Head (1968)

1 year ago

Head (1968)

**Hey Hey: Head and The Monkees’ Attempt to Get Cool**

by Joe Bernardi

After seeing Head just once, I began telling people it was one of my favorite movies. It’s not one of my all-time favorites now and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t then, but Head is one of those films so dizzyingly high-concept that the act of describing it to someone is potentially even more enjoyable than actually watching it. Both its importance and quality are very easy to play up, even within one’s own mind. A cynic might see it as a second-rate Help! written by a future powerhouse who hadn’t yet found his footing. When I’m describing it to someone at a party, it’s like if the Marx Brothers discovered psychedelics and then tried as hard as they could to commit career suicide.

Within the first ten minutes of Head, the audience sees both the famous footage of Nguyen Van Lem being shot in the head and Mickey Dolenz making out with a mermaid. Throw in cops getting knocked out, an (unrelated) appearance by Sonny Liston, and Peter Tork dressed as a Vietnam soldier on a fictional cover of Life magazine, and it’s clear there were forces at work much stranger and more interesting than the desire to make a feature-length adaptation of the pretty straightforward Monkees television series.

There are basically no bones about the fact that Head is a must-see for a certain type of culture weirdo. For a specific but relatively common definition of “everything,” the film contains everything. Depending on one’s perspective, though, Head is either an insane, genius critique of its era’s popular culture—or merely a bunch of entertainment industry pawns’ last-ditch grasp at some cred. One may come away from the film thinking of one of two events that occurred soon after its production: screenwriter Jack Nicholson’s violent, subversive role in Easy Rider or The Monkees’ collapse into mom-approved nostalgia.

“It’s not right. It’s for the image. The kids aren’t gonna dig it, man.”

- Peter Tork, to Jack Nicholson, during Head, on why he thinks it’s a bad idea to hit a girl during Head.

Much of Head is dedicated to the assumption that lots of people love The Monkees and want to follow them wherever they go. Even before its release, however, this wasn’t necessarily the case. The press had begun to accuse the group members of being frauds who didn’t write their own songs or play their own music. The band (which by then had fought for and won the rights to perform some of their own compositions) tried to defend itself, but as so often happens when someone tries to set the public straight, it didn’t work. Record sales were down, the television show had been cancelled, tensions between the band and their ringleaders were bubbling over—and in the midst of all this confusion, somebody managed to push through a psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness, feature-length exploration of fame, commercialism and eastern philosophy.

Explaining the plot of Head, such as it is, would probably be completely fruitless for both writer and reader. Suffice it to say that it’s a loosely-connected series of vignettes depicting The Monkees’ life on a film set making the sort of movie you would expect the Monkees to make. Pepper that with scenes of The Monkees attempting to throw the entire production off the rails, throw in a bunch of abrupt non-sequiturs and a general aura of nobody knowing what they’re doing, and that’s about as close as lines on a page can get to summarizing this thing.

As if to pre-empt any criticism of itself, a number of scenes in Head attempt a more or less boldfaced look at the pre-fabricated sham that had been The Monkees. Peter Tork literally comes out of nowhere to interrupt a scene and reassure Mickey Dolenz and Michael Nesmith that he has always been “the dummy” of the group. Davy Jones walks into a bathroom whistling “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The group eventually finds themselves playing the role of flakes of dandruff on a giant head of hair in a commercial, only to be sucked into a giant vacuum cleaner.

Sure, these scenes are all comedic piss-takes, but they represent knowing nods to the part of Head’s audience that would be able to wrap their minds around a concept as twisted as making a movie about how you know your immensely successful pop group is just a moneymaking ploy. The only problem was that, upon the film’s release, this part of the audience barely existed. Even the New York Times dismissed it as a crummy drug movie on a level with Nicholson’s previous screenwriting effort The Trip, effectively ignoring the fact that Head stars the gosh-danged Monkees and that they were up there trying to ruin their own lives for your entertainment.

“Well well well, if it isn’t God’s gift to eight year-olds.”

- A sassy waitress, to Davy Jones.

Back to what I said about career suicide: You can’t really blame the respectable artist types to whom Head is ostensibly targeted for either dismissing it as juvenile trash because it starred The Monkees or simply not seeing it in the first place. The Monkees, after all, had just spent the previous couple of years getting rich by exploiting the people they were now trying to target. The underground has always prided itself on exclusionism, and all of the behind-the-scenes anti-corporate action in the world wasn’t going to gain The Monkees any sympathy. They were going to have to sacrifice their careers, and I’m willing to bet that they knew it.

Any questions about Head’s intentionality with regard to permanently ending the popular myth of The Monkees can be put to rest within the first few minutes of the film. “Ditty Diego – War Chant,” a spoken word piece written by Jack Nicholson and recited in unison by all four members of the band over circus music, offers the movie’s thesis in typically blunt Nicholson/Monkees fashion:

Hey, hey, we are The Monkees

You know we love to please,

A manufactured image

With no philosophies.

You say we’re manufactured.

To that we all agree.

So make your choice and we’ll rejoice

In never being free!

Hey, hey, we are The Monkees

We’ve said it all before

The money’s in, we’re made of tin

We’re here to give you more!

Given the state of their careers while Head was being made and the almost uncomfortable honesty of their delivery, it seems safe to say that The Monkees were desperate for something, be it a rejuvenated pop career or a legitimate connection with the respectable artistic community they’d been flirting with since their inception. (Peter Tork had been selected for The Monkees based on the recommendation of his friend Stephen Stills; Frank Zappa once claimed that, were he to reunite the Mothers of Invention, Michael Nesmith would be a member, et cetra.)

Head, of course, accomplished neither of these things upon its release, and instead merely puttered off into unprofitable oblivion. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can wince at the group’s awkward attempts to be taken seriously just as easily as we can marvel at the fact that Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith could apparently write a corker of a song. Time has created a large cushion of irony upon which our modern appreciation of Head can always fall back. In 1968, the viewers were forced to appreciate Monkees qua Monkees—a proposition that seems only marginally more attractive now than it must have at the time. In 2010, Head’s semi-obscurity and spectacular concept have lent it the enviable status of “fascinating relic.”

Does that status make Head the movie it aims to be? Probably not. The film’s motives (in terms of both profit and culture capital) demanded quick success, and if Head has chalked up any money or smart-points since its release, it’s a direct result of the aforementioned kitsch factors that can only be awarded ex post facto. The Monkees themselves have long since cashed out, fulfilling their destinies as walking museum exhibits alongside the surprisingly elite likes of Brian Wilson and Lou Reed. By the time The Monkees set out to make a movie, they’d already been processed and rejected by both the masses and the underground. Head represents The Monkees’ final appeal to both, but given the notoriously fickle nature of just about everybody, it was almost certainly destined for failure.

Head is basically a film about The Monkees trying really hard to convey A) that there was a joke, and B) that they were in on it. One is tempted to compare it to the smirk coming out of a guy in a stupid t-shirt, but, on some level, this ridiculous movie is weird and sincere enough to work. The Monkees were intended to represent Middle America’s amusement park ride through the late-60’s counterculture, with all the acoustic guitars and shaggy hair, but none of the fist-raising, drug-fueled excitement. With Head, however, they managed to at least jerk the ride around a little bit by coming across as the one thing pop stars have been barred from being since time immemorial: Confusing.