I Would Like to See It: 3 Women

The first half of 3 Women, Robert Altman’s 1977 avant garde classic, is perhaps the most stressful thing I’ve ever watched. The friction between Shy, submissive Pinkie Rose (Sissy Spacek) and vapid, self-absorbed Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) is nails on a chalkboard, Millie’s petty cruelties and Pinkie’s numb, stunted affect almost unbearably dysfunctional in action. It’s like watching a pissy, insecure teenager try to raise a child she doesn’t want. The minuscule stakes make it all the more suffocating. There’s a cloying lack of self-insight, scene after scene of unselfaware social fumbling running together until suddenly the whole thing snaps into a new configuration, roles inverting in a kind of metaphorical rebirth.

Much of the rest of the film is concerned with this sort of Mulholland Drive-esque depersonalization and metamorphosis, though where Lynch’s film makes its lesbian content explicit with his typical soapy melodrama (which, for the record, I love), 3 Women’s simmers just beneath the surface, informing the discarding and appropriation of feminine identities as a silent, suggested force, much like quiet painter Willie’s (Janice Rule) enigmatic murals of reptilian figures with mammalian sex characteristics. Are they symbols of archetypal sexual savagery? Expressions of her frustration with her joyless marriage? They feature prominently in the movie’s dream sequences, fits of psychologically loaded imagery fuzzed with twisting bands of static like ethereal umbilical cords drifting in amnia.

Strangely, it’s Willie’s creepy, uncaring husband Edgar (Robert Fortier) who functions as the crux of each major shift in the film’s structure. Pinkie and Millie exchange roles after the former sees the latter take Edgar to bed. Edgar’s attempt to initiate a threesome with the two younger women during Willie’s dangerous labor (there’s an essay to be written on the insistent use of the diminutive form of each woman’s name) precipitates the first connection between the film’s titular women, and it’s heavily implied that his death is central to their final configuration as a kind of family unit, Pinkie once again childlike, Millie now dressing like Willie, and Willie herself gray and worn. The triple goddess parallel seems unavoidable, the death of Willie’s boy child and the subsequent implied murder of Edgar by the women laden with meaning about the incomplete nature of masculinity. Ultimately, though, no pat “solution” to the films imagery and symbolism can rival its sheer bizarre richness. A truly unusual feast.