|
Dig! tells the story of The Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre from their entry into the world of alternative rock through to present day. (Sorta.) Beginning in the summer of 1996, director Ondi Timoner followed the bands across America and Europe (with a brief visit to Japan), chronicling both stage performances and private moments as a way of contrasting two very different roads to stardom. At its core, however, the movie is the story of songwriters Courtney Taylor and Anton Newcombe and their complex friendship.
Since its release in 2004 and Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival the same year, few critics have stopped singing the praise of this ambitious documentary. While I am certainly a fan of Dig! -- I watched it compulsively for the first few days that I had it -- I have serious problems with its implicit claim to be a tale of two bands and their divergent paths from lowly rock wannabes to alt-rock icons. This is what the film should be about -- two groups of people who become equally respected and admired, albeit in completely different forums. And yet, for all the stories and the footage that seven years on the road and at home with talented musicians produced, Timoner takes the easy way out and panders to some imagined rockist audience, giving them the film that validates the popular myth of a tough industry (generally) and BJM's instability (more specifically) without truly interrogating either. Reduced to such a stereotypical plot, Dig! is in many ways the story we've heard before -- the one about a crazed, perhaps schizophrenic genius who burns out before he can find his star -- rather than something closer to the truth. This truth, that Anton Newcombe and his band of merry men continue to be successful despite their outright antagonism of the industry that they once hoped could support their art, seems too complex and muddy for Timoner to tackle. Instead, she allows The Dandy Warhols' mainstream success to validate their role as "heroes" while the men and women involved with BJM are seen to flounder after hitching a ride with the decidedly unheroic Newcombe.
It's not for me to say whether Dig! is full of falsehoods and mispresentations (Newcombe, for one, says the film is full of lies), but the director's commentary illustrates that Timoner is all too willing to psychologically scrutinize Newcombe in a way her camera utterly fails to do in seven years of documentation and two hours of screen time. After the fact, Timoner speaks of Newcombe's depth and complexity as a subject, but the film itself presents a one-dimensional ur-rockstar for whom there is no possibility other than self-ruin. The Dandy Warhols and ex-BJM Joel Gion, meanwhile, stink of sunshine and roses at the film's conclusion, and the supplemental material provided by the DVD (wonderfully ample in its presentation here by Palm) only furthers this view of events.
Timoner often comes off as an amateur videographer with a group of friends willing to be captured doing interesting things at an interesting time in their lives. There's little evidence that any real time was spent theorizing and scrutinizing the film's representational practice or what the project hoped to achieve. An examination of the jarring divide between art and industry? Dig! is more interested in personas than art or the industry. Specifically, Newcombe is offered up as less a musician than a foil for Taylor's composure and increasing success.
As a document of two bands and their music, Dig! is good, and I defy anyone not to be entertained during their introduction to the film. But upon subsequent viewings, Dig! begins to buckle under the weight of its promise to challenge while entertaining, and the cartoon quality of its myth-in-the-making musicians begin to draw attention to itself. Somewhere along the way, Timoner chose to ignore Newcombe and his cohorts' humanity and instead relied upon them for cheap thrills and quick punchlines, in contrast to The Dandy Warhols' slow-but-sure climb to greater heights. The Dandy Warhols are treated marginally better, perhaps because their success has already established a particular image within the public's imagination, but they, too, are forced to exist within a warped world of Timoner's design, where chronology and documented fact take a back seat to ensuring audiences will leave believing they've seen life inside the worlds of drugged-out, bohemian alt-rock stars. In his final words in the film, Newcombe says that it's people without vision who are destroying the music industry; fine as it is, Timoner's film would have been all the better if she had demonstrated some of this vision, as it appears to be lacking in her representation of this complex group of artists and their often contradictory relationships with one another.
-- Mike Baker
|
