Girl Reel
Reviews

The Lesbian Review of Books, Summer 2000

Girlhood Framed, by Amy Villarejo

To read a memoir is to have a glimpse into another’s life trajectories, its paths and its detours, it origins and its destinations; to read a good memoir is to recognize something of one’s own life in another’s, in the intersections in which autobiography becomes biography. For lesbian lettristes, moreover, a life’s story can become another’s tool of survival, reminding us of the ways our biographies provide touchstones, models, anchors for others mired in dominant narratives of women’s lives and loves. Bonnie J. Morris’s Girl Reel confirms in its closing line that 'We’re still our best biographers, us girls’ (167), a full seven decades after we first were given that enigmatic possibility in Virginia Woolf, that Chloe liked Olivia. I’m not researching for references here. Morris cites Woolf, as scores of others have done, to wonder about the paucity in that three-quarters of a century, of stories of lesbian lives not only in literature but also in the history of cinema:

[H]ow interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represents as friends. (Cited in Morris, 65)

Much less as lovers. Morris’s task in Girl Reel, an admixture of essay and memoir in three reels ("girlhood," "adolescence," and "higher education"), is as much to comment on images of women and lesbians in television and film over the past three decades as it is to produce her own images of herself and ourselves: as counter-image, or afterimage, of the mainstream, in order to transform it.

She begins her chronicle with her movie childhood in Los Angeles (she is the daughter of two child actors/extras and developed in her early years an intimate relationship with the big and small screens), moves to her adolescent years in Durham, North Carolina (and her narrative of coming out in the shadow of ‘70s films about women’s friendship, such as Julia [[Fred Zinneman, 1977]), and concludes with the movement from college to graduate school to her professional life as a professor of Jewish women’s history, at George Mason University and Georgetown University. In the book’s two final essays, we find that Morris’s path is not, of course, a straight line from childhood to adulthood but a complicated spiral: in the penultimate entry, she reconnects with an old junior high school pal (another strong young woman who considered herself then as now a writer), Maria Maggenti, whose film The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995) premieres in Washington, DC, where Morris attended high school and college and still lives. And in her final essay, Morris herself becomes a movie extra, working with Jodie Foster on the film Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997); following the footsteps of her parents, she takes her place on the big screen but now beside a lesbian icon.

What is most glorious about Morris’s book is her obvious delight (and skill) in blending recollection with critical insight, and the best sequences (to extend her metaphor) among the three reels remind us, as Woolf had, that our knowledge of ourselves rarely comes through a clear path but instead rears up in complicated interstices. In "How I Spent My Allowance," Morris recalls:

I spent my allowance on many things, but I always ended up at the movies: first the Yorktown Theater on 15-501 and later the Center I and II at Lakewood Shopping Center, the Carolina Theater downtown, the Northgate Plaza. Most of these movie houses were within biking distance,and I was old enough to spend Saturdays on my own. But how I got to the movies was never a straight line between, say, our yard and the Yorktown. It was more of a complicated Saturday dance, of teetering between play and seriousness in my allowance- spending choices. After all, I was eleven years old; and I remember what it was like to be eleven years old on Saturday mornings in 1972. (8)

And, boy, does she. Girl Reel is so powerful in its conjuring of a late ‘60s/early ‘70s childhood that I often lost sight of the fact that she was describing hers and not my own. I also spent a movie childhood in West L.A. (probably a few blocks away from the Morris home), and it was all I could do to restrain myself from changing the numbers in the book to reflect the two years Morris has on me, for her eleven-year-old Saturday was mine at nine. (I likewise wanted to insist to her that we encountered the gleeful transsexualism of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at sixteen, not eighteen.) Part of the impact of Morris’s prose comes from delicious detail; as in the passage above, the effect derives from specificity, surface, texture, street addresses, and theater names.

Two particularly palpable examples in the same meditation on her allowance stand out, the first a list of the "kid stuff" sold at the Kwik Pik Morris frequented, "to buy Wacky Packages," before the Saturday matinee:

magic tricks, superballs, curly drinking straws that mother hated because they couldn’t be cleaned; Silly Putty, wax lips, clik-clacks, and jacks. They sold slurpees that turnred one’s lips and tongue a reckless artificial aqua, beef jerky and Slim Jims in cellophane, jars of Mary Janes and Atomic Fireballs and speckled jawbreakers, drumstick ice cream pocked with cardboardy walnut sprinkles, and because it was the South, giant hot pickles and pig’s feet. (12)

The window of recognition for this list may be small indeed (ourselves and our mothers who peeled Wacky Package stickersÑparodies of mass-produced consumer goodsÑoff our windows and childhood furniture, or all who came within hearing distance of the insistent crack of clik-claksÑtwo hard plastic balls that knock against one another at the end of nylon stringsÑin frenzied spins); the sam may be true for the next page’s summoning of comic book nonconformists in the Harvey Comics lineup of "truly spunky oddballs: Little Dot, Little Lotta, Richie Rich, and the tantalizing Hot Stuff: an actual spawn-of-Satan devil child with a pitchfork, whose comic series was noticeably absent in our Bible-belt convenience store" (9).

But what Girl Reel makes possible are a number of alliances that glide at another level along the connections that mass culture itself produces: in the places where Slim Jims and Donny Osmond and, most important to Morris, movie theaters bring us together are also the overlapping stories of lesbian lives.

The second reel, "adolescence," cuts from comic books to "Frye boots under painters’ pants, marijuana without love or inspiration, pet rocks and mood rings"; it also moves from a nurturing education at a Friends school in Durham to the cruelties and curricular "tracking" at public high school in Bethesda, Maryland. Morris’s initiation into girl gang is especially poignant. Her personal rite of passage involved swearing to give up the thing she loved/loves most, writing, in order to gain popularity and acceptance from the leader, whom Morris adored:

We all walked in the dark for hours, then slept in a pile on somebody’s waterbed. "Here, give me your hand," said Lindsey, her touch sending waves of what I would later call Arousal across my solar plexus. I recognized that strange new feeling I had hitherto only experienced at Lindsey’s party that spring. Well and good, then. No one had asked me to giveup that sensation, that magnificent swoop, that always unanticipated pinwheel of love. I was not anaesthetized by any means. I still had Lindsey’s hand in mind when I fell asleep that night, clutching my new necklace of beads; journal-less, washed clean. (58-59)

Their only and repeated activity also reveals the contradictory tension of adolescence, conformity or nonconformity: an outing to a double feature of Harold and Maude(Hal Ashby, 1972) and King of Hearts (Phillippe De Broca, 1966) that "satisfied our multiple psychic dietary needs [of] snobbery, eccentricity, desire, long hours of holding each other’s hands" (60). Not only through this double feature but through films of the ‘70s more clearly directed to women’s relationships did Morris find convergences on the big screen: in Julia, especially, Jane Fonda/Lillian Hellman’s declaration of love to Vanessa Redgrave/Julia by the fire etched itself on Morris as an Ur-lesbian moment and, as significant, a moment of Jewish resistance to Nazism.

It is in the transition between the second and final reels that Morris’s Jewishness complicates her nascent lesbianism, and it is also the place, regrettably to my mind, at which her adult voice (more academic, more overtly "political" and thereby less impressionistic and less nuanced) overwhelms the book’s sequences. Where the first and bulk of the second reels becomes more insistent upon enlightened political stances an upon finding and celebrating "positive images" of Jews and lesbians alike (122), particularly as the two converge in "Yentl: The Women Who Want Something More." in that piece, Streisand’s titular character figures both the subversive possibilities and the real limits on Jewish women’s intellectual and erotic lives, and Morris engages in another teetering dance, this time between Jewishness and lesbianism, in another essay in the final section as well, on a year abroad in Israel (where she watched Bette Midler in The Rose [Mark Rydell, 1979]). In that section, Morris also includes a piece, "Sappho Goes Hollywood: How We Looked to American Moviegoers," on the activities of an upstate New York lesbian group called Herizon, which brought Judy Katz to present a clipshow entitled Sappho Goes Hollywood," detailing a hidden history of Hollywood lesbians from "negative images" ("misery, degradation and death" ) to the "happier portraits" of the 1980s (127). Although we may appreciate the fact that Judy Katz’s presentation was edited at home, in the wee hours, on amateur equipment in order to tell an illicit story, it offers an account of Hollywood lesbianism that actually seems to work against the density and complexity of Morris’s other reels, insofar as she knows, just as we do from reading Girl Reel, that pleasures, stories, and desire are found in the most startling conjunctions.

Perhaps it is because I began in roughly the same place as Morris, only to find myself (teaching film, no less) in that upstate New York town she left after graduate school, that I appreciated more the circuitous route toward "lesbian" of the first reels than the surety of lesbian cinematic history or Jewish identity in the final one. But I am generally loath to see a narrative wrapped up, and I’m ready for the sequel, when it comes and returns us to the beginning, to start over in the dark.

Booklist, June 2000, starred

Morris, Bonnie, J. Girl Reel: A Lesbian Remembers Growing Up at the Movies. June 2000. 192 p. illus. Coffee House; dist. by Consortium, paper, $14.95 (1-56689-094-2). DDC: 302.23.

That society both forms and is formed by media is a theme that animates Morris’ account of the years she spent as the child of parents who had grown up in the Industry, as Los Angelinos refer to the movie business. Given her heritage, it comes as no surprise, then, that even after relocating to other parts of the nation, her liberal parents encouraged moviegoing, individually and as a family. It was in the movies that young Bonnie, an archetypal grunge baby butch, found instruction, however challenging (e.g., be smart, but don’t let the boys know), as well as respite from the public school hierarchy that ostracized her. As she grew fumblingly through adolescence and young womanhood, certain films marked key turning points in her life as a Jewish lesbian, especially Barbra Streisand’s Yentl with its homoerotic overtones. Only in the mid-nineties, in Maria Maggenti’s landmark film The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love did she find what she had sought all her life: a model in a movie, which depicted two smart teenage girls finding not only love but also happiness, rather than the usual suicide and/or murder at the end of similar celluloid tales. At last! ÑWhitney Scott

Impact News, July 2000

Reviewed by Greg Herren

One of the great advantages of being a book reviewer is that frequently I find myself reading and reviewing books which I ordinarily might not have picked up. Before I was a book reviewer, I primarily read writings by gay men. With a typical, elitist gay white male attitude, I closed myself off to work by minority writers as well as women. As such, for years I cheated myself out of the incredible joys of reading such enormous talents as Dorothy Allison, Jewelle Gomez, Katherine V. Forrest, Erasmo Guerra, E. Lynn Harris, and countless others. However, as a book reviewer, I could no longer summarily dismiss these works, and every time I discover another writer that is not a gay white male thank the cosmos for being a book reviewer.

Last year, Bonnie J. Morris, a Women’s Studies professor at George Washington University, published a monumental work on the history of women’s music festivals called Eden Built by Eves. This work required thousands of hours of interviews, incredible amounts of research, and countless hours of editing. This year, Bonnie is back with a newer, more personal book from Coffee House Press called Girl Reel. Part memoir, part sociological study, it is, like her earlier work, destined to become a classic of lesbian studies.

While the growing up gay/coming out story has almost become a clichŽ in the world of gay men’s fiction, with almost every writer tackling it at one time or another, one of the things that all of these works have in common is that the main characters (whether fiction or autobiography) all became adults in the days before the Stonewall Inn riots changed what it meant to be gay and lesbian in the United States forever. Perhaps it is precisely because of the preponderance of these types of works that the next generations of gay writers have not written the coming out story. What Morris has done created a book which not only explores what it was like to grow up and slowly come to terms with her lesbianism in the 1970s, she takes it one step further. As an avid fan of movies, Morris explores the films she watched as a child and young adult, what effect they had on her when she watched them, and has analyzed them in her current context as an out and proud lesbian Women’s Studies professor.

An example of this is the film Julia. For those of you who are too young to remember this film, it starred Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave and was based on a memoir by the great playwright Lillian Hellman. In the chapter titled "Julia: Love between Women as a Slap in the Face," Morris discusses how the close friendship between Lillian (Fonda) and Julia (Redgrave) subtly alluded to lesbianism. However, when a man makes a reference to them being lesbians, Lillian reacts even more violently to this man (knocking him down with one punch) than she did to the threat imposed by the Nazis against Julia. The impression given is that the accusation of lesbianism is more threatening and dangerous than what the Nazis are up to. (Julia is an anti-Nazi activist helping Jews escape and is a criminal against the German state.) Later, when reading Hellman’s actual memoir, Hellman herself is not quite so subtle about their closeness, and in the actual event portrayed in the film, what actually happened was the man equated the love between Julia and Lillian as being on par with child molestation. This was what caused Lillian to punch him outÑthe allusion that the love between women is a perversion.

While perhaps not on a par as Vito Russo’s classic The Celluloid Close, Morris’s work is actually even more powerful. While Russo wrote as a critic, exposing the homophobia rampant in Hollywood’s depictions for gays and lesbians (whether overt or subtextual), Morris writes from a personal perspective, which makes it more accessible. It is hard not to smile, for example when she talks about the great disaster movie binge of the mid-1970s (who can forget The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno, camp classics on the highest level?).

Morris has created a work that will make her readers think and reflect on how Hollywood’s depictions of gays and lesbians can unconsciously affect how we view and see ourselves. While we may have come a long way from the 1970s, does a film like To Wong Foo really help or harm a teenager who is a male to female transgender? Morris’s reminiscences are vivid, colorful, occasionally funny, and occasionally sad, which makes for the best kind of literary effortÑone that is not only smart, but also makes you think.

Girl Reel is an excellent companion piece for The Celluloid Closet.

Library Journal, starred review, July 2000

For many, film plays an important role in the journey to adulthood and beyond, introducing fresh ideas, raising significant questions, and marking life’s events in the process. Morris (women’s studies, George Washington and Georgetown Univs.; Eden Built by Eves, LJ 4/1/99) connects episodes of her life to movies, compelling the reader to examine a variety of social, ethnic, intellectual, artistic, minority, and gender issues. Despite the subtitle’s implication, the lesbian experience is not the author’s sole focus. Much of her childhood allowance went toward seeing such films as Song of the South and Paper Moon, sparking observations on society, stereotypes, and role models. Disaster movies, teen favorites, and independent releases raised further questions about the nature of existence on many levels. Films ranging from Batman and The Rocky Horror Picture Show to The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love figure in her story, as Morris affirmed her lesbian identity, Jewish heritage, and intellectual talents while building relationships. A gifted writer, she captures life’s details, triumphs, amusements, and absurdities, brilliantly using the silver screen as the backdrop. This gem of a memoir is for general circulation, particularly libraries with large entertainment and women’s studies collections. ÑCarol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ