I’VE KNOWN SAMANTHA MATTHEWS, an actress, voice-over artist, and my cousin once removed, since she was a teenager. (I’ll be sixty next year; she just turned forty.) For a decade, I’d encouraged her to make a self-reflexive documentary film about a job she occasionally moonlighted at during her first few years in Barcelona—dubbing Italian porn films into English. It seemed to me powerful material, well worth exploring, especially since she wound up divorcing her Spanish husband. I thought perhaps the dubbing had something to do with the divorce, on a difficult-to-articulate level that she would try to articulate.
She’d gathered some footage but never was able to carve out enough time to make the film, so a couple of years ago I suggested that we work on the story together. To my horror and her own, she immediately agreed. Over eighteen months—via email, text, Skype, and FaceTime—I asked her increasingly difficult questions and she emailed back her increasingly revelatory answers (as well as several surreptitious recordings of her dubbing sessions). Initially, I thought we’d wind up with an amusing novella about America and Europe and Daisy Miller, updated to the twenty-first century. I had no idea. Samantha tunneled so deeply into her own psyche that we wound up with more than seven hundred pages, relatively few of which had anything to do with dubbing porn.
My goal was to shape all these pages into a narrative that explores what is for Samantha and for me and for many people a crucial or even the question: how and to what degree is it possible to get beyond early trauma?
David Shields
Seattle