All the messy psychosexual complications — and all the big-heartedness — of “DTF St. Louis” came out in one scene that moves from a motel room to a swimming pool.
Series creator Steven Conrad “was able to deliver these very awkward, original moments in a way that you’re just taken as a viewer into a place that you didn’t think you were going,” Jason Bateman said during Variety’s Making a Scene conversation, presented by HBO Max. This scene is a prime example, moving from farce to something more tender: Floyd (David Harbour) is watching Carol (Linda Cardellini), his wife, and Clark (Jason Bateman), his best friend, being intimate from behind a closet door; Carol and Clark are well aware of his presence, as all of this is a sex game between the trio. Suddenly, Floyd — an American Sign Language interpreter — sees through the window a young man meandering toward the motel’s pool, on the verge of falling in. Floyd has the presence of mind to realize that the wanderer, who does not respond to shouted prompts, is both blind and deaf, and, as such, will likely drown if not stopped. He intercepts the fellow and signs into his hand in order to communicate.
The progression of the scene reveals Floyd’s empathy and resourcefulness. It also gave Harbour, who’d been standing inertly as he watched sex between two people he loved, some real physicality to play. “ASL communicated between two deaf people is one thing, but when you’re sharing ASL with someone who’s blind, it has a real physical element,” writer-director Conrad said. “The signs are placed in the palm of the blind person’s hand.”
This aspect allowed Harbour, an actor adept at using his physicality, to use the language skills he’d picked up for the show. “I learned some ASL when we were doing it, before we started shooting,” he said. “The interesting thing about any language is that it’s fluid — there’s a certain fluidity.” Harbour, working with ASL interpreters on set, adapted the lines as written to fit the rhythms and structures of ASL parlance.
All of this read beautifully on camera, thanks in part to cinematographer James Whitaker, who had experience shooting a deaf character on “Hawkeye.” “You might want to be a little wider when you’re capturing someone who’s doing sign language, because a lot of those hands are right up here within the frame,” he notes. “We also really wanted to get close-ups of the hands because not only was it really beautiful how these two men were moving their hands together, it felt so intimate and close, but they’re also communicating.”
This is a sort of connection that Floyd hasn’t been able to access in his home life or with his closest friend; indeed, it’s a physical connection analogous Clark and Carol are enjoying without him. That’s a contradiction the actors relished. “We’re having our own language with gestures and touching,” Cardellini said, of her character and Bateman’s, “and it’s supposed to be sort of sexual and kinky, and you cut to them having their own version of it and it’s so pure and beautiful. I just love the idea of both things happening in the same space.”
“From sin to caretaking,” Bateman said.
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