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FROM REVERENCE TO RAPE: The Treatment of Women in the Movies BY MOLLY HASKELL Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1973; hardcover $10.00; 388 pages; illustrations, index.
POPCORN VENUS: Women, Movies and The American Dream BY MARJORIE ROSEN Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York, 1973; hardcover $9.95; 416 pages; illustrations, references, bibliography, index.
WOMEN AND THEIR SEXUALITY IN THE NEW FILM BY JOAN MELLEN Horizon Press, New York, 1973; paperback $4.95; 225 pages; illustrations.
There's a short sci-fi story called "Double-Take" in which the plot hinges on a new technique for making and viewing movies: a single film is shot twice, once from the heroine's point of view and again from the hero's. The two pictures are projected simultaneously to the audience, whose members wear pairs of special spectacles-pink-rimmed for women, blue for men. Each man can see the heroine but never the hero, for the glasses enable him to be hero. Similarly, each woman lives the part of the heroine. But living through her, she cannot see her.
Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen would, I think, share the belief that this fantasy is close to the way in which movies have been made and experienced. Beginning with personal memories of childhood movie-going, both writers recount identifying themselves wholeheartedly with Margaret O'Brien; Marjorie Rosen confesses to still having a "soft spot fot the Robert Redfords, Marion Brandos, and Paul Newmans who make love to me in glorious Technicolor." But both books go on to the important premise that women (and men-although these ground-breaking books could only have been written by women) take off their sexually polarized glasses and look hard at movie heroines, "considering," as Molly Haskell points out, "the importance of these women in our lives and their centrality to film history."
Propelled as they are by the same motivation and exploring the same territory, one might expect one of these books to plant the definitive stake. But actually each book approaches its subject from its own direction, which determines its particular discoveries and limits.
Popcorn Venus is sociological film criticism, concerned with the unparalleled power of movies, throughout their history, to both reflect the changing image of women in America and to affect women's lives.
The book is at its very best when...