**Come see WTO/99 at The Balboa Theater SF on Sunday, April 26th 7:30pm, hosted by Hit Factory featuring a post-screening Q&A w/ director Ian Bell. Tickets are available here.**
Prolific filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay joins us to discuss her newest feature The Serpent's Skin (expanding this week to Los Angeles and San Francisco) alongside the high-gloss, sugary sweet, and characteristically transgressive Gregg Araki film Splendor. Structured as a prototypical romantic comedy, the film subverts the classic love triangle dynamic to explore the unique dynamics and language of intimacy that develops between a romantically committed threesome.
We begin with a discussion of Alice's latest film The Serpent's Path - a lush, bold trans lesbian fantasy that wears its debts to teen classics like The Craft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer proudly on its sleeve. Then, we dive into the 90s work of Gregg Araki, and how Splendor subverts the expectations laid by the director's previous films in the Teen Apocalypse trilogy while losing none of the director's antagonisms toward the stricutres of heteronormative American society. Finally, we interrogate the film's subtle complexities, how Araki navigates the shifting dynamics of the threesome within the language of the romcom, and how the film pushes past the trap of "selling out vs. buying in" customary to so many films of the decade.
See The Serpent's Skin, now playing in NY, SF & LA.
Follow Alice Maio Mackay on Twitter.
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Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.