FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS

by Kevin Koehler

I'm not sure whether Diane Arbus is a good photographer.  Rather than celebrate the "freaks" (her word, not mine) that dominated her portfolio, one can't help but feel the artist's antipathy.  Loathing.  There is no beauty, but instead a voyeuristic revelry in the grotesque.  How do you humanize a transvestite when you refuse to even give this individual a name?  Two Female Impersonators Backstage.  Albino Sword Swallower.  The Human Pincushion.  Perhaps there is an intended irony - defining social outcasts by their perceived scarlet letters - but I doubt it.  Like a grandmother filling her shelves with porcelain dolls, Arbus strikes me as a collector: of the melancholy, the macabre, and the masochistic.

Steven Shainberg, if his previous picture (2002 S&M indie comedy Secretary) is any indication, does find transcendence in masochism; I suppose that partly explains his passion for this misguided project, an "imaginary" portrait of the artist as a young woman.  After a brief prologue of Arbus (Nicole Kidman) at a nudist colony (filled with sensationalist, unfulfilled promise of the actress au naturel), we flashback to her life a few years earlier.  A bored, sexually-frustrated Manhattan hausfrau (aren't they all?), Diane assists her husband, Allan (Ty Burrell) on conventional photo shoots of models holding cookware.  This is about all of the film that's true, as much as "true" means adhering to the documented facts.  "This is a film about Diane Arbus but it is not a historical biography," Shainberg tells/warns us in the picture's opening title cards.  "What you are about to see is a tribute to Diane."  Perhaps as much as Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room is a tribute to Mexicans.  And dwarfs.

A short aside: it also begs the question whether films, or at least good films, should be tributes at all.  Hagiographies tend to be tributes to the author, who identify with perfection (or wish to be associated with it by proxy), rather than their subject.

Moving on...

During a party during which her mother asks why she is wearing a dress from last season, Diane watches as a new neighbor moves in upstairs; it is soon revealed that Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.) suffers from the rare disease hypertrichosis, whereby his body is covered from head to foot with unsightly hair.  Diane is intrigued, seeking him out for portrait and muse, both artistically and sexually (when she lies in bed, she hears the call of the wild, so to speak).  Unfortunately, the romanticism of Fur falls flat; where Shainberg had intended a Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast-style surrealist courtship (not to mention the S&M subtext), instead we find a miscast Kidman trying to pretend Robert Downey Jr.'s foul-mouthed wolfman is dangerous and sexy.  He is neither, making their games of erotic sensory deprivation more sleazy than titillating.  When he's not sucking on an oxygen mask, Lionel is frequently seen coughing - it's clear quite early this love affair, while not exactly doomed, will be short-lived. Thankfully.

With Lionel as her guide, Diane visits a New York underworld social scene populated by apparent ex-carnival acts.  Like her famous photographs, it's unclear what Arbus' interest in these sideshow freaks is outside of some vague reassurance of her own beheld superiority.  There is no reclamation of "normal"; her new acquaintances are, to use the photographer's own words, "aristocrats" by virtue of their misery.  "Freaks were born with their trauma.  They've already passed their test in life."  Diane is beautiful (well, at least Kidman is) and came from money; Arbus, the director would have it, is empowered by her interest in freaks, and further, by her appropriation of their suffering.

One need only examine the film's concluding third to discover just how hollow the notion is.  In a final tip of the cap to Beauty and the Beast and its unwitting hypocrisy, Lionel (with Diane's help) goes through a "normalizing" physical transformation before their extended seduction is consummated (and Lionel rides into the metaphorical sunset with an act mirroring the real Arbus' own fate).  Where's the empowerment in that?  Diane gets to fuck one of her precious freaks - after he's removed all that unattractive hair, of course - and Lionel is allowed a look in the mirror, finally seeing a human being staring back.

But wasn't he one before?

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