Hella Nation - Evan Wright [162]
She giggles. “To sexually satisfy you and clean the house.”
Dollard enters the frame, totally nude, a decrepit satyr. A montage ensues of him performing various sex acts with her, intercut with close-ups of the girl smoking a glass pipe. There is unintended comedy: while Dollard is having sex with her on the couch, it catches fire, and the two fail to notice until flames engulf their feet. There is intended comedy: Dollard performs anal sex with her while simultaneously talking on the phone with an agent at William Morris.
In the film, Josiah, who serves as cameraman, does not have sex with Sunshine. He later explained that he enjoyed watching it and pleasuring himself. His most significant on-screen presence is to lean close to Sunshine and offer encouragements: “What’s his name? Say ‘Pat.’ You’re fucking a rich man with accomplishments, not a fucking loser.”
In the room with me, Dollard and Josiah howl and tap knuckles. I stand up.
Dollard shoots me an annoyed glance. “You have to pay attention,” he says. “You’re going to miss that this is not really a porn film.”
The film fades to black. Jim Morrison comes across the loudspeakers singing “The End.” Dollard narrates in the background about immortality, death and the horrors he witnessed in Iraq. It cuts to Dollard readying to make his money shot on Sunshine.
In Auto Focus, when Bob Crane and his sidekick watch their homemade porn together, they masturbate. Fortunately, Dollard takes a different route. He turns to Josiah, speaking excitedly. “You love this girl, Josiah. But you know what? You wandered off into a room by yourself to fucking jerk off to a tape of her fucking somebody else. That’s who we are. That’s who people are! They’re scumbags!”
“This is so fucked up,” Josiah shouts, “but I like it.”
“Exactly, dude!” Dollard claps his hands, like a teacher whose pupil is about to achieve satori. “That’s what I told you! That’s the whole point to everything around here, with this whole thing, all of it, beyond! It’s what everything in my life is about. It’s about finding all those truths and those fucking experiences that other people just don’t get.”
Josiah seems paralyzed, staring at the screen, his huge eyes unblinking. “This is so fucked up,” he repeats.
“That’s what we do here,” Dollard says, pounding the editing table. “We take everything to its furthest limits. We go out. We go get in cars. We fucking kill people. We kill terrorists.”
I’m guessing that Dollard has veered into the realm of his jihadi-killer fantasies, or that he is in some sort of meth psychosis. The final moments of the film play. Dollard stares at the decrepit-satyr version of himself on-screen executing the money shot. When it’s over, he turns to me. “So what do you think?”
All I can think of is Ben Stiller’s line in Meet the Parents after Robert De Niro asks Stiller for his reaction to the awful poem he reads about his deceased mother. “Wow,” I say. “Your film contains a lot of information.” I urge Dollard not to send it to HBO.
“Our taste may be too cutting-edge, too extreme,” he admits. Despite these reservations, Dollard stands. “We need to film Sunshine more.” He tells Josiah to phone her and ask her to come back over. It turns out Sunshine has a responsible day job. Josiah reaches her, but she refuses to come over. Dollard takes the phone and pleads, “We’ll make right on the mistake from when you were here the last time. I promise.”
He hangs up and drops onto the partially burned couch in the living room. “Josiah,” he says, “we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that she may not be coming back.”
THE GEOGRAPHIC CURE
DOLLARD DOES NOT GET a deal for Young Americans. Nor does he send Nevins a copy of Three Days. He drops out of sight for nearly a month. About a week before Thanksgiving