The 1983 indie-underground New York movie Variety, directed by Bette Gordon and scripted by Kathy Acker, is re-released for its 40-year anniversary. It is a flawed but fascinating critique of the male gaze, the porn gaze, and the luxurious ordeal of guilty voyeurism. Gordon casts a female lead, flipping gender assumptions and turning the tables on the underworld quest-torments of Paul Schrader’s male heroes in the likes of Taxi Driver and Hardcore. Perhaps she was inspired by the mysterious inner life of the listless young woman played by Diahnne Abbott in Taxi Driver, working behind the porn-cinema concessions counter, irritated by Travis Bickle’s inquiries about what candy she has: “What you see is what we got.”
Actor and film-maker Sandy McLeod plays Christine, a demure young middle-class woman from Michigan who is desperate for money after failing to get into media or publishing in Manhattan and falling behind on her rent. Prompted by her friend Nan (played by the artist and future photography star Nan Goldin), she takes a job tearing tickets in a scuzzy adult movie theatre near Times Square, ironically called Variety though it offers an unvarying bill of pornography. She finds herself strangely unsettled by the movies on offer, and by the attentions of Louie (Richard M Davidson), a wealthy older man she sees there – a rather classic porn-narrative situation, in fact. Luis Guzmán plays Jose, an amiable guy who works at the cinema; Spalding Gray is the voice of a creep who leaves pervy messages on Christine’s answering machine.
Louie doesn’t appear to be a creep in the normal run of things. He takes Christine on a date to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium (of all the old-fashioned things), where he seems to have a private box, taking her there in his own chauffeured car, making flirty conversation but basically behaving like a gentleman. Christine is piqued and slightly hurt when he says he has to leave and that his driver will take her home. She then becomes obsessed with Louie and what she thinks are his mafia connections to porn, and starts following him everywhere.
The extended tailing and surveillance scenes I think are the weakest part of the film; we drift into some slightly hackneyed and derivative Coppola/Conversation territory and … well, yes … Louie is probably a mobster or crook, but so what? Did we think anything else? The strongest scenes are the weirdest: Christine keeps confiding about this awful new job she has to her male friend Mark (Will Patton), with horribly vivid descriptions of how the auditorium reeks of Lysol disinfectant when it opens for business first thing in the morning. Then she disgusts and scares him by zoning out into a reverie mid-conversation, speaking aloud her weird porn fantasies as if in a trance. It is genuinely really strange, one of those extended dialogue scenes and two-shot scenes that indie movies did in those days, with semi-improv dialogue that could ramble on for ever and yet keep your attention.
There are also of course the archival scenes of New York, with the ambient sound recording of the era giving us a ghostly honking in the distance. A single static shot of Times Square traffic with nothing happening had me on the edge of my seat. Part of what is so strange about the “porn theatre” genre is its comment on city design; in those days, in New York or indeed London, porn theatres (on sites now occupied by Starbucks outlets and Gap stores) just stood there, in or near the respectable commercial centre in all their unacknowledged squalor.
Variety is a sharp, fierce, engaged piece of work.
• Variety is released on 11 August in UK cinemas
