Sue Sorensen

Rocker Auteurs: David Byrne and NeilYoung as Film Directors

The crossover from making rockmusic to directing feature film is,

for some reason, an unusual direction to take. Perhaps this is because the

brevity and anecdotal quality of the three- or four-minute song is so unlike

the complexity of the full-length narrative film, orbecause the often de-

lightfully narve qualities that are part of a pop song's success would not

necessarily go far in the apparently more sophisticated arena of film. It is

true that in the 1970s, Frank Zappa co-directed 200 Motels and Bob

Dylan made Renaldo and Clara,but both films were critically unloved

and are now difficult to locate. Many rockers, from Elvis Presley to

Courtney Love, have appeared in both musical and narrative films, butfew have had control of these projects. The Who, while making an impor-

tant confribution to the shape of contemporary music with longermusical

narratives hkeTbmmy, did not direct the film versions of their rock op-

eras.

Yetthe visual attributes of some fine rocklyricists -Paul McCartney,

Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello - ought to mean tlanslatable skills in the cin-

ematic medium (both Mitchell and McCartney, for example, are paint-

ers). Whatever the reasons for the relative absence of rockers in the ranks

of film directors,r there are two examples worth noticing because they

insist on making naivet6 and rock's critical foundation of simplicity the

basis of their films. True Stories, directed by David Byrne in 1986 and

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uesueros 90I

David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 107

to say "the message," of True Stories is unexpectedly similar toGreendale's, although Byrne's cinematic style is quirky and seemingly

satirical andYoung's is rou gh,fuzzy,and deliberately unrefined' Both films

are tributes to small-town American life, simplicity, and family, and both

promote awayforward out of politically difficulttimes with aphilosophy

based on love.Nearly all of these attributes are startling, given the histories of these

rockers. Neither is an American citizen. Neither is a keen promoter ofsentimentality but instead is better known for irony. Neither is especially

known forcontributions to the romantic lyric. Yetthe climaxof Tiue Sto-

ries has character Louis Fyne (John Goodman) singing "People Like IJs,"

with Byrne's bittersweet lyric: "People like us /We're going to make itbecause / We don' t want freedom / We don't want justice / We just want

someone to love." Rolling Stonehadthis to say about Byrne's own ver-

sion of the song, released on a Talking Heads album that exists indepen-

dently of the soundtrack album:Rather than affect a down-home twang, Byrne sings in his natu-

ral tone, and the resulting tension drives the lyric home. Some

will hear this paean to the simple life as patronizing: it's about

people who answer their own phones, watch TV, get fat, don'tfret about politics and figure that human rights come down to

finding another person to love. As incongruous as the bteezy

fiddle and gentle pedal steel sound at first behind the nasal,

urbane Byrne, this unlikely combination makes a greater impact

with each listening. (Coleman)

Greendale'sopening song is "Falling FromAbove," which tells us

that "A little love and affection / in everything you do / will make the world

a better place / with or without you." Admittedly, these lyrics are ambigu-

ous - note the negative qualities involved in each search for love' In Byme's

song, are freedom andjustice completely or only provisionally jettisoned

in favor of the love that is rather desperately pleaded for? What does

"with or without you" mean in Young's song? Both Young and Byrne as

lyricists can be indeterminate, as they regularly employ a range of perso-

nas, including psychokillers, junkies, and Civil War fighters. But listening

to the style of music in each case clarifies the intentions, at least in part:

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David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 109

thatanyone can create a film, sing a song, and make a political difference,

and sophistication be damned. But if our tastes have only been tempo-

rarily damaged by exposure to billion dollar special effects extravaganzas

and our political sensibilities merely blunted by comrption and self-

centeredness, Byrne and Young hold out hope that the damage is revers-

ible.

Celebration of Specialness

In some respects, True Stories follows not in the tradition of ear-

lier rock movies or Hollywood musicals but is one of those stories (like

Starman or E.T.) where a benevolent alien visits earth to observe and, ifpossible, promote healing. David Byme is this alien figure, an awkward

visitor to the fictional town of Virgil, Texas during the sesquicentennial

celebrations. Byrne's Narrator is cheerfully dressed in stereotypical west-

ern garb that Roger Ebert, in his review, called "Saturday night cowboyclothes." Speaking directly to the camera as he drives around town in ared Chrysler convertible, the Narrator swivels his head toward us, mak-ing us his fellow alien visitors. He alternately utters perceptive comments

and non sequiturs ("This isn't a rental car - it's privately owned"), as

expected from the chief lyricist of Talking Heads. Byrne, while with Talk-ing Heads, once sang the following with deadpan mock affection, in "Don'tWorry About the Govemment" :

I see the states, across this big nationI see the laws made in Washington, D.C.I think of the ones I consider my favoritesI think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved onesThey work so hard and they try to be strongI'm a lucky guy to live in my buildingThey own the buildings to help them along

It must have been difficult forWarner Brothers to decide how topromote True Stories. In 1986, Talking Heads were a popular new wave

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David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 111

without sounding inane, butthe viewing experience is complex, moving,

and furmy. Consider the scene where a group of 4-H kids wanders through

a vacant lot, with a goat, singing with gusto the song "Hey Now." The

scene could be embarrassing, but instead it is delivered with memorable

affection. Byrne's background in visual art gives him a sure hand with

color, symmetry and juxtaposition. (Today he combines a visual attca-

reer with music.) He finds beauty in the Texas skies, in the dirt roads and

highway overpasses, and lingers over them. His shots of four-car garages

and blowin g garbage are both critical of suburban life and strangely at-

tractive, inajolie laide manner.

This is not the celebration of small town goodness in Capra's lt's a

Wonderful Life.Byrneintroduces us to The Lying Woman (Jo Harvey

Allen), a megalomaniac who claims to have written half of Elvis's songs;

The CuteWoman (Annie McEnroe), who refuses marriage-seeking Louis

Fyne because he sings a hurtin' song; and The Preacher (John Ingle), an

evangelist touting a rousing but murky world conspiracy theory. None ofthese people is particularly admirable. Similarly, Earl Culver, the town's

master capitalist - played with eccentric verve by Spalding Gray - spins a

maniacal tale about the interconnectedness of commerce and family lifethat should be disturbing. And it is. Yet all of these people are accepted

and valued within the movie. What Virgil, Texas is about is real integra-

tion. It's a dream town where whites and Spanish-Americans and Afri-can-Americans get along and everyone gets a chance to perform at the

talent show. I would not want to watch a lot of films about sunnily inclusive

and strangely innocent communities, but there are few enough of them,

and they offer a valuable counterweight to the many American films satu-

rated with menace. Oddly, a not dissimilar viewing experience is the ap-

pealing Mark Illsley comedy Happy, Texas (1999), in which women,

children, and gay men (and a couple of men pretending to be gay) band

together in heroic but goofy exploits. Who knew that Texas, which carries

out nearly one-third of the executions in the United States, could be the

launch site of acinematic program of loveableness?

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uesueros zI I

David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 113

can this be a satire, as it has sometimes been called? If one thinks ofsatires as biting, I see no real teeth in Byrne's film. His quirks can confuse

the issue, bttTrue Storiesisaboutthe importance of neighborliness. Mr.

Rogers would have been proud.

The Devil Plays Harmonica

Every ten or twenty years, Neil Young directs a film, and although

few people have seen Journey through the Past (1973) or Human

Highway (1983), his latest frLm, Greendale (2003), has received more

attention, even though it was made independently by Young's Shakey Pic-

tures. Young has become one of rock's senior statesmen, if such a term

can be used to describe such an unruly personality, and he performed

Greendale material tirelessly in concert before its release in several for-

mats (on CD, on a DVD featuring concert perfornances of the work, and

in a narrative film now available on DVD). The receptionto Greendale

has been mixed, but some critics havebeen quietlyrespectfi.ll, ifbemused.

Young has been, forhim, unusually painstaking inhis provision of access

to the project, not only providing lyrics, maps, and family trees of his

characters on the DVD, but also commentary on the songs in the CD

packaging, and the entire shooting script on his website, neilyoung.com.

Young has always been keen on alter egos, and, while he gives his

own name as one of two camera operators, the director is billed as Ber-

nard Shakey, a long-time pseudonym. Using Super 8 cameras and a vol-

unteer cast of friends and family, Young has made a filmthat is deliberately

inexpensiveJooking. Indeed, the "Making of Greendale" documentary

ontheDVD features an interview withYoung and fellow producerL.A.

Johnson in which they claim to be approaching the $220 mark for the

film's expenses. According to Michael Hollett, Greendale actually cost

$500,000, and if one says that every cent shows up on screen, do note

that the comment comes with a smile.

Observe that I said smile, not sneer. It is easy to say thatGreendale

is amateurish;the adjective "lo-fi" tumedup in alengthy fan discussion of

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uesueJos ,I I

David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 115

themselves, making it the Double E, "they nearly made history / the neigh-

bors rose up / and some of them were mad as he11." Yet, although "change

Comes slow in the country" and "there'S a lot Of distrust," the town is also

the perfect place for their daughter Sun to read, study the media, and

think over social issues in tranquillity until she is ready to take her stand:

for peace and the environment, against government comrption and big

business. Her first action is to create a huge "No War" logo on a hillside,

using hay bales, and her second is to chain herself to a massive bronze

eagle in the lobby of Powerco, an organization whose name suggests both

"big oil" and, more generally, any huge capitalist enterprise.

Running alongside this primary story of Sun's growth as an activist

are three supplementary stories. One focuses on her cousin Jed, an ap-

parently decent fellow with dark secrets involving drugs and guns. Jed

kills a cop "in a split second tragic blunder" ("Leave the Driving") and

spends the rest of the album/film in jail. In the film, the town jail's address

is 666, and in "Devil's Sidewalk," Young makes it clear that the Devil had

a direct hand in Jed's crime. The Devil and Jed are both played withpanache by Young's tour manager, Eric Johnson, who as the Devil dances

aroundtown wearing aloud red sports jacket andplaying the harmonica.

Another plot sffand involves Sun's father Earl Green (James Mazzeo), a

painter who cannot find buyers for his work, and who is also tempted by

the Devil. His temptations, shown in a rather obscure series of scenes,

involve making art that is not frue to himseff and having telephone conver-

sations with Lenore, the town's gallery owner and drug connection' The

final strand of story features Grandpa Green (Ben Keith), who stands up

to the journalists stalking his family in the wake of Jed's crime. Grandpa

gets off some of the best lines in the song cycle: "It ain' t an honor to be on

TV/Andit ain't aduty either," he says, justbeforehe falls dead infrontofthe uncaring TV crews.

One problem with Greendale (in terms of standard popular plot

structure) is that only Grandpa's and Sun Green's Stories are resolved.

Grandpa is declared by Young's narrator-voice to have "died like a hero

/ fightin' for freedom of silence / tryin' to stop the media / tryin' to be

30.1 October 2007

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uesueros gI I

David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 117

ideas. The voice also offers coherence to a loosely-woven project thatcould easily have (and sometimes frankly does) come unravelled. Thisfilm also, in retrospect, helps to make sense of many Young songs over the

years which have used a modified ballad form. He has written many nar-

ratives in which it is not always easy to decide exactly who is singing. One

thinks, for example, of "Rockin' in the Free World." The lines "Don't feellike Satan, but I am to them / So I try to forget it, any way I can" and"Now she puts the kid away, and she's gone to get a hit" seem to belongto different personas. WithGreendale, since we can partake, literally, ofNeil Young's vision, it is clearer now which lines, for example, are as-

signed to Grandpa, Jed, Sun, and the narrator in "Falling fromAbove."Most significantly, as with the simplicity of the songs' structures and the

rudimentary quality of the two-camera shooting, Young's plaintive voice is

empowering for the audience. The message is: these are home movies and

if you want, you can do this too. The fact that the actors are mimingthroughout the film creates some puzzlement, but the resonant music mosfly

makes up for such confusion. It helps if you are familiar with Young'swork - he has created such soundscapes before, particularly After the

Gold Rush, his 1970 album of songs created for a film, written by Dean

Stockwell, that was never made.

The graininess of the super-8 footage is not merely the cinematiccounterpart to Young's notoriously fuzzy gluitar playing (once describedby David Fricke as the "timeless, impolite charms of distortion and endur-ing eloquence. . . in the hands of expert wildcats" l27 lD or his fl annel shirts,

worn years before Seattle grunge existed. The graininess exists to providea shocking contrast to the freacherously precise images available from thecommercial media. This is unmistakable in "Grandpa's Interview" whereYoung's shots are interspersed with CNN-style video footage. The com-mercial media's presentation is almost ludicrously crystalline in compari-son to Shakey's. But after an hour in the company of Young's camera, one

is comfortable with its humanity, its ambiguities and flaws. The media'sview, in contrast, seems heartless and ultimately meaningless. That thecrew stands over Grandpa's dead body, doing nothing, is appalling. But

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uesueros gI I

David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 119

and his musicians in a counfiy church. In this film, Young praises his family,

gives thanks, but chiefly makes music. One could hardly imagine a more

hearty endorsement of stereotypical middle-America mores. (In a bffiingmove, the MPAArated the film PG "for some drug-related lyrics," and

one assumes this could only refer to the famously mournful song "TheNeedle and the Damage Done.") While Heart of Gold has little ofGreendale' s activist passion, it does retain its warmth. Yet many have

noted Young's continually conffadictory messages. William Echafi n NeilYoung andthe Poetics of Energy says that, even in Greendale, "Young

seems to endorse stereotypes and values from both conservative and left-

ist branches of American politics" (40). Echard finally decides thatYoung

is neither conservative nor leftist but primarily an individualist, but I would

argue that while this may be true of Young's earlier work, Young's latest

projects (Greendale, Heart of Gold, Prairie Wind, and Living With

War) xemuch more expansive and outward-looking in their socio-politi-

cal stance.

Young is so closely watched by his fans and the critical fratemity that

whenever he sffays from his sffong suit of astonishing guitar noise, he willbe criticized. His plunges into populistpolitics and environmentalism are

not new, however. What is new is his emphasis on hope. He no longer

wants to fly "mother nature's silver seed / to a new home in the sun"("After the Gold Rush") but is intent on saving this planet "for another

day;"

A Little Love And Affection: A Touch Of The Sacred

While neither David Byrne nor Neil Young have much patience forconventional religion, there is a sneaking respect for the spiritual in bothTrue Stories and Greendale. One of the highlights of True Stories rsseeing gospel pioneer Pops Staples, as spiritual healer Mr. Tucker, sing

the haunting song "Papa l-egba." The voodoo context of the song is prob-

ably nonsense, but the longing that underpins that song sincerely suggests

the metaphysical. And Mr. Tucker's incantations work: he helps John

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uesueros 0zI

David Byrne and Neil Young as Film Directors 121

Such narvet6 may have been the undoing of bothYoung andByrne,in terms of finding an audience for these films. But if this is narvet6, per-

haps the problem is that there is not more of it around, and thus audiences

don't know what to do when it is encountered. It is also possible that bothByme's andYoung's acknowledgement of somekind ofreligious feelingwas confusing for their fans. It is too early to say, based on these twoexamples, whether other rock musician/directors would or should also

workthis vein of simplicity and morality. Greendale andTrue Stories ueunusual enough that it will take some time and effort to understand theiraesthetic. But such a task is worthwhile, since both films, in their homelyways, empower the viewer to do nothing less than reshape North Ameri-can society. You can do this too, say Byrne and Young. Each film ends

with a scene of ouffeach: the final, highly theatrical musical numberin each

case is a hand extended toward the audience, not so that the little people

can touch the heroes, but so that the torch of political and moral actioncan be passed. The lack of heroism in each film is worth remarking: the

characters are resolutely ordinary, fallible, not necessarily admirable.Whatever doubts there might be about the success of True Stories andGreendale,the call to keep music and message "lo-fi" is unambiguousand valuable, as is the appeal - not terribly new, but nevertheless terriblynecessary -to love yourneighbor.Sue SorensenCanadian Mennonite University

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30.1 October 2007