ALL ABOUT DICK

This is a story about a sociopath finding his own solution to a problem he had no chance of solving on his own. The story is a glimpse into obsession overtaking unreasonable intentions. And the absurdity plays out through a single event – when Dick meets Jack.

The movie opens with a chance encounter at a rest stop along a little-used stretch of Interstate. Dick is a farmer, and loves working with soil. Jack is a military man, traveling home from a formal event. We soon learn, the “chance” part in their encounter is mostly Jack’s, and that self-fulfilled fantasy is what Dick seems to thrive on. The encounter quickly turns ugly, and Jack receives an extraordinary rendition. Against a backdrop of absurd and disorienting shifts in sonic and visual imagery, Jack is beaten, forcefully abducted and taken to Dick’s secluded farmhouse.

Dick has another obsession. He loves to dress up as a bunny. He enjoys the irony expressed during the confrontation and capture, and the sweet and sexually-ridiculous “cute” that is part of his sense of “doing the world a service.”

And Dick likes to grow things. He loves the feel of soil. He finds his own world when planting, and tends to sow more than he reaps. But this inner-space he finds is often broken by a harsh awakening into the other world he inhabits. Here he lives in the realities of hiding from an outside world he no longer trusts and, as he’s fully aware, shouldn’t trust him. But Dick has learned to disregard and overrule any connection to his conscience. When conscience inconveniently enters in, the voice that reaches him is always, in the end, cast-off and ignored.

On this night, while doing some planting, Dick is thrown back unusually hard into his other reality. And here, we discover the fate of Jack. He’s been “planted” waist deep, and deep-shackled beneath rich, fertile soil – the only kind of soil Dick can tolerate. As Dick struggles to regain his senses, he immediately seizes the moment to confront Jack, and put him through the paces from where things had left off. In his battered state, Jack has been forced to memorize and recite a piece of bad French poetry, written by Dick himself. But the words, never understood by Jack, are well designed, and effective in breaking down his will. Dick has finally got him!

As Jack continues on, the greater scene begins to reveal his recital more as a ritual, undertaken by those abducted before him. We find that he’s become the latest addition to a miserable, yet well-tended, garden of implants – all of them authority figures in some form, and each laden with live and flowering plants. All have been costumed-out as Dick’s sexually-idealized vignette. This is where Dick’s sense of justice, humor, and his younger days of gay clubbing all meet. He’s teaching them how the world needs to change. He’s showing them where they went wrong along the way.

As the story winds down, it winds up, and the edgy peculiarity and visceral aesthetic find its way to a far more colorful and festive setting. We now know that Dick has been doing this for a long time. And though he hangs on to a shadow-image of his original intent, he now does it for himself, and his well-developed fantasies and obsessions. Dick enjoys donning his bunny suit and celebrating as master of his world. And his lovely, flowering implants are willing to celebrate with him.