Anatomy of an Anatomy

A BOB FOSSE FILM is a little like a steel fragmentation grenade shiny, precise, and efficient--but not something one wants to get too close to. Some say that Fosse's new film Star 80 is merely a violent update of A Star is Born: pretty, naive young Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway) is discovered working in a Vancouver Dairy Queen by a small-time promoter and pimp, Paul Snider (Eric Roberts). He wines and dines her, wins her away from her mother and younger sister--and gets her into the centerfold of Playboy magazine. Dorothy marries Paul, becomes Playmate of the Year for 1980, and then just as she's beginning a film career and an affair with Director Aram Nicholas (a loosely disguised Peter Bogdanovich, played by Roger Rees) her estranzed husband assaults her, blows her head off, and then turns the gun on himself. A fit subject for Hollywood style moralizing, but Fosse is not reminding us that all that glitters is not gold--the modern bumper sticker message that "Life sucks and then you die" seems more applicable.

Dorothy never has time to make any discoveries about herself and her would: she is merely Snider's sacrificial lovely. Snider does love her, but he also sees an exploitable innocence; she is a property that he can ride our of his world of cars and girls--into a world of faster cars and faster girls. Hugh Hefner (Played with den-mother benevolence by pajama-clad Cliff Robertson) is Snider's Buddha, and the Playboy Mansion his sensualist's nirvana. He impresses Dorothy with his tacky style; he gives her a real two-carat topaz; he escorts her to her senior prom in a ruffled sky-blue tuxedo. Eric Roberts is a brilliantly spoiled and clutching Snider--he has as many wants as a child on Santa's knee. He is overjoyed when Dorothy's talents land them in the Los Angeles fast lane, yet he wants more, and throws petulant tantrums when the power brokers of sleaze take Dorothy over and exclude him from the action. Hefner eventually orders Snider out of his Mansion, telling Dorothy that her husband "has the personality of a pin."

Though Snider is a whining specimen of failed machismo, Fosse makes sure you realize that Snider is oblivious to his own absurdity. Snider sees only his reflected image: he exercises, grooms himself obsessively, and even says "Hello" to himself in different ways, all in front of the mirror. Later in the film, as his narcissism begins to crumble into self-loathing, he even watches himself throw up in the mirror, sneering at his reflection over a predatory mustache. Dorothy might have been able to save some men like this: behind the counter of the Dairy Queen she was just chunky, unaffected, and lovable. But though Mariel Hemingway plays the familiar Mariel Hemingway role very well (just little of me, the naive young movie star). Fosse shows you Dorothy as Snider sees her: the pin-up fantasy with chemically enhanced breasts. When Dorothy is in the room. Saider looks through the camera to see her hotter: when she is away on locations, he builds a photo shrine to her.

Several minutes of the movie are merely stiffs of Dorothy scantily clad, with the whirring sound of camera shutters in the background. Hitcheock used sly tricks to make his audience feel like voyeurs: Fosse flatly hits you with the accusation that there is a little of Snider in all of us, that given a choice between a picture of Dorothy and the real thing, you'll take the snapshot, and make her into an object of your slavering fantasies, judging her only against Playboy's photo ideal of the perfectly formed "girl next door." Many tribal groups refuse to have their pictures taken, believing that the photographer captures the subject's soul along with the image. Fosse implies that you replace Dorothy's soul with her static image, and rebuild her personality with your own dark fantasies.

The problem with Fosse's technique, which is a skillful blend of narrative action, reminiscences about Dorothy and Paul from those who knew them, interviews with Dorothy after she became famous, and blood-drenched flashbacks to the afternoon of the murder, is that you know the ending, and must wait uncomfortably for the violent climax. The acting is uniformly excellent, the camera work unobtrusively effective, and the cinematography by frequent Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist superb. Sleazy glitter is shown in a drab light that seems to have been filtered through all of the cocktail lounges in Los Angeles. But it is difficult to appreciate technical virtuousity while trying to distance yourself from the film and its imminent ending. Though Fosse wants you to identify with Snider, your situation is really closer to Dorothy's: you want to get out.

Even after she realizes that she can transcend mere Bunnyhood and become an actress, Dorothy begs Paul to take her back to Vancouver. But Snider tells her "we can't go back," and Fosse would surely agree that the girl from next door can't go home again, because he presents no alternatives to the cruel world of entertainment he has been obsessed with since his first film, Caboret. At one point Snider visits a carnival with Dorothy's sister Eileen (Lisa Gordon), and they both seem happy riding the merry-go-round and eating gobs of cotton candy. But it is a child's paradise, and all Dorothy's childish innocence and Paul's childish rages won't gain them entrance to it. Once they discover lust and the cars, pinball and games, and ultimately guns, they are lost. Suicide is not the ultimate act of self-absorption for Snider: he had disappeared into the vacuum of his own desires long before.

Aram Nicholas does seem to offer Dorothy an avenue of escape, and this allows Fosse to present her story as a tragedy. Nicholas doesn't ask to see pictures of her when she auditions, he just looks at her until she blushes. He tells her to make her own decisions, to leave Snider--but in his eyes there is a feverish, ashamed glint that hides the familiar fantasies: Nicholas's difference is that he sees her as a Madonna instead of a whore. When she's with Aram she dresses better and drives a nicer car--but she's still an image that is only shattered when Snider destroys them both in a horribly protracted fit of self-annihilation.

In Star 80, you see sex, anger, violence, and death until you're sick. There are no restraints on your arms and legs, no steel clamps on your eye-lids that force you to watch, but Fosse cynically expects you to keep watching, even as you wince. This, Fosse seems to be saying, is what adult life is all about. Look at the dirty pictures and the degraded emotions. Enjoy.