Frankie, Underwater

FRANKIE, UNDERWATER is my first directorial effort since the student films I made at Columbia College Chicago, as well as the culmination of a nearly fifteen year journey to finding and accepting my voice as a queer filmmaker.

I left film school put off by some of my experiences on set. I told myself and others that this was due to the clique-y, hierarchical nature of these spaces, reminiscent of the locker rooms I had left behind in a lifetime in athletics. Although some of this may have been true, I now realize that the more pressing issue was my inability to exercise my own identity in those spaces. This was something I had to find, and then find the confidence to assert. I retreated into writing for quite some time in order to do so. This is where I said a lot about myself without having to say anything. And this is how I found Emily Carlton. And that is how Frankie came to be.

Emily identified the queer undertones of my work, and through six years of writing together, encouraged me to engage with them more holistically. We worked together to mine our respective childhoods for different sense memories that exemplified our earliest, most visceral notions of queerness and to identify the commonalities in those moments that defied gender or geo-cultural differences. From these memories, we built a bit of a shared autobiography that, I believe, exemplifies my voice as a late-blooming queer artist.

Frankie is told through the lens of the beating-sun suburban summers of America’s midwest. Those I know so well having grown up in the suburbs of Chicago. The oppressive heat outside the oppressive household, fleeting liberation. School, authority, always looming. These environmental elements in conjunction with the pent up frustration, confusion, and excitement brought on by a changing body and fledgling sexuality breeds a desperation to eject one’s self from the quotidian and explore the oncoming phantasmagoria. That is what this film tries to capture.

After all, this is a film about the breaking of, or fleeting escape from, rigid forms. Claws from scabs, crystals from beakers, water over the pool’s edge, the girls from Frankie’s house. We applied a ‘loose sticks’ camera approach to a majority of the film as a means of articulating restlessness inside many of these static settings: the house, the beaker, the body, while choosing specific moments of that fleeting liberation to take the camera off the tripod and embrace the fluidity and kinetic nature of certain moments.

Also present in the film’s construction is the constant juxtaposition of the subjective versus the objective that is so prevalent in the experience of coming of age. The feeling versus the objective happening. The sentiment versus the science. Body dysmorphia can create a bizarre voyeurism. You watch yourself go through something in mirrors and through the eyes of others that you don’t necessarily feel connected to. This sort of ‘mutual othering’ can create a rift in reality. We use the claws to articulate that rift and the spaces in which the characters are creating, forming, and developing to highlight this concept of the ‘never-ending gaze.’ The harsh sunlight through the windows of the house beams like a spotlight on an experiment, as if the girls’ development in the house is being watched - studied like the activity of their experiment in the beaker. This constant cycle of observation spins us into a dizzying fit that leaves us to wonder what or who the experiment really is, and who is overseeing it.

Regarding the ‘experiments’ involved in the actual making of the film: makeup, props, effects, we looked to the films of David Cronenberg and Dario Argento as guiding works. We wanted to achieve as much as we could practically in order to imbue the film with the same naive wonder that the girls embody while conducting their experiment. Even if this practical approach meant asking the audience to suspend disbelief a bit more than they might have otherwise had to had we realized the effects digitally, we thought it would elicit an earnestness and authenticity that’s vital to the childish spirit of the story. A beautiful side effect of this approach was that we ended up creating talisman not only for the audience but for the cast and crew. Making almost all of the surreal elements together and having them there with us on set allowed all of us to step into the world of the film collectively each day.

And so, Frankie, Underwater is in my mind a holistically queer story. That term is used quite ‘blanketly’ at times, but in my estimation it celebrates the breaking of convention. We tried to break the convention of the typical set by hiring as much queer crew as we could to cultivate an environment that reflected the story we were telling. We tried to break the convention of the typical narrative by conveying a sensory rush as opposed to a character arc. And finally, we tried to break the convention of low-budget shorts by building out a world practically, in-camera. Frankie is a body song sung in the voice of its makers, and although I may have culled much of its narrative underpinning from a time long gone by, it feels viscerally relevant to my present experience.