All Of Charlie’s Art In Dee Made A Smut Film Has Always Fascinated Me. But Today I Want To Focuses

All of Charlie’s art in Dee Made a Smut film has always fascinated me. But today I want to focuses on a couple that really stood out to me and why I think they help teach the message of the episode.

This painting shows a woman with dirty blonde hair and a halo ripping out a man’s heart while he’s wearing The Boy footie pajamas from Nightman. I think when Charlie painted this, he intended it to be him and the Waitress—she ripped his heart out when she rejected him after his play but he still sees her as an angel.

But doesn’t it also kind of look like Dee and Dennis? Especially with the messy makeup on the woman, the way the man’s face looks like it can have facial hair or be clean shaven depending on how you look at it. In this scene where the painting is shown, Dee is confronting Dennis with his trauma, showing everyone his bloody ripped out heart and acting like she’s doing him a kindness (killing him while seeing herself as an angel). Also super interesting in hindsight when you consider that in DTAMHD Dennis fantasizes about eating a bloody heart to sooth himself, taking the trauma back into his own body in a sense.

Let’s look at some more.

A painting of dogs barking (at a human shape maybe? Hard to tell) and a rat covered in blood. To Charlie, I again think these are pretty straightforwardly about his life—he was illustrating Cricket’s dog orgy and the rats he bashes at Paddy’s.

But in the scene they’re framing Dennis, who is in the middle of trying to make excuses for the CSA he suffered. He’s trapped like a rat who’s being bashed, he wants to scream and howl like those dogs but he can’t. And the dog orgy is literally Cricket being assaulted by dogs and then playing it off casually so that’s also a pretty obvious parallel.

In this scene Dennis also explains that he thinks good art is just whatever the “right” people say is good art. Because he’s never been able to connect with his feelings due to his trauma, Dennis has always had a hard time connecting with art on a personal level (in sharp contrast to Frank, who sees himself in art depicting WWII so deeply he has an out of body experience). Like most things in life, Dennis only sees art for its social and commercial value, not as a way to feel connection. That’s why he’s so dismissive of all art that isn’t porn, because porn at least has an obvious tangible use. But even then, even then, when he tries to make “artistic” porn, his mind immediately (subconsciously) tries to express his trauma, using art to express his deepest wounds in a way he isn’t even aware of. And I think Dee sees that and tries to help him through her own interpretation of his art, continuing the metaphorical conversation he started, but she’s also petty, and bitter about him mocking her art at the beginning of the episode, so she does it in a way that’s vicious and public. Art can hurt you, make you think about things you don’t want to, and Dennis hates that. He doesn’t see the emotional connection he could make with Charlie’s art or Dee’s or even his own because he won’t let himself.