The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean
Imagine a rock band using a psychic as an attraction to gain fame. Think of all of this as a movie directed by a female director in 1963.
When talking about surrealism in movies, people always point towards either Carnival of Souls or Dementia. With that being said, a movie about a young psychic being used by a rock band in order to obtain fame should rank up there amongst the surreal movies of the 60s. Problem is, nobody seems to have seen the Plastic Dome of Norma Jean.
Director Juleen Compton, born 1933 in Phoenix Arizona, first started her career as a theatre actress in 1948, in New York. According to an interview she gave to UCLA, a friend of hers, in the entertainment industry in Phoenix, told her she couldn’t go straight away to Hollywood for the Valley would eat her up. Instead she had to go to New-York and make it on Broadway to enter Hollywood through the big door.
It’s there, despite her getting good roles, that she said she realized she would never get “lead roles” according to her own words. A fact she put on herself lacking a voice. This realization is what led the quitting actress towards direction and filmmaking.
For this endeavour, Compton moved to Greece in order to shoot Stranded, a movie in which a woman recalls her life while walking towards the ocean. According to her, she got the idea of making such a film through a travel she made to Paris, during which she met a couple of lesbian. It’s this particular moment of her life, Juleen wanted to imprint onto celluloid. She thought, if I’m able to make such a film, Hollywood will know what I’m able to do. Hence why she decided to write, direct and produce said film, for a little under $300k.
Still, it’s her second feature The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, made for somewhere around $150,000 in the Ozarks that people seem to remember most. This may be due to the feature having been screened only in Cannes where it’s supposed to have garnered a special prize and a screening with Q&A in the Moma.
So much so that a Reddit post containing solely critics was the only resource one could find about the movie for the longest time. Luckily, the UCLA restored and recently screened the movie for 250 persons— an atttendance I was a part of. According to the restorator, Stranded was also planned to be restored but was plagued with visual artefacts much harder to erase.
It appears Juleen Compton once heard of a giant plastic dome and decided to buy the damn thing before having written any outline of the script. Once she mail-ordered it, and it was set-up she wondered: “What type of movie can I do with such a big thing?”
It’s funny, a woman stating she was so inspired by the French New Wave decided to make a fantastic film in which a girl possesses psychic power. Truth is, watching the movie, it’s eerie seeing this now common trope of a character being slowly devoured by the use of her powers — Life is Strange, anyone? Sure, such a thing is now almost cliché but in the 60s? It must have been one of the first instances of said concept. Although, now that I think of it, HG Wells’ short story The New Accelerator plays with such an idea, yet it’s mostly based upon physics and the decay of flesh having to endure abnormal speed.
What I’m hinting at is, French filmmakers would never approach the idea of mystical power destroying an individual because of mass consumption, even if it were to denounce the star system that, in the end, corrodes every public personality’s existence. And this is what The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean really is about. Celebrity and what one would do to obtain it, even by proxy.
As a new audience, as a user of Twitter, I have to say that those positions the movie takes aren’t the only one that should be noted. SPOILERS AHEAD: While some critics state that the movie ends in death because of the band, it’s quite ironic to notice that in the end, the main character Norma Jean is, in fact, shot by mistake by the police while attempting to help an old man. An old man said officers think is an aggressor. END OF SPOILER
Still, as I write this article, Twitter is agitated because a thirteen year old kid got killed today by the police. On average, police officers in the US kill 3 people a day.
It’s somehow a shame, UCLA keeps this raw gem under wraps only to unveil it every once in a while, because thanks to its surrealism and the refusal of its filmmaker to really answer every question, The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean actually delivers on a lot of quite modern topics.
Juleen would finally arrive to Hollywood in the 70s. Sadly only writing two movies before directing her last feature in 1988, taking her last chance of directing a movie by making a western in hope it would finally launch her career. This movie would be called Buckeye and Blue. Alas, according to Compton, film execs forced her to rewrite her ending. While the director wanted to yell her disappointment in the film industry through the prism of her character despising the outlaw life, executives in Hollywood preferred a happier ending.
It may be preferable, Juleen put her despise onto executives’ shoulder for audiences also tends to like happy endings, ask Carter Smith or Jordan Peele.
Disgusted, she would return to her former love of theater while also managing a real estate agency. Nowadays Juleen is still alive, aged 92. Most of what’s in this piece was written thanks to a Zoom convo she had after the UCLA vimeo screening.
Next week’s fiction is named Cropsey!
