Background:

Shot linearly in 1977, using exclusively in-camera editing, this Super 8 film was the product of a childhood obsession with things Bionic. My best friend, Kevin Maxwell, and I must have shot over 50 films focusing on bionic themes and characters. This was the last film of that genre. Many of the films don’t survive today. In fact this is the surviving second reel of a three reel moving. Originally our collaboration produced a very serious treatment of our topic—we were kids at play, but we wanted our films to be taken seriously. That is until the Bionic Dolly Pardon came into our lives. She was an experimentation with female drag, a caricature. Just as the Bionic Man was an exaggeration of a certain type of masculinity, a form of drag in and of itself, so was Dolly an exaggeration of femininity. Looking back, I’m surprised that my boyhood mind realized this on some level, at least conscious enough of it to reproduce it as performance for the camera. It’s interesting to me now that as a young boy that I used these two points of reference to work out my early notions of gender roles. It’s also interesting to me, now, that when I made the leap from acting the role of a bionic man to that of Dolly Pardon, I chose to present myself as twins—good versus evil—also two polarities battling it out.