The Great Movies III

I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: "A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people." I do. That is not ego. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than forty years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy. We are so terrified these days of showing disrespect for low taste. You can admire Miley Cyrus (God love her), but if I prefer Billie Holiday, why, I'm a snob. It is quite possible to devise a defense of T2RF, as its fans affectionately call it. One persuasive critic likened it to pop art. Well, okay. He had an argument, he had his reasons, he considered it in a particular context. But to argue I am a snob for not loving T2RF as much as "everybody does" values less thought and experience over more.

What am I getting at here? The way to know more about anything is to deepen your experience of it. I have no way of proving it, but I would bet you a shiny new dime that it is impossible to start out loving T2RF, experience the films in this book, and end by loving it.

nd so I descend once more into the mysterious depths of3 Women, a film that was imagined in a dream. Robert Altman's 1977 masterpiece tells the story of three women whose identities blur, shift, and merge until finally, in an enigmatic last scene, they have formed a family, or perhaps have become one person. I have seen it many times, been through it twice in shot-byshot analysis, and yet it always seems to be happening as I watch it. Recurring dreams are like that: we have had them before, but have not finished with them, and we return because they contain unsolved enigmas.

Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule play the three women, who live in an apartment complex in the California desert. Duvall plays Millie Lammoreaux, who works as a therapist in a senior care center; Spacek plays Pinky Rose, who gets a job there and becomes Millie's roommate. Rule is Willie Hart, the pregnant wife of the building owner, who moves within a sad silence, holding herself apart from the others, and paints on the bottom of the pool godlike creatures, bizarre and fantastical men and women who menace one another.

There are men all around, but only one drifts drunkenly into focus. This is Edgar (Robert Fortier), Willie's husband, who speaks gruffly in a low, sardonic voice, and defines himself with guns, motorcycles, and beer. He has an awkward jocular style based on his pose as a chivalrous gunslinger, but is a drunk and a lech and seems hardly able to see his wife. The other men, at work and around the pool in the evening, are objects of Millie's fascination, and she seems always in a state of preparing for dates and dinners that never happen.

In the opening scenes, the three women represent three roles that women often play. Willie is the mother, pregnant with sad knowledge, an earth goddess who drifts across the desert landscape in a world of her own. Millie is a chirpy consumerette who studies the women's magazines, "coordinates" her wardrobe by wearing yellows and whites, plans her meals by the time it takes to prepare them, and obsessively shares recipes. Pinky arrives in the movie unformed and childlike; she blows bubbles into her Coke through the straw, she impishly walks in step behind the twins who work at the senior center, she makes faces, she tells Millie "You're the most perfect person I've ever met."

The early passages of the film focus on Millie's relentlessly cheerful attempts to ingratiate herself with her neighbors and co-workers, who ignore her and then ridicule her among themselves. She dreams of dates with Tom, who presides over the grill at poolside dinners, and with the doctors in the hospital across the street from the senior center, but we cringe when she joins the doctors in their commissary for lunch and sits between two of them, who talk right through her. In a movie filled with mirrors, reflections, and multiple images, Millie always seems to be primping, making minute adjustments to her clothes and hair, perfecting her makeup, admiring herself in reflection while no one else seems to quite see her.

Millie is ordered to show Pinky the ropes at work. Their dialogue in the scene is precise and exactly heard, the American idiom. Preparing to take her into the heated exercise pool, Millie asks Pinky, "What's wrong with you?" Pinky doesn't think anything is. "Well there has to be something wrong with you, or otherwise why would you be here?" Pinky finally figures out that Millie is addressing her as a hypothetical patient, for purposes of demonstration. "Oooh, my head!" she says like a child. "Oooh, my legs hurt!" Later, she suddenly plunges underwater and Millie has to drag her up, looking around uneasily to see if anyone noticed.