To watch this film is to pinpoint a very slippery moment in the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Amidst the multiplying perspectives and reflective surfaces with which POLLY MAGGOO outfits itself, a series of white caverns sit impassively. They seem oblivious to the spectacle they are housing: an adoring audience, rapt before a group of female models, absurdly in thrall to the gleaming sheets of aluminum the women are wearing. Between the oblique contours of the caverns and the abstractions formed by the aluminum sheets, you could be forgiven for thinking we are still dealing with modernism's spatial mutations. But this is a red herring: it is indeed the metal-clad models we will be considering as the movie progresses. The caves are little more than an attractive surface, and its occupants seem unaware of their singularly strange environment, captivated as they are by the world of haute couture. Gone is Antonioni's mute awe in the face of art and landscape. The world is nothing more than a stage, and everyone's an actor. We have entered the eternal present of simulation.
Polly Maggoo, model extraordinaire, seems to be a native citizen of this world. She seems equally comfortable swathed in massive slabs of metal as she is navigating an uninvited TV crew in her own apartment. Not much fazes her (except those excitable male oglers in the streets), and every moment is an opportunity to further accumulate human capital. She was not born beautiful, but she became beautiful as she grew up, learning along the way that the world loves nothing more than looking at women like her. She also has the distinct (mis)fortune of reaching adulthood just as the mass media apparatus is taking off. Before, theatrical films stupefied viewers with their larger-than-life images of the eternal feminine. Now, television provides that same lusty exhilaration in their very own living rooms. Conventionally attractive women are commodified and distributed nationwide at a greater scale than ever. The process decentralizes, shifting from a few influential movie studios to the world's many television producers. Polly Maggoo is one among many. She is American by birth, but she is just at home in France. Phallocentric spectatorship knows no language barrier.
In William Klein's film, as in Cronenberg's VIDEODROME and EXISTENZ, reality seems permeable to emergent media. People spontaneously sing and dance to television commercial jingles. Events occurring in "real life" reveal themselves to be taking place on television. Polly herself attends a dinner party and is seemingly absorbed into the TV placed at the head of the table, where she speaks and is spoken to by her hosts. Edits, montages, and hand-drawn animations fracture the ontology of the film's settings. It's 1966, and although we are only four years removed from Antonioni's L'ECLISSE, the world seems even more alien here than it did in that film. But don't let me overstate the case: I'm just trying to historically situate this startling film. Although we now have video games, CGI, and the internet to account for, the world of POLLY MAGGOO is suspiciously similar to our own. Entertainment industries continue to provide stimulation in the form of elaborately constructed beauty. Publicly and privately, women are bombarded with the demands of male desire. The Polly Maggoos may gain some measure of counterbalance, but most women find themselves the subjects of endless control, which slowly seeps into their self-image. It becomes ever harder to see yourself without seeing through the eyes of onlookers, real or imagined. In this dystopia, there are the watchers and the watched (even the watched do watching of their own, fractally pushing the process into increasing abstraction).
VVV unfinished extrapolation VVV
Is it so simple? Are women nothing but empty receptacles for social norms? Passive vessels whose bodies are fetishistically contorted by heteronormativity? It seems most see things this way, but I can't help thinking this is an oversimplification of the way things work. And surely women have some say in the matter, even under such compromised conditions? The story of Paris Hilton is instructive here.
The one time Polly mentions her life before modeling is through a performance for the TV program "Who Are You?" Her anecdotes are charming, even as they're cut short prematurely by Gregoire the director. Soon after, we view a brief montage that dispassionately illustrates Polly's life up until now. It is only those few seconds that are devoted to the life-defining events that shaped the interiority of our ostensible main character. In Polly's world, it seems she can only be known briefly before men interrupt to reassert their control.
In POLLY MAGGOO, men are extensively involved in the construction of femininity. It is the models who wear those ungodly metal 'dresses', and yet their male designer receives all the adulation after the fashion show ("I'll be doing the same collection in copper!"). The men in Polly's apartment try out a number of different scenarios for her TV appearance. One man slips a microphone up her shirt. Then, in the editing room, a gnomish editor chops her rather insightful musings on fame and beauty into gibberish (prompting a nearby woman to mutter about how idiotic Polly sounds). Men walk up to Polly in the street to explain to her that she's "not a real woman," and Gregoire launches a similar monologue at her in her own home. The panopticon nips and tucks according to its commercial whims, ensuring that Polly is constantly at her most marketable.
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Additionally, how do we account for the real and sincere pleasure people of all genders get from fashion and beauty? Doesn't it seem transphobic to imply that artifice is inherently opposed to some supposed authenticity, of which gender is frequently seen as a component? And aren't drag shows all about the possibilities of reality achieved through artifice? Through this lens, condemning pleasures of the surface suddenly seems to stigmatize women, drag performers, and transgender people alike. How progressive is that?
