PT: In your film [The Last Days Of Disco], among the characters who are psychologically interesting without being cases, none is more compelling than Charlotte. She’s lovely on the outside, not so lovely on the inside. She is everyone’s worst nightmare of a female or of a friend, saying things under the guise of friendship that really, truly undermine a person.
WS: In a way, it’s also a critique of the idea that if people recognize a bad trait or problem behavior in themselves and are aware of it and talk about it and apologize for it, then they have solved the problem. In fact, Charlotte is always very aware of her downside and confesses to it, and yet she does not change at all. It’s the idea that talking about things corrects them–when it doesn’t. Being aware of some problem or some bad behavior doesn’t correct that bad behavior.
3. If that’s not enough to whet your appetite, take a listen to one of the Stillman-inspired disco re-edits from JAZ’s I Played Sports, “Weejun Dancer”:
I can't wait for the interview!! What a quote from PT. That really puts a lot of the "confessions" of Charlotte into context. She is constantly making apologies for her character and you expect it to lead to change, but it never does.
Maybe if we're lucky John will give us some commentary…
John, give us some commentary…
I don't know what to say… "Weejun Dancer" is an edit I made of an 80s cover of clapton's classic "Cocaine", by a band called Eric's Friends. The cover is far superior to the original, but the guitars on the og drive me nuts, so I cut them out and replacing them with greater emphasis on the synths and weird parts. It's basically a preppy take on Romans 7 darkness. A light-hearted hedonism soon spirals into something very dark, albeit creative. I guess too, it was probably a bit inspired by the Des character (at his worst) in LDOD.
note: the cd (I Played Sports) doesn't end with this, the fourth track,…and neither does the gospel dialectic.