Chapter Two: Head
By Brett Ballard-Beach
May 24, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“Hey hey we are the Monkees/You know we love to please/ A manufactured image with no philosophies /. . . Hey hey we are the Monkees/We’ve said it all before/ The money’s in, we’re made of tin/ We’re here to give you more.”
The subject of this week’s column occupies an unusual spot at the intersection of Chapter Two Lane and Sole Criterion Boulevard (DVD Spine #544). Head was released mere months after the wildly popular and culturally influential television series it was based on - The Monkees - had ended a successful 57 episode two-season run on NBC (1966-1968), and yet the movie flopped horribly. The soundtrack album ended both a string of five successfully charting LPs (four # 1s and a top three over an 18 month period) and numerous hit singles (nearly a dozen top 40s, including three # 1s over the same stretch) for the band in question. If I may be allowed some hyperbole, in the annals of deeply felt works of art that double as intentional artistic suicide (by pulling a sea change on fans) it ranks with George Michael’s 1990 album Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 for replacing a goodtime rock n’ roll party with something infinitely deeper and darker . . .and a lot less “fun.”
The key advertisement on television for the film consisted of a man’s deadpan face held for 30 seconds and the word “Head,” flashed onscreen. (And yes, an Andy Warhol film in which a man received a blowjob while the camera remained focused entirely on his facial reactions inspired that ad. So if you hear the title and think oral sex, you’ve cracked at least one of the multiple meanings.)
The film was conceived by the creators of the show, who would go on to create a film studio and write, produce, direct, and/or help shape some of the most challenging American cinema of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, including Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Drive, He Said, The Last Picture Show, and The King of Marvin Gardens. Jack Nicholson is co-credited with the screenplay. Thematically and chronologically, in its subtext of a youth culture that has been crushed by both the older generation and its own innate predisposition towards self-destruction, Head is the missing link between Bonnie & Clyde and Zabriskie Point, and, barring the “ultimate trip” that was/is 2001: A Space Odyssey, it probably played more mind (head?) games on its intended audience (of teenyboppers) than any other big studio release of the year.
As seems to be my custom for most movies based on successful television shows, I have never seen an episode of The Monkees. I have also never glimpsed the 1969 television special 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee, which I understand simply performs further desecration on the star image that the band sought to torpedo with Head. I approach this consideration of Head as someone who is somewhat familiar with the band’s key songs, the reputation of their television show as an entertaining rollick that was somewhat ahead of its time, and the oft-lodged complaint/myth that they don’t deserve serious consideration because they were simply a fabricated American response to the success of The Beatles.
Armed with such limited presuppositions, what is evident to even a layman viewing Head is the tremendous surge of bitterness and anger. I watched it twice on consecutive nights, and it was a little harder to work myself up the second time around only because I knew there would be little to no levity to offset the caustic emotional nihilism that begins the film and then builds to a crescendo once again by the end. (I counted precisely one laugh-out loud moment, and that was solely attributable to Mike Nesmith’s verbal timing.) I don’t take this paucity of laughs to be a failure on the film’s part. The same sort of gags that peppered the show are here (though in far lesser numbers), but more often than not, they are staged for funhouse mirror-type distortion and anxiety, rather than laughter or hijinks.
Consider, for example, the excerpts at the top of the column for comparison of the television show’s theme song lyrics versus the rejiggered anti-theme lyrics, which appear early on in Head under the title “Ditty Diego War Chant.” The easygoing goodtime bouncy flow of the former is supplanted by the manic, almost sped up sung/spoken nature of the latter. The replacement of that sunny optimism (as well as the promise that the “young generation [has] something to say”) with such an acerbic cynicism serves as an introduction/thesis for what is about to follow.
However, Head isn’t simply a narrow indictment of the mobs of pubescent girls who shrieked over them (the fans generally aren’t raked over the coals) or merely a shallow but occasionally potent acknowledgement of the Vietnam War (then-new images appear abruptly from time to time, particularly during several channel-surfing montages). What Nicholson, Nesmith, Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, and director/co-writer Bob Rafelson have perpetrated is an indictment of celebrity itself triumphing over artistic pretensions. The more you struggle against the image you have created - or that has been erected on your behalf - the worse it gets. Like flailing in quicksand that only sucks you in deeper, every effort by the band individually or as a unit to rail against the artificiality of their circumstances fails miserably. They are caught in a waking nightmare of Bunuelian proportions.
The film opens (sans credits or studio logos of any kind) with a bridge dedication ceremony populated entirely by representatives of the world from which the Monkees remain outcasts: elected officials, police, the press, and the military. For nearly two minutes the camera tracks or holds with no cuts, creating a claustrophobic pseudo-documentary style effect before the band appears from off-screen, breaks through the ceremonial tape (fleeing someone or something) and Dolenz takes the deep dive off the span, finding some kind of brief respite in the water with mythical sea creatures while the psychedelic opening number “Porpoise Song” plays on the soundtrack.
Head returns to that image at the film, in an ironic fashion, but this opening sequence initiates the film’s modus operandi: segments slip into one another like the layers of a Chinese box and the four band members find themselves passing on through an endless gamut of Hollywood back lot clichés and generic conventions, shuttling from Western to dancehall musical and from Indian through trench warfare. This strategy of disconnection often intentionally isolates the band members from one another, even if they all happen to be sharing the same shot. A telling example is the segment that immediately follows from the “Porpoise Song” opening.
There is a fade-in to the Monkees’ pad where in slow succession the same unnamed/unidentified blonde woman, who is never seen again, gives each band member an extended sensual kiss before leaving. It’s a blatantly sexual (and weirdly erotic) moment that still succeeds in leaving a slightly acrid aftertaste. Upon reflection, I think it’s because, like many other instances in Head, it take a potentially archetypal Hollywood moment and subverts it, leaving behind a hard to place, but distressing emptiness, in its wake.
It is worthwhile to discuss the function of the film’s songs in this context, because although there are only half a dozen distinct numbers, and most of them are fairly short, they work at odds with the film’s dour thematics by showcasing a talented band singing and playing a grab bag of memorable songs in several distinct genres. My personal favorite is “Circle Sky” penned and sung by Nesmith, with a sound that strikes me as in-line with rockabilly raveups. This is the only time in the film where all four are seen playing together on a tune, and in front of a mostly female audience stoked to hysterics.
Although the band performance (the only instance where they are “live”) is edited more than it should be - a similar thing happens during Jones’ wistful and melancholic solo number “Daddy Song” where his pas de deux with Toni Basil is Cuisinarted - there is no denying the evident electricity among the quartet, or the fact that they seem to genuinely enjoy performing together. As with other respites, such joy is short-lived, as at the conclusion of the song, the fans storm the stage and the band become plastic mannequins quickly torn limb from limb.
Despite the decree of “no philosophies” in “Ditty Diego,” the slightly more serious (and generally less successful) second half of Head is about nothing but the search for deeper meaning. Tork ponders life while an ice cream cone melts in his hand, a swami dispenses sage advice from the steam room and Frank Zappa (!) makes a cameo as “The Critic” to remind the band that the youth of the world need them, all while he walks his talking cow. Throughout, the band members battle an endless parade of authority figures - personified most predictably by a suspicious cop and least predictably by Hollywood matinee idol Victor Mature.
Mature, a star of the 1940s and 1950s in just about every genre under the sun (the same ones Head mocks on a continual basis) had mostly retired by 1968 but returned on a limited basis to play himself as needed. His character in Head is billed as “The Big Victor” and he appears to be modeled on a slightly less benevolent Jolly Green Giant. He emerges time and again to rain down the fury of a god on the hapless quartet. In the most memorable sustained non sequitur in the film, Mike, Davy, Micky and Peter find themselves stranded in the dark in the middle of a dandruff commercial only to be vacuumed off of Mature’s head and wind up inside a life-sized vacuum cleaner bag. There is a fair amount of wit about the whole progression, lacking the heavy-handedness that tips the scale at other moments. It feels like it could have been a sequence on the television show.
By the film’s end, the plot has reached a “this is where we came in” moment reminiscent of old serials where the entire band takes the plunge after disrupting the bridge dedication, and the resulting idyll, scored to a reprise of “Porpoise Song” is soaring until… well, if you’re expecting that some kind of happy ending will be obtained after all that has come before, you may want to stick with the television episodes.
One of the earliest critiques of Head that I recall coming across was in a review guide to music video compilations and other rock-music themed movies and concert films. The author posited a scenario in which a Monkees fan in late ‘68 caught the film and then (paraphrasing here) shuffled off quietly out of the theater, thinking silently to himself or herself “What the hell was that?” A lot of the film’s significance now rests in its status as a cultural artifact, a time capsule of a very particular moment in American history, and in the life cycle of a pop culture phenomenon. The music still holds up, and The Monkees in one form or another rode waves of nostalgic revivals that allowed them to keep touring over the decades. In a recent interview Nesmith indicated that he viewed Head as a necessary step in the evolution of the band and that, as unpleasant as the experience was, he would make the same decision to do the film again. Unwitting or not on his part, that comment is perhaps the most fitting and succinct analysis of what Head is all about.
Next time: We jump from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, and a cult musical documentary about the underground metal scene.