As I explained in a prior entry, I am having trouble reconciling Diane Arbus’s body of work with my ethics. So I’ve been consuming as much information about her as I possibly can. Ergo, I rented Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.
Quick description of my expectations: I figured that the film was not going to be accurate – very few biopics are. I thought that, at the very least, the film would be an entertaining perspective on Arbus’s life – and that I’d get to see how the Rolleiflex camera works.
Well, as it turns out, I was wrong on both counts.
Disclaimer: Spoilers lie below.
[Visual description: Nicole Kidman, a white woman with blue eyes and brown hair, wears an old-fashioned blue dress and a Rolleiflex camera. She gazes up at the viewer.]
Like Secretary, which was also directed by Steven Shainberg and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, Fur starts with a single visually arresting scene from the story’s end, then cuts back to the beginning and gradually winds its way to the ending. In this case: Diane Arbus enters a nudist camp with a camera and, just as she is about to disrobe, the screen cuts to black and an intertitle reads: “Three Months Earlier.”
Things start out middlingly enough. One by one, a different component of Diane’s life is introduced. Her parents work in the fur industry, her husband is a fashion photographer, and she is an unhappy housewife who has no purpose in life. Okay, these details are from real life, kind of. Her parents were furriers. She worked with her husband on fashion photography, but in the film, her role is minimized in an offensive way: she is an “assistant” whose only apparent job is to bring the models tea and cookies and occasionally tell her husband, “Yeah, that photo looks great.” In real life, she was the freakin’ art director of the Arbus studio. As for the depression, Diane had a history of depressive episodes, but it seems to me as if they were more biological than situational – she wasn’t just an “unhappy housewife,” she had a mental illness.
So already the truth has been stretched a little bit in troubling ways. Nonetheless, we gradually gain sympathy for Diane, albeit as a fairly generic character that we’ve already seen a million times. It’s a retread for Nicole Kidman because she’s played this exact same character in films like The Hours and it’s a retread for the director and screenwriter because the main character in Secretary is very similar.
But then the film takes a sudden sharp turn and stops representing reality altogether. By the way, Diane likes to flash her neighbors! Then, BAM, the male lead is introduced!: a fictional character named Lionel who is covered from head to toe in hair.
From here on, Diane Arbus’s biography goes out of the window and a fictional story, written by somebody who apparently has a Chewbacca fetish, takes over.
[Visual description: A man with hair on virtually every visible part of his face and long, wavy hair on top of his head wears a navy-blue jacket, black gloves, and a ring with a large red stone. In the few patches of skin that we can see, he is white. He holds a clear teacup with a fancy silver base and handle. Out of focus, a white woman with a blue dress is at the right of the frame. The subtitles say: "How could you tell?"]
Let me emphasize one thing: Lionel did not exist in real life. He is 100% fiction. This is a film that is supposed to give us some insight into an actual artist that lived in the 20th century. Yet the most important character in this film, second only perhaps to Diane Arbus herself, never actually existed. Plus, he’s her romantic interest. Diane must be rolling over in her grave now.
Back to the film. Lionel gradually seduces Diane. Again, the parallels to Secretary are quite strong. So strong, in fact, that I had to make sure that I was still watching Fur and that I hadn’t accidentally switched to Secretary. Lionel asks a series of provocative questions in a flirtatious tone. Personally, if somebody had asked me these questions, I would have been very unsettled and offended, but Diane flirts right back and admits to being a naughty little girl who harbors a deep desire to be an unbridled exhibitionist.
As the film progresses, Diane spends less time with Mr. Arbus and her two daughters and begins to spend more time with Lionel. Life goes on more or less as it did before: Diane’s absences are tolerated without a word and the only move that Mr. Arbus makes is to grow a beard in an apparent attempt to recapture his wife’s attention from her hairy lover.
In the meantime, Lionel introduces Diane to a scandalous underworld: Midgets are singing and playing piano! That woman without arms is playing the cello with her feet! That transsexual is putting on makeup before her show! (Sidenote: the transsexual woman is played by a man and, in the credits, the character is named “transvestite.” Way to show that trans people are human beings and not just character types or plot devices!) The point of the view of the whole film is from a nauseatingly privileged “normal” person – look, people on the bus are staring at us! What a wild and thrilling experience!
Gradually, Diane is accepted into Lionel’s circle of friends as an honorary “freak.” Throughout her oh-so-marvelous journey, Diane looks upon Lionel’s world in absolute rapture – but we only see her use her camera once or twice throughout the entire film. In fact, Lionel frequently urges her to not carry the camera with her. Unlike the actual artist, this character is not an active agent who transforms the world around her into photographs but is a mere spectator who is content to look mutely around herself in wonder. When she speaks, it is either to flirt with Lionel or to tell him more about her background as a child of a wealthy family. In real life, Diane had a reputation for being sharply intelligent and was praised for having a unique eye. This character possesses neither of those characteristics.
Eventually, the tentative peace between Mr. and Mrs. Arbus shatters. From there on, the film further dissolves in a series of awkward metaphors.
It rather suddenly turns out that Lionel is going to die in a matter of months due to some unspecified lung condition. Logically, Diane shaves off all of Lionel’s hair (at his request) so that he can “swim further.” Yeah, because that totally makes sense. This is a rather thinly veiled excuse for a sex scene: make the “freak” palatable enough for “normal” audiences to feel more turned on than unnerved.
At the same time, Mr. Arbus finds Diane’s countless rolls of film and develops them, then shaves off his beard when he discovers what is in the pictures in an overwrought metaphor for having given up on recapturing his wife’s affection. It’s a mystery that Diane managed to fill up dozens of rolls of film because, like I said, we have seen her take only one or two pictures throughout the entire film, but there you have it. Also, the photographs shown do not resemble the actual artist’s work in the slightest.
That’s it. Lionel, the fictional character, is dead. Mr. and Mrs. Arbus’s relationship is shattered.
[Visual Description: A white woman's hand holds a scrapbook open. It is blank except for a small placard that says: "Plate Two: 'Untitled' By Diane Arbus."]
But here comes the denouement that puts a cherry on the top of this trainwreck of a film. At a funeral party for Lionel, somebody gives Diane a thick photo album and tells her that Lionel wanted her to have it. She opens it. It is a blank photo album and all of the pages are already labelled in Lionel’s handwriting: “Plate [Number], Untitled, by Diane Arbus.” Then the film cuts back to the nudist camp, where Diane asks a woman if she can take her photograph. The end.
Final message: A fictional man enabled Diane Arbus to evolve and move forward as an artist.
Okay, this is super offensive. Most films about female artists explore a tired old plot: “How did this woman overcome sexism to become a great artist?” [Personally, I think that asking "Why are there no great women artists?" is the wrong question - the correct question is, "Why don't we teach about the great women artists that actually did exist?" - but that's another post altogether.]
In this case? In real life, Diane Arbus was independent and needed no man. Solution: the filmmakers made up a man out of thin air to help her blossom as an artist! Ouch. Diane Arbus is rolling over in her grave right now.
But wait! Here come the end credits!
[White text on a black background. Transcript: "This film is intended as a tribute to the life of Diane Arbus and her extraordinary photographic career. Although it was inspired by the biography of Patricia Bosworth, which provided invaluable information, as indicated by the title, this film is not a historical biography. Indeed, many of the characters and all of the events, including the character of Lionel and the scenes involving members of Diane's family, are fictional."]
A tribute? Okay, Diane Arbus isn’t just rolling over in her grave right now – she has actually broken free from her coffin and is currently hitchhiking to LA, hungry for the filmmakers’ blood.
Let me reiterate: this film bears no relationship at all to the actual artist. If it had been presented as an original story with a lead character named Jane Smith, I highly doubt that anybody, even the most hardcore Arbus fan, would have been able to look at it and say, “Hey, that kind of reminds me of that photographer Diane Arbus.” If anything, people would have been reminded of Secretary because Fur is more than a spiritual sequel – it’s a near copy in some parts.
The fact that the team behind Fur felt the need to piggyback the film to the actual figure of Diane Arbus is incomprehensible. Honestly, it would have been better if it hadn’t been. It wouldn’t have helped much – the film is standard kitschy melodrama that’s trying too hard to present an “edgy” story that, in reality, we’ve seen a million times. But at least it wouldn’t have been an offensive affront on an actual woman’s life.
