CARNAL NATION

Recently I interviewed director Maria Beatty for the upcoming issue of Filmmaker magazine. Best known for the lesbian BDSM movies she's been creating for the past decade and a half, Beatty and I discussed the challenge that awaits every growing and changing niche artist sooner or later—how to move beyond the "ghetto" that once defined the art without losing the support of the very community that allowed the artist to blossom in the first place.

In Beatty's case we talked specifically about the backlash she's received in response to her indie "mainstream" debut Bandaged, executive produced by Abel Ferrara. (Though to call a film about a blonde ingénue whose failed suicide attempt results in third degree burns to her face, virtual imprisonment by her plastic surgeon daddy, and a passionate, bondage inclusive affair with a sexy nurse "mainstream" is to use the word in only the broadest, Bad Lieutenant terms.) Though Bandaged luckily has been picked up by an indie distributor, Beatty related the tough time she's had on the festival circuit, playing to lesbian audiences who feel the film is too "straight," as well as to fetish audiences who consider the flick too "vanilla." Bandaged hasn't been received well in the fetish world because there's not really an overt fetish theme to it. And the film was rejected from many gay and lesbian festivals because it wasn't gay enough," Beatty sighed.

The Paris-based director's sensible solution? To follow her vision and trust that those disappointed fans will eventually let go of preconceived notions of what "A Film by Maria Beatty" should be and just come along for the less explicit ride. "I think I disappointed a lot of people who were expecting something more transgressive. But this reaction just forces me to go over the edge and do whatever I want to do. It's pushed me even farther out of the ghetto," Beatty enthused. Which, fascinatingly, didn't sit too well with her friend Nickel Dakota, a fetish filmmaker who kindly was videotaping our interview as we sat on a park bench by the Hudson River on a sunny summer Sunday. Why, Dakota wondered, couldn't Beatty just expand the erotica genre itself instead of jumping the lesbian S&M ship for the indie world? It was a point well taken, and one that many "pornographers" agreed with back in the maverick 70s, when men like Radley Metzger and Gerard Damiano were adding high production values and professionally written scripts to all the screwing.

But is this really feasible when an artist is trying to expand both oneself and one's audience in 2009? In fact, Beatty reminded her friend that it's been the "straight vanilla" audiences who've been most receptive to Bandaged hot bondage scene and all. And why shouldn't they be when nary an eyelash bats at the sight of Daniel Craig being tied up and whipped in the remake of Casino Royale? For in the Internet age the ghetto walls are coming down at the speed of a Tweet. Beatty isn't leaving one community for another, but aspiring to a career in which she can move fluidly back and forth between. For her, Bandaged was an aesthetic exercise to see how far she could take sexual imagery within a non-erotica context. And if her upcoming film—set in a decadent, sexed up, post-apocalyptic club—is any indication, she'll soon be bringing a touch of indie back to her kink.