Sweetheart Deal

When we first meet Laughn Doescher – or Elliot, as he is known on the street – he’s feeding pigeons. Deftly, he slides his hands around one of them, scooping it up. “If you hold ‘em right they don’t usually struggle too much,” he says.

Elliot lives in his RV. He says that he used to be a criminal investigator. Of course, a lot of men say things like that. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. What matters to the sex workers who visit him is that he treats them with kindness. They can talk with him and he really seems to listen. He feeds them. He lets them sleep there is they need to. He doesn’t think less of them because they use heroin. It’s a rare thing for women in that situation to encounter somebody they can trust.

Elisa Levine and Gabriel Miller’s documentary, which screened at Slamdance 2023, follows Elliot and several of the women who visit him over time, giving them space to talk about their lives and observing the relationships between them. Elliot doesn’t pretend to be a saint. He’s open about the fact that he’s keen to have sex with the women any time they want to. He takes the first opportunity to boast about the size of his cock. He makes the kind of joke about stalking which is really uncomfortable but, at the same time, often just indicative of cluelessness in a man who means well. His openness about his failings gives the impression that any risk associated with him can be managed, so the women are more at ease with him than they would be with somebody who seemed more perfect, less human – until a betrayal occurs which nobody involved with the film anticipated, and which sends it in a completely different direction.

The film is unusual throughout in its straightforward, non-judgemental approach to the women, their addictions and their work, which is neither romanticised nor disparaged. None of them want to be there, but living with addiction is like having a chronic illness without any associated sympathy or legal protections, and most employers won’t even hire them in the first place. “I personally have never met a working girl who has gotten out of the life and not gone back to it,” says Tammy, though over the course of the film we see some of them try. Sara wants to get her kids back, having left them with family members because she knows she can’t manage as a parent whilst addicted. We see her go through the agony of withdrawal. She’s Elliot’s favourite, and he tries to keep her in his RV whilst she does it, but the ethics of the situation are difficult even before that revelation.

Some people stay in sex work because they like the money they can make. These women are earning $60 a trick, barely enough to pay for the drugs and food and essentials. We see them share drugs to help each other out when earnings are low, a form of generosity not always present in addict communities. There is real solidarity between them. We learn something about how they came to be in this situation. One got addicted after being heavily dosed with opioids post-surgery and then cut off to go cold turkey. One was screwed up by two and a half years in solitary confinement – something which most of the world would see as torture, and utterly unacceptable. Admittedly she was imprisoned for making bombs, but as a teenager, when a lot of people do things like that with little thought and no intent to harm.

Life on the street can be brutal. Early on, we see Amy in a state of shock following a vicious attack by a client who tried to keep her prisoner. She’s terrified that he will return to finish her off. The police are sympathetic but get nowhere, so Elliot offers to investigate. What seems to matter most to Amy is simply being able to talk about it with people who will believe her, but she can’t shake the fear, the enhanced awareness of her vulnerability. With a loving family willing to support her, can she quit?

It’s difficult to create respectful portraits of people in crisis, but Sweetheart Deal will really make you feel that you have got to know these women, beyond their addiction and occupation. If any of them do manage to get out and stay out, they will be able to look back at this without embarrassment. Of course, there can be no neat ending to a story of this type, because addiction is a lifelong battle, but we do see them change and develop over time. There is no imposed narrative here either. Little things like the growth of someone’s hair speak to the months which pass between interviews. Close as we are, we also see the damage done by the central betrayal, and how it echoes through their lives. It illustrates, without making demands, the need for justice for people from all walks of life, and it invites empathy for people who too often find it lacking.