James Hosking, (co-worker, filmmaker, art director), and I were recently discussing the brilliance of Don Dellilo. I had just finished End Game, which managed to alter the most extreme situations into comedic genius: each character sees the world through a distinct philosophic lens as he bumbles through football, college, nuclear bomb explosion fantasies, and girlfriends. Neither sports fan nor nuclear bomb expert, I could relate to the subtle yet meaningful dialects within the language of grunting, the mirror-like effect of inanimate objects,and the euphoria found in losing oneself to the game. James recommended Delillo's recent review of the film Wanda. As expected, Delillo's article was a fabulous mixture of personal history and keen insight into the film and its larger context.
This is not film noir. There is no mingling of atmospheric suspense and fateful resolution. The bank robbery is not paced differently from the rest of the film. It is ordinary, with guns. This is the dark side of the moon of Bonnie and Clyde, flat, scratchy, skewed, without choreographed affect but not without feeling.Wanda wears a shroud of uniquely 1970's era depression: part panic, part cynicism. From the endlessly bleak landscapes where Wanda appears like an alien on a dying planet, she plods through her life as if she isn't there. Her inability to care about anything including herself verges on astonishing. As Delillo says: "She is simply the empty space designed to accommodate a man's self-doubt and flaring rage." To me this statement epitomizes the suffering felt on both sides of the burgeoning gender divide that went on so violently in that decade.
“She doesn’t keep the house good and the kids are all dirty!” was grounds for divorce in 1970. Women's sole purpose, according to men and society, was caring for their husbands and children. No wonder then that Wanda feels so apathetic towards her own life and that it is impossible for her to feel anything binding towards her husband and children. She is so accustomed to being treated as if she has no intrinsic value of her own that she’s started to believe the charade.
But when someone does see her – albeit a sexist, neurotic, pill-popping criminal – she comes alive. And the test he sets up for her to take becomes the springboard which delivers her from a depressive state that dead-ends (apathy) into something that at least holds potential for growth: the self realization of who she is and what she is capable of.
