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Suburbia
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The Rejected
What
a long, strange road Penelope Spheeris’ career has taken – from a tumultuous
early life and proud grounding in Los Angeles’ punk culture through to Wayne's World (1992) and other manifestations of mildly or wildly disreputable comedy. With
all kinds of curious and crazy pit stops along the way, from the fanciful punk
fantasy Dudes (1987) to the angry telemovie The Crooked
E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron (2003) and a Janis Joplin biopic long
in the wings (alas, never made).
Spheeris
(who turns 74 in 2018) has never – in this path bifurcated between independent
and mainstream projects – made an uninteresting movie. But she had, before her
departure from the film scene for a less stressful life in real estate, already
been nudged to the outer rim of contemporary cinema histories. It’s time to go
back and revisit Suburbia, a work
that really deserves a cult tag.
Suburbia’s nominal
market orientation as a B genre film is announced in its pre-credit trauma: in
a dark, lonely strip of outer L.A. suburbia, at a phone booth, a wild dog runs
at and kills a small child, while a mother chats obliviously on the phone and a
teenage runaway, Sheila (Jennifer Clay), stands by uselessly. This, is no
doubt, part of the B formula: start with a shock, and keep the violent action
coming every ten minutes or so (“If not, your film’s not moving anywhere”, as Spheeris cheerfully explains on the terrific DVD
audio commentary – during which she seems consistently amazed, in retrospect,
at the quality of her own movie!).
But
the scene is not a gratuitous teaser: the rhyming of this pack of abandoned
dogs gone wild (based, like much of the script, on an actual incident) with the
kids in the punk squat who call themselves T.R. (for The Rejected), is
consistent for the entire film. Spheeris twists the association further in the
many embedded (sometimes comically paranoiac) sci fi/post apocalypse references
to toxic waste, radioactivity and hideous bodily mutation (the spectre of Mad Max 2 [1981] is never far away).
Which
is to say that Suburbia is among the
first great films of the ‘80s to mine the topic of dystopia, later so reflexly fashionable – a theme explicated in the
scene where Evan (Bill Coyne) reads the 1960s diary of his now bitter and
alcoholic mother, and discovers her optimistic rumination, when moving into
this area as a new wife, on the union, in the very word, of ‘suburb’ and
‘utopia’. The wise response of Jack (Jack Diddley), who has literally picked
Evan out of the gutter the previous night at a punk gig, is to hurl the pages
of this deluded diary out the car window.
Suburbia derives
much of its power and fascination from its real setting: what appears like an
entire abandoned mini-suburb on the outer limits of the city – and, indeed,
much of the story (which has basically a single, escalating motor: the growing
determination of some vigilante citizens to come and do some harm to these
rejected) is devoted to the political geography of this place, its laws and
limits. (In a curious and very functional plot touch, Spheeris gives Jack a
stepfather who is black and a cop!)
Spheeris
had already made the first instalment of her legendary documentary series on
punk, The Decline and Fall of Western
Civilisation (1981 – the other parts followed in ’88 and ‘98), but Suburbia – co-financed by Roger Corman
and a furniture mogul, Bert Dragin – was, as the director admits, her way of
learning the craft of narrative filmmaking on the job. It is a remarkably
accomplished piece on this level, full of felicitous touches in framing, camera
movement and cutting.
It
is not imbued with any particular cinephiliac penchant for quoting other films,
but it has ended up being mightily influential over two subsequent decades of
punk cinema: it is hard to imagine the Australian film Dogs in Space (1987), for instance, or even parts of the often
great UK television series Skins (2007-2013), without the example Spheeris set here.
The
film offers a modest panorama of some punk bands of the time (such as The
Vandals) and includes, without making a big deal of it, the rituals of punk
spectatorship (a key scene twists the club’s makeshift techniques of crowd
control into gruesome voyeurism, as an unfortunate Neo-Romantic girl is
unfussily stripped and held mercilessly in the spotlight beam for all to gawk
at).
It
is an intriguing mirror of the duality of Spheeris’ later development that Suburbia is not exactly a politically
radical vision of the punk lifestyle. Spheeris was then, and remains now,
righteously fired up by the evidence of social injustice, misery and violence –
but she tends to sum it up as unnecessary conflict, avoidable bad vibes that
evolve to the status of community wars. The kids in Suburbia have little political consciousness; there is no trace of
Situationism here, although one could easily have imagined it. Spheeris indulges
a familiar lament over broken homes – where the inventory of adult problems
includes not only alcoholism and abuse, but also gayness!
Accordingly,
her teens are surrounded with a pathos of longing for the domestic,
nuclear-family utopia they never had: two frilly, girly punks like to listen to
Sheila and recite fairy tales; Evan looks on, through a window, at a happy
family in a restaurant; as in a key Skins episode, all these wild kids demand the right to mourn at the funeral of their
comrade (with disastrous consequences, of course).
And
Evan’s little brother, Ethan (Andrew Pece), once rescued from his bad home and
decked out with a Mohawk, just keeps riding his little tricycle around and
pining for what he misses – until final-scene tragedy intervenes, and Suburbia abruptly suspends its fragile
evocation of a makeshift world apart.
MORE Spheeris: Black Sheep © Adrian Martin March 2009 / September 2018 |
