Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Haven't been sleeping so I can't come up with anything cleverer for the title
Hello friends and enemies,
We are verging on two thirds of the way through Martin Scorsese’s filmography. Now that we’re here, I sort of regret not saving all of my favorite films for the end. I specifically told myself I would reserve my top two for my last two, but otherwise, I wouldn’t follow any restrictions. But as we get toward the end, it’s a little bit like, I’ve already written about The Last Temptation of Christ and Casino, now I have to write about Gangs of New York and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore?
Which is not to denigrate the film, it’s a great movie, one I’ve seen many times. But in a project of excavating my relationship to the filmography of my favorite filmmaker, it’s not one of the nearest and dearest to my heart, and it’s not particularly close to what gets at the heart of Martin Scorsese. It’s not one that keeps me up at night thinking about What It Means For Cinema.
But we are here and (Mary Tyler Moore in Flirting with Disaster voice) yes, we’re going to talk about it. And we’ll go back to what was originally the mandate of this project, that I completely abandoned: this movie is really gay. All of the men seem gay. All of the women seem gay. There’s a Wizard of Oz-inspired sequence which opens the film.
We might as well start there. Instead of Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s sepia-tinted farm, Alice opens with a red-tinted fantasy, the titular Alice remembering (idealizing) her childhood in Monterey, CA. Then we slam into the real world—it’s the mid-70s, there’s rock n roll, and life is hard! Alice (Ellen Burstyn, in an Oscar-winning role) is in a loveless marriage to a man who abuses her. Pretty quickly, he dies in a workplace accident (yay!) but oh no! Alice has to support herself and her son now. So she decides to do what any sensible woman would do: get a job as a singer in a bar, and work her way back to her hometown of Monterey.
Ellen Burstyn cannot sing. It’s low-key incredible how bad she is. (Barbra Streisand was offered the role first and she said her fans wouldn’t believe she’s a struggling singer—true…) Despite this, Alice is able to wrangle her first lounge singer job! And we think, yay! She’s done it. But then she starts seeing Ben (Harvey Keitel), one of Scorsese’s classic early maladjusted male types, a pre-Travis-Bickle Travis Bickle. Ben is already married, it turns out, and when his wife finds out about Alice, he beats them both up. And yet, there is something a little queer about him, a little fey, as with most Scorsese macho men… He is covering up an inadequacy.
So Alice has to flee that town and gets a job as a waitress in another. She has to put bread on the table. Here she meets Flo (Diane Ladd—yay!) and at first Alice doesn’t like her. She’s vulgar and loud. But Alice soon learns, maybe that’s exactly the energy she needs in her life. Almost all of the film is handheld, or at least moving on a dolly track, a visual approximation of the chaos in Alice’s soul, and one of the only peaceful, static shots in the film is the beautiful shot of Alice and Flo sunbathing behind the diner, finally having become great friends, before having to go back in to work, enjoying lesbian bliss.
Much like the Gilmore Girls, Alice and her son, Tommy, have a codependent, meeting-of-equals relationship, instead of a traditional child/caregiver relationship. A relationship that proves that nurture and not nature creates gay men. And that’s so fun! She just leaves him in these tiny motel rooms for hours so she can work, or find work. She has impulse issues with her son in a way that is low-key troubling—splashing soda in his face and letting it escalate to a whole water fight thing, pulling over on a drive home and kicking him out of the car and leaving without him.
So all of this makes Tommy gay, it’s quite clear. His one friend, whom Alice refers to as his girlfriend, is Jodie Foster, already a confident and powerful lesbian at age 12. Just butch as hell yet terrifyingly regal.
The film progresses and we wonder, is Alice going to make it to Monterey ever? Is she going to make it as a singer? What starts as a complex movie about a real woman with real problems devolves into something quite straightforward due to studio exec notes, which is a real shame. It could have been quite something. I’m not going to talk about Kris Kristofferson because he is a nonentity in this to me. Who gives a fuck.
Scorsese took this job more or less to prove that he could be a director for hire, that he could deliver something from a script he didn’t write and that it would be as Mean Streets. It certainly doesn’t reach that level, but it was an important step in legitimizing his career, to the world, and to himself.
Hi! I can comment from my perspective as someone who was 18 in 1974 when this movie came out. I would urge you to consider the historical context of that time.
Second-wave feminism was peaking. Laws were changing with respect to women's financial independence, there was a huge 1973 National Women's Conference, and women were well on their way toward reconsidering the sexual revolution in all its aspects. In Hollywood during this period, we had "An Unmarried Woman," "The Turning Point," "Starting Over," "Norma Rae," "Girlfriends," and many other films which attempted to grapple with the changing social and economic condition of modern women. "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" must be considered in that context.
I'm sure you meant your comment about "All the men" being gay as a joke. Kris Kristofferson's character in this film, relatively gentle, is intentionally meant to counter stereotypes about men and suggest whan an alternative might look like. He's not perfect by any means; in fact, the first thing he says in the movie is a request for Ellen Burstyn's character to smile -- and I'm sure you know how women in the 21st century feel about that particular request.
Look at it this way -- back then, everyone was learning, tryping hard to seek out new ways of being and relating, and sometimes this meant a certain earnestness that doesn't necessarily play as smoothly today, 50 years later. As for whether or not she can sing -- you're right, she isn't very good. It's part of her delusion about how she might remake her life, but it's also something she can hold onto as belonging to her alone, and that's key to her character.