Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Death is a Photograph, a culture at the end of history with Chase Biduzniak and us Sam. i'm goingnna I'm going to put in Mikkel Haga is going to be my... That's the choice you've ever got. That was all right.
Speaker: Our guest today is veteran podcaster J.G. Michael of Parallax Fuse. Welcome to the podcast, J.G. Hello, salutations, greetings, and I love the name of the podcast. Nice Susan Sontag reference. oh Thank you very much. i and you know, question, ah something I've thought about a lot with your podcast, because we're both, I know Sam has been on it and I'm a long time subscriber. if you're listening, you should subscribe to Parallax Views.
Speaker: It is a reference to the film or Zizek thing or both? Because know Zizek is embedded in the end or was for a long time. Both. Okay. It's both. That's how the lefty podcasters or the lefty academic types are like, oh, Zizek.
Speaker: And then, you know, everyone else is is like, oh, he must be real smart. He likes the Warren Beatty movie from the 70s. I'm not kidding. I've had people agree to do my show just because they like that movie. It's a good name and it's ah it's a great movie. And ah a movie that maybe captures the paranoia that presages the end of history with which we're ah so concerned.
Speaker: Possibly one of the best movies about journalism about that as well. Is this you coming out as a conspiracy theorist? Because last time it was me talking about P2 on the podcast that got me in some trouble. And now... Wait, the P2 Lodge? Yeah, we were because we were doing... We were talking with... Chase was scaring a GQ journalist. Yes.
Speaker: He's ah an actual respectable you know member of society. And I was in here talking about Licio Jelly and Silvio Berlusconi doing P2-style parties in Italy. and i probably would have done the same thing in that situation, to be honest.
Speaker: Listen, I just think you know we have to know our history lest we forget it. It's important. We you know we don't want to tear down our monuments, and those monuments include the P2 Lodge. So, okay, maybe this is a good opportunity to ah talk about the movies that you brought with you today, JJ. I think we have two, both by the same director. Maybe you could say a little bit about what led you to bring them to the show.
Speaker: So when you explained the podcast to me, essentially saying this is going to be a podcast analyzing Gen X movies, I thought, well, what is a Gen X movie? And you know that can be very broad, right? yeah And I knew what most people were going to probably say. they'll They'll say a movie like Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater or Heathers, I think is like a quintessential Gen X movie for a lot of people.
Speaker: But I wanted to pick a director that I think is overlooked and It doesn't get talked about that much. I think he's a working man's director, like the working class equivalent you know within directing, and a journeyman.
Speaker: So I thought the ultimate Gen X journeyman in terms of filmmakers, or one of them, is ah Adam Rifkin, who I think should actually be taught in film school because this man knows how to direct a movie on a very modest budget.
Speaker: And ah he's probably most known for... Well, I would say that Chase is one of his most is probably one of his bigger movies, although it's hard to get now, because ah Disney owns the rights to it, and they don't want to release it on Blu-ray, and they're not going to license it out to anyone.
Speaker: But he did a number of movies over the years. The Chase... Detroit Rock City, this Kiss movie that we're going to talk about. He also directed a number of low-budget movies under the name Riff Coogan, where he got to do more exploitation-type movies. So he did a soft-core, raunchy sci-fi comedy under the Riff Coogan name called The Invisible Maniac.
Speaker: with the adult film star Savannah, the tragic adult film star Savannah. Then he did another one under the Riff Coogan name called Psycho Cop Returns, which is the only slasher movie I know that deals with the topic of police brutality right after the Rodney King beating. He's a very unusual director.
Speaker: And ah he's he's done a number of movies since then. He did a very interesting movie, of ah maybe in the 2000s, called Look. Are you familiar with that? No, I'm not. It's literally a movie based around the idea of showing you surveillance footage from a ah supermarket or a gas station and all the interactions that take place.
Speaker: It's like the Mikhail Hanuk of U.S. journeyman filmmaking. He's doing his version of cachet. Well, Look is one of his more like a tour-like movies, but he's he's very much, he he he can float between more pop cinema and genre cinema and sort of arthouse style cinema. So I think he's a very interesting director. And I think his attitude that he brings to the films, the sort of high energy rebellious attitude that we'll talk about in The Chase and Detroit Rock City is very quintessentially Gen X.
Speaker: I went wrong that he also had some part in ah the, I think it's 1999 film, Small Soldiers. I think he co-wrote Small Soldiers. Yeah. That's actually his most well-known film. Scratch what I said about the chase.
Speaker: Yeah, to me, ah when that came up, I was like, I sort of had Christian flashbacks to being about five years old and seeing Small Soldiers, probably on replay somewhere on TV. It's a very interesting movie, too, because you think it's just like an action kids movie, but it's actually kind of about colonialism a bit.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I remember vividly there the kind of the premise of the film is that the Cold War is over and you know the military-industrial complex needs new markets for their technology, one of which is kids' toys, right?
Speaker: oh That didn't turn out to be you know prescient in any meaningful way. So, no, I think that's great. and And one of the things we've wanted to do is sort of explore films that may be done so obviously fit under the the umbrella. So this is sort of perfect.
Speaker: And I'll just lay my cards on the table and say that I knew nothing about Adam Rifkin. I'd seen Small Soldiers as a child, like any obedient 90s kid. and well Real quick, you you guys never saw Mousetunt as a kid?
Speaker: I did not. No. I'm going to double track now, but um I don't think it crossed my... ah That's the other big movie he did, I should mention, which is ah it's a movie about these two inheritors basically get this antique house and they want to become big capitalists using it for some reason. I think they want to make like a restaurant or something.
Speaker: I forget the details, but everything is just ruined by a mouse. And they just ruin the house trying to stop the mouse. And that one sort of has like themes that Gen X would like about you know greed and and whatnot, because you know the mouse destroys everything, and their greed doesn't help them in the end.
Speaker: They're bumbling capitalist idiots. This is sort of fascinating, because it it has Christopher Walken in it, and it has lee Evans, who is in The Ladies' Man, which is one of my favorite Jerry Lewis movies. So, I mean, this is ah kind of a stacked cast for Mouse Hunt. to to check it out.
Speaker: Yeah, but Small Soldiers, definitely. I forgot he wrote Small Soldiers. I can't believe that. In any case, we're here to, I guess, do a semi-autorist vindication or recovery of Adam Rifkin. And maybe we could start with The Chase, because typically we've kind of been separating and then bringing them back together at the end, you know, one movie and then another, if we can if we can manage it So maybe we can start with a little summary, a capitulation. I mean, it's kind of all in the title, but you can lay it out.
Speaker: How else do i do I say other than Charlie Sheen kidnaps Christy Swanson using a Butterfinger bar? Anyway, he he basically plays this down-on-his-left dude who's on the run after being convicted of a crime he did not commit. He's been sentenced. He breaks out, and he ends up accidentally kidnapping a rich heiress and you know takes her hostage.
Speaker: He doesn't want to, but you have to watch the movie to understand it's all revealed. And ah it's it's a very interesting movie because the whole movie is just him being chased, in his car with the hostage played by Christy Swanson. Cops are after him. Everyone's after him. The media circus is all around him, and he's just trying to get to Tijuana because he doesn't want to be in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he didn't commit.
Speaker: Was that a good explanation? No, that's perfect. It's perfect. i The Butterfinger thing seems especially relevant to me because... it First of all, maybe think of Bart Simpson, of course, which I think is a later ad campaign, but there is something extra Gen X about it being a Butterfinger bar.
Speaker: When you say media circus, it's also important. I'm sure we'll talk about this more. I know, Sam, you had questions about this. But I mean, we're talking helicopters, like getting up close. The the people back in the studio saying, get in there. We want shots to their faces. you know When do you think this movie came out?
Speaker: night before It's 94. It's 94. It's March 94. Why is that relevant? This came out like three months before the OJ Simpson chase. Oh my God. Oh yeah, of course. yeah See, when I watched this, I thought he must be riffing on the OJ stuff. Yeah, of course. This came out before the OJ stuff.
Speaker: I mean, he still had a lot to work with. I mean, there was what, there was Rodney King, there was the Menendez brothers, there was media circuses before OJ, but the way it like eerily sort of reminds one of OJ Simpson right down to the chase, although it's more exciting than the OJ Simpson chase. It's just bizarre to me. Three months later, the OJ chase happens.
Speaker: This is ah ah sort of a question for the Americans, I guess, around that sort of chase spectacle, right? Like, later on in the sort of, like, 2000s media, you get a real sense of, like, kind of ironic look at the car chase as a sort of American media phenomenon that was kind of really prevalent in the 90s in a much more earnest way.
Speaker: I'm just wondering where, yeah, where the origins are of that. You mean even before O.J.? Even before AJ, because like obviously Rifkin, if this comes before AJ, Rifkin is drawing on some kind of trope that's kind immediately recognizable to the audience, right?
Speaker: I have to imagine some of it just comes out of the American experience of of being so driving-focused by comparison with basically any other Western nation. But I don't know.
Speaker: Well, there's there's also like precedence to this kind of movie, right? like um you know The movie movie that immediately comes to mind when I think of Car Chases is ah the 1970s film starring Peter Fonda and ah my greatest love, Susan George from Straw Dogs. The movie is called Dirty...
Speaker: Dirty Mary, Crazy Leary. It's a 70s car chase film. And then there's other films like of this type, like Vanishing Point, you know that influenced Tarantino when Tarantino did Death Proof.
Speaker: This is not the first car chase movie, but it's certainly like the one that is like the most ninety s Well, very. it well And to be fair, I mean, I think of car chases like, for example, The French Connection has you know one of my favorite, I guess it's not really a car chase. It's more of a train and car chase, but you know chase sequences in film.
Speaker: But something about this movie is like, singular focus on the act of driving. Like there are so many wonderful shots, just quick cuts, you know, but as as the car moves back and forth and then you'll get like, you'll be from, it'll be a long shot from way out when you get to see, for example, all of the corpses fall out of the morgue truck. So there's this interesting interplay of like genuine excitement at the fact of the car chase. And then these constant little like comedic riffs that understand that there's something kind of funny about the whole idea, you know?
Speaker: which does feel very Gen X to me. So I think Rifkin's an interesting director because the way I've described him to some people is he directs his live action movies as if he's directing either a comic book or a cartoon. yeah And I really feel that way. Like a lot of, a lot of scenes he'll, he'll do almost remind me of splash pages from a comic where there's like that one focal point. And he also does the quick cutting. It almost feels like you're flipping through panels. Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that's true in both Detroit Rock City and The Chase. Like, it feels very much like a comic book. Everything is very heightened. It's very cartoonish, the characters are. And, like, there's always there's always movement in his movies.
Speaker: Like, even though he's working on a very limited budget, this is I think The Chase was only made for a couple million. And Rifkin will say he doesn't consider it a studio film. because of how low budget it was. It was distributed by a studio, 20th Century Fox, but he considers a lower budget movie by Hollywood standards.
Speaker: But he's really able to overcome those constraints because of the way he does these quick cuts and He'll also do fluid camera movement when it's necessary. Yeah. You know, like the opening shots when we have the initial hostage situation where Charlie Sheen takes Christy Swanson hostage. There's a lot of camera movement. And as he's dragging her to the car, the camera is really, really jittery as it moves. And it's supposed to reflect sort of the tenseness of the moment. He's a very clever director.
Speaker: And there's always movement. There's always action. I really like that as a comparison point. It's worth maybe bringing up for the listener. the beginning, you have these two cops who are trying to stop what what they think is a robbery, basically, or what you know is turning into a kidnapping.
Speaker: And he's like, okay, give me your guns. And so they give the guns to the store clerk, who then tosses them across the floor, but they go too far past the Charlie Sheen character, kind of bounce off. He's like, no, no, you know not that hard. And the camera keeps having to follow them back and forth in this very... um This wonderfully diffusing way. like It takes this moment of deep tension and just turns it into slapstick comedy.
Speaker: um And it's all in the camera movement and in the joke as well, of course. Sam, did you maybe did you feel that the movie was extremely American? Yes and no, right? like it It felt almost like a send-up of sort of American tropes around by car culture, so the relationship between the media and the police.
Speaker: it was sort of It felt more like a sort of running commentary on Americanness, which it ah in and of itself isn't that American, if I may say so. perhaps Yeah, um I think the kind of like symbiotic relationship between sort of like the high drama of crime, this sort of like, you know, industrial scale media and then the police and the sort of linkages between the three, that felt quite American in the sense of, you know, like the the second lot of police who follow Charlie Sheen after he sort of gets rid of the third lot of policemen in the
Speaker: petrol station, um gas station, as you could say, um they don't happen just happen to have a TV producer sitting in the back, don't they, when they start the chase. Which, like okay, like is a bit it's just an artificial plot point to make the story easier. But in a way, it feels like a commentary about like the symbiosis between those two different like you know bits of power.
Speaker: I could definitely see that. I think one of the things that makes this film and Detroit Rock City interesting, don't know if both of you would agree on this, but Rifkin does this thing where he he sort of creates mini cliffhangers.
Speaker: What I mean by that is he'll focus on one character, then get to a scenario where you're asked what's going to happen next with them, and then he cuts to the other character. He does that even more in Detroit Rock City, but he does it here too, where they you're he's constantly switching between characters to the point where I never find myself bored. And I do think it reveals a certain, I think you're right, Sam, it sort of reveals a dynamic between the characters too by doing that.
Speaker: and we We should not let it go without remarking that, of course, in the cop car, the the person driving it is Henry Rollins of you know Black Flag fame. So there's something kind of deliciously ironic in Gen X about putting a punk singer as your driver of your cop car. And he's the cop who's like bloodthirsty.
Speaker: right Because there's this dynamic between the two police. You've got the one who sort of wants to confess on camera to the producers of what is basically the show Cops, right which is coming to prominence in the 90s.
Speaker: I watched it every Saturday before America's Most Wanted with my family. I think a lot of American families did. And you know the other character sort of wants to be like... you know, I, I, you know, start trying to be like reflective or meditative about the idea of what it means to be a cop. He gets asked, are you ever scared? And he's like, yeah, all the time, you know, it's, it's not an easy job. And,
Speaker: I wanted to comment on that. So you're talking about the cop that isn't played by Henry Rollins. It's kind of like, I wouldn't even call him like the nice guy cop, but he's like, but he's like good cop to to Henry Rollins, bad cop in a weird way. Right. And this is one of the funniest parts of the movie to me.
Speaker: He's like, they're like, have you ever killed anyone? And Henry Rollins was like, no, we haven't. And then the, the Mr. Good Cop sensitive guy is like, I have. Yes. It doesn't feel good. And then he just adds in, but I would do it again if I had to. It's my job.
Speaker: And I just bust out laughing every time I see that. This movie knows exactly what it's doing, too, when it did that whole life sequence. No, you're right. I think... What we're floating around in a way is this... Something that we found in the show, you know in the interviews we've done, is there is something about Gen X, especially you know by the point in the mid-90s where Gen X kind developed to relative maturity, right? 94, the oldest Gen Xers are almost 30 years old, right? So they're they're working in the studio system. they're They're in the world of the movies, even if Rifkin himself is a little bit older than that, I think.
Speaker: There's this preoccupation with... using irony as a send-up mechanism for these social problems, like almost a recovery of yippee sort of mentality that gets filtered through punk.
Speaker: And so that's why it feels so important to me that Henry Rollins is the guy in the front seat, because it's this wink and a nod at the audience that's saying, I know exactly what I'm doing. And even if we can't take the system down through this studio film, we're goingnna you know we're going to give it little bit of a black eye and have fun while we do it.
Speaker: I mean, do you think reason why the Henry Rollins cameo is sort of like softened or hushed up or sort of obscured? But obviously you have this really obvious cameo from Flea and Anthony Casidas from a Red Hot Chili Peppers who just played these two like doofuses in a monster truck. It's like a monster truck, in fact.
Speaker: It was sort of vigilant. I i mean, like it's unclear what their aim in the narrative is beyond sort of like this quest for fame. Oh, there they're amazing. i I have to say, so i thought of them very squarely in one way. JG, I know you you you have a complicated relationship to it, but you maybe you're familiar with Dark Side of the Ring, the wrestling show. I promise this relates to what I'm about to say. Yeah. And before a New Jack died, they interviewed him on that show, right? for I think it may have even been his episode. I can't remember.
Speaker: But he's wearing the whole time his kill your local pedophile shirt. And if you know anything about New Jack, yeah maybe not the greatest guy in his personal life and how he treated you know certain people. i could not stop thinking about that shirt when the Red Hot Chili Peppers guys came in in the monster truck. I was like, this is such a classic American type shirt. of the like vigilante who's going to you know demonstrate their like masculinity and their sort of like importance by coming in and stopping this, you know in this case, this chase, or in the case of you know many things in American politics in New Jack, you know sex sexual offenders of some kind or another. And that made it so much funnier to me you know when they're trying to ram the car. and Maybe we should actually explain like what's going on here, like what actually happens with the Red Hot Chili Peppers guys.
Speaker: I mean, they don't come in until really later in the film. but That's true. But they basically play these two, like, oafish characters in a monster truck that care about what's happening because everyone's tuned in.
Speaker: That's the whole point of the movie. Like, everyone is tuned in to the 24-hour news cycle. All anyone is watching and hearing on the radio. I was going to that is... distinctly really ninety s isn't it the media ecosystem in this film is like coherent and whole yeah like it's unifying and everyone is sharing the same experience at the same time that is incredibly gen x incredibly 90s the fact that now like a similar chase now you'd have like five different viewpoints four different youtubers they're giving different narratives right but in effect you have the media sort of like presenting one narrative on this
Speaker: Well, and so a couple of things maybe are are worth going over in this respect. So first of all, the unified kind of field theory of media that you're describing, Sam, is really important to the movie. But I also think...
Speaker: It's not just that it's whole, though that is true. It's that there's a ah belief in ratings, you know sort of with the capital R, and this idea that if you can show people something that's exciting, you will capture, you know you'll get the highest Nielsen rating or whatever, and you will dominate the media landscape. So for example, I was watching this very bad, in fact, Netflix docuseries about Jerry Springer, right? One of my favorite shows as a youth, which probably is an indictment.
Speaker: And a lot of it, they're sort of asking, like, how did this come to be? and they're just like well, we realized that ah we were getting better ratings when we had a guy on who married his horse.
Speaker: You know, it just turned out that got better ratings. And I think you can't underestimate the degree to which this movie accepts that reality and sort of figures the media as this almost like parasitical organism that exists to whip people into a frenzy by showing them the most kind of like disgusting or over-the-top things possible. nowm i don't Maybe we can talk about this. I don't necessarily think the movie moralizes about that. It seems to just take it as a given you know reality.
Speaker: But i think you kind of have to start there. And J.G., you said that these two characters show up later. You're right. Maybe we can back up and say that you're getting various angles on what's happening. The other characters in this movie are essentially the other personages observing the chase from one perspective or another. So you have the car in which the cops like TV show is being filmed, driven by Rollins and the ah the cop who's killed someone before.
Speaker: You get a news helicopter that we briefly mentioned earlier that is then in communication with anchors back in the studio. And then at another point, I believe we get a news van.
Speaker: It's presented this as kind of like maybe independent media station. It's like quite punky. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. yes ah like Like I said, like the cameraman is like literally hanging from the back of the van like bungee ropes to try and get a shot of the Kirsten Swanson the female protagonist in distress.
Speaker: Oh, right, right. Because we we haven't really said this out loud, and you know ah the spoilers to a certain extent here, but the irony at at the heart of the movie is that she is increasingly comfortable with an understanding of Charlie Sheen as this like sensitive man who's actually been wronged by the United States justice system, right?
Speaker: Yeah, well, they even make the jokes about like Patty Hearst in the movie. Yes, right. yeah With the tabloid talk show stuff, did did it remind you of like, um i mean, this is the age where like hard copy, a current affair, inside edition are getting big. Do you think it was like related to that? Like what he's commenting on there?
Speaker: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, so earlier, you were having a little bit of an issue with your earphone. And so we started talking and, I was explaining what 2020 was to Sam because he was unfamiliar and how it led me to call my mom a lesbian for about a week in 2004. Inside Edition, in these types of shows, or even Geraldo Rivera and The Vault and all of these famous things, seemed to me to be like squarely what the movie is interested in. And that is wonderfully Gen X in ninety s This kind of
Speaker: how do I explain it? this This idea that media, even traditional media, can be sort of transgressive and in your face in a way that would have been you know unacceptable in, say, the 60s, right? you know Walter Cronkite's not going to get up there and do MTV Spring Break. He's not going to hello I was going to say, I initially read it as a send-up of 24-hour broadcasting, and specifically Fox News-style broadcasting. But then actually, Murdoch didn't start Fox News until 1996. So this is pre-the Murdoch move to broadcasting. So yeah I'm sort of wondering, in the American media system, what what we would be talking about in 1994.
Speaker: I was going to say that the 24-hour news aspect and the sort of tabloid media aspect of the movie is interesting in the context of the relationship that develops between Charlie Sheen's character and Christy Swanson's character. Because what that sort of tabloid media does, right, is it's focused on scandals, the downfall of celebrities, sensational crimes. And it's always based in victim or hero-villain storytelling. You know, there's the victim and the perpetrator. They hero and the villain. There's no room for nuance. Complexity is constantly flattened by this sort of tabloid media in the 90s and it often amps up moral panic.
Speaker: Well, at the beginning of the movie, when Swanson and Charlie Sheen first meet with each other, they have very different views on each other, right? like and And they're flattened views. you know Oh, you're just a criminal Charlie Sheen. And then Charlie Sheen looks at Chrissy Swanson and flattens her. Oh, you're just rich Dalton Vox's daughter. You're just a spoiled brat. But they end up both being more than that caricature.
Speaker: And it's a caricature we see constantly in tabloid-style media that wants to flatten everything down and turn everything into a nice, tidy package with soundbites.
Speaker: it's It's interesting also to compare that with the idea of Rifkin as something like a comic book filmmaker. Because in the 80s, when you sort of get this movement towards a rich and variegated comic book world and characters, the the beginning of the graphic novel, right? So he's kind of using these formal devices we might associate with a medium that's about two-dimensionality and using it to create a movie in which we get these three-dimensional characters who at first seem two-dimensional.
Speaker: I did want to raise sort of a question about that. and maybe this is less of a big deal over in the UK, Sam, where i don't know, you guys have probably had ah the death penalty abolished since the Yorkshire Ripper got put away or something, but it was 67.
Speaker: Yeah. So, I mean, in the US does get rid of the death penalty for a while, but then the Supreme court kind of brings it back. The reason I'm bringing this up is because in the movie, it is crystal clear. I would say that Charlie Sheen is not guilty, right? That he is not actually responsible for the,
Speaker: Is it another armed robbery, I think, is why he's originally put away? Yes, he's put away for another armed robbery by the red-nosed robber who was dressing up as a clown doing armed robberies. And it just so happens that Charlie Sheen was a professional clown, his character in this movie. So they just picked him up, and there was blood andmp evidence vindicating Charlie Sheen's character. But because of a legal mess-up, it wasn't admissible in court. Which is amazing.
Speaker: I got the impression in the U S like that that there was a real concerted campaign against death penalty in the nineties. Right. Like that was a very like big discourse in the nineties, like around the death penalty.
Speaker: And you've got a lot of films, Gen X films coming out in America at the time about wrongfully accused people like Shawshank Redemption is the big one that like comes up to me. um there's going to be a few others, right? Like, um,
Speaker: I'm a weirdo. The one that comes to mind for me is actually a William Friedkin movie. You know, William Friedkin, The Exorcist, The French Connection. He did a movie called Rampage. I haven't one. And it's based on the Vampire Sacramento murder spree that Richard Chase did, which that's a whole topic in and of itself. But it's an interesting movie because...
Speaker: He made it in 1989, and in the original cut, you know he's against the death penalty in it. Friedkin is very against the death penalty with the ending. And then he recut it in 92 to have a completely different ending where he's pro-death penalty. is He's like, oh, I changed my mind on the death penalty. But that shows you how intense the debate was that there's two different versions of this one William Friedkin movie, one that's pro-death penalty and one that's anti-death penalty. That's amazing.
Speaker: ah Go ahead, Sam. i'm Sorry. But like Gene's character, he like, the the character in Short-Shrank Redemption, or maybe like the main character in Green Mile, or the the met Morgan Freeman's character in Time to Kill. These are all like men stuck in like, unaccountable, irrational systems that they're just trying to get away from.
Speaker: That's what's so wonderfully kind of Gen X about it is that he's in there because the system has stuck him there. What I mean by that is now I think we would tend to think of the legal technicality as what gets someone off.
Speaker: rather than what sticks someone who's innocent within the system. Like, you know, now the discourse would be, oh, he got off on illegal technicality. That's why we could, you know, a cop would sort of like furrow his brow, grab his face and be like, goddamn prosecutors, you know, they'd always let them off.
Speaker: Was this a time that like Fox News and American moms and yeah suburban dads were talking about like suing culture, the rise of like litigation culture. And there's a really famous case where that woman spilled a really hot McDonald's coffee on their lap and got like third degree burns.
Speaker: Yeah. and it it there this huge discourse about you know that actually was really bad and she should' have sued for it because she was like horrifically injured but the the media discourse was all around like bureaucracy and like the leveraging of like the laws like unaccountable lens and stuff i'm pretty sure that was like a ninety s set right yeah i mean where is all this coming from from an american context for somebody who's not like familiar you mean like why is it that this is a particular point of interest Gen X, and especially American Gen X, seem to have like a a real sort of love-hate relationship with like bureaucracy and the law.
Speaker: I think there's a lot of factors to it. I think Gen X just became very cynical. I mean, that's sort of what sums up Gen X for me, at least in the popular consciousness. in America is this sort of cynical attitude about power or about... yeah I remember i I had a Gen X sort of mentor, and you know i was talking about like charities and NGOs, and he's just like, he's like they just don't really help either.
Speaker: People just take the money for themselves. There's just this pervasive cynicism you see about institutions amongst Gen X. What do you think the reasons for that are, though? I didn't really answer Sam's question.
Speaker: i just like just so I just realized that the main character in Shawshank Redemption is also obsessed with escaping to Mexico, right? like We have these two films about Ron Leakey's men trying to get across the Mexican border to live their life yeah drinking margaritas in Baja, California or whatever.
Speaker: Okay, so now we got two things here because that's the classic, you know, California, American, like how do you escape? You know, it's always this borderland that's, you know, in Mexico, there are no laws. In Mexico, you know, you can just with, you know, 50 pesos, which is, you know, three cents or whatever,
Speaker: So the entirety of the film, I was like, doesn't Mexico like have an extradition treaty with the U.S.? i mean When the U.S. cops drive into Mexico at the end the movie, I was like, this is crazy. We're just invading Mexico now to get Charlie Sheen.
Speaker: But tier to your question, Sam, I mean, based on what we've watched and maybe some of my own predispositions, but I think of it as sort of like what happens... when you've got this energy for rebellion or transgression that doesn't really have a purely political direction, which is to say, you know, no one is joining CPUSA.
Speaker: There's not really like a vanguard party, right? And i now i'm going to I'm going to sound like, you know, Mr. Marxism over here, but it is really a moment for something more like a decentralized kind of quasi-anarchist, although even that probably is a little too big of a label to put onto what I'm talking about.
Speaker: I think that that leads you into a situation where authority structures as such are the enemy, right? So in a movie like this, yeah that takes the form of Charlie Sheen being wrongly convicted because the system is inhuman and impersonal and doesn't care about people and what people actually need and want and their desires It's really telling that his lawyer, his attorney, is like entirely useless in this film. like A few years later, you'll have films, real legal films, where attorneys are heroes. like
Speaker: Once you get into the real swing of Clintonism, you have like films very much where the law can solve everything. I had a different take on that, actually, because I was thinking, you're right that he's useless in it, but it's interesting to me. All my life, I always heard growing up, because I grew up in the suburbs, attorneys are basically the devil, and then they would quote that Shakespeare play. Was it Macbeth? The one where the the villain is saying lawyers are bad, but everyone quotes that as if Shakespeare is like telling us not to have lawyers. Do you know what I'm talking about? I know what you're talking about, but I don't remember which particular play it is from.
Speaker: What's interesting to me about this movie is the lawyer is basically a good guy in this. that That's a good kind of fusion here. He is well-meaning, but inefficacious.
Speaker: A lot of movies at the time, though, I felt like were like lawyers the bad guys, but go on. who doing What I'm trying to establish is that there's a break, right? like The sort of early 90s, 80s lawyers kind of come across very much as bad guys.
Speaker: At the time you get to like the early 2000s and you've got like Legally Blonde and stuff, lawyers are recuperated into this kind of like liberal recognition politics. There is a a pivot, I think that happens, but in this movie, it's like this almost borderland between the two ideas, because here the lawyer means well, it's kind of like a good guy but also is one of the primary voices at the beginning.
Speaker: Who's like, you, you promised you would just give it up. You know, like that we've tried everything we can. That's you you just got to give it up now, man. I want anybody getting hurt. Like, you know, So I think it's interesting because it it makes sense.
Speaker: If we take this Gen X view to be this kind of anti-authoritarian view, the lawyer is almost like a tragic character because he's someone who wants a good thing, but is in service to the system.
Speaker: Well, this is like a different topic entirely, but I was interested in talking about, I think if people listen to this, they'll think that we're centering the Charlie Sheen character, and he's definitely the center of the film. But I think Christy Swanson is also, she has her own story in this, and she's just as much of a focus, and you don't realize it until the end. Because most of the movie is Charlie Sheen making decisions that And she doesn't really make any decisions. She sort of, she doesn't have her voice. a really mean way to put it would be she doesn't, she doesn't have like the spine to go against her father. Right. You know, and then at the end of the movie, there's that sort of a switch that takes place and you realize, oh, this story has been just as much about her finding her voice and finding who she is as a person. Right. It's not just Charlie Sheen's story. I think her story is just as important to what makes this film effective for me.
Speaker: And I think it's very Gen X because there's almost like a female empowerment thing going on. There is a little bit of like a girl boss and it is it is it maybe be down the road kind of fitting because of course she is a child of great wealth who is basically coming to terms with that wealth, her agency's relationship to it, meaning like her freedom, not like you know her modeling agency or something. And maybe we should back up and and give a better sense of who she is. So she's the daughter of Dalton Voss, who is at one point characterized as the Donald Trump of California, played by, I think, Ray Wise from Twin Peaks.
Speaker: The king of being like an evil father is probably the best way to describe him. And you know so ah some of the movie, actually some of the funnier sequences involve um Ray Wise and his wife, who is the young kind of trophy wife, stepmother of Chris Swanson character, and them coming down to the police station.
Speaker: There's a great scene early on where I guess whoever the chief, whoever's in charge of the station is like in his office. And this young guy comes in. He's like, oh, chief, I really, really need yeah something. He's like, shut up. Like, you know I'm busy. You know, right he's probably reading Playboy or something. And he's like, no, but it's a Dalton Voss's daughter. And there's only three cop cars. And he's like, three cop cars. Like, you know, what's going on? And where are those cop cars who can't be on site for the chase, but at a police officer's funeral.
Speaker: So there's this wonderful kind of like making a ah joke out of sort of, you know, cop culture, but, Anyway, back to the Voss character and and Swanson. She is someone who obviously resents her parents greatly.
Speaker: Her parents obviously think, or at least her father obviously thinks, that money can resolve any issue. This is returned to time and again, where he basically just keeps saying on the car phone, you know how much is it going to take? What can I pay you? How can I resolve this? And a key element of the movie is that money cannot solve the problem. And that, to me...
Speaker: is saying she understands, that Charlie Sheen understands that this older generation of sort of like Reaganified business people who rule the United States cannot understand. i was at the ah mother also Her mother and her mother's boyfriend also appear about midway through the movie, right? Yes.
Speaker: Like many Gen X films that we've covered, her parents are divorced and remarried, which is a a sort of big theme that threads its way throughout all of these podcast episodes. But the mother is this kind of like California bohemian married to this...
Speaker: irish american sort toy boy hunk he's like clearly an idiot it's quite interesting that his his the that the father dolce and voss's sort of attempt to solving the situation through money through commerce through like utilitarian exchange is foiled and like ultimately like met with but zero recognition for the gen x characters but the mother's attempt which is kind of like this emotional i think there's was there's a mention of like crystals perhaps or like astrology by the mother at one point yeah Like this kind of like new age self-actualized like emotional attempt to like resolve whatever's going on with the daughter is also kind of rejected or laughed at.
Speaker: So you get these two kind of strains of, you know I don't know, silent generation boomer thought, hyper capitalist individualism and like some kind of like still very individualistic new age bohemianism and they're both sort of seen as just like ridiculous.
Speaker: That's how I was going to swing it back to the daughter because she feels totally left in the lurch by the parents and is trying to figure out who she is. And it's obvious that money is not going to resolve that problem. And also the sort of like, you know, what it could be called California ideology is not going to solve the problem. You know, the sort of... ah joining up with EST or whatever that that group is called. like That's not going to do it either. So she, ironically, is brought to agency, to self-consciousness, through being presented with this Charlie Sheen character who's this wrongfully accused kidnapper, for lack of a better term.
Speaker: which to me is very like Gen X. There's something kind of beautiful about it because it's like, oh, the only way to escape is actually for this like Deus Ex Machina to happen where, you know, someone from ah totally outside of my world, something I can't even imagine. Like if we rewind, her character could never imagine walking into that gas station that she's going to get kidnapped with Butterfinger.
Speaker: It's not in her world, but it requires this like active God to even have the possibility that she could escape this like totalizing system that America has produced, which her parents typify.
Speaker: So that does feel very Gen X to me as well. She needed that tiger blood. yeah exactly yeah I was going to say, what what did like Charlie Sheen represent to the American audience at this point? i mean He'd been in tune, no?
Speaker: He'd been in a lot of things, and I don't know what he represents, because Charlie Sheen's a very unusual actor. Yeah. In that, ah I think he's a very good actor, and I think in ways he's more exceptional than not just most actors of his generation, but just a lot of actors in general, because...
Speaker: He was playing, you know, in the 80s, he was playing, you know, delinquent characters like in, ah what was the movie I was thinking of? um The Boys Next Door, which is a very brutal film about thrill killing and two thrill killers. And Charlie Sheen plays one of them.
Speaker: And it's ah it's like a very serious movie. But then in this, he's doing comedy. And he's playing a sympathetic character. you know Whereas in The Boys Next Door or a movie he did later, like Bad Day on the Block or Under Pressure, he's playing a domestic psycho. He pleases has a very wide range.
Speaker: It is interesting that ah a through line for a lot of his roles is this seeming recognition from audiences that psychosis is in him. like It's true that that's not who he is in every movie. like Take Major League, a movie I basically grew up with.
Speaker: where his whole thing is that he's a really good baseball player, but his nickname is Wild Thing because he's kind of a freak who doesn't really fit in with the the world of baseball. That's true. There's sort of a rebellious streak to all his characters in a way.
Speaker: Which is interesting because here it is playing on that, right? like He is recognizable as a rebel, as a kidnapper, as a bad guy, but in reality, he's a teddy bear and he's sweet and he's a good guy who's been misapprehended, basically.
Speaker: In real life, it's a different story. Yeah, no, no. I mean, that's I almost feel weird because I know people are going to think, like, why is he praising? I really think he's a great actor. But then, like, you look at Charlie Sheen, the person, you're wow, this person's a train wreck. Well, we're we're we're separating ah the art from the artist from the person here on Death is a Photograph, ah specifically with respect to Charlie Sheen.
Speaker: To be fair though, he really doesn't get his due in a way because he is so understandably untouchable, you know, given where his career would would go. It's sort of like my vantage as a kind of for late millennial, early Gen Z person who only really knew Charlie Sheen from that infamous sort of cocaine, drugs interview quite late on, I think in the early 2010s.
Speaker: I had no contact with him before that. And, like, sort of only really knew him from that. And then, you know, I think I watched Platoon, like, six months ago. And sort of went, what the fuck? Like, Charlie Sheen's playing this sort like, complicated everyman, like, all-American suburban kid in a Vietnam. pop ah yeah I mean, it's interesting, like, that film, like, as a kind of Gen X attempt to understand the boomer experience in Vietnam.
Speaker: And Sheen, I think, is born, importantly, in 65, right? So he's sort of, like, the first year of Gen X. Sheen is in this kind of interesting position of, you like a... I mean, she shares, like, not to skip forward to Detroit Rock City too quickly, but there's something very Charlie Sheen-like about one of the characters in that film, Hawk. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Right. Like, I almost felt like I was watching someone do an impression of Charlie Sheen, like a teenager do an impression of Charlie Sheen. Yeah, i I mean, unless we have more things to say about The Chase, I'm fine with pivoting to Detroit Rock City. I'll say this about The Chase. I think it's a film worth analyzing, but I also think people have to understand the context it was made in, which is... So right before this movie, Adam Rifkin had made a movie called The Dark Backward.
Speaker: which I think had Judd Nelson, I want to say, and I think Bill Paxton may have been in it. But it was a very, very weird, dark comedy, and it bombed very badly. Rifkin panicked and said, oh my god,
Speaker: my movie just bombed, I'm going to get kicked out of Hollywood. I need to make a high-concept movie, as in a movie I can describe in one line, and people will be like, I want to see that.
Speaker: And I need to do it on a modest budget, or I'm not going to be in Hollywood much longer. but it's It's a film worth analyzing. I guess my point is, he he very much knows that that could have been his last movie. So he's thinking...
Speaker: I think he wanted to make a movie that was entertaining first and maybe had ideas in it second. But I think that that is sort of what makes it so interesting for our purposes, that it sort of like bears out all of these silent realities of 1994 America without even necessarily always theorizing them that way, right? Like you're saying this is a movie that's made to make some money, rehabilitate Rifkin's career. He's not trying to do...
Speaker: you know I don't know. he's He's not trying to make the prestige or something. so That's also, by the way, I was bringing that up also in relation to Charlie Sheen. is Charlie Sheen, even though he was a very big name actor by the 90s, he's one of those actors that if you gave him some money, he would do lower budget movies.
Speaker: So it's weird because he walks between the A-list world and the B-list world, even in like the 90s. And you know it's interesting what Sam said about Charlie Sheen, that um you know we only know him now because of the Coke and the ah parties and the yeah just other horrible...
Speaker: I mean, the abuse of Capri Anderson, I think, was the adult star. But even in the 90s, he sort of had controversies around him. He was he was dating Ginger Lynn Allen, the adult star, I think, in the 90s. So, you know, that was a big controversy and, like, scandal. up He was always sort of ah a scandal magnet.
Speaker: There's almost like something punk rock about him. Yeah, I mean, he's incredibly refreshing as a sort of leading man. There's something quite dissonant about a young Charlie Sheen versus the kind of like typical male protagonist of like a film made last year.
Speaker: and the sense that he's not like, he's not bad looking, but he's... He's just kind of like average. He's kind of like this wry, very cynical. He looks like a working schmo, which is what the character is, right?
Speaker: Yeah, and yeah, and yeah, he's like absolutely magnetic to um the Kirsten Swanson character, Natalie Voss, who's like, I don't know, like manna from heaven. She's just like beyond good looking in this all.
Speaker: And I guess you could make a critique of that, that like it's kind of displays Gen X's kind of i a problematic kind of like a celebration of sort of male slackydom. but i did But at the same time, something kind of like liberating about this kind of like working class, fairly average guy who nonetheless is this kind of like role model, but maybe like role model, kind of a archetype of something to be like attained.
Speaker: And also, I mean, we were just saying he's 65, so he's like, you know, the Gen x the the beginning of Gen X. of Of course, he's the perfect star for the period. I mean, you know, the 90s, 90s, 2000s, it's the period for this mass media kind of 24-hour news coverage. But it's also the age in which, yeah, Jerry Springer, the age in which Girls Gone Wild is going to come about, the age in which this, you know, we want to talk about wrestling. It's going to be the the age of the bra and panties match. I mean, this is a ah time in which someone like Charlie Sheen is almost like an avatar for the time itself. A bad boy who maybe isn't the greatest looking guy on earth, but who's got an effortless cool that inheres in his just rebelliousness. as I was going say, it really contrasts with like 10 years later. You get to like six, seven years later, you get like 2000, at least in like British culture.
Speaker: The archetype moves, is very much like six pack, short hair, slightly metrosexual, kind of like flirting with the feminine, but it's very like uber masculine, like Jim going away.
Speaker: And yeah, like seeing stuff from like only like six years earlier, where it's like the archetype is kind of, It sounds like what you're you're picking up on is he does not look like your average action star, especially given what would come later with like, I've always hated that like nowadays it feels like we have like the pretty boy action movie star. Like that's why I've never been a fan of Vin Diesel.
Speaker: Like I know women that love Vin Diesel and that's cool and all, but I'm like, I prefer my action stars to look more like Charles Bronson or like some like beat up dude like Bruce Willis. And Charlie Sheen does not look like your average action star. He just looks like a dude.
Speaker: The last thing I'll say is ah about the chases. I'm always surprised when I watch this movie how much Charlie Sheen is able to just ah convey almost everything through his eyes and his facial expressions. As he goes from like portraying nervousness to affection to, I'm at the end of my rope and I'm about to probably commit suicide by getting out of this car and getting shot by cops. And I'm i'm out i'm constantly amazed at how good of an actor he really was.
Speaker: a I have one more question on the chase, and then we'll we'll move on to Detroit City, which is, I mean, how much do you think something like Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, which came out in 1988, would have made its way to Hollywood at this point?
Speaker: mean, it kind of feels like, it the entire film in some ways feels like a riff on Manufacturing Consent, like, especially the the elements around the the media circus, this TV producer in the back of the cop car. You know, the way that the TV producer is sort of like,
Speaker: subtly directing the cops towards certain situations. I have found that certain directors and producers in Hollywood are much more astute about that kind of thing than I would initially think. you know one One of my favorite people that I interviewed was Brian Yosna, who specialized in um sort of these low-budget horror movies like... ah reanimator and most famously society, which is almost like the Marxist horror movie. It's literally a class struggle body horror movie. yeah And, you know, he's very well read and you wouldn't think that about Hollywood people, but you know, it's possible, I guess is what I'm saying that someone like Rifkin would be influenced by something like manufacturing consent. I don't find it out of the realm of possibility.
Speaker: And if listeners have not seen Re-Animator or – is the sequel Bride of Re-Animator? Am I remembering that? Bride of Re-Animator, yeah. And then, of course, From Beyond, the other Stuart Gordon movie from that kind of – they really should because those are all – ah Just exceptional.
Speaker: um I'll just say on what you were saying there, Sam. I do think the end of the movie, which we actually haven't really discussed, and I won't say too much except to say that it is telling to me that you have to literally get out of the United States and like assert yourself violently to be able to kind of break out of the...
Speaker: media environment and also just like the conditions of life that have been constructed for you in the movie. The only way for her to claim her agency and the only way for Charlie Sheen to kind of get out of his situation are for both of them to effectively, in his case, act in this giving way and in her case to sort of act in a rebellious way that is also giving without saying too much about what happens.
Speaker: And again, it seems important to me that that's all outside the US. So I don't know if obviously they've read Chomsky, who's to say, but it does seem to me that the kinds of problems that Chomsky is interested in are reflected to us in the movie. And you know we might call that in our fancy academic speak that I spent way too much of my life having to learn and not use, a symptomatic reading.
Speaker: We're looking for those things in the text that it is just presenting to us without even consciously thinking about why they have to be the case. Maybe Rifkin just intuitively understood what Chomsky intellectualized. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he was just, he just got it because he was watching the news, you know? He's also, he's also like in the sausage factory, right? In a sense, like if we, if we extend the notion of media beyond news proper to just like anything that media is like, Rifkin's are the controls in some ways.
Speaker: I mean, I think it depends on the – it's very like – in my experiences with Hollywood people, they're either one way or the other. They're either like, ah I know nothing about the world outside me and I just need to make a movie with big explosions.
Speaker: Or they're like very insightful about stuff when you talk to them about like politics or whatnot. It's never in between. Well, the movie I was going to bring up that your question made me think about, Sam, is of course Robert Altman's The Player, which is from a couple of years earlier and is a movie about sort of, you know, it's basically Altman giving a middle finger to Hollywood for what happened to him in the in the eighty s And that's a movie very much about like the the shallowness, but also the ultimate victory of the evil studio executive.
Speaker: And if we think about Rifkin as a guy who's coming off of making this movie that you mentioned earlier, J.G., which I looked up the plot and it ah it seems to be about a garbage man who tries stand-up comedy, who eventually develops a third arm coming out of his back.
Speaker: who has that fail and then has to sort of like give the people the slop they want, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it. he He would have to be attuned to some of these problems because to make a smart movie like The Chase that is also entertaining and makes money, you simply have to be aware of how things work.
Speaker: it's fascinating that this is a movie is sort of a lot of people will see it as condemning the sort of 24 7 news cycle and tabloid media but we're just as much voyeurs as the characters that are watching the chase within the narrative yeah you see what i mean like we're you know we're getting off on the excitement the same way the characters in the movie who are watching it unfold are getting off on Well, and yeah, we've we've gone to the movies or the video store and have decided to watch The Chase with Charlie Sheen and Christy Swanson. like you know we We know what we're getting.
Speaker: Yeah, okay. ah the This will be the the pretend space in which we play music. that You know, da-da-da-da-da. With that, I'm going to say we're back with the second Adam Rifkin movie from 1999, as I recall, Detroit Rock City, which is a very different kind of movie. And I think in that sense, maybe reflects the journeyman thing that you were talking about, JG. Maybe you could say a little bit about what it is that happens in the broadest sense.
Speaker: Well, let let's, I want to do something first. I want to say that this is sort of the perfect contrast to the previous film we talked about, The Chase. because The Chase has this sort of very cynical view of all the institutions and and just everything, right? It's just sort of poking fun and satirizing the 90s completely.
Speaker: And this is like this warm-hearted, loving tribute to teenage rebellion in the nineteen seventy s rock era. It's like a much sweeter, they're both sweet movies, but this is like, there's not that sort of cynicism that you see in The Chase.
Speaker: Yeah, it's definitely a movie about how much the 70s kind of rocked, um which is a, know, maybe we'll discuss this in in a few minutes, but is a major theme of like what I call Y2K cinema, the sort of very late ninety s early 2000s.
Speaker: Right. And for people that don't know Detroit Rock City, in any other filmmaker's hands, I think this would have just been... movie commissioned by Gene Simmons, who Gene Simmons is a whore, right? I mean, this dude is like, this dude, at the height of Kiss's fame, he had a movie made called Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, where Kiss fights a Phantom of the Park, like some pulp movie or some ah stuff that's on ABC primetime movie of the night.
Speaker: Okay. Like he has whored himself out constantly. He's like, Oh, put me in the Tony Hawk game. Just give me a ton of money. you know, and I mean, he's even gotten into comic books. He created a superhero called dominatrix and I doubt he wrote anything. He probably just said, I want this cool dominatrix character based on my wife and, uh, you know, someone else write it and I'll put my name on it.
Speaker: But I mean, he's literally a whore. So by the nineties, he's like, Wow, i I need to just make a movie about Kiss. But Rifkin manages to make a movie that is presumably about Kiss, but it's not really about Kiss. And I guess that's where we can get into the story. Do you want me to go over that real quick? Yeah, maybe just it's worth saying that, yes, Kiss is is literally behind the movie. So, I mean, as J.G. will say in a second, it's a movie about Kiss, but it is also like the equivalent of like a Kiss-sponsored film in the same way that Red Hot Chili Peppers was involved in the other one, but turned up to a thousand.
Speaker: Right, So it basically centers on four youths in 1970s America, led by the great Edward Furlong of Terminator 2 fame, and also backed up by ah an actor who I very much miss and who went missing a few years ago, Giuseppe Andrews, who is really great in his role in this, and James DiBello, and I forget the fourth actor.
Speaker: Sam Huntsman. Sam Hunt, yeah, yeah. But you have this quartet of four kids. They're kind of the misfit kids that like smoke weed, maybe have a parent or two that likes acid and another parent that is a fundamentalist Christian nutbag that thinks KISS means Knights in Satan's service and doesn't want them listening to the records.
Speaker: And you have these four kids. All they want to do is see KISS. They've had their plans to see KISS thwarted three times prior, and this time they're going to see KISS. In Detroit, it's Detroit Rock City, baby. But there's going to be a lot of obstacles along the way yeah and a lot of ah sort of slapstick humor, I would say.
Speaker: No, that's perfect. And I have to ask Sam because I've seen your notes and your questions, Sam. To what degree are you familiar with what I will describe as Israeli-American rock band KISS?
Speaker: sir ah So my my and my entire familiarity with Kiss comes from reading Simpsons comics as a ah late child, early teenager. I mean, someone might phone in or write in and correct me, but I think they were never big in the UK. We had David Bowie, who is far superior.
Speaker: I could tell that you knew nothing about Kiss when you sent me the notes for this. as She talked about, oh, that woman that Edward Furlong gets with, and I'm like, oh, he doesn't realize that's Gene Simmons' wife. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, no no, this is this is this a foreign territory. um I think that that and then I had four friends dress up as Kiss for Halloween once, which is amazing. But yeah, I've never listened to their music.
Speaker: i mean, they they feel like very much like a franchise band, like the Monkees or something. like it's It's more about the merchandise than anything else. Well, it is interesting because that accords with the Gene Simmons as horror... that JG was making earlier. He even admits to it. You know, he's like, I'm in the business of merchandising.
Speaker: You know, the music is just a soundtrack to the merchandise. Yeah, I mean, it feels like a band that's been like conceived in like a basement of Atlantic Records with two record producers on crack. I don't know.
Speaker: I have to add this in here. This is around the same time that he worked out a thing with the wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling, which at the time was big. you know It was just as big as WWF, WWE.
Speaker: And he literally did a concert at one of their shows, and then they created a wrestler called the Kiss Demon, who dressed up like Gene Simmons and wrestled. So that shows you that like he really was a whore.
Speaker: So to the the movie itself, ah let me get on my soapbox very briefly, actually, which is that you mentioned the mom as a fundamentalist Christian, the the mom of um sort of our our main character insofar as we have one. The mom played by Lynn Shea, who was, ah you know, this is a New Line Cinema movie. New Line Cinema was run by Robert Shea. Lynn Shea is his wife, so nepotism.
Speaker: But also, she's a good actress. She's been a lot of great movies over the years. Very familiar face. If you've watched any amount of film for a... a long time. So you described her as a fundamentalist Christian, which is true.
Speaker: But something this movie does that is is to my eternal frustration in Hollywood depictions of religion and specifically Christianity is she is treated as both a Catholic and a fundamentalist Christian. And I'm not saying there are not Catholics who are not like that to a certain extent, but she is. no I don't think she was Catholic. I think she just took her kid to that Catholic priest because there was no other churches around. I thought there was a crucifix in the house. I might be wrong.
Speaker: She threatens to send him, well, she does send him to a boarding school that's called, like, St. Xavier's or something, that's run by a priest called Father McNulty. Okay, so that, that, they were Catholic, okay. Yeah, we're definitely in Catholic territory, yeah.
Speaker: Well, and because she takes him to, when once they're in Detroit, you know which we'll get to you know chronologically. I was thinking of the second priest that she takes. off Oh, yeah, that guy who's, we should say something about the movie Send-Up of Religion because it does feel very Gen X to me, right?
Speaker: but This is literally listed in the trope book of media, right? Like, all Christianity is Catholic, effectively. Well, it's because, I mean, the the rituals and symbols kind of make it an easy stand-in. Like, this is a movie that uses the confessional as a comedic device when later on, you know, this couple basically has sex in there. And that then gives him the ability, but again, we're getting out of ourselves, but gives him the ability to confess the sexual sins the priest wants to hear that he can then escape.
Speaker: Right? So you have to have sex in the confessional to be able to see kiss. Like that's sort of a prerequisite. And the the movie is very preoccupied with sex, of course. um You know, not only do we get something I know Sam wanted to talk about, the, um you know, 14-year-old or 15-year-old boy being in the strip show and having sex with this sort of cougar woman in a car who, you know, lavishes him with gifts, basically. But also, it Kiss is figured in the movie as this force for sexual liberation, like rock and roll to Detroit Rock City. Is this almost like, okay, if you take whoever's seen Sinners, the recent you know sort of vampire blues musical dramedy that came out,
Speaker: that movie, in that movie, Blues, it you know are both good and scary. This is like, what if it were just good? What if, like, Rocket Roll were a purely liberatory force that could deliver you from, you know, having to live in the suburbs and make it so that you can stick your tongue out, like, really far?
Speaker: So what I going to say is, like, Kiss feels, despite all of this, like, desire for, like, liberation from, like, middle-class suburbia, KISS feels deeply suburban, right? Like at the time, if you were like a cool art kid in New York, you you weren't listening to KISS, right? I'm assuming you were listening to like television or like Talking Heads or something.
Speaker: ah you You're going to have to inform me on this, but I i imagine the average sort of KISS fan is like, you know, a sort of Midwestern suburban. Like they feel incredibly suburban as a band. Well, here's the thing about this movie, if I could, and I think people really have to understand this.
Speaker: I do not consider this, ah I don't consider it a true 70s period piece. What I mean by that is it's a 90s reimagining of the 70s loaded with Gen X irony.
Speaker: It's a snapshot of late 90s nostalgia for 70s rock culture filtered through a sort of post-Wayne's world, post-American pie sensibility. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't think it's true 70s movie. Like it's not trying to, everything in it is exaggerated. I don't think it's actually trying. I think it's very self-aware that it's doing this. I was going to say it, the main characters really remind me like a film that comes up, sorry, a TV show that comes up the exact same year as Freaks and Geeks. Oh, yeah. it Comes out in 1999 as well. And it's supposed to be set in like 1980, so like two years off this. I think this ah detro Detroit Rock City is set in 78, so like two years later. But I mean, the green camo jackets, the sort of baggy trousers, like the sort of like erstwhile sort of like timeless sort of atemporal stoner culture.
Speaker: like it's all like it's very much there. The other thing I was going to say about this movie, I've had people in the past say to me that the movie doesn't work today because of the humor. And I get that the humor would not... It's it's very politically incorrect now.
Speaker: But I also... It's hard for me to be offended by it because it operates... The whole movie operates in such an exaggerated and cartoonish register that's deliberately divorced from realism that the whole thing just feels like a harmless adolescent fantasy.
Speaker: you know like it's It's too goofy for me to be offended by any of the off-kilter elements. But it is it is interesting interesting. I agree with you that it is like obviously meant to be exaggerated. and sort of like You're supposed to have fun with it. And it is this reimagining of almost like, yeah, Generation Jones, like the oldest versions of Gen X's youth, basically.
Speaker: but In some ways, I think it's both at admiring and almost like it's it's almost like a parody of seventy s culture in some ways. What I find weird about that moment is like, it's so retrospectively in terms of like subculture mythologies about the late 70s, like, or just about ah the the second half of the 20th century, right? Like, big touchstones. It's like,
Speaker: 1968, like, Woodstock, The Acid Wave, and then, like, 70s, it's kind of, like, mid-70s, Lower East Side, Birth of Punk, and then you sort of, like, fast forward to and grunge.
Speaker: But that's the kind of, like, narrative that we're playing with. I, like, yeah, like, 1978, Kiss Mania? it just feels like this kind of like, dustbin of history, man. I'm just so curious, like, beyond, like, Kiss sponsoring the film, like, was there any sense of, like,
Speaker: This being like a sort of big cultural touchstone in 1999, like it it just seems completely irrelevant to me. this This was not – I don't think this movie did that well when it came out. It did not. It lost money. um But I do think it is talking about a real thing, though, right? which is I think Kiss was big in the late 70s, though, for real. I mean, like I said, they had an ABC primetime movie called Kiss Meets the Fan of the Park, ridiculous as it was. The fact that they had a TV movie made about them, I mean, they were part of the zeitgeist. Well, Sam, I think part of it is that this is really the birth of arena rock. right And a lot of the other arena rock bands have sort of maintained themselves a little better. Like Queen would be a good example of a similarly timed band that has remained to a certain degree more culturally relevant.
Speaker: So it is real, right? But I think you put your finger on something important, which is that it is mainstream real. You know, it's not mainstream in the sense that it's obviously not what everyone at school listens to They are figured as kind of outcasts.
Speaker: But i feel like that has as much to do with how... KISS wants to imagine its own rebellion-stoking potential as it does to what KISS actually is.
Speaker: right like The kids who were getting beat up at the school probably would have been the punks or something. The kids were listening to Pair Ubu, not the you know not the kids who were listening to KISS. And it's notable to me, if I can compare this with another movie we've watched for this season, It's notable to me that they do get into their fight with the disco guys. That happens, right? That's how they kind of semi-kidnap Natasha Leone. In any case, in the imaginary world of this movie, you do get the square off between the rockers and the disco guys. And obviously there's some truth to that.
Speaker: But if we look at a movie that takes place in an urban center that I think is truer to reality because it's about an actual thing that happened, to the Son of Sam murders, we watched Spike Lee's Summer of Sam.
Speaker: And the war in that movie is between the punks and the disco guys, and there are these kind of ethnic undercurrents and all these things. In this movie, punk is eliminated, and instead it's like, oh no, the great Manichaean war for the soul of the American suburbanite is like the macho but also kind of like ethnically bad disco guys who like drive on the highway and treat women poorly in their way. The guidos, as they call them. Yes, exactly. Versus the rockers, the guys who, you know, maybe they're kind of shitty, but like ultimately they're just trying to have fun. Like they're not self-serious like the disco guys. And I don't necessarily think that that's what like Rifkin believes, but I think that's the world that Kiss once created and it is the world we get. And I think it's important because it shows us how the seventies are being mythologized and remembered
Speaker: in the 90s, in the way that J.G. is talking about. And obviously, in some cases, that worked, right? Like that 70s show, gigantic TV show from only a few years later. Dick, which is a bizarre reimagining of the Watergate scandal, right?
Speaker: You have The Last Days of Disco by Whit Stillman as well. Yep, the Whit Stillman movie. Yep. So there is room for that reimagination. And I think it's telling that Gen X wants to reimagine its own roots, right?
Speaker: I just think that the KISS version is maybe, wasn't successful because it was a little too... too much Adam Rifkin is kind of like cocking a wink at the audience and maybe like at the expense of Kiss in the sense that the disco guy, the sort of Italian-American disco guys and the sort of Kiss rockers, like neither are sort of depicted like massively. Like this there's a scene and where they sort of get in a fight on the highway. and like both I think both sides are sort of depicted as pig-headed. yeah. Sort of like subtly homophobic.
Speaker: but yeah i think Yeah, there's a scene in the car where they pick up the the disco chick and the character, the beanie and the long hair is trying to get her to sort of give them all sort of head, oh yeah road head in the car.
Speaker: like Yeah, I think Riskin open about rock culture being... Well, it is maybe an interesting question that I would like to ask, because it's a movie in which sexuality is pretty free-flowing, right? I mean, we we already mentioned this with um the sex of the confessional, with what you're talking about where they're trying to pressure Natasha Leone into you know basically sex acts in the car, so on and so forth. But also, right, we get a scene where one of the characters breaks into the show and discovers that backstage they've got hot tubs full of groupies and they're being lit into the trailer and
Speaker: it is very much this world of like sexually liberated rock and roll. Do we think that the movie is kind of like interested in criticizing that, Sam? Because you seem to be suggesting that that might be true to a degree. Whereas in my initial viewing, at least, I was like, you know this is that classic Y2K moment, the American Pie moment, as JG said earlier, where like,
Speaker: the investment in like teen sexuality is at kind of a premium or like an extreme high in film and TV and just the culture. I don't know, though. like All the characters seem kind of like quite sexually naive in a way, which I think is another thread that runs through Gen X, right? like we We watched Streetwise 1984 a few episodes a ago, and like those you know that includes like scenes of child prostitution, and yet even those characters like seem quite under-sexualized in comparison to say millennials like if you if you sort of like compare Detroit Rock City to a millennial coming of age film like Superbad like Superbad there's this kind of foregrounding of like perverse like almost kind of an overdone hyperbolic sexuality in the characters like there's ah there's a main character who is constantly drawing penises like in more and more inventive ways in like iterations of different penises throughout the whole thing
Speaker: I think Sam may be onto to something in that, uh, the Detroit or city, like that they are sexual, but they're kind of, there's this constant like reluctance or trepidation around sex from all the male characters. Well, especially with Furlong's character. Yeah.
Speaker: Stage fright. Oh, yeah. oh yeah i think I think there is. i mean, for me, this movie, in a lot of ways, I consider something like American Pie much more offensive to my taste than this movie, just because like the world that's presented here, Rifkin isn't telling you to emulate that world. He's just providing you with a really blown out caricature of basically the adolescent id.
Speaker: But Gene Simmons is telling you to emulate that world. That's what he... Well, he stands, but I don't know that Rifkin is, and i I think it knowingly leans into stereotypes and excess as sort of a way of maybe mocking those tropes. Because, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, there's like a few tender moments they have with all the women that they become interested in.
Speaker: It's not just about the sex. I don't know if you would agree with that, but... I would, and it it's an opportunity to bring up one of the characters who keeping the names of these four boys straight is difficult, but the small one who ends up ah dancing in the in the strip contest at the... That's ah Edward Furlong's character, yeah. Yes. yes They need money, right? Just to get on the actual plot here, basically, they get tickets. The tickets are initially taken from them and then eventually destroyed by this omnipresent mother character who happens to be at the concert protesting and therefore catches them in the act of trying to go to the concert. So they need to come up with the money to get the tickets. And of course, there is this transparently ah kind of lying scalper who's like, yeah, if you bring me 100 bucks, I'll get you the tickets. So
Speaker: They all set off on their different paths. And I do think it was kind of interesting in a kind of Scooby-Doo, but also in a Gen X individualism way, that they don't work together to get the tickets. They each go on their own little entrepreneurial voyage to individually get the money to get the tickets. And one of these, furlong character, goes into this strip club.
Speaker: And it's very funny. He realizes he's going to be up. He's this like tiny little shrimpy guy. He's up against a bunch of like you know cut 25 years. He's never had a drink in his life. Yeah, it goes in there. There's this Cougar, Stifler's mom, Jennifer Coolidge-style MILF character who is constantly buying him drinks. He's getting really drunk at the bar. He gets up and tries to strip and ends up just vomiting into a pitcher that they pass to him, which is a really funny sequence. Anyway, the tender part of that character is that despite losing at the contest, obviously, you know, there's this moment where they build it up. as it Maybe he's going to win. Maybe he was so successful that he can actually beat all these giant dudes.
Speaker: And no, of course, he's he's defeated handily. But this cougar is still interested in him. And then so they end up going out and she's almost like... yeah, counsel's restraint. You know, she's, we're going to go, going to have some drinks. They're sitting in the car, they're talking. They have this almost like tender relationship despite the fact that he is very obviously a a child and she is very obviously, you know, i don't know, in her 30s or 40s or something. Well, she he won't take the money from her. Yes, right. That's it. Yeah, say something about that, JG, because I didn't, I forgot to say that.
Speaker: Well, they they have sex. Then she's like, here, I want you to have the money. And he says, it wouldn't feel special or something like that if I took the money. It wouldn't feel right. And she's like, well, it's it's not about the money. It's about there's some reason you need this money and it must be very important to you. so i'm going to give it to you anyways. I don't care.
Speaker: At least for several of the characters, so each of them goes off on their little journeys, right? So that's one. We get the one in the confessional that we've already spoken about. There's another character who is sort of like the goon of the group, basically, who is like, i'm just going to shake somebody down and take their tickets. like That's the same thing. That's James DiBello, yes.
Speaker: And so he goes and tries to shake down this tiny kid who's playing, a i think, in a pinball machine or something. And of course, it turns out that he has like this gigantic brother whose name is Cornfed or something.
Speaker: So it's this gigantic guy who can obviously beat the crap out of him. And this... turns into this complicated sequence where almost like Homer Simpson robbing the Quickie Mart style, you know, he needs to like go through what it's going to require to shake down this convenience store to get the money that he now owes to this little boy and his much larger brother. um And that one also involves a romantic connection because during the robbery that he sort of it Basically, someone else turns out to be robbing the store moments before he's about to rob the store. So instead of Homer Simpson waking up in his car and realizing he's holding a hot dog rather than a gun, instead he comes to from his vision of what robbing the store would be like to discover that someone is already robbing the store. um And so this allows him to then be the hero using this kind of stretch Armstrong doll to pretend to have a gun in it, frankly, in a scene reminiscent of the chases Charlie Sheen with a Butterfinger, right?
Speaker: It's weird because he's like portrayed as an idiot, but he ends up being very smart by the end of the film. He's like resourceful. He's making it all work. He gets the girl and then the girl like wants him to stay, but he's sort of in a traditional hero is like, no, I need to, you know, go. I have to basically have to go rock and roll. And she's like, oh you know, come back. I want to see you again. you know, that kind of thing.
Speaker: I love, I love the part where he says, she's like, what's your name? Call me Dr. Love. Yeah. Dr. Love. I can remember what the nickname was. Right. Yeah. So, okay, going through this, I will say i have come around to the view you were expressing, Sam, that this is sort of, there is like a tender jokiness to the way that sexuality is depicted. so Yeah, like even the puke hawks in the sh strip club, the puke scene where he's puking,
Speaker: I feel like if this was a film from 2005 or 2015, I don't know, of like like a cutscene from The Inbetweeners, which like American viewers might not be familiar with, like it would be played for like real gross shock value.
Speaker: Somehow, even the puking was kind of like, somehow like sympathetic, in a way that I just feel like if a sort of like slightly later coming of age film would be. Well, it's it's because Rifkin cuts it in this interesting way where it's a mixed, it's very fast cuts, much like with the the chase we were talking about earlier, where you go back and forth between kind of profile shots of him vomiting directly into the thing and then reaction shots from the crowd who are increasingly just like aghast at what's happening. Like not in a what's happening is disgusting way, but in a like, oh no, I'm watching a 15-year-old puke his brain down in a strip club stage way.
Speaker: I just feel like a millennial film, would he would have lost the crowd at that point. like That would be the kind of like the end of his shots. And yet he he kind of he has a salvation in the dance where even though he loses, the crowd kind of... like He brings the crowd back.
Speaker: He gets all these disco people who enjoy Kiss. Yeah, oh that's a good point too, right? It's interesting how... That's what I meant by he does these like weird mini cliffhangers in his movies where he's telling the James DiBello subplot, where James is in the store wondering if he's going to rob the store.
Speaker: And then when he's about to do something, it cuts to Giuseppe Andrews' plot where he's going into the ah garage where Natasha Lyonne's character is being held hostage and where he has to get his car back. And then it you know just as something's about to happen in that subplot, it cuts back to Edward Furlong's character in The Bar.
Speaker: You know, it is interesting that in this movie, it makes more overt sense, right? Because there are essentially four main characters in this film. Whereas in The Chase, he does it definitely by going between these kind of like various vigilante or cop or news characters, these kind of voyeur characters, the characters who are watching The Chase become the other perspectives rather than just, you know, the the four boys from Detroit Rock City.
Speaker: I wanted to ask what people made of, I guess, a very definite narrative for like Gen X and also millennials. I mean, Brace Belden of True Anon is a ah big case on this. Like ah the sort of idea of like the troubled teen.
Speaker: Something you find, a trope you find in so much kind of 90s and early 2000s media is kind of the overwhelming threat of military school or boarding school. So I'm thinking Francis and Malcolm in the middle, who's sent away to to military school. Or i think AJ faces the threat of military school in The Sopranos.
Speaker: And yeah Jam, who's a kind of, I suppose, the sort of lawful, good protagonist. I mean, they all kind of fit on that kind of quadrant, don't they? There's like chaotic Evo. He's kind of like lawful, good character. He's very conscientious.
Speaker: He's actually probably the most conscientious character in the film. And he's constantly under the threat of boarding school. and being sent away from his kind of suburban ah high school to this kind of like uber-catholic school. And I wonder what this kind of like fear of the troubled teen, I mean, how that manifested for you watching this film.
Speaker: We can get into the boarding school theme thing and the troubled teen thing, but remember, I think it's interesting. So this movie comes out in August of 99. What happens in April of 99, earlier that year? Columbine.
Speaker: Columbine, yep. Yep. And what comes after Columbine, the moral panic around rock music, video games, and youth culture, you know? So in a way that, I mean, I don't think the filmmakers intended that because it obviously was, you know, in post-production by the time Columbine happened and the moral panic happened.
Speaker: But it feels like a very timely movie in a lot of ways. It's OJ all over again with the chase. Yeah. i I do need to say, to your point, Sam, this brings us full circle to the media circus Jerry Springer stuff from the discussion of The Chase. Because what is one of the most popular, you know, Maury, Jerry Springer, daytime TV sort of specials is the Troubled Teen. you know And sort of Bad Baby and the Catch Me Outside thing is like the tail end of that.
Speaker: That as a character, the scary teenager who is incapable of domestication, right? Why is J.G. Allen, but or sorry, J.G. Allen,
Speaker: you know Why did he get to be on daytime TV? Because he was thought of as someone who was influencing children till like, yeah, i get poo thrown at them at shows right and be bad kids. So there's something, i think the boarding school stuff and then eventually what becomes the wilderness therapy stuff.
Speaker: you know That's kind of the later version. But I think in the ninety s and early 2000s, it's the military academy because that's the institution that like society has to deal with that problem. And eventually, that's you know maybe there's not enough military academies, whatever. They have to invent these other programs based in Synanon and whatever.
Speaker: i Also, it it it feels like a response of the negligent parent in the sense that yes it it doesn't feel like a looming threat for like later millennials and Gen Z in the sense that their parents, by and large, are helicopter parents.
Speaker: They're so like intimately involved in every aspect of their children's lives that this this just sort of doesn't come up. And it's, I mean, it's interesting that Jam's sort of, yeah, weird evangelical hybrid Catholic mother, who is incredibly moralistic and it actually fairly negligent.
Speaker: yeah She sort of dumps um Jam at home and she goes, oh, I'm fucking off to Detroit. Doesn't tell him why. I'll be back whenever. And she's constantly chain-smoking as well, which I think is... I love that, that she's leaving him alone to protest Kiss.
Speaker: But like... like Don't worry, there's you know there's food in the oven and you're going out to, like I don't know, go to Mothers Against Drunk Driving meetings or something. it's just it's very it's so like She is not a trad wife, right? She's a single mother who spends a lot of her time. She's Phyllis Schlafly, right? She's the mother who like expresses her traditional femininity by doing protest and being politically active and being an agent in the world.
Speaker: What do you think of the bookend of her sort of story with the character Jam? Because I thought it was interesting at the end. She's like, oh, they grew up so It's almost like she's proud of him for standing up to her.
Speaker: That is an interesting question. The movie is very explicit that she... It's not just a hypocrite, but like it almost feels like the movie suggests that she, in her heart of hearts, actually does understand him. What I mean by that is when he gets up and sort of announces to the crowd you know why he's going to go see KISS to this crowd that's against you know teenagers and rock and roll or whatever the acronym is.
Speaker: He basically says like what Sam was saying, you left me at the house. you you know you're You're a single mom. You don't actually observe any of the things you claim to believe, blah, blah, blah. blah Yeah, it almost ends up feeling like that was the big moral lesson that she secretly wanted, that it was all like a charade to make it so that her son would come to like moral maturity. you know, like some kind of Zen master. Like if you've seen the video of the reporter asking Steven Seagal what the essence of Zen is and Steven Seagal in the most Steven Seagal way imaginable just grabs him and throws him into a nearby water fixture. Cause you know that like Steven Seagal has been like, I heard that the Zen masters, if you ask them about Zen, they just, that they hit you.
Speaker: Right? Like, and so you kind of feel like the mother is made out as that kind of character by the end in this, this odd way. yeah I don't know. I mean, yeah, she also says, like, they grew up so fast at the end. and I couldn't really tell if that was just a sort of, like, breaking of a full fire at Adam Rifkin to sort of wink at the audience. Or if it's just sort of a logical extension of this kind of negligence narrative, whereby, like, no it's kind of like, ah, he's rebelled against me. My moral, like, obligations or duties to this child is undead.
Speaker: don't have to look after him anymore. I do think you raise an important point, though, which is that all of the parents in the movie, we kind of whispered about this earlier, we didn't actually talk about it, are either like the kind of indulgent parents right who let you go down in the basement and play kiss covers and like smoke weed, right or they're like they're all absent in one way or another, but they're either absent by way of permission or absent by way of repression.
Speaker: And parental figures in the movie are located precisely by like, whether or not they care what their kids are doing, but they're never going to be there either way. And that to me is so Gen X, so Latchkey Kid, so important to the self mythologization. That's what gets us the, we were drinking out of hoses, you know, line that we all love to hear today.
Speaker: I was going to say, are there any other parents in the movie other than... Yeah, I was going to say, like I think Jam is the only one who has a present. Beth has her parents in it, but she's sort of a side character that exists for Jam's character development.
Speaker: Yeah. I was going to say, interestingly, Lex, I think his dad is like on a has gone off on like ah a huge conference for like two months as a gynecologist conference. Right, that's okay. You see the car, don't you? in the car lot once has been stolen. It just has gyno as a sort that's number of plates.
Speaker: But also, like, so in contrast to other films we've watched, they're very much about sort of working class negligence. These are upper middle class sort of suburban kids who are sort of still suffering the same sort of negligent fate.
Speaker: You're right. I forgot about the gynecologist bit. And it like Jeff's mother is obviously able to raise him, right? Like we don't get the sense that they're like deeply impoverished or something like that. So it is it is interesting that, yeah, the negligence is not like Marx and Capital talking about the moms, you know, drugging their babies that they can go work at the factory, right? It's very much like, no, we're just all in the workforce now. We're divorced. Therefore, there's no oversight.
Speaker: I don't know if it can get more Gen X than that, to be honest. Final thoughts on like Adam Rifkin as filmmaker, since we can maybe wind it up. <unk>ll I'll go last on this one. I want to formulate my thoughts. Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, I'll just say that I'm now going to watch The Backward Darkness, J.G. What was the one? The Dark Backward.
Speaker: I was as close as I was with J.G. Allen. I think if you haven't seen an Adam Rifkin movie and you're listening to this, I mean, whether or not you're interested from the generational perspective this podcast is taking or not, I strongly recommend checking these out and specifically other things Rifkin has done because...
Speaker: I found myself pretty surprised. And you know what This is something we haven't really mentioned that maybe is worth drawing out is that the 80s and 90s are kind of a golden age for a certain kind of trash cinema. I mean, obviously, you get a lot of great 70s exploitation movies, but you know your lower budget horror movies, the 80s is full of these like soft core fantasy movies and like sorcery, sword and sandal type movies. um The 90s, you get the revival of the kind of neo-noir erotic thriller that gives us ah you know Poison Ivy and movies like that.
Speaker: I think Rifkin is very reflective of that generational spirit just kind of in himself, this moment in the history of film and television that brought, if only for a second, that that world of quote-unquote B-cinema to the surface or to the major studio in a way that it hadn't been previously. So at that kind of meta level, I think he works as a choice as well, putting aside all of the particulars we talked about. And I do think that relationship between high and low has the potential to tell us quite a bit about Gen X's self-conception, sort of how it thinks of its own relationship to art and maybe breaking down the boundaries between, you know, the ossified world of art up here and the world of trash art down here that maybe in its worst version becomes Banksy and, you know, in its best version becomes something like The Chase.
Speaker: but know I know what you mean. um There's something like democratic about Rifkin's work in the sense that like yeah it's it's it's both sort of like lowbrow and highbrow. There's very little like friction or anxiety in that juxtaposition.
Speaker: like It feels incredibly natural in a way that I think maybe later filmmakers kind of would feel an anxiety around combining a kind of like shocky action film with an arch, very dry, almost old-school Groucho Marx-style ah they't Even before that, like kind of like Charlie Chaplin style slapstick.
Speaker: It's quite intellectual. That might seem was kind of dissonant, but yeah, there's a kind of like intellectual slapstick to to to these films. and yeah I wonder where the anxiety around sort of combining high and low in kind of modern filmmaking comes from. Because yeah, I think Rifkin feels but just incredibly happy inhabiting both worlds.
Speaker: So I think Rifkin is interesting because he very much is a fan of genre film and obviously grew up on it. I do think he's done things outside of sort of what we, I i hate the word lowbrow, but yeah I mean, he's done movies that are more, guess, high flute and highbrow.
Speaker: ah Night at the Golden Eagle is one. that movie I mentioned, Look, which is sort of a found footage drama comedy. He can be very experimental with a movie like Look, and then he can do a movie like Psycho Cop Returns and just make a slasher movie with Penthouse Pet Julie Strain, and then he can make a Charlie Sheen action comedy. Then he can do Mouse Hunt, this family-friendly comedy. Then he can do Detroit Rock City and give us a scene with ah Shannon Tweed after her great years is ah as a Skinamax actress. um
Speaker: He's just all over the place. It's very interesting to me. I think, like I said at the beginning, ah he interests me from sort of a technical standpoint more so than maybe you guys because but i literally think he should be taught in film schools.
Speaker: No, i I think he deserves like an auteurist profile. I mean, based on what seen. It's not even the auteurist element, though. it's If you wanted to teach a film student how to make movies on a budget and how to, he's very good with visual language.
Speaker: He's extremely adept at visual language through cutting, through dolly shots, and everything he does has a reason. You know, all the visual things have a reason. He's extremely adept at that.
Speaker: Did he ever work with Corman? I mean, just because so many of the guys who came up kind of knowing how do He did not work with Corman, but I can tell you who he he was mentored by. When he took up the Riff Coogan name for Invisible Maniac and Psycho Cop Returns, the reason he did that was he was told by John Landis Start making movies under a pseudonym and do these low-budget B-movie exploitation flicks, and that'll teach you how to make a movie.
Speaker: So he was mentored by Landis in a lot of ways. Wow. So there's ah an indirect connection between this and millennial staple Lisa Frankenstein, directed by ah John Landis' son.
Speaker: That's actually kind of fascinating. And I think especially what you're describing there is You used the word journeyman earlier, right This kind of like ability to just get in there and get it done.
Speaker: i think that comes across in both of the movies here, but it's also important because to some extent, that's a lost art. Not entirely, but in a world where there are fewer of these small and mid-sized budget pictures made by studios, you have fewer opportunities to do those kinds of things. And so maybe another way, thinking about Gen X is, i mean, this is a...
Speaker: period in which they're turning out a lot of lower budget and mid-budget things that gave directors opportunities to learn crafts like this. Things that are, you know, in some ways easier now, insofar as anyone can make a movie, upload it to YouTube, you know, all that good stuff.
Speaker: But in which doing that in a financially viable indie way or in a studio way is much harder. So Rifkin represents that too. I wanted to add to that because, uh,
Speaker: i all There was another person I was going to pick instead of Rifkin, but then I realized, oh, maybe they aren't Gen X enough. I was going to offer Kat Shia, but I think she's a boomer. But Kat Shia did a lot of movies like Strip to Kill and ah Dance of the Damned, but she also did Poison Ivy, which I always i consider that like a very quintessentially Gen X movie.
Speaker: But movies like Poison Ivy and The Chase, there was a time when those could be made in Hollywood and It feels like we've moved so far away from that now, where you could have directors sort of learn the ropes through making these like mid- to low-budget movies like Poison Ivy or The Chase.
Speaker: You don't see as that as much now. and Actually, this you reminded me of something I wanted to say, which is to get really kind of like ah in the weeds on this. so The producer on both these movies, one of the major producers, is a guy named Brad Wyman.
Speaker: He also produced Barb Wire, which is this weird Pamela Anderson like superhero, future like kind of cyberpunk movie. there's There's a lot of crossover between Barb Wire. who who did you say? ah Brad Wyman.
Speaker: is the guy's name. Yeah, another person that produced this and also was involved with Barbed Wire is a Tim Sullivan, who I would also recommend if you like Rifkin. Yeah, well, and I was just going to add that also, of course, Wyman did both of the Freeway movies, and I feel like I may have even, know I think I thought about one of the first one earlier, but those are in a kind of similar universe. I think the first Freeway movie is amazing. Is Natasha Lyonne in the second one? Am I...
Speaker: Remembering that correctly? I believe so. Yeah. Brittany Murphy's in the first one. I think Natasha's in the second one. And it's interesting because Wyman has made a bunch of movies, because I was looking this up at the time, like when I was watching these, just looking into the various people, that are, you know, became kind of like indie, more arthouse-seeming movies later on, like ah one called Normal Adolescent Behavior, which sounds like it might be like a mumblecore movie or something. So there's this this weird... um There is something that allows people to kind of float above genre or concern here in this way that's like part journeyman, but part also just having one foot in the world of, yeah, no jobs gay to bring back Sam's comparison and also in the world of entertainment.
Speaker: um That is, for for better words, I think really definitive for the generation that comes of age in the 80s, 90s, early two thousand s which is basically Yeah, to the point you're making. I mean, Rifkin is the only guy i think that could have done a movie in the 90s about a satanic serial killer cop.
Speaker: I mean, that movie, Psycho Cop 2, literally reenacts the Rodney King incident, and then they beat the shit out of the cop at the end. And it's like, only in the 90s from a Gen X director could you get a cop slasher movie that's commenting on the Rodney King incident.
Speaker: Yeah, because you know what? To compare this to our own you know moment now, right? You would need, it would have to be a situation where they like, I don't know. i can't even think of anything that's like ridiculous enough. I don't know, re-swap them or something? thats or Or just like give you a big arrow that says like this is bad while showing you the footage of the Rodney King meeting or something. it would You wouldn't be able to operate at the same level of of irony, essentially.
Speaker: Like, I was listening to to the Shopo Trap House movie podcast, movie Mindset, and it was about two films about transness and Butterfly and, oh God, what what is it called?
Speaker: In any case, the point they were making is these movies get accused of being transphobic now because they don't just come out and be like, the trans character is a good guy. You know, like... The trans character is good, big arrow. you know They have actual subjectivity, actual personality. There's a distance there.
Speaker: And one thing that does seem to characterize at least a lot of the Gen X and O we've watched is that sense of distance, usually with a little more sentimentality. And I do think something that maybe sketches Rifkin out from some of the other directors we've looked at is he does seem less sentimental. It's not that there's not tenderness, but it's... um What do you mean? Because i think Detroit Rock City is very sentimental in a lot of ways.
Speaker: What I mean is that like one of the things I feel I've discovered in watching these Gen X films is that for a generation that's remembered so strongly for being so cynical and ironic, which is true, I mean, patently, so much of the media is saturated in a kind of like tender sentimentality that sometimes goes into the world of like a a tweeness or um a treacliness, right? So like a good example of this, we haven't done any of his movies, but a lot of the John Hughes 80s movies are a great example of this, right? this ah Or Cameron Crowe, the rom-com director operating, you know, mostly in the late 80s, early 90s movies like Say Anything, Singles, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And we've seen bits and pieces of this in some of the other directors that we've talked about. So Sam brought up Streetwise, which is a documentary, right? It's ah it's a documentary about street youth. And in that sense is a very, almost like serious depiction of a lot of the issues that we've been talking about being lampooned or sort of presented comically in the Rifkin movies here. So things like children being left alone, divorce, the effect that that has on young people.
Speaker: There is kind of a moral core to a lot of Gen X's concerns. Sometimes it gets ironized away. Sometimes it gets made lighter in various ways. But it always seems to be there, or at least very often has been there in the movies we watched. And here, the tenderness feels tender in an almost like, this kind sounds sort of silly, but in like a human way rather than in an issue of the week way. And sometimes with Gen X movies, it can feel a little issue of the week-like.
Speaker: It doesn't feel like an episode of Seventh Heaven or Full House. Exactly. It can feel a little bit like that sometimes, and that's not true here. It's interesting, if we're talking about the kind of like this earnestness, sentimentality, to sort of citizen of irony spectrum. It is interesting that both of Rifkin's films here, like they both sort of give the audience the catharsis they want. Like Charlie Sheen and Kirsten Swanson's character, should they make it to Mexico, they make it to Tijuana, they're given a happy ending. And you know the boys in Detroit City, know they make it to the Kiss concert.
Speaker: both these films feel much more like they're farcical, that they're on the side of like the farcical yeah or the picaresque rather than the tragic. For all of Gen X's cynicism, our characters can attain a kind of like happiness or catharsis.
Speaker: I was going to say, I love that whole comparing it to like ah how Rifkin's movies don't have like a sort of PSA or like movie tragedy of the week feel. Maybe one of the reasons I really like Detroit Rock City, because I'm not a KISS fan, to be honest.
Speaker: Like, I made a few good tunes, but it's like, don't know, Gene and Simmons is over the top. not a fan. But I love that movie. And maybe it's because, you know, I grew up in a family where Seventh Heaven and Full House were always on. yeah And I remember, like, the but one episode of Seventh Heaven where, ah you know, oh, my God, this new bad girl, Gia, is trying to get Stephanie to smoke cigarettes. That's evil.
Speaker: and And it's like, I fucking hated that growing up. And Detroit Rock City is like the antithesis to all of that just... blue sort of PSA bullshit that you see in like a lot of 90s shows.
Speaker: But I think what makes it kind of exciting is that there's a version of a Gen X movie that would get mad about that episode, but do its own kind of like fully moralized antidote to it, which would be the movie, I think... Where it where it would be like, oh, Lin Shay is just the evil mom. Because she's not really evil. like She's so... unless you You don't hate her, you know Exactly. like She's played for laughs too.
Speaker: It's not mean-spirited like... It doesn't try to be like dark, edgy Gen X. It's not the crow. you know A great example of of this, and it's more of a millennial show in some ways, so take that for what it's worth, but in Daria, which I'm supposed to pronounce Daria, but I went to school with a girl by named Daria, and it is in my accent that A sounds, going to say Daria, the late 90s TV show, the cartoon.
Speaker: There's a great episode of that where Jay and Dario's best friend starts dating a rockabilly guy. And at some point in the episode, they learn, like, he's not just a rockabilly guy. he like, wants a trad wife, if I can use the kind of way we would talk about this now. And then episode ends with this, like,
Speaker: long monologue about how it's okay to cosplay the 50s as long as you don't want to return to 50s gender roles, which, fine, like I don't disagree with that as a point, but the show presents it as like a speech to the viewer where you are moralistically told that is how you are supposed to feel about the 1950s. It is okay to be nostalgic, but don't make it a political thing that requires other people's you know consenting to your, or like imposing it on them.
Speaker: That to me, that kind of like suspending the comedy at a certain point and turning the you know turning to the monologue is something we've seen a bit of in a lot of Gen X movies that is missing in the Rifkin films for for this episode. All right. Well, ah first of all, ah JG, thank you so much for coming on. JG Allen.
Speaker: Sorry, I can't quite get over that. did Do you have anything that you want to plug? Patreon.com slash Parallax Views. I'm on Twitter at Views Parallax Twitter or X or whatever it's called. People can find me on Facebook if they want.
Speaker: And, ah you know, the main podcast is up on Podbean and pretty much all your podcast services. so But the Patreon, and I could really use some support on that one because this is my full-time gig. So patreon.com slash parallaxviews. And then I have a new show coming up with Jason Miles of the This Is Revolution Network called Dudes in the Jeep Seats. I don't know how regular it is as of yet, but we're working on it.
Speaker: And that's going to be about B-movies. Very fitting. um And Parallax Views includes an interview with Sam, so you should subscribe for many reasons. But um one of them is that you can... a complete A complete trajectory and of talking about Ann Applebaum of all things.
Speaker: yeah and I forgot that that was the topic of your guys' conversation. But okay, yeah, please do subscribe. Thank you, JG. Thank you all very much. Bye-bye.
