The film centers on Jack Smith as Madame Nescience, wearing dresses and makeup, playing with dolls, and smoking marijuana. Paul Arthur writes that the movie contains "dizzying quasi-autobiographical rants" which spin on sadism, and that, like Ken Jacobs's Little Stabs at Happiness, it contains "languid improvisations studded with the bare bones of narrative incident or, more accurately, its collapse." The performance is marked by long stretches of droning, singing, and wildly cooing and cackling, creating a hypnotic, unsettling rhythm that folds the viewer into a fractured world.
One especially provocative sequence centers on the so‑called "lonely little boy" episode, about a child living in a vast house with ten rooms. This segment has been described as potentially repugnant to many viewers because it probes sadism against children and touches on childhood sexuality. In this episode, the narrator confesses to have "blown up the penis" of a seven-year-old boy with a match, a detail that has haunted discussions of the film for decades.
The film pushes beyond boundary after boundary, presenting a constellation of shocking elements for its time. There are references to necrophilia, the use of the slur "cunt," a nun (voiced in a posh, high-pitched tone by Smith) confessing to lesbianism, the holding of a giant would-be dildo, and a portrayal of transvestites. The work also weaves in memorable lines and aesthetic riffs, including lines that echo from cinema's past and echo back to the filmmaker's own frame of reference.
> Why shave when I can't think of a reason for living
> life is a sad business
> "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" is then played, described as a "burlesque rendering" of Robert Siodmak's 1944 film Cobra Woman.
In a particularly stark moment, Smith exposes his bare buttocks to the camera, with a butcher knife handle placed to resemble a blade protruding from his stabbed anus, while he intones in a voice-over: > Sex is a pain in the ass. Sex IS a pain in the ass.
Scholars Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett have described the film as a camp portrayal of Rose Hobart, placing it within a lineage of provocative, self-consciously performative cinema.
The closing sequence heightens the sense of despair and defiance. Smith chants, "A mother’s wisdom had dragged me down to this! a crummy loft! a life of futility! hunger! despair!" He then raises a toy gun to his head, with a graveyard scene in the background, and collapses to the floor as a title card softly reads "Fin." As the image fades, his wailing voice lingers with the question, "What went wrong? What went wrong? What went wrong?", a line that seems to signal both the survivor’s brush with self-destruction and the film’s unresolved, haunting aftermath.
