was born in 1932, six years after Marilyn Monroe [who Loden would play a version of on Broadway in 1964], two years before my mother, the same year as Elizabeth Taylor, Delphine Seyrig, and Sylvia Plath.”⁵ After being refused access to Loden’s personal archives and told firmly by Loden’s long-term collaborator, Wanda cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes, that he was not interested in talking to her (nor about Wanda whatsoever), Léger increasingly merges Loden’s story with Wanda’s to create a muffled portrait of tragedy. Raised by an impoverished family near Asheville, North Carolina, Loden certainly related to Wanda’s condition of class hardship and intimacy wounds, however, by exaggerating this slippage, Léger and others have risked misconstruing Loden’s work of fiction as documentary. It’s important to recognise that Wanda’s candour is the outcome of meticulous crafting – of a script drafted by Loden over a decade earlier, a high shooting ratio which allowed for improvisation, and Loden’s refined approach to acting, informed by psychoanalysis and her dedicated studies at the Actors Studio. However tedious, the widespread habit of obscuring Loden – who died too soon in 1980 and thus can no longer speak for herself – hints at what is so precious about her creative presence in Wanda: it is so naked and tender, like a pressed bruise, that it feels perverse to address head-on. 

In Katja Raganelli’s intimate documentary portrait I Am Wanda (1980), Loden attributes her decision to play Wanda in large part to the character’s profound passivity which, she reflects, enabled her to occupy the role and direct simultaneously. Contra to Kael’s cruel reading of the film, Loden reflects on passivity as itself a creative attribute, a kind of attentiveness: as a child, she hid behind her grandparents’ oven, fascinatedly watching domestic life unfold in their kitchen as if she hailed from a distant planet. In contrast to her bright-eyed sexual magnetism in Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961), Loden’s deftness in Wanda resides in her divine capacity to recede – in the way she constantly searches for something to stabilise her uncertain hands (a cigarette, a beer, her own forehead), or lets her blonde mop fall flush against her cheeks. Like that of a ghost or a wraith, the near-invisibility of Wanda paradoxically draws attention to her existence, so delicate it renders the world around her grotesquely transparent, as evident in the garish concreteness of other characters’ desires for money or domination. Wanda’s wan silhouette – pale fabric against pale skin against clouds or light-coloured walls – is repeatedly decentred in Proferes’ frame. Tucking her chin, shielding her face, and abandoning expressions before we have time to recognise what they could signify, Loden frustrates the viewer’s impulse to survey and categorise Wanda. Her evasiveness is only furthered by the grainy, misted surface of the film, which was captured on 16mm and blown up to 35mm. As Bérénice Reynaud notes, where “the ‘bad woman’, the ‘drifter’ is a commodity,” Loden’s portrayal of Wanda, restrained to the point of mysticism, allows her to exceed these archetypes, as Loden rejects what she considered to be the flattening effects of Hollywood image-making.⁶ “I really hate slick pictures,” Loden once said. “The slicker the technique is the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns into Formica, including the people.”⁷

While formative road movies such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) cast ‘the road’ as an anarchic third space where outlaws surge towards self-actualisation and explosive ends, Wanda – which Loden described as an “anti-Bonnie and Clyde”⁸ – configures it as a more fraught space than any other, where the laws of subjugation constrict instead of loosen. In her astute recent monograph, Anna Backman-Rogers argues that “At the centre of Wanda is a crisis of movement.”⁹ Near the beginning of the film, Wanda trudges towards the courtroom, a slow white speck against a landscape of undulating coal in Proferes’ sublime, extreme long shot, while her soon-to-be ex-husband breezily drives himself there, surrounded by family and protected from the elements. Later, as Mr. Dennis drives closer to the locale of his planned heist in a stolen vehicle, he flings Wanda’s remaining possessions from the window. While Wanda’s more conventional road movie counterparts treat their subject as if it were a natural fixture of the outback landscape, a recognition of ‘the road’ as a product of (colonising) labour is embedded in Loden’s film. Not only are Wanda’s images of highways contextualised by those earlier ones of coal, fuel-guzzling trucks, and workers’ tired hands, but Proferes also avoids showcasing sublime vistas, focussing instead on the car’s confined interior and unnerving, mechanical vibrations. 

If the tagline of the American road movie is, as the title of this Melbourne Cinémathèque season, quoting Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) offers, “You can never go fast enough,” then Wanda is an outlier concerned instead with the aesthetics and politics of slowness – with limbos, pitstops, and pauses. As the poet Anne Boyer writes, “We perfect the loiter before we perfect the hustle” (if we ever do).¹⁰ Loden cited the films of Andy Warhol – many of them obsessive, observational precursors to ‘slow cinema’, in which ugliness and beauty dovetail in the enactment and re-enactment of simple gestures – among her influences. She attributed the prolonged, early sequence of Wanda walking to the courtroom to her desire “to show that it took a long time to get from there to there.”¹¹ Wanda herself is denied piecework at a factory because she is “too slow”, and eventually she foils Mr. Dennis’ heist because she, the getaway driver, does not ‘go fast enough’. Wanda knows she is altogether too stagnant to be productive, and so announces to Mr. Dennis that she is “nothing” and “no good”. A failed worker, a failed mother, a failed woman, and even a failed outlaw, in the film’s final scene Wanda stops speaking and becomes suspended in a silent freeze-frame that nevertheless seems to scream, “NO FUTURE.” It’s grim, yes, but the shot also solidifies the film’s most profound and enduring miracle: its singular depiction of a woman who’d sooner be nothing than a cog in the machine.

Wanda (1970 USA 103 mins)

Prod Co: Foundation for Filmmakers Prod: Harry Shuster, Barbara Loden Dir, Scr: Barbara Loden Phot, Ed: Nicholas Proferes 

Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Frank Jourdano, Valerie Manches, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Marian Their, Anthony Rotell, Anthony Rotell

Endnotes