The Fake Counter-Culture of "Valley of the Dolls"

"Valley of the Dreck" is what star Patty Duke called the film version of the biggest selling novel of all time, Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of Dolls". The film's guilty-pleasure kitsch factor has been written about many times before and won't be repeated here. What is worth pointing out is the unreal, never-neverland setting of the film, unrecognizable as history.

Though the film is purportedly about the underbelly of the entertainment industry in the mid-to-late 60's, the film makes no acknowlegement of the turmoil and cultural tectonics of its era. In this universe, Broadway theatre is still the dominant media (with only a passing reference to movies) and no attention is paid to the ever-increasing influence of rock and roll on entertainment and mores. Ludicrously, the dominant industry figure that every up-and-comer is gunning for is Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) an aging star of stage and screen patterned after Judy Garland (originally cast in the role until she was fired for locking herself in her dressing room for two days). The only stylistic concession to the 60's is a scene where Lawson belts out a show tune while hilariously enveloped in a mass of spinning psychedelic mobiles -- an effect comparable to watching Buddy Ebsen shoot heroin.

Instead, the film inserts its own counter-culture. Though the movie is ultimately about drug abuse, you won't see any LSD, speed or marijuana here. Instead the illegal substances depicted here are "Dolls", a slang term for secanols and nembutols that has never been referenced by any other source and is most likely a made-up term. While the "hip" young people in the 60's were going to rock clubs or discotheques (rock festivals and stadium concerts still being a few years away), the with-it young people of "Valley of the Dolls" hang out in Copa Cabanna-type lounges, dining in formal dress while eagerly awaiting performances by "the latest sensation!". It is at one of these anachronistic nightspots where the Sharon Tate character meets her lounge singer boyfriend, Tony Polar, croaking out "Come Live with Me".

This is your father's edgy movie, but its lack of coolness was hardly unusual for the period. Though it is hard to believe today -- with the exception of the recording industry -- youth culture was hermetically sealed off from mainstream culture, impenetrable to anyone over age 35.* In an era where the youth demographic is chased with monomaniacal fervor and the most soul-deadening corporations try to appear rebellious, the squareness of this period is not only quaint but charming.

*This explains the phenomenon of Fake Rock Music seen in many films between 1964 and 1970. Usually heard during swingin' party or nightclub sequences, this inauthentic music was distinguished by Doc Severson-like band arrangements featuring anemic high-pitched electric guitars that conveyed to rube audiences everywhere that seriously hip-happenings were going-on.