Screen Picks

Dottie Gets Spanked ($19.99 DVD) It may not have the outlaw cachet of his suppressed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, but Todd Haynes' 1993 short is a real treasure. The story of Steven Gale, a young suburban boy whose obsession with a female television star worries his parents and unnerves his classmates, Dottie extends the concern with transgression and sexualized punishment of Haynes' Poison, while pointing the way to the stylized surfaces of Far from Heaven. Though it lasts less than half an hour, Dottie is dizzyingly dense. Steven's devotion to the Lucille Ball-esque Dottie, rather than, say, football, distresses his dad and leads the girls at school to call him a "feminino." But in his fantasies, he's the king of a black-and-white fairyland, lording it over Dottie and administering spankings with barely concealed glee. A visit to the set of Dottie's show only confuses things further: The actress, who affects the persona of a bawling child, turns out to be a domineering diva who runs the show with an iron fist. Steven's preoccupation with spanking, which is only fed by his parents' opposition to corporal punishment, points the way to an exploration of the link between power relations and nascent sexuality. But Haynes uses the boy's innocence, here less a state of purity than fluidity, to undermine established categories. Who is dominant and who submissive? Steven's powerlessness is real, Dottie's feigned, but both imagine themselves on the other side of the equation—Dottie through the medium of TV, and Steven through dreams that use TV imagery to give his subconscious form. Economic logic would normally consign Dottie to life as a bonus feature, but Zeitgeist's DVD gives the film the billing it deserves; it's equal to Haynes' feature-length works and superior to a few of them. The disc includes audio commentary as well as Mary Hestand's short film He Was Once, a surreal, ingeniously conceived Davey and Goliath takeoff which counts Haynes among its cast of life-size puppets.

Miscellaneous Picks Newlywed Jay Schwartz must be in a giving mood: Friday's Secret Cinema best-of rounds up crowd favorites like a SoCal skateboarding film with a dubbed Swedish soundtrack and a porno puppet comedy from the director of Deep Throat (8 p.m., Moore College of Art and Design). Feminist forebear Jill Godmilow drops by Bryn Mawr College with her films What Farocki Taught and Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (Mon., Nov. 22, 8 p.m). Too late for the election, but just in time for Fallujah, Penn Cinema Studies hosts a free screening of Three Kings at the Bridge (Tue., Nov. 23, 5 p.m.).

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