ON WORSHIPPING GIRLS

ON WORSHIPPING GIRLS

CREEMEDIA

GIRLS ON FILM by Julie Burchill (Pantheon)

Iman Lababedi

Julie Burchill’s Girls On Film starts with a lie: men are worshipped in all walks of life, but women are worshipped only for their acting in movies. This statement is so hapless and self-loathing as to be beyond reasonable discourse. I worship the ground Simone De Beauvoir walked on, would love to have been an adult in the '50s solely for the chance to talk with Hannah Arendt, firmly believe Emily Bronte was one of the greatest people who ever lived, and have more than an affected liking for Billie Holliday.

After sprouting this said lie, Julie abruptly forgets it as Girls On Film follows a fairly tortuous (if well-written path) to a ludicrous equation:

The decline and moral decay of America equals the decline of American Cinema.

The decline of American Cinema equals the decline of decent roles for women in films.

Therefore, the decline and moral decay of America equals the decline of decent roles for women in films.

This logic doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been reading Julie since she joined the staff of the British rock paper New Musical Express a dozen years ago when she was 16, and I knew what to expect. If you’ve never read street credible, working-class journalist Julie's vicious interpretations of fact and failure, buy this book. If the substance offends, the style is never less than enchanting.

But I’ve been here before (I’ve even edited Julie), and what's raising my blood pressure isn’t her Yankee bashing. It’s how poorly-slapdash, insulated, badly-researched and lazy Girls On Film is.

In 1983, for her column in The Face, Julie wrote about the late comic actress Judy Holliday. The column was a tough-minded study of women under pressure: all bulimics, bitchiness and booze. At the time, Julie claimed it was an excerpt from this book but somewhere along the line, she ran out of energy. Judy Holliday is dispensed of within a couple of paragraphs here.

Everyone is dispensed of within a couple of paragraphs. True, Liz Taylor gets a whole chapter. Still, unlike Liz herself, it comes and goes before you notice it. Over and above that, there’s only the usual thrust and parry. The great Greta Garbo gets her due. Marilyn Monroe (“A face made of milk and honey from a land of muck and money”!) gets.. .well, there's nothing left to say about M.M., and Julie goes the sexdoli/victim route. Alfred Hitchcock gets the The Dark Side Of.. . treatment, without appreciation for his directorial skills. The golden age of the studio system is revered, the "boys” own school of male bonding (Cimino, Scorsese, Coppola) is reviled.

By the time I reached the "Homosexuals’ Girls” chapter, with her gay friend slipping on a dress and watching old movies, I’d decided Girls On Film was Julie’s worst writing to date.

It’s so damn obvious: the book’s construction, chapter headings, shortness in length, incendiary conclusions.

What was shocking yesterday is standard European partyline today. Anyway, I’m too old to think the States has a patent on moral turpitude. It doesn’t ring true. For every Custer slaughter of Native Americans, there’s a Stalin fake famine.

Alright, that’s enough Burchill bashing for one review. Worshipping girls? I’ve worshipped Julie’s writing for a long time. Sure, Girls On Film sucks, but it doesn’t detract from her first rate mind and first class prose. Kudos to Pantheon. What the world needs now is more and better Julie Burchills.