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 Hooksexup 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.
