Poison Ivy: a remarkable, underappreciated (lesbian/ feminist?) thriller

I have owned the DVD of Poison Ivy for maybe ten years, with the intention of someday seeing it again. I bought it in Maple Ridge at a thrift store, I think, maybe because I was spending a lot of time with my mother, sharing a lot of genre films with her. She favoured classics and/or revenge thrillers with clear-cut good guys and bad guys - she would, sweet little aphasic lady that she was, sometimes holler "kill him" as the former faced down the later - and tended to hate moral ambiguity. We never got around to Poison Ivy, though. That may be for the best, because this film is far more complex than what she'd usually go for.. In any event, since picking it up, I have kept it through dozens of purges and mass trade-ins of physical media - including a video garage sale and many, many trips to Videomatica - solely because Erika and I both like Drew Barrymore. In fact, I had low expectations. But Corolianus, our other discussed film for the night, was seeming a bit too daunting, so I went to the pile of films I keep that I plan to watch with Erika once and then get rid of - the "I don't know why I have this really but we should watch it before I give it away" pile, all films that have accumulated and remained unwatched to now because I really, really don't expect to care much. There it was: Poison Ivy. Well, let's clear it, I thought, scratching my ass and poking through the shelves, remote control in hand. It could be fun. And like I say, Erika likes Drew Barrymore.

I think I might just have seen a great, much neglected film, one worthy of serious reappraisal. I don't remember anyone praising it much back in the day, where it no doubt was regarded as a lesser sexploitation film - the kind about sexually predacious or otherwise dangerous women putting family units in jeopardy, the 90's film equivalent of a Femme Fatale movie, but with more sex. Roger Ebert's dismissal at the time was pretty thorough: 

There is scarcely a moment in the movie when the story works as fiction; I was always aware of the casting, of the mood-setting devices, of the stylistic borrowings from Hitchcock... [it's] a movie that never really convinces us it's anything but a lurid wind-up machine with lots of rainy nights and lightning flashes, split-second double-crosses and hysterical upheavals.

By contrast, I remember a certain amount of critical respect - likely even by Ebert - being accorded films like Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Basic Instinct, and even the very interesting Single White Female (more of a good sister/ bad sister film than a femme fatale film, but more relevant and valuable than any of the others on that list). That last - a Barbet Schroeder film, from his Hollywood period, is actually pretty interesting, as commercial fare goes, and is almost as psychologically rich as Poison Ivy, but not quite. And you expect complexity from a European arthouse filmmaker from Iran, slumming it; you don't expect it from a former Roger Corman filmmaker whose first film was called Stripped to Kill. I mean, this looks like something Robin Bougie might gush about. Wonder if he's seen it?

As you might expect of a film made by someone who made the above, Poison Ivy, at the time, was sort of regarded by critics as inferior to any of those aforementioned thrillers. Even today, it holds a mere 34% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty sad, compared with Fatal Attraction (76%) The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (63%), Basic Instinct (a mere 54%, but still) and Single White Female (53). What film Poison Ivy really needs to be compared with is probably Heavenly Creatures (made two years later, R/T score of 92%), but I think it may be an even better (or at least more interesting) film than that one, in that it is far less overt about what it is doing. Peter Jackson declares high intention from the gitgo, but Poison Ivy could be mistaken for a failed attempt to make a trashy exploitation film (which I think is the standard Mr. Ebert has judged it against).

Holy shit, Poison Ivy: I never knew ye. (I do actually think I saw the film when it first came out in the days of VHS, but I didn't make much of it at the time and had very little memory of it. I certainly don't remember the feeling of having my jaw hit the floor, which it did last night; this is not a failed genre film, it's a very adult thought-piece disguised as a genre film, with a lot more going for it than any of the above movies). 

Here's why the film is so remarkable, best as I can muster:

Let's start with the Bechdel Test - a feminist ranking system for film, which finds its origins in a lesbian comic strip (I never knew that part!). From the Wikipedia page linked above:

The rules now known as the Bechdel test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In a strip titled "The Rule", two women, who resemble the future characters Mo and Ginger, discuss seeing a film and one woman explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

The movie has to have at least two women in it,
who talk to each other,
about something other than a man.

The other woman acknowledges that the idea is pretty strict, but good. Not finding any films that meet their requirements, they go home together. The context of the strip referred to alienation of queer women in film and entertainment, where the only possible way for a queer woman to imagine any of the characters in any film may also be queer was if they satisfied the requirements of the test.

Later on, said page explains, the significance of the test widens, and we get refinements that have nothing to do with the queerness of the original context: "According to Neda Ulaby, the test resonates because 'it articulates something often missing in popular culture: not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories, and the range of their concerns.'" 

Well, not only do women talk to women in Poison Ivy - about their backgrounds, their lives, their dreams, their fears, their unexpressed emotions, their occasional self-destructive thoughts - and many other things besides men, but in fact, they almost never talk about men in the film. Not at all. In fact, men don't talk about men very much in this movie, and they barely ever talk to each other. Other than Tom Skerritt's cold-fish horny dad character, who is necessary to the narrative and not entirely unsympathetic, but also not very interesting, there are, really, no significant men in the narrative at all. 

Grasp that: compared to all those aforementioned thrillers, many of which revolve around their male characters, fall very low on the Bechdel scale, and often are rooted in fear of the female, even when women are very much present in the narrative - Poison Ivy has one guy in it, who barely says anything. The actor playing him, Skerritt, gets top credit, somehow (and even Sara Gilbert gets credit over Drew Barrymore, for reasons I cannot grasp), but the narrative is entirely driven by three women, their desires, feelings, fears and ambitions. The film is about a nerdy girl, the "bad girl" she looks up to and maybe loves, and her embittered dying older mother (an almost archetypal range of feminine stereotypes, maybe - a virgin, a slut and a mother who doubles perhaps as a crone - but all well and believably played). Everything important that happens in the film stems from their interactions, and from the Gilbert character's growth into womanhood. Tom Skerritt - maybe at his career best, actually, and I'm not taking the piss - exists only to get a hard-on that he fails to control well. He is a plot point, not a hero. The narrative in particular is commanded by Roseanne's Sara Gilbert. She would have been about seventeen at the time of the film's release. She wears glasses, is homely, and announces in the beginning narrative that she might be a lesbian (and is definitely a feminist).

When, in the cinema of the 1990's, does a geeky, maybe queer teenage female feminist command a narrative? Ghost World wasn't til 2001, and again, is not presented as a straight-up sexploitation thriller, but a quirky indy movie, is vastly more overt about what it is. How many mainstream movies made in 1992 had teenage girls who might be lesbians as their main characters?  

Who really needs to see this film? LGBTQ+ movie lovers. Fans of New Queer Cinema. People who loved Carol. Has anyone claimed this film for the LGBTQ film community? Katt Shea, the director, is not mentioned (by Wikipedia, anyhow) as being queer; in fact, she was married for 13 years to a man (Andy Ruben, who co-wrote this film). Yet the film has a fond and accepting eye on Gilbert's girl crush, and has frequent moments of sexual tension between its two main female characters. There does seem to be a possibly trite "theory" of lesbianism at work - that it has something to do with Gilbert's character's unresolved feelings toward her remote and unhappy - indeed dying - mother, but neverminding that bit of pop psychology - which does pay off in one pretty startling kiss - it doesn't judge Gilbert's possible queerness. It is a remarkable thing to understate: it suggests it's entirely normal. 

That's why the film needs a new appraisable by queer cinephiles, I suspect, but only one element in why it is so interesting and unique. The really odd thing about the film, for me, is how sympathetic it allows all its main characters to be. An almost universal convention in thrillers is to have clear cut good guys and bad guys. While the things Ivy - Barrymore - does are often immoral and motivated by unstated self-interest -- while the film could have gone a far more typical route and made a monster of Ivy -- she remains sympathetic throughout, even after (spoilers!) she's killed Gilbert's mom, fucked her father, and  almost killed Gilbert in a car accident. Not even the best film noirs suspend judgment that long: we almost always know the femme fatale is a monster whose seduction of the protagonist will lead to his downfall. You can see them coming, even if the protagonist can't. But by extreme contrast, we can sympathize with Ivy, understand her reasoning, even celebrate it through much of the film, and (just like the main character) never come to hate her, though what she does sure does seem, uh, blameworthy.

Why don't we blame her? Ebert, in his review, sees this as a weakness - that Drew Barrymore is just not able enough to come off as a villain - but like I say, he's clearly judging this film against the standard of conventional thrillers of the day, which it isn't. He's right there with my Mom, wanting to shout, "Kill her!" at the screen, and being non-plussed that the film, unlike the vastly more typical mainstream misogyny of movies like Fatal Attraction, does not allow that. It's actually vastly more thought-provoking to have a thriller that DOESN'T fully let you see the "bad" character as truly bad: it gets you asking questions that more conventional thrillers don't, like, why are we watching her do these bad things, and yet somehow sort of accepting her rationalizations and feeling a bit bad for her, even? 

The film is smart enough that it gives as a possible answer to that question. Ivy's machinations are explained in part via mechanisms of class, which the film seems very aware of. We are told again and again of her childhood and we fully understand how she could come to be the way she is. Why wouldn't she use what she has, after what she's been through? 

There are more reasons to like the film, including very effective cinematography from Phedon Papamichael, who does some beautiful stuff with Ivy on a rope swing at the start of the film, being scrutinized and described all the while by Gilbert's narrator (yes, the narrating voice of the film is female, too). 

It also represents a very early credit for Leonardo DiCaprio, but unless he's in a scene other than this one, it becomes puzzling why he appears in the credits at all, since he's basically an extra. (Erika and I couldn't be bothered to go through the whole film again and try to spot other scenes with him; we certainly didn't notice him the first time through or realize he was in it, til the credits rolled. In fact, we're not even sure which kid he is in that scene. Why is he even mentioned in the credits? It's weird). 

I wonder what other films I've been neglecting in my I'll-get-around-to-it-someday stack? Poison Ivy is vastly better than I expected it to be. Lest you think I am a voice crying in the wilderness or that the intensity of my scrutiny is due to my having smoked something before the film - I did, and so what? - Peter Travers also writes well and interestingly about it, too, in Rolling Stone, touching on some of the same observations and a couple I didn't make it to. See here for more on that, but trust me: this film deserves to be re-evaluated in exactly this way. It's one of those films after which you go to the shelf, take down your copy of Robin Wood's Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond and flip to the index to see if he mentions it. 

(He doesn't). 

Oh, and it also works as a thriller, too, and Drew Barrymore is amazingly sexy. I've never been remotely jealous of Tom Skerritt before. So there's that. 

Y'all should see this movie, really. The next question for me is, should I see Stripped to Kill?