© 2016 by James Clark
A college baseball player filled to the brim with dreams and drives about making it to the Big Leagues, creates a small riot at a club by attacking the bartender for less than Big League cocktail skills. When he and his teammates are finally chased out to the parking lot, part of the venue’s name shows on the exterior—SOUND. (The full name is the unimaginative, “Sound Machine.”) The one with the noticeably bad temper calls himself Raw Dog, seemingly dovetailing with his Detroit (Murder City, circa 1980) home, perhaps (he might hope) giving him a better chance to stomp to fame and fortune in a very competitive endeavor. The ironic little demurral on the wall brings about a circus-catch robbery of a home run so many viewers would take for granted here.
This film comes to us (after a long incubation) fully aware of general cultural and film-genre biases toward the processes of so-called coming-of-age, to the effect that late-adolescent self-indulgence is a basically life-affirming event. The boys milling about on that asphalt watching Raw Dog scream and jump up and down assertively, have begun their last weekend before classes with a view to drinking, smoking and fucking everything in sight. Most of them seem on the surface to be—in the vernacular of an even earlier era— “disturbingly healthy” specimens on the way to domestic efficacy, under the aegis of the American Dream. Whatever instability they might evince has been universally accorded that spiritedness that makes the world go round. (Still to come are the co-eds, their perhaps inordinate preoccupation with mixing adventure and domestic bliss accorded the same uncritical sunniness from that vast constituency of those unconvinced that there is anything more to life than the accolade-strewn domestic tattoo they have immersed themselves in.)
The mockery in the word “Sound,” as we draw a close bead on the wild bunch, goes much farther than a gentle notation that there are some steps left to be duly taken. There is a far less brash protagonist, namely, Jake, a freshman (as in Linklater’s previous coup, Boyhood [2014]) and so a newcomer to that home team in the business of producing homespun magic. He is part of a constellation of venture far from easy to figure out; and who, like Boyhood’s, Mason Jr., does not claim to know what he wants and seems willing to persevere with finding out. Also like Mason, Jr., he crosses paths with a freshman co-ed who is far more seriously reflective than he is. Jake uses the phraseology of kitsch poet, Rod McKuen, to enhance a gift of flowers to Beverly, a Theatre student. And she not exactly gently teases him for doing so. On the other hand, McKuen’s fondness for the songs of Jacques Brel and modernist Paris nuances cannot be so quickly held against him, providing the rock-vinyl fan and budding pitcher has that second pitch to play.
The Texas college town has endowed the ball team with two adjacent rambling, 3-story houses in an affluent district. (Beverly’s arts-digs are in a big old pragmatic motel reminding us of the walkways of cell blocks or even the spartan motel balcony set-up where Martin Luther King was killed.) Though the coach delivers his annual disclaimer about no alcohol and no hotties on the respectable premises, the impact of the opening scenes is one of quite abrasive appetite and predation (Jake quietly aghast that his super-rural roommate won’t disappear long enough to allow him to comfortably bed a cute young dancer found, with many of her new friends, by the high-stamina athletes on their bar-crawl and brought as such to the respectable premises for at least the hundredth-time in living memory). Also abundantly clear within the skirmishes—many of the boys being luckier in their accommodations than our-man-to-watch—is that the pillars of the community readily turn a blind eye to lively sportsmen (perhaps, you never know, headed for fame and fortune) so damn cute you know they’ll turn out fine. Later in the endless, shifting party requiring Special Forces endurance, a couple of gamers tee up on the roof their supply of golf balls, sending a hail toward the neighbors who, taking into account that Texas bounty of firearms, would have made a strong, perhaps fatal, protest, had they given a damn.
This film, marketed as a “comedy,” and accordingly tricked out with easy-listening period rock and roll, is in fact a deep and dark and very peculiar war movie doing manoeuvres in a setting akin to a paintball emporium. The troops are genetically gifted, painstakingly honed elites, working their way, not very impressively, through a balancing act between megalomania and team play. On the surface, nothing very compelling is apparent. But that title, deriving from a sex-drugs-rock notable, Van Halen (in fact a loud McKuen—only making things worse by titling a recent album, “A Different Kind of Truth”), has been enlisted to say much more than the cheesy origin was up for. War games wall-to-wall (going through a pin-ball parlor like locusts in the corn being just one of countless overtly stupid little competitive flings with a view to feeling superior, and, in fairness, sharing smarts and agility); but somewhere out there in the mesquite wilderness a real war bides its time before biting.
Jake, cruising tentatively into that homogeneous, insular centre for the first time with an upbeat song on his tape deck and eye-candy co-eds distracting his vision, resembles in surprisingly fundamental ways Ridley Scott’s homogeneous Andy (Jake’s Texas plates serving such an easy fit), at the outset of Black Hawk Down (2001), with his fortifying music and sense of danger in not being as local as he looks. The 70s era boat of an Oldsmobile our protagonist surrounds himself with puts us in mind of a landing craft. That premonition of wide-spread hostility soon takes concrete form at the Animal House estate where he’s met with a couple of teammates revving up a water bed and instantly transferring their macho devotions to kicking the stranger’s ass. Within the introductions, one of them glares and shoots, “I hate pitchers” [Jake’s position] and the other blocks the corridor, necessitating the newcomer to either kick the shit out of the impediment and tromp upon him as he goes on his way; or, as in fact transpires, meekly squeak through the narrow channel. No doubt having seen a lot of people like the welcoming committee here, during his high school obsessing with working on his array of pitches, Jake feels lucky that right after that brush with those trolls he encounters the new transfer pitcher, Willoughby, who assures him that that pair are indeed dead in the water. Far from a normal athlete, Willoughby is a drug addict with only the slenderest threads of interest in organized sports and organized sportsmen, while, on the other hand, a sort of pilgrim to the mystique of the many forms of pitch production. He tells Jake, “They [the rude alphas] find pitching a complete mystery… Were different …They’re frightened by pitchers… They don’t get it…” And in an on-again/ off-again dialogue through the first 36 hours of being picked off by freedom, Jake gets equipped as never before with regard to games off the field. Willoughby (calling himself a mid-coast Californian [double flakiness?]) sees immediately the wisdom of the Texan’s carrying in his vinyl rock collection before anything else, their bond being more vividly musical than the kinetics of their position on the diamond. On hearing Jake offer, “I kinda like Van Halen,” the guy with all the answers snaps out (like a pick-off move to first base), “Van Halen is the result of the American music industry putting business before music.” He had just run by the freshman that the music of Pink Floyd provides rewards in “finding the tangents [surprising add on] in the musical structures…” From this perspective, he adds the California polemic, “We used to be telepathic, like wild animals. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to that…” We soon see Willoughby’s baseball career go the way of telepathic tangents. During the Sunday workout, the only structured moment of that weekend of improv dash, the coach calls the idea-man off the pitcher’s mound and our mystery man is sent packing for fraudulently posing as a schoolboy when in fact he’s 30 years old and has attached himself through the years to a string of other stairways to the stars.
There is, about Willoughby’s getting the heave-ho, his body language—being strikingly different from that of the teammates who, in fact, with their facile management of talking the talk and walking the walk, occupy a distant range of the conscious universe. On being called out, he stands still and calm for a moment, places his glove (which, it seems, he’ll never use again) on the rubber, walks up to the authority figure, extends his hand for a handshake, waits a couple of seconds for the out-of-sorts bureaucrat to do the right thing, and disappears under the stands, no longer an actor in the Show, no longer a misfit in the audition to become one of the Boys of Summer. He has, we find, left a Pink Floyd disc back at the land of the free and the home of the brave. Presumably it was meant for Jake and his less than Raw Dog fixation upon becoming (questionable) news.
The cinematic heartland of Everybody Wants Some!! consists of that mainstream conformist (though souped-up) personal aggrandizement as occasionally being tripped up by an irregular pace, self-censored by an exigency to distil some kind of fortune from a reality felt to be, in the last (but perhaps not best) analysis, a grotesque joke. The central eventuation comprises elite young athletes having, for many years now, devoted long hours to reach rare and marketable skills (which, in most cases [Willoughby and Jake conspicuously “different,” alright…; and Raw Dog being a pitcher lacking the right stuff] do not register as activating another, quite remarkable, spiel of endeavor.) Jake is embedded with that sort of occupying army during a down time from more serious action—a down time, in view of the copious inanities, we can’t imagine them putting aside for very long in any circumstances. His invitation from Beverly, to a costume party, comes to him as a welcome change of pace. That, as the lost weekend winds down, his teammates see him as a bro—insisting on tagging along to where the putative glamor girls will be—provides an occasion for the convergence of intrinsically incompatible circles, surface proximities notwithstanding. At the large house (the grounds strung with many rows of lights), endowed by a patron for the sake of providing a bit of the fabulous for those risk-takers not seeing much of it in their future, the hosts—calling the event “A Trip to Oz”—deck themselves out in generally medieval/ mystical garb, Beverly, for instance, in the voluminous raiment of Queen Genevieve. Jake and the nearly-pros cut a figuration putting them in the sightline of the so-called “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Nights Dream. (Jake, though, carrying along a tentativeness which sets him apart.) Raw Dog, the perfect (though far less charming) Bottom (being transformed into a donkey) hits on a coed about “just getting into my groove” and she whizzes by, leaving him a piece of road kill. (The boys, or most of them, have a fondness for minor league hockey, Manitoba Moose-style—a fondness which takes them into fan-boy territory for a franchise that did not exist prior to 1996. Or do they regard the name and the place [on the frozen Northern Prairie] as a bush league miasma they most certainly would rise above, and thereby an in-joke? The aristocrats there would lack the generosity of the royals in the Shakespeare play. Willoughby’s embarrassment perhaps having spooked them a bit, did they renew a tried-and-true dump therewith on the team, the home-town [Winnipeg] and the country? (On the very first afternoon and the drive to the tenderloin zone, a carful, including good-at-bonding Jake, chant word-for-word a rapper song.)
In the run-up to the Midsummer Oz, Beverly invites Jake to her bush league motel/dorm which she sees to be extremely temporary. “As soon as I graduate, I’m heading for New York!” Also coming up there, after her learning that he was on a baseball scholarship (covering her disappointment with the diplomacy, “Athletes aren’t stupid, they’re just one-track…”), she asks about how he filled out his application for the sake of showing promise as a college student. Stemming a troubling tide, he comes up with pegging baseball as a form of the myth of Sisyphus, whereby life boils down to trying to sustain a heavy load on a steep grade until it inevitably comes crashing down, only to be moved upwards again (and again…). That being a sort of open sesame, she invites him to the arts ball.
The denouement of Everybody Wants Some!! in which Jake’s History prof introduces himself by inscribing on the chalk board the seemingly stirring challenge, Frontiers Are for You, leaves us wondering about everybody wanting some wild side; and, then again, whether we have a demonstration of the bromide that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. (After spending the night with Beverly, Jake falls into an impervious sleep as the teacher rolls out his words to the wise.) There are, as we have already seen, gales of provocation bringing us to this knotty issue. And here we should run through the extra intensities which this deceptively low-key film carries in its back pocket.
Jake and some friends actually find a bit of time for, if not solitude, near-quiet, in strolling along a bucolic roadway. Soon, however, one of the self-styled overachievers admits out loud to a bout of malaise. Anonymous others are around, and he asks, “Who are these people? They’ll never know what being in the Big Leagues is. [During the workout, on supposing a house painter nearby is a scout in disguise, one of them sings out, “Welcome to the Big Leagues, boys!”] All these people doing some dumb job just like everybody else…” Thereupon they encounter in this remote range a friend of Jake’s from the highs of high school baseball, not connected with any job or school at all. This leads to an episode of what Jake refers to as “Punks for a Day.” At a concert that night, he becomes very animated on recognizing that the flea-circus frenzy onstage is riffing on the theme-song of “Gilligan’s Island.” Jake was also moved to say, about the territory of foreign mood, “It sort of asks the question of who we are…” (Willoughby had displayed an encyclopedic mastery of all the programming of “Star Wars.”) The ease with which those slumming for a bit fill out the mosh pit reminds us that that wolf pack packs a wide range of curiosity and skill about games, experience and articulative flourishes in addition to baseball, seemingly confirming that they are indeed as bright as they are physically strong. But Linklater, a one-time baseball scholarship student, hopes to dash that assumption by following up upon the orgy of childish coarseness in a very subtle way.
As in Boyhood, his delivery of special goods concerns timbres of modernity where the party is a free-for-all of talking the talk and not only fumbling walking the walk to date, but forever. All that talk of Big League masks—as cinematically accomplished—another Big League being all but invisible. (And, moreover, a league where physical prowess is paramount. I mentioned that this is, in the last analysis, a war movie. Its time frame framing multiple assaults and “kills” is just about the same as that weekend in Mogadishu where hot-shots didn’t do too well. The sleepy-time ending in the History class recalls that Heraclitean edict about giving up, not to mention all the dialectic pouring out of Willoughby [along with a restriction of resentment, too soft to rock]. The end-of-workout batting practice with the freshmen duct taped to the outfield fence and being pelted has a viciousness reminiscent of the Muslim troops with a capacity for harmonics but much happier being “one-track. “After the masquerade ball, where Jake congenially fills the bill with, first of all, a Davey Crockett coon-skin cap, only to soon replace it and re-emerge as the White Rabbit in a stage show reshaping Alice in Wonderland, Beverly and Jake drift in a rubber raft in a pond in the middle of the night. Jake marvels that, whereas a short while ago he was the single star of his high school baseball team, now he barely belongs at the college level and his future is clouded. On the other hand, he’s pumped about plunging into the fray, come what may. Beverly understands very well, since she was a high school theatre star and now realizes she’ll have to go flat-out for bit parts. She enthuses, “It’s beautiful that we get to feel passionate about this! We all feel in over our head!” Having eventually made their way to the Martin Luther King bedroom, we see her dressing for school, he still in bed. “Hey, you up?” she asks; and I can’t resist thinking that Laura’s question to Counselor, “Are you awake?” at the beginning of Scott’s The Counselor is in the air. (Then why not see that coon-skin cap as a flash of the Alamo, as recycled in the Mexican war where Laura loses her head? The saccharine love interest and pipsqueak redress, making the proceedings less than inspiring, get thereby a treatment of real war—far from pampered youngsters seeing nothing but fun days ahead. (The splayed-on-the-fence freshmen resemble choppers coming down; or enemies held aloft.) The soundtrack of the closing credits jacks up, “Let the Good Times Roll.”
It is Richard Linklater’s fascinating and vastly challenging genius to slam the door on his leading players and still pay homage to their sweet confrontation of a fertile monstrosity as including currents of uncanny and sustaining joy. Beverly’s motel room number is 307. Martin Luther King died at 306, and the building became a National Civil Rights Museum. Her “It’s OK to make a fool of yourself,” smacks of high school coddling. In a world history that, deep down, wants you dead, being a fool is a dangerous luxury. Linklater, much tougher than he appears to be, puts his players’ feet to the fire for the sake of highlighting opportunities allowed to dribble away. Willoughby, smart enough to ace a Phenomenology course if he wanted to, remains a phony in the same way Quentin Tarantino’s John Ruth, in The Hateful Eight (2015), is a precious, sanctimonious and feeble ideologue. (The actor, Wyatt Russell, playing the part of Willoughby, is the son of actor Kurt Russell, who embodied John Ruth.) Willoughby prettily tells some boys and us, “I grew up on two rivers,” dealing out thereby that dialectic of ebb and flow so well put by that Heraclitus who is the pacesetter for Black Hawk Down. Like Beverly, “OK” is Willoughby’s trade mark. Jake persists in being not OK with the hostility he felt on arrival to the precinct where anything goes (anything except elite courage, Jake’s innate poise being mistaken for an alien threat). The Pink Floyd expert counsels, “You can’t fight it. They’re fine… We are weird. You have to bring to it what you want. And then it becomes fine…” Another of his assurances— “Let the experience find you”—recalls Mason Jr’s new friend at the end of Boyhood, musing, “We say seize the moment; but sometimes it seems the moment seizes us.”(On the heels of that Californian solipsistic close encounter with getting somewhere, the round-the-clock troopers invade a country music and mechanical bull haven, and, as in Thelma and Louise, the line dancing [and its ironic link to King Arthur’s Court] shows the boys and girls to be infectiously happy ponies. Could the hardness of freedom and grace [welling up in Scott’s film]—real chivalry, not self-serving mush—ever speak to those soft predators?)
Willoughby shakes hands with the coach as he enters a chapter no longer having baseball highs to provide the illusion that he has to do with interpersonal depths. The coach, we clearly perceive, has already forgotten him. Most of the teammates are clearly delighted with that embarrassment, though they all claim to have “liked” him and found him to be a “good pitcher.” Along with Jake’s tone-deaf, Rod McKuen pensees, his other not so on-the-mark winning hand, the myth of Sisyphus, finds him sinking in his own ballast, but in an edifying way. Isolated sublimity (Willoughby’s way, though he abundantly tapes TV shows), in the hands of pretenders, conspicuously falls short of that solitude comprising a strategic, exploratory concourse with others. The miniature basketball the baseball players shoot toward a tiny hoop on the living room wall recalls Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) and its bemused contemplation of the factors of Yin and Yang. Self-absorbed gluttons that they are, the squad enact to remarkable effect the dreariness of boyhood on a planet facilitating their more or less tempered venom. Beverly’s cute little run-through of the gamut to be found at her arts high school: dancers, bulimic; visual artists, coke junkies; Broadway and Vegas singers, antiquated air-heads—also coincides with tearing down those who could be fostered as kin. The special octane about Manitoba (a rookie is advised to go north to find a Moose to castrate, as a key to success) and Canada shows off a jet of goofy jingoism recalling the harsher xenophobic Muslims, Mexicans and Russians in Scott’s films.
After the gift of roses, Jake and Beverly meet for the first time in unit 307. As she warms up to Jake’s being more than “one track” she touches upon the “revolutionary” aspect of rock and roll. Innovative social timbres, deriving from the thrill of power chords and secular insurrection across a wide range of situations, go hand-in-hand with her certitude that they are soulmates insofar as they share a commitment of unprecedented body language, that lingua franca which Willoughby wanted to press (with no success) in terms of telepathy.(In a demonstration at the fun house, he was thinking shark but the guys were not on the same page.) You could say that the myriad flouting of conventional restraints by the jocks during that free-fall of a weekend has been touched by a modernist momentum within world history. (The aggressively insistent rock soundtrack comes across as slap-dash marches.) But you could also say that, whereas all of the students in sight (Beverly included) enjoy describing themselves as going to great pains for the sake of flashes of uncanniness in a world that has been too canny for too long, none of them twigs on to intractable perversity implicating the joy ride of the modern in a severe, reactionary struggle (room 306 being a notable factor). (Being eager to become one of the Boys of Summer is not a promising gambit. On the other hand, a form of playfulness does paradoxically squeeze by. The title, by the Neanderthal Van Halen, describes a similar range—knocking up chicks; primordial wisdom.) Despite all those negatives, Linklater leaves the rout still graced with overtures it would be careless to discount. That brings him rather close to the plight of Scott’s few figures, in Black Hawk Down, galvanized to the case of the SOUND.
I’ve seen other Linklater films, but not this one. The review written for it is fascinating. Must investigate
Thanks, Peter.
Everybody Wants Some!! came out in March and disappeared far too soon. Linklater is a deft specialist concerning efforts into being able to live with oneself. The abrasiveness might have eclipsed that matter. But patience here pays off handsomely!
Jim, I have yet to see this film, but your colossal effort to connect the time dots has me more than intrigued! I have of course indulged in nearly all of the Linklaters and am particularly fascinated by your contention that coming-of-age will invariably lead to a fuller understanding of the life cycle. There is much thematically to chew on here, and you have again written with great passion and authority! I do of course consider BOYHOOD one of the great films of recent years!
Thanks, Sam, for your generous linking to this film which seems to have turned off the early viewers to such an extent that the theatres hastily squeezed it out.
Like you, I loved Boyhood and I can`t understand that its large fan-base did not follow up. I think Linklater is a deep and witty surveyor of how and what young people of today learn.His alertness to this difficult situation is drawn with remarkable accuracy and sensitivity.
I’ve always seen Linklater as a cultural anthropologist, observing social subculture in their natural habitat with amazing authenticity and attention to detail and this film is no different. For the first third of this film I was wondering why I should care about these jocks (never having been one myself) but Linklater gradually got me invested in them by deftly humanizing them in a wonderfully understated way.