Pizza, Porn & The Proletariat

Claudia Elena Rodríguez on Filmmaker Talia Shea Levin

Issue No. 5 | Summer 2024

“It didn't make any sense. Why would the minimum wage pizza delivery guy accept sex as a trade for pizza?” asked filmmaker Talia Shea Levin, the director and co-writer of Make Me A Pizza. She said this was the question that drove her to make the 2024 South by Southwest Festival-selected short film.

The film begins with a story we’re all familiar with: a sexy (usually older) woman orders a pizza but really wants to devour the delivery boy (uncannily, a man in pizza-boy drag). It’s a ubiquitous trope in pop culture, brought into the zeitgeist through pornos, urban legends spread in high school locker rooms, films and advertisements. But Levin wanted to know why, going past carnal desires to explore the inner world and unconsciousness of the cliché.

Levin said of her intention with the work and her character’s motivations: “Ultimately they want to become pizza. They want to become commodities. Because maybe if they become commodities, it'll be easier to relate to each other or easier to understand their own value.”

The idea for the short film started as a joke between friends while gathering at a bar after rehearsals for an immersive theater show by the theater company Ceaseless Fun at the Brewery Artist Lofts in 2019. Levin, Woody Coyote (the film’s eventual co-writer who stars alongside actress Sophie Neff) and Katie Peabody (credited with story), were discussing their frustrations with the state of modern showbiz when one of Levin’s unconventional remedies gained unexpected momentum. She described the watershed moment, saying, “In some fit of disenchantment with the industry, I said ‘I'm going to go direct feminist porn’ then Woody was like, ‘I've done porn.’ Then we were like, ‘Katie, you in?’”.

The conversation could have ended there, another bit in the bottomless pit of recurring riffs between friends. But the 2020 pandemic came, and for Levin, that unassuming bit became a glue–a gooey, stringy, cheesy glue–that held Levin together.

“The first couple weeks of the pandemic, when I just had an outline, I was like, ‘Could this be a thing?’ This is the only thing that's keeping me happy. I'm miserable and this is making me laugh,’” said Levin.

From its impetus, the trio didn’t want to make just any porno, they set out to make a Marxist porno–one that examined existential questions such as: Why would a pizza delivery boy forgo a payment of $29.99 for sex? What does the pizza boy, the worker, want? What’s the price of desire? And does it change with inflation?

She found inspiration in everything from German Erotica (namely, It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, the 1971 German avant-garde film directed by Rosa von Praunheim) to Anna Nicole Smith’s performance in the 1996 film Skyscraper. Levin said it wasn’t only porn that understood the erotic commodification existing in the symbiosis between sex and pizza. “A lot of food advertisements are really sexual. This one had someone tearing apart a stuffed crust and saying ‘STUFFED!’ It looks like someone's legs are pulling apart. A lot of it was just already there for the taking.”

Pivotal scenes of Make Me A Pizza are shot on sixteen-millimeter film. When it came to deciding whether or not to go the riskier route of shooting on film, it was simple. “I'd rather someone take a wild swing and miss than make something trite,” said Levin.

To Levin, shooting certain scenes on film was integral to the project. “We wanted to see the seams of it,” she said. “The people I brought on are at a place where there's a certain level of craft that we're all going to expect of ourselves.”

The results can be seen through a centerpiece of a disgustingly saucy sexual fantasia of sweat and marinara. The bizarre and messy scene elicits a nostalgia for something that could be found in a John Holmes film or Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut commercial from 1998.

This recipe of sex, pizza and nostalgia taps into our most primordial carnal desires for nourishment and intimacy. The result is comforting, painful and leaves an impression not dissimilar to good sex or burning the roof of your mouth when biting on a DiGiorno Rising Crust Ultimate Pepperoni Pizza.

But the human instinct to desire is what leaves us vulnerable to corruption or manipulation, either by an advertisement or a lover. “Desire is always a triangle with the Other, which in this narrative is pizza.” Levin continued, “Sex is disgusting. And pizza deconstructed can be disgusting.”

If true, then what does that make those of us who desire something that when laid bare becomes so unsavory?

Watch Make Me A Pizza on Vimeo.