Words by Layla Bird Revoldt
A decade later, I have managed to maintain my strict contraception regimen. No human children, yet. However, I have often thought of my ideas as my children. A lot of times when I am alone watching movies, my favorite pastime, I find myself mostly nude, vulva open receiving contents from the TV. I have trichotillomania but you wouldn’t know looking at me, because I only pull out my pubic hair. So I sit there, for hours, consuming films, mindlessly plucking coarse hairs and collecting them in a little pile to then shove in the crack of the couch. Only kidding! I roll them into an impossibly knotted, dreadlock-like ball and then flick the ball across the room into the darkness. I am sure these little pubic hair balls eventually break down into dust, are breathed in by my guests, and the cycle of inspiration continues.
I am a student of David Lynch and do believe that we have to maintain a certain level of subconscious openness in order to receive ideas. It is quite possible that the dust in people’s homes can contribute to the arrival of our most unexpected visions. C. G. Jung had written in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961):
He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view, thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, ‘if you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.’ It was he who taught me psychic reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective matter and I understood that there is something in me which can say things I do not know or do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.
All of that to say, I became really curious about this experience, for women. How does this apply to the combinations of orifices I have? Why are women not more commonly successful as filmmakers if they are clearly, often the more complicated gender emotionally? What are all of the factors, truly, preventing their success?
Plainly, making a film from conception to delivery, to an audience, takes a lot of time, effort, money, and faith from the people around you. I do not see women being given the time, space, finances, and especially faith from those they need it most. People ask me why I have not started sooner – as if I am starting late (?) and all of sudden I get a flash of how hard I have worked to change my financial status, my living situation, my state. I went to university full time, and worked full time +. I dealt with high maintenance romantic relationships wherein I had to uproot my life and bend over backwards to accommodate man-children that still needed their mothers. I learned how to cook, how to dress myself, how to travel, how to work a room with a cocktail, how to be a person, in my perspective, that others could take seriously. By the end of 2024, I had completely burned out on all of this nonsense. I lost my mojo and I looked at the world and felt like it was too broken anyhow. But I had spent all this time dreaming, intuiting, writing and I had one project in mind that really made me laugh.
That was Bloodsuckers of Bushwick; it is my child. Once it learned how to walk, it started to run, and I can confidently say, this one runs faster than me, I have been chasing it for months. In order to keep pace, I had to pull some things off my plate. And by my plate, I mean my compartmentalized prison tray: politics (especially the aggravating, horrifying dailies of Donald Trump), household chores (fuck em), cooking (couldn’t bring myself to look down at the knife, put my fingers at risk), answering when people spoke to me (try it, it feels good), caring what others think (piggybacks on the last one), attending social events with people I actively dislike, pretending I am not a self-confident impatient bitch that will stop at nothing to get what I want.
So I experimented with some changes, shifts in priorities, and some folks did not like it. Where is that cute, chipper midwest girl? I don’t think she’s dead, she’s just not public access anymore.
Another interesting thing that happened, when this project revealed itself as a runner, is I started to feel really angry about all the mistreatment I had suffered at the beginning of my career in the industry. When I first got on the scene, the 2017 #metoo movement was in full effect. This generated so much hopefulness, and I could see the men especially, I was working with on set, be more careful. However, the predators didn’t stop, they just moved more tactfully. See, I thought, if I wasn’t an actor or a model then I was safe. Totally wrong. I dealt with so many inappropriate advances, powerplays, circumstances of financial exploitation, white savior leadership weirdos, downright stupid rich people, and a lot of pressure to have relationships with the normies I worked with.
The anger from looking back at those experiences in this matured state would wake me up out of a dead sleep; I was grinding my teeth, I would get up and pace around reliving these scenarios and seeing so clearly why women have a harder time in this industry.
There’s just too much extra crap to be dealt with. The expectations for women delivering on a daily basis, on a decade basis, on a rite of passage basis (college, husband, home, babies), are exceedingly high for people that feel a lot, bleed every month, and more often than not, have romantic partners that don’t even do their fair share. It’s pretty disappointing. When I am not spending time conceiving films, but instead chasing my boyfriend’s mess around the house, stuck on a call with a male colleague that thinks it is appropriate to complain about his wife, pressured into drinks with a dead end connect, not paid a fair wage, spending a week being anxious about a new stalker in my neighborhood, feeling guilty for all the things I am struggling to accomplish, worrying about if my life will pan out the way it is ‘supposed to’, caring too much for others – I know this is why we don’t have as many women filmmakers as we ought to.
