Mother Jones
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“The truth is, making the movie was a really traumatic experience. I suspect I may have developed some mild PTSD.” This is how filmmaker Alexander Perlman describes shooting Lot Lizard, his hypnotic new documentary about truck stop prostitution. While his claim might sound hyperbolic—or like a canny bit of marketing—it rings true: He logged thousands of miles and hundreds of hours to make the film, braving roach motels, crack highs, and homicidal pimps. Indeed, what Perlman captures in Lot Lizard is visceral and harrowing.
The film’s three protagonists—Betty, Monica, and Jennifer—work on the fringes of the trucking industry. America’s Independent Truckers’ Association estimates there are nearly 5,000 truck stops across the country, and although many offer nondescript places to sleep, eat, or shower, many others host a bustling shadow economy of sex and drugs. Lurk on truckers’ online message boards long enough and you’ll likely come across what amounts to a guide to interstate sex, replete with lurid tall tales (see here, here, and here).
A police intervention program in Texas that works?
Life on the road, they say, is lonely. To quote one trucker in Lot Lizard: “These walls close in on you. Being in this truck can actually make you crazy.” As Perlman discovered, however, the women—and, occasionally, men—who cater to this loneliness don’t fare much better. Betty and Monica are addicted to crack, Monica is homeless when she’s not crashing with friends or sympathetic drivers, and both are entangled in dysfunctional relationships. “I can feel money,” Betty says, a kind of human divining rod, and yet she spends most of the film desperately searching for just that.
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