This guest post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
The prostitute is a common figure in the landscape of crime film–she’s a scared witness, a disposable victim or a condemned woman whose character is rarely fleshed out enough to reveal her as a person. In genres like melodrama and after-school specials, where she is a protagonist, the real-life horrors and anxiety of her work are made explicit and over shadow any possible upside.
Angel, a 1984 cult film, attempts to be both a melodrama about a teen hooker forced to face her life choices (as the trailer proclaims it “A Very Special Motion Picture”) and a very 80s crime thriller where a tough-talking street kid teams up with a cop to catch a killer, but the resulting film is a mess of clashing tones that seems more campy than hard-hitting.
This conflict is clear in the music video for the film’s theme song, “You’ve Got Something Sweet” by the Allies, which hilariously juxtaposes bright, sitcom-ready music with images of men slipping money down a teenage girl’s shirt, the main character, Molly (Donna Wilkes) discovering her friend’s beaten and bloody body, the serial killer ominously shaving his head, and Molly running terrified. And then, in the midst of the lead up to a crime story, there are images of Molly fixing her make-up and walking down the street laughing and smiling.
What’s even more surprising is how much fun Molly’s life looks.
In a real world context, the story of the movie is tragic: Abandoned by her parents, Molly has been working as a teenage prostitute since she was twelve, and the adults in her life who make up her surrogate family fail to provide her with other options or suggest they disapprove. While there are characters like the detective and Molly’s guidance counselor who want to help her and a moral message about the desperation and abandonment that give young women no choice but to turn to prostitution seems intended, the film is unwilling to commit to an entirely negative portrayal of Molly’s life.
Instead, viewers are presented with an extended teenage fantasy of complete independence and sexual exploration with bits about murder thrown in. Molly has all the things teenage girls want; there is no one who can tell her what to do, she feels beautiful and in control of her life, and her only moments of awkwardness stem from feeling more mature than her classmates. She lives comfortably in her own apartment, goes to a private school and, at the film’s start, seems to have no worries about the really awful things that could happen in the course of her work. Rather than portraying the detective story of typical violence on the streets or hooker murders that get swept under the rug, this murder case seems instead to be a momentary intrusion into Angel’s fairytale life.
In one scene, soft music plays as Molly sits in front of the mirror, having a “glamor moment.” In a series of close-ups, she carefully puts on her make-up and fixes her hair, smiling excitedly at her reflection, transforming from school girl to sex worker.
While the viewer knows the film’s protagonist is a prostitute going in because of its promotional material, the opening scenes of Molly at school function as if the viewer doesn’t know.
In doing so, the film drives the viewer to compare the two distinct images and attempts to make the contrast between them jarring.
A Madonna/Whore dichotomy is further suggested in the film’s posters, which read “High School Honor Student by Day, Hollywood Hooker by Night,” suggesting viewers will be shocked to discover they can be one and the same. (Streetwalkin’, a 1985 film has a similar tagline, “She dropped out of high school this morning. Tonight she’s a Times Square hooker.”)
Instead, Molly could be a girl getting ready for a date or a dance. In the end result, she does not appear transformed, just a more polished version of her everyday self. Because this glamor moment is so familiar to many women from their own lives, it instead draws viewer identification and brings positive associations.
Though on one hand, the sequence suggests teenage Molly’s transformation to adulthood, it could also be interpreted as a subtle indication that she is not as grown up as she feels she is. For me, this scene brings to mind young girls dressing up in their mothers’ clothes, projecting a grown-up image over a child body. As it is followed by scenes on city streets at night, it is also reminiscent of a girl going clubbing.
In these scenes, Molly strolls confidently down the street, greeting people as she passes and sharing inside jokes and nicknames. When someone she passes condemns her for prostitution, she continues smiling, as if these outsiders will never understand her free and adventurous world. These scenes are portrayed as if she is going home, and to me, they recall walking though high school hallways and greeting friends.
On the street, Molly has put together a surrogate family for herself, populated by the types of characters teenage girls growing up in the suburbs dream of finding in the city, Diane Arbus photos shot through the lens of Lisa Frank.
Her friends, a transvestite who acts as her surrogate mother, a cowboy movie actor/stuntman, and a butch landlady are presented as outsiders who banded together to support each other in a world that had rejected them. This is mostly implied, but is shown literally through the cowboy, once a star but now a has-been doing stunts for money on the street. Because of this, in parts the film has a certain heartwarming tone, constantly reminding the viewer Molly has a “family” who loves her, even as it descends deeper into a crime thriller. Though she has the independence to be in charge of her life, she does not have to shoulder the burden alone.
The films seem to suggest that by working and supporting herself, she has matured past her peers and doesn’t belong in their world. As such, one of Angel’s trailers repeats the line, “Angel, it’s her choice, her chance, her life,” glamorizing Molly’s independence and avoiding mention of the factors that made prostitution not a choice but a necessity for her.
By emphasizing Molly’s youth and innocence with the title Angel, the schoolgirl, already a figure of sexual fantasy for some, is cast here as an attainable object. The viewer is told that Molly is a hooker, but never sees her nude or actually having sex. Strangely, the high school cheerleaders she notices in the locker room, who are shown showering fully nude, are more sexualized than she is.
As such, the scene where Molly casually informs the detective that she’s slept with hundreds of men is difficult to believe based on how chastely she has been portrayed. To this end, the film portrays her as a child, joking with her friends and taking breaks from work to go get ice creams and do her homework in hotel lobbies.
In school, Molly dresses childishly, with pigtails and matching pastels, perhaps to emphasize the contrast. While other prostitutes are dressed in skimpy lingerie or are topless, Molly’s hooker wear is not dissimilar from what a teenage girl would wear to a club.
Conversely, Molly’s independence could be seen as coming from the sacrifice of her innocence or virginity. She is allowed to inhabit dark, dangerous places her classmates will never see as she has entered into an illegal activity and with it, a criminal underworld. As a criminal in this respect, she is given qualities usually reserved for male characters, such as toughness, inclusion in masculine spaces and the ability to use a gun. She also displays enviable bravery as in calling the police, she risks arrest, exposure, or a foster home.
Homicide detective Lieutenant Andrews, who would be the lead in any other crime drama, functions in relation to Molly and is presented as a secondary character. Viewers don’t see his life outside the case, and the film follows Molly’s story rather than his investigation. Though he is the adult and authority figure, she has power over him, both in his inability to actively save her and his reliance on her to find the killer. The film’s tonal clashes are also apparent in the image of Molly, a young girl in a dress and heels wielding a gun that nearly knocks her over when she fires it, which is presented for comedic effect. Rather than giving Molly the power to cooly seek vengeance for her friends, the suggested unnaturalness of this image through her girlish dress, small size and her friends’ attempts to stop her, further compounds her innocent image instead of tarnishing it.
It is interesting to note that the film does not suggest prostitution on a whole is safe and wonderful, but that for Molly it usually is. She’s the exception, who is able to maintain her status as an “Angel” and with it the suggestion of purity, while other women around her are scantily clad and brutalized. In this fashion, the film suggests, she is young enough to be redeemed and live a different life, but older women in more desperate circumstances are long past helping and thus, must be concerned with things like violence, rape, STDs and unwanted pregnancy that are outside of Molly’s orbit. As mentioned before, the crime story of the movie, an (albeit exaggerated) norm for these other women, is presented as an unusual episode in her otherwise happy life. Still, Molly is always able to protect herself and in incidences where she is threatened by the killer and when two of her classmates try to rape her, she takes control of the situation and forces them to leave her alone.
This viewpoint, that the bad things could happen to anyone else, but would never happen to oneself, appears to me to be a very immature, adolescent idea. Likewise, there are many teenage girls who glamorize prostitution as being wanted, or getting paid to be beautiful and enjoy expensive dinners, presents and sex, ignoring the circumstances that drive desperate women to prostitution or the danger and discomfort that even women who choose to be sex workers must take measures against.
However, the film ends abruptly and without any real closure, giving the viewer no sense of what will happen to Molly now with all the changes in her life. It is unknown whether she will go back to her life of fairytale prostitution, go into foster care or find some other solution (in the sequel, Avenging Angel, Molly is off the streets and attending college). Ultimately, I believe this abrupt ending contributes to the film’s fantasy image of prostitution. The viewers don’t have to see Molly live with the consequences, both of picking up the gun intending to kill the villain and of prostitution itself, so it can remain an escapist fantasy. Not a trauma, but another adventure she has bravely overcome.
Elizabeth Kiy has a degree in journalism with a minor in film from Carleton University. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is currently working on a novel.
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