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Spanking the Monkey
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I get depressed at the amount of small-scale, independent American movies released in the Australian arthouse market of the 1990s. This is not an anti-American sentiment on my part – far from it, I (often) love this cinema. But I experience a sense of injustice at the disproportion in evidence. Simply put, we see many more independent movies from America than from any other country. And it is a bizarre reversal: if you were going to arthouses in the 1960s or ‘70s, it was a rarity to come upon almost any American film. It seemed, then, to be an all-French/Russian/Italian/German menu, more or less. In fact, it was up to the die-hard cinephiles of that time to defend certain brave American movies like those of Robert Altman, Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) or even a late Orson Welles masterpiece, F For Fake (1973). Not that these films were unseen in Australian cinemas. They would pop up unannounced in some pokey commercial slot, and then immediately die after a week. Sometimes without a single review in the mainstream press – or only negative notices. The arthouse distributors, by and large, wouldn’t touch these films; it was up to the repertory chains of a slightly later time to reclaim them as ‘edgy’ fare. By 1995, this situation had been almost entirely reversed. Beyond Caro diario (Nanni Moretti, 1994) and some Giuseppe Tornatore film, how many Italian movies did you see at arthouse cinemas in ‘95? What was the last German, Turkish, Russian or Iranian movie you saw anywhere outside of SBS TV and the yearly Film Festivals? But you can bet your life that anything with the names of Altman, Quentin Tarantino, John Sayles or Hal Hartley attached will be in arthouses before the reels have dried at the lab. And it does seem unfair, finally, that, since America so completely rules mainstream cinema, it gets to rule the arthouses, too. But the American indie scene, it appears, is more glamorous as a market commodity than ever before. Something particularly weird happened in the world of American independent filmmaking somewhere in the early-to-mid 1980s. Before then, in the ‘70s, American independent Cinema (under various, changing labels) designated a group of radical, non-commercial, hard-edged, demanding mavericks, directors like Jon Jost, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Rappaport, James Benning. In many ways, these people have been unfairly pegged as the ‘70s generation’ in independent American film – the old lefties of the scene. But they keep influencing kindred spirits, like the Canadian Mike Hoolboom, and they keep making their own feature films, which continue to be remarkable. I’ll forgive you if you’ve never heard of any of them, because their work has almost never been shown in our arthouses, either yesterday or today. You could only have become a fan of their work by attending cinema courses in universities, or attending the National Cinematheque program. In the ‘80s, the whole independent filmmaking scene in the US changed its character [see my reflection on this from 2008]. A new generation emerged, led by Sayles, Allison Anders, Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch and others. Their films were jokier, simpler, more conventional and less demanding than those of the ‘70s generation. But Repo Man (Cox, 1984), The Return of the Secaucus Seven (Sayles, 1980) and Stranger than Paradise (Jarmusch, 1984) caught on in the arthouses, and those venues have never been the same since. At the same time, some of the great European filmmakers staged their own American rendezvous – especially Wim Wenders with Paris, Texas (1984). The stage was set for a certain mainstreaming of independent American film. It wasn’t radical or challenging, iconoclastic or intellectual any longer – it just had to be a little bit different, a little bit kinky, with the flavour of a youth culture or an alternative lifestyle worked in. By the ‘90s, ‘American independence’ had become an almost meaningless phrase. Major studios were making quite big-budget movies and marketing them as fierce little independent films, and an item such as Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994 (which I do like) was shown simultaneously at the arthouses as well as at the major cinema chains – a bad sign for a certain cultural ecology. In fact, it’s the major chains that are now buying the rights to most of these films, taking over, in various ways, the space once inhabited by arthouse exhibitors and distributors. In this scenario, independence is just an advertising tag, a commodity brand label. An angry Jost put it more bluntly in an article for Film Comment (January/February 1989): “The ‘independent’ wrapping is but a subterfuge, a PR angle for the dim wizards of the press, asserting a difference that is not there”. One of the major events in the ‘80s that helped grease this mainstreaming of the independent film industry was the Sundance Film Festival, with its Sundance Institute presided over by the grey eminence of Robert Redford. Every time I encounter the promotional tag “A hit at the Sundance Film Festival!”, I am immediately suspicious. Some of the films that have gained attention because of this event, such as Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994), are indeed pretty wacky, low-budget numbers. But others, particularly ones workshopped through the Sundance Institute, tend to be glorified American Playhouse-type dramas – well-meaning, character-driven pieces, with a pinch of social relevance and a dash of topical spice, but ultimately not much chop as cinema. And that description, I believe, covers an awful lot of what is being shoved in our faces as American Independent Cinema at present. Spanking the Monkey fits this bill perfectly. From the first, it vacillates uneasily between wanting to be a sensitive character-piece – about dysfunctional families, coming of age, and so on – and a more generic, raucous entertainment. There are early indications that this tale of a college student stuck reluctantly at home with his injured mother is going to turn into a teen movie in the style of the early Tom Cruise vehicle, Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983). Certainly, the spirited jokes about male masturbation rituals (i.e., "spanking the monkey") point in this fine, populist direction. Alas, this movie remains, for the most part, in low gear. It’s directed and written by a film-school-trained newcomer, David O. Russell. Judging from this movie, I’m not sure that Russell is the best person to direct his own scripts. It is perfunctorily shot and staged, with arbitrarily placed bits of hand-held camera flutter and other dramatically cheap devices. The music by Morphine lazily fades up and down on the soundtrack to no particular affect, except for a vague stab at dark moodiness. Fortunately, Russell is at least able to coax fine performances from his relatively unknown players. Alberta Watson as Susan, the demanding, seething mother, is particularly well-cast – communicating a wide range of emotions from sinister to supplicating – and Jeremy Davies as the teen hero Ray is captivating, even as the character is less than lovable. Ultimately, Spanking the Monkey has one thing and only one thing going for it: a remarkable plot twist that happens on the hot-house domestic front. I didn’t know it was coming when I viewed the film at a media preview and I’m glad for that, because it’s a real beauty. So, unlike some other reviewers, I won’t spill the beans. But I can say something about the before-and-after of this thrilling, transgressive scene. After, the film completely goes to pieces. Russell displays absolutely no clue about to how to follow it up, how to really explore its implications and possibilities. Rather like the last 20 minutes of a Geoffrey Wright or Zalman King movie, the young hero here is simply thrown into a whirlwind of histrionic perplexity and pseudo-angst. In the greatest and emptiest cliché of contemporary American cinema, he even shows up at the side of a road, hitching a ride into his uncertain, adult future … What leads up to the big scene is rather more interesting. The film takes on our prevalent Western confusion about sexual roles and behavioural protocols – questions concerning when and how we can express our desires in the thrust and parry of everyday life. These anxieties have condensed around hot issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace, or intimate relations between teachers and their students. Interpersonal transgressions, in other words: situations where people cross an implied or imagined social line, prompted by desire. We’re reading about this everywhere in the mid ‘90s, from books by Helen Garner and Camille Paglia to a million, hysterical beat-ups in the mass media. Russell sets up this area by putting his sulky, frustrated hero together with a younger teenage girl, Toni (Carla Gallo). There is a very painful kissing scene between them, where every hesitation, every misread signal, every crossed wire, is beautifully and lucidly conveyed. Why doesn’t he kiss me passionately – is he gay? Does she want me to overpower her like a real man? And on it goes. The scene ends badly, with tears, hysteria and recriminations. In a surprisingly everyday kind of way, the matter then goes to the authorities – Toni complains to her father, who’s a psychiatrist. This triggers an entirely new chain of interpersonal and social reverberations, in which everyone is hyper-conscious of limits and repressions. In this atmosphere, something is really going to give – and it finally does. As a film, Spanking the Monkey is only moderately OK. But it does tap into something real – some problematic knot in the way that we are trying to relate to each these days. The movie doesn’t manage to totally untie that knot and take us anywhere new. But it does, at least, get under the spectator’s skin in an intriguing, discussion-provoking way. MORE Russell: I © Adrian Martin July 1995 |
