“Look, you got to be recepcricol, see like this, this is give and take,” says Faith. “I give, you take. But you give, and I take, too. It’s like a circle.”
Sitting on a patio on College and Ossington, M talks about the worms in our stomach. “They are just in there, growing, and I’m okay with my worms in my stomach,” she says. It’s true, around 25 per cent of the world's population has them, and it’s not the end of the world. 25 is a big chunk, you’ve probably spoken to someone, slept with someone or hated someone with a worm in them.
I used to have a health fanatic friend who would purge their worms, half a foot long, from what it seemed like. She’d show me photos of these feces-covered worms that she’d release after a detox. There was 100 percent something else going on, but it made me wonder how much I’d be happy carrying one. Some form of obscure motherhood or companionship, where my entire life is a performance for my worm. “Would you love me if I were still a worm?” No, that’s not it.
“What would I do to make my worm stay with me…forever?”
Lea Rose Sebastianis’s short film Please Love Me is a whirlwind of codependency within companionship; it’s about what it means to love and to be loved. The 9-minute short portrays the beautiful yet tumultuous relationship between Tap Dancer (Sebastianis) and Friend (Moira Brown) and a falling out that leads to Tap Dancer's final performance. A two-woman show, performed in tandem, where two people virtually live in a universe created for them that comes crashing down. Sebastianis worked alongside Nate Wilson, Katerina Zoumboulakis and Nicholas Field to produce the short.
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Throughout the film, you follow Tap Dancer preparing for her “big show”, which soon becomes a last-ditch chance to win Friend back. After a fight where Tap Dancer wields a knife, unsure if it is fake or not, Friend yells, “You always take things too far!” Tap Dancer's journey in preparation for the show is replaced by a yearningly deep urge to capture Friends' heart once again.
What’s rather interesting isn’t the result of her journey, which we’ll touch on later, it’s how she reaches this point. Tap Dancer is shrouded in her own world. While it is blatantly obvious throughout the short that each of them plays a role in the demise, she centers herself. Her urge to please and her itching from the lack of codependency are making her spiral.
But we need to start from the beginning—her hand.
In the opening shot, Tap Dancer’s hand gets caught under a knife during a game of pinfinger. Hand roulette, five finger fillet, bishop or chicken, either way, a hand is drenched in blood as it shakes. There isn’t fear of the wound but some sort of excitement, shaking her hand in exhilarating joy. Some form of anticipated ecstacy of neurotically planned pain. From the jump, you're told that the violence and physical pain equate a proclamation of love. Is it a sacrifice? Not really. It's masochistically self-centred, slightly exhibitionistic, but Tap Dancer sees it at giving her fullest self.
While filming this, I recall seeing Sebastianis working at Bambi’s with a bandage wrapped around her hand. According to Sebastianis, it was fake. I don’t believe that, unless I’ve begun to create new memories based on delusions. Anyway, I’m never usually wrong.
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Photo Courtesy of Sebastianis
Somehow, in my mind, the blood rush, the shaking hand covering it, is the reality that Tap Dancer has built for herself. Or at least, in her mind. The true reality is that the relationship is a two-way street; Friend shoving the ashtray buds into her face and mouth, punching her, slapping her, only for Tap Dancer to then reach for a knife comically.
Sebastianis’s portrayal of pain codependency is oddly joyful, but with an asterisk over it. The iris eye zoom, a vaudeville-esque nod that is constantly seen throughout the short. To me, vaudeville is everywhere. It’s a psychological minefield of morally ambiguous dilemmas, glittered through the scenes with dance and chipper yet dreadful sounds.
Tap Dancer’s journey continues through submission, where she’s told about the two-way street by Faith Alexandra Marie in the presence of Dusty Lee. Even after being spanked with the crop, Tap Dancer still seems to center herself as the one who must entertain, who must continue to perform for someone else. Even in a flashback, where Friend is the literal puppetmaster, Tap Dancer still continues her journey in her final performance rather than realizing it’s a duet.
Please Love Me reminds me of the 1986 public access talk show Beyond Vaudeville, which would eventually become Oddville MTV. But it’s not Andy Kaufman-esque, and that’s a good thing. Fuck that. Most particularly, Suzanne Muldowney, aka Underdog, shows off her silver cape in episode 19.
There’s also Pat Ast, Warholian star and co-conspirator with the devil, Andy himself. Intertwined into every inch of the screen, when Tap Dancer smiles, full teeth, full of comically violent jest. It’s Ast serenading an uncomfortable Warhol at the Halston Atelier.
Pat Ast and Andy Warhol (1972 - Halsten Atelier)
Lurching back into his seat, melting away from Ast, Warhol avoids touch while Anst leans further in and sways through the atelier. Ast is a star. Everything in Please Love Me is cartoonishly manic, holding itself like a debaucherous Looney Tunes cartoon.
Muldowney is embedded in so much of the short, in her attitude, in her demeanour and in her passion for the performance. However, Muldowney especially shines through during the Tap Dancer’s final performance. When Muldowney was eventually asked back during Odville, MTV, her voice mimicked an operatic theremin, if that could even exist. While Tap Dancer prays before her performance, I hear Muldowney singing “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters during the mantramonial episode. An oath to God, an oath to a Friend, to be the best she can be.
Soon, she’d take a knife to her guts as a proclamation of love.
Leading up to this moment, Sebastianis captures the true nature of mania. The goths, the prom queens and the mimes blend into her reality, convincing her the choice she’s about the make is the right one. Marni Marriott boxing in the air, Tap Dancer vomiting, Martha Allendes yelling at her to get on stage. Her Muldowney prayer.
On stage, the wand tricks, as she planned, that in some ways may be true to her actual self, her real self, fail. So, she slits her stomach open. It’s a simple, cliche yet effective way of giving your everything. But Sebastianis leaves you questioning whether what's on the inside is truly the most important thing. Is it actually who we are? You’d have to truly know yourself first and what you deserve to give to others and yourself when it comes to love.
Friend does return, but it’s too late. Lying in a pool of her blood and innards, Tap Dancer is gone.
“She fucking killed herself in front of us. Heaven has another angel, I guess, but God, what a performance.”
While watching this for the first time at Paradise Theatre, I realized something. This is so much of what NYC’s film scene wants to be; it’s so much of what the male-dominated edgelord scene wants to be. Drenched in hyperboles and false metaphors that are so clearly digestible by a 13-year-old girl experiencing the angst of reality, they try to emulate those woes but fail to do so. Having watched www.RachelOrmont.com with J, and after seeing Sebastianis’s film, the former spent 120 minutes trying to tell me about the overconsumption and psychological warfare post-digitalism, performance and the overtly terrifying nature of being wanted. Please Love Me does that in 9. I even sat in the same seat during both screenings.
Listen, I know Vack’s film poses different themes, reaching towards meme culture and maternal love, yet they have a shared essence: companionship derived from yearning and wanting to be seen. The results differ in many ways. As Rachel sees through MOMMY6.0’s facade, in Sebastianis’s film, viewers are left with the result of that realization not coming to fruition, which ultimately leads to her death.
It occurred to me how many films, much like Vack’s, attempt to integrate this multimedia lens of post-digitalism and rotted content creation that was pushed into the digital vacuum by Angelicism. Under a pseudo-digital, fascist-like nature, one that reminds me of white Hinduism and the barefoot movement, it captures the essence of whiteness and suggests that the alt-right edgelordism lifestyle can be presented under left-leaning imagery. There, hence lacks a human touch or even a human response.
I didn’t feel that with Sebastianis’s work. In a culture and community filled with internet commentary, Sebastianis prompts you to reflect on your relationship. It actually makes you feel uncomfortable in the way you're supposed to, by picking at the skin around your nails until it's bleeding onto your skirt. It doesn’t make you think about post-digitalism like every other film in this scene, even as you watch dozens of cameras film her demise.
You want to be spiralled into pleasurable psychosis, as you hear the applause for a film. Sure, yes, you understand it, but the most important part is whether you come out wanting to have.
