Más allá del valle de las muñecas

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was made at a time when the best drugs were flowing into Hollywood and that is made abundantly clear in the film. It was also a unique time, when the great studios, stunned by the success of indie hits such as Easy Rider, gave space and funding to the big names from the fringes of cinema, before abruptly coming down from the hallucination. BVD is a crazy reminder of this short-lived trend and, in some respects, also its peak. While most other filmmakers, such as Roger Corman and Dennis Hopper, were willing only to have their films distributed by the studios, here 20th Century Fox utterly reasonably decided to finance a new project by Russ Meyer, a luminary of titillating fetish flicks and the notional king of nickel-and-dime cinema. In collaboration with the then budding film critic Roger Ebert, who expanded their common theme into a screenplay, Meyer created one of the most elaborate and, at the same time, most subversive studio projects in the history of Hollywood. BVD is purebred camp, where soap-opera kitsch and spasmodic vicissitudes are blended with hippie ideals, elements of trash movies bleed into the artificial world of show business, mainstream and trash writhe in shared ecstasy, while caricatures from men’s magazines speak with a straight face in a new Esperanto composed of flowing hippie expressions and Shakespearean phrases. And with his voyeuristic view, Russ Meyer captures all of this like a boudoir erotic flick. Paradoxically, instead of soap operas, BVD is even more reminiscent of Hanna-Barbera’s trippy animated series of the time, particularly Josie and the Pussycats and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, albeit more challenging, bloody and subversive. Meyer and Ebert created a centrefold-style hippie melodrama packed with absurd twists, lasciviousness, kitsch, free love and equally free identities. Here midcult slides into cult, when it gets a metafictional top view and campily overwrought production that elevates superficiality and vulgarity. Ebert stated that his intention was to make a film that would contain absolutely everything while also simultaneously being a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation flick, an erotic film and a morality play. The plan worked out perfectly, so it is no wonder that the result was considered to be one of the worst-rated films of the year, and heads rolled at Fox because of it (and because of the campy Myra Breckinridge, which was made at the same time). However, in subsequent years BVD gained its well-deserved cult status, became a reference work of camp and inspired the creation of other classics of midnight screenings. After all, it is said that a young playwright took his colleagues to a London screening of BVD when they were shaping the contours of a certain goofy musical called The Rocky Horror Show, the film version of which was made a few years later under the patronage of 20th Century Fox. (23.09.2020)