If you follow Sean Baker’s Letterboxd account—as of this writing, more than 68,000 people do—you may have noticed his deep dive into sexploitation and commedia sexy all’italiana (especially those featuring the Lolita-esque Ornella Muti) during much of the latter half of last year. (Not to mention a couple rewatchings of The Sugarland Express [1974].) One of American cinema’s most studious filmmakers, Baker was prepping for his typically resourceful new film, Red Rocket, which came together in a flash in time to premiere in the Cannes Competition yet nevertheless feels like a wholly resolved, even necessary object. Set in Texas City against the backdrop of the looming 2016 election and filmed amidst an ongoing pandemic, Red Rocket is a portrait of two overlapping Before Times that itself frames a narrative image of toxic masculinity. For the latter, Baker employed the often-deemed unemployable Simon Rex to play Mikey Saber, an opportunistic mid-forties male porn star who, having aged past the adult film industry’s tacit expiry date, crawls back to his ex, Lexi (Bree Elrod), in Texas. There, he resumes moving bud for his dealer friend, Leondria (Judy Hill), and woos 17-year-old Strawberry (played by radiant newcomer Suzanna Son), who he hopes to groom for a career hat he can cash in on.
For Baker, Mikey represents the quintessential “suitcase pimp,” an adult-entertainment archetype that describes those men who make ends meet by exploiting and leeching off the higher-paid women in the industry. Tenacious, fawning, and undeniably charismatic, Rex’s Mikey is a perfectly balanced personification of a parasitic male ego. That Mikey’s target this time is a teen nearly 30 years his junior explains to some extent why Baker looked to Italian sex comedies for representational strategies—rife as those films are with scenarios that could hardly hope to satisfy our present, comparatively prudish ideals. Fitting, too, that Red Rocket should feel like the product of two disparate wavelengths: the primal glow of 1974, and our Zooming contemporary moment that, in every sense, is running on fumes.
No mere pastiche artist, Baker knows how to make an idea his own, and the voice that projects is distinctly his. In addition to his trademark penchant for marginalized characters (particularly sex workers), and is perhaps the best expression yet of Baker’s ability to extract grace from belligerence. Local life is key, where regional lingo and deep-rooted companionship tend to trump whatever corporate intrusions and nefarious threats enter the picture. In this way, Baker’s relationship to cinema’s past ought to be understood as one of camaraderie rather than basic nostalgia. If reality (like anything at all) can only be understood by looking at what it isn’t, then a mirror simply won’t do—at least if we have any hope of truly comprehending our situation.
