Beyond the Valley of the Dolls · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

You remember the voice before you remember the faces. At the end, after the party at Z-Man's mansion has curdled into a hacking, sword-swinging massacre, a narrator settles over the carnage like a vicar over a grave and starts handing out lessons — this one paid for greed, this one for lust, this one is redeemed. It is the most sincere-sounding thing in the movie and the least true. Hold onto that gap between the solemn voice and the gleeful wreckage it pretends to judge. The whole film lives in it.

Russ Meyer made his name in the grindhouse, and the thing he carried onto the Fox lot intact was an editing reflex: a percussive, near-subliminal smash-cut that treats a face, a thigh, a guitar, a pill as graphic shocks to be banged together. Eisenstein had a name for staging that jolts rather than narrates — the montage of attractions — and Deleuze keeps it as the attraction-image: an image that figures and assaults rather than advancing a sensory-motor chain. Meyer doesn't cut to show you who did what to whom. He cuts to hit you. The Strip, the parties, the band's rise arrive as a barrage of collisions, and that barrage is the argument. Nobody in this movie acts their way through a situation; they are swept.

Which is why the older Deleuzian label the dossier reaches for — the impulse-image — fits so snugly. The impulse-image is the cinema of appetite and slope: a world of raw drives erupting under the social skin, sliding irreversibly downhill toward exhaustion or death. Meyer gives you the polished surface first — Hollywood, the recording contract, swinging Los Angeles rendered as pop-art cartoon. Deleuze would call that the derived-milieu, the nice concrete setting. But the milieu is a lid. Underneath sits an originary-world of pure compulsion, and Z-Man's mansion is where it breaks through. The film's whole shape is a line of slope: hope, then sex, then drugs, then betrayal, then the Grand Guignol paroxysm, each cut steeper than the last. There is no point where a character perceives the danger and changes it. They can only descend. (The climax is widely read as Meyer working off the cultural shock of the Tate–LaBianca killings, which is exactly the originary world declaring that the party was never as innocent as its colors.)

Then there is the voice, and the voice is where this trashy little picture turns genuinely strange. Roger Ebert — yes, that Ebert, then a young critic — wrote a script that wears the costume of the showbiz cautionary tale and detonates it from inside. Meyer had done the mock-sermon before; Lorna and Faster, Pussycat! both deploy a faux-pious narrator who condemns the flesh he is busy selling. Here it becomes a structural principle. Deleuze's powers of the false names the move precisely: truth and falsity stop being something the film reports and become something it makes, undecidably. The classical realist contract said the camera doesn't lie. Meyer's epilogue lies with a straight face and dares you to take it straight. That sermon is falsifying-narration — a telling that assigns clean moral verdicts the images flatly refuse to earn — and its power is that you can't decide whether the film means it. It means it and mocks it at once, and that undecidability is the joke and the form.

The pivot of the whole undecidable machine is John LaZar's Z-Man Barzell — the impresario who quotes Shakespeare, throws the parties, and is finally revealed, in the film's most transgressive turn, not to be the person his performance advertised. Deleuze has a figure for this: the forger, the protagonist of the false who is never one settled identity but a series of becomings, forging the truth of each scene as he goes. Z-Man isn't a character with a secret. He's a performance all the way down, and the late revelation doesn't expose a real self underneath — it just flips the last card. He is the powers of the false given a body.

And none of it would land if the film didn't know it was made of clichés. Deleuze, charting how postwar cinema lost faith in the action-plot, describes a consciousness of clichés — characters and movies aware they are moving through worn genre furniture and unable to believe in it anymore. Meyer's whole satire runs on that awareness. The rise-and-fall, the corrupted innocents, the pill addiction, the big-city wages of sin — all of it lifted, by title and by structure, straight from Valley of the Dolls and inverted into parody. The film performs the genre so hard the genre curls up and dies, which is why it became a midnight-movie scripture for the camp sensibility that followed.

So what did this delirious thing actually do? For one improbable moment a blue-chip studio, broke and desperate, let the grindhouse inside the gates, and the grindhouse repaid it by proving that an exploitation picture could be more knowing about Hollywood than Hollywood was about itself. Watch it again for the cuts — the way Meyer makes meaning by collision, not by story. Watch the narrator. Decide, if you can, whether he believes a word he says. You won't be able to, and that's the film handing you better eyes.