Laura's choice

Mark Marvel

No actress has grown up sexually onscreen as convincingly, disturbingly, or thoroughly as Laura Dern. Now, with her role as Ruth Stoops, the glue-sniffing, serially pregnant heroine of this month's Citizen Ruth, Dern's career reaches a climax of sorts. The story centers around the question of whether Ruth should abort her fifth baby or not, and what happens to her when she finds herself pushed and pulled by the various gurus, politicians, and nutcases who have attached themselves to the opposing sides of the abortion debate. Everyone, Ruth discovers, wants to tell her what to do with the baby, but nobody knows what to do with her. Citizen Ruth is a lacerating satirical portrait of America at its most extreme, and this is what its thirty-year-old star has to say about it.

MARK MARVEL: Where do you stand on the abortion issue? I know that's a big question to start with, but I figure we could, you know -

LAURA DERN: Get it out of the way. Well, I'm pro-choice and have been involved in political organizations that support choice. So that's my opinion separate from Citizen Ruth. My first response to the script was that I thought it was flawless satire. The writing was just hilarious, and I wanted to be part of the film based on that, not because I saw a potential platform for a cause I cared about.

MM: The movie isn't unequivocally pro-choice, is it?

LD: For me, the film is pro the individual and, therefore, pro-choice.

MM: Have you ever had to deal with abortion directly yourself?

LD: Not directly, although many people in my life have had to make that decision because of unexpected, unplanned pregnancies. Luckily, I was raised by an actress [Dern's mother, Diane Ladd] and around a group of her friends who are strong, feminist women who were very open about discussing issues in front of their teenage daughters. So at an early age I got a real education in women's issues, particularly abortion. Then, when I was around sixteen, I was in Teachers [1984]. My character in the movie was a high school student who'd had an affair with a fifty-year-old gym coach played by Nick Nolte. She got knocked up and couldn't go to her parents; so Nolte's character took her to get an abortion. It was a small part, but I remember this one line. We're driving back from my abortion and I pull out a cigarette, and Nolte says, "Uh, Diane, do you think you should be doing that?" And I say, "I just had an abortion, I think I'm old enough to smoke." I liked that line because of how honest it was.

MM: In Citizen Ruth, poverty defines Ruth's options, particularly In terms of how she uses her sexuality.

LD: That's what's so tragic about the abortion issue. The people who suffer are poor women; wealthy women, even in countries where abortion is illegal, will always be fine. And what I think people - particularly antiabortion activists - forget is that if you give the government the right to say a woman is not allowed to have an abortion because it's murder, then in ten years it could have the right to enforce abortion because of overpopulation. And don't think it wouldn't.

MM: Talking about the way Issues like abortion can cause people to demonize those they don't agree with, I'm wondering if the satire In Citizen Ruth won't just piss a lot of people off.

LD: It's earnest satire, which is what true satire is. True satire isn't Spy magazine; it isn't mean-spirited. The movie is not about trying to offend one particular group, and, hopefully, that will be made clear in the publicizing of the film, so people can go in without saying, "O.K., what side are you on, motherfucker?" To me the film goes way beyond that, because Ruth's process of discovering what she wants to be is a much more interesting issue. We are all so desperate to belong, and in the movie, Mary Kay Place's character goes to pro-life rallies with all her girlfriends, and the Swoosie Kurtz and Kelly Preston characters have their lesbian feminist organization. It's all about clubs - but Ruth has never been part of anything in her life. I love her, though, because if she feels like getting fucked up, she does it. If she wants to take a dump or punch that kid [who discovers her inhaling his model glue], she does it - without questioning whether it's appropriate or not.

MM: Do you think Ruth is sexual or asexual?

LD: Ruth uses sex purely for survival. It can get her a place to sleep and maybe some money. As an actress, I needed to understand why Ruth is where she is, and there's one line in the movie that says it very clearly.

MM: I know the line you mean. It's when Ruth's mother is trying to convince her to have the baby by asking her, "What if I had aborted you?" And Ruth responds, "At least I wouldn't have had to suck your boyfriend's cock."

LD: There you go. In that one moment you know that sex is not particularly fun for Ruth. She doesn't want to feel anything. She doesn't want to feel herself, let alone have somebody else's body on top of her.

MM: So where does Ruth fit with all these highly sexual women you've played in your career?

LD: As Lula in Wild at Heart [1990], I was sex. In Rambling Rose [1991], Rose was desperate to be loved, and the only way she'd known affection from a man was physical. So if sex was the way to get love and be appreciated, then she'd sleep with someone to get it. But of all the movies I've done, probably the most symbolic sexual journey was in Blue Velvet [1986]. Isabella [Rossellini] and I were like twin sides of the Madonna/whore thing. In fact, doing Smooth Talk [the 1985 film in which Dern played a teenage girl stalked in her home by a creepy Treat Williams] and Blue Velvet back-to-back taught me a lot about the relationship between human expression and fear. With each character I play, if I can understand something of their sexuality, then I know what drives their fears.

MM: What would you say it is about abortion that drives people crazy?

LD: My instinct says it's all about control. Alexander Payne, the director of Citizen Ruth, is smart when he says the movie is not about abortion. It's actually about people's desperate need to control the masses, and people wanting to be controlled.

MM: That's the flip side of it, isn't it? People don't want to have to make their own decisions.

LD: Hey, I don't half the time. I assume others feel that way, too. For example, if a relationship's not working, there's this hope that the other person will decide which course it should take. Do we get married? Do we break up? Do we fight this through? It's like we're searching for somebody to give us the answer because we don't know that we're entitled to have an opinion that other people might not agree with. And standing on one's own again becomes terrifying.

MM: Given the current political climate, what do you think a film that's being labeled an "abortion comedy" can do to open people's eyes?

LD: I think if we can try to forget about the seriousness of the issue for a minute and laugh at the opera we create, then maybe we can reconnect to it and understand it on a human level. We get so bombarded by issues that too often we lose contact with what they're really about.

MM: My last question is, if your rambling Rose met your citizen Ruth, what do you think her advice to Ruth would be?

LD: Ruth would tell Rose to fuck off. And Rose would just be looking for a little companionship. Maybe Rose would teach Ruth some sexual things and they'd end up in bed together.

MM: Ah, the lesbian sequel.

LD: Yes. That will be my next movie. I'll make love to myself as two different women.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning