America, as told by Cinema #2: 'Wanda'
Barbara Loden's only directorial effort is quiet poetry on the physical independence and intellectual subordination of women in the United States.
For the second installment of America, as told by Cinema we’re going to talk about Wanda (1970), Barabara Loden’s subtle independent masterpiece. Each week I will write about one movie that perfectly encapsulates the American experience in some way, regardless of scope or intent. You can follow the Letterboxd list I’m working off of here. Feel free to suggest more movies— there’s a lot I have yet to see, surely!
Barbara Loden’s Wanda is an underappreciated meditation on the American experience in more ways than one. Released in 1970 at the Venice Film Festival to little fanfare and mixed reviews, Loden’s only feature-length directorial effort underwent critical reappraisal in the 21st century on the heels of restorations and a re-release in theaters; it is now considered somewhat of a cult classic. The titular role, played by the writer-director, is a fractured yet personal reflection of her own life told through the lens of a working class woman. Both Wanda the character and Loden herself are equally important, though, in telling the story of womanhood in modern America.
The Movie
Wanda was shot on 16mm film stock with a skeleton crew of only four people and a budget of $100,000. Loden turned these limitations into the movie’s chief strength, though, with cinematography that is shot to look like a low-budget documentary and a loose adherence to the original script. It’s heavily influenced in form by Andy Warhol’s experimental films of the era, but in content it follows a more direct narrative and portrays poignant themes Warhol never dared to touch.
The whole movie takes place up and down the Appalachian Mountains, starting in Pennsylvania and ending in North Carolina, and the setting is as much a character as the actors themselves. Wanda Goronski is a poor girl from eastern Pennsylvania coal country, dissatisfied with her life. The things expected of her as a 1960s housewife— parenthood, domesticity and inexorably mundane conversations with neighbor wives— seem to Wanda meaningless and vapid, so she throws it all away, abandoning her family in search of some inexplicable greater truth. She skips town and hitches a ride with a “Mr. Dennis,” who turns out to be an abusive small-time criminal whose limited life perspective leads him to rob dive bars and dream of robbing banks, a man who lives on the lam in the name of what he believes is personal freedom. To those of us born and raised on the internet, it’s hard to grasp the idea that someone’s worldview could be this small. People today in the smallest crevasses of the world are exposed to big things— and their dreams follow suit— but back then we were an insular people. Nestled in blue collar mountain towns, one’s dreams could only get as big as they knew was possible.
Wanda and Mr. Dennis amble across the American countryside for most of the movie’s runtime and Loden fills our hearts and minds with long, establishing shots of grayscale coal mines; verdant tree-lined highways; and a bug-sized Wanda meandering through massive and inhuman industrial landscapes, destination nowhere. Their trip together ends abruptly when Mr. Dennis dies by police in a failed bank robbery; but that’s not the end of Wanda’s story. She continues on, avoiding danger where she can, still searching for something greater than herself, toeing the line between dependency on and freedom from men who want to control her. The film’s last scene, when she stumbles into a roadhouse and is taken in and given free alcohol and cigarettes, tells us that she’s still not at her destination yet, whatever that may be. In truth, maybe there is no destination, no ideal that she will ever reach; maybe the journey is the main event. What Wanda was searching for the whole movie was already happening to her.
“There is no such glory in the tavern as upon the road thereto.” - Cormac McCarthy
As the movie fades to black, the sound of laughter and clanking of beer glasses in the roadhouse is drowned out by the ripping radiance of woozy and imperfect bluegrass music, and we are left with only the imprint of such a fierce woman in our hearts and souls. She’s at once tenderly helpless and spiritually indomitable, constantly wavering between the support of men in her life and bravely forging her own path in the face of a world that wasn’t made for her and doesn’t understand her.
A film feminist in its very nature, Wanda the character is not a feminist but an antihero with baggage and a streak of selfishness. Barbara Loden contested with this movie that if men can have divisive protagonists with questionable ethics, women can too. Wanda is portrayed with sympathy and soul, to be sure, regardless of her material decisions. She takes agency of her own life, even if it’s all funded by the men around her. There is a flame in her heart that cannot be extinguished by such trivial and material occurrences like death and arrest and abandonment. Her soul is grander than anything measly reality has to offer. There’s a moving power in her resilience in the face of loss and a drifting aimlessness that’s uniquely American; a psychosomatic, dialectical feminine existence in this country, where you at once have the freedom of physical movement but not mental. Women’s rights are the same as men in a legal sense, maybe, but not in an actionable sense. None the matter: Wanda’s rebellion comes in the form of nonmaterial liberation. The bad things that happen to and around her are secondary to her own spiritual journey, American machinations be damned.
The Woman
Barbara Loden’s life story is as important as the movie itself in contextualizing its place in American culture. Initially a poster child of the American Dream for many girls at the time, Loden ascended the ranks of Hollywood in the most plausible route possible. Born in Appalachia, she left home at 16 for New York, where she became a pin-up girl and a dancer at the Copacabana to pay her way through acting classes. Within 10 years she became one of Hollywood’s biggest bombshells of the post-Marilyn Monroe era. She even played a fictionalized version of Monroe in legendary director Elia Kazan’s stage production of After the Fall. Kazan would go on to marry Loden, despite an age gap of 23 years.
Leave home, become a big actress, marry a Hollywood legend. That was the American Dream for a modern woman of the 1950s and 60s— that is, if the story was told by a man. But Loden wouldn’t let her story be told by men ad infinitum.
Kazan could’ve easily helped Loden get financing for a film— she’d always wanted to direct a movie— but scared of losing control of his young wife, he was not very supportive. When inspiration struck and she wrote the script of what would become Wanda, Loden was on her own despite all her connections. Her friend Harry Schuster believed in her vision, though, and financed the film himself with a tiny budget. Thankfully for us, the result was a poignant slice-of-life documentary-style film that waxed poetic about a wandering soul and the American Woman in an exquisite display of lights, mountains, coal, dust, smoke, suffering and catharsis, a semi-autobiographical masterpiece about a woman who knows she must leave but doesn’t know where she must go.
At the time of its release, there were some supporters but far more critics. It wasn’t until later on that the film became recognized as culturally significant. Loden would never direct another film; for the decade following Wanda, she lived and worked in New York City directing plays and teaching acting classes before dying of breast cancer at 48. She never lived to see her film get the respect it deserves. One could argue that it still doesn’t earn its proper due.
But aside from the obvious unfairness and tragedy surrounding the movie and the quietly freewheeling spirit of its main character, everything about Wanda is American and what it means to grow up a downtrodden person in this nation: how can we expect young women to find themselves and adjust to the evil that men do in the shadows a world that isn’t built for them? So many are born, live and die without trying to find themselves or pull away from the expectations our societies levy upon them. Wanda is an imperfect person, but she’s living her truth and exploring herself in a way few are brave enough to undertake themselves. And the movie’s writer and director imbued much of her own exceptionality and indomitable spirit into the movie, using the outlaw motif to tell her own story of liberation, dreams and self-determination. There’s poetry in the mere fact that one of the greatest films of the latter half of the 20th century was a low-budget improvised indie film made by a typecast bombshell married to a giant of Hollywood’s golden age: it was ambitious, risky and bold. It was someone refusing to box themselves into society’s unwritten rules. It was a visual poem about a woman who had to bring her search for greater truth to the people. If you have something to say, it’s important to say it. And in the sunset of the American experiment, history has finally begun to do Barbara Loden justice.