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May 2, 2009

Seventeen

A few weeks ago, a handful of filmmakers were having breakfast in a dingy back room off Sunset and talking about documentaries. One of them mentioned an unheralded classic from 1982 called Seventeen; eyes lit up around the table, and another director exclaimed, "oh, I happen to have a few copies of that in my backpack! Who hasn't seen it yet?"

I hadn't, and apparently I'd been missing out. In the ensuing days, I'd mention to people that I had procured a copy and they'd respond with enthusiastic references to keggers and church mice. What I discovered prior to watching it: the film, directed by Jeff Krienes and Joel DeMott, was commissioned by PBS and subsequently squelched by their corporate sponsor, who didn't want their name anywhere close to the final product. It has survived in the ensuing decades through VHS bootlegs and the rare cinemateque screening, and has developed a rather fervent fanbase.

But as it turns out, what's particularly fascinating (and wonderful) about the film's near-cult status is that isn't due to any sensationalism, but rather an intrinsic quality level. The film is simply really, really good.
Krienes and DeMott embedded themselves with a group of high school seniors in Muncie, Indiana and spent a year filming them. These are not the coiffed media darlings of American Teen; these are kids with limited prospects and equivocal ambition, with very little to look forward to but no shortage of off-kilter charisma and good humor. The cameras follow them as they date, break up, mouth off to their teachers, drink, get high and negotiate the racial tensions that run high in the town. The lines between outright racism and tolerance are shockingly gray, and this, more than the scenes of parents and teenagers drinking themselves into oblivion together, seems the likely cause of the film's suppression. It was bad enough for middle America to have to watch their kids smoking and swearing and sleeping around, but to see them cast aside racial boundaries was apparently too much to take. 1982, after all, was a lot closer to 1968 than it is to 2009.

But let's jump back to the kids and parents drinking together, and the extended party that kicks off the last third of the movie. It drags on all night, as everyone - including the chaperones and a 12-year-old sibling, gets completely hammered. It's an unforgettable sequence. Emotions run high, tears are shed, and it's here that the immortal line "it just ain't a kegger without church mouse" is uttered, in reference to a dear friend who recently died in a car accident. Such instantly quotable bon mots - and the film is full of them - have gone a long way towards affixing the film's cult status. This subcultural appropriation isn't in jest; this is no sideshow. One cites lines like "he looks like he’s got titties on his arms because he’s got muscles so big" out of shock and awe, and also love. It's impossible not to care for these kids. As Kreines and DeMott state, "We respected the kids’ complexity, celebrated their liveliness, despaired of their future. And we loved them dearly. "

That quote came from a PDF file available on the filmmakers' website, kinetta.com, which is otherwise devoted to developing digital technology for film preservation (along with an early 4k digital camera). Another good read can be found at SF360, which published an article entitled 'Seventeen reasons why Seventeen might be the greatest movie about teenagers ever made.' Amen to that.

* * *

Also worth mentioning is the fact that the DVD we watched was clearly pulled from a VHS tape of dubious generational integrity. The image jogged, the bars rolled, and all those tape-based artifacts added a layer of underground nostalgia to the viewing experience. It reminded me of when Adam and I would stay up late on school nights watching some rare film we'd picked up on eBay. Eraserhead with Japanese subtitles, or Lynch's short films on dubs so degraded that they were practically unwatchable. These low-fi viewing experiences weren't technically the best way to experience those films, but because we wanted to see them so badly, we were willing to look past those imperfections. Such duress begets sentimentaly, which in turn engenders aesthiticization; and so it is that an entire generation of filmgoers now waxes nostalgic about shitty VHS dubs. Those were the days.

Posted by David Lowery at May 2, 2009 8:19 PM

Comments

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