230 3 Women

[Rayon Vert]

This says it all. (NSFW?)

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[colinr0380]

3 Women is also about roles, but I think its surrealism-in-reality succeeds...

It makes sense that, after all this shifting around in such a short time span, the characters would be left in a kind of indefinable space, adrift. If I decided to go away and isolate in the mountains for a few months, I'd blend with my cognitive part and probably go a bit crazy, or at best I'd start seeing myself a certain way based on limited resources to advance or expand that definition of self. These women already have very few resources they can rely upon. Certainly not men, institutions, or most of their peers... they only really attempt genuine depth in intimacy with one another (or, perhaps, only get the opportunity to really develop that intimacy, since everyone else rejects them close to the beginning stage). But even then, there's a competitive spirit that comes out, an impulse to play a role in friction with one another.

There's a nice ambiguity here: I don't necessarily think this caustic pattern emerges or progresses because they're destined to experience dysphoria due to relentless social comparison in the presence of a homogenous demographic a la Sartre's No Exit, though that's certainly one tragic reading. Another is that they wind up in a kind of Sisyphean catatonia, their identities withering as they try on new roles repeatedly, with no comfortable clothes fitting to cultivate a vital foundation to ground them while they experience all of life's ceaseless traumas. But there's also the reading that - much like children engage in these games of dominance and submission in play - these women are only comfortable around one another, and so this is the 'safe' way/place to do what they need to do: try out different roles, and form identities -even if impermanent is the best they can do- in response to the people they trust to do so against.

That was a great post therewillbeblus, and suddenly clarified for me how 3 Women fits in with the Altman ensemble films, as those are also about rather isolated (and often self-selected) disparate groups of people gathered together around one particular unifying interest (a political rally/music festival; a wedding; a country house weekend; the Hollywood film world; a certain geographical area of Los Angeles; the fashion world; a murder-mystery; the Army hospital). Many of the characters are not in those situations by choice but there is a mix between people who are at home in the situation and are facing a bunch of 'interlopers' into their world (i.e. Willie); those who have to be there for the purpose of simply existing and doing a job (i.e. Millie); and those who, much like the audience for the film, are there for a short time for the course of a particular event that the film is focused on that ties everyone together in having to respond to their unpredictable responses (i.e. Pinky).

And in those situations the characters are moving between different roles as they move through different spheres and interact with other members of the ensemble cast. Say the contrast between on stage and amateur performance in Nashville (where the amateur eventually 'usurps' the professional singer through circumstance). Or the Gosford Park upstairs-downstairs dynamics (which gets blown through by the Stephen Fry investigator character as the Pinky figure who can go everywhere). There's the world, the people in it, and how its structure gets punctured through 'transgressive' actions (or basic rules of drama!) that reveal some of the psychological underpinnings of the societal structures in which they are operating.

Which also usually, as Rayon Vert has pointed up, results in the production of blunt pieces of art (or a film, concert, or fashion show) as a consequence of all the drama going on as some of the more artistic characters struggle to attempt to express and understand their feelings.