Correspondence No. 6: “Hope You Like the New Me,” a song by Richard Thompson, from his album Mock Tudor // 3 Women, a film directed by Robert Altman
Thompson’s exquisitely creepy song chronicles the gradual theft of one personality by another. The thief is speaking to his victim, detailing all the things he stole from him, and giving his justifications for each theft, in a manner that sounds not entirely sincere.
First is “I stole your style,” for which the excuse is “I must try to be all I can be.” The vampire-like narrator then stole his laugh, his jokes ("just the good ones") and his walk, all of which are meant to enhance the speaker’s social life. “To steal is to flatter / What a compliment to pay,” he says.
In the last two verses, things get really serious. First comes “I stole your wife,” with the excuse given that “she was looking bored, don’t you think?” Predictably, the song finishes with “I stole your soul.” The excuse cited, for the second time in the song, is “it suits me more than it ever suited you.” “The new me” turns out to be a reconstructed version of the victim, cobbled together with stolen parts. To be pedantic, the style, laugh and walk are not stolen in the literal sense; the victim can still possess them. The wife however is now lost to the victim, and possibly the soul as well.
Altman’s exquisitely creepy film tells a similar story – but with more complications, mysteries and digressions than Thompson’s rather straightforward song. The plot deals primarily with the shifting relationship between Pinky and Millie, two employees at an old-age health resort in the California desert. There, amid stunning cinematography dominated by pink, yellow and purple hues, as well as shimmering aquatic and desert landscapes, their relationship to each other and to a mysterious third woman (Willie), who paints unsettling erotic murals, is documented in quotidian, granular detail.
Pinky is a young adult but behaves like a child. She blows bubbles in her Coke, makes faces and barfing gestures, and indulges in attention-grabbing play-acting (“Oooh, my head! oooh, my legs hurt!”). Millie serves as her mentor at work, which implies a sense of responsibility that she doesn’t really demonstrate. Millie is vacuously obsessed with recipes and fashion, and talks constantly to people who prefer to ignore her. She appears to be severely lacking in self-awareness. This point is brought home by repeated shots of her driving around with the hem of her skirt stuck in the car door, something to which she is totally oblivious.
Pinky winds up living with Millie, and starting from a certain point in the film (which I won’t reveal here), begins to take on aspects of Millie’s personality, to the extent that they eventually trade places. Pinky becomes the boss, giving orders to Millie. Ominously, she also starts reading Millie’s diary, wearing her clothes, and using her Social Security number. (This is foreshadowed in an earlier scene where Pinky – accidentally? – punches out of work using Millie’s card.) Pinky goes beyond Millie’s bossiness, becoming irritable and bad-tempered, to the point that you begin to sense violence on the horizon.
Unlike Thompson’s narrator, Pinky doesn’t really give any excuses for her soul-stealing. Apart from an apparent eagerness to fit in and get ahead, her motivations remain subject to speculation. Does she genuinely admire Millie (“to steal is to flatter”), or is she merely using her for some ulterior purpose? At one point she tells Millie, “you’re the most perfect person I ever met,” but given what we know of Millie, we have to wonder about her sincerity. As she steals Millie’s personality, she doesn’t say “it suits me more than it ever suited you,” but judging from her behavior, that’s certainly what she thinks. There’s even an “I stole your name” moment, something Thompson didn’t include in his catalogue of thefts.
Part of the genius of 3 Women is the way in which the ongoing merger-and-acquisition of personalities is depicted via the most mundane of everyday details. Who has to sleep on the roll-away bed tonight; how to squirt Cheez-Whiz on crackers; the right way to punch in and out of work; not being careful enough with that shrimp cocktail; which dress to put on today: these tiny actions all contribute to the drama. Millie’s obsession with recipes (I counted three different “melts” alone) has even benefited me personally – I’ve made her tuna melt a couple of times, and it was pretty good.
Even though Pinky steals aspects of Millie, it’s not a straightforward theft and appropriation, as in Thompson’s song. She remains (at least for a while) her own person, something different from both her former self and from Millie. But 3 Women evolves further, going in a direction that Thompson doesn’t explore. The film’s tagline summarized the action this way: “1 woman became 2/2 women became 3/3 women became 1.” Or, as Pinky says about the identical twins who also work in the health resort: “Do you think they know which one they are?... maybe they switch back and forth. One day Peggy's Polly, another day Polly's Peggy. Who knows?”