Beauty Becomes the Beast

Beauty stars Lydia Lunch as an agonized downed-out woman of ambiguous age (anywhere between three and 23), trekking around from ocean front to East Village slum with her companion, a naked, eyeless, wrecked, wretched rubber baby doll, to a screaming soundtrack partially composed of Lunch singing with her group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. She lolls on the bed with her cat, fights in front of the TV set, is beset with leering, grimacing, paranoid-freakout monsters who tell her, "Be dirty, sugar," and threaten to sew up her pussy. The rhythm of Dick's shooting and editing mimics her heroines' manic-depressive behavior, shifting mercurially from the horrific to the comedic and back again.