By Jake Walters
Source: The Long Take
At the beginning of Head, Monkees’ drummer Micky Dolenz runs away from a legion of fans and dives off a bridge into a body of water. If this is too-obviously following in the footsteps of its prankish predecessor, A Hard Day’s Night, where the Beatles suffered a similar crowd-sourced fate, it also blows it to smithereens. Rather than canonizing the ‘60s, Head offers a comeuppance, jumps into the deep end of the next decade, dissolving into an aqueous, collective, diffuse space called the early ‘70s.
Soon enough, the band performs the phenomenal, acid-stained rocker “Circle Sky,” a mission statement of the band’s newly serious attitude toward their music that ultimately unweaves itself in the very act of coming into being. If the song promises progress, a band achieving new heights of self-worth and self-ownership, the lyrics offer a vision of eternal return that culminates in fans rushing the stage only for the band to be crumble as mannequins, material constructs of composite parts, all image and no flesh. Rather than personal authenticity, the film explodes into gleeful mediation, a promise that ostensible freedom only masks new modes of control, that genuine originality is only one more mask. Head marked the band announcing their recovery of their own catalogue as an exercise in self-becoming, and in doing so they paradoxically destroy themselves. We’re off to the race in the opening minutes, in other words, but we’re also lost in an abyss. In the band’s go-for-broke stylistic tour-de-force, they go beyond playful monkeying around and instead monkey wrench the nuts and bolts of the machine that made them.
Writer-Director Bob Rafelson had concocted, quite literally, the band’s image, explicitly turning the “fab” in their PreFab Four image from Fabulous into Fabrication. Slotting the band members into artificial roles and shuttling them through various mostly unexplained situations, The Monkees television show was the epitome of pop post-modernism, a roguishly disobedient experiment in televisual liquidity that was also a vexing and mettlesome portrait of four lost souls struggling to maintain stable selves amidst a polymorphous and unmooring world. While the show largely took this playful casting aside of reality in stride, testing and teasing at systems of popular imagery from the relative inside, Head is a more cynical, explosive affair, a downright nasty exercise in self-deconstruction. The band look and sound tired here, being pushed and prodded in and around sets, sequences, and sketches, forced into new roles and identities all while being asked to maintain their artificially constructed image. In almost every sequence, they’re running to or from something, or being walled in by forces that seem increasingly opaque and invisible as the film continues, as though it alone simply cannot visualize what ails it, cannot conjure the totality of overlapping enigmas constraining it.
Thus the film imagines pyrrhic victories like Dolenz futilely punching a Coca-Cola machine in a desert, an amusing parody of the Wild West saturated with corporate malfeasance. When Dolenz finds a tank, presumably arrived from one of the other sequences, a faux war film turned into a bunker football game, the film understands his demented-grin glee as a sign of his exhaustion. (It’s less surprising than it may seem that Dolenz was originally considered for the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, a role that went to Rafelson’s friend Jack Nicholson). Later, the film reveals that at least part of the film takes place in the hair of past-his-prime Western actor Victor Mature. If the band are Sea Monkeys, those mischievous little devils, they’re also head lice, itching and scratching, propagating profusely, dancing on the brain of classic Hollywood Western cinema.
In doing so, Head turns to televisual flow as termite art, eating away at cinema’s hollowed form. They at least have the good grace to take Mature along for the ride, recognizing that his name is so apt for an antagonist for the band’s acid-scrawled juvenilia that you’d forgive the band for thinking they’d conjured his whole career up whole cloth just to appear here. Head’s finale, where the band escape and escape again, dissolving themselves in a literal age of Aquarius only to find themselves in another more pernicious prison in the back of Mature’s truck, is as vicious as anything Godard or Antonioni created, perhaps because it establishes its critique of what Guy Debord called “the spectacle” from within Hollywood’s own entrails. Imagining a cinematic diarrhea, Head constantly and incessantly spews the band back into the desert, the biome that, in films, books, critical theories, and head-trips alike, so frequently serves as the unformed and deconstructive space of the mind. Here, the film joins Monte Hellman’s The Shooting in questioning whether this formlessness was simply an Ouroboros, an imaginative ego trip for minds to spew their own thoughts out and have them talk back to us. The further we spread horizontally outward, the more we end up right where we started.
Admittedly, Head’s head-scratching ambition, which involves chasing a kind of cosmic self-abnegation on the part of both the band and the film, requires an energy that doesn’t come easy for the film, nor its characters. The film’s paradoxical atmosphere of curdled zest thrives on never really progressing anywhere, and the film seems all too self-aware in naming a key, Ringo Starr-ish song “Do I Have to do this All Over Again.” Head’s endlessly frictive relationship between freedom and enclosure figures television as a prison-like black box and an implosive void that reorients and revises itself constantly, shifting tonal and textural registers. Or does it? Part of the film’s argument is its own triviality, and, daringly, the band figures the remarkable heterogeneity of its sequences and sketches as little more than a smooth paste. That’s a damned, damaged thing for any film to do. Head shoves it down our throat, cackling, and the ‘60s seem to die in the process.
Score: 10/10
After the Crash 