Claire Dolan

While it might sound like a crock of shit to most men (and women), I can say unequivocally that I would never under any circumstances voluntarily fuck a prostitute and there is a number of reasons for this, though it is mainly because I find few things less arousing than the prospect of penetrating an internally necrotic mess that has literally set a specific price to smash her overly used and abused gash.  Additionally, when it comes to vaginas, there is no fun in being able to open a lock that can be unlocked with any key.  On the other hand, I have developed a certain unexpected and misplaced (and probably delusional) empathy for these forsaken women, mainly due to my chronic cinephilia and affinity for filmmakers that have bravely tackled the subject in various ways, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Paul Morrissey, Paul Verhoeven, Walerian Borowczyk, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Andy Milligan, and Frank Henenlotter, among countless other examples. In fact, when it comes to streetwalkers in sinema, I think I have a pretty eclectic understanding of the subject and do not feel like I am being even remotely hyperbolic when I declare that Claire Dolan (1998) directed by underrated American auteur Lodge Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven, Keane) is indubitably one of the most intimately brutal, nuanced, and tightly constructed of these taboo-driven studies in carnal (self)degradation. In short, while the film might depict various sex acts and nudity, it is about as sexy as the prospect of masturbating with sandpaper or reusing a used semen-and-menstrual-blood-soaked condom, as Kerrigan’s film is an unconventionally humanistic neo-Bressonian experiment in the slow-burning despoilment of the soul as a strangely foreboding cinematic work where the viewer is forced to confront the fact that being a whore is more of a metaphysical affliction than a simple urban black market trade. As far as I am concerned, fucking a pussy-peddler is something akin to spiritual necrophilia, or so one might assume if they are fully willing to embrace Kerrigan’s keenly cold yet somehow strikingly empathetic and understated quasi-realist celluloid nightmare. 

 Undoubtedly, one of the most intriguing aspects of Claire Dolan is that the titular anti-heroine makes the valiant attempt to transform herself into her archetypal opposite by going from being a prostitute to a mother. As he detailed in his classic text Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) aka Sex and Character, suicidally self-loathing Viennese chosenite Otto Weininger regarded the dichotomous psychological extremes of femininity as being divided between the mother and the prostitute types, or as he wrote, “The fact that motherhood and prostitution are polar opposites can probably be gleaned from the simple observation that good housewives and mothers have more children, while the cocotte never has more than a few, and the streetwalker is mostly sterile. It must be noted that the type of the prostitute includes not only women who sell themselves, but also many so-called nice girls and married women, some of whom never commit adultery not because the circumstances are not favorable, but because they themselves do not allow things to reach that point. Therefore no exception should be taken to my using the term ‘prostitute,’ which is yet to be analyzed, in a much broader sense than that of women who sell themselves. The streetwalker is distinguished from the more prestigious cocotte and the more genteel hetaera only by an absolute lack of differentiation and a total absence of memory, which makes her live from one hour to the next or one minute to the next, without the slightest connection between one day and another. Moreover, the prostitute type could manifest itself even if there were only one man and one woman in the world, because it expresses itself in a specific kind of behavior toward a male individual.” In short, despite her aspirations towards motherhood, the film’s lead is and will always be a sort of spiritual prostitute, thus her rather ambitious efforts at rehabilitation are ultimately in vain, or so her baby-daddy concludes just before kicking her to the curb while she is still pregnant. Indeed, while the pussy-peddler does in fact manage to fill her womb with cum that leads to life, the mensch that plants the seeds ultimately decides to leave her after coming to terms with the harsh reality that she is a whore and will always be a whore whether she is peddling her meat curtain or pretending to be a proper housewife. In that sense, Claire Dolan is not the sort of film that would be deeply appreciated by the sapless sort of people that use pc terms like “sex workers” as it is a rather harsh and emotionally brutal film that unequivocally demonstrates that prostitutes are by no means typical women, but tragically damaged goods that no man—no matter how kind or well meaning—can ever hope to ‘save.’ For better or worse, the film follows Bresson’s cinematic dictum, “Neither beautify nor uglify. Do not denature,” though it gets pretty organically ugly. 

 Claire Dolan (English mischling Jewess Katrin Cartlidge, who previously worked with Mike Leigh and Lars von Trier, in what is indubitably the greatest performance of her fairly respectable career, which was tragically cut short when she died in 2002 at the premature age of 41) is a slightly swarthy Dublin-bred whore that is wise enough to peddle her puss to white collar corporate types instead of negro dope dealers, but she seems to loathe everything about her rather lonely life. Throughout the film, the viewer discovers bits and pieces about Claire’s dubious past, but it seems her sole reason for existing now is to pay off a hefty debt that she owes to a pimp named Roland Cain (Colm Meaney)—a stereotypical red-faced, curly-red-haired, and alcohol-addled mick bastard—who was ‘kind’ enough to pay for her dying mother’s expensive nursing home and medical bills. Not surprisingly, Claire decides to quit her trade when her mother drops dead and ultimately decides to betray her employer by running away and starting a new life in Newark, New Jersey as a lowly hairstylist. Needless to say, mad mick Roland hunts Claire down and forces her back into selling her gash for cash again during what proves to be a somewhat inauspicious point in her life. While Claire initially meekly abides and slavishly gets back into the loose-coat game, things become complicated when she meets and ultimately falls in love with a sloppy and somewhat neurotic taxi-driver named Elton Garrett (Vincent D'Onofrio in one of the many underrated and largely unseen performances of his rather singular acting career) who treats her a whole lot better than a blowup doll. In fact, not long after meeting, Elton reveals his keen sensitivity and strong altruistic sense of intimacy by performing cunnilingus on Claire, so naturally she is somewhat freaked out when a john attempts the same thing a couple days later and thus further compounds her rather schizophrenic sense of sexuality.  As demonstrated by a scene where she angrily kicks out a man that she had a soulless one-night-stand with, Claire has a lot of pent of (self)hatred, confusion, and anxiety when it comes to sex, yet Elton manages to completely change that, at least momentarily.

Undoubtedly an emotionally battered beta-male of sorts that seems to have a pathological compulsion to try to save forsaken women, Elton even opts to stay with Claire after discovering that she is a prostitute and is on prescription drugs to treat STDs, though he is certainly painfully self-conscious about the situation like any half-sane self-respecting man would be. Of course, to settle for such a damaged woman who literally cucks him for cash, Elton has to be an extremely wounded individual himself, which is probably, at least partially, the result of being a divorced father that only gets to see his adolescent daughter every once in a while. Indeed, if Claire and Elton have anything in common, it is that they are both decidedly debased and degraded virtual human-punching-bags that have mostly lived their lives serving others while failing to take of themselves in the process. Naturally, you cannot help people that do not want to help themselves, but Elton tries and almost immediately begins giving Claire money to pay off her debt to Roland. When Claire stoically declares to Elton on a rooftop, “I want to have a child” and he simply replies, “Are you sure?,” she demonstrates her seriousness by responding with the utmost stoicism, “Yes. We can make it work.” Naturally, as a relationship involving two terribly emotionally damaged individuals, it does not work, but Claire at least gets the baby, which was obviously her main motivation. Indeed, while she loses her mother at the beginning of the film, Claire still manages to continue the so-called ‘circle of life’ by creating a (bastard) child of her own. 

 Right from the get-go of the film when we are first introduced to Claire as she attempts to flirt with a nameless/faceless john on a payphone, it is immediately apparent that, on top of selling both her sex and soul, she lies for a living. Indeed, aside from pretending to enjoy having sex with strange men and dressing in a slutty way that she clearly does not enjoy, Claire spends her free time telling potential johns over the phone with a monotone dispassionate voice things like, “I wanna be with you. I can be at your hotel in ten minutes […] I want you to fuck me.” In fact, Claire has such a decidedly degraded and depressing essence that it is a surprise that any man would want to fuck her lest they succumb to the emasculating shame of erectile dysfunction.  In fact, Claire looks like she is more aroused at the prospect at castrating men than engaging in coitus with them. Of course, Claire is also not a particularly pulchritudinous pussy-peddler as she looks like she could be the emo big sister of Anne Frank and not like the sort of overtly lecherous chick that has a talent for downing Brobdingnagian dicks or engaging in the art of double penetration, but of course that is why she might appeal to certain strange men. In fact, Claire is sometimes stalked by sadists and degenerates that seem attracted to the special brand of degradation that she practically radiates. Luckily, Claire has managed to project a rough exterior. For example, when a young ugly hood approaches her at a diner and reveals his intent to sexually defile her, Claire emasculates the man by audaciously replying that she would prefer banging his friend because he is “better looking.”

Of course, Claire’s ‘tough bitch’ routine is nothing but a carefully crafted act and she is just like everyone else in the sense that she desires to be loved, hence her attraction to the inordinate sensitivity of Elton.  While Claire certainly gets to exploit her talent for extra wanton female wiles, she is also incapable of using classic feminine weapons, including the exploitation of the stereotype of female weakness, or as Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “The Strength of the Weak.—Women are all skillful in exaggerating their weaknesses, indeed they are inventive in weaknesses, so as to seem quite fragile ornaments to which even a grain of dust does harm; their existence is meant to bring home to man's mind his coarseness, and to appeal to his conscience.  They thus defend themselves against the strong and all ‘rights of might.’”  Not only does Claire work in a deleterious trade of the flesh that involves her customers, who technically engage in a crime or two just to procure her services, leaving their consciences at home, but she also cannot afford to show weakness as it could get her raped or even killed, or so the film hints in its rather unflattering depiction of everyday bipedal sidewalk scum.

 Undoubtedly, out of the three main characters of the film, mick pimp Roland—a man that unquestionably personifies everything that I find repugnant about the stereotypical Irish phenotype —is, in many ways, the most magnetic yet understatedly monstrous. While the viewer does not learn much about Roland aside from the fact that he is a proud traditional family man and that he uses a bourgeois bar as a sort of front/hang-out for his prestigious slut-slinging enterprise, the viewer is exposed to the imperative little detail that he has actually known Claire every since she was just a wee little girl, thus making his relationship with her seem all the more sick and morbid. As hinted by a random photograph that appears in the film, Claire’s mother seems to have been friends with Roland and was probably also one of his whores in the past, hence why he was probably helping to foot her hospital bills. Despite their deep-rooted history together, Claire seems to both deeply hate and fear Roland, hence her rather sneaky failed initial attempt to escape his wrath. Needless to say, Roland can be pretty emotionally brutal to the anti-heroine as demonstrated by rather rude remarks to her like, “You’re looking worn, Claire. How many years do you think you got left? Two, maybe three? What are you going to do when you start falling apart? Push your pussy on the street for 20 bucks a pop? You’re not a new girl.” Still, at the same time, Roland is a completely practical man that willing to honor a deal and freely releases Claire from her bondage when she finally manages to pay off her hefty debt.  Needless to say, Roland has very little faith that Claire could excel at anything aside from peddling heir puss, but she is fanatically determined to prove him otherwise.

While Roland certainly gives Claire some tough lessons about life, he ultimately provides poor hopeless sap Elton with the greatest lesson and gives some harsh yet true insights about life that seem to completely change his worldview, at least on the highly personalized level. Indeed, when Elton randomly approaches him in an aggressive fashion at his bar, Roland hits him in the family jewels and then angrily states whilst grabbing him in a rather painful position, “I don’t like to repeat myself, so listen carefully. She may have paid me off, but she’ll never quit. I’ve known Claire since she was 12-years-old and I knew then what I know now—that deep inside, she’s a whore. She was born a whore . . . she’ll die a whore.” After kicking his ass and doing his nice little perennial whore spiel, Roland, who is not an unreasonable man, proceeds to act friendly toward Elton by giving him some whisky and leaving him with the following thought, “I know it’s hard, but try to accept what I told you. You’ll have a happier life and be a better person for it. It’s time you started looking after yourself. You’re not a little boy anymore.”  Undoubtedly, had Roland not kicked his ass, Elton might have been made the biggest mistake of his life and settled down with a woman that seems to have a different STD every other week.

 While Roland clearly knows next to nothing about Elton, he, like any good pimp, is a highly intuitive individual and can clearly sense that he’s a broken emotional cripple that has the unfortunate self-destructive compulsion to want to help other broken emotional cripples, hence his dubious love for a godforsaken second-hand Sue like Claire. While it is immediately apparent after he discovers that Claire is a prostitute that he is extremely bothered by her curious choice of trade and that he should not be involved in such a decidedly deleterious and clearly foredoomed relationship, Elton is clearly a victim of his own low self-esteem and misplaced empathy. In short, getting the shit beat out him by a pimp was probably the best thing that ever happened to Elton as he probably would have lacked the testicular fortitude to break up with Claire otherwise. At the very end of the film, it is revealed that Elton ultimately made the right choice as he ended up with a much cleaner and ladylike woman. Indeed, in the very last sequence of the film, Elton is depicted a couple years later randomly running into Roland while he is with his new extremely nice pregnant blonde wife Madeline. Notably, Roland states to Elton in regard to kids, “It’s the best thing that’ll ever happen to you. It changes everything. You can’t stop with one! You gotta keep on having them.” When Elton’s wife asks how he knows her husband, Roland somewhat humorously states, “We knew each other years ago in another life. It’s funny how time passes.” Of course, it is doubtful that Elton’s wife knows that he has a bastard son with Claire.

Of course, as the bastard son of a whore, Claire and Roland’s son probably has a good chance of growing up to be a rent boy, tranny freak, druggie, and/or some other sort of irredeemable urban concrete-pounding degenerate. Additionally, even if Elton had not left Claire, their love affair would have undoubtedly been doomed to failure as it was built on extreme doubt and lies. After all, as Weininger once wrote when describing the mother and prostitute archetypes, “Whether a woman will meet a man who can make her the mother of his child through his mere presence is a matter of chance. To that extent it is imaginable that the destinies of many mothers and prostitutes could have turned out the opposite of what they have actually become. On the other hand, there are not only countless examples of women remaining true to the type of the mother even without such a man, but there are also doubtless cases in which this man does present himself and even his presence fails to prevent the woman from finally and irrevocably turning to prostitution.” In a sense, Elton acts as a sort of ‘emotional prostitute’ to Claire to the point of providing her with what she wants most but cannot seem to acquire: a child. Of course, Elton completely lacked the strength and sense to transform Claire into a real ‘mother,’ but then again even sub-literate rappers and gang-bangers know that you cannot turn a whore into a housewife. 

 As a sort of unintentional connoisseur of call-girl cinema of all sorts and someone with an interest in perversity and abnormal psychology in general, among other things, I do not feel I am committing puffery when I say that Claire Dolan is unequivocally one of the greatest and most effortlessly emotionally grueling depictions of a pussy-peddler ever committed to celluloid. Indeed, while there are a number of films ranging from Federico Fellini’s early classic The Nights of Cabiria (1957) to Andy Milligan’s gritty classic exploitation piece Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973) to Ken Russell’s weirdly high-camp Crimes of Passion (1984) to Mike Figgis' endearingly pathetic Leaving Las Vegas (1995) that depict the seeming incapacity of prostitutes to find real lasting love or even simple emotional connections, Kerrigan’s underrated film is arguably more effective than any other cinematic work of the same sort in that it manages to intimately communicate the almost intolerably grating emotions associated with such abject romantic forsakenness. In that sense, the film is quite comparable to Kerrigan’s equally potent debut feature Clean, Shaven (1994) in terms of its gratingly viscerally authentic approach to the virtually never good, very bad, and uniquely ugly reality of living with a sort of metaphysical affliction. Also, like the director’s debut, Claire Dolan mostly shies away from any overt political subtexts aside from a mostly superficial critique of the evils of capitalism, though it could arguably be interpreted as left-wing or right-wing. Undoubtedly, the film's fairly obvious theme of capitalistic degradation is pretty much summed up when a random john acts inordinately empathetic towards Claire and makes the heartfelt speech just before, rather ironically, defiling her frail body, “It’s ok. I understand. I used to do a lot of things for money. Things that I hated. Things that got inside me and tore me up, but I learned to push it away and seal it off. The worst part—the thing that I kept coming back to—was that I couldn’t completely understand how I got into those positions. I couldn’t figure out what it was inside me that allowed me to accept those things. For years, I thought I was different from everybody—in a bad way. I had no one to turn to, to get myself straight. It took me years to realize that I wasn’t a freak. There are a lot of people out there that do things that tear them up—that they hate. Do you understand what I mean? Just try not to think about it.” Like Iranian auteur Sohrab Shahid Saless’ hard ghetto West German epic Utopia (1983)—a similarly painfully raw and gritty yet slightly less intimate portrait of pussy-peddling—the film cuts sharply into the soul with an acidic pathos-laced knife as wielded by the most forlorn of female fuck machines; or, tears of (anti)eros. 

 In the eyes of left-wing Nietzschean Georges Bataille, virtually all women have the capacity to be capitalists of the cunt that see their pussy as always having a very specific price, or as the degenerate frog once wrote, “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, a woman is a prey to men’s desire. Unless she refuses completely because she is determined to remain chaste, the question is at what price and under what circumstances will she yield. But if the conditions are fulfilled she always offers herself as an object. Prostitution proper only brings in a commercial element. By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men’s attention. Similarly if she strips naked she reveals the object of a man’s desire, an individual and particular object to be prized.” Of course, the great irony of Claire Dolan is that it is only through the very same prostitution that led to her personal debasement that the titular twat acquires her freedom and capacity for motherhood. Indeed, in a sick semitic sort of way, Claire owes her sense of personal sovereignty to selling her cunt to be used as a virtual all-purpose public porta-potty. On the other hand, Bataille believed that “Prostitution seems to have been simply a complement to marriage in the first place.” Still, Bataille—an unhinged mensch that married a Jewess at a time when it was less than vogue who seemed to fetish things simply because they were sick and repellent, including eggs-in-pussies and human sacrifice, among other things—might as well have been summing up the metaphysical employment resume of Claire when he wrote, “The lowest kind of prostitute has fallen as far as she can go. She might be no less indifferent to the taboo than animals are except that because what she knows about taboos is that others observe them, she cannot attain an absolute indifference; not only has she fallen but she knows she has. She knows she is a human being. Even if she is not ashamed of it, she does know that she lives like a pig.” After all, she does not seem all that terribly shocked when her special savior Elton eventually leaves her, but she probably first and foremost wanted him to knock her up, thus he arguably becomes the exploited whore in the end yet he still greatly pays for it, at least both emotionally and monetarily speaking.  In short, Claire Dolan contains the relatively simple but extremely imperative message that one should not dip their dick in a dirty dasher dame's dearest bodily part lest they seek cuckoldry and extreme emasculation, among other obscenely odious things.

 According to Weininger, “The prostitute is very different. She at least lives her own life fully, even if—in extreme cases—she is punished for this by being excluded from society. Rather than being brave as the mother is, she is a coward through and through, but she always posses the correlative of cowardice, which is impudence, and thus she is at least brazenly shameless.” Of course, the same could be said of artists, especially good ones. In fact, somewhat ironically, Weininger argues that prostitutes share much in common with great men/leaders of history—another obsession of artists—arguing, “The unique phenomenon of the great man of action has always had a powerful attraction for artists in particular (but also for philosophical writers). The surprising unanimity displayed in this respect will perhaps make it easier to approach the phenomenon by means of conceptual analysis. Mark Antony (Caesar) and Cleopatra are not altogether unlike each other. Initially, most people will probably regard this parallel as quite fanciful, and yet the existence of a close analogy seems to me to be beyond any doubt, however different the two persons may at first sight appear. The ‘great man of action’ renounces any inner life in order to express himself (the term is appropriate here) fully in the external world, and to suffer the fate of everything that expires, rather than achieving the permanence of everything that is internalized. He tosses his whole value behind him and keeps it at arm’s length with all his might. Similarly, the great prostitute flings the value that she would be able to obtain from being a mother into the face of society, not in order to take stock of herself and to embark on life of contemplation, but in order to give completely free rein to her sensual urges. Both the great prostitute and the great tribune are like firebrands which, when lit, illuminate vast expanses, pile corpses on corpses as they pass, and fad out like meteors, without contributing anything worthwhile and meaningful to human wisdom, without leaving anything permanent behind, without any sign of eternity—while the mother and the genius quietly work for the future. Both the prostitute and the tribune, therefore, are perceived as ‘scourges of God,’ as anti-moral phenomena.” Of course, this would explain why prostitutes, not unlike great men, are among the most intriguing and intricate female characters of cinema history, just as archetypical mothers tend to be the most banal and one-dimensional. Certainly, Peter O'Toole's performance as a great man in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) has something particularly whorish and wonderfully immoral about it. By dedicating himself to the melancholy and even morose life and times of a walking and talking sex object, auteur Kerrigan, despite his modernist art fag cred and his fairly young age at the time of directing the film, reveals himself to be a timeless artist with a knack for depicting ancient perennial archetypes in a relatively idiosyncratic fashion.  Needless to say, I think I would rather enjoy seeing Kerrigan directing a film about a historical great man, though I think he is probably more fit for making a film about Nietzsche or even SS-Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger.

It is undoubtedly fitting and even somewhat ironic that one of Kerrigan’s greatest cinematic achievements is a film about the metaphysical perils of prostitution as he has, rather unfortunately, been forced to spend the greater portion of his somewhat uneven filmmaking career prostituting himself out to projects that are surely beneath him. Indeed, aside from the singularly artistically tragic bad luck he suffered when his fully finished feature In God's Hands starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard was scrapped in 2002 due to what the director described as “technical issues with the negative” as a result of some insipid retard destroying it in a lab, Kerrigan has spent most of the 2010s directing episodes for lame and/or generic TV series like Homeland (2012, Episode: “State of Independence”), Longmire (2013, Episode: “Carcasses”), Bates Motel (2014; Episode: “Caleb”), and Starz' patently pointless TV adaptation of Steven Soderbergh's pretentious turd The Girlfriend Experience (2009), among various other examples. On the other hand, it does make some sense that the auteur would tackle The Girlfriend Experience (2016-current), which was just renewed for a second season and which he is once again co-writing and co-directing in collaboration with vaguely attractive Mumblecore veteran Amy Seimetz. Aside from his TV work, Kerrigan also directed the French-American co-production Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs) (2010)—a French-language flick about a crazy frog bitch that supposedly wants to be Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick—though the film seems to be impossible to find (as far as I know, it has never been released in any home media format) and it has received mostly terrible views, which is no surprise considering it contains a particularly preposterous premise that seems inconsistent with the director's previous cinematic efforts. Still, Kerrigan’s first three features—Clean, Shaven, Claire Dolan, and Keane—are good enough to secure Kerrigan’s place in cinema history as one of the most underrated and uncompromising  American auteurs that has ever lived. As Ingmar Bergman revealed with his covertly spiritually autobiographical film Ansiktet (1958) aka The Magician, the life of an artist can sometimes be more degrading than a whore.

In his fairly favorable 3.5 out of 4 star review of Claire Dolan, Roger Ebert concludes with the following somewhat humorous sentences, “I think Claire Dolan will make a good mother. I think she can make it work. Not with Elton, but by herself, which is the only way she can live and not have to lie.” Of course, as the film subtly hints, Claire’s mother was probably a whore too that was responsible for turning her daughter onto prostitution so she’s probably somewhat ill-equipped to be a mother, not to mention the fact that being fatherless is one of the biggest prerequisites for failure and criminality in life (as a childless celebrity that settled on an overweight and unattractive, I sincerely doubt that Ebert knew much about women). Indeed, I can only feel sorry for the kid but then I am reminded of Nietzsche’s quote, “Where are thy greatest dangers?—in pity.” Speaking of Nietzsche, who may have owed his break with sanity to syphilis that he obtained from a whore, he was certainly onto something when he wrote, “Praise in Choice.—The artist chooses his subjects; that is his mode of praising,” though I think in Kerrigan’s case it is more about empathy. Undoubtedly an acutely sensitive empath, Kerrigan has revealed an inordinate love and affection for the trash and rabble of society that is almost Christly in character.  In that sense, Claire Dolan is Kerrigan's tribute to Mary Magdalene, but of course the auteur does not have any use for the Virgin Mary.

-Ty E