The 250 pound man named Robbay plays opposite The Girl as “The Motorcyclist”; the motorcycle isn’t running, serving merely an inert prop.
The Girl’s skimpy and colorful costume “came from a Miss Chelsea Shop in Van Nuys.
The Director and his actors arrive at The Beach, an isolated stretch of California coastline and prepare the scene.
A man who she doesn’t recognize tells her that the police don’t care if the perpetrators are caught.
The title itself suggests that “individual women are reduced to gender-based roles.”[7] The unnamed female protagonist deludes herself that she is contributing to a work of cinematic art.
As such, she submits to a sexual assault, and in its aftermath, seeks to confirm that the film was genuine: “[S]he is so desperate for identity that her major concern in seeking the rapist’s capture is her need to know that it was a ‘real movie’”[8] Literary critic Greg Johnson registers a sharp rebuke to fellow critic Mary Kathryn Grant’s assessment that “what is finally disconcerting about Oates’s women is that they are weak, spiritually impoverished, devoid of beauty, morally bankrupt - in a word, unfeminine.”[9] Johnson declares that Oates’s characterizations of women in these stories “reflects the very cultural conditions that Oates is indicting.”[10] Most of the women are not weak, but disenfranchised; not spiritually impoverished, but viewed as lacking the full humanity necessary to “spirituality’; not devoid of beauty, but made ugly by molestation and violence…[11]Johnson adds that any “moral bankruptcy” attributed to these female characters is a measure of their social designations, which limit them to “the status of madonnas, muses, or whores.”[12] Biographer Joanne V. Creighton observes that Oatesian females “become disenchanted with their emptiness and reach out for some confirmation of their being.”[13] The insult and injury the girl endures is an indication that she possesses “no selfhood.” Oates’s conclusion is that some women have an “unlimited capacity for self-abnegation and the dedication to men…”[14]