Smooth Talk: Girl Power

Joyce at 34 also brought Chopra her great subject: moments of change in women’s lives. Looking at the film again, I’m struck by how she staged improvisations to advance the story of what was, after all, a documentary—her deft juxtaposition of our CR group’s raucous discussion of motherhood with an old-fashioned kaffeeklatsch featuring her mother, a retired teacher, and some contemporaries of hers, sitting around a table talking about the compromises and pleasures motherhood had brought them. Chopra has sympathy for both generations, and the effect is refreshingly nonideological, as is the pure joy on Joyce’s face in the scene of the birth of her daughter—likely the first live birth shown in American film. One sees her eagerness to evoke rather than impose narrative again in Girls at 12 (1975), which tracks a group of white suburban girls as their ambitions to be scientists and astronauts fade into talk of makeup and boys—a perception that predicted Carol Gilligan’s research (“Confident at 11, Confused at 16” was the name of Francine Prose’s January 7, 1990, New York Times Magazine cover story about Gilligan’s work); and in Clorae and Albie (also 1975), about two twenty-one-year-old friends, both Black, whose ongoing conversation exposes the chasm between what they desire and what has befallen them. This awareness of the undertow in the lives of women, even at the height of feminist optimism, also informs Smooth Talk.

In a marvelous coincidence, Joyce and I became next-door neighbors in 1978—I was a summer resident of Kent, a town in northwestern Connecticut, and she; her husband, Tom Cole; and their daughter, Sarah, had moved there full-time. I remember long afternoons when Joyce and I exchanged ideas about feminism and gossiped about our circle of friends, but most of all we talked about work. She’d screen a film, or I’d read her a new poem. At the time, Joyce was finishing a documentary, Martha Clarke Light & Dark: A Dancer’s Journal (1981); Clarke was an old friend of Joyce’s and a new friend of mine. Again, Joyce was making a film about a change in a woman’s life. Clarke, always a dancer, was becoming a choreographer. I expected the film’s sensitive attention, but I was stunned by its visual richness—striking images of Clarke’s quirky everyday gestures becoming choreographic moves and then dances. I knew Joyce was “burning to direct” a narrative feature, and I continued to be inspired by her perseverance in the face of crushing disappointments and near misses—a collaboration on a screenplay for a Hollywood film had been green-lighted and then canceled; she’d had to settle for producing a PBS film of Cole’s play Medal of Honor Rag because she was deemed too inexperienced to direct it. I was not surprised when one day she told me she’d optioned a story.

Written by Joyce Carol Oates in 1966, it was titled “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” “It has always haunted me,” Joyce said as she handed me a photocopy. “Tell me what you think.” Compact and chilling, the story centered around what seemed to me a freak encounter between a seducer, creepily named Arnold Friend, and a young girl. Still in my thirties and a committed feminist, I was unnerved by what I read as its pessimism. For Joyce, it hit a nerve. She’d had a brush with sexual assault as a girl and found herself fearful whenever Tom traveled and she was left home alone with Sarah. I lived in the country alone and without fear. I wanted stories that affirmed my optimism about the changes in women’s lives, not that explored undercurrents of danger I hadn’t yet confronted.

But my feelings soon changed. I was teaching a writing workshop for women in my living room. The flyers I posted at supermarkets and libraries had attracted eighteen participants, so many that half of them had to park in Joyce’s driveway next door. It took just a few meetings for one woman to reveal that she was a battered wife, and for another to write obliquely of her experience of incest. Despite having published a poem about my own childhood violation by a male babysitter, I was shocked by these revelations. Now I had a way of thinking about the story Joyce had given me, which she and Tom had begun to adapt. As I welcomed more discoveries and poems from my students, I began to understand that Oates’s story engaged something submerged in the lives of most women.

They called the movie Smooth Talk, after the smooth-talking seduction the screenplay takes almost verbatim from the story. But it was Tom and Joyce who filled in the life of a family on the outskirts of an American nowhere—especially the daughter Connie’s conflict with her mother (Mary Kay Place). “Sometimes, over coffee, they were almost friends,” Oates writes, until something came up and “their faces went hard with contempt.” And of the dynamic with Connie’s well-behaved older sister: “If June’s name was mentioned her mother’s tone was approving,” Oates writes, “and if Connie’s name was mentioned it was disapproving.” From those sentences, Tom and Joyce spun a complex and poignant family drama. The film offers a father (Levon Helm) who is loopy, kind, and checked-out, and, as a visual representation of her agitation, a mother who is endlessly redecorating the house. In a poignant invention of Cole’s, we see mother and daughter in separate rooms, both dancing to James Taylor’s song “Handy Man,” their respective sadnesses in sync with the lyrics: “I fix broken hearts / I know that I truly can.”

“No film I saw as a teenager so authentically dramatized my own confusion.”