HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

What is it about financial poverty that so often impoverishes the inner lives of those who suffer from it? Does the relationship even operate in this fashion, or does emotional poverty precede—even serve as a primary cause of, in some cases—the pecuniary variety? As often and as deeply as I’ve reflected upon these questions throughout these early, underpaid years of my career as a filmmaker, I can’t say for certain that they were at the fore of my thinking when first I considered the production of a film about a stunted man doing his shady business in parking lots. I hit upon the idea of psychotherapy being the stunted man’s shady business not merely to question that discipline’s worth, but rather as a figurative conduit through which the hurting young man I’d created might both examine and express his own grappling with the dualistic nature of his experience with poverty. He is, to put it differently, no more conscious of what he is doing than I was when the inward search that I share with him (in only its broadest iteration, of course) became the seed which grew into this film. His story, perhaps, could only have been told through a cinema of small means. It is a private story whose movements could only be written by one man holding one camera. Jean-Paul Sartre suggests, in the line from Huis Clos which suggested the title Hell Is Other People, that human beings can define themselves only via the definitions thrust upon them by other human beings. My stunted man deserved to be defined only by me; a large crew—both for him and for his film—would truly have been Hell.