'Head': Less Than the Sum of Its Parts
The amount of drugs fueling this movie must have been astonishing.
RECENTLY, I’ve fallen down a Monkees rabbit hole. A few weeks back I wrote a freelance article about the old TV show “The Monkees,” and was a little surprised at how interesting the whole thing was1. The band was definitely manufactured and the show was really, really silly—but it was also visually experimental, and the band actually evolved into a pretty decent pop-rock outfit that wrote some of their own material. It’s not uncommon for me to become briefly obsessed with aspects of pop culture that I’ve been subliminally aware of my whole life2.
I’d always been aware of The Monkees (and “The Monkees”) but never actually paid them any mind beyond enjoying their surface-level hits like “Daydream Believer” or “Last Train to Clarksville.” I never watched the show, even when it was revived on MTV in the 1980s. So writing about them led me to watching a few episodes and digging in a bit deeper into their music3. And inevitably, I watched Head, their bizarre 1968 film written by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, and directed by Rafelson.
Now, Head is weird, but consider: Rafelson and Nicholson would go on to reinvent movies with Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces and other projects. There was some serious talent involved in this film, even if you don’t count The Monkees themselves (which, for the record, I do).
My brother and I have a standard joke when discussing any film that seems too strange and terrible to actually exist. “How did this get made?” one of us will ask, and the other will respond simply: “Cocaine.” Head is not a good movie—let’s be up front about that. The Monkees (Mickey Dolenz, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Mike Nesmith) more or less admitted that they holed up with Jack Nicholson one weekend, did a lot of drugs, and dictated whatever popped into their minds. Then Nicholson, a few years away from becoming the world’s most famous actor, cobbled it all together into a script4.
It’s not good. Plotless, it’s precisely the sort of ‘psychedelic’ trash the 1960s encouraged, and the sort of film that thinks repeatedly showing the execution of Nguyen Van Lem by General Ngoc Loan somehow translates to political commentary. But! I am not here to argue that Head is a good movie. It is not, though you should watch it just for the head-scratching fun of it. Because there are parts of Head that are absolutely terrific, and that brings up the question of whether that means it’s actually a good movie after all. In other words, how much of a movie—what percentage—has to be good or interesting or good and interesting to qualify the whole thing as a success5?
Let’s take a look at a few sequences that are several orders of magnitude better then the rest of this fever dream.
Opening Ceremony
The film opens with an absolutely terrific sequence. If you have no idea what’s coming, in fact, this sequence might actually convince you that something amazing is going to fall into your eyeballs. It’s not flashy. It is, in fact, the dedication of a bridge by a local mayor. There’s a ribbon to be cut, a few National Guardsmen, some reporters.
Rafelson opens tight on the ribbon, the pulls out to show the California Highway Patrolman holding onto it. He then follows the cop using a disorienting tight focus—the cop wanders around the whole scene, presumably doing a last-minute security check, but the audience gets zero sense of space because the camera never pulls back enough to show us context. This makes the scene drip with tension. It’s all noise and confusion—people buzzing, feedback swirling. And the cop’s humorless, authoritative manner isn’t exactly relaxing6. It’s extremely sweaty and paranoid.
Finally, the CHP officer goes to a waiting limousine and tells the mayor it’s time. They go to the microphone set up in front of the ribbon, but the mayor has a problem—every time he tries to speak, the feedback on the microphone drowns him out. Every time the humorless cop tests it, it works just fine—and the cop’s expression will be familiar to anyone who has a Humorless Authority Type in their life. It drips with baffled contempt. There’s a real, bizarre tension to this scene, and it’s staged perfectly7.
The technical glitch is resolved and the mayor begins his speech. For the first time, Rafelson gives us a wide shot of the scene, but then immediately begins to zoom in on the mayor. Suddenly, the Monkees race into the shot from out of nowhere. This brief moment of order and calm is shattered—and the Monkees just keep running. Mickey lurches into the lead, and leaps off the bridge in what could be a suicide. It’s a weird, wonderful scene, capped by the chaotic and decidedly lo-fi entry of the film’s stars.
That Song was Pretty White
Perhaps the greatest thing in the entire movie is a sequence simultaneously corny and technically amazing. It’s a sequence that Frank Zappa describes as “pretty white” in the very next scene. That’s right, it’s “Daddy’s Song,” written by Harry Nilsson, performed by Davy Jones, and choreographed (and also performed) by a young Toni Basil.
Watch this in all its amazing glory:
If you watched that and those horns aren’t seared into your brain, you are not well. But beyond the unlikely, bonkers catchiness of that song, it’s also an incredible sequence, especially for 1968. The sudden cuts between the black/white and white/black sets, the exaggeratedly puppet-like dancing, Toni Basil’s obvious joy as she strides in for the partner dance8. The directing (Rafelson), the cinematography (Michel Hugo), the editing (Michael Pozen and Monte Hellman). Considering there were no digital tools back then, the cuts are fucking incredible.
And all of that hides the fact that this is a pitch dark, totally depressing song about a man whose father abandoned him and his mother when he was a child9. The loss scars him into adulthood, where he prays he can spare his own son the pain and suffering he’s experienced. That earworm horn riff combined with the lyrics creates a dissonance that’s mimicked by the black/white cuts. It’s nearly a perfect scene in a movie that is anything but.
The Sum
Head is certainly not the only work of art that has great elements that don’t congeal into anything coherent or worthwhile. It was clearly engineered to have no actual story—it’s really an extended metaphor on the artificiality of The Monkees and the constrictions their fame and constructed personas put on them. It’s a collection of skits that feels very much like the sort of thing a bunch of friends would put together—filled with in-jokes, meta-references, and ideas that seem much better in your head than on the screen (I’m sure the giant Victor Mature was hilarious back in 1968).
But there’s good stuff in there, if you’re willing to pan for it. Which brings us back to the question: If there’s gold in there, is it a good movie10?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a piece of pop culture even more obscure than a 50+ year old film starring a sitcom band whose last charting single was in 1987.
Next week: Malignant and why horror is the most powerful genre.
To be fair, I am easily interested in all manner of things, including starting up newsletters about pop culture no one else has ever seen. Apparently.
The first time this happened to me I was in high school and it involved the band Styx. For a while I convinced myself that “Mr. Roboto” was a great and thrilling song. I sometimes daydream about becoming a billionaire and hiring some Nobel laureate to write a novelization of that album just to accelerate the end of society. Secret, secret, I’ve got a secret indeed.
Apparently watching really bad 1960s sitcoms aimed at kids is what we professional writers call “research” these days.
After reading about Nicholson’s writing process while working on the film The Departed, I totally understnd how Head came to be: Cocaine.
I also wonder about this Golden Ratio for novels for, er, reasons.
AKA standard cop face.
There’s a version of this scene just about every night at the Somers Compound, when the Duchess calls me into complain about some technical problem she’s having with her computer. It will always work fine when I’m standing there, then break again the moment I step away. It would be hilarious if she didn’t beat me so mercilessly for failing to fix it.
Forget “Mickey.” THIS is Toni Basil’s greatest achievement.
This is definitely a song that could find its way into a horror movie about a psychologically damaged orphan who sings this song as he murders people. I would watch that movie.
Much like its author, this newsletter is not about “answers” or “solutions,” but rather “asking questions that make me seem smart and mysterious and then walking away.”