GIRL 6
A film review by irina@IMAP2.ASU.EDU
Copyright 1996 irina@IMAP2.ASU.EDU
Director: Spike Lee
I would like to add my own review of "Girl 6," the latest film from Spike Lee. Theresa Randle stars as a would-be actress struggling to pay her bills and keep her dignity while auditioning for parts. After a series of minor misfortunes, she begins to look for work in the phone sex industry. The company that initially hires her is very professional in that it has an office manager and a phone operator, both of whom randomly monitor calls. In the training session for the new "girls," we meet the various women who have found themselves seeking this line of work. The multicultural crew is told that, unless requested, they are "white." They are encouraged to develop stereotyped personae that men find intriguing, such as teenage nymphets, dominatrixes, etc. (Naomi Campbell, as one of the girls, exhibits self-deprecating humor by wearing a t-shirt that says, "models suck.") Theresa Randle's character, Judy, steps into this impersonal, role-playing world, and finds it suits her current circumstances. She develops a regular clientele, but begins to lose herself in the role that she has created as "Lovely." She makes the understandable mistake of trying to meet a client who confides his problems to her, but when he doesn't show, she slips even more into the nowhere land of identity loss. She becomes withdrawn from her co-workers and her neighbor, played by Spike Lee, a baseball-mad nebbish (very reminiscent of some of Woody Allen's roles). A phone sex "madam," played by Madonna, gives Judy the necessary contacts to set up her own business at home, where she can field any and all calls with no inhibitions. At this point, Spike Lee uses a cinematographic method that shows how distorted Judy's sense of self has become, as her body moves in the opposite direction of the receding/approaching background, which is a smear of hallucinogenic colors. She feels like the little girl that is shown on her local nightly news, the victim of an unlocked elevator door that allowed her to fall all the way down the elevator shaft. What snaps Judy out of her victimization as a male fantasy object is a phone call from a man who threatens her life. Judy realizes that she has become derailed from her dreams, and gets back on track. Whether or not she makes it is of less importance than the fact that she is in control of her life again. I thought that this film was unfairly dismissed by the media and movie-going public. It is subtle and deals with issues of self-perception on an emotional level, not as a comedy or even a drama, but as the deceptively simple tale of a woman who finds work in a business which negates one's humanity.
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