Reel Bay by Jana Larson

Author:Jana Larson [Larson, Jana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

“I used to be a lot like that,” she told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times in 1971. “I had no identity of my own. I just became whatever I thought people wanted me to become.”9

Loden was inspired to make Wanda when she read a newspaper article about a woman who had been an accomplice in a bank robbery and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. When she received the sentence, the woman thanked the judge. “That’s what struck me: Why would this girl feel glad to be put away?” she said in an interview in 1974.10 Loden, who has said that the film is partly autobiographical, knew the answer to that question. She knew immediately and intimately who this woman was because she was this woman, at least in part.

Loden was raised in North Carolina by her maternal grandparents, whom she described as religious and cold. She remembered her childhood as solitary and bleak, that she spent hours hiding behind the kitchen stove, not knowing who she was or what she was doing there.11

She moved to New York when she was sixteen and became a model. Later she became the Vanna White of her day, appearing on the Ernie Kovacs Show as the woman who got pies thrown in her face and was sawed in half during magic tricks.12 In movies she was often cast as the attractive but unintelligent woman.

Loden said, “I got into the whole thing of being a dumb blonde…. I didn’t think anything of myself, so I succumbed to the whole role. I never knew who I was, or what I was supposed to do.”13

But in Wanda, Loden’s performance feels true. The submissive, deluded, lost version of herself is amplified into full being. This is the stunning and singular accomplishment of the film. Marguerite Duras, in a conversation with Kazan after Loden’s death, said of the film, “The miracle for me isn’t in the acting. It’s that she seems even more herself in the movie, so it seems to me—I didn’t know her—than she must have been in life. She’s even more real in the movie than in life; it’s completely miraculous.”

Kazan replies, “It’s true. In some way there was an invisible wall between her and the world, but her work permitted her to make some openings in this wall. She would do this every time.”

And Duras says, “It’s as if she found a way to make sacred what she wants to portray as a demoralization, which I find to be an achievement, a very, very powerful achievement, very violent and profound.”14

On the Mike Douglas Show, after a clip from Wanda is shown, the Plastic Ono Band gets up and plays a song. Loden stands awkwardly in the background, shaking a tambourine and dancing. As you watch Yoko up front, screaming like Patti Smith, you think about how she’s the kind of woman you always thought you wanted to write about—fierce, unafraid. But now it seems you’re more interested in writing about the woman Loden describes—a woman who doesn’t have the equipment to make her life work.

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