Polythene Pam – Round 1

“Oh, you should see Polythene Pam/She’s so good lookin’, but she looks like a man” – Lennon said this song, as a song, was a bit of rubbish he came up with on a trip to India. It was written for one of the band’s first, and most lasting superfans. Of course, Polythene Pam shares a name with Mean Mr. Mustard’s sister, Pam, so it’s safe to assume we’re to think they’re the same person. These two songs are the two shortest on the album, different in length by six seconds. And they have a kind of twin-like/binary relationship. Like Here Comes the Sun and Because, with their sun/moon quality, Mustard and Pam are man/woman, brother/sister, vagrant/worker. Pam and Mustard are both foods, but meanness denotes emotion, and polythene denotes artificiality. So it’s interesting that both sequences these songs play over have very similar components: Wendy and Danny in the maze, Jack throwing the ball, Wendy looking at the All Work pages.
Also, I don’t think it’s a huge thing, but Wendy’s attire is increasingly tomboyish once the hotel drama begins, and here both Wendys are in either work clothes or blue jeans. While I don’t think anybody today would bat an eye, in the 80s this might’ve stood out or at least defined Wendy as a forward-thinking woman, if not a drag king in a polythene bag.

“Get a dose of her in jackboots and kilts” – Wendy never wears actual jackboots, but when she goes to visit Jack at the typewriter in a little bit (standing almost where backward Wendy is standing here), we’ll see her wearing prominent red galoshes similar in tone to the red coat she’s wearing here (see below). And of course, kilts tend to be plaid/tartan, which is what Danny’s wearing. Jackboots are also associated with fascism and nazism. Shelley Duvall happens to be mostly half Scots-Irish, half German, so those references couldn’t be more astute, in the sense that they capture the spirit of Wendy’s later attire.

As the song turns into its rousing instrumental finale Jack enters the lobby and plays around. Ringo is doing some really cool drum work here, and Wendy is mostly just walking around with the bat. There’s a cool moment when John or Paul shouts out “Great!” and I seem to recall this was the one signalling to the other how good they were playing, and the person writing about it was saying how amazing it was that, even in the midst of all this interpersonal turmoil, the band still loved being a band, still loved creating and performing together, even on a song this supposedly rubbish.
What’s also cool about the “Great!” though, is it happens just as Jack is throwing the ball at the backside of Wendy with the bat. Every time I see that, I think, “Man, if I’m wrong about everything else, that’s still pretty cool.”