Lypsinka (John Epperson) in “Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity,” directed by Chloë Sevigny (screenshot by me)

“Lypsinka Suffers Nervous Collapse!”

So screams the trashy rag headline from the Los Angeles Tribune that spins dizzily into frame at the beginning of Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity, a 43-minute film directed by Chloë Sevigny and currently screening on The New Group Off Stage’s website (until February 16 so watch it fast!). The report of a mental break isn’t some tabloid exaggeration. The first viewers see of Lypsinka, after a dramatically lit close-up as her eyes flutter open, is sitting on a hospital bed wrapped tight in a straightjacket. Rocking from side to side, she mutters—or more appropriately, lip-syncs—Mimi Hines’s version of “Nothing Can Stop Me Now!” Don’t worry about Lypsinka, though. Mania soon hits after those tranqs wear off and the tempo rises. She tears through the restrictive garment revealing—what else?—a sensible dress, heels, and a pearl necklace.

“Now I know that there is a Promised Land! I’m gonna find it, and how!”

Though she may swing around a streetlight like Singin’ in the Rain as interpreted by a psych ward escapee with bubbling exuberance, Lypsinka isn’t doing particularly well (the straightjacket should be a clue!). Of course, Lypsinka—the iconic redheaded character created and inhabited by John Epperson since the 1980s—has always suffered a bit of an identity crisis, possessed as she is by the voices of the most hysterical of Hollywood’s golden age. Yet, in Toxic Femininity, Lypsinka has been beset by split personality disorder, divided into two separate versions of herself. The first slumps over a desk in a darkened green room, slurring out dashed dreams (“I was trying to be…a singer”), crushing loneliness (“I’m all by myself…as usual”), and mostly grievances (“Oh boy, what a sticky stinking bunch to be caught up in…but they caught me up!”) into a tape recorder that is hopefully on and working. This recorded soliloquy is repeatedly shattered by another Lypsinka popping in through a single white door to announce: “I always go up and introduce myself to strangers. I always say, “Hi! I’m Joan Crawford!”

Lypsinka (John Epperson) in “Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity,” directed by Chloë Sevigny (screenshot by me)

Meet the second Lypsinka, a much more, at least on the surface, put-together, well-manicured, and stable Lypsinka. Like the first, she sits at a desk, though it is properly organized and decorated with a lush vase of flowers. Rather than the dim and dank green room, she exists in a vacant blue abyss. Appropriately so as it is all blue skies for this Lypsinka as she presents a cheery and optimistic version of life in the spotlight. She offers rosy visions of the future (“All my nostalgia is for tomorrow, not for any yesterdays”), motivational tidbits (“Inactivity is one of the great indignities”), pearls of wisdom (“Bitterness and self-pity are deadly poisons that cannot be hidden. They seem to exude from the pores”), and advice for repression (“Sure, we all have our problems, but why inflict them on our friends!”). This isn’t to say that this second Lypsinka is devoid of the inner rage and disappointment of the first. It’s there, but that bitterness is hidden away, only bubbling to the surface at the infuriating thought of unannounced “dropper-inners.” Like the first Lypsinka, the second’s sunny-to-the-level-of-delusional musings too get interrupted, typically by phone calls proclaiming, “The world isn’t interested in your problems” or Faye Dunaway’s shrieking, “Barbara! Barbara please, please Barbara, leave us alone. If you need anything ask Carol Ann!” from Mommie Dearest.

This is a not-so-subtle wink at the audience, for these two versions of Lypsinka are channeling, beginning with the latter, the audiobook for Joan Crawford’s memoir My Way of Life and Judy Garland’s self-made tapes for her own unpublished memoir. Whether mumbling into a tape about “success and failure and fatigue and overweightness and tears and laughter and Halloween” or keeping a tight grip on sanity through impossibly high expectations of perfection, these two versions of Lypsinka faithfully mirror both the distinct differences and noticeable similarities of their sources—two women of a certain age grappling with their equally towering legacies. The impetus for this mortality-induced existential crisis is represented by a third Lypsinka that wanders ominously through the film to the Psycho score. She is a ghostly snaggled-toothed long-haired figure with her arms straight out as if the Grim Reaper only spoke in quotes from Rosemary’s Baby. As the first Lypsinka recites from Garland, “I don’t want to die. I’ve never met a cast of people I want to die with…”

The way I’m describing Toxic Femininity is deceptively simple—or well, simple-ish. This Lypsinka duo (or trio) is occasionally interrupted by sudden bursts of berserk song and dance routines, as well as a rewardingly unhinged telephone sequence, a staple of Lypsinka’s live performances, in which, answering the phone with her fingers, she takes calls from a multitude of films. In this maddening sequence in Toxic Femininity, much of Lypsinka’s dialogue relates to monstrosity, including Geraldine Page as Sweet Bird of Youth’s Alexandra Del Lago: “When monster meets monster, one monster has to give way and it’ll never be me!” I quote Sweet Bird of Youth here as it’s one of the quotes I actually recognize. Epperson, yet again, proves himself to be a foremost historian of Hollywood. I have no clue where so many snippets of audio come from and I want to find out! Why isn’t there a Shazam for movie quotes?! Admittedly, it took me several viewings of Toxic Femininity before I settled down and tossed out the impulse to play “Guess that quote,” a response I found myself much more drawn to on my couch with Google at the ready than seated in a theater.

Lypsinka (John Epperson) takes a call in Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity, directed by Chloe Sevigny (screenshot by me)

I raise Lypsinka’s live act as before watching I assumed Toxic Femininity might be a simple capture of Epperson’s stage show. Thankfully, it’s not. Sevigny, no stranger to camp as seen in her current role as C.Z. Guest in Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans, employs a beta camera to create a grainy lo-fi DIY VHS aesthetic, including some delightful throwback effects like nauseating kaleidoscopic swirls and a whole chorus of mirrored Lypsinka clones. This aesthetic not only plays on 1980s nostalgia but also pays quite a reverential tribute to artists from the era in which Lypsinka emerged. The film is reminiscent of both Nelson Sullivan’s early video documentation of Downtown performances, including of Lypsinka herself, in venues like the Pyramid Club and, perhaps even more so, the cinematic frenzy of Tom Rubnitz’s films. Rubnitz and Ann Magnuson’s zany Made for TV seems like the biggest frantic reference here as a quick-change channel-surfing tour-de-force.

While we’re on the technical side of things, there are more than a few nods to Epperson’s own taped trickery (“I think I’ll just run through those beautiful lines again, just to get in the spirit of it!”; “Oh what wonderful lines. Aren’t they marvelous?!”). Granted, lip-syncing is not all that unique for drag performances, and yet Epperson transforms his source material into its own unique cut-up creation. Beyond the humor, beyond the camp, and beyond the Hollywood worship, Toxic Femininity addresses aging, society’s view of older women as monsters, celebrity, loneliness, and looming death. All of which raises the question in relation to the film’s title: Is this femininity toxic to others or to the women themselves? All this pressure to be relevant, to be young and beautiful, to be a star—it just might be corrosive.

Installation view, ‘Cindy Sherman,’ Hauser & Wirth New York Wooster Street, 18 January 2024 – 16 March 2024 (© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer)

In many ways, the themes of Toxic Femininity, as well as Epperson’s cut-up performance, remind me of Cindy Sherman’s new series of photographs currently on view in her eponymous solo show at Hauser & Wirth. Like Epperson, Sherman employs the cut-up quite obviously, only here it’s a visual cut-up through Photoshop that transforms Sherman’s still-lovely face into new, garish, and hysterical amalgamations. Sherman, too, has become unraveled, monstrous even—her features cracked, breaking, and bending like a Picasso painting with noses stuck sideways and lopsided heavy penciled eyebrows set on a diagonal. Its own form of drag, each photograph seems to embody a different character, from the furiously rabid Untitled #632 to the frighteningly mirthful Untitled #642 to the freshly showered Untitled #661 with a towel wrapped around her head. Yet what ties these figures together is their apparent dedication, with all the layers upon layers of makeup, slathered over barely concealed wrinkles, to aging disgracefully.

Rather than seeming pathetic, though, they are heroic—the pancake makeup like war paint. Sherman’s photographic prints, largely black and white with pops of color like orange lipstick smeared on teeth, are incredibly detailed allowing viewers to spot every pore, every flake of concealer, every well-earned fold and wrinkle. In their over-powdered distortions, the figures are, at once, Joyce Wildenstein and Baby Jane Hudson. You can just imagine Untitled #651 putting her own spin on “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy.” There are art historical references too. Francis Bacon’s melting faces seem relevant, as well as, with the figures whose heads are cloaked in scarves and other fabrics, Early Netherlandish depictions of the Virgin Mary like Juan de Flandes’s Christ Appearing to his Mother.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #659, 2023, Gelatin silver print and chromogenic color print, 101.6 x 74.9 cm / 40 x 29 1/2 in (© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

Yes, it’s fun to play association games with Sherman’s new works too, as well as laugh at her purposefully goofy expressions. However, the meaning behind this body of work is perhaps best articulated by an older woman I overheard speaking to a friend while wandering around the gallery one late Friday afternoon. Pointing to Untitled #634, a profile shot with an exaggerated smile, she said, “This is how I feel when I look in the mirror.” Relatable—or will be eventually.

Ultimately, so are Judy, Joan, and Lypsinka’s predicaments, which could explain Sevigny’s account of becoming teary when first hearing Lypsinka’s material for Toxic Femininity. As she describes in Interview Magazine, “When John first sent over the audio edit, I listened on headphones and I started crying. I found the material really emotional, this woman, two sides of herself, the dichotomy of being a star and loving it and hating it and being a woman and loving it and hating it, and all the expectations put on us as women and actresses, and aging and public cranks, all of that. ” Whether Judy or Joan, Lypsinka or Sherman, all seem to reveal different ways of coping with the inevitability of time and age. Either plaster on as much makeup as possible and draw large black rings around your already growing nostrils as in Sherman’s photographs or, like Lypsinka, slap on a tightly strained rictus grin and let Ethel Merman’s hollering bellow be your guide. Nothing can stop me NOOOOOW!!!