Groomed to within an inch of her life, Gretchen Mol looks eerily perfect as the iconic 1950s bondage pin-up queen Bettie Page. With a subtle and vulnerable performance as a warm-hearted, wholesome, kind, and often naïve Bettie, Mol manages to flesh out a woman who exists in popular culture today as practically a logo. Mary Harron restages all the famous and favourite Bettie Page photos, but upstages the eroticism by making Bettie such a good girl she becomes almost a parody of 1950s gender stereotypes.

The look of this film dominates the storyline of Bettie’s life leading up to her career as a bondage model, and her subsequent devotion to spreading the word of God.  Evoking film noir with the use of actual black-and-white 35mm film for the majority of the narrative The Notorious Bettie Page succeeds wonderfully in imitating a film of the period. Colour is used sparingly, and again, archaic film stock and processing techniques are utilised to create the loud, bright look of mid-twentieth century Technicolour, reminiscent of 1966’s Batman TV Series.  Bettie's infamous bondage films are even recreated on an old hand-cranked 16mm camera in tribute to the rhythmic quality of the original Super-8 footage.

The film opens in 1955 with raids on stores selling bondage photos, and Bettie waiting to be called to the stand by the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency led by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver.   David Strathairn, who played Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck, plays for the other team in The Notorious Bettie Page; almost unrecognisable as the morality campaigner Senator Estes Kefauver.  In both its use of black-and-white film, and its focus on the 1950s government-led witch hunts to distract the populace, Mary Harron’s film certainly acts as a fine feminist companion film to Clooney's grim examination of McCarthyism.

What could have become another exploitative flick about women being punished for expressing their sexuality, instead turns into an examination of how the photographic image has a life of its own, far beyond the original subject and context.  The persecution of the photographers Paula and Irving Klaw (Lili Taylor and Chris Bauer,) brought the photos a wider audience and established Page as a quintessential representation of sexual and intellectual repression. Her controversial bondage photos were blamed for everything from youth suicide and drug use, to a rise in pre-marital sex. The Klaws created the bondage photos for circulation in their private postal photo club and were unaware they were being closely watched by the FBI.  In the late 1950s, Senator Kefauver began a morality campaign to stamp out pornography, and his witch-hunt ruined the lives of the Klaws and almost ended Bettie’s career.

By 1978, however, a new ‘X’ rating made the photos look positively demure; a revival in Bettie Page pictures seeing them reproduced on everything from t-shirts to ashtrays, and inspiring many artists to create images based on the ‘girl with the perfect figure’ and the signature bangs.  Bettie remained unaware of her popularity, and initially received no money for the use of her images, until Playboy millionaire Hugh Hefner hired her some lawyers to recover her royalties.

In the 1950s Bettie Page was known as the Queen of Pin-Ups and the First Famous Bondage Model.  Her photos appeared in magazines with fabulous titles like Eyeful, Wink, and Twitter.  She mysteriously disappeared in 1958 and various rumours circulated including that she had committed suicide (she is actually still alive today), gone insane (she did spend ten years in the Patton State Psychiatric Institute from 1983-1992) and that she had become a fundamentalist Christian (she is now a born-again Christian and in the 1960s worked with Billy Graham whom she adores).

The film does not deal with Bettie’s period in psychiatric care, nor does it make clear that the famous bikinis she wore were made herself including her favourite, the leopard skin bikini she wore in the Jungle Bettie shots with wild animals taken by Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson).  Neither does the film examine the way she become popular in retrospect, shifting from alternative to mainstream culture.  Despite these missing pieces of page's life, the film is still an accomplished work of cinematic art.  The contrived  colouring, pace, lighting and even often staging, lends a sense of make-believe to this dramatic biopic.  Harron manages to sustain her characters as believable within this backdrop of an absurdly overdone style of shooting.

The stylisation becomes a commentary on the subject itself – such an ubiquitous image, Page can be nothing but a series of stills imbued with our hidden fantasies.   Mary Harron (American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol) and co-writer Guinevere Turner (Go Fish) go back to Bettie’s childhood and trace her life from church in Nashville to modelling in New York, but they don’t present a shiny clean world; this is a dark make-believe world that swings between film noir and Leave It to Beaver.  Bettie is presented as incredibly innocent and much is made of the hypocrisy of a culture that accepts bondage in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew because it is a classic, but persecutes photographers as criminals.  Mol's presents Page almost as if she is the quintessential vanilla girl Doris Day instead of the dominatrix her image suggested.

This story of persecution and censorship shares a similar focus to two 2005 documentaries on artistic censorship Metal: A Headbangers Journey and Inside Deep Throat, which examined how counter-culture music and film are used as a scapegoats for social ills.  The Notorious Bettie Page plays into postmodern notions of the reader creating meaning instead of any object being inherently endowed with ideas.  An iconic image like Bettie Page, who has been re-interpreted and rediscovered over and over again, acts almost like a gauge of what is deemed acceptable feminine sexual behaviour.


The Notorious Bettie Page
2005

Director: Mary Harron
Screenwriters: Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner
Cinematographer: W. Mott Hupfel III
Editor: Tricia Cooke
Original Music: Mark Suozzo, Joseph S. DeBeasi
Cast: Gretchen Mol, David Strathairn, Lili Taylor, Chris Bauer, Sarah Paulson