Privilege (1990)
On Yvonne Rainer's intersectional marvel and the limits of conservative storytelling
Writer’s Note: For my first dispatch on this new platform, I am going to talk about a film that, as of this writing, has only 370 logs on Letterboxd. This may not net me any new readers, but it’s sort of a statement of purpose. Not every movie I write about is going to be as niche, but all of them will be ones I wish more people saw or talked about. Enough spaces exist for the films du jour; I’d like this space to be for the ones that may have slipped through a cracks a bit.
If that sounds interesting to you, you could hit the subscribe button below!
TW: References to sexual assault.
In yet another point for sitting through the credits, one of the most surprising things about seeing Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege without any prior background on her work is realizing that she is white. Part of this is by design; her ostensible author avatar, Yvonne Washington, is portrayed by Novella Nelson, a Black woman. Beyond the names, a lifetime of movie-watching trains you to identify the artist as whoever has control of the narrative, and for the most part, Yvonne W. is the woman behind the camera. In gradually subverting these expectations through a kitchen-sink approach that uses nesting-doll structures and meta techniques to blur the lines between reality, fiction, and fiction-in-fiction, Rainer arrives at an extraordinary self-reflection that examines her own privilege through a developed intersectional lens.
It’s worth noting that intersectionality as a framework had only first been articulated the year before in 1989, by Black scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, so for a film to engage with these ideas so directly feels radically progressive. More than just political commentary, the film is a deep dive into the different privileges and prejudices faced by white, Black, and Latinx men and women—many of whom occupy the same New York block over the course of an extended flashback sequence—and culminates by interrogating Rainer’s own status as a white woman, who constantly vacillates between oppressor and oppressed despite her own best intentions. The pointedness of this critique of the self as political actor was and unfortunately remains ahead of its time.
The bulk of the film centers on Yvonne W. interviewing her friend Jenny (Alice Spivak), a middle-aged white ex-dancer and current drifter-by-choice living off a sliver of LA property she owns and leases to a Burger King, about menopause. Their talk digresses into a plethora of tangents the way conversations with old friends do, with much of the film’s second act devoted to Jenny’s recounting of a neighbor’s sexual assault and its aftermath, which Rainer dramatizes through stage-y, threadbare sets and anachronistic actors (Spivak plays Jenny’s younger self in these sequences, while everyone else is appropriately aged) to evoke the inherent artifice of memory. Within this digression are even more digressions, as Yvonne W. and various side characters interject with their own perspectives on the situation, each revealing more about their respective positions on the societal ecosystem as their lives ricochet off each other.
This all sounds very avant-garde—and it is, in concept—but the film never feels obtuse as much as so chock-full of ideas that it’s difficult to flesh them out using traditional storytelling devices. Much of its humanity comes from the sheer warmth that radiates from Nelson and Spivak’s performances, which serve as the emotional fulcrum upon which the movie’s unorthodox machinery can pivot. Even in the film’s stagier parts—Rainer’s roots in modern dance are palpably felt both in many of Privilege’s set pieces as well as its overall texture—are steeped in an inescapable authenticity of experience, never teetering so far into metaphor as to become incomprehensible.
Rather, metaphor becomes central in elevating the film’s preoccupations beyond the conceptual. It is viscerally different to hear about the violence and erasure faced by Latinx women when it’s coming from Digba (Gabrielle Made), an abused wife who lived in Jenny’s old building, and whose perspective is foregrounded during the staged flashback as a sort of counterpoint to Jenny’s main narrative. Likewise, the film’s Expressionist portrayal of the assault—or at least, of Jenny’s imagining of it—as a verbal negotiation between two parties (a Latinx male and a white lesbian woman) that invokes former activist Eldridge Cleaver’s horrifying justification of rape as a political weapon sidesteps cheap salaciousness for something much thornier yet no less chilling in its implied violence. Playing these scenes straight might have resulted in an easier narrative, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful.
Even with all its storytelling flourishes, Privilege still seems to bristle against the limitations of the medium. There is so much more the film seems to want to say, both about the political framework it traffics in as well as the storyteller’s role in all of it. The film’s central set piece, after all, is a self-serving story being told by a middle-aged white woman —the avatar for Rainer’s examination of her own complicity—that is then summarily complicated by interjections from men and women of color, who expose the systemic inequities that led to those events. In its implication of the storyteller and audience as complicit political actors, the film leaves no space for a neat resolution: Only the discomfort of realizing something terrible but undeniably true.