As with many of the brash, self-consciously tacky films released under the Warhol house brand, Paul Morrissey’s Women in Revolt emerges as a serious parody project with a few distinct origin points, each of them a spiritual forebear and a point of mockery. Its clearest titular inspiration comes from Ken Russell’s 1969 prestige subversion Women in Love, a movie which isolated the throbbing animal heart at the center of D.H. Lawrence’s famously salacious novel, and which, despite its title, culminates in a ridiculously homoerotic scene of two hairy, beefy men wrestling nude atop a bearskin rug. Released 30 years prior, George Cukor’s The Women, seems to operate in an entirely contrary mode, a genteel comedy of manners revolving around a host of independent upper-middle class ladies. The contrasting methods of both films mutate together to form the chimeric spirit of Women in Revolt, a tawdry comedy burlesque that operates at some jagged interstice between lampoon and social commentary, employing a trio of transgender performers intended to detail different aspects of the female psyche.
As with Morrissey’s other collaborations with the Warhol Factory crowd, Women in Revolt seems explicitly intended to contrast with the polished Hollywood product of the time, yet it spends as much time worshipping and tweaking such excesses as it does establishing its own demanding mise-en-scène. Cukor, with his dual legacy as a queer outsider and studio insider, famed director of women’s material presented with a dissident edge, sets the tone, while the bizarro affectations of an iconoclast like Russell establishes the thrust. The satire is conducted scabrously, through a garishly unattractive style that eschews classic film grammar for static mid shots in untidy downtown apartments, offering an unvarnished look at real life while holding up sleek dream factory perfection for implicit mockery.
Unlike earlier projects, Women in Revolt, expands beyond a crude primitive aesthetic; compared to 1968’s Flesh, which featured an audibly whirring camera, jarring smash cuts achieved only by turning the device off abruptly and no movement whatsoever, this film feels positively professional. It’s an expansion that helps differentiate the individual style of Morrissey—more interested in developing gonzo melodrama with simultaneous aspirations toward high and low art—from Warhol’s abrasive concept of the camera as an always perceptible tool for data collection. Compositions and scenes, however, are still largely static, with movement mostly restricted to via jagged jumps or close-ups that refocus a shot on one character’s expression. This unblinking view is intended to absorb the full chaotic energy of the “superstar” performers, whose conception of femininity is held up for as much mockery as the beefcake meatheads and nebbish rapists constituting the male portion of the film.
Part of the gag here appears to be the mere fact of these gender-confused men masquerading as women. Yet the joke isn’t on them as much as it might often seem, at least no more than it is on anyone involved in this oddball costume pageant. Beyond its technical breakthroughs, the film is definitively revolutionary in the way it tears into the validity of gender strictures, with the inherent roleplaying of “straight” and bohemian lifestyles held up same sort of impish skewering. If it takes anything seriously, it’s the conception that labels of any kind are a prison, one which the women here (whether biologically female or not) are determined to break free from.
This liberation is told through the intertwined tales of the three central stars, whose titular revolt doesn’t exactly progress smoothly. Holly (Holly Woodlawn) is a confused hooker with a bad habit of getting attached to the dirtbag johns with whom she spends her time. Candy (Candy Darling) is a spoiled Long Island heiress, harboring dreams of making it as a movie star while carrying on an illicit affair with her brother. Jackie (Jackie Curtis) is the intellectual of the group, an uptight virgin who thinks she may be a “dyke,” yet goes as far as to hire a lunkish male prostitute to “see what it is we’re up against.” They unite to form P.I.G. (Politically Interested Girls), a collective whose name is both a dumb jibe (a dig at Women’s Lib extremists like would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas), and a further evocation of the slovenliness on display here, particularly the scenes involving Holly, who seems like a major inspiration for John Waters’ forcefully filthy vixens.
All three linked storylines involve a prominent focus on highly sexualized but decidedly unsexy boudoir play, with a visual emphasis on dangling body parts, tossed about with the detached flaccidity of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, a similar study of forbidden sexuality and another clear influence. The frequent love scenes mostly involve the performers thrusting ridiculously against one another. Sex thus becomes something other than sex, neither titillating nor concealed, displayed warts and all as a vector for the nastiness of commerce and ambition, expressing both personal development and weakness. While the scenarios and drama are pure Hollywood, the hideous home-movie aesthetic revels in the everyday grossness those films go to huge lengths to disguise.
Yet despite the caustic tone there’s obvious affection here. Women in Revolt blissfully envisions a world in which fantasies can exist enmeshed with reality, where sex is treated as the normal bodily function it is and shame and judgment aren’t applied, even to the sleaziest of characters. Despite its iconoclasm, the film also doesn’t have a vested interest in totally decrying the Hollywood system, which it needs to survive, as both an engine to draw inspiration and influence and an opposite for its seedy pseudo-realism to reflect from. Women in Love may not be as innovatively confrontational as Flesh, as perfectly structured as Trash or as outré as a Warhol-helmed monolith like Chelsea Girls, but it still stands out as important milestone in the filmed depiction of sexual politics.
A significant moment, symbolic of all the film’s derelict pleasures, occurs in its final scene, in which Candy has finally made it as a big-time star. Interviewed by a female TV correspondent, she finds herself dressed down by the increasingly acidic interviewer. Candy finally attacks her, tearing off the woman’s wig as they struggle, the entangled, scrabbling pair eventually bursting through the white stage dressing, revealing bare walls and wiring behind it. Here fantasy and reality collide, yanking back the curtain to unveil the shabbiness inside. As the actress herself says earlier in the movie, during a casting couch audition with a sleazy agent who tells her that she’s nobody: “No, I’m everybody all at once.”