Sop it up: Food in Barbara Lodens Wanda, 1970

by Kim Göransson

My favorite scene in Wanda, Barbara Loden's low budget feel-bad 1970 drama and only feature film, is after she meets Mr. Dennis and they're having spaghetti in a restaurant. Spaghetti with a red sauce. They're the only guests in the restaurant. The staff or owner is looking on, impatient for them to leave.  Wanda is eating with an appetite while Mr. Dennis smokes his cigar. He tells her to wipe her mouth. Her beer glass is empty. She asks if he wants some bread, talking to herself because he doesn't respond:

"That's the best part I like.
Don't you like that - that part?
Sop it up.
Don't you like it? I do."

For a moment she is joyful, teasing. Sopping up the sauce, her favorite part. Don't you like it? I do.

***

In Splendor in the Grass (1961), directed by her husband-to-be Elia Kazan, Barbara Loden plays Ginny, Warren Beatty's character Bud's wild, doomed and ukulele playing sister, who has returned from Chicago after an annulled marriage and rumored abortion. She has flunked out of art college. She has rebelled, mainly against her father, while Bud can't stand up to him. She's a disappointment, returned home.

She is doomed because she has crossed the line of what is acceptable for a woman. She sees too many men. One of them is married. She wants to drink and party. Her character functions as a cautionary warning for the main character, Deanie, played by Natalie Wood, of what going too far looks like, but also as inspiration, to refuse and to want something else, something more. Or to just want. 

Ginny disappears less than halfway through the film, after causing a scene at a party, having been scolded by her father. She is sexually assaulted in a car outside, Bud coming to the rescue. Men fighting. Her character has served its purpose. We are later told by Deanie’s mother that she was killed in a car accident some other night:

“We all knew something like that would happen. The way she carried on.” 

We are left to fill in the gap. What happens to Ginny. The way she carried on.

***

Before the spaghetti scene but after she has told the judge that she has no objections, that the kids are "better off with him", her husband, and after she has inquired about work and been told that she's just too slow, Wanda walks into a bar.

"Do you want something, Blondie?"

She's caught off guard. She orders a beer. Rolling Rock. She has her hair curlers and a shirt with little blue flowers. She has her white purse and blue wallet. A man offers to pay for her beer as she's searching for change. There is no time for Wanda to exist here before becoming the transaction between two men, the bartender and the man.

She wakes up to the man trying to sneak out of the motel room, hurries to get dressed and chases after him. She catches him but he drops her off at an ice cream parlor. Speeds off as soon as she's out of the car. She starts to run after the car but stops. The woman behind the counter hands her an ice cream cone. Plain. She’s holding the ice cream cone, looking at it and looking around. We don't see her eat it.

***

The first cut of Wanda was 3 and a half hours long. How many other food scenes were cut? Is there a scene where Wanda is getting ready, rolling her hair? Does she walk along the road, eating the ice cream cone? Wander the shopping mall for hours? Do she and Dennis stop for pizza on the way, another diner, another bar. Does she tell him what her favorite part is?

***

Watching Wanda after Splendor in the Grass, it feels like a continuation of the character. Both Ginny and Wanda refuse the life they’re supposed to live.

​On The Mike Douglas Show, Barbara says of Wanda: “She doesn't know what she wants, but she knows what she doesn't want.”

The last time we see Ginny she is driving off, crying, out of the scene and out of the film. We first meet Wanda crashing on a girlfriend's couch, presumably after a night of drinking, hiding under sheets, an annoyed husband rushing past her, a baby crying.

​In a long faraway shot, we watch her walk through a mining quarry. A clear tiny white figure against the grey, depressed landscape. 

Ginny in her white dress, falling in a sea of black-suited men. 

***

Wanda is eating chips in the bar where she first meets Mr. Dennis. She has surprised him mid-robbery, pushed past him for the restroom before he can stop her. Afterward she sits at the bar and eats chips. They look like plain potato chips. Mr. Dennis has tied the barman on the floor behind the bar and he is now acting in his place. She asks for a beer and Mr. Dennis gets her one from the tap while trying to get the cash register open. He slaps it down, flustered, spilling. Wanda is unfazed. She eats the chips that were already on the bar and drinks her beer. Holds up one large potato chip and bites into it. She tells him about how she lost all her money. She asks if he has a comb so that she can comb her hair.

***

"The hair curlers, the handbag. The bag, that strange, oversized handbag with its mysterious contents, is an event in itself. Everything in Wanda’s life has gone, but this immaculate still life of a handbag is there to bear witness, a proof of reality, proof that there is something that remains even if there is nothing inside." - Nathalie Léger, Suite for Barbara Loden

***

Mr. Dennis robs a convenience store, walks out with beer and whiskey, and they stop off the main road somewhere. A gravel road in a field, buildings and a chimney in the background. There is always some piece of civilization interrupting the landscape. Gravel heaps, reminders of where Wanda and the film started. Two dogs follow Mr. Dennis. He has beer, Piels Real Draft, in one hand and whiskey, Jack Daniels, in the other. 

Wanda sits on the car and eats something that looks like bread, a pickle, and later something that breaks rather than tears, a cookie? Some kind of snack. Drinking beer. It is as close to peaceful as we will get. Mr. Dennis has a tender moment, placing his suit jacket on her shoulders. Then he tells her she should do something about her hair, that it looks terrible.

She says she lost all her rollers.

He suggests she should cover it up. “Get a hat.”

“A hat?”

***

(I send blurry photos to R. asking if she knows the whiskey label. It looks like Jack Daniels but not conclusively. Freezing on Mr. Dennis standing on the car, swinging the bottle to the sky, fighting the annoying toy airplane buzzing overhead that has ruined the moment, broken the illusion. Too grainy to make out. Ezra Brooks? Rewinding. One frame, as Mr. Dennis gets into the car holding the bottles, offers irrefutable evidence.)

***

Barbara Loden wanted to adapt The Awakening but couldn’t find the funding. I am reading Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, imagining the scenes in grainy long intimate shots, Barbara playing lead because she would be best for the part, directing herself, eating bonbons in the New Orleans heat.

***

On the night they meet, in another hotel room, in the middle of the night, Mr. Dennis tells Wanda to get dressed and get him something to eat. He takes her pillow in a ridiculous show of authority and places it behind him, making her get up. There's a place open all night. He wants her to get 3 hamburgers. She can’t find her wallet, gives up looking for it: 

“Oh well, nothing in it anyhow.”

Mr. Dennis gives her money. He is particular about his burgers:  "No garbage. No onions. No butter on the bun. I want the bun toasted."

When she returns he slaps her because he saw her talking to someone on the street. The order is wrong. There's onions on the burger, and “garbage”. Lettuce. He makes her take it off. She scrapes it off in the trash bin, where she finds her wallet he'd stolen and looked through while she was gone. Pictures of her family, kids. 

Wanda likes onions.

"I don't know why you don't like onions? I do."

***

In I Am Wanda, Barbara Loden talks about reconnecting with her mother in the last years of her life, while she was sick and dying. They talked and got close. Her mother told her she tried to abort her but was glad she didn't. It was the depression era. Her mother told her she wouldn't know what to do without her now. Barbara tells the camera she didn't feel bad, that she understood.

***

Wanda is sitting in another bar with another man. Uniform, eagle patch. What went down with Mr. Dennis is on the TV but she is not watching. The bomb was fake, nothing inside. She holds a cigarette. The man tries to talk to her but she ignores him. “You just sit there.” Bottles of beer on the table, white label with red and gold. He orders fresh ones.

Red convertible, another off-road quarry. He pushes her down, tries to rape her. Wanda is frozen but then fights back, screams. Manages to get away, out of the car.

***

Nathalie Léger: “Her bag, she doesn’t forget her bag. She escapes, running, she stumbles and falls, gets up, runs into the nearby bushes, keeps going, loses her way. It might only be a little patch of municipal woodland but it might as well be a mythical forest; she has entered the circle of forgotten antiquities and of fairy-tale coincidences, the site of indecipherable truths, all preserved there between two parking lots. Running, frantic, she vanishes, as into sleep.”

***

In interviews on both The Dick Cavett Show and The Mike Douglas Show the men insinuate that Barbara Loden must have had help from her “great director” husband, “since the film’s now won a prize, you know” (Dick). She ignores the implication, responding earnestly that yes he was very helpful.

On The Mike Douglas Show, appearing alongside Yoko Ono and John Lennon, she says: “Yoko and I have sort of a feeling for each other.”

​Finding a longer clip of the interview is nearly impossible, where at the end she takes the stage with Plastic Ono Band, performing The Elephant’s Memory. Barbara stands to the side, next to John, playing a drum, while Yoko sings.

***

America loves a roadtrip movie and a heist movie, both fantasies of new beginnings, of leaving behind and starting new, from scratch, temporarily released from reality and history, if you only dream. Who doesn’t want to dream? Who doesn’t want an adventure? Don’t look back, don’t note the graves. Here, see this open road and horizon full of possibilities. They replicate an alluring image of American freedom, even if at the end you go up in a hail of bullets.

Wanda, the movie, refuses to be in service of this dream. There is no dream and no escape. She is traveling but not really going anywhere, from one man to another, one quarry to another. Wanda is in survival mode. There is no space for her. She is just trying to make it from one moment to the next. 

Food feels like one part of this refusal. Food is material. Eating is basic survival. Repetitive. Wanda is bleak and doesn’t offer hope but these are moments of pause, of some brief enjoyment, of existing undisturbed. 
​

***

It's night and Wanda arrives at another building. The muted sound of people inside. A woman checks on her: “Are you waiting for someone?”

The final scene is a food scene. She's sitting with a group, crammed between two men, smoking and coughing and holding a beer. The woman is there also. They’ve taken her in. It’s chaotic but also a temporary respite. She gets a hotdog from a tray and eats it. Plain. The group is rowdy, talking, getting on. She's existing among them but no one is particularly focused on her yet. They're clapping along with the music. A fiddle and guitar player playing with fervor. We see them playing. It is loud.

Wanda's eyes are closed. She's holding a cigarette.

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​​Kim Göransson (they) is from Sweden but live in Virgina with their family. They like to bake, make playlists and get lost in nature. They like tinned fish, brie, sad movies and pro wrestling. Shinsuke Nakamura fan. Editing for Superfan Zine and Meow Meow Pow Pow lit. They're trying to learn classical guitar and make a garden. You can find them @sonofgore on instagram. ​