Note from zine editor Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy:
The Summer 2024 issue of MovieJawn features articles that discuss Loneliness and Isolation in films. Titles featured include: All of Us Strangers, Kes, Gerry, One Hour Photo, and others. While this article came in too late for the zine deadline, we thought we’d give you a taste of the type of writing you will see with Matthew’s piece on Wanda. To see more fine writing like this, order a copy today.

by Matthew Crump, Staff Writer

When I found out the upcoming print issue of MovieJawn would be on Loneliness and Isolation, the first film that came to mind was Wanda (1970). The titular character and the woman who wrote, directed, and starred as her, Barbara Loden, feel like poster girls for this theme. Of course, they aren’t exactly one and the same; Loden has said that Wanda is more an imagining of what might’ve happened if she’d never left her hometown of Marion, NC.

I myself hail from just a few counties over. It’s one of the many parts of Barbara Loden’s life and stories that have brought me to regard her as something of a kindred spirit. It’s also the reason I missed the deadline for this most recent issue. A last-minute trip to North Carolina presented itself the same weekend as the due date and, well, let’s just say I’d already missed the last couple of deadlines on visiting home.

So, much like Wanda, I hopped in the car with a less-than-stranger and made my way cross-country toward an aimless destination. Going back south always feels slow and uncertain, no matter how much planning I’ve put into it. Wanda’s same lack of direction in life gets her wrapped up with a low-level criminal that eventually escalates to fatal consequences. Her only shred of salvation is tied to being lost in traffic. 

The film is often criticized for its passive protagonist, getting described as the “anti-Bonnie and Clyde” movie. This only makes me love it more. Wanda might not be the action-thriller blockbuster that we’ve grown accustomed to, but it's still a story worth telling. She’s a lonely, depressed person, and lonely, depressed people aren’t known for taking action. Yet the action still manages to find her, as it does eventually with all of us.

My sister could tell you this better than anyone. She became a willing accomplice for much of my weekend away. Out on the open road, we talked about all the ways depression makes life feel impossible, whether that be in navigating complicated family dynamics or something as seemingly simple as making a doctor’s appointment. What we can never remember when we’re in it is that depression, and the loneliness that accompanies it, isn’t forever. 

In preparation for the article on Wanda that was daunting me, I came across a beautiful little book by Nathalie Léger called Suite for Barbara Loden. She sums the movie up simply, saying, “It’s the story of a woman who’s alone… Who breaks up— but without violence, without having thought about it, without even wanting to break up.”

Léger melds journalism and poetry in ways rarely seen in the genre of celebrity memoir, going as far as to get personal with her own pain and the pain of women before her. She weaves her own mother’s experience throughout the book seamlessly, at first with moments of levity about her lack of enthusiasm for the film. However, slowly we begin to see the similarities between Léger’s mother and Wanda. Being abandoned in the rubble of their divorces often left this generation of women open to abuse and listless woe.

Calling Wanda a passive character as a way of condemning her also feels like an insult to Loden. She’s been open about the years of her life that she lost due to her inescapable ennui, many of which bled over into her tumultuous relationship with famed director Elia Kazan. If it weren’t for those experiences, we never would have met Wanda. Based on her decade of persistence to make this low-budget production with nothing but a skeleton crew by her side— entirely independent of her husband, by the way— it’s obvious that Barbara Loden became a woman of action, but what caused this shift?

“I’m just no good.” Of all of Wanda’s scant dialogue in the film, this is the line that sticks with me. Despite what the film critics say, in some ways I see her as the perfect protagonist. She’s a sanded down totem, something for us to project symbolism from our own lives onto. 

Does she suffer from constantly comparing herself to others? The look on her face when she enters the local weaving mill and sees hordes of women working with deft efficiency seems to say so. Maybe she lacks a sense of self? Her gaze at the mannequins in the local mall as if she’s searching for a reflection leaves us to wonder. Is she insecure about her intelligence? How she reads the crime beat aloud from the local newspaper— a soft persistence with undeniably long lapses between words— ends up telling me more about myself more than it does Wanda. 

Léger also makes her fair share of projections onto Wanda, sometimes based solely on a look. She posits that whenever Wanda interacts with the lover who is only a few degrees away from being her captor, she is constantly scrutinizing him in an effort to understand, or at the very least, anticipate what this man will do next. I know that look as well as I’ve held it.

I was a pre-teen the last time I drove around in the car with my sister, just the two of us. She told me about how being back behind the wheel, particularly when she merges onto the interstate, always makes her think of our parents. In return, I told her about the time when, against my better judgment, I got into the car with a boy in the middle of a fight. When I looked up through bleary eyes and saw the sun breaking out over the open highway, I could feel our mom watching over me. She said she knew exactly what I felt. That’s the only time I’ve ever heard that and really believed it.

When Barbara Loden discusses filmmaking the words “healing” and “processing” often crop up, making it sound like it was her special form of therapy. In the documentary about her life, I am Wanda (1980), Loden speaks about taking care of her mother in her final days. She confesses the confession her mother made to her then: that she intended to abort Barbara. Loden cries and says how she doesn’t resent her for it, in fact, she understands. “I feel my mother still lives through me,” she says. “Through what I do I might be able to help to express some of things that my mother wasn’t able to express during her lifetime.”

Léger reflects similarly on her own mother, deducing that after the shock and humiliation at being abandoned had worn off, she might’ve been suicidal. The only thing that prevented her from such an end was Léger herself, describing what is left after such an all-consuming pain, saying, “One thing remains: the fact of still being there in spite of everything, denuded of power, with no idea how to describe the thing that is dying, the thing that has already died.”

But Loden, Léger, my sister, and all of our mothers aren’t the only real women with ties to Wanda. What planted the seed for the film was an article about a woman named Alma Malone who was found guilty of being an accomplice to a bank robbery. It wasn’t the sensationalism of the article that inspired Loden, but rather how when the judge sentenced Malone to prison, she responded by sincerely thanking him. He’d saved her the suffering.

The rest of Wanda was all Loden, explaining, “Wanda’s character is based on my own life and on my character, and also on the way I understand other people’s lives. Everything comes from my own experience. Everything I do is me.” 

This humanist approach and the passion that Loden found later in her career— the fuel that brought Wanda to life— led me to reconsider this upcoming issue’s themes of loneliness and isolation. If it’s Wanda’s passivity that her loneliness is rooted in, maybe it’s the isolation that eventually drives her to take action. No matter how lonely life becomes, Loden seems to know that a return to your people is inevitable.

In the final act, well past the time when we’re taught the engine of the story should start, we see the man who’s criticized her, pushed her away, and used her being put in danger. She grabs the gun and gets him out of his bind; the first independent action she’s taken in the film. It’s not out of love. It reads more as an act of desperation, a way to keep alive the only source of attention in her life, as negative as that attention might be. “Everything you do must be heard,” Loden once said. “That’s why I made Wanda: as a way of confirming my own existence.” 

Barbara Loden died in 1980 at the age of 48. The doctors told her it was breast cancer. Other “doctors” told her it was because she hadn’t cried enough. She lived a hard life, the kind that only few of us can truly understand. For her next project she was planning to make a film adaptation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. 

This led me to the next step in my unending research process on Barbara Loden. She brought me to the local library and I found a copy on the dwindling shelves. She put the book on my nightstand, where it collected dust until I haphazardly packed my bag for the last minute road trip and threw it in on a whim. She led me back to the place where we’re both from, my bag landed on the carpet in my sister’s apartment, and The Awakening spilled out. I asked her if she’d ever read it.

“That’s my favorite book,” she replied and immediately I felt the presence of all the women who came before us. I already know how the book ends but I’m sure there’s much more to the story.