Beyond the Valley of the Dolls · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Meyer's Hollywood is immediately recognizable as what Deleuze calls an impulse-image — a world governed not by goals but by raw, ungovernable drives, where the infrastructure of ambition (the mansion, the record contract, the industry party) is simultaneously the machinery of degradation. The Carrie Nations don't merely fall into corruption; they enter a milieu in which appetite is the organizing logic, made visceral by Meyer's characteristically low-angle camera, which turns every body into a monument to drive and every extreme close-up into a percussive assertion of desire against the film's otherwise clean Fox studio photography. The film's more audacious move, however, belongs to the powers of the false: the closing voiceover, whose mock-sermon structure Meyer had codified in Lorna (1964), solemnly distributes moral lessons to characters whose catastrophes the film has been staging as exhilarated spectacle — a narrator who ritually condemns what the camera has been ecstatically celebrating. This is narration that has abandoned truth as a criterion, wearing the costume of the morality melodrama while systematically detonating it from within. The engine driving both modes is genre itself: by reproducing the showbiz cautionary tale with microscopic fidelity — the three-women rise-and-fall arc, the pill-addiction arcs, the whole Susann scaffolding annexed wholesale from Valley of the Dolls (1967) — Meyer reveals that the genre always required the very sensationalism it pretended to condemn. The sermon, BVD argues, was never anything but the alibi.