April 3, 1977 [Three Women]

A little more than mid-way through Robert Altman's Three Women, I felt a moment of cinematic déjà vu ("I've seen this movie before") that seemed gray and grainy, something lying in the attic long enough to leave a silhouette in dust when I picked it up--and saw it was a silent film, The Female of the Species, a strange little thing made stranger by my dim recollection of it. I believe it was a tale of survival in the desert, the men dying, the women left to fend for themselves. It may have ended with a dust-storm, the three women--one holding a baby--pushing on, disappearing into a cloud of sand.

--And they finally emerge from the desert, decades later, to change themselves--not only into Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule but also each other, the women swiping and borrowing to piece together their own version of womankind, alone at last in the perfect American wide-open space, hot and dry and safe. Like the women of that silent picture, they have to decide whom they will trust--even if that means denying themselves. But both pictures do not end in dissipation, let alone annihilation--not so unusual in the desert, where the Big Bombs and dry scrub make threats, not promises; no, as they move into the storm, they calm it, claim it--were those earlier three miners' women?--and settle themselves, like real pioneers.