year at U.C.L.A., dropped out to focus on modeling, commuting from San
Diego to Los Angeles for catalog jobs. When she was 19, she showed up at a
casting for Treats. Waiting at the studio, Ratajkowski spotted a large poster
for ‘‘Blow-Up,’’ the 1966 fi lm about a fashion photographer by the Italian
director Michelangelo Antonioni, his fi rst English-language work. ‘‘I love
that fi lm,’’ she told Treats’ founder Steve Shaw, who excitedly produced a
book of Helmut Newton photographs to show her the tasteful nudity he
was after. Then he asked her to take her clothes off. ‘‘A mere mention of
a pretentious fi lm — it was so easy to subvert your expectations,’’ Rataj-
kowski writes in an essay addressed to Shaw. But she hadn’t feigned her
admiration for ‘‘Blow-Up,’’ which she watched in high school, struck by the
desperation of the fi lm’s beautiful models. She even owned the same poster,
which features the fi lm’s protagonist straddling the German supermodel
Veruschka as he searches for the perfect shot.
Later in ‘‘Blow-Up,’’ the fashion photographer, whose name is Thomas,
wanders into a park and takes candid photos of a pair of lovers. When
he enlarges the photos, Thomas is startled to notice a gunman hiding in
the bushes, as well as what might be a dead body. But before investigat-
ing further, he is interrupted by two aspiring models who demand that
he photograph them. When he gropes
one of them, she panics and gestures
at her friend. ‘‘She’s got a better fi gure
than me!’’ she squeals. In the infamous
sequence that follows, the girls end
up rolling around laughing on one of
Thomas’s paper backdrops while he
peels off their nylons. ‘‘Much was made
of the nudity in 1967 ,’’ remembered the
late fi lm critic Roger Ebert. ‘‘Today, the
sex seems tame, and what makes the
audience gasp is the hero’s contempt
for women.’’
But does the male gaze really have
any more control over what it sees than
Thomas does in the park? All photo-
graphs are clues in search of a mystery;
they tell us something happened, but
they do not say what. This is as true of
‘‘Blurred Lines’’ as it is of ‘‘Blow-Up,’’
right down to the possible crime. ‘‘I don’t
know that a woman giggling sheepishly
means what these male directors think it means,’’ Ratajkowski says to me,
wondering how the actresses must have felt on set. The sequence is far
too chaotic to be choreographed. The models tug at each other’s bodies,
crunch awkwardly on the paper beneath them. They are as interested in
each other’s bodies as they are in the photographer, who remains mostly
clothed; when they fi rst wrestle each other to the ground, Thomas is not
even in the room. What kind of sex the models have off screen with him —
or with each other — is left to our imagination.
When I ask if she thinks her friendship with Sadie had a sexual charge,
Ratajkowski is hesitant. ‘‘I don’t know if it was true homoeroticism because
I do think it was about male desire,’’ she answers, recalling how much the
boys at school liked seeing the two of them together. When they were
alone, Ratajkowski was unsure what the older girl could possibly want
from her. On the weekends, the two friends would crash with Sadie’s
boyfriend, Mike, the three of them crammed onto one bed together. One
night, Ratajkowski awoke to the feeling of Mike’s hands on her bare breasts;
Sadie lay beside her, still asleep. Ratajkowski rolled over out of his reach,
and never told Sadie. ‘‘I told myself that in choosing to reach over Sadie’s
body to touch mine, Mike had complimented me,’’ she writes. ‘‘I knew
that if Sadie found out, she’d blame me.’’
Ratajkowski, Sadie, Mike — this is a classic triangulation. But what does
it mean? ‘‘Did it give me some power over her?’’ Ratajkowski wonders
in retrospect. ‘‘I even started to convince myself that I liked the feel of
Mike’s touch. Maybe I was into it? Turned on even?’’ Mike had crossed
a line, yes. But if anything was arousing, it wasn’t his attention but the
prospect of Sadie’s jealousy. ‘‘Your boyfriend likes my boobs better than
yours,’’ Ratajkowski imagines needling her friend. And as for Mike? If the
author’s teenage attraction to her friend indirectly expressed the lust of
skater boys and male photographers — that is, if Ratajkowski liked Sadie
because boys liked Sadie — then it is equally plausible that Mike’s fumbling
betrayed the intuition that his girlfriend’s relationship with Ratajkowski
had, at root, nothing to do with him. (Sadie and Mike are pseudonyms.)
My point is that heterosexual male desire — that vaunted juggernaut
of psychic space — is just as often a convenient vehicle for women, gay
or straight, to reach one another. I ask Ratajkowski if she has seen ‘‘The
Unbearable Lightness of Being,’’ the 1988 adaptation of Milan Kunde-
ra’s novel about a love triangle. (She has.) In the fi lm, a photographer
named Tereza asks her friend Sabina, an artist whom Tereza correctly
suspects of being her husband’s mistress, to pose nude for some photo-
graphs. Initially meek, Tereza begins
to order Sabina around, pushing her
naked body into the carpet; behind the
lens, Tereza is crying. When they are
fi nished, Sabina slips on her robe and
snatches the camera. ‘‘Take off your
clothes,’’ she says, pinning Tereza to
the couch and miming sex. By the end
of the sequence, the two women have
collapsed in laughter.
Ratajkowski remarks on the hus-
band’s absent presence in the scene.
‘‘There’s this very clear power thing
where the women are both aware of
how men look at them, and specifi cally
one man,’’ she says, ‘‘and yet they also
have their own relationship.’’ Then she
asks me for my reading. I tell her that
the women are trying the camera on
like an article of clothing, experiment-
ing with the gaze, seeing if they can see
each other. They are nervous, titillated,
ashamed, jealous, vicious. They role-play as Tereza’s husband; they role-
play as each other. They want to humiliate each other, and they almost
have sex. Their laughter, like the laughter of the groupies in ‘‘Blow-Up,’’
expresses both the futility of escaping and the fact that, somehow, they
already have.I arrive fi rst at the studio, a cavernous space with massive windows
overlooking SoHo. Before the offi cial photo shoot for this article, Rataj-
kowski and I are going to take the Polaroids we discussed. In the dressing
room, I take a seat in front of a vanity lined with glowing light bulbs and
exchange a few halting words with Ratajkowski’s publicist and stylist. In
my tote bag are two lighters, a box of matches and a little brass pot, for fi re
safety. The night before, Ratajkowski told me she was excited to destroy
the photos. ‘‘The chemical inside the Polaroids is sticky,’’ she texted.
Ratajkowski walks in a few minutes later. Unprompted, she tells me
she’s been meaning to read ‘‘Camera Lucida,’’ a book on photography by
the French writer Roland Barthes that I mentioned to her in passing. Bar-
thes built the book around an old photograph of his mother as a young
girl standing in a glass conservatory. Discovering the photo while sorting
through her possessions, the grieving writer feltThe New York Times Magazine 33‘My point is that
heterosexual male desire —
that vaunted juggernaut of
psychic space — is just as
often a convenient vehicle
for women, gay or straight,
to reach one another.’
(Continued on Page 53)