THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT…Mary Harron

As South Park’s toe-tapping ditty ‘Blame Canada’ proves, America’s northern neighbours are all-too-often given the raw end of the deal. Mocked by their flashier counterparts and mostly ignored by other nations, their effect on Western culture is actually fairly immense. They may be considered Americans now, but actors like Dan Ackroyd, Keanu Reeves and William Shatner were all born north of the border along with influential directors like James Cameron and David Cronenberg, who have both contributed to American culture, while at the same time commenting on it.

This week’s There’s Something About… also falls into that category. Mary Harron may not be particularly well known and has only made three films across her relatively short career, but she is a bold, brave and intelligent director, whose movies have all taken a fascinating and relevant peek into the troubled and turbulent times of late 20th Century America.

Her debut came in 1996 in the shape of I Shot Andy Warhol. A stylish biopic of militant feminist, SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto writer and Andy Warhol assailant Valerie Solanis, the film neatly compares two of the most significant cultural movements of the late twentieth century and the two figures who embodied them.

On the one hand, we have Solanis (played with gritty charm by Lili Taylor), the deeply intelligent radical who attempted anything to put her message of female superiority across. On the other, there’s Warhol (a captivating Jarrad Harris), the gifted but somewhat callous artist, who often seems as superficial as the bitchy hangers-on who surround his infamous Factory workshop.

With his ‘famous for five minutes’ prediction and soup can paintings, Warhol, of course, was the one who ultimately found long-lasting success, but Harron’s film attempts to redress the balance. Far from being the crackpot mentalist her later actions and subsequent incarceration would suggest, Harron shows Solanis was a pioneer of the feminist movement, one who, with a little more planning and support, could have been as well known as Emmeline Pankhurst or Germaine Greer.

By finding the humanity behind such a controversial and misunderstood figure, you’d expect Harron to be pigeonholed as a feminist filmmaker. However, with her second effort she defied stereotypes and took on Bret Easton Ellis’ supposedly misogynistic novel American Psycho, in which businessman Patrick Bateman goes on a murderous rampage through 1980s New York. (NB: for the purposes of this article, we’re accepting that the murders actually happened. Like the book, the film keeps the truth ambiguous.)

Together with co-writer Guinevere Turner, Harron toned down much of the extreme violence of the novel, meaning that some of Ellis’ finer moral points about the media’s reporting of serial killers are lost. What remains though is a cutting and sharply funny satire of yuppie America which is only now starting to gain the kind of respect it deserved upon release in 2000.

An emasculated little boy, desperately seeking power and void of any personality of his own, Bateman is portrayed as the ultimate 80s man, lost in a sea of faceless drones and reduced to murderous rampages in a bid etch out some kind of identity for himself.

Sadly for poor old Paddy, it doesn’t work. He may be the one killing and maiming innocents, but society is just as degenerate and refuses to believe or even acknowledge the killings. When he confesses to his lawyer, it’s laughed off as a joke and when he claims to be into ‘murders and executions’, his words are misunderstood and heard as ‘mergers and acquisitions’.

Most disturbing is the brilliantly captured moment when he returns to the scene of one of his crimes. Rather than finding a carved-up body and blood-spattered walls, he is presented with a freshly decorated, clean apartment complete an estate agent who ushers him out hurriedly so she can make the sale. It’s blackly comic brilliance, loaded with menace, and the fact that it works so well is mostly down to lead Christian Bale, whose casting Harron had to fight tooth and nail for.

While the studio wanted a Leonardo Di Caprio who was still hot off the success of Romeo and Juliet and Titanic, Harron demanded Bale, even quitting the project when it looked like the studio would win out. Thankfully, she got her way and the decision to cast the then relatively unknown actor works a treat as his turn is a masterpiece of macabre pantomime in which he keeps the character undeniably unhinged, but frighteningly real.

Six years later, Harron followed up this stroke of genius with another bold move: hiring Gretchen Mol to play the eponymous heroine of The Notorious Bettie Page. Telling the story of the 50s pin-up girl/bondage queen/latter day kitsch icon during her modelling year only, the film is a nostalgic trip through a long-dead America which posits Page not as an exploited victim or even feminist pioneer (as many have claimed), but a somewhat naïve innocent, who grasps and is comfortable with the idea of nudity, but perhaps doesn’t understand how the pictures that were taken of her would be used.

Mol, who fell off the radar somewhat after Vanity Fair hailed her as the next big thing in 1998, brings suitable mystery to the character, grounding the occasionally too-lightweight script in a necessary sense of realism and nailing Bettie‘s cute facial expressions and girl next door charm. Wonderful support is found in the shape of the returning Harris and Taylor, but what ultimately makes the film fly is Harron and her sublime use of colour.

For Bettie’s time in the sexually-repressed New York during her bondage shoots, Harron uses dusty black and white. Realistic but claustrophobic, it is contrasted sharply with the explosion of glorious Technicolor which is used to denote the freedom Page felt on the beaches of Miami during her lighter pin-up sessions for photographer Bunny Yeager. It’s such a simple, almost obvious, idea, but it tells you so much more about Page visually than could be put across through words.

Sadly, the film was overlooked upon release last August, thanks mainly to Harron’s refusal to provide pat answers to Page’s mysterious life (she is currently a recluse). But the model is used here mostly as a cipher to investigate wider issues of sexuality, repression and civil liberties and with Janet Jackson’s nip-slip a few years ago still influencing what can and cannot be shown on US TV, such subtext ensures that the film, like all of Harron's work, is a revealing and all-too-relevant window into today’s America.