BigJeffLebowski Blog

I made a note early in the film Anytown, USA which read “I doubt it’s a coincidence that the pattern of his tie matches the pattern of the chair in which he’s sitting to be interviewed.”  The “he” of whom I was speaking is Steve Lonegan, the mayor of Bogota, NJ, one of several mayoral candidates in the 2003 election, the subject of Kristian Fraga’s 2005 documentary.  Much later in the film, Fraga shows Lonegan shopping with his mother for an ensemble to wear on election day; “Do I have a charcoal grey pinstripe suit?” he calls home to inquire, before explaining to the cameras that “the tie’s important, it has to be a great tie.”  Were I a less cynical man -- or, hell, maybe even a more cynical man -- I would laugh.  Instead, I shake my head at this tiny metaphor for everything that is wrong with politics: no one who cares about anything other than being elected will ever hold an elected office.

 

In the case of Anytown, USA, we have a small town in northern New Jersey with a two term incumbent candidate (Lonegan) seeking reelection.  His recent budget cuts -- specifically those which affected the local high school and, in particular, its athletic department -- have put him out of favor with many of his citizens.  He has a relatively strong record otherwise, but he cannot hide his disregard for Bogota as a community, nor does he try too.  He is aloof and dismissive, self righteous to a fault, mistaking his opinions for facts, and of the belief that Bogota High School -- whose Bogota Bucs are the maypole around which the town near-universally rallies -- is more of a financial burden than it is worth.  His policies, as far as the film illuminates them, are of the stereotypical Republican school: financially somewhat admirable on paper, but impersonal, without regard for the populace, and geared more toward the town than the townspeople.

 

So what does a community in revolt do?  Well, just like any self respecting democratic republic, they throw in a couple other candidates.  Fred Pesce, an amiable enough man, emerges as the democratic candidate.  A former member of city council, he is, to put it mildly, past his prime.  He denies rumors that he will drop out of the race due to health concerns, but he frequently appears as though he should.  Pesce would be great as your Italian uncle, leaning over the grill with a spatula in one hand and a cigar in the other, but as a mayor?  Well, he always looks tired, moves lethargically, and never really seems to grasp the concept that in order to campaign, you have to... well, you have to campaign.  It seems as though no one in the town knows Pesce’s stance on any of the issues, including Pesce himself.  When asked what he brings to the debate, he simply says he is passionate about several issues; when asked to name a single one of them, he is silent.

 

Not much competition, right?  Enter Dave Musikant, the ostensible hero of the film.  A former Bogota High football star, Musikant is legally blind as a result of a brain tumor he had removed almost a decade earlier.  His outrage at the direction his beloved town is taking is infectious; he doesn’t resort to name calling or petty attacks, he actually wants to discuss his town.  His care is what’s missing from Lonegan, and his passion is what’s missing from Pesce.  What he lacks, however, is any kind of political experience.  We find ourselves rooting for Musikant, partly because he is the underdog and partly because we can see how deeply he cares for his town, but never because he comes off as the most qualified.

 

It’s also worth noting, if only for irony’s sake, that Lonegan is nearly legally blind.  But, he insists, “The only handicap I have, really, is that I’m a republican in a democratic district.”  (I wish I could end that quote after the word “republican,” but my journalistic integrity apparently trumps my political partisanship.)  As if it weren’t enough that Musikant is a legally blind write-in independent candidate, he’s attempting to unseat a nearly legally blind incumbent.  It’s completely irrelevant to the election, and yet it’s emblazoned all over the local papers (and, subsequently, the literature for the film).  This is important.  Ever since Kennedy debated Nixon on live television, politics has been a totally different animal.  Appearance is every bit as important as content.  Oh, who am I kidding, appearance is more important than content.

 

The other historically significant change in politics that is relevant to discussion of Anytown, USA is the idea of the eternal campaign, a term -- and school of rule -- coined in the Reagan administration to reflect the increasing amount of attention given to polling and its effects on how a campaign -- and a term in office -- is run.  When an elected official is in office, how well he or she performs will determine whether or not they are elected to another term.  This seems simple and logical, right?  It is.  Until it is taken to an extreme, at which point his or her term becomes nothing more than a campaign for their second.  And third.  And ad infinitum.  “How are you doing?” a citizen asks Lonegan.  His response of “That’s what I’m here to find out,” could seem indicative of a greater concern for his town and his people.  After watching Lonegan roll his eyes, cross his arms, and scoff at the slightest hint of dissent, it comes off as what it is: a last attempt to win an election that has been moving increasingly out of his favor.

 

It’s just about this point in the documentary that we realize this election is not among candidates, but between The Republican and Everyone Else.  “Most people like him.  Mostly democrats don’t,” an interviewee claims of Lonegan.  “He’s splitting the anti-Lonegan vote,” another protests of Musikant’s campaign.  And it’s just about this point in the review that I stop talking about the film and instead launch a tirade about politics in general.

 

What are the stereotypes?  Republicans are pernicious, spurious, misguided bullies.  Democrats are lazy, unfocused, and define themselves by what they oppose instead of what they support.  Independents are -- well, the whole system is designed to shit on independents, so it doesn’t really matter what they are.  And I hate to admit it, but the film fully supports every single one of these generalizations.  As my anthropologist friends assure me, stereotypes have to come from somewhere; just because they don’t reflect the totality of a group, don’t be so diplomatic as to deny they often reflect a majority.

 

Al Gore’s latest book, The Assault on Reason, directly addresses many of the same topics found in Anytown, USA.  Where the film only alludes (it is quite diplomatic, doing its darndest to steer clear of partisan bias in any direction) Gore points and shouts, lamenting the shift in public consciousness and how it is shaped.  It’s been said countless times that politicians are corrupt; I can’t help but wonder how many entered politics because they were corrupt compared to how many have become corrupt because they entered politics.  Even Musikant, that pillar of small town ideology, succumbs to The Game.  He has to.  Hiring Doug Friedline, political consultant to such underdog candidates as Jesse Ventura, was a wise step.  No doubt the fraction of the vote Musikant received, as small as it may have been, would have been negligible if not nonexistent without Friedline’s help.  Friedline’s organization not only brings a modicum of respectability to Musikant’s otherwise amateur DIY campaign, but allows Musikant to stay at least partly out of the ugly muckraking inherent in politicking.  Regardless, Musikant gets off on his rising visibility and power.  To his credit, only when pushed does he have harsh words for his opponents, although he does use Pesce’s failing health and the rumors of his withdrawal from the race to his advantage.  (He did not start the rumors, and he claims he never brought them up first as a talking point, but the film is more ambiguous on this matter.)  It’s hard to overlook the irony, however, that the Musikant campaign’s “secret weapon” has nothing to do with Musikant’s personal or political ideology.  It’s a man in a pencil suit.  Yes, it’s a man wearing a pencil suit, waving his arms at cars passing by, urging them to vote for “the write-in candidate” Dave Musikant.  It’s a good secret weapon, I must admit.  I smiled.  A lot.  And if I were undecided, it might have been the kind of gamble that would tilt me in his direction.  But at the end of the day, it’s still a seven foot tall pencil.  With arms, legs, a smiley face, and the name “Musikant” in big, purple letters.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, if I’m being too obtuse, I offer you the following equation: Giant Pencil Man = War on Terror.

 

Elections are not won by credentials, policies, plans, blah blah blah, so on and so forth.  The unfortunate truth, which is illustrated with frightening clarity in Anytown, USA, is that candidates are products.  They are developed, researched, tested, marketed, market-test-researched, rebranded.  An election is like a weekend, and each candidate is like a film opening that weekend.  The “issues” are the trailers, posters, full page color advertisements with cherry-picked critical quotes; the issues, or rather their presentation and packaging, are the trifling ephemera used to hook the audience.  And just as advertising frequently misrepresents the products it advertises, so too will candidates alternately emphasize or downplay aspects of their character and their ideology in favor of a wider base of support.  To return to my analogy, chances are, the film with the best advertising is going to sell the most tickets.  If you’re reading my reviews, chances are you agree with my filmic tastes; if you agree with my filmic tastes, chances are you rarely think highest grossing means best.  If you’d like, you can extend my analogy past opening weekend, but I will end here.

 

If my vitriolic rants are as transparent as I imagine they are, you can assume who won the election.  It’s no surprise to the cynic, and disheartening to the idealist.  Not because of Lonegan’s policies (the film is deliberately judicious in dispensing this information) but because of his rhetoric and his techniques.  It does seem defeatist to say that within our version of democracy, the best candidates are unelectable.  Regardless, one cannot deny that the game must be played; a politician’s ambition often comes at the expense of his integrity, and it has bred no shortage of jokes at their expense.  I will not say that there is no solution, since films like Anytown, USA and books like The Assault on Reason are raising our consciousness of the flaws within our government.  But I will also not resort to speculation or sermonizing.  A century from now, America may very well be written of in the history books as a failed experiment.  Works such as these can either steer us away from that fate or illustrate how it befell us; it’s entirely up to us which it will be.

It's easy to minimize the influence of Roky Erickson on the music world.  Unless you were among his ardent fans and followers, he was ostensibly a one hit wonder who promptly disappeared from the music industry, only to return several times with diminishing results.  At its best, his music was carnal, raw, and fierce, as such luminaries as Billy Gibbons, Thurston Moore, Gibby Haynes, and Patti Smith attest in Kevin McAlester's documentary You're Gonna Miss Me.  But at other times, Roky's music was meandering, lacking in direction and cohesion, and -- at least lyrically -- downright silly.  It was hard to tell when Roky was being irreverent and when he was being serious, and the same can be said about the Roky Erickson of McAlester's film.

 

When we first see Roky, he resembles the addled recluse he is: with scraggly hair, long yellow nails, and a spotty beard, he is fascinated by a half assembled Mr. PotatoHead doll and impressed that Publishers Clearing House would so generously offer him money.  He spends most of his time wandering through his cluttered house, keeping comprehensive logs of his mail -- both incoming and outgoing -- whether it be junk mail and advertisements, or letters to the late Alfred Hitchcock, which he never sends.  His sleep ritual is not unlike something from a David Lynch film; with TVs, radios, baby monitors, and all other sorts of white noise blaring cacophonously, he sits at the head of his bed, and putting on a pair of sunglasses announces that he will now be going to sleep.  Awake, he will only answer the door or the phone for his mother, who spends four hours a day with him, trying to make sense of her son's life -- and through her efforts, validate her own.

 

Roky's mother Evelyn becomes his de facto guardian, which is a point of contention among Roky's brothers, who feel Roky should have access to prescribed drugs and rehabilitation, of which his mother is skeptical.  This conflict is where McAlester chooses to focus his camera, framing it within Roky's storied history, which includes his early abuse of LSD, arrest for marijuana possession, nervous breakdown, diagnosis of schizophrenia, and three year stint in Rusk Maximum Security Mental Hospital, where he regularly received shock treatment.  The film wisely avoids supposition about the causes of Roky's mental state -- was it the drugs? the shock treatment? natural proclivity? sexual abuse as a child? -- keenly accepting that within the insanity of Roky's life, there is no way of discerning which factors weighed most heavily upon his psychological health.  "Roky chose to go crazy," notes his brother's therapist, "for him it was a solution."

 

It may have been the only solution.  His family was particularly volatile, driving at least two of the Erickson sons to therapy, most notably the youngest, Sumner.  Evelyn, however, prefers religion and yoga to science and medicine, and tries to lead Roky down a similar path of recovery.  To explain her distrust of psychiatry, she alludes to "Frasier," noting how Frasier and Niles, both therapists, are unable to solve their own problems, never make mention of a "supreme being," and are "another example of knowledge not being turned to wisdom."  Her catharsis comes from giant collages of photos, paintings, newspaper clippings, and other such ephemera which she constructs as a kind of autobiography of her life, to convince herself of her worth as a human and, specifically, as a mother.  Rather than attempt to reconnect with her children and discuss their growing rift, she elects to make a fairy tale film called "The Five Kings" as a metaphor for her relationship with her sons.  A great deal of her skewed sense of context and especially her packratting can be seen in Roky and his mess of a home, but Sumner vocally wonders if this is the healthiest environment for a man who claimed to hear voices and would travel to the beach to "literally have the sense knocked into him" by the crashing waves.

 

This is not to say that Sumner is a bastion of sagacity.  His home is an eyesore, a great, big box of windows and primary colors -- yellow and red, mostly, both inside and out -- that would stand out anywhere, but does so doubly in the Pittsburgh suburbs; his therapy teeters precariously on the edge of new-agey poppycock.  Nonetheless, he provides a sturdier ground for Roky, and when the film flashes ahead one year, we immediately see a change in Roky, both in how he carries himself and how he interacts with his environment.  He is sharper, keener, and his sense of wonder about the things around him is decidedly more childlike than the skewed rantings and blatant misconceptions we have seen from him up to this point.  But still, when Roky picks up his guitar today and plays a song for his brother and his therapist, the wide-eyed glance he gives to his audience is still somewhat amiss, and begs the question: For someone who, as a youth, only seemed happy playing his guitar, and as an adult walked away from music entirely for no apparent reason and without any remorse, is the joy in his face from the music itself or from pleasing his audience?  If Roky comes off as anything in You're Gonna Miss Me, it's a man at the mercy of those around him, a man being pulled in several directions, unable to cope with the stresses of his family life and his fame.

 

Whether it's 1966, and he is taking more of bandmate Tommy Hall's acid despite his bad trip, or it's 40 years later and he's picking up the guitar at the suggestion of his therapist, Roky's life is one that seems unable to rectify the impulse to please those around him with his indomitable individuality.  McAlester plays the last several years of Roky's life as triumphant, and there's no doubt they are when you see the new spark of life he possesses.  Nonetheless, the film hits a bittersweet final note: sweet, yes, for Roky's climb back to lucidity, but also bitter, for its portrayal of a man -- brilliant, if you considered him such, but undeniably one of a kind -- who has passed through so many trials in his life that no one, least of all Roky himself, can be sure what is truly in his best interest.