→ A Movies By Women.com Article

We are very grateful to the late Sarah Jacobson for giving us this article for our readers.

→ Clit-O-Matic, The Adventures of White Trash Girl

Directed by Jennifer Reeder

When I first saw Clitomatic, I was practically in shock from seeing such a cool girl, fuck you kind of film. This is the 'teaser' for an going series of superhero White Trash Girl. We get the sordid story of WTG's beginnings. Her mother was raped by her 'uncle' (some say he was her own daddy) and miscarriaged into a toilet where WTG was flushed into the sewer and soaked up all the toxic sludge. She grew up to be a beautiful ass kickin' chick with awesome powers. We also get to meet her rag tag cast of characters including Mental Girl, Scrappy, Trelita and Eddie the Landlord (One is portrayed by PXL queen Sadie Benning but I forget which character). With cool music and voiceover prose like "Coming at you faster than you can say hatchet wound!" over found footage of destroyed trailer parks, bloody driver's ed footage, close ups of vaginas creaming all intercut with sexy of footage WTG struttin' her stuff, this is a piece of work you cannot ignore. The thing I loved most about Clitomatic was how it was completely aggressive, mean as hell and gave no apologies. I was lucky enough to meet with Jennifer, whose hometown is in Chicago.

→ S- What was the thing that made you start this vision of White Trash Girl?

→ J- It was a combination of a bad first semester in grad school and an article by Laura Kipnis about Hustler Magazine. I really kept thinking to myself for some reason "What kind of superhero would I be if I were a superhero and how could sort of come in and in one fell swoop and kick some ass here at this school?" At the Art Institute of Chicago, I kind of right away sensed that I was doing work that was just different than what other people were doing. My work was kind of pedestrian, dorky, kind of trashy.

→ S- What made you reference the white trash thing? Did you feel that it was something you knew a lot about?

→ J- I think it was I felt certain class distinction between certain people at the school and myself. The article that Laura Kipnis wrote was about how Hustler Magazine kind of adheres to the lower bodily strata that is associated with the lower classes. Hustler Magazine shows sweaty bodies or bodies of color or it talks about sex being embarrassing and it talks about your sex organs being next to your shitting organs. It has this way of undermining the dominant culture, the power structure, because people of a certain socio-economic level don't give a fuck if they pick their nose in public or they have really great sex and their neighbors hear. They don't care. What do they have to lose? I started associating this lower class with that kind of power, a personal power, not monetary power. The ability to walk into a restaurant, eat with your hands, enjoy your meal and make everyone around you feel incredibly uncomfortable. Certain women, you see them hollering down the street and they're yelling "get the fuck out of here!" and they don't give a fuck. It's sort of like poor white people in this country have this space that's really awkward. They're not really the minority, because they're white. But it's like they're poor and there is no such thing as privilege when you're poor, no matter what color you are. I became interested in how being marginalized can still be an incredibly powerful place to be.

→ S- A lot of times I find women's films to be whiny and introspective in this really serious place where all of a sudden you have to abandon every goofy thought you've ever had and just think serious thoughts. One of the things I like about your film is the sense of fun in it. It's such an ass kicking film and when you see it, you have such a good time watching it yet you say a lot of really powerful things. Was that a conscious decision?

→ J- It definitely was. I started out as an undergrad in women's studies and there was something about that that made me defensive, but in this really weak way. I was attacking guys for the place that women held in society. It was teaching me to be against...I don't know, It had this really weird sense of this place that women held, being calm and rational. There was something in that that didn't work for me. For me, it just feels a lot better when you tell someone to go fuck themselves. To be able to even to have this kind of power is immediate. We all have certain violent tendencies in us I guess, but in a civilized society you do not pull out a gun when someone is taking your parking space. But there is something about this tape (Clitomatic) that allows you to do that. I ask the viewer to indulge in these fantasies of going after somebody. And it is the same for me too. I understand that I have to exist in this society and be a nice person. This project allows me to be all like "fuck you" and to hit people if I want.

→ S- Is it sort of a release for you like all the aggressions that you have all the time?

→ J- Yeah, and there's something raw about it and definitely something that's really goofy . White Trash Girl herself is like a total goofball. She allows herself to be embarrassed and to embarrass other people. She doesn't give a fuck. She has no sense of being a dignified female in this society and doesn't care what people say about her. To me seems it fits the way I find power in my own life other than stepping back and being poetic or metaphoric or beautiful.

→ S- It seems like your influences from what I saw were comic book, trash cinema, especially how you have trading cards with your film What kind of influence did you get from that whole comic book scene and how does that tie into what you do?

→ J- Well, she's a superhero and normally most superheroes are super powers, at least in the pages of the comic book. There is something I love about that fantastic world of comic books that's totally over the top, that is totally outrageous, anything can happen. The same thing can happen with animated comics. I love that it is detached from reality, but nonetheless you can get into it. I wanted to do something that was live action obviously. I thought about making it into a comic book, something I'd love to do, but I couldn't do that by myself. And the trading cards, I just love this idea of merchandising. I'd love to make an action figure or to go beyond that traditional idea of marketing and make collectable plates..

→ S- Like Elvis plates.

→ J- Yeah or like salt and pepper shakers and move into this other area of kitch or collectables, that is not obviously associated with the Batman action figures.

→ S- Also I like the idea of a trilogy, how you are going to have two more parts that are following up White Trash Girl. That's also very marketing oriented, but also comic book oriented.

→ J- It is a serial. And who knows? Right now I'm working on the third one, but I've got plans to make four. I'm interested in that kind of series, not only because it gives me an opportunity to put her in as many different places as possible and just write her into as many stories as possible not like think I've made this one tape and that's it and you can't revise it. I sort of like the idea of being able to put her in a whole bunch of different situations. Just to continue to work on it. Definitely, it is a series just like a comic book.

→ S- Okay, you said you are finishing the third one. Does that mean the second one is done?

→ J- Well, the second one is done.

→ S- What's the premise of that?

→ J- The second one the character, Scrappy, who is introduced in the first one which is more like a trailer, like an introduction. You're introduced to one of her sidekicks, her band of trailer trash. In the second episode Scrappy owns this big piece of land and some guys come from "the city"...

→ S- "Metropolis."

→ J- Exactly, and they are interested in building what is called Mallmart that is associated with Walmart so they want to build this big shopping mega shopping center and they keep trying to sell her on this idea. She enlists the help of White Trash Girl to get these guys at least to push them away for awhile. So White Trash Girl comes over and she is really charming and says why don't you join us for lunch? She makes them this shit casserole. Of course it's toxic. They get really sick and run away screaming. She's like "Get away from here and don't come back!"

In the end she says, "Listen Scrappy they'll be back, but maybe not for a while." So I wanted this idea to not, for this or any of the episodes, to be like a happy ending, but that certain problems that plague the lower classes will never go away. There might always be somebody trying to evict you to build something else. I'm interested in doing episodes where somebody gets hurt and they don't have any medical insurance. The episode I'm working on right now is about a phone sex operator and single mother who works for this guy who doesn't who pays the girls sometimes and sometimes he doesn't. He's this corporate guy. It ends with this kind of big brawl with White Trash Girl fighting this corporate guy. These endings aren't really final. None of them kind of end with 'She triumphs and everything is fine'

→ S- Very Tim Burton Batman. Where are you from originally?

→ J- I'm from Ohio.

→ S- Where did you get that bad ass accent in the movie?

→ J- Oh, I think partially from southern Ohio, but also from half my relatives grew up in Alabama and Mississippi. Trailer parks and honky-tonk bars and bad ass women are from all over.

→ S- How did you get into the scene where it was academic and women studies and the Art Institute? How did that happen?

→ J- After I graduated from under grad at Ohio State, I really wasn't done making tapes. I thought, let's look for a video department. I found myself in Chicago in grad school and in a really very academic environment making really trashy work. My first semester was rough, but from then on out I found people at that school who were incredibly smart, really smart people who loved it. I mean, Laura Kipnis spoke there and I ended up meeting her. She is one of my theory heroes and she ended up interviewing me for a book called White Trash: Race and Class of America. And what's really funny is that it is being edited by some people who are at Berkeley. It was really ironic that at some point this work has really been embraced by both by the underground film people and certain academic people.

→ S- Yeah, Serial Killer never hit that academic crowd. It's so odd also just to see especially at this festival there is the underground scene, there's the experimental scene, and there's a PC scene and sometimes they overlap and sometimes they really clash. I think it's interesting that your film seems to straddle all of those and do it with total success.

→ J- I'm just as surprised as anyone. I had no idea where this project would go. It was totally the most fun to make. I just lucked out that other people were in to it, too. Luckily, most people have been able to pick up on the fact that there's more than just this kind of girl walking around, kicking ass. There are certain things about it that I'd like to think were smart, but you know if people laugh in all the right places, that's all fine too.

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