Director Report Card: Adam Wingard (2011) - Part 1

4. Autoerotic

Adam Wingard would have two movies play film festivals in 2011. The first of which is “What Fun We Were Having.” That is a collection of four stories all based around date rape, which is even stated in its blunt subtitle. Unsurprisingly, a movie with such an uncomfortable subject matter did not find much of an audience. “What Fun We Were Having” has never found its way out of “searching for distribution” limbo and remains seen only by festival attendees to this day. The other Wingard joint from 2011 is “Autoerotic.” Another collaboration with Joe Swanberg – who has co-director status this time – it was also an omnibus feature with a touchy premise: Sex, masturbation, and kinkiness. This proved slightly more commercial and would be picked up by IFC Midnight shortly after it debuted.

“Autoerotic” revolves around four unnamed couples. The first is a man who fears his penis is too small to please his girlfriend, who doesn't seem to mind. Desperate for results, he chugs penis enlargement pills. The resulting growth spurt does not have the intended effect. The second couple is a man with a spandex fetish and a woman who can't stop masturbating. Her constant horniness leads her to experiment with autoerotic asphyxiation. The third couple are expecting a child but the woman finds sex with her husband unsatisfying since she got pregnant. She seeks out a lesbian encounter to satisfy herself, her husband secretly watching to take notes. The last story follows a man who masturbates exclusively to the dirty videos he made with his ex-girlfriend. When she returns to ask him to delete those videos, he thinks up a mildly disturbing compromise.   

Adam Wingard and Joe Swanberg's first team-up, “A Horrible Way to Die,” flirted with the conventions of the mumblecore movement without actually falling within it. “Autoerotic,” on the other hand, fits right in with genre expectations. Like all mumblecore movies, this is a movie about a group of pasty white twenty-somethings navigating sex and relationships. It's also partially unscripted with largely improvised dialogue and performances. If you consider mumblecore an inherently self-indulgent style, Swanberg making a movie about jerking it might seem a bit on-the-nose. It's not too surprising that this is the point when some critics decided the movement had jumped the shark. (Or flogged the dolphin, as it were.)

Of course, one has to ask how much of “Autoerotic” is Swanberg's work and how much of it is Wingard. Unlike Wingard's later “V/H/S” anthologies, where a different director is credited with each segment, we don't know who did what on this one. There's little background info on “Autoerotic,” so I can only assume both directors are equally responsible for all four segments. The connecting fiber of the stories, of listless young people navigating sex and relationship, certainly feels more like a Joe Swanberg thing than an Adam Wingard thing. If you told me that Joe and Adam simply switched the actor/director statuses they held on “A Horrible Way to Die,” I would probably believe you.

Yet there are certainly elements of “Autoerotic” that do mark it as an Adam Wingard project. Much like his Alabama-based two features, the director is clearly as interested in his setting as his characters. “Autoerotic” takes several pauses to focus on the Chicago cityscape around its cast members. Moreover, one particular moment summons up a certain type of horror movie dread. That would the moment directly after the autoerotic asphyxiation sequence, where a pregnant moment of suspense leaves you wondering how dark this movie is going to go. That moment, which teeters between dark uncertainty and sick humor, very much feels like something the director of “Home Sick” would do.

The best way to handle omnibus features like this is to just look at each segment on its own. The first sequence is maybe the film's most interesting. It's the story of a man so focused on his self-perceived inadequacies, that he pushes every single woman out of his life. This could be a worthy commentary on how men obsess over their dick size, comparing themselves to porn stars and other guys, even though size really doesn't matter to most women. How it's ultimately about ego and macho self-serving. The final image of the segment – the man kissing his monstrous penis – makes that point especially clear. Yet the story is ultimately too thin and too farcical – one perspective lover flees the room after seeing his member – to make too much of a statement.

The second and third segments of “Autoerotic” are even thinner than the first. The second story seems especially empty. It simply follows the chronic masturbator from scene to scene, as she flicks her bean in different locations and fashions. That's really all it is. The sudden interest in autoerotic asphyxiation arises out of a random friend mentioning it. The scene directly before that involves the girl mentioning all the different things that turned her on recently, in a dry and list-like manner. The denouncement – where boy and girl come to an understanding – is similarly detached. Save for that burst of suspense mentioned above, it's a very flat segment. It seems the filmmakers wanted to approach the topic of out-of-control passion in as passionless a manner as possible.

The third episode has a similarly distant approach to its characters. No further depth is provided concerning the pregnant woman and her husband – one of the few characters in the movie with an actual name, Frank – and their sex life. Was it satisfying before she got pregnant? Is he a selfish lover or is her body just doing weird things right now? We don't know. Similarly, the movie never passes judgment on whether it was okay that Frank spied on his wife having sex and beat off to it. Yet at least some sort of point arises by the end. The man learns to go down on his wife, suggesting their dysfunctional was more about a lack of communication than anything else. That maybe the couple just needed to see what the other person wanted to actually know what to do it. Some couples are like that. 

In its last segment, “Autoerotic” graduates from a film with no certain tone at all to a grotesque sex comedy. The main character – played by Wingard himself – is a sweaty pervert who only cares about his own pleasure. That he can only get off to images of himself having sex suggests something about his ego. As does his disregard for his ex-girlfriend's comfort and independence. When she comes by to pick up her stuff, he attempts to seduce her in the most awkward way possible. Obviously, uncomfortable laughs are the goal here. The only time the segment achieves these is when the girlfriend flatly tells Adam to never contact her again after she fulfils the embarrassing agreement. The movie's final scene is its most gross and over-the-top image yet, a clear attempt to make the audience laugh through shock value. It's shocking but not funny.

The movie's at-times detached approach to its steamy subject matter must have been part of the point, as the film's visual design reflects this. Many of the film's scenes are captured in distant, stationary shots. The camera holds back and watches the characters go about their sexual adventures, almost like a scientist watching protozoa under a microscope. Is that the idea? That the movie is a scientific capturing of human sexual foibles? If so, no deeper commentary is attached to this method. This is matched with equally weird musical choices, as the rare instances of music in the film are unusually ominous. 

Considering the material is so intentionally vague, it must've been hard to act in “Autoerotic.” Swanberg and Wingard cast the film largely with people they've worked with before. “Pop Skull's” Lane Hughes plays the short dick man while “A Horrible Way to Die's” Amy Seimetz is the girlfriend. Hughes brings a degree of dead-eyed self-loathing to the role while Seimetz is totally unable to get a bead on the material. With the second segment being the film's most vague, that leaves Kate Lyn Sheil almost nothing to work with. She gives a wide-eyed and rhythmless performance. Swanberg himself plays the boyfriend and he similarly has nothing to give in his scenes.  

Swanberg's real wife, Kris Swanberg, plays the pregnant woman in the third story. She was really pregnant at the time and shows a certain amount of bravery revealing it all the way she does. She also has a light-hearted delivery that provides a little energy to the largely humorless segment. Frank V. Ross is a complete enigma as the husband. Megan Mercier also has a degree of comedic timing, that is decently utilized as the put-upon ex in the last segment. As for Adam Wingard himself, he gives a very sweaty and aggressive performance. Considering how off-putting the character is, I suppose that's fitting. I also saw way more of the director's naked body here than I ever wanted to. 

Truthfully, I don't know what the hell to make of “Autoerotic.” If it's trying to be a comedy, it mostly fails by providing little in the way of actual funny moments. If it's trying to make a profound statement about sex, there's simply not enough depth for the audience to really latch onto. The weird tonal uncertainty throughout leaves the audience perpetually uncertain about how to react. One Letterboxd review describes it as “the “Movie 43” of mumblecore,” characterizing it as a tossed-off act of shock humor, a goofy and horny lark by a pair of filmmakers more talented than this. I would largely agree with this statement. If the directors are in-on-the-joke, making a metaphorical masturbatory act about very literal masturbatory acts, “Autoerotic” barely reflects that. [Grade: C-]