Will Carey’s Still life with ivory carving, geode and blue vase (2024)

excerpt from

Laura’s Desires

THE problem of Bette Gordon’s 1983 film, 

Variety, is economic. Christine needs 

a job so she can avoid returning 

to the phantom Michigan from 

which her mother calls. The movie 

opens with Christine by a swimming pool,

the water audible but just out of frame, 

her hair held by a yellow swim cap. 

She turns around, looks at a clock 

on the wall, wonders if she has 

enough time, how much she should rush, 

but then she’s already here and so might 

as well try. The cruel absurdity of being 

anywhere, the persistent absence

of an alternative, the restless water.

She dives in, swims across,

flips over, returns, this time on her

back, her arms complete circles 

we can only half see, her thighs break 

and restore, break and restore 

the surface of the pool. A close-up 

of her stomach under her striped red suit.

The way the camera isolates her body

in fragments refracted by the pool’s surface

both creates and disrupts the sense of

witnessing a display. Afterwards 

in the locker room she asks her friend 

for lipstick and disappears, returning 

from the wrong direction. We had seen her 

before in a mirror, now we see her in 

the frame, she moves again and we 

get both. If the camera shifted slightly, 

it would enter the picture reflected, 

and another Christine would appear, 

inverted on the lens. 

I have never liked 

going to the gym with others,

although I really like the gym itself.

It’s not a matter of privacy, it’s more 

because one of the ways my gender 

informs my behavior is that I always 

feel a host, with duties to attend to 

by making my warmth, which is sincere, 

more immediately perceptible to others 

in a way that might provide some ease 

against the strain of being a person 

in public, while also appearing 

so natural as to hardly register.

It’s sometimes fun and other times

exhausting, and so a lot of what I do

I need to do alone, or with someone

who I know wants nothing else.

But Christine, played by Sandy

McLeod, and her friend do want 

something from each other,

they want not to be alone in the

brutal early evening, and also 

Christine needs a job. Her friend,

Nan, played by Nan Goldin, is trying 

to help her in this pursuit, the trap 

of labor, the threat of return. Christine 

wants to be a writer, but she needs money. 

They list out options while pulling on 

their sweaters against the thick air,

but nothing is viable, there are no 

copy-editing gigs, people wait

in line to work at failing 

department stores. Finally, Nan,

with great reservation, mentions an

opening at Variety, a Times Square porn 

theater. Nan worries Christine is not

the type for it, but Christine is more

worried about her bounced rent check, 

and the next scene we see her in 

Variety’s window box between 

the lobby and the street selling 

tickets for $2. Variety Photoplays 

was a real place, however not in 

Times Square—the real Variety 

was down on Third Avenue between 

13th and 14th Streets, right around 

the corner from my job now. 

The theater isn’t there anymore, 

though at first I read the address 

wrong and thought of another 

theater I have loved a block 

further south, where I’ve stolen 

blue slushies after spending 

afternoons beneath well-funded 

disasters. I’d look out the tall 

windows of the vacant second 

floor lobby, not yet ready to 

leave, thinking about people 

and what people might think 

about me, snow falling on parked

cars, trash bags tripping aimless 

pedestrians. Variety, which operated 

from 1897-2004, was demolished after 

its closure, replaced by a glass highrise 

where life, which once had so richly stained 

the seats, is now unimaginable. In 1984, 

a year before Variety’s general release, 

a writer for Bright Lights Film Journal 

described visiting the theater and finding 

the film playing upside down, which 

no one in the audience appeared to mind, 

searching and stirring around in the dark 

from their seats to the lobby to 

the bathroom, which was located 

at the front of the theater behind 

the screen. Upside down the movie 

rolled on, flesh-filled and weightless.

The journalist said the walls were nothing 

special, but the ceiling was covered 

in a beautifully patterned tin that had 

somehow lasted all the years as glittering 

teeth in the dark. He called it a time 

capsule. If movies are attempts 

to freeze moments, transforming 

events into repeatable, rearrangeable 

units, then shouldn’t their palaces also 

take part in this pursuit? All such efforts 

are doomed. I wonder what kind of candy 

the workers sold at porn theaters to make 

the day more sweet, already good as night. 

In Variety the movie, there is a soda fountain, 

but no candy I can recall. Once in youth

a boy poured Diet Coke over his cock so

it would be sweeter when I sucked it. I was 

touched by the gesture, if also a bit concerned,

as Coke can be corrosive, but it wasn’t there 

for long. Eventually everyone needs 

a woman to appear at a distance and 

burn like science fiction’s distant cities, 

with medical training and the memory 

of six or seven summers on the water, 

draped in silver from the hidden 

filth of icicles, receiving confession 

with a clerk’s disinterest, a stingray 

on the floor of the ocean, dawn’s 

hardest blue, walking backwards

from a station fixed by nothing but 

the firmament of her anger won 

in chaos, to stand in her silence 

like a vandal at the crypt, in love 

with its marble. We follow Christine 

as she becomes increasingly 

embedded in the social world

of the theater, moving around 

the neighboring bars and adult 

bookstores that operate in an economy 

driven primarily by sex work. One habit 

she develops is to narrate pornographic 

scenes in a dispassionate, almost 

trance-like state, to her boyfriend,

Mark, who cannot hang. In one of my 

favorite scenes, they sit in his car,

eating Chinese food with forks 

straight from an assortment of 

paper cartons. They’re talking 

about his job, he’s a journalist 

trying to expose some racketeers 

he’s become obsessed with, enchanted

by the power he perceives as ill-begotten,

power that he longs to dismantle and, 

in so doing, establish new power 

for himself. There are noodles 

on his face. He explains to his 

bored girlfriend that if he has to 

disclose his sources, that will be 

a whole other story, and Christine repeats 

the phrase, “other story, other story,” slow 

as if she’s trying to read a water-damaged sign 

from across a dark room. “Other story, other

other story, stories, stories, smooth story,

smooth skin,” until eventually the story 

becomes a black slip on a woman’s body 

as she paces before a man in an armchair,

stroking his cock. She gets on her knees, 

she kisses him, she pushes him away. 

She pulls up her slip, she’s down on 

all fours, the fabric brushes her breasts 

as she breathes. Christine describes 

her shoes, her ass, the way she opens 

up. Kathy Acker wrote Variety’s script,

based on a story by Bette Gordon, and 

in the porn monologues in particular

you can really feel her. Christine’s boyfriend, 

dejected, stares into lo mein, until he can’t

take it anymore, he asks if she’s okay. 

She looks confused, “I’m just trying 

to tell you about my life.” She wants 

to be a writer, she’s in her boyfriend’s 

parked car, writing her life. It’s interesting,

one big critique of the movie at the time

was that it didn’t have enough sex in it, 

it wasn’t pornographic enough, it was a tease.

This betrays the underlying assumption 

that porn has to be visual, something you 

watch, and so all the scenes where Christine 

narrates erotic encounters are just,

what? Not pornography, or worse,

unsatisfying pornography. It’s funny

to me these critics don’t recognize

their twin in Mark, sitting there 

useless, unwilling or unable to 

receive what Christine is offering.

Sometimes I wonder if I even like writing, 

it’s so difficult, and so rarely do I say what 

I mean, but then what’s likable about

anything under the patriarchy. Leo Bersani 

writes that most people don’t really like sex, 

even if they still feel the need to have it. 

Bersani was making this argument from 

the same deadly 80s as Variety, in an 

essay examining the anti-sex rhetoric 

of the conservative Right, gleeful

conductors of the mass death of the AIDs crisis, 

shaking their heads on television as they talked 

and didn’t talk about anal sex, and also of

the radical feminists of that era, in fervent 

crusade against pornography, which to them 

was the same as rape, a category under which, 

according to their logic of domination, all 

fucking fell, as all fucking remained subject 

to the tyranny of penetration, its absolute power 

turning any cavity into a vacuum, a void.

Of these feminists, Bersani writes, 

Their indictment of sex—their refusal 
to prettify it, to romanticize it, to maintain 
that fucking has anything to do with 
community or love—has had the 
immensely desirable effect of publicizing,
of lucidly laying out for us, the inestimable
value of sex—at least in certain of its
ineradicable aspects—anticommunal,
antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.

The problem, according to Bersani, is not 

that the self is fucked into annihilation, 

nor is it the loss of self-control, of power 

over the self and the world beyond the self. 

Instead, what needs to be challenged is the 

inherent devaluing of powerlessness

on which rests this anti-sex argument. 

Let fucking be nonteleological, but if it 

must be towards something, then let it be

nothing, not reproduction, not even 

orgasm, but the temporary abdication 

of the numb despotism of being anyone 

at all. 

Laura’s Desires is Laura Henriksen’s first book. She lives in Sunset Park, Lenapehoking, teaches writing at Pratt Institute, and works as the Program Director of The Poetry Project.