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| Director Kathryn Bigelow |
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| Willem Dafoe |
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| Tina L’Hotsky |
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| Robert Gordon |
THE LOVELESS B USA (85 mi) 1981 d: Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery
Man, I was what you call... ragged. I mean, way beyond torn up. I wasn’t gonna be no man’s friend today. Been out of storage for about a year now. And to me, this endless blacktop is my sweet eternity. I knew I was going to hell in a breadbasket. —Vance (Willem Dafoe), opening narrative voiceover
This is the kind of thing that is emblematic of American films, easily transportable around the globe, given a distinctive look that oozes with rebellion on the open road, a postmodern neo-biker flick inspired by Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING (1963), using a teenage genre that America has been exploiting since the 1950’s, low on plot, heavy on atmosphere, one of the inspirations behind Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders (2024), exuding a certain retro charm that can at the same time be both aloof and tantalizing. Like a revised western where a lone gunman strolls into town, with everything going haywire afterwards, a motorcycle gang heading for the Daytona motorcycle races pulls into a small Southern town, where there is a cultural and generational divide that pits a racist, abusive, and corrupt society at war with itself, with marginal female characters having a position of prominence here, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, though they are typically omitted from male-dominated westerns or the biker genre. Bigelow initially studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and received her BFA degree in 1972, but then moved to New York City after winning a scholarship to attend the prestigious Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of Art, tutored by Susan Sontag and Richard Serra, developing an interest in New York’s avant-garde art scene in the 70’s, but she changed her focus to film, indicating “My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one. Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.” Bigelow transferred to Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts program to study film theory and criticism under Milos Forman and Peter Wollen, among others, graduating in 1979. In her early films, Bigelow explored genres and expanded her skills, making her first full-length feature with fellow Columbia film school student Monty Montgomery, who was in film production, perhaps best known for playing the Cowboy in David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001), while also producing several of his works. Co-writing and co-directing with Montgomery, though the vision is largely Bigelow’s (as evidenced by her succession of films, while this is Montgomery’s only directing effort), drawing characters that only live in a cerebral context, where even today this may largely be viewed as an academic exercise, though The Loveless is apparently the favorite film of Cuban screenwriter and novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Bigelow turned to Willem Dafoe in his first feature screen performance, who came out of The Wooster Group, a New York City-based experimental theater company, becoming a star-making venture, with violence and repressed sexuality simmering at the edge of every frame, exploring the line between subconscious realms and reality, while cinematographer Doyle Smith provided the lurid imagery. Shot in just 22 days on a streamline budget, fitting somewhere between arthouse and B-movie grindhouse, this low-budget film garnered a cult following that toured for years on the underground circuit with David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977), becoming a stepping stone for Bigelow’s vampire love story set in the American West, NEAR DARK (1987), as well as her sci-fi New Year’s Eve thriller Strange Days (1995). Bigelow is the first woman director to win an Academy Award for Best Director with The Hurt Locker (2008), and one of the few women in mainstream cinema with an academic background in film theory.
Set in 1950’s America, this is a visually stylish, leather-clad motorcycle movie that’s completely conceptual, an homage to biker flicks of the 50’s and 60’s, with a reverence for Brando’s THE WILD ONE (1953) that sets a tone of outsiderism, bringing Bigelow’s experience in the visual arts to striking cinematic effect, bringing a painterly eye for detail, as she had not yet embraced the concept of a narrative at that point, which was completely antithetical to anything in the art world, so this film defiantly rejects it, creating the illusion of a story that’s barely there, with one foot in the art world and another in cinema. Offering a skewed perspective that feels overly distant and abstract, there is leisurely pacing as well with long, lingering shots, immersed in an atmospheric ennui, remaining on the outside of whatever transpires, with fragmented exposition of both the dialogue and the performances. Providing a meditative snapshot of a group of bikers passing through a quintessential 50’s small town America, there is a prevalent use of largely primitive rock ‘n’ roll music, where the extensive jukebox scoring makes viewers think of Aki Kaurismäki, which this in many ways amusingly resembles, with large periods of no dialogue, and hardly any natural sound, replaced by an assemblage of rockabilly music scored by Robert Gordon, including the selection of songs, while he also portrays one of the bikers, with other music provided by brothers John and Evan Lurie of The Lounge Lizards, but then this film takes off in an entirely different and often disjointed direction. With Relentless by Eddie Dixon playing over the opening credits, Relentless (Title Theme from The Loveless) - Eddie Dixon YouTube (2:50), a sauntering guitar riff with exaggerated reverb and a walking bassline introduces viewers to Vance (Willem Dafoe) as he sits atop his bike in the middle of an isolated desert. But the music comes to an abrupt halt with preening gestures for an audience as he combs his hair, tightens his belt buckle, and kickstarts his bike, with the music picking right back up again as he drives down the highway, with a voiceover establishing his state of mind, where the fusion of rebellious music with a biker attitude sets the scene, leading to an opening car repair interlude as he stops for a lone woman (Jane Berman) in a car stopped along the roadway with a flat tire, where there’s a raw energy of unease and sexual tension, with plenty of suggestions about what lies under the surface, Car Repairing Scene - The Loveless (1981) YouTube (5:18). Despite his arrogant swagger, he is polite and changes her tire, but then steals a kiss and her money while aggressively groping her before he departs, where Bigelow understands the darkness and the danger that bubbles under the surface and has had a fascinating interest in both masculinity and violence since the beginning of her career. Bigelow has worked in various genres from thrillers, horror movies, westerns, science fiction, a road movie, a cop film, big budget action pictures, and war stories, with most of her films concerned with male protagonists, where she’s demonstrated time and again that she’s not afraid of making films that appeal primarily to men, yet there’s no denying the homoerotic undertones that also exist in this film. While there is a level of provocation in nearly all her films, most of them portray violence that can be shocking, yet the dreaded anticipation of that release carries even greater dramatic force.
The bikers converge on a local diner, arriving separately,
including Davis (Robert Gordon) and his vampish girlfriend Sportster Debbie
(Tina L’Hotsky), La Ville (Lawrence Matarese), the youngest member of the gang
Ricky (Danny Rosen), and Hurley (Phillip Kimbrough), whose Harley motorcycle
broke a chain, so they intend to stick around to get it fixed, locating a
nearby garage. But nothing happens in this neck of the woods, so time is
suspended as the locals and the out-of-towners size each other up, with each
developing their own suspicious views of what they see, where there’s a
seething hostility about the unruly appearance of this riff raff that is
tainted with extreme prejudice, fanning the flames of potential violence,
evoking the ending of Dennis Hopper’s EASY RIDER (1969), Easy Rider 1969 End
YouTube (5:23). This uneasy alliance forms
the basis of what there is for drama, that is, until the arrival of Telena
(Marin Kanter) in her red Corvette convertible pulling into the service station
for gas. Cue Vance’s theme music by Eddie Dixon, and the sparks quickly
fly with her incendiary sexual appeal, where she looks about fifteen (or
younger, though she was 21 at the time) with her pixie haircut, brash attitude,
and not a trace of makeup, where her startling revelations are told in such a
brutally honest and understated manner. A relationship begins with an
abstract conversation between two outsider characters who are drawn together
and trying to understand one another, until they are torn apart by the ensuing
violence. While we expect a violent confrontation, it takes a while to
get there, taking an unexpected twist when she reveals the sordid secrets of
her dysfunctional family relationship with a mother who committed suicide in
front of her and an overly violent, sexually abusive father Tarver (J. Don
Ferguson) who hates anyone coming between him and his daughter, which leaves an
impression on this seemingly carefree motorcycle gang leader. The edge
that Talena brings literally drives the story, actually becoming more about
her, providing an entirely sympathetic portrayal of Telena’s oppressive
circumstances, revealing internal knowledge about a horrific woman’s
experience, yet told within the parameters of a male biker genre, which is
completely unexpected, yet it provides a backdrop for a sickly maladjusted
patriarchy at the heart of the American experience that continues to this
day. One thing leads to another and they end up having sex at a roadside
motel, only to be interrupted by her father with a shotgun, where she screams,
“Daddy he ain’t done nothing to me you haven’t done to me a hundred times
before.” What initially seems simple suddenly turns incredibly
complicated, especially after she bares her private anguish, where her honesty
is quite simply stunning and emotionally jarring, as he suddenly realizes both
the benefits and the downside of his attraction to someone who is potentially
so dangerous. In both of Bigelow’s first two films, there is a subtext
about how people are attracted to each other at first, evolving slowly, and
then abruptly ends, causing a violent disconnection, which leads the audience
to ask deeper questions about their relationship, and how they react to an
emotionally dark situation. Deeper into the night it gets more surreal as
the dirty little secrets of this town unravel in a roadside bar, where the
customers turn discomfortingly explosive in a raucous bar scene that spins out
of control, as this group of outsiders serves as a catalyst to a social
implosion from the seething anger and resentment that already exists in this
backwater town. The disempowerment of women is painfully illuminated, and
in the aftermath of the ensuing chaos we see Vance staring off into the void as
his sex, drink, and rock ‘n’ roll-filled existence is shattered as he hears an
earlier scene repeatedly play out in his head, which deepens his character,
allowing the audience to hear his internal dialogue and share a private moment
with him. This side of his character is not typically part of a gang
leader’s personality, evoking a bond of sympathy with the audience, yet there’s
an unreadable aspect to who he is, distinctive yet understated, where we are
both enticed and repulsed by what we see, with Vance becoming the template for
future Bigelow films. Through aesthetics and subversion, this is a
contemplative, nihilistic, and deviant film that screams individuality, with
Vance narrating his final existential thoughts on an endless road trip to
nowhere, “Every one of us dollar chips in one big floating crap game.”
