The (Not so) Notorious (Ho-Hum) Bettie Page

Bettie Page. Cult icon? Fetish hero? Pinup Queen? Victim? I’m positive she’s a complex woman, no matter how her cultural significance is interpreted. Anecdotally, her life is complicated and conflicted, but you wouldn’t know that after watching The Notorious Bettie Page.

Matthew and I watched Notorious Bettie this weekend, expecting a dramatization of her life’s events, expecting a plot rife with conflict and character and controversy. We didn’t get that. At the end of the movie, I said, “At least it was shot on film and not digital.” Matthew said, “Irving Klaw would have made a better story.”

The Notorious Bettie Page came off flat and uninteresting, its only inherent interest that it was about Bettie Page. In the “Making of” segment, the director, Mary Herron, said she wanted to “make a movie about Bettie Page and sex in the 50’s.” She did neither. The character of Bettie bounced around like an inflated beach ball, passing aimlessly, colorful and bright, floating from one scene to another. She was never shown to be affected by the traumas in her life or by the choices she made: she just gleamed along. The social aspects of sex in the 50’s were glancingly told by a few scenes where men furtively purchased girly mags and later when Irving Klaw testified before a senate committee on sexual depravity. I think the only sentiment shown (not told) by the movie was that it’s tough to be a pretty girl.

I know there are many other biographies and dramatizations of Bettie Page’s life in circulation. I hope that there are at least a few that are more true to her life--unless she really is just that bland in reality. Sorry, The Notorious Bettie Page, I give you two stars in Netflix. Don’t like.