Strange Pleasures: Laura Dern - Journal - Metrograph (2025)

In Rambling Rose (1991), Martha Coolidge’s Southern melodrama, Dern plays a 19-year-old ingenue rescued from forced sex work by a patrician family. Rose delights in playing the nymphet. She arrives to the Hillyer family’s country home, where she will work as a maid, looking like a sultry Bo Peep in a dropwaisted sundress with a corset-style bodice, again in pink. Sexually active from a young age, Rose’s love language is physical intimacy; it’s the way she shows affection toward the men in her life: be it the Hillyer patriarch, played by Robert Duvall, whom she tries and fails to seduce, or Lukas Haas’s 13-year-old narrator, the Hillyer’s eldest, whom she allows to experiment with her body one night. She’s equally elated to attract attention when she heads out on the town in a fern-green halter dress speckled with rose decals, yet the boldness in her stride, her gleeful, full-dentured cackle, conveys something purer than vampish intent. With Dern, innocence and experience don’t cancel each other out; they are intertwined, cutting through the virgin-whore dichotomy.

Rose’s strut through the streets is her “princess” moment, and though the men that turn their heads may not be thinking gallant thoughts, all she sees in their gazes is love. Moral judgments against promiscuity don’t hold much water when the need for validation is tangled up in the stuff of desire itself, which Mrs. Hillyer—played by Dern’s mom Ladd (making them the first mother-daughter duo to garner Oscar nominations for their work in the same film)—understands all too well in her sympathetic treatment of Rose.

A similar craving for adulthood runs through Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk (1985). Dern plays 15-year-old Connie, a teen who is “unformed and looking for something to happen in her life—something wonderful,” said Chopra in an interview. Immersed in the classical trappings of youth culture—malls and gossip rags—Connie is at the cusp of her sexual awakening. She comes to realize that her looks and body, no longer that of a little girl’s, might give her access to the life she dreams about. She practices her flirting skills in the bathroom mirror. Later, she luxuriates in the image of herself wearing a newly acquired halter top: cropped and satin white, with peepholes along the center where the garment’s laces fasten into a criss-cross pattern. The halter top brings to mind history’s bombshells, like Marilyn Monroe (who posed above a subway vent in a billowing white halter dress in Billy Wilder’s 1955 romcom The Seven Year Itch). In that way, wardrobe anchors Connie to a dreamy old-school romanticism—further evident in the many posters of James Dean on the walls of her bedroom. Connie’s glorious apparel also gestures at the decade’s consumerist values, which informed ideas around youth empowerment and individuality. In this top, Connie believes, she can finally become who she is meant to be.

Although Connie may be trapped in the bubble of her adolescent illusions, she’s not wrong to perceive someone different in her reflection: a new and sensual being. She wears the top every time she visits the diner where all the local teens hang out in the late hours, hoping to be approached by some Prince Charming—there’s the promise of freedom in the company of men—even if she’s not sure how to handle it. Connie talks about her hopes of getting out and “just travelling somewhere,” before canoodling with a boy in his convertible. But there’s also danger in taking his hand. When Arnold Friend (Treat Williams), a menacingly suave older man, shows up at Connie’s doorstep when her parents are away, the satisfaction of her open-road fantasies becomes more like a threat. The scene, which culminates in the suggestion of rape, presents a curdled coming-of-age, one that underscores the way women’s sexual awakenings can be corrupted by male prerogatives.

At the same time, Dern—with her thrill-seeking gaze, her elastic mouth always slightly open, —is a great force of desire herself. Lynch and Dern, who called each other by the same nickname, “Tidbit,” proved kindred spirits, leaving Wilmington for the open road for their second collaboration, Wild at Heart (1990). In a role written specifically for her, Dern again plays a classic dream girl, albeit one with her libido unleashed. In typical Lynchian fashion, the domestic realm is full of buried horrors: there, Lula lived with her deranged mother (Ladd again) and experienced an assault at the hands of a family friend. Dern could easily play Lolita roles, though these performances were always grounded by a certain guilelessness that others proved all too keen to take advantage of—and rape often recurs in the fictional lives of her youngest characters.

Lula’s mother is freakishly obsessed with preventing Lula and her beau Sailor (Nicolas Cage Dern’s then-boyfriend, in Elvis drag) from being together. Here, we’re rooting for the couple, their love so fiery and boundless as to make them outlaws, estranged from the rest of the world. In between run-ins with the crooks Lula’s mother has sent after them, Sailor and Lula dance and screw and drive like no one’s watching. Everything Dern seemed to be testing out as Connie—the lip-biting and coy poses—she brings to full-blown hyper-feminine expression as Lula, a sultry pin-up-style beauty who wears polka dot dresses, black bodycons, and pink (!) leotards. If her style is meant to please her dear Sailor, Lula also carries her clothes with a crazy-eyed confidence that suggests she’s, well, really feeling herself. She’s a passionate babe made fearless by love.

When Lula strikes a pose in her hot pink leotard, her chin facing skywards, her hands gripping the sides of her hips, she’s a cartoon diva: her femininity is a force larger-than-life, prefiguring the girlbosses and finger-snapping power players that Dern has grown into as she and her roles have matured, discarding her girlhood innocence for a more hardened outlook still coated in pink and its feminine theatricality. Dern’s Renata in the television series Big Little Lies comes to mind, as does Dern’s double role of actress Nikki Grace/Sue Blue in Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), notably reclining in a grimy pink bathrobe inside a purgatorial mansion. Then there’s FBI employee Diane Evans in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), whose love for agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) is corrupted during his years as the malevolent “Mr. C.” But it is in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), where she plays Nora, an intimidatingly sharp divorce lawyer, that Dern’s heightened womanhood fuels the film’s explicit gender rivalry.

Funny that after so many boy-crazy roles in her early years, Dern, as Nora, can seem to represent a metabolization of all those past lives and their corresponding relationships: when Nora counsels Scarlett Johannsen’s Nicole, she rouses her out of complacency and urges her to consider her desires in such a way that no longer privileges her husband. In the scope of Dern’s career, it’s also another instance of her flaunting her glamour as a power move. This time, however, she’s not trying to win a man’s affections; she’s asserting her dominance in the courtroom. With a wave of her manicured hand, she commands the spotlight, wielding her feminine gravitas with killer instinct:a wolf in the clothing of a girly girl.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to The New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Artforum, 4Columns, and other publications.

Strange Pleasures: Laura Dern - Journal - Metrograph (2025)

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