Gay Today: Entertainment

Storytelling

By John Demetry

Todd Solondz's Storytelling projects onto movie screens two of the most complicated portrayals of American youth that I know. First complication: stars Selma Blair (as Vi) and Mark Webber (as Scooby) never appear on screen together.

Blair plays the central character of the first short film of Storytelling titled "Fiction." White undergrad Vi experiences a shattering sexual encounter with her Black creative writing professor. Vi's attempt to record the event in a short story comes under attack in the classroom.

Mark Webber is Scooby in Todd Solodnz's Storytelling, a story of American youth

Vi's call, "But this really happened!" echoes from the classroom and into the second short film, "Non-Fiction." Webber stars as its touchingly apathetic protagonist. Scooby endures pressure from his Jewish family to enroll in college. A documentary director exploits Scooby's bewilderment in a video called "American Scooby".

Vi and Scooby both desperately try to express themselves, even through their T-shirts - decorated with pop-political icons. For the movie audience, making such connections constitutes an uncomfortable act of autobiography. Pop and politics turn out irrevocably personal. The story Solondz tells becomes your own. The spectator is the spectacle.

Selma Blair as Vi

Of course, that's always true at the movies. Vi flips through a collection of photos stashed in her professor's bathroom that display other young white girls in bondage poses. Her response: "Don't be a racist." It's an easily understood expression of the inability to make sense of visual information. Solondz snaps the audience out of its mass-media trance.

In "Non-Fiction," Solondz bridges sequences with shots of the banal exterior of the family house or of Scooby's high school - a television sitcom technique. Scored to cult pop group Belle & Sebastian's mock(ing) innocuousness, these shots disturb the lazy acceptance of institutions - family, education, television. Solondz locates the gas chamber within.

With cinematographer Frederick Elmes, Solondz creates psycho-lush interiors. Through Elmes and Solondz's moral sensibility and graphically striking sensitivity, the film's space moves to the beat of Vi and Scooby's unexpressed confusions and desires.

Elmes and Solondz conjure the professor and the documentarian out of the young characters' imaginations. A camera pan from Vi in the foreground moves the professor into focus in the background of a bar, accentuated by a neon-red light. Deep focus in the high school men's room puts the documentarian's mirror reflection in the foreground of the frame with pot-smoking Scooby.

Blair and Webber's performances help guide the viewer through this psychic terrain. They don't so much "become" the characters as tell their characters' stories. The humor of their performances conveys the pleasure of facing Solondz's challenge.

There's a knowing bemusement behind the actors' line readings. They reveal their characters' confusions. Vi: "Will I ever make it as a writer?" Scooby: "You a pervert?" They expose the desires that ensure their exploitation. Vi: "I have so much respect for you." Scooby: "So, you have connections." The laughs in "Storytelling" get stuck in the heart.

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Storytelling: Official Site
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That shared understanding marks Solondz's own growth from the funny, but unchallenging, observations in his previous art-house hits "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness". That's why he returns to a coming-of-age story ala "Welcome to the Dollhouse".

His coming of age as a filmmaker moves beyond the reductive crosscutting of characters in Happiness. Solondz allows spectators to make connections between Vi and Scooby's stories on their own. The audience grows up along with Solondz. It's the difference between standing on a soapbox and looking in the mirror.

Just as the performers tell the characters' stories, the stories form a mythology of the characters' psyches. Solondz shoots Vi's hand-in-hand walk with her professor in ironic-romantic slow motion. That shot goes hand-in-hand with the sequence of Scooby's shroom-induced revenge fantasy, prompted by a blowjob he receives from a male classmate and the Belle & Sebastian tune "The State I Am In" ("My brother had confessed that he was gay / It took the heat off me for a while"). Those fantasies extend disastrously into the characters' lives and out into the movie theatre. When jock middle brother confronts Scooby about rumors of his homo activities, Scooby lies: "No problem. I'm cool." In the next sequence, a football coach's put-down of a player for acting "like a bitch" leads to a macho display leaving Scooby's brother in a coma.

Adolescent sexual insecurity combusts with normalized homophobia. The audience of Storytelling must recognize the psychosocial heat generated by the brothers' conflict. Meanwhile, the documentarian merely constructs confusion. "But what about Scooby?" he narrates "American Scooby".

Solondz confronts audience confusion. During the sex scene between Vi and her teacher, Solondz places censorial red boxes over the act in long shot. The red boxes put spectator subconscious on display. An entire history of oppressive racial/sexual discourse - of images older than movies that will outlive celluloid - gets projected into the mind's movie screen.

"I'd be willing to direct," says Scooby of his dreams of celebrity in an "American Scooby" interview. The line gets laughs from the "American Scooby" sneak screening. The look on Scooby's face in the audience shows the recognition of his exploitation. With audience and subject divided, performer finally meets character. Not a titter is heard during this moment of Storytelling.

Vi's short story concludes with the blunt statement that her experience turned her into a "whore." Scooby ends the movie with his rejection of the documentarian's opportunistic, "I'm so sorry." Staring into the video camera and at the Storytelling audience, Scooby responds: "Don't be. Your movie's a hit." In these instances, Solondz is not being accusatory.

Solondz breaks down audience defenses. He provides the beginning. The spectator creates the middle. The audience must live the end. Storytelling is your arsenal.