LA. Dolce Vita

By R.C

THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Directed by Penelope Spheeris

Consider Darby Crash, lead singer of the Germs. When the band was formed, their manager recalls, "they didn't know how to play their instruments." Darby still hasn't learned to sing into the mike during performances. Instead, he lurches across and off the stage topless, his baby fat segueing to paunch, his voice clogged with booze and speed, his bruised, burned and scarred body looking like a souvenir from a guerrilla war in which he was the only participant. He passes time offstage with his pet tarantula and his friend Michelle, who giggles about the day she and Darby discovered a corpse in their backyard. At night Darby wanders through rock halls as the more engaged members of the audience pogo to the music and slam into each other with the force of bumper cars. Darby doesn't dance much; he simply staggers forward, backward, attentive to some inner music, like the dying of his brain cells. Within the year, the rest of him will be dead, of overdose and ennui, at 22.

Penelope Spheeris' The Decline of Western Civilization is a documentary about the punk-rock scene in Los Angeles: music from seven bands (Black Flag, the Germs, Catholic Discipline, X, the Circle Jerks, Alice Bag and Fear), plus interviews with band members, their managers, the club owners, rock writers and fans. It is also an acid test of hipness. You're hip if you see the punks' musical and social anarchy as liberating, bringing rock back to its proletarian roots and also forging ahead. You're out of it if you see this new wave as one of calculated moral repulsiveness, winning converts by courting violence. "I want them to hate me," says Claude Bessy, the singer and rock critic who goes by the name of Kickboy Face. "It makes me feel good." Says another punker: "Nothing else is going on. We're the only form of revolution left."

It may be so. But the punk revolution, like many others, is one of style. Or of antistyle: the incendiary insults, the compulsive tattooing, the head shaved as if recuperating from a Nazi lobotomy. Punk admits to no past; it anticipates no future. And the present is only impulse--the 300 heartbeats a minute of the raucous new rock. This music is rigorously monotonous, a mantra of bully nihilism; the lyrics are surrealist graffiti, spat out indistinctly. Director Spheeris occasionally supplies English subtitles for these messages from a lost world. In interviews she plays the sympathetic den mother to these kids barely out of their teens, and they respond, most of them, with patience and decorum. In assembling these chilling images, Spheeris has followed the music's dictum: start at the climax and run like hell. And in providing a punk primer, she has documented a troubling tendency in movies as well as in music--the triumph of aggression over involvement, movement over purpose, action over passion. Alas, nothing much else is going on.

-R.C.

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