Mary Harron (born 1953) is a Canadian film director and screenwriter most well known for her films I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page.
Born in Ontario, Canada, Harron grew up with a family that was entrenched in the world of film and theater. Her father, Donald Harron, is an actor, author, director, comedian, and writer. Harron’s first stepmother, Virginia Leith, was discovered by Stanley Kubrick and acted in one of his first films. She also had featured roles in other movies such as the 1956 version of A Kiss Before Dying and The Brain That Wouldn't Die (Leith’s brief acting career partly inspired Harron's interest in making The Notorious Bettie Page). Harron’s stepfather is Stephen Vizinczey, a novelist and screen writer, and another of her stepmothers is the singer Catherine McKinnon. Harron’s sister, Kelley Harron is an actor and producer.
Harron moved to England when she was thirteen and later attended Oxford University. Whilst in England she dated Tony Blair who would later become the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She then moved to New York City and was part of its 1970’s punk scene. She helped start and write for Punk magazine as a music journalist -- she was the first journalist to interview the Sex Pistols for an American publication.
In addition to her films, Harron was also the executive producer of The Weather Underground, a documentary looking at the radical activists of the 1970’s. She has has also worked in television, directing episodes of Oz, Six Feet Under, Homicide: Life on the Street, The L Word and Big Love. She is currently developing a film based on the book Please Kill Me which details the 1970’s New York punk scene which she was so much a part of.
She lives in New York with her husband, filmmaker John C. Walsh, and their two children.
Harron’s first movie, I Shot Andy Warhol, released in 1996, is the story of the real life Valerie Solanas. After a life filled with hardship and abuse, she becomes radically embittered by patriarchy, and decides to shoot the famous pop artist Andy Warhol as a statement against the arrogant domination of male power figures. Failing to attract serious recognition from Andy Warhol, who says he will look over a play she wrote and wants produced, Valerie is filled with resentment and shoots Warhol, but does not kill him. Solanas has received recognition because of this movie and her extreme views in the now infamous SCUM Manifesto, a book detailing her ideas for ridding the world of men. In the movie Harron uses the character of Solanas to represent the outrage that many women feel towards the repressive patriarchy. While the movie speaks to larger issues of power, it also shows how oppression affects someone on an emotional and personal level. Harron related to Solanas’ struggle:
"For Solanas, there was this fierce, outsider quality to her unhappiness and frustration. That was a time in my life when I was frustrated myself in my work. I wanted to direct. I had the idea years before I got to direct myself. So I think there were elements of my own frustration and elements of what it was like growing up with an unfair attitude towards women . . . and Valerie was an extreme example of that. There was also the intellectual interest of how someone can be so brilliant and her life goes so wrong, and also, that she was so forgotten and misunderstood. In both cases, I felt like Valerie had been consigned to history as this lunatic, almost nothing written about her." (Kaufman)
While Solanas was never able to produce her play, Harron was able to make her movie and was able to tell Solanas’ story. I Shot Andy Warhol does not glorify Valerie Solanas; it pleads her case by showing that she was the product of a larger system of cruelty, and was not a lunatic, but a frustrated member of society.
Harron’s second movie, American Psycho, released in 2000, is based on the book of the same title by Bret Easton Ellis which is notorious for the misogyny of its lead character, and graphic descriptions of torture and murder. However, although the movie has been praised repeatedly, much of its satirical nature was already present in the novel. For example, the list of products Patrick uses was always in the book as well as the runnning joke throughout the movie that Bateman is often confused for other rich, white, handsome men which adds to his desire to be noticed, something that could be one reason he kills. These critiques of power are expressed through a humorous lens. The protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is a rich white man who works for fictional mergers and acquisitions firm Pierce & Pierce, a nod to the name of Sherman McCoy's employer in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Bateman kills randomly, although some (or all) of the deaths could be the results of a bored yuppie’s revengeful imagination. As Stephen Holden writes in The New York Times:
“From the opening credits, in which drops of blood are confused with red berry sauce drizzled on an exquisitely arranged plate of nouvelle cuisine, the movie establishes its insidious balance of humor and aestheticized gore� (Holden).
Harron’s second film, like her first, is also about deconstructing gender. Like Solonas, Bateman is influenced by the roles of gender in our society. In the movie, Bateman faces the pressures of manhood, of making money, and of gaining power while denying emotions. He is forced to such an extreme, inhuman state of apathy, materialism, and detachment, that he begins killing people at random to confirm his power, which is all he has. Harron again uses a single character to communicate larger themes and tensions concerning gender and power in America.
The Notorious Bettie Page, released in 2005, is about the 1950s pinup model who became a cult icon of sexuality and who helped popularize pornography. Harron shows Page as the daughter of religious and conservative parents, as well as the fetish symbol who became a target of a Senate investigation of pornography. For this project, as well as for I Shot Andy Warhol, Harron had to do historical research and interviewed several friends of Page’s, as well as her first husband. Page was legally bound to another project and was thus unable to do an interview, but not being attached to Page meant that Harron was free to create a subjective representation of Page. Harron saw Page as an unwitting feminist figure who represented a movement for women’s sexual liberation, ironically similar, yet dissimilar to Solonas’. About the film, Harron says in an interview:
"Clearly Bettie is a very inspiring figure to young women because she had a strong independent streak. She did what she wanted to do and she wasn't just doing it for men. . . But I think it's a huge mistake to think of her as a conscious feminist heroine. As far as I can see, she didn't have an agenda, ever. She just followed her own path unconsciously. I don't think she thought of herself as a rebel in any way. She was kind of in her own world of dress-up." (Nerve.com)
Like Page, Harron also does not follow a strict feminist ideology, but has instead openly explored issues, instead of tying herself to a single perspective on gender. She is not aiming to create political films, but may end up doing so anyway, in her attempt to express a woman’s point of view. She says in an interview:
"I feel that without feminism, I wouldn't be doing this. So I feel very grateful. Without it, God knows what my life would be. I don't make feminist films in the sense that I don't make anything ideological. But I do find that women get my films better. Women and gay men. Maybe because they're less threatened by it, or they see what I'm trying to say better." (Hornaday)
