The Last Movie I Watched

I'm co-teaching an Honors Seminar this semester on Popular Music and Society, and consequently thinking quite a bit about the the ways that music, especially rock and roll, is presented in other media aside from straight performance or recording. Of course, much of that transference to other forms involves a degree of mythologizing artists or styles in a way that often has little to do with the music itself, or anyway posits the music as an outgrowth of something other than mere creative or even artistic expression. It's easy to decide that you like a song because of what it sounds like, but all-but-the-most-casual fans almost always take it further (again, maybe especially with rock and roll) to imagine links with the musicians based on factors that only begin with their work and extend to often carefully managed offstage personas. Obviously, this kind of celebrity association extends to everyone from movie stars to athletes to politicians in our culture, but I'm not sure any of those other professions are so powerfully affective as rock and roll is to young people, since the inherent message of the genre itself, from Elvis Presley forward, has to do with the power to define yourself, to construct your own destiny, usually in opposition to the status quo. The myths of rock and roll expressed in the music itself can be intensely magnified when converted to narrative film, where the visual, story, and aural elements are stretched out beyond the three minutes of the typical pop single. When all those components are in sync, it's quite a heady mix. Not all films devoted to rock pull this off, but I think that The Runaways, directed by Floria Sigismondi, comes pretty close. There's a fair amount of melodrama in this true story of the notorious seventies group composed of five teenage girls and their manipulative manager, and that's always a danger. But there are some near transcendent scenes of Kristen Stewart especially, playing Joan Jett being transformed by just playing her guitar. Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie has a couple of powerful scenes too, though Currie's motives seem less visceral than Jett's and that, oddly, seems important in this context. Apparently the film was not a hit (it never played a theater in Montana as far as I can tell-- I watched the DVD), so maybe I'm misjudging its potency. But another possibility is that rock and roll has kind of spent itself, so that in the age of Lady Gaga audiences have become so jaded that they no longer relate to the truly transgressive without giggling. If so, maybe it's time for another musical revolution to shake things up.