3 Women and canned convenience

I'm famous for my dinner parties. RIP Shelley Duvall

Jul 19, 2024

More than a few years ago I pitched Into the Gloss a shopping story about looks and accessories tied to the movie 3 Women. This was during the heyday of Glossier pink, and if you’re familiar with Altman’s film or seen a screenshot, you’d instantly grasp the connection. 3 Women is awash in shades of carnation and buttercream (with the occasional pop of violet and orange) and taps into femininity, friendship, and performance, all preoccupations of the beauty industry if you ask me.

The pitch never came to fruition (should’ve tried

Leandra Medine Cohen

over at Manrepeller instead). I don’t doubt a story on swipeable blushes and balms tied to tantalizing stills would be a hit on this platform, seemingly growing towards a certain direction and prioritizing a certain subset of interests, but that’s not what I’m about to do right now. I’m going to discuss the non-makeup inspired merits of 3 Women, including Shelley Duvall’s performance and it’s lightly gross-out but mostly period-accurate dinner party. You should watch it!

Pinky does not like tomatoes on her tuna melt.

3 WOMEN

Robert Altman, 1977

Miraculously conceived in a tumultuous dream and green-lit by Fox, Robert Altman's 3 Women was written without a proper shooting script in the 1970s, back when studios gambled, banking on and emboldened by the previous decade’s counter-cultural waves. Convention thrown to the wind, pixie dust of the California desert scattered like clouds of apprehension, 3 Women sends forth vibes surreal and spooky, typically atypical in Altman-land.

Small-town Texas naif Pinky (Sissy Spacek) arrives in Palm Springs to work at a geriatric spa. She’s taken under the wing of and moves in with her slightly older work colleague Millie (Shelley Duvall). They both act in varying degrees like 15 year-olds—or girls play-acting as women—until one’s admiring emulations turns sinister and she pretty much steals the other's identity. Meanwhile a mysterious third woman, Willie (Janice Rule), pregnant and married to the girls’ landlord, paints hieroglyphic murals of violent men in lieu of talking.

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Spacek perfectly embodies the formidably naive Pinky while Duvall is expertly aloof and innocuously delusional. A clueless motormouth, she’s the kind of woman totally unaware that she’s being made fun of, yet carrying blindly, triumphantly, on her own. Duval does all of this naturalistically — she improvised a lot—without pretense “allowing the fool in her to show itself,” says Altman.

In one of the first scenes at the rehabilitation center where they work, Pinky pretends to be a patient with aching limbs and ailments so Millie can show her the ropes with proper exercises. The patient/caretaker dynamic hints at things to come, and conjures Persona, often cited as one of Altman's inspirations. The pool waves recur, too, undulating in hazy dream sequences, layered with superimpositions, grainy and opaque like the film's ending, which I’m not about to spoil with hypothesis, except to say that it’s a field day for psychologists attempting to unlock the symbolism and dream logic about these three women, their roles, their functions, ever merging and shifting amongst them.

RELATEDLY…

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Images (Altman, 1972)
Always Shine (Sophia Takal, 2016)

“I’m famous for my dinner parties.”

Pigs in a blanket
Prepackaged shrimp cocktail
Sociable crackers topped with spray cheese and an olive
Chocolate pudding tarts + whipped cream (Pepperidge farm pastry shells, Betty Crocker pudding, canned “dessert topping” )

Anyone host who utters this, as Millie does, probably isn’t. Millie’s approach to food reflects the culinary zeitgeist of the late 60s (slightly more so than the late 70s when the film was made). Cooking was largely viewed as a nuisance rather than a joy, and food publications of the time conveyed the convenience of processed foods,¹ targeting women with streamlined, assembly-style recipes that would allow them to meet societal demands (cooking for their husbands) and basic needs (nourishment) while also injecting a sense of novelty into the process. You could have a pleasurable dinner on the table in short order or swiftly orchestrate a dinner party that impresses your friends, leaving more time for your own leisure.

As someone who has aggressively shaped her tastes and opinions on women’s magazines, Millie would have been particularly susceptible to these calculations. She takes pride in her cooking; in earlier scenes gives Pinky explicit instructions (and unsolicited, like most of her advice) on how to prepare a tuna melt and tells her doctor colleagues about making “Penthouse Chicken with Campbell’s soup. Unfortunately her dinner-party guests are a no-show. Millie blames Pinky (who moves around the kitchen in a daze like a small orangutan, spilling jarred cocktail sauce all over herself, a blood foreboding mess) precipitating a fight that propels the rest of the film’s eerie events.

Try these instead: chocolate pudding tarts from A Lightly Floured Surface

“First thing you open all the cans and jars so you have 'em ready. Then you drain a can of tuna and dump it into a big mixing bowl. Now you add a tablespoon of mayonnaise, salt, and pepper to taste. Next you dice up— not chop up— onions and celery so you don’t get a big bite of onion or something when you’re eating it and mix em up/ If you don’t have any onions or celery you can use some dehydrated onions and celery salt. That’s what I did.” - Millie’s tuna melt, unspecified cans and jars.