Head opens with a scene that should be familiar to fans of The Monkees TV show, but something is a little off. Here they come, running down the street, getting concerned looks from everyone they meet. Hey, hey, they\u2019re the Monkees, and\u2026they\u2019re going to kill themselves? The staged suicide kicks off a profoundly weird and surprisingly trenchant media satire from the 1960s\u2019 most perennially uncool band. Made by the same outsiders who formed the band and introduced them to audiences only two years earlier\u2014writer-director Bob Rafelson, and producer Bert Schneider\u2014Head was co-written by Jack Nicholson and turned A Hard Day\u2019s Night-like romp into biting avant-garde comedy.<\/p>\n
Ignored upon release, Head\u2018s kaleidoscopic deconstruction of pop superstardom lives on. As more pop stars, from The Weeknd<\/a> to Charli xcx, use movies as a form of pop-star character assassination, Head remains as gleefully irreverent and self-assuredly edgy as ever. It\u2019s pop-stardom dissected by chainsaw, with Davy, Mike, Peter, and Micky transforming into mannequins for their fans to cut apart. Yes, to become free, \u201cGod\u2019s gift to the eight-year-olds,\u201d as they\u2019re described in the film, would have to die.<\/p>\n Released in 1968, Head hit screens about a year after the release of Headquarters, the album that was supposed to shut the Monkees\u2019 haters up. There\u2019s a nice bit of symmetry between Headquarters and Head. Following years of criticism over the group\u2019s inauthenticity, Headquarters was a chance for Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Micky Dolenz to show off their chops and play their own instruments on a record for the first time. But timing is everything: A week after Headquarters hit number one, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band, reducing every album on the new release wall to rubble. At every turn, The Monkees were a step behind. However, as their NBC show wound down, Rafelson saw the Monkees\u2019 movie as a way to make a final statement about the project. For the first and last time, The Monkees would be ahead of their time.<\/p>\n If there is a plot to Head, it\u2019s one in which the band becomes trapped in the very media machinations that created them. Attempting to shed their TV-born pop-idol personas, the Prefab Four bounce from situation to situation and genre to genre, hoping to break free of the ecosystem that defined the group. High on the jump-cutting, montage mania of the French New Wave, Rafelson and editor Mike Pozen structure the film like a bored channel surfer flipping through stations in search of something to distract them from the Vietnam War. Following the band\u2019s failed suicide, Rafelson pulls out and fills the frame with TV screens, like The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded. Clips from the film juxtapose footage from Vietnam as the Monkees\u2019 self-deprecating \u201cDiego Ditty (War Chant)\u201d declares a sarcastic mission statement: \u201cHey, hey, we are the Monkees \/ we\u2019ve said it all before \/ the money\u2019s in, we\u2019re made of tin \/ we\u2019re here to give you more.\u201d Carried along by the group\u2019s best tunes, including the Gerald Goffin and Carole King-penned \u201cPorpoise Song\u201d and Mike Nesmith\u2019s garage-rock toe-tapper \u201cCircle Sky,\u201d Head deconstructs their image and the nascent media landscape, flattening their jokey Hard Day\u2019s Night parody against the constant small-screen war dispatches, contextualizing the Monkees\u2019 playfulness within a world of violence.<\/p>\n Head doesn\u2019t abide by the conventional rules of film, and instead offers an omnibus of sketches akin to what was on The Monkees TV show. Scenes start and stop on a whim, serving a single joke or a better idea. In one, Micky finds an out-of-order Coke machine in the desert that sets up a Lawrence Of Arabia joke; another shows Peter\u2019s trip to a diner that ends with the actor calling cut to discuss the scene\u2019s misogyny with Rafelson\u2014and giving Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, already in Easy Rider costume, a chance for a cameo. Like in the TV series, there\u2019s plenty of room for flights of fancy, but with a heightened sense of reality and a grim sense of humor within the nesting doll of cultural references. War scenes feature more realistic sets and detailed trenches, but carve out space for a dumb bit about Micky\u2019s helmet being too heavy and a jab at Life magazine\u2019s coverage. Davy restages the show\u2019s boxing-based episode, \u201cThe Monkees In The Ring,\u201d with boxer Sonny Liston. Liston is one of many \u201closers,\u201d as Jones and Rafelson refer to their guest stars in the Criterion release\u2019s archival interviews, dotting the film\u2019s credits. Original Mouseketeer Annette Funicello and backlot wild man Timothy Carey join the festivities as the band is relentlessly mocked by The Big Victor (classic Hollywood staple Victor Mature), who laughs mercilessly at the group\u2019s trials from the heavens like a cruel god. They are but dandruff on Mature\u2019s head\u2014in one scene, literally.<\/p>\n An 85-minute exodus into the heart of American media wasn\u2019t for the fans who were buying Monkees-branded lunchboxes, and those who dismissed the Monkees as phonies weren\u2019t interested either, so distributor Columbia hid the band from the film\u2019s original poster. Instead, Columbia used a photo of the film\u2019s PR executive, John Brockman (who was affiliated with Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory). In an attempt at gonzo marketing, Rafelson and Nicholson stuck Head stickers around New York, and were reportedly arrested<\/a> at the film\u2019s premiere for trying to stick one on a police officer\u2019s helmet. Perhaps understandably, this defiance\u2014translated through the Monkees\u2014didn\u2019t make for a popular counterculture film.<\/p>\n While audiences mostly avoided Head, it allowed the musicians to thumb their noses at a pop culture that consistently overthought and underrated their talents. It was also the oft-forgotten opening shot in a New Hollywood revolution: After Head bombed, Rafelson, Nicholson, and Schneider moved along to a more adult-friendly form of cultural upheaval\u2014a revisionist biker film called Easy Rider. The trio, along with Stephen Blauner, would help jumpstart the American independent film scene through BBS Productions, with movies depicting an out-of-place American working class in movies like Five Easy Pieces, The King Of Marvin Gardens, and The Last Picture Show. But the impact of Head and its freewheeling, Hellzapoppin\u2019 trip can be felt throughout movie history. Blazing Saddles\u2018 beloved fourth-wall-breaking studio tour finale owes much to Head, as does the self-spoofery of Gremlins 2. But most specifically, whenever a pop star outgrows their young fanbase, they can always look to the original manufactured boy band, who built their own escape hatch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Head opens with a scene that should be familiar to fans of The Monkees TV show, but something…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":["post-439428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}