John Waters and David Lynch are the greatest American filmmakers, and neither one of them has made a feature length film in years. Waters, in interviews, has complained of difficulties in securing funding for his film projects, a problem which stalled production of his last film in progress, a work titled Fruitcake. Instead they've focused their energies on creative outlets such as lecturing (Waters is listed as a speaker at the European Graduate School), writing, music and photography. This Filthy World is an example of one of Waters' side gigs, a one-man show of the filmmaker speaking about his experiences as a low budget independent Baltimore movie director.
The show is essentially a staged telling of much of the same material that appears in Waters' book, Shock Value. He speaks about his life with the Dreamlanders, the name he and his friends used for the little social group they assembled to star in, and produce his early films. He speaks about his interest in attending criminal trials, his interest in unusual sexual practices, his illegal filmmaking practices, the trashy films and filmmakers who influenced him. This Filthy World shows John Waters joining other 'alternative' figures like Henry Rollins who draw in audiences to listen to them become storytellers of the countercultural past.
The Yes Men are a pair of culture jamming pranksters whose interventions into media have revealed injustices in the basic structures of contemporary neoliberalist globalization. Their modus operandi has been to mimic the conventional forms by which information is packaged and delivered to contemporary audiences, deliver a message that is absurd, either in the traditional sense or in a modern sense where an inconvenient truth is acknowledged, and then capture the reactions of the audience. The most profound example of this later sense of the absurd which I mentioned, as expressed in the work of The Yes Men, can be seen in this interview wherein one of the Yes Men claim that Dow Chemical will make reparations for Union Carbide's 1984 Bophal (India) disaster, when the company's Bophal plant leaked toxic gasses which almost immediately caused over 15,000 deaths, now that Dow has purchased the guilty company. The result was Dow's stock dropped instantly, revealing the sense of justice encoded into markets, and The Yes Men were instantly acused of giving the people of Bophal false hope.
The film begins with the song 'Get Happy', which I otherwise know from David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks.
This documentary, The Yes Men Fix The World (an irritating title for a film that doesn't actually show them offering solutions) shows The Yes Men going behind the scenes of their own work and following up on its results. They used media to pretend as though officials were acknowledging the errors made in Bophal India, and also in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and bringing equitable compensation to those affected populations. They visited these locations to speak with people and to ask them if they were filled with false hope, the generic critique of Yes Men interventions by media pundits. Naturally the people of of those locations have very good reason to be angry at the cruelty of governments, corporations, and markets, on a continuing basis and weren't especially put off by the actions of the culture jammers.
The film's revelation that the duo were so often accused of providing false hope is fascinating. Clearly the Yes Men are playing with media to create an image of what justice should look like when filtered through the conventions of contemporary media channels. Of course, when The Yes Men are revealed as tricksters, and media personalities are not including questions about the withholding of justice by the actual offenders in part of their response to the Yes Men's intervention, then they are choosing to protect the image of institutions responsible for disaster.
The Yes Men are media pranksters, and fundamentally this is a documentary about media, chains of communication and representation, the manipulation of symbols, and the public relations industry. TV's are viewed in strange locations, creating juxtapositions of imagery, the sleek PR television image against what is often a post-industrial setting, for our own consumption via our own screen. I'm not pointing that out to note any irony, but I do believe that the production of a documentary like this serves the purpose of giving the Yes Men a forum for responding to their own imagery and the responses it garnered in turn, since they're used to making images with other people's machinery.
Mouth to Mouth is a film about a group of street kids travelling through Europe in a rusty old van, attending festivals, dumpster diving, and smoking and drinking. The group, called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge, or SPARK, goes from city to city living as crusty punks, forming social bonds and drifting around until they make their way to a vineyard somewhere in southern Europe. At this point the group began living communally and working the land while they also take on the form of the charismatic cult that was hinted at during their earlier travels.
The group has a leader, Harry, who expresses a bland self-help straight-edge philosophy and repeatedly admonishes his followers to "stay strong". At one point, while the group is on the road, their youngest member cuts his throat on a piece of twisted metal and dies after he's flung into a dumpster to look for food. No one really takes responsibility for the death, including the boy's best friend who carelessly tossed him in there, but its Harry's disinterest that is striking as an early clue of his evil. Once they occupy the vineyard, Harry begins exercising authority more cruelly, punishing disobedient followers by putting them in a well. The film ends predictably when one member dies under such punishment and another, Sherry (the film's main character - it doesn't really suit the purpose of my blog to speak about her) rejects Jeff's authority and leaves the group.
The group is a charismatic cult with a complete absence of spirituality, much like the cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They are a self-help group with a bad man for a leader. Much like with that other movie, its easier for me to understand how the bizarre and psychotic millenarianism of Charles Manson, for example, could compel followers to invest in him as an authority figure, than it is for me to understand how a bland punk-guru's dull can inspire his friends to obey his every word.
Director Allison Murray also made the documentary Train on the Brain, the greatest of all hobo/train hopping films, so that's good.
The Bug is on the soundtrack, which is also very good.
Streets of Fire is a pretty okay movie by the director of the greatest street gang film of all time, The Warriors. Many of this film's features are similar its predecessor: the urban setting dominated by criminals, the emphasis on nighttime, travel by subway, dirty buildings, empty concrete spaces, large congregations of gang members. Streets of Fire is fun to watch but it lacks the constant pressure and intensity of The Warriors. Instead the film has this mix of punk and faux-50s noir asthetic of gritty streets and 'Nighthawk' type diners and Marlon Brando style bikers.
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (1942)
The film is about a nearly famous nightclub singer and her ex-boyfriend returning to the city from somewhere where he got really good at fighting people. They become entangled with an outlaw biker gang called The Bombers, based on the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club from The Wild One. They go back and forth until a big fight scene with sledgehammers at the end of the movie between the boyfriend and Raven, the leader of The Bombers, who dresses like a Nazi officer.
Probably the best feature of the movie is a minor element, the small role played by Lee Fing, frontman of Fear. He does the cheerleading in support of Raven during the final fight scene, shouting out words of encouragement in his Fear voice.
Oh, also the film ends with a soul group performing called The Sorels, who I suspect are named after Georges Sorel.
Ian Curtis was the mysteriously depressing frontman for the new wave punk proto-goth band, Joy Division. Curtis’ band, in 1977, helped launched Factory Records, gloom rock, and the Manchester rock scene (later dominated by their polar opposites in sound and attitude, The Happy Mondays). Curtis continues to be an enigma to fans because of his darkly personal lyrics, his freaky dancing that occasionally gave way to epileptic fits, and his 1980 suicide at age 23.
Control is a black and white cinematic representation of Curtis’ backstage life, which is, in essence, a dull story that could hardly interest anyone were it not for the fact that Joy Division was great. Curtis was and is revered for his onstage presence and his songwriting talent and like many talented artists and performers, he was not a particularly interesting person beyond that. Not that that’s not enough, Joy Division was a great band and probably one of the most enigmatic manifestations of punk culture. Certainly Curtis and co, as musicians helped to extend the possibilities for what punk can be but to look at the singer beyond Joy Division is to tell a story of a young man who doesn’t get along with his wife and had an affair. The most interesting aspects of Curtis’ life, his music, are put into the background in order to fill the foreground with the dull gossip of his personal life.
Curtis’ lyrics continue to provide solace to the people who watch this movie and take in this mundane soap opera. The crisis of these biographical dramas is that they provide film studios with an opportunity to retell a story that have been already long-exhausted by the culture industry, simply because they are attached to cultural figures whose work has presence in our lives.
The film is largely focused on Curtis, with very little on the people who helped make him the ghostly embodiment of gloom punk, such as the other members of his band - who went on to become New Order and displayed their own considerable songwriting talents for decades after - or Factory Records founder Tony Wilson. The film does put a fair bit of the focus on Ian’s wife, Deborah, whose biography of Curtis, Touching From a Distance, provided the textual ground for this film. One of the consistent features of these kinds of films, consider also Pollock and Walk the Line, is the strain and anguish of being the wife of an egomaniacal ‘tortured genius’. Pollock, unlike Walk the Line or Control, lets the viewer know that a tortured genius can bring great art into the world and also be a horrible person to those who care the most about him.
Anton Cobijn directed this. He photographed the band back in the day, then began a career directing music videos like Nirvana’sHeart Shaped Box.
Now he’s a filmmaker directing a film about the people he knew at the start of his career. Michael Winterbottom’s representation of Curtis and Joy Division in his film about Factory Records, 24 Hour Party People, is a far more compelling portrayal precisely because it restricts its representation of Curtis as the intense lead singer of an innovative band. Joy Division had this enigmatic frontman but they were one of those bands where each member had an equal share in creating a unique sound.
