[Last fall I had
the chance to watch the third and final season of The
Deuce, George Pelecanos
and David Simon’s phenomenal HBO series about, well, all the things I’ll
AmericanStudy in this series and more! I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Deuce, or other TV you’d recommend,
in comments!]
[FYI: SPOILERS
for The Deuce in most of this week’s
posts, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get thee hence and then come on back!]
On an inspiring
character who can help us remember and recover forgotten filmmakers.
If as I wrote
yesterday Lori Madison’s arc across the show’s three seasons was one of the
most tragic, Maggie
Gyllenhaal’s Eileen Merrell’s was one of the most inspiring
(although as you might expect within the world of a Pelecanos/Simon show and as
that latter hyperlinked video certainly indicates, “the most inspiring” also
means “complicated and bittersweet” to be sure). Like Lori, Eileen begins the
show as a prostitute (known as Candy) who becomes a porn actress, but in that
latter world the arcs diverge significantly—Eileen moves from acting to
directing, becoming over the show’s second and third seasons an award-winning,
feminist porn filmmaker and producer. She spends much of the third season
trying to make a film that is truly her own, one that examines the questions of
gender, sex, work, and society that have been at the heart of her own
experiences (as well as the show itself, of course). Although it seems as of
the show’s conclusion that she has failed to finish that film, in the most poignant
and beautiful reveal in the series finale’s 2019-set coda we learn (through an
obituary for Eileen who has passed away from cancer) not only that she completed
it, but that the film (despite not receiving much attention upon its release,
in large part because she “took the fucking out”), A Pawn in Their Game, became over time an “arthouse classic” that
has even been remastered and rereleased by the Criterion Collection.
As I watched and
read more about the show after that series finale, and through additional conversations
with my friend and fellow Deuce fan
and TV
and film buff Matt Raymond, I learned that both A Pawn in Their Game and Eileen’s character arc were based on
actual historical figures and films. Pawn was inspired in large part by former
pin-up model Barbara
Loden and her one, profoundly personal and independent film Wanda (1970, rereleased by the
Criterion Collection as that latter hyperlink illustrates), which she wrote,
directed, and starred in. And Eileen’s evolution and perspective as a feminist
pornographer was inspired in large part by Candida Royalle, a porn actress
turned filmmaker of whom her 2015
New York Times obituary noted, “She
defined her work as female-oriented, sensuously explicit cinema as opposed to
formulaic hard-core pornographic films that she said degraded women for the
pleasure of men.” Although they were combined to produce different aspects of the
character of Eileen, it’s important to be clear that these two women and their respective
films were quite distinct: Royalle made only pornographic films, if again
groundbreaking and feminist ones; Loden made only one film, which while it
focuses in gritty and realistic ways on themes of gender and sex would never be
described as pornographic.
Yet despite those
important differences, I would argue that Loden and Royalle are also significantly
linked, and not just by their combination into this fictional character. To put
it bluntly, these are two prominent filmmakers and cultural voices about whom I—a
lifelong film buff and an AmericanStudier who prides himself on his pop culture
knowledge—knew absolutely nothing, and of whom I might have never learned were
it not for The Deuce and Gyllenhaal (not
just as a performer but as an executive producer who rightly takes great pride
in helping advance such threads and themes). That might be an indictment of me,
of course, but I think it’s more likely an indictment of our collective
memories and cultural conversations, and how much these unique, impressive
artists have been left out of them. And while there would be various ways to
analyze that absence, including in Royalle’s case our general unwillingness to
think of porn as an artistic genre at all, I don’t think there’s any question
that gender is a central part of the elision of artists like Loden and Royalle.
Which makes it that much more important to honor Gyllenhaal’s character and
work and, through those things, to do justice to these forgotten, pioneering
female filmmakers.
Next
DeuceStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?
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