Review of Good Dick (2008) by Arin D — 23 Jan 2010

First time director Marianna Palka wants to consciously script a truly uncomfortable romance, which seems as much about disgust, loathing, *massive* fear of intimacy, and somewhere under all the emotional sturm und drang, childhood molestation. Heavy? Well, not really, since at least one of the two leads is an exceptional actor. And no, it's not Marianna. She directs herself as a woman addicted to soft-core porn, strenuously and somewhat creepily courted by her video store clerk, purveyor of said porn. I suppose there can be things said about 'reality in romance' and 'oddball love'. You can say those things. I think the reality that even the director won't allude to in her blurbs on the film is that there is an America that only connects through the depiction of human bodies connecting on screen, those who only see intimacy in mechanical intercourse in porn, and for whom the reality of a human body and all its emotional freight is unnecessary, and in the end, dangerous. For three-quarters of the film, Palka's character does her best to convey this. Palka channels all the classical discourses on childhood abuse as manifested in adult disassociation and anomie. However, those explanations reveal themselves later and seem trite as the framework for the behavior we see in the film.

Why couldn't it be behavior for behavior's sake? Are personalities not allowed to be noumenic, must they have an origin myth? If only it had been a comment on urban anomie alone. Watching it only for this revelation, rather than its rather frantic and ultimately unconvincing end (spoiler: it all works out, hm), I think this little film would have satisfied. I hope Palka goes on to explore this form of the human condition a bit more. But chances are that with bigger budgets come lower things. Jason Ritter as the clerk is fabulous. The boy deserves to go places, beyond being the real-life love of the director.