Three Woman by Robert Altman

One woman becomes two

Two women become three

Three women become one

Women are a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.

—St. Chrysostom

In the arid expanse of the California desert, three women dwell in an apartment complex, their lives interwoven in a tapestry of solitude and silent longing. Shelley Duvall breathes life into Millie Lammoreaux, a therapist at a senior care center, whose days are marked by routine and a yearning for connection. Sissy Spacek embodies Pinky Rose, a newcomer who secures a job at the center and soon becomes Millie's roommate, her presence a delicate disruption. The idea of disruption is something I will repeatedly return to later. Janice Rule portrays Willie Hart, the heavily pregnant wife of the building owner, who navigates her days shrouded in melancholy and silence. She distances herself from the others, retreating into a world of her own creation, where swimming pools become her canvas, adorned with fantastical beings, men and women, both bizarre and near-mythological in scope, locked in an eternal dance of menace and mystery, the lines between the pursuer and the pursued blurred. While she rarely speaks, her presence is palpable, weighty, and unmistakable. Willie is akin to a modernist re-imagining of the earth witch.

Despite its origin in the nebulous realm of dreams, this film's surreal narrative and enigmatic characters compel us to explore its depths, seeking meaning amid the ambiguity. Dreams often reflect our deepest fears and desires, and the film's dreamlike quality offers rich ground for interpretation. This invites us to peel back its layers and examine the intricate dance between reality and fantasy. Needless to say, in our pursuit of interpretation, we must embrace ambiguity, recognizing that some mysteries must be left unresolved. I would insist that being dreamlike should never be an excuse to forgo understanding but rather an invitation to engage more deeply with what lurks under the surface, like Willie's phantasmagorical creatures, with what makes us dangerous, with what keeps us unpredictable and alive.

When Pinky begins to work at the same senior facility, she becomes immediately infatuated with Millie, inexplicably seeing her as the height of perfection. Pinky herself is of an indeterminable age, oscillating between a woman and a child. In a very real way, she has no fixed societal role nor is she culturally molded. At some point, she dumps a bunch of salt into her beer, to watch it froth over, and at another, she blows bubbles into her soda, oblivious to how this appears to others. As Millie snaps at her later, “You are not doing anything you’re supposed to!” That means Pinky doesn’t obsess over her looks, doesn’t smoke, and is not interested in scoring dates or collecting recipes.

Yet, it is precisely Pinky’s arrival that hails a disruption of lives, identities, and the lines between dreams and reality. She activates the fault-lines in those around her, pushing their fundamental wounds to the surface, with catastrophic consequences. 

Michael Balint's concept of the basic fault might be illuminating here. This foundational psychic wound transcends conventional language and adult cognition, rooted in preverbal experiences, which is one way of interpreting the choice to punctuate the film with the shots of Willie’s otherworldly murals. These murals are the tipping point of all verbal, rational meaning and discourse. These primal etchings create a pervasive sense of internal wrongness, not as a conflict or complex, but as a fundamental fault. This fault is a dynamic force, manifesting as a deficiency within the mind, a profound sense of lack or incompletion. It is, in fact, a painless scar. Pinky’s presence, with her childlike behaviors and lack of societal molding, serves to reveal and exacerbate these hidden wounds, forcing the women around her to confront the deepest parts of their psyches.

Pinky herself appears to be the most damaged of all of them, in a fundamentally obscure way. In a sense, she is the blade to open all scars.

As Millie and Pinky become roommates, the former openly dismisses Pinky’s attempts at conversation, forever in a world of tragically delusional romance, with the undercurrent of meanness, while the latter repeatedly violates Millie’s privacy by reading her diary.

As Pinky survives an act of self-harm, which happens right after she witnesses Millie about to have sex with a man (yes, I am suggesting that her attraction to Millie goes beyond platonic), she undergoes a psychic metamorphosis, as does Millie, who, for the first time, seems to be utterly shaken up and so very, very lonely. Her raw loneliness becomes almost unbearable to watch when she meets the people who appear to be Pinky’s parents and begins seeing herself as part of Pinky’s family. She no longer seems interested in her appearance or flirtations.

(Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, introduced the concept of the real as one of the three key registers of human experience, along with the symbolic and the imaginary. This idea is particularly important here and later in the film. The real refers to what is outside language and cannot be articulated. It's everything that cannot be symbolized, represented, or fully understood. The real is what remains when words and images fail. It's the raw, unprocessed part of reality that resists integration into our understanding and experiences. The real can manifest in moments of intense trauma or shock, where normal comprehension, the Kantian schemata, breaks down.

It is an elusive and sometimes unsettling part of our existence that highlights the gap between reality as we know it and reality as it truly is. It is the trauma that breaks through all of our defense mechanisms.)

Pinky, on the other hand, sees herself as Millie now, or perhaps her version of Millie, as she emerges from her coma as a dominant personality. It is now her turn to belittle and dismiss Millie, mirroring the earlier behaviors towards her with unsettling accuracy, calculation, and, let’s face it, pleasure.

Nearby, Willie’s marriage to a drunken womanizer collapses when her asshole of a husband leaves her completely alone in their apartment to give birth, after hitting on Pinky and Millie. Both women rush to her, once they realize what’s happening. This is somewhat similar to her demeanor visiting Pinky in the hospital, Millie is in a state of clear anguish, desperate to help. She tells Pinky to fetch a doctor, continuing to do what little she knows about helping someone in labor.

Pinky never calls for help.

I admit that my way “in” into the film and my obsession with it are the excruciatingly prolonged moments when we observe Pinky's face, her mind and body immobilized in complete inaction. Pinky is merely watching a woman in labor, about to deliver a stillborn. Her face is inscrutable. A blue line is pulsating before her, as the umbilical cord of a life that could have been saved, the mother’s grief averted. This situation, as Adi Ophir would describe, demands real and moral urgency, necessitating relief for the suffering individual. Any hesitation signifies acquiescence or indifference to the suffering of the specific embodied other, amounting to a superfluous evil. While we can endlessly speculate about what crossed Pinky's mind during those moments, the fact remains that she either couldn't or wouldn't provide any practical help. (At this point, I turned to my husband and said, “Maybe don’t send the crazy person on a life-or-death mission?”). In this, Pinky both illuminates the possibility of disrupting suffering and simultaneously shatters it, brutally and forever.

It is worth noting that after a very clearly traumatized Millie approaches her, the blood of the stillbirth on her hands, the realization that Pinky never went to help descending upon her like a vulture about to gorge on her torment and grief, Pinky’s expression remains just as blank, even as she hears Millie’s words, “He is dead.”

This scene is grueling, psychotic, and one of the greatest in cinema. Pinky had previously demonstrated her capacity for cruelty, and I am convinced that a certain terrible cruelty was unfurling within her. If the primordial ethical cry is a demand for analgesia, as Emmanuel Levinas puts it in his brilliant essay “Useless Suffering,” we feel the passage of those minutes in an agonizing, visceral way, understanding that as long as Pinky fails to act, any possibility of help for Willie and her baby is always already too late.

The film’s ending is enigmatic and surreal, leaving much open to interpretation. After a series of identity shifts and emotional crises, the three main characters—Millie, Pinky, and Willie—settle into an unconventional family dynamic, now inhabiting Willie’s house. Millie assumes a maternal role for both Pinky and, strikingly, Willie, who appears to be hollowed out of her eerie, magnetic witchinness. They, in a sense, merge together, possibly for the sake of survival, possibly because each is too shattered to exist alone, without the psychic propping from the other women. The last words we hear is Willie telling Pinky, “Don’t know why you have to be so mean to her [Millie].” Once again, we encounter the theme of Pinky’s possibly innate meanness, at a crucial moment in the film, no less. 

While this film invites endless interpretations, the key point for me aligns with Ophir’s claim that the sufferer does not need interpretation; they need relief. The movie hinges on the fact that there was a possibility for relief during Willie’s harrowing labor, with Pinky as an impassive, almost stone-like observer. And then there wasn’t.

All the lingering questions (how much of Pinky’s temporary transformation was real and how much was faked, for example) and the dreamlike sequences and transitions collide with the immutable fact that the plea to interrupt suffering, that the demand for analgesia, fell on deaf ears. Finally, it is up to every viewer to decide just how much Pinky’s admittedly obscure, yet severe psychic trauma mitigates or even justifies the catastrophic consequences of her failure to act.

Finally, Altman weaves a haunting and dreamlike atmosphere through its minimalist, dissonant score by Gerald Busby and unsettling ambient sound effects, all calibrated perfectly to create a pervasive sense of dread and foreboding. The surreal murals by Bodhi Wind, filled with mythic and symbolic imagery, reflect that which precedes and goes beyond language. 

This style profoundly influenced David Lynch, particularly, I would argue, in the key scene at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. Like the terrible realizations during Willie's labor—Pinky's failure to get help, Willie's realization of abandonment, and Millie's lack of preparedness—the Silencio scene presents a moment of devastating clarity.

Sometimes the most terrible thing in the world is a lucid moment.

In both films, the music, sound, and surreal imagery converge to expose harsh truths. In 3 Women, the fragility of their constructed identities, and in Mulholland Drive, the collapse of all illusions revealing the reality that the mind could not bear. This is the real that breaks through any barriers, regardless of what sense of comfort or safety they might offer, for a time.