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Stop Making Sense Review by
Jerry White
I
will confess that I felt a little bit of nostalgia for the 1980s when I heard
that Stop Making Sense was to be re-released. I don't really think
there's anything wrong with this sentimental response, though, because it can be
backed up with more substantive arguments. This combination, I think, of the
purely sentimental and the coolly argumentative, is what drives the work of the
two artists at the heart of this work, David Byrne and Jonathan Demme. Stop
Making Sense is not a perfect film, it's not even the best concert film of
the 1980s (I'd save that distinction for Tom Waites' Big Time). If you're
interested in the culture of the 1980s, though, it's a film you simply have to
see, and have to take on its own terms. It won't re-pay any of the smarmy, campy
80s retro attitude that's in vogue right now; instead, it's a monument of
excess, anxiety and passion that represents a very odd, and oh-so-rarely
wonderful, cultural zenith. Stop
Making Sense
is, as I suspect many people know, a concert film of the Talking Heads' tour.
The Heads were at the height of their fame and, more importantly, at the height
of their craft. Their music of this period was unambiguously pop, this being a
few years before lead singer David Byrne would go off on his own and explore the
semi-folk/world music pathways of albums like Naked. This meant that the
synthesizer riffs are often excessive and occasionally cheesy, and the lyrics
careen between enthusiastic and manic. And yet, the Heads' genius lay in their
ability to exploit this kind of energy in a way that was vaguely ironic, and yet
drew on pop's energy and simplicity and ended up expanding the form. It's
difficult to imagine the recent work of REM, or the emergence of Beck, without
this period in the Heads' career. Stop Making Sense has as its central
project to preserve this moment, in all its lunacy and ambiguity. Much
of this could also be said about the career of Jonathan Demme, and he was
certainly the perfect choice to direct the film. Stop Making Sense, keep
in mind, was directed by the Demme of Citizen's Band and Something
Wild, made well before the birth of the Demme of Philadelphia, The
Silence Of The Lambs or Beloved. These two filmmakers aren't totally
unrelated, but there is a sort of looniness and excess in this earlier work
that's not, shall we say, quite as central in the later stuff. Stop Making
Sense, though, is an odd example of Demme's 1980s mindset, and you could
even argue that it serves as something of a transition between these two phases.
Stylistically it's quite straightforward; indeed, when I first saw the film,
several years after its initial release, I felt like it was too stilted, far
less innovative than contemporary concert films like Laurie Anderson's Home
Of The Brave or the above mentioned Big Time. I felt much the same
way about Demme's record of the Spalding Gray monologue Swimming To Cambodia.
I'm inclined to judge both of these films less harshly now, and have a much
harder time summoning much passion for Home Of The Brave (I still think Big
Time is fantastic, but that's another review...). I've developed a respect
for Demme's ability to locate someone who's excitable and truly eccentric, and
to stand back and just let that person work, all the while documenting them with
a careful, sometimes obsessive attention to detail. That's not exactly the
aesthetic of Something Wild, but it's equally far from the simple
attention to convention that marks Philadelphia. What makes Stop
Making Sense a fascinating piece of cinema (and this is also true of Swimming
To Cambodia) is Demme's ability to put a viewer inside of Byrne's head in a
way that that viewer scarcely notices it's happening. The desire to take a
viewer to such a place, and the ability to do it with such care, conveys a
spirit that's every bit as maverick and longing as Byrne's. And
at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, there weren't a lot of pop musicians in the
1980s that were more maverick than David Byrne. When I say maverick, I mean it
in the sense of someone working within a system in such a way that the system's
boundaries begin to stretch to the point that you can hear them creaking, as
though they're about to break but never do. There are parts of Stop Making
Sense where you have the sense that you're watching a fairly standard,
cool-weird pop concert, but there are other moments, never too close together
and never lasting too long, that throw this into question. This is why Stop
Making Sense also ages so well; it powerfully resists a retro-camp sort of
reading. Who's mocking whom, I ask you, when Byrne comes out in his
now-legendary "Big Suit"? And where, exactly, can camp get a foothold
in the naked, creepy excess that we see in his solo acoustic performance of the
Heads' "Psycho Killer," a song left over from their late 70s
repertoire? The way that Byrne swings between the extremes in these
performances, disorienting everyone in sight (himself seemingly included) was
seldom equaled in 80s pop culture. And
truth be told, it was never really equaled in Byrne's other film work. He seems
to be covering a lot of the same ground in his feature film True Stories,
but that picture ends up feeling forced and pretentious, lacking the grace,
exactitude and strategic moderation of Stop Making Sense. That, finally,
is what makes it a great concert film; it stands out not just because Byrne is a
great performer, or just because Demme is an exceptional documentarian, but
because these two artists are working together, their talents synthesized in a
way that leads to something they couldn't accomplish on their own. I
suspect that Stop Making Sense is being re-released to cash in on the 80s
nostalgia of the hyper-ironic, now yuppie-in-waiting demographic known as
Generation-Y. There are worse reasons for re-issuing a film like this, but going
into this unstable, strange work with that kind of attitude won't really lead
you anywhere interesting. Going in with a desire to see two artists totally at
home in a cultural moment otherwise defined by excess and trashiness of the
worst sort, though, well then you just might see something close to a redemption
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