When I lived in Calgary, there was a Bettie Page themed store and I used to bus by it everyday. I finally set my foot in the store one day, and it was full of black and red, Bettie Page-esque clothing and accessories, fetish and feminist fridge magnets. Not surprisingly, the store was manned (or womanned) by girls with jet black hair and trademark bangs that study theatre or women’s studies or something of that sort. It was a mix of the innocent (polka dots and cartoon depictions) and the slightly subversive (masks, corsets). It felt like an enclosed capsule of art and history that was completely detached from the city and the time.
On the weekend, news came that Bettie Page is dying from a heart attack. I felt compelled to look her up again. In a Salon film review of the 2006 feature, the following was said:
Bettie Page’s spirit transcends traditional feminist ideology, cutting straight past perceived ideas of how women should or shouldn’t pander to men’s sexual appetites. Her pictures are so elemental, so lacking in guile, that they often seem to be less “about” sex than about a pure state of being — maybe even a state of grace. No wonder Page, even long after she left modeling and became deeply religious, never denounced her past. Mol’s Bettie explains, “I’m not ashamed. Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden. When they sinned, they put on clothes.”
Susan Bright’s interview with the director of the Bettie Page movie was also particularly interesting:
SB: When I first was introduced to Bettie, it was within the milieu of gay life, the counter-culture that existed in San Francisco and New York. She was like the post-AIDS pin-up girl, a little ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak period.
It was the same time when bondage and fetish were entering fashion trends, again fueled by gay and punk culture. What do you make of such an unusual rebirth?
MH: It’s interesting that gay men and young women have been the twin engines of the Bettie cult. I wonder if her original gay cult had something to do with the ironies inherent in her image, as well as her innate fabulousness as an image.
The Bettie bondage shots are filled with contradiction: her sunny smiles and cheesecake poses are at variance with the pictures’ supposed message of dark S&M.
She was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up. And there is a camp element in the Bettie catalog: the bondage shots next to homely wallpaper and living room furniture in the Klaw pictures, the leopards with leopard-skin bathing suits in the Bunny Yeager shots.
Here’s the movie trailer of the 2006 feature film, “The Notorious Bettie Page”, bringing her alive for all to see and appreciate.
source: suziebright, Salon
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