They want to hear some American music.–Dave Alvin, “American Music”
Perhaps, sometimes, things just slip under the radar. You’d like to believe that because the alternative is total paranoia, the notion that sinister forces are trying to keep something from you, vital information that you need. Or even just something cool that you’d enjoy—such as the deadpan cinematic saga of a quartet of Japanese schoolgirls (with one Korean ringer) struggling to get on top of ’80s J-punkers The Blue Hearts’ best-known song, “Linda Linda Linda.
”In the case of Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita’s 2005 film of the same name, it’s hard to imagine what conspiracy has kept it out of all but a few U.S. movie theaters—and not just the megaplexes that run nothing but the moldy truffles ejected to the surface by Hollywood’s porcine rooting through Marvel Comics back issues, but the dwindling remnants of the art-house circuit as well. Granted, not much cinema variety makes it to Las Vegas in general. Even relative bright spots like the once-a-year CineVegas schedule work out to just about two weekends’ worth of what you get on a regular basis in a truly film-mad town like Portland, Oregon (the best refutation of the notion that it’s only big media cities such as Los Angeles and New York that are into outré international movies). Nice try, guys, but it’s like irrigating the desert with an eyedropper. So it’s no big mystery that Linda Linda Linda never made it to the big screen here, despite the rave notices and film festival awards that it racked up elsewhere. What’s weird is that it’s also not available on the starving cinephile lifeline known as Netflix or even those other Internet-driven rental agencies that specialize in Asian films, such as eHit.com. If you want to see it, your only option is to scrounge a copy from the overseas DVD dealers on eBay.
The actual problem might be that Linda Linda Linda’s producers signed up with a podunk distribution company (manga- and anime-oriented Viz Pictures) rather than one of the biggies. Might be nothing more to it than that. But there’s a constant little tickle at the back of the mind, given the vast resources of time, effort and taxpayer money that we’ve invested as a nation into turning our public schools into self-esteem mills, fluffing up the fragile egos of America’s children while making sure that they can’t actually do anything other than each other and recreational drugs. The powers that be, from Mrs. Grundy at the blackboard in the high school down the street, to whatever worthless bureaucratic hack is running the Department of Education, might have accurately determined that if there were the slightest risk of our teenagers seeing something like Linda Linda Linda, they would realize how completely they’ve been screwed. We’ve not only flubbed passing on the moderately useful parts of our culture, such as algebra and basic personal hygiene, but also the really valuable stuff, such as rock ’n’ roll. Thank God for foreigners; where would American popular culture be without them?
Can these schoolgirls save American teen culture?
What our kids have now is show business, which is a different thing, and one from which bands like The Killers will make a lot of money. There was no significant loss engendered by Cirque du Soleil attempting to breathe life into the corpse of the Beatles’ back catalogue. As Creedence main man John Fogerty correctly noted, the Beatles were never rock ’n’ rollers, but just British music-hall board-treaders. They were so weightless, it’s no wonder the drugs blew them away like dry leaves. A certain negative thrill of apprehension, though, follows the announcement of Cirque spangling out Elvis. As Mike Cooley put it in the Drive-By Truckers’ alt-country anthem “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” “Dammit, Elvis ... making money you can’t spend/Ain’t what being dead is all about.” If the Cirque-meisters invest in padded fat-suits for all their lithe little gymnasts and concentrate their creative fire on latter-day Vegas Elvis rather than swamp-fever Memphis multiculturalist Elvis (back when white-trash redneck was still considered an ethnicity rather than a de facto criminal status), then fine, no problem. We’ll always have Tokyo, won’t we?
Linda Linda Linda’s schoolgirls don’t sing in English—in fact, the Korean exchange student they draft as their lead vocalist can barely sing in Japanese. Like most people struggling with an unfamiliar language, she’s developed the habit of nodding and replying “Yes!” to everything anyone says to her; given the possibilities, it’s a miracle she winds up in a band rather than something worse. (Played by actress Doo-Na Bae, last seen here in Korean megahit The Host, she almost qualifies as the movie’s main character.) If she and her bandmates don’t have the cheerful nihilism that John Barth said was such a distinctively American characteristic, then they at least possess that certain dogged embrace of meaningless joy that used to be our birthright. When a classmate sneers at the girls’ band—“What’s the point?”—the answer is, “There is no point.” Exactly. We used to understand that.
Not that it isn’t important. The sense of there being something real going on—though that train left the station here a long time ago—is what impels the makers of lesser movies to pump up the narrative consequences, like those prog-rock twits who figured that slathering on more keyboards à la Rick Wakeman would somehow render dull music more interesting. In bad music-based movies, something always depends upon the big-deal performance, as if grinding out the same three chords over and over could somehow change the world or at least drive the standard Hollywood plot to a big finish, wrapping up the stitched-together plot before it falls apart completely. When the scenery along the way is that boring, nothing matters except getting to the end of the ride. Even given that the core joke in comedies such as The Blues Brothers and School of Rock is to strap absurdly big consequences on top of that which would otherwise be considered disposable, you’re still stuck with the notion that the music is only important to the degree that it can make something nice happen for the film’s characters when they finally shut up and lay down their instruments. The Linda Linda Linda girls have nothing more at stake than being able to hack their way through a three-minute punk karaoke standard in time for a school festival. Nothing more, and everything more. When the lead singer—barefoot, rain-drenched, knee-skinned—stares wide-eyed into the camera, her back to the school auditorium audience she’s been waiting and dreading her whole life to meet, we see someone assembling herself on the spot, from equal parts desperation and the sheer guts that are always in short supply for every one of us. It’s a good deal that the most important things in life don’t matter—“There is no point”—otherwise we’d never manage to pull them off at all.
In an age when you can e-mail Hillary Clinton with your pick of whichever marshmallow-rock anthem should be her campaign theme song, there’s no longer any equating rock with rebellion. The Man is always happy to have you stick it to him with the same foam-rubber weaponry he retails by the truckload. The polite, studious rockers in Linda Linda Linda, running off their band parts on the school office’s photocopier, don’t need to style themselves as the kind of cutely pouting, Avril Lavigne-style teen terrorists with an agenda against the adult world. The adults are on the Japanese schoolgirls’ side, actually; this is a movie that rates about a zero on the transgenerational-tension scale. What the girls mainly have to fight against is their near-narcoleptic tendency to fall asleep, either literally nodding off with their arms wrapped around their instruments or gazing out into the distance with that attentionless distraction that so effectively drives parents and teachers insane all around the world. Anybody who has spent time with teenagers, in school or out—or even ever been one—will recognize that this is something that Yamashita and his screenwriters completely nail, versus the usual Hollywood depiction of teens as cranked-up energetic fireballs, Energizer bunnies with hormones.
Maybe Linda Linda Linda should stay hidden, a little secret treasure for those who make the effort to dig it up. We’ve got our kids safely narcotized and sleepwalking the malls; what would we do with them if they did manage to wake up for even the three minutes it takes to get from the first snare beat to that last messily aching chord?