“My life, my sexual identity, is as a feminist, but my films don’t fit easily into that category”: Bette Gordon on Variety in 1984

My life, my sexual identity, is as a feminist, but my films don’t fit easily into that category – they are not easy films at all, in fact. Films like Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, which I really like, and Michelle Citron’s What You Take for Granted, are a lot more comfortable for women to deal with and simpler to use in an issue-raising way. Mine ask difficult, disturbing questions and come from another place, a different category. Or maybe no category at all, which is very exciting for me as a filmmaker. Variety is a curiosity piece. It is there to raise a lot of eyebrows.

Variety comes out of the fact that the whole sexuality question is very big in New York at the moment. Women who have worked together politically for a long time are finding themselves split around issues of what you can show, what you can want sexually, what you can even think. Variety fits right into that split. It is a dividing film, with the project of forcing people to confront things. Some women come up to me afterwards and say thank you for dealing with those issues, while others won’t even talk about it. Even among my friends, there are those who rush up and those who hide. It is as though the film touches something deeply repressed.

For myself, I took the risk of coming out and saying things about my own sexuality that won’t be popular, in talking about things that contradict the positive view of women that you are supposed to show. I guess my view of things is much more like Fassbinder’s: looking at the way things are and hoping that the audience will see that and make changes, as opposed to prescribing the way things ought to be, which is what Lizzie Borden does.

Nicolas Roeg saw Variety at the Rotterdam festival, and said that he liked it but that the main character should have pushed her performance further. I agree with that. I had immense problems getting any actress to deal with that part. Not only is Christine a really complex character, but just getting someone to deliver the sex monologues in public, with a lot of people sitting around watching, was very hard.

I was looking for someone who seemed absolutely everyday, but also looked as though they could turn weird at any moment. Sandy McLeod has a quality of holding back which I really liked. I don’t see her as a victim, which is something people always ask me about. Although situations are constantly set up where you expect victimisation and brutalisation, it just doesn’t happen. Even the end of the film is not what you might have thought was coming.

Christine works it out, gets it right, by somehow dealing with her sexuality in a way that most of us aren’t prepared to do. I was very conscious of how James Stewart remakes Kim Novak in Vertigo, changes her clothes, her hair, her face. My character remakes herself, she’s not remade by anybody else – except by culture and patriarchy, which are things you can never ignore or pretend aren’t there.

For me, there is one scene that sums up the whole film, when Christine is listening to the yoga tape and trying to relax, and has a sort of dream about the men we’ve seen in previous situations shaking hands. For me, that circle of handshakes is the symbol of patriarchy. It is the same with the baseball game and the fish market and the pornography: there is a bond between men which women have to break into. When I was thinking about Variety, I went into a lot of places like porn stores and the men always moved away from me. They couldn’t deal with a real woman, only with a woman on the page.

I wrote the story, then gave it to Kathy Acker, and she wrote a kind of ‘Kathy Acker’ short story, which I rewrote into a film. She then did some of the dialogue, like the conversations between the men and the scene in the limousine, and the sex monologues. This was all about two years ago, before she had become famous in London-she’s still not famous at all in New York. I’d seen her do performances, and thought she was really brave for getting up and saying those things, reading out letters to the men in her life, making all the things that go on in her relationships public. She decided to tell everything, even if it might embarrass her, and that’s a lot of what my character does. Christine says things out loud, and although it’s in male language – people disagree with me, but I deny that there is a female language – articulating things out loud is important. It’s not something that everyone would do, but something that I like to do.

Bette Gordon was speaking to Jane Root.