Robert Switzer

Vincent Gallo is an interesting guy.

My first exposure to Mr. Gallo was Downtown 81, the Edo Bertoglio film, originally titled New York Beat Movie, that was shot in 1981, but not released until 2000.

In 1981, when I bought a ROIR cassette release of a live set by James White and the Blacks, a.k.a. James Chance and the Contortions, I got the stink-eye from the record store clerk in the conservative college town where I bought it, and my small-town musician buddies, who were perpetually decked out in full Clash regalia at the time, considered me to be a triple loser in the trifecta of cool, with dodgy hair, dodgy clothes, and shit taste in music. Spending ten bucks on a cassette tape of a guy in a lounge-lizard tuxedo playing out-saxophone in front of a band of jazz musicians while singing like Pee Wee Herman channeling James Brown did nothing at all to enhance my reputation.

So when Downtown 81 came out I felt kinda thrilled and vindicated to find out that what I had liked in 1981 was actually pretty cool at that moment, despite what the Clash Police would have had me believe at the time.

On top of the superb performances in the film, the incidental music is pretty good, and some of this is by Mr. Gallo, who, as well as being an actor and filmmaker, is also a painter, composer, and musician. He is a contemporary of Jean-Michel Basquiat, James Chance, Liquid Liquid, Tuxedomoon, Kid Creole, and the others featured in Downtown 81.

As a result of Downtown 81, I discovered Gallo’s film music, in a collection released on Warp Records in 2002 called Recordings of Music for Film, featuring thirty instrumental tracks that range from lyrical to abrasive. Three of the tracks are from Downtown 81. The remaining tracks include his full contributions to the soundtracks for his films If You Feel Froggy, Jump, The Way It Is, and Buffalo 66. This, in turn, lead me to Gallo’s post-post-punk industrial project Bohack, that released It Took Several Wives on Family Friend Records in 1982. This album is roughly contemporary to the better known Homotopy To Marie by Nurse With Wound, and is in a somewhat similar vein.

Gallo’s most recent musical project is the band RRIICCEE, which includes a revolving cast of other musicians. I’ve read descriptions of RRIICCEE that characterize them as a noise band. They sound nothing like what I would consider to be a noise band. I’ve only heard a bootleg of a 2007 live set, but what I’ve heard sounds more like a continuation of Bohack and Gallo’s soundtrack work in a live, improvised context than, say, Harry Pussy or Merzbow.

So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I like the man’s music, which predisposes me to like his films, too.

The Brown Bunny is the more recent of the two films, but both have elements in common. It’s clear also that both are set in a world that Gallo knows well, and from first hand experience. It’s his evocation of this world that won my sympathy for the rest of what he does or doesn’t do.

The first cut of The Brown Bunny isn’t available, as far as I know. The DVD version is 92 minutes, down from the 118 minute version that premiered at Cannes, and provoked most of the controversy that surrounds the film.

The pace of the film is stately, but I wasn’t yawning. Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer, finishes a race somewhere on the east coast, packs up his bike, and heads to California. On the way, he meets several women, all named after flowers, that he seems to want to, but becomes unable to connect with.

In both films, Gallo shows the right stuff to establish the mood that he’s looking for. I screened these right after the Lynne Ramsey films Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher. And there are some similarities. Gallo’s films are set in working class America, in the same way that Ramsey’s films are set in working class Scotland. Gallo, whose parents were hairdressers, comes from Buffalo and is a part of the world he portrays. And his portrayals resonate with me, because I’m also a part of that world.

Buffalo 66 has more humor, and more familiar faces than The Brown Bunny. The bleak picture-in-picture beginning of Buffalo 66 morphs into a series of sight gags about having an impossibly full bladder, trying to find a place to take a piss, and having no success. Also, Buffalo 66 was, and continues to be much more highly regarded critically.

The Brown Bunny is much rawer from a production standpoint. The grain suggests it was shot on super 16 and blown up to 35mm. The only humor, at least from my perspective, is that all of the women are named after flowers, and all unambiguously want Bud Clay, but Bud wants none of them. Former supermodel and Sears spokesperson Cheryl Tiegs turns in a strong cameo performance as Lily. But there are some technical point-of-view issues that can be confusing, especially after Bud meets the first flower-girl in the convenience store, and invites her to California with him.

Buffalo 66 is shot almost exclusively in Buffalo. I’ve only been to Buffalo once, but the look of the place is the unmistakable strip mall and chain restaurant milieu that characterizes rotting post-industrial America, east coast version. So even though I haven’t been there often, I know it well. Supposedly, the house where protagonist Billy Brown takes his kidnapped tap-dancing ad hoc girlfriend Layla is Gallo’s own childhood home. The scene in the bowling alley is priceless. Christina Ricci’s character Layla tap-dances to King Crimson’s Moonchild right there on the lane. And Gallo obviously bowls just as well as his character Billy Brown.

The Brown Bunny is about the effect addiction can have on young women, and about loss. Buffalo 66 is about the overwhelming and unreasonable love children can feel for indifferent and abusive parents. In both films, what you expect to happen doesn’t.

Chloe Sevigny is an excellent actress. I spotted her first in Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, and I love her character Nicolette Grant in Big Love. I’ve yet to screen Gummo, but look for a review of it here as soon as I do. The final scene of The Brown Bunny includes Sevigny performing unsimulated fellatio on Gallo. So put the kids to bed. That being said, the scene is absolutely necessary dramatically. The framing, angle, composition and dialog of the scene are far from being pornographic. And I recommend turning on the subtitles to capture all of the dialog.

Gallo has gotten a lot of bad press, and I can’t say that I like his politics, as the press perceives and reports them. Although when I’ve been confronted by liberals of the witless, reflexive and upper-middle-class variety, I’ve often adopted a larger than life caricature persona of the racist, reactionary and homophobic lout liberals of the witless, knee-jerk, and upper-middle-class variety often assume all working class people to be, just for the fun of watching them reveal their own prejudices by swallowing it all whole, without catching even a hint of the irony involved. Somehow, I think that Gallo may be doing something similar with his public persona. And he is, along with Jim Goad, a gamy, bona-fide working class hero in a world full of working class hero poseurs.

To paraphrase Gallo’s website, if you had to share your childhood bedroom with someone else, you couldn’t put anything of your own on the walls, you couldn’t lock the door, and it had to look, at all times, like nobody lived there, you’re probably working class.

Despite my admiration for Gallo, his music, and his films, he’s not someone I’d care to meet. And I’m definitely not buying any of the self-aggrandizing and over-priced stuff on his website.

But Buffalo 66 (1998) and The Brown Bunny (2004) are worth the effort. Get them from Netflix.