Movie Explainer: What is Damsels in Distress about?

It's about the will, in a kind of Germanic sense

“No soap, radio!”
•trad.

Of all the movies I’ve ever loved, the one I’ve had the hardest time figuring out is Damsels in Distress (2011). L’Age d’Or (1930) and The American Astronaut (2001) are too oneiric to approach rationally; Lost Highway (1997) and Primer (2004) dutifully click into place after you stop and think about them; 2001 (1968) is…less obscure than people claim it is. But Damsels in Distress does not give up its secrets easily.

I started writing things I called “movie explainers” as a bit of laugh at myself—I’m a book guy, not a movie guy—but I have hitherto tried, in my small way, to explain things. This explainer, so-called, is more hesitant. More than usual I may not know what I’m talking about.

Because Damsels in Distress is not the most famous of movies, despite the presence of several celebrities in the cast, I will offer a brief summary before we begin. If you’ve already seen the movie, this section may be de trop, but perhaps play along, anyway; perhaps there’ll be something new.

A bare plot summary

The movie: Violet is an eccentric junior at a small liberal arts college. If she is not a pathological liar, she at least tells a lot of lies. She lives with and leads a coterie of well-meaning but kind of interfering students, including

1. Rose, who affects a British accent, appears to be terrified of men (a problem the movie does not make much of), and is paralyzed by the presence of bad odors (a problem the movie does); and
2. Heather, who appears to be perpetually confused.

Whenever four characters can be fit into frame, four characters are fit into frame.

Although Rose is the one designated as suffering from “nasal shock syndrome,” all three of these friends are very sensitive to smells. They also have great faith in the healing power of scents (or at least Violet does—she expresses most of the opinions for the group). Perhaps good smells can help the depressed and suicidal patrons of the campus Suicide Prevention Center (which the three of them appear to run). If not smells, then certainly dance. The Suicide Prevention Center is putting on some kind of musical show, in which only the suicidal or certifiably depressed are permitted to participate; it also serves donuts and coffee, but, again, these are strictly for the suicidal.

Among their other goals are uplifting the hapless “doufi” at the DU fraternity to some sort of civilized state and getting the malodorous residents of Doar Dorm to wash. “There’s enough material here for a lifetime of social work.”

All that is merely by way of background. The movie has not started yet.

The movie starts

As movies should, Damsels in Distress begins by introducing an outsider, a sophomore transfer student named Lily. (These names are all plants, guys!) Violet and her crew recruit Lily as she in moving in, offering her a room and a role. Lily is relatively normal, and is constantly distressed, repulsed, or annoyed by Violet.

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The plot of the movie follows the emotional arc of Violet’s precarious mental state. I’m not sure that fact is obvious. One could just as easily say that the film follows the romantic fortunes of Heather, Lily, and Violet. (Rose, of course, expresses no emotion towards boys except caution, and finds no romance.)

(From this point on there are spoilers. If you’ve never seen Damsels in Distress, you might want to go do it now, at least in part because nothing I am about to say will make any sense otherwise.)

Heather finds a nice boy who is just as confused as she is. Lily becomes entangled first with a French graduate student whose religious convictions require him to sodomize her and second with a “playboy or operator type” who constructs a fictional backstory for himself. We’ll call him (by perhaps his real name) Fred (a name Whit Stillman has used for a “big personality” character before).

But the movie belongs to Violet. Violet’s boyfriend, the dim and unpleasant Frank, cheats on her with a depressed woman perhaps recently rescued from suicide (probably not), and Violet spirals into depression. She pines endlessly for Frank. She wanders away from campus (creating a stir; no one knows where she went) and finds hope in a hotel’s fancy soap; but despite her claim that the soap’s scent is revelatory, she is still depressed. Instead of sitting behind the desk at the Suicide Prevention Center, Violet is now eligible for treatment. She can, as they say, eat the donuts. Perhaps more importantly, she can participate in the SPC musical production.

After delivering a monologue against “uniqueness, eccentricity, etc.” and in favor of being part of “a large mass of normal people” Lily (implicitly) dumps Fred perhaps to return to the French graduate student (who promises no more sodomy). Violet (implicitly) ends up with Fred, a character remarkably similar to her.

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Furthermore, Lily breaks up with Violet’s crew of eccentrics (resolving the tension introduced in the first scene). But she agrees to take part in the dance recital. The exact dialog is:

Violet: But you’ll still do the part?
Lily: Yeah, of course.

Cut to a title card: “Dress rehearsal.”

Dress rehearsal

Like that. And then the whole cast does a Fred Astaire dance number (“Things Are Looking Up”). Lily and Fred kiss at the end of the number. That’s the end of the movie. There’s a coda in which Violet teaches the audience how to do a dance (“sambola!”) she invented. The cast dances together again (Lily is paired with Xavier, the French grad student in this coda, but not in the Astaire climax).

This dance number is clearly an homage to Old Hollywood musicals. It is not “realistic,” but then neither is the ballet from An American in Paris (1951). Yet here we have one of the puzzles of the movie: An important (?) plot point (?) had been that only clinically depressed people could be in the show. Violet qualifies now, but: How can Lily agree to be in the show? How can Fred dance with Violet?

I realize that once the music starts and Violet dances out the door we have left reality behind, but surely we are still in the regular movie reality before Violet dances out the door, and yet Fred and Lily are canonically included in the musical of the depressed. When the whole cast joins in, we find that the only people in the “Things Are Looking Up” number who “belong” are Violet and an extremely eccentric character named Freak Astaire. You will notice that Freak Astaire cannot be his real name, and that his name is pointedly not Fred.

Who is this Violet character, anyway?

“People aren’t exactly as you assume,” Rose says, revealing Violet to be literally “crazy” (her term). Rose knew Violet in her youth; Violet is not her real name (it’s Emily Tweeter); she suffers from OCD compulsions. One is tempted to take Rose at her word here, but her story of Violet’s youth (told when Violet is absent) takes a sudden and melodramatic turn. Violet’s parents perish in an unexplained and unexpected way. Is that part true, too? Is any of it?

Because we later learn that Rose is herself faking—consistently, “Method”ly—her English accent. She is an American who merely visited London briefly. The only independent corroboration about the Emily Tweeter story comes from Fred, who frequently makes things up (e.g. his name) and who admits that in this case he misremembered. Violet herself makes things up, such as a fictional cousin in Philadelphia she trots out in various guises in various conversations. We have liars lying about liars and then dancing a dance they are mostly ineligible to dance.

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The structure of the film is in some ways its strangest part. Violet becomes depressed fairly early on. She remains depressed. She leaves town, finds hope in soap, returns to campus…and is still depressed. She explains that she’s actually in a tailspin. This goes on. Although full of plans to overcome others’ depression through dance and scents, she cannot overcome her own.

Until, I suppose, the final dance number, which will prove significant.

These are the basic building blocks of the movie. What are to to construct from them? I’m not 100% sure, but this is my groping towards an attempt.

“Still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently” •Nabokov

Violet’s character in a nutshell: She is always trying to impose her will on the world. Rose’s account of young Violet/Emily trying to keep her parents alive through the magic moving of a suitcase, whether “true” or not in the context of the film, certainly rings true. Thus do I will, and thus do I make manifest.

Lily notes that groups sort themselves the way they do for a reason, and Violet’s crew is indeed generally made up of people who refuse to be constrained by reality. In Heather’s case, she may just be too dumb to understand that Xavier, unlike Zorro, can start with an X, but Rose is willfully inventing herself. She is “from London” in the sense that she was once there and came from there; this bit of sophistry she links to glorifying God by overcoming oneself.

(Fred’s casual treatment of reality is, similarly, obvious.)

Now, throughout the movie, Violet attempts to tap dance. People make fun of her lame dancing. She has no reason to be dancing, really. Whereas the obsession with scents is shared with her roommates (and perhaps Heather believes most in the healing power of good smells, Rose most in the damaging power of bad ones), dance is Violet’s thing. Other dancers, such as Aubrey Plaza’s Debbie, are openly hostile to Violet’s dancing. One way of viewing the movie is a way in which either through force of character or superhuman power (not a bad definition of the capital-W Will), Violet manipulates events to allow her to dance.

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Violet brings Lily into the fold—Lily attracts potential suitor Fred—Violet then exposes Fred as a fraud (read: eccentric), which is poison to Lily’s preference for mundanity: In this way, as Lily recoils from Fred, Violet acquires a dance partner.

Furthermore: Violet constructs (i.e. wills) suicidal ideation for Priss and then rescues her from the same—Priss steals Violet’s boyfriend—Violet sinks into depression precisely so she can have an excuse to dance in the depressive revue. You’ll notice that Violet cleverly invalidates the alternate method of relieving depression (olfactory therapy) by appearing to embrace it; but the soap does not work, not on Violet and not on Doar Dorm; it is not “transformative” (Violet’s optimistic word). With no hope in soap, Violet has little choice but to turn to dance, the eventuality she desired all along.

Perhaps it is ascribing excessively occult power to the will to suggest that Violet somehow manages to arrange things so that Fred (not, recall, the name by which he is originally known) takes the identity of Freak Astaire (not, recall, his real identity) to allow him symbolically to dance with her. I mean, there’s something going on with the passing along of the Fred name! But, regardless, since her preferred dance partner cannot skip down a lane with her and kiss her in a fountain (in the context of the depression revue, b/c he’s not depressed), we are treated not to the show, but, significantly, merely a dress rehearsal. Anything can happen in a dress rehearsal!

But our big musical number / anti-depression course / romantic kiss is a dress rehearsal in another sense. If Violet’s skill is reality creation—if we are supposed to believe that her story is the story of a woman who wills her own destiny—then “Things Are Looking Up” is a mere aperitif for the true event, the thing she wills above all else. What follows the dress rehearsal? why, the main event, of course. And the main event here is the sambola!

One is tempted to point to “Things Are Looking Up” as the moment the movie enters fantasy land, but it is in the coda that Violet turns directly to the audience and demands that we obey her. We become the subject to her will as surely as in-movie reality does. Dance like this! Do it!

The sambola is Violet’s triumph over reality. I guess you could see the movie as Violet spiraling into madness, but in the context of the film it feels more like triumphing over sanity. Mere reality can no longer stand firm against the terrifying power of Violet’s will!