the truth but slanted
romance, realism, and heroin in the panic in needle park // meta-sentimentality in alex ross perry's pavements
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got an essay I wrote for the Trylon’s Perisphere blog about the origins of heroin chic in Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park, plus a review for Alex Ross Perry’s new Pavement pseudo-documentary Pavements. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which I think next week will actually mean Wednesday and so on for the rest of the summer. Maybe.
I wrote an essay for the Trylon's Perisphere blog about The Panic in Needle Park and its place in the history of heroin movies. Read it here! I don't adore Needle Park, but I'm fascinated by artistic depictions of heroin use and their enduring appeal to edgy teenagers and emotionally stunted adults alike. I'm not sure I get it 100% right - there’s a lot wrapped up in this topic, and as someone who has never experienced anything more than a 600 mg dose of ibuprofen, I'm not sure I'm the one to figure it out.
If you're in the Twin Cities and want to see this and other deeply depressing movies, head over to BLEAK WEEK: MINNEAPOLIS, a collaboration between the Trylon and American Cinematheque. Highlights include Needle Park (Wednesday 11 June), fucked-up WWII classic Come and See (Saturday 7 June, selling out fast), and Bergman's seminal rape-and-revenge film The Virgin Spring in 35mm (12 June). If you’re in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, New York, Boston, Dallas, or London, you can get in on the Bleak Week fun too. Getting stunned into numbing depression in a dark room with strangers is a great way to kick off your summer. See you there.
Here’s a question that won’t get anyone talking: who is more famous in America, Robbie Williams or Pavement? A Google Trends analysis suggests that Pavement is by far the more popular search term, but "pavement" is also a commonly encountered infrastructure phenomenon, so I don't know what to believe. Either way, let’s note that we live in a world where Hollywood took a 1,500-screen swing on a Robbie Williams biopic starring a CGI chimpanzee while an elaborate work of meta-fiction about a ‘90s MTV staple gets an eight-screen release. Some people never get any respect. And I suppose one takeaway from Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements is that some people don't want it.
The central premise of Pavements is "what if Pavement was the most important band on the planet?" The weird thing is, I sort of think they were. Founded in 1989 in Stockton, CA by Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, Pavement is arguably *the* band that defines the sound and aesthetic of 21st-century indie rock. If you were a teenager in the 2000s who identified as "into music" but weren't cool enough to read zines, there’s a good chance you spent about 50% of your Broadband time on Pitchfork Media, and there’s a good chance you learned that "Gold Soundz" was the official best song of the 1990s. To a certain type of millennial, Pavement's first two or three albums were essential homework listening, not always beloved but necessarily respected. Does the average American feel this way? Or is this a band that, for most people, doesn’t exist?
I think I know the answer, but Pavements doesn’t clear anything up. Somewhere between The Rehearsal, Close-up, and Rolling Thunder Revue, Perry’s documentary tells the story of four contemporary Pavement projects: a 2022 30th-anniversary reunion tour; a Pavement biopic called Range Life starring the guy from Stranger Things; an off-Broadway musical called Slanted! Enchanted!; and a pop-up museum in New York called Pavement: 1933-1922. If this sounds like too much to you, the band seems to agree: they slip in and out of each story line, sometimes undercutting the premise and sometimes boosting it to preposterous proportions. By the end of the film, I was convinced that Pavement had multiple gold records (they don’t have any), and that Stephen Malkmus is genuinely embarrassed for participating in the Apple “Think Different” ad campaign (he isn’t, because he didn’t). Did Pavement actually reunite? Did they actually embark on a global, sold-out tour? Who knows. Instead of feeding us facts or stories, Perry opts for an enormously complex web of deceit that mostly amounts to a prank.1
Why would anyone go to these lengths for a band like Pavement? The archival interviews in Pavements reveal again and again that Pavement had no sincere interest in being famous. Their impact came from the lack of marketability that hangs over everything they sell. Ironic musing, slouchy t-shirts, dull production, off-key whining and occasional barking: Pavement didn’t invent any of these things, but they wrapped the package in crinkly paper and dropped it on MTV’s doorstep. Stephen Malkmus made it acceptable for rock stars to be lazy, snarky, and somewhat well-adjusted, thus paving the path for a generation of normcore imitators who liked being alternative but weren’t dangerous enough to commit to punk. It’s tough to identify an iconic Pavement moment because they’re too self-aware and nowhere near self-serious enough to pull off anything iconic. Instead, the behind-the-scenes footage in Pavements reveals how normal they are - especially if your perception of normalcy was crafted in their wake.
All this makes Pavement a terrible subject for a documentary. The point of a music documentary - or a biopic, or a jukebox musical, or an archival museum exhibit, or even a reunion tour - is to solidify the importance of an act and to transpose it into legend. For these guys, that’s basically impossible. Pavements plays it honest by abandoning history and heading straight for hagiography. It’s tough to write history when your primary sources are obsessed with undercutting their own truth. If your subject's most famous lyric is "and they’re coming to the chorus now," you're doomed to meta-analysis from the start.
I wish the Bryan Singers and Sam Mendeses and James Mangolds of the world would take note of this approach. We live in a world saturated by music biopics, and we’ve never needed them less. The wonderful thing about recorded sound and video is that it doesn't disappear outside the moment of its occurrence, a reality that should have made the music biopic obsolete before it was invented. There’s no need to recreate a legendary live performance when video of that performance lives on Youtube. Pavements hits on this absurdity when it covers Pavement’s 1995 Lollapalooza performance, arguably the closest thing to a legendary moment in the band’s career. The band gets wasted and noodles around without a setlist, which leads to some drunk kids pelting them with mud balls, which leads to Scott Kannberg pulling down his shorts and mooning the crowd. Pavements splices footage of the actual event with Perry’s exact recreation of the scene in Range Life (complete with replica costumes, coordinated movements, and perfectly reproduced background) - and then splices that with the behind-the-scenes footage of Nat Wolff-as-Scott Kannberg exposing his bottom in front of a mud-splattered green screen. One butt flashes to another and then to another, three butts made one, merged at enormous effort into something I can watch any time I’d like for free.
Why go to all this trouble? The real-life aftermath of the Lollapalooza fiasco, captured on video and included in the documentary, was that the actual Pavement thought it was kind of funny. Perry includes the footage in Pavements - it’s some of the silliest and most lighthearted inter-band comedy of the entire film. In contrast, the Range Life Pavement treats the backstage meeting as a come-to-Jesus moment that drives the drama for the final act of the film. Perry2 shows both versions side-by-side and asks the viewer to take in the contrast. We want the public event to be a catalyst for private transformation, but the truth is much less satisfying: the legendary event stands alone, surrounded by myriad forgotten moments that cancel out any emotional momentum. The trick of the biopic is to exactly recreate the public history in order to rewrite the private. The trick of Pavements is to shrug that all away.
If there’s a central ethos of Pavements, it’s this happy disregard for the tools of hagiography. Perry never blinks as he reveals scheme after overblown scheme, but he provides every opportunity for the viewer to take a step back to remember that none of this is serious. A Pavement museum that features a replica of Stephen Malkmus’s uniform from his pre-band job as a security guard is an extremely stupid thing to create. A jukebox musical that features a “Gold Soundz” Santa Claus dance number is an atrocity that could never possibly succeed. A biopic in which Griffin Newman plays a drummer could only ever be a joke.
And yet. The wildest thing about Pavements is that when we finally get to the climax, it’s somehow sort of moving. The Slanted! Enchanted! finale plays out over a montage of sold-out reunion shows, COVID-masked museum-goers, and starry-eyed biopic stars, everyone pouring out their love for a band who never seemed to ask for it. Perry proves his point: Pavement can be the most important band on earth so long as we manipulate the tools of narrative to make it so. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and the power of cinema can cook it up out of almost nothing.
Pavements isn’t breaking new theoretical ground. We know that the postmodern condition presupposes that interrogation of the truth is the only way to get at anything true. But in making a mockery of the idea that anybody could possibly care about a band as sardonic as Pavement, Perry comes to a fairly sweet conclusion: people do actually care, and all of them are susceptible to tears just as much as the people who bought tickets to Bohemian Rhapsody. What's distilled through jukebox musicals and museum exhibits and biopics isn't history but sentiment, the same sentiment that swells up when we watch concert videos or pour over personal mementos or listen to the music itself. To be human is to care about stupid things. I don't really care about Pavement, but it's sweet to know that a lot of people do. Including Stephen Malkmus himself. "It's a real joy to be sentimental," he says, looking around the many articles of bullshit in the Pavement museum with an expression that could almost be described as misty. "People relate to that, I think." I think he’s probably right.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week with thoughts on Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme and John Maclean’s Tornado.
I did some research after watching and it turns out a lot of this is real. The tour definitely happened (my coworker worked the door and can confirm). Pavement: 1922-1933 popped up for a few days in Greenwich Village. Slanted! Enchancted! A Pavement Musical ran for two performances and received mixed reviews. The existence of Range Life is questionable; it appears to have premiered at a theater in Brooklyn, but there are no public reports from anyone who was supposedly there, except maybe Stephen Malkmus, who seems to have been offended by it and called it “like not ready for public consumption.” But Perry definitely filmed large portions of it, and we can see the evidence in Pavements in all its melodramatic glory.
I’m writing Perry because it’s less confusing, but the real credit here should go to the phenomenal work of editor Robert Greene, who wove all of this crazy material together and is largely responsible for all the juxtapositions that make this film so interesting.