How to Make a Slut

I wasn't a slut in high school, but if I had stuck around my small town after graduation, I would have become one. It doesn't take much in Belle River, a working-class town one hour outside of Detroit. A bit of coke in the guys' bathroom at your best friend's wedding, one giggly blowjob in the back of the rented limo, and the next time you'd stop into Edna's for a coffee, wankers you'd given handjobs to in tenth grade would be coughing "whore" into their napkins. You had to get out, or you'd end up like the girls in the new HBO movie "Hysterical Blindness," which airs throughout September.

As directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding), Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis are those kind of sluts. Thurman, who executive produced, plays Debby, a town catch at 20 who remains uncaught at almost 30. She has become a sad fixture at Ollie's, a bar in Bayonne, New Jersey. Like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, Debby has been so long in the same town, in the same company, that she has lost most of her innocence and youth (both finite, but necessary, qualities for Bayonne's brides-to-be to possess). She also loses her eyesight spontaneously whenever contemplating that reality. Although lesser actresses might resort to the same old tricks, Thurman portrays Debby sympathetically. As someone who's been cruelly picked over, she looks exhausted, and so tarty it's as though the costume designer took an Uma Thurman goddess suit, dipped it in a vat of sadness, rubbed it in Jersey disappointment, squeezed out excess desperation and zipped it back on.

Juliette Lewis is equally compelling as the trashy barfly Beth, Debby's best friend and single mother to a 10-year-old. Debby's and Beth's features have a patina of pathetic '80s authenticity: Wonky hair, amateurishly feathered, is anxious to defy gravity but fails miserably. Eyeliner bleeds in a slightly clownish, maniacal way. Rubber bracelets and unicorn charms feel talismanic, infused with tacky superstition, and serve as a reminder that the '80s were a rough time for yearbook photos.

It was also a peculiar decade for feminism, which seemed to be in complete ideological stagnation. Camille Paglia, Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf had yet to become feminista media darlings. That's why Madonna, in all her sexual arrogance, was such a revelation; girls just wanted to have fun.

Although "Hysterical Blindness" is ostensibly a movie about friendship and hope, it also demonstrates how certain circumstances, particularly rampant in Reagan's America, gave birth to the modern slut: the gum-snapping Madonna wannabe with a heart of glass, not gold, someone never played by Molly Ringwald. In the auto town where I come from, to make a slut, you would take one part common beauty, add high-school popularity and a distracted mother, then remove the father suddenly and entirely. Fold in financial insecurity and a rudimentary public education. Top it off with a V8 engine, a latchkey and booze, and you get the Debbys and Beths, the sad good-time girls. They're so low on the class rung that their need for rescue oozes out of every pore and limp curl.

It's the same neediness Lily Bart tried desperately to conceal in turn-of-the-century New York. She knew that teetering on the brink of poverty, with marriage her only solution, made her a target for women in a similar jam, and for the few men with the resources to save her.

Watching Uma Thurman cling to her one-night stand for dear life, I'm reminded how far women haven't really come. Dark parts of us still believe in matrimonial rescue, which is why I couldn't help but root for Debby every time she traipses out of the bar with some "lucky" guy.

Much of "Hysterical Blindness" could have taken place in 2002, and in a way, it does. Occasionally "Sex and the City" allows us a fleeting glimpse into its characters' deepest fear: remaining single, or, more accurately, unloved by a man. But Nair's film goes further, showing how female friendship becomes precarious in competition.