Paradoxical Girl: Untangling 1984’s Angel
(Content Note: This story discusses sex work and violence.)
It’s probably for the best that a movie like Angel could not be made today. Robert Vincent O’Neil’s 1984 film is seedy, salacious and scandalous. There’s no doubt that today, such a film would be yet more proof of the moral decay and corruption of Hollywood and prompt several congressional hearings.
The film’s tagline lays its premise bare: “High school honor student by day. Hollywood hooker by night.” Our titular character is a 15-year old girl, who lives a double life as a woman of the night on the strip. So obviously, I decided to give it a watch on a Tuesday night.
I find myself attracted to stories of lost girlhood. To me, Angel looked like a funhouse mirror Sofia Coppola. A grimy, exploitation-soaked take on the stories of girls forced to become women too fast. I wasn’t expecting a particularly nuanced take from a picture entirely directed, written and produced by men. That I managed to find something surprisingly sensitive is in itself, a paradox.
Because Angel is a story of the paradoxical girl.
Angel is produced by New World Pictures, a studio that was founded by B-movie impresario Roger Corman and made a name for itself by popularizing the “women in prison” genre (one, 1971's Women in Cages, boasts the tagline “White skin on the black market! The dirty dolls of Devil’s Island.”). New World also served as an early proving ground for Jonathan Demme, James Cameron and Joe Dante, filmmakers who would later repackage the disturbing or offbeat for a mainstream audience.
When we first meet our main character, Molly (played by Donna Wilkes, who was aged 24 at the time), she’s modestly dressed and fresh-faced, her ringlets tied into pigtails. The film makes it clear, she is a girl.
Of course, we’ve seen the poster. Molly comes home from her Los Angeles prep school and transforms into Angel. Her hair comes down. She puts on bright pink lipstick and slips on some stilettos to match. Then, she gets to work on the Boulevard.
When I was younger, I would watch Access Hollywood every weeknight with my mum. I would talk wistfully about how glamorous Hollywood Boulevard must be. “It’s disgusting,” my mum would say. The Walk of Fame and Chinese Theater might look nice on TV, but the real thing is dirty, cheap and seedy. Men selling sunglasses, women selling themselves.
I moved to Los Angeles for a brief period in 2018, and arrived into the paradoxical land that is the City of Angels. A place flush with unbelievable wealth and squalid tent cities. Where the Oscars take place in a mall. When, if the Santa Ana Winds blow just right and the wildfire smoke fills the air, the city feels like its own circle of hell. But when I flew out of LAX back to Nova Scotia, I knew I would eventually find myself returning to LA.
Molly straddles these two sides of Los Angeles. She also straddles the two sides of teen girlhood: the virginal high-achiever and the sexually available tramp. While most girls find themselves falling more or less into one of these two, Molly occupies the two extremes at once. She’s the paradoxical girl.
I’ve espoused before on the impossibility of being a teenage girl. For Molly, that means literally splitting herself into two people. It felt all too familiar to see a girl living in impossible circumstances still push to be top of the class. It is the public and private self taken to its logical endpoint. Molly cannot intersect with Angel, and vice versa.
It works, for a time, until her male classmates come across Angel. How dare she turn them down at school, when she’s giving it away at night. She must really want it, so the thinking goes. After all, she’s a whore. Word spreads around school. It’s a shame, Molly overhears a girl say in the locker room. I really liked her.
It’s clear that Molly was written as a concept before she was a character. Of course, a group of men would find the idea of a high achieving whore tantalizing. Who wouldn’t want to have it both ways? (Seven years later, Pretty Woman would make this very thing part of our cultural collective.) Yet, it’s remarkable how throughout the film, Molly and those surrounding her manage to assert their humanity, even in the face of a system that wants to ignore them at the best of times and eliminate them at the worst.
Molly has no family. Her father left, followed by her mother a few years later. In Molly’s words, she put on some sexy clothes and got to work. She keeps up the ruse that her mother is paralyzed from a stroke to avoid getting placed in a foster home.
Angel, however, has a family on the seedy strip my mother warned me about. She has sisters in her fellow sex workers, a father in an aging cowboy who performs pistol tricks on the strip, and a mother in drag queen, Mae. Angel doesn’t judge these characters, nor Angel herself. Angel and her street family are people who are doing what they need to do, the only way they know how, to survive in the margins of one of the richest cities.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t trade in exhausting tropes. Sex workers are ceremoniously fridged and queers are buried. The action of the film centres around the search for a serial killing John. The police are largely indifferent to the fact that sex workers’ bodies are being found mutilated in their motel rooms. It’s a dangerous line of work, they say, simply suggesting that the women keep their guard up and work in pairs.
This would be disturbing on its own, if not for the fact that it parallels real-life attitudes towards sex workers and violence. One of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, Robert Pickton, confessed to killing 49 people, largely female sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Pickton was first charged with attempted murder of a sex worker in 1997. He was released, as his victim had drug addiction issues and was seen as unreliable. Five years later, Pickton was charged with a total 27 counts of first or second-degree murder.
The filmmakers of Angel perhaps drew from real life. Robert Hansen murdered at least 17 women in Anchorage, Alaska, many of them exotic dancers at local nightclubs, over nine years prior to his capture in 1983.
When Angel and Mae try to claim the body of their murdered friend from the morgue, they are turned down. But, they say, we are her family. Doesn’t she deserve the humanity of a proper burial?
“It’s her choice. Her chance. Her life.” So says the trailer for Angel. Molly is certainly a character with agency, but we also know better in 2024 to believe that being a child in sex work was really 12-year old Molly’s choice. It’s also notable that Angel’s Hollywood is overwhelmingly white. In a film deliberately designed to shock, one can see this casting as a choice.
Despite its issues, its exploitative male fantasy premise and its surface-level empowerment politics, Angel begs for a read between the lines. What was a piece of ’80s schlock cinema is to me, an imperfect portrait of a girlhood at its most extreme.
Angel is available to stream on Tubi, the streaming equivalent of the one-dollar DVD bin. That is a compliment. Long live Tubi.
