Feeling Minnesota

(Steven Baigelman, USA, 1996)

It was an awful time for movies – especially of the commercial-release sort – in the mid 1990s; I consecutively saw so many poor films in in the relentless course of my reviewing gig that it put me in a bad, bad mood. Feeling black and foul, I figured, then, it would be a good moment to try to come to grips with grunge in cinema.

There can’t be anybody out there, surely, who actually believes the hype in the world of Australian publishing to the effect that grunge as a trend – grunge lit, as it’s daintily called – began roughly in the first half of the 1990s with the appearance of a bunch of grotty local novels by Justine Ettler (The River Ophelia, 1995), Christos Tsiolkas (Loaded, 1995) and, first in this line, Andrew McGahan (Praise, 1991). That’s like claiming the much-vaunted Generation X as the first batch of teenagers in human history to feel a bit bored and restless, callow and confused.

No, we’ve all been there before – well, at least some of them of us have  – gloriously callow, and wallowing in the grunge. Those are the prerogatives of youth, after all.  

Like everything, grunge has a history and a tradition. And what a fine history it is, too! Grunge has a lot to do with what some French poets once referred to as a “yearning for the mud”. To want to yearn for mud usually indicates that you weren’t born in it. So the art and fiction of grunge, for many decades, has recorded the adventures of middle-class guys and gals who go forth and slum it.

These anti-heroes de-class themselves, going downwardly mobile. They get smashed, taking all the drugs they can. They beg and scam and steal for money. They read arty, philosophical books voraciously, but in a carefree, magpie fashion; they tear through art galleries with a superior smirk on their faces; they plonk themselves in the very front or the very back row of fleapit cinemas, to imbibe the very best and the very worst of what the seventh art has to offer them.

And they live in an amoral haze of promiscuous, bisexual, polymorphously perverse relationships … that is, if they’re really lucky. Naturally, one of the most successful movies of the grunge decade of the ‘90s, internationally, was Trainspotting (1996).  

Sometimes, the adventure of downward mobility is not exactly a matter of choice: the grunge lifestyle can be thrust upon people whether they like it or not – when they are students, or find themselves unemployed. Or when they are just born into it, worst luck. But no matter how someone gets there, the important thing is that they come to like it, somehow: to identify with it. They take up grunge as a cause, celebrating it as the highpoint of authenticity: real living, real partying and real desperation.

Perhaps I’m being unfair saying that grunge is solely the invention or the province of middle-class kids slumming it: the Nick Cave or Dogs in Space (1986) model. There’s a variation on that: the rough, vital men and women of the street – hustlers, pool players, construction workers, postal employees – who suddenly find themselves embraced and courted by a big world as artists, poets or spokespersons for their generation. They go on to write books, make films, appear at literary festivals and on TV talk shows; fame and fortune lure them out of the gutter but that gutter is only thing, the only real thing, they have to hold onto.

So their work, too, becomes a eulogy for the down-and-dirty, a vicious attempt to protect this bit of grunge turf deep inside themselves. That’s the Charles Bukowski or Hubert Selby, Jr grunge model – and by the way, the 1989 movie version of Selby’s 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn directed by Uli Edel is, for me, among the genuine monuments of grunge cinema. (Poor Uli has taken too many knocks since the unfairly maligned Body of Evidence [1993].)

The grunge arts can be divided up in terms of such class differences, or we can go at the field via nations and their sensibilities. In short, there’s American grunge, deep-dish Americana; and then there’s Euro-grunge, Euro-trash. There’s a great deal in common between the overall sensibilities of American and European grunge; but the aesthetic strategies tend to be very different. For now, let’s go Route One, U.S.A.

Feeling Minnesota is an extremely contrived, manufactured piece of grunge Americana. Predictably, it comes to us courtesy of the USA production-distribution juggernaut Miramax. It’s not in the grand grunge tradition of French low-life poets or Last Exit to Brooklyn; it’s content to wade in a much shallower pool. Basically, it’s a by-the-numbers attempt at supposedly independent American filmmaking – a grotesque mélange of bits and pieces from successes of the 1980s and ‘90s. A really lousy film, in short, but worth trying to work out for its grunge inventory … Just so that you will know straight away, from the trailer or the poster or simply even the title, the next time a movie like this is coming at you.  

So first, the title: Feeling Minnesota. It contains an active emotion and a place name – as with Leaving Las Vegas (1995), which is also a bit of a grunge number (and also a terrible film). The active emotion bit signals the pretension of many contemporary American films toward a certain Mad Romanticism. I mean all those films that gesture in the direction of vast, long-lost dreams of love, happiness and especially escape – escape from a humdrum, oppressive, collapsing world.

Naturally, we are not given these dreams straight: oh no, they have to be smothered in a certain kind of grim, fatalistic irony, a sense that these dreams are probably vain and stupid in the first place – and are, most likely, unobtainable.

Grunge dramas always have a heavy dread lurking inside them: the suspicion in the heads of their anti-heroes that they’re just going to end up shot dead or rolling off the road in their car. That outcome, too, has a certain grandiloquent attractiveness to it within the context of the grunge aesthetic: live fast, die young, go out with a big movie death like you’re Humphrey Bogart or Hanna Schygulla or Jean-Paul Belmondo in an underworld criminal escapade.

All this love/death/dreams/gutter stuff adds up to a certain Punk Romanticism. For young American directors with short-term memories, Punk Romanticism begins mainly with Quentin Tarantino and his script for True Romance (1993) – another archetypal grunge title. 

What about the place: Minnesota? It has the function of Vegas in Leaving Las Vegas or Denver in Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995), another sorry grunge entry in this sorry decade (even if it inspired a jaunty 2003 song, “Things”, from John Cale). According to Grunge Cinema, Minnesota is a proletarian, industrial hellhole; a haven for petty, pathetic crims, psychotic losers and crooked, tawdry, bloated cops. It’s a place for prostitutes, strippers, tawdry liaisons and weird, arranged marriages. In this place and in this story, everybody and everything is behind the eight-ball from the word go.

This is a film utterly lacking the slightest sense of politics, social structure, history, or anything of that sort. Its debuting writer-director, Canadian Steven Baigelman [who later co-wrote biopics of James Brown and Miles Davis], is clearly nostalgic for the hard-boiled, depressive, fatalistic existentialism of an earlier era – that of Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague classic Shoot the Piano Player (1960), for instance.

So Feeling Minnesota offers us an anti-hero played by Keanu Reeves; his name is Jjaks – spelt that way because of a typo on his birth certificate, and that kind of originary mark on your Soul (wouldn’t you know it) just doesn’t ever go away. Maybe its the fault of this typo that Jjaks now goes around fatalistically murmuring, no matter what love or lust or fun or joy enters his life: “Everything is going to turn to shit”. 

Well, it certainly turns to grunge. JJaks’ knightly mission is to rescue Freddie (Cameron Diaz) from a grim, loveless marriage to JJak’s bullish brother, Sam (Vincent D’Onofrio). Immediately we are in the land of movie pastiche. The union of promiscuous Freddie and kleptomaniac Jjaks is a bit like the dead-end love of a prostitute and an alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas. As the plot wears on and corpses disappear and resurrect, with ever more ghastly wounds in their flesh, it’s hard not to recall the Grand Guignol strain of the Coen brothers and their stylish debut, Blood Simple (1984). And all that brotherly, male-bonding type of shooting, biting, kicking, punching that Sam and Jjaks compulsively inflict on each other is edging us once more into Tarantino territory – especially when it plays out to the beat of catchy 1960s tunes by Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra. 

“You came for me?” The first time this line is spoken by Freddie, it’s after having hurriedly performed sex with Jjaks on a toilet floor; she stresses the word came. The second time she says it is when Jjaks shows up at the bedroom door to rescue her from that grim loveless union with Sam – and this time the emphasis falls on me. That is certainly the cleverest touch in the entire film. Meanwhile, all the actors are left to their own devices, flailing and wailing.

Feeling Minnesota works hard to achieve a thick fog of dirty, grunge realism. But it displays a fatal lack of emotional truth on any level. Every gruesome wound, hysterical outburst and cathartic confrontation occurring between the characters in this infernal triangle seems weightless, a mere special effect. The casting works in the same way: comedian Dan Aykroyd, for instance, is wheeled into to play a nasty, sadistic cop (just as Denis Leary incarnated a brutal villain in The Neon Bible [1995]) – and you never stop noticing the mild surrealism in the disjuncture between a chubby, charming comedian swearing his head off, and the action of whacking people in the face.  

But this awful, painful truth was already there to be seen in the very poster for the film. Its one of those posy, pictorial arrangements where the beautiful, slutty woman is pouting on the ground, the supposedly soulful Keanu is dramatically braced within the beams of a phone booth, and bloated wild-man D’Onofrio is prowling in an out-of-focus blur in the back. That poster is as far as you need go with Feeling Minnesota.

© Adrian Martin November 1996