Guy Rundle
posted 1 September 2006

By now, it's almost impossible to remember a time when the 1950s weren't retrochic. The decade that was triumphantly pushed aside by the revolutions of the 1960s has had its revenge; from Happy Days via the films of David Lynch and the mountain of kitsch and ephemera collected in countless retro shops, nostalgia for the decade that everyone seemed desperate to get out of is now well into its fortieth year.

The reason is not hard to find. Once you're well out of a period of limited horizons, sexual repression and the enforcement of mainstream values, the codes and rituals of the period become irresistibly alluring. Even the most innocent nostalgia product acquires an erotic charge - witness Grease, which delights in what we thought was a forgotten habit of men and women dressing differently, having different worlds and the lost art of flirtation - culminating in the transformation of the good girl into a leather-clad biker chick. What makes the period so inexhaustibly alluring - and what makes the 1960s rather less interesting - is that it's the last decade in which there was a genuine division between public and private, symbol and reality, conscious and unconscious. In the wake of a subsequent period in which there were no restraints, everything about the 1950s - from fedora hats to the fridge-freezers - becomes not only impossibly erotic but melancholic with it, a lost world redolent of a time when desire had a language. David Lynch has become the past master at teasing out the everyday surrealism of the decade's gleaming innocence, its luminous menace.

And thus it's a damn shame he wasn't at the helm of The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron's immensely disappointing biopic of the 1950s pinup model, whose work covered everything from mainstream cheesecake shots to backyard bondage porn. Page's career ended in the early 1960s and she was all but forgotten - the icon and the person - for two decades, until the rise of postmodernism initiated a wholesale strip-mining of earlier eras. Everyone who lived through this period remembers how strange it was - to see an artist like Edward Hopper suddenly come full force to the centre of the culture, or the clichéd language of the period's advertising come to be used as a parodic visual language in innumerable silkscreen posters.

What made it so alluring was what it held back - Hopper's empty streets and portentous shadows, the strange no-place timelessness of perfect kitchens and cars. In the case of Page's work, what made it so strange was the casual arbitrariness of its backgrounds and settings - usually dingy, curtained backrooms somewhere. 'Where are they? Who are these people?' one used to think, poring over the Taschen volumes that, in the mid-1980s, began to hoover up and republish seemingly every naughty postcard and floor polish ad of the time. In an era when, a la 9½ Weeks, Basic Instinct, porn moved into the mainstream, such pictures carried a powerful aura by virtue of retaining a sense of furtive shame that could not be exhausted - as contemporary porn can - by a single viewing. James Ellroy captured this best in the novels of his LA Quartet, interweaving conventional crims with blackmailers, pimps, porno kings, schlock filmmakers, JFK's assassins and the like.

The Notorious Bettie Page has none of this. Conventionally shot, with little visual imagination - aside from the predictable shift between colour and black and white and the use of different filmstocks - it has no more drive than an average US TV-movie-of-the-week about some actress you've never heard of. Bettie grows up, moves to New York, becomes involved in girlie pics, until the industry is shut down by a US government commission. There's no real attempt to conjure up a pre-1960s demi-monde, and the whole thing is overly influenced by the Boogie Nights idea of an Edenic innocent world of porn, before the fall.

This is one of those movies you start redirecting in your head while you're watching it ('linger on that!' 'eroticise the furniture - do a track shot on that kitschy sideboard!') as well as thinking of all the stuff in Page's life they could've put in. After all, the woman spent years in mental hospitals in the 1980s and 1990s, and you don't have to be out to make a feminist tract to not wonder if becoming the twentieth century archetype of kinky sex had something to do with it. But no, there's nothing, save for the vaguely interesting idea that the complex bondage routines - invented for her by photographer Irving Klaw - were not so much a revelation of 20th century male desires as an invention of them, that millions of Cosmo and FHM readers would not be embarrassing themselves with handcuffs and PVC were it not for these casual improvisations in New York backrooms half a century ago.

Yet even that seems part of a desire to remove any element of darkness from the picture, of damage and violence. And without darkness, there ain't no light. 'Is sex dirty?' Woody Allen once remarked: 'only if it's done right'. I suspect even he would have made a more interesting product out of this material, and that is a pretty damning indictment.