Observance
Wandering thoughts about Wanda
I keep thinking about the movie Wanda, which I saw at the Paradise in October. So … this newsletter is just about that.
The 1971 film was the only one writer and director Barbara Loden ever successfully made. She both directed and starred, which I kept thinking about while watching. The camera is trained on Loden’s face so carefully, almost lovingly. A kind of gaze not often brought to film; obsessive but not leering, intimate but not revealing. The hard set of her mouth and the lines on her face in contrast to her delicate girlishness. She is enigmatic but just accessible enough to fall in love with her.
I suppose this kind of self-observance was possible for Loden within the psychological removal of acting—she is not actually Wanda. But thrumming under the surface of the movie is some kind of deep connection between her own personality and the story that inspired it.
Natalie Léger’s beautiful book on the subject notes that the film’s script was inspired by a news item Loden read, about a woman who was arrested after bungling a bank robbery in which her counterpart was killed by police. She was meant to be the getaway driver, but she got lost and pulled up to the bank too late; police were already swarming, her partner in crime already dead.
Léger writes that Loden was fascinated by what the woman said at her sentencing: she thanked the judge for sending her to prison. What kind of life would lead up to a gratitude for being locked behind bars?
Wanda is the imagined prelude to that moment. The details of the robbery are close to what was reported in the news, but the backstory is invented. And there springs Wanda, a drifting character, down on her luck, having abandoned a secure kind of life for reasons that, although unclear, seem valid. She feels worthless, but she’s not exactly depressed. She takes a childlike joy in, for instance, sopping up the extra pasta sauce on her plate. When her hardened-criminal travelling companion tells her to go buy a hat and a dress and look presentable, she comes back with a hat so feminine as to be childishly goofy. She has an awe about the world, if not a respect for it.
So—and sorry to spoil Wanda—why, in the end of the movie, does she not get sent to jail, as the ‘real’ person, the source inspiration, did? Instead, Loden has her continue to drift, to come upon yet someone new who invites her in. But she’s not really in. In the final scene, she is seated at a roadhouse table with a crowd of people, all drinking, laughing, talking—she’s been enveloped by their little community but she is not engaging, exactly. The camera watches her worried, stony face. She lights a cigarette. It seems she can never access society. Do all things pass through her? Is she trapped or transcendent?
It’s unclear to me whether this ambiguous ending should be read as hopeless or hopeful. Either way, it feels as thought it’s captured a record of something elusive.
Loden herself felt impermanent, unreal, Léger reports. Her work was, more often than not, not produced. She began her career as a model, her likeness appearing in print, but then again, that wasn't her exactly. She married a famous man, and she died young, overshadowed in every direction. I suppose that knowledge adds to Wanda’s air of melancholy.
The ending of the movie reminds me of another favourite movie ending, Nashville, which I can never decide about: is it cynical or pure?
Or a secret third thing? Maybe Wanda is a kind of dark hope, the precise embodiment of negative capability.
When Keats coined the phrase, he said to be a great thinker, an artist, was to be capable of uncertainty, to not suffer “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This is a space I crave in art lately, especially as these days reason feels so exhausted. Understanding seems futile when the news is surreal and logic abandoned.
I am reading Canisia Lubrin’s The World After Rain, and a line keeps echoing:
time begins motherlike / into the plain cold season
The seasons are changing again and I suppose this is the time of year I start thinking about ritual, when the trees and lights go up and I start to repeat what I did last year. There’s an image in the Margaret Atwood novel Cat’s Eye of the past as a series of transparencies laid on top of one another, so that looking back in time is to look back through it, all memories stacked on top of each other like animation cells. Here I pull out the same Christmas ornaments and hook them around the plastic branches of the same tree, a different person and also the same as every other time.
I think of Wanda and her wide-eyed silence. We don’t have access to her thoughts. We are her observers, but she is also observing, eyes reflecting back into our own, as we each try to take something from the other.👁️
Stray thoughts from the changing of the seasons
I can’t stop listening to Lily Allen’s West End Girl. It’s so perfect. And now David Harbour is, parasocially, my mortal enemy.
🍃
We went to Ohio in October and I did my annual fall pilgrimage to Yankee Candle, which I am unaccountably obsessed with. Our apartment now smells like a Christmas tree at all times! Unfortunately they discontinued my favourite mysterious scent, ‘Smoked Cashmere,’ maybe because it sounds as though it would smell like a burnt sweater. Everyone working there was wearing Halloween cat ears and they gave me a special discount for being from Canada and my mother-in-law a free candle for her birthday. I love that place.
🍂
After extensive sampling, I have created a definitive ranking of Ontario-brewed pumpkin beers:
High Park Brewery Pumpkin Spice Latte
Flying Monkeys’ Paranormal Pumpkin Imperial Ale
Great Lakes Brewery Pumpkin Ale
Refined Fool Satan’s Pillowcase Pumpkin Beer
Bobcaygeon Brewing Pumpkin Pie-PA
Small Pony Barrel Works SMUV pumpkin
I will not be taking questions at this time, thank you.
🌨️
A couple years ago I knit a sweater out of a two-strand of merino and mohair and it looks really nice but the mohair made is so bulky and warm that I can only wear it when it’s cold enough to need the warmth but not cold enough to need a jacket on top, because it’s too big to fit under a jacket. So basically, I can wear it in November. Goodbye sweater I can only wear in November, we had a good run. See you next year.
I hope your 2025 is ending well and that you’re ready to move into winter. Recommendations for quiet 1970s movies and winter rituals always welcome.❄️