I spend so many days at the moment thinking about Faye Dunaway's depressing life, her cold lifeless eyes.
Seriously what the hell happened to Faye Dunaways career? One minute she was making "Chinatown" with Polanski, that film "Bonnie and Clyde" and the movie "Network", and by minute I really mean decade even though "Bonnie and Clyde" was made in 1967 and was set in the thirties it feels like the seventies, and then her career all went to hell. No photo encapsulates this sense of mid career slump like Dunaway in neglige crouching by a bar heater while holding some indeterminate white thing in her hand and looking more troubled than she really should. The bar heater is a pretty bleak detail in the picture, the wall also has a sort of faux tuscan/lower east side junkie chic thing. It only took five years for Dunaway to slip from winning an Academy award to being in one of the worst movies of 1981, Mommie Dearest. Now she looks sort of like the following picture, but as if she took that picture to a platic surgeon in 1995 and was like "do your best" and the plastic surgeon took a long hard look in the mirror in the adjoining room after Faye Dunaway left and was seriously questioning whether he had the technical ability, let alone technological ability to be up to the task and when the operation occurred was sitting up in his office afterwards not overly pleased, not stressing out about it, but certainly wishing he had another chance.
In a way his predicament sort of mirrors that of Faye Dunaway, except presumably Faye Dunaway was more attractive at her peak. In Network Faye Dunway's character, in some frank disclosure, reveals to the extremely middle aged man she is having an affair with - an affair which is explained by stating that since college she had a massive crush on the guy who looks like Gregory Peck in his seventies, that she "has a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and can't wait to get my clothes back on and get out of that bedroom." This is followed, not immediately, but after some digression and a trip to Montauk by a really uncomfortably contracted old spice scented sex scene with cragged, network producer which is short even by those of a "masculine temperament". It lasts all of ten seconds, which would be a poor showing by anyone's standards. I don't really know why she has this character flaw, it shows up again except with erectile disfunction in "Bonnie and Clyde". Its as if her whole career is defined by really bad sex. As if the audience isn't allowed to enjoy the concept of a beautiful intelligent woman who also has great sex, as if sex has to always be her achilles heel. Fortunately for Faye Dunaway in real life her Achilles heel is her crappy career post 1980.
So disappointed in you Faye Dunaway. Felt real human emotion in three films she was in when she had a good career.
