Maggie Davey
Asking Yvonne Rainer how difficult it was to expose her mastectomy scar in her film Murder and Murder, I receive a practical answer. “It was not that difficult,” she says, “I’m a performer.” Still, as she slips her shoulder out from under a boxing gown and allows the camera to caress the scar, a new deal for the representation of women in film is announced.
Murder and Murder is a story of love and breast cancer. It is a story about memory and aging, of labour and need, and mostly, of a frisson of lesbian sexuality, at a time of life, we are led to believe, when frissons are memories, and the only sparkle comes from the image of a zimmer frame future.
From the moment that Rainer introduces the old footage of garment workers, we are reminded of the popular front movement of another radical time in American history. Films such as Pins and Needles and women like Emma Goldman and Tillie Olsen captured a time when the popular media hadn’t existed for long enough to have created an idealised body to which women would eventually be beholden. A radical spirit flits through this film, and emboldens it.
The film is spiked with horrifying breast cancer statistics – sometimes as sub-titles running along the bottom of the screen. As it plays, one is quietly engaged in an impossible mathematical decathlon of weighing up one’s own chances. Rainer says of the repetition of horrifying statistics: “Yes, maybe they overwhelm, maybe they disturb people because they reveal what someone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer is feeling. They are having to make a decision about treatment based on conflicting and often contradicting information.”
Only a moment of reflective dance by the character of Doris at the beginning of the film gives a nod in the direction of Rainer, the dancer. And when Rainer arrives on the screen dressed in a tuxedo, in the middle of a scene, or in the aforementioned light blue shiny boxing gown, chewing uncomfortably on a cigar, we are invited into the world of Rainer, sufferer of breast cancer. Rainer says she wants people to get the message from the film that there is no indignity in aging and that, as she puts it, “there is life after menopause”.
One particularly enchanting scene is of Doris and Mildred, the lovers, fighting in a boxing ring. The floor of the ring is littered with more dread-provoking statistics and the occasional cut-aways to the crowd are taken from an old movie. In a moment of some irony, the tough-guy of American noir, Richard Widmark, is seen in the crowd. Dirty realism stands on the sidelines waiting for the tough middle-aged women to finish their fight. Rainer says the boxing scene “is like a cartoon to illustrate the extremity of domestic bickering”. The women end up sprawled over the floor in a beautiful embrace.
Rainer says that she is looking forward greatly to her South African visit and to creating awareness around the issue of breast cancer. Which is only one reason why you should see this warm, funny, radical and moving film.