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PARTISAN REVIEW
way. Though she allows herself to be abused, discounted, mocked by her
lover, though the film maker misses no chance to make her a ridiculous
working-class piece of ass, she is a successfully realized figure whose presence
in the film is essential to its dominant thrust. Does the film maker like
Rayette? The question is, in this case and most others like it, beside the
point. What he has to like about Rayette is the occasion she provides for a
display of wit and the elaboration of a striking character profile. He likes too
the way Rayette can be played off against other characters, providing comic
relief in otherwise tense circumstances, or pointing up by contrast the rela-
I
tive abstractness of more intellectually impressive figures , the quite different
t
though no less striking ways in which they too are alienated from any genu-
ine sense ofwho they are.
The film maker, then, is drawn to Rayette on behalf of the color, variety
and wit she enables. But it is clear that there is also a "visceral fascination"
with Rayette as the incarnation of what is .. intellectually loathesorne ." She
has no self-respect. She is content to be a sexual object as long as her basic
need to have and hold a man is served by her erotic attraction . She is entirely
without cultivation, and without that sensitivity
to
nuance and irony which
we moderns consider exemplary in mature adults. Though she knows how
to moan and complain, she does so crudely, with conspicuous indecorum.
At the same time, Rayette is a recognizable human being, in the brutishness
of her strategems, the earnestness of her entreaties, and the hideous im–
poverishment of her imagination. She is, for all her repellent qualities, a
particular instance of the thing itself, and the film maker is taken with her,
precisely as we are, for the range of feelings and thoughts she alone can
liberate in him. There is an unmistakable pleasure we take in observing
Rayette , even when she is grossly mistreated, for there is in each of us an
inarticulate conviction that one so defenseless deserves what she gets. All
the more strongly, therefore, do we resent her lover when he steps beyond
I
the limits of 'reasonable' mistreatment, and feel stirred to take her part
>,
when she is condescended to late in the film by people who have no idea
what such a person may have seen and felt .
This is not the place to dwell at length on a single film or character, but
it seems to me essential that we see what the feminist critic will not, whether
in
Five Easy Pieces
or in other films. Whatever the represented flaws in a
particular character,
if
the film is worth our attention, the visceral fascina–
tion we feel for her will not ensure that we acquiesce in her condition. A
major object of criticism will be to discover what relation the character bears
to other characters in the film, and in what degree she is essential to the
structure of the work as a whole. In the case of
Five Easy Pieces,
to deplore
the presence of Rayette in the film is
to
refuse to see how many different
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