‘The intense desire – and the fulfilment of that desire – experienced through looking.’ – “Scopophilia,” as defined by the artist Nan Goldin.

In a July 2023 interview with the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine — ‘Entering the forbidden zone: Bette Gordon’s Variety at 40′ by Rachel Pronger — Variety’s director Bette Gordon said, “When you move to New York, one of the first things your family says is, ‘Don’t ever go out alone at night. But of course all I did was go out alone at night!” It was during this time, as a new resident of the city, that Gordon stumbled across the Variety, a dilapidated vaudeville theatre turned porn cinema. She was immediately transfixed, reminiscing: “Its neon marquee [was] right out of the past, right out of a movie. It looked delicious,” she said. “I couldn’t stop looking, the lights. It was like candy, it was just calling me.”

In her landmark text, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ the film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote, ‘It’s the place of the look that defines cinema. The possibility of varying it, exposing it.” Mulvey’s explicitly feminist and groundbreaking thesis provoked enduring discussions about how women are presented and perceived – or looked at – in the arts. Using psychoanalysis and Freudian theory, Mulvey notes that the traditional on-screen gaze positions ‘woman as object, man as bearer of the look.’

As soon as she started making films, Gordon became obsessed with what she described as “the seduction of the image.” In her 2011 article for Artforum titled ‘Look Both Ways’: Amy Taubin on Bette Gordon, the critic and writer Taubin writes, ‘Bette Gordon’s films have always put women first. The sense of adventure in Gordon’s movies springs from her depiction of women’s psyches and bodies, desires and fears.’

Gordon began making short films in the mid-1970s in the Midwestern United States, all experimental works dealing with movement through place, sexuality, culture, and structure. Although her early work was more in line with structuralist filmmaking, she soon became involved with issues combining film and feminism, and rather than pander to the voyeurism of the male gaze, Gordon, as Taubin writes, ‘insisted on training her camera on women, often unclothed.’ She continues, ‘Gordon realised that the problem of the objectification of women in film has less to do with the display of the body than with who has control of the narrative—of the desire that motors it and of how that desire is resolved, or left as an opening into the unknown. She also understood, psychologically and pragmatically, that for a woman to become a filmmaker or to simply enjoy movies, she had to take pleasure in her own voyeurism.’

As Gordon told Sight & Sound. Variety is ‘a story about looking.’ The film centres on Christine, a young Midwestern woman (played by Sandy McLeod), who finds liberation working at a New York City pornographic theatre and becomes increasingly obsessed with a patron who is potentially involved with organised crime.

Based on a (loosely autobiographical) story by Gordon, Variety boasts a screenplay by Kathy Acker, a dynamic writer associated with and influenced by the New York Punk Scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Acker was at the forefront of postmodernism before postmodernism was popular and heavily influenced by experimental writers, including William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras, formulating a body of work combining cut-ups of passages and pastiche alongside biography, power, sex and violence.

Variety co-stars the photographer, activist, and the 2023 most influential art figure of the year recipient, Nan Goldin, as Christine’s friend Nan. The Tin Pan Alley bar where Nan works on screen was the Bowery bar where Goldin worked at the time, and which featured alongside the bar’s regulars – friends and sex workers – in her renowned photographic Slide Show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Goldin also documented the film via various gorgeous on-set images. 

Gordon has described Variety as a “part-document, part-narrative, part-desire-filled-landscape of New York at that moment in time”. A Hitchcock fan, Gordon presents Variety as an inverted noir, drawing inspiration from Vertigo (1958) and the idea of what would have transpired if Kim Novak had stalked James Stewart: woman as ‘Investigator’, man as ‘Enigma’. As Gordon reflects, ‘With Variety, I said, let me see if I can have the female as subject. [Christine] transgresses the limits of the situation. She’s the voyeur.’

Variety is a presentation of politics, cinephilia, art, and feminism. The film claims the gaze while disrupting the boundaries of male and female spaces. Early in the movie, while on break, Christine sneaks into the cinema at Variety, as equally fascinated by the men in the theatre as she is by the women – and images – on the cinema’s screen. As Christine’s obsession increases so does her confidence, and she starts boldly entering traditionally thought-of ‘male-dominated spaces’ or once ‘off-limits’ to women: a baseball game, a sex shop, a nocturnal market, all places where ‘man’s business’ is done. 

As an independent art film, and to contrast so much Hollywood mainstream fare or even the porn watched by Christine in the film, Gordon refuses to offer narrative catharsis and tie the ending in a neat bow. While contentious to some audience members who seek closure before the end credits roll, Gordon admits, ‘the ending didn’t offer what the audience wanted,’ and is keen to stress curiosity and the grey area — or “empty space” — of desire. Susanna Moore’s book In the Cut also does this very well. Moore’s 1995 book, adapted for the screen by Jane Campion in 2003 (Campion also directed the film), has a divisive ending that differed drastically from the book. Still, fundamentally, it is another crucial New York film about, among various things, women’s desire, sexual power, and risk.

Yet this “empty space,” this ambiguity, is part of Variety’s enduring appeal, prompting discussions, interpretations, and evolving opinions that only occur over time and with the audience’s shifting perceptions. Gordon told Sight & Sound that recent audiences, whether watching the film for the first time or due to their evolving politics over the years, appear increasingly receptive to the film’s provocations. As Gordon said, ‘For me, I want to enter the forbidden zone. Variety forces the spectator, the viewer, to recognise [their] own complicity, [their] own voyeurism… I don’t want to suppress the imagination. And maybe Variety is open to the imagination.’

*Film introduction for at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, January 6 2024.