In college, we spent a lot of time on the theoretical. Part of that derived from our classes — although, if I recall correctly, I greeted my PHI 101 preceptor’s question about the possibility that we existed as figments of an unknown entity’s imagination by announcing to the room that my brain stem had just tied itself in a knot, then marching straight to the registrar’s office after class to change my grading option to Pass/D/Fail, and my freshman-year roommate observed several times that she had no choice but to subscribe to the God-as-Watchmaker theory, given that He had evinced no interest in saving MAT 104, and her final problem set specifically, from certain doom. Mostly, though, we sat around with mugs of tea and plastic cups of beer and carefully rolled joints and batted hypothetical balloons at each other instead of doing our history reading. Under what circumstances would you kill another person? If you had to live with one gender for the rest of your life, and provided that you had your sexual needs taken care of, which would you pick — men only, or women only? Which would you give up for life if you had to give up one: bread, or beer? If you could live at any other time in history, when would you live?

Invariably, the time question got the same response. Eric The Red would smile beatifically and nod, “The sixties, man…the six-ties.” Then Sunny would giggle, “The sixties!” as if the mere idea of the sixties filled her with joy. Slim would think about it for a moment before beaming, “Got to go with the sixties,” and Ernie would sigh wistfully, “The clothes. The music? The whole vibe, dude,” and everyone else in the room would start naming off cool stuff about the sixties, like white lipstick and GTOs and getting to see Hendrix live, and then the conversation would veer off into a debate about Dylan’s decision to go electric before I could chime in, but I’d never have voted for the sixties.

Not that the sixties didn’t have things to recommend it, like women’s lib and the civil rights movement and the Rolling Stones and fringed clothing and Peter Fonda’s righteous sideburns and whatnot, but it never occurred to me to want to see it for myself. It just seems so…chaotic, at least from here. I cherish a neurotic love of order and regulation and hygiene — not too much, obviously, as a quick glance around my cluttered and dusty apartment could tell you, but a minimum. My friends often lamented missing the original Woodstock, but I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for the idea; maybe it suggests a sterility of the soul on my part, but I’d seen the movie, and it looked really hot out there, and the mud and the crowds and the Port-a-Potties, and the tripping folk wanting to hug and love me…eh. For an afternoon, okay. Unique experience, tell stories about it later, sure, great. For three days? No. After a certain point, I want a toilet that flushes and iced tea without Peach Microdot in it. The very cultural elements that many people pointed to as the highlights of the sixties and the reasons they’d want to visit — unfettered drug use, free love, expansion of the consciousness — unnerved me on a certain level. Like, free love sounds great in theory, but I knew that in practice I’d get jealous and not want to share my swingin’ tight-suede-pants-clad hep cat with other chicks. My consciousness gave me enough to do in its contracted form; expanding it beyond the marginal material it already contained (i.e. sexual fantasies about Al Gore…I know, I know, kill me) struck me as a dangerous proposition.

Let’s not forget the hopeless sincerity of the time, either. It’s easy for me as a child of the eighties to say with the benefit of perspective, but a lot of the peace-sign flashing and commune-joining and casual Zen lingo comes off as annoyingly naïve now. At the time, of course, it meant something; at the time, protesting the war and having stoned meep-and-deaningfuls about the potential of the human mind had a purpose and contributed to the evolution of modern society and so on, I suppose, but no way could I go back to the sixties and keep a straight face. War is bad, you say? Well, thanks for the tip, but I’ve seen Full Metal Jacket three times, and I get it. Sadly, empirical evidence suggests that buying the world a Coke will not in fact lead to the world living in harmony — just the opposite, actually — and something about the adolescent earnestness of the idea is very tiring. The sixties counterculture believed so passionately in the power of music and pot and come on people now smile on each other everybody get together and love one another right now, but failed to account for human nature, and it seems quaint now. But quaint can bug.

Quaint bugs big-time in the Monkees’ “movie,” Head, which I’d wanted to see for ages and which Netflix just sent me a few days ago. I used to love the Monkees as a kid. I’d seen every episode numerous times during their MTV revival in the mid-eighties, and I had a weird crush on Mike Nesmith (I could have done without that infernal hat, but a Texas accent gets me every time), and I still dig the music, even though Peter Tork’s heavier peacenik lyrics call a ninth-grade poetry assignment to mind. I’d heard that the movie sucked, but I wanted to see it anyway, not really considering the possibility that the movie, much like the show, wouldn’t travel well into my adulthood. Because…man. Did you like The Monkees as a kid too? Yeah. Well, have you sat down and watched an episode lately? No? Okay. Don’t. Seriously. It’s painful.

I bought Wing Chun a Monkees DVD for Christmas a couple of years back, and we literally could not get through an entire episode. We tried, but the show is bloody awful. During one extended proto-music-video montage set in Paris — yeah, remember that one? Gah. And by “gah,” I mean “GAAAAAAH” — Wing turned to me with a squinty expression of regret and began, “Dude. It’s a great present. Really. I appreciate the thought. But I can’t — I don’t — see, it’s just that –” and I finished for her…

Sars: That the show…blows?
Wing: God, YES! It TOTALLY BLOWS! It’s not good, at all! I’d rather listen to the CD!
Sars: I know! What happened?
Wing: We liked this show! We LIKED this show? WHY? It’s horrible!
Sars: Uh. We were twelve?
Wing: Yeah, but we were twelve, not brain-damaged.
Sars: I don’t know. I’m sorry. You’re right. Turn it off.
Wing: We watched this…voluntarily.
Sars: I remember.
Wing: They have LEGIONNAIRES outfits on.
Sars: I know.
Wing: I can’t — I have to turn it off.
Sars: I know you do. It’s okay.
Wing: Legionnaires outfits.
Sars: Just turn it off.
Wing: Jesus.

The Monkees is a bad show. Period. The writing is…well, it’s designed to showcase the band, so whatever. I can forgive whimsy gone awry. But Peter Tork can’t act. At all. He can’t even run convincingly; any sequence that calls for him to dash or sprint anywhere — and that’s a whole other set of problems; how many creepy millionaires and their hunchbacked lieutenants who chain up cute mini-wearing blondes in the basement can one pre-fab boy band really encounter, anyway? — reminds me of Barry Pepper’s ultra-bizarre blocking in Battleship Earth. And I don’t know who told Micky Dolenz that his proto-Jim Carrey wacky spazmatoid shtick made for good television, but it doesn’t. It’s annoying. It’s so annoying that it causes kidney failure in young children and the elderly. Add anti-war “commentary,” in-“jokes” about marijuana, Mike Nesmith practically checking his watch on-camera, and the most half-assed set design since Ed Wood to the mix, and you’ve got a truly gruesome half hour of television. And that’s just the show.

The movie showcases all of these irritating components and more — at interminable, inscrutable length, because it’s their movie. Micky getting into a spazzy fistfight with a Coke machine, and then a football player, and then a bunch of cops. Peter sitting in a sauna and receiving wisdom about the human imagination from a yogi of some sort, which he then shares with (read: lobs a pontification grenade at) the other three. A party scene, which looks lifted from stock footage of sixties party scenes — overexposed film, kinetic cuts of frugging girls, twirly camera angles — with clips of the Rockettes spliced in. The famous shot of the Vietnamese boy getting shot in the head, followed by a thuddingly inappropriate smash cut to a pubescent Monkees fan screeching deliriously during a performance of “Circle Sky.” Mysterious (and crappy) special-effects shots of Victor Mature looming over a Western town, and getting his hair vacuumed. Cameos by Frank Zappa in the company of a German-accented talking cow. My beloved Mike, cloaked in poorly-shaven smugness (and those anti-groovy red sunglasses — the hell?). Legend has it that the Monkees sat around a hotel room with Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, smoked a ton of grass, and tape recorded their ideas for a movie, and it shows in every frame. It’s a compendium of the deep thoughts you have when you get high, in celluloid form, and it’s bad.

It’s so, so bad, people. It’s so bad that it’s not enjoyable. It’s way too heartfelt, and it’s trying way too hard with the eyeball in the bathroom cabinet and the psychedelic desert belly-dancer dream sequence and the “give me a W!…give me an A!…give me an R!” cheerleading scene and all that. It’s grating, and yet somehow it’s boring also. It wants very badly to use surrealism to comment on something, anything, but in order for surrealism to work effectively in film, it needs an element of realism to contrast with — something ordinary to point up the weirdness. David Lynch understands that. Rafelson and Nicholson don’t. There’s no plot here, no linear control group of normal, and as a result, the weirdness comes off as extremely contrived. And then there’s the meta-commentary about how the band feels trapped in a role that they’ve outgrown, non-cleverly represented by sticking them all in a black box they can’t get out of. No, literally. All four Monkees, wearing white space-agey jumpsuits, locked into a black box. Ingenious, no? No. No, not really. The production “values” don’t help much, either. The movie doesn’t work on any level — not as pastiche, not as anti-war propaganda, not as a satire of Hard Day’s Night. Okay, that’s not entirely true. If it’s a montage of self-indulgent acid-trip transliterations involving trampolines that you want, or proof that Micky Dolenz dresses left (you heard me), look no further than Head.

The film does have its amusements. Davy’s endless soft-shoe routine nearly put me into a coma, but then I spotted Toni Basil as his dance partner, which livened things up — not much, but a little. Sonny Liston, doing an extended cameo, renders one of the most eloquent expressions of “the minute I get off this set, my agent is getting his ass kicked into 1974” that I’ve ever seen. One of the more pointless scenes, which involves a girl threatening to jump off of a building, shows up as a sample in a song, and I’ve spent several productive hours trying to figure out whether it’s Deee-Lite, MC 900 Ft. Jesus, or the Soup Dragons that uses said sample. (Feel free to solve the mystery for me — it’s a girl’s horror-movie scream, followed by the words, “I’m gonna do it.” I think it’s mixed into “Softly” by the Soup Dragons, but I can’t say for sure.) But overall, it’s just a waste of time. It’s the fashion to cluck and wonder how movies like Freddy Got Fingered or Dude, Where’s My Car get made, how it happens dreadful, offensive, tedious SNL vanity projects and flaccid sequels ever see a green light. Well, it’s not a new phenomenon — and at least Dude, Where’s My Car had a plot, or a semblance of one. The guy lost his car; he’s gotta find it. It’s not much, but it’s a plot. Head makes that shit look like Proust.

That’s why I wouldn’t go back to the sixties, in the end. I like things to make sense most of the time. I don’t think getting stoned is a wellspring of hilarity, or even of inspiration, really; I wrote quite a few stoned poems in my day, and every last iamb sucked rocks. I believe world peace is a lovely idea, but an unrealistic one; I rather dislike tie-dyed clothing. A lot of wonderful, essential things came out of the sixties, not least in the world of film, but Head isn’t one of those things, and it manages to encompass every annoyance that came out of the decade too. And that’s not even counting Dennis Hopper. Shut up, Dennis Hopper.

March 18, 2002

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