Sarah Lasley
Sarah Lasley shares her quarantine creation, How I Choose to Spend the Remainder of my Birthing Years. A recreation of a childhood fantasy. A simulated meeting with Patrick Swayze.
So happy you are part of The Casserole Series this week! Can you tell us a bit about who you are?
SL: Yea, thanks so much for having me! I’m grateful for those carving out new spaces for arts engagement during the pandemic. Having grown up in the south in the 80s, I’m also a big fan of casseroles. My dad had a cookbook called “A Man, A Can, A Plan” which was pretty much all the casseroles you could make from a can. Mmmm... So, yea who am I? I’m an artist, filmmaker, and professor of New Media at University of Texas, currently living in San Antonio with my dog, Dude. Much of my work draws a parallel between how American culture values women and how it values nature, in that both are pruned and groomed to be accessories to the male mythos. Side note, I’m also the reigning karaoke champion of the Btown Karaoke League in Bloomington, Indiana, but that’s for another time. And I guess it’s fair to say I’m an admirer of Patrick Swayze’s character in Dirty Dancing.
What I love about this film is the way that it addresses the power of cinema. At the young age of five you recognized desire, even before you could name desire. Your mom edited the film by taking out the "inappropriate scenes" but the damage was done. Your curiosity was already sparked, your world became bigger.
SL: That's what great film can do, right? It gives you emotions you weren’t prepared for, didn't know you had. I think what really hit me about this scene is how sensual it is. There's little sexual content, though that bra reveal moment WRECKED ME as a child, which is partly why I cut to the green screen for that moment in my film. That, and the fact that the pulley-system I built to take my own shirt off didn't work over 8 takes. It was both the single most defining shot of my adolescence and the only shot I couldn't recreate as an adult. But this whole scene is radical! It's the main love scene and it, like most the movie, revolves around a young woman stepping into her power and taking what she wants. This was my first experience of female sexual subjectivity. Even at the age of 5, I had already absorbed so much male sexual subjectivity, so this felt different. It was for my body. I was the main character in this sensual boundary pushing dance. It introduced me to feminine sexual power, which became the subject of my work for decades.
This film struck me because it speaks specifically to this universal moment of isolation that is quarantine. Where simple human (physical) connection is almost erotic. Zoom happy hours, FacetTime, etc. are a simulation of connectedness. Very similar to the sometimes synched / sometimes out of sync way you interact with the filmed Patrick Swayze.
SL: Yes! That's so well-stated. I'm very interested in the connection of visual verisimilitude and belief, particularly in relation to simulation. What failing conditions in the image can break the connection to the viewer? And how does our desire to believe help bridge the gap created in those moments? For instance, with Zoom, is it when the signal fails or the video becomes too low-res to keep up the illusion of presence? Did the Starbucks cup in that final season of Game of Thrones kill the whole vibe for some fans? How much work does our belief have to do to overcome these moments? I've also been thinking a great deal about cognitive dissonance in the current political moment and with white folks clinging to their racism in this, hopefully, final hour. What happens when our mind alters what we see in favor of what it wants to believe?
After all these years, what is your relationship now to this scene? What made you go back to that memory?
SL: Well, I was having one of those living-my-best-life evenings at home alone, and I caught the end of Dirty Dancing on TV. Watching the final dance scene with the speech at the mic and the lift, agh... I cried almost immediately when I've Had the Time of My Life started playing. So once it ended, I dug out my DVD of the movie and watched it from the beginning. I know most of the choreography from my own memory and its persistence in pop culture, and I kept laughing at the thought of trying to recreate the dance scenes from that movie as a single woman. I was plotting the contraptions I could build to do all those backbends (most of the choreo in the film is a slow backbend in Johnny's arms), and I was thinking about how my neighbors would think I'm insane if they saw me through the windows. Anyhow, like most of my films, it begins with an image, and I couldn't get that image of my nearly-40, single self backbending while suspended from a ladder to make the most of my Patrick Swayze fantasies. I also felt empowered that as a visual effects artist I could now in my adult years make manifest that reality as a gift to my child self. So, the next morning I started meticulously removing Baby from the scene, frame by frame. It was tedious and the parts where she and he were too entangled became an opportunity to explore these ideas of how much illusion is necessary to create belief. The rest of the content in the film arose rather organically.
How has your work changed, if at all, in quarantine?
SL: For the past year, I've been in pre-production for a short film that posits the National Parks as white utopias. I created the character Blair, a well-intending white woman on a search for spiritual and personal transformation, who takes a cathartic swim in the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Ignorant that she is freely crossing the US/Mexico border, Blair co-opts this site of political tension and racial violence for her white-narrative gain. Simultaneously, I was building a 3D model of an idealized suburb in the game engine Unity. With the closing of parks, I relocated Blair into the 3D neighborhood and moved her older, more conservative sister Moni across the street, thus creating the Enclave, “a residential sanctuary for women who’ve chosen a uniquely digital lifestyle” and a chance for me to consider white utopian vision on the ‘post-racial’ Internet.
SL: PS. About a month after I released the film, a former colleague of mine told me that she is close with Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and producer of Dirty Dancing, and asked if she could share the film with her. I of course complied, and weeks later received this note from Eleanor. I think it might be my greatest review. I mean, it’s her story. She’s Baby. This unexpected connection was a great final chapter in the story of this film.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Sarah’s mom’s Johnny Mosetta Casserole
(I especially love the ‘Add cheese’ emphasis)