Frenesi Gates—DL Chastain

Frenesi Gates and DL Chastain share a relationship shaped by both intimacy and revolutionary work: once companions in the 24fps collective, they come to recognize that their faith in political filmmaking could not protect those around them from violence. Their bond breaks under the weight of betrayal, rumor, and responsibility, ending not in reconciliation but in a night of painful confrontation and a parting after which DL never sees Frenesi again.

Companions in 24fps

Within 24fps, Frenesi and DL occupy contrasting symbolic territories. Frenesi is associated with light; DL with darkness and invisibility. The contrast is not simply between two temperaments: it also marks their different kinds of presence in the collective’s dangerous world. DL’s comrades believe she can pass unseen through guarded entrances and police-filled areas, rescue fellow members and their vehicles, and emerge without seeming to have disturbed her bright red hair. Her reputation makes invisibility a shared belief among people who also believe in LSD, imminent revolution, and Eastern disciplines.

The contrast between them becomes more painful in retrospect. Their shared political commitment had treated the camera as a force capable of confronting power, but Frenesi later doubts that this confidence amounted to real protection. The closeness between the women belongs to a collective whose hopes have been tested by actual guns and by the deaths and disappearances that follow. What once joined them as comrades cannot shield their private relationship from the consequences of the political world they inhabited.

The collapse of a shared political faith

In their later conversation, Frenesi reflects on the apparent futility of 24fps’s work. She compares the collective’s filmmaking to children waging war with toy weapons, imagining that cameras gave them the power of artillery. She wonders how they lost contact with reality and whether they saved anyone. In her account, the arrival of guns rendered their carefully made cinematic gestures powerless; she has also heard that others on campus were killed and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation concealed what happened.

The reflection is not an abstract disagreement about art. It expresses the damage that political violence has done to the meaning Frenesi and DL once shared. Frenesi’s grief over Weed Atman’s death is joined to a broader suspicion that their actions did not alter the outcome for the people they meant to defend. Her questions put the relationship under pressure because they make the women confront not just what happened, but what their former faith in collective action was worth.

Rumor, responsibility, and the rupture

The conversation turns from the fate of their comrades to Rex. Frenesi has heard that he left the United States, and presses DL to disclose what else she knows. DL reports a rumor that Frenesi helped frame him, then admits that she could have prevented what happened. The admission brings their conflict into the open: the harm is no longer only something done by distant authorities or by the movement’s enemies, but something entangled with choices and failures inside their own circle.

DL also tells Frenesi that the prosecutor’s name has been mentioned in connection with an alleged conspiracy. Frenesi recognizes the implication and responds with a question about why DL should care. As they speak, their hands repeatedly reach across the table almost to touch, then withdraw. The gesture gives physical form to their divided attachment: neither woman has stopped reaching for the other, yet each new disclosure makes the distance harder to cross.

The argument continues after they leave the room and walk through dark, rain-filled streets toward their hotel. They remain awake through the night, crying separately and together, pleading, demanding, insulting one another, repeating themselves, and deliberately misunderstanding each other. Their exchanges grow increasingly heated as each new detail reduces their doubts about the other and brings them closer to a decision. The relationship’s collapse is therefore not a single clean break; it is a sequence of attempted contact and renewed injury.

Intimacy, guilt, and departure

Frenesi’s imagined plea reveals how much of their conflict is bound to sexual intimacy and shame. She resists being treated as an emotionless “Queen of Cinema,” insists that DL witnessed things Brock Vond never would, and longs to make love to her former friend again. In the same inwardly staged exchange, she imagines DL answering that she was the one who led Frenesi into those experiences. The scene presents desire and accusation together: Frenesi still wants the closeness she has lost, but anticipates that intimacy would now carry pain and judgment.

That imagined exchange also makes the difference between the women’s choices explicit. DL had been regarded as the steady heart of the collective, someone presumed to possess a saintlike self-control that would keep her from accepting Brock Vond’s bargain. Frenesi did accept it, and fears that DL will learn she helped undermine that very control. The text frames these statements as what Frenesi would want to cry and what DL might have answered, not as a straightforward transcript of their final argument. Their force lies in the imagined confrontation’s exposure of a guilt neither can separate from their former intimacy.

The later account of Frenesi’s drugging deepens that tension without resolving it. Frenesi describes Thorazine and Stelazine being administered in escalating doses, her attempts to evade medication, and the coercive rituals through which it was forced on her. She attributes her failures and complicity to forces stronger than herself, including the drugs. This account complicates any simple division between a betrayer and an innocent: the relationship is caught between Frenesi’s responsibility and the conditions she invokes to explain her surrender.

DL’s recollection places their last separation at Quilbasazos. After another day and night there, she says, they crossed the border at Nogales and she left Frenesi at the Las Suegras highway exit. She never saw her again. Prairie later says that her parents met at Las Suegras, where the Corvairs were performing at Phil’s Cottonwood Oasis, and describes it as love at first sight. That later family memory gives the place an unexpected echo: Las Suegras is both a point of origin in the story of Prairie’s parents and the site of DL and Frenesi’s final parting. For DL and Frenesi, however, the remembered ending remains unresolved, marked by attachment, injury, and the permanent fact of their separation.