Sissy St. Claire is dying to be known — not unlike Jesus, she tells us in the opening seconds of her first-ever primetime spectacular, Give Me Pity! The two have much in common, she insists: their industry savvy, their iconic looks. Over the next 80 minutes, she’ll even mount a sort of psychic crucifixion for our attention and, hopefully, our love.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the musical variety television special — a precursor to the music video, the same format that would ultimately murder it — reached its zenith. Key entries of the time often rested on the X-factor of a single triple-threat, especially zanier divas with an album to promote and only so much shame, from Olivia Newton-John to Diana Ross, and Cher to Ann-Margret. (These days, such projects only really appear on the impulses of idiosyncratic stars like Lady Gaga^* and Mariah Carey, and exclusively around the holidays.)

To gorge oneself on the half-century’s worth of specials available online, as director Amanda Kramer spent months doing in 2019 and 2020, is to be equal parts entertained and unsettled by the vulnerability — and sometimes debasement — at play here. Over and over, performers spend months or more self-disciplining and finding new ways to lay their creative selves bare, then present us with an hour of song and dance belying those sacrifices. We’re not here for them, anyhow.  

Making its London premiere via Beyond Interpretation is Kramer’s 2022 feature Give Me Pity!, the eventual product of her YouTube deep dive. Her film funnels a beautiful nightmare of industry rot and self-loathing through this magical, would-be comforting, inherently deranged TV tradition. Give Me Pity! was conceived in part as a bare-bones filmmaking fantasy of Kramer’s: five days, small budget, even smaller team. “I love control,” she told Filmmaker of shooting it on a contained set at Mack Sennett Studios in 2021. “I don’t understand Terrence Malick … I don’t want to know if it’s raining and I don’t want to know if it’s sunny. I don’t want to think about anything that God has anything to do with. I want to be God in that moment and say, ‘The lights go on and the lights go off.’” The film and music video director has voiced many gripes with the state of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, from our infatuation with seeing an actor’s pores in 4k to the sheer number of bodies needed for a single day’s work, and her quote further fleshes out a laundry list of industry desperations and difficulties.

Sissy’s own road to this special has been “desperate and difficult,” she says — baggage that will reveal itself to us in pieces as her personal demons become her supporting players. Give Me Pity! begins as a mostly straight parody of the variety format, its central diva puppeted by a dynamic Sophie von Haselberg. Sissy moves through the musical numbers and bizarre conceptual vignettes expected of her, from a Donna Summer-esque sex worker sketch^** to a cover of the classic march “You’re a Grand Old Flag” by way of Giorgio Moroder. The latter is a joke on the compulsory dose of weird patriotism these specials tend to include,^*** but a particularly haunting earworm given how much of the film is visually grounded in the early Reagan years — nothing if not a showbiz second act, and one remembered largely for its bootstrap ethos of “making it” at whatever human cost to the nation.

But while things begin looking and sounding mostly as they should — the film was degraded and distorted in post-production to more closely resemble its references — both show and star verge ever-closer to unravelling. The question is who’s pulling the thread… a Phantom of the Soundstage? Our domestically anxious host? (Some viewers may be just as inclined to think mommy issues due to von Haselberg’s uncanny resemblance to her real-life mother, Bette Midler, who’s won multiple Emmys for this sort of work.)^† Underpinning Sissy’s performance is a sense of both precarity and paranoia that often looms over artists, especially the forward-facing ones and especially the women. At any moment, this could all disappear. That we’re encountering her name for the first time only heightens that idea; we’re left to guess what preceded her special (she seems to long for something of a total brand reset), the stakes involved in it going swimmingly, and what she’s possibly traded in for it (a baby?).

As she deteriorates before us, so does the picture itself. Original songs give way to an extraterrestrial synth bassline. What’s glamorous — satin you can feel through the screen, the idea of radical reinvention — stifles and even nauseates. Kramer is a filmmaker not just comfortable with risk (another of her decidedly un-Hollywood sensibilities) but indeed insistent upon it, and she forces our gaze here with an unnerving wink.

*Kramer has named 2011’s A Very Gaga Thanksgiving, specifically the “Hair” number, among her references

**See: the “Bad Girls” sequence from 1980’s The Donna Summer Special

***1988’s Olivia Down Under manages a whole hour of this

†The first for 1977’s Ol’ Red Hair Is Back, the most recent for 1997’s Diva Las Vegas

Sydney Urbanek is a Toronto-based editor and writer specializing in popular music on screen. Since 2020, she has self-published the newsletter Mononym Mythology, where she covers music video culture with a bent towards pop stars.