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for me to dislike the way I looked. I sent a ten-minute excerpt of the best of the naked that I was still too paranoid to keep in the film to . . .
MacDonald:
Tom Baker?
Robertson:
Yes. (He had written to me in 1989, thanking me for films of myself, my cats, and my family.) He's a plausible nut. He's a plausible nut. He might be The Guy. The thing is, if he
isn't,
I've boxed myself into a corner. I've said I'd give all this to my husband. If I meet some other guy, and
he's
the one, he's going to say, "Where's the film for me?" I'm going to have to say, "I've already sent it away to some other man."
Earlier, I was sitting out here [I interviewed Robertson on my back porch], and I set the camera up on the tripod and took a picture of me in the corner of your house. Luckily, your house is a nice neutral color, like a lot of other houses.
I don't like taking pictures of other people in my film, because I've been a target. Someone has been breaking into my family's house. They've stolen from my garden, and left, really, some of the weirdest things. They've dug holes the size of a coffin, four feet deep, at the side of my garden. They've left piles of sand with feathers arranged on them. I've found a pile of something that looked awfully like human excrement in my garden. They've broken into my house; they've taken my cats overnight; they've left food and lace panties. They took film and then returned it to my house. I feel my letters have made me a target, and I don't want to get anybody else targeted.
MacDonald:
What do the "experts" you deal with psychiatrically tell you about yourself?
Robertson:
I'm a manic depressive. Sometimes they call it "bipolar syndrome." That's just the label for it.
MacDonald:
It sounded last night like you've been through a whole evolution of ways in which they think they're dealing with it.
Robertson:
Now they think the miracle drug is lithium. It's not a miracle drug; it doesn't stop you from having grandiose ideas. I left naked parts in my film and irreligious things that I can't even look at now. I was on lithium, and they seemed like perfectly fine pieces of film. When I went off of lithium just this last summer, I went into my film and felt I was looking at it with brand new eyes, with my own eyes, rather than drugged eyes. They told me I had to be on lithium the rest of my life. They've told me that about a number of drugs that have made me feel like a zombie. Every time they give me a drug, they tell me I have to be on it for the rest of my life.
I would be carefully monitored if I were pregnant. They would withdraw me from the drug and put me in a mental hospital. I've seen