Made between Safe and Poison, Dottie Gets Spanked is a strange, affectionate rumination on childhood sexuality, fantasy and repression, featuring a possible stand-in for Haynes as a young boy. The boy, Steven, is fixated on two things: spanking and a TV comedienne named Dottie. His obsessions come full-circle as he visit the set of The Dottie Show and witnesses Dottie being spanked theatrically during a comedy routine. The film is short, made for TV, but packs an emotional wallop, with stilted, dark dream sequences of Steven’s guilty pleasure.