Bettie Page: Varietease and Teaserama

When exactly did “burlesque” start to shift into the domain of “classy strippers”, a justification for belly-button ringed, cashed-up post-bogans to 'don a quiff and line up for overpriced retro-style frillies from the Hot Topic online store?

I peg it around the late 1990s and early 2000s, somewhere between the rise of Suicide Girls as a sanctioned place for women to feel prettily liberated and all alternative-like by getting their tatt-laden tits out, and the total and absolute assimilation of what was once lost 50s lounge music, propelled from obscurity to the gang-Bang and Olufsens of the West's most overpriced and fashionable bars.

So it is not without some mixed feelings that the release of Irving Klaw's Bettie Page films Teaserama and Varietease through a large DVD distributor around Australia is received. The inner turmoil doesn't stem from an adolescent hysteria that something sacred and precious has “sold out” - the glee felt when finding the $5 bootleg “Rettie Page” t-shirt recently made sure of that. Indeed, claiming some kind of cultural purity for anything related to Klaw, bereft of the rank scent of capitalism, is at best just outright factually incorrect – the guy was a freaking business man. Let's never forget that, as harmless as these films look now, that the guy worked in pornography for fucks sake.

And pornography this was. Hard to gauge its shock value by todays standards – the girls (Bettie at the helm), soft, curvy and coy, seem at times more like champagned-up, randy schoolgirls than professional sex industry workers. But – as the titles suggest – these films are about the tease itself, from a time when the pornographic film industry was happy to let the male viewers figure out how to get to their “moment of glory” in their own time. Tease was the focus – the “Splodgearama” and “Variety Cumguzzle” lines were to manifest soon enough in the 1970s jizz-and-coke fests that the porn industry became, but these releases (no pun intended) celebrate a very different time.

Teaserama and Varietease have little bite now outside of patronising kitsch – its like looking back at your grandmother's photo album and having her explain how much of a stir she caused on the beach in her swimsuit that to our eyes resembles your entire winter wardrobe sticky-taped together. Burlesque is sadly now more often than not reduced to something ironically conservative, raunch cultures way of sanctioning through nostalgia and pastiche what in the 80s would have been seen as tasteless:and I mean 'topless on someones shoulders at a Motley Crue concert' kinda tasteless. And it's happened not only with the word 'burlesque', but with the utilisation of Bettie herself. Her wardrobe, her sweetness, her legend itself are held central by the legions of half-naked wannabes draped across frou-frou laden alternative venue stages around the country. Anchor and cherry motif patches sewn on Wheels and Dollbaby corsets paid for with daddy's gold visa does not an ironic-sex worker make. US comic Sarah Silverman respects strippers for waxing their assholes, but for mine its the fact that they are frank enough to call a spade a spade, as it were. I can shake the uncomfortable feeling that at times there is perhaps something going on here that smacks of reclaiming stripping as an art form for middle class private school girls...

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but where does that leave Bettie?

Terms like 'exploitation' lead to dicey ideological terrain, but it is not just in terms of Bettie's direct legacy that questions arise. More immediately of concern to the DVD release of films such as this is their status as cultural artifacts: does their accessibility now remove some of the allure and enigma of what was once considered a rarity, a precious your-lucky-if-you-can-find-it-anywhere treasure? Does the shift from 16mm film to video to digital make something that once looked a little rough now look a little clinical, a little more photoshop-effected than genuinely “old”? Does the fact you can buy these at JB Hi Fi somehow add insult to injury to the folks your granddaddy's age probably hid their original Klaw's in the back of the garage, their deeply hidden treasure played on clangy, archaic projectors?

These questions are ultimately redundant now – Pop Culture Archaeologists at the helm of the SS Postmodernism keep telling us that the more we dig up the more we prove mastery over the past, and perhaps even the more progressive we are as a society. Or something - yeah, I don't really buy it either. Either way, these are significant releases, but ones that demand questions: ones that you may not see in the wide-eyes of the wide-hipped, frilled, feathered, high-heeled and amply bosomed ladies of the films themselves. There, all you see is: “Are we done yet?”.