Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Another report from Mr. Sheldrake in New York, this time regarding one of the films I’m most interested in seeing right now.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Hungary 2005
‘Merican
directed by Jeff Feuerzeig
Best Documentary Directing Award at Sundance 2005
Sheldrake here, reporting live from midtown in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art is running it’s New Directors / New Films series from March 23rd through April 3rd. Go to MOMA’s site (www.moma.org) to see the schedules. The programs feature new cinema by directors who’re coming to the Big Silver for the first time, and much of what’s being shown is stunning. MOMA’s on 53rd Street in Manhattan between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
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THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON – This year’s must-see rock documentary, though not for the reasons you’ve been told, it’s getting raves from everyone whose seen it, including, I see, Ghostboy on this site. It’s the story of an Austin-based musician of legend whose mind is so screwed up, whose talent is so small and unimportant, and whose self-destructive tendencies are so perfectly honed and timed to undermine any success he ever has, that no one outside of Austin, except for a few downtown New York musicians, has ever heard of him. As his website (www.hihowareyou.com) notes, “30+ albums, hundreds of songs and dozens of fans.”
The title of the movie pays homage, of course, to the Stephen Vincent Benet story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” which is great to find in your literature collections in high school because it’s essentially a cool piece of comic-book style genre fiction that has slipped through the filters that prevent almost anything interesting from crossing through the weapon-checks of our modern high schools. In that story the hero signs his soul away to the devil, but there’s a flaw in the contract so the case goes to trial—BEFORE A JURY OF THE DAMNED! The words in uppercase would be the Marvel title of that issue, were they to publish the tale.
The Devil horns his way into the title of this movie not for any tort-related reasons, but because Daniel, a fundamentalist Christian wacko, hasn’t quite passed through the Renaissance and still lives in Danteland in his head, where his favorite rides are the Career-Go-Boom Carousel, the Slide Into Madness and the White Powder Trail. We review, with DJ and the director, the history of his musical career, such as it is, from the days when he horned his way into MTV videos in Austin, to a successful concert after which he had a near-Buddy Holly/Jim Croce/ experience, to the exhibitions and booming sales of his comic-booky drawings and sketches.
So, why has he been ignored for so long? Other crazy people have big followings, he doesn’t. Does Daniel Johnston have any talent?
I listened to the music and I found it underwhelming in the extreme. There’s a kind of paranoid schizophrenia, one of whose symptoms is the sufferer’s repetition of the same melody over and over without change, and, I’m no doctor, but DJ probably has that condition: to say his song structures are “static” is to bend over backwards to be polite. His lyrics are the kind that are either artless and brilliant, or just artless, and to my way of thinking they’re the latter (though Funeral Home is better than most of them, though it’s basically nicely decorated self-absorbed teenage morbidity). Furthermore, his artwork, while it contains some cool comicy images, is basically on the level of a 10-year old boy. Matt Groening shows up at a show and praises him at the end, but, you know, MG is brilliant and brings that brilliance to whatever he looks at, and I have the feeling he’s just being polite to DJ. You just know that the Austin crowds that listened to him originally had a smirk on their face when he played, and that’s what I saw when the director incorporated film from some earlier performances. Through droning familiarity, I guess his songs developed a following: they probably remind Austin college students of fun times and great parties. I have some band memories like that, bands that used to collect at the Marlin Bar on 110th and Broadway, but with two, maybe three exceptions, I don’t confuse them with talented musicians.
There was a guy called “Sam” who hung around the Columbia University campus steps, 116th and Broadway, when I lived in that neighborhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was a bent over, dwarfish little old guy who spat out paintings, drawings, sketches, all Picassoesque, all immature and valueless, but it became chic for them to end up on the walls of large numbers Columbia students, who in general were, and are, a pretty smirky bunch, as are downtown New York musicians: there’s nothing more common then for them to adopt an inferior “artist” deluded about his ability and perform quasi-celebratory-critiques of his poor attempts at art; it’s how nasty-minded intellectual snobs get their rocks off. That’s the kind of artist Daniel Johnston is, and there’s a reason he doesn’t have a huge fan base: he’s not very good, so don’t think you’re clueless, the emperor is nude. It’s fairly clear that when anything good has emerged from his juvenalia, it’s been because an actually talented musician has taken something DJ has produced and transformed it.
That said, the documentary itself is a towering one, as long as you don’t buy the line that Daniel Johnston is a genius. The right way to look at THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON is as a very, very great documentary about the way dime-store Salieris lead their minor lives in America, within the form of the rock star but without the content. You know the type, we all know them: they lead their lives as rock stars in their minds, as the center of the crowd’s attention, and never develop a real life because they’re always working on their next poorly-produced, badly-performed, amateurishly written, toneless “album” that they’ll force on their friends and family until you’ll start to duck around corners when you see them coming. They have fragile egos, and often drinking and drug problems, and often don’t survive the forty-or-fifty-something realization that the Dream will never be theirs, and that when the moment came to give up, they’d been asleep. Daniel Johnston has had more success than most of these types because he was just crazy enough that he attracted the right “downtown” cache, but he’s still broke, still has no career, still has parents who are worried about whether he’ll be able to survive when they pass on. Maybe the right answer is to give Daniel, towards whom I bear no ill will and feel quite a bit of sympathy, a little career that will sustain him. Or maybe turn the movie into a Hollywood narrative film and give him the proceeds. I’d be happy to a see an entire movie telling Daniel’s story – done by, say, Linklater, it could be a masterpiece. What I will not do is support him by buying his droning music or his childish art.
Go see this movie. It’s a real look at a real American life, even a real kind of American life, that’s common to Daniel’s generation.
SHELDRAKE, NEW YORK
Thanks, Sheldrake. Keep up the good work.
"Moriarty" out.
