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Dominatrix Waitrix is a video featurette inspired by frustrations with the service industry and the power imbalance between owners and managers, managers and servers, servers and customers. It is fueled by revenge fantasies from over ten years waiting tables, and the transformations of these fantasies into a reversal of power play for sexual pleasure.

Combining narrative, sci-fi, sadomasochism, and elements of musical theatre conjures an ideal forum for questioning power dynamics in the service industry and among lovers. These relationships stir and release a complex range of emotional responses from frustration to arousal. The musical numbers are the repetitive texts and movements of restaurant servers. The science fiction space station is a video patch bay, connecting satellite surveillance cameras in restaurant bathroom stalls. The narrative asks the ultimate question of, not, “will she be rescued?” or “will they fall in love?” but rather, “who will top whom?”

Dominatrix Waitrix emerges from the sex positive political pleasure politics of queer artist-activist collectives such as ACT UP, transgressive writers such as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, burlesque social commentators such as Charlie Chaplin, and the campy drag aesthetics of pop culture artifacts such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Three decades after Laura Mulvey challenged the male gaze and called for a new cinematic pleasure in her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Dominatrix Waitrix stands within a new generation of porn-art films by women and queers, gazing and being gazed at, and entertaining pansexual communities with intelligent, pleasurable, smut.

SYNOPSIS

A chorus of restaurant servers identically dressed and robotically chanting banal lines, ie: “Can I take your order, Sir?” and “Thank you. Have a nice day.” Programmed movements and intricate patterns based on Busby Berkeley film choreography. Dominatrix Waitrix appears: “Now give me my fucking tip.”

The Dispatcher’s Headquarters: The center of a vast surveillance network and restaurant worker rescue service with live video feeds of disgruntled servers. At the switchboard sits The Dispatcher - an alluring and commanding pimp-daddy in furs. Dominatrix Waitrix is bold and cunning and clad in leather. She works for The Dispatcher who created her in his image. They flirt and flatter, banter and bicker.

The Dispatcher sends Dominatrix Waitrix out on missions: to clone herself as Server Clients, to take over their miserable jobs long enough for them to have a break while still receiving tips and paychecks for the hours worked by Dominatrix Waitrix. This is a free service. We never learn The Dispatcher’s motivations. We do, however, learn the motives of Dominatrix Waitrix.

Dominatrix Waitrix exists as a human clone. She is amorphous, multi-gendered, and immortal. The only human quality she owns is an extremely powerful libido. She chooses the bodies of vulnerable servers and preys on their puppet-like customers. Her only concern is to give and receive pleasure and pain.

One bold and buxom waitress wishes to keep Dominatrix Waitrix under her spiked heel. Dominatrix Waitrix fancies the red-headed mortal, but in the end, who will hold the whip and who will wear the handcuffs?