September 07, 2007
In Da Club
Some primary themes of the modern club scene
When I was younger, my parents warned that my eyes would turn square if I watched too much television. They never said anything about too many movies. Little did I know that after watching way too many movies, my vision itself would change, and I’d see everything as a shot in a film: my neck would swivel to emulate a pan; my focus shifting from foreground, to background, to foreground again.
For some reason it often happens when I’m in the club – you know, like in Fifty Cent’s parlance, “in da club.” I don’t get out too often (unlike, say, T-Pain, I don’t club so often that I fantasize about hooking up with the bartender so my drinks are free and there’s no cover). So when I’m in the club – any club – usually for a rock concert, I’m taking in images I rarely see: seas of young people, scores of drinks, collective movement, flashing lights. I start to think of movies, every alcohol-laced denizen is suddenly an extra, and the music fades to merely a backing track.
Clubs have always been the backdrops of movies – in Casablanca, after all, Bogart owned one. Because the club scene is an easy excuse to compact a group of people together, it often becomes an easy introductory exposition into the world of the characters. In both the Duff sisters’ Material Girls and the Wayans brothers’ White Chicks, the club scene is used as a device to illustrate the characters’ social milieu, introducing a host of supporting characters (the similarities of the two films don’t end there, of course, but I’ll leave further comparisons for another time).
Director Michael Mann uses clubs in a similar way, but he exploits their visceral energy even more so than Material Girls or White Chicks. He puts the club to use as the fuel for action-side of his modern noirs. The original theatrical cut of Miami Vice opened directly, without credits of any kind, into Crockett and Tubbs rocking it in da club on a stake-out, with Colin Farrell’s Crockett slurping product-placed Bacardi mojitos. The centerpiece of Mann’s previous film Collateral is a rapid-edit shoot-out in an LA club, with bumping bass dance track supplying a further layer of energy; it’s a Wild West bar fight for the 2000s.
Not all films use clubs as a visceral, social experience; they often portray a deadening anti-social one as well. Many movies portray clubs as I tend to experience them – a monad, adrift in the mass, rapt in a spectacle but forever apart from it at the same time. For this reason, isolation and alienation seem to be primary themes of the modern club scene.
Think of Bela Tarr’s Damnation, where the mere pacing of the camera work circling the singing siren on stage makes you want to slit your wrists. Or how about the angel wondering into the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds concert in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire? The black and white photography isolates the light – there’s lots of people there, but its fucking lonely all the same, even for an angel.
The list of contemporary auteurs from Asia provide more examples aplenty. I can’t think of a Hou Hsiao-hsien film set in the present that doesn’t feature a neon dancefloor with flashing lights but otherwise overwhelming darkness. In Millenium Mambo, protagonist Vicky virtually lives in the club; the dancefloor is her escape, but her deadbeat boyfriend and gangster support network ring the floor around her – she’s really just in the eye of the violent storm (same goes for the gangster-dating actress in Hou’s Good Men, Good Women). Her later coming-of-age escape to Japan even occurs through her networking at a bar.
Shu Qi’s other modern Hou heroine, in Three Times, is a rock and roll singer who bellows out her modern malaise on stage in a club while her boyfriend circles her, taking photographs. Like Vicky, she has an internal world that no one in the club is aware of, no matter how much she is the center of attention. Those photos her beau is taking only capture the surface.
Hou’s not the only one out of Asia who uses the club as a device to simultaneously evoke the emptiness of the characters at the same time as capturing the social world they live in. Jia Zhang-ke’s Unknown Pleasures uses the pulsing beat of a Pulp Fiction theme remix to illustrate his characters vicarious – and vapid – life in the shadow of American pop culture. And Tran Anh Hung also uses a club scene coupled with a Western song – in this case, Radiohead’s "Creep" – to showcase the emotional devastation of Tony Leung’s chronically uncaring pimp in Cyclo.
On the American side of the Pacific, the best use of club-as-social-critique that comes to my mind is an old one, Haskell Wexler’s 1969 Medium Cool. In one scene, the bastard cameraman takes his poor, single-mother date to an acid freakout; the band is rocking some silly tune about San Francisco, hair, and hippies, and the woman, originally from West Virgina, couldn’t feel more out of place. By foregrounding the woman’s alienation, Wexler’s is commenting on the alienating, middle-class content of the so-called counterculture. Like all great club scenes, Wexler’s does double-duty as capturing a moment in time as well as critiquing it.
In the best club scenes, like Wexler's, it isn’t about the body itself – sweating, grooving, gyrating – but about the world each body exists in: by packing many bodies into a small room, it brings into bold relief the tensions between the individual and society. To the extent that films highlight these tensions, which are the essence of any political or social ethics, perhaps my seeing everything like a movie is not such a bad thing after all – even if the inability to sink unconsciously into the dancing mass of the club remains forever isolating. No matter, Colin Farrel's makes it look hot, so it's all good.
