An Attempt To Avoid JOE

To the largest section of Easy Rider’s audience, that film was a declaration of war. While Southern rednecks cheered the film’s ending, and the Berkeley Liberation School published a “Manual of Self-Defense for Easy Riders”, hardhats and Weathermen moved the bike-apocalypse into high gear. And in the cynical minds of America’s predominantly young moviegoers, the film’s moral added up to a simple dictate of prudence (Ah, but Prudence Who?), to wit, if you’re riding through the South on a bike in buckskin,, leather, long hair and American flags, don’t go giving the finger to a Mongoloid cracker pointing a gun at you. Not if you like living.

Anyway, it took Easy Rider, wherein two arrogant freaks flaunted their “liberated” lifestyle at people whose' own oppression was so intense and therefore their self-esteem so precarious that murderous attack was their only psychic defense, to bring us up to date with what the Left has been waiting for, or ignoring, for years: for lack of a better phrase, The White Working Class Fights Back, also known as the Year of. the Hardhat. Not, that is, the furtive harassment of the rightwing lunatic fringe, blit the mass movement known, loved, and hated as the Silent Majority: mass psychotic compensation for all those repressed lives of silence. Now, a year later, we have here this film called Joe, which, though more forced and less forceful, cinematically, than Easy Rider, goes far beyond it to remind us once again that ignorant armies still clash by night.

The plot can be discussed in broad outline (the details bring no credit to the fine fictive art of screenwriting; it is the vignettes and one moment of action that count): an advertising executive and a hardhat are united by their hatred of hippies, which leads them to the slaughter of a rural commune, one of whom turns out to be the ad exec’s daughter. To give the picture full benefit of the doubt and also to criticize its most dangerous shortcomings, let us say that it is planned as shock treatment for the Silent Majority, pleading with it to wake up lest it kill the things it loves (literally, its children). A nice moral purpose for any filmmaker these days, to be sure.

Well, we have Joe Curran, the $160-a-week hardhat who boozes, bowls, collects guns and delivers barroom tirades which reveal him to be a professor emeritus of racist philosophy. Without my spilling all the deliciously unsavoury details, imagine him to be the Compleat Bigot, Mr. Amerikan Pig, the Man, as they used to say of vori Stroheim, You Love to Hate. But in all his twisted excesses he exhibits the energy and imagination that is of his dynamism as a worker. And he can be pitied because we know he’s fucked up (just don’t think you’re any better). We know he hates blacks because they threaten his low rung on the economic ladder, college students because they have what he never had and hippies because their life style is a direct attack on his own Values: work, marriage, patriotism, the hollow shams he clings to viciously, knowing nothing else, unable to face his work-a-day life without them. Yet he derives no satisfaction from his depersonalized wife and tawdry house and dull assembly-line job †4 it is only in their blind defense that he is safe from himself.

Joe is a man for whom the Amerikan Dream has failed. For Bill Compton, it worked, bringing him $60,000 a year, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and an elegant, bitchy wife — all rejected by his hippie daughter. His face is pale and constricted with a look of fear and constipation. He is afraid for what he thinks to be his manhood, and the plot is motivated by his murder (which Joe sleuths out and admires) of his daughter’s lover, a hippie who laughs at his “uptight” manner. The root of both men’s problem is revealed as their jealously guarded machismo sexuality when they attend a hippie “orgee” and find themselves impotent.

In any event, both men have come to the point best treated in film by Death of a Salesman, but a dominant theme in our culture down to Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy — where the Amerikan Dream has become the nightmare, where money finally can’t buy them love, where they have to vindicate themselves with action or else go mad — but their way lies madness anyway, as the movie melodramatically

Making Joe was an attempt to avoid Joe, creating him was an appeal to his counterparts to, destroy him in themselves. As I said above, an eminently worthy project, yet with little hope of success. Joe’s repellent character is so well acted by Peter Boyle, its portrayal of workingclass life at times so cruelly accurate, that it may turn off altogether the Silent Majority to whom it seeks to speak, chastising them with their own culture as much as Easy Rider terrified them with ours. Instead, Joe has become the darling of the art-house crowds, fulfilling hip people’s nightmare stereotype rather than destroying it at the source. It is ironic that Joe remarks in the film that “The fucking kids are taking over the culture”, for he himself may be no more than another figure in that landscape, another one of our good and bad guys.

Or again, maybe not. It’s hard to tell. Perhaps we’ll find out after the revolution — or the apocalypse.

Honest Bob Singer

A Warhol Breakthrough

“Trash” represents a breakthrough for Andy Warhol productions and the moviegoing public. Directed by Paul Morrissey, the most important of Warhol’s many co-workers, the film is a slicker-than-ever-before look at the Warhol world of sex, drugs, and degradation. Slick enough, as a matter of fact, to get a booking at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive East Side cinemas. Now the same chic film freaks who stood for hours across from Bloomingdale’s to see top Hollywood product such as “Bob & Carol” and “Midnight Cowboy” are lining up to see a Warhol sized version of a world filled with junkies and transvestites. Manhattan moviegoing makes for strange cinematic bedfellows.

The film records the wanderings of a junkie (Joe Dallesandro) who .. is so strung out on heroin that he can no longer respond sexually to women. As Joe goes (literally) limply from a bouncy, silicone-breasted go-go dancer, to an acid freak, to a bored rich housewife (played by the incredibly wooden Jane Forth), Morrissey hammers away at the futility of shooting up by playing the themes of sexual impotence and drug addiction off against each other. Joe shares a sleazy East Village flat with Holly Woodlawn, a garbage picking young woman (actually a transvestite) who comes on like the Wicked Witch of the East on speed. Holly wants to get Joe off junk and on welfare, but her efforts are to no avail. The film ends with the two of them sitting on a bed, staring blankly out into space.

Previous Warhol films never made it with the general public, as “Trash” probably will, for two reasons: they were overstuffed with camp, and they were deadly boring. The performers Warhol chose were obvious freaks who prattled on and on. about how sadbeautiful their lives were, and the incredible amount of camp mannerisms with which their “performances” were overlaid, coupled with the condescending way Warhol filmed them, made the films seem trivial and exploitative. Nothing seemed honestly felt. In this respect, “Trash” is noticeably different. There is real despair evident in this film, especially in the scenes where a shrill, pathetic Holly tries to help the hero. Her chaotic performance is both blazingly theatrical (or campy) and honestly poignant and despairing. Much of Morrissey’s film has this same ability to juxtapose camp and tragedy to telling effect, notably in a scene where a vapid Jane Forth and her husband bicker endlessly over absurdities while Joe shoots up in grotesque close-up.

“Trash” also inadvertently solves the structural problem of boredom by hav-. ing a junkie for a hero. As Joe Dallesandro stumbles from scene to scene in stoned, solitary splendor, he contributes enough sullen screen presence to keep us moving along with him. Normally people grow restless at Warhol films because nothing ever happens; everyone just sits around and talks. But here most everyone — especially the hero — is on dope, so we don’t expect them to do much anyway. Our natural expectations about narrative structure are scaled down by the people we see on screen, and this works to the film’s advantage.

Technically ‘Trash” is primitive; it has scratchy sound, poor lighting, and choppy editing. But we go to movies for a variety of reasons, and technical virtuosity need not always be one of them. Morrissey has extracted performances from many of his actors (as opposed to the “exhibitions” performed in Warhol’s films), toned down the ridiculous amount of camp present in many previous Warhol films, and communicated some real feelings of anguish over a couple of lost lives. He has done it all in an adequately structured film which contains tragedy, absurdist humor, and .true funkiness. That doesn’t make ’’“Trash” a masterpiece — as some people have been calling it — but it. does make it worth seeing.

The Sex & Money Trip

Finally, the long-awaited “groupie movie” (titled simply, “Groupies”) is out. It is a documentary film, picturing about eighteen actual people, male and female, who follow groups like Ten Years After, Spooky Tooth, Terry Reid, and try to fuck them. They rap, they chase, they cavort and have scenes: the camera records all. And it is a devastating film.

After seeing it, you have to ask: What is rock music? Some people, like, for instance, John Sinclair, believe that rock music is a liberating thing, that rock music is, by it’s very nature, revolutionary. Others see rock music as, at least, a part of a new, rising culture, one which rejects the death attitudes of Amerika and affirms life in many positive. ways. The groupie movie portrays rock music in a very different light, its theme being that rock music is basically two things: sex and money. The scene that flows from that, as pictured in this sad film, is decadent, sick, and very, very counter-revolutionary.

The sex-and-money trip is as old as Rome. In this movie, the only appeal that the rock groups have in the minds of the various groupies is sex-andmoney. One girl talks about Led Zeppelin, saying: “That was their first tour, and they had all this money. It’s really fun to stay with a group that’s got a lot of money. And they stayed at this Chateau Marmont... We spent a lot of money. We ate food like it was going out of style, and sniffed cocaine ..,. ” and she goes on to describe the orgies she had with Jimmy Page and Richard Cole, how Page had this whip and whipped her all the time. There’s never a word said by this groupie or any other groupie in the movie about the group’s music (not that Led Zepplin’a music is anything to talk about — it stinks).

So where’s the shit at? There’s nothing very new or revolutionary about that sort of scene. But OK, Led Zepplin may not be the band to talk about. Let’s take Ten Years After. They make some damn good music, and Alvin Lee is a pretty farout artist (even if their music is derivative). In this film, the group is shown in some really fine musical scenes. But the camera follows them afterwards into the dressing room where they take the groupie scene in stride, have their fun and so on. Alvin Lee makes a few comments in mild disgust at it, but on the whole, his, and the rest of the group’s consciousness is on such a low level as to make you wonder why in hell everyone at Woodstock was so carried away, by them. And in uie musical scenes, all that Lee sings is “0 baby I want to ball you all night long, yeah...” Big deal.

The groupies in the film are incredible. While rock music is supposed to be such a liberating, together thing, there is something coldly impersonal about their idea that because a person is a famous rock star he is suddenly desirable. What if Alvin Lee was a cab driver? Would he find himself so sought after? Would it make any difference? It must be a terribly destructive thing to have to grapple with the fact that only your name makes you valuable and all else is for shit. As far as a groupie is concerned, anyway.

The groupies are such lost people. There is one scene where a male groupie named Chaz, obviously gay, tries in a pathetic way to come on to Terry Reid. Chaz is in sad shape after having been slugged around by somebody, and Reid, recognizing the sadness in this guy, is reluctant to give Chaz another sharp rejection. “But there’s nothing I can do,” says Reid (who seems like an OK cat), while Reid’s drummer, Keith Webb, gently reasons with Chaz in such a way as not to hurt him. But it’s very sad. The girls are just plain .maniacs, especially the Plaster Casters. They just love punishment, love the male dominance of the rock scene, and reject love. Unlovely, unloving, and unloved, the female groupies are in the ancient category of Fucked-up Chicks, and they’re proud of it. Rock music hasn’t liberated them. They are about as liberated as harem slaves in the fifteenth century.

“Groupies,” as a film, only points up something which the “cultural” revolution (l believe one exists somewhere) has constantly ignored: as great as rock n’ roll is, it’s basically a product of capitalist society. And within every little separate facet of any society is reflected the whole of the society it is part of. Rock music exists as a part of the corporate Amerika with its recording contracts and its booking dates and its business deals and its male chauvinism and its big dollars. Especially its big dollars. So how can the Jefferson Airplane sing about how “We are all outlaws of vAmerika”?

Let’s face it. Rock is fantastic music, and maybe it will always stand, but as far .as including it in any new, revolutionary movement goes— forget it. And let’s not delude ourselves by thinking that some rock groups might ever be -political/revolutionary forces: in “Groupies” one of the Plaster Casters named Harlow describes her problematic experience with the MC5. They were so eager to have their cocks glorified in plaster that poor Harlow had to sweat doing two of them at once. Imagine that! Tsk tsk.

Let’s kick out the jams, brothers and sisters, but for real.

Roy Weiner