You probably know of Wanda through the Criterion Collection hailing it as a forgotten masterpiece, ever present on the Channel whether it be on its own or in their trove of female filmmaker collections. I didn't think much of it initially, but the clumsy, eager-to-please yet totally scatterbrained main character made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t help but remain unsettled by this story of a woman who doesn’t know what she wants floating around, narrowly escaping destruction at every turn. This year has been pretty formative for me, and as I began exploring my past, I began to understand why this movie couldn’t leave my mind.
Wanda is about someone who is entirely checked out of life. It reminded me that when you’re drifting, you can really drift forever and crush your desire down into nothing. I’ve come close to this many times in my life, completely dissociated and unwilling to confront myself, hence why I was so unsettled. Wanda wants to be accepted, but is slow and easily confused. She’s pretty much impossible to get a read on because she doesn’t seem to know herself or her actions. Worse yet, she is unsympathetic in her misery because she doesn’t even know she’s miserable. Although on its face, the movie is about Wanda tagging along with a bank robber who bosses her around, nobody actually forces her to do anything. She abandons her husband and kids for no apparent reason, and by her own admission was neither a good wife or mother. She gets slapped around and ditched at an ice cream shop after a one-night stand, but reacts so passively that my response was not actually despair but respect for her cockroach-like stamina. Again: she is a person characterized as a total loser and failure, but not in any way that elicits pity. It’s unsentimental and not particularly fun to watch, but is ultimately a sobering reminder of what life can be like if you decide to abandon all presence of mind.
I was so interested in this filmmaker who seemed to understand what it’s like to be totally, pitilessly adrift in the universe that I spent a week or so tracking down every single interview of her I could, and I was surprised at what I found. Wanda was her first and only movie. She lashes out at Pauline Kael, who hated her movie for being about a “dumb slut”. And most interestingly, she constantly challenges the idea posed to her by interviewers that she was in a unique position as a female filmmaker. When Dick Cavett praises the making of the movie as a sign that “things are getting better for women”, Loden is quick to talk about how being a woman actually helped her in the process of getting funding for a film, even in the 60s! In this talk, she even refutes the idea that this movie is about the female experience, saying, “I spent a lot of time wandering around...I think a lot of people are that way, not just women but men too…they have no reason to exist. They’re not aware of their condition, of the situation they’re in”.
I felt a sense of kinship with this woman who lived an early life of total dissociation and confusion, and matured into someone who decided to take responsibility for her actions through self-expression in art. While I deeply identified with Loden and this story, I wanted to know what modern critics thought of it, because at the time of its release, critics hated it for depicting a woman as weak and unsympathetic. I ended up being extremely frustrated. According to writers of today, the complex woman I saw’s passivity “can be seen as a radical indictment of the multitudinous and infinitesimal ways that women every day are forced to subjugate and deny their personhood”. Film critics in the 70s who hated the main character’s docility “could not perceive the ways in which the film, and Loden’s performance in it, illuminated Wanda’s humanity and that of most women all over the world, who have internalized the misogyny of family, church, and state so thoroughly that they are not able to conceive of a way to fight back”. This isn’t the movie I saw, or the movie Loden claimed she made.
Being forced to subjugate and deny your personhood is not a feminine trait. There’s no indication that Wanda is a victim of anything in the film other than the simple fact that she’s a woman. I’m not being obtuse, though — I understand why this movie is seen as feminist. Wanda’s passivity elicits a strong reaction, and she stumbles across a bunch of men who she tries to please who don’t care about her, but to completely deny the character as anything other than a suffering victim of patriarchy is asinine. I’ve never been an auteurist, but for people to write this pablum without watching interviews with Loden herself, who fights this very idea, is downright offensive to filmmakers everywhere. It’s so bizarre to me that we all champion complex female characters, but only within this very narrow and insulting band of potential, where their behavior must be easily reduced to a political statement - as a victim of patriarchy. Our times are defined by the belief that we construct our own realities, yet the more we think we can do this, the more we all seem to be boxed in by the same tired narratives. It’s a shame that Wanda has been completely misunderstood by critics since its release, first because 2nd wave feminists couldn’t fathom the empowering purpose of a weak female character, and now because modern feminists think movies made by women aren’t allowed to be anything but a grand statement on the female experience.
The movie confounds me and everyone else because it’s about someone becoming nothing. The idea that someone can choose to lose and be a victim of her own inadequacy is extremely empowering to me because it is an image of my past reality. The fact that there are still systemic and cultural forces actively working against women all over the world, and that women can and should make movies about this, is so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be said, but I’ll say it anyways. All I know is that when I look at my life, acknowledge the harm done to me, and more importantly acknowledge my acceptance, dissociation, and any complicity in this harm, I feel a lot better. This movie was made for people capable of doing that. Wanda is a masterpiece because it shows how the mind imprisons itself. Wanda is a masterpiece because unlike any film I’ve seen before, it acknowledges that there is empowerment in acknowledging your own role in your destruction.
If you’re interested in what I’m saying, check these out:
"I Am Wanda", a documentary about Loden made shortly before her death
Barbara Loden on The Dick Cavett Show
Marguerite Duras and Elia Kazan's 1980 conversation on the film
The modern criticism I reference: Wanda: Film from the Future, Wanda: A Miracle