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In Lovelace, the first glimpse of Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried) is total glam – she’s bedecked in pearls, wearing a fashionable scarf and driving a posh car. That shot, though, was a role she was playing – a notoriety-making one – in the top-grossing porno movie Deep Throat.
Her real story was far more Saturnine – one of emotional deprivation, self-doubt and an inability to demand that planet’s association with respect – and a far cry from the initial technicolor facade.
The irony here is that, for a brief 17 days in the early 1970s, Lovelace – her birth name was Linda Susan Boreman – was all about pursuing a career that promised the greatness aligned with Saturn’s predilection for rising to the top. The downside here is the hellish Pluto energies that accompanied her journey.
As the movie, co-directed by Rob Epstein Jeffrey Friedman, depicts, Lovelace had a cold, unsupportive mother (an unrecognizable and brutally effective Sharon Stone), whose behavior all but made her daughter ripe to seize on the first opportunity to flee her Florida roots.
Her conduit was Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), eventually her Svengali-like husband, who shared Pluto’s diabolical penchant for control, filthy lucre, possession (he administers beatings and pimps her out) and secrecy with the movie’s producers with whom he orchestrate fees. Even the paltry $1,250 she was paid for her work on the movie went into his pocket.
The stark contrast between Lovelace’s wholesome, fresh-faced looks – “Don’t cover her freckles,” Traynor orders – and the underworld she was made to inhabit with both her husband and the adult-film industry personnel makes her situation all the more sympathetic, especially when her mother refuses to take her back in. “You took a vow,” says Mom. “Go home to church and obey him.”
Lovelace, although a biopic, is a cautionary tale for women and men to embrace self-mastery (Saturn) and power (Pluto) for themselves. Lovelace arises from her circumstances, eventually becoming an anti-porn advocate. It’s transformation (Pluto) at its finest.
Astrology Film Rating: ♄♇ (Saturn, Pluto)
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