There is a fight for authorship at the center of the mental-crisis drama Die My Love that drives most of its scene-to-scene tension. The project was initiated by its star, Jennifer Lawrence, after Martin Scorsese forwarded the source-material novel to her as a potential showcase for her acting talents. Indeed, Lawrence gets to run wild in the resulting movie adaptation of that book, the most violently expressive she’s been on screen since 2017’s mother! — no small feat. Somewhere in the process of adapting the book, however, Lawrence hired an equally ferocious authorial voice in Lynne Ramsay to direct. Instead of adapting a novel about postpartum depression, it appears Ramsay has pulled a fast one and adapted those Britney Spears knife-dancing videos to feature length instead, doing as much as she can to abstract & rattle the text until it is no longer recognizable as anything other than a Lynne Ramsay picture. Die My Love touches on all of Ramsay’s greatest hits—the feral playground brutality of Ratcatcher, the illustrated-mixtape rhythms of Morvern Callar, the mother-in-crisis chills of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the curdled social isolation of You Were Never Really Here—but it has to contend with a new disruption to the way she normally does things: an unrestrained Jennifer Lawrence. Typically, Ramsay’s filmmaking style is overtly intense while her protagonists convey a calm, quiet surface to onlookers, with their inner turmoil saved for the audience’s horror. Here, Lawrence is the loudest, brashest, most chaotic presence in every room, matching Ramsay’s firepower with her own histrionic arsenal, so that all eyes are constantly on her. It’s difficult to say whether either of those two voices overpower the other here, but the tension between them is undeniably compelling.
That tense creative partnership between actor & director is echoed in the onscreen marriage between Die My Love‘s two leads: JLaw & RPats. The young couple start off well enough in the early stretch when they’re nesting in their new rural Montana home, routinely getting wasted and fucking on every possible surface. That ferocious animal attraction fades once Lawrence is nursing the inevitable baby they make together, with Robert Pattinson’s husband figure finding an increasing number of excuses to spend time outside of the house “for work.” Lawrence’s mental health rapidly plummets as she raises their baby in extreme isolation, due partly to postpartum depression but due largely to the soul-crushing boredom of being left alone in the house. The barking dogs, buzzing flies, and baby-appropriate novelty songs that fill that house’s void are enough to drive anyone insane after a few months of solitude, and that’s before you consider the wild hormonal swings the human body suffers after giving birth. For Ramsay’s part, she mimics the “chopped up” mental state of postpartum mothers in her trademark dissociative editing style, which helps abstract a fairly typical romantic-drift-apart story into the more experiential nightmare of a woman on the verge. Meanwhile, Lawrence lashes out at how “fucking boring” the universe is by literally clawing at the walls of her new prison/home and begging her husband to fuck her like he used to, proving that she’s still a person to him and not just a baby-making appliance. She follows through on every intrusive thought that might break her out of the domestic pattern she’s doomed to repeat, including jumping through sliding glass doors just to feel something. If Die My Love were made by any other director you’d expect those violent shocks to be momentary fantasies (see: last year’s Nightbitch), but since it’s Lynne Ramsay we know to accept the worst at face value and brace for the fallout.
Not every moment in Die My Love is tension & strife. Lawrence’s mother-in-crisis finds a surprise source of patience & grace in her neighboring mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. While the younger mother is suffering through the maddening isolation that follows bringing a new life into this world, the older mother is suffering the maddening isolation of watching a loved one leave this world. As she grieves the recent loss of her own husband (Nick Nolte), Spacek slips into a similar self-destructive trance as Lawrence, and the two women only find moments of peace in the monochrome moonlight while the rest of the world is asleep — unlikely common ground. Sissy is an inspired casting choice for the part, since her historic woman-on-the-verge performance in Carrie is just as core to the driven-mad-by-the-patriarchy canon as the more often-cited works of Gena Rowlands & Isabelle Adjani. Even within that looming context, Lawrence admirably holds her own here, even steamrolling the dependably off-putting Pattinson in her own unpredictable, unhinged antics. Ramsay is somewhat accommodating in her role behind the camera, allowing for a little more storytelling conventionality than is typical to her work (imagine, for instance, if Morvern Callar was hospitalized for depression instead of fucking off to a rave). There are a few harmonic moments when the star and director are working perfectly in collaboration to illustrate a young mother’s frazzled mental state. It’s arguable, though, that the movie is at its most compelling when those two creative voices are fighting for dominance, with both the acting and the filmmaking reaching such top-volume kettle whistles that it’s difficult to parse out any specific grace notes from one or the other. They’re both screaming for your attention, and the result is effectively maddening.
Running this movie blog for the past decade has rotted my brain to the point where I can’t even vacation without planning my day around cinematic artifacts. Thankfully, I recently found plenty cinema history to visit in Washington D.C.: a superb selection of used film-criticism texts for sale at Second Story Books, a few gorgeous art objects on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History (including a foam face-hugger egg from Aliens) and, of course, the infamous Exorcist Steps at Georgetown. That part was easy. What was a little more difficult to pin down was a local screening of a D.C.-specific film to commemorate the trip, like when I caught the Bay Area Blaxploitation relic Solomon King at The Roxie in San Francisco. Visiting D.C. during an election year, I expected there to be some local rep series of 70s-political-paranoia classics screening somewhere, but what I mostly found was the usual suspects that clog up most corporate cinema calendars: Harry Potter, Hitchcock, the rest. Weirdly, though, I did discover a D.C.-specific tidbit when The Angelika Pop-up at Union Market listed a couple screenings of the classic 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King novel Carrie. Although King’s work is generally associated with Maine, the movie version of Carrie neither premiered there nor in more traditional first-run cities like Los Angeles or New York. For its first couple weeks in theaters, Carrie played exclusively in the D.C. and Baltimore distribution markets before expanding nationwide, for no other reason that I could identify besides giving this humble movie blogger something regionally specific to do on a Monday afternoon while vacationing there a half-decade later, where I comprised exactly 50% of the attending audience.
Even without knowing its bizarre distribution history, Carrie has always been a kind of orphaned anomaly to me. The problem is that it’s almost too perfect as a literary adaptation, vividly capturing everything I remember about King’s most powerful, most succinct work. It’s so vivid, in fact, that I had remembered looking up the definition of the word “telekinesis” in my high school library while reading it for the first time, only to rediscover on this viewing that my supposed research was actually just a scene from the novel & film. Given that narrative loyalty to its source text and given its looming stature in the larger canon of All-Timer Horror, it’s easy to forget that Carrie is also a great Brian De Palma film, maybe even one of the director’s personal best. While not as wildly chaotic as a Sisters or a Body Double, Carrie does not find De Palma tempering his stylistic flourishes for wide-audience appeal. The man never met a lens he didn’t want to split or a Hitchcock trope he didn’t want to reinterpret, and those personality ticks are present all over Carrie if you’re looking for them. Every time he doubles the frame or imports notes from Psycho score the film’s placement in his personal canon becomes just as clear as its placement in the larger Horror canon. Carrie is just so self-evidently great on its own terms that I never think of it as a De Palma film first and foremost. Maybe it’s just not sleazy or ludicrous enough to register among his more idiosyncratic titles like Dressed to Kill or Femme Fatale. Either way, I can’t name another time when a De Palma film has made me cry in public, whether those tears were earned by the director or by his lead actor, Sissy Spacek.
Spacek stars as the titular Carrie White, a cowering teenage recluse whose abusive homelife (at the hands of her religious zealot mother, played by Piper Laurie) makes her an easy target for high school bullies (including improbable castings of Nancy Allen, John Travolta, and P.J. Soles as cackling teenage demons). What Carrie’s wicked parents & peers don’t know is that she has a powerful mind that can violently lash out if provoked, like a goth Matilda. Because this is a high school movie, this all comes to a head at prom, when Carrie is taken on a pity date by one of her former bullies and then grotesquely pranked by the rest of the knuckleheads, who pour days-old pig’s blood on her homemade gown so that everyone can point and laugh at the freak. In an act of moody teen-outsider wish-fulfillment, she snaps and effectively burns the entire town to the ground with her immense, supernatural intellect, taking revenge on world that was cruel to her for no other reason than the fact that she was born Different. Carrie is bookended by bloodshed, but not in the way you’d expect a classic horror movie to be. It ends with the pig-blood prank and begins with Carrie getting her first period in a high school locker room, having had no previous sex-ed training to prepare her for the shocking experience, much to her peers’ cruel delight. That inciting menstruation is exactly what makes it one of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in later horror titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw. It’s a perfect, self-contained text in that way, when the other heights of De Palma’s filmography tend to be defined by ecstatic messiness and directorial indulgence.
This theatrical revisit of Carrie is the first viewing that both made me cry (when Carrie finally enjoys herself for ten minutes of her otherwise miserable life at prom) and made me jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s undead hand reaches out from the rubble of her home, post-revenge). Those strong emotional reactions directly resulted from De Palma’s deliberately Hitchcockian use of tension. His filmmaking hero famously demonstrated how to build cinematic suspense through the “Bomb Under the Table” analogy, explaining that the best way to keep the audience on edge is to show us the bomb minutes before it goes off rather than to surprise us with it at the moment of detonation. Ever dutifully faithful to the Master of Suspense, De Palma literally translates the Bomb Under the Table tension of that analogy to the Bucket in the Rafters totem of King’s novel. He allows us to be swept up in the momentary fantasy of Carrie White’s prom night romance, but not without repeatedly cutting to the bucket of pig’s blood that hovers over her, waiting to tip over at the most painful moment possible. The way he draws out that tension can be knowingly absurd at times, especially when the camera trails up & down the string that controls it in long, unbroken tracking shots that tease its precarious position above our poor, murderous heroine’s head. It’s incredibly effective, though, and its obvious adherence to Hitchcock tradition is just as much a De Palma calling card as the countless shots framed with a dual-focus split-diopter lens (as well as the leering girls’ locker room opening that crams in as many naked actresses as the script would possibly allow, the pervert).
I don’t know that I discovered anything new about Carrie by watching it in the unlikely city where it premiered in its initial theatrical run, but I did rediscover a lot of what made it feel so powerful when I first saw it in my own moody, poorly socialized high school years. Back then, I would’ve watched the movie alone in my bedroom on a rented VHS tape. Now, I watched it alone with an afternoon beer in a city where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have anything especially urgent to do. Its story of religious resentments and teenage revenge felt empowering when I was still a Catholic school grump, but this time I didn’t feel invigorated by it the same way I did revisiting The Craft at The Prytania last year. I mostly just felt sad, unnerved, and coldly alienated from the rest of humanity by the time the end credits rolled – all reassuring signs that it’s an all-timer of a horror movie.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britneemade Boomer, Hanna, and Brandonwatch 3 Women (1977).
Britnee: “I’m trying to reach toward a picture that’s totally emotional, not narrative or intellectual, where an audience walks out and they can’t say anything about it except what they feel.” Robert Altman’s words about his 1977 masterpiece 3 Women accurately describes the experience I had when watching it for the first time about a year ago. When I first saw the film I didn’t really understand what I had watched, but I knew that I loved it. Over time, it’s become one of my all-time favorite movies. The idea for 3 Women came to Altman in a dream, and the movie really does feel like a dream, where nothing really makes sense yet everything feels perfectly normal. Typically, when you wake up from a dream it’s difficult to explain it to others, and 3 Women is equally difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it.
As the title suggests, 3 Women is about three women: Pinky (Sissy Spacek), Millie (Shelley Duvall), and Willie (Janice Rule). Pinky is a carefree young girl and possibly a teenage runaway. She finds a job working at a geriatric health spa, which is where she meets her new coworker and her new obsession, Millie. Millie is a bit older than Pinkie. When she’s not working at the spa, she’s talking about all sorts of unappetizing recipes and how much she loves Scrabble. She actually never stops talking, but the problem is that no one listens to her. Everyone around her acts as if she doesn’t exist. Everyone except for Pinky, who is infatuated with Millie in a very Single White Female sort of way. Pinky eventually becomes Millie’s roommate in an apartment complex for singles. On their way to the apartment, Millie brings Pinky to her favorite bar, Dodge City, a dive attached to an abandoned Old West theme park in the middle of the desert. Both the bar and the apartment complex are owned by Edgar and his pregnant wife, Willie. Willie is older than Millie and Pinky, and she spends her time painting bizarre murals in silence.
Of the three women, my favorite is Millie. My God, Shelley Duvall is utter perfection in that role. She’s one of the most tragic characters in all of cinema, wasting most her time talking to people who don’t bother making eye contact with her or even acknowledge her existence. Whether it’s the group of male physicians she awkwardly lunches with, her coworkers, or the tenants in her apartment complex (especially bachelor Tom, with his never-ending “cough”), everyone treats Millie like a ghost. She really embodies that feeling of when you are trying to talk to someone in a dream, but they won’t respond or pay any attention to you.
Brandon, what did you think about Millie? Did her character’s journey throughout the film stick out to you more than Pinky and Willie?
Brandon: The main reason that Millie is such a standout in that central trio is that Shelley Duvall is such a heartbreaker of a performer. She is too fragile for this callous world, and watching people crush her spirit is always absolutely devastating. Whether in canonized classics like The Shining or in disposable novelties like Altman’s own Popeye adaptation, she is perfectly suited for the damsel in distress archetype. Unfortunately, this extends beyond her fictional performances and bleeds over into her real-life persona, something that’s haunted me ever since her offscreen struggles with mental illness were crassly exploited for ratings on a very special episode of Dr. Phil in 2016. Watching Millie endlessly chat at no one in particular, reaching out for human connection to a disinterested world only to be rejected, ignored, or taken advantage of over and over again easily made for the most compelling performance of the three women for me. By which I mean I spent most of the movie wanting to reach through the screen to whisk her away to a community that actually gives a shit about her. Even seeing her skirt get caught in the car door every time she went for a drive was just as heartbreaking as it was adorable.
The tragedy, of course, is that she does not acknowledge the one person who’s actively listening to her babble about boardgames and casserole recipes. Pinky’s childlike crush on Millie is just as delicately menacing as Spacek’s telekinetic fury was in her performance as Carrie White, but there is a kind of sweetness to her obsession as well. Pinky goes way overboard in her fixation on Millie, extending beyond a “I want to be your best friend” sentiment to more of a “I want to wear your skin like a housecoat” vibe. Still, Pinky’s loving attention towards her new roommate & unwilling mentor is essentially just an intense overdose of the kindness & interconnectedness that Millie longs for. It’s heartbreaking that they can’t get past their awkward social barriers to truly connect with one another on a meaningful level (ditto in their relationship with the reclusive artist Willie, who’s just as closed off to the world as Millie is openly vulnerable to it), so it’s effectively a relief when real-world logic breaks down to allow them to form a truly cohesive unit. The film strikes a nightmarish tone as it shifts their world around to allow these connections to happen, but the end result is outright sublime, serene: they become a family.
I don’t know why there are so many psychological thrillers where women who are fixated on each other start to meld & swap personalities over time, but I do know that I’m always a sucker for it (with recent examples including titles like Queen of Earth, Sibyl, Always Shine, and Butter on the Latch). Even so, 3 Women registers as one of the greats, maybe bested only by the queen of the genre: Persona. Boomer, do you have any thoughts on this genre in general or how 3 Women functions within it? What differentiates its tone & purpose from a more typical woman-on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown story?
Boomer: When the Swampflix Canon was updated a few months ago, I took a look at my contributions to that list and had one of those “You really don’t see your patterns until they’re laid out in front of you” moments and realized that there are apparently only three things that I like: (in Brandon’s words) “populist superhero spectacles, obscure Euro horrors,” and women-on-the-verge films. My love for the aforementioned Queen of Earth is well documented, but the film that I thought of most frequently throughout 3 Women (after my initial thoughts of “Oh, this is Single White Female” followed by “Oh this is actually Mulholland Drive“) was Puzzle of a Downfall Child, which similarly features dreamlike narrative and “gauzy” filmmaking juxtaposed against harsh realities of disaffection and occasional violence.
There’s a definite undercurrent of that quality that fascinates me in that genre present in 3 Women, but one major difference that I see is that 3 Women has (arguably more than) one woman who’s already on the other side of the verge: Willie. She’s clearly past the point where she cares about “society” in any meaningful way, living in a derelict mini golf park/shithole bar and spending her waking moments making angry and occasionally violent (literally, with bullet holes on the canvas) art on every available surface. Millie isn’t really flirting with the edge, yet, but you can tell that she knows it’s not too far away, as her constant attempts to garner not just the friendship but the mere attention of her peers and other members of the community is her defining character trait; at first, Pinky isn’t even aware that there’s a cliff that she could possibly go flying over, until her disappointment in and (tacit and explicit) rejection by Millie causes her to leapfrog straight over her crush/roommate into complete loss of identity.
What really differentiates 3 Women from others in this genre, however, is the way that it treats the characters’ pasts. Queen of Earth has flashbacks to the year prior and features much discussion of the past and the characters’ relationships that delineate their current conflict; Puzzle of a Downfall Child likewise has flashbacks to Lou’s childhood that ultimately explain why she is the way she is, albeit not without some contradiction; 2011’s The Roommate (which I’m citing because I saw it more recently than Single White Female, despite it being a worse movie in every way) has a backstory and a diagnosis for our identity-coveting villain. Like the desert itself, the “now” of the film seems ageless in an anxious, foreboding, and eternal way. We learn relatively nothing about Willie, even in comparison to her husband, whom we at least know is a prankster and a former stunt double from the outset. We know a little bit more about Pinky, but her backstory is still mysterious and possibly false, as we never really confirm if she’s even from Texas. In comparison, we know lots more about Millie because she’s always talking about herself, but the things we learn about her are pretty shallow (that irises are her favorite flower, that she had to sleep in the rollaway bed in the living room a lot when her previous roommate had “company,” and that she keeps a daily journal that’s factual and perfunctory rather than insightful or meditative) and don’t really inform an understanding of her long term psychology, other than the fact that she’s doing her level best to be “normal” without much success. There’s a strength of character and identity that’s conveyed solely through performance here without the standard packaging of “Character X does Y because of childhood event Z” that we normally see, and I like that a lot.
Hanna, what do you think of Pinky’s story, in or out of the context of the epilogue? I’m thinking in particular of her pre-hospitalization stories (such as they are) about herself, and the scene where Millie drives her home to the apartment for the first time, wherein Pinky compares their surroundings to Texas; later, when Pinky’s parents (maybe) visit to see her, her mother (maybe) says “It sure doesn’t look like Texas.” Does she really not recognize her parents only due to amnesia and taking on an amalgamation of Millie’s real and imagined identities, or is it because they’re not her parents, as is potentially indicated by Mrs. Rose’s claim that Mr. Rose came up with the name “Pinky,” although we know her real name is Mildred (or is it)? Is Pinky merely an honest girl who experienced severe brain damage or does she simply lie about her past like a lot of teenagers do and lose track of her deceptions?
Hanna: To be honest, I had a very hard time interpreting the journeys of these characters, or at least articulating any kind of interpretation. Just like in a dream, the relationships are foggy, disjointed, and archetypal; it seems like you can’t make sense of them unless you close your eyes. So, when I close my eyes, I feel like Mr. and Mrs. Rose are the parents of pre-coma Pinky, who dies in the pool; when Pinky is “reborn” as Mildred, her parents aren’t her parents anymore. I don’t think Pinky is lying about her past, and I don’t even really think that “Mildred” Pinky is brain damaged; I see “Pinky” Pinky and “Mildred” Pinky as two connected but distinct people, one of whom has started to absorb Millie’s identity. Pinky’s dive felt sacrificial, and the first step towards fulfilling the prophecy of enmeshed identity that Willie’s paintings seem to predict; through the sacrifice, she destroys any part of her that has history outside of the other two women. I also think it’s telling that, in the very end, Pinky identifies Millie as her mother, and that all three women have established relationships that preclude individual lives. This is a totally strange line of logic in real life, but if it was happening in a dream I don’t think I would question it.
I think one of the most compelling aspects of this film was each woman’s sublimation of self into a single folkloric identity. Boomer’s pointed out that nagging “eternal” feeling of the desert, and that perfectly describes my feelings about the three women. The film starts off with Pinky and Millie working in the rehabilitation center for the elderly, but slowly the two women are drawn out of Californian society and into this dreamworld saloon by the magnetism of Willie, the pregnant Wild Woman. In the end, we find all three of the women abandoning the identities that no longer serve them, creating a dreadful symbiotic family comprised of a Child, a Mother, and an Elder out on the ranch that’s incapable of fostering growth outside of itself. I imagine that they’ll be living out there until the end of time, certainly never in need of a spa for the old.
Lagniappe
Brandon: This feels like a huge departure from what I’ve come to expect from a Robert Alman picture. I’m much more used to seeing him in his big cast/overlapping dialogue mode (Short Cuts, Nashville, Pret-a-Porter, Gosford Park, etc), and 3 Women feels like a much more insular, cerebral experience than that. I wish he had tackled this kind of eerie, dreamlike, horror-adjacent material more often; he’s damn good at it. Looking through his filmography, the hallucinatory psych-horror Images is really the only title that seems close to this territory, and I’m excited to check it out.
Hanna: I definitely agree that Shelley Duvall was the standout (I cringed very deeply and personally during the lunchroom scenes), but I really wish this movie had more Willie. Her energy elevated 3 Women from a dreamy psycho-drama into the realm of the mystical. On the other hand, I think that mysticism was accentuated by the fact that she spent 90% of her scenes skulking around the edges of the frame painting beautiful, tortured fish-people.
Britnee: Listening to Millie talk about now vintage recipes made with nothing but processed ingredients brought me so much joy. The one that stuck out to me the most was Penthouse Chicken. When she was trying to impress the table of silent doctors with the recipe that can be “made with a can of tomato soup,” I was sold. It turns out I’m not the only one who wanted to make Penthouse Chicken after watching 3 Women. The Famous for My Dinner Parties blog (titled after a direct quote from Millie) posted a picture of the recipe from the 1963 cookbook Cooking with Soup. What a great dinner and movie combination!
Boomer: Shelley Duvall’s overall career is referenced above, and I think it’s worth mentioning that when I think of her name, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t The Shining or Popeye, it’s Faerie Tale Theatre. Enjoy.
And also this, which is one of my earliest memories of watching a movie and fully warped my brain.
Upcoming Movies of the Month September: Hanna presents Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) October: Brandon presents Monster Brawl (2011) November: Boomer presents Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003)
I’m a sucker for films set in New England, so I knew that I was going to enjoy In the Bedroom regardless of the films plot, acting, etc. There’s just something about those little fishing villages on the east coast that speaks to my soul. Thankfully, In the Bedroom, which takes place Camden, Maine, was not a letdown.
The film focuses on the life of a middle-aged married couple, Matt (Tom Wilkinson) and Ruth (Sissy Spacek), after the violent death of their only son, Frank (Nick Stahl). Frank is a college boy that’s visiting home for the summer. During his return to his hometown, he develops a relationship with an older, married woman named Natalie (Marissa Tomei), who is in the process of divorcing her very unstable husband, Richard (William Mapother). Richard, overwhelmed with rage and jealousy, ends up murdering Frank. This happens towards the beginning of the film, which was pretty surprising to me. I assumed this film was going to be a thriller/murder mystery from the short description I read on IMDB, but the film isn’t really about solving a mysterious homicide or a lengthy court case; it’s more about the impact death has on the loved ones of the deceased.
After Frank’s death, Ruth and Matt let out some inner demons that they’ve been suppressing throughout their marriage. She wanted more children, he didn’t agree on her parenting methods, and so on. There are many films that follow a similar plot to In the Bedroom, but it’s easy for the acting to be over-dramatized and unrealistic (just think of all those terrible Lifetime movies). Spacek and Wilkinson avoid becoming just another grief stricken couple on the big screen by applying their exceptional acting skills in their roles as Ruth and Matt. Watching them go about their day to day lives after the death of their son made me feel as though I was a part of their family or a close friend. That may sound a bit creepy, but there’s this unexplainable connection that you’ll develop with these characters because of their authenticity.
Swampflix 