Storytelling is Todd Solondz's sexiest film yet. Which is a bit like
saying Apocalypse Now was the most scenic of Francis Ford Coppola's period pieces
— in both films, nature sets the stage for unspeakable horrors. That approach is
no deviation for Solondz: his first film, Welcome to the Dollhouse, involved the
rape fantasies of a seventh-grader; with 1999's Happiness, he presented a
sympathetic pedophile. His latest, Storytelling, is a tale of exploitation in two
acts: in the first, "Fiction," the college student Vi (Selma Blair) develops a
mutually exploitative sexual relationship with her African-American
creative-writing professor. After the two have violent sex, she writes the
experience up as rape and presents it to their class. In "Nonfiction," the
lachrymose teenager Scooby is trailed by a documentary photographer, who
captures a non-self-starter's suburban hell, including shrill, witless parents
and a malevolently perfect eight-year-old brother who delights in torturing the
family's immigrant maid. Along the way, the movie careens through a dark sexual
cul-de-sac, exploring sex with the disabled, Mandingo stereotypes, domination and
humiliation, teen-age bisexuality and Polaroid-taking. Recently Solondz spoke to
Nerve about the definition of a taboo, his critics' hang-ups and whether he's a
dom or a sub.
—Michael Martin
Storytelling seems to push the sexual envelope more than your other films, if
just in the sheer breadth of territory you cover: sex with the disabled, for
example, is something you rarely see onscreen. Was that your intention?
I'm not sure it was. My goal isn't to push the envelope in some sort of gratuitous
sense. Nothing in the film is really taboo — there's nothing I do that isn't
discussed, that you can't read about or see on TV in some form. But I certainly
try to use the sexual arena as a place to reveal certain things about the way we
perceive each other, or imagine that we perceive each other.
An example of this: Vi and her boyfriend are shown in bed together, even
though he has cerebral palsy. Then he dumps her. "I thought he would be
different!" she cries. "He has CP!" It was a great moment. The idea, of
course, is that someone with an affliction is not defined by that affliction, but
rather by what they do or don't do, or say and not say. For me, Marcus's
disability is beside the point. But it's very much not beside the point for Vi.
In the scene where Robert Wisdom is fucking Selma Blair, it's established that
he's humiliating her: he's taking her from behind, he makes her scream, "Fuck me,
nigger!" over and over again. The scene has a red box over it, so it can be heard
and not seen. It's disconcerting on a couple levels; it makes the scene almost
funny. Why didn't you leave it in as-is and take an NC-17? Number one: it's
only in this country that you'll see the red box. The rest of the world doesn't
have it. To get the movie financed, the only place that was going to give me
money was New Line, which is a major studio. They do not release movies that have
an NC-17. So I agreed to work with them, with the proviso that I would be able to
insert bleeps and/or bars as needed to procure an R rating. Then, I wouldn't be
vulnerable to having any shots or lines of dialogue removed and the
audience wouldn't know what the director intended.
It's a ridiculous process. But at least this way it's front and center.
The audience can understand, "This is what the director intended, and this is
what you're not allowed to see."
Are you a shock valuist? No. Others consider me one. I think everyone has
a different capacity for absorbing taboos. I think shock for shock's sake isn't
very interesting. I think that if I wanted to be even more explicit, it wouldn't
be very difficult. Sometimes, in order to get a fresh angle on things, it can be
somewhat discomfiting for some people. But I try to approach things as truthfully
as I can, to wipe away certain prejudices and comforting self-deceptions.
The movie had a complicated gestation: I read that an entire third act was
edited out, which showed James van Der Beek having graphic anal sex with another
guy. Number one, there wasn't a third act. Someone said that months ago but
was misinformed. There was an epilogue that was two minutes long, which I had
added later and decided not to include. It was not a third part. It was connected
tangentially to another part.
How explicit was the scene and why did you cut it? I only talk about
what's in the movie. If you hand in a manuscript for a book, you cut out a hundred pages, five hundred pages — it's just not there anymore. It's very painful to have to remove these things. But the ultimate shape of the movie, I felt, couldn't support it.
So it wasn't because the studio thought nobody wants to see Dawson doing that
kind of creekdipping? No, of course not. I had final cut. It's what I wanted.
Sex and power and exploitation is a recurring theme. For example,
the professor has been sleeping with a number of his female students, tying them
up and taking Polaroids. It seems the women are being exploited far more than the
men in this film. Is that a fair observation? I think it's a limited one. For
example, with the teacher and student, there's a kind of dance taking place
between them. The student is going after the teacher, and she wants something
from him. He, of course, knows she wants something from him. I think there's a
sense of "Who's going to use whom? Who's going to exploit whom?" and I think the
professor doesn't want to be exploited — if someone's going to go down, it's not
going to be him.
Speaking of power, do you view yourself as a dominant or submissive
person? My goodness. [long pause] I never really thought of myself in
those terms. I try to think of myself as a friendly person.
Which could go either way. In the film's second half, the teenage protagonist,
Scooby, lets a neighbor boy give him a blowjob while Belle & Sebastian plays in
the background. The neighbor really gets into it, but Scooby just lies there like
a disaffected hustler. The kid is like sixteen, and he's grown up in this wealthy
neighborhood. Did you write Scooby as bisexual, or does he just approach sex with
the same ennui he does everything else? The sexuality is ambiguous, but the
point is that there's something husklike about him, about his slackerhood —
there's no Scooby quite there. If someone goes down on him, whether it's a guy or
a girl, it doesn't matter. And how can these things not matter when you're
talking about the most intimate act that can happen between two people?
I bring that scene up because I wonder if you're trying to reflect what's
going on in youth and culture — this kind of new sexual ennui. Yes! Scooby's
grown up in a moral vacuum — a world suffused by pop culture and MTV and so
forth. What's most insidious about MTV is that it commodifies precisely those
things that young people believe are subversive. In other words, subversity
itself has become a commodity. It's all a way to trick young people into
believing that there's something unique about what they do, but this is all
completely a corporately designed maneuver. He's very much a product of that
campaign, so to speak.
One critic
recently called your films freak shows, and accused you of having contempt for
your characters and audience. Is that fair? Often somebody will ask me, "Why
do you make movies about such ugly people?" Well, I don't see them as ugly. I
think that kind of criticism is less telling about me than about that viewer. The
difficulty that people have with my work is that there is a moral gravity, a
moral center to what I do, but I don't put out signposts telling people how to
think and what to feel, and people have hard time getting their bearings. But
that's what makes it compelling.
Semen seems to keep making cameo appearances in your films. In Happiness, you
had a dog licking ejaculate off a railing, then passing it on to Cynthia Stephenson.
Then you had Scooby's money shot in this film. Thoughts on a follow-up? You
must have seen an earlier version of the film. That shot actually isn't in the
film anymore. Not because I thought it was too much, but for reasons that have
nothing to do with semen itself. It's a question of context, if I feel it's
appropriate. It's certainly not in any sense a goal of mine.
Does it bother you that people see your films, see these sexually miserable
characters, and assume that you never get laid? It's a tricky leap to intuit
someone's personal life from watching their work. I'm very much reflected in my
movies, but in ways that may be very misguiding for viewers.
Will there ever be a sexually fulfilled character in a Todd Solondz film?
I haven't thought about it. [thinks about it] Of course, it's very easy to have
wonderful sex and to put that up on screen. But when you're trying to dramatize
certain painful realities about ourselves — for me, it's much more compelling to
explore what's problematic.
