SOURCE: "Personal Best: What's New in Towne," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXVII, No. 11, March 16, 1982, pp. 52-3.

[In the following review, Stone discusses Towne's treatment of women's sports and lesbian sex in Personal Best, contending that "the themes are entwined in a startlingly innovative way."]

Nervous sweat drips off Mariel Hemingway's face as she sets up for a sprint in Personal Best, and real life bursts through decades of movie convention. We've seen sport as background to romance in the charming caprice, Pat and Mike. We've seen the athlete as manipulated beauty: Susan Anton in Golden Girl. But we've never before seen the beauty as jock foremost; and, amazingly, the woman's commitment isn't presented as some dazzling exception or aberrant piece of sublimation. Writer-director Robert Towne doesn't explain it at all. It's simply a given.

Women's sports are treated with an altogether new seriousness in Personal Best, and so is lesbian sex. The themes are entwined in a startlingly innovative way, but most reviewers, even those who liked the movie, have failed to identify its novelty and daring. Personal Best is striking resonant chords and pinching sensitive nerves among feminists and gay activists too. Some love it. Others think it's exploitive and distorting. Herewith, an attempt to sort out the controversy and distinguish what works in the film from what doesn't.

Personal Best is about Olympic contenders Chris Cahill (played by Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (Patrice Donnelly). They meet at a track event, become lovers, and then teammates at the University of California. When we first see Chris, she's an emotional wreck, unable to perform under her father's goading. When we first see Tory, a seasoned competitor, she's lifting her male coach in the air after a victory. Tory attracts Chris because she displays the self-confidence the younger woman lacks and desires, and Tory recognizes in Chris the great physical potential she has always longed for. Tory encourages Chris as no one ever has, and she blossoms into a champion. After three years of living with Tory and working out with her, however, Chris hungers to test experience on her own. The women break up and Chris eventually takes a male lover, but sport remains the center of both women's lives.

I found Michael Chapman's cinematography intoxicating, with its close-up and slow-motion adoration of female anatomy and racially integrated sport ritual, and I was surprised to learn that others thought it leering and reductive. I first heard the charge from a magazine editor. "But what about all those crotch shots?" she asked, with obvious distaste. She was referring to a sequence of high jumps. At the peak of the event, the pelvis, of course, is thrust upward, and that astonishing arch is what the camera recorded.

For a fuller elaboration of her chagrin I recommend Robert Hatch's denunciation in the February 27 Nation. "What gravels me about the film is its persistent treatment of its large cast of women as sex objects in situations that are unrelated to sex. We wander into their steam room, where they are relaxing in languorous nudity," Hatch fumes and then adds: "This is cheesecake; it demeans women, and the lubricious chuckles in the audiences suggest that it does so successfully."

Hatch has completely misread the film's images. His category "not related to sex" seems vast to me, and Towne's naturalistic depiction of sport life and its innate eroticism is thus lost to him. Does Hatch imagine that women in steam rooms sit at attention in dress-for-success ensembles? Towne's depiction of women athletes is an unqualified triumph. He sees sport with a voluptuary's eye—a far sight from the ascetic, running-for-God/running-for-the-Jews sensibility which steered Chariots of Fire. He makes Chris's and Tory's physical attachment—and that between men and women, and men and men, who train together—seem a natural concomitant of the pared-down jock world of group saunas, massages, gallops on the beach, and salty embraces. The lines dividing sex and sport are easily blurred, for both genders: there's a playfulness to the sex and a sexiness to the carousing. These are people who can think of fucking as building lower body muscle.

Personal Best is a celebration of the life lived entirely in and of the body. Tory and Chris are both raw material and the artists who mold it. They know sensation—the agony of ripped tendons; the exhilaration of achieving new feats—as nonathletes never can. And they are wonderfully unsqueamish about physical functions. In a funny, revolutionary scene, Chris gets behind her male lover and holds his penis while he urinates, exclaiming: "I've always wanted to pee standing up."

But the indignant response to the film (it's in a lot of other reviews too) belies more than ignorance about sports. It's a muddled, knee-jerk puritanism, also known as antiporn feminism, a line far more focused on how women are damaged than how they are pleasured. To claim that Towne sees his characters merely as sex objects is preposterous, since his camera is almost always revealing the nitty-gritty of women's training. Towne makes women's sexiness a function of their power: he shows that women are alluring when they're strong, graceful, accomplished, and rippling with muscle. What a long, salubrious way Mariel Hemingway is from the poignantly helpless flesh of Marilyn Monroe, or an anorectic wisp like Audrey Hepburn, earlier exemplars of female sexiness.

This month's Playboy photo layout on Personal Best unwittingly documents the difference between empathetic images of female sexiness and the other kind. First there are four pages of stills from the movie: the camera has observed women in their lives, engaged in either athletic activity or sex with one another. Then boom! On the next double page is a classic, posed Playboy shot of Hemingway nude except for pearls, doing a spilt with her head bent forward. She's photographed from behind, so the camera targets her ass, legs, and back in a darkened room.

It's a disturbing picture, partly because the photographer flaunts his advantages over his model—you're on display; I have put you there—and partly because the photographer's advantage is precisely what makes the shot sexy to its intended audience. The Playboy viewer needs to see configurations which declare, unequivocally, that the woman is displaying herself for no reason other than to arouse the viewer and that never, for one moment, has she forgotten she exists only to be seen by potentially excitable men. The less the Playboy viewer sees a woman's strength and accomplishment, the less he is reminded that she can be distracted from her role as turn-on for him.

Personal Best is a male fantasy too—only Towne gets off on female vigor and self-will. He really tries to get feminism right (unlike poor George Cukor who, in his recent debacle, Rich and Famous, depicted liberation as a woman's right to get humiliated by increasingly younger men). Towne is careful to show how good women are to one another and how successful they've become at telling pushy men to fuck off. He dramatizes both the gratitude and the impatience the women feel for their coach, a man who wants them to win, but his way. And Towne subtly reveals how sport and lesbianism—two choices which make women marginal in society—reinforce his characters' independence. Eventually, their inner lives match the radicalism of their outer situations and both are able to feel fine without male approval.

Towne's treatment of lesbianism—despite the problems it raises, and there are some—is completely new in films. Personal Best is a gratifying, clarifying departure from lesbian-punishing movies like The Children's Hour, The Killing of Sister George, The Fox, and Windows. A friend who recently saw Personal Best at the Greenwich Theater, with an audience consisting largely of lesbian couples, said that spontaneous applause and cheering broke out after the initial lovemaking scene.

It is gloriously sensual, if too brief. Tory and Chris drink beer, smoke dope, get silly, and whip off their clothes, ex-ulting in their nerves and cells. The camera traces their long thighs and flat stomachs like an amorous tongue. It's intent but unsmutty, partly because Towne doesn't view their sex as neurotic. He rescues lesbianism from a number of other bum raps as well, including the belief—advanced by some lesbians and gay men—that lesbians disdain lustiness in favor of affectionate cuddling (while gay men supposedly do the opposite). The movie cuts against the stereotype that lesbians accept each other as a consolation prize, because they can't attract men; Tory and Chris are known as "the two best-looking women in San Luis Obispo" and choose each other freely. There's no butch/femme division: both women combine tomboyish swaggering with womanly tenderness. And most remarkable—a first among movies with lesbian characters—their sexuality isn't made the Problem around which everyone else's emotions quiver and congeal.

Towne's good will notwithstanding, a number of gay men and women have come down hard on Personal Best. Recently interviewed in the Times, Vito Russo said that Towne trivialized lesbian sex, and therefore all homosexuality by having Chris go from Tory to a man. It made the women's affair seem adolescent, Russo argued. A lesbian friend, who came back railing against this movie I'd suggested she see, thought the lesbian sex insultingly tame, nothing like genuine eroticism which, she said, Towne didn't come close to portraying.

I don't think these charges make a case for Towne as a homophobe. Tory is clear about what she wants. Chris isn't. She is young, an experimenter who wants to taste the full sexual menu. If anything, it was bold of Towne to make a movie which didn't lock characters into an either/or rigid sexual identity. Tory has had male lovers—she describes one at the beginning of the movie. She may have a man again, and it's certainly possible that Chris could fall in love with another woman. Chris is uncertain about how her male lover will feel about her affair (he accepts it), but she never disavows this aspect of her sexuality.

Towne doesn't make lesbianism like beginner sex. When Chris makes love to a man, she's just as coltish as she was with Tory. In fact, her lesbian affair is presented as more intense than her heterosexual one. There's no hot-and-heavy eroticism anywhere in this film. It's about people obsessed with sport, not sex.

The trouble with Personal Best is that Towne doesn't know how to dramatize his characters' conflicts, and, as a result, the film portrays athletes more astutely than it does a lesbian relationship. The women's break-up is awkward and unimaginative. Chris isn't exactly a fount of introspective eloquence, and with her grazing-animal, Renoir face and squeaky drawl of a voice, Hemingway is terrific as a jock required to look dumber than she is. Still, the women's emotions deserve a more intelligent treatment than the few fuzzy hurt-feeling episodes Towne provides. By not permitting us to understand or probe his characters, Towne distances us from them irretrievably.

He makes another crucial error by abandoning Tory. Until the split-up, Personal Best is about two women, but afterwards, Tory is glimpsed in snippets and only in relation to Chris. It's unfair to the character, and it severely unbalances the film. We need to see Tory in her own life—miserable, or with friends, or with another lover—because Towne has made us care about her. Tory and Chris are thrown together once more at the Olympic finals, and Chris gets a chance to return the support which Tory first gave to her, but the ending is slapdash, and Chris's relationships with both Tory and her coach are left frustratingly unresolved. After the astonishing and lengthy first section—well worth seeing—the story goes nowhere, like the athletes who cannot get to Moscow.

The abandonment of Tory as a character is the one uncontestable antilesbian charge that can be leveled at the movie. I did get the feeling that Towne wanted to see Hemingway in bed with a man—not to legitimatize her, however, but because that's what he likes. Towne clearly doesn't get off on the spectacle of affirmed, second-round lesbianism, or he would have shown Tory with another woman. It's not believable that this beautiful, adventurous character would just mope and pine indefinitely.

In a similar vein, Towne and Herningway have been telling reporters that Personal Best is not about lesbianism, which is rather like saying that Moby Dick is about men at sea, nature, and change, but not about whale-hunting. Having made the most enlightened movie about lesbians to date, is Towne now afraid the theme will hurt the movie commercially, and if so, why doesn't he come right out and say so? The producers of Making Love made a big, newsy deal out of their risk in doing a movie on gay men. What's up?

By advertising the financial chanciness of male gay sex and not mentioning that lesbians are risky too, everyone seems to be agreeing that homophobia is essentially about male/male sex—that sex with penises is the kind that's truly threatening. Lesbians aren't a turnoff to straights of either gender, the rationale goes, because what women do together isn't serious.

But this doesn't quite square with Towne's denial of the content of his film, or with the fact that Towne's film company was harassed with bomb threats and guns while on location in Oregon, or with the fact that lesbianism is a far more closeted subject in society than male gay sex. Gay men are a reality in popular culture, even if only as a Phil Donahue "issue." There are male gay characters on sitcoms, and comedians satirize the cruising life, while lesbians rarely show up on the tube and are never joked about. Gay means gay man on TV, and to most Americans, therefore, the questions of who lesbians are and what they do in bed are still mysterious and fraught. Why else the morbid gravity when the subject comes up?

Maybe the relative openness with which male homosexuality is now discussed is partly a cover for, and distraction from, the possibility that lesbian sex evokes even deeper terrors. Perhaps Towne denies his subject because he's realized that nowhere, save the laid-back world of Personal Best, are people relaxed about female sexuality. Maybe most people feel that sex without penises isn't safe and sweet but scary and subversive. It's certainly not good for the family. It's certainly not good for men. That's dangerous enough for me.