The Metatextual Exorcist's Assistant: MAPS TO THE STARS, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Film as a medium isn't old enough that it has a set response as to how to handle the 'problem' of aging A-list actresses. But two 2014 films both recently released on DVD have shown the 'old' way can be made 'new' again through post-modern tweaks. The sexy young bitches of the 80s-90s have found work playing middle-aged actresses fighting to stay young and relevant, the way hot bitches of the 20s-40s did in the 50s-70s, by playing faded stars who go insane from being cooped up in their cobwebbed minds and mansions while the pictures (and cars) in the world outside get smaller, junkier, younger. Going 'Norma Desmond' allows for a kind of ageist exorcism which then makes the aging actress playing the unbalanced aging actress seem balanced by contrast. So Billy Wilder makes Gloria Swanson seem cool and Robert Aldrich makes Bette Davis seem fearless--they boldly go into the depths of their own potential madness as Hyde versions of their own personae. Skulking around their eerie mansions as theremins goose their every mirror-ward hiss, the well-aging actress playing the semi-well-aging actress playing the unwell (delusional) aged actress is cathartically freed from her own gerascophobia, exorcised with the help of a Chanel-scented strait-jacket (starring Jessica Lang as Joan Crawford). (1)

Maps and Clouds stars in an important drama about Alzheimer's

Now that we're all feminists again, the kind of lurid madness that made Baby Jane and Norma Desmond so indelible is too objectifying, too freakshow, for squeamish PC Hollywood. Age and narcissism mustn't be reduced to just another carny attraction-- not that Hollywood wouldn't make it so if we demanded, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. So the producers must instead paint a sensitive portrait of Alzheimer's or some real-life tragic figure's descent to madness. They must be educational, touching, and earnest instead of high-camp shock-value horrific. We associate aging with importance now, middle-aged actresses with serious drama. In this way, filmdom solemnly leads them out to pasture rather than letting them shred the walls of a cinematic padded cell. With all projects not good enough for a dame of their stature, they wither from underuse.

Sensing an opportunity to fill the gap, however, scrappy maverick independent filmmakers circle the wagons around the A-list divas with a little money saved up (or will work for scale to get their attached to a truly edgy and 'now' product) who want to sink their teeth into something bonkers for a change, to work with talents unafraid to plunge into new dark depths behind the camera, irregardless of the PC putsch that so paralyzes mainstream Hollywood when it comes to bitches over 40. Canadians like David Cronenberg and Frenchmen like Olivier Assayas, keep the luridly self-reflexive spirit of Billy Wilder and Robert Aldrich alive, for they know a secret denied the average Hollywood hack: the 50s-70s 'horror hag' spirit need only be taken one meta-level further to resonate in our new century's junk TV-addicted consciousness afresh and leave the stigma of exploitation behind in the process: Julianne Moore and Juliette Binoche shall play Gloria Swansons playing Norma Desmonds now, instead of just playing Norma Desmonds trying to play Salome. Brian Oblivion would be so proud! 

THE CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Dir Olivia Assayas (2014)

***

Olivier Assayas uses the post-modern lesbian corporate thriller the way Jean Pierre-Melville used the French New Wave gangster film, as a gateway between high art and low genre for anyone with a Gauloises and Steadicam to glide through behind him. In his Boarding Gate, for example, scenes of Asia Argento walking through a vast bustling Hong Kong mall-flea market--each booth/stall a vast tapestry of electronics, contrasting languages and music all whirling together one after the other--are perhaps the most ear-boggling use of post-modern affect in all cinema, but then... what is there to when from why? We're left feeling cheated, confused, even irked.Assayas' biggest weakness has always been his endings, since demonlover, even. His best works, like Irma Vep, end in pure abstraction. His worst endings feel like betrayals - like he led us on, like seducing us into bed then running away going "I forgot I'm married" and runs away last minute.

Before something like that happens, Clouds of Sils Maria covers several layers of a power trio of strong female leads ranging along the All about Eve axis, each playing versions of themselves and their personal assistants in screens-within-screens. The catsuit Les Vampyres S/M gone corporate bitch-in-the-boardroominess of his dEmonlover and Boarding Gate coalesce against Summer Hours pastorale realness as two women play characters studying to be themselves and each other; the same weird mix of back-stabbing and compassion with which younger executive assistants are shepherded by older female employers into the abyss of self-awareness and ambition, breaking them down and being broken in turn in some twisted--even if initially altruistic--identity merge/melt-down. They have youth; you have power. But they can get power, what can you get, except older?

From the ongoing discussion between Maria (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant Val (Kristen Stewart) about Maria's character in the play that made her famous (she's now shifting from the ingenue to the older lesbian mentor, and she ain't happy about it). Maria's nihilistic interpretation of the character during rehearsals and discussions jibes with Val's hip youthful (American) interpretation of Maria's interpretation, which Val sees as solipsistic, as glorifying youth based on one's rose-tinted memories and attacking her own aging dignity. And Val isn't backing down even against Maria's contemptuous laughter which might have worked on her when she was Val's age, but Val is somehow more grown up than that.

It makes sense then that Kristen Stewart steals the show as Val, handling her personal assistant duties with startling cool, knowing just how to rile, soothe or otherwise push Maria's buttons while juggling deals and cars and hotel rooms and interviews and meetings with photographers, all without ever seeming to break her detached stride or smash her incessantly ringing cell phone. Chloë Grace Moretz plays the rising star playing the younger part in the play (the superhero masochist in the comic book film they see) who Val and Maria meet with later for drinks, along with the young dumb boyfriend, a writer whose wife tries to commit suicide and...hmmm.

If that's confusing, it's my fault. Let's just say it's Bette Davis' The Star meets Petra Von Kant rehearsing a lesbian corporate boardroom version of The Blue Angel in the isolation of Faro (where Bergman filmed Persona) so hey, that's a lot a layers of reference. What makes it work even if you don't know those films is the way the pair of actresses connect with such quiet force (we understand immediately why Stewart won the César) and the dialogue of the play they're working on resembles their characters' own relationship--and perhaps Stewart's real-life relationship with PA Alicia Cargile (left)--so much it's (intentionally) impossible to tell where one (the lines they're running) ends and the other (their actual relationship) begins, except that the line-running they do feels real while their sudden lurches into directly discussing their own relationship--Val complaining as Maria laughs at her impressions of the play's subtext--seems sudden, hamfisted. It's as if direct confrontation would be too much, too theatrical, so they just endure all they can like it doesn't bother them until they just bail. It begs an interesting question: how does one deal with having acted all kinds of break-up scenes with someone when you're suddenly actually breaking up with them, without it feeling cliche? Atsa lotta layers, Olivier! Maybe ats too much...

Maybe yes, for then comes that terrible Assayas anticlimactic 'resolution.' As the Binoche-Stewart personae (see what I did there?) merges into itself like a sssnake. along with the two characters they're rehearsing (via the actress and personal assistant they're playing), there's a sudden mystical shift that... well.. it doesn't work. Oh Olivier, you just had to keep adding layers until the whole thing deflated like an overdone soufflé... again. 

Maybe I'm wrong or nitpicking --it's just that jibing to Stewart and Binoche's chemistry through most of the film as I was, I felt genuinely saddened by the sudden flight into Peter Weir-ish fourth act mysticism. The big comparisons critics have been making of course are to the endings of Bergman's Persona and Antonioni's L'Aventura, but the former was abstract from the get go, there the weird ending made sense and in the latter they at least talked about the disappearance --it even obsessed them for awhile, until they forgot about it, and we didn't much miss the missing girl anyway, since it was Monica Vitti we were collectively falling in love with even at the start. Here in Sils that love equation is reversed, like L'Aventura if Vitti just left without a note toward the end and we spent the rest of the damn movie with the smarmy Sandro (Gabriele Farzetti). Some critics hypothesize Val kind of morphs into Chloë Grace Moretz, playing the tabloid-branded scarlet letter marriage-wrecker of years ago (see: Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison), but to me they're making excuses on Assayas' behalf. Mention art cinema 'modernity' vs. vérité realism if you want --it just plum doesn't work... for me at least. In interviews Assayas says he wanted to give the audience something to think about, but it feels to me like all he did was take something we were thinking about away. 

The scenery is staggering. I love this mountainous zone where German loftiness, Nordic depression, and French intellectual aesthetics sizzle together and align like a constellation. I was imagining what if Bergman were directing, that he might go full-on post-modern and we'd maybe get an interview with Alice Cargile in between takes of the film within the play about a pair of women in a play. That might have worked, but whatever - the Melville of post-affect cinema transcends such things as satisfying destinations. As with Irma Vep, Boarding Gate, Carlos and demonlover, the trip is where he works his magic. Once arrived, he's all out of rabbits.

MAPS TO THE STARS

(2014) Dir. David Cronenberg

***1/2

One can't imagine either Hollywood or the Sils Maria European bourgeois "artist" community making a film like Maps to the Stars. A lurid, slow-burn haunted-Hollywood saga of pyromaniac schizophrenics, hot young ghosts, egomaniacal stars, and abusive life coaches, it could only come from a Canadian indie auteur who doesn't need pretentious vanishings to craft a Brechtian dissertations on aging actresses being intimidated by the endless incoming waves of amber ingenues. As in Sils, the idea of female 'performance' leads to meta-split mirroring, passive-aggressive sabotage by the older insecure actress against her younger personal assistant, the Twilight connection (Stewart in Sils, Pattinson Maps), Stewart co-starring with Maps star Julianne Moore in Still Alice the same year (top), like an eerie reflection across continents, genres, and post-modern layers. 

Thing is, of the two films, only one is genuinely subversive and ballsy. Only one goes to places the jugular didn't even know it led to.

In both Sils and Maps there's the idea of being subsumed by another's ego, of being a young female assistant, trying to have her own life while working for a solipsistic middle-aged actress who's going insane from dealing with the dwindling roles / loss of youth, and so bullying their younger incarnation in an attempt to exorcise their own inferiority complex. In Sils the assistant takes revenge in the must cowardly way possible, by merely vanishing without even two-weeks notice; in Maps, well.. I can't spoil it, but it's far more satisfying. There's a sense of unyielding magnetism in Cronenberg's film that Assayas' was too high in the Alps to feel: the inexorable magnetized streak of insanity running deep in the fault line crust of Los Angeles, and the most expedient, direct way to drill down into it.

Sordid show biz underbelly chronicler (and Castaneda mystic) Bruce Wagner (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) knows every inch of what his script is chronicling, and he can match the darkness, stab-for-stab. Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) arrives on Hollywood Boulevard by bus after being released from some juvenile mental hospital, and--like Melanie Daniels at Bodega Bay--her mere presence triggers the vengeful furies, here a series of ghosts: Her new employer, fading star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), is haunted by her crazy star mom Clarice, who set their house on fire when Havana was only a child; Agatha's estranged brother Benji (Evan Bird), a bratty child star, finds himself haunted by a girl who died before he could grant her Make-a-Wish Foundation request. Meanwhile, a new biopic is being made on Clarice's storied life and daughter Havana is  fighting to play her, even while claiming she was molested and abused. Ingeniously, the ghost of Clarice is played by luminous hottie Sara Gordon (above, in the bath),  and of course, it makes sense--why wouldn't a vain ghost want to appear younger than her own grown alive children? It's just the right kind of weird twist that shows a real subversive instinct that Maps has in abundance, the kind Assayas ultimately lacks even as it covers the same ground.

It's all in the genes.

With the kind of naive prepossession that does well in Hollywood, Agatha-- on meds and working the steps, tries make amends with her family, but that doesn't go over well with her bitter father (John Cusack) who still hates her for setting fire to their house as a child and feeding Benji a near-fatal overdose of pills. Since that ordeal, Cusack has risen to make a fortune as a platitude-spouting gestalt masseur (with clients including Havana whom he clearly hasn't told about Agatha or vice versa). He has demons of his own, clearly, exhibiting the typical violent denial self-help gurus often display towards their own hang-ups. 

Ultimately these two interlocked pyromaniac-and-narcissist-choked LA families crash into one another in a shocker climax so effective and satisfying it becomes the polar opposite to Assayas' Sils's (we saw them as a double feature this past Friday night - I'd recommend you do the same, in the order presented). We just don't expect such a shock because for awhile there Cronenberg made us forget we were watching a Cronenberg film and not some piece of Hollywood self-regard and near-whimsy about how all we need is a bus ticket and a dream. That's the Cronenberg touch at work, to be good enough at the one thing you forget it's the other. Stars has courage to go deep into the abyss from off a steep, high diving board, while Sils only splashes around a bit then crooks a finger towards Lars Von Trier's receding light. Even Maps' ghost appearances aren't trite or cliche. Although they're presumed to be just psychic projection, it's a movie first, so we understand that being actors anyway the haunted A-listers are conditioned to let their imagination get the better of them, to confuse their script with their life in ways only we were confused by in Sils Maria. In other words, even as actors playing characters who are actors, characters will mess themselves up in the name of a good performance, with the understanding that--above all--they're still in an "actual" film as well as a film about film, even when they know within the context of the (outer) film that the (inner) film is just their reality and not even a film-within-the-main film!

If that's confusing, consider the contrast: in Sils, Binoche is playing an aging Marlene Dietrich remaking The Blue Angel as a butch Emil Jannings, heading back to her classroom to sulk after her younger wife hooks up with the strongman. In Maps, the better option is finally presented: kill them both and burn the whole fucking cabaret to the ground! Clarice and Agatha, I tell they, by the power of Chuck D, Hollywood sur le feu!

NOTES:
1. PS - when I wrote this that AMC show FEUD hadn't even been announced! Was it ushered into existence because of this post? I like to think so (5-16-17). 

Sexy Terrorists are Go!!! - CARLOS (2010) and Post-Cinematic Airline After-Affect

If you were wondering about where the whole "we don't negotiate with terrorists" thing got started, meet the guy who ruined it for everyone: Carlos the Jackal, who grabs hostages and demands planes to safe havens the way the rest of us order tickets online, at least until policy changes. With his new zillion-hour epic CARLOS, Olivier Assayas continues his post-modern affect approach to film, proving he's the best on-airplane director in history, capturing the feeling of the aircraft roar and air circulation inside a sealed plane, the way pressurization pops the ears; he even captures the horror and drag of being stuck in your seat for what seems like days on end, when the government won't let you deplane because your hijacker's demands aren't being met. Assayas brings the 'you are there' distress where it belongs, back to the terrorists who started it all.

Divided into three two-hour slabs of cryptic meetings, hostage negotiations, and jarring moments of gratuitous sex, we don't learn much in CARLOS, but we 'feel' like we do. The middle slab is the best: Carlos and company take the 1975 OPEC meeting hostage and are supposed to fly to Iraq for sanctuary, but Saddam turns out to have been up to shady treacherous tricks even then. Back when 'we' did negotiate with terrorists, taking hostages was an easy way to fly to some safe haven country whereupon the terrorists would usually release the prisoners and plane -- why not? As long as they did, their demands were more likely to be met the next time. And anyway, so many of the terrorists were good looking and educated, you know, college kids. But that didn't last long, terrorists lost their sense of humor and sexiness, and Carlos got his comeuppance when his safety zone's regime changed hands while he was still on the tarmac, leaving him SOL. Such is life.

By the end it's a bit of a drag as Carlos (Edgar Ramirez) loses all his friends and allies and the new post-communist world takes effect and there's just no place for an airport-fightin' man now that the whole world has been divvied up--every country getting $$ from either side to keep the Jackal at bay. Even with the bummer slow descent (rather than a fiery SCARFACE finale), CARLOS is an invaluable peek at the other side of the curtain, which few of us in the States ever imagined or would film so objectively. It takes a Socialist country like France, who kept their 70s decor longer and never routed the commies out of their academic tenures, to make a grand film like CARLOS. And there are sexy girl terrorists whom Carlos sleeps with at the drop of a hat, the most noticeable of which is Nora von Waldstätten as Magdalene Kopp, Carlos' future wife. Their hook-up (top) is one of the first times I've been genuinely turned on by a seduction scene in years. Years! Maybe it's the red dark room lighting, or the amazing von Waldstätten's jet black hair and pale skin--a combo that sends me, Jackson. But again, not much reason for it in the long run, except to show Carlos is seductive. You can feel the drag of her attraction to him in her eyes and speech, like a gravitational drug.

What's bizarre is that Asia Argento is not involved. CARLOS is perfect Assayas material and Argento was the perfect Assayas heroine in BOARDING GATE, and like that film and DEMONLOVER, there's that impression in CARLOS of what Steven Shaviro called "Post-Cinematic Affect" (a highly recommended book) and I know there's some critics that seem to miss what 'post-cinematic affect' - is all about, the best I can sum it up is two things, 1) Asia Argento, and 2) international air travel:

Here's how you too can discern it if you haven't already: Next time you're flying out of the country take stock of all your surroundings, from the drive to the airport to the taxi to your final destination, see it all as a movie with you as the star engaging in the Deleuzian Time-Image. How are you 'manifesting' your character during this journey, via what you gaze at or listen to on your iPod? Do you ever feel like a rat in a TV camera-monitored trap? How many choices, actions, freedoms are available to you within the confines of the plane, the customs line, the monorail, etc.? Do you feel like you're just a pair of eyes and ears soaking up prerecorded pre-flight messages, gate departure lounge CNN screens, lines, obnoxious cab drivers, and baggage checks? Do you get a feeling of adrift ennui in a preconfigured landscape of retro futurist simulacra? Don't you wish you could escape it somehow? Go off the grid without the grid noticing? Carlos thinks he can, and that's the fantasy in his mind, which differs from ours because he still wants to hang out at airports, and make a big scene there, where most of us just want to zip through them like a ghost. We turn off our ego and just tune out and take it all in--from the science fiction weirdness of the traffic lights reflecting on the rain streaked windshields to the lines and customs and clouds and electric grids--we become it all, rather than ourselves --and in so doing avoid ruffling any feathers.

So next time you're going through the whole door-to-door experience of flying somewhere, ideally to a hotel, imagine you are high on glue fumes or a spiked whiskey, or better yet, be high, and then you might get a glimpse of the Assayas effect.

Asia Argento was a great match for Assayas in BOARDING GATE. She has what Shaviro calls 'direct carnality.' She is "immediately present in the flesh." She "collapses the seductive distance between star and audience, and instead offers us her own hyperbolic presence... Even her irony is immediate, and too close for comfort." (p. 55).  Dude! This is what I was circling around, slowly and tenderly and distractedly, in my 2003 praise for her directorial debut SCARLET DIVA (2000). As you experience that glue sniff lost in translation post-affect disconnect at that airport, let's say you're watching CNN in the waiting area by your gate. Suddenly Asia Argento is onscreen and she looks right at you. No one else notices, and before you know it, she's coming out of the women's room, walking towards you, smiling back. You scared? Damn right. But are you supposed to recognize her, ask for an autograph, smile, mouth the words "I loved you in XXX"? Or what if she's incognito, so if you say hello her crazy ex-husband hears her name and comes running out of nowhere with a knife and/or a court order. Or maybe she's in character, and you're so method you forgot you're not actually living this movie... remember your lines and let them sound like you just thought of them. That should be easy... you can't even remember who you really are. Now, now you got it.

Postmodern affect in the States--from what I discern via Shaviro's book-- is based around the complete saturation of the image, to the point reality --if it exists or ever did --is lost, or inseparable from said saturation. SOUTHLAND TALES and GAMER are examples of this in Shaviro's book - not dividing lines so much between nations and corporate economies as between screen and person; the image and the 'real' within the film's diegetic framework collapse into one another and the world grows cold and strange and much wider than the cinema has ever before been able to conjure. The post-cinematic affect breaks down difference just as when you're in an airport you're neither here nor there, in a post-cinematic affect you're neither safe nor in danger, neither an actor nor an extra, neither on TV or in front of it. Assayas landed on the map with this in his IRMA VEP which collapsed eight ways from Sunday a visit from Maggie Cheung to a French film studio, and the subsequent breakdown of authority and knowledge about a project.

One of the first sights of this post-cinematic might well be Fellini's 8 1/2 wherein the director onscreen creates the movie we watch as a defense mechanism against nosy producers. Godard makes films that operate on this post-cinematic level, flattening the dimensions of the mise-en-scene, and boiling whole narratives down to detourned Cocoa-Cola ads. And you know why there ain't more of it? Because the terrorists--the cool, sexy, crazy international Marxist-version, not the stubbly and sandy new a-Qaeda--- lost!! They blew it. The globalizing forces of evil capitalism won. What can a poor boy do? Except sing a karaoke "Streetfightin' Man"?  In this paralyzed post-cinematic town there's just no place for a Carlos... outside a first person shooter game on Playstation.

See also: Olivier Assayas, Super Genius! (BOARDING GATE)

Olivier Assayas - Super Genius: BOARDING GATE, DEMONLOVER

Thank god that at least there are a few Frenchmen, like Olivier Assayas, who get that life is beautiful even when (or especially when) it's drenched in blood. Assayas makes movies that move and feel like ambient techno music: glacial emotions and settings, rapid tempo stream of conscious flow editing and magnificent paranoid foley work cohere and swirl. As characters walk around crowded hallways there's a constant flow of parties, cash registers, and other sounds from every hole in the wall they pass, the kind of thing Orson Welles fought to keep in TOUCH OF EVIL but lost, the real noises of this crazy world. In attempting a futurist neo-realism, he shows us just how bizarre our lives have become. He makes it seem ironic that science fiction movies are built on sets when the real world is right now far more complex and cyber-delic than anything one singular human mind could e'er imagine. Assayas provides a link wherein even corporate work and air travel becomes sexual and dangerous, futuristic. He knows where to point the camera to make the familiar resonate into the uncanny, the everyday into the post-modern and sinister.

His latest, BOARDING GATE (2007), returns to the world of corporate espionage in catsuits that won him mixed reviews with DEMONLOVER (2002). Superstar Asia Argento is great here playing a cross between her strung-out exhibitionist more-or-less self in SCARLET DIVA and the role which helped make her an international sex symbol, the influential-but-little-seen cult film NEW ROSE HOTEL (1998).

Based on a short story by William Gibson and directed by Abel Ferrara, HOTEL was set in a dystopian future where international corporations had replaced government and everything from banking to boarding room negotiations were done via camera phones. It starred Christopher Walken and Willem DaFoe as two corporate spies-for-hire who recruit Asia's duplicitous and irresistible prostitute to seduce and betray a married Japanese researcher. They find Argento at a hip bar where the DJ is playing Cat Power in all murky cool Bozan Bajeli reds. Assayas clearly loves NEW ROSE HOTEL or parts of it. The son of Jacques Remy, Assayas has captures the child's eye view of jet set privilege, being shuffled through futuristic airport terminals and off to weird meetings and culture shock shopping malls without hardly knowing why or how soon you will get to rest and have a coke. Parents, nannies, porters, and a hostile but fascinating swirl of international commerce going on all around his eggshell mind.

Critics say that for all his innovations, but that's hardly relevant; if he riffs on other's work, it's cool because he steals only from the very best. Using the template of Godard's ALPHAVILLE (modern business architecture and practices as science fiction) and the sexy late night with unlimited mini-bar expense account decadence of Ferrara's HOTEL, he joins them together at the USB port where Argento's own SCARLET DIVA wanders in exile.

One thing Assayas does better than all the rest, Godard included, is transmitting the sense of emotionless futurism that comes from being drugged out on international flights: following the protracted hook-up and assassination of Michael Madsen comes a bravura montage of Asia (Argento) on an overnight flight to Hong Kong (the city), the television on the back of the seat hawking the tourist spots seem strange and alien in ways only Assayas can deliver. He also sjhows the weird intimacy that develops between passengers sleeping next to each other in a darkened cabin for hours and hours; Asia climbing over sleeping Chinese people to get back to her seat; waking up cuddled against the old man next to her and not feeling good or bad about it, how in this one situation, there's still such a thing as a communal slumber party of all ages and nationalities, Grabbing a bottle of water off the stewardess's tray at what seems like the dead of night, but then opening the window shade and the harsh white rays of the rising sun blast in like a laser.

If you have seen DEMONLOVER you remember the opening with the water on the plane and this leads to a sense of overall paranoia which Assayas clearly loves playing with, exploiting for our mutual benefit. Most of all he has an eye for Asia Argento, perhaps the perfect queen of the Assayas universe (which she helped birth, after all, via HOTEL). Maggie Cheung and Connie Nielsen could only do so much with their catsuits and slinky stares; Asia is this sort of person, this cat woman espionage agent: like Assayas she has a famous filmmaker dad (Dario) and a penchant for "stealing" shots at airports for maximum free sci fi affect. And just like her character in GATE, Argento lives the life of a jet setting debauched intellectual artist forever maneuvering her way through the tangled web of vice and male desire for her own exhibitionist fun and profit! It's who she is... in real life...

If such a thing still existed.