Not a Pretty Picture: An Act of Reckoning

Things spiral out of control—or, rather, spiral into a contest of wills that is virtually no contest. Martha and Curly go through the hole in the wall while their pals remain in the other room, and suddenly we seem to be watching Alice in Terrorland. Curly—tall, swaggering, bullying (though with considerable charm)—has been here before. Many times. He is not only physically stronger, he commands the vocabulary of intimidation: “You know you want it; all girls do.” “You were meant for it.” And that killer: “Don’t be so uptight.” When Martha resists and says no, he presses harder, pins her down. Then comes the explosion, clearly unrehearsed: “Goddamn it, relax!” All of this will later make her wonder if she is somehow to blame for what happened.

The presence of the others listening, witnessing, brings home the degree to which Curly is performing for his buddies, in an act that has little to do with desire and everything to do with the male ego. Accompanied by that familiar masculine combination of competition, bonding, and insecurity that seems uniquely American, sex is a sporting event in which Curly scores, primarily to earn the respect of his horny comrades. He will then pass on his conquest’s name in case they want to try the same thing with her. She’s not a “pig”—the name they have for easy lays—but she is seen as a convenient target nonetheless.

Coolidge’s presence in this section adds another dimension, as she directs, asks questions, watches, and allows the camera to watch her. In two unnerving moments, she puts her hand to her mouth, as if the violent episode is happening now, to her, all over again. In the postmortem that occurs after this scene, Manenti wonders if she was right to sign on for this project: will it lead her to a deeper understanding of sexual violence, or is she merely seeking abasement by participating? Carrington, after first suggesting that women he has slept with wanted to be raped, backs up, retracts, and acknowledges the degree to which he and other men behave this way for one another. Most astonishingly, he admits that he got carried away in the reenactment and actually wanted to kill Manenti in the heat of the moment. There follow searing scenes back in the dorm that show Martha’s humiliation, her fear of pregnancy, and her inability to ask for or receive help from the school principal. The loneliness. The prospect of a future overshadowed not just by the rape but by her own continued questioning of it. The female solidarity that we glimpsed earlier in the film proves fleeting, as some of the girls begin to turn on their dorm-mate after the boys offer different versions of the event—an all-too-real reflection of the way women and society at large bow to the male point of view. Coolidge herself admits that, at twenty-eight, she still doesn’t trust any man.

Given the rise in reported incidents of rape and the omnipresence of the subject across social media in the intervening years, you’d think Not a Pretty Picture would have lost its power to shock. It hasn’t. Coolidge’s seminal film is a fascinating window onto another time, one that we would like to think of as kinder and gentler, but alas, Not a Pretty Picture also seems horribly contemporary, shudder-inducing in its relevance—and in the thoughts it gives rise to as it turns a bifocal spotlight on the sometimes irreconcilable relations between the sexes, male and female always at cross-purposes, talking past each other, particularly at that vulnerable age.

Like so many films made by women in the seventies—including those of Joyce Chopra, Claudia Weill, Amalie Rothschild, and Joan Micklin Silver—Not a Pretty Picture was well received at women’s film festivals but was met with a muted reception outside that context. Recently, it has been the subject of a revival, thanks to a restoration that has been shown to stunned audiences across the country. Some have seen the film as a kind of antidote to John Landis’s Animal House (which Coolidge was in the running to direct when she made her transition to Hollywood later in the seventies), whose motley crew of male characters crack rape jokes despite being “old enough to know better.”

Coolidge’s subsequent career in Hollywood was aided by Francis Ford Coppola, who saw Not a Pretty Picture and recognized her talent. Coppola and his producing partner Fred Roos signed her to a deal at American Zoetrope; she worked there for several years developing a project to direct that ultimately didn’t come to fruition. Shortly thereafter, she was enlisted to helm the low-budget independent comedy Valley Girl (1983), which she turned into a hit, giving Nicolas Cage his breakthrough role. This was followed by Real Genius (1985), starring Val Kilmer, a movie that is just as musically savvy and fast-paced as its predecessor, its bright colors in harmony with the breakneck hilarity of adolescence in overdrive. Both these films play to young audiences with the usual teen-movie tropes, but they are also more perceptive than is typical for their genre, with stabs of insight and a balance between male and female perspectives. These movies have rare emotional depth, depicting lovers as they face rejection or isolation from their peers, suggesting the desperation behind the need to be included as a member of the tribe. Coolidge’s work thereafter covered different genres and varied considerably but always showed her trademark empathy.

She fully imagines characters across gender and generational lines again in one of her best and most beloved films, Rambling Rose (1991), scripted by Calder Willingham and based on his own novel. The movie features Laura Dern as a gangly, unformed, awkward, yet sexy domestic servant—a demon ex machina (similar to the Terence Stamp character in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema) who descends on a southern family to disrupt their genteel life forever. Rose can’t help but be a provocateur: she falls madly in love with “Daddy” (Robert Duvall), enchants the hard-of-hearing mother (Diane Ladd), seduces men sent to the house, and mesmerizes her employers’ son (Lukas Haas), who spends the film looking on as if at a prizefight. To the patriarch, she increasingly appears to be a sex-starved menace. Meanwhile, the mother goes to the other extreme by being almost irrationally sympathetic. That Rose is understood in such seemingly opposing ways—all of which are somehow valid—is a mark of Coolidge’s ability to get inside different characters, so that none of them become villains.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ever any villains. The sexual ignorance that afflicts men like Duvall’s Daddy becomes heinous and criminal in Not a Pretty Picture, which offers little hope for a bridge between the mutually exclusive points of view that people hold on the subject of rape. “This should be an educational film,” says Carrington at one point. But was it? And are we capable of learning? The past few decades have delivered mixed results. Although our social landscape may be more fraught than in the midseventies—with no taboos (strangulation, anyone?) and few inhibitions (pass the LSD, gummies, and Rohypnol)—the countervailing pressure is constant. The resistance is louder, society more aware, the crime of rape less subject to lenient interpretation—and for all this we can thank women like Martha Coolidge, who took her life in her own hands, risked further isolation and censure for speaking out, and made her case with imagination and style. The combination of bracing honesty and compassion offered up in this remarkable film is a gift we can’t afford to ignore.