Reclaiming the Gaze in Bette Gordon’s 'Variety'

Few films explore voyeurism, female sexuality and the politics of desire so perfectly as Bette Gordon’s 1983 neo-noir, Variety. Set in an almost unrecognisably shabby 80s New York, the film follows Christine (Sandy McLeod) - an archetypal ‘Hitchcock Blonde’ - and her experience selling tickets at Variety, a pornographic cinema in Times Square.

Right from the outset, the film seeks to radically subvert the Male Gaze. In Variety, we see a woman look at film the way film looks at her. Upon starting work at the cinema, Christine is placed behind a glass booth to sell tickets. She becomes a kind of objectified attraction, a gatekeeper to this world of unfettered male desire. Her presence is an inconvenient disruption to the idyllic space of masculine freedom within.

As the film progresses, Christine intrudes further into male-dominated spaces. The visual pollution of Pussycat playmates!, Live on Stage XXX!, litters the screen as Christine enters the cinema itself to watch the pornographic films, and later the sex shops and video stores that clutter the streets of New York.

I remember reading somewhere that Gordon claimed the film was about the ‘pleasure of looking’. Most of the scenes are shot in real-time and the camera rarely moves - uncomfortably lingering on scenes of men leafing through the latest edition of Playboy. The cinematic tradition of voyeurism, pioneered in films like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, is turned against itself.

The subplot of the film revolves around Christine’s increasing obsession with one of the cinema's patrons - an elusive and slippery businessman called Louis. Christine follows Louis across the city and to his ‘business meetings’ in seedy motels in New Jersey. The whole episode is strongly reminiscent of the kind of stealthy shadowing normally reserved for male detectives in films like The Third Man, but in Variety, the woman becomes the investigator and the man, the object of fascination.

The film’s treatment of female sexuality is pretty groundbreaking. As Christine is plunged further and further into New York’s neon sexual underworld, she begins her own sexual transformation. The final scenes depict Christine parodying the women in the pornographic films - fawning over herself in the mirror whilst wearing corsets and suspenders. Red light and soft jazz dominate. Christine’s painfully stale and uptight boyfriend, Mark becomes increasingly alienated by her growing interest in this hyper-sexualised world of pornography. Part of me wonders whether Mark’s discomfort with Christine’s sexual exploration is Gordon’s way of pointing out the binding, quasi-Freudian Madonna-whore social landscape that women are forced to operate in.

Variety’s unapologetic disruption of cinematic convention is pretty unsurprising given the army of radical artists that helped make the film. Kathy Acker wrote the script and the music was composed by John Lurie - the artist and director who stars in several Jim Jarmusch films. Nan Goldin, the photographer, both appears in the film and did a series of stills for it - brilliantly capturing its heady sensuality.

Something I love about Variety is the way it blurs fact and fiction. Variety actually was a pornographic cinema in New York. The bartenders, sex workers and friends in the film aren’t actors, but real people that Gordon interviewed. The shots of sex shops and strip bars aren’t manufactured, but entirely accurate. The film almost becomes a documentary on life in New York and the place reserved for women in it.

I could probably ramble on forever about how brilliant and overlooked Variety is. Admittedly it’s definitely less of a plot-based feature-film than an examination of the Gaze through a series of vignettes, but its continual relevance and aesthetic makes it super super gripping nevertheless. Ultimately Variety doesn’t just ‘reverse’ the Male Gaze, but questions the notion of gazing itself. As we watch Christine watch other men watch her, the questions of power and desire are left unresolved - and maybe that’s the point. The ambiguity of the ending (the film closes just before Christine confronts Louis) forces us to plug the holes in the story ourselves. I suppose in that sense, Variety is a rallying cry. Gordon described how Christine is ‘not being made over by a man: she remakes herself.’ In encouraging the viewer to continue the narrative independently, Variety invites all women everywhere to reclaim their sexuality and desire in a world that too often pretends it doesn’t exist.