trailer for The Lollipop Girls Struggle on the Hard Earth

16mm film by Denise Prince

additional work from Object Lessons in portfolio one

Full of longing for a return to the safety, the ease, the pretends of childhood, The Lollipop Girls Struggle on the Hard Earth reminds us that Fantasy organizes our experience of everyday reality and tells us who we are.

Employing the visual language of ready-to-wear (fashion) film, a woman finds herself, by choice, in a perfected world, reminiscent of classic childhood literature. She is an adult, however, and so her Desire (the memory of the missing thing) includes fantasies of potency she cannot leave behind.

The transition from childhood into being an adult is a bridge into a permanent state of temptation from taking responsibility for one’s pretends. A child’s fantasies of adult life and an adult’s equally unrealistic fantasies of oneself, as well as the unrealistic fantasies of what childhood was are the largest stumbling block. Prince equates personal longing and the Fantasy of satisfaction with effective advertising. She warns us that cultures messages about what to aspire to and the way it manipulates Desire to serve commercial ends, are much more dangerous than the storybooks of childhood. Fantasies of the imaginary body are difficult to put away on the shelf as what they hold behind the veil is the awareness of mortality.

Prince creates a bold and evocative space in which we can imagine and reconstruct the naive, youthful wishes we used to identify ourselves and to read our world. As children desperate to know about the hidden world ahead, we accept both the conflict and the confidence offered to us if only we become an object assigned a value within another's desire: then the lesson can begin.

This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department