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PUNK LIKE ME: the Battle Cry of the “Grups” |
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Contributed by Sara Schieron
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Saturday, 13 May 2006 |
PUNK LIKE ME by Zach Merck is a documentary about Rich Wilkes: the man
who made his rock n' roll dreams come true by lying, cheating and
drinking. |
A 37-year-old Hollywood screenwriter (credited with xXx), Wilkes lives out this fantasy by starting a Punk Band. After successfully convincing the founder of the Vans Warp Tour that he's doing a piece for Rolling Stone for which he'll "pose" as a band member on tour, Wilkes compiles a team of would-be and has-been musicians, (each of whom risk all for this opportunity) and dub their band "Carne Asada." These five men undertake the tour on a luxury trailer with over a thousand dollars worth of alcohol and a few of their wives. En route to the dream, the band gets applause, screws up, and finally starts to take itself seriously - all on the way to this fake stardom.
"Carne Asada" is a deliberately artificial amalgamation of punk and mariachi. The band dons sombreros, play a raw and aggressive rendition of "Cielito Lindo" and wear neon earplugs. The mixture of genres (and ages) along with a number of other factors (such as the last minute attendance of Rich's in-laws, for example) constantly strips the dream of its ease, but not of its allure. Beyond the fact the realities of touring are not as conducive to free wheeling sex and excessive alcohol consumption as one might think, stardom seems even less a possibility if your band is made up of mostly middle aged, Tecate laden, non-professionals who are, as the narrator puts it "just going through the motions." After a sturdy run of bad shows, the band figures out they can't actually get what they're looking for if they treat the whole thing like a shower-less, drunken vacation.
What's clever about this film is its take on the nature of being fake. PUNK LIKE ME is an extensively narrated documentary about real life events that goes into the truth and fiction of living out the anarchist dream. The irony is that the anarchy may feel like sincere rebellion but the look and work of that sincerity requires quite a bit of maintenance. Out of the gate, Wilkes identifies with the self-parody of his dream, he laughs at how bad he sounds, he goes to a rather pricy stylist to get his green Mohawk, he says he's doing this as a joke, and he knows it's all a show, and all this amounts to is further repression of his fantasy. When Wilkes and the band realize that not taking their fantasy seriously means they're squandering their "shot", the story turns and the band begins to deal with the validity of their dream. The point proven by PUNK LIKE ME touches many issues: the extent of truth offered by jokes, the value of something you don't take seriously, or the meaninglessness of image. The list is long and reads like a crash course in "real world" values.
In sum, PUNK LIKE ME is a wet-dream of awkward, charming, funny, playful, and occasionally embarrassing events that all amount to living your teenage dream and finding out you already had it good as a "Grup." So then, it's not so bad to wake up from the dream, but waking up certainly doesn't end the fantasy.
PODCAST WITH RICH WILKES
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