As many students have pointed during recitations, our very own Davy Jones has passed away today. The New York Times has reported the fact on their blog, but the obituary is yet to be published.
I leave you with Davy’s dance scene with Toni Basil, from Bob Rafelson’s Head (1968).
Biskind’s chapter “What Made Us Right?” from the book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” describes the ascension of counter-cultural ideas and filmmaking into the pantheons of mainstream Hollywood studio productions. The initial journey of these ideas is illustrated with the introductions to Bob Rafaelson and Bert Schneider, two aspiring filmmakers strongly influenced by the French New Wave who believed that the American studio system did not allow for a director to fully express themselves and wanted to change that. They were far from counter-cultural icons (“Bob liked Bert precisely because he had short hair and did not smoke dope” pg. 52) but soon became that after their move to Los Angeles and success with their creation, The Monkees.
The Monkees gave Rafaelson and Schneider power and influence, but they grew to resent the group and what it meant to them – an unoriginal Beatles clone that only served to pay their bills. The Monkees’ mainstream success was like ‘selling out’ to Bob and Bert and in Head they tried to erase that by parodying it. The opening lyrics to the film display this (“He, hey, we are The Monkees/You know we love to please/A manufactured image/With no philosophies.“)
The studios had lost touch with the youth audience, an extension of the generational gap seen between baby boomers and their parents in the 1960s. The successful studio pictures of old (big budget blockbuster period epics) were flailing and when films like Head and Easy Rider come out and start to make money, studios went from “…shaking their heads in incomprehension to nodding their heads in incomprehension.” (pg 73) These films drastically differed from the recent studio films by portraying real, contemporary America. This element of realism shows through in Easy Rider – to what extent are Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson acting as themselves? Nicholson allegedly smoked real marijuana for the campfire scene where he talks about Venetian invasion. Most famously however, as the article points out, is the LSD trip scene at the end where Peter Fonda is having a very real, emotional moment in regards to his feelings towards his mother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH-compe0Q0
I also found there was an element of caution in this chapter – the extreme and often unbelievable antics of Dennis Hopper seem to warn against what may happen when the director is given too much power. There needs to be a happy medium where the producer is not stifling the director’s creativity on the film, but also one where the power structure does not allow for unchecked egomania.
The late 60s and the resulting New Hollywood represented a time where both studios and directors were ‘happy’ – studios were making money in an area they were flailing and the directors were able to have creative control over their films.
Week 3: The Counterculture Goes Mainstream
The recitation began with a discussion of Andy Warhol’s experimental film The Chelsea Girls. We discussed how the use of 2 scenes playing at once worked together and how any connection between the two is purely of the audience’s own creati on since the two scenes that are paired is random. It was also brought up how the 2nd projector starts a little later than the first and so the two scenes are always slightly off. The differences between the two screens were also discussed. One screen is in color and silent while the other is in black and white and with sound. The idea of “actively” watching a film was then discussed. With the film, the audience is forced to choose one screen over the other constantly either consciously or subconsciously.
We then talked about the ethics of filmmaking and about whether or not the director should step in when things start to get unethical. The fact that the scene in The Chelsea Girls with the man slapping the woman makes it into the film is meant to force the viewer to make heir own judgement regarding it. The “real yet not real” aspect of the film was also discussed and how it makes the viewer have to decide what’s part of the performance and what is reality. We finished discussing The Chelsea Girls and Touching by talking about how these two films are not difficult to film but that no one had tried to film them in such a manner before and so that is where the production value of art comes from.
The time period (specifically the year 1968) surrounding this week’s films were discussed. We talked about the Columbia student protests against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King’s murder, the Manson family murders (which hit Hollywood hard), and Nixon’s election and afterwards a student presented the Biskind article to the class.
We watched a clip from Easy Rider where the group drops acid and is tripping followed by the ending of the film where both Hopper’s and Fonda’s characters are killed. We talked about how the acid scene is particularly interesting as it involves now special effects and yet it is still able to convey the feeling of tripping convincingly. The significance of the acid scene was also discussed. The scene was described as showing the characters being trapped and existing in a place between life and death.
The discussion then moved to the film Head. The class was given the task of trying to answer the question “What is Head?” One answer said that it was “about The Monkees, but not exactly…” We discussed how the film was attempting to take the media-produced image of The Monkees and radically change it to something closer to reality. The film showcases the battle between the counterculture and the mainstream. The idea of performance versus reality was again brought up when the class was posed the question of whether the Monkees are acting as themselves in the film or not. We discussed the financial shortcomings of the film (it only made $16,000) and the screenplay credit dispute between the filmmakers and the Monkees. We ended the recitation by watching a clip from the film where Davy performs the song “Daddy’s Song”.
We began class by discussing Chelsea Girls with respect to ethics and also how the split screen affected our viewing. As far as ethics, we compared it to documentary filmmaking or video journalism. When does the crew behind the camera decide to step in? More importantly, what does it say about the director that he would choose to keep that footage in the final cut? What does it say that he would elect to show that, punitively unethical, side of himself?
Bruno referred to the split screen effect as active spectatorship, meaning that even if the content was boring, the audience is still active in having to choose which screen to look at at any given second. This activity also leads to a self-evaluation. Why am I choosing to look at the left screen now and not the right? This causes us to lose focus and makes it a phenomenological experience.
We also discussed that the reason films like Chelsea Girls and Touching were successful and are still being analyzed and enjoyed today despite the fact that, especially in the case of Chelsea Girls, “anyone could do it,” is because nobody had done it before.
From there, we had a brief overview of the historical context of Head and Easy Rider (i.e. the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, the election of Nixon, the Manson murders, the Vietnam War, the May 1968 protest in France, race riots, Columbia students’ takeover, the beginning of using harder drugs, psychedelics and the ideas of yuppies and what it means to be authentic) and a student presented on the Peter Biskind article.
We watched the acid trip scene from Easy Rider and discussed how it illustrates the idea of authenticity and shows the characters in between life and death. The scene was unique for it’s time in that it didn’t rely on visual effects to display a trip, just pure acting and editing.
We further discussed how the Biskind article affected our viewing of the film and to what extent we believed Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were acting.
We ended by watching the clip of “Daddy’s Song” from Head and discussed what elements of the other films were used in this film and why it was such an epic failure in the box office. We attempted to answer the question, “what is the film about?” After struggling to answer and questioning why it was a struggle, we concluded that the film was less about a narrative and more about revealing how media-produced the Monkees were and what the public’s perception of them was.
We began recitation by watching that scene from Midnight Cowboy that Professor Zinman mentioned in class. By the late 1960′s, that type of scene- seeing a more straight-edged, old-school guy get high for the first time- had been pretty much played out. Movies like Easy Rider had to take it to a whole nother level- which Easy Rider did- to make its mark. More on Easy Rider later….
Next we discussed the Koch read and Chelsea Girls. We were all in agreement with Koch that one of the reasons Odine snapped at the girl in the clip we saw was because she had disturbed his equilibrium, or the collective equilibrium of the Warhol house-and the drug scene in general. There was no glitz and glam; just depressed artists trying to escape their difficult reality. We discussed Koch’s assertions that at many readings, black and white films were screened simultaneously, but how the clips we saw worked very well together. The vivid colors on Nico’s face drew some of our attention away from the poorly lit, out of focus, but otherwise much more interesting scene involving Odine and the girl. This is a technique I am very interested in, although we did not discuss other movies which screened multiple reels at once.
On to T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G: we discussed how the flashing lights, slurred speech and changes in time (measure by the heavy, thumping base) affected viewers’ perception of the action being taken (the man cutting out his own tongue). Some people suggested it was a critique of the psychedelic drug scene, but I was not so convinced. It certainly would’ve appealed to that group, just because of it’s bravado. But it was also very radical.
Next, we discussed the mixing of the main stream and the avant garde in Head exemplified in Davy Jones’ pop song, which featured well-planned cuts to highlight the color changes-either with Davy dressed in the Black Tuxedo to the beige background; or to the White Tuxedo in the black background.
Finally, we discussed the making of Easy Rider, how it opened new possibilities to no-name directors like Dennis Hopper. Prior to Easy Rider, studios would not fund films unless a big director was attached to the project. We tried watching the graveyard scene which caused so much friction between Hopper and Peter Fonda. Although we had to settle for an Italian version of the scene, it was apparent that this scene felt more real than the rest of Fonda’s performance.
We started the recitation with the discussion of Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls. A recurring theme of this week’s recitation was the interplay between fiction and reality / authenticity and performance. Referring to the scene where Ondine hits a woman, we talked about how much a filmmaker can or should interfere with his subject and how Warhol uses his medium to blur the line between the two. Everybody knows that this scene is all set up, yet we can never tell for sure where the performance starts, where it stops or whether there is a performance at all. How real is Ondine’s anger when he is called “phony“? Do they stop performing when she calls him phony and he gets mad? How real are the drugs? How are they influencing the performance? We pointed out again that Warhol’s film seems like an early version of reality TV and how the adoption of a stage persona (Ondine is not his real name, for instance) is the ultimate rejection of a real identity. Furthermore, it was emphasized that being part of the hip culture is a lot about performance in general, too.
Next, Bruno talked a little bit about 1968, which was a very tumultuous year. Afterwards, the Peter Biskind text “Who Made Us Right“ was presented. We talked about how Biskind constructs history, pointing out that his sources were not facts but oral history, personal stories and interviews. After watching two scenes from “Easy Rider“, the acid scene followed by the brutal ending of the film, we also argued how Biskind’s text influenced our reading of the film. Here again comes in the question of authenticity vs. performance. Do we see the film differently after reading his text because we know, for example, that Fonda and Hopper hated each other on the set? Additionally, we underlined the scene’s resemblance to “Scorpio Rising“, especially due to the quick cuts, the religious imagery, the shooting and, of course, the motorcycles.
Moreover, the question was raised whether “Head“ was the worst marketing strategy in the world. The film was not a success, and we concluded that there was nothing The Monkees could have done to change their image. Because they were ultimately mainstream and the embodiment of phoniness, the hipsters did not see it just on principle and for their admirers the film was too transgressive. Nevertheless, the film maybe tried to reach out for a new type of audience. Also, we talked about the references to “A Hard Day’s Night“ and about the comments on celebrities, the war, Coca Cola and the fact that the film makes fun of its very own production.
Finally, we quickly discussed “T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G”. Most of the students did not like the film, yet some admitted that while watching it they fell in a kind of trance and that the film therefore did something with them. However, it was argued, is that really the only purpose? Can’t any film do this? Touching is a phenomenological film and it is about the experience of watching a film itself. Bruno underlined how hard single frame editing is. Out of destruction, the film produces new meaning.
Then the recitation ended.
We began with our recitation on “The Counterculture Goes Mainstream” with a discussion of Andy Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls. 
Chelsea Girls was met with a generally positive response from our class. Many commented on the film’s modesty–the film’s lack of editing, the realism of Warhol’s style, etc. One observation that became especially important in our discussion was the idea of breaking the fourth wall. All of the actors in Warhol’s film know they are being filmed; they even interact with the camera. We also interpreted this to be something about self-acknowledgement of one’s own “phoniness.” When Ondine gets called a “phony” by the girl at the confessional in the famous pope scene, he begins to hit her and chase her. Since it would have been a supreme offense to have been called a “phony” if you were a hipster such as Warhol or any member of his factory, Ondine got angry. He becomes self-aware and self-conscious, which incites anger inside him. Such is the case with the film too–Chelsea Girls uses that self-awareness to deconstruct film as a medium. We also discussed the effect of drugs on Ondine’s performance. At what point did he stop acting? Where did improv begin? Was the anger all just drugs. The question of why Warhol used two films was then posed. One response was that it questions the relation between images and sound, a further deconstruction of film. Furthermore, the lighting, sound, and cinematography guide our senses between the two films projected simultaneously–another filmic deconstruction.
Peter Biskind’s essay, “Who Made Us Right?,” was then presented after a brief discussion of history in 1968. Biskind traces the developments of several directors and producers in the early 60′s in what was labelled as “salacious journalism” the night before. The early careers of Schneider, Rafelson, and Hopper are traced in Biskind’s essay. The three directors’ films ended up becoming responsible for the dawn of a new Hollywood, one that was more open to countercultural movements. Biskind creates a narrative out of a series of interviews given by the aforementioned directors.
Following the presentation of Biskind’s essay, two clips of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider were shown–that of the acid trip in the cemetery and that of the film’s bloody finale. We discussed why Hopper juxtaposed these two scenes. The acid trip represents freedom, while the shooting of the two protagonists represents imprisonment. Whether or not the protagonists “blew it” remains ambiguous. One important observation was that Hopper clearly had Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising in mind when he made Easy Rider. This is very much evident in the editing style. Another important observation was that reading Biskind’s essay changed many people’s perception of the film. When you know that the actors and Hopper feuded on set and that the girl in the LSD trip scene was forced to strip, Easy Rider seems much more raw.
After that, we began discussing Bob Rafelson’s 1968 film Head. As for what the film meant, an important point that was raised was that Rafelson destroyed many different genres in the process of making this film. By making fun of The Monkees, their image, many different Hollywood genres, and mainstream culture, Rafelson intentionally destroyed the film’s subjects, economically and otherwise. We discussed the poor marketing strategy a bit. Columbia Pictures, a mainstream distributor, released the film under the false notion that a Monkees picture would be highly successful. That, however, turned out to be wishful thinking, as Head flopped. It is important to note, however, that the film may have been designed to fail. Rafelson did, after all, make advertisements (and a title) that alluded to Andy Warhol’s Blow-Job, an avant-garde success. 
Was Head only for a small, educated audience and not for the hipsters? Did Rafelson want Head to hurt the studio and the Monkees? We then watched a clip of Davy Jones’ “Daddy’s Song” dance in Head.
When asked what the clip reminded us of, one said Chicago, another said Singin’ in the Rain. Rafelson has actually been inspired by Paul Sharits’ 1969 film T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G. Sharits’ film, like Head itself, destroys film. The word “destroy,” which is repeated many, many times in Sharits’ film, is meant to refer to the physical, phenomenological destruction of the film itself. Many of us objected to Sharits’ single-frame editing style because it is a film that is so hard to watch, however this was all Sharits’ intention. And so ended the recitation.
You know, this used to be a hell of a good country, I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.—George Hanson, Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)
This week’s class addressed the following themes and topics:
The counterculture crossing over into the mainstream, and the interaction between the two cultural spheres.
The crisis of selling out vs. “being real”
The notion, expressed by Wyatt in Easy Rider, of “blowing it,” and it’s ramifications for the American Dream and the counterculture of the late 1960s.
Authenticity and performance
The portrayal of the psychedelic experience on film (the term “psychedelic” comes from the Greek words for “soul” and “manifest,” translating to “soul-manifesting”).
These themes and tensions are expressed in the words of “The Porpoise Song,” that opens and closes this week’s feature, HEAD (Bob Rafelson, 1968), as sung by the Monkees: “Wanting to feel / To know what is real / Living is a lie.”
We began by screening Bruce Conner’s short film BREAKAWAY (1966), a proto-musuic video starring singer/choreographer/dancer Antonia Christina Basilotta, who reappears throughout tonight’s films. Multimedia artist Conner—a painter, photographer, sculptor, light show artist, and filmmaker—was one of the pioneering directors of appropriation and cinematic deconstruction, and central figure in the underground Bay Area scene. Conner’s use of found footage in A MOVIE (1958), radical editing patterns, and use of pop music, all proved to be a tremendous influence on his friend Dennis Hopper, and is also evident in Rafelson’s cut-up media critique in HEAD.
N.B.: This is not the full version…
bruce-conners-1966-short-breakaway
16 years later, Antonia Christina Basilotta, now Toni Basil, enjoyed a US #1 with her single “Mickey” in 1982:
1966 was also the year of Andy Warhol’s art film sensation, The Chelsea Girls. We briefly discussed Warhol’s use of the cinematic apparatus to deconstruct movie-making (films of extreme duration, like Sleep, Eat, Blow-Job, and Empire; fixed camera setups, wherein the entire reel is shot, printed, and screened without editing) and challenge cinematic conventions of narrative, pacing, and stardom.
Warhol on his early films:
Sometimes I like to be bored, and sometimes I don’t – it depends on what kind of mood I’m in. Everyone knows how it is: some days one can sit and look out the window for hours and hours and some days one can’t sit still for a moment. I’ve been quoted a lot as saying, ‘I like boring things.’ Well, I said it and I meant it. But that does not mean I’m not bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring can’t be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite: If I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.
Critic and poet Parker Tyler writes that Warhol’s films engage in dueling and simultaneous temporalities, “Dragtime,” and “Drugtime.” The former, for Tyler, is “eventless” and “nonprogressive”, resulting in filmic passages that comprise a “vicious circle” or “an endurance test. “The latter, he says, is “the time of sublimated leisure: all the time in the world,” it relates to drug use, and perhaps even the psychedelic trip.
The Chelsea Girls, comprised of twelve discrete 30-mintue reels, to be played by the projectionist as a dual, asynchronous projection in any combination, certainly embodies both of these temporalities, while offering a new kind cinematic experience: episodic, rather than narrative, documentary but performative, confrontational but catatonic.
Steven Koch, who we read this week, writes that the film offers almost too much information: “The Chelsea Girls seems almost an act of aggression, though it must be called aggression of a very special kind. A cliché leaps to mind: The film is mind-blowing, an inept cliché that has leapt into a good many people’s minds. The work overloads the circuit of perception.”
We looked at the infamous scene with Robert Olivo, “Pope” Ondine, in which the meathadrine-stoked actor violently loses his temper with a young woman, set against colorful images of Nico, singer for the Velvet Underground, crying. We discussed the film’s notion of exposure, its relation to contemporary reality television, the question of who is a “phony,” the term that sets Ondine off on his rampage, and the perceived cultural subtext of the war in Vietnam.
We then moved on to Easy Rider, and viewed it through the backdrop of the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the election of Richard Nixon and the Silent Majority, the collapse of the counterculture, the Tet Offensive, the changing drug culture, and student uprisings at home and abroad.
Discussion of the film included:
The relation of the film to genre: westerns and biker films; the influence of Scorpio Rising (both in the use of rock and roll and the outlaw theme), Bonnie and Clyde, 2001, and the films of Bruce Conner.
The film as an explicit clash of cultures, and how its box office success signaled a melding or interplay of those cultures.
Critic Matt Zoller Seitz on the film’s final shot: It could represent the death of a man or of a dream of a revolution. But it may also signify the death of a false dream of comfort. Billy and Wyatt were born to be wild, and they died wild; in its twisted way, it’s a happy ending.”
Then we looked at the Joshua Light Show, and it’s role in a variety of cultural spheres.
From the lecture:
The group members were resident artists at the Fillmore East, a seated rock theater on 2nd Avenue in New York City. From March 8, 1968, until the venue closed in on June 27,1971, the group performed multiple shows every weekend for up to10,000 people, receiving nearly equal billing to such acts as the Who, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. One of the premier historians of visual music, William Moritz, summed up the light show’s unrepeatable nature as “always only once.” In its finest instantiations, Moritz wrote, light shows comprised “a living art work of organic complexity considerably more interesting, challenging and satisfying than any of the flat, static art styles of the past, including painting and the traditional fictional cinema.”
The Joshua Light Show’s appeal was broad and circulated in a variety of cultural strata. In addition to their work at the Fillmore, the group produced a light show for the premiere of the New York Symphony at Carnegie Hall, provided light effects for a Lincoln Center production of King Lear, collaborated with Yayoi Kusama’s staging of her political performance piece Self-Obliteration, in 1968—on a bill that included Fleetwood Mac and Country Joe & The Fish.)—held a happening in Bryant Park, and, in a performance that drew a direct line between the light show and its synaesthetic forebears, Shoesmith contributed light sequences to accompany pianist Hilde Somer’s recital of Scriabin at Alice Tully Hall.
This interplay of sub-cultural and mainstream cultural spheres is perhaps best seen in the party sequence that the Joshua Light Show designed for John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969). In the scene, Jon Voigt’s Florida naïf-turned-hustler Joe Buck tries marijuana for the first time, and the viewer sees projections of the group’s oil and water mix on swaying women, some of whom wrap themselves in sheets hung throughout the Factory-style loft space. Schlesinger’s use of zooms, proleptic framing of 8mm interview footage from partygoers superimposed over the action presented in the narrative’s present, and close-ups of Buck’s sweating, open-mouthed, glazed-eye visage, all scored to Elephant Memory’s woozy “Old Man Willow,” all register as an attempt to convey the dizzying upheaval of Buck’s altered consciousness. The director initially asked his friend Andy Warhol to design the scene, but, according to White, Warhol’s organization was too unorganized to complete the project. Warhol did lend his art to the set, however, and many of Warhol’s “superstars,” including Viva, Ultra Violet, and Paul Morrissey (appearing, appropriately, camera in hand, as the event’s documentarian) played themselves in the scene. The resulting sequence combined the talents of Warhol’s personnel, who had been celebrated in the New York art/film world as well as in the pages of Vogue and other national magazines, the Joshua Light Show, lesser-known as personalities but part of the burgeoning popular culture of rock and roll, and Schlesinger’s crew, who were members of the Hollywood filmmaking community. That the film was the first X-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture points to how mainstream culture is striated—Schlesinger’s film initially seen as being outside that culture before being dilatorily subsumed into it. Nevertheless, by 1969, the “psychedelic party scene,” was already something of a cliché…
Warhol’s influence also informed our discussion of structural film and screening of Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G. Sharits frame-by-frame manipulation of the filmstrip calls into question the use of the apparatus, the meaning and limits of cinematic representation, and makes film itself the subject of cinema: celluloid, sprocket holes, frame lines, emulsion, the projector, etc. In other words, Sharits cinema is about what cinema can do. His project is to shatter or disrupt our senses in order to reorient our understanding of the world, and make us self-aware viewers. If cinema can make us see and hear differently, then we might think differently, and that argument carries cultural and political implications.
Sharits:
I’d like to give up Imitation and Illusion and I’d like to enter the higher drama of Celluloid, 2dimensional film stripes, individual images, nature of perforation and emulsion, projector operations, 3dimensional lamps, environment, illumination, the 2dimensional reflecting screen, optic nerves and individual psychophysical conditions. In this cinematographic drama light is energy and not a tool for the representation of non-film objects. Light as energy creates its own objects, shadows and textures. If you take the facts of the retina, the flicker mechanism of film projection than you can make films without logic of language.
We finished up with a screening of the Monkees movie, HEAD, a work that I called “the Trojan Horse of the New Hollywood,” not only because it features a script by Nicholson and represents Bob Rafelson and Bert Schinder’s (who went on to produce Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Last Picture Show, and the Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds) attempt to break into the movie business after making a fortune off of The Monkees television show, but also in the film’s attempt to expose the limitations of genre-based filmmaking in search of something real.
The specters of Conner and Warhol looms large here, in the appropriation of advertising and corporate sloganeering, the newsreel footage of the assassination of a captured Vietcong soldier and bombing attacks, the ad campaign referencing Blow-Job, and a party sequence that, as in Midnight Cowboy, includes members of Warhol’s entourage, the expressionistic colored lighting of The Chelsea Girls, and the floating sliver pillows that once floated above the Factory.
We discussed the film’s awareness of the “the media”—especially television, the idea of self-relexive auto-critique, of the Monkees’ precarious cultural position (neither hip nor popular any longer) at the time of the film’s release—interestingly, the day after Nixon’s election, it’s meditation on phoniness (or, in the film’s satiric terms, “the real and the vividly imagined experience”) and it’s radical anti-narrative, anti-genre, anti-corporation, anti-war stance.
Some questions for further discussion:
What do you make of the film’s structure? How is this a trip film?
Why do you think this film has had a critical revival? How does it resonate with contemporary culture?
Do you feel empathy for the Monkees? Does the movie offer the potential for escape?
