Aaron Hillis sent me a screener of the film he co-directed, Fish Kill Flea, several months ago. I watched it on a Sunday afternoon, shortly after returning to Queens from a trip to suburban New Jersey, where my boyfriend and I sometimes go to raid forgotten thrift shops and record stores. On that trip, I had picked up a handful of obscure DVDs, including a circa-1936 mystery serial starring Bela Lugosi, a Japanese bootleg of El Topo, and the 2-disc release of Suki Hawley and Michael Galinksi's first two films, Radiation and Half-Cocked. I watched Half-Cocked and Fish Kill Flea back-to-back, and took a chunk of notes considering one film in light of the other, which I never published. Fish Kill is making its New York premiere this weekend, so I thought I'd revisit those notes.
I knew very little about either film going in, but it turned out be an accidentally appropriate double feature. Both are anthropological documents in a way, speaking to the idea that subcultures need to be documented before the disappear; both films offer a scrapbook-like vision of scene that no longer exists. Fish Kill Flea is a more literal document, a quietly stylized portrait of the final days of flea market in upstate New York. Half-Cocked, though nominally a fiction film about a gang of kids who steal a van and pretend to be a band on tour in order to mask their getaway, clearly functions as a symbolic gesture of self-preservation on the part of the filmmakers, who were themselves touring indie rockers in the mid-90s.
At their core, both films are ultimately about a ragtag group of outsiders who try and fail to live outside the real-world realities of contemporary capitalism. Fish Kill Flea is an elegy, not just for this one flea market, but for the almost-completely-dead American phenomenon of small, self-contained economic systems. The era of small business, mom and pop, one-to-one transactions, independent salesmen leaving their fingerprints on their products and, by extension, their community--that's all vanishing, to be replaced by homogenous big box superstores. In a series of man-on-the-street interviews in Fish Kill Flea, visitors to the soon-to-vanish flea market seem universally confused to hear what's set to replace it. Even if the march of mainstream culture is a foregone conclusion, the question of why the community might need "another Home Depot" seems honestly bewildering.
When it comes to the inevitability of mass culture takeover, both films feel like wistful attempts to stop time. Fish Kill is strongest texturally in its montages of still images, in which the film literally functions as a scrapbook. The fact that these stills, in terms of sheer beauty and oddness, eclipse most of the moving imagery in film is fitting: the subject's glory days exist only in still frames. The images could hardly be more evocative--I could imagine a whole film sprouting out of that one shot of the kid cowering from the monkey with the shotgun--but their relationship to the flea market's current fix isn't spelled out. The past is a pastiche, the present is a muddle, and we're able to fill in the blanks with our own lived experience of late capitalism.
These are films about doomed micro-economies. Neither the DIY indie rocker nor the flea market vendor needs a lot of money to keep going, but that's part of the problem: neither is able to produce or consume on a scale large enough to fit into contemporary capitalism. And the films themselves circulate within their own micro-economies: produced on shoestrings, exhibited largely at sub-mainstream venues, they're endeavors entered into without hope of profit. As an audience member, I'm of course conscious of the fact that I'm only able to make these connections between the two films because I seek out the kinds of alternative economies--film festivals, suburban indie video stores--that both films both celebrate and exist within. (The fact that I'm fortunate enough to be able make a living making these connections is also amazing, and in fact part of the reason why I'm only writing about this now is that I was working for what is essentially the Home Depot of internet content at the time I saw these films, but that's neither here nor there.)
At the end of the day, I'm really a capitalist: I like money, but I also passionately believe in free markets, to the extent that I want to see economies of every scale succeed. If you're in the same boat and you're in New York, do your part by going to see Fish Kill Flea this Saturday at Rooftop Films. For more information, check out the Fish Kill Flea website.
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