Viewers follow Penelope as she searches for romance, at the same time that Virginia is searching for sex and fame.Īt the height of her celebrity, Penelope goes to a restaurant with her mother (who has with alarming alacrity set aside her concerns for her daughter once she realizes how profitable Virginia’s fame can be) and Dr Pearl and is quickly surrounded by fans. These tableaux are linked only by the central premise, and are occasionally punctuated by musical routines featuring songs such as ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ and ‘Cock a Doodle Do’.
#CHATTERBOX MOVIE 1977 SERIES#
Penelope seeks psychiatric help from a Dr Pearl who later becomes Virginia’s manager and the film, in a structure reminiscent of the porn features DeSimone also directed, unfolds as a series of vignettes.
‘Madam’, the poster asks, ‘how would you react if your “you-know-what” suddenly began to talk and sing?’ Penelope, star – or, crucially, as we shall see, co-star – of Chatterbox, is a self-effacing, socially naïve hairdresser whose vagina – later named ‘Virginia’ – does suddenly begin to talk and sing. ‘It speaks for itself!’ the poster exclaims, asking: ‘she talks with her what?’ The Belgian version of the film poster is even more explicit in that it dispenses with Penelope’s head and torso altogether, leaving instead a pair of stockinged legs balancing that lipsticked open mouth, the ages-old equivalence of lips and labia being quite clear. From her crotch comes a speech bubble which tells us that this is going to be ‘the story of a woman who has a hilarious way of expressing herself’, and that audiences will ‘roar when she sits down to talk!’ Above her is the movie’s title, the ‘o’ of Chatterbox being made up of a woman’s heavily lipsticked open mouth. The movie’s aesthetic is less Breughel or Bosch, then, than Benny Hill, and the US poster makes quite clear the ‘Exploitation’ genre to which the film belongs: a woman (we later find out that she’s the film’s protagonist, Penelope) is dressed in a bikini and heels, her right leg drawn up in a pose which could be read as provocative or self-defensive. The issues to which Chatterbox gives rise are important, focusing as they do on a particular ‘crisis’ of female identity which was articulated by second-wave feminists, and which motivated so many of the writers and artists I’m considering in this book.
#CHATTERBOX MOVIE 1977 .EXE#
While Breillat and Von Trier depicted menacing facets of a radical crisis of selfhood, with women’s genitals at its core, DeSimone’s 1977 film Chatterbox is, in its low-budget, kitsch approach, less intense and is not as much of an explicit take on themes which had been explored in Claude Mulot’s earlier porn movie Le Sexe qui Parle (Pussy Talk, 1975).
In the 1990s, DeSimone moved into television work, directing the soap opera Acapulco Bay. He made several gay porn movies under the pseudonym of Lancer Brooks (How to Make a Homo Movie (1970)), and has had artistic forays into the camp horror genre, such as 1973’s Sons of Satan which features a gang of satanic homosexual vampires.
The film’s director, Tom DeSimone, spent much of the 1970s working in the Exploitation/porn margins of the American film industry. What might the great 1970s feminists Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan have in common with a little-known cult movie in which a woman’s vagina suddenly develops a voice and embarks on a singing career? Chatterbox, a 1970s Sexploitation movie, plays with ideas of nonunitary selfhood, and examines issues of silence, sexual identity and social participation, while charting the protagonist’s desperate attempts to assimilate her ‘body-self’. Excerpted from The Vagina: A literary and cultural history
0 kommentar(er)
