Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984)

What makes Rob Reiner’s 1984 masterpiece This is Spinal Tap so funny? Is it the clever, hilarious and quote-worthy dialogue? Or is it the way the movie is done? This is Spinal Tap opened up a whole different genre of film – “the mockumentary” a film shot in the style and using the conventions of documentary filmmaking but focusing on a fictional, and often satirical, subject. Spinal Tap not only is a great movie, but paved the way for other great movies using the same type of filmmaking. Christopher Guest, who is one of the leading “rockers” in Spinal Tap, was heavily influenced by Reiner’s unique style of filmmaking and went on to direct other mockumentaries such as Waiting for Guffman (1997), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003).

Reiner’s film, the first for Reiner as a director, also influenced other mockumentaries such as: Bob Roberts (1992), Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), and Borat (2006), as well as other musical mockumetaries like Fear of a Black Hat (1994), about hip-hop, and Dill Scallion (1999), about country music. Reiner has found himself in as one of the most successful directors of our time.

One reason that I think Spinal Tap is so funny, is because it is almost real. They tried to do everything in their power to make the audience believe that this was an actual documentary on aging rockers trying to squeeze a few bucks out of a tour. The three main characters of the movie, David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) all learned how to play their own instruments and learned how to talk in a believable British accent. Reiner takes us into the minds of these “rock stars” and shows us the in-fighting and the steady decline of the rock band as it hits rock bottom.

Because most of the film was adlibbed, it created the impression that it was a real documentary and that the actors in the film weren’t really “acting” but saying what they tought stupid, drugged out, washed up British rock stars would say. After the film came out other rockers said that almost everything in Spinal Tap had happened to them. For example, rockers like Robert Plant and Ozzy Osborne said that they too had been lost in the hallways looking for the stage door. In fact, the film has a number of not-so-veiled references to the real histories of such bands as The Beatles, The Who, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and a variety of others.

All the music in Spinal Tap was created by the members of the “band” and Reiner. Spinal Tap even has their own page on iTunes where you can buy their music. If you go to Amazon’s music page, you can actually buy albums by this “fake” band. This ambiguity – real or not? – has confused audiences from the beginning. When the movie was originally released in 1984 the screen audience didn’t think it was very funny because they were confused whether this was an actual documentary or not.

Spinal Tap was the first of its kind, making it ultimately a cult film. Pop culture was ever-altered by its release. It not only opened doors for future filmmakers, but altered filmmaking itself. Spinal Tap shows us that directors don’t need multimillion dollar budgets to make a great movie, but just clever dialogue and an open mind to filmmaking.

Tim Blodgett
Film Club

Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957)

Let’s do something really wacky this time. Let’s consider how Macbeth transcends the era in which Shakespeare wrote it – Jacobean England circa 1605 – and comments presciently on our own day and age. English teachers are always telling us that Shakespeare speaks to every age; it’s why we continue to find him in the modern classroom. Yeah? So what, really, does a guy who communes with witches, hears fatal prophecies, stabs a king to death, sees ghosts, falls for the idea that a child delivered by Caesarian section is “not of woman born,” and gets his head hacked off have to do with us?

First, let’s consider Macbeth’s relation to its own time. Although set in Medieval Scotland, the play’s Renaissance audience could see a direct parallel between the play’s situation and their own. Critic Terence Hawkes points out that “on 5 November 1605 a search by security forces, instituted at the personal behest of King James, discovered beneath the Houses of Parliament a secret cache containing enough gunpowder, fuses, and other implements to blow the king, his ministers, and the lawful government of the entire state sky-high” (Hawkes 2). This “Gunpowder Plot,” prepared by Guy Fawkes, a member of a group of English Catholics bent on assassinating King James, failed. Fawkes’ notoriety survived him though as the English celebrate the failure annually on Guy Fawkes Night.

This plot to kill a king, though, would have been foremost in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience. It would have seemed that Macbeth himself was, in part, a literary version of Guy Fawkes, although more successful. The play’s depiction of Lady Macbeth slipping into insanity, Macbeth receding into moral emptiness, and the natural world going crazy, all as a result of the regicide, confirms the Renaissance view of the king as rightfully placed and cosmically protected and explains the heavenly reason for Fawkes failure.

Now if Fawkes’s name rings a bell that’s because it has been in vogue lately. Ever since Alan Moore’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, was made into a movie, people on this side of the Atlantic have been reintroduced to Fawkes, except the movie casts him as a hero, a vigilante who tears down a corrupt and oppressive government. (And if you want to see this transformation taken to an absurd extent, look at how the character and the slogan associated with him – “Remember, remember, the 5^th of November – have become affixed to libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.)

The V character wears a Fawkes mask, his anonymity making him more of a symbol against tyrannical governance than an outraged citizen. So where does this take our connection to Macbeth? In a world where the anti-government, proto-terrorist vigilante is celebrated because he succeeds in blowing up Parliament, succeeds in bringing down the “king,” where does that leave Macbeth? Is he not a sort of hero? Well, no.

There is nothing in Macbeth that indicates that Duncan is corrupt (although there is little to suggest that he is not, too). Macbeth’s own inclination prior to the murder is not to do the deed. He feels, as host to the King, responsible for him. And afterwards he suffers from intense guilt. Everything about the play says his action is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Still, our society is distrustful of political power at this moment. It would be easy to digress and consider Macbeth as a version of Moore’s V, a man not driven solely by ambition or by a shrewish wife or by his own fevered visions, but by the desire to cast aside the powers-that-be and take control of his own life. If that’s not what Ron Paul wants, it’s certainly what his supporters want. Forty-five years ago, we may have been able to make a similar comparison to Lee Harvey Oswald. The point is that Shakespeare gives us room to consider all his characters in a modern context. You just have to connect some dots.

“Hey, hey, hey,” you’re yelling. “Aren’t we watching an Akira Kurosawa film? A JAPANESE film? About a guy not even named Macbeth?” Well, yes. But it’s the same story, and we encourage you to consider just what might have compelled Mr. Kurosawa, in 1957, to make a Japanese version of an early 17^th-century English play. Perhaps because where, or when, it takes place does not matter. What matters is the universality of the human condition it depicts. Enjoy Throne of Blood.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser