Diane Keaton in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”

These photographs were taken during the final awful scene in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” when the heroine dies by the hand of a closeted gay man. Hopped up on poppers and self-loathing, he first strangles and then stabs the young woman, Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) who has been our heart’s desire for the preceding two hours. No one can save Theresa Dunn because even before she’s lived her life the world has given her up for dead–she’s a woman. The tension and pathos of her character is her belief in her life force, and it’s constant defeat. In her life, drugs act as a kind of bridge between living and not living. When the film came out a number of feminists complained that Dunn was a moral downer, the work of another dude equating female sexual freedom with death, but I didn’t see it that way; to me it felt true to what is menacing and awful about giving up your body in a world filled with non-feeling–a kind of spiritual obliteration in an atmosphere of neon and crummy apartments. I knew girls like Theresa, now mostly dead, whose consorts were gay men who wanted to deny their sensitivity, and thus everyone else’s. It cost to much to “feel.” (If I were to program a selection of pre-AIDS era films that resonated for me when bodies started falling and disappearing, I would screen “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”) Raised Catholic, Dunn’s body was never her own: it belonged to God, to the church. Promiscuity became her transubstantiation.  When she offered herself up her body became something else: owned, maybe free. Keaton’s performance is so hard to watch because she’s so physically relaxed in the part; when disaster visits her she rolls with it, and so much more, including the director Richard Brooks drawing obvious parallels between Keaton’s character and Perry Smith in his masterpiece, the 1966 film version of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” In both films Dunn and Smith are aspirin addicts who fear nuns and think of their bodies as a source of destruction and power and fantasy. In the end, though, they are only dreaming of themselves, and what the world can’t give them: themselves.