The Wannabe: Director's Notes

The Wannabe is a short film that I wrote and directed. It is about a young man who tells another man’s crime story as his own.

I am interested in the ways that we use narrative and aesthetic codes to produce ourselves as recognizable subjects (sexual, racial, cultural, national, gendered). My work is concerned with the struggles of outsiders, and those at the margins, to be seen, heard, and desired, and the failures that occur in the process of articulating one’s self using available terms. In The Wannabe a nobody seeks to prove that he is a real man. The film explores America’s fascination with crime stories and focuses on the true 1990 case of one man’s tragic attempt to tell his own. The film examines performance and storytelling and what happens when the emancipatory power these acts have in our lives gets twisted. I used film because it draws the audience in to the captivating nature of popular cultural forms, specifically the seductive power of the gangster genre. Through my choices, I hope to provoke the audience’s complicity with the crime of the lead character: the crime of fantasizing that you are someone else and taking pleasure in storytelling.