pirate radio - Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio
Richard Curtis
Universal Pictures
2009

I doubt that there will ever be a better pirate radio film than Pump Up the Volume although the series People Just Do Nothing is a strong offering. Pirate Radio, also called The Boat that Rocked, is leagues below its predecessor (that's a pun for a boat movie). This kind of movie... well, a lot of effort must go into every movie, but who could care about a movie like this? It's the usual colorful cast of randy characters (if they were american I'd call them zany) who have somewhat amusing things happen in their lives. This is a movie, this is the basic movie concept, now fill the picture out with a time (the sixties) and place (England) - and for an extra dose of novelty, it's set on one of the boats that broadcast rock music at England from its coastal waters.

The film has a lot of people who are in funny shows, Roy from The IT Crowd, Rhys Darby, whose really funny, is here, and so is the rotund guy from all the Simon Pegg films. Philip Hoffman is here too, presumably because he played Lester Bangs in another rock movie. I find sixties nostalgia to be obnoxious most of the time, with everyone dressed goofy and their floppy hair and groovy talking and the pretense that all those rock songs that people my age have mostly heard in TV commercials and movies all our lives were so magical and dangerous to the establishment. Now, in 2016, the sound of the electric guitar is a basic signifier of youthful rebellion in TV commercials.

So the film shows scenes from the boat, interspersed by the gray offices of anti-rock members of parliament who want the boats shut down. Through most of the movie, the "pirates" aren't breaking the law, and it seems likely to me that the term 'pirate' was applied retrospectively. So that's it, they're shut down, they keep going for a bit but that is pretty much the end of the floating broadcasters. What's interesting is that while this is supposedly the end of the era, rock radio became pretty dominant afterwards (in real life) while London is just one location that continues to have a pirate radio scene with complicated signaling systems. Really what these boats broadcast was a commercially viable alternative to the BBC.

The film shows the impact of the station by showing different people's reactions at different places. A girl in her bedroom listening, a group of people at some work place, some old guy dancing. This is where the difference is most significant from Pump up the Volume, where the radio of happy hard harry is also shown to pierce the community, but its also woven into it.

hippies - 2012 - Wanderlust

Wanderlust

David Wain

2012

Apatow Productions

This film is a tale of counterculture tourism. A journey of the heart where the human spirit is led back to their place of origin to find that, yes, yes, middle class conformity is the best possible lifestyle. Thank you... so much, for this portrayal of hippies, culture industry.

Wanderlust is a stupid movie that is sometimes funny although it is mostly exactly the shallow movie anyone who’s watched movies before should expect. A married pair of Manhattan yuppies lose their foothold on the success ladder and are forced to leave the city. The man works in an investment firm that’s shut down by the feds and the woman’s a documentary film director who blows a screening of her latest work in front of HBO executives. After this meeting when the wife seeks solace for her failure from her husband, it's revealed that her filmmaking career was simply a dalliance in a long list of discarded career-paths, revealing that the professional realm is a world of struggle for some and a playground for others. Not just anyone, afterall, can jump into filmmaking on a whim and obtain meetings to screen their projects in front of high-status industry personnel.

So anyways this couple leave Manhattan, the gilded city of success. They had to, because they’re failures now and Manhattan doesn’t accommodate failures. On their trip out of the city they need a hotel, and they find one, but it’s also a hippie commune called Elysium where they feel the good vibrations and decide to become permanent residents after a brief rest in the suburbs with the man's materialistic and success-driven brother. That the commune is also a hotel is crucial in indicating that this turn in their life is as tourists seeking a temporary escape, rather than as explorers of alternatives to dominant values. The man, who was also in the movie Clueless, talks Jennifer Aniston, his wife, into staying with the hippies. Over the course of the film Jennifer Aniston comes to love her new habitat while the Clueless guy wants to leave. Throughout this film there’s all the stuff about naked communing with nature and swaying back and forth to folk music and hallucinogenics and long hair on men that make hippies so hilarious.

There are a few moments in the film that are of interest to me. The first is the already mentioned HBO meeting. Another prime moment of interest occurs towards the end of the film. The husband receives a call for a job interview and is ready to return to the mainstream and besides, he’s not as cool as he thought he was and he likes the commune less and less, so he has a fight with his wife where suddenly he’s arguing that conformity is great if it means enjoying air conditioning again. He argues so passionately in favour of technologically mediated bourgeois urban lifestyles that its easy to forget that earlier in the film he was convincing his wife to give the hippies a chance. The two interesting things about the husband’s statements are, first, at one point he shouts that experiencing air conditioning is the norm in the United States. This statement indicates at once that it is just plain incorrect to live in violation of norms of any kind, and also immediately repositions himself as harshly opposed to the commune. It is interesting to me that his loudest opposing statement to communal life is in reference to air conditioning, which evokes the title of Henry Miller’s critique of American conformity, The Air Conditioned Nightmare.

The second interesting statement in this argument was when the husband accused his wife of ‘drinking the koolaid’. Drinking the Koolade, of course recalling the Jonestown mass suicide where followers of Reverend Jim Jones drank cyanide-laced flavour-ade in 1978, has become a term of critical conformity. Use of this term is how the squares quickly criticize non-conformists for adopting non-conformist dress, language, ideas, etc.

Another scene of interest appears when Jennifer Aniston eats a breakfast meat platter or something like that at a diner in town, far from the isolated rural environment of Elysium. All this meat has to be eaten in secret because the commune is strictly vegan and, uh oh! she finds that the guy who founded the commune is also at the diner eating a big hunk of meat. She’s scared because she’s caught but the commune patriarch reveals that he’s been eating secret meat for years. This scene interests me because it was an opportunity to demonstrate that the strict rules of the commune and its adherents may actually be elastic to some extent... after all, if this hardcore old time hippy can violate the rules, anyone should be able to, to some extent, without facing exile. Instead, this is a secret they share with the implicit knowledge that this violation of the rules means they don’t really believe in the hippie life after all.

The final thing that interests me in the movie is that the commune has a charismatic leader who’s good at everything and has everyone’s admiration and truly believes in the hippie way of living. For some reason he wants to go steady with Jennifer Aniston, and sells out the commune so that he can impress her with his new wealth, even though she had come around to committing to life at Elysium. This was clearly just a lazy movie crisis inserted into the film to move the action along to some conclusion, but it also expresses, I think, a widespread skepticism among mainstream people that anyone can truly avoid the lure of success in mainstream society, because not only is Clueless-man enticed back rather quickly, the hardest-core hippie of the film gives up his lifestyle for reasons that don’t even come close to making sense.

hippies - film - 2009 - Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock
Ang Lee
Focus Features
2009
120 minutes

Ang Lee, director of Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and his career centrepiece The Incredible Hulk (haha, just kidding), also directed Taking Woodstock, another film about chance encounters and personal transformations.  In Taking Woodstock, the time and place is upstate New York, 1969 - the crisis: the investor group planning the Woodstock Art Festival has already been barred from holding their from Wallkill NY and the need to find another venue quickly.  The solution: Elliot Tiber, the youngest chamber of commerce president in the history of the tiny-town of Bethel, NY, opens up his family’s “resort” to the Woodstock people as a headquarters, and helps them find a new concert venue on a neighboring dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur.  

The film is about the Woodstock arts festival, but its also about a small number of the small-town characters unbinding their uptight tendencies through their encounters with the Woodstock people and the hippie travellers, Elliot tries drugs and explores his homosexuality - his overbearing parents try drugs and dance in the rain, etc.  Max Yeager agrees to host the concert on his property as a rebellion against the town’s conservative population (who occasionally express their simmering anti-semitism and, at times, appear like they’re ready to launch a pogram against Yasgur and the Tiber’s).







The film presents a perspective on the famous Woodstock concert that pushes the music to the periphery, where it drifts into the centre an echo that’s heard across the rural countryside.  Elliot attends the concert in the sense that he’s on the Yasgur farm while music is played, but he’s so distant from the stage that it’s relevance is primarily to affirm the historical setting of the film.  Instead, the short-lived community that emerged, and the carnivalesque atmosphere that the concert created, is the centre of Lee’s focus with regards to the concert itself.  Elliott slides down a muddy hill and takes LSD in a van with a pair of hippies he met by chance.  

The reproduction of the hallucinogenic experience on film is a standard feature of virtually every hippie and drug movie ever made, from Reefer Madness to Easy Rider to Friday to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  The scene provides directors with an opportunity to indulge their facility with visual effects for their own sake, without concern for the constraints of fantastical plot advancements.  In Taking Woodstock Ang Lee places Tiber in a setting that was already decorated in abstract psychedelic patterns that begin glowing and moving after he takes the sacrament of the Aquarian age.  Lee’s filmic visualization of the psychedelic is, in fact, fairly conventional, but it is also true to much of the psychedelic imagery of the era he represents.  In a that vein it should be noted that one of the promotional posters for the film emulates the uniquely colourful ‘rainbow-inking’ printing technique pioneered at the San Francisco Oracle.  One of the hippies metaphorically refers to the vast audience as an ‘ocean’, and Lee uses visual effects to represent it as such in his own psychedelic flourish.

A scene from Taking Woodstock's Hallucination sequence

A final point of interest is the character of Michael Lang, the young hippie who organized the concert and, in the film, is represented as an old friend of Elliot’s.  The film is an adaptation of a heavily contested book written by Tiber, and one of its main disputants is Lang himself.  Tiber is the centre of this film, and he positioned himself as indispensible to the organizing of the concert.  Lang acknowledges Tiber’s role but regards it as minimal, asserting that some aspects of Tiber’s telling are altogether false, including the part where Elliot introduces Lang to Yasgur.  In Tiber’s version, Lang is always kind to Tiber and appreciative of his ideas and always acting as an intercessor between Tiber’s family, the hippies, and his own cost-obsessed investors.  Lang’s last words are in reference to his work in helping the Rolling Stones organize what ended up being the Altamont Free Concert, the anti-Woodstock where the Oakland Hells Angels worked as stage security and killed an aggressive fan (in self defense).