Viking Night: SLC Punk
By Bruce Hall
October 11, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Maybe that’s never happened to you but as we go through life, change is inevitable. You learn new things whether you want to or not, and sooner or later you know enough to want to do some things differently. If you’re inherently mature, you know when it’s time to suck it up and change. If you’re not, then you defiantly blame the rest of the world for your problems. You could end up wandering through life, swimming against the current instead of learning how to chart a course. Some guys lose a lot of years that way. Some guys lose them all. SLC Punk is a story that contains one of each. It’s the brainchild and semi-autobiographical handiwork of director James Merendino, who came of age a disaffected punk rocker in Salt Lake City during the waning years of the Cold War.
Now you know where the name comes from.
As for the plot, it comes largely from Merendino’s own post high school years. And these were evidently spent fondling the fringe of the anti-establishment drug culture - or, what there was of it in Salt Lake City. I’ve never been there, but I lived in the Bible Belt long enough for a few things to look familiar.
SLC Punk depicts the town as a highly conservative place that features some archaic ideas about drinking, as well as a somewhat selective enforcement of its moral code. I’m not saying it’s true. I’m just telling you what’s in the movie. It’s the standard talk you’d hear all the time if you lived within a thousand mile radius of the place. Anyway, you’re bound to have more than the average level of teenage insurrection in an environment like this - so allow me to introduce to you, People’s Exhibits A and B, Steveo and Heroin Bob.
Steveo (Matthew Lillard, who has very prominent crow’s feet for a teenager) is a an exceptionally bright high school graduate whose antisocial tendencies put him at odds with his parents’ Ivy League dreams. His best friend Heroin Bob is a melancholy drunk whose nickname comes from the ironic fact that he faints at the sight of needles. They’ve known each other since elementary school, and now they seem content to live out their young adult years together in a crumbling tenement overlooking a construction site. They spend most of their time drinking, working just hard enough not to get fired and living on the drug culture’s event horizon. Again, this sounds familiar. My reaction to boundaries was to infiltrate a social underclass that didn’t need boundaries, because they already knew everything. In my case it was the Goth scene. In Steveo’s case, it was Goth’s mean older brother, Punk.
But this defiant, directionless duo don’t just have each other. They belong to a cadre of equally aimless friends including Sean (Devon Sawa), a bumbling drug dealer who can’t seem to catch a break. And then there’s Trish (Annabeth Gish), Steveo’s on/off girlfriend whose flakiness may be a punk staple, but it’s contrary to Steveo’s more conventional view of love. There’s also Mark (Til Schweiger), a wealthy German psychopath who’s about ten years older than the rest of them. Their lives consist mainly of partying, sleeping it off, and if there’s time, doing it all over again. The festivities are narrated by Steveo himself, whose analytic sense of proportion makes him seem destined for better things than his friends. But for now, Steveo acts as tour guide, leading us through his madcap, pointless pinball machine of a life.
His crew exists in a subculture of many post teen social groups. There are “Mods”, who appear to be disaffected Mormon kids out to prove that rebellion looks good in a suit. There are Neo-Nazis, but they’re more Blues Brothers than American History X. You’ve got New Wavers, who listen to maudlin crap like Flock of Seagulls. Just for fun, throw in plenty of garden variety truck driving Rednecks. Sometimes they clash, and sometimes they coexist. They find creative ways to get beer on Sunday. They also seem content to spend their lives stagnating on an intellectual hamster wheel. Never growing, never changing, never aspiring to anything better than the present. That is except for Steveo, who seems to hover above it all, regarding it from a curious, semi detached point of view.
In a sociological sense it’s a barely warm soup of people and that’s kind of the way it plays out on screen, for a while. I felt myself getting impatient with SLC Punk, irritated that a film so full of activity could feel so utterly devoid of momentum. It never stops moving and making noise but it grows listless, like a fast boat quickly taking on water. Part of it might be that for an R rated film, SLC Punk feels incredibly harmless. It’s as though the filmmaker is pulling punches with his autobiographical recollection. And that’s okay; You get to tell your own story the way you want to. But how a man describes his past says almost as much about him as the past itself. The movie is relentlessly self-indulgent at first, immediately adopting a frenetic, colorful, music video paced look at punk life that seems a little like something you’d have seen on MTV at the time.
But some of it is strikingly familiar, if you’ve ever known people like this, or lived among them. Eventually I realized that the seemingly random events the film depicts really are anything but. Each of Steveo’s recollections ends with one of his existential pillars cracked or even shattered. Little by little, the laughs come a little less often and the futile irony of nihilism is forced upon you. It’s said the hamster only likes the wheel because he doesn’t know what it is. Like I said, it sucks when you find out everything you’ve devoted your life to is actually just a depressing, self indulgent waste of time.
So on the one hand, SLC Punk is just another stylized coming of age movie but with drugs, Punks and Mods, cats and dogs living together. But it also comes with a very depressing message. It’s one that will probably feel disappointing, but I think that’s because it’s so obvious. And the hardest lessons we all learn in life do seem, in retrospect, completely obvious. It’s melancholy but wistful; certainly not as dreary (or as professional looking) as Less Than Zero. And although it tries, it falls somewhat short of the romantic voyeurism you’d expect from a Cameron Crowe flick. It’s like inexpensive sushi, good enough to eat but not enough to remember.
What it does do is capture some weird, sad things that happen in just about every town in America, in a town that could only have happened there. It’s not a great film, nor is it unforgettable in any way - except that it’s the only punk-related movie I can recall set in Salt Lake City. In fact outside of the Olympics, I can’t think of anything ELSE I’ve ever seen happen in Salt Lake City. SLC Punk is an interesting change of pace for a familiar genre. And if it’s people watchin’ and philosophizin’ you like, it’s very absorbing, to witness the juxtaposition of middle class anarchist kids flailing hopelessly against life’s tendency toward order. It’s a hell of a lot easier than buying beer on Sunday.