‘Spermworld’ Director Lance Oppenheim Successfully Walks The Line Between Cringe Comedy and Sincere Pathos

Director Lance Oppenheim sold the concept for his new documentary Spermworld (now streaming on Hulu) with a five-minute teaser that now comprises the opening of the finished film. That scene was the first thing the crew shot, and it’s easy to see why he led with it: two perfect strangers meet at an unattractive, anonymous hotel, and though she makes some tentative overtures toward polite chit-chat, he’s more interested in getting right down to business and having sex. She likens the encounter to a “horrendous one-night stand” in voiceover, but this was no simple hookup, as made clear by the following shots in which she lovingly cradles her newborn child. The pair met through a Facebook group dedicated to black market sperm donation, and they made the unorthodox choice to directly inseminate the old fashioned way. The contrast between the halting, tense stiffness of the non-foreplay and the beatific calm of motherhood offers a shorthand for the film’s thesis that however bizarre this behavior might seem, its results have a way of making everything make sense. 

“It always felt like a good prelude,” Oppenheim tells Decider over beers at Jimmy’s Corner, the last great dive bar still standing in midtown Manhattan. “It’s the only time in the movie that you see a successful pregnancy result from a donation. There’s a logic to it. You try to imagine what brought someone here, where she’s trying to lighten up this conversation with this guy, and then once the awkwardness subsides, there’s this dream-sequence reverie of babies and promise, everything Spermworld can deliver. If you’re able to achieve what you set out to do, it’s such a magnificent, transcendent thing, life, that everything going into it is negated. What you had to do to make that happen no longer matters.”

Using Nellie Bowles’ New York Times article “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand” as a jumping-off point, the rest of Spermworld concerns itself with artificial insemination, an option no less intimate or emotionally fraught for those pursuing it. Oppenheim mentions that he was attached to the title from the earliest stage of production for how it implies a wide variety of relationships to this practice, each participant having their own reasons for under-the-table sperm donation. Many fear that cost-prohibitive healthcare will leave them in financial ruin, or feel uncomfortable with the anonymity of sperm banks. “Even the way sperm is packaged is wild,” Oppenheim says. “You donate, they split the sample into several vials, and each vial can cost as much as $1500 a pop. In the medical establishment, most of these sperm banks are owned by massive hedge funds, and just regulated by the government, not operated by them. It’s not a public service, it’s completely privatized.”

The film maps the topic’s breadth with three subjects: Tyree, who must balance his calling for bestow the gift of life with his duty to his partner; Steve, a divorcee with the confused idea that this might be a good way to meet someone; and Ari, a perpetual nomad drifting between the homes of his hundred-plus offspring. Each of their journeys blends cringe comedy with sincere pathos, neither one undermining the other. Tyree sees the humor in his unusual circumstances as he generates a sample in a vacant mall parking lot, which doesn’t detract from the emotional weight of his striving to be a father in more than the biological sense. Once Steve understands that his abortive attempts to flirt aren’t going anywhere, he accepts the denial and advances forward into an unlikely friendship. Ari arranges a sweet, surreal meetup party for his many toddler sons and daughters, locked into a Sisyphean effort to give more of himself than he can humanly offer to his vast brood.

“These things can begin as extremely transactional, then end up becoming very messy and human,” Oppenheim says. “The perspective becomes less about the question of ‘how can I get pregnant?’ or ‘how can I impregnate someone?’ and more about the real relationships and dynamics that take shape.” After trawling a number of apps including one called JustABaby, Oppenheim scouted collaborators through the Facebook group that the film uses as a sort of Greek chorus. Agreeing to let a film crew in on the process of siring a child required an extraordinary degree of trust, but the same openness that leads someone to search for reproductive material online also primed them to share their interiors with the camera. “The quest to matter, in general, is the part I relate to the most,” he says. “That’s what drives a lot of people to have children in the first place — to stave off feelings of inadequacy, loneliness. It’s a desire to be seen by someone else, who sees you as valuable. Nobody wants to die alone.”

“That’s what drives a lot of people to have children in the first place — to stave off feelings of inadequacy, loneliness. It’s a desire to be seen by someone else, who sees you as valuable. Nobody wants to die alone.”

In focusing on the male donors and making supporting players of the women who have contacted them, Oppenheim anticipates some response that he’s missed the point. But he’s fascinated by the “intersections of vulnerability” that motivate a man to approach connection in this confined, unusual capacity. Observing Ari’s myopia in how thin he spreads himself, Tyree’s drive for redemption after an incident in his past, and Steve’s ill-advised attempts at romance, the film dares us to withhold judgement as the full scope of flawed, idiosyncratic humanity comes into view. This abiding spirit of empathy also informs Oppenheim’s working methods, oriented as they are around even-footed cooperation between director and subject. “We’re shooting everything on a tripod, so they know exactly when we’re filming,” he says, by way of explaining his rejection of the fly-on-the-wall principle. “If something uncomfortable happens that they don’t like, or I have an idea for representing their reality that they feel isn’t honestly representative, a conversation happens. They’re performing real moments in their everyday lives, and because there will always be artifice with a camera watching, we hunt for the little moments of real truth.”

The decisive stylistic choices at play — interludes of expressionistic abstraction, clear visual metaphors, digital effects emulating the grain of filmstrip photography — mark Spermworld as a work of constructed cinema art, which some viewers understand as antithetical to the documentary form. Oppenheim wishes to emphasize that the opposite is true, that nonfiction also benefits from the aesthetic considerations that go into any other film, working toward the same goal of higher truth. “When I see talking head interviews, there’s nothing more dishonest than the way those images are captured,” he says. “It’s an interrogation between two people, it’s not lived or observed experience. It feels like someone’s being cross-examined… We use all the cinematic tools at our disposal to transport the viewer into not just observing someone’s life, but inhabiting how they see themselves. It all works in tandem. How do I match what’s going on in these people’s minds, make the film reflect their feelings and desires? People see documentaries, and think that trying to access subjectivity is impossible. It’s not.”

Oppenheim is currently pondering a foray into fiction features, possibly a film about the grizzly bear-obsessed Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise. But for now, as he completes Spermworld’s life cycle with the streaming release, he can’t help but relate to the feeling of vacancy that sets in after these men finish their duty and go back to their own life. He was drawn to the odd personalities of the “Sperm Kings” not for their novelty, but for the most familiar aspects of their experiences, chief among them the need to do something meaningful for your fellow human beings. Like anybody else, they’re simply “people trying to matter in some way.” Just as hopeful parents face an uphill battle through an antagonistic and often discouraging process, these power-donors must contend with their own interior crises and insecurities. Oppenheim watches it all with a measured ambiguity, neither absolving nor damning, curious above all else. Insatiably inquisitive as he may be, he’s certain about one thing: “I’ll never look at an abandoned mall or a Macy’s parking lot the same way again. People could be donating anywhere.”

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.